"Why not indict McCabe on felony false-statements charges? That is the question being pressed by incensed Trump supporters."

"After all, the constitutional guarantee of equal justice under the law is supposed to mean that McCabe gets the same quality of justice afforded to the sad sacks pursued with unseemly zeal by McCabe’s FBI and Robert Mueller’s prosecutors. George Papadopoulos was convicted of making a trivial false statement about the date of a meeting. Roger Stone was convicted of obstruction long after the special counsel knew there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy, even though his meanderings did not impede the investigation in any meaningful way. And in the case of Michael Flynn’s false-statements conviction, as McCabe himself acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee, even the agents who interviewed him did not believe he intentionally misled them.... "

From "Why Wasn’t Andrew McCabe Charged?" by Andrew McCarthy (National Review).

Special counsel to investigate the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One deal?

This seems to be the biggest story today.

Washington Post, "Sessions considering second special counsel to investigate Republican concerns, letter shows":

In response [to an inquiry from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.)], Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote that Sessions had “directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues raised in your letters,” and that those prosecutors would “report directly to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

New York Times, "Justice Dept. to Weigh Inquiry Into Clinton Foundation":

The letter appeared to be a direct response to Mr. Trump’s statement on Nov. 3, when he said he was disappointed with his beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and that longstanding unproven allegations about the Clintons and the Obama administration should be investigated.

Any such investigation would raise questions about the independence of federal investigations under Mr. Trump. Since Watergate, the Justice Department has largely operated independently of political influence on cases related to the president’s opponents.....

Now that there's no influence to peddle, the Clinton Foundation must soldier on, lest it look like it was an influence-peddling operation.

That's what I think.

I don't know what other people are saying. I found a Daily Caller article, "Experts Question If Clinton Foundation Will Survive." That's about the investigations looking into what the Foundation did during the period, now ended, when donors could gain influence with a Secretary of State and quite possibly the next President. I'm wondering how the Foundation will operate going forward. It can be what it has purported to be, a legitimate and beneficent charity that gives luster to the Clinton legacy. Whether that's what it has been all these years or not — and especially if that's not what it was — that's what it must be now.

FBI Director writes a letter supplementing that letter he wrote 9 days earlier.

He writes:

Since my [letter of October 28th], the FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large volume of emails from a device obtained in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation. During that process we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State.

Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.

I am very grateful to the professionals at the FBI for doing an extraordinary amount of high-quality work in a short period of time.

What does it mean? It at least means that Comey stands by his recommendation that Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted over the way she handled classified information. I can't see that it means Comey thinks he did wrong in sending that letter on October 28th or that there are no ongoing investigations involving Clinton. It says nothing — as far as I can tell — about investigations into the Clinton Foundation or the usefulness of the new email in that regard.

Here's how the NYT puts it:

While the new letter was clear as it related to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey’s message was otherwise vague. He did not say that agents had completed their review of the emails, or that they were abandoning the matter in regard to her aides. But federal law enforcement officials said that they considered the review of emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s server complete, and that Mr. Comey’s letter was intended to convey that. 

The NYT doesn't mention the Clinton Foundation. CBS News gives us this statement from Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus:

"None of this changes the fact that the FBI continues to investigate the Clinton Foundation for corruption involving her tenure as secretary of state.”

"Secret Recordings Fueled FBI Feud in Clinton Probe/Agents thought they had enough material to merit aggressively pursuing investigation into Clinton Foundation."

By Devlin Barrett and Christopher M. Matthews at the WSJ (the link should work).

Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said....

Amid the internal finger-pointing on the Clinton Foundation matter, some have blamed the FBI’s No. 2 official, deputy director Andrew McCabe, claiming he sought to stop agents from pursuing the case this summer. His defenders deny that, and say it was the Justice Department that kept pushing back on the investigation....

Much of the skepticism toward the case came from how it started—with the publication of a book suggesting possible financial misconduct and self-dealing surrounding the Clinton charity. The author of that book, Peter Schweizer—a former speechwriting consultant for President George W. Bush—was interviewed multiple times by FBI agents, people familiar with the matter said....

Will the Weiner email cache revive the investigation of the Clinton Foundation?

I'm reading "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe/Laptop may contain thousands of messages sent to or from Mrs. Clinton’s private server" by Devlin Barrett at The Wall Street Journal. This is the long piece that Drudge is linking right now with the headline — in red — "FBI FOUND 650,000 EMAILS ON LAPTOP/DOJ BLOCKED FOUNDATION PROBE."

It's that second part that interested me the most. The discovery of the Weiner cache — and isn't it huge? — has overshadowed the Podesta emails, which contained what I thought was the October surprise: Chelsea Clinton's alarm over the pay-to-play structure of the Clinton Foundation. I cannot understand why the Clinton Foundation hasn't been a much bigger issue.

And now here's the news* that the Department of Justice blocked the FBI's investigation into the Foundation.

Because I think the NYT is terribly slanted toward helping the Clintons, I read everything with an eye toward getting to normal.

I think: How would the equivalent material be presented in an article about Trump? And then I try to average it out, back to the middle. It's annoying, but it's possibly a good mental exercise, not unlike what I do when I read what I have to read for my job: judicial opinions. I don't have to read The New York Times, but where else am I going to get the news? Everything else is also bad in its own way, and I'm accustomed to the bad that is The New York Times.

This morning what I'm reading is "Chelsea Clinton’s Frustrations and Devotion Shown in Hacked Emails," by Amy Chozick. I assume the damaging material — which would be right up front in a Trump article — begins to appear many paragraphs down. I'm not going to tarry at the mushy beginning. (The first paragraph reads like a children's book: "Chelsea Clinton was alarmed.")

So let's skip ahead:

Though her housecleaning role had Hillary Clinton’s tacit approval (“My mother strongly agreed,” Ms. Clinton said in one email laying out proposed changes at the foundation)....

Ugh! Not far enough! (But let me just say that language-oriented feminists would chide Chozick for that "housecleaning" metaphor.)

Ms. Clinton, 31 at the time, had held various jobs, including positions at McKinsey & Company and Avenue Capital, a hedge fund owned by a major Clinton donor. She had degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Columbia but had not quite found a way to harness all of her academic wherewithal...

Translation: Chelsea was at loose ends, drifting, unable or unwilling to make anything out of her long and very elite education. The word "wherewithal" is particularly silly, especially with the mixed-metaphor verb "harness." "Wherewithal," the noun, is usually a polysyllabic way to say money. The unnecessary reaching for polysyllabic words is an old-fashioned form of humor. H.W. Fowler cautioned against it all the way back in 1908. What is this urge, suddenly, to write like George Eliot or Charles Dickens? They were not bullshitting us. Are you?

And the funny thing is, Chozick sees that Chelsea Clinton is dipping into inane polysyllababble*:

Ms. Clinton often gravitated to weighty policy discussions and interspersed statistics and SAT words into casual conversations.

Hours after the 2012 attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, she mused about the unrest in Egypt and Libya in a late-night email to her mother. “Such anathema to us as Americans — and a painful reminder of how long it took modernism to take root in the U.S., after the Enlightenment, the 14th, 15th, 16th, 19th amendments,” she wrote. “Much to discuss when we talk, hopefully tomorrow?”

In another email addressed to “Dad, Mom,” Ms. Clinton seemed apologetic, writing, “I hope this mini-behemoth is not rife with grammatical errors or inadvertent gaps; I am sorry if either true.”

"SAT words" is putting it kindly. Why would a 31-year-old woman who went to Stanford, Oxford,** and Columbia use words like "anathema" and "behemoth"*** so badly, and why would the only offspring of Bill and Hillary Clinton even feel the need to try to impress her parents in the first place? What did they do to deserve it? Does it have anything to do with why Chelsea was at loose ends so late in her privileged life and why they installed her in their charitable operation?

Now, the meat of the Chozick piece is the "cascade of grievances, gossip and infighting" that the installation of Chelsea unleashed at the foundation:

Ms. Clinton had already started to fret about the intermingling of foundation business with Teneo, the corporate consulting firm co-founded by Douglas J. Band, one of her father’s closest aides. She suggested an audit of the charity and wrote that she was concerned that Teneo’s principals had been “hustling” business at foundation gatherings....

Band fought back with a 13-page memo about all the millions he'd raised for the foundation and Bill Clinton:

“We have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the president and his family — for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like,” Mr. Band wrote.

The subtext was clear: Where Ms. Clinton saw a messy overlapping of business and charity that could haunt both of her parents, Mr. Band saw an ungrateful daughter who was naïve about how what he called “Bill Clinton Inc.” made its money, and how her own expensive lifestyle was funded.

“I just don’t think any of this is right and that we should be treated this way when no one else is, only because CVC has nothing better to do and need justify her existence,” he wrote in one email, using the initials for Chelsea Victoria Clinton. Mr. Band, who had already planned to leave the foundation to focus on Teneo, often expressed frustration at the global charity’s nepotism, pointing to Ms. Clinton’s installing her friends in central roles....

That is buried in the center of Chozick's piece, which proceeds into some fluff about a note "from the Bon Jovis" and Bill Clinton "buying clorox wipes" and Chelsea's feeling "profoundly disturbed" about the Haitian earthquake. Remember the headline: The idea is to leave you with an amorphous, generalized empathy for Chelsea with her frustrations and daughterly devotion.

But the story from the leaked emails is about the inner workings of the Clinton foundation — how the Clintons got rich finagling in a way that Band justified and Chelsea seems to have been able to see was quite wrong.
_____________________________

* I just coined that word, polysyllababble. But Google tells me it has been used twice before in the history of mankind as revealed by the internet, so let's just say I discovered it independently and I'm surprised I'm in a group as small as 3.

** Note that I, unlike Chozick, use the Oxford comma after "Oxford."

*** The Oxford English Dictionary defines "behemoth" as "An animal mentioned in the book of Job; probably the hippopotamus; but also used in modern literature as a general expression for one of the largest and strongest animals."

Is it "a treacherous strategy" for Trump to attack Hillary Clinton over Bill Clinton's sexual misdeeds?

From the NYT piece "How Hillary Clinton Grappled With Bill Clinton’s Infidelity, and His Accusers":

Last week, Donald J. Trump... criticized Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Clinton’s affairs and her response to them and said he might talk more about the issue..."in the final weeks before the election. That could be a treacherous strategy for Mr. Trump, given his own past infidelity and questionable treatment of women. Many voters, particularly women, might see Mrs. Clinton being blamed for her husband’s conduct. It could also remind voters of a searing period in American history, and in Mrs. Clinton’s life....

The NYT, warning Trump that this "could be a treacherous strategy"? That means it's a good strategy, right? The NYT isn't trying to help Trump... although I'm reading the comments over there and they are lambasting the Times for helping Trump.

It seems to me that Hillary Clinton and her supporters have already attacked Trump as much as they can over Trump's "questionable treatment of women." Why shouldn't he throw back what he's got on the Clintons' treatment of women? Trump antagonists will mock him for taking the bait and keeping the focus off things that damage Clinton more, like the email controversy and the Clinton Foundation.

But there's no getting away from gender politics. So the key is to choose your best approach to gender politics. For Trump, it's not attacking Bill for cheating. Bill should be attacked for betraying liberal values relating to sexual harassment in the workplace and sexual violence against women. And Hillary should be attacked not for staying with a man even though he cheated, but for staying with him despite his victimization of women and for participating in that victimization.

But what are the facts? How much did she participate? The NYT says Hillary's involvement in the effort to discredit Bill's accusers in 1992 is "still the subject of debate": "By some accounts, she gave the green light and was a motivating force; by others, her support was no more than tacit assent." Her spokesman says: "Those who took the lead in responding to those attacks at the time have plainly stated that Hillary Clinton did not direct their work."

Does Trump need facts? He seems to get by — if he's getting by — with raising questions, saying what some people say, and observing that we just don't know. He's so careless, reeling out speculative ideas that he can get into trouble. His opponents will pick out the most far-fetched things — "Just wild accusations Hillary Clinton’s cheating on Bill?" That fits the template that's most harmful to Trump: He's a reckless hazard untethered to reality.

"These pressure cooker bombs are terrorism, and it does not matter whether it's home-grown terrorism or foreign terrorism. It's terrorism, Mr. De Blasio."

Says the top-voted comment at the NYT article on the explosion in NYC last night. The article says that "Mayor Bill de Blasio called the explosion... 'an intentional act' but initially said there was no connection to terrorism and no immediate claim of responsibility."

At the end of the article there's some material connected to the presidential election:

Donald J. Trump, in Colorado Springs, rushed to describe the explosion as a bomb well before the authorities had made any determinations about what had happened and while the situation was still in flux.

“I must tell you that just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows exactly what’s going on,” he said. “But boy, we are living in a time — we better get very tough, folks.”

The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was informed of the episode after she gave a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual awards dinner, her campaign said. She seemed to scold Mr. Trump for his quick assessment. “I think it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions,” Mrs. Clinton said.

What "conclusions" did Trump rush to? There was a big explosion and he called it "a bomb." He didn't say it was "terrorism" or what terrorist group he thought it was. He only said "bomb," and, we're told, the authorities hadn't yet "made any determinations" and things were "still in flux." Was that a "conclusion"? He said "nobody knows exactly what’s going on," so where's the conclusion?

It seems as though the NYT and Hillary Clinton are just trying to find something to smack him around about. Who's really stooping here — Trump or the NYT and Hillary Clinton? Trump's remark didn't attack Clinton. It just addressed the immediate event and may have said "bomb" before other things that could cause an explosion were ruled out. Hillary Clinton and the NYT were the ones who rushed to find something to use in a direct attack on their opponent.

Notice how closely Trump's response relates to the way the NYT readers reacted, up-voting the comment I put in the post heading. And here's the second-most-up-voted comment:

NYC must follow what Boston did to capture the criminals and take the pubic into confidence, instead of being more concerned about shaping public opinion before the election like they did with Benghazi.

Meanwhile: "ISIS Supporters Rush To Celebrate NYC Explosion."

“The lions of the Caliphate roar in New York, we cause you pain inside your house, the carrier of the Cross,” wrote one Twitter user who went by the name “I am ISIS, come and block me.” The account was soon suspended. Another, called “The Lone Wolves,” tweeted with the Arabic hashtag #ExplosionManhattanNewYork “Oh God burn America, take revenge in the name of your oppressed slaves and believers’ blood.”

AND: Look at this! Hillary Clinton's remark — the one quoted in the NYT — came along with HER saying it was a bomb!

"I've been briefed about the bombings in New York and New Jersey," she told reporters. 

"Do you have any reaction to Donald Trump immediately ... referring to the explosion as a bomb?" a reporter asked.

"Well I think it's important to know the facts before responding to an incident like this," Clinton said. 

Shame on the NYT!

"The media elites are in a panic. They witnessed the meltdown of their candidate in broad daylight and can feel that shiver up their spine..."

"... except that this time, it is not the delight of victory they are feeling, but the dread of defeat," writes Kenneth R. Timmerman at The Hill.

They watched her spar unsuccessfully over this issue with Clinton Global Initiative member and NBC morning news anchor Matt Lauer during Wednesday night's national security forum, and blamed her poor performance on — Matt Lauer.

The Washington Post is now essentially an arm of the Democratic National Committee. It has done this with deep investigative dive into the penetralia of the Trump empire and no equivalent reporting about the Clinton emails, the Clinton Foundation's corrupt pay-to-play scheme or the nonstop lies from Clinton herself.

All very interesting. Read the whole thing. Timmerman is an out Trump supporter. I'm just going to get distracted by the word "penetralia."

It is a word. Not a coinage. My dictionary — the Oxford English Dictionary — says it's "The innermost parts or recesses of a building; spec. the sanctuary or inner sanctum of a temple. Also fig.: secret parts, mysteries, etc." From the diverse the historical examples:

1876   J. G. Holland Story of Sevenoaks (new ed.) xxiii. 323   They followed the boy into the penetralia of the great office.
1947   B. N. Cardozo Paradoxes Legal Sci. 99   We reach the penetralia of liberty when we throttle the mental life of a group so fundamental.
1994   H. Weinstein Better Man vii. 73   Even since Spock's mind-blowing journey through the vast penetralia of the machine-being V'ger a couple of years earlier.

I just want to say: 1. I hope the boy is okay. 2. I can't find a searchable copy of Cardozo's book, and despite the seeming love of lawyers for Cardozo, I can't find that quote in any case, so I can't tell you what group's penetralia he didn't want to throttle. 3. Nice to see "Star Trek" pop up in this context. And: What a great word! Penetralia. It's like genitalia, but, despite sounding sexier, you can use it in all sorts of contexts, from lofty legal bullshit to pop culture chatter.

Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a "basket of deplorables."

"To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables'. Unfortunately there are people like that, and he has lifted them up."

Half of them. Just half of them. And some, I assume, are good people. (The italicized words should be familiar. If not, here.)

By the way, is a basket of deplorables anything like a binder full of women?

ADDED: Why "basket"? Because of "basket case"? From the (unlinkable) OED, "basket case" originally referred to soldiers in WWI who had lost both arms and both legs. (A 1919 U.S. government bulletin said: "The Surgeon General of the Army... denies... that there is any foundation for the stories that have been circulated... of the existence of ‘basket cases’ in our hospitals.") Later, it had come to be used quite casually to refer to mental breakdown caused by stress, like this, from 1953: "By New Year's, 1935, after three months in the new house, I realized I'd wind up a basket case if I didn't take a vacation."

AND: As long as I'm in the OED, "Deplorable" means "To be deplored or lamented; lamentable, very sad, grievous, miserable, wretched." I've noticed that "sad" is getting used a lot in this year's political discourse. Trump uses it. It's very tweetable, being only 3 characters long. But "deplorable" is a good word for speech. It makes you seem lofty, which is good for looking down on people. To "deplore" is, according to the OED, "To weep for, bewail, lament; to grieve over, regret deeply." But in speech these days, it's used quite casually. You don't really need to be wailing and weeping. It's more just frowning imperiously. That's how I see it.

I did a search of my blog archive for "deplorable." I think I've only called something "deplorable" 3 times in the 12 years of this blog: 1. "resistance to the workings of the criminal trial ," 2. some political attack ads, and 3. the "'wall of text' approach to argumentation."

It's not really one of my words. And I've never used it, even as an adjective, to refer to a person, as in "X is deplorable." Hillary used it as a noun. To call a person "a deplorable" is dehumanizing. We should just be grieving over these people, our fellow Americans.

ALSO:

"If this judge isn't careful, he might determine the course of the election and discredit the judiciary branch..."

"... as the Supreme Court did with its election of Bush even against the popular count. Judges should stay out of the political process and let the people decide how much honesty or bombastery they want."

That's the most-liked of the NYT-picked comments on the NYT article, "Hillary Clinton’s 15,000 New Emails to Get Timetable for Release." The article begins:

The dispute over Hillary Clinton’s email practices now threatens to shadow her for the rest of the presidential campaign after the disclosure on Monday that the F.B.I. collected nearly 15,000 new emails in its investigation of her and a federal judge’s order that the State Department accelerate the documents’ release.

As a result, thousands of emails that Mrs. Clinton did not voluntarily turn over to the State Department last year could be released just weeks before the election in November. The order, by Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court, came the same day a conservative watchdog group separately released hundreds of emails from one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides, Huma Abedin, which put a new focus on the sometimes awkward ties between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department....

That is, the timetable is what it is because Clinton didn't turn over all the email. It's not as though the judge is synchronizing the email with the eve of the election to try to affect it. It's more as though he's endeavoring to get through his work in time to thwart what looks like a scheme of depriving us of material we need until after the election.

And I love the way the opening line of the NYT article is structured to eclipse the human actor: "The dispute over Hillary Clinton’s email practices now threatens to shadow her for the rest of the presidential campaign...."

Is Hillary the person even there? The subject of the sentence is the "dispute." Better watch out for the active and dangerous character called The dispute. It "threatens." What does it threaten to do? To shadow her. The dispute is a creepy stalker! Hillary is there in the sentence. Not where her name is. That's the possessive, modifying "practices," which is what the dispute is about. Hillary the person is there as the "her," the victim of the creepy stalker that is the dispute.

"Included among the Abedin-Band emails is an exchange revealing that when Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain requested a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton..."

"... he was forced to go through the Clinton Foundation for an appointment. Abedin advised Band that when she went through 'normal channels' at State, Clinton declined to meet. After Band intervened, however, the meeting was set up within forty-eight hours. According to the Clinton Foundation website, in 2005, Salman committed to establishing the Crown Prince’s International Scholarship Program (CPISP) for the Clinton Global Initiative. And by 2010, it had contributed $32 million to CGI. The Kingdom of Bahrain reportedly gave between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. And Bahrain Petroleum also gave an additional $25,000 to $50,000."

From "New Abedin Emails Reveal Hillary Clinton State Department Gave Special Access to Top Clinton Foundation Donors."

The NYT goes for balance, with Sunday articles about "Trump's Empire" and the Clinton Foundation.

Let's take a look at that balance. Here's how the articles are stacked up right now on the home page:



Putting the articles together makes an implicit statement that the NYT is applying its investigative powers in a professional journalistic fashion to both candidates and delving into the questions about the nature of their wealth and their financial dealings. Putting the Trump article in larger print and on top conveys the impression that the investigation into him turned up more serious problems.

So does the language used.

The words "Trump's Empire" parallel "Foundation Donor's." It doesn't even say "Clinton Foundation." The name "Clinton" is used in "Clinton's Candidacy," which faces "obstacles." The active characters are the donors, raising obstacles for her candidacy (not even directly for her, but for the abstraction that is her candidacy). See all that distancing? She's essentially the hero of that headline, with a worthy goal and facing obstacles from other characters. Read the finer print too. See how she's the hero? A classic hero is even named: Achilles! And speaking of names, none of the donors are named. You have to click through to find the worrisome list: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei and Algeria.

But Trump has an "empire" — that doesn't sound American — and his empire has "hazy ties" — sounds spurious! — and $650 million in debt. That sounds like a lot of money! No dollar amount is specified in the headline or the squib about the Clinton foundation. The Trump debt is presumably owed to banks as part of a huge, ongoing real estate enterprise, so I don't know what's nefarious about that, but I guess something is "hazy," and it looks like he might have grossly misstated the debt in the federal electing filing, though the use of the word "apparent" — in "nearly twice the amount apparent in his federal election filing" — makes me (a detector of semantic hijinks) suspect semantic hijinks.

So, let's finally click through and see how these 2 stories compare. The one on Hillary is called "Foundation Ties Bedevil Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign." This is by Amy Chozick and Steve Eder.

Where does the NYT put the most important presidential election news story of the day?

I think the story is "Emails Renew Questions About Clinton Foundation and State Dept. Overlap":

A new batch of State Department emails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.

The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Mrs. Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied.

In one email exchange, for instance, an executive at the Clinton Foundation in 2009 sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with the United States ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there....

I knew this story was up, because I'd seen it at Memeorandum, my go-to source for trending news. I expected to find it on the front page at the NYT, but I ended up have to go back to Memeorandum to get the link. So let's examine the front page of the NYT and see what other presidential election news is there. I'll list them in the order that they are conspicuous on the front page. I'm not going to put links on them all.

1. Unsurprisingly, the story presented as the most important one is that Trump said something that can be understood as very bad: "Trump Suggests Gun Owners Could Stop Clinton Agenda." Trump is always saying something, so there's always another story on the worst thing Trump recently said.

2. "Trump’s Support Among Republican Women Is Faltering." There's always another poll, so you can always point out some specific detail in that poll.

3. "Stress Over Money Pushed Clinton Into Corporate World." Finally, we get to something about Clinton, and it relates to the distant past and is not even actually negative, though the second half of the subheading tells us "But she has been accused of going against her principles." The first half of the subheading has already primed us to think of those accusers as jerks: "In an aspirational life on the edges of power, Mrs. Clinton shouldered her family’s financial burdens."

4. "Modest to Majestic: A Look at the Clintons’ Homes." Again, nothing that just happened. Is this mostly a real estate article or some digging down into finances? Okay, I clicked through. It's just the houses they've owned over the years — not including the White House and the Arkansas governor's mansion. But thrown in at the end is something I don't think they own (and that I'd never heard of): "Perched atop the Clinton library... is a tastefully decorated private residence where the Clintons stay when they’re in Little Rock." A penthouse was built on top of Bill's library?!

5. "New Election Podcast: A Landslide Win for Clinton?" Imagining the future.

6. "New Emails Renew Questions About Clinton Foundation." Oh! I finally found it. It is on the front page, just very inconspicuous.

Hillary Clinton has "a comprehensive plan to defeat and destroy ISIS and keep America safe"?

That's the question I asked out loud as I watched Leon Panetta's speech last night.

I found this fact-checking at CBS:

Clinton has been touting her plan for months. It's hardly comprehensive.The three-part strategy, as described in November, involves crushing IS "on its home turf" in the Middle East, disrupting terrorist infrastructure on the ground and online, and protecting America and its allies. All are elements already included in Obama's anti-IS strategy. And none addresses the biggest gaps in the U.S.-led response to the Islamic State over the last two years, such as the lack of effective local troops to defeat IS in Syria. At what point should U.S. ground troops step in? What levels of civilian deaths are acceptable? How exactly does she propose to end Iraq's age-old Shiite-Sunni divisions? She hasn't said. She's expounded further, but mostly to reject suggestions by Trump and other Republicans.

And here's the full text from last November:  "The strategy Clinton outlined hinges on three main elements – defeating ISIS in Syria, Iraq, and across the Middle East; disrupting and dismantling the growing terrorist infrastructure that facilitates the flow of fighters, financing, arms, and propaganda around the world; and hardening our defenses and those of our allies against external and homegrown threats."

"And how can you be a friend, when you take... 10s of millions of dollars, $25 million from one country... when these countries are oppressive to LGBT, when they're oppressive to everybody?"

"How can you be a friend to women, when you take that kind of money from people that enslave women? How can you be a friend?"



ADDED: A chart the first 2 columns of which contain information straight from the Clinton Foundation website:

"Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field..."

"... a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff," ABC News reports.

The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later.

"She's not equipped to be President — in so many different ways."

Said Donald Trump, evoking — right? — among other things, genitalia.

Here's the NYT article on that speech to the NRA: "Donald Trump Tells N.R.A. Hillary Clinton Wants to Let Violent Criminals Go Free." The headline focuses on one of a few issues highlighted in the article:

Donald J. Trump accused Hillary Clinton on Friday of wanting to let violent criminals out of prison and “disarm” law-abiding citizens in unsafe neighborhoods, and warned that women, in particular, would be at greater risk if she were elected president. ... [Trump] said the November election would be a referendum on the Second Amendment....

The Times conspicuously rankles at Trump's daring to believe he can appeal to women, especially with a pro-gun message (though the NRA has made women-specific appeals for a long time):

Mr. Trump, whose record of sexist remarks, among other things, has left him at a potentially crippling disadvantage among female voters, polls show, appealed directly to women in his speech, imbuing his defense of gun rights with an undercurrent of fear.

“In trying to overturn the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton is telling everyone — and every woman living in a dangerous community — that she doesn’t have the right to defend herself,” Mr. Trump said. “So you have a woman living in a community, a rough community, a bad community — sorry, you can’t defend yourself.”

But why does the headline zero in on Hillary's supposed plan to let violent criminals go free? You can see it here — racial politics:

If Mr. Trump’s comments seemed reminiscent of an era when crime rates were far higher — the Willie Horton ads attacking Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, in the 1988 presidential race came to mind — they also appeared somewhat at odds with the broad bipartisan consensus on the need to reduce incarceration rates and prison populations: Mr. Trump sought to frighten voters about the idea of criminals being released from prison....

How irritating that Trump is trying "to frighten voters," just as Hillary is working the other side of the criminal law enforcement issue:

[O]n Saturday, Mrs. Clinton will speak at a dinner of the Trayvon Martin Foundation’s “Circle of Mothers” in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a group offering support to women who have lost a child to gun violence. And she is expected to press the issue to win over voters in Los Angeles, Oakland and other California cities before that state’s primary on June 7.

She's offering support to a group that offers support so that this other group  — those "voters in Los Angeles, Oakland and other California cities" — will offer her support as she continues her quest to defeat the gruff-voiced old socialist who isn't even really trying to win.

It's a hard life for a woman trying her darndest to be the most powerful person in the world — with the help of the most powerful newspaper in the world.

ADDED: "Circle of Mothers"! I was just talking about Hillary, mothers, and circles 2 posts down (in the context of the nonVenn diagrams: "Maybe they're just circles to be pretty. Circles are nice. So round! Here, they enclose words, words and numbers. Numbers can be hard, so soften them with round shapes, round shapes and soft colors, like the colors Mother used to decorate your nursery, Mother, who didn't trouble you too much with numbers but who comforted you with her round, round shapes.").

Trumpquake.

So Reince Priebus was on "Face the Nation." John Dickerson tried to get him to talk about Trump-not-Trump's "John Miller" routine from a quarter century ago, but Reince brushed it off and plugged in his main message: The Earthquake:

[P]eople are comparing Hillary Clinton, a career politician, someone who has made millions of dollars on politics, and a guy who has never run for public office, a business guy, who is a total outsider that is going to cause an earthquake in Washington. That's really the issue that is on the ballot.

I was laughing, because: Which side is he on? Who likes earthquakes? But I guess maybe it's figured out, the people want mass destruction... in Washington. That was the talking point Priebus came to deliver, because he found a way to say it again at the end of the interview:

And when the choice is Hillary Clinton, someone who has made a career of lying and skirting the issues, and you look at the e-mails, the Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, and a guy who has never run for office and might have some stories out there that may make some interesting news, I think, in the end, people are going to choose the person that is going to cause an earthquake in Washington and get something done over Hillary Clinton.

When it was panel time on FTN, John Dickerson brought up the Trumpquake:

DICKERSON: What if it's just, we -- you know, we are so fed up with Washington that -- and Reince Priebus used the word "earthquake," you know, that -- that they want the earthquake. And forget positions, smitions, we want the earthquake, and that's Donald Trump.

[CBS News political analyst Jamelle] BOUIE: I mean I think that might be true in the Republican Party. I'm just not sure how true it is in the Democratic Party... [T]he heat of a primary has sort of created the perception in the Democratic Party that there are these steep divisions and no doubt I think there are generational divisions in the Democratic Party that Sanders has revealed and may play themselves out in various ways going forward. But in terms of the presidential race, I tend to think that there really isn't that much disunity in the Democratic Party... And I don't think -- given that the Democratic Party is almost like, you know, it's close to majority non-white, I just do not think that Trump is the earthquake that anyone in the Democratic Party is looking for.

That's a lot of blah blah from Bouie, like he thought we wouldn't notice when he switched from asserting that Democrats don't want an earthquake to Democrats might want a different earthquake. Know your quakes. There's the Trumpquake and the Berniequake. To those who want to be counted out when you talk about destruction, "earthquake" sounds like undifferentiated chaos, but to the earthquake connoisseur, there are distinctions.