When In Doubt About Clinton.com, Send the Marines

Equity: WaPo gives two Pinocchios to Hillary’s Marine Corps tale

. . . Kessler starts off by noting that even when Hillary first told this story in 1994, reporters like Maureen Dowd and Tony Kornheiser were deeply skeptical. Kessler quotes both, but Dowd had the best analysis:

• “At the time, Hillary Rodham was an up-and-coming legal star involved with an up-and-coming political star.”
• “She had made a celebrated appearance in Life magazine as an anti-establishment commencement speaker at Wellesley College, where, as president of the student government, she had organized teach-ins on her opposition to the Vietnam War.”
• “She was a Yale law school graduate who had worked on the anti-war Presidential campaigns of Eugene J. McCarthy and George McGovern.”
• “Mrs. Clinton told friends that she had moved to Arkansas for only one reason: to be with Bill Clinton.”
• The Clintons married on Oct. 11, 1975, in Fayetteville.

Still, another Post reporter found two of Clinton’s friends who recalled hearing the tale before 1994. Neither had a detailed account of her purported attempt to join the Marines, but one thought it was an attempt by Hillary to test whether Marine recruiters on campus would accept women as recruits. That explanation doesn’t make much sense, Kessler concludes, because the Marines have accepted women since 1918, had deployed them to war zones since Korea, and had 2700 women in the Corps at the height of the Vietnam War, in all positions except combat.

Kessler also notes that Bill Clinton told the story differently in Hillary’s previous presidential campaign:

Complicating matters is that in 2008, Bill Clinton told an audience that his future wife tried to join the Army. “I remember when we were young, right out of law school, she went down and tried to join the Army and they said ‘Your eyes are so bad, nobody will take you,’” he said.

Overall, this smells like fabulism to Kessler, giving the story two Pinocchios. . .

When it comes to Glenn Kessler handing out Pinocchios for lying, I automatically add two to any story involving a democrat, and deduct two from any about a Republican. It saves the time it takes trying to untwist his logic.

CNN piles on: C’mon, did Hillary really try to join the Marines in 1975?

DNC Chair Freaks Out After Andrea Mitchell Actually Fact-Checks Hillary

On Friday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell actually fact-checked Hillary Clinton’s suspicious tale of trying to join the Marines in 1975: “Those comments are being mocked by Republicans today and they’re getting two Pinocchios from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler....Why on earth would she go to a Marine recruiter in 1975?...It doesn't make sense.”

Her guest, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was so taken aback that the Florida congresswoman attacked Mitchell for asking questions: “With all due respect, Andrea, why on earth are we talking about this?” Mitchell hit back: “Because she brought it up in New Hampshire the other day. If she hadn't brought it up, it would not be an issue in this campaign.”

Schultz argued: “Andrea, Andrea, what the story illustrated was that we have made a lot of progress in America. Secretary Clinton is absolutely right. I mean, back then, you did have a much tougher time for women to be able to make it successfully through the recruitment process and move up in the military and we’ve made tremendous progress since then.”

In other words, she calls the story fake but accurate.



Meanwhile, the Hillary Clinton email scandal just keeps grinding along.

FBI Expanding Hillary Email Probe To Include Investigation into "Materially False" Statements

A Clinton? Making materially false statements to avoid conviction on other matters?

Surely you must be mistaken.

But I'm not happy. I'll tell you why in a moment.

The FBI has expanded its probe of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails beyond a provision involving "gross negligence" with national defense information, Fox News reports.
Agents are now also looking at whether statements that have been made violate a federal statute on providing "materially false" information, according to Fox.
"The agents involved are under a lot of pressure and are busting a--," an unidentified intelligence source told the network, which noted that the statute can be broadly applied.

Here's what I feel in my gut:

This is just clearing the decks of all possible charges, so they can say "nothing here can be charged against her."
. . .
I think the FBI is corrupt at highest levels -- not at the agent level, but at the level of the political brass, and they are sifting through each charge to find a way to say Hillary did nothing wrong. Oh, they'll do what they always do with the Clintons; they'll come up with a "compromise" that gives the Clintons what they want. They'll say what she did was "reckless" and "against all security protocols," which they'll offer up to prove this wasn't a whitewash.
. . .
I just don't feel like we live in a Republic anymore. We live in a gangster country, and the top of each agency knows they have to curry favor with the reigning gang.

I've never had any faith that the Justice Department would press a case against Hillary if the FBI finds one is warranted. I would just hope that enough of the juice would leak out via disgruntled agents that we might know the truth in time to do something about it.

Clinton email companies rebuff Senate investigators

Several companies that worked on Hillary Clinton’s private server are refusing interview and document requests from congressional investigators, even as they are cooperating with the FBI.

Platte River Networks, the Denver-based tech company that housed Clinton's server after she left the State Department in 2013, has declined requests by the Senate Homeland Committee to interview five employees about the security of the system, according to correspondence reviewed by POLITICO.

And Platte is blocking another tech company, Connecticut-based Datto Inc., from answering committee questions about its cloud backup of the Clinton emails, according to a separate letter Datto sent the committee. Datto has a confidentiality agreement with its client, Platte River, and can answer questions about that specific account only with their permission.

While the firms have voluntarily produced some information for congressional Republicans in the past, now it seems they're not willing to go beyond their legal obligations when it comes to responding to committee inquiries. Led by Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the Homeland panel is trying to ascertain whether classified information was exposed on the homemade server Clinton used while she was secretary of state, an inquiry that's running in parallel with a similar FBI investigation.

Republicans should keep this in mind, should they ever come back into control of the bureaucracy.

Drip-drip, away: Judge rules Hillary e-mail releases to stick to planned schedule

A court handed Judicial Watch a small setback, but didn’t do any favors for Hillary Clinton, either. Earlier, Judicial Watch sued the State Department to force them to prioritize the review and release of Benghazi-related e-mails. Ruling on behalf of the State Department, Judge Amit Mehta ordered the release to stick to the current schedule:

Judge Amit Mehta said that it would be “unwise and potentially risky” to order the government to quickly release some of the 329 emails specifically related to the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, which it had recently discovered.
Those emails — along with tens of thousands of others — are already on pace to be released by next February, as a result of a separate lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, said Mehta, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who was appointed by President Obama.
The best solution would be “to keep this on course,” Mehta said, since the government has already “made concrete commitments” in the other case.

It’s a momentary loss for Judicial Watch, but not a long-term defeat. The e-mails will still come out, but in the current drip drip drip timing that is predicted to last through February at the earliest. That may frustrate the government-transparency activist group, but it doesn’t prevent the e-mails from coming out.

The Hill’s headline on the case is curious: “Judge rules for Clinton on e-mails.” Actually, the judge ruled for the State Department, not Hillary Clinton, and it’s not likely to be seen as a victory in Hillary’s campaign headquarters. They would much prefer a single release in the near future, so that they can put the e-mail scandal in the rear-view mirror. It’s the slow reveal that keeps generating media interest — we can safely assume it’s not media vetting, as we’ll see shortly — and even when Hillary has a good moment, the next tranche of e-mails overshadows it. I’m surprised Team Hillary didn’t file an amicus brief on behalf of Judicial Watch. 

Top Hillary Aide Signed, Failed To Comply With State Dept ‘Separation Agreement’

The Daily Caller has exclusively confirmed that a top aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed — but failed to honor — an official “separation agreement,” which required her to surrender all work-related documents when she left office.

That aide, Huma Abedin, maintained control of emails she sent and received through a personal email account hosted on Clinton’s private email server for nearly two-and-a-half years after she left the agency in Feb. 2013.

In signing the form — called the OF-109 — but failing to turn over State Department records, Abedin may have opened herself up to criminal charges.

“I have surrendered to responsible officials all classified or administratively controlled documents and material with which I was charged or which I had in my possession,” reads Abedin’s signed OF-109, which The Daily Caller obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed on its behalf by the watchdog group Cause of Action.
. . .
Abedin, who used the email address huma@clintonemail.com, returned 6,714 emails in her possession in September. Mills and Reines, who used Yahoo and Google accounts, respectively, turned their emails over to the State Department in June. Clinton gave hers to the agency last December.

Laws and regulations are for the little people.

Big Obama Donors Stay on Sidelines in 2016 Race

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama’s biggest campaign donors are mostly sitting on the sidelines of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary so far, not opening their wallets in support ofHillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Almost four-fifths of the people who gave the 2012 maximum $5,000 to the president’s re-election committee hadn’t donated to a presidential candidate by Oct. 1, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal campaign finance records found.

In interviews ahead of this Saturday’s Democratic debate in Iowa, donors said Mrs. Clinton, the party’s front-runner, hadn’t motivated them to give the way Mr. Obama and previous Democratic candidates had. Still others said they are put off by the larger role of super PACs and that their donations to candidates, which are limited in this election cycle to $5,400 for the eventual nominee, just don’t matter much anymore.

I guess he lied about that too. She's just not "likable enough."

Sister Souljah Says Hillary Clinton Reminds Her of “the Slave Plantation White Wife”

During an interview published on Thursday, ahead of the release of her new book, Sister Souljah told Time she stands by her decades-old comments. “If you ask me my view, even if it’s not your view, you have to handle that,” she said. It’s safe to say Bill Clinton is not her favorite, but with another Clinton White House a distinct possibility, what does she think of Hillary Clinton? Here’s what Sister Souljah told Time:

… [W]hat does she think of Hillary Clinton? She pauses for a long moment, then pulls out an unsealed envelope. “I want to control what I say so that I can be quoted properly. I have this past history of being misquoted or misunderstood.” She slides an index card across the table. It reads, “She reminds me too much of the slave plantation white wife of the white ‘Master.’ She talks down to people, is condescending and pandering. She even talked down to the Commander in Chief, President Barack Obama, while she was under his command!”

So much for the critical black vote. Lady of the house wonders when he's gonna stop. . .