WikiLeaks: Among the curiosities spewed from John Podesta's email by WikiLeaks is an intriguing memo to a group of billionaires that outlines the real goals of the Democratic Party's progressive wing. Turns out they don't want to rig an election, they want to rig the whole system — demographics, politics, the media, everything.
The idea that the Democratic Party is the party of the "little man," as the old term would have it, is one of the great fallacies of our time, as this memo clearly shows.
The Democratic Party has been captured by the interests of a handful of left-leaning billionaires and cash-rich labor unions who see the party as a way to impose their progressive vision on all of us, without us even knowing it.
This, no doubt, explains why Clinton's Campaign Chairman Podesta has become so indispensable to Clinton's run for the presidency. He is the ultimate insider link between Clinton and the billionaire moneymen who fund her and much of the progressive movement.
The 2007 Podesta memo, "Strategic Outlook For The 2008 Elections," was sent to progressive billionaire heavy-hitters George and Jonathan Soros, Peter and Jonathan Lewis, Herb and Marion Sandler, Steve Bing, John Sperling and Soros fund executive and political go-between Michael Vachon.
But it's about much more than just 2008. As the Daily Caller's Peter Hasson notes, the memo "lays out the long term progressive strategy to dominate American politics by creating an 'echo chamber' to control public discourse and changing American demographics to make them more 'advantageous.' "
This is not your father's — or your mother's — Democratic Party, which once hewed sensibly to the middle of the political spectrum. No, the "progressive" Democratic Party has turned into a giant grievance-machine premised on welfare for all, higher taxes on the most-productive Americans based on class warfare, and an ongoing attempt to separate Americans by race, gender, class, income, religion and geography.
Read the memo. Theirs is a vision of a balkanized America of competing interests, which can only be managed by an all-controlling central government that distributes the benefits of citizenship.
Some of the tactics described strike one as more than slightly Orwellian in nature. In a section titled "Controlling the Dialogue, Messaging and Media," Podesta laments that the "structure of using outside forces to control the messaging and the debate in the campaign is almost nonexistent."
He continues: "Ever since the 1996 Clinton campaign discovered the soft money loophole in the campaign finance law to run 'issue ads' that pummeled Bob Dole before he even got the nomination, national and local television campaigns have been waged using non-federal dollars."
By the way, Podesta's "outreach," if it can be called that, to billionaires wasn't limited to just this one memo. It goes far beyond that.
For instance, Podesta, a former top advisor to Barack Obama, in 2008 recommended billionaire hedge-fund manager and climate-change extremist Tom Steyer to be Obama's first energy secretary, according to the hacked emails. Why is that important? As the Huffington Post wrote earlier this month, "Podesta is expected to stick with Clinton if she is elected, and it wouldn't be surprising if he throws Steyer's name in the mix for a cabinet spot again." Of course not.
Steyer's aide, Chris Lehane, sent Podesta an email in 2014 on a climate change policy that could be used as a political bludgeon against Republican candidates.
"We hope this is helpful and stand ready to support whatever you need," Lehane wrote in an email to Podesta.
So powerful is Steyer — who has donated at least $34 million to Democrat-linked leftist and green causes since the 2014 political season — that the Democratic National Committee's extreme official position on climate change, which would virtually shut down American industry, was dictated virtually word-for-word by a Steyer funded "fact sheet."
Other memos from the Podesta-WikiLeaks trove show the Democrats' extreme deference to the ultrarich, despite their hypocritical expressions of concern about the working class.
At one point in 2014, Clinton's current campaign manager, Robbie Mook, complains in one email about having to send Hillary to fundraisers for "political reasons (i.e., to make Soros happy)." Soros turns out to be the elephant in every Democratic room.
Meanwhile, Soros functionary Michael Vachon continued to have extraordinary access, thanks to his billionaire boss's generosity to Democrats. He "frequently emailed Mr. Podesta to schedule phone calls and meetings and relay his boss's policy positions," noted Fox News. "Many of the messages were brief or mysterious."
By the way, Soros has spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars on various open-border and immigrant projects. Is it any wonder that Hillary Clinton, behind the scenes, tells her millionaire Wall Street audiences that she's a proponent of "open borders"?
This is the real world of progressive politics: Billionaires, big shots, insiders, Washington elites, big unions, all colluding to fracture our democracy into pieces and set one group of Americans against another, for maximum political benefit and power. To this end, they give hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democratic Party, ignore or insult the Constitution, and treat the U.S. political system as a personal toy with which to radically change the very fabric of our nation.
Knowing all this, we would at least hope that whatever moderate voters still exist would pause next Tuesday before pulling the lever for a Democrat.


1a)

The Clinton Campaign at Obama Justice

Emails on WikiLeaks show a top federal lawyer giving Hillary a quiet heads up.


 By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSel
The most obnoxious spin of the 2016 campaign came this week, as Democrats, their media allies and even President Obama accused the FBI of stacking the election. It’s an extraordinary claim, coming as it does from the same crew that has—we now know—been stacking the election all along in the corridors of the Justice Department.
This is the true November surprise. For four months, FBI Director James Comey has been the public face of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. He played that role so well, putting the FBI so front and center, that the country forgot about Mr. Comey’s bosses. Revelations this week build the case that President Obama’s politicized Justice Department has been pulling strings and flacking for Mrs. Clinton all along.
One piece of evidence comes from WikiLeaks, in a hacked email between the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, and Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik. It was sent in May of 2015 via a private Gmail account, which has become the favored way for Obama employees to hide communications from the public. “Heads up,” Mr. Kadzik warned, informing the campaign about a coming hearing and a recent legal filing about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.
Don’t let Mr. Kadzik’s fancy title fool you: He is a Clinton partisan. Before joining the Justice Department in 2013, Mr. Kadzik spent 30 years at the (now-closed) law firm Dickstein Shapiro,engaging Democratic causes—and Clinton causes. Mr. Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House and a communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Kadzik also represented the DNC. Campaign-finance records show the two variously donated to Hillary’s Senate leadership PAC, to her 2008 presidential campaign and to her current campaign.
Mr. Kadzik is also an old buddy of Mr. Podesta’s. The two go back to Georgetown Law School. When Marc Rich was lobbying Bill Clinton for a pardon, according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report, the fugitive financier recruited Mr. Kadzik “because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.” Mr. Kadzik even represented Mr. Podesta, during the Monica Lewinsky saga.
WikiLeaks emails show the two chatting about birthday parties and dinner meetings with fellow Democratic power players. A 2014 email lists donors for a fundraiser that Mr. Podesta held for his daughter, running for a school board in California. Mr. Kadzik (as he sat at the Justice Department) is shown giving $250. Also appearing are the usual Clinton glitterati: Doug Band, Harold Ickes, Neera Tanden, Betty Currie, Madeleine Albright,Carol Browner. This is Mr. Kadzik’s social circle.
The Justice Department has tried to dismiss Mr. Kadzik’s tip-off to the Clinton campaign as a note “about public information,” sent “in his personal capacity, not during work hours.” But Mr. Kadzik is a senior government official. He does not get to feed any information to a potential target of an investigation, at any hour of the day or night.
What the email reveals is the mind-set of the senior officials at the Justice Department. They are in it to win it for Hillary. They have taken a cue from their boss, the president, who has felt free to personally absolve Mrs. Clinton, no matter how inappropriate that is.
Those leaders include Leslie Caldwell, head of the Criminal Division, an anti-business activist tapped by Mr. Obama in 2014. Benjamin Mizer,who leads the Civil Division, went to bat for Mrs. Clinton last year in Freedom of Information Act litigation over her emails. He co-wrote a brief insisting her email production had been “over-inclusive” and arguing there was no evidence that she had “intentionally deleted” public records. The Office of Legal Counsel is under Karl Remon Thompson, once a counselor to the über-political Eric Holder. A Washington Free Beacon report from May found that 228 Justice Department employees had donated some $75,000 to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. Mr. Trump? Two contributions totaling $381.
So what else has the department done? While Mrs. Clinton was under investigation, Mr. Kadzik had the opportunity to feed her campaign plenty during personal meetings with Mr. Podesta at dinner and the latter’s home. In a previous WikiLeaks email, another Clinton staffer references “DOJ folks” who leaked him information. And Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton would have us believe they only talked grandchildren on that tarmac in Arizona.
Or what about those immunity deals for Clinton aides? Mr. Comey told Congress that they were provided by Justice Department lawyers. The Journal reported this week that “from the start” of the FBI probe into the Clinton Foundation, “Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case.” From the start—meaning before evidence was collected. That story says senior leaders (unnamed) pressured the FBI to shut down the investigation. (Aside: For a supposed hotbed of Trump activism, the FBI sure did a good job of keeping this probe quiet for a  year.)
Mr. Comey has botched plenty in the Clinton affair. Maybe the biggest was providing a shield for Justice Department shenanigans. Because if this feels sordid now, just wait for the actual Clinton Justice Department.
1b)

The Costs of Clinton

Her policies are further left than Obama’s, and you know her ethics.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton looks on during a campaign rally in Tempe, Arizona, Nov. 2.ENLARGE
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton looks on during a campaign rally in Tempe, Arizona, Nov. 2. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
766 COMMENTS
Americans go to the polls next week facing what millions believe is the worst presidential choice of their lifetimes. As we wrote after Donald Trump won the Indiana primary in May, the New Yorker and Hillary Clinton are both deeply flawed. But one of them will be the next President, so in the next two days we’ll try to summarize the risks—and the fainter hopes—of each candidacy in turn.

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Start with Mrs. Clinton because the costs of her Presidency are easier to see in advance. To wit, she would continue President Obama’s progressive march to a French-style welfare and regulatory state. On nearly every domestic issue, she has embraced Mr. Obama’s agenda and moved left from there.
She wants higher taxes, more spending on entitlements that are already unaffordable, more subsidies and price controls in ObamaCare, more regulations on businesses of all kinds, more limits on political speech, more enforcement of liberal cultural values on schools and churches.
The greatest cost of this would be more lost years of slow economic growth. The U.S. economy hasn’t grown by 3% in any year since 2005, and the explanation from Mrs. Clinton’s economic advisers is that America can’t grow faster and inequality is a bigger problem in any case. More income redistribution is their patent medicine.
But as we’ve seen with the rise of nativism and protectionism, the costs of slow growth are corrosive. Flat incomes lead to more social tension and political enmity. The fight to divide a smaller pie would get uglier in a country that was once accustomed to rising possibilities. Imagine the 2020 election after four more years of 1% growth.
Some Republicans say Mrs. Clinton would be more willing to negotiate with them than Mr. Obama has been. That’s a low bar, and during the 2016 campaign she hasn’t thrown a single policy olive branch to Republicans. None. Her current agenda may reflect her real beliefs going back to her activist days before the failure of HillaryCare caused her to adopt some New Democratic coloration. In 2017 she would also have Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders pulling her to the left.
Mrs. Clinton would also be less restrained by the courts. Mr. Obama has remade most of the federal appellate bench, and the Supreme Court is on the cusp. A Hillary victory means progressive judicial domination for a generation or more. This would mean more green lights for the abusive rule by regulation that has characterized Mr. Obama’s second term—and little chance to block the likes of his immigration order or Clean Power Plan.
Mrs. Clinton’s clearest advantage over Mr. Trump is on foreign policy, where she has shown more respect for America’s role in maintaining global order. She has sometimes shown more hawkish instincts than Mr. Obama, but then she also embraced his worst mistakes: the reset with Russia that badly misjudged Vladimir Putin, the nuclear deal with Iran, the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, and the abandonment of Libya after Europe and the U.S. toppled Moammar Gadhafi.
Even if she wants to revive U.S. leadership abroad, however, there is the question of means. Her entitlement expansions and higher taxes would squeeze the economic growth and budget space needed to finance more defense spending. This is Western Europe on the installment plan.
Lurking behind all this, as we’ve seen these past two weeks, is the familiar pattern of scandal fed by her penchant for secrecy and political paranoia. As journalist Carl Bernstein has noted, she shares Richard Nixon’s “obsession with enemies.” She surrounds herself with henchmen like Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock, who feed her instinct to stonewall and attack.
The most astonishing revelation of the 2016 campaign has been that neither she nor her husband learned anything from the ethical traumas of the 1990s. You would have thought they’d want to shed the legacy of the Lippo Group and the Lincoln-Bedroom-for-rent, but instead they built the same pay-to-play structure via the Clinton Foundation.
Mrs. Clinton made the astounding decision to use a private email server for official business so she could duck federal records laws. But when that was discovered, rather than admit the mistake and release everything, she and her retinue continued to resist and deflect and deceive. By her behavior in the past year, Mrs. Clinton has ratified the worst things her critics say about her.
Some of our friends argue that Mrs. Clinton’s corruption is tolerable because it is merely about gaining and maintaining political power. This understates how much the Clinton blending of public office with private gain erodes confidence in honest government. It feeds the leftist narrative that business is merely another arm of the state and thus reduces support for free markets.

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All of which means that if she does win on Tuesday, the manner of her victory would damage her ability to govern. Rather than win a policy mandate, she has chosen to destroy Mr. Trump personally. She would face a Congress that wants to investigate her from the first day and an electorate that is polarized and doesn’t trust her. Her instinct would be to lean even more on the left for political support, making compromise with Republicans in Congress even more difficult.
We’re as optimistic as anyone about the resilience of American democracy, but four more years of aggressive progressive rule would more deeply entrench the federal Leviathan across ever more of the economy and civic life. The space for private business and nonpolitical mediating social institutions would shrink.
The case for Mrs. Clinton over Donald Trump is that she is a familiar member of the elite and thus less of a jump into the unknown, especially on foreign policy. The case against her is everything we know about her political history.
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2) Republican Troops in Western Pennsylvania
"The enthusiasm is for Trump."

The Mike Pence rally here, 36 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, on Tuesday brought to mind those old beer commercials where two slogans—"tastes great" and "less filling"—vied for supremacy. In this case, the slogans—"lock her up" and "drain the swamp"—were battling for the highest decibel level at the Westmoreland Community College gym as Pence rallied the crowd of some 1200 to help turn the Keystone State toward Trump and the GOP next week. The crowd was eager and motivated, but given polling averages that have consistently given Hillary Clinton the lead in Pennsylvania, it seems unlikely to happen.
Chants of "lock her up" erupted after Pence laid out the corruption culture that has come to light over the course of Clinton's campaign for the White House. He spoke about her server, and how the Clinton Family Foundation accepted money from foreign governments that then lobbied Hillary at the State Department for their pet projects. Pence also mentioned how friends of the Clintons got millions to rebuild Haiti, without actually doing the job.
The crowd got riled up again when Pence spoke about the corrupt and burdensome federal government. "Americans are sick and tired of pay-to-play, and Donald Trump has a 100-day plan to clean up Washington," Pence said, leading to a round of "drain the swamp" chanting.
Pence argued for his ticket by covering three major themes: Security, prosperity, and the Supreme Court.
In terms of security, Pence explained how a Trump administration would "rebuild the military, restore the arsenal of democracy, and destroy ISIS at its source." He also spent some time detailing failures in Iraq. "By the end of the Bush presidency," Pence argued, "the American soldier won peace and security for the Iraqi people. Clinton and Obama squandered what we sacrificed and won in Iraq." And the vice presidential contender won big applause when he said that under a Trump presidency there would be no more paying ransom to terror-sponsoring states.
His discussion of prosperity focused on health care, trade, and jobs. "We can't trust Hillary Clinton with healthcare anymore than we can trust her with classified information," Pence said. The crowd loved that one.
On trade, Pence declared that "when Trump becomes negotiator-in-chief we're going to have American trade" and that's "going to mean American jobs first." It was music to the ears of the Western Pennsylvania audience when Pence referred to natural resources as a blessing. He also tagged Clinton as the candidate of the status quo. "This economy may be the best they can do," he said, but "this economy isn't the best we can do."
As for the Supreme Court, Pence reassured the pro-lifers in the audience, one of whom was standing next to me, that a Trump presidency would mean a chief executive who "cherishes" the sanctity of life as well as the Second Amendment. As the older woman beside me explained, she'd been skeptical of Trump until he was interviewed on her local Christian radio station and promised that he supported the pro-life position. She also explained that while her daughter was less excited about Trump (though still planning to vote for him), it was her son who was most energized.
At one point, Pence asked everyone in the hall to turn to the law enforcement officers in the room and thank them and applaud them for their hard work. Pence had earlier recognized the veterans in the audience and asked the crowd to applaud their service. Does either happen at Clinton or Kaine rallies?
Pence told one joke near the beginning of his speech when he reminded the crowd about his debate performance. He apologized for being late to the venue but he explained, "We stopped to get a bite to eat, but Tim Kaine called and interrupted me 10 times."
Twice during his remarks, Pence referenced Ronald Reagan and compared the Gipper to the Donald. Early on, he said Trump had given voice to the aspirations and frustrations of so many Americans the likes of which hadn't been heard since Reagan. And toward the end, Pence used Reagan's formulation about how the election was a choice not between right and left, but between up and down. Pence then demanded that instead of continuing to head down in the same direction that the crowd and all Americans had to stop, plant their feet, turn around and "march back up that hill!"
Speaking to various people in the crowd before the event, one theme repeated itself and it came as something of a surprise. It seems that being a conservative on campus has turned some younger voters enthusiastically toward Trump.
I spoke with a young couple, both 22, standing together and holding hands as they awaited Pence's arrival. She grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania but has come to the city of Pittsburgh for graduate work in public health. The experience has been eye-opening she says. "Everyone around me [at school] assumes I'm a Democrat" because of her age and her chosen course of study. It's the first time she's been in the minority based on her political views. Her boyfriend of eight months is also studying in Pittsburgh, for a graduate degree in business administration but he's finding it more pleasant. What's the difference, I asked. He'd done his undergraduate degree at Kent State and is a member of the National Guard, he explained. "They hated us there."
A mother of two young voters—a 20-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter—sounded a similar warning. She said her kids were the ones getting their parents excited about Trump. "Schools are just so liberal" she said and her kids disagree with a lot of what they hear there. I asked if she meant public school and she shook her head. "College," she replied. Her kids are both a community colleges.
If energy and momentum counts, attorney Michael Korns, who is the chairman of the Westmoreland Republican committee, says Trump may have a shot. He explained how the local party had a rush of new voter registration to the tune of 11,000 people. He says that the number is evenly split between Democrats switching to the GOP and new voters registering for the first time. "The enthusiasm is for Trump," he explained, citing the issues of trade and immigration as well as the fact that the local community wants jobs and is hoping that their kids and grandkids will stay here.
Abby W. Schachter is the author of No Child Left Alone: Getting the government out of parenting (Encounter Books).

2a)

No UnRinging the FBI’s Clinton Bell

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN

If there was any doubt that Democrats think that James Comey has turned the presidential race upside down, it was put to rest yesterday. Barack Obama, the man who appointed the FBI director to his position, denounced his actions. Obama’s blunt assessment of Comey contrasted sharply with words of White House spokesperson Josh Earnest. The spokesman’s more equivocal stand earlier in the week probably had something to do with the new poll numbers that show more wavering Republicans willing to stop Hillary Clinton by casting a ballot for Donald Trump.
Though Trump’s path to 270 Electoral College votes remains narrow, the changing Electoral College map–in which key swing states like New Hampshire, Florida, and North Carolina have flipped from being likely Democratic wins to tossups–is a function of the fact that the national political conversation has been about the FBI and Clinton, and not about the GOP candidate’s personal misconduct.
Though he continues to strain at his handlers’ leash, Trump has managed to stay on point in the last six days. His speeches have been focused almost entirely on “crooked Hillary,” with some criticisms of ObamaCare thrown in. But instead of the usual stream-of-consciousness insult rant, he’s been reading salient points from the teleprompter about the leaks regarding two ongoing FBI investigations of the Clintons.
Even more important, Trump has finally gotten around to the same closing argument against Clinton that any of his more mainstream Republican primary challengers would have used. Like Trump, they were prepared to argue that the voters needed to consider whether they really wanted to elect a president who would begin her term under a federal investigation. If the stories about an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation are true—and given the likelihood of wrongdoing from the massive conflicts of interest between its fundraising activities and State Department business during Hillary Clinton’s time in office, there ought to be such an investigation—then he’s not wrong to say there is a possibility of a constitutional crisis if she wins.
Whether justified or not, Comey’s letter triggered the avalanche of competing leaks from both the FBI and the Justice Department about investigations of Clinton. Comey ensured that Trump’s “crooked Hillary” routines would be seen as a reaction to the news rather than yet another gratuitous insult.
That may not seem fair to Clinton loyalists, but it’s too late to un-ring the FBI bell. Moreover, as much as Clinton’s ads highlighting Trump’s despicable behavior toward women help remind voters why they can’t stand him, the opening up of a discussion about her ethics fundamentally alters the narrative of the election. Instead of it being, as the Democrats thought it was a week ago, a contest between a plausible if not particularly likable or trustworthy candidate for president and an unhinged sexual predator, it’s now a match between a dishonest Democratic woman and a bad Republican man.
Put that way, most Republicans can live with the choice of the latter, and that should be enough to get Trump to where Mitt Romney was four years ago; e.g., a respectable loss rather than a landslide defeat, which also takes down the GOP’s congressional majorities. But if the leaks from the FBI continue to get traction and Trump doesn’t blow himself up as he has so many times before, it’s not unreasonable to imagine something much closer than that.
For that, Republicans can thank James Comey. After Democrats finish excoriating Comey, they should remember that the real reason a Trump presidency is a possibility today is because they nominated a candidate who could be taken down by FBI leaks.
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