Crumbling

Is it time to file charges against the technician who lied to the FBI about destroying Hillary Clinton's emails and installed Bleach Bit when they were under congressional subpoena and preservation orders? At National Review, Andrew McCarthy thinks so.

Also, John Soloman reports at The Hill,

Congressional investigators find irregularities in FBI's handling of Clinton email case.

Don't get overconfident, folks!

Ann Althouse makes another important point this morning. She asked,

Do you remember how Watergate looked on the eve of the 1972 election? We knew about the Watergate break-in when we went to the polls. Here's how we voted:


Here's a Watergate chronology. The break-in occurred in June 1972. The burglars, caught in the act, were indicted on September 15th. Nixon had made an announcement on August 30th that his counsel John Dean had done an investigation that determined that no one in the White House was involved, but on September 29th, WaPo reported that Attorney General John Mitchell "controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats." On October 10th, WaPo reported:
FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon's re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.
So that's what people had to think about when we reelected Nixon in the biggest landslide ever. (I was 21 and it was the first time I was eligible to vote, though the voting age was suddenly 18. All that youth vote — which represented a lot of opposition to the war (and, especially, the draft) — wasn't enough to stop Nixon. Like everyone I knew, I voted for McGovern.)

The news that there were audiotapes of White House conversations didn't come out until July of the following year, and without these tapes, Nixon would have hung onto the presidency. The slow roll out of the Watergate scandal went on for more than a year after that before Nixon resigned. It was August 8, 1974. Almost 2 years after that landslide election.

So let's look back in 2 years and see how Hillary's big trouble looks compared to Watergate. But if you want to compare it to Watergate now, try comparing it to how Watergate looked on the eve of the 1972 election. And think about what it was like to go through those 2 years from landslide election to forcing the President to resign. What an ordeal! But I'm not saying that if Hillary Clinton gets elected — even by a slim margin — that she'll be swamped by scandal the way Nixon was. The press won't be straining to take her out, and for all the wars we are fighting, there's nothing like Vietnam.

Putin has Hillary's emails

Edmund Kozak reports at Lifezette,

“There’s a debate going on in the Kremlin between the Foreign Ministry and the Intelligence Services about whether they should release the 20,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that they have hacked into,” Judge Andrew Napolitano told Megyn Kelly on Monday.

...the FBI's investigation has at times seemed almost farcical. On Monday, the State Department said it had apparently lost four years' worth of emails from Brian Pagliano, Clinton's IT head who set up the private server.

"Such records might shed light on his role in setting up Clinton's server, and why he was granted immunity by the FBI," said Republican National Committee Deputy Communications Director Raj Shah. "But it seems that his emails were either destroyed or never turned over, adding yet another layer to the secrecy surrounding his role."

But if the State Department is unable (or unwilling) to provide materials to the FBI pertinent to its investigation, then perhaps the Russian government will oblige.

Read more here.

Hillary's email server: the "why"

Monica Crowley writes at the Washington Times that someone named Justin Cooper may know the reason Hillary Clinton used the email server that had been originally set up by Bill Clinton and his team.

Mr. Cooper is a central player in the shadowy worlds of Bill and Hillary Clinton — serving as Mr. Clinton’s top aide since 2015, when his predecessor, former right-hand man and “surrogate son” Doug Band, resigned from the Clinton Foundation — yet he has largely escaped notice.

The obscure Mr. Cooper may, in fact, be the linchpin of the case swirling around the Clintons. Perhaps more than anyone apart from the principals themselves, he is at the nexus of the Clinton Foundation, Hillary’s work at the State Department, and her possession of highly sensitive government documents. After all, Mr. Cooper was the one who, before she became secretary, negotiated with the Obama White House over the parameters of acceptable conduct by Bill Clinton and the foundation to minimize the possibility of “conflicts of interest.”

I have previously reported that the server in question actually belonged to, was paid for and was housed by Mr. Clinton, raising questions about his possible legal exposure. Now it appears that it wasn’t just his server, but his team and their co-motive: to leverage Mrs. Clinton’s position as secretary to expand their contacts and raise ever more exorbitant amounts of money for their foundation.

Recall that the FBI probe is proceeding along multiple tracks. The one involving her possible mishandling of classified material is the “what” part of the equation.

Far more important, however, is the “why.” Why did she have these documents on their unsecure, private server in the first place? What was the motive for receiving and sending so many of them, deleting more than 30,000 more and changing her story several times about their nature?

Motive is the key. That brings us to another part of the investigation: possible violations of public corruption laws in the co-mingling of Clinton Foundation work with her duties at the State Department.

Read more here.

Hey, New York Times could you rewrite the headline and story about that criminal investigation of me?

Ed Driscoll writes at Instapundit about Hillary's team leaning on the New York Times to change the headline and story about the two inspectors general asking the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.

As BuzzFeed’s C.J. Ciaramella tweeted, “Passive voice: the politician’s best friend.”

Read more here.