“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
Will the Republican party learn the wrong lessons from its election victory?
At dawn Tuesday in West Quoddy Head, Maine, America’s easternmost point, it was certain that by midnight in Cape Wrangell, Alaska, America’s westernmost fringe, there would be a loser who deserved to lose and a winner who did not deserve to win. The surprise is that Barack Obama must have immediately seen his legacy, a compound of stylistic and substantive arrogance, disappearing, as though written on water in ink of vapor.
His health-care reform has contributed to three Democratic drubbings. The 2010 and 2014 wave elections, like scythes in a wheat field, decapitated a rising generation of potential party leaders. Then came Tuesday’s earthquake, which followed shocking increases of Obamacare’s prices. This law has been as historic as Obama thinks, but not as he thinks: It might be the last gasp of progressivism’s hubris expressed in continentwide social engineering imposed from the continent’s eastern edge. Hillary Clinton’s proposed solution to Obamacare’s accelerating unraveling was a “public option”: intensified government manipulation to correct the consequences of government manipulation of health care’s 18 percent of the economy. Her campaign’s other defining proposal, “free” tuition in public higher education, insulted the intelligence of voters aware that “free” means “paid for by others, including you.”
Obama’s foreign-policy legacy, aside from mounting chaos worldwide, was the Iran nuclear agreement. By precedent and constitutional norms, this should have been a treaty submitted to the Senate. Instead, disdainfully and characteristically, he produced it as an executive agreement. Because the agreement lacks legitimizing ratification by senators, the president-elect will feel uninhibited concerning his promise to repudiate it.
The simultaneous sickness of both parties surely reveals a crisis of the American regime. The GOP was easily captured, and then quickly normalized, by history’s most unpleasant and unprepared candidate, whose campaign was a Niagara of mendacities. And the world’s oldest party contrived to nominate someone who lost to him.
To an electorate clamoring for disruptive change, Democrats offered a candidate as familiar as faded wallpaper. The party produced no plausible alternative to her joyless, stained embodiment of arrogant entitlement. And she promised to intensify the progressive mentality. “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it”? Actually, you can’t even keep your light bulbs.
Americans perennially complain about Washington gridlock, but for seven decades they have regularly produced gridlock’s prerequisite — divided government. From 1944 through 2016, 22 of 37 elections gave at least one house of Congress to the party not holding the presidency; since 1954, 21 of 32 did; since 1994, eight of twelve. Republicans now lack excuses: If 40 Democratic senators block repeal of Obamacare (or Supreme Court nominees), the Republicans’ populist base will demand Democratic behavior — revision of Senate rules to make this body more majoritarian.
For constitutional conservatives, the challenge is exactly what it would have been had Clinton won.
For constitutional conservatives, the challenge is exactly what it would have been had Clinton won: to strengthen the rule of law by restoring institutional equilibrium. This requires a Republican Congress to claw back from a Republican executive the legislative powers that Congress has ceded to the administrative state, and to overreaching executives like Obama, whose executive unilateralism the president-elect admires.
From Clinton’s nastiest aspiration, we are now safe. She promised Supreme Court justices who would reverse Citizens United, thereby eviscerating the First Amendment by empowering the political class to regulate the quantity, content, and timing of campaign speech about itself. This will never happen.
Demography need not dictate for Republicans a grim destiny but it soon will, unless they act to counter adverse trends. Republicans should absorb Tim Alberta’s data in National Review: Arizona whites have gone from 74 percent to 54 percent of the population in 25 years; minorities will be a majority there by 2022. Texas minorities became a majority in 2004; whites are now 43 percent of the population. Nevada is 52 percent white and projected to be majority-minority in 2020. Georgia is 54 percent white, heading for majority-minority in 2026. Because of inexorably rising minorities, Clinton, an epically untalented candidate, did better than Obama did in 2012 in Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and where one in eight Americans lives — California.
The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on, perhaps soon to inscribe this: In 2016, Republicans won a ruinous triumph that convinced them that they can forever prosper by capturing an ever-larger portion of an ever-smaller portion of the electorate.
This kamikaze arithmetic of white nationalism should prompt the president-elect to test his followers’ devotion to him by asking their permission to see the national tapestry as it is and should be.
The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level. Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclouded itself and is finished.
I think of the lawmakers, the consultants, the operatives, and—yes—the center-left media, and how everything said over the past few years leading up to this night was bullshit.
The midterm losses? That was just a bad cycle, structurally speaking; presidential demographics would make up for it. The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must own that failure herself.
Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008, only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral College. These people didn’t know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media thought they did.
We should blame all those people around the Clintons more than the Clintons themselves, and the Clintons themselves deserve a ridiculous amount of blame. Hillary Clinton was just an ambitious person who wanted to be president. There are a lot of people like that. But she was enabled. The Democratic establishment is a club unwelcoming to outsiders, because outsiders don’t first look out for the club. The Clintons will be gone now. For the sake of the country, let them take the hangers-on with them.
What was the line? Hillary Clinton would do well in a general election, because she’d been “vetted” for 20-some years and there was nothing new Republicans could try? Just writing that, I recognize that it’s the funniest line I’ve ever seen, and yet it was the exact argument Clinton used in two separate campaigns for the Democratic nomination.
The ace ground game, the brilliant ad-makers, the top Hollywood talent, and the best analytics operation ever assembled? This was all a joke. The best analytics team in the world, apparently, couldn’t find in their numbers that it was worth making a single stop to Wisconsin following the convention in a campaign against a Republican whose base appeal was in the Rust Belt. Not that an extra visit would have changed the result.
Think of how wrong the entire national media conversation was—and yes, I contributed my fair share—about how the Republicans were being torn apart as a party. I prewrote a piece Tuesday afternoon, to be published in the event of the expected Clinton win, pushing back against both myself and other members of the media, arguing that Democrats and Republicans were both in existential trouble and that, in the short-term context of a decaying political system, Republicans might even have the edge: Democrats could win the presidency most of the time but never a majority of state governments or the House; while Republicans could always win the majority of state governments and the House, and occasionally—probably in 2020, I thought—the White House. This was wrong. Republicans don’t have a slight edge over Democrats in a decaying political system.
Republicans are ascendant. Trump has given them a mission. The country is now theirs.
Whoever takes over what’s left of the Democratic Party is going to have to find a way to appeal to a broader cross section of the country. It may still be true that in the long term, Republicans can’t win with their demographics, but we found out Tuesday that the long term is still pretty far away. Democrats have to win more white voters. They have to do so in a way that doesn’t erode the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable. If only there were a model for this.
The few Democratic leaders who remain are going to say that it was just a bad note struck here or there, or the lazy Bernie voters who didn’t show up, or Jim Comey, or unfair media coverage of Clinton’s emails, to blame for this loss. I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue “wall.” They will say, just wait for Republicans to overreach. Then we’ll be fine.
Don’t listen to any of this. Everything is not OK. This is not OK.
Latest wikileaks shows slimy John Harwood checking in with John Podesta for instructions on which questions he should ask Jeb Bush when CNBC’s John Hardwood was acting as a moderator on early debate.
WikiLeaks: John Harwood is such a sycophantic hack
The WikiLeaks Pedestal emails are chock full of sycophantic groveling from CNBC’s John Harwood.
Good grief, this guy is such a ass-kisser, it’s nauseating.
While combing through today’s release, I found a September 21, 2015 email from Harwood to John Podeta with the subject line what should I ask Jeb….
…in Speakeasy interview tomorrow?
You get it?
John Harwood is going to be interviewing Jeb Bush and he is checking in with John Podesta to find out what questions the Clinton campaign wants him to ask.
For crying out loud. What a hack.
But don’t worry. The Enslaved Press isn’t carrying Hillary’s water.
They’re not trying to help get Hillary elected.
Nope.
That’s just crazy talk! And anybody who thinks that is just a whacked-out right winger.
Asking the campaign director for Hillary Clinton to provide him with questions for an interview with a Republican candidate is just John Harwood’s idea of hard-hitting journalism.
Why not just drop the pretense and ask Pedestal to conduct the interview, you sniveling suck-up?!
Assange: Clinton is a cog for Goldman Sachs & the Saudis (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT)
Whistleblower Julian Assange has given one of his most incendiary interviews ever in a John Pilger Special, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, in which he summarizes what can be gleaned from the tens of thousands of Clinton emails released by WikiLeaks this year.
John Pilger:What’s the significance of the FBI's intervention in this last week of the US election campaign in the case against Hillary Clinton?
Julian Assange: If you go to the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America's political police. And the FBI demonstrated with taking down the former head of the CIA over classified information given to his mistress [that] almost no one was untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that, "No one can resist us." But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's investigation. So, there is anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. Well, we have published quite a number of different sets of emails, so, about 33,000 of Clinton's emails while she was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails. In those 60,000 emails, Clinton has kept about half, 30,000, to herself, and we have published about half. And then there are the Podesta emails we've been publishing. Podesta is Hillary Clinton's primary campaign manager. So, there's a thread that runs through all of these emails. There is quite a lot of "pay for play," as they call it – taking… giving access in exchange for money for many individual states, individuals and corporations – combined with the cover-up of Hillary Clinton's emails while she was Secretary of State has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases.
‘Russian government not the source of Clinton leaks’
JP: But the Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this. It says that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails.
JA: The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of net-mccarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything.
JP:Yeah.
JA: Hillary Clinton stated multiple times – falsely – that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. OK. That's false. We can say that the Russian government is not the source, yes. WikiLeaks has been publishing for 10 years. In that 10 years, we've published 10 million documents. Several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources. And we have never got it wrong.
‘Saudi Arabia & Qatar funding ISIS and Clinton’
JP: All the emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefitted from this and how she is benefitting politically are quite extraordinary. I'm thinking of where the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million-dollar check and many other examples. Can you…?
JP: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where – for me, anyway – where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL in the Middle East. Can you talk something about that? What the… how the emails demonstrate this connection between... those who are meant to be fighting the jihadist ISIL are actually those who have helped create it.
JA: There's an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, so not so long after she left [her job as] Secretary of State, to her campaign manager John Podesta. That email, it states that ISIL, ISIS is funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar – the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now, this is a… I actually think this is the most significant email in the whole collection...
JP: Mmm.
JA: …And perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the place, including into many media institutions, all serious analysts know, even the US government has mentioned or agreed with that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS, funding ISIS. But the dodge has always been, that's… what… it's just some rogue princes using their cut of the oil money to do what they like but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
JP: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis – particularly the Saudis and the Qataris giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.
JA: Under Hillary Clinton, and Clinton emails reveal significant discussion about it, the largest ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia – more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from United States in terms of the dollar value doubled.
JP: Doubled. And of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious terrorist jihadist group called ISIL, or ISIS, is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.
JA: Yes.
JP:That's extraordinary.
‘Clinton has been eaten alive by her ambition’
JA: Look. Hillary Clinton is just a person. I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick. You know, they faint as a result of going on and going on with their ambitions. But she represents a whole network of people, and a network of relationships also with particular states. The question is, how does Hillary Clinton fit in this broader network? She's this centralizing cog, so that you've got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs, and major elements of Wall Street, and intelligence, and people in the State Department, and the Saudis, and so on. She's is the, if you like, the centralizer that interconnects all these different cogs. She's smooth central representation of all that, and all that is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It's what you call the establishment, or the DC consensus, and its influences. In fact, one of the most significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed – and half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from Citibank. It is quite amazing.
JP:So, Wall Street decides the cabinet of the president of the United States.
JA: If you were following the Obama campaign back then closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests. It wasn’t so close to oil interests but it was very close to banking interests.
JP:Yeah. Yeah.
JA: So, I think you can't properly understand Hillary Clinton's foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia. The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate.
‘Libya is Hillary Clinton’s war’
JP: Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us – told you – about what happened there? Because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria: the ISIL, jihadism, and so on. And it was almost Hillary Clinton's invasion. What do the emails tell us about that?
JA: Libya more that anyone else's war was Hillary Clinton's war. Barack Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person who was championing it? Hillary Clinton. That's documented throughout her emails. She had… She put her favored agent in effect, Sidney Blumenthal, onto that. There's more than 1,700 emails out of the 33 thousand of Hillary Clinton's emails we published just about Libya. It's not about that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state something that she would use to run in the general election for president. So late 2011, there's an internal document called the "Libya Tick Tock" that is produced for Hillary Clinton, and it's all the... it's a chronological description of how Hillary Clinton was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state. As a result, there are around 40,000 deaths within Libya. Jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in. That led to the European refugee and migrant crisis, because not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people then fleeing Syria, destabilization of other African countries as a result of arms flows. The Libyan state itself was no longer able to control movement of people through it. So, Libya faces on to the Mediterranean. So, it had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So, all problems, all economic problems, the civil war in Africa... Previously, the people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. And that was said explicitly at the time, back in 2011, by Gaddafi: what do these Europeans think they are doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan state? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa, and jihadists into Europe. And that is exactly what happened.
‘Trump won’t be permitted to win’
JP: You get a lot of complaints from people saying, “What is WikiLeaks doing, are they trying to put Trump into White House?”
JA: My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he’s had every establishment offside. Trump doesn’t have one establishment – maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. But banks, intelligence, arms companies, big foreign money, etc. – it’s all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well: so, media owners and even journalists themselves.
JP: The accusations that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians and you hear people saying, “Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?”
JA: We have published over 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical. And… a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. And our documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases, refugee cases of people fleeing some kinds of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.
JP: Do you take yourself a view of the US election? Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump?
JA: Donald Trump – what does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American “white trash,” deplorable and irredeemable. Basically, the same thing. It means, from a… establishment or educated, cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are, you know, like the rednecks, and you can’t… like, they are just… you can never deal with them. And because he so clearly – through his words and actions and the type of people that turns up at his rallies – represents the people who are not the upper-middle-class-educated, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with that, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting in any way Trump, including criticizing Clinton. And if you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, it makes absolute sense.
‘US attempting to squeeze WikiLeaks through my refugee status’
JP: I’d like to talk about Ecuador, a small country that has given you refuge and has given you asylum in this embassy in London. Now, Ecuador cut off the Internet from here, where we’re doing this interview, in the embassy for the clearly obvious reason that they were concerned about appearing to intervene in the US election campaign. Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you?
JA: Let’s go back four years ago. I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy because of the US extradition case. And the result was after a month, I was successful in my application, and then the embassy has been surrounded by the police. Quite an expensive police operation, which the British government admits they’re spending more than 12.6 million pounds – they’ve admitted that over a year ago. And now there’s undercover police and there’s robot surveillance cameras of various kinds. So, there has been a quite serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador – a country of 16 million people – and the United Kingdom. And the Americans, who’ve been helping on the side. So, that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the US election afoot. The Ecuadorian election is in February next year. You have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing. WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from its embassy or the territory of Ecuador. We publish from France, we publish from Germany, we publish from the Netherlands and a number of other countries. So, the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status. And this is really intolerable: When you try and get at a publishing organization, to try and prevent it publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election.
JP: Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.
JA: So, I would be immediately arrested by the British police, and I would then be extradited, either immediately to the United States, or to Sweden. In Sweden, I am not charged, I’ve already been previously cleared, etc. So, we’re not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States. And they have extradited 100 percent of people that the US has requested since at least 2000. So, over the last 15 years, every single person that the US has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited. And they refuse to provide the guarantees. So, it’s… yeah.
JP: People often ask how you cope with the isolation here.
JA: Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they are adaptable. One of the worst attributes of human beings is that they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses. They adapt to being involved themselves in abuses. They adapt to adversity and continue on. So, in my situation… frankly, I’m a bit institutionalized. This is the world – visually, this is the world.
JP:It’s a world without sunlight, for one thing…
JA: It’s a world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long like I don’t remember it. So, yeah, you adapt. The one real irritant is that my young children – they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard adaptation, which they didn’t ask for.
JP:Do you worry about them?
JA: Yeah, I worry about them, I worry about their mother.
‘I am innocent and in arbitrary detention’
JP: Some people would say, “Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?”
JA: The UN has looked into this whole situation. They spent 18 months in formal adversarial litigation: me, at the UN, versus Sweden and the UK – who is right? The UN made a conclusion – I’m being arbitrarily detained, illegally, deprived of my freedom. What has been… occurred, has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden must obey. It is an illegal abuse. I mean, the United Nations formally asking what’s going on here, what’s your legal explanation for this. He says you should be… you should recognize his asylum. Sweden formally writing back to United Nations, says “No, we’re not going to,” leaving open their ability to extradite. I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publicly and in the press. Because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative that, “Yes, the West has political prisoners.” It’s a reality. It’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well. The West has political prisoners. No state accepts to call the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons “political prisoners.” They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan, and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, the UK or Sweden. It’s absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception. But here we have a case. Talking about the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the state of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum. Those are the facts. But what is the rhetoric?
JP: Different.
JA: The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up, trying to avoid that the UN formally found that the whole thing is illegal. Never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.
Indeed, it would seem imperative that FBI Director James Comey, even if it violates protocol and costs him his job, should state publicly whether what Baier’s FBI sources are telling him is false or true.
The people have a right to know — before Tuesday.
For, if true, Clinton could face charges in 2017 and impeachment and removal from office in 2018.
According to Baier, FBI agents have found new emails, believed to have originated on Clinton’s server, on the computer jointly used by close aide Huma Abedin and her disgraced husband, Anthony Weiner.
Abed in’s failure to turn this computer over to the State Department on leaving State appears to be a violation of U.S. law.
Moreover, the laptops of close Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, thought destroyed by the FBI, were apparently retained and are “being exploited” by the National Security division.
And here is the salient point. His FBI sources told Baier, “with 99 percent” certitude, that Clinton’s Chappaqua server “had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence services…”
If this is so, Hillary Clinton as security risk ranks right up there with Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, though they acted out of treasonous ideology and she out of Clintonian hubris. What do these foreign intelligence agencies know about Clinton that the voters do not?
The second revelation from Baier is that the Clinton Foundation has been under active investigation by the white-collar crime division of the FBI for a year and is a “very high priority.”
Specifically, the FBI is looking into published allegations of “pay-to-play.” This is the charge that the Clinton State Department traded access, influence and policy decisions to foreign regimes and to big donors who gave hundreds of millions to the Clinton Foundation, along with 15 years of six-figure speaking fees for Bill and Hillary.
According to Baier’s sources, FBI agents are “actively and aggressively” pursuing this case, have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple persons, and are now being inundated in an “avalanche of new information” from WikiLeaks documents and new emails.
The FBI told Baier that they anticipate indictments.
Indeed, with the sums involved, and the intimate ties between high officials of Bill’s foundation, and Hillary and her close aides at State, it strains credulity to believe that deals were not discussed and cut.
Books have been written alleging and detailing them.
Also, not only Fox News but also The Wall Street Journaland other news sources are reporting on what appears a rebellion inside the FBI against strictures on their investigations imposed by higher ups in the Department of Justice of Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Director Comey has come under fire from left and right — first for refusing to recommend the prosecution of Clinton, then for last week’s statement about the discovery of new and “pertinent” emails on the Abedin-Weiner computer — but retains a reputation for integrity.
And he knows better than any other high official the answer to a critical question that needs answering before Tuesday: Has Baier been fed exaggerated or false information by FBI agents hostile to Clinton?
Or has Baier been told the truth?
In the latter case, we are facing a constitutional crisis if Clinton is elected. And the American people surely have a right to know that before they go to the polls on Tuesday.
What is predictable ahead?
Attorney General Lynch, whether she stays or goes, will be hauled before Congress to explain whether she or top aides impeded the FBI investigations of the Clinton scandals. And witnesses from within her Justice department and FBI will also be called to testify.
Moreover, Senate Republicans would block confirmation of any new attorney general who did not first promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the email and pay-to-play scandals, and any pressure from Lynch’s Justice Department on the FBI.
Even Democrats would concede that a Department of Justice, staffed by Hillary Clinton appointees, could not credibly be entrusted with investigating alleged high crimes and misdemeanors by former Secretary of State Clinton and confidants like Abedin and Mills.
An independent counsel, a special prosecutor, appears inevitable.
And such individuals usually mark their success or failure by how many and how high are the indictments and convictions they rack up.
However, these processes proceed at a torpid pace.
First comes the setting up of the office and the hirings, then the investigations, then the grand jury appearances, then the indictments, then the prosecutions, then the horse-trading for the testimony of the accused and the convicted in return for immunity or leniency.
Steadily, it moves up the food chain. And when a head of state is involved, it is a process deeply debilitating to the nation.
The national bestseller that shocked the nation–The Death of the West is an unflinching look at the increasing decline in Western culture and power.
The West is dying. Collapsing birth rates in Europe and the U. S., coupled with population explosions in Africa, Asia and Latin America are set to cause cataclysmic shifts in world power, as unchecked immigration swamps and polarizes every Western society and nation.
The Death of the West details how a civilization, culture, and moral order are passing away and foresees a new world order that has terrifying implications for our freedom, our faith, and the preeminence of American democracy.
The Death of the West is a timely, provocative study that asks the question that quietly troubles millions: Is the America we grew up in gone forever?
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This volume is luxuriously bound in genuine leather and embellished with gold stamping of an original design. The raised bands across the spine are distinctive of the classic bookmaker’s art. Specially commissioned marbelized endleaves are reminiscent of fine Old World editions. Coordinating headbands grace both ends of the spine and add strength. The acid-free leaves are Smyth-sewn; their edges are gilded for additional protection and elegance. A permanent silk ribbon marker ensures easy reference.