A Fine Bunch - Clinton, Comey, Weiner, Abedin and Obama

FBI Agent : It's a slam dunk case. She was grossly negligent. If she wasn't, there's no such thing. We have to recommend indictment.

Comey : (Thinks silently for a several moments, then asks,) What's a good synonym for "grossly"?

Agent : Hmmmm....How about, "extremely".

Comey : (face brightens) Good. That's good. Now, another word for negligent.

Agent : Ummmm...."careless"?

Comey : (smiles broadly) Yes! Excellent! That's it. She was "extremely careless". And I don't see that wording in any of the relevant statutes. We'll go with "extremely careless".


Within the confined space of a WSJ op-ed, former U.S. AG Michael Mukasey presents the case for Hillary Clinton's indictment on multiple misdemeanor and felony counts and then goes on to bash FBI head James Comey and current AG Loretta Lynch for their dereliction of duty in not bringing the former Secretary of State up on charges.

...In July (Comey) announced that "no reasonable prosecutor" would seek to charge her with a crime although Mrs, Clinton had classified information on a private nonsecure server -- at least a misdemeanor under one statute; and although she was "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information such that it was exposed to hacking by foreign nations -- a felony under another statute; and apparently had caused the destruction of emails -- a felony under two other statutes.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-directors-dishonorable-choice-1477863402

Retired CIA officer Charles S. Faddis has no patience for Clinton apologists. --

I have worked in national security my entire life. Most of that has been in the intelligence community surrounded by classified information. For twenty years, I worked undercover in the Central Intelligence Agency, recruiting sources, producing intelligence and running operations. I have a pretty concrete understanding of how classified information is handled and how government communications systems work.

Nobody uses a private email server for official business. Period. Full stop.

The entire notion is, to borrow a phrase from a Clinton campaign official, “insane.” That anyone would presume to be allowed to do so is mind-boggling. That government officials allowed Hillary Clinton to do so is nauseating.

(Faddis isn't quite correct here. Government officials, including Barack Obama, knew of the Clinton email arrangement and did nothing to stop it. Nobody actually "allowed" it. Saying it was approved was just one of Clinton's egregious lies).

Classified and unclassified information do not mix. They don’t travel in the same streams through the same pipes. They move in clearly well defined channels so that never the twain shall meet. Mixing them together is unheard of and a major criminal offense.

If you end up with classified information in an unclassified channel, you have done something very wrong and very serious.

Accidentally removing a single classified message from controlled spaces, without any evidence of intent or exposure to hostile forces, can get you fired and cost you your clearance. Repeated instances will land you in prison.

Every hostile intelligence agency on the planet targets senior American officials for collection. The Secretary of State tops the list. Almost anything the Secretary of State had to say about her official duties, her schedule, her mood, her plans for the weekend, would be prized information to adversaries.

It is very difficult, in fact, to think of much of anything that the Secretary of State could be saying in email that we would want hostile forces to know.

As we wait for more information on the latest revelations, let’s quickly note what we already know Hillary Clinton did.

While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email address for official business. Instead of using a State Department account, she used a personal email account, housed on a private server located in her home in Chappaqua, New York. The Department of State exercised zero control or oversight in this process. No government security personnel were involved in protecting them.

When the House Select Committee on Benghazi asked to see these emails, the Department of State said they did not have them. Clinton’s lawyers then went through all the emails on her server. They turned over 30,000 emails they decided were work related and deleted all of the rest.

How they made the decision as to which emails to share and which to destroy remains unknown. Active government officials were not involved in this process.

Hillary says she did not use the account to transmit classified information. This has been proven false. The FBI found over 100 messages that contained information that was classified when sent, including numerous email chains at the level of Top Secret/Special Access Programs. They don’t get any more highly classified, it’s the virtual summit of Mt. Everest. One theme pertained to the movement of North Korean nuclear assets obtained via satellite imagery. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this is extremely sensitive information.

The FBI found another 2,000 messages containing information that should have been classified at the time it was sent. How much more classified information may have been in the tens of thousands of emails, which Clinton’s lawyers erased, is completely unknown.

(Not completely. The Russians and Chinese certainly know. Possibly the Iranians and North Koreans too. Oh, and the British and the Israelis know for sure. Fortunately, the latter two are our friends).

Hillary Clinton supporters like to ask rhetorically, “Well, what about Colin Powell?” Nice try, but using your own private email address which received 2 emails determined to be classified later, is nothing like deliberately operating a home brewed server, and then see it handle thousands of classified e-mails.

It’s like asking, "what about the guy who received a stolen apple?" while equating his actions to those of bank robbers who stole $10 million.

What happens next we do not know. What we do know already is this. While serving in one of the most senior positions in the United States Government, Hillary Clinton was at a minimum, grossly negligent in the handling of classified information and when confronted with this practice, acted immediately to destroy information and prevent a full, fair and complete investigation of any damage to national security.

Anyone else who did such things in the government would long ago have been tried, convicted and sent to jail.

You decide if you want to send her to the White House instead.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/303499-hillarys-emails-matter-a-retired-cia-officer

Meanwhile, Ben Shapiro and Mark Steyn are both having a grand old time analyzing the circumstances of the Clinton scandal's latest revelations.

Shapiro --

http://www.dailywire.com/news/10355/5-reasons-fbis-new-email-investigation-hilarious-ben-shapiro

Steyn --

This passage is priceless --

Thursday's Wikileaks brought forth the revelation that, at the highest levels in the Hillary campaign, senior officials had been wondering what precisely is the difference between credibly accused sexual predator Bill Cosby and credibly accused sexual predator Bill Clinton. My post on the topic prompted Professor Larry A Feig of Tufts University to write to me:

Cosby drugged women you asshole
Larry A Feig, PhD
Professor of Developmental, Molecular & Chemical Biology
Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences
Tufts University

I'm not a PhD, but I think there should be a comma between "drugged women" and "you asshole".

Two points to Professor Feig:

1) You should have sent your response to Hillary campaign official Ron Klain, senior foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan and campaign chair John Podesta, who were the ones trying to agree to a line on this particular topic.

2) Still, thanks for giving us the view from one of America's most prestigious safe spaces. If I understand Professor Feig correctly, the critical distinction is that it's totally unacceptable to sedate your victims so they wake up afterwards wondering what the hell happened, as opposed to ensuring they remain conscious for every violent, traumatic moment of the rape. "Zzzzzz" means "no", but "no" means "sure, go for it, just make sure I stay awake." You might want to put some ice on that theory, professor.*

http://www.steynonline.com/7577/occam-weiner

*I'm at risk of ruining the line by explaining it, but here Steyn is alluding to the Juanita Broaddrick rape allegation against Bill Clinton. "Put some ice on that", he told her after chewing up her lip.

And lastly -- From Time magazine (!!) -- Unless this is a parody, and I don't think it is, the writer is irredeemably stupid. And insane. Between the lunatic left and the alt-right, it's clear why we get the candidates we do.

http://time.com/4551711/hillary-clinton-emailgate/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter

What Can One Say But...Obama!

Salieri : Mozart, it was good of you to come!
Mozart : How could I not?
Salieri : How... Did my work please you?
Mozart : I never knew that music like that was possible!
Salieri : You flatter me.
Mozart : No, no! One hears such sounds, and what can one say but... Salieri!

Another happy Obamacare customer (At least the notice is honest. "...Open access POS")--

The repercussions of Obama's "smart" power --

                  Syria bombs school ; 35 dead, including 20 children

Across Russia, 40 million civilians and military personnel just finished up emergency drills aimed at preparing the general population for nuclear or chemical-weapons attacks --

         Soldiers dressed in hazchem gear carry victims of an attack away from the scene

Another Obama "legacy" -- The Iran capitulation --



















The Obama administration disclosed to Congress that it transferred a total of $1.7 billion in cash through Swiss banks to Iran around the time American hostages were released this year, about four times the amount originally disclosed to the public.

...Between January 2014 and July 2015, when the Obama administration was hammering out the final details of the nuclear accord, Iran was paid $700 million every month from funds that had previously been frozen by U.S. sanctions.
A total of $11.9 billion was ultimately paid to Iran, but the details surrounding these payments remain shrouded in mystery, according to Mark Dubowitz, executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In total, “Iran may have received as much as $33.6 billion in cash or in gold and other precious metals,” Dubowitz disclosed. 

Ah, money well spent...

...Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are believed to be behind a series of incidents this month that saw surface-to-surface missiles fired at the USS Mason on at least two occasions.

And Obama loses...the Philippines?!

Rodrigo Duterte, a self-proclaimed socialist with close links to communists, announced in Beijing the Philippines' 'separation' from the United States, throwing into doubt a 70-year alliance that is anchored on a mutual defense treaty

..."America has lost now. I've realigned myself in your ideological flow," he told business leaders in Beijing on Thursday. "And maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world: China, Philippines and Russia. It's the only way."

With Australia and Japan next ?! --

Australia has slipped into neutral gear in the South China Sea, saying it won’t participate in any joint naval exercises there. Japanese officials worry that U.S. weakness in dealing with China will mean Beijing’s plans for turning the East China Sea into a Chinese lake may be unstoppable.


But at least Obama is "saving the earth" -- 

Earlier this month, employees of the Environmental Protection Agency, acting in their official capacities, caused one of the largest waste spills in recent history.

For almost a week, a torrent of toxic sludge, the color of hot mustard and rife with poisonous metals — has been flowing through Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

(Not) For the birds -- "sustainable" energy

And next in line -- HRC and her gang.

Kevin Williamson --

James Comey, the contemptible bureaucrat who apparently is running the show at the FBI these days, just informed Congress that the agency plans to reopen its investigation into the question of Mrs. Clinton’s covert e-mail system, the classified information that passed through it, the contents of e-mails that were improperly kept from investigators, and more. “The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote to Congress, which means that the FBI is finally catching up with the gentlemen in Moscow and Buzzfeed. Hurrah for the feebs.

The recent WikiLeaks release is hugely entertaining reading. Vexed by the Clinton circle’s lack of e-mail security, Clinton aide Cheryl Mills wrote to John Podesta — in an e-mail, for pete’s sake! — “We need to clean this up.” Clean what up? “He” — President Barack Obama — “has emails from her. They do not say state.gov.” You’ll recall that President Obama, whose dishonesty is at least as instinctive as Richard Nixon’s was, said that he knew nothing about Mrs. Clinton’s e-mail shenanigans until he learned about the situation on the evening news. “I first heard about it on the news” is his standard line on practically everything. If, God forbid, the man should one day come down with testicular cancer, he’ll learn about it from Dr. Sanjay Gupta at 7 p.m. on a slow-news Wednesday on CNN.

Remember that this mess started with the invasion of an e-mail account belonging to Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton sycophant. If you and your gang were in hot water because you could not keep your secret e-mails secret, what on earth would possess you to put a such a confession — a confession of what looks for all the world like conspiracy to obstruct justice – into an e-mail?

English is going to need a stronger word for stupidity.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441586/hillary-clinton-corruption-fbi-investigation-election-outcome

Go Blue!

Some good news for a change. Apparently, there's been a positive reaction to Kaepernick's deplorable stunt.

Liars Lie

"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."
White House web page, 2009

Barack Obama repeated some variation of this 37 times while campaigning for the ACA. The left-leaning fact checker, Politifact called this the "Lie Of The Year", 2013.

On October 29, 2013, NBC News reported that 50 percent to 75 percent of the 14 million Americans with individual healthcare plans would receive a cancellation notice in the next year.


"I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year."
Barack Obama, 2008

"Not only are premiums lower than they were, they're lower than the most optimistic predictions."
Barack Obama, 2013

"The average premium for a family in an employer-sponsored plan in 2008 was $12,680. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, for 2016, annual premiums for an average family are now beyond $17,500."
Jim Geraghty, 10/2016

"Premiums will go up sharply next year under President Barack Obama's health care law, and many consumers will be down to just one insurer, the administration confirmed Monday.
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVARBefore taxpayer-provided subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services."

Associated Press report, 10/24/2016

KW with a primer on why Obamacare didn't work --

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/441432/why-obamacare-doesnt-work

The Contemptible, Loathsome, Hateful, Detestable, Reprehensible, Abhorrent, Heinous Candidate

And Donald Trump is not any good either.

How Hillary Clinton treats the people sworn to protect her life with theirs. Deroy Murdock documents a few examples.

“I’m not voting for Clinton,” Air Force staff sergeant Eric Bonner posted on Facebook in July.

“It’s because she actually talked to me once. Almost a sentence,” wrote the Air Force K-9 handler. “I got to do a few details involving Distinguished Visitors.”

“One of my last details was for Hillary when she was Secretary of State,” Bonner continued. “I helped with sweeps of her DV quarters and staff vehicles. Her words to me?”

According to Bonner, Clinton told him, “Get that f***ing dog away from me.”

“Then she turns to her security detail and berates them up and down about why that animal was in her quarters,” Bonner added. “For the next 20 minutes, while I sit there waiting to be released, she lays into her detail, slamming the door in their faces when she’s done. The Detail lead walks over, apologizes, and releases me. I apologize to him for getting him in trouble. His words, ‘Happens every day, Brother.’”

“Hillary doesn’t care about anyone but Hillary.”

“Stay the f*** back, stay the f*** away from me!” the then-–First Lady screamed at her Secret Service agents. “Don’t come within ten yards of me, or else! Just f***ing do as I say, okay!!?” Clinton demanded, according to former FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s Unlimited Access, page 139.

“If you want to remain on this detail, get your f***ing ass over here and grab those bags!” Hillary yelled at a Secret Service agent, as Joyce Milton reported in The First Partner, page 259. The officer explained in vain that he preferred to keep his hands free, in case a threat arose.

“Good morning, ma’am,” a uniformed Secret Service officer once greeted Hillary Clinton.

“F*** off!” she replied, as Ronald Kessler documented in First Family Detail, page 16.

“Put this back on the ground!” Hillary Clinton screamed at the pilot of presidential helicopter Marine One. “I left my sunglasses in the limo. I need my sunglasses! We need to go back!” Clinton so abused the chopper’s crew that they christened it Broomstick One.

Also in Dereliction of Duty, its author — Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson (Ret.), who carried the “nuclear football” — recalled hearing “volleys of expletives” erupting from Hillary’s mouth. He also lamented “the Nazi-like edge that emerged when she was around.”

“Where is the goddam f***ing flag? I want the goddam f***ing flag up every f***ing morning at f***ing sunrise,” Hillary snapped at state trooper Larry Patterson at the Arkansas governor’s mansion on Labor Day 1991, according to Ronald Kessler’s Inside the White House, page 246.

“Good morning,” an Arkansas state trooper said to Clinton, according to American Evita, by Christopher Andersen, a former contributing editor with Time magazine.

"F*** off!” Hillary told him and his fellow bodyguards. “It’s enough I have to see you s***-kickers every day! I’m not going to talk to you, too! Just do your goddam job and keep your mouth shut.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441367/hillary-clinton-security-detail-curses-foul-mouth

The Continuing Outrage

Since this cannot be repeated often enough...

Hillary Clinton committed multiple felonies during her tenure as Secretary of State and escaped prosecution only because the current president is as corrupt as she is.

Andrew McCarthy with yet another devastating critique of our next president, comparing her treatment with that of the recently prosecuted General James E. Cartwright.

Here's an extensive excerpt, but the entire piece should be read.

...Compared with Clinton, Cartwright is a piker. As the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reports, Cartwright appears to have been a “confirming” source. That is, reporters from the New York Times and of Newsweek already had the Stuxnet intelligence (from some other leaker whom the administration has not prosecuted). Cartwright merely acknowledged the information’s accuracy — and, he says, only after it had appeared in published news reports. His claimed purpose was to prevent additional intelligence from being published to the detriment of our national security. This does not excuse his conduct, but it may go a long way toward explaining why the Justice Department charged only a felony false-statement count, not a classified-information offense.

Clinton, by contrast, willfully set up a homebrew e-mail system. Given that the secretary of state’s duties preponderantly involve intelligence matters, this made it inevitable that classified information would unlawfully be transmitted and stored on non-secure servers (i.e., outside the multi-layered protection of the government’s classified communications system). Thus did the FBI find, for example, that of the 110 e-mails on Clinton’s non-secure system that were — contrary to her claims — classified at the time she sent or received them, eight involved top-secret information.

What does “top secret” mean? Under the executive order signed in 1995 by Mrs. Clinton’s husband, President Bill Clinton, it is information the mishandling of which “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” With such an enormous level of threat, extraordinary restrictions on access are imposed to limit the possibility of exposure. That’s why the government generally comes down like a ton of bricks on offenders, or at least offenders not named Clinton.

Even these extraordinary measures, however, are deemed insufficient when the information is designated as “SAP” (“special access program”) — as seven of Mrs. Clinton’s were. Because mishandling top-secret SAP programs could expose either intelligence-gathering efforts that are critical to protecting American lives or intelligence sources who gravely imperil themselves in order to acquire life-saving intelligence for the United States, access to such information is on an even more extremely limited “need to know” basis. Yet, Clinton made them vulnerable to everyone.

Fully 36 of Clinton’s e-mails fell into the “secret”-information category. That designation applies when information “could be expected to cause serious damage to national security” if transmitted or stored in an unauthorized manner. “Serious” is not as weighty as “exceptionally grave,” but it is, well, serious. That’s why people usually get prosecuted for compromising it. Unlike Cartwright, Clinton did not just communicate with a couple of reporters who already knew the information in question. She made previously concealed intelligence massively vulnerable to capture by foreign intelligence agencies and hackers.

...That brings us back to “(C),” the designation that applied to at least seven of Clinton’s e-mails at the time she sent or received them, and that now covers thousands more because government intelligence agencies adjudged them too sensitive to disclose publicly. Again, “(C)” does not really stand for “Cartwright” or indicate alphabetical ordering. It is, instead, the designation for “confidential” information that, if mishandled, could “cause damage to the national security.” This means its mishandling is a significant offense, even if the damage is not likely to be “exceptionally grave” or “serious.” That’s why its compromise often results in prosecution, or at least severe sanctions such as termination of employment or loss of security clearance.

In light of General Cartwright’s prosecution for lying about his mishandling of classified information, it is worth revisiting Mrs. Clinton’s representation to the FBI that she did not know what “(C)” meant.

For four years, Clinton was secretary of state, a job in which classified information is stock-in-trade. On starting her tenure, Clinton signed a document acknowledging that she had “received a security indoctrination concerning the nature and protection of classified information.” In the last paragraph, right over her signature, Clinton acknowledges that she has been provided with the aforementioned executive order signed by her husband in 1995 — the one that explains, in painstaking detail, what classified information at the confidential level is.

Naturally, when later asked about it by the FBI, Clinton denied any recollection of this security indoctrination. Yet in her memoir, Hard Choices, Clinton vividly recounts receiving thorough training to guard against the omnipresent danger of espionage. Indeed, she recalled that, when she traveled, she and her staff would leave “BlackBerrys, laptops — anything that communicated with the outside world — on the plane, with their batteries removed to prevent foreign services from compromising them.” Further, based on the training she’d gotten, she took to reading intelligence information

"inside an opaque tent in a hotel room. In less well-equipped settings we were told to improvise by reading sensitive material with a blanket over our head."

These mountains of documents she scrutinized involved such matters as the Snowden leaks, the NSA program, the Libyan civil war, Mubarak’s fall and the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise, the Saudi role in 9/11, the Iraqi nuclear and missile programs, the Benghazi siege, the arming of “rebels” in Libya and Syria, the deterioration of Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and on, and on. And that’s not the half of it. Before heading the State Department, she spent eight years in the U.S. Senate, most of that time as a member of the Armed Services Committee. It was wartime, and the major national controversies centered on classified information. She therefore had to pore over intelligence that, for example, supported the Iraq invasion, was derived from interrogations, measured the success of the “surge,” and so forth.

If there is one thing Clinton has emphasized in her presidential campaign, it is her “readiness.” Whether she was on Capitol Hill or at Foggy Bottom, she wants you to know, she was never the phone-it-in type. She did all her homework, and then some.

If there is one thing Clinton has emphasized in her presidential campaign, it is her ‘readiness.’ Well, in those classified documents she studied lo those dozen years, the “(C)” designation is ubiquitous. It often appears numerous times in a single document — even on a single page. Yet, despite spending a decade-plus as a daily, top-level consumer of classified information, Clinton looked a room full of FBI agents and federal prosecutors in the eye and told them she didn’t know what the “(C)” designation meant.

Mrs. Clinton has told many preposterous lies, but that has to be the most outrageous of the lot.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441358/hillary-clinton-secretar-state-emails-classified-information-fbi-justice-department

Principled Conservatism

Jonah Goldberg at his best...

Facing a skeptical, if not quite hostile, crowd at Hillsdale College (no less), Jonah forcefully defends his Never Trump position with passion, clarity and humor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNbXqQ1IeIs

A more relaxed Goldberg discusses What Is Conservatism? as part of a panel. Listening to this, (and the Hillsdale video), I realize that he is the person closest to being my philosophical guru.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL7ilna67Ws&spfreload=5