"Hillary Clinton wrote 104 emails that she sent using her private server while secretary of state that the government has since said contain classified information, according to a new Washington Post analysis of Clinton's publicly released correspondence.

"The finding is the first accounting of the Democratic presidential front-runner’s personal role in placing information now considered sensitive into insecure email during her State Department tenure. Clinton's authorship of dozens of emails now considered classified could complicate her efforts to argue that she never put government secrets at risk.

"In roughly three-quarters of those cases, officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified. Clinton sometimes initiated the conversations but more often replied to aides or other officials with brief reactions to ongoing discussions."

"Under the Affordable Care Act, deductibles are increasing in 41 states, with some deductibles increasing by more than $1,000, according to Freedom Partners 2016 Obamacare deductible increase tracker.

"The tracker looks at deductible increases from the previous year through Obamacare'€™s Bronze, Silver and Gold plans as well as a weighted average increase for all plans.

"While some states are already facing high deductibles of $3,000 or more, the tracker finds that deductibles increased by $265 or 8.4 percent on average, with some state deductible increases rising as high as $1,395."

"The Justice Department has granted immunity to a former State Department staffer, who worked on Hillary Clinton's private email server, as part of a criminal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement official.

"The official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.

"As the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation in the coming months, agents are likely to want to interview Clinton and her senior aides about the decision to use a private server, how it was set up, and whether any of the participants knew they were sending classified information in emails, current and former officials said."

"The final returns from most states are not quite in as I write, and the delegate count is not established, but here are some initial observations.

"On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has a clear flight path to the Democratic nomination. She won everywhere except in Bernie Sanders's Vermont, in Oklahoma with its low black population (and its large number of conservative registered Democrats), and in the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses. ...

"Donald Trump won, but not quite as big as he might have liked. He lost Oklahoma as well as Texas to Ted Cruz, he came within 2 or 3 points of losing Virginia to Marco Rubio, he ran third in the (announced late in the evening) Minnesota caucuses which Rubio won. His best percentages were in the very different states of Alabama, with its populist tradition, and Massachusetts, with its very low number of registered Republicans. Elsewhere he got between 21 and 39 percent -- good numbers, but well below 50 percent."

"A federal magistrate judge on Monday denied the United States government's request that Apple extract data from an iPhone in a drug case in New York, giving the company's pro-privacy stance a boost as it battles law enforcement officials over opening up the device in other cases.

"The ruling, from Judge James Orenstein in New York's Eastern District, is the first time that the government's legal argument for opening up devices like the iPhone has been put to the test. The denial could influence other cases where law enforcement officials are trying to compel Apple to help unlock iPhones, including the standoff between Apple and the F.B.I. over the iPhone used by one of the attackers in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., last year.

"Judge Orenstein, in his 50-page ruling on Monday, took particular aim at a 1789 statute called the All Writs Act that underlies many government requests for extracting data from tech companies. The All Writs Act broadly says that courts can require actions to comply with their orders when not covered by existing law. Judge Orenstein said the government was inflating its authority by using the All Writs Act to force Apple to extract data from an iPhone seized in connection with a drug case."

"According to a recent American Enterprise Institute report, the ideological make-up of the Republican Party hasn't changed much over the last 15 years. Looking at Gallup data, the researchers found that the share of Republicans who identify as 'conservative' increased from 62 percent in 2000 to 68 percent in 2015.

"But the percentage of Democrats who self-identify as liberal has risen in that time from 29 percent to 45 percent. The number of white Democrats who identify as liberal has nearly doubled, from 28 percent to 50 percent. The report also found that barely a third (37 percent) of Democrats describe Hillary Clinton as a liberal. About half call her a moderate.

"Michael Barone, the Washington Examiner's senior political analyst and an AEI resident scholar who contributed to the report, analyzed exit poll data from the early primaries. He found not only that the Democratic electorate is getting more liberal, but that it is shrinking. Exit polls and vote totals in the early Democratic primary states find that the Democratic electorate is 'much more liberal' than it was eight years ago."

"The Republicans ought to be comfortable in their catbird seat, surveying nothing but knee-high cotton, corn as high as an elephant's eye and blue skies for as far as anyone can see. They have the happy prospect of running against a Democratic foe awash in scandal and chicanery. Few voters like her, nobody trusts her and she seems as likely to land in prison as in the White House.

"But the Grand Old Party dare not break out the bubbly, not just yet. It's caught in a curious dilemma. The party elites, with their hands on the familiar levers of the party apparatus, are the helpless hosts of a party they can't control. They huff and they puff and then huff some more, but at the end of the day they're only exhausted, frustrated, and out of breath."

"Since at least 2009, the government's domestic spies have captured the metadata -- the time, place, telephone numbers and duration of all telephone calls -- as well as the content of telephone calls made in America under a perverse interpretation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Patriot Act, which a federal appeals court has since invalidated.

"The department knows where this data on this killer's cellphone can be found, but if it subpoenas the National Security Agency, the NSA complies with that subpoena and all this becomes public, that will put the lie to the government's incredible denials that it spies upon all of us all the time. Surely, it was spying on the San Bernardino killers.

"There is more at stake here than the privacy of Apple's millions of customers, the security of power grids and all that the Internet serves. Personal liberty in a free society is at stake. A government that stays within the confines of the Constitution is at stake."

"On Tuesday morning, while the president was delivering a statement from the Roosevelt Room announcing his plan to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Spanish and Moroccan police were arresting four suspected members of an Islamic terrorist cell seeking to recruit fighters to the Islamic State, among whom is a former Guantanamo detainee. ...

"The release of Guantanamo detainees has proven calamitous. As The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes has reported, of 653 released detainees, 117 have returned to the fight against the U.S., and 79 more are suspected of doing so -- a recidivism rate of almost one-third. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is committed to releasing another 35 detainees already approved for transfer. The president has never addressed the high recidivism among terrorists, and his plan offers no way to mitigate the risk. ...

"It is currently illegal to transfer Guantanamo prisoners onto American soil. Congress would need to change the law to allow this. If lawmakers refuse to do this, Obama will no doubt attempt to unilaterally empty the facility by transferring the detainees abroad. There is little recourse available to the Congress to stop that. However, they can ensure that Guantanamo Bay remains available to the next president -- who, one hopes, will put American security above moral grandstanding."

"Republicans are delighted that a recently unearthed Joe Biden speech appears to be a strong endorsement of the GOP's current Supreme Court strategy.

"'Politics has played far too large a role in the Reagan-Bush nominations to date. One can only imagine that role becoming overarching if a choice were made this year, assuming that a justice was announced tomorrow that he or she was stepping down,' Biden said on the Senate floor in June 1992, not long after Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination to challenge then-President George H.W. Bush.

"'A process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all,' Biden continued. 'Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, the nominee or to the Senate itself.'"