RUTHFULLY YOURS

A series of new revelations about the FBI under James Comey has provided more evidence that partisan agents may have abused their agency positions for political purposes during the Hillary Clinton email investigation and 2016 presidential campaign.http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/14/fbi-hillary-clinton-email-investigation-peter-strz

Top FBI agent Peter Strzok, the public now knows, was removed from the Mueller investigation after a Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (IG) investigation revealed damning text messages between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

The messages show Strzok and Page praising Clinton, discussing whether Strzok could use his position to protect the country from Donald Trump — whom they described as “that menace” — and referring to an unnamed “insurance policy” in case Trump beat Clinton.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40” Strzok said of Trump in one message to Page. “Andy” referred to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who has close ties to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally.

Strzok is reported to be the agent who officially signed into existence the Russia investigation that now plagues the Trump administration.

During the Clinton investigation, Strzok led the interviews of top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin — neither of whom faced consequences for making false statements in those interviews.

President Trump ought to direct his Justice Department and FBI to provide the House Intelligence Committee with the FISA warrant application — any FISA warrant application — in which they relied on information from the Steele dossier in seeking court permission to spy on the Trump campaign. It may well be that they did not rely on the dossier. It is ridiculous, though, that we are still in the dark about this.

I have long experience with how scrupulously the FBI and Justice Department work in the often controversial foreign-intelligence realm. They care deeply about their honorable reputation with the FISA court, just as the judges of that secret tribunal care deeply about not being perceived as a “rubber-stamp” for the government. I have thus given our agencies the benefit of the doubt here.

While urging that we have disclosure (with all due care to protect intelligence methods and sources), I have presumed that the FBI and DOJ would never fraudulently present the FISA court with fanciful claims attributed to anonymous Russian sources as if they were a refined product of U.S. intelligence collection and analysis. This, after all, is a “dossier” that former FBI director James Comey dismissed as “salacious and unverified” in Senate testimony just six months ago.

When a court is asked for a warrant, the government must provide the judge with a basis to believe the information proffered is credible — by vouching that the source has been reliable in the past, by corroborating the information offered, or both. If Comey adjudged Steele’s information unverified in June 2017, it had to have been unverified ten months earlier. That’s when the FBI and Justice Department obtained a FISA warrant for Carter Page, who had been loosely described as a Trump campaign adviser.

Consequently, I have assumed that the following happened. The FBI already had information that Page was something of an apologist for the Putin regime — although the record, we shall see, is more complex than that. Thus, the FBI and DOJ may have combined that information with some claims mined out of the dossier; but they would not have included Steele’s claims without corroborating them independently. This combination of information, doubtless added to by intelligence not known to us, was crafted into the application presented to the FISA court. This would be the normal, appropriate process.

The crucial question for the American Right today, as it has been for at least 60 years, is: What is the nature of its confrontation with modern liberalism?https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/15/disruptive-politics-in-the-trump-era-yuval-levin-or-victor-davis-hanson/

Is it a policy argument over how to achieve the common goals of liberal democracy? Are we working to expand liberty, equality, and prosperity for all citizens? Do we share the same principles with American liberals but differ with them over policy and how best to implement those principles? Is it really, as Yuval Levin has said, “a coherent debate between left and right forms of liberalism”?

Or is this conflict a much deeper existential struggle over the very nature of the American “regime” itself—its principles, values, institutions, mores, culture, education, citizenship, and “way of life”? Is it, as Victor Davis Hanson has put it, that we are in a “larger existential war for the soul of America”?

I would argue that Hanson is essentially correct: We are in the middle of a “regime” struggle.

Put another way: We are in an argument over the meaning of “the American way of life,” because the weight of opinion on the progressive Left rejects the classic constitutionally based American regime.

Instead, progressives envision a new way of governing in both politics and culture based on an individual’s race, ethnicity, and gender rather than on our common American citizenship.

Progressives don’t really deny this. Recall President Barack Obama, who in 2008 famously (or infamously) announced his administration would be “fundamentally transforming America.” America, as it actually existed at the time, was something Obama viewed as deeply problematic—permeated with “institutional” racism and sexism.

There can be no doubt that Obama understands the ongoing progressive-liberal campaign against conservatives and traditional America as a “regime struggle” (“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion” and “the arc of history” is trending their way). But somehow, many Americans still want to resist or deny the implications of these words.

The Foundations of Modern Conservatism

Sixty years earlier and across the political spectrum, the founding fathers of modern American conservatism in the mid-1950s at National Review also envisioned, not the give-and-take of bread and butter politics, but an existential conflict over the regime, i.e., over the “American way of life.”

In the premier issue of National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote that liberals “run just about everything….Radical conservatives in this country [among whose numbers he included himself and the NR editors]…when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those on the well-fed Right.”

This sounds familiar.