Byron York: What campaign wouldn’t have wanted to get them?
It was, as the New York Times’ Mark Landler said in August 2016, the “original sin” of the Clinton email affair — that Clinton herself, and no independent body, unilaterally decided which emails she would hand over to the State Department and which she would delete.
Still, there were people who did not believe that Clinton’s deleted emails, all 30,000-plus of them, were truly gone. What is ever truly gone on the Internet? And what if Clinton were not telling the truth? What if she deleted emails covering more than just personal matters? In that event, recovering the emails would have rocked the 2016 presidential campaign.
So, if there were an enormous trove of information potentially harmful to a presidential candidate just sitting out there — what opposing campaign wouldn’t want to find it?
I certainly still want to see them. And I still want to see a special prosecutor appointed to do (unlike Comey’s) a proper investigation.
The problem for the Trump defenders (and after last week, I hesitate to bring the issue up again), is that the campaign spent months vociferously denying that they were colluding with the Russians to get this kind of information while simultaneously doing everything possible (other than saying they weren’t) to make it look as though they were, including Trump’s own public request of Putin almost a year ago to hack her and find the emails. His defenders now say there was nothing wrong about going to Russia for oppo research. OK, fine. If there was nothing wrong, why have they spent so much energy denying that they did so?
I hate to say what I would do if I were Trump, because, obviously, if I were Trump, I’d do all the stupid things that Trump does. But if I were someone in Trump’s position here’s what I would have done. I’d have given the following speech:
One of the reasons that I won this election is because my opponent was not only a terrible candidate with awful policies, but recognizably corrupt. And not only was, and is, she corrupt, but so was the previous administration that in addition to siccing the IRS on its political enemies while covering up the crime, refused to properly investigate her, and tied the hands of the FBI director in his investigation.
Because she did all she could to destroy all those emails, we have no idea what was in them that she so feared us finding, but the public still deserves to know. If getting them from the Russians was the only way to get them, then that was the price that had to be paid, to begin to restore the integrity of the American government, and I make no apologies for that.
But I’m not Trump.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of Clinton corruption, I’m sure that this is just a coinkidinky: Haiti official who exposed the Clinton Crime Family Foundation’s criminality and was going to expose much more next week “commits suicide.” Sure he did.
Oh, and a reminder from a year ago. Sad how being associated with the Clintons (and/or investigating them) makes so many people so despondent that they have to take their own lives.
[Update a few minutes later]
For those too young to remember, how the press ignored or helped cover up Clinton corruption two decades ago. Democrat operatives with bylines.
The sprawling fundraising scandal ultimately led to 22 guilty pleas on various violations of election laws. Among the Clinton fundraisers and friends who pleaded guilty were John Huang, Charlie Trie, James Riady, and Michael Brown, son of the late Clinton Commerce secretary Ron Brown. But many questions went unanswered, even after the revelations that Clinton had personally authorized offering donors Oval Office meetings and use of the Lincoln bedroom. A total of 120 participants in the fundraising scandal either fled the country, asserted their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, or otherwise avoided questioning. The stonewalling worked — and probably encouraged Hillary Clinton in her own cover-up of her private e-mail server and her ties with the Clinton Foundation.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449539/chinese-illegally-donated-bill-clinton-reelection-campaign-media-downplayed
The nineties were when I finally lost any vestige of support for Democrats I’d ever had.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Subpoena Fusion GPS:
Isn’t it interesting that a Russian-born American lobbyist with a Soviet counter-intelligence background just happens to have been tied to Fusion GPS?
The depth of corruption in DC is staggering. Trump was elected in part to drain that swamp, but he seems too incompetent to do it.
[Update a couple minutes later:
Which theory is harder to believe?
That Trump, who had never run for office before and who was panned as a clown by the Democrats and the media right up until Election Night last November, orchestrated a grand coup d’état with the assistance of the Russians to “hack” an American election, and that it was so well hidden that the Don Junior meeting is the only real evidence unearthed so far of the whole thing?
…Or that the Obama administration and the Democratic Party used their immense power to attempt to ensnare the Trumps in a damaging narrative that would either discredit him and the Republican Party as traitors in the event of a Clinton victory or cripple his administration in “scandal” should he pull an upset?
This is going to get very messy for the Democrats, I hope.
“If getting them from the Russians was the only way to get them, then that was the price that had to be paid, to begin to restore the integrity of the American government, and I make no apologies for that.”
Replace “Russians” with “KGB”. Our American President?
Or, put aside the crimes against humanity committed by the USSR, and just think about today’s Russia (with the KGB replaced by the FSB). Does going to Putin really sound like a good idea to you, Rand? Why would you think that the version of the email you get from “the Russians” would be accurate? That problem is even discussed in the Byron York piece – I can’t see it working for Trump.
Why would you think that the version of the email you get from “the Russians” would be accurate?
How would we know any version of email we get from anyone would be accurate?
And I didn’t say it could have worked for Trump.
The e-mail trail doesn’t support the idea that Trump “went to” the Russians. It indicates that “they” came to him. And if “the Russians” delivered information that could be corroborated, and proved some of the criminal activities of the Clintons, it would be a service to the United States.
Podesta’s e-mails were extremely damaging to the Democrats. But they were Podesta’s e-mails. It didn’t matter that they were obtained illegally. They were the truth. If Pol Pot provided verifiable evidence of Clinton criminality, the only thing that would matter is the evidence – not who provided it.
Bob-1, one of your heroes, Ted Kennedy, actually did collude with the Soviet Union to attempt to defeat Ronald Reagan. He solicited a propaganda campaign from Yuri Andropov, in which the Soviet leader would profess the peaceful intentions of the USSR. Kennedy believed he could get the likes of Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters to give it favorable coverage. That is an example of un-American collusion. Getting some actual dirt on the Clintons would not have been. But then, none was forthcoming. So what are you bitching about?
Oh, no! You liked to Byron York! I’m a Trumpkin snowflake, and I’m melting . . . I’m melting . . . What a world . . .
including Trump’s own public request of Putin almost a year ago to hack her and find the emails
I disagree with that characterization. At the time, the server was already wiped. So Trump would be asking for them to travel back in time. It came across more of as a joke about how hard it was for the State Department to get any of Hillary’s emails.
Most of the articles that talk about this stuff conflate any adjectives noting Putin’s competence as loving Putin, any Russian as being a Russian agent, and the DNC emails, Podesta’s emails, and Hillary’s server as all being the same. It would be nice that a media that can be so clintonian in their pedantry could be a little more precise.
Still, it doesn’t look good that a Republican, affiliated or unaffiliated with the Trump campaign, went to the dark web to see if anyone had material hacked from Hillary’s private server years earlier. It would have looked good if some reporters had done that though.
This reminds me a bit of Instapundit’s warning to the media about crying wolf. They make up some much crap and get caught in it that when the day comes that they finally have something real, no one would care. The real stuff that has come out is a lot more tame than the fevered fantasies have been, so it doesn’t get much of a reaction except from people who already dislike Trump. But even then, the reaction can’t meet the fever pitch that has been going on for over a year.
Trump didn’t invite the Russians to hack Hillary’s email server. He expected they already had done that and was hoping they would release what they found. I still hope that someone who hacked that poorly secured server will release what they found.
The associations between Fusion GPS, various Russians, and the Democrats could be real collusion but the accusation also seems to be reaching too much. Certainly there is good evidence that the Democrats hired out Fusion but the larger claim that Fusion is a Russian front and Obama set it all up to justify spying on Trump and snare him on the off chance he won isn’t much supported.
It is sketchy that the lawyer goes to anti-Trump rallies and got preferential treatment from the previous admin but the Democrat’s policies favor the Russians. This could just be the 70 year pattern of Democrats aligning with the Russians rather than a specific plot to harm Trump.
There certainly is more smoke here than the Trump/Putin collusion meme, so I don’t know why the media isn’t aggressively investigating it since they have a deep concern about Putin meddling in our elections.
The media has zero concern with Russia hacking our elections just as they have zero concern for illegal foreign funds going into democrat campaigns.
They are concerned with ratings and electing democrats that 95% donate to, in that order.
The article on the Clinton body count was certainly chilling. I remember vividly watching the news the night Vince Foster’s body was found. I had not been paying much attention to politics during the election, and had no awareness of the alleged criminal nature of the Clinton machine. In fact, Clinton seemed like a nice enough guy. But as I listed to his remarks on Foster, I took pause. Clinton went on, and on, and on, in a random, yet overly detailed manner. And I sat back in my chair and said (aloud) “He’s lying.” I didn’t know about what, or why, but I just knew that he was. It was completely transparent to me. But the idea of Foster’s death being anything but a suicide never entered my mind.
At least not that night. It wasn’t until lefty Stephanie Miller (whose radio show was one of my evening staples) did a segment on suicide that was a complete sham that I began to wonder. Her “question,” which she didn’t really seem to care about at all, was “why would anyone kill themselves?” And she gave examples of people who had killed themselves…all of which were just Vince Foster. She was a Democrat shill for her entire career (which I assume is over), and it occurred to me that she was just trying to convince everyone (including herself) that Foster had committed suicide.
It was only when the nature of Foster’s death was officially questioned did I take note of things. And the very most telling thing I ever heard anyone say was a question by a caller to the G. Gordon Liddy radio talk show. The caller asked Liddy how long he had lived in Washington DC. Liddy replied “25 years.” The caller noted that Foster had lived there less then seven months. Then he asked Liddy: “Do you know where Fort Marcy Park is?” Liddy didn’t. I’ve lived here seven years, and though I’ve passed it twice (by accident), I have no idea where it is.
Whether Foster killed himself or was murdered, I don’t believe for a second that he died in Fort Marcy Park.
By the way, I should disclose that I, too, was in the meeting with the Russian lawyer in the Trump Tower. Full disclosure, don’t you know.
Think of all the people that have gone to prison for the Clintons? They probably understood that the alternative was worse.
But all the deaths, at such coincidental times, just prove that turning $1000 into $100,000 in cattle futures just proves how lucky they are.
Everybody commits suicide with two calibers of guns and back of the head is the preferred suicide method.