So infectious is the boobery of the moment that the vector of contagion has penetrated even the high tower walls behind which dwells Hillary Rodham Clinton, into whose weedy enchanted kingdom few are admitted except discreet deliverymen with the usual weekly bulk shipments of eye-of-newt and toe-of-frog supplements. Herself frequently is banal, insipid, poorly informed, glib, contemptible, and almost always boring, but she’s usually not much of a genuine bomb-thrower, until she accuses her opponents of being genuine bomb-throwers, i.e., declaring that those in the pro-life camp who object to the vivisection of living human beings for commercial purposes are soul mates with “terrorists.”
A new Quinnipiac poll has more bad news for theHillary Clinton campaign, with poll results showing voters think of Clinton as “dishonest” and a “liar.”
“What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Hillary Clinton?” Quinnipiac asked. All three of the most popular answers were along the same lines: “liar,” “dishonest,” and “untrustworthy.” After those responses, Clinton nets a few positive responses, such as “experience” and “strong.” But then the negative qualifiers begin again, with responses like “crook,” “untruthful,” “criminal,” and “deceitful.”
The same question was asked of Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. The top three responses for Trump were “arrogant,” “blowhard,” and “idiot,” while the top responses for Bush were “Bush,” “family,” and “honest.”
The same poll found Clinton with low favorables. A majority of voters, 51%, say that they have an unfavorable opinion of Clinton while only 39% says they have a favorable opinion.
Washington (CNN)Vice President Joe Biden fares better against top GOP candidates in hypothetical general election match-ups than Hillary Clinton, according to a new national survey.
The Quinnipiac University poll, released Thursday, also shows Donald Trump smashing the GOP presidential competition garnering 28% support from registered Republican voters in the 17-member field. The real estate mogul's closest competitor is retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who tallies 12%.
Just 7% said they would vote for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a record low since November 2013.
Those results show just how far both Trump -- now the Republican front-runner -- and Bush -- the old one -- have come. Bush led national polls for much of the first half of 2015, but was quickly dislodged by Trump, after he announced his presidential ambitions this June.
Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida both are tied with Bush at 7%, the polls shows, with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at 6% and former tech CEO Carly Fiorina and Ohio Gov. John Kasich tied at 5%.
"Donald Trump soars; Ben Carson rises; Jeb Bush slips and some GOP hopefuls seem to disappear," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the survey. "Trump proves you don't have to be loved by everyone, just by enough Republicans to lead the GOP pack."
And Trump certainly isn't loved by everyone, the survey shows. About 1-in-4 GOP voters say they would never vote for Trump, topping the field. Bush comes in second with 18%.
Clinton still leads the Democratic race at 45% support from registered Democrats, followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at 22% and Biden -- who is currently mulling a 2016 bid -- at 18%.
But Biden, currently sporting the highest favorability rating among any 2016 candidates polled of either party, tops Trump 48% to 40%, compared to Clinton, who beats Trump 45% to 41%. Biden also beats Bush, 45% to 39%, compared to Clinton, who beats Bush 42% to 40%.
Keep the Promise, a SuperPAC said to be supporting Ted Cruz, has come out with a new ad on Hillary Clinton and it’s awesome. I don’t want to spoil it so I’ll just let you watch it and comment:
NOTHING LIKE THE FAMILY EATING THEIR YOUNG (OR OLD IN THIS CASE)
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to President Obama, described a potential presidential run by Vice President Joe Biden as a “family feud,” if he challenged Hillary Clinton for the nomination.
“It’s very tough,” Pfeiffer admitted during an interview on CNN, calling Biden “one of the best guys you’ll ever be around” but added that other Obama staffers were “incredibly fond” of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“This would be a family feud, a lot of people knew everyone on both sides, you know both of the candidates,” Pfeiffer admitted when asked about how Obama loyalties would split.
Pfeiffer pointed out that former staffers from President Bill Clinton’s White House and Hillary Clinton’s campaign came to work for Obama and that many staffers from Obama’s White House went to work for Hillary’s current presidential campaign.
He pointed out that Biden was the “most clear continuation of the Obama legacy” who also had his own record and was “energetic and young at heart.”
“He runs full force at everything he does, he’s full of energy,” he added, praising Biden.
On Twitter this morning, Pfeiffer continued his praise of Biden.
“Lots of reasons to run or not run, but legacy shouldn’t be one,” he said. “Vice President Joe Biden’s place in the history books as greatest Vice President ever is secure no matter what.”\
Hillary Clinton's classified emails contain discussions of conversations with foreign diplomats, issues with embassy security and relations with countries from Russia to China.
The broad range of information that was deemed classified by the State Department — just within the emails published by the agency to date —underscores concerns that sensitive material was routinely mishandled on Clinton's private email server.
For example, Huma Abedin, Clinton's former deputy chief of staff, forwarded a summary of a high-level Sept. 2009 meeting to Clinton in which she detailed the "embassy security issues" that were discussed.
The issues had been raised by Eric Boswell, a diplomatic security official who was later forced to resign in the wake of the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi.
Abedin was frequently involved in the transmission of classified information to Clinton, emails show.
Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff, and Jake Sullivan, former director of policy planning, also routinely sent or received classified emails from the secretary of state.
Despite her campaign's claims that Clinton was simply a "passive recipient" of classified information, a review of her emails indicates she wrote messages that are now classified.
For example, in July 2009, she discussed relations with Russia and Afghanistan with then-Deputy Secretary William Burns in an email that has been partially classified. She also discussed her travel plans with Burns over the private network.
Other classified conversations involved one of Clinton's present Democratic challengers for president: then-Sen. Jim Webb.
The State Department does not appear to have submitted legally required information regarding Hillary Clinton's secret computer server to the Department of Homeland Security during her term as secretary, FoxNews.com has learned.
All federal government agencies are mandated to submit a list of systems, vulnerabilities and configuration issues to DHS every 30 days. The department then performs a "cyberscope audit" to ensure security, a responsibility the agency has had since 2010.
FoxNews.com learned of the lapse as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request submitted June 11. It is not clear if State Department officials in charge of compliance with the DHS audits knew of their boss's server, which has been shown to have included "top secret" information in emails.
Clinton headed the agency from 2009-2013. The DHS established the "Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation" program in 2010, amid growing concerns government systems could be vulnerable to cyber attack. But Clinton's computer server, through which she and key aides sent and received tens of thousands of emails, was apparently never audited, according to DHS, which conducted a comprehensive search of Office of Cyber Security and Communications records after FoxNews.com lodged its request.
"Unfortunately, we were unable to locate or identify any responsive records," wrote Sandy Ford Page, chief of Freedom of Information Act operations for DHS.
The revelation means DHS never audited Clinton's server, and the State Department allowed Clinton to operate outside the federal mandate aimed at hardening defenses in federal networks, one cyber expert told Fox News.
The State Department has not provided a substantive response to a similar FOIA submitted by FoxNews.com in early June.
The State Department did not comment on media requests about why it did not comply with the DHS security review requirement.
"There are reviews and investigations under way, including by the IG and Congress," said State Department Spokesman Alec Gerlach. "It would not be appropriate to comment on these matters at this time."
Denver-based Platte River Networks upgraded and maintained the server Clinton shares with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, after she left the State Department.
The company is not on the list of contractors approved by the Pentagon's Defense Security Service, the only federal agency with the authority to review and approve private contractors. The department administers the National Industrial Security Program on behalf of the Pentagon and 30 other federal agencies, including the State Department. About 13,000 companies have received clearance.
"But Platte River is not one of them," a spokesman for the DSS told Fox News. "As Platte River Networks is not a cleared facility under the National Industrial Security Program, DSS has no cognizance over the facility and cannot comment further."
Clinton, the leading contender for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, and the State Department have been under fire in recent months after it was revealed Clinton had a "homebrew" server and private Blackberry system that could have left classified or sensitive government data open to hackers.
Clinton maintains her use of a private email server was allowed under government regulations and her system was secure.
But this followed the news Clinton wiped her server of some 31,000 private email messages, turning over just 30,000 hard copies of her emails to the State Department amid a congressional investigation into her actions during the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where four U.S. personnel including the U.S. ambassador to Libya were killed.
While Clinton has maintained that she neither sent nor received information marked classified on her private server or Blackberry, Reuters reported last week that dozens of emails that passed through Clinton's server while she was secretary of state, under the U.S. government's own regulations, were automatically considered classified.
That includes 30 email threads starting as early as 2009, which contained information on foreign governments, Reuters said.
The FBI has opened an investigation to determine whether or not Clinton's private email server was secure and if classified material was improperly shared or stored on the Clintons' private email account.
A federal court hearing last week only added to the intrigue. The State Department asserted in a court filing that it did not give personal electronic devices to Clinton and may have destroyed the smartphones of her top aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.
"If the State Department was not providing secure email devices to Mrs. Clinton, who was? Best Buy? Target? Mrs. Clinton clearly did whatever she wanted, without regard to national security or federal records keeping laws," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who took the State Department to court over its lack of disclosure on the email and server issues.
The panel of MSNBC’s Morning Joe tore into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after she turned her private email sever over the government after two top secret emails were found to have been stored on her email.
“Politically, it’s a no-win situation for her,” Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin said. “If they recover the information from the emails, the 30,000 personal ones, I think it’s almost certainly the case that someone will find something that should have been turned over, and that would be a problem for her.”
“If it’s been fully deleted and permanently erased… I think people will say, ‘Wow, why did Hillary Clinton go to such length to permanently delete the e-mails?’” he continued. “And the question will linger forever, what was on there?”
Republican strategist Nicole Wallace agreed, and slammed Clinton’s “cumulative string of dishonesty” and desperate excuses. “I just think they’re down the rabbit hole of now squandering of whatever is left of the general public’s trust.”
Contributor Mike Barncile said the emails were indeed a problem, but the larger problem was the scandal “regurgitates” all the public’s worries about the Clintons. “Hillary Clinton, it’s quite obvious thus far her candidacy, too much of it has been about the past.”
The panel also ripped Clinton for framing the inquiry into her emails as a partisan issue, even though she was being investigated by Obama appointees.“I have to say, that feels condescending” host Mika Brzezinski said.
Former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey told Shannon Bream the claims from Democrats that Hillary Clinton is not the target of a personal, criminal investigation are “ridiculous” while being interviewed on Fox News Sunday.
MUKASEY: It may not impact her personally eventually if it comes to show that she didn’t know what was on the server, but to say that the investigation is not of someone personally is ridiculous. The FBI does not investigate machines. It investigates people, and to say she is not one of the people being investigated is ridiculous.
The tens of thousands of emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server from when she was secretary of state could also be on a second device or server, according to news reports.
The FBI now has the only confirmed private server, as part of a Justice Department probe to determine whether it sent of received classified information for Clinton when she was the country’s top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.
Platte River Networks, which managed Clinton's server and private email network after she left the State Department, has indicated it transfer – or “transferred” – emails from the original server in 2013, according to The Washington Examiner.
However, Clinton, the front-running Democratic presidential candidate, has suggested that she gave the department 55,000 pages of official emails and deleted roughly 30,000 personal ones in January, which raises the possibility they were culled from a second device.
Neither a Clinton spokesman nor an attorney for the Colorado-based Platte River Networks returned an Examiner’s request for comment, the news–gathering agency reported Saturday.
The DailyMail.com on Aug. 14 was among the first to report the possibility of a second server.
The FBI took the server last week, after a U.S. Intelligence Community inspector general reportedly found two Clinton emails that included sensitive information, then asked the FBI to further investigate.
Hillary Clinton, whose campaign is suffering from email drama + The Bern, wants you to know that she is fighting for you. Those of us in the middle class, she is our champion. She is fed up with income inequality, and she wants the term “middle class to mean something again”.
After all, she is just one of us, and she’s just as incensed. But I’m not sure which I can relate to more? The $368.00 “Hillary for President” sweater, her $200,000 speaking fees, or the Clintons’ multiple houses? From her one-percenter platform, she shakes her head at the inequality she sees below, and wants us to again believe “our work will be rewarded”.
The inconvenient truth is that income inequality isn’t a scourge against the 99% by those who hold the purse. Business is business, and you are worth what an employer is willing and able to pay you for your work. Recently, fast food workers have campaigned for “fair” wages, and some companies have caved to their demands. This is not sustainable. The desire to level the playing field feels good, but what does that say about what someone brings to the interview table in terms of education, experience, etc.? Those things set others apart, and should be the criteria for selecting employees. You want the best the workforce has to offer. If you want to be that “best”, then improve your position among applicants by gaining that experience or obtaining that degree. If it’s just a matter of moving the decimal point for anyone whenever they demand it, then why try to present yourself as a worthwhile candidate?
There is no better example than that of Gravity Payments, a credit card payment processing company. A few months ago, its young CEO, Dan Price, changed the company’s minimum salary to $70,000. He took a 90% pay cut and dipped “into the firm’s annual $2 million in profits” to help accomplish this feat of paycheck equality.
Price decided to hike his employees pay after he read a study about happiness. It said additional income can make a significant difference in a person’s emotional well being up to the point when they earn $75,000 a year.
Fast-forward to August, and the side effects of the feelings-based decision, which selected an arbitrary salary amount, haven’t exactly amounted to that sought after happiness.
…a few customers, dismayed by what they viewed as a political statement, withdrew their business. Others, anticipating a fee increase – despite repeated assurances to the contrary – also left. While dozens of new clients, inspired by Price’s announcement, were signing up, those accounts will not start paying off for at least another year. To handle the flood, he has had to hire a dozen additional employees – now at a significantly higher cost – and is struggling to figure out whether more are needed without knowing for certain how long the bonanza will last.
Two of Price’s most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises.
Then potentially the worst blow of all: Less than two weeks after the announcement, Price’s older brother and Gravity co-founder, Lucas Price, citing longstanding differences, filed a lawsuit that potentially threatened the company’s very existence. With legal bills quickly mounting and most of his own paycheque and last year’s $US2.2 million in profits plowed into the salary increases, Dan Price said, “We don’t have a margin of error to pay those legal fees.”
Happiness, indeed. This social experiment certainly has proven something. That feelings-based business decisions, or political ones, are not grounded in reality. CEOs or longer serving employees make more than non-CEOs and new employees, but they should! Being the founder/leader of a company with your financial life on the line, or proving your worth over the long haul and obtaining much experience, do factor into pay, whether some like it or not.
I’m not sure how Hillary, who says she wants to “reshuffle the deck”, plans to address income inequality. However, taking from those that have earned it in order to appease the crowd that yells “But I want more!!” might look good on paper, but doesn’t play out in the real world. Just ask Dan Price.
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton insists she did nothing wrong by running all of her government communications, including classified material, through her unsecured, home-brewed computer server. Perhaps she’s forgotten one of her husband’s final acts in the Oval Office: issuing a presidential pardon to former CIA director John Deutch. Deutch’s offense? Keeping classified material on unsecured home computers.
The pardon came just as Deutch was reportedly going to cop a plea with the Justice Department. Deutch headed the CIA from May 1995 to December 1996. Several days after he left the agency, classified material was discovered on a government-owned computer at his house in Bethesda, Md. Additionally, unsecured classified magnetic media were found in the study. According to the CIA inspector general’s report, the computer had been “designated for unclassified use only.
” Unlike the current administration’s six-month delay in obtaining Clinton’s computer, the feds moved almost immediately in the Deutch case. Within ten days of discovering the errant material, they retrieved the hard drive from Deutch’s computer. A formal security investigation was opened within a month.
that the government didn’t let Deutch’s lawyer pick and choose which e-mail communications to turn over. Rather, a “technical exploitation team, consisting of personnel expert in data recovery, retrieved the data from Deutch’s unclassified magnetic media and computers.”
As the investigation progressed, the IG discovered that Deutch had “continuously processed classified information on government-owned desktop computers configured for unclassified use during his tenure as DCI [director, CIA] [and that] . . . these unclassified computers were located in [his] Bethesda, Maryland and Belmont, Massachusetts residences, his offices in the Old Executive Office Building, and at CIA Headquarters.”
Notice that the government didn’t let Deutch’s lawyer pick and choose which e-mail communications to turn over.
The computers, as configured and used, were “vulnerable to attacks by unauthorized persons.” The report stressed that “all [computers] were connected to or contained modems that allowed external connectivity to computer networks such as the Internet.” The information the security team retrieved from these computers included “Top Secret communications intelligence” as well as information on the “National Reconnaissance Program.”
The IG criticized senior CIA officials for not taking appropriate action against Deutch when they were apprised of the results of the security investigation. That was one of the reasons the IG “initiated an independent investigation.”
That may seem like a wildly premature question in the summer of the year before the presidential election. To which I would respond: It’s too early to know the answer the question, but it’s not too early to ask it.
I say that because the extraordinary developments surrounding Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, which we now know contained material classified as Top Secret and is now in the hands of the FBI. It was on August 11 that the FBI took possession of Clinton’s server hardware and three thumb drives in her lawyer’s possession, which are said to contain copies of everything she turned over to the State Department. In addition, experts say that tens of thousands of emails she deleted may be recoverable. Which means Mrs. Clinton has now lost control over events, which is precisely what she was trying to ensure when she created her own homebrew computer system in the first place.
Two veteran prosecutors in the Justice Department’s National Security Division are overseeing the investigation. One of them helped manage the prosecution of David H. Petraeus (the retired general and former CIA director was sentenced to probation earlier this year and fined $100,000 after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified materials.)
Experts say it’s a virtual certainty that her server was compromised by foreign intelligence services.
If you want to understand the gravity of the situation, I’d urge you to watch this interview with Robert Baer, a former CIA operative and CNN national security analyst. Mr. Baer pointed out that if he had sent a document like the one Hillary Clinton had on her server over the open Internet he’d get fired the same day, escorted to the door and probably be charged with mishandling classified information. When asked if this situation was a “deal breaker” for Clinton’s presidential candidacy, Baer said, “As a national security employee, a former one, yes.”
“I can’t tell you how bad this is,” he added. “A lot of things get talked about, a lot of gossip, but having documents like this sent across the Internet, it could be hacked very easily and probably were hacked, is a transgression that I don’t think the president of the United States should be allowed to, you know, have committed.”
Bob Woodward, who knows about such things, said that the Hillary Clinton email scandal “reminds me of the Nixon tapes. Thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his …. Hillary Clinton initially took that position, ‘I’m not turning this over, there’ll be no cooperation.” Now they’re cooperating. But this has to go on a long, long time, and the answers are probably not going to be pretty.”
That rather understates things. What we’ve seen so far has not been pretty at all. And with the FBI driving this investigation, things may get a whole lot less pretty for Mrs. Clinton. I understand the argument of those like Ross Douthat of the New York Times that “I simply do not believe that the Obama Justice Department is going to indict the former secretary of state and Democratic front-runner for mishandling classified information, even if the offenses involved would have sunk a lesser figure’s career or landed her in jail.” Still, in a career marked by scandal, this one has the potential to be politically lethal. We’ll know soon enough if it is.
Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, is the New York Times bestselling author of The Secrets of the FBI and The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents, now in paperback.
When it comes to arrogance, Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's longtime top aide, and her presidential candidate boss are two peas in a pod, according to Secret Service agents.
For that reason, it's not surprising that the FBI investigation of Hillary's use of classified emails reportedly got a jump start after uncovering highly classified emails sent by Abedin and another Clinton aide.
Yesterday, it was revealed that State Department BlackBerry devices issued to the former Secretary of State's aides Cheryl Mills and Abedin, 39, have likely been destroyed or sold off, the department said in a court filing.
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At your service: Hillary and Huma Abedin leave posh department store Bergdorf Goodman in New York city surrounded by Secret Service agents. 'There's not an agent in the service who wants to be in Hillary's detail,' a current agent, not in this photo, says. 'If agents get the nod to go to her detail, that's considered a form of punishment
Based on the research and interviews for my book The Secrets of the FBI, I can say that the FBI would not have opened such a high profile investigation unless it already believed Hillary had violated criminal laws governing handling and dissemination of classified material.
Nor, as some media reports have claimed, is the investigation a 'security investigation' into handling of the emails. The FBI does nothing unless it is pursuing violations of criminal laws and targeting individuals.
And the pertinent laws make no distinction between classified material that is marked as such or not. If material is classified and is handled improperly, that is a violation of criminal laws.
While Hillary Clinton claims she will be the champion of the little people if elected, the truth is that behind the scenes she is so nasty and abusive toward her own Secret Service detail and treats them with such contempt that being assigned to Hillary's detail is considered a form of punishment within the Security Service.
According to Secret Service agents interviewed for my book The First Family Detail, Abedin can be just as rude and nasty as Hillary. A former agent recalls helping Abedin when she got lost driving Chelsea to the February 2008 Democrat presidential debate in Los Angeles.
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Closer than close: It's not surprising, says Kessler, that the FBI investigation of Hillary's use of classified emails reportedly got a jump start after uncovering highly classified emails sent by Abedin
'She was belligerent and angry about being late for the event,' the former agent says. 'No appreciation for any of it, not a thank-you or anything. That was common for her people to be rude.'
At another event in Los Angeles, a female agent challenged Abedin because she was not wearing a pin that identifies cleared aides to Secret Service agents. The agent had no idea who she was.
'You don't have the proper identification to go beyond this point,' the agent told her.
'Huma basically tried to throw her weight around,' a former agent says. 'She tried to just force her way through and said belligerently, 'Do you know who I am?''
That got her nowhere. Eventually, Abedin - who is married to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner - cooperated with the agent and suggested a contact who could verify her identity
Margaret Sanger is a saint in the feminist church. She is a charter member of the progressive hall of fame. Liberals revere this woman who preached “race improvement” and denounced what she called “human weeds”.
Speaking to Planned Parenthood a year earlier, President Barack Obama, hailed the organization founded by this racial eugenicist committed to creating a “race of thoroughbreds” and purging America’s “race of degenerates.”
“Thank you, Planned Parenthood,” and “God bless you,” said Obama to a giddy crowd of ecstatic women. The president commended Planned Parenthood’s “extraordinary” and “remarkable work,” and told the women they do a “great, great job.”
Margaret is there enshrined in the Smithsonian’s vaunted “Struggle for Justice” exhibit.
This brings me to my reason for writing here today: a group of angry African-American pastors are demanding the removal of Sanger’s bust from the Smithsonian.
“Perhaps the Gallery is unaware that Ms. Sanger supported black eugenics, a racist attitude toward black and other minority babies, an elitist attitude toward those she regarded as ‘the feeble minded;’ speaking at a rally of Ku Klux Klan women; and communications with Hitler sympathizers. Also the notorious ‘Negro Project,’ which sought to limit, if not eliminate black births, was her brainchild.”
The pastors quote an infamous December 1939 letter from Sanger to Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Eugenics Society, where, in the context of discussing the Negro Project, Sanger wrote: “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
The succinct, powerful statement from the pastors adds: “Despite these well-documented facts of history, her bust sits proudly in your gallery as a hero of justice. The obvious incongruity is staggering!”
