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The Russian lawyer who landed a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. during last years presidential campaign with the promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton had one big thing in common with the Democratic candidate: Both had opposed Russia sanctions targeting human-rights abusers.

Further, former Secretary of State Clintons initial opposition coincided with a $500,000 speech her husband gave in Moscow a link her 2016 campaign fought to downplay in the press, according to WikiLeaks-released documents.

Trump White House officials now are trying to draw attention to that speech and the Clintons ties to Russia in a bid to counter criticism over Trump Jr.s now-infamous meeting.

If you want to talk about having relationships with Russia, I'd look no further than the Clintons, Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at a briefing last week. Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars to give a speech to a Russian bank, personally thanked by President Putin.

With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRCs opposition to the Magnitsky bill a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow.

The former president indeed had received a personal call from then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin expressing his appreciation for the speech.According to Mrs. Clintons ethics disclosure form filed while she wassecretaryof State, Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 bytheRussia-based finance companyRenaissance Capitalfor hisJune 29, 2010, speech in Moscowto itsemployeesand guests attending the company's annualconference.

The speech is now coming back to haunt the Clintons, considering the company that cut the check was allegedly tied to the scandal that spurred theGlobal Magnitsky Act, a bill that imposed sanctions on Russians designated as human-rights abusers and eventually would become law in 2012.

Former President Bill Clinton with his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (AP)

This was the same law Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskayawas lobbying against during her sit-down with Trump Jr. last year. And back in 2010, it would have put the Clintons on her side.

Shortly before Bill Clintons speech in 2010,when members of Congress pushing the sanctions bill had asked Hillary Clintonto refuse visas to Russian officials implicated under the policy,the State Department denied the request. The Obama administration initially wasopposed to the Magnitsky Actbecausethen-President Barack Obama wasseeking a reset withRussiaand did not want to deepen the divide between the two countries.

Former President Bill Clintons speech to Renaissance just weeks later was all the more curious, considering Renaissances Russian investment bank executives would have been banned from the U.S. under the law.

Fast-forward to 2015, and the timeline apparently had caught the attention of Bloomberg News.

Portrait of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky held by his mother Nataliya Magnitskaya during 2009 press conference in Moscow. (The Associated Press)

According to a memo from Clintons presidential campaign team later published by WikiLeaks, however, the Clinton campaign was able to stop the presses.

With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRCs opposition to the Magnitsky bill a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow,Jesse Lehrich, on the Rapid Response Communications team for Hillary For America, boasted on May 21, 2015.

The Global Magnitsky Act was named for 36-year-old tax attorneySergei Magnitsky,who died in the custody of the Russian government after accusing the government and organized crime of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a foreign company, Hermitage Capital Management. Magnitsky, hired by foreign investor and Hermitage owner William Browder, had tracked what turned out to be hundreds of millions of dollars in tax fraud. He reportedthefraud to the Russianauthorities, but instead ofpursuing charges against the alleged offender, Russianauthorities jailedMagnitsky.

After Magnitsky died inNovember 2009, Browder said Magnitsky proved Renaissance officials were among thoseorchestrating the scheme.

The State Department finally reversed its position in 2011 and refused visas to someRussians purportedlyinvolvedinthe financialfraud seeking to enter the country.

TheMagnitsky Actpassed with bipartisan support in 2012.

Russia retaliated against the U.S., ending any possibility for Americans to adopt Russian orphans and also banning 18 U.S. officials from entering theircountry.

Malia Zimmerman is an award-winning investigative reporter focusing on crime, homeland security, illegal immigration crime, terrorism and political corruption. Follow her on twitter at @MaliaMZimmerman

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Hillary Clinton sided with Russia on sanctions as Bill made $500G on Moscow speech - Fox News

In recent years, there has been an interesting trend in international relations research: a renewed focus on the role that individual leaders play in foreign policy outcomes. This runs counter to traditional international relations scholarship, which argues that the system imposes powerful structural constraints on individual leader behavior. Over the past decade, however, an increasing number of scholars have focused on the first image, suggesting multiple ways in which individual foreign policy leaders affect their country's approach to international relations.

Donald Trump's Electoral College victory in November has accelerated this research even further. At a minimum, he has sounded different from, say, a garden-variety Republican on a number of fronts. But if Hillary Clinton had won 100,000 more votes in the salient states, would things be all that different? This kind of counterfactual analysis is also a crucial part of political science and foreign policy analysis.

Over the weekend, the New York Post's John Podhoretz argued that neither American politics nor public policy would be all that different if Clinton had won:

"The astonishing answer, if you really think it through, is: not all that different when it comes to policy.

"Let's face it: With the exception of the Supreme Court appointment and confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump has astoundingly little in the accomplishments column especially for a president whose party controls both houses of Congress ...

"What would the Republicans have done in the Hillary era so far? They would have sought to stymie her, or challenge her...

"We would have been awash in a scandal narrative that would not be quite as breathless or bonkers as the Trump White House helps to generate but would have been disturbing and unpleasant.

"Moreover, the questions raised about the unprecedented nature of the Trump presidency would have been raised by the dynastic Clinton White House, featuring a candidate who got elected despite her e-mail scandals and the spouse who was only the second president in history to have been impeached."

Read the whole thing. Podhoretz is not Clinton's biggest fan, and yet almost everything in his column rings true. The thing is, what's not in the column matters as well.

He is largely correct about what President Hillary Clinton could have accomplished with a Republican Congress. Surely, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would have made his No. 1 goal similar to what it was in 2010: defeating Clinton in 2020. Indeed, in this scenario, there are ways in which the current moment would be more fraught with tension, as Clinton would have had to work hard to get Congress to pass a clean debt-ceiling increase and fund the government. We might still get that with Trump, but the probability would have been higher with Clinton.

And surely Podhoretz is also correct that Congress would have tried to hamstring Clinton with investigation after investigation. Remember this story from October 2016, in which Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, bragged about having two years of investigations prepped for Clinton?

"'It's a target-rich environment,'" the Republican said in an interview in Salt Lake City's suburbs. "'Even before we get to Day One, we've got two years' worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain't good.'"

Even in this calendar year, Chaffetz seemed primed to go after Clinton.

So yes, there are a lot of ways in which 2017 wouldn't look all that different with Clinton in the White House. Podhoretz, however, omitted the most obvious areas where Clinton and Trump would differ: the areas of politics and policy where a president exerts the most unconstrained influence.

Focus on the rhetoric first. I seriously doubt that Clinton would publicly characterize the mainstream media as "the enemy of the American people" or tweet insults directed at critical commentators or request public effusions of praise from her cabinet or just generally act ridiculous in the public eye. To be fair, Podhoretz acknowledges this, noting that "Hillary is many things, and many not good things, but she is not a sower of chaos or the subject of infighting so constant that no one can even catch a breath before one weird story is displaced by another. She's far too boring for that." Still, this is not an insignificant difference.

The more important differences are in the policies where the executive ranch wields the greatest authority. I am pretty sure that a Justice Department under Clinton would not have "taken a sledgehammer to Obama's legacy" on incarceration, voting rights, and private prisons. A Clinton administration would not engage in the kind of deregulation that, say, Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt would. A Clinton administration would not issue a dumb, self-defeating travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries. A Clinton administration would not solicit bids to build a wall along U.S.-Mexico.

More generally, however, Clinton would be conducting foreign policy rather differently. She would not have withdrawn from either the Paris climate accord or the Trans-Pacific Partnership (I know she opposed the latter during the campaign, but the far more likely option is that she would have sought to negotiate additional side deals akin to how her husband dealt with NAFTA). There would be no underhanded GCC effort to embargo Qatar, because Clinton would never have been so stupid as to have given the Saudis and Emiratis a blank check to do so.

The nation under Clinton would not be contemplating the start of the dumbest trade war in this century. European allies would not be talking about the need to go it alone. Asian allies would not talk about the need to "cut the tag" with the United States. The likelihood of a competent secretary of state doing his or her job seems much higher than odds of the current one doing anything constructive. There would be no ongoing beclowning of the executive branch. And no one would be worried about the sudden collapse of American soft power, because it wouldn't be collapsing.

If Clinton were president right now, American foreign policy would not have deviated too much from the prior status quo. She would have made America Boring Again. And given how this year has actually gone, I would take that outcome every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Washington Post

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor toPostEverything.

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If Hillary Clinton were president instead - Chicago Tribune

Two unlikely individuals are working together on a bipartisan effort to fight cyberattacks and protect the integrity of U.S. elections. The former presidential campaign managers of Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Mitt Romneyare leading an initiative, launched Tuesday, called Defending Digital Democracy, specifically to prevent repeats and copycats of Russias 2016 election interference.

Related: Voters prefer President Trump to Hillary Clinton,a poll finds

Robby Mook, Clintons 2016 campaign chief, and Matt Rhoades, Romneys 2012 campaign manager, are co-leading the project. They will execute their endeavor at the Harvard Kennedy Schools Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Robby Mook, thencampaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, talks to reporters aboard the campaign plane en route to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on October 28, 2016. Mook and Matt Rhoades, the manager for Mitt Romneys 2012 presidential campaign, on Tuesday launched a new initiative to fight cyberattacks. Brian Snyder/Reuters

Experts from the national security and technology communities, including Facebook and Google employees, will join Mook and Rhoades. Among other things, the project aims to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks, according to a news release.Its the first major effort outside the government that specifically aims todeal with recent hacking operations,and it hopes to make progress on prevention techniques through being bipartisan but nongovernmental.

Foreign actors could target any political party at any time, and that means we all need to work together to address these vulnerabilities, Rhoades said in a statement.This project will bring together not just different parties and ideologies, but subject matter experts from cyber security, national security, technologyand election administration to make a difference.

The Belfer Center is the focal point of the Kennedy Schools research, teaching and training in international security and diplomacy, environmental and resource issues, and science and technology policies, as well as where those topics intersect.

In 2012, Chinese hackers targeted Romneys campaign against then-incumbent President Barack Obama. Then, during the 2016 election campaign,Russian-backed hackers stole information from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to assessments byU.S. intelligence agencies. In January, the office of the director of national intelligence released a report that said Russia had attempted to undermine Clinton and assist Republican candidate Donald Trump to win the presidency. Obama has faced criticism for not taking federal action to respond, after The Washington Post reported that he had found out about the Russia meddling in early August.

Russia is also believed to have attempted to influenceelections in other countries, including the French presidential election.

Last week, Donald Trump Jr.was forced to releasea controversial email exchange he had with a Russian lawyer during his fathers 2016 campaign. The emails revealed that the lawyer claimed to havedetails to share that would incriminate Clinton.

President Trumps lawyer has said there wasnt anything illegal about Trump Jr.s meeting.

Just a small number of Republicans in the U.S. believe Russia interfered in the election, with the majority outright denying Russian attempts to influence the result, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

More:
How Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney's Ex-Aides Are Coming Together to Fight Election Hacking - Newsweek

What we clearly see in the focus groups is they dont regret what they did.

They are millennials of color who either didnt vote or voted third party. And for Cornell Belcher, the president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, who was the pollster for the Democratic National Committee under then-Chairman Howard Dean and for both of Barack Obamas campaigns for the White House, this makes them the new swing voters the Democratic Party should be trying to win over.

LISTEN HERE

For more conversations like this, subscribe to Cape UP on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.

Belcher came to this conclusion after conducting focus groups, commissioned by the Civic Engagement Fund, in Milwaukee and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in May. The goal was to find out why young voters who previously voted for Obama either sat out the 2016 election or voted for one of the third-party candidates. The resultswere sobering.

They are so outraged at the broken politics that they see on both sides, Belcher told me in the latest episode of Cape Up,that they really think that them protesting their vote makes both parties have to pay attention.

And there is pointed ire at the Democratic Party. One participant was particularly blunt. Youre damn right, I dont have any loyalty to Democrats, a person of color said in a focus group in Fort Lauderdale. If Republicans want to get real about s thats happening in my community I would vote for every one of them. Then maybe Democrats would take us serious too.

[Is demography destiny for Democrats? The short answer is no.]

The Democratic Party had better be paying attention now. When you look at the third-party vote margins in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the missed opportunity jumps off the page.

Theyre not necessarily Democratic voters, Belcher told me, but they are Obama voters. This is an echo of what former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on the podcast immediately after the election. Theres no connection to her. Black folks have not had a connection to her. Theyve not had a real substantive feel for her, Steele said. How could that be when she is the wife of the still-revered former president Bill Clinton and was the secretary of state for the beloved Obama? Steele broke it down. If I have a connection with your friend over here in the corner through you, he said, its not the same as my connection with you.

[Michael Steeles most searing observation was about the Black vote and its relationship with Hillary Clinton.]

Listen to the podcast to hear what Belcher thinks the Democratic Party needs to do to win back the Obama coalition and what he thinks about the intense focus on winning back white working-class voters.

We spend a lot of time talking about blue-collar white voters and Reagan Democrats. Reagan Democrats are dead, said Belcher, who believes effort should be placed on winning back millennials of color and young progressive whites. Bringing that coalition back together would seem to make a lot more sense to me than try to, in fact, bring in voters who have not been voting Democrat for quite some time.

Cape Up is Jonathans weekly podcast talking to key figures behind the news and our culture. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever else you listen to podcasts.

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These Obama voters snubbed Hillary Clinton and 'they don't regret what they did' - Washington Post

A few days ago, I was at a conservative gathering talking to a friend about my dismay at the latest turns in the ongoing Russia controversy. A collusion narrative that once seemed far-fetched was back front-and-center in the investigation. Indeed, the argument for attempted collusion seemed airtight. Donald Trump Jr. was asked to meet with purported Russian officials as part of a purported Russian plan to help his father. His response? I love it.

An older gentleman, a donor to the event, was eavesdropping and obviously irritated. He jumped into the conversation with the mic-dropping comment thats always and everywhere the last refuge of the Trump apologist. What? Are you saying that you wish Hillary had won?

My response? Its too soon to tell. Before he could voice the fury that covered his face, I followed up with a question. With the benefit of hindsight, how many Democrats are glad that Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976?

In January, two conservative thinkers, National Reviews Reihan Salam and the New York Times Ross Douthat, both raised the thought that President Trump risked becoming a Carter a disjunctive president who tried and failed to keep together competing Democratic coalitions. Reihan and Ross focused on the difficulty of Carters political task and the tensions inherent in his fragile coalition. The concern was that, to use Reihans words, Trump (like Carter) would try and fail to paper over the deep divisions plaguing Republicans.

No doubt Republicans are divided. The struggle over Obamacare reveals a party that lacks a common national vision. Its one thing for small-government conservatives, traditional Reagan Republicans, and Buchananite politicians to unite against Hillary Clinton or to join in common revulsion against leftist cultural overreach. Its another thing entirely to unite these same people under a series of common national political goals. But this challenge is heightened immeasurably by something else that Trump so far shares with Carter a staggering amount of incompetence.

Carter would have struggled to hold his coalition together under the best of circumstances (people forget how narrowly he won the 1976 presidential election even post-Watergate), but his challenge was compounded by his own unforced errors. For Millennials, Jimmy Carter is a kindly man who builds houses and works for international peace. But to Baby Boomers and older members of Generation X (like me), Carter is the man who presided over some of the lowest points in recent American history. Carters tenure was buffeted by oil shocks, stagflation, a humiliating hostage crisis, and a stunning act of Soviet aggression, its invasion of Afghanistan. Carters presidency was so disastrous that it took the end of the Cold War for American voters to again entrust Democrats with our foreign policy.

After Carters narrow victory, Republicans won three consecutive landslides. Democrats, stung by defeat after defeat, kept tacking right in national politics culminating in a Clinton presidency that in many respects was to the right of both national parties today. Can anyone imagine a crime bill such as the Clinton-era crime bill passing today? Is anyone even trying to balance the budget, much less create a surplus? With the collapse of Obamacare repeal, is there any reform on the horizon comparable to Clintons welfare reform? Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and implemented the now-hated dont ask, dont tell policy for gays in the military. As for immigration, is there a national Democrat alive whod make comments like this, from Clintons 1995 State of the Union address?

In true-believing leftist circles, Clintons presidency (aside from judicial appointments) was still part of the long, dark night of national political conservativism, and his moderate Democratic coalition, embodied by the Democratic Leadership Council, is anathema to the modern Left. Even today, you can find think-pieces spitting venom at the DLCs efforts to move the Democratic party to the right. Part of the leftist ecstasy at Barack Obamas victory in 2008 (and his reelection in 2012) was the realization that the Democratic party had elected its first genuine progressive of the modern era.

In other words, after Jimmy Carters failure, there were twelve straight years of Republican rule (featuring no less than 568 federal judicial appointments, including five justices of the Supreme Court), and arguably 28 years of moderate to center-right rule before the Left reclaimed the political throne.

Whats the lesson here? Yes, nations change and political coalitions can shift and fracture, but also that failed presidencies have serious consequences. Thats why better than Hillary simply isnt an argument. Trump has to be good. Trump has to be effective. Hillary wont be on the ballot in 2020, and shes not the alternative today. She is no longer the measuring stick, and any callback to her failures signals that the person making the argument is bereft of a meaningful Trump defense.

I am certain that a Democrat in November 1980 could look back on Jimmy Carters failed, disastrous four years and point to individual policies or appointments that they preferred over a hypothetical Ford administration, but wereDemocratstruly glad to be facing the future with the Carter legacy hanging around their necks? As they spent three full election cycles trying to convince Cold Warera voters that the party could handle the Soviet threat, were they thrilled with that narrow win in 1976?

When it comes to presidencies, the stench of overall failure can easily overwhelm the fragrance of an individual judicial appointment or a laudable regulatory rollback. Donald Trump has done good things in his first six months the Neil Gorsuch and James Mattis appointments most notable among them but he cant stop shooting himself in the foot, he hasnt yet shown that he can lead his party in Congress, and even a GOP conditioned to disbelieve all negative polls has to be concerned that only about 25 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president. His honeymoon was over before it had a chance to begin.

In the face of this reality, every cry of better than Hillary actually hurts Trump. It hurts the GOP. Rather than demanding the best of Trump, it enables and excuses his worst. Soon enough, the president will stand on his own record, against a different opponent. Its still early, and Donald Trump has a chance to learn to lead, but if the present trajectory doesnt change, Republicans will learn what Democrats learned after 1980 that you dont want to be the political party begging the nation for a second chance.

READ MORE: Whataboutism: What of It? Our Current Presidential Era May Not Be Normal, But It Is Predictable No One Emerges from Trumps Feud with the Media Looking Good

David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

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Stop Talking about Hillary Clinton and Start Thinking about Jimmy Carter - National Review