A recent flurry of leaks by FBI sources to the media about ongoing investigations related to Hillary Clinton has raised questions about whether bureau personnel are trying to meddle in the presidential race less than one week before the election.

A current FBI agent, speaking to The Guardian in a story published Thursday, perhaps put it most bluntly.

Clinton is "the Antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel," they said. "The reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump."

Over the past week, unnamed FBI sources have leaked details about the battles both within the agency and between the FBI and the Justice Department over whether FBI Director James Comey should have recommended that Clinton be indicted for using a private email server amid the investigation into whether she mishandled classified information.
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The election is just five days away, and something truly frightening is happening, something with far-reaching implications for the immediate future of American politics. Republicans, led by Donald Trump but by no means limited to him, are engaging in kind of termite-level assault on American democracy, one that looks on the surface as though it’s just aimed at Hillary Clinton, but in fact is undermining our entire system.

I know, my conservative friends will say that this kind of talk is just fear-mongering and exaggeration. But there is something deeply troubling happening right now, and it goes beyond the ordinary trading of blows in a campaign season. Consider these recent developments:

[font size="6"].[/font] There appears to be a war going on inside the FBI, and from what we can tell, a group of rogue agents, mostly in New York, may be in such a fervor to destroy Hillary Clinton that they may be aggressively leaking damaging innuendo to the press against her in the waning days of the campaign. They succeeded in their apparent goal of making FBI director James Comey a tool of their campaign — and the basis for their investigation is an anti-Clinton book written under the auspices of an organization of which the CEO of the Trump campaign is co-founder and chairman. Pro-Trump FBI agents now seem to be coordinating with Trump surrogates to do maximal possible damage to Clinton.

[font size="6"].[/font] Republicans continue to cheer the fact that the electronic systems of American political groups were illegally hacked, and then private communications were selectively released in order to do damage to one side in this election. The Republican nominee has explicitly asked a hostile foreign power to hack into his opponent’s electronic systems.

[font size="6"].[/font] High-ranking Republican officeholders are now suggesting that they may impeach Clinton as soon as she takes office. These are not just backbench nutbars of the Louie Gohmert variety, but people with genuine power, including Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin, Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and veteran legislators like James Sensenbrenner and Peter King. The message is being echoed by top Trump surrogates like Rudy Giuliani.

[font size="6"].[/font] There is a growing movement among Republicans in the Senate to simply refuse to approve any nominee appointed by a Democratic president to the Supreme Court, leaving open any and all vacancies until a Republican can be elected to fill them.

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As Election Day nears, anonymous "sources" in the FBI has been steadily supplying reporters with claims that this or that Clinton-related investigation is a very big deal while investigations into Trump are, by golly, just not turning anything interesting up.

But when an FBI Twitter account suddenly sprung to life to reinforce that same narrative directly under the auspices of the bureau, that was too much. And now the FBI is investigating itself.

The account at issue, @FBIRecordsVault, had been dormant for more than a year. Then on October 30 at 4 a.m., the account released a flood of documents, including one describing Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump as a “philanthropist.”

But it wasn’t until two days later, when the account tweeted documents regarding President Bill Clinton’s controversial pardon of Marc Rich, that the account began to attract significant attention.

The account has not been active since that tweet.

The FBI had previously claimed the three days of tweets after a year of bupkis was just following "standard procedure"; now the bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility is confirming they have referred it for "investigation."

So there's been no explanation of why the Twitter account sat unused until a week before the election and became dormant again immediately after tweeting documents about the William J. Clinton Foundation, but they'll presumably be, you know, investigating that. Any bets on whether the results of that investigation will leak?

I know I’m not the first to notice this, but Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin.

There has always been a sympathetic authoritarian chord between the Republican presidential nominee and the Russian president. Both are on record as admiring The Strong Leader. They’ve even complimented one another on the trait. Putin could have been humming along when Trump was claiming “I alone can fix it” during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Maybe he was.

Each seems to have a pretty conspiratorial view of the world, too. Putin comes by his naturally. He’s a product of a KGB Marxist philosophy where “the other” — any other — is reflexively identified as hostile and created by immutable forces of history, something to be feared and ultimately crushed.

Trump seems to view business a bit that way. At least I don’t recall a lot of win-win vocabulary when he touts his deal-making skills.
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Billionaire Mark Cuban completely deflated Fox’s Neil Cavuto on Tuesday afternoon after the business news host complained about the speaking fees received by former President Bill Clinton that went to the Clinton Foundation.

After Cavuto questioned Clinton receiving $250,000 for a speech, Cuban set him straight about what the market pays for ex-presidents..

“Look. You have to ask yourself what’s the market for a former president giving a speech, right?” he lectured. “So first of all, Ronald Reagan was paid more than a million dollars for speeches in 1989. He went to Japan and gave two speeches. Second of all, Bill Clinton made, I think it was $250K give or take, for a lot of speeches. I’ve made $250K for a bunch of speeches. For the most part, he gets paid a little more than I do, but the point is he was right inside the market. He wasn’t getting paid more or less than the market.”

When Cavuto attempted to make the case that Clinton received the money — that actually went to the Clinton Foundation — as part of a “pay for play” scheme, Cuban knocked that down too.

“In order to determine if there is any quid pro quo, there’s go to be some money destined for the trade-off,” Cuban said, before interrupting Cavuto’s claim that it looks suspicious, saying, “But Neil, they’ve been investigated more than anybody.”

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ASHEBORO, N.C., Nov 3 (Reuters) - When Bill McAnulty, an elections board chairman in a mostly white North Carolina county, agreed in July to open a Sunday voting site where black church members could cast ballots after services, the reaction was swift: he was labeled a traitor by his fellow Republicans.

“I became a villain, quite frankly,” recalled McAnulty at a state board of elections meeting in September that had been called to resolve disputes over early voting plans. “I got accused of being a traitor and everything else by the Republican Party,” McAnulty said.

Following the blowback from Republicans, McAnulty later withdrew his support for the Sunday site.

In an interview with Reuters, he said he ultimately ruled against opening the Sunday voting site in Randolph County because he had “made a mistake in reading the wishes of the voters.” He declined to discuss the episode further.
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