Among all the 2016 hopefuls, Ted Cruz was the recipient of the most defense-industry dollars, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Cruz received a total of $343,000, followed—perhaps surprisingly—by Bernie Sanders with $323,000, and then Hillary Clinton with more than $273,000.
Sanders’s place at the top of the Democratic heap in terms of defense-sector support may seem odd for a man who attacked Clinton’s support for overseas military interventions. But it’s not so strange at all when one considers that the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—the most expensive aircraft in U.S. history, and more than a decade overdue—underwent development in Sanders’s home state of Vermont.
.. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have PACs that rank among the wealthiest in the industry. Lockheed’s PAC, which spread around over $1.6 million for federal candidates this spring, had given $10,000 to Cruz by the end of March. Northrop Grumman’s PAC, on the other hand, gave all of its $1.5 million as of March to House and Senate candidates—mostly Republicans.
.. Clinton has a candidate profile that seems like an especially good fit for military industries.
.. ABC’s Martha Raddatz, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said of Clinton, with classic understatement, “I think that she probably would be somewhat more hawkish than President Obama.”
.. As Landler’s story makes clear, Clinton has had an unusually accommodating relationship with generals and top civilian brass. She has always been portrayed as a sympathetic partner, an enabler-in-waiting. To the wider national-security establishment, she is clearly “of the body.”
.. The defense industry is in fact a relatively marginal player in the presidential contest, at least from what the visible paper trail shows. Hillary Clinton is far more reliant on resources from the securities and investment industry. The war machine doesn’t even crack her top-20 list of contributors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
.. That’s because the defense sector spends its money elsewhere. By putting their cash into Congress, defense industries can elect and influence legislators who will remain in Washington far longer than any president. Congress is where the action is ..
.. “Defense contractors have enormous influence in shaping the secretary of defense’s decisions, but if the secretary happens to do something that displeases the industry, they will get Congress to undo that too, taking advantage of the broad leverage the companies have bought by spreading subcontracts across 48 states, by contributing generously to key committee congressmen, and by unleashing armies of lobbyists and paid-for think-tank pundits.”
.. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, comes in third on the list, with $265,450 as of this writing. The next Republican after him is a top F-35 proponent, Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), chairman of the HASC Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, who raked in $181,950. He’s followed by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), chair of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, with $166,700.
.. but critics warn of tricky accounting: the House Appropriations plan uses wartime contingency funds to get around funding caps for baseline budgeting.
.. the big fight in 2017 will be getting rid of those spending caps, which were put into place under the Budget Control Act (BCA), the “sequester” of 2011.
.. “The F-35 is in 46 different states and 350 districts,” Smithburger says. “That is a lot of political support for one program.”
.. Even when the Department of Defense asks for something else, lawmakers in the pocket of contractors make sure the companies’ pet projects are funded anyway. And the corruption is getting worse.
.. Because of this entrenchment, little will change next year no matter who wins the White House, says Dan Grazier.
The Big News About What We Already Knew
The longest-running investigation was conducted by John Chilcot, a retired British civil servant, who took 2.6 million words to report that Prime Minister Tony Blair helped President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney mislead their countries into a war with Iraq in 2003 that was one of the most damaging blunders in history.
Chilcot said the intelligence on Iraq was wrong, that diplomatic and military preparations were bungled, that dissenting voices were stifled, and that Blair blindly followed Bush’s lead.
On July 28, 2002, Blair sent Bush a note that read, “I will be with you, whatever.” He actually thought giving Bush a blank check was a good idea?
.. Here is what it showed us about Clinton: She has an elevated sense of entitlement, even for a politician, that would be the envy of any hipster millennial. She is self-protective to the point of paranoia. And she is tone-deaf about her public image.
If there are Americans who didn’t know these things already, they had to have been vacationing in Antarctica for the last 25 years.
.. The vast majority of the sensitive information in the Clinton emails was not marked as classified. And it has been widely reported that a lot of it was about Obama’s killing-by-drone operation, which Obama should never have kept secret for so long.
.. The lack of security notations on those emails was no excuse, as Comey rightly pointed out. And it makes Clinton’s insistence that she didn’t use the servers for classified information seem too cute by half.
But too cute by half is a Clinton trademark. You have to wonder if anyone on her team has the authority, or courage, to tell her when she is doing something that she will later regret.
.. Clinton has never adequately explained her decision to use a private email server, but we can guess that it had to do with her insecurity, her belief that Republicans are out to get her (they are) and her lack of skill at managing her public relations.
.. That lack of judgment about herself, about how people perceive her, is perhaps her greatest weakness as a candidate.
Hillary’s Banana Republic
Rarely have 30 minutes of television so perfectly encapsulated the decline and fall of the rule of law and the extraordinary privileges enjoyed by America’s liberal elite. After listing abuse after abuse — and detailing lie after lie — Comey declared that “no reasonable prosecutor” would prosecute Hillary for her obvious and manifest crimes. It’s good to be a Clinton.
.. But rules and standards are for the little people. The FBI demolished every Clinton excuse and blew apart every Clinton lie, but soon she might well walk into rooms serenaded to the sweet sounds of “Hail to the Chief.” To paraphrase the words of Benjamin Franklin, we’ve got a banana republic, if Hillary can keep it.
Criminal charges against Clinton could have set new legal standard
Extreme carelessness isn’t criminal, at least when it comes to handling classified information.
That’s the consensus of experts in national security law, who weren’t surprised that the FBI isn’t recommending an indictment for Hillary Clinton and her staff related to her use of a private email server, saying such a move would have set a bold new standard for such cases.
Story Continued Below“It would have been a real long-shot to shoehorn Secretary Clinton’s conduct into the existing federal criminal laws,” said Stephen Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law. “I don’t think this was the case in which to pursue unprecedented interpretations of those statutes.”