Like A Mob Boss

“Ball of Collusion” is a detailed, connect-the-dots read. McCarthy, a former top federal prosecutor in New York, knows the workings of the CIA and the Department of Justice.

It looks to me like a Chicago Way takedown. In the old days, boss mayors would call in trusted detectives — even those on the payroll of the Chicago mob — and ask for dirt on opponents, which would be leaked to friendly local scribes.

Just as the Steele dossier, paid for by Clinton, was leaked to CNN and BuzzFeed.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/john-kass/ct-white-house-collusion-andrew-mccarthy-kass-20190824-5mn2vv6ovvaz5m2nzblge2yun4-story.html

"The DOJ’s silence on the road that the FBI willfully chose not to take is all the more deafening given what we already know about the Clinton email case.

As I previously wrote, then-FBI Director Comey’s original draft findings in the Clinton case concluded her transmission of classified emails through an unsecure server was “grossly negligent,” the legal standard supporting a felony charge under the Espionage Act.

But the findings were edited and the term changed to “extremely careless,” and Comey chose on his own to announce on July 5, 2016, that he would not seek criminal charges, a decision that the DOJ's IG concluded had wrongly usurped prosecutors’ authority to make charging decisions.

In addition, as I have written, FBI general counsel James Baker believed — almost until the last minute before Comey’s announcement — that Clinton should, in fact, face criminal prosecution, but he was talked out of it."

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/458478-the-road-not-taken-another-fbi-failure-involving-the-clintons

We just have to imagine what would have happened if she got what she deserved for the arrogance she lives by.

How Was This Person a Candidate

The message from the Clinton email scandal, the Mueller investigation, and the careers of Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe seems to be that if the government wishes a document then do not provide it. If you are finally forced to surrender it, either erase or destroy what you can reasonably get away with hiding. Or barring that, insist that it be heavily redacted, according to your own judgment, for the sake of America. If asked to explain such behavior or allegations of leaking information to the press, either deny or claim faulty memory.

Do all of that and be of the correct political persuasion and of Washington repute, and there is little chance of criminal exposure.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/06/an-epidemic-of-erasures-redactions-omissions-and-perjuries/

The Headline Reads ...

When will BC get his #metoo moment?

I wonder the same. I don't think it will come until HC is clearly not even a remote possibility as a candidate for president. Until then, he's still of some marginal utility to a powerful political party.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kendall-bill-clinton-and-me-too-20181104-story.html

"Two other allegations were made public in the 1990s as a result of the Starr investigation and impeachment proceedings. Kathleen Willey, a former White House volunteer, went public in 1998 with her allegations that Clinton assaulted her in the Oval Office in 1993.

And Juanita Broaddrick, a former nursing home administrator, went public in 1999accusing Clinton of raping her in a hotel room in 1978, when he was attorney general of Arkansas. (Though accounts of Broaddrick’s claims were initially reported in 1992, during Clinton’s first run for president, she was not identified at that time.)

But for the most part, Broaddrick’s and Willey’s allegations remained outside of Starr’s purview. Broaddrick appeared in the Starr report only as a footnote in an appendix, where she was referred to as “Jane Doe No. 5.”

A fourth accuser, Leslie Millwee, a former television reporter, came forward in 2016saying Clinton assaulted her three times in 1980 during his first term as governor of Arkansas.

The news media has aired these four allegations repeatedly. There are a number of other allegations that never got much of a media airing. Peter Baker, in his impeachment saga “The Breach” relayed that additional unwelcome advances were described in Starr’s files.

She'll Never Understand

I don't think this person will ever understand how alienating her campaign was, how alienating the democratic leadership has been, to non-city going folks who have been striving to play by the rules they knew. Her party says they are know nothing hicks with bad intentions who hold back progress and don't understand right and wrong. I don't think that party will get many votes absent substantial, perhaps transcendent charisma.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/12/backwards-hillary-clinton-still-has-no-clue-why-she-lost/

If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle where Trump won. I won in the coasts, I win, you know, Illinois, Minnesota, places like that. But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, and his whole campaign, “make America great again,” was looking backwards. You know you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are. Whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/editorial-hillary-reminds-america-why-she-lost/article/2011909

The Professionals at the FBI

Of course agents have their own beliefs, of course they will bleed over into their enforcement, of course power corrupts and the citizenry should ask for accountability. It will be interesting to see where this goes.


http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/370717-as-walls-close-in-on-fbi-the-bureau-lashes-out-at-its-antagonists#.Wmowv-452Qw.twitter

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fbi-texts/u-s-justice-department-recovers-fbi-officials-missing-text-messages-idUSKBN1FE2OY

Lynch? Coordinating? No Way, No One Would Believe Such A Thing

A million years ago when I was in flight training we would eat lunch at the O club and SA would be on the screen. I just stared, she was so gorgeous I could not take my eyes off of her. I was a 20-something, there was not much better in life than looking at pretty girls. I chuckle now as she comes back into the "picture" as such a heavy weight investigator. Awesome.

http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/370019-was-lynch-coordinating-with-comey-in-the-clinton-investigation

300 Hacked Emails, That Will Leave a Mark

Then, last Sunday evening, during the NFL playoff game between the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers, the FBI posted on its website more than 300 emails that Clinton had sent to an unnamed colleague not in the government -- no doubt her adviser Sid Blumenthal -- that had fallen into the hands of foreign powers. It turns out -- and the Sunday night release proves this -- that Blumenthal was hacked by intelligence agents from at least three foreign governments and that they obtained the emails Clinton had sent to him that contained state secrets. Sources believe that the hostile hackers were the Russians and the Chinese and the friendly hackers were the Israelis.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/01/12/andrew-napolitano-why-criminal-investigation-hillary-clinton-is-back-to-front-and-center.html?intcmp=ob_article_sidebar_video&intcmp=obnetwork

Cannot Be Shamed

As the presidential campaigns sink to the challenge of demonstrating that there is no such thing as rock bottom, remember this: When the Clintons decamped from Washington in January 2001, they took some White House furnishings that were public property. They also finished accepting more than $190,000 in gifts, including two coffee tables and two chairs, a $7,375 gratuity from Denise Rich, whose fugitive former husband had been pardoned in President Clinton’s final hours. A Washington Post editorial (“Count the Spoons”) identified “the Clintons’ defining characteristic: They have no capacity for embarrassment. Words like shabby and tawdry come to mind. They don’t begin to do it justice.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441669/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-campaign-2016-sleaze-sweepstakes

The Parallels

Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign for president involved trying to conceal the truth about Watergate until after voters went to the polls. “The early part of the Watergate cover-up was actually successful,” noted a report from the National Constitution Center. Running against a gaffe-ridden, disorganized challenger whom he was able to vastly outspend, Nixon pulled out a victory, but the cover-up unraveled and the country went through two years of turmoil. If Hillary wins, will her cover-up unravel and leave her a weakened president hounded by critics? No one is suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal is exactly like Watergate, but the parallels are certainly there.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441590/hillary-clinton-richard-nixon-cover-ups-lying-enemies-list

Clinton = Farce

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead, and hoping that the election was sooner than later. Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one. With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal: the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure; Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader; Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/clintons-farce-14823.html

A great read.

Changing Norms - Like Expecting To Get Away With Felonies

The rules in politics haven’t changed that much in recent years. What has changed is adherence to norms, in an increasingly destructive way.

I made that case, using examples different from the ones I’m about to present here, nearly two years ago. The shift in norms is also a central part of Thomas Mann’s and Norman Ornstein’s prescient It’s Even Worse Than It Looks and Mike Lofgren’s The Party Is Over, plus of course Jonathan Rauch’s “How American Politics Went Insane,” our very widely read cover story (subscribe!) this summer.
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/10/trump-time-capsule-james-comey/505904/

Funny write up wherein the author pretends not to notice the Clinonesqe assumption that scrutiny can be avoided by committing felony, but then isn't smart enough to know all email is going to be hacked. 

Immunity? We Know Why She Wanted It

Remember, FBI Director James Comey, who blessed Mills’ immunity deal before ever cracking open her laptop, assured us during congressional testimony that Mills was cooperating with the investigation. Was she?

In the FBI’s summary statement, Mills alleged she didn’t know anything about Hillary’s email server until after the secretary of State’s tenure was over. In leaked emails we learned that this was untrue. Now we have emails in which Mills explicitly discusses concealing illegal activity in an effort to protect the president. Did she tell the FBI about her attempts to “clean up” emails? If so, why was she given immunity?
http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/25/we-need-to-clean-this-up-new-e-mail-from-top-hillary-aide-proves-criminal-conspiracy/#.WBCiOSXayeY.twitter

Well Written, Bravo

But I hate even more the even grosser culture of The Lie where someone like Hillary Clinton or people like the editorialists at the Washington Post and the Formerly Grey Lady get to point their fingers and pretend they didn’t create and celebrate the culture in which Trump merely partakes.

These people who celebrate porn and abortion and make heroic figures out of small-souled, sex-deluded creatures such as Bill Maher and Lena Dunham and Sandra Fluke and lionize sick predator men like the Kennedys and Bill Clinton are not merely being hypocrites or playing politics when they denounce Trump. They are deliberately engaging in The Lie: the corruption of meaning itself. They aren’t outraged because they’re decent. They’re using our decency as a pawn in their quest for political power.

I don’t even have an expletive strong enough to express my contempt for what we’re witnessing this news cycle. All I know is I deeply resent being put in a position where denouncing the grossness of Trump’s remarks becomes playing into a larger Lie and everyone’s rightful disgust becomes a mere political tool.

This is the problem of the corruption of culture, as Harriet Beecher Stowe illustrated brilliantly in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. There, the good guys who defend human dignity are forced by the culture itself to become outlaws—to lie to hide runaway slaves, or break the law to participate in the Underground Railroad. They are forced to defend what they ordinarily would find indefensible in order to defend the greater goods of human liberty, human dignity, and equality before the law. In a corrupt culture, no matter what you do, no one escapes with his purity intact.
http://amgreatness.com/2016/10/08/lewdness-donald-trump/

This is bad if Trump does, we look the other way for our candidate's husband ...

Just read it - there are no standards but they'll act like there are some when that's politically expedient.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/trumped-outrage-14777.html

Old News

Of course, it was the late, great columnist Bill Safire who caused a stir back in 1996 when he chronicled then-First Lady Clinton’s manifold falsehoods over the years, from how she gamed the commodities markets by miraculously earning $100,000 in cattle futures by, she claimed, simply reading the newspaper (and not because she had a well-connected broker), or her involvement in questionable land deals as a Little Rock, Ark., lawyer while hubby Bill was governor.

Back then, Safire called her “a congenital liar,” something that brought howls of protest from the left as a wild overreach. It certainly didn’t stop Hillary from becoming a US senator, secretary of state and now likely president.
http://nypost.com/2016/10/10/wall-street-speeches-reveal-the-real-hillary/

Duplicitous? Naturally

Worse still, is an email purportedly from Hillary outlining her true beliefs about immigration. "The main reason behind successful immigration should be painfully obvious to even the most dimwitted of observers: Some groups of people are almost always highly successful given only half a chance (Jews, Hindus/Sikhs and Chinese people, for example), while others (Muslims, blacks and Roma, for instance) fare badly almost irrespective of circumstances."

It goes without saying, this shocking racial and ethnic stereotyping if it indeed reflects Hillary's thinking would doom a Republican candidate. The media so far haven't even really reported it.

That points to one other major issue: The emails show that Clinton has what can been described as a "cozy" relationship with the mainstream lapdog media bordering on sycophancy.

As Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning left-leaning activist, blogger and author noted, the Clinton campaign went to extraordinary lengths to shape and control stories done by the chummy Big Media. "At times," Greenwald wrote, "Clinton's campaign staff not only internally drafted the stories they wanted published but even specified what should be quoted 'on background' and what should be described as 'on the record.' "
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/clinton-email-scandal-hillarys-hypocrisy-and-medias-bias-revealed/

Clinton A Worse Version of Trump

“We were not willing participants,” Broaddrick said. “These were crimes.” In a separate interview, Broaddrick shared her own story of brutal sexual assault which she says Bill Clinton perpetrated against her.

Willey called out NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell and CNN’s Jake Tapper by name, challenging them: “These are not infidelities. A rape is not an infidelity. These are crimes. Any other people would be in jail…

“This is no longer about infidelities, indiscretions, girlfriends, sex, interns — none of those. This is about a serial rapist, a predator, and his wife who has enabled his behavior all of these years.”

Later in this interview, Jones, Willey, and Broaddrick expressed fear at how a potential President Hillary Clinton would use the power of her office.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/09/juanita-broaddrick-kathleen-willey-paula-jones-bill-clinton-sexual-assault/

Immunity. Why?

The Clintons dirty?  No one will be surprised, no one will be outraged.  If you need the devil to save you from something worse, you can get your head to focus on the devil's virtues.

We already knew that Justice offered immunity to at least five central figures in the private email probe, including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, the aides in charge of deciding which of the former Secretary of State’s emails on her private server would be turned over to the State Department. FBI Director James Comey struggled to explain to Congress last week why immunity was necessary to obtain the laptops the two had used for sorting the emails.

Now we learn that Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson also obtained guarantees that investigators would not search these laptops after Jan. 31, 2015. More amazing, Justice agreed to destroy both laptops after examining them. Think about that: Before the authorities knew what was on the laptops, they agreed to destroy potential evidence in their investigation. The evidence was also under a congressional subpoena and preservation order.

The “no-look” date beyond Jan. 31, 2015 means the FBI couldn’t see what the two aides said or did after the news of Mrs. Clinton’s private server became public in March 2015. Investigators would be unable to determine if Ms. Mills or Ms. Samuelson had engaged, as Mr. Goodlatte put it in his letter, in “destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server.” Why else would time limits be necessary given that the two women already had immunity?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cheryl-millss-legal-privileges-1475708726

Why Did She Need It?

Why did Cheryl Mills require criminal immunity?

This is the irksome question hanging over the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s home-brew server in the wake of news that Ms. Mills was granted immunity for her laptop’s contents.

Ms. Mills was a top Clinton aide at the State Department who became Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer when she left. She was also a witness, as well as a potential target, in the same FBI investigation into her boss’s emails. The laptop the bureau wanted was one Ms. Mills used in 2014 to sort Clinton emails before deciding which would be turned over to State.

Here’s the problem. There are two ways a witness can get immunity: Either she invokes the Fifth Amendment on the grounds she might incriminate herself, or, worried something on the laptop might expose her to criminal liability, her lawyers reveal what this might be before prosecutors agree to an immunity deal.

As with so much else in this investigation, the way the laptop was handled was out of the ordinary. Normally, immunity is granted for testimony and interviews. The laptop was evidence. Standard practice would have been for the FBI to get a grand-jury subpoena to compel Ms. Mills to produce it.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secrets-of-cheryl-mills-1474932673

I feel covered in slime reading about these things.