While it was hard to call a winner between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders last night, it’s easy to say who was luckier.
The race between the Democrat presidential hopefuls was so tight in the Iowa caucus Monday that in at least six precincts, the decision on awarding a county delegate came down to a coin toss. And Clinton won all six, media reports said.
The situation came about in precincts where Sanders and Clinton were running neck-and-neck, but there were an odd number of delegates, so they couldn’t be evenly split between the two. That was the case in precincts in Ames, Newton, West Branch, Davenport and two in Des Moines, the Des Moines Register reported.
Univision reporter Fernando Peinado caught one of the Des Moines coin tosses on video:
Six months after it began, the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server shows no signs of slowing down.
Former FBI officials said the length of the probe is not unusual and speculated that a decision on whether to file charges against Clinton or her top aides could come later this year, during the heat of the general election campaign.
“I don’t know that there’s any magical cutoff date,” said Ron Hosko, the FBI’s former assistant director of the criminal investigative division and a 30-year veteran of the bureau.
For Democrats, the extended investigation has become a source of some anxiety, with Republicans gleefully raising the prospect of the Democratic presidential front-runner being indicted.
“It does give pause to Democrats who are concerned that there may be another shoe to drop down the road,” said Andrew Smith, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire.
The government has been examining the former secretary of State’s private email server since last July, when the inspector general for the intelligence community issued a security referral noting that classified information could have been mishandled.
That referral came months after Clinton acknowledged that she had exclusively used a personal email address housed on a private server during her tenure as secretary.
The scrutiny of her email practices has mounted since then, with more than 1,300 emails that passed through her server found to contain information that has since been classified, some at the highest levels.
Hillary lags among men, again. Is it misogyny, or her brand of feminism? The story too hot for the New York Times
CAMILLE PAGLIA
During her two presidential campaigns, Hillary Clinton has consistently drawn greater support from women than men. Is this gender lag due to retrograde misogyny, or does Hillary project an uneasiness or ambivalence about men that complicates her appeal to a broader electorate?
As a career woman, Hillary is rooted in second-wave feminism, which began with Betty Friedan’s co-founding of the National Organization for Women in 1967, while Hillary was in college. Friedan sought to draw men into the women’s movement and to ally with mainstream wives and mothers. But after a series of ideological struggles, she lost her leadership role and was eventually eclipsed in media attention by the more telegenic Gloria Steinem, who famously said, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Hillary has unfortunately adopted the Steinem brand of blame-men-first feminism, which defines women as perpetual victims requiring government protections. Hillary’s sometimes impatient or patronizing tone about men, which can perhaps be traced to key aspects of her personal history, may prove costly to her current campaign.
The FBI is investigating whether members of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle “cut and pasted” material from the government’s classified network so that it could be sent to her private e-mail address, former State Department security officials say.
Clinton and her top aides had access to a Pentagon-run classified network that goes up to the Secret level, as well as a separate system used for Top Secret communications.
The two systems — the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) and Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS) — are not connected to the unclassified system, known as the Non-Classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). You cannot e-mail from one system to the other, though you can use NIPRNet to send e-mails outside the government.
Somehow, highly classified information from SIPRNet, as well as even the super-secure JWICS, jumped from those closed systems to the open system and turned up in at least 1,340 of Clinton’s home e-mails — including several the CIA earlier this month flagged as containing ultra-secret Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Programs, a subset of SCI.
By ALEXANDER BURNS and MAGGIE HABERMANJAN. 23, 2016
Michael R. Bloomberg has instructed advisers and associates to draw up plans for a potential independent campaign in this year’s presidential race. His advisers said he was galled by Donald J. Trump’s dominance of the Republican field, and troubled by Hillary Clinton’s stumbles and the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the Democratic side.
Mr. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, has in the past contemplated running for the White House on a third-party ticket, but always concluded he could not win. A confluence of unlikely events in the 2016 election, however, has given new impetus to his presidential aspirations.
Mr. Bloomberg, 73, has already taken concrete steps toward a possible campaign, and has indicated to friends and allies that he would be willing to spend at least $1 billion of his fortune on it, according to people briefed on his deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss his plans. He has set a deadline for making a final decision in early March, the latest point at which advisers believe Mr. Bloomberg could enter the race and still qualify to appear as an independent candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.
The contrast between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, startlingly evident in their debate Sunday night, could not be clearer. While devotees of the establishment can tell themselves that Clinton held her own, it is clear she did not.
Sanders had all the passion, anger, force and emotion on his side, and the best Clinton could do was to try to keep it in the park as her rival hit ball after ball. Since primaries are about motivation in getting out the vote, the Vermont senator has it all over Clinton.
So what happens if she:
(a) loses Iowa;
(b) loses New Hampshire;
(c) falls behind Sanders in the national polls and Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the head-to-heads?
The Democratic howls of concern will be deafening. “She’s blowing it again,” will be the least of what they will say. Democrats will feel trapped with a candidate who is showing before their eyes that she cannot even win a primary, much less a general election.
Emails from Hillary Clinton’s home server contained information classified at levels higher than previously known, including a level meant to protect some of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence, according to a document obtained by NBC News.
In a letter to lawmakers, the intelligence community’s internal watchdog says some of Clinton’s emails contained information classified Top Secret/Special Access Program, a secrecy designation that includes some of the most closely held U.S. intelligence matters.
Two American intelligence officials tell NBC News these are not the same two emails from Clinton’s server that have long been reported as containing information deemed Top Secret.
The letter doesn’t make clear whether Clinton sent or received the emails in question, but in the past, emails containing classified information have tended to have been sent to Clinton, not written by her.
The new revelation underscores the extent to which the email classification issue could continue to dog Clinton, as State Department and intelligence officials review sensitive information within messages that were blacked out before being released to the public.
During a radio interview Sunday, Juanita Broaddrick revealed a shocking new detail about her history with Bill Clinton.
She says that within a few weeks after Clinton allegedly raped her, he started to call her repeatedly with the aim of meeting again.
“I was shocked to say the least that he would have the audacity to call me after what he did to me,” Broaddrick said, speaking on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” the popular Sunday night radio program.
She said that just a few weeks after the 1978 alleged sexual assault, “He called the nursing home that I owned and they patched the call through to my office and I didn’t know that it was him. And he immediately said, ‘Hi, this is Bill Clinton. I was just wondering when you were coming back to Little Rock again.’
“This just caught me so off guard. I had not expected anything like this at all. And I told him I would not be coming back to Little Rock again and definitely would not ever be seeing him again. And I hung up.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Broaddrick told Klein that Clinton, at the time the attorney general of Arkansas and candidate for governor, called the nursing home where she worked on numerous occasions throughout the next six months.
Advisers to Hillary Clinton, including former President Bill Clinton, believe that her campaign made serious miscalculations by forgoing early attacks on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and failing to undercut his archliberal message before it grew into a political movement that has now put him within striking distance of beating Mrs. Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire.
According to Democrats close to the Clintons and involved with her campaign, Mrs. Clinton and the former president are also unnerved by the possibility that Mr. Sanders will foment a large wave of first-time voters and liberals that will derail her in Iowa, not unlike Barack Obama’s success in 2008, which consigned Mrs. Clinton to a third-place finish. They have asked her advisers about the strength of the campaign’s data modeling and turnout assumptions in Iowa, given that her 2008 campaign’s predictions were so inaccurate.
As the Democratic rivals prepare for what is likely to be a contentious televised debate on Sunday night, the Clintons are particularly concerned that her “rational message,” in the words of an aide, is not a fit with a restless Democratic primary electorate. Allies and advisers of the Clintons say Mr. Sanders is clearly connecting with voters through his emotional, inspiring rallying cry that the American economic and political systems are rigged for the wealthy and powerful. By contrast, Mrs. Clinton has beenstressing her electability and questioning the costs of Mr. Sanders’s ideas.
Clinton instructed an aide to remove the classification marking from information, a federal offense
by Keith Koffler
The latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department early Friday contain what may be the smoking gun that forces the Justice Department to charge the former secretary of state with a crime, according to former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova.
“This is gigantic,” said diGenova. “She caused to be removed a classified marking and then had it transmitted in an unencrypted manner. That is a felony. The removal of the classified marking is a federal crime. It is the same thing to order someone to do it as if she had done it herself.”
On the June 17, 2011, email chain with senior State Department adviser Jake Sullivan, Clinton apparently asked Sullivan to change the marking on classified information so that it is no longer flagged as classified.
Clinton, using her private email server, asks for “the TPs,” apparently a reference to talking points being prepared for her. Sullivan, who is using his official State Department email, responds, “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.” Clinton responds, “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w[ith] no identifying heading and send nonsecure.”
January 06, 2016, 05:18 pm
By Mark Hensch and Jonathan Easley
A woman who publicly accused former President Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978 is resurrecting her claims on social media.
“I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me,” Juanita Broaddrick tweeted Wednesday.
“Hillary tried to silence me,” she wrote of Bill Clinton’s wife and the current Democratic presidential front-runner. “I am now 73…it never goes away.”
The Hill reached a woman by phone in Van Buren, Ark., on Wednesday who identified herself as Broaddrick. She said the Twitter account is hers.
Broaddrick said she set the account up in 2009 but hasn’t used it much since because she’s unfamiliar with Twitter.
The former nursing home administrator alleged in 1999 that Bill Clinton raped her in Little Rock, Ark., during his 1978 gubernatorial campaign.
In a brief interview, Broaddrick, who said she retired after selling her nursing home business in 2008, said she’s decided to play a more visible role heading into 2016.
“I’ve been quiet for too long, and now with the possibility of [Hillary Clinton] being the Democratic nominee and possibly president, I feel the need to get involved,” she said
Clinton biographer struggled against ‘horrible feelings that [the Clintons] might have a hollow marriage’
BY: Alana Goodman
January 6, 2016 5:00 am
Bill Clinton dismissed Paula Jones in the 1990s as a “floozy” and a “nobody” who was only suing him for sexual harassment in order to have her “moment in the sun,” according to an audio diary recorded at the time by one of his closest confidantes.
Clinton’s friend and biographer, Taylor Branch, took notes on a late-night conversation he had with the president on Oct. 2, 1997, and immediately recorded them into an audio diary. The recordings were recently obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
According to Branch’s diary, Clinton discussed the pending sexual harassment lawsuit brought against him by former Arkansas government employee Paula Jones, who claimed he unzipped his pants and asked her to perform a sex act on him in a Little Rock hotel room in 1991.
“[Clinton] said they had now changed Paula Jones’s hair style, made her look less like a floozy, and that she didn’t seem to have any visible income but was always driving a new car,” said Branch, a historian who drew from many of his diary entries to write his 2010 Clinton biography The Clinton Tapes.
During a radio interview on Sunday, Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who notoriously sued President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment, demanded Hillary Clinton personally apologize for “allowing” her husband to “abuse” and “sexually harass” women.
Speaking to weekend talk radio host Aaron Klein, Jones slammed Hillary as a “two-faced” “liar” who waged a war on women by trying to discredit “predator” Bill’s sexual accusers.
“And how dare her. You know what? She don’t care nothing about women. Because if she did she would believe what I had to say. She would believe what the other women had to say. ”
Jones further accused the media of practicing a double standard by “protecting” the Clintons while deservedly scrutinizing Bill Cosby’s alleged sexual assaults.
Stated Jones: “It’s really a sad, sad day if Hillary becomes president, because she has allowed her husband to get by with this type of stuff. Why does he have a right to be back in the White House, the people’s house?
“Why is he allowed to be back there with the track record that he has and his wife and the lying that she does and how she tried to discredit all of these women that her husband abused and sexually harassed?”
Jones slammed Hillary as “such a liar. And she’s so two faced. I never once was contacted by her. Not one time and apologized about what her husband did to me.”
Those remarks prompted Klein to ask specifically whether Jones thinks Hillary owes her an apology. Jones replied that “she needs to do a public apology or something or other (for) all the women who have come out and said publicly what her husband did to them. Yes, she does. I believe she does.”
Sunday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said his potential general election opponent Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is not “innocent” in her husband former president Bill Clinton’s “serious” abuse of woman.
It turns out that Bill Clinton raked in millions from entities with matters before Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Oh, and the Clinton Foundation collected millions more from the same bunch.
In total, The Wall Street Journal reports, two dozen companies and groups, plus the Abu Dhabi government, gave Bill more than $8 million for speeches, even as they were hoping for favorable treatment from Hillary’s bureaucracy. And 15 of them also gave at least $5 million total to the foundation.
At her confirmation hearing, questioners raised the issue of her hubby’s global business. Hillary vowed to take “extraordinary steps . . . to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Count 13 million record fails for those “extraordinary steps.”
Hillary’s solemn promise recalls a line from George R.R. Martin: “Words are wind.” Heck, it must be the House Clinton slogan.
The issue first arose thanks to Peter Schweizer’s book, “Clinton Cash.”
“The really troubling thing about Bill’s speeches is the apparent correlation between his fees and Hillary’s decisions during her tenure as secretary of state,” he wrote.
“The timing of the payments, the much-higher-than-average size of some of them, and the subsequent actions taken by Hillary raise serious questions about just what those who underwrote these exorbitant fees were actually paying for.”
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon says “no evidence exists” connecting State Department actions under Hillary to Bill’s lucrative speeches.
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