RUTHFULLY YOURS

A ranking Republican statesman this week told an off-the-record gathering that a “coup” attempt was in progress against President Donald Trump, with collusion between the largely Democratic media and Trump’s numerous enemies in the Republican Party. The object of the coup, the Republican leader added, was not impeachment, but the recruitment of a critical mass of Republican senators and congressmen to the claim that Trump was “unfit” for office and to force his resignation.

It’s helpful to fan away the psychedelic fumes of allegation and innuendo and clarify just what Trump might have done wrong. Trump will not be impeached, and he will not be harried out of office. But he faces a formidable combination of media hostility—what the president today denounced as a “witch hunt”—and a divided White House staff prone to press leaks. The likely outcome will be a prolonged dirty war of words that will delay Trump’s domestic agenda and tie down his loyalists with the chores of fire-fighting.

One thinks of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. Trump was elected by campaigning against the Republican Establishment as well as Obama, ridiculing their policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan and questioning their credibility. In the flurry of personal attacks, the underlying policy issues have faded into the background, and that gives the initiative to Trump’s enemies.

Nothing that has been alleged, much less proven, about President Trump comes close to the threshold for impeachment, as Prof. Jonathan Turley of George Washington University’s law school explained in a May 17 comment in TheHill.com. Even if Trump asked then FBI Director James Comey to go easy on Gen. Michael Flynn, Prof. Turley notes, “Encouraging leniency or advocating for an associate is improper but not necessarily” illegal. The charge of obstruction of justice presumes that there is an issue before the bar of justice, but as Turley adds, “There is no indication of a grand jury proceeding at the time of the Valentine’s Day meeting between Trump and Comey. Obstruction cases generally are built around judicial proceedings — not Oval Office meetings.”

The appointment of the respected former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to look into allegations of Russian interference in the November 2016 election strongly suggests that the Trump team feels it has nothing to fear from a thorough review. In the case Trump’s detractors appear to be bluffing. Press reports of contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian diplomats and businessmen appear to reflect the sort of conversations that every presidential campaign conducts with important foreign governments. It is not clear that Russia was responsible for the delivery of embarrassing Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks, moreover. Pro-Trump media report that a DNC staffer Seth Rich was Wikileaks’ source. Rich was murdered on a Washington street in July 2016, and a counter-conspiracy theory is circulating about his death.

Then there is the alleged leak of highly classified intelligence on the laptop bomb threat to airliners, of which Wall Street Journal editors intoned, “Loose Lips Sink Presidencies.” Exactly what the president told the Russians is under dispute, but the salient fact in the case is that presidents and cabinet members frequently leak classified information without prompting the condemnations that piled up on Trump. Obama’s then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta leaked the role of Pakistani physician Shakil Afridi in locating Osama bin Laden’s lair, and President Obama himself revealed that Seal Team 6 had killed Obama, making the unit a subsequent target for terrorists. Apart from inadvertent leaks, the Obama administration deliberately leaked British nuclear secrets to Russia, over bitter protests from London.

If you listen to breathless, Trump-loathing Democrats and their stooges in the liberal media, you would think President Donald J. Trump is the biggest traitor since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg sent Stalin the recipe for the atomic bomb.

As the Washington Post reported on Monday, President Trump met Russia’s foreign minister and its ambassador to Washington in the Oval Office on May 10. They discussed ISIS’s secret plans to detonate laptop computers aboard passenger jets. Trump said via Twitter Tuesday that he shared this intelligence — possibly from Israeli sources — because “I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.”

National-security adviser H. R. McMaster vigorously insisted on Monday that Trump did not do what the Left accuses him of doing, including revealing how and from whom America acquired details on ISIS’s laptop weapons.

“I was in the room,” McMaster said. “It did not happen.” He added: “At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.”

This story emerged after someone found President Trump’s handling of state secrets so worrisome that he or she blabbed those same secrets to the Washington Post. Go figure.

Despite the White House’s denials, Democratic volcanoes erupted afresh.

“Congress must immediately investigate this irresponsible action and take steps to ensure that Trump does no additional damage to U.S. national security in his dealings with Russia,” bellowed Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

“I just think it’s part of a pattern of recklessness that we’ve got to get a handle on,” said Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.

Representatives John Conyers of Michigan and Elijah Cummings of Maryland fumed in a joint statement: “After an unprecedented week in which many thought it would be impossible for President Trump to be any more irresponsible, he now may have sunk to a dangerous new low.”

According to the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler: “Applause in the newsroom as the Russia-leak scoop breaks the Hollywood Access record for most readers per minute.”

But where were these Democratic and left-wing Krakatoas when Obama gave Putin the identity and whereabouts of Great Britain’s nuclear missiles?

President Donald Trump flatly denied that he asked former FBI Director James Comey to end his investigation of former National Security adviser Mike Flynn.

At a press conference Thursday alongside Colombia’s president, Mr. Trump was asked whether he had asked Mr. Comey to end his probe. Mr. Trump responded: “No. No. Next question.”

On Tuesday, media outlets reported that Mr. Trump had made the request of Mr. Comey during a private dinner in February, citing Mr. Comey’s notes on the meeting. Those reports came one week after Mr. Trump had abruptly fired Mr. Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Before Thursday, Mr. Trump had not directly responded to the Comey account; any denials had come from the White House.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump also reiterated his position that he never colluded with Russia during last year’s election, although he left open the possibility that others may have done so.

“Believe me, there’s no collusion,” the president said, before adding a qualification: “I can only speak for myself.”

The president’s statements came Thursday afternoon at a joint press conference with the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, after a difficult several days for the administration.

Democrats and their media allies finally got their man. After weeks of political pressure, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein blinked late Wednesday and announced that he has named a special counsel to investigate Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. These expeditions rarely end well for anyone, and Democrats are hoping this one will bedevil the Trump Administration for the next four years.

“My decision is not a finding that crimes have been committed or that any prosecution is warranted,” said Mr. Rosenstein, which is nice but irrelevant. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused from the Russia probe, Mr. Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller III, who will now have unlimited time and resources to investigate more or less anything and anyone he wants.

While the decision will provide some short-term political relief, not least for Mr. Rosenstein, it also opens up years of political risk to the Trump Administration with no guarantee that the public will end up with any better understanding of what really happened.

The problem with special counsels, as we’ve learned time and again, is that they are by definition all but politically unaccountable. While technically Mr. Rosenstein could fire Mr. Mueller if he goes too far, the manner of his appointment and the subject he’s investigating make him de facto untouchable even if he becomes an abusive Javert like Patrick Fitzgerald during the George W. Bush Administration.

What the country really needs is a full accounting of how the Russians tried to influence the election and whether any Americans assisted them. That is fundamentally a counterintelligence investigation, but Mr. Mueller will be under pressure to bring criminal indictments of some kind to justify his existence. He’ll also no doubt bring on young attorneys who will savor the opportunity to make their reputation on such a high-profile investigation.

Mr. Mueller has experience in counterintelligence and at 72 years old has nothing to prove. But he is also a long-time Washington player close to the FBI whose director was recently fired, and he is highly attuned to the political winds. As they say in Washington, lawyer up.

Now at The Daily Caller

Flipping back the pages of my proverbial notepad I find a fair amount about Robert Mueller and his Bush-to-Obama tenure at the FBI.

Despite the rose petals bestrewing his path back to DC as special counsel, it was not a pretty thing. Summing up — as Patrick Poole began here in 2012, as former FBI special agent John Guandolo does here — Mueller’s FBI tenure should be remembered in large part for having been one long “Muslim outreach” to combat so-called Islamophobia, one long purge of Islamo-realism; and literally so, as when Mueller’s FBI purged lecturers and training materials for their supposed offensiveness to Muslims [read: truthfulness about Islamic teachings on jihad and sharia]. This purge was the result of an “inquiry” beginning in September 2011, described by Wired magazine as an “Islamophobia probe,” and which the magazine claims to have instigated. In February 2012 Wired reported, “The bureau disclosed initial findings from its months-long review during a meeting at FBI headquarters on Wednesday with several Arab and Muslim advocacy groups, attended by Director Robert Mueller.”

As a result, John Guandolo notes, “The FBI no longer teaches anything about sharia, the MB networks, or the Global Islamic Movement.”

Mueller’s legacy.

Here are some of my own reports on Mueller and his FBI — “They Call It Intelligence” (2010) “Uncle Sam Conducts Another `Anti-Islamic’ Purge” (2012), “The Continuum … Continues” (2012), “Making Islam (Not Terrorism) Disappear (2013), “Will FBI Director Mueller Ever Be Held Accountable For Anything? (2013).

That last piece appeared after the jihad attack on the Boston Marathon, where, it might well be argued, Mueller’s see-no-Islam FBI policies, honed over both the see-no-Islam Bush and Obama administrations, came to deadly fruition. In the explosive video clip above, Rep. Louie Gohmert extracts from Mueller the extraordinary admission that he, as FBI Director, did not know the mosque the Tsarnaev brothers attended – Islamic Society of Boston/ISB (Muslim Brotherhood) – was founded by Al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi. Director Mueller defended not sending FBI agents to the ISB [until] after the bombing because the FBI was there before the bombing doing `outreach’ with the Imam.”

Which brings me to my question. How can someone who has long engaged in the political and ideological exercise of blinding himself, the FBI, and the USG to Islamic influence on terrorism and subversion suddenly be expected to assess Russian influence on the Trump (and, a must, Clinton) campaign(s) free from politics and ideology?