The Hillary Step:As the House mounts its impeachment inquiry into President Trump, the State Department is investigation the missing emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that were an issue in the 2016 election.

  They’re going at it by investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Clinton’s private email. The Washington Postreports that as many as 130 people have been contacted in recent weeks. The paper says those contacted have been told that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and are now potential security violations. 

  The State Department says the investigation began late in the Obama administration and it’s taken this long to review millions of emails.

  Clinton’s defenders say this is another effort by President Trump to use the power of government against his political enemies.

  Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have bought into the theory … so far just a conspiracy theory … that it was Ukraine not Russia that hacked Democratic emails in 2016 and that Ukraine might even have a copy of Clinton’s missing server content.

The Roy Cohn Defense:President Trump’s classic defense technique is to accuse his accusers. After demanding that Ukraine investigate his political rival Joe Biden — a potentially impeachable offense — Trump claimed in a video released over the weekend that it is Democrats talking about impeaching him who are a threat to American Democracy.

  “What’s going on now is the single greatest scam in the history of American politics,” Trump says on the video.

  He goes on, “The Democrats want to take away your guns, they want to take away your healthcare, they want to take away your vote, they want to take away your freedom, they want to take away your judges. They want to take away everything.”

   Trump is presenting himself as the only source of truth and defender of liberty. He says on his video, “Our country is at stake like never before. They’re trying to stop me because I’m fighting for you, and I’ll never let that happen.”

  Trump’s own campaign is turning things on their head claiming he’s the real hero. They tweeted, “Getting to the bottom of a corruption scandal in Ukraine is in the American national interest. The President of the United States is the real whistleblower!”

No Bill:The man wo was Ukraine’s chief prosecutor until August told that BBC that, contrary to what President Trump claims, there is no reason to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Yuri Lutsenko said, “I don’t know any reason to investigate Joe Biden or Hunter Biden according to Ukrainian law.” 

 The Man With Vanity Plates:The impeachment argument has made for some great writing on both side of the issue.

  Editor Graydon Carter writes for his online magazine Air Mailthat,“Donald Trump was just a third-tier New York builder with vanity plates and a knack for self-publicity. If he was a threat, he was a small-scale one, a danger mostly to the city’s skyline—and, as it turns out, to the female population. As the leader of the United States, he’s a danger to much of what our country stands for: fairness, compassion, reason, and the rule of law. Given the powers granted him by dint of his current position, he is most certainly a real and present danger to the entire world.”

  NY Timescolumnist David Brooks argues against impeachment. Only losing the next election badly will kill Trumpism in the Republican Party, Brooks says. 

He says most Americans don’t want it and impeaching the President might only strengthen him if he’s not removed from office. 

  “This could embed Trumpism within the GOP,” Brooks writes. “If Trump suffers a withering loss in a straight-up election campaign, then his populist tendency might shrink and mainstream Republicans might regain primacy. An election defeat would mean the people don’t like Trumpism. But the impeachment process reinforces the core Trumpist deep-state message: The liberal elites screw people like us.” 

  Also for the Times, Ross Douthat writes that, “If Trump survives impeachment and somehow gets re-elected, there will be no after Trump, not yet and not for four long years. Instead Trump will bestride his party like a decaying colossus, and his administration’s accelerative deterioration will be the GOP’s as well.”

Easy Booking: Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign aides have written to the television networks asking them to stop booking and interviewing President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. They say the networks are just giving Giuliani a platform to spread Trump disinformation.

  “While you often fact check his statements in real time during your discussions, that is no longer enough,” says the letter from top aides Anita Dunn and Kate Bedingfield.“By giving him your air time, you are allowing him to introduce increasingly unhinged, unfounded and desperate lies into the national conversation.” 

The Bulletin Board:The CVS pharmacy chain has become the latest to suspend sales of the heartburn drug Zantac because of its links to cancer. — The golden leaves are still on the trees, but parts of Montana got two to four feet of snow over the weekend. — In the college admissions scandal, the College Board has decided to allow the daughter of actors Felicity Huffman and William Macy to re-take the SATs. He mother got caught paying to have her daughter’s answers corrected on her original tests. The College Board says there’s no evidence that Sophia Macy knew what Huffman had done. — The young people’s disposable-fashion chain Forever 21 has filed for bankruptcy, becoming disposable itself.

The Obit Page:Joseph Wilson, the former diplomat who countered President George HW Bush’s claim that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear bomb, resulting in the administration vengefully unmasking Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, has died at age 69.

  Wilson forced the Bush administration to admit they based the Iraq War on faulty intelligence, if not an outright fabrication. Wilson said in a 2003 opinion piece in The NY Timesthat, “If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.”

  Wilson’s wife was revealed as a CIA agent by Bush aide Scooter Libby, who was convicted of obstruction and perjury, becoming one the one of the highest White House aides ever convicted of a crime.

  Wilson and Plame, now 56, recently divorced. She’s running for Congress as a Democrat in New Mexico.

It’s Pat:In the new world of gender fluidity, the Mattel toy company has released a series of dolls that’s a boy, a girl, neither, or whatever your kid wants it to be.

  Whatever it is, it’s not Barbie with the missile-cone chest or Ken, the most boring man who never existed. The dolls have facial and body features that are neither very male nor female. Mattel calls it a “A doll line designed to keep labels out and invite everyone in.”

  Already there are critics who say the dolls set an impossible standard of attractiveness for gender-fluid children to live up to. 

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