Mediaboss Marketing

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

A contempt of the laws is the high road to anarchy.

Alexander Hamilton

Hillary Clintons email scandal and the Clinton Foundation scandal are back in the news, as they are likely to be for years to come. At his confirmation hearing, Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions said he would recuse himself from all investigations involving the Clintons.

Last November, President Donald Trump said that his preference was for no further investigation of Hillary Clinton or the Clinton Foundation. A decision (which does not seem to have been made yet) not to continue any investigation raises at least three concerns:

1). Deciding whether to prosecute someone isnt normally the presidents decision to make. Its the job of the system.

The system may sound amorphous, but in fact the system is what we call the rule of law. That rule is not just an arcane concept that interests lawyers and public policy mavens. The rule of law is probably the single most important governing concept we have far more important than democracy. The rule of law elevates the weakest citizen to the level of the most powerful.

In this case, the rule of law would see the FBI and the Justice Department make the determinations whether or not to continue investigating and to prosecute. Nevertheless, the attorney general can always exercise prosecutorial discretion and decide to drop an investigation without necessarily traducing the rule of law. And if the AG (in this case the deputy AG, Mr. Sessions having recused himself) can make that decision, so can his boss, the president.

2) Dropping the case raises the question of fairness.

Fairness may be an elusive concept; even so, we tend to know its missing when we dont see it. It is true that its not always possible to be fair. Sometime its necessary to be just. But in this case, there are people who have done far less than what Mrs. Clinton has already been shown to have done and who have been punished for it. Why should they have to pay a price if she does not? The response that life is not fair does not entirely satisfy.

In 2009, Kristian Saucier, a Navy machinist, took six photos labeled confidential/restricted of the nuclear submarine USS Alexandrias classified propulsion system. Saucier was sentenced to one year in prison and six months of home confinement following his release, and to perform 100 hours of community service.

In 2015, Bryan H. Nishimura, a naval reservist deployed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008, pleaded guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials. There was no evidence, however, that Nishimura intended to distribute the classified information to unauthorized personnel. Nishimura pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years of probation, assessed a $7,500 fine, and ordered to surrender any his security clearance.

And Gen. David Petraeus, hero of the Iraq War, gave classified material to another person who had a security clearance but no need to know. Gen. Petraeus was sentenced to two years probation and ordered to pay a $100,000 fine.

3) Danger lurks in curtailing the investigation.

Who knows what evils the Clinton Foundation engaged in? The answer is: Many people know the many people who have been investigating it. They know things. And it is almost inconceivable that there will be no leaks. Those leaks would embarrass Donald Trump for letting Mrs. Clinton escape, even as they would embarrass Mrs. Clinton always assuming its possible to embarrass a Clinton.

One can argue that continuing to investigate and perhaps prosecute Mrs. Clinton would continue to divide the nation, though we should note that it appears to be the hard-core left that is fomenting the divisive activity. Even so, one can argue that trying to heal that divide is more important than strictly observing the rule of law. Perhaps. People will differ.

What is more difficult to differ on, however, is how people like Nishimura and Saucier, and probably dozens like them, should be treated if Mrs. Clinton et al. are allowed to escape investigation, and perhaps prosecution and punishment.

If Mr. Trump decides to stop the investigation of the Clintons, he should also pardon all people currently in situations similar to those of Nishimura and Saucier. Such a pardon would be both fair and supportive of the rule of law because it would tend to equalize the small fry and the kingpins.

In addition, such pardons, especially if there were lots of them, would make apparent the venality of Mrs. Clinton and make the case for her guilt, but without the trauma of another Watergate-like circus. Mrs. Clinton, though free to spend time with her loving husband, would appear in the publics mind to be guilty, yet would have no way of being exonerated.

Thats not a perfect outcome. But its not bad either.

Daniel Oliver, chairman of the board of the Education and Research Institute and senior director of the White House Writers Group, previously served as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Ronald Reagan.

Read the rest here:
Hillary Clinton and the law - Washington Times

Nick Merrill, Clinton's spokesman, confirmed that the 2016 Democratic nominee will be the commencement speaker at the all-women college in May.

The remarks will be one of Clinton's biggest speeches after her 2016 loss. She has kept a low profile since losing to Donald Trump, only headlining a handful of small events that generally have a personal connection to her life.

Clinton has slowly begun to emerge into public life, however. She tweeted earlier this week that Trump's travel ban was "not who we are," her clearest rebuke of Trump since the election.

Clinton has begun booking speeches, too. She will speak at a ceremony honoring Oscar de la Renta on February 16 in New York, at a Vital Voices event recognizing International Women's Day on March 8 and at an event at the LGBT Community Center in New York on April 10.

And then comes her book: Simon & Schuster, Clinton's publisher, announced Wednesday that Clinton will publish a new book of personal essays in fall 2017.

Clinton will discuss different points in her life in the book, a release said, using quotes she "lives by" as a way to get into each essay.

"These quotes have helped me celebrate the good times, laugh at the absurd times, persevere during the hard times and deepen my appreciation of all life has to offer," Clinton said in a statement.

Clinton was the first student to ever speak at the Wellesley College commencement in 1969. Republican Sen. Edward Brooke, speaking before Clinton, argued in favor of small victories and decried people protesting.

"The overwhelming majority of Americans will stand firm on one principle: Coercive protest is wrong, and one reason it is wrong is because it is unnecessary," he said.

Clinton, who had written a speech, instead tore it up and used the top of her remarks to blast Brooke.

"Something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now," Clinton said. "We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest."

Clinton was lauded for being a student leader after the speech, and was profiled by LIFE Magazine.

See the rest here:
Hillary Clinton to give Wellesley College commencement address - CNN

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

Just as former Secretary of State used a private e-mail server, whose contents she later wiped, in an attemptto shield some of her communications from the government and from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, bureaucratic rebels are using external communications and applications to create what amounts to a shadow administration. But unlike Clinton, or perhaps having learned her lessons, they are encrypting their communications, using secure messaging apps like Signal.

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

Politico notes:

Whether inside the Environmental Protection Agency, within the Foreign Service, on the edges of the Labor Department or beyond, employees are using new technology as well as more old-fashioned approaches such as private face-to-face meetings to organize letters, talk strategy, or contact media outlets and other groups to express their dissent. The goal is to get their message across while not violating any rules covering workplace communications, which can be monitored by the government and could potentially get them fired.

At the EPA, a small group of career employees numbering less than a dozen so far are using an encrypted messaging app to discuss what to do if Trumps political appointees undermine their agencys mission to protect public health and the environment, flout the law, or delete valuable scientific data that the agency has been collecting for years, sources told POLITICO.

The effort is part of what Breitbart News has called the coup of the bureaucrats. There are several steps the Trump administration could take to clamp down on it. One involves internal investigations, leading to disciplinary action though that could also lower morale and drain administrative resources. Another is to set an example by firing high-profile rebels like acting Attorney General Sally Yates though that does not solve the problem completely. The Trump administration could also appeal to former President Barack Obama to stop encouraging protests and to urge bureaucrats to do their jobs though it seems unlikely that President Trump would want to make such an appeal, or that President Obama would agree.

The simplest solution may simply be to cut or close federal government departments that seek to operate independently of the executive. With Republican budget hawks in charge of Congress, the Trump administrationmight have a unique opportunity to fulfill conservatives long-standing ambition to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy and the scope of its powers.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the most influential people in news media in 2016. His new book,How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Follow this link:
Federal Bureaucrats Go 'Full Hillary Clinton' with Secret Emails - Breitbart News

NewsBusters (blog)

NBC Welcomes Hillary Clinton's 'Return to the Spotlight' NewsBusters (blog) Co-host Matt Lauer eagerly told viewers: ...after taking some time away from public eye following the election, Hillary Clinton appears ready to return to the spotlight. In the report that followed, correspondent Peter Alexander proclaimed: After a ... and more »

See the article here:
NBC Welcomes Hillary Clinton's 'Return to the Spotlight' - NewsBusters (blog)

Claim: An academic study cited by conservative news organizations and the Trump administration proved that Hillary Clinton received more than 800,000 non-citizen votes in the 2016 presidential election.

Origin:A recurring refrainissuing from President Trump's Twitter account ever since he won the 2016 election by 74 electoral votes in November holds that he was robbedof a victory in the popular vote count (which Hillary Clinton won by 2,865,075 votes) duetoat least 3 million illegal ballots cast by non-citizens.

The documentation offered to supportthis assertionhas ranged fromvague to nonexistent. When asked to defendit in a 24 January 2017 press conference, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated that Trump's belief that there wasmassive voter fraud in 2016was "based on studies he's seen." Pressed to cite such a study, Spicer said, "There's one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who voted were non-citizens."

Albeitmistaken about both itsorigins (it was writtenby researchers at Old Dominion University usingdata collectedbythe Cooperative Congressional Election Study, not Pew) and findings(it did not remotely show that 14 percent of the electorateamountingto 18 million voters were non-citizens), Spicer was, at least, alluding to an actual study.

In fact, the same studywas cited for the same purposes two days after thepress conferencein a Washington Timesarticlestating that Hillary Clinton benefited to the tune of834,381 non-citizen votes in the 2016 election:

Hillary Clinton garnered more than 800,000 votes from non-citizens on Nov. 8, an approximation far short of President Trumps estimate of up to 5 million illegal voters but supportive of his charges of fraud.

Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on non-citizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trumps assertion.

Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by Mr. Richman said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult non-citizens in the U.S. voted in November. He extrapolated that that percentage would have added 834,381 net votes for Mrs. Clinton, who received about 2.8 million more votes than Mr. Trump.

The study in questionwas published in the December 2014 issue of the journalElectoral Studies,titled: "Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections?" Its authors,Jesse T. Richman, Gulshan A. Chattha, and David C. Earnest of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, sought to contribute hard data to the ongoing, largely partisan debateover how much voter fraud actually occurs in the United States. Richman and Earnest summarizedtheir research in a 24 October 2014 article in the Washington Post:

Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections.

To be clear,when Sean Spicer citedthis study to support Trump's assertionthat millions voted illegally in the 2016 election, hewas referring toa set of extrapolations madein 2014 based on data collected by another research group in 2008 and 2010. Further, the validity of those extrapolations has been repeatedlychallenged by the original pollsters(more about thatlater). Just as importantly, the lead author of the study advancingthose extrapolations, Jesse Richman, has saidthat even if their conclusionswere 100 percent valid which, again, is in question they don'tconfirm Trump's claim that"millions" voted illegally:

Donald Trump recently suggested that his deficit in the popular vote to Clinton might be due entirely to illegal votes cast, for instance by non-citizens. Is this claim plausible? The claim Trump is making is not supported by our data.

Here I run some extrapolations based upon the estimates for other elections from my coauthored 2014 paper on non-citizen voting. You can access that paper on the journal website hereand Judicial Watch has also posted a PDF. The basic assumptions on which the extrapolation is based are that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted, and that of the non-citizens who voted, 81.8percent voted for Clinton and 17.5percent voted for Trump. These were numbers from our study for the 2008 campaign. Obviously to the extent that critics of my study are correct the first number (percentage of non-citizens who voted) may be too high, and the second number (percentage who voted for Clinton) may be too low.

The count of the popular vote is still in flux as many states have yet to certify official final tallies. Here I used this unofficial tally linked by Real Clear Politics. As of this writing Trump is 2,235,663 votes behind Clinton in the popular vote.

If the assumptions stated above concerning non-citizen turnout are correct, could non-citizen turnout account for Clintons popular vote margin? There is no way it could have. 6.4 percent turnout among the roughly 20.3 million non-citizen adults in the US would addonly 834,318votes to Clintons popular vote margin. This is little more than a thirdof the total margin.

Is it plausible that non-citizen votes added to Clintons margin. Yes. Is it plausible that non-citizen votes account for the entire nation-wide popular vote margin held by Clinton? Not at all.

Returning to theWashington Times piece defending Trump's assertion about illegal voters (see top of page), the article creates the impression, perhaps intentionally, that Richman conducted freshresearch using new data from the 2016 election. However, in a 27 January 2017 open letter to theTimes, Richman objected that both his research and his own comments about the research weremisrepresented:

I do not support the Washington Times piece

Dear Washington Times,

As a primary author cited in this piece, I need to say that I think the Washington Times article is deceptive. It makes it sound like I have done a study concerning the 2016 election. I have not. What extrapolation I did to the 2016 election was purely and explicitly and exclusively for the purpose of pointing out that my 2014 study of the 2008 election did not provide evidence of voter fraud at the level some Trump administration people were claiming it did. I do not think that one should rely upon that extrapolation for any other purpose. And I do not stand behind that extrapolation if used for ANY other purpose.

Best Regards,

Jesse Richman

Finally, we must address the question of whetherthe extrapolations Richman et al made in their 2014 study were valid in the first place. Let usturn to one of the pollsterswho compiled the original Cooperative Congressional ElectionStudy voter data in 2008 and 2010, Brian Schaffner, who wrote:

As a member of the team that produces the datasets upon which that study was based and as the co-author of an article published in the same journal that provides a clear take down of the study in question, I can say unequivocally that this research is not only wrong, it is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place. There is no evidence that non-citizens have voted in recent U.S. elections.

Although based on precisely the same data as Richman's, Schaffner's conclusion could not be more starkly different. To simplify his argument (which we encourage allto read in full), the Richman study failed to account for measurement error specifically, it failed to account for the frequency with which survey respondents may have incorrectlyidentified themselves as "non-citizens":

Such errors are infrequent, but they happen in any survey. In this case, they were crucial, because Richman and his colleagues saw the very small number of people who answered that they were immigrant non-citizens, and extrapolated that (inaccurate) number to the U.S. population as a whole.

How do we know that some people give an inaccurate response to this question? Well, we actually took 19,000 respondents from one of the surveys that Richman used (the 2010 study) and we interviewed them again in 2012. A total of 121 of the 19,000 respondents (.64 percent) identified themselves as immigrant non-citizens when they first answered the survey in 2010. However, when asked the question again in 2012, 36 of the 121 selected a different response, indicating that they were citizens. Even more telling was this: 20 respondents identified themselves as citizens in 2010 but then in 2012 changed their answers to indicate that they were non-citizens. It is highly unrealistic to go from being a citizen in 2010 to a non-citizen in 2012, which provides even stronger evidence that some people were providing incorrect responses to this question for idiosyncratic reasons.

Correcting for thoseerrors, saysSchaffner, the likely number of non-citizen voters in the 2016 election turns out to benot 5 million, nor 3 million, nor even 800,000, but zero.

Ansolabehere, Stephen, Luks, Samantha and Schaffner, Brian F. "The Perils of Cherry Picking Low Frequency Events in Large Sample Surveys." CCES. 5 November 2014.

Chattha, Gulshan A., Earnest, David C. and Richman, Jesse T. "Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections?" Electoral Studies. December 2014.

Richman, Jesse. "I Do Not Support the Washington Times Piece." 27 January 2017.

Richman, Jesse. "Is It Plausible that Non-Citzen Votes Account for the Entire Margin of Trump's Popular Vote Loss to Clinton?" 28 November 2016.

Richman, Jesse and Earnest, David. "Could Non-Citizens Decide the November Election?" The Washington Post. 24 October 2014.

Scarborough, Rowan. "Trump Argument Bolstered: Clinton Could Have Received 800,000 Votes from Noncitizens." The Washington Times. 26 January 2017.

Schaffner, Brian. "Trump's Claims About Illegal Votes Are Nonsense. I Debunked the Study He Cites as 'Evidence.'" Politico.com. 29 November 2016.

View original post here:
Crock the Vote - snopes.com