but the emails Hillary
1010 belated disambig
see private email
SEE GRASSLEY JASON FOSTER POW CHAFFETZ?
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aha: the server (in her office, in ukraine) is a black box; // agenda just something hidden and sinister; b/c hillary is crooked, must be wrongdoing hidden there
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~ biden impeach 12 23
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gop ROUTINELY DODGE OFFICIAL EMAIL TO HIDE ACTIONS; sOs POWELL SAID HE USED PVT EMAIL? SIGNAL-GATE 3 25
OMG SEE FIASCO BENGHAZI MIKE SCHMIDT HAD HILLARY EMAIL HRD22 ? BUT ASSUMED SHE ALSO USES AN OFFICIAL ACCT? INVESTIGATTOR MIL INTEL ON 2ND TREY GOWDY SPECIAL COMM DID NOT SEE PROBLEM
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7 25 raw
U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is joining a wave of Republican voices reviving criticism of the FBI’s Clinton email investigation—calling it “rigged” and saying it will be “fun” to watch Democrats “lawyer up”—as media scrutiny intensifies around Donald Trump’s ties to the late, notorious sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein and his refusal to release the files.
Fox News on Monday reported that the FBI, under then-Director James Comey, “botched” the Clinton emails investigation in 2016, citing a press release from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
The FBI “failed to perform fundamental investigative work and left key pieces of evidence on the cutting room floor,” Senator Grassley alleged. “The Comey FBI’s negligent approach and perhaps intentional lack of effort in the Clinton investigation is a stark contrast to its full-throated investigation of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, which was based on the uncorroborated and now discredited Steele dossier. Comey’s decision-making process smacks of political infection.”
ALSO READ:'Sick of it': House GOP fury rises as Trump ally Johnson dodges Epstein debate
On Tuesday, Senator Tuberville told Newsmax (video below), “James Comey’s FBI rigged the Hillary Clinton investigation so we would, you know, we would never know how badly she damaged our national security when they didn’t probe those crucial thumb drives.”
“What a colossal cover-up this has been,” Tuberville alleged. “It is a huge cover-up.”
“They’ve tried to push a narrative that basically they want to change our country that’s something it’s not. They wanted to take all the ability of us as Republicans, as Americans, to try to keep our country going in the right direction,” he said. “But the mainstream media, the Democrats, and a few Republicans have pushed this narrative of, ‘Let’s do it the right way. Let’s make sure we’re doing the right thing.'”
“It has been—it’s been—something that I’ve been shocked at since I’ve been here, and now we’re finally seeing things start to leak out, the truth of really what happened,” Tuberville claimed, not offering any specifics.
“The American people are going to find out, it is going to be fun up here to watch all this start taking a narrative, a true narrative of what really happened, of the Democrats trying to change this country into a socialist communist country for the last four years,” he alleged, apparently referring to the Biden presidency, of which Hillary Clinton was not a part.
“These people need to lawyer up, and they need to find out really what it’s really like to be under the gun, putting her hand up, testifying in front of people all over this country because it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be much watched, as we look at all this narrative being brought forward.”
After she served as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton testified, under oath and television cameras, before Congress, for 11 hours in a single day in 2015.
On Sunday, Tuberville claimed that President Donald Trump’s bloated ankles are the result of him “fighting the radicals in this country.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
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AN 7 25
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Monday that the Justice Department has released a declassified appendix from the 2018 Inspector General’s report, shedding new light on the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
This step follows a long-standing appeal from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, who has consistently advocated for more openness about the investigation.
Grassley released the document on Monday after receiving it from Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
READ MORE:Carville says this 'forceful' 4-word phrase should be Dems' 'core message' going into 2026
The newly released appendix shows the FBI retrieved thumb drives, described as containing hacked State Department data, including messages from former President Barack Obama — but did not fully analyze their contents, per theWashington Examiner.
The Clinton email controversy dates back to 2009–2013, when Clinton conducted official business via a private, home-based email system. The FBI concluded she had been “extremely careless” but did not find evidence of criminal intent, opting not to press charges.
Bondi’s Monday announcement also intersects with ongoing controversy over the handling of documents related to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Conservatives had pressed for the release of Epstein’s “client list,” but a DOJ-FBI memo later said that no such list existed and emphasized that most materials remain sealed to protect victims.
Responding to calls for further disclosure, the Justice Department filed a request Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in the Epstein case — following directives from President Donald Trump and public pressure.
READ MORE:'He is failing': Top GOP pollster explains why 'the next 6 months' could seal Trump’s political fate
However, legal experts have warnedthat the request is unlikely to reveal much new information, pointing out that grand jury presentations in the Southern District of New York usually include only enough detail to support an indictment, not exhaustive evidence.
Meanwhile, Bondi's Monday decision was criticized as a "distraction" on social media.
Podcaster Brian Allen wrote on the social platform X: "Trump’s DOJ just reopened the Clinton email investigation — releasing documents from the failed 2016 probe under James Comey. Pam Bondi’s DOJ says this is about 'transparency.' But we all know what this really is: political theater to distract from the Epstein fallout and criminal referrals now hitting Trump’s own administration. They’re flailing. And they’re running out of cards to play."
Another X user wrote: "NEW: Here we go again… it’s 2025 and they’re still yelling 'BUT HER EMAILS!' Pam Bondi is releasing more Clinton email drama, because when Trump world feels the Epstein heat, they always reach for Hillary. It’s not about justice or anything serious, other than about a distraction for MAGA base. The smoke machine is on full blast."
"The desperation is so obvious," wrote another account.
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Trump says “Russia, if you’re listening” was a joke. There’s tape proving otherwise. | Vox
no lnx
Trump says “Russia, if you’re listening” was a joke. There’s tape to prove otherwise.
Trump is layering lie upon lie to rewrite the history of his encouragement of Russian hackers.
by Aaron Rupar
Sep 29, 2020,
Trump accused reporters this weekend of mischaracterizing comments he made in July 2016 publicly encouraging Russian hackers to attack Hillary Clinton. But the way he described those comments is completely at odds with reality, and there’s video to prove it.
“Do you remember when I said, ‘Russia, if you’re listening, find her emails,’ or whatever the hell I said? ‘Find her emails,’ and then we all laughed together, 25,000 people in a stadium,” Trump said at a rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. “They cut it off exactly before we all started to laugh together, right? And for two years they’ve been saying, ‘He dealt with Russia. He asked Russia to please get her emails,’ or whatever the hell we were asking ... the whole place cracks up with me ... this is how dishonest these people are.”
This is no doubt part of his never-ending effort to discredit the media.
Watch:
Trump made the remarks in question during his first campaign, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”
But Trump did not say this to a cheering and laughing crowd at one of his rallies. He actually said it in front of a handful of reporters during a news conference at his Doral property in Florida. That news conference wound up being his final one before the election, in large part because of the negative stir his remarks generated.
Furthermore, nobody laughed when Trump said it, and his comments are just as bad in context as they are when the “Russia, if you’re listening” line is considered on its own. Here’s the footage:
Jim Acosta of CNN, the reporter who asked the question that prompted Trump to say “Russia, if you’re listening” at the July 2016 news conference, tweeted on Tuesday morning that “the reporters at the news conference didn’t laugh. And Trump didn’t appear to be joking.”
The president seems to be trying to turn reality on its head, even though there’s tape to prove otherwise.
Trump is spitting on his supporters and telling them it’s raining
Retconning the incident has become a staple of Trump’s campaign speeches. On September 19 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for instance, Trump brought it up and claimed “everybody laughed” and “it was a joke,” then added the lie about it happening at a rally for the first time over the weekend.
Even if Trump didn’t mean for his comments to be taken seriously, Russian hackers apparently did. According to Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officials, on the same day Trump made those comments, Russian hackers “attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provided and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.”
Trump has made clear in the years since that he doesn’t think foreign interference in American elections is a bad thing, insofar as it helps him. In October 2019, Trump flatly told reporters that he thought the Chinese and Ukrainian governments “should investigate the Bidens.” Those comments were widely condemned but were defended as just a joke by Republican members of Congress like Kevin McCarthy and Roy Blunt, even though footage of the comment showed Trump was serious.
Trump’s comments about the July 2016 news conference were especially shameless, but they were far from the only brazen lie he pushed in Middletown. He told his supporters that just prior to the coronavirus hitting the US, “we were coming together ... I was getting calls from stone-cold, hard-line Democrats,” even though in reality he had just been through an impeachment trial. He claimed 35,000 people attended his Friday evening rally in Newport News, Virginia, but local reports indicate there were around 4,000. And he appeared to fabricate stats about excess mortality in order to mislead people about how hard the US has been hit by Covid-19.
Trump once advised his supporters in 2018 to “just remember — what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” He’s not subtle about it.
See More:
2020 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Politics
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hunter kos ref NYT
no lnx
NEWS ANALYSIS
Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political Rivals
President Trump took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was ordered by President Trump to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
By David E. Sanger
Oct. 10, 2020
President Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.
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Mr. Trump has long demanded — quite publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.
He took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.
“There is essentially no precedent,” said Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush and has written extensively on presidential powers. “We have a norm that developed after Watergate that presidents don’t talk about ongoing investigations, much less interfere with them.”
“It is crazy and it is unprecedented,” said Mr. Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School, “but it’s no different from what he has been saying since the beginning of his presidency. The only thing new is that he has moved from talking about it to seeming to order it.”
Mr. Trump’s vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family business he presided over. “I have an Article II,” he told young adults last year at a Turning Point USA summit, referring to the section of the Constitution that deals with the president’s powers, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don’t even talk about that.”
Now he is talking about it, almost daily. He is making it clear that prosecutions, like vaccines for the coronavirus, are useless to him if they come after Nov. 3. He has declared, without evidence, that there is already plenty of proof that Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton, among others, were fueling the charges that his campaign had links to Russia — what he calls “the Russia hoax.” And he has pressured his secretary of state to agree to release more of Mrs. Clinton’s emails before the election, reprising a yearslong fixation despite having defeated her four years ago.
Presidential historians say there is no case in modern times where the president has so plainly used his powers to take political opponents off the field — or has been so eager to replicate the behavior of strongmen. “In America, our presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes — that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian,wrote on Twitter after Mr. Trump returned from the hospital where he received Covid-19 treatment and removed his mask, while still considered contagious, as he saluted from the White House balcony.
Long ago, White House officials learned how to avoid questions about whether the president views his powers as fundamentally more constrained than those of the authoritarians he so often casts in admiring terms, including Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. They have something in common: Mr. Trump’s State Department has criticized all three for corrupting the justice systems in their countries to pursue political enemies.
(Russia, the State Department complained in its 2019 Human Rights report, engaged in a “crackdown on political opposition and other critics before and after presidential elections that Vladimir Putin won.” Turkey, it said the same year, has conducted the “arbitrary arrest and detention of tens of thousands of persons, including former opposition members of parliament.”In recent weeks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been particularly outspoken about the state’s use of a new national security law to arrest activists and political opponents of the Chinese Communist Party.)
Mr. Pompeo has always bristled when reporters have asked him to explain what the world should believe when it reads Mr. Trump’s most authoritarian-sounding tweets. He answers that what distinguishes the United States is that it is a “rule of law” nation, and then often turns the tables on his questioners, charging that even raising the issue reveals that the reporters are partisans, not journalists, intent on embarrassing Mr. Trump and the United States.
But his anger is often wielded as a shield, one that keeps him from publicly grappling with the underlying question: How can Washington take on other authoritarians around the world — especially China, Mr. Pompeo’s nemesis — for abusing state power when the president of the United States calls for political prosecutions and politically motivated declassifications?
“We’ve never seen anything like this in an American election campaign,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state who is now an informal adviser to Mr. Biden. “It reduces our credibility — we look like the countries we condemn for nondemocratic practices before an election.”
“I have worked for nine secretaries of state,” Mr. Burns said. “I cannot imagine any of them intervening in an election as blatantly as what we are seeing now. Our tradition is that secretaries of state stay out of elections. If they wanted to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, they could have done it in 2017, 2018 or 2019. It is an abuse of power by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.”
Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what Mr. Trump had ordered is “exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.”
“In dealing with Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, we would have protested and condemned such actions,” he said. “Now it’s our own government that’s engaging in them.”
“The result,” said Mr. Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “is the hollowing out of our institutions at home, and deep corrosion of our image and influence abroad.”
In the current cases, it is unclear whether Mr. Trump will get his wish — or whether his loyal appointees will slow-walk his requests. There is some evidence they are already looking for escape hatches.
Mr. Pompeo, the administration’s most conspicuous ideologue, Mr. Trump’s most vocal loyalist and a lawyer, was clearly taken aback when the president expressed displeasure, saying he was “not happy” that the State Department had not released emails sent through Mrs. Clinton’s home server.
“You’re running the State Department, you get them out,” the president told Fox Business in an interview this week. “Forget about the fact that they were classified. Let’s go. Maybe Mike Pompeo finally finds them.”
Mr. Pompeo, one of his aides said Saturday, was in a box: The complaint about Mrs. Clinton’s home server was that she was risking exposing classified emails by not using the State Department email system — a system Russia had already infiltrated — yet Mr. Trump was demanding that they be released in full. Just days before, he had announced, over Twitter, that he was using his executive power to declassify all of them, without redactions.
“We’ve got the emails,” Mr. Pompeo responded on Fox News. “We’re getting them out. We’re going to get all this information out so the American people can see it.”
But he also hinted that many of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, mostly those that were stored on the State Department’s own system, have already been posted on the agency’s website, after an unusually diligent effort by the department to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests from Mr. Trump’s supporters. (They are often heavily redacted — to the point of containing no content — despite the president’s order to the contrary.)
“We’re doing it as fast as we can,” Mr. Pompeo told Dana Perino, a Fox News anchor who once served as President Bush’s press secretary. “I certainly think there’ll be more to see before the election.”
Mr. Pompeo clearly understands the problem: Even if he makes all of them public, they are unlikely to satisfy the president. Last year, the State Department’s own inspector general found that while Mrs. Clinton had risked compromising classified information, she did not systematically or deliberately mishandle her emails.
William P. Barr may face an even greater challenge in satisfying the president. No attorney general since John N. Mitchell, who served Mr. Nixon and brought conspiracy charges against critics of the Vietnam War, bent the Justice Department more in a president’s direction. And Mr. Nixon himself, while urging the I.R.S. to audit political opponents, stopped short of publicly calling for individual prosecutions. Yet in February, Mr. Barr told ABC News that Mr. Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” At the same time, he complained that the president’s tweets about the Justice Department “make it impossible for me to do my job.”
Now, clearly, the president has asked Mr. Barr to act in a criminal case — and not in a quiet phone call. Instead, he did it on Twitter and Fox News, expressing his deep disappointment with his second attorney general, for essentially the same reason he fired his first one, Jeff Sessions: insufficient blind loyalty.
His complaint appears to have been driven by Mr. Barr’s warning to the White House and other officials that there are likely to be no indictments before the election from the investigation being run by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut. Mr. Durham is searching for evidence that the inquiry into Russia was a politically motivated effort to undercut his presidency.
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Mr. Trump says the case is clear-cut. He told Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host to whom he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the last State of the Union address, that Mr. Durham has had “plenty of time to do it.”
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“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crime in the history of our country — then we’ll get little satisfaction, unless I win,” Mr. Trump said on Fox Business.
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“If we don’t win,” he said, “that whole thing is going to be dismissed.”
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