Insider details of the famed Bohemian Grove

Aaron Klein writes in Breitbart,

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of Colin Powell’s hacked Gmail account saga is that dozens of messages contain insider details of the famed Bohemian Grove — a place the Washington Post once described as “where the rich and powerful go to misbehave.”

Bohemian Grove is a 2,700-acre campground in Monte Rio, Calif that serves as a meeting place for top politicians and businessmen who are members of the Grove society. The site’s annual secretive meeting takes place for two weeks in July, with Powell writing that he was present at last July’s event.

...Powell sarcastically writes the attendees amounted for “half the nation’s GDP,” and that they were “all bitching about everything and discussing their next golf club to join, a G5 vs. a Global Express and their fifth home (Nantucket or Palm Beach).”

Read more here.

I was less careless than she was!

Rudy Takala reports at The Washington Examiner,

Hillary Clinton is trying to use Colin Powell as a scapegoat to vindicate herself over her private email server and her mishandling of classified information, Powell said over the weekend.

"Her people have been trying to pin it on me," the former secretary of state said in an interview published Sunday night in People magazine. "The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did."

Powell added that he "has no recollection of the dinner conversation" where Clinton alleged he advised her to use her own system for emailing, though he said he did send her "an email memo describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department."

The FBI typically seeks to corroborate the claims made by interview subjects over the course of an investigation. It is unclear why the agency did not check with Powell before Director James Comey released his recommendation on the case July 5 when he said the agency was not going to recommend any punishment.

The House Judiciary Committee is set to hold a hearing next month to investigate whether claims Clinton made to Congress last year constitute perjury. Witnesses in the hearing have not been confirmed, though aides have said Comey is a top prospect.

Colin Powell: "I Used Secured State Computer to Access Classified Emails"

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell fired back at Hillary Clinton today in this memo to Brad Jaffe at NBC News,

General Powell has no recollection of the dinner conversation. He did write former Secretary Clinton an email memo describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department. At the time there was no equivalent system within the Department. He used a secure State computer on his desk to manage classified information. The General no longer has the email he sent to former Secretary Clinton. It may exist in State or FBI files. For a complete discussion of his use of private emails he refers you to chapter 16, “Brainware” of his recent book, “It Worked For Me — In Life and Leadership,” published in 2012.

Read more here.

When there is no law

Victor Davis Hanson writes about America's descent into lawlessness.

Do you remember Lewis “Scooter” Libby?

In 2003, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate allegations that Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, unlawfully disclosed the covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Yet Plame may not have been a covert undercover agent, based on the formal government definition of that role. And even if she were, it was widely known at the time that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s subordinate, Richard Armitage, had most likely disclosed her status earlier.

In other words, Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime that may not have existed. But if it had, it was more likely committed by someone else.

Publicity-seeking special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald persuaded a Washington, D.C., jury to find Libby guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal investigators — not the supposed crimes for which he was originally targeted by the media.

Apparently, the very suspicion of improper behavior by high public servants once warranted vigorous legal inquiry — by supposedly independent and autonomous prosecutors.

In the eight-plus years since the Libby trial, the Obama administration has blown up the law as we have known it for centuries.

...After his re-election in 2012 and the midterm elections in 2014, Obama made a mockery of immigration law.

Hundreds of liberal sanctuary cities have announced that federal immigration law does not apply to them. That scary, neo-Confederate idea of legal nullification was sanctioned by the Obama administration — in a way it never would have been if a city had suspended the Endangered Species Act, emissions standards, or gun-control legislation.

As a result, once-detained and later-released immigrants with criminal records have murdered innocent American citizens.

Consider the proposed nuclear deal with Iran. By past custom and practice, the nonproliferation agreement would be treated as what it is — a treaty.

But ratifying treaties constitutionally requires 67 yes votes from the Senate. Obama could never obtain that margin. So he managed to downgrade the treaty into a mere legal agreement. Then he claimed that the Senate required 67 no votes to override his veto.

Obama also was worried about the political impact of his new Obamacare legislation on the 2014 midterm elections. So he simply suspended by executive fiat the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Had another president done that to the laws of Obamacare, the Left would have demanded impeachment.

In Ferguson, Mo., law enforcement eased off and allowed a city to burn. But the cause of the rioting — the supposed improper police killing of criminal suspect Michael Brown — was based on the lie that Brown was shot in the back while fleeing. No matter. The ensuing public outrage seemingly exempted arsonists and looters from arrest.

Just as scary is the application of the law on the basis of the perceived politics of a suspect.

IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner was exposed as a rank partisan whose office gave particular scrutiny to would-be tax-exempt groups deemed opponents of Obama’s re-election efforts. She invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify before a congressional committee about her actions at the IRS. Lerner has never been indicted.

Almost everything former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stated about her improper use of a private e-mail account and server has been proven false. A State Department staffer who worked on Clinton’s private server plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before a congressional committee about his role in privatizing Clinton’s email.

But like Lerner, Clinton has escaped an indictment or jailing.

Not so Kim Davis. She is a conservative Christian court clerk in Kentucky who apparently thought, given the lawless times, that she could ignore without consequence a Supreme Court decision making gay marriage legal.

Davis was jailed for not enforcing the law. That is a justifiable punishment — if it were applied equally to the progressive mayors of sanctuary cities and all officials who likewise ignore federal law.

In the same manner, rank amateur video maker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was jailed for violating his probation. Why?

Nakoula made a video insensitive to Muslims and thus was falsely blamed for the riotous 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The most likely culprit of the preplanned Benghazi attack was not scapegoat Nakoula, but the inconvenient pre-election truth that al-Qaeda was quite alive in Libya and U.S. security quite lax.

America is becoming analogous to the mess in lawless contemporary Venezuela. When the law is suspended or unevenly applied for politically protected individuals and groups, then there is no law.

So we are now seeing the logical descent into the abyss of chaos.

Read more here.