Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump just gave the greatest comeback of all time to Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
At the Democrat National Convention in Philadelphia, Clinton said that Donald Trump can’t “handle the rough and tumble of a political campaign.”
“You really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander in chief? Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough and tumble of a presidential campaign!” she exclaimed. “He loses his cool at the slightest provocation.”
But Trump would not sit by and watch his rival tear him apart. Instead, the business mogul turned politician took to Twitter to defend himself. Here’s what he said:
Just last week, Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, and surprised even those within his own party by beating out countless other GOP candidates for the coveted presidential bid.
Thank God. I think Trump can handle losing the election, but losing a ratings battle to a dial tone like Hillary Clinton might have broken the guy. He’ll be okay now.
The downside: He’ll be mentioning his ratings win not just every day until Election Day but likely every day for the rest of his life.
Clinton’s Thursday night acceptance speech at the DNC averaged 28 million viewers across the six biggest cable and broadcast channels.
Trump’s speech at the RNC one week earlier averaged 30 million viewers across the same channels…
CNN was by far the highest-rated channel on Thursday, averaging 7.5 million viewers during Clinton’s speech. MSNBC was #2 with 5.3 million viewers. NBC was #3 with 4.5 million.
These are the early numbers. The final figures later today will be slightly better, but probably not enough to erase Trump’s advantage. All three previous nights of the Democratic convention outdrew their Republican counterparts, by the way, and Hillary outdrew Trump last night on CNN and MSNBC. Trump’s margin of ratings victory comes entirely from Fox News, which blew the roof off last Thursday for his speech with 9.3 million viewers but clocked just three million yesterday for Clinton. Did Fox get a big jump for Trump because right-wingers who were already voting for him decided to tune into their favorite network to watch his speech? Or was it a more politically mixed audience that gravitated to Fox last week on the assumption that the Republican news channel is naturally the place to watch the Republican nominee speak? The answer to that question would give us a clue about Trump’s crossover appeal in November.
Obama’s 2012 speech outdrew both Trump and Clinton, but if you missed last week’s postabout convention ratings over time, read that for all of the caveats about shrinking ratings in an age with multifarious media options. Given Trump’s celebrity and the curiosity factor surrounding him, it’s arguably no surprise that he’d draw more of an audience than a ho-hum Democratic nominee. But Hillary’s no ordinary nominee: She’s the first woman major-party nominee in history. The fact that she couldn’t bring out enough viewers to top him despite having a historic storyline to help boost interest is a comment on how “meh” she is to the public. Apart from her husband she’s the biggest known quantity in American politics, the ultimate rerun. And like I said in last night’s convention thread, who wants to watch a rerun when there’s so much else on TV — even when that rerun is a Very Special Episode?
Ann Althouse writes a perceptive commentary (hat tip: Instapundit) on an aspect of Hillary Clinton that bothers me a lot, too: that wide-open-mouth/insane-elation thing with her face.
Specifically, she analyzes a still photo of President Obama onstage with her at the Wednesday night session of the DNC:
She explains the really weird facial expression this way:
… my theory was that she's stuck making the best of doing appearances where she needs to look like the person who is intensely loved but she does not believe she is loved.
The specific reference here is standing next to Obama, who is well liked at a personal level by a majority of Americans. But remember that ever since she graduated from law school, she has been standing next to her husband, who is even more than Obama a charming fellow – so charismatic that he was able to charm even Newt Gingrich right after the GOP won control of Congress in 1994. From Hillary’s perspective, her adult life has been one long lesson in being the unlikable one in a very prominent couple.
There has to be a lot of resentment. The stories of screaming matches, thrown lamps, and the rest are credible to me because Hillary has endured a level of private humiliation at her husband’s hands, in ways overt as in all the extracurricular sex, but also in ways completely unintended, the product of her negative charisma.
The result of all this is a burning desire to surpass Bill, to occupy the Oval Office, and get revenge for his casual ease at being liked.
And the facial expression? I think it is a window into the intensity of Hillary’s desire, buried deep within her soul, and rarely allowed out.
PHILADELPHIA - Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus released the following statement on the final night of the Democrat National Convention:
“Time and again, Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty and cronyism have proved she is the wrong person to lead our country as president. The American people have had enough of the corruption, the deceit, and the stonewalling which have been the hallmarks of her entire career. After decades of lying to the public, politically-motivated flip flops, a family foundation that took millions from foreign governments while she was Secretary of State, and repeated and blatant lies over her reckless mishandling of classified information, the only sure thing about Hillary Clinton is that she puts her own political interests above the rest of us. Tonight’s speech was merely a litany of platitudes which dodged a serious discussion of our slumping economy and our diminished standing in the world under President Obama, topics which should be well-known to her after spending years in his cabinet. Hillary Clinton is the ultimate Washington insider at a time when Americans are eager to break with eight years of a Democrat status quo, and there’s no doubt her longtime pattern of shady conduct and double standards will continue if she is elected president.
“Americans can no longer afford a system which takes care of the well-connected at the expense of everyone else, and a Clinton presidency only means a third term of President Obama’s failed policies, just with more corruption and secrecy. Now is the time to break from a left-wing agenda which has shrank paychecks, left America more ripe for terrorist attacks, and reduced our freedoms. With Donald Trump and Mike Pence, Americans can look forward to being prosperous at home, respected abroad, and having their voices heard once again.”
‘The Totalitarian State of Not Being Able to Be’ is upon us. Read their lips if you’ve got the stomach to do so: Barack and Hillary not only love America, it’s the Love Affair of the Century.
An identity theft started by President Barack Obama was completed by Hillary Clinton at her last night nomination acceptance speech.
Donald J. Trump, the populist folk hero millions want to see in the Oval Office, has had his identity stolen by Barack and Hillary. Just like Islamic terrorism, he was only a figment of our imagination.
The Totalitarian State of Not Being Able to Be’ is now the lay, if not the law, of the land.
Here’s how it looked before becoming official:
Well hidden under progressive policies disguised as “Good for all”, it’s not yet as glaringly recognizable as all those totalitarian states that came before, but it’s making speedy headway toward a civil society where freedom and liberty will be filed away in the Distant Memories Folder.
In case you haven’t yet noticed, you are no longer permitted to be a patriot without being identified as a Xenophobe.
You are deemed as “unreasonable” for wanting protection for your children in public school washrooms without being categorized as a bigoted anti-LGBTQ revolutionary.
You are not permitted to be leery about ‘refugees’ flooding your town or city without being labeled an Islamophobe. Acting like the latter will get you thrown off Facebook and Twitter, and the day is not far off when it will come with a prison term.
A battle of the brass has broken out in the wake of the Republican and Democratic party conventions, as one of the top generals supporting Donald Trump lashes out at retired Marine Gen. John Allen who delivered a tough-as-nails endorsement of Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia Thursday night.
“I honestly don’t know how John Allen can look at himself in the mirror and say why he supports Hillary Clinton,” retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn told Fox News.
Both Flynn and Allen served in the Obama administration. But Flynn, who used to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency, has since become an outspoken critic of the president’s anti-ISIS approach – while Allen helped shape that strategy as the president’s special envoy for the anti-ISIS coalition.
Flynn, who spoke at the Cleveland Republican convention last week on behalf of Trump, zeroed in on that portion of Allen’s resume in challenging his credibility.
“General Allen as a retired officer was in charge of our current strategy for well over a year … and during that period of time the rise of radical Islamism and ISIS, you know, it exponentially grew,” he said. “The strategy that John Allen was in charge of … it’s a failed strategy.”
He said he was “a bit stunned” by his endorsement of Clinton, noting he and Allen both worked with the former secretary of state.
“I cannot see how John Allen can support somebody who perpetually cannot tell the truth,” he said.
The stinging criticism between senior retired military officers is unusual, even in a presidential campaign. But the tensions could build as each presidential candidate suggests the other would put national security at risk.
1. Clinton Twice Refused to Apologize for Using Private Email, Secret Server
2. “I am sorry that this has been confusing to people and has raised a lot of questions.”
After refusing to apologize twice, Clinton’s nonapology apology is to suggest that the situation is too complex for us to understand. The reality is, none of this would be an issue if Clinton had been transparent and up front from the start and had not set up a secret server. She has no one to blame but herself.
3. “I take classified material very, very seriously. And we followed all the rules on classified material.”
Although it has been confirmed that Hillary Clinton both sent and received classified information on unsecured networks several times a month, Hillary repeated the claim that she did not send classified material on her secret email server.
Even worse, Hillary has continually tried to dismiss her mishandling of classified information as a laughing matter. A recent email released by the State Department also shows Clinton telling a staffer wary of sending classified information over her private network to “just send it.”
4. “…I was not thinking a lot when I got in”
So Clinton takes classified material very seriously, but didn’t think the security and protocol of her primary means of communication was something she should think about when she became Secretary of State? Clinton cites the “convenience” of using her personal email, but wouldn’t it have been more convenient to comply with the setup and rules that were already clearly setup for the State Department’s government email system?
5. “There are answers to all of these questions and I will continue to provide those answers.”
The facts don’t match the talking points. Just this week, the State Department bobbedand weaved through a series of straightforward questions about Hillary’s email practices.
And then there’s this…
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
What’s clear is Hillary Clinton regrets that she got caught and is paying a political price, not the fact her secret email server put our national security at risk. Hillary Clinton’s repeated distortions of her growing email scandal, which now involves an FBI investigation, and her refusal to apologize only reinforce why three-fifths of the country doesn’t trust her.
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her family reportedly paid a State Department staffer to maintain the private email server she used during her tenure as secretary of state.
The Washington Post, citing an unnamed campaign official, reports the arrangement helped Clinton maintain her personal control over the server that she used to conduct public and private business. The official also said it also ensured that taxpayers weren’t paying for the upkeep of the server that was shared by Clinton, her husband, the former president, and their daughter as well as former aides, the Post reports.
The State Department staffer in question, Bryan Pagliano, told a congressional committee that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights instead of testifying about the private server. A congressional source told Fox News on Friday that investigators on the Benghazi Select Committee hoped to question Pagliano, a former IT specialist, over possible destruction of evidence.
Pagliano served as Clinton’s IT director of her 2008 campaign committee and then on her political action committee, according to The Post. He installed and managed her server and left his IT job at the State Department in February 2013, the same month Clinton stepped down as secretary.
The Post reports the Clintons paid Pagliano $5,000 for “computer services” prior to him joining the State Department, according to a 2009 financial disclosure form he filed. After he arrived on the State Department’s staff in 2009, he continued to be paid by the Clintons to maintain the server, a campaign official and another person familiar with the arrangement told The Post.
When asked about whether the former IT specialist had been paid privately to maintain the server, a State Department official said the agency “found no evidence that he ever informed the department that he had outside income,” The Post reports. This week, a different State Department official, couldn’t clarify to the newspaper Pagliano’s pay situation.
Pagliano reportedly didn’t list any outside income in the required personal financial disclosures he filed each year. The Post reports he remains a State Department contractor doing work on “mobile and remote computing functions,’ according to the State Department.
It’s not known exactly when or who “wiped” Clinton’s personal email server. However, it seems clear the move came after October 2014, when the State Department requested personal emails be returned as part of her business records.
Committee Republicans have long argued they don’t have all the documents that should be available to the investigation, after Clinton, using her personal discretion, purged some 30,000 emails.
Fox News put additional questions to Pagliano’s attorney, Mark J. MacDougall, Friday about whether his client played a direct role or had knowledge of the server scrub, but MacDougall said there was nothing further to add beyond the letter.
An intelligence source who confirmed to Fox that the FBI’s “A-team” was handling the Clinton email case, described the investigation as “moving along well,” adding investigators remain “confident” deleted records can be recovered because whoever did the scrub may “not be a very good IT guy. There are different standards to scrub when you do it for government vs. commercial.”
Clinton’s politically appointed State Department information technology manager had no national security experience and may have enjoyed a 55 percent pay hike after Clinton departed as secretary of state in February 2013, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.
Bryan Pagliano joined Clinton in 2009 as a top-level IT strategist and adviser. He previously was IT director of Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. The White House personnel office must approve political appointees before they are hired.
Pagliano was hired as a GS-15 even though he had no national security experience or security clearance. He was paid $140,000 annually at the outset but that was reduced to $136,000 in 2011 and 2012, according to the Asbury Park Press, which posts federal compensation data.
Pagliano described himself at the State Department on his LinkedIn page as a “strategic advisor and special projects manager” to the department’s Chief Technology Officer.
He was assigned to the State Department’s Bureau of Information Resource Management, a highly classified system which manages the digital traffic of 50,000 U.S. diplomats and foreign service officers at the 250 U.S. embassies and consulates located around the world.
Prior to working for Hillary’s presidential campaign, Pagliano was a senior systems engineer at Community IT Innovators, a small IT firm that catered to non-profit organizations. The organization represented liberal advocacy groups, community services organizations, schools and NGO’s, according to its web site.
You think? CNN’s Elise Labott noted yesterday that Bryan Pagliano’s decision to plead the Fifth rather than testify before Congress — and even, as it turns out, cooperating with the FBI — makes it appear that the 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign aide that set up her secret server is afraid of criminal charges in the scandal. Team Hillary says it urged everyone to cooperate with investigators and profess to be mystified as to why anyone would worry about an indictment, but that spin isn’t selling:
Michael Isikoff first reported on Pagliano’s refusal to cooperate with any part of the probe. It also sets up a potential indicator of just how serious this investigation will get. The one way around a Fifth Amendment claim is immunity, which would mean that “extremely serious” FBI investigators will have convinced Department of Justice prosecutors to get “extremely serious,” too:
The former aide to Hillary Clinton who helped set up and maintain her private email server has declined to talk to the FBI and the State Department inspector general’s office, as well as a congressional committee, invoking his Fifth Amendment rightnot to incriminate himself, sources familiar with the investigation confirmed to Yahoo News.
The move by Bryan Pagliano, who served on Clinton’s 2008 campaign and later as a technology officer in the State Department, to decline to cooperate in two federal probes considerably raises the stakes in the Clinton email investigation, the sources said. It confronts the Justice Department with a decision about whether to grant him immunity in exchange for his testimony — a move that could be taken only were the department to escalate the probe into a full-scale criminal investigation, the sources said.
Former federal prosecutor Joseph DiGenova tells McClatchy that this may force the DoJ into empaneling a grand jury, a move with dire political and legal consequences for Hillary Clinton and her aides:
One former Republican U.S. attorney predicted Thursday that the development will compel the Justice Department to set aside the FBI’s limited inquiry into whether Clinton’s emails breached national security, empanel a federal grand jury and conduct a criminal investigation.
“Obviously, if he’s not going to cooperate, all of these people who were on her email are all going to get subpoenas now,” Joseph diGenova said. “It is fairly abundant that the setting up of the server – unencrypted, without State Department input – was done partially surreptitiously. And this gentleman who was part of that process could be criminally exposed for violating the espionage statutes, especially for the grossly negligent handling of classified information, which is a 10-year felony.” …
As U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia from 1983 to 1987, diGenova prosecuted Israeli spy Daniel Pollard. He said he still has a security clearance above top secret because he represents clients in national security cases.
“When people like this little guy start taking the fifth,” diGenova said, “it means that a lot of other people along the way are going to do the same thing. This happened because she wanted to have an unencrypted server to protect her privacy, and in the course of doing that, she compromised national security information for four years, whether she wants to admit it or not.”
For an army of ethically compromised defenders in politics and the media, Hillary Clinton’s email scandal is being framed as little more than a political attack aimed solely at derailing her presidential candidacy. Yet while each new revelation makes it harder to dismiss Hillary and Bill’s seemingly endless effort to monetize the Clinton Foundation by virtually any means possible, most of it is beside the point. What’s not beside the point is the reality that Hillary Clinton is a walking, talking national security disaster.
The Daily Beast’s John R. Schindler, who wonders if other officials in the Obama administration, including the president, will be burned by this scandal, notes that many counterintelligence officials now assume Clinton’s emails have been read by foreign intelligence officials in Russia and China because her server was “wholly unencrypted for months.” A Department of Defense counterintelligence official was so certain of that reality he insisted that anyone working for the Chinese or Russians would be fired if they couldn’t explain why “they didn’t have all of Hillary’s email.”
As if on cue, RadarOnline.comrevealed a person claiming to be a computer specialist allegedly has 32,000 emails from Clinton’s private server, and is putting them up for sale for $500,000. “Promising to give the trove of the former Secretary of State’s emails to the highest bidder, the specialist is showing subject lines as proof of what appear to be legitimate messages,” the website states.
At least four of those emails contain subject lines with the word “Sid,” presumably referring to Clinton hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal, whose own AOL account was breached in 2013 by the Romanian hacker known as Guccifer. That hack also revealed Clinton’s @clintonemail.com email address. The website’s source warns that if the 32,000 emails enter the public domain, “not only is Hillary finished as a potential Presidential nominee, she could put our country’s national security at risk.”
She already has, and the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reveals the unassailable logic behind that assertion. Even if Clinton was extraordinarily lucky, and the Russians and Chinese haven’t accessed some or all of her emails, it is nonetheless incumbent on the nation’s entire security community to behave as if they did. “Doesn’t that mean that we are now making massive changes to the sources and methods of our intelligence?” Kurtz asks. “Are we now withdrawing valuable agents? Are we trying to replace methods that cannot be easily replicated? Are we now forced to rebuild a good deal of our intelligence capabilities from the ground up? Are we not suffering tremendous intelligence damage right now, regardless of what foreign intelligence services did or did not manage to snatch from Hillary’s server—simply because we are forced to assume that they got it all?”
Considering the stakes—as well as the reality there have been massive hacks at Office of Personnel Management, networks of the Department of Defense (DOD), the IRS, the State Department (called the “worst ever”), and the White House, compromising the personal data of million of Americans—the answer is an unequivocal yes.
WASHINGTON — Longtime Hillary Rodham Clinton aide Cheryl Mills was grilled for hours Thursday by a House committee — a day after a former Clinton staffer said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights to avoid giving testimony.
The appearance by Mills, who testified behind closed doors before the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack, came after it was revealed that former Clinton tech expert Byran Pagliano would refuse to answer committee questions.
That created another political embarrassment for Clinton, who “has made every effort to answer questions and be as helpful as possible, and has encouraged her aides . . . to do the same, including Bryan Pagliano,” said campaign spokesman Nick Merrill.
Pagliano isn’t just any staffer. He was responsible for Clinton’s private server during her 2008 presidential campaign, and followed her to the State Department as a “special adviser.”
Those of us who have been watching politics for the last quarter of a century have asked this question time and again, as the Clintons wriggled out of a dozen different kinds of shady behavior. And each time we think something’s finally going to take them down, they skate. It’s kind of like being a Cubs fan: maybe next year.
But there are five reasons why Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal could finally be the one.
1) It’s not about Bill.
People like Bill Clinton. I don’t really know why; he’s always struck me as a smarmy used car salesmen. But people actually do buy used cars from questionable characters, and the general public somehow likes Bill Clinton and wants to cut him some slack. Sometimes there’s just no accounting for these things.
But Hillary is not Bill. She can’t do that thing where he responds to a scandal with finger-wagging outrage at the unjust accusations one moment, and humble, lip-biting contrition the next, and people buy it. She seems cold and distant, and her lame attempts to laugh off the scandal as a non-issue don’t make her seem buoyantly confident. They just make her seem contemptuous and out of touch.
There are plenty of people—Democratic Party activists, mostly—who have a vested interest in making excuses for Hillary. But she doesn’t have the kind of mysterious charisma that gets her a free pass with the general public.
2) It’s about a real issue.
There were some real issues behind the previous scandals, as we wasted a lot of time explaining to anyone who would listen, which wasn’t many people. But the most famous issue on which the Clintons skated—Bill’s dalliance with a White House intern—seemed like it was all about his personal sex life, not matters of state. So who cared, really?
This scandal is about national security. It’s about Hillary Clinton casually, recklessly mishandling something that was central to her job as Secretary of State: protecting the secrets of the United States. That’s why the latest revelation is so important: that her unsecure homebrew e-mail server was not merely the passive recipient of classified information sent to her by others, but that she used it to 766 Comments containing classified material.
3) It’s about something concrete.
The biggest Clinton scandal by far is the way the family cashed in after Bill left office, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in speaking fees and consultancies, far beyond the actual value of any work they provided—money that is obviously being laid down in an attempt to secure access and favors from the Clinton family. And all of that money has been washing around between Bill and Hillary and their foundation, which seems to operate mostly as a family slush fund.
But the thing about influence peddling is that it’s vague and hard to pin down. That’s why people do it. Everybody knows the rules of the game: give money and you get access, you get an ear eager to hear your concerns—but there is never any explicit quid pro quo, no smoking gun that can send anybody to jail. So critics are left pointing to overall patterns that seem suspicious, but it can all just be brushed off as coincidence.
The e-mail scandal is specific and concrete. It’s about a server and a hard drive. It’s about a specific classified message sent at a particular time from a particular e-mail account. It’s a lot harder to explain away.
4) It’s something people have been prosecuted for.
It’s hard to turn back once you’ve made a witch hunt out of mishandling classified information. Too many people have been prosecuted for that under this administration. Most famously, prosecutors went after General David Petraeus for keeping physical notebooks with classified information in his home—which is actually more difficult for our enemies to steal than the contents of a server, which can be hacked remotely. While you might be able to get someone to construct an argumentabout how that case is totally different from this one, it’s a distinction that isn’t going to hold up.
5) It turns Hillary’s big accomplishment into a big liability.
Secretary of State is the only executive office Hillary Clinton has ever held. When she lost the Democratic primary in 2008, this was the position she wanted as her stepping stone back to the presidency. It was an office in which she could rack up experience doing something that seems presidential—dealing with foreign policy—without having to take responsibility for whatever Obama messed up in domestic policy.
This scandal takes the one big thing Hillary Clinton has done in the past ten years to demonstrate her credentials to run for president, and it turns that one big asset into a big liability. It turns her tenure at the State Department into something she cannot mention without raising questions about all the classified information she potentially laid bare to Russian and Chinese hackers.
When it comes to actual prosecution, the Clintons are masters at getting off on a technicality, claiming that they didn’t really violate the strict letter of the law because it all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. And you know they can afford flesh-eating lawyers who will work every angle for them if this goes to court.
But we also know just how ambitious the Clintons are. We know that the real punishment for them isn’t prosecution or prison. It is being denied access to power. All this scandal really has to do is to make Hillary Clinton look unfit to be commander-in-chief.
After all, nobody can keep getting away with this stuff. It’s all got to catch up with them some time.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump just gave the greatest comeback of all time to Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
