il miglior fabbro

Matt Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone, tells the Dems what they need to understand, but don't want to hear:

Yesterday’s really gone.

In 1993, liberal America sang along at the Bill Clinton inaugural ball with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks (and Michael Jackson, whoops). “Don’t Stop” was “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” for the smart set. The New Democrats ushered in a new reign for youth and modernity against Reagan-Bush reaction.

That’s done. After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election — the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.

Coinciding with the flatulent end of the party’s impeachment gambit, and the related news that Donald Trump is enjoying climbing approval ratings, the Blue Party was exposed as an incompetent lobby for doomed elites, dumb crooks with nothing left to offer but their exit.

Much, much more at the link. Taibbi is no friend of conservatives, but when he's correct, he's correct.

FIFY

Steve Sack has been the cartoonist for the Star Tribune for decades. He's an exceptionally reliable indicator of the current liberal wisdom and his cartoon for today's edition is a perfect example of how we're supposed to interpret recent events:

If I were a betting man, I'd guess the conversation was more like this:

They have some lovely picnic areas at Ft. Marcy Park, by the way

Fixed it for ya, as they say on the internet. Let me know if you have any questions, Steve. Always glad to help.

Drip, drip, drip

So why would Bill Clinton dragoon Attorney General Loretta Lynch into a private meeting? Well, maybe this is why:

 Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin said in a legal proceeding that Clinton did not want the private emails that she mixed in with State Department emails on her private computer server to be accessible to "anybody," according to transcripts released Wednesday.

Abedin's comments provided new insight into the highly unusual decision by the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate to operate a private email server in her basement to conduct government business when she served as secretary of state.

Abedin also said under oath that she was not aware whether Clinton personally deleted any emails during her tenure as secretary.

I'm sure Clinton didn't personally delete any emails -- she has staff for that sort of thing. More:

Clinton's private server contained tens of thousands of work-related emails as well as private messages, and her decision to conduct both private and government business on her system meant that she kept control of both types of correspondence, effectively preventing her State Department correspondence from being archived by the agency and made available for public records requests. It was not until late 2014 - more than a year after Clinton left office - that the State Department learned that she held all of her email and requested that she turn over all work-related records.

Clinton turned over nearly 33,000 business-related messages while disposing of about the same number of personal messages. But Clinton failed to turn over at least three dozen work-related emails, according to the agency. Among those emails was a November 2010 email exchange with Abedin discussing her concerns about the risk of the "personal being accessible."

You might remember the first story about all those deleted emails -- they were about Hillary's yoga schedule and planning Chelsea Clinton's wedding. Do you believe that story? A "personal" email about a yoga class schedule wouldn't be embarrassing at all. Maybe emails about off-the-book meetings for the Clinton Foundation?

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the State Department to produce the e-mail records of Hillary Clinton’s scheduler during her tenure as secretary of state, expanding an investigation being pursued by conservative nonprofit Citizens United into the overlap between Clinton’s official travel and her meetings with foreign Clinton Foundation donors.  

Citizens United is slated to receive all e-mails sent to and from Lona Valmoro, Clinton’s State Department scheduler, in the two-week periods before each of 14 international trips Clinton took during her four years in office. David Bossie, president of Citizens United, hopes to confirm suspicions that Clinton maintained an off-the-books schedule, meeting with Clinton Foundation donors on the taxpayer’s dime. “Citizens United wants to know how many overseas dinners Secretary Clinton attended with Clinton Foundation donors that didn’t make it on her schedule,” he says.

What types of meetings would those be?

Judge Rosemary Collyer, the federal judge presiding over a public-records case brought by Citizens United, was initially hesitant to allow the release of Valmoro’s e-mails, and asked the group to provide one example of an off-the-books meeting with Clinton Foundation donors. As part of a joint filing with the State Department on Monday, Citizens United presented the judge with several pieces of evidence suggesting Valmoro deliberately struck from the official schedule a December 6, 2012, dinner in Dublin, Ireland, with several Clinton Foundation and Clinton campaign donors, organized by Teneo co-founder Declan Kelly. Though Valmoro was made aware of the Dublin meeting through an earlier e-mail chain, neither Clinton’s archived daily calendar nor her detailed official schedule make any note of it.

I blame Rose Mary Woods.

State of play

How I see things in the presidential race:

• I'm not convinced the current polling tells us much about the race. When one poll tells you it's pretty much a dead heat and another tells you that Hillary is up 10 points, you can surmise that Hillary's winning, but she's having a difficult time making the sale.
• If Trump were even the slightest bit disciplined, he'd be winning easily, but he's not disciplined and he's not winning. I have many reasons for falling in the #NeverTrump camp, but the primary one is he doesn't believe in anything other than himself. 
• It's blindingly obvious that the media want to protect Mrs. Clinton, but there's only so much they can do about it. The email scandal is now beginning to morph into a national security scandal and her primary argument, competence, is going away.
• We are now almost certain to have a horrible person in the Oval Office in 2017. I suppose we're used to that now.

Reckless

It gets worse for Hillary Clinton:

State Department staffers wrestled for weeks in December 2010 over a serious technical problem that affected emails from then-Secretary Hillary Clinton's home email server, causing them to temporarily disable security features on the government's own systems, according to emails released Wednesday.

The emails were released under court order Wednesday to the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch, which has sued the State Department over access to public records related to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's service as the nation's top diplomat between 2009 and 2013.

The emails, reviewed by The Associated Press, show that State Department technical staff disabled software on their systems intended to block phishing emails that could deliver dangerous viruses. They were trying urgently to resolve delivery problems with emails sent from Clinton's private server.

Think about that -- to accommodate Clinton, the government disabled security software. And there's more:

Days after the technical crisis, on Jan. 9, 2011, an IT worker was forced to shut down Clinton's server because he believed "someone was trying to hack us." Later that day, he wrote, "We were attacked again so I shut (the server) down for a few min." It was one of several occasions when email access to Clinton's BlackBerry smartphone was disrupted because her private server was down, according to the documents.

The AP reported last year that in the early morning hours of Aug. 3, 2011, Clinton received infected emails, disguised as speeding tickets from New York. The emails instructed recipients to print the attached tickets. Opening an attachment would have allowed hackers to take over control of a victim's computer.

In a blistering audit released last month, the State Department's inspector general concluded that Clinton and her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup broke federal standards and could leave sensitive material vulnerable to hackers. Her aides twice brushed aside concerns, in one case telling technical staff "the matter was not to be discussed further," the report said.

Actually, I can think of an excellent work-related reason to remove the spam filters — as a diplomat, 
Mrs. Clinton needed unfettered access to the large number of Nigerian princes who are always eager to correspond with Americans of all stations. It was actually an egalitarian move on her part. Meanwhile, we had this particular spectacle:

The man believed to have set up and maintained the private server in the basement of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s New York home invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination more than 125 times during a deposition as part of a civil court case on Wednesday.

Fox News reported that Bryan Pagliano’s sworn testimony with conservative organization Judicial Watch lasted roughly 90 minutes, during which the IT expert repeatedly read a carefully worded statement off of an index card while refusing to answer questions.

I don't mind the guy pleading the Fifth, actually. It's a sign that at least some due process remains in Washington, even as the juice boxers on Capitol Hill stage their "historic" tantrum in the well of the House. Might as well enjoy the Bill of Rights while you can.

Hacking and grifting

If this is true, it's a big problem for the Clintons, and for all of us really:

The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation was among the organizations breached by suspected Russian hackers in a dragnet of the U.S. political apparatus ahead of the November election, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The attacks on the foundation’s network, as well as those of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, compound concerns about her digital security even as the FBI continues to investigate her use of a personal e-mail server while she was secretary of state.

Clinton Foundation officials said the organization hadn’t been notified of the breach and declined to comment further. The compromise of the foundation’s computers was first identified by government investigators as recently as last week, the people familiar with the matter said. Agents monitor servers used by hackers to communicate with their targets, giving them a back channel view of attacks, often even before the victims detect them.

The whole point of Hillary Clinton's efforts to maintain a homebrew server for her communications was to keep the prying eyes of inspectors general and others seeking to scrutinize her dealings. It's worth remembering that, around the time of the public disclosure of the homebrew server, Mrs. Clinton directed that up to 30,000 "personal" emails be removed from the server. The claims we heard at the time included the preposterous idea that the removed emails were about Mrs. Clinton's yoga schedule, or wedding planning for her daughter, and the like. It's far more likely that much of the email traffic that was deleted involved dealings between Mrs. Clinton and her family's foundation, which received many millions of dollars from nations who had business with Mrs. Clinton and the federal government. A handy chart:

Follow the money, as always

None of these numbers are in dispute. What we don't know is Hillary Clinton's personal involvement in these transactions, and if there is any impropriety involved. She knows the answer and, if the Foundation has been breached, you can safely assume the Russian government, among others, knows the answer. If she has something to hide, the Russians will have a huge amount of, ahem, leverage in dealing with Mrs. Clinton, should she manage to get into the Oval Office.

At bottom, the overarching issue with the Clintons has always been their penchant for grifting. We need honest leadership in Washington and returning the Clintons to power is hardly the way to bring that about.

What does #NeverTrump mean, local edition

Our friend and multimedia sensation Brad Carlson offered a useful synopsis of what #NeverTrump should mean:

So does this mean I would vote for Hillary Clinton for President? Uhhh, no. Not. A. Flippin'. Chance. I would not vote for a Democrat if someone literally (and I do mean literally) held a gun to my head while at my polling place.

Of course the typical retort might be that "not voting for POTUS or a vote for a third party candidate is equivalent to a vote for Hillary." Well, I live in Minnesota. A Republican hasn't carried this state in a general election since Richard Nixon in 1972. That trend isn't likely to change in 2016, so my vote would be of little consequence regardless of whom I support. 

The gun to one's head won't happen until after Hillary repeals the Second Amendment, but I digress. And Brad is right about one thing -- it doesn't matter how you vote in Minnesota. I will be supporting a number of candidates on the ballot with an (R) after their names. In particular, I'll be supporting Camden Pike in his efforts to grab an open seat in House District 41B. It will be a tough push to get any Republican elected in Minnesota in this cycle, but doing so matters and Camden is the sort of young, enthusiastic candidate we need to change the disastrous trajectory in St. Paul.

The point about #NeverTrump is rejecting a guy who isn't a conservative, a guy who would take the country in a bad direction. It's not a matter of party, at least for me; I have backed away from party politics in the last two years, a decision I made before Trump began his campaign. It's about rejecting the orc-like behavior of too many Trump supporters, rejecting a man who lacks a moral compass, eschewing a man who treats principles like Charmin. Most of all, it's providing a categorical no to the installation of yet another unscrupulous individual in the Oval Office based on a cult of personality.

I can promise you this much -- I am prepared to document every outrage from both the of likely major party candidates. Hillary Clinton is a monster and she'll receive nothing from this feature other than the contempt she richly deserves. I look forward to the FBI leaks once the Obama Justice department wipes its butt with the rule of law and ignores the crimes Clinton has committed. We'll talk about all of it. But I can't -- I won't -- support a man who accuses his rival's father of being an accomplice to Lee Harvey Oswald, based on nothing. I don't know the condition of Donald Trump's soul, but I have my own to worry about; supporting a scoundrel like Donald Trump won't help matters.

News You Knew

Yes, the FBI is actually investigating Hillary Clinton:

The FBI formally confirmed that its investigation connected to Hillary Clinton’s private email server remains ongoing in a letter released on Monday.

The letter from FBI general counsel James Baker comes one day before the New Hampshire primary.

The message does not offer new details about the probe, which the bureau has been reluctant to discuss. However, it represents the FBI’s formal notification to the State Department that it is investigating the issue.

Since last September, “in public statements and testimony, the Bureau has acknowledged generally that it is working on matters related to former Secretary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server,” Baker wrote to the State Department. 

So, would you know that if you read, say, the Star Tribune? Nope. Not a word on the homepage this morning. Would you find out about it from, say, the Washington Post or the New York Times? Mr. Google says:

We'd rather not discuss the matter

Actually, if you go through the first four pages of search results, you won't see anything from the Times, or the Post, or even from the Associated Press. It's almost as though we aren't supposed to know.