The response came only a few hours later in an email from Wade Boese, chief of staff for an undersecretary of state: “The true answer is simply that S staff ( Cheryl Mills) added him,” Mr. Boese wrote. “Raj was not on the list sent to S; he was added at their insistence.”
Tesla Autopilot Crashes
I got to drive a Tesla once. It was cool. Like driving one of the HO slot cars I had as a kid.
But I think I’d be queasy about letting the car drive itself. There are those who say it’s a great innovation. Like speed control on steroids. But the car can kill.
Tesla Autopilot Crashes
The WSJ reports Tesla is being investigated by the SEC for not informing shareholders of a fatal crash involving its autopilot system.
Update:
Daily Beast says Tesla is misleading about autopilot safety. If you don’t brake it’s your fault because your weren’t paying attention. If you do brake it’s your fault because you were driving.
Holman Jenkins says the autopilot feature has been around since 1995. It’s basically cruise control and the driver still has to pay attention.
Dallas PD De-Escalation
I noticed while watching on TV that the Dallas Police weren’t wearing riot gear during the Black Lives demonstration. And the atmosphere seemed peaceful – almost friendly in some cases. The Dallas PD calls it De-Escalation.
De-Escalation
The department wanted more transparency. It published a spreadsheet showing 10 years of incidents resulting in injury or death to suspects in custody. BuzzFeed reports claims of excessive force dropped 64% between 2009 and 2014.
The department’s tactics for covering protests reflected its community policing focus. “You have a community that is upset, that feels wronged. It’s important to establish trust with them,” Maj. Max Geron told the Washington Post. “The ideal police response to a protest is no response at all.”
And so on Thursday night, the officers around the protest wore normal uniforms, without helmets or heavy vests.
Vox shows officers posing for pictures with protestors on the police department Twitter feed.
Above the Law
Are some people above the law?
FBI Director Comey told Congress that Hillary was “extremely careless” and “negligent.” He said she lied about classified information on her private server (but not to the FBI). And he said her lawyers wiped emails from her server. Then he let her off the hook.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, uninfluenced by her surprise meeting with Bill Clinton, proclaimed the case closed.
Above The Law
Paul Mirengoff at Powerline thinks Comey was protecting the will of the people. Democratic voters didn’t care about her emails when they nominated her for president.
But Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan says, “Americans’ trust in their government is at an all-time low.”
Considering police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, followed by the murder of five police officers in Dallas, Congressman Jordan might have a point.
Hillary 7 Vast Right Wing Conspiracy 0
Here’s a Hillary Clinton scandal primer courtesy of The Atlantic.
Speaking of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I haven’t used this punchline in a while.
This is Attorney General Edwin Meese in 1988.
Here’s Todd Purdum in Politico:
Twenty years after the New York Times columnist William Safire first called Clinton “a congenital liar” in print, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus could still rouse his convention delegates in Cleveland with an unyielding refrain about the emails. “She lied,” Priebus cried. “And she lied over and over and over. She lied! She lied!”
Now it’s Personal
I got the idea for this from a Bloomberg article about a deposition by Hillary aide Huma Abedin.
Huma testified to Judicial Watch lawyers that she advised Hillary to get on the State Department email server. The reason being some of her important messages were ending up in spam files.
Hillary rejected that advice because she didn’t want to “risk the personal being accessible.”
Abedin testified that “the personal” referred to non-government messages Clinton was also exchanging via the e-mail address rather than any improper treatment of government records.
Now It’s Personal
Kimberly Strassel reported in the WSJ that Hillary’s personal emails weren’t all about Chelsea’s wedding plans, her mother’s funeral, or yoga. Some were about a Chicago Securities trader named Rajiv K. Fernando. He landed on the International Security Advisory Board. The board has “the ability to access the nation’s most sensitive intelligence.” Nobody knew how Fernando got there:
Mr. Fernando had no background that would have qualified him to sit on the ISAB alongside the likes of former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Defense Secretary William Perry, a United Nations chief weapons inspector, members of Congress, and nuclear scientists. That Mr. Fernando didn’t belong was apparent. “We had no idea who he was,” one board member told ABC News. So how exactly did he get there?
We now finally know, thanks to State Department internal emails that the government was forced to turn over to the watchdog group Citizens United. And thanks to ABC News, which began digging into Mr. Fernando’s bizarre appointment when it first happened.
In August 2011, ABC requested a copy of Mr. Fernando’s resume from the State Department. This, the internal emails show, sent a press aide reeling to find answers to how a trader had ended up on the ISAB. Even the aide noted that it was “natural to ask how he got onto the board when compared to the rest of the esteemed list of members.”
