News & Politics

While the nation focuses on the 2016 elections, the frustration over FBI Director Jim Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton server investigation still rages, now with calls for a different person to spearhead the probe.

“Do you know what it’s time for?  A special counsel,” said former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Victoria Toensing, who is also a former federal prosecutor.

Toensing notes that such a move must come from the attorney general.  And while Loretta Lynch has reportedly hindered the FBI’s investigation into Clinton, Toensing says public pressure can accomplish big things.

“There should be such an outcry that she has no choice,” said Toensing, who believes the push for a special prosecutor could be bipartisan.

“Republicans and Democrats alike should welcome a special counsel,” she said.

“It’s, in concept, an independent prosecutor or an independent investigator.  It should be somebody like a retired federal judge, who doesn’t have any political affiliations, hasn’t come on TV and said, ‘I’m for Trump or I’m for Hillary.  Somebody who could be entirely neutral.  That person would then conduct the investigation.  I think that’s the only way we can have faith in what’s going on in this matter,” said Toensing.

She says impartiality was standard operation procedure during her time at the Justice Department.

“The whole time I was in the Justice Department, there was never anybody protected or gone after because of their political affiliation,” said Toensing.

Toensing points to a high-profile case involving her husband, former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, during the Reagan years.

“When my husband, Joseph diGenova, was the U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, he indicted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Thayer.  He indicted a number two person in a Republican government.  This is unheard of,” said Toensing.

On Sunday, Comey sent word to lawmakers that review of emails found on a newly discovered device, believed to be from a probe into the actions of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, did not change his recommendation that Clinton should face no charges for her handling of classified information.  Reports suggest there were 650,000 emails to review.

“He’s just a miracle worker, isn’t he?  Six hundred fifty thousand emails in just a few days when the State Department says it can’t go through a thousand a month.  You have to wonder or scratch your head.  The FBI must really be good,” mused Toensing.

While also referring to Comey as a “clown,” she believes Comey is simply in over his head.

“I don’t think he knows what he’s doing.  It doesn’t make any kind of sense.  He must have gotten political pressure.  And, of course, it gives us no confidence in anything else he’s going to decide,” said Toensing.

Toensing points out Comey’s reputation has “ping-ponged” multiple times this year depending on people’s views on Clinton innocence or guilt.  She says Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s secret meeting with Bill Clinton on the airport tarmac in Arizona back in the summer, shows she cannot be trusted either.

“So we have an FBI director that we don’t have any confidence in.  We have an attorney general, who met with the husband of the person that she was investigating,” said Toensing.

Toensing also points out that another FBI investigation into the Clintons seems to be proceeding at full speed concerning pay-to-play allegations at the Clinton Foundation.

Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America offer their predictions for Election Day 2016.  Jim and Greg state their final electoral college results and go over each of the key swing states.  They also predict the final balance in the U.S. Senate come January and go through each of those key races.  And they discuss what the numbers in the U.S House of Representatives will look like.

For months, the Trump campaign has been criticized for not investing in staff and a robust data campaign to boost turnout across the country and in key swing states, but Trump may have an ace up his sleeve in the turnout battle.

That ace is the ucampaign app used to beat expectations earlier this year by both the Ted Cruz presidential campaign and the “Leave” movement on the landmark “Brexit” vote in the United Kingdom, where the voters narrowly ordered the UK to leave the European Union back in June.

Direct engagement with voters has become an increasingly critical aspect of campaigning in the digital age.  After George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, his campaign put a much higher priority on boosting personal contact to drive up turnout in 2004.  Both of Barack Obama’s winning presidential campaigns are noted for their tech-savvy approach to voters, while Mitt Romney’s highly-touted ORCA technology crashed and burned.

It was in the wake of ORCA’s failure, that ucampaign was envisioned.  Creator Thomas Peters says the concept is really quite simple.

“You can download our apps off of iTunes or the Google Play Store onto your smartphone.  Pretty quickly, it’ll show you a variety of actions you can take to impact the bottom line.  It could be donating or sharing a social media message or sending a message only you could send to a friend or family member that we think you should reach out to,” said Peters.

But how does it work on a national campaign?

“What this allows us to do is send tens if not hundreds of thousands of pinpointed messages to people in swing states who are making up their minds about who to support for president,” said Peters.

Peters says he knew from the start that he had to engage young people with the technology and make it fun.

“We set out to use smartphone technology to its fullest extent, so we use push notifications.  We use address book matching.  And we use fun stuff like gamification and social capital to give people points and credit for what they’re doing.  I think that’s much more the future of political activism is to make it engaging and fun, just like all the other games that you might download on your phone, from Candy Crush Saga to Pokemon Go,” said Peters.

Political debates on social media happen frequently, seemingly without many minds being changed.  What makes ucampaign different?

“We cut through the noise by letting folks send text messages,” said Peters.

“If I get an email from a campaign that I’m not particularly interested in, I might ignore it or if might go to my spam, but text messages are read at a 99 percent rate.  The text messages that we send are sent from friends and family, so if I get a text message from my brother saying, ‘I’m supporting Donald Trump for president.  Here’s why,’that’s a message that I’m much more likely to read,” said Peters.

But it’s not just a person-to-person approach.  There is a big picture strategy to the app as well.

“We do it both ways.  We let people choose for themselves who they want to reach out to, but we also allow them to opt into sharing their address book contacts.  From there, if they say yes, we can match that to a voter file.  That’s the kind of 21st century stuff we’re doing here,” said Peters.

“This allows the campaigns to get a look at who your friends and family are, and then in turn make it easier for folks to reach out to folks,” said Peters.

He says the campaigns can also recommend specific messages on different issues to appeal to family and friends.

Peters says the Trump campaign is making great strides by using the app.

“(With) the Donald Trump app actually we’re bringing in one new person for every twelve that they do.  And that’s actually an incredibly impressive statistic.  To get new people to actually download and get very involved in a campaign is a hard thing to do,” said Peters.

Other ucampaign clients include Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, the Colorado Republican Party and the National Rifle Association.

Peters says using the app will help Trump but he’s not making any definitive predictions.

“I think the impact will be that more people will be more involved in the political process than they would have been without our app.  And that is our proudest achievement,” said Peters.

Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America dissect FBI Director Jim Comey’s announcement that he still finds no reason to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her handling of classified information.  They also react to a new WikiLeaks dump showing a top Clinton Foundation official noting that the Clinton Foundation paid for Chelsea’s wedding and other questionable things.  And they react to WikiLeaks demonstrating another example of CNN colluding with Democrats on questions for GOP candidates.

The FBI is reportedly working two separate investigations linked to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, but the Obama Justice Department is regularly throwing up roadblocks to impede the work.

On Wednesday, Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel reported several explosive revelations gleaned from two unnamed FBI sources.  The report noted the twin investigations, that the FBI is vigorously pursuing a pay-to-play case involving the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, that experts believe Clinton’s private server was almost certainly hacked by as many as five foreign governments, and that indictments could be coming in the Clinton Foundation case as well as the renewed investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information.

But in closely following the reports at Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy sees two major takeaways.

“(It’s) the fact that the investigation into the Clinton Foundation is so far along and regarded as so serious within the walls of the FBI.  Coupled with that, the fact that the Justice Department seems to have made it very difficult for the FBI to conduct that investigation,” said McCarthy, who led the federal prosecution of the World Trade Center bombers following the 1993 attack.

Some of the most frustrating information for McCarthy centers on the thwarted efforts of FBI special agents to procure emails and devices from top Clinton personnel such as Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson.

“The agents were thwarted in the attempt to get access to these emails by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, which is in Brooklyn,” said McCarthy.

Why is that significant?

“The reason I think that’s so interesting is that the Eastern District of New York is the former U.S. Attorney’s office that was headed by Loretta Lynch before she was elevated to attorney general by President Obama,” said McCarthy.

“As someone who really doesn’t believe in coincidences, it’s very interesting that that investigation and that call ended up with prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, even though it’s not clear to me why the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s office there would have venue over either the Clinton emails aspect of the investigation or the Clinton Foundation aspect of it,” said McCarthy.

McCarthy says top FBI officials actually stopped agents from bringing their evidence to a different federal prosecutor.  And he says the man who made the call is already under a cloud of suspicion.

“Reporting indicates they were told no by FBI brass.  In particular, the FBI official who refused to allow them to go, as he put it, ‘prosecutor shopping,’ was the top official whose wife received $675,000 in campaign cash and in-kind contributions from political action committees controlled by (Virginia Gov.) Terry McAuliffe, who of course is a longtime Clinton aide and actually was at one time a board member of the Clinton Foundation,” said McCarthy.

The contributions were for the failed Virginia State Senate campaign of Jill McCabe, wife of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

While the FBI continues to gather evidence in both cases, it can only take the matter so far.  For any charges to be brought against anyone, McCarthy says the Justice Department will have to give its blessing.

“I think all of the U.S. Attorneys in the country have been appointed by President Obama.  I don’t think anyone is going to haul off and indict the Clinton Foundation and anyone connected with the Clinton Foundation without getting a green light from the Justice Department,” said McCarthy.

McCarthy is also frustrated that latest bombshell in the classified information investigation didn’t come a long time ago.  Specifically, he wants to know why the FBI didn’t already have Anthony Weiner’s laptop, by which agents have discovered some 650,000 emails that “may be pertinent” to the probe.

He says that blame belongs with the Justice Department as well.

“The Justice Department made it very difficult for the FBI to do the investigation, particularly by not using the grand jury.  It’s by the grand jury’s power to compel evidence by subpoena that the FBI is usually able to get people to be cooperative,” said McCarthy.

He also says the FBI could easily get trigger-shy in pursuing evidence from a large numbers of lawyers with various levels of connection to the Clintons, especially with the Justice Department providing no assistance.

“The FBI’s always concerned, when you’re dealing with lawyers’ computers, that there could be attorney-client privilege and it’s a big hassle for them, so if it’s clear that the Justice Department is not supportive of the fact they’re trying to gather this evidence in the first place, there’s going to be a natural innervating kind of ethos that takes hold and dissuades people from doing things that are difficult, like trying to fight over whether they can examine the computers of lawyers,” said McCarthy.

Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America react to Fox News breaking the story that the FBI is running separate investigations into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information and allegations of pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation while Clinton was Secretary of State.  They also shudder as Fox also reveals that FBI experts are 99 percent certain that up to five foreign governments hacked into Clinton’s private server.  And they shake their heads at Huma Abedin’s ongoing bewilderment as to how 650,000 emails ended up on Anthony Weiner’s computer.

The past eight years have witnessed an “avalanche” of government encroachment on the personal property rights of Americans and a Hillary Clinton presidency would be even worse, according to financial expert and radio host Gary Rathbun.

 

He says the first thing voters need to understand is how property rights pertain to a lot more than just our physical property.

“Personal property rights are somewhat misunderstood because we naturally think of real property like real estate and land and your home, but private property rights encompass everything about you; your right to work, your thoughts, your right to speech, everything you own, everything you can produce,” said Rathbun, an Ohio-based personal wealth adviser and host of “An Economy of One” on the Radio America network.

Rathbun says the term “personal property rights” is not often addressed in political campaigns but many of the underlying issues are.

“It’s easier talking about the peripheral aspects: the right to bear arms, wetlands, zoning, eminent domain, minimum wage, free speech.  All of those funnel right down to private property rights,” said Rathbun.

He says two significant new items call under that umbrella, including the concerns over health care access and costs.

“In the last years, look at what’s happened with government intruding into our lives.  They’ve taken over one of our most personal property rights and that’s our right to health, to choose our health care and choose our doctor,” said Rathbun, noting the government encroachment through environmental regulations is also maddening to him.

“Our real property rights have been highly eroded with the EPA and restrictions on zoning and land use and wetlands.  Every day our liberty is thinned down a little bit due to government regulations and what’s been coming out of Washington,” said Rathbun.

Rathbun says the past eight years have inflicted a heavy toll on personal property rights.

“Absolutely an avalanche of encroachment.  Look at the EPA.  That’s one of the of the easy ones.  With an executive order, President Obama changed the language of wetland on your property from navigable to any water on your property.  He took out the word ‘navigable’ with just the stroke of a pen.  That means the EPA can come on your property and prohibit you from doing just about anything,” said Rathbun.

Other critical personal property rights issues getting a lot of attention are the debates over minimum wage and guns.  Rathbun says both Clinton and Donald Trump have it wrong on the minimum wage.

“Hillary Clinton wants a higher minimum wage.  By the way, so does Donald Trump.  That infringes on your private property rights.  You can’t negotiate unless it’s over $15 under their rules,” he said.

Rathbun says gun rights protect all the others.

“The reason we have the Second Amendment is to protect our private property.  If you can’t protect your private property, the rest of the rights don’t mean much of anything,” said Rathbun.

He believes a Clinton presidency would only accelerate the government targeting the freedoms of Americans.

“I think under a Clinton presidency, that liberty and those private property rights would be continued to be infringed upon, and I think at an accelerated rate over what President Obama has done,” said Rathbun.

Rathbun is not a huge Trump fan.  In addition to disagreeing with the GOP nominee on the minimum wage, he vigorously disagrees with Trump on eminent domain.  Rathbun says he understands why Trump likes the practice from a real estate development perspective, but he says eminent domain has gotten way out of hand.

Noting that eminent domain makes sense for projects that serve the “common good” so long as property owners are fairly compensated, Rathbun says it is too often abused.

“Communities are exercising eminent domain so that private companies and developers can develop the land.  They’re justifying that from an increase in property taxes, maybe even an increase in income taxes from jobs, but I disagree with eminent domain outside of absolute necessities like road and bridges,” said Rathbun.

While saying he hates one-issue campaigns, this one boils down to who is chosen to safeguard our liberties on the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This is the ultimate federal court that is there to interpret the Constitution and protect our rights.  The Supreme Court should not be political but we all know it is.  Everybody says it’s 4-4 right now.  Well, it shouldn’t be.  It should be 8-0 on protecting our Constitution and the rights therein,” said Rathbun.

“Who is likely to give us the Supreme Court nominees who will protect our liberty for the next 30-40 years,” said Rathbun.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Ian Tuttle of National Review discuss the FBI investigation into allegations of straw donors influencing the Florida Senate race.  We also slam President Obama for suggesting the reason many men oppose Hillary Clinton is because she is a woman.  And they react to both parties trying to attack down ballot candidates of the other party by attaching them to Clinton or Trump.

While the FBI and the Justice Department dig into some 650,000 emails on the computer of Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, the man who reported back in August that Abedin was sending classified emails to her non-secure account is explaining how the trail leads us to where we are now.

Dr. Jerome Corsi, a senior staff writer at WND.com and author of “Partners in Crime,”first reported in late August that Abedin forwarded work-related emails to her private account after scouring a report on emails from the watchdog group Judicial Watch.

“I was looking it over and it hit me, ‘She just forwarded that email to herself.  Why would she do that?’  I started looking and I realized there had been about 300 emails released by Judicial Watch.  I realized she forwarded 200 of them to herself,” said Corsi.

The account to which the emails were being forwarded was partially redacted, except in one email.  The address was humamabedin@yahoo.com.

“As soon as I had that, I realized that she was sending many classified State Department emails offline to Yahoo, which is completely insecure.  She was sending both emails she received at state.gov and emails she received at [clintonemail.com], the private server,” said Corsi.

But Abedin was not the only one sending emails to her private account.

“Hillary was sending emails from clintonemail.com to Huma Abedin at yahoo.com.  They were both involved and they completely compromised the State Department security, because anybody that had the password or user name could read, in unredacted form, all these emails in real time,” said Corsi.

“Why would you go to the problem of downloading it, offloading it from the State Department computer that many emails when, if you were trying to follow the rules, you could just read them at the State Department,” said Corsi.

Corsi says there is no question there was sensitive, classified information included in these emails.

“Some of them that I found and published had been marked classified by the State Department.  One in particular I remember was a Sid Blumenthal email.  It came to Hillary.  She sent it to Huma and Huma sent it to herself and the State Department marked it classified,” said Corsi.

He points out the classification came later but that should not matter.

“They did that retroactively afterwards, but it still should have been known to be classified by Hillary because there’s rules where documents don’t have to be marked classified to be classified when you’re at her level,” said Corsi.

Then the mystery for Corsi became how Abedin was sending emails from one account to the other.

“If Huma went to all this trouble to offload all these emails that I know about…then she probably didn’t use a State Department device.  She probably used somebody else’s device,” said Corsi.

Enter Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former New York congressman, who is Abedin’s estranged husband, although they were still together during Clinton’s years at the State Department.

“It was really the FBI and the New York Police Department that decided to go knock on Weiner’s door with a search warrant.  Once they found the computer and the emails, they knew they had a case.  This way they didn’t have to go get permission, which they never would have been given by (FBI Director James) Comey or (Attorney General) Loretta Lynch, to continue investigating the Clinton emails,” said Corsi.

Corsi says there should be no doubt as to the criminality of Abedin and Clinton offloading emails onto Abedin’s Yahoo account.

“That’s obviously a major felony in violation of federal security laws for handling classified information.  You can’t do that,” he said.

And why couldn’t they do that?

“The rules for handling classified materials is you’ve got to handle them on secured channels.  You can’t let them go on an insecure channel.  Clearly, sending these emails to Yahoo.com – and we know some of them had classified material because they’ve been marked classified – is a violation of the law and it doesn’t require intent,” said Corsi.

He says Clinton and Abedin could have avoided this entire scandal by establishing secure, government accounts and not sending any of it to private accounts.

“This was such an obvious violation of law and perhaps leading to an espionage case or a treason case, that when presented to Comey he really had no alternative than to go forward,” said Corsi.

He says the key to this story getting legs is the NYPD involvement in investigating Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting of underage girls.

“With the NYPD in on it, in addition to the Department of Justice in New York, there’s no way to contain the case by saying you’re not allowed to pursue it from the FBI’s point of view.  The New York Police Department said, ‘Well, we’ll pursue it,'” said Corsi.

Corsi believes this story is about to explode, as he believes Clinton and Abedin moved all the emails in preparation for a pay-to-play scheme for access to her emails.

In addition, a Tuesday release from WikiLeaks shows a March 3, 2015, email from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta to former Clinton State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, urging a quick dispatching of unidentified emails.

“On another matter….and not to sound like Lanny, but we are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later,” wrote Podesta.

“This is a crime scheme that stinks.  I think this WikiLeaks and this cache of 600,000 emails from the State Department, plus the other documentation we’ve gotten over time.  I think this is going to be the biggest scandal in U.S. history and it’s just about to break,” said Corsi.