“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace sat down with President Obama last week to discuss, among other things, the legal imbroglio over Hillary Clinton’s emails. As a journalist, I was fascinated by the political implications of the president’s defense of his former secretary of state. As a lawyer, I was stunned by his logic and reasoning which seemed, at times, tortured. Here are my five takeaways from the conversation which aired on Sunday.
1. PRESIDENT OBAMA SAID HE BELIEVES HILLARY CLINTON “HAS NOTJEOPARDIZED AMERICA’S NATIONAL SECURITY.”
How does he know? He doesn’t. He was speculating. Hackers may well have gained access to her unsecured server… and we simply don’t know it.
Hacking is often surreptitious. Many victims don’t even know it when they’ve been hacked. The Chinese, Russians and other adversaries have a long history of hacking to obtain American secrets. Which is exactly why unsecured servers are a risk to national security. So, Obama’s claim is baseless and without real knowledge. No one, not even the president, knows every occasion when hackers succeed or fail.
2. OBAMA CLAIMED CLINTON “NEVER INTENTIONALLY PUT AMERICA IN ANY KIND OF JEOPARDY.”
In a court of law, that is not the issue. The question is not whether Clinton intended to put America at risk, but whether her actions were intentionaland thereby put America at risk.
Clinton’s acts were clearly intentional. She intended to create a private server. She knew it was unsecured. She intended to retain classified materials on the server, and she proceeded to do so (with some 2,000 classified and 22 “top secret” documents).
Remember, knowingly storing classified information at an unauthorized location is a crime. (18 USC 1924)
3. OBAMA DESCRIBED CLINTON’S ACTIONS AS “CARELESS,” AS IF THAT MAKES IT OKAY.
It is not okay under the law. Recklessness (or gross negligence) is sufficient to indict and convict, according to the statute and case law. The president’s use of the word “careless” is simply a synonym for “reckless”. While Obama was trying to exculpate Clinton, he was really inculpating or incriminating her by pronouncing her careless. From a legal standpoint, he actually hurt Clinton’s case.
4. OBAMA INSISTED HE WILL EXERT “NO POLITICAL INFLUENCE” ON THE FBI AND THE DOJ.
Yet, he did precisely that in the interview! He all but proclaimed Clinton’s innocence by offering his opinion that she did nothing legally wrong (that is, his repeated description of “careless, not intentional”).
Obama was too clever by half.
Presidents are not supposed to interfere directly with pending cases. So, what did Obama do? He interfered indirectly.
As president, he wields a huge megaphone. He shouted his desire to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey in a nationally televised interview. Of course they saw it and/or read about it. They now know what he wants them to do. The question is…will they do it?
5. CLINTON’S DEFENSE IS NO DEFENSE AT ALL.
She claims some of her predecessors did the same thing. Incorrect. None of them had their ownprivate, unsecured servers in their homes on which they conducted their business exclusively. Even if they did, Clinton’s defense is the equivalent of saying, “it’s okay to rob banks because other people do it.”
She also claims the materials were not “marked” classified. That’s utterly irrelevant under the statute. It is the content, not the markings, which make matters classified. Indeed, it doesn’t matter if they are marked or unmarked.
If Clinton wants to claim she did not recognize the classified materials without the markings, then she would be arguing her own incompetence. In a court of law, incompetence is not a defense.
Here’s the juice: from morning ’til night, 24/7, 365 days a year, lying…
…is all these two do…about anything and everything. And the Dissimulating Duo’s continued denial of their deliberate deceptions, while readily accepted by a MSM as crooked as they are, mean as much as TLJ’s disavowal of having sourced the wretched odor permeating our vehicle’s interior when there’s only two of us in the car.
Which includes, as the WSJ‘s Jason Riley reports, Team Tick-Tock’s explanation for its latest assault on America’s moral compass:
“…The “Obama administration is aggressively imposing its claim that existing laws prohibiting sex discrimination require that public school districts, as a condition of federal funding, allow boys who think they’re girls to use the public-school bathrooms, locker rooms and showers designated for girls,” Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote in a blog post last fall.
Attempts to accommodate transgender people with separate facilities or private stalls have been rejected by the Obama administration and LGBT activists, who deride such compromises as akin to the return of Jim Crow.Advocates insist that supporting separate bathrooms and showers for men and women is the equivalent of supporting separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites. A year ago this month, the White House opened the first gender-neutral bathroom, but its use is optional. According to the administration, transgender people should be able to use any bathroom they choose, an option not open to the nontransgender community.
It is clear that the ultimate goal here isn’t accommodation but special protection for “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” under the law. The argument, which amounts to a denial of human nature, is that gender is fluid and that biological realities don’t matter. But historically, laws targeting sex discrimination have never granted members of the opposite sex regular access to single-sex facilities. And courts have rejected the novel interpretation of Title IX that the administration is using to pressure public school districts.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, who signed the new law, has come under pressure to reverse himself. The Republican announced Tuesday that he is open to tweaking some aspects of the measure but is standing by the “common sense” provisions regarding the use of bathrooms.One can bear no ill-will toward the LBGT community and still think: Good for the governor.“
While we certainly bear no ill-will towards any LBGT individual, at the risk of sounding overly harsh, we consign their “community’s” uncompromising, nonsensical goals and agenda straight to the fires of Hell.
Since we’re on the subject of perpetually patent prevaricators, Allahpundit details The Donald’s explanation for his latest act of managerial ineptitude:
“The funniest part of this is when he says the rules in Colorado were changed to help “a guy like Cruz.” In reality the rules were changed to block guys like Cruz. Colorado used to award its delegates via a caucus, but that backfired in 2012 when Rick Santorum upset Mitt Romney there. That’s how it tends to go with caucuses — unlike a statewide primary, they benefit well-organized candidates with a passionate grassroots following, both of which are hallmarks of Cruz’s campaign. When the rules were alteredlast August, decoupling the caucus from the process of awarding delegates, it was done with the intent of preventing another victory by an outsider — not just Trump but Cruz, Rand Paul, Ben Carson, and so on. The hope, I’m sure, was that an establishment champion would emerge this year and would, by dint of his greater campaign resources and “insider” support,” be able to out-organize all of the insurgent candidates in electing delegates directly. Trump’s not wrong, in other words, to believe that the system was “rigged,” but it was rigged to try to hurt Cruz as much as to hurt him. So what happened? Cruz adapted and Trump didn’t. As the establishment candidates crumbled, Cruz got organized to target delegates at the state and district level while Trump glided on with his media-saturation campaign strategy. If Trump had been paying attention, he’d have brought Paul Manafort into the campaign the day after Colorado changed its rules, knowing that delegate-wrangling could end up playing a key role in claiming the nomination.He didn’t.
Which, says Ben Domenech, raises the question: If Trump can’t anticipate his opponents’ moves in a straightforward game like this, where the rules are written down and publicly available, how’s he going to do with foreign policy?
…“[T]wo key Trump claims have fallen apart thanks to his inability to fight for delegates properly, writes Ben Shapiro: “[H]e’s not a great dealmaker, and he doesn’t hire all the very best people.” Pay attention to the clip below, in fact, and you’ll find Trump complaining at one point about the process of wooing delegates, “They offer him trips, they offer him all sorts of things, and you’re allowed to do that.” That’s the second-funniest moment here. The billionaire who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” who’s bragged for months about how shrewd he was in buying influence with pols like Hillary Clinton by cutting them big checks for donations, is now whining that it’s unfair to dangle goodies in front of political actors to get them to do your bidding…”
Writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty seconds the motion:
“…The Colorado Republican party made the decision to not hold a straw poll back in August, with very little objection at the time from Donald Trump or anyone else outside Colorado. And this is not much of a change from the previous cycles.
...On March 1, Colorado Republicans gathered at 2,917 precinct caucuses to select delegates to the county assemblies and district conventions.If you’re a Coloradan with a view on the Republican primary, this is when you got to vote.At the county assemblies, those delegates elect delegates to the congressional-district and state conventions. (Colorado Republicans pick three delegates and three alternates from each of the seven congressional districts, and then another 13 to represent statewide.) Once again, this is all laid out in the party rules. This isn’t hidden somewhere.It’s not written in code.
Trump asks, “How is it possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the Republican Primary? Great anger – totally unfair!” It’s very possible, because another nine states and the District of Columbia have people who “never get to vote in the Republican Primary” because they have a caucus, and another four territories have caucuses or state conventions. Trump’s contention is that only primaries are fair.
One might think he had never paid much attention to a presidential primary before. (We do know he hasn’t voted in the past six presidential primaries, and he mentioned this morning that two of his children missed the deadline to register to vote in the New York primary.)
It’s been easy to scoff at this description of Trump’s meeting with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus…
When Mr. Priebus explained that each campaign needed to be prepared to fight for delegates at each state’s convention, Mr. Trump turned to his aides and suggested that they had not been doing what they needed to do, the people briefed on the meeting said.
But the evidence is mounting that yes, indeed, Trump really is being poorly served by his staff, as his campaign seems to get blindsided by existing rules week after week…”
“…Mr. Cruz cleaned up in Colorado because his campaign was paying attention to the process. Whatever one thinks of the Texan’s appeal as a candidate, his campaign is organized and focused on winning the required 1,237 delegate majority. This speaks well of his ability to lead a complex organization.
The Trump campaign’s delegate-counting blunders show the downside of running a one-man show from a Boeing 757. Mr. Trump famously disdained the trappings of conventional campaigns, banking on mass rallies and free media. That has worked well in primaries, especially open primaries when Democrats and independents can vote for GOP candidates.
But Mr. Trump hasn’t taken the time to understand how the GOP’s state parties work, and he’s now paying the price as delegates are chosen…”
Donald, you want some cheese…
…with that whine?!?
Last but not least, as Guy Benson opines at Townhall.com…
“As Donald Trump attempts to distract from his campaign’s myriad failures in Colorado by cynically stirring the “rigged corrupt game” pot, one of the public faces of this phony outrage is a gentleman who earned himself prime Drudge real estate when he dramatically burned his voter registration card on camera — claiming that he was wrongfully turned away from the state party convention because he’s a Trump fan. It’s a disenfranchisement conspiracy cooked up by the elites, he argued, torching his Republican documentation in protest. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway was skeptical of the man’s version of events and dug into the back story. She discovered that rather than being the victim of shadowy subterfuge, Douglas County resident Larry Wayne Lindseydidn’t understand the rules, shirked his own responsibilities, and leapt to inaccurate conclusions…”
You know…just like his candidate of choice!
Bottomline?
Answer: he has none!!!
Turning now from the clueless to the willfully blind, as reported by FOX News and courtesy of the most politically-driven director in CIA history…
“So what if we waterboard our own aircrews and special ops personnel to simulate far more heinous and harmful methods of interrogation?!?”
“CIA Director John Brennan has said that his spy agency will not use controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, even if ordered to do so by a future president….“I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure,” he said. Brennan later added that he would “not agree to having any CIA officer carrying out waterboarding again.”…”
Brennan’s seeming assertiveness is akin to Captain Smith saying he’d refuse to skipper Titanic again until the White Star Line provides sufficient life boats. As if any future President remotely inclined towards utilizing waterboarding, a completely safe yet terribly effective interrogation technique, would keep a partisan hack as ineffective as Brennan in any position of importance, let alone one involving national security.
“Hmmm…good point!”
In a related item, the WSJ‘s Bill McGurn relates how…
“Hey, it’s not like anyone we know are doing the dying!”
“Are Marines combat troops? In Barack Obama’s world, the answer is apparently not—not even when they are on the ground exchanging fire with the enemy. This is the fiction supported by Hillary Clinton and largely unchallenged by any of the three Republican candidates for president.
A recent headline in the Marine Corps Times summed it up this way: “Marines in Iraq technically not in combat but still getting some.”Welcome to Mr. Obama’s hidden war.
Forty-five years ago this month, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a young war vet named John Kerry complained that the whitewashing of the reality of American involvement in Vietnam meant that each day “someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we don’t have to admit a mistake.”
Today, as secretary of state, Mr. Kerry travels about the world rationalizing an Iraq policy designed to keep President Obama from having to admit his mistake: that he has only made worse a war he claimed to have ended.The entire world knows this too.
…In 1971, a much younger John Kerry complained to Congress about the phony distinction between ground troops and helicopter crews in Vietnam, and an American people who “accepted a differentiation fed them by the administration.” How fitting that Mr. Kerry, who recently returned from Baghdad, now serves as secretary of state for an administration feeding us the whopper that Marines fighting ISIS in Iraq are not combat troops.“
Modern Liberalism as personified by The Great Prevaricator is proof positive Orwell had it right:
It’s all right there in the fine print!
On The Lighter Side…
We’re out of town on business Wednesday and Thursday, so we may be radio silent come Friday. ‘Til then…
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