Obama's obfuscation of Hillary's guilt

At National Review, Andrew McCarthy writes,

he Justice Department is reviving investigations involving Hillary Clinton’s emails and the degree to which the State Department during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary was put in the service of the Clinton Foundation. Good. Indeed, it is long overdue. It underscores a point we’ve tried to make repeatedly here: You don’t need a special counsel for this kind of thing; such investigations are what we have a Justice Department full of career prosecutors for. The perverse institution of the independent prosecutor should be shunned whenever possible — and its jurisdiction tightly confined in the rare necessary case.

This was a straightforward case of criminal intent. Negligence was the fallback position — for a prosecutor, an “even if” theory, as in: “Even if you’re not convinced by our overwhelming evidence of Clinton’s willfully illegal retention and transmission of classified information, you can still comfortably find her guilty if you conclude that she was grossly negligent — which, as the judge will tell you in his instructions, simply means ‘extremely careless.’”

Mrs. Clinton’s criminal intent was so clear that its obfuscation also required Obama’s second point: Mrs. Clinton’s lack of intent to imperil the United States.

...Obama is a Harvard-trained lawyer. What he and those who echoed him executed was a not uncommon defense-attorney stratagem: The conflation of motive and criminal intent, two importantly distinct concepts. Motive is the reason why we do something; intent is our state of awareness in doing it — the understanding that, regardless of why we are doing something, we know we are doing it and we are doing it on purpose. To prove someone guilty of a crime, no motive need be established, but intent must always be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

...every government official with a security clearance knows it is wrongful to transfer classified information to a person not authorized to have it or to a place where its storage is not authorized.

...Rather, it was urged that she had transmitted classified information on purpose, but not with intent to do the country harm. That is less heinous than the treasonous offense. But it is still egregious. It is a crime that puts the lives of intelligence sources and the effectiveness of life-saving intelligence operations at risk.

Moreover, it is a black-letter principle that a person’s innocence of Crime A is inadmissible to prove that the person has not committed Crime B. For example, the fact that I have not personally sold drugs has no bearing on whether I laundered drug money. And the fact that Mrs. Clinton did not intend that any harm come to the United States does not make her innocent of willfully transmitting classified information to unauthorized persons or places, or of retaining it when she left the government and when the State Department finally requested that she surrender the government records in her possession.

As for Mrs. Clinton’s motives, no sensible person believes she wanted to imperil the country; many, however, justifiably believe she put her own interests ahead of the potential that the country could be threatened. I have always believed her motive in setting up a private communications network for her government work was twofold: to conceal the links between State Department business and Clinton Foundation business; and, as she was contemplating a presidential bid, to insulate her communications from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, congressional oversight, and other government-transparency measures.

...the evidence that Clinton willfully mishandled classified information is mountainous.

When the request was made that Clinton surrender her emails to the State Department, she turned them over to her own lawyers and subordinates who did not have the security clearances required for access to the information. She destroyed tens of thousands of emails, even though they were under subpoena, so that they could not be reviewed by the State Department or the FBI. Of the 30,000 she deigned to surrender to the State Department, over 2,000 contained classified information, some of it among the nation’s most highly classified national-defense secrets. And she serially lied in her public statements about her emails, in congressional testimony (in which she brazenly claimed to have turned over all work-related email to the State Department, and that her lawyers had carefully reviewed every email before designating which should be surrendered and which withheld), and in her FBI interview (in which she pretended not to know what the ubiquitous “[C]” designation — for confidential — in classified documents meant).

Any prosecutor who understood there was no need to prove intent to harm the United States would be delighted to take that case to the jury — especially once the prosecutor realized he’d get to tell the jury: “Even if you suspend disbelief and buy the defense argument that she didn’t mean to horde and transmit classified information, you must still find her guilty if you conclude she was grossly negligent — as in ‘extremely careless’.” The Trump administration and its Justice Department say they want to stop rampant leaking by government officials. It won’t stop absent a reversal of the last administration’s fiction that the prosecutor must establish a motive to harm the United States. The law does not require it. The rule of law requires correcting it.

Read more here.

Andrew McCarthy on the Iran deal

On the Iran deal, Andrew McCarthy writes,

...the Constitution is plenty strong enough to foil the ambitions of a rogue president. True, Congress cannot compel the president to execute our law faithfully. But if the president is derelict in his duty to submit an international agreement to the Senate for its approval, or to the full Congress for implementation as ordinary legislation, then the agreement will not have the force of American law. It remains a mere executive agreement between the president and other chiefs of state. That means it may be rescinded at any time, by either the president who entered it or a successor president.

the Obama administration concedes that the jihadist regime in Tehran continues to support terrorism and remains one of only three countries our government designates as state sponsors of terrorism. Indeed, the administration further admits that Tehran will divert some of the lavish money streams it got from the Iran deal to terrorist organizations. It goes without saying, moreover, that a major purpose of the deal, from Tehran’s perspective, was the preservation of Iran’s nuclear and other weapons programs.

Because the Framers were leery of foreign entanglements, they ensured that international agreements would not be legally binding unless Congress concurred in a president’s claim that they served America’s interests. Thus, to be cemented in law, such agreements must be either (a) ratified after Senate consent by a two-thirds supermajority or (b) implemented through legislation passed by both congressional chambers in the constitutional manner — i.e., enacted by simple majorities in the House and Senate.

...At first, Obama had no intention of going to Congress. Not knowing how easy it would be to roll GOP leadership, he calculated that he had no chance of getting his legacy “achievement” approved as either a treaty or legislation. Thus, the president’s original plan was to (a) make a beeline to the United Nations Security Council; (b) get its resolution endorsing the deal; (c) argue — unconstitutionally — that this U.N. resolution made the deal binding international law despite the absence of U.S. congressional assent; and (d) persuade big corporations and financial institutions to enter long-term commercial deals with Iran. This scheme was more political than legal: Change the facts on the ground so drastically that, even if the deal was not binding under federal law, other countries that wanted lucrative Iran business would revolt if the next president tried to rescind Obama’s handiwork and revive sanctions enforcement.

...But then Corker decided that, rather than steely opposition, bipartisan cooperation — with Democrats generally supportive of Obama’s Iran policy — was the way to go. With Democrats “helping” Corker write the INARA, Obama realized he’d get a windfall: not just the Security Council resolution but also congressional legislation that would effectively repeal the sanctions.

...That outcome is a disaster for U.S. national security — worse than what would have happened if Congress had done nothing. I explained why that is so when Congress failed to enact a disapproval resolution: The language of the INARA can be read to state that Congress has lifted the sanctions.

Had there been no INARA — even better, had the Republican-controlled Senate and House passed resolutions affirming the sense of each chamber that the Iran deal was a non-binding executive agreement that needed congressional approval in order to have legal effect in the United States — President Donald Trump could have, upon his inauguration, simply rescinded the deal and announced that all congressional sanctions would henceforth be fully enforced. But thanks to Corker’s INARA, it is very likely that the nuclear sanctions are dead; they’d have to be reenacted from scratch. Indeed, it is the assumption that the INARA killed the sanctions that induced big corporations to commence business with Iran — such as Boeing’s aforementioned $17.6 billion deal to supply aircraft to the “Death to America” regime.

Even in disagreement, I admire a number of these lawmakers. I also believe that Senator Corker — and other principal INARA supports, like Senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham — really do oppose our Iranian enemies. That’s why I spent so much time and energy pleading with them to reconsider their course. I think they just miscalculated. Some of them naively believed that, somehow, an administration more contemptuous of Congress than any in our history could be squeezed into revealing the terms of the atrocious deal. Many of them, mindful of the 2016 election then on the horizon, undoubtedly believed the political upside of hammering Democrats on Obama’s Iran policy outweighed the legal downside of allowing Obama to eradicate the sanctions.

We now also know there were secret arrangements between the Obama administration and the mullahs to forgive Iranian noncompliance regarding caps on retention of low-enriched uranium and heavy water. The administration further agreed that the IAEA would no longer provide broad reporting on Iran’s nuclear programs. And who can forget the notorious ransom? Although the INARA directed Obama to disclose all ancillary agreements to Congress, the administration concealed the arrangement by which it paid Tehran $1.7 billion in exchange for the release of four American hostages — a ransom paid in cash under the guise of settling 38-year old financial claims from a failed arms deal.

Read more here.

Ransom payments to Iran: "The president’s press conference is better understood as a confession than an explanation... The president has broken the law."

Andrew Mccarthy writes at National Review about Obama's ransom payments to Iran:

The Iranians have bragged that the astonishing cash payment was a ransom — and Obama has been telling us for months that we can trust the Iranians. The hostages were released the same day the cash arrived. One of the hostages has reported that the captives were detained an extra several hours at the airport and told they would not be allowed to leave until the arrival of another plane — inferentially, the unmarked cargo plane ferrying the cash. The reason American policy has always prohibited paying ransoms to terrorists and other abductors is that it only encourages them to take more hostages. And, as night follows day, Iran has abducted more Americans since Obama paid the cash. No matter how energetically the president tries to lawyer the ransom issue, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . .

More worth examining is why the transaction took the bizarre form that it did. To cut to the chase, I believe it was to camouflage — unsuccessfully — the commission of felony law violations.

...Obama conceded at his press conference both that these sanctions are still in effect and that they applied directly to his $400 million pay-out to our terrorist enemies. But here’s the president’s problem: While he is correct that the sanctions barred him from sending Iran a check or wire transfer, that is not all they forbid — not by a long shot. They also make it illegal to do what he did. As noted above, the sanctions prohibit transactions with Iran that touch the U.S. financial system, whether they are carried out in dollars or foreign currencies. The claim by administration officials, widely repeated in the press, that Iran had to be paid in euros and francs because dollar-transactions are forbidden is nonsense; Americans are also forbidden to engage in foreign currency transactions with Iran.

Obama had our financial system issue U.S. assets that were then converted to foreign currencies for delivery to Iran. Both steps flouted the regulations, which prohibit the clearing of currency of any kind if Iran is even minimally involved in the deal; here, Iran is the beneficiary of the deal.

Although these regulations leave no room for doubt that their point is to prevent and criminalize things like sending $400 million in cash to the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, the ITSR adds another reg for good measure. Section 560.203 states: Evasions; attempts; causing violations; conspiracies: . . . Any transaction . . . that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, causes a violation of, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this part is prohibited. . . . Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this part is prohibited.

By his own account, President Obama engaged in the complex cash transfer in order to end-run sanctions that prohibit the U.S. from having “a banking relationship with Iran.” The point of the sanctions is not to prevent banking with Iran; it is to prevent Iran from getting value from or through our financial system — the banking prohibition is a corollary. And the point of sanctions, if you happen to be the president of the United States sworn to execute the laws faithfully, is to follow them — not pat yourself on the back for keeping them in place while you willfully evade them. The president’s press conference is better understood as a confession than an explanation.

Oh, and there is also Section 560.701, which makes clear that willful violations of the regulations constitute serious felony offenses under federal criminal law — punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment.

...In sum, the Obama administration has provided Iran with $400 million under circumstances in which it well knows that at least some of this cash will be used for terrorism. Indeed, as the editors point out, by providing the money in cash, Obama makes it more likely that it will be used for terrorism: Iran likes to deny its complicity in jihadist acts; so now, flush with cash, it can fund atrocities without leaving a paper trail.

...The circumstances of Obama’s enormous cash transfer to our terrorist enemies raise serious questions about whether American policy against paying ransoms to terrorists has been flouted. But that should not obscure a more fundamental issue: The president has violated the law.

Read more here.

That is no way to protect our country

I often excerpt the writings of Andrew McCarthy, the successful prosecutor of the jihadists who conducted the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The leader of that attack was Omar Abdel Rahman. This week McCarthy spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on “Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts to Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism.”

Omar Abdel Rahman was not merely blind. He was beset by several other medical handicaps. Terrorism is hard work. Yet, here was a man who seemed utterly incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization: he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination.

Still, he was the unquestioned leader of terror cells and revered by jihadists across the globe. How could that be?

The answer is straightforward, though it plainly remains one we do not want to hear.

The Blind Sheikh is a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of expertise is sharia -- Islam’s legal code and societal framework.

The jihadists who listened to him did so because he is an internationally recognized authority in the political ideology that draws on Islamic scripture to inspire attacks against the West.

The centrality of ideology tells us why terrorists obeyed the Blind Sheikh. It tells us why terrorists act. This is something we must grasp if we have any hope of defending ourselves and defeating our enemies.

Yet, instead of focusing on this ideology, we have wasted much of the last two decades on a fool’s errand: attempting to define a “true Islam,” in the futile hope of discrediting terrorists as purveyors of a false Islam.

The stubborn fact is that there may not be a “true Islam.” Islam has a rich and diverse history, and there are various interpretations of it, all vying for the mantle of “true Islam” and denying it to one another. Innumerable factions of Muslims have been debating one another, often violently fighting amongst each other, for fourteen centuries. They have not settled the question, “What is the true Islam?”

The United States is not going to settle it, either.

From a humanitarian standpoint, we have to hope courageous reformers prevail – devout Muslims like my co-panelist here this afternoon, Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser. We should do what we can to help them, including marginalizing – instead of taking our cues from – sharia-supremacist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

But from the standpoint of American national security, it is irrelevant whether there is a true Islam. What matters is that there is a sharia-supremacist construction of Islam to which hundreds of millions of Muslims have adhered for centuries. They are supported by centuries of scholarship and scriptural literalism. We are not going to convince them that they are wrong.

They do not care what American politicians and commentators think about “the true Islam.” They judge themselves by their own civilization and culture principles – just as we in the West do by ours. It is absurd to believe, as what passes for today’s counterterrorism strategy maintains, that they are motivated or even affected by the language we use to speak about them, or by our stated beliefs about Islam.

Sharia supremacism, their interpretation of Islam, is not a religion as we understand religion. It is political radicalism with a religious veneer. Sharia supremacism is virulently anti-Western, misogynist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. It rejects basic tenets of Western liberalism, including the power of people to chart their own destiny and make their own laws in contravention of sharia. It rejects individual liberty and equality. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It endorses violent jihad to implement and spread sharia. And it regards the United States, closely trailed by Israel and Europe, as the principal enemies of Islam that must be defeated.

That is something we desperately need to understand and highlight, not obscure and avoid.

There has been a reluctance to do this. Government counterterrorism policy has been willfully blind for a quarter-century to the ideological underpinnings of radical Islamic terrorism. The reluctance has been rationalized on the wayward theory that because a person’s religious beliefs and political speech are constitutionally shielded from prosecution, they are similarly shielded from mere inquiry and investigation – notwithstanding that we know they are often precursors to violence.

A sensible national security policy cannot regard the objective presentation of evidence as if it were the promotion of hate speech.

There is nothing inherently wrong with, much less constitutionally offensive about, the concept that radical religious or political beliefs should trigger investigations. That is especially the case if those beliefs are conveyed by aggressive language, or by association with other radicals or mosques known to endorse jihadism.

Here’s an important principle we must get right:

It cannot be that evidence an investigator may use to prove guilt of terrorism offenses is somehow insulated from an investigator’s suspicions about potential terrorism offenses.

The goal of counterterrorism is supposed to be the prevention of jihadist attacks, not the hope that there may be a living terrorist or two still around to be indicted and tried only after Americans have been murdered.

In 1996, I was awarded the Justice Department’s highest honor for proving the nexus between (a) jihadist commands in Islamic scripture, (b) their exploitation by sharia jurists like the Blind Shiekh, and (c) the commission of jihadist atrocities by the young Muslims he inflamed. Today, to say aloud what the Clinton administration honored me for twenty years ago, is to be ostracized as an Islamophobic bigot.

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, that is no way to protect our country.

Read more here.

A witless aider and abettor

I love this headline for Andrew McCarthy's important piece at The Corner:

We Interrupt Our Regular Trump Programming to Announce America’s Surrender to Iran and Global Governance

McCarthy writes,

At the New York Times website this morning, if you dig down under stories on the Donald Trump Circus, you will find a one-line link, buried beneath several other one-line links, to a report titled, “U.N. Vote on Iran Nuclear Deal Irks Congress.” Further burying the lede, you must scour down to a passing reference in paragraph four to find a glimmer of the real story: The Obama administration has already raced to the United Nations Security Council to spearhead action, today, that would adopt Obama’s Iran deal in a resolution that will begin the deal’s implementation.

The Times tut-tuts that this has left the people’s representatives in Congress “irked,” that lawmakers of both parties are “complaining that the Security Council action, expected Monday morning, would pre-empt the congressional debate.” Of course, the point is not that Congress’s pride is hurt. It is that the Constitution and the capacity of the American people to determine their own national interests are being torn asunder.

...In sum, the Obama administration has acceded to these demands by foreign sovereigns – some of which are enemies of the United States, and none of which guards the interests of the United States – that legal action imposing obligations on the American people be taken by those sovereigns not only before action is taken by the American people’s representatives but in violation of our Constitution.

...We should be asking each lawmaker who voted for the Corker Bill: If you did not want Obama to go to the Security Council before Congress could review the deal, why did you vote in the Corker Bill to allow the deal to commence without a vote from Congress? And why did you limit Congress’s review to statutory sanctions when there are so many other elements to the Iran deal – elements blatantly contrary to American national interests.

At the U.N. today, the Obama administration is colluding with our enemies and other foreign sovereigns to deprive the American people – through their elected representatives – of the power to determine what obligations they will accept under international law. The Obama administration has taken the position that Russia, China, and, yes, Iran, have a vote on our national security, but we do not. And in this betrayal, Congress has, at best, been a witless aider and abettor.

Read more here.

Obama and Kerry: hapless

Andrew McCarthy writes clearly in National Review about Iran:

Iran has built its foreign policy around the goal of “Death to America” for the last 36 years. It continues, unabashed, to be the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism — in particular, anti-American terrorism. It has killed and abetted the killing of Americans throughout the current regime’s existence. It is a totalitarian sharia state that, at this moment, is imprisoning at least three Americans. One of them, Saeed Abedini, has been sentenced to eight years’ incarceration for establishing Christian houses of worship, which the regime says is a threat to national security. The regime, further, has repeatedly vowed to exterminate Israel, our close ally and the only true democracy in the region.

With such a rogue state, there is only one negotiation a sensible nation — particularly the world’s most powerful nation — can have. You tell them that until they convincingly disavow their anti-American stance, cease their support for terrorism, release American prisoners, and acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, that there is no point in discussing anything else.

In the middle of their negotiations with Obama, the mullahs had one of their top military commanders announce that, as far as Iran is concerned, “erasing Israel off the map” is “nonnegotiable.” That is one of their bottom-line requirements. Obama’s job is to move them off their bottom line, not erase ours.

Two weeks ago, while the hapless Secretary Kerry hailed supposed progress in the negotiations, Khamenei reaffirmed his call for “Death to America.” As the negotiations limped along, Iran-backed jihadists known as the Houthis ousted the government of Yemen, triggering the emergency abandonment of the U.S. embassy and potentially enabling Iran to disrupt key commercial sea lanes while establishing a menacing presence on Saudi Arabia’s border. Iranian military officials continue to proclaim that “the American Navy is one of our targets”; just a few weeks ago, as Obama’s negotiations entered what was portrayed as the critical phase, Iran fired ballistic missiles at a mock-up of a U.S. aircraft carrier during naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz.

Read more here.

Extorting compliance with their own intolerant agenda

Andrew McCarthy writes that the controversy in Indiana is trumped up, but the RFRA isn't a good law.

If this were actually about pizza, a demand for specific performance would be frivolous. We have a controversy in Indiana, and now nationally, only because liberal fascists want a controversy. They want what a free society should never grant: License to use the law not as a protective shield but an offensive sword for extorting compliance with their own intolerant agenda — something that, as Tammy Bruce explains with moving eloquence, ought to be especially offensive to gay people who’ve felt the sting of condemnation over being different.

...Messrs. Clinton, Kennedy, Schumer, et al., knew what they were doing: Progressives like transferring decisions to the courts, which are more likely to share their predilections than the public. They also knew their movement. As long as the RFRA was being invoked on behalf of radicals in an effort to buck the law, it would be dandy. But the moment it was relied on by traditionalists to safeguard their Judeo-Christian values, the left’s shock troops would brand the traditionalists as “haters” and no one would care to remember that Democrats wrote the law.

Read more here.

Rationality: an alternative solution to Obama's Iran policies

Andrew McCarthy notes that

History, after all, gets revised so that those who write it can appear to have been on the right side of it.

...One must clarify whether we’re talking about when a Democratic administration was bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan because it was really a joint chemical-weapons venture between Iraq and al-Qaeda; or when that Democratic administration joined Congress in making regime change in Baghdad the national policy of the United States; or when congressional Democrats insisted on voting to show their support for the war to remove Saddam Hussein from power; or when Democrats decided Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda after all; or, finally, when Democrats turned with a vengeance against the Iraq war they had enthusiastically supported.

...Yet, what is the president’s rationale for appeasing Iran with a disastrous deal that will enable it to become a nuclear-weapons power? It is that the only alternative to his bad deal is war.

...Iran, like Saddam’s Iraq, cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons because it is a rogue aggressor that promotes jihadist terrorism, aspires to hegemony, and serially violates its international obligations. Consequently, the U.S. national interest is that Iran’s revolutionary regime, which has killed thousands of Americans and made opposition to America its ne plus ultra for 36 years, be — as Obama is fond of saying with respect to ISIS — degraded and ultimately defeated.

...Democrats have been telling us for years that there is a smart way to do this, a way that does not call for a false choice between surrender or war. According to their “Iraq in a box” model, the administration needs to work with Congress to codify regime change as the unambiguous national policy of the United States. With that long-term goal as our compass, crippling economic sanctions must be restored and enhanced — and enforced without waiver — in order to cut off the regime’s access to the international banking system and curtail its ability to engage in commerce, especially the marketing of its oil and related products. Other countries that do business with Iran and abet its efforts to defeat the sanctions should find their own capacity to conduct business in our markets and those of our allies significantly diminished.

Actors within the long reach of our enforcement jurisdiction should be prosecuted if they trade with or materially support Iran and its agents (such as the Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah). Iran itself needs to be put on notice that all options are on the table, including military attack, in response to its abetting of jihadist organizations and its refusal to dismantle its nuclear program. In the meantime, economic and logistical support for Iran’s dissidents should be substantially stepped up.

...Very simply, it should be made obvious in word and deed that we take the regime’s “Death to America” rhetoric and actions deadly seriously, that we believe the sole rational response is to treat the regime as the incorrigible enemy that it is. Iran is not the Soviet empire; it is no match for determined American opposition on the world stage. Negotiating with it as if it were is a damaging error that empowers the mullahs when they should be forced to play the weak hand they actually have.

Read more here.

Clintonian parsing

Andrew McCarthy wrote on March 11,

In her characteristically underhanded way, Mrs. Clinton waited until after she was done “answering questions” to have her lackeys distribute a sheet explaining that she has withheld from the government files and likely deleted from the private servers she refuses to relinquish an astonishing 31,830 e-mails from her time as secretary of state. The icon of the “personal is political” crowd says they . . . were personal. You’ll just have to take her word for it.

...She could have deleted documents throughout her tenure as secretary of state, long before the State Department asked her for records two years after she left office. That’s the way she rigged the system.

Clinton rigged up a system where the presumption was against retention: She made herself, rather than federal law applied by government record-keepers, the sole arbiter of what the government got to keep in its files.

...Against that background, consider what was perhaps the most ludicrous argument Mrs. Clinton made at her press conference: Because the Clintons have Secret Service protection, the private Clinton server system was physically protected by federal agents. So what? The Clintons could have had the entire United States Marine Corps on scene and it wouldn’t have made a difference. We’re not worried about someone busting in with a sledgehammer to wreck the server. We’re worried about cyber espionage.

...The fact that Mrs. Clinton says she did not store classified documents on her private server, which is very likely true, does not discount the distinct possibility that she discussed classified matters in private e-mails. We would not be able to judge that absent reviewing the e-mails. If any of the 31,830 withheld e-mails from the private, non-secure system — involving America’s top diplomat who was in constant discussions with other important diplomats, top military and national-security officials, her trusted advisers, and even the president of the United States — touched on classified matters, that could land Mrs. Clinton in very hot legal water. It would be a powerful incentive to hit the “delete” key.

Read more here.

Hillary toys with the Benghazi select committee

Andrew McCarthy, who excoriated Trey Gowdy is a recent post, has a new one entitled Don't Blame Gowdy. McCarthy points out that the Select Committee on Benghazi, headed by Gowdy,

is powerless to obtain search warrants and coerce the physical surrender of evidence. Simply stated, the committee is not a prosecutor.

Congress has no authority to conduct criminal investigations or to seize evidence. Those are police powers and they belong solely to the executive branch.

...Congress is neither intended nor equipped to compel production of evidence, investigate crime, and prove guilt.

I believe I have been harder on the Benghazi select committee than any conservative commentator (see here, here and here). That is largely because I admire Representative Gowdy, was very happy to see the committee placed in such capable hands, and have been disappointed at its lethargic approach to an urgent matter. This, however, has never been to overlook that the committee has a very difficult job.

Not only are there political pressures to bury Benghazi and the disastrous bipartisan policy decisions that led to it. It is also simply very difficult for a congressional committee to investigate government misconduct. It has a much harder time coercing cooperation than a prosecutor does — especially when at least half the Congress is undermining the investigation.

My objection is that, just as the public and the commentariat seem confused about what the committee is for and what it can do, so does the committee. Chairman Gowdy is determined to run the case like a criminal investigation, but it is not one. It is a public-accountability investigation. It is not legal but political in nature – and I mean “political” not in the pejorative sense of partisanship but in the classic sense of accountability for the misuse and abuse of political power.

...For ten months, the committee takes virtually no action and conveys the impression that it is not exactly tripping over itself to get to the bottom of Benghazi. There are nearly no hearings – the ones that have been held have been desultory and mostly irrelevant to the main issues. The public may be forgiven if it forgot that there was a congressional Benghazi investigation, much less that anyone in Washington still thinks it worth examining the government actions that both created conditions inviting the terrorist murder of four American officials and then covered up what happened.

...Republicans, meantime, have forfeited the power of the purse for this year. They will not even consider impeaching officials who abdicated their duty to protect and defend Americans and then studiously defrauded the public about the cause of the attack. They continue to rubber-stamp Obama appointees. Indeed, as Betsy McCaughey points out, they overwhelmingly confirmed a secretary of state who told them he would not adhere to the Constitution’s treaty requirements; and now, they are poised to confirm as attorney general — the nation’s top law-enforcement officer — a nominee who has told them she supports the president’s unconstitutional amnesty order and his non-enforcement of federal law.

Obviously, most of us want the Benghazi select committee to succeed; while skeptical and impatient, we’re willing to assume that the committee wants to succeed. But if Chairman Gowdy and his committee are ever to get to the bottom of Benghazi, everyone needs to stop agitating over executive police powers they do not have and start demanding that they use the powerful tools the Constitution has actually given to Congress.

Read more here.

A governing plan for a free, self-determining people

Andrew McCarthy writes,

It is no secret that Barack Obama does not have much use for the United States Constitution. It is a governing plan for a free, self-determining people. Hence, it is littered with roadblocks against schemes to rule the people against their will. When it comes to our imperious president’s scheme to enable our enemy, Iran, to become a nuclear-weapons power — a scheme that falls somewhere between delusional and despicable, depending on your sense of Obama’s good faith — the salient barrier is that only Congress can make real law.

...It is otherworldly to find an American administration conspiring against the Constitution and the Congress in cahoots with a terror-sponsoring enemy regime, with which we do not even have formal diplomatic relations, in order to pave the enemy’s way to nuclear weapons, of all things. Nevertheless, Republicans and all Americans who want to preserve our constitutional order, must stop telling themselves that we have hit a bottom beneath which Obama will not go. This week, 47 senators seemed ready, finally, to fight back. It’s a start.

Read more here.

Positively Clintonian

Andrew McCarthy reminds us that

Indeed, the main point of having a unitary executive — vesting awesome powers in one president, rather than in an executive committee or in a minister advised by a privy council — was accountability. Ultimately responsible for all executive conduct and unable to deflect blame for wrongdoing, Alexander Hamilton argued, a single president would be amenable “to censure and to punishment.” The future Supreme Court justice James Iredell concurred: the president would be “personally responsible for any abuse of the great trust reposed in him,” a key ingredient in making him “of a very different nature from a monarch.”

In sum, as the chief executive, the president is responsible for any failures or misconduct by his subordinates.

...What does it say about Clinton’s purported realism about America’s enemies that she would conduct the highest-level government business — matters of life and death — on an unsecure communication system that could be easily hacked by hostile nations that we know spend prodigious amounts of their energy on cyber-espionage?

...Secretary Clinton plainly knew that the president was not serious about stringent record-keeping and transparency. Otherwise, she would not have dared communicate with him repeatedly by private e-mail — and, of course, he would not have been sending e-mail to her private address.

Read more here.

Coverups

In no uncertain terms, Andrew McCarthy excoriates the chairman of the select committee on Benghazi, Congressman Trey Gowdy, a favorite of conservatives. Why? Because Gowdy has known since last summer that Clinton circumvented federal law by using private email accounts to conduct State Department business, but waited until last Wednesday to issue subpoenas for all of Clinton’s communications related to Libya.

Fabulous! Gowdy just got finished railing about how Clinton used private e-mail precisely to avoid the government-mandated paper trail. So what’s he been doing about it for six months? Discussing the matter with Clinton’s loyal staffers — i.e., people who helped her carry out the scheme — and with the State Department — i.e., the people he just got done telling you have neither the relevant e-mails nor access to them.

That’s it: no subpoenas, no hearings, no nothing. Just as Mrs. Clinton did not turn over any of her private e-mails until the State Department finally asked for them, Gowdy, by his own account, did not issue a subpoena to address a scandal he has long known about until the scandal became public.

That in itself is a scandal.

...As some of us have contended for some time, there is abundant reason to fear that Republicans do not want to get to the bottom of Benghazi. GOP congressional leaders were major supporters of Obama’s disastrous decision to ditch our counterterrorism alliance with Qaddafi and empower jihadists to oust him. Some of those jihadists were complicit in the Benghazi attack — and they’ve since turned Libya into a failed state in which both al-Qaeda and ISIS now have footholds. Furthermore, if there was a covert operation to help move arms from Libya to the Syrian “rebels” — some of whom worked with al-Qaeda, others of whom became ISIS — it is a near certainty that top congressional Republicans were in the loop when it was approved.

Read more here, including a long list of questions the Benghazi select committee has failed to answer.

Politicized justice

Andrew McCarthy writes:

David Petraeus, the former top U.S. military commander and CIA director, is reportedly being permitted by the Obama Justice Department to plead guilty to a misdemeanor in order to end the criminal investigation into his mishandling of highly classified information. It is just another example of Obama’s hyper-politicized administration of justice: One set of rules for government insiders like Petraeus, another set for most Americans, and a third — law as a weapon — for use against Obama’s political detractors and scapegoats.

...Had he not negotiated a plea, Petraeus should have been charged in a multi-count indictment. If he wanted to dispose of the case without a trial that would have further disgraced him, he should have been required to plead guilty to at least one felony count and to have admitted his lies to government officials — misrepresentations that, under the sentencing guidelines that apply to people who don’t get special treatment, instruct judges to impose a term of incarceration.

McCarthy goes on here to detail the criminal acts of Petraeus, then concludes,

General Petraeus served his country with courage and distinction. That record certainly should have weighed in his favor . . . at sentencing. His deliberate and reprehensible criminal conduct, however, cried out for a felony prosecution. That it was treated instead as a trifling misdemeanor is another shameful chapter in the Obama legacy of politicized justice.

"True" Islam

Andrew McCarthy writes that it is

foolish for the Obama administration — as it was for the Bush and Clinton administrations, and as it is for Republican as well as Democratic leaders in Washington — to become enmeshed in the futile effort to define the “true” Islam. There probably is not one. Even though the scriptures are troublesome and unvarying, the practice of Islam — the interpretation of and degree of adherence to those scriptures — varies widely around the world.

But whether the Islam of the jihadists is “true” or “false” is irrelevant to us. What matters about sharia supremacism is that many millions of Muslims believe in it. It is a mainstream interpretation of Islam that has undeniable scriptural roots and inevitably breeds violent jihadists.

We must protect the United States regardless of whether they are right and regardless of how Islam’s internal strife is resolved – if it ever is.

Read more here.

"We may need ground forces just to rescue our ground forces."

Andrew McCarthy points out that

less than 24 hours after Obama suggested that Congress should forbid him from using ground troops against Islamic State terrorists, Islamic State terrorists were busy capturing a western Iraqi town just 13 minutes away from the base where 320 U.S. Marines are on the ground, training hapless Iraqi forces. Forget ground forces to defeat ISIS; the way Obama is managing things, we may need ground forces just to rescue our ground forces.

...In our constitutional system, therefore, Congress is not permitted to command the armed forces. It has no more power to direct the president to deploy or not deploy ground forces than it does to tell the president to “take that hill” or capture this enemy combatant.

...Or, as he has done in Iraq and is doing in Afghanistan, he can withdraw even as the enemy is on the rise — a command decision known, in less politically correct parlance, as surrender. But whatever command decisions the president makes, they are his decisions. He is politically accountable for them.

...Obama has made a career of ducking accountability, whether by voting present, leading from behind, or cynically condemning the predictable damage wreaked by his own policies (and relying on the press not to call him on it). The effort to gull Congress into passing an AUMF that purports to forbid military commands that this commander-in-chief has already, and irresponsibly, decided not to give is not just the usual Obama blame-shifting; it is unconstitutional.

...More to the point, ISIS is not close to being the totality of the enemy. Because of his own ideological blinders, the president will not recognize that we are confronted by a global jihad united by the ideology of sharia supremacism. Besides ISIS and al-Qaeda (its Sunni forbear and, for now, rival), the enemy includes Iran and its Shiite terror axis. While battling the Sunni jihadists in Iraq and Syria for the moment, Iran has long colluded with those selfsame Sunnis in the jihad against the U.S., Israel, and the West.

An American strategy that focuses only on ISIS, pretends that al-Qaeda has already been “decimated,” and regards Iran as a potential ally rather than a mortal enemy is doomed to fail. When it does, Obama wants congressional Republicans to share in the ignominy.

Obama’s second rationale involves his legacy hunting. Uniquely in American history, Obama is building a presidential legacy that is not about his contributions to the United States but his place in the movement Left as the man who tamed America.

...I’ve contended several times over the years that the AUMFs currently in effect need overhauling. The objective of overhaul, however, should be to define our jihadist enemies more clearly and encourage the president to vanquish them — without geographical or temporal limits. Still, even with all their imperfections, the current AUMFs, as they’ve been interpreted over the last 13 years, empower the president to use any appropriate military force against al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their sponsors, wherever on earth they operate.

Congress would be wise to improve on the current AUMFs. Obama’s unconstitutional proposal, to the contrary, is the roadmap to defeat.

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Read more here.

A wake up call

Andrew McCarthy writes about a "rousing" speech given by Newt Gingrich at the Iowa Freedom Forum last week. Gingrich astutely noted that

when it comes to obfuscation about Islamic supremacist ideology, the State Department was nearly as bad under Bush as under Obama. And while Bush at least included the Taliban as a terrorist organization in a 2002 executive order, Obama spokesmen have spent this week spinning the risible yarn that the Taliban is not a terrorist organization but a purely domestic “insurgent” group.

In truth, as the former speaker asserted, we have an elite in both parties that is unwilling to tell the truth. You can’t win the war without telling the truth and without admitting it’s a war. As he put it, there is a common thread that unites the enemy, wherever on earth the enemy operates: They “hate our civilization and would impose their religion by force.”

Gingrich proclaimed:

If you are a Muslim, and you want to live in peace with your neighbors, and you have no problem with people converting in both directions, and you’d like to be allowed to have a mosque but, by the way, they can have a synagogue, a temple, or a church – I have no problem with Muslims who are prepared to live in diversity. But if you’re a Muslim who believes you are going to impose sharia by cutting off my head, I have a desire to kill you before you cut off my head.

Hearing Gingrich say those things, McCarthy asserted:

The ensuing standing ovation from Freedom Forum attendees carried a salient message for the GOP’s field of would-be presidential nominees: A Republican will not win the White House in 2016 unless national security is a major issue and one on which Republicans hold a decisive edge.

McCarthy believes that

It is again time – past time – to be bold in calling the threat against us what it is, and in understanding why it seeks to conquer us (i.e., in grasping that it is about their ideology not our flaws).

Read more here.

The road to tyranny

Andrew McCarthy writes:

short of credibly threatening impeachment, Congress and the courts can neither compel a president to enforce the laws nor stop him from using his plenary pardon authority to grant a sweeping amnesty. That gets Obama two-thirds of the prize he is pursuing — namely, several million aliens whose illegal status has been purged, put on the path to inevitable voting rights that will give Democrats an invincible electoral majority.

Against this backdrop, I am gratified that Fox News’s Megyn Kelly and Charles Krauthammer have just given the topic of impeachment in the immigration context more of the serious consideration it deserves. Appearing on The Kelly File Thursday, Dr. Krauthammer asserted that the president’s anticipated amnesty decree for millions of illegal aliens “is an impeachable offense.”

He is plainly correct. As Faithless Execution elaborates, “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitution’s trigger for impeachment, is a term of art for abuses of power that violate the president’s fiduciary obligations to the American people he serves, the constitutional system he takes an oath to preserve, and the laws whose faithful execution is his core duty.

This is the theme of Faithless Execution: All Americans who aspire to sustain a nation of laws not men have a vital interest in rejecting executive lawlessness. The Framers understood that presidential usurpation of lawmaking power would be the road to tyranny. They were right . . . and avoiding tyranny should not be a partisan issue.

REad more here.

The lobbyist-laden, crony-socialist Obama administration

Remember when Solyndra waited until the day after the 2010 midterm election to announce its layoff of employees? Guess who was the political fixer who arranged for that timing? Ron Klain, the man whom Obama just appointed to be the ebola czar. Andrew McCarthy has all the relevant details here.

Benghazi hearing

I am glad to see that Andrew McCarthy is raising questions about the Benghazi hearings. McCarthy credited Chairman Gowdy, who

pointed out that security for high-threat facilities was supposed to be personally approved by the secretary of state, not a subordinate — a problem given that, under Secretary Clinton, security in Benghazi was decreased despite attacks, threats, and expert assessments that clearly signaled an intensifying threat.

In the midst of Libya’s civil war, the United States government decided to switch sides — we went from support for the Qaddafi regime that had been regarded as a key counterterrorism ally to support for “rebels” who very much included the anti-American jihadists Qaddafi had been helping us track. That was not just an Obama-administration policy preference; it had strong support from prominent senior Republicans in Congress. The toppling of Qaddafi that resulted enabled jihadists to raid the regime’s arsenal. That has greatly benefitted both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorists currently rampaging in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and much of northern Africa.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration, again with significant Republican support, decided to aid and abet Syrian “rebels” who, as in Libya, very much included anti-American jihadists. There is colorable suspicion that this assistance included the gathering up of arms in Libya for shipment to Syrian “rebels.” Abdelhakim Belhadj, the al-Qaeda operative who was Ambassador Stevens’s “rebel” point-man in Benghazi, was clearly involved in at least one major shipment of weapons that went to Syrian “rebels” — including to some of the jihadist groups the United States is now bombing. That shipment was coordinated by Turkey, a country with which Ambassador Stevens, Secretary Clinton, and President Obama worked closely — a country whose ambassador was the last diplomat Stevens met with in Benghazi before being killed.

There will be no accountability for the Benghazi massacre absent a full public airing of what the United States government was doing in that most dangerous of places: Setting up shop among anti-American jihadists and staying there like sitting ducks even as other countries and international organizations pulled out. What was the benefit? Trying to limit the damage caused by switching sides in Libya? Fueling a new jihadist threat in Syria and Iraq — the very one we are now struggling to quell?

In Washington, there seem to be a lot of people resistant to a full public airing of the policy. They may not all be Democrats.

Read more here.