++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
When Bill Clinton recently told the truth revealing his unvarnished thinking regarding Obamacare, I maintained he did so because subconsciously he wants to wreck his wife's chances. Why? Because his ego cannot accept her being president and his role being relegated to a second fiddle position . You decide. (See 1 below.)
And
A few questions for Hillary that will never be asked by the mass media because they have anointed her to be their Queen. (See 1a below.)
===
I noted in a memo, long before I came to Savannah, the acquisition of newspapers by corporate America would radically alter the approach towards reporting news because entertainment and profit, not factual and ethical reporting, would become the driving force.
Virtually every major newspaper has been acquired by Wall Street Corporations. Private ownership, and with it pride, no longer is a driving profit motive, only entertainment. Technology has also crippled advertising income. Readership is down so per copy prices have risen to offset these revenue losses. Newspapers no longer commit the level of resources to investigative reporting they once did and time pressures force instant reporting before adequate fact checking occurs. Sensationalism has been elevated, ethics has been shoved to the rear and an informed America has paid the price.
Only The Wall Street Journal has risen, in my opinion, because their corporate owners have committed the necessary funding to improve their technology and staffing. (See 2 below.)
More dry rot afflicting our nation. (See 2a below.)
And then:
There were those who pointed out, almost a year ago, if Obama was guilty of what Hillary was there was no way the investigation of her actions would succeed. And so it goes. Comey was in the tank all along unless he wanted to bring the president down and of course Atty. General Lynch would never allow this to happen. So a weasel was created.
I made the mistake of believing no one is above the law but now we know that it no longer true. Obama, by using a pseudonym and thus, breaking the law, killed any prospect of the investigation going forward.
Consequently, Hillary and Obama turned The FBI into a complicit agency and that agency is now deemed untrustworthy. No wonder Americans are fed up and the sun is setting on this once great Republic. (See 2b and 2c below.)
+++
I am leaving for Athens/Augusta and hope Matthew will go out to sea. Stay safe.
I just could not resist posting this before I left.
====
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1) Bill Clinton Contradicts Hillary, Calls Obamacare ‘Crazy System’
“It doesn’t many any sense."
Former President Bill Clinton, whose efforts to create a government health care system under the leadership of then first lady Hillary Clinton went down in flames, on Monday used words very different from those of his wife in discussing Obamacare.
“I am a staunch supporter of President Obama’s principal accomplishment, namely the Affordable Care Act,” Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said in a debate in Milwaukee on Feb. 11, although she has suggested the law needs some tweaks to make it better.
Her husband, however, speaking Monday at an event in Flint, Mich., sounded more like he was calling for a full-scale overhaul.
“The people who are getting killed in this deal are the small businesspeople and individuals who make just a little too much to get in on these subsidies,” Bill Clinton said.
“So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care, and they … wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half,” he said.
“It doesn’t many any sense. The insurance model doesn’t work here,” Clinton said in discussing the government-run marketplaces created through Obamacare.
“So here’s the simplest thing: Figure out an affordable rate and let people use that. Something that won’t undermine your quality of life, won’t interfere with your ability to make expenses and save money, and let people buy into Medicare or Medicaid,” he said.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has also called for an overhaul of Obamacare.
“It is going to be amazingly destructive. Doctors are quitting. I have a friend who’s a doctor, and he said to me, ‘Donald, I never saw anything like it. I have more accountants than I have nurses.’ We have to repeal Obamacare, and it can be replaced with something much better for everybody. Let it be for everybody. But much better and much less expensive for people and for the government. And we can do it,” Trump has said.
“More than six years after becoming law, the proudest accomplishment of the Obama years is a political burden for Democrats,” wrote Michael Gerson in The Washington Post.
“A recent Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans disapprove of Obamacare. The larger concern for Clinton and her party comes deeper in the numbers. Only 18 percent of Americans believe the Affordable Care Act has helped their families; 80 percent say it has hurt or had no effect,” Gerson wrote.
He then put that into context.
“A higher proportion of Americans believe the federal government was behind the 9/11 attacks than believe it has helped them through Obamacare,” he added.
1a)
2)
1a)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2)
A Voter Revolt Against ‘Shareholder Value’
It will take corporate America a long time to climb out of this self-created hole.
CBS Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
I begin with a Feb. 29 quotation from Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS, that sums up everything wrong with today’s media culture—and with corporate America.
Reflecting on the Trump phenomenon at a media and technology conference, Mr. Moonves said that “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Unable to contain his glee, he continued, “The money’s rolling in, and this is fun. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
Mr. Moonves is saying that CBS’s only responsibility is to maximize profits, not only in its entertainment division, but also in its news operation. He knows that what his network is doing is against the national interest. He has just enough conscience to be aware that it is “terrible,” but not nearly enough to stop doing it. It might impair shareholder value, after all.
Beyond an indefensible understanding of corporate responsibility (more on this in a bit), Mr. Moonves is suggesting that there is no difference in principle between entertainment and news. Both should be judged by the same standard—ratings. If policy speeches don’t attract large enough audiences, cut to a Trump rally.
Yes, I know American politicians and parties have used entertainment to draw audiences for the better part of two centuries. But there used to be countervailing forces, including prestigious broadcast news organizations. Not anymore. Once these organizations served as gatekeepers; now they are open-door enablers.If the leading purveyors of broadcast journalism make no distinction between news and entertainment, then who can blame viewers for seeing no difference between entertainment and politics? You need no information to be entertained, so why should you need any to evaluate a candidate’s speech?
I don’t mean to pick on Mr. Moonves, who simply said out loud what his peers are thinking. They are all in the grip of the same misunderstanding, that their business begins and ends with maximizing shareholder value.
They may believe that this is a statutory requirement or a fiduciary duty. If so, they are mistaken. It is Milton Friedman’s theory. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” he wrote in “Capitalism and Freedom,” “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”
But as Cornell University law professor Lynn Stout points out, corporate law imposes no enforceable legal duty to maximize either profits or share prices. As a policy argument, Friedman’s thesis flunks key empirical tests. And it is not politically sustainable. This is the clear meaning of the 2016 presidential election.
In the years after World War II, corporations were respected institutions in American society. When GM’s CEO Charles Wilson famously equated the national interest with the good of his firm, intellectuals snickered, but the majority of Americans agreed with him. Corporations, it seemed, could provide rising wages and security for their workers while generating more than adequate returns for their shareholders and serving as good citizens of the communities in which they were headquartered.
But during the 1970s, inflation, recession, a stagnant stock market and rising competition from abroad created an opening for Friedman’s theory, which soon dominated corporate boardrooms. In the name of maximizing shareholder value, corporations moved plants and jobs around the world, paid the lowest wages they could get away with, and scheduled work assignments to maintain managerial “flexibility,” whatever the consequences for workers’ families. Meanwhile, their lobbyists engineered a myriad of special interest breaks in the corporate tax code.
Now we can see what four decades of pursuing shareholder value at the expense of everything else has yielded. Public confidence in corporations is at rock-bottom, and public anger is sky-high. The revolt against the corporate economic agenda—free trade, a generous immigration policy, lower corporate taxes and the rest—is sweeping the country. As the Republican rank and file has turned against corporations and New Democrats have given ground to left-wing populists, big business has been left politically homeless.
It will take corporate America a long time to climb out of this self-created hole. Its first step should be to back long-overdue proposals for improving workers’ lives and incomes. Paid family leave is an idea whose time has come; so is a catch-up increase in the federal minimum wage; so are stable and predictable schedules for part-time workers. Allowing workers to share in profits and productivity increases would be another good step. Over time, measures such as these will help rebuild public confidence in corporations as responsible members of American society.
Above all, corporate leaders should grasp the distinction between immediate gain and self-interest rightly understood. Pushing for the last increment of profit over the next quarter and the one after that comes at the expense of the strategies that can leave firms best positioned for the future. Instead, America needs a new generation of corporate statesmen.
2a) The Sun Is Setting on America as Founded
The seemingly endless and sweltering Philadelphia summer was finally coming to an end. It is the 17th of September 1787 and for nearly four months delegates from twelve of the thirteen states, after many compromises and at times virulent disagreements, consented to what would become the Constitution of the United States of America. At the signing ceremony Ben Franklin gave an emotional speech using an anecdote involving a sun that was painted on the back of George Washington’s Presidents Chair. As recounted in James Madison’s notes:
So exclaimed Hillary Clinton’s close aide and confidante, Huma Abedin. The FBI had just shown her an old e-mail exchange, over Clinton’s private account, between the then-secretary of state and a second person, whose name Abedin did not recognize. The FBI then did what the FBI is never supposed to do: The agents informed their interviewee (Abedin) of the identity of the second person. It was the president of the United States, Barack Obama, using a pseudonym to conduct communications over a non-secure e-mail system — something anyone with a high-level security clearance, such as Huma Abedin, would instantly realize was a major breach.
Abedin was sufficiently stunned that, for just a moment, the bottomless capacity of Clinton insiders to keep cool in a scandal was overcome. “How is this not classified?”
She recovered quickly enough, though. The FBI records that the next thing Abedin did, after “express[ing] her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym,” was to “ask if she could have a copy of the email.”
Abedin knew an insurance policy when she saw one. If Obama himself had been e-mailing over a non-government, non-secure system, then everyone else who had been doing it had a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Thanks to Friday’s FBI document dump — 189 more pages of reports from the Bureau’s year-long foray (“investigation” would not be the right word) into the Clinton e-mail scandal — we now know for certain what I predicted some eight months ago here at NRO: Any possibility of prosecuting Hillary Clinton was tanked by President Obama’s conflict of interest.
As I explained in February, when it emerged that the White House was refusing to disclose at least 22 communications Obama had exchanged with then-secretary Clinton over the latter’s private e-mail account, we knew that Obama had knowingly engaged in the same misconduct that was the focus of the Clinton probe: the reckless mishandling of classified information.
To be sure, he did so on a smaller scale. Clinton’s recklessness was systematic: She intentionally set up a non-secure, non-government communications framework, making it inevitable that classified information would be mishandled, and that federal record-keeping laws would be flouted. Obama’s recklessness, at least as far as we know, was confined to communications with Clinton — although the revelation that the man presiding over the “most transparent administration in history” set up a pseudonym to conceal his communications obviously suggests that his recklessness may have been more widespread.
Still, the difference in scale is not a difference in kind. In terms of the federal laws that criminalize mishandling of classified information, Obama not only engaged in the same type of misconduct Clinton did; he engaged in it with Clinton. It would not have been possible for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for her offense without its becoming painfully apparent that 1) Obama, too, had done everything necessary to commit a violation of federal law, and 2) the communications between Obama and Clinton were highly relevant evidence.
Indeed, imagine what would have happened had Clinton been indicted. The White House would have attempted to maintain the secrecy of the Obama-Clinton e-mails
(under Obama’s invocation of a bogus “presidential communications” privilege), but Clinton’s defense lawyers would have demanded the disclosure of the e-mails in order to show that Obama had engaged in the same misconduct, yet only she, not he, was being prosecuted. And as most experienced criminal-law lawyers understand (especially if they’ve read a little Supreme Court case known as United States v. Nixon), it is an argument that Clinton’s lawyers would have won.
In fact, in any other case — i.e., in a case that involved any other unindicted co-conspirator — it would be the Justice Department itself introducing the Obama-Clinton e-mails into evidence.
As noted above, the FBI told Huma Abedin that the name she did not recognize in the e-mail with Clinton was an Obama alias. For the agents to do this ran afoul of investigative protocols. The point of an FBI interview is for the interviewee to provide information to the investigators, not the other way around. If agents give information to potential witnesses, the government gets accused of trumping up the case.
But of course, that’s only a problem if there is actually going to be a case.
In this instance, it was never going to happen. The president’s involvement guaranteed that . . . so why worry about letting Abedin in on the president’s involvement?
Abedin was startled by this revelation. No wonder: People in her lofty position know that direct presidential communications with high-ranking officials who have national-security and foreign-policy responsibilities are presumptively classified.
To convey this, and thus convey the legal significance of Obama’s involvement, I can’t much improve on what I told you back in February. When the Obama Justice Department prosecuted retired general David Petraeus, the former CIA director, for mishandling classified information, government attorneys emphasized that this top-secret intelligence included notes of Petraeus’s “discussions with the president of the United States of America.”
Petraeus pled guilty because he knew the case against him was a slam-dunk. He grasped that trying to defend himself by sputtering, Clinton-style, that “the notes were not marked classified” would not pass the laugh test. As I elaborated in the February column, when you’re a national-security official engaging in and making a written record of policy and strategy conversations with the president, the lack of classified markings on the documents you’ve created
Abedin knew, as the FBI agents who were interviewing her surely knew, that at least some of Obama’s pseudonymous exchanges with Clinton had to have crossed into these categories. They were born classified. As I said in February, this fact would profoundly embarrass Obama if the e-mails were publicly disclosed.
Hundreds of times, despite Clinton’s indignant insistence that she never sent or received classified information, the State Department has had to concede that her e-mails must be redacted or withheld from public disclosure because they contain information that is patently classified. But this is not a concession the administration is willing to make regarding Obama’s e-mails.
That is why, as I argued in February, Obama is trying to get away with the vaporous claim that presidential communications must be kept confidential. He does not want to say “executive privilege” because that sounds too much like Nixon. More important, the only other alternative is to designate the e-mails asclassified. That would be tantamount to an admission that Obama engaged in the same violation of law as Clinton.
Again, this is why the prosecution of Mrs. Clinton never had a chance of happening. It also explains why, in his public statements about the matter, Obama insisted that Clinton’s e-mailing of classified information did not harm national security. It is why Obama, in stark contrast to his aforementioned executive order, made public statements pooh-poohing the fact that federal law forbids the mishandling of any intelligence secret. (“There’s classified, and then there’sclassified,” he said, so cavalierly.) He had to take this position because he had himself effectively endorsed the practice of high-level communications through non-secure channels.
This is also why the Justice Department and the FBI effectively rewrote the relevant criminal statute in order to avoid applying it to Clinton. In his public statements about Clinton, Obama has stressed that she is an exemplary public servant who would never intentionally harm the United States. In rationalizing their decision not to indict Clinton, Justice Department officials (in leaks to the Washington Post) and the FBI director (in his press conference and congressional testimony) similarly stressed the lack of proof that she intended to harm the United States.
As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, however, the operative criminal statute does not call for proof of intent to harm the United States. It merely requires proof of gross negligence. This is entirely lawful and appropriate, since we’re talking about a law that can apply only to government officials who have a special duty to preserve secrecy and who have been schooled in the proper handling of classified information. Yet the Justice Department frivolously suggested that applying the law exactly the way it is written — something the Justice Department routinely tells judges they must do — would, in Clinton’s case, potentially raise constitutional problems.
Alas, the Justice Department and the FBI have to take that indefensible position here. Otherwise, Clinton would not be the only one in legal jeopardy.
I will end with what I said eight months ago:
2a) The Sun Is Setting on America as Founded
The seemingly endless and sweltering Philadelphia summer was finally coming to an end. It is the 17th of September 1787 and for nearly four months delegates from twelve of the thirteen states, after many compromises and at times virulent disagreements, consented to what would become the Constitution of the United States of America. At the signing ceremony Ben Franklin gave an emotional speech using an anecdote involving a sun that was painted on the back of George Washington’s Presidents Chair. As recounted in James Madison’s notes:
Whilst the last members were signing it Doctor Franklin looking towards the Presidents Chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to the members near him, that Painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. I have said he, often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.
What made Franklin so optimistic was that the framers had devised a political system combining a republic with never before seen limitations on a central government through a unique system of checks and balances, as well as disbursal of governmental power to the various states, in order to avoid the possibility of a monarch or an oligarchy ever assuming the reins of an unfettered national government. Yet, two hundred and twenty-nine years later the same question can be asked as it now appears that the sun is indeed setting on America as founded.
The authoritarian/socialist mindset most often identified with the Left is now overwhelmingly dominant in the United States of 2016. The acceptance of a powerful central government and its attendant governing class dictating to all Americans what they can and cannot do has become the norm. Beginning in the 1930’s, but in earnest over the past five decades, a socialist Democratic Party, media/entertainment complex, and education establishment has effectively conditioned a majority of Americans to look to the government as the source of salvation, opportunity and rescue in times of difficulty. Thus, there now exists a permanent ruling class or oligarchy in charge of all the levers of power in the government, including the Judiciary, and in a majority of all societal and educational institutions. While they may differ on leadership and nationalism, they agree on the supremacy of the state and limitations on individual freedom. Thus, they represent the outlook of the majority of the American citizenry today.
The structure set up by the founding fathers was genius; however, it had two severe drawbacks. The first was acknowledged by John Adams when he wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The second is that the fragmented political system as envisioned by the founding fathers can only function with two major political parties each as viable opposition to the other.
The Democratic Party is irretrievably socialist and the home to the what would be considered the authoritarian Left. The leadership of the Republican Party, for the past 20 years, has willfully chosen to not fulfill their obligation to be the opposition party extolling the virtues of limited government and vociferously opposing the agenda of the Left. During the terms of the Barack Obama presidency, the GOP, despite controlling at least one of the two Houses of Congress for six years, acquiesced to virtually every spending and legislative demand and surrendered without a whimper their authority insofar as treaty ratifications as well as rubber-stamping all of Obama’s Judicial and executive branch nominations.
The Party’s current standard bearer, Donald Trump, has proposed further expansion and maintenance of the current central government as he has declared his support for 1) expanded government paid maternity leave and child care, 2) mandatory increases in the minimum wage, 3) punitive tariffs on imported goods, 4) retaliatory steps against business who relocate overseas, 5) taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, 6) leaving Social Security, medicare and all welfare programs in place with no reforms although all are heading for insolvency, 7) doubling the infrastructure spending as proposed by Hillary Clinton, 8) unilaterally abrogating treaties and agreements, 8) the continued unfettered use of executive orders as he sees fit, and 9) limitations on free speech and changes to libel laws.
The Republican Party, regardless of whether Trump wins or loses, appears irreversibly committed to cementing its status as the socialist-lite party versus the Democratic Party’s staunch socialist status. There is little difference between them.
This nation, if it has any chance to survive as founded, cannot afford to have two nearly identical major political parties. However, the probablility of creating a third party to replace either major party is miniscule. The last time it happened was in 1854 when this was a nation with less than 4.5% (10 million) of today’s 222 million eligible voters. Further, there were just 31 states connected by primitive means of communication and no government sponsored social programs. Today, nothing short of a catastrophic national disaster of near biblical proportions would eventuate in either entrenched party being replaced by a constitution based conservative party determined to return to the tenets of this nation’s founding.
The United States has evolved into a Euro-socialist democracy. It now has the following in common with the failing states of Europe: 1) socialist and socialist-lite political parties, 2) no checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches, 3) uncontrolled immigration, legal and illegal, with the vast majority of immigrants refusing to assimilate, 4) overwhelming national debt and insolvent cradle to grave social programs, 5) escalating limitations on speech, religion, gun rights and assembly, and most significantly, 6) increasingly secular and agnostic societies.
The republic the founders bequeathed future generations is no more. But that is what the American populace has chosen. This nation will continue to move on; however, it has embarked on the same downward trajectory as the nations of Europe whose destinies are collapse and turmoil. Only the American people, and not any self-serving politician of either self-serving political party, can change this reality. It is time the citizenry gets their collective heads out of their posteriors and fathom what has happened, why and where it will lead.
2b)Obama’s Conflict Tanked the Clinton E-mail Investigation — As Predicted
Hillary couldn’t be proven guilty without proving the president guilty as well.
‘How is this not classified?”
So exclaimed Hillary Clinton’s close aide and confidante, Huma Abedin. The FBI had just shown her an old e-mail exchange, over Clinton’s private account, between the then-secretary of state and a second person, whose name Abedin did not recognize. The FBI then did what the FBI is never supposed to do: The agents informed their interviewee (Abedin) of the identity of the second person. It was the president of the United States, Barack Obama, using a pseudonym to conduct communications over a non-secure e-mail system — something anyone with a high-level security clearance, such as Huma Abedin, would instantly realize was a major breach.
Abedin was sufficiently stunned that, for just a moment, the bottomless capacity of Clinton insiders to keep cool in a scandal was overcome. “How is this not classified?”
She recovered quickly enough, though. The FBI records that the next thing Abedin did, after “express[ing] her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym,” was to “ask if she could have a copy of the email.”
Abedin knew an insurance policy when she saw one. If Obama himself had been e-mailing over a non-government, non-secure system, then everyone else who had been doing it had a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Thanks to Friday’s FBI document dump — 189 more pages of reports from the Bureau’s year-long foray (“investigation” would not be the right word) into the Clinton e-mail scandal — we now know for certain what I predicted some eight months ago here at NRO: Any possibility of prosecuting Hillary Clinton was tanked by President Obama’s conflict of interest.
As I explained in February, when it emerged that the White House was refusing to disclose at least 22 communications Obama had exchanged with then-secretary Clinton over the latter’s private e-mail account, we knew that Obama had knowingly engaged in the same misconduct that was the focus of the Clinton probe: the reckless mishandling of classified information.
To be sure, he did so on a smaller scale. Clinton’s recklessness was systematic: She intentionally set up a non-secure, non-government communications framework, making it inevitable that classified information would be mishandled, and that federal record-keeping laws would be flouted. Obama’s recklessness, at least as far as we know, was confined to communications with Clinton — although the revelation that the man presiding over the “most transparent administration in history” set up a pseudonym to conceal his communications obviously suggests that his recklessness may have been more widespread.
Still, the difference in scale is not a difference in kind. In terms of the federal laws that criminalize mishandling of classified information, Obama not only engaged in the same type of misconduct Clinton did; he engaged in it with Clinton. It would not have been possible for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for her offense without its becoming painfully apparent that 1) Obama, too, had done everything necessary to commit a violation of federal law, and 2) the communications between Obama and Clinton were highly relevant evidence.
Indeed, imagine what would have happened had Clinton been indicted. The White House would have attempted to maintain the secrecy of the Obama-Clinton e-mails
(under Obama’s invocation of a bogus “presidential communications” privilege), but Clinton’s defense lawyers would have demanded the disclosure of the e-mails in order to show that Obama had engaged in the same misconduct, yet only she, not he, was being prosecuted. And as most experienced criminal-law lawyers understand (especially if they’ve read a little Supreme Court case known as United States v. Nixon), it is an argument that Clinton’s lawyers would have won.
In fact, in any other case — i.e., in a case that involved any other unindicted co-conspirator — it would be the Justice Department itself introducing the Obama-Clinton e-mails into evidence.
As noted above, the FBI told Huma Abedin that the name she did not recognize in the e-mail with Clinton was an Obama alias. For the agents to do this ran afoul of investigative protocols. The point of an FBI interview is for the interviewee to provide information to the investigators, not the other way around. If agents give information to potential witnesses, the government gets accused of trumping up the case.
But of course, that’s only a problem if there is actually going to be a case.
In this instance, it was never going to happen. The president’s involvement guaranteed that . . . so why worry about letting Abedin in on the president’s involvement?
Abedin was startled by this revelation. No wonder: People in her lofty position know that direct presidential communications with high-ranking officials who have national-security and foreign-policy responsibilities are presumptively classified.
To convey this, and thus convey the legal significance of Obama’s involvement, I can’t much improve on what I told you back in February. When the Obama Justice Department prosecuted retired general David Petraeus, the former CIA director, for mishandling classified information, government attorneys emphasized that this top-secret intelligence included notes of Petraeus’s “discussions with the president of the United States of America.”
Petraeus pled guilty because he knew the case against him was a slam-dunk. He grasped that trying to defend himself by sputtering, Clinton-style, that “the notes were not marked classified” would not pass the laugh test. As I elaborated in the February column, when you’re a national-security official engaging in and making a written record of policy and strategy conversations with the president, the lack of classified markings on the documents you’ve created
Moreover, as is the case with Clinton’s e-mails, much of the information in Petraeus’s journals was “born classified” under the terms of President Obama’s own executive order — EO 13526. As I’ve previously noted, in section 1.1(d) of that order, Obama issued this directive: “The unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security.” In addition, the order goes on (in section 1.4) to describe other categories of information that officials should deem classified based on the damage to national security that disclosure could cause. Included among these categories: foreign relations, foreign activities of the United States, military plans, and intelligence activities.[does] not alter the obvious fact that the information they contain [is] classified — a fact well known to any high government official who routinely handles national-defense secrets, let alone one who directly advises the president.
Abedin knew, as the FBI agents who were interviewing her surely knew, that at least some of Obama’s pseudonymous exchanges with Clinton had to have crossed into these categories. They were born classified. As I said in February, this fact would profoundly embarrass Obama if the e-mails were publicly disclosed.
Hundreds of times, despite Clinton’s indignant insistence that she never sent or received classified information, the State Department has had to concede that her e-mails must be redacted or withheld from public disclosure because they contain information that is patently classified. But this is not a concession the administration is willing to make regarding Obama’s e-mails.
That is why, as I argued in February, Obama is trying to get away with the vaporous claim that presidential communications must be kept confidential. He does not want to say “executive privilege” because that sounds too much like Nixon. More important, the only other alternative is to designate the e-mails asclassified. That would be tantamount to an admission that Obama engaged in the same violation of law as Clinton.
Again, this is why the prosecution of Mrs. Clinton never had a chance of happening. It also explains why, in his public statements about the matter, Obama insisted that Clinton’s e-mailing of classified information did not harm national security. It is why Obama, in stark contrast to his aforementioned executive order, made public statements pooh-poohing the fact that federal law forbids the mishandling of any intelligence secret. (“There’s classified, and then there’sclassified,” he said, so cavalierly.) He had to take this position because he had himself effectively endorsed the practice of high-level communications through non-secure channels.
This is also why the Justice Department and the FBI effectively rewrote the relevant criminal statute in order to avoid applying it to Clinton. In his public statements about Clinton, Obama has stressed that she is an exemplary public servant who would never intentionally harm the United States. In rationalizing their decision not to indict Clinton, Justice Department officials (in leaks to the Washington Post) and the FBI director (in his press conference and congressional testimony) similarly stressed the lack of proof that she intended to harm the United States.
As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, however, the operative criminal statute does not call for proof of intent to harm the United States. It merely requires proof of gross negligence. This is entirely lawful and appropriate, since we’re talking about a law that can apply only to government officials who have a special duty to preserve secrecy and who have been schooled in the proper handling of classified information. Yet the Justice Department frivolously suggested that applying the law exactly the way it is written — something the Justice Department routinely tells judges they must do — would, in Clinton’s case, potentially raise constitutional problems.
Alas, the Justice Department and the FBI have to take that indefensible position here. Otherwise, Clinton would not be the only one in legal jeopardy.
I will end with what I said eight months ago:
That is why the Clinton e-mail scandal never had a chance of leading to criminal charges.To summarize, we have a situation in which (a) Obama knowingly communicated with Clinton over a non-government, non-secure e-mail system; (b) Obama and Clinton almost certainly discussed matters that are automatically deemed classified under the president’s own guidelines; and (c) at least one high-ranking government official (Petraeus) has been prosecuted because he failed to maintain the security of highly sensitive intelligence that included policy-related conversations with Obama. From these facts and circumstances, we must deduce that it is possible, if not highly likely, that President Obama himself has been grossly negligent in handling classified information.
2c) Clinton’s Disgraceful Three-Headed Crime Has Compromised the FBI
By Austin Bay
Hillary played fast and loose—with both her system and the law
The first Clinton-Trump debate was Benghazi-less and all but criminality-less—but criminality wasn’t totally absent. In a brief exchange early in the debate, Donald Trump mentioned Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails.
“That was more than a mistake. That was done purposely. OK?” Trump said, adding, “when you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment—taking the Fifth so they’re not prosecuted—when you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth, I think it’s disgraceful.”
Trump raised his hand. A high five? No. The Crooked Fifth. A gesture mimicking the act of swearing in a criminal court or before a congressional investigating committee that possesses the power to subpoena evidence and punish perjury.
The mainstream media and its Democrat operatives with bylines missed the significance of Trump’s raised palm, but I’ll bet the majority of viewers—Donald’s Deplorables, Hillary’s Utterly-Despicables and the undecideds—understood his gesture and reference. “Taking the Fifth” is what mobsters and other guilty real world crooks do when they know the DA or the congressional committee has the goods. Hollywood and television murder mysteries often portray “taking the Fifth” as a shameless and arrogant admission of guilt. As the guilty perp takes the Fifth, she grins sardonically, implicitly daring the cops, the prosecutors—perhaps an informed and non-Democrat presidential debate moderator, if there is such a creature—to prove the charge.
As a motif, taking the Fifth combines criminality and brazen evasion of justice. Trump’s gesture caught both in a single image. But then The Donald blew it and moved on.
In so doing Mr. Rookie Candidate missed an opportunity to force Ms. Perpetual Candidate—there, under the spotlights, on live television—to address the two great frauds she perpetrated during her stint as secretary of state in the Obama Administration.
* * *
Hillary’s two great frauds are linked at the hip… and cankles. I refer to The Great Benghazi Lie and the crime Democrat operatives-with-by-lines dub “The Email Scandal.”
Understand “The Email Scandal” is a befogging term employed to camouflage a complicated three-phased crime. This is the triple crime Trump called “disgraceful,” the crime upon crime upon crime that led Hillary’s aides and employees to “take the Fifth” to avoid implicating themselves in its linked illegalities and to avoid committing felony perjury in sworn testimony.
Media perjury? No problem. We can blame that on a short-circuit.
Felony perjury, however, is another matter. Even with a compromised FBI, felony perjury might have consequences. The House of Representatives began investigating the Benghazi attack and questioning the Obama Administration’s Great Benghazi Lie. Testimony wasn’t the only issue. The House had subpoena power. Providing inquisitive representatives and senators with Hillary’s Benghazi-related communications would expose the rogue email operation. Better start destroying evidence.
Hip and cankles. QED.
“Three-phased crime” accurately describes the linked illegalities, but it’s a dud headline. “Three-phased felony” is artsy—sounds like a court room accusation in aLaw and Order episode. The Triple Crime echoes horse-racing’s classy Triple Crown. The Triple Crown’s big time, and so are Hillary’s felonies.
But Hillary’s triple isn’t classy. It’s ugly. It’s a living monster that began in 2009 and continues. Thanks to the FBI’s compromised director, Jim Comey, and an obstruction of justice operation with tentacles throughout the Obama Administration, Hillary’s disgraceful Three-Headed Crime is on-going.
HILLARY’S THREE-HEADED CRIME
CRIME 1: The Server Head. Hillary made a calculated decision to establish an off-the-books communication system (rogue email server) that she controlled. The system was designed to evade laws regulating the retention of government documents and thus evade scrutiny and accountability. The document retention laws exist for several reasons. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that mainstream media types claim to love relies on these laws being enforced. Information tech specialist Bryan Pagliano and Hillary aide Cheryl Mills are Server Head’s human faces. The FBI gave both of them immunity in exchange for their cooperation in the FBI Director Jim Comey’s completely suspect investigation of Hillary’s Three-Headed Crime.
CRIME 1 immediately segued into CRIME 2: The Loose Lips Head. Hillary used her off-the-books and non-secure server system to transmit and analyze classified national security information—some of it highly classified.
Even compromised Jim Comey called her treatment of classified information “grossly negligent.” The law says gross negligence is criminal. That means Hillary committed a criminal act. Laws governing the handling of classified information exist for good reason—lives are at stake. The great World War 2 counter-intelligence poster reminded Americans that Loose Lips Sink Ships.
Hillary played fast and loose—with both her system and the law—so there’s no surprise the drip drip drip of accumulating evidence indicates her system was hacked. Hence poster for Loose Lips Head: Hillary whispering to Vladimir Putin.
CRIME 3: The Nixon Head. Let’s paste Richard Nixon’s face on The Nixon Head. Nixon Head is the criminal obstruction of justice perpetrated by Hillary and her key aides. It begins with The Big Hide. Hillary and her aides tried to hide evidence the rogue server existed and evidence they routinely mishandled of classified information. If they thought the server was merely shady, they knew very well their mishandling of classified information was criminal. They ignored requests by State Department information technology personnel to use a secure system. The House Select Committee on Benghazi found evidence Hillary and her aides insistently ignored advice (from many sources, including career government personnel) that they comply with the communication and document retention rules.
Yes, the Benghazi investigation. When Congress asked for documents relating to Benghazi, Crime 3’s Big Hide morphed into The Big Destruction.
This post by Jonathan Turley includes a timeline suggesting the firm destroyed subpoenaed evidence at the request of Cheryl Mills and/or Bryan Pagliano. Remember them, the human faces of Crime 1, The Server Head? Turley initially defended Comey’s July recommendation that Hillary not be prosecuted. I didn’t. Comey clearly sold out the rule of law. Now that he’s learned the FBI dished out fast and loose immunity deals, Turley has changed his mind. He is astonished that the Justice Department “would give immunity to the parties on both ends of those communications—guaranteeing that a criminal prosecution is no longer a real threat.” However, his initial defense helped buy Hillary time and helped Comey deflect criticism. Delay. Obstruct. Then more damning evidence appears—but time has moved on. The election is now less than six weeks away.
For evidence of the obstruction of justice and delay operation, plow through the Benghazi committee’s proposed report’s Part IV: COMPLIANCE WITH CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS like I did and the mainstream media didn’t.
When the proposed report was released in late June, big media instantly dismissed it as “old news.” That was war on honesty. Three months have passed and Hillary’s obstruction of justice crime is current news. The bizarre immunity deals given to Hillary’s aides are current news. The disgrace of “taking the Fifth” is current news.
The Benghazi committee did a remarkable job of investigation and research in difficult circumstances. As you plow through Part IV—as you read the footnotes—you may get an inkling or two that committee Democrats sought to undermine and discredit the investigation. Why, at times, it appears committee Democrats were aiding Hillary’s obstruction of justice operation.
Why on earth would they do that?
* * *
“What did he know and when did he know it” became a Beltway chant duringNixon’s Watergate scandal.
The FBI’s jaw-dropping revelation that Barack Obama used a pseudonym when he communicated with Hillary on her outlaw system indicates the President knew the system existed and was shady.
While interviewing Hillary aide Human Abedin “investigators showed the aide an email exchange dated June 28, 2012 with the subject ‘Re: Congratulations!’ Abedin did not recognize the name of the sender. Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be a pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed ‘How is this not classified?’” reads the FBI’s summary of the interview.
As the report notes, President Obama claimed he learned of Hillary’s rogue operation in 2013—from press reports.
Did President Obama himself willingly participate in The Big Hide? Did Compromised Comey sell out the law to protect both Hillary and Obama? In the Watergate scandal, the FBI’s second-in-command provided Washington Postreporters with evidence of Nixon’s malfeasance.
How far the G-Men have fallen. Hillary’s Three-Headed Crime has compromised the FBI.
No comments:
Post a Comment