ActRight

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is telling the media to “fact check” Donald Trump during the first presidential debate Monday night at Hofstra University in New York — already framing the spin for a potentially weak performance from the Democratic nominee. Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, told ABC News’ “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos it was the job of debate moderates to push back all the “lies” that Trump will try to level against Clinton. “I really don’t appreciate campaigns thinking it is the job of the media to go and be these virtual fact checkers and that these debate moderators should somehow do their bidding.” “What we’re concerned about is that there might be some sort of double standard here,” Mook told Stephanopoulos. “You know, Donald Trump can’t lie on that debate stage and win or even get a passing grade. Donald Trump cannot demonstrate that he doesn’t have a command of the issues and get a passing grade.” When Stephanopoulos

Smithtown High School West teacher Veronica Welsh said her students were racist if they support Donald Trump. Welsh was reportedly ...

Still on the fence? Here are the top five reasons you absolutely, positively cannot vote for Hillary Clinton. REFERENCES AT http://louderwithcrowder.com/the-...

Well, what would Friday be without the latest document dump from the Clinton email investigation? Yesterday afternoon, with the public in distracted anticipation of the coming weekend and Monday’s Clinton-Trump debate showdown, the FBI released another 189 pages of interview reports. Along with this document dump comes remarkable news: The Obama Justice Department reportedly gave top Clinton aide and confidant Cheryl Mills immunity from prosecution for any incriminating information located on her personal computer. According to House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), the limited immunity was granted in order to persuade Ms. Mills to surrender her laptop computer so the FBI could check whether classified information was stored on it. This is very strange. There was no need to grant concessions to Mills. The Justice Department could have required the production of the computer by simply issuing a grand jury subpoena. And had there been any concern that Mills would not cooperate, would destroy the computer, or would “misplace” it (as Team Clinton claims to have misplaced so many Hillary devices), investigators could have applied for a search warrant and seized the computer. In normal cases, the Justice Department does not grant immunity in exchange for evidence when it has lawful power to compel production of that evidence. Mills is not alone. Apparently her subordinate, longtime Clinton aide Heather Samuelson, was given the same deal. Unbelievably, Mills and Samuelson, who are lawyers, were also permitted to represent Hillary Clinton in the very same investigation in which, we now learn, they were personally granted immunity from prosecution. That’s apart from the fact that both of them were involved as government officials at the time they engaged in some of the conduct under investigation – a circumstance that, by itself, should have disqualified them from later serving as lawyers for other subjects in the same the investigation. As readers may recall, I have been trying to draw attention to questions about immunity in the Clinton emails investigation since last spring (see here and here). That was when we first learned that some form of immunity had been given to Brian Pagliano. He is the Clinton family employee who serviced then-Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized private server and, astonishingly, later drew a large State Department salary while continuing to be paid on the side by the Clintons. As I explained at the time, it seemed highly likely that Ms. Mills, too, had been granted some form of immunity before agreeing to speak with the FBI. After all, she was a key player in events regarding which the FBI was conducting a criminal investigation, and she had previously declined to be interviewed by the State Department’s inspector general. In addition, we now know that, on advice of counsel, she refused to answer many questions when deposed by Judicial Watch regarding the email scandal. We can thus surmise that Mills had concerns about criminal jeopardy. We also know that her lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, aggressively – and successfully – lobbied the Justice Department to prevent the FBI from questioning Mills about topics of great significance to the investigation. Based on all this, it would be very surprising to me if Mills had not been given a “proffer agreement” form of immunity before agreeing to an FBI interview. (As I’ve outlined in columns linked above, in a proffer agreement, known in prosecutor jargon as the “queen for a day” arrangement, the Justice Department agrees – with some caveats – not to use against the person any statements made during the interview). To this point, we still do not have a clear picture of whether Mills was given any kind of immunity in exchange for agreeing to an FBI interview. We have now learned, however, that she did not surrender her private laptop computer until she received assurance – in the form of immunity – that she would not be prosecuted if the FBI found any incriminating information on it. (Ms. Wilkinson, told the Associated Press that Mills got immunity only for the computer, not for the FBI interview … but Wilkinson refused to show the immunity agreement to the AP.) Mills’ subordinate, Heather Samuelson, who is also represented by Wilkinson, reportedly got the same immunity deal as Mills. The FBI had abundant reason to suspect that there was classified information improperly stored – i.e., potentially illegally stored – on Mills and Samuelson’s computers. These devices had been used in 2014 (i.e., about two years after Mills and Clinton had left the State Department) in the process of reviewing the 62,000 emails stored on Clinton’s homebrew server. It was by this process that Clinton determined which emails related to government business and would be surrendered to the State Department, and which were (purportedly) private and would be retained by Clinton. (We now know that thousands of what Clinton claimed were “private” emails were actually government-related, that some even contained classified information, and that Clinton and her minions attempted to destroy all of them – notwithstanding that destroying even one government file is a felony.) Because thousands of emails containing classified information were included among the 62,000 reviewed on the Mills and Samuelson computers, and because data usually remain stored in the memory of a computer even if a deletion attempt has been made, it was a good bet that the Mills and ­­Samuelson computers contained classified information. It can be a felony to mishandle classified information by transmitting it to, or storing it on, an unclassified system. Moreover, it constitutes a threat to national security (and to informants who risk their lives to acquire intelligence for the United States) to leave classified information on a non-secure private computer that can easily be hacked or otherwise infiltrated. Consequently, the Justice Department had the power and the duty to take custody of the Mills and Samuelson computers. It does not matter whether Mills and Samuelson were concerned that their computers might contain incriminating information. The Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination only protects a person from being forced to provide the government with self-incriminating information of a testimonial nature; it does not cover physical evidence. Thus, when law-enforcement has reason to believe physical evidence could be relevant to a criminal or national-security investigation, it demands the production of that evidence. There is no need to bargain with the person in possession of such evidence by offering immunity from prosecution. Instead, the Justice Department simply issues a grand jury subpoena compelling the possessor to surrender the evidence, on pain of being jailed for contempt if she fails to comply. Further, if investigators fear that the possessor might destroy or tamper with the evidence rather than honor a subpoena, the prosecutor simply obtains a judicial search warrant, enabling the FBI to seize the evidence forcibly. In a normal case, immunity-from-prosecution never enters into this equation. Immunity is a valuable concession that the Justice Department is only supposed to grant if there is no other way to get the evidence in question. Investigators are not supposed to “pay” for evidence the law empowers them to obtain cost-free. If, for example, a prosecutor surmised that a suspect’s hair might match hair recovered at the scene of a robbery, the prosecutor would not offer the suspect immunity from prosecution for the robbery in exchange for the suspect’s provision of a hair sample. The prosecutor would issue a subpoena requiring the suspect to provide the grand jury with a hair sample; if there was a match, the grand jury would then indict the suspect for the robbery. As the Associated Press puts it: “By including the emails recovered from the laptops in the immunity agreements, the Justice Department exempted key physical evidence from any potential criminal case against [Hillary Clinton’s] aides.” It makes no sense to have done this … unless the Justice Department had already decided it would not prosecute Mills and Samuelson, no matter what the proof showed. Add this to an already long list of startling concessions made to Mrs. Clinton and her confederates. The latest revelations raise other new questions that I will deal with in subsequent posts. For now, suffice it to say, yet again: It appears the Obama Justice Department’s goal was not to make a prosecutable case, but to make it appear that Hillary Clinton was “exonerated” after a thorough FBI investigation. 

This is insane...

Make your own free bingo cards at myfreebingocards.com

The president’s aides worry the Republican represents more of America than a fringe.

U.S. Special Operations Command has privately pressed the staff of the nation’s highest-ranking military officer to include in his upcoming National Military Strategy a discussion of the Sunni Muslim ideology underpinning the brutality of the Islamic State group and al Qaeda.

Here's a shocking story. A student, active in white racial politics, gets cross because he sees a black student filming him. He knocks the smartphone out of the black student's hand and then posts on Facebook: I wish I'd actually not been a good law abiding citizen & whupped the black sass out of the bastard. The same student had earlier boasted of reducing a waitress to black tears after refusing to tip her. Yet, curiously, he has a following in the media and even in politics. Actually, I just played a little trick on you. I swapped the colors. The student in question is Ntokozo Qwabe, whom I wrote about in this column a while back as the chap who wanted to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford. He is now back in Cape Town and evidently as charmless as ever. The actual words of his Facebook post were that he wished he had whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard. It was the white tears of a waitress that he had enjoyed.

Just one point separates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in two states that are critical to both candidates' chances of becoming president, according to new CNN/ORC polls in Pennsylvania and Colorado.

‘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. Obama not only engaged in the same type of misconduct Clinton did; he engaged in it with Clinton. 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 [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. 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. 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 as classified. 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’s classified,” 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: 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. That is why the Clinton e-mail scandal never had a chance of leading to criminal charges. — Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

Liberal punditry is in a bit of a panic about tonight’s debate: You can tell by all the demands that moderator Lester Holt basically take Hillary Clinton’s side, and by the whining about how debate…

The American Dream is real, but it may not be for much longer. What exactly is the American Dream? And why is it in danger? Elaine Parker of Job Creators Net...

Hillary Clinton's momentum seems to have stopped

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, you can bet that in the wake of the Charlotte riots, her Justice Department will ratchet up the micromanaging of local police departments. But the Black Lives Matter movement that Clinton embraces doesn’t stop with allegations that the police are killing innocent blacks. Look for an Environmental Protection Agency controlled by Hillary to fully embrace the movement’s theory of “environmental racism,” which holds that minority communities are disproportionately exposed, either intentionally or unintentionally, to hazardous materials and waste facilities. That in turn is said to be a contributing factor to riots and urban unrest. Is my prediction implausible? In 2014, after the Ferguson riots, Deirdre Smith, an environmental activist, said, “To me, the connection between militarized state violence, racism, and climate change was common-sense and intuitive.” Smith is a law professor at the University of Maine and a strategic-partnership coordinator for 350.org, an environmental organization whose goal is to “reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere from >400 parts per million to below 350.” At 350’s website, Smith wrote: “Oppression and extreme weather combine to ‘incite’ militarized violence.” Not only are minority communities less able to cope with the effects of climate change, but “people of color also disproportionately live in climate-vulnerable areas,” she claims, which makes climate change, yes, a race issue. Smith failed to note that the weeks surrounding the Ferguson riots were only the seventh-warmest in the last 20 years. In the 1960s, people who blew off the importance of riots as a result of “just the temperature” were thought to be Neanderthals. Gordon Lightfoot even had a song, “Black Day in July,” about the Detroit riots. The song included these lyrics: “And It wasn’t just the temperature / It wasn’t just the season.” Now leftists such as Deirdre Smith are resurrecting this idea. And Smith is far from alone, Van Jones, who was President Obama’s “green energy czar” until he was forced to resign in 2009 after his past ties to the Communist party surfaced, has long blamed some of the problems in minority communities on “environmental racism.” So, too, has National Resource Defense Council president Rhea Suh, who last December linked the Ferguson violence with environmental racism: “I’ve seen firsthand the ways communities of color too often suffer first, and suffer most, from pollution that poisons our waters and air, our communities, and our food.” Hillary Clinton has joined the parade. She showed up in April at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference to promise the creation of an Environmental and Climate Justice Task Force. Through this task force, the Department of Justice and the EPA would work together to address public-health concerns ranging from lead to mold and pesticides. As for climate change, a campaign memo on Hillary’s website that was released at the same time as her speech states: Across America, the burdens of air pollution, water pollution, and toxic hazards are borne disproportionately by low-income communities and communities of color. . . .  Simply put, this is environmental racism. And the impacts of climate change, from more severe storms to longer heat waves to rising sea levels, will disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities, which suffer the worst losses during extreme weather and have the fewest resources to prepare. One problem with all of these new excuses for expanding the regulatory reach of both Justice and the EPA is that the evidence for environmental racism is scant and circumstantial. Take last week’s report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which claims that the federal government is failing to protect minority communities from environmental racism. “In its report, the commission focused on coal ash dumps,” writes Nidhi Subbaraman, a science reporter for BuzzFeed. Subbaraman quotes the conclusion that Martin Castro, the commission’s chairman, reaches in the report: I’m not certain if the Environmental Protection Agency is incompetent or indifferent when it comes to requiring environmental justice from polluters of minority communities, but whatever the case, the result is the same. The EPA has failed miserably in its mandate to protect communities of color from environmental hazards. But the New American Civil Rights Project, a group of scholars and lawyers who question the race-based approach of many federal regulations, presented a powerful rebuttal to Castro. They note that Castro concludes that racial minorities are “disproportionately affected by the siting of waste disposal facilities.” But this conclusion had to be worded vaguely, they say, because the commission staff’s only independent research — which focused only on coal ash — tended to show that coal-ash disposal sites were disproportionately located near whites. This embarrassing result was downplayed in the commission’s report. Indeed, the report title was changed to delete the words “coal ash,” and the commission abandoned its original plan to focus specifically the EPA’s coal-ash policy. The report includes a strong dissent from U.S. Civil Rights Commission member Gail Heriot. She notes: The biggest take away from this report should be this: Coal ash landfills and ponds aren’t actually disproportionately located in the vicinity of racial minorities — at least not insofar as the Commission’s independent empirical research shows. Our research indicates that, if anything, coal ash landfills and ponds may be disproportionately located near whites. This research is broadly consistent with the findings of the EPA when it conducted similar research into coal-fired electric utility plants in 2010 and into surface impoundments and landfills in 2014. She adds: We must acknowledge and try to do something about legitimate grievances. But we must also be careful never to fan the flames of racial resentment by telling people they have been “targeted” on account of their race when it isn’t true. Heriot’s warning is both timely and ominous. Already some leftists are tying together allegations of police misconduct with specious environmental causes. If Hillary Clinton wins, look for the rapid growth of a new legal industry in which the grievances of everyone from environmental extremists to Black Lives Matter will find a powerful new advocate in the Department of Justice. Under that regime, there would be virtually no limit to what power the federal government took on, riding roughshod over local communities nationwide. — John Fund is NRO’s national-affairs correspondent.

On Thursday, with tongue somewhat in cheek, I launched a movement on social media:

It's been one year of Trump already; let's review his top suggestions to make America great again.

Newsweek obtained a deposition that shows Donald Trump committed perjury. Or lied.

Thank God no one else was murdered by these terrorists.

Why he will come to regret his endorsement of Donald Trump’s presidential bid.

From sea to shining sea.

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook discusses with Jake Tapper comments from an I.T. worker regarding Hillary Clinton's emails in a recent document dump.

On the eve of the first presidential debate, the race has essentially become a coin toss. While Hillary screams into camera, “Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?,” it’s actually not clear that she’s ahead at all.

Less than a week after rioters nearly burned the city of Charlotte to the ground in a fury of mob violence over the shooting death of Keith Scott, an African-American man with a criminal history, police have released a substantial amount of evidence pertaining to the shooting. Police released most of the material on Saturday, quieting a medley of voices complaining about the department’s supposed lack of transparency.

Five people were shot dead Friday night at the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Washington north of Seattle. Turkish born Arcan ...