House Speaker John Boehner is expected to announce this week a new investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices as Secretary of State, including her admission that more than 31,000 emails were destroyed because she determined them to be personal, top House Republicans told ABC News today.

During a news conference last week, Clinton did not go into the details of how the review of her email was conducted, but said it was “thorough” and that she went “above and beyond” what she was required to do in turning over many of her emails to the State Department.

Via YouGov:

None of what you said made any sense. Keeping a single account mingling business and personal with your own server wasn’t about “convenience.” It was about expedience. You became judge and jury on what’s relevant because you didn’t want to leave digital fingerprints for others to retrace. You could have had Huma carry two devices if you really couldn’t hoist an extra few ounces. You insisted on piggybacking on Bill’s server, even though his aides were worried about hackers, because you were gaming the system for 2016. (Or even 2012.)…

Instead of raising us up by behaving like exemplary, sterling people, you bring us down to your own level, a place of blurred lines and fungible ethics and sleazy associates. Your family’s foundation gobbles tens of millions from Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes, whose unspoken message is: “We’re going to give you money to go improve the world. Now leave us alone to go persecute women.”

That’s an uncomfortable echo of a Clintonian trade-off, which goes: “We’re going to give you the first woman president who will improve the country. Now leave us alone to break any rules we please.”

Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett leaked to the press details of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail address during her time as secretary of state, sources tell me…

In addition, at Jarrett’s behest, the State Department was ordered to launch a series of investigations into Hillary’s conduct at Foggy Bottom, including the use of her expense account, the disbursement of funds, her contact with foreign leaders and her possible collusion with the Clinton Foundation.

Six separate probes into Hillary’s performance have been ­going on at the State Department. I’m told that the e-mail scandal was timed to come out just as Hillary was on the verge of formally announcing that she was running for president — and that there’s more to come…

“Obama and Valerie Jarrett will go to any lengths to prevent Hillary from becoming president,” a source close to the White House told me. “They believe that Hillary, like her husband, is left of center, not a true-blue liberal.”

It was hard not to think of this status report on the condition of women in the twenty-first century while Hillary Clinton stepped into the lights before an agitated crowd of reporters at the U.N. last Tuesday. A large tapestry of “Guernica” hung behind her, and she looked no happier in that setting than the tormented figures in Picasso’s image of civil war. And yet contrition was not in her plans. Instead, she chose a familiar course, offering explanations that were by turns petulant and pretzelled. Asked about the way she chose to deal with federal guidelines on e-mail when she was the Secretary of State, she said, “I opted for convenience.” Clinton’s further explanations were so familiar, such a ride in the Wayback Machine, that you had to wonder, Why do I suddenly feel twenty years younger yet thoroughly exhausted?…

At that moment at the U.N., she should have been returning to those feminist themes, but she used the opportunity to claim that she was only trying to protect the sanctity of her communications about her “yoga routines,” her daughter’s wedding, and her mother’s funeral. This was a notably transparent exploitation of gender. It’s one thing for a politician to be stupid; it is quite another for her to assume that we are.

Rightie pundits are going on about government-issue Blackberries, insecure servers, federal record-keeping, the law, national security, peripheral stuff like that. Leftie pundits are saying: yawn, nobody cares, it’s never gonna catch fire, give it up. Everyone implicitly agrees that Hillary did something she shouldn’t and that her justification for doing so is ridiculous. The only disagreement is whether it makes any difference…

Let’s take The Hill’s chap at his word: “Gender” will trump whatever stiff the Republican primary season throws up. In that case, why not run a woman who isn’t quite so bloody awful at running? Someone younger, someone whose principal selling point isn’t her husband’s surname, someone with actual accomplishments and a political philosophy? She doesn’t have to be that much younger, or accomplished. Elizabeth Warren is two years younger than Hillary, and her principal accomplishments are TARP and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, neither of which is my cup of tea. But that’s two more accomplishments than Secretary Clinton can claim. And okay, she’s not the most riveting public speaker, but she’s Tom Jones at Vegas next to a speak-your-weight machine in a pantsuit. And yes, Senator Fauxcahontas Crockagewea Warren’s got her own scandal – in that she got hired as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color” on the basis of a dubious claim to be one thirty-second Cherokee and having contributed Cole Porter and the Duchess of Windsor’s favorite crab dish from an upscale Manhattan restaurant to a cookbook of authentic tribal recipes…

As I said, Senator Warren is a mere two years younger than Secretary Clinton, which means, if she’s ever going to run for president, it has to be now. Why not go for it? Wouldn’t Democrats like to elect a real first female head of government like Thatcher or Merkel or Golda Meir or all those Scandinavians? Why should all those Americans itching to cast that “historic vote” have to have it tainted and thrown away on dynastic succession? How “historic” can your vote really be when, insofar as Hillary’s “running” at all, she’s running as if she’s already won and she’s just running out the clock till the coronation? Are Democrat women so cowed and subservient they’re just going to have the House of Saud’s candidate shoved down their throats and meekly be driven to the polls in theirs burqas by Lanny Davis?

The fact that Team Clinton is relying on the old rat squad once again is vastly more significant than most commentators have suggested. Yes, yes, it’s bad politics. A candidate looking to offer a fresh face forward, figuratively speaking, has no choice but to keep his or her own face (John Kerry notwithstanding). But she surely has plenty of options for who she picks to represent her in public. Mrs. Clinton has millions and millions of dollars at her disposal. She has people placed at the highest reaches of the government and the media. There are over 200 people working, formally or informally, for her as policy advisors already. And yet she chooses to get the old band back together instead.

Why? There are many possible answers, but the only plausible one is that a Clinton only trusts Clinton loyalists. This fits everything we know about the Clintons. And it speaks volumes about the thickness of her bubble.

But it also speaks even louder about what kind of president she would be. If you want to know what Hillary Clinton would be like as president, you’re seeing it right now. There is no other Hillary. This is her.…

When someone asks, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a female president?” the correct answer, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to be sure, is “Yes.”

When asked, “Wouldn’t it be great to have Hillary Clinton as president?” The correct answer, again with varying degrees of enthusiasm, is “Oh, dear God, no. No, no, no. No.”

Like Nixon at his lowest, she must be asking herself — or will be asking herself soon enough — “What was it for?” The lies? The endless public humiliations? The cruelty to women? The edifice of deceit that is the only real monument to what the name “Clinton” stands for? Nixon, the best efforts of his admirers notwithstanding, is remembered mainly as the one thing he insisted he was not — a crook — largely repudiated by the very same conservative movement that once embraced him, his face familiar outside that movement mostly as a grotesque latex mask. Nixon was — and is — a monster, in the ancient sense of that word: a warning, an omen.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a monster for our times…

Following the health-care debacle, she abandoned any ambition of securing the sort of radical change she once embraced. Since then, it has been all politics — all calculation. And she is not a very good politician or calculator, as Barack Obama could tell you with a self-satisfied smirk…

Those addicted to political power do not usually wind up living in the streets, but they suffer a parallel dehumanizing abasement: There is nothing left in them, in their minds or their souls, that transcends the pursuit of political power itself. As with de Sade’s protagonists or the defeated drug addict, the relentless process of subtraction from the human sum has left only a single exotic appetite.

The Democratic Party has pool of campaign managerial talent, an enormous base of donors, and the sympathy of the media that are consumed by persuadable voters. I think the current Democratic coalition is vulnerable to splintering from both its left and center, but I don’t think that will happen in the 2016 presidential race. The vast majority of Democratic primary voters are not going to be looking to symbolically repudiate Obama through their choice of nominee – especially if the labor market holds up. While there might be some minor variations on policy, the 2016 Democratic nominee (whether it is Clinton or someone else) will end up favoring pretty much whatever Obama favors.

Virtually any Democratic presidential nominee would have those advantages. The challenge for a Democratic presidential candidate is not so much mobilizing those advantages once they get the nomination, but getting the nomination itself. The obstacle to a contested Democratic nomination is less the absence of a Democratic bench, than the presence of Clinton and her advantages in name recognition and institutional support.

While any non-Clinton Democratic candidate would have their own weaknesses (as every candidate has weaknesses), they would not carry the burden of Clinton’s contempt for the rules, her obnoxious and geriatric press agents, and her obviously self-interested hunger for power.

Delivering the Weekly Republican Address, Rep. Susan Brooks (R-IN) discusses the work of the House select committee investigating the Benghazi terrorist attacks that took the lives of four brave Americans on Sept. 11, 2012. 

It was the committee’s oversight, Brooks notes, that led to the discovery that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used personal e-mail for official State Department business.   Brooks calls on Secretary Clinton to turn over her personal server to an independent arbiter who can determine which of her e-mails should be made public.  “By handing her server over to a neutral, third-party arbiter,” Brooks says, “Secretary Clinton can help us move forward with figuring out what happened to our people.”

“There are lots of ways to motivate people in life, Chris. One is public pressure. If it becomes an issue for her, if the public believes it is reasonable for her to turn over that server which contains public information to a neutral, detached orbitor, retired judge or archivist or inspector general, then she’ll be forced to do so. Otherwise, the House as an institution, may be forced to go to court to try to get access to that. But again, the house has no business looking at purely personal e-mails, but by the same token, she doesn’t get to decide what is purely personal and what is public,” he added.