Monday, March 9, 2015
From: Gary L. Bauer
Hillary’s Problems Grow
The pressure on Hillary Clinton continues to mount over her use of private email servers during her tenure as secretary of state. The ongoing drumbeat dominated the Sunday talk shows.
On ABC’s “This Week,” Bloomberg editor Mark Halperin dramatically downgraded Hillary’s 2016 chances, saying:
“I said a few weeks ago on this show I thought she was easily the most likely president of the United States. . . . If this is the way she’s going to run her operation, if this is the mindset she’s going to have, I don’t think she’s going to be president.”
On NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) was asked how Hillary should respond. Feinstein answered: “I think that she needs to step up, and come out, and state exactly what the situation is. I think from this point on, the silence is going to hurt her.”
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” liberal Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus said, “[Clinton] has a history, an unfortunate history — one that she doesn’t seem to be adequately learning from — of always erring on the side of keeping things behind closed doors and secret rather than going for full disclosure.”
On Fox News Sunday conservative columnist George Will said:
“The Clintons come trailing clouds of entitlement and concealment . . . the kind of people who could find a loophole in a stop sign. Her obvious motive was to conceal. You conceal in order to control, and that’s what makes this literally, strictly speaking, Orwellian. . . . This is a way of controlling what we will know about the history of our country, and it is deeply sinister.”
Follow The Money
The cloud of scandal that Will alluded to may not dissipate as quickly as some on the left hope. Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House select committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, said there are “gaps of months and months and months” of missing emails. Gowdy added:
“If you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya . . . she has her handheld device in her hand. We have no emails from that day. In fact, we have no emails from that trip.”
National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who has covered the Clintons since their days in Arkansas, connects the email scandal to recent news about the Clinton Foundation’s questionable fundraising from corporations and foreign governments. He writes, “There are not two Clinton controversies. There is one big, hairy deal.”
Fournier adds that “one of [Bill Clinton’s] longest-serving advisors, a person who had worked directly for the foundation,” warned that, “‘The emails are a related but secondary scandal. Follow the foundation money.'”
Speaking of Clinton Foundation money, the New York Times is drawing attention to donations from “Middle Eastern countries known for violence against women and for denying them many basic freedoms.” The Times notes, “This was not how she intended to reintroduce herself to American voters.”
Nuclear Negotiations & Criminal Investigations
U.S. and Iranian negotiators may not meet a crucial March 24th deadline to provide the framework of a proposed nuclear deal. If that happens, negotiators would likely miss the June 30th deadline to produce the final deal. The latter date is important because that is the day the current agreement, negotiated in 2013, expires. There could be serious repercussions in Washington if these deadlines slip.
There is broad support in Congress for applying additional sanctions on the Iranian regime if it leaves the talks. Senate Democrats, under heavy pressure from the Obama White House, agreed to give U.S. negotiators until March 24th just to see if there was any meaningful progress.
It is not at all clear that senators will again defer to Obama beyond the 24th, and the Iranians are threatening to walk away from the talks if Congress passes new provisional sanctions.
In a related development, a top Obama law enforcement official leaked late Friday that Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the administration’s chief foreign policy critics, is facing a criminal corruption probe by the Justice Department. Menendez, one of the most pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate, vowed Friday, “I am not going anywhere.”
The Justice Department alleges that Senator Menendez used his influence to benefit a campaign donor. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) questioned the “curious timing” of the investigation, adding, “It raises the suggestion to other Democrats that if you dare part from the Obama White House, that criminal prosecutions will be used potentially as a political weapon against you as well.”
Meanwhile, 47 Republican senators released a letter they sent to the Iranian regime educating it about the constitutional process by which treaties or binding international agreements are made. Obama is refusing to submit this deal to the Senate for ratification. If he does not submit it to Congress, then his pact with Iran could be cancelled by the next president.
Notre Dame Wins
The University of Notre Dame scored a victory today at the Supreme Court. The justices overturned a ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals forcing the Catholic institution to pay for contraception and abortion-inducing drugs in its health insurance policies.
The justices ordered the 7th Circuit to reconsider the case in view of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision upholding religious liberty rights.
If you thought this issue had been decided as a result of the Hobby Lobby case, think again. The Obama Administration is still prosecuting cases against religious institutions and charities, including the Little Sisters of the Poor, arguing that Hobby Lobby only applied to closely held businesses.
Hopefully today’s action by the Supreme Court is the beginning of the end of this assault on religious liberty.
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