Hillary Clinton ties to Russiagate and other commentary

Scandal watch: Hillary Ties to Russiagate?

Indictments and new court filings “indicate that Special Counsel John Durham is investigating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for feeding false reports to the FBI” to paint Donald Trump & Co. as Kremlin agents, reports Paul Sperry at RealClear Investigations. “Clinton’s role” in the Russia hoax “remains elusive”: “What did she know and when did she know it?” Documents, video footage and comments by key officials now suggest possible links between an operation to damage Trump and top Team Clinton officials, including Clinton herself. “How credible is it to suppose that Hillary herself wasn’t in the know,” one ex-FBI agent asks. With each new indictment, warns Sperry, Clinton moves “closer to the center” of the scandal.

From the left: Pandemic Censors’ Follies

TK News’ Matt Taibbi takes on a new attack on Substack, for letting “vaccine-skeptic” writers earn big bucks. Substack, meanwhile, hosts “tens of thousands of writers” (including Taibbi), a diversity “like the Internet as a whole.” Indeed, “The company’s real crime is that it refuses to submit to pressure campaigns and strike off Wrongthinkers.” And: “The most dangerous misinformation is always, without exception, official.” During COVID, “the FDA, CDC, the NIH, as well as the White House (both under Biden and Trump) have all been untruthful, or wrong, or inconsistent, about a spectacular range of issues” from masks to lockdowns to school closures. And this “two-year clown show of lies and shifting positions by officials and media scolds has created a groundswell of mistrust that’s a far bigger threat to public health than a handful of Substack writers.” Plus, “If you wipe out critics, people will immediately default to higher levels of suspicion.”

Libertarian: Schools Fail With $30K a Year Per Kid

“When I hear the phrase the underfunding of schools, my head explodes,” gripes Reason’s Nick Gillespie: It’s a “demonstrably false idea that schools are being starved for resources.” Case in point: “In New York, where I live, real per-pupil revenue has increased by a mind-boggling 68 percent between 2002 and 2019. Public schools in the Empire State are now shelling out more than $30,000 per kid.” Yet these “public schools are still as terrible as the Mets, the Jets, and the Giants, with only a third or fewer of students up to grade level in eighth grade reading and math.” Fact is, “$30,000 a year puts the lie to the argument pushed by unions and progressives that more money will fix schools.”

Court beat: Biden’s SCOTUS Pledge vs. Reagan’s

“With the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, President Joe Biden was immediately challenged by Democrats to make good on his pledge to only consider black females for his first vacancy on the Court,” observes Fox News’ Jonathan Turley. “When he made that pledge, some of us raised concerns that he was adopting a threshold racial and gender qualification for the Court.” But liberal commentators now “insist that Biden did exactly what Reagan did in 1980 when he pledged to appoint a woman to the Court.” But Reagan “never pledged to only consider women and in fact considered non-female candidates.” Biden is “categorically ruling out non-female and non-black applicants.”

Pandemic journal: Joe’s Oblivious Omicron Rx

“Scolding the unvaccinated left” left President Biden “unprepared for Omicron,” charges David Gortler at Newsweek. The prez “adopted a strategy of scaring Americans into getting vaccinations and boosters” and “vastly overstated the COVID vaccines’ ability to keep most everyone from getting the virus.” But case numbers show “vaccines and boosters did little if anything to slow the spread of Omicron.” Even Biden’s own agencies note the vaxxed and unvaxxed alike can spread the variant. “Despite these findings, the president has continued to scold and belittle Americans who have chosen not to take a vaccine or booster” rather than release “evidence-based public-health recommendations” that might have actually helped control the spread.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board