RUTHFULLY YOURS

ERIC HOLDER REDUX?????RSK

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions said today that “fairness and justice” should be applied to personnel matters when enforcing “the highest standards of behavior” at the FBI.

Special counsel Robert Mueller removed FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page from his team in July after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered numerous text messages exchanged between the pair, who were engaged in an extramarital affair, that made disparaging remarks about President Trump, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and former Democratic Party presidential contenders Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

“The decision to remove Mr. Strzok off that case was made by Director Mueller, based upon the circumstances known to him,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told the House Judiciary Committee this week. “…I’ve discussed this general issue with Director Mueller on several occasion. He understands the importance of ensuring that there’s no bias reflected in the conduct of the investigation.”

Outside the White House today, Trump said that “it’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI, but we’re going to rebuild the FBI and it’ll be bigger and better than ever.”

At a Justice Department press conference today, Sessions said his team “will not be reluctant to admit error” and “will never fail to monitor our people and we’re going to insist on the highest standards of behavior.”CONTINUE AT SITE

House and Senate conferees signed their tax agreement on Friday, and the bill that seems headed for passage next week is—Minor Miracle Dept.—better than what either body first passed. The bill’s corporate reform is far superior to its muddled rewrite of the individual code, but on balance this is the most pro-growth tax policy in decades.

The bill’s biggest achievement is reforming at long last the self-destructive U.S. corporate tax code. The top U.S. rate of 35%—highest in the developed world—will fall to 21% on Jan. 1. Cash currently held overseas will be taxed at a 15.5% one-time “deemed” repatriation rate, and America will move to a territorial system that allows money to be taxed where it is earned. The bill includes rules to prevent companies from concealing taxable income, especially on intangible assets such as intellectual property. And it sweeps away billions of dollars worth of industry-specific loopholes that misallocate capital.

All of this will go a long way to restoring American competitiveness that has eroded over several administrations. Even Barack Obama acknowledged this problem, though he declined to do anything lest some large business end up with a tax cut.

The same economists who presided over the weakest recovery since World War II now say none of this is needed with the economy finally growing at 3%. But the faster growth never materialized when they were in power, and this expansion has been notable for slow business investment and weak productivity growth.

This GOP tax reform—including five years of 100% immediate business expensing—is aimed directly at that weakness to keep the expansion going even as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. This isn’t a demand-side “sugar high.” These business tax changes are supply-side reforms that will increase the economy’s productive capacity.

Reducing the cost of capital should raise business investment and invite a capital inflow to the U.S. More investment means more hiring and more productive workers, which is what increases wages. Especially with a tight labor market, the share of income that goes to workers should increase. After eight years of trying to redistribute income through higher taxes and more subsidies, why not try a return to growth economics?

Sixty-three percent of polled voters believe that the FBI has been resisting providing information to Congress on the Clinton and Trump investigations. This is a remarkable finding for an agency whose new head said a few days ago that the agency was in fine shape. No, it isn’t.

Fifty-four percent say special counsel Robert Mueller has conflicts of interest that prevent him from doing an unbiased job, also according to this month’s Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll. So, given this finding, the silence from the special counsel on the subject has become downright deafening.

These are significant findings about an operation that was supposed to bring more objectivity and less partisanship to the Trump-Russia investigation. Clearly these numbers indicate that there is a crisis in public confidence in both the FBI and Mueller. What makes these findings important is that, with Trump’s approval rating at 41 percent, these results include large numbers of voters who don’t like Trump yet who now agree that these investigations have veered off course.

After this poll was conducted, we learned that rogue agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page, both high-ranking members of the Mueller task force, discussed during the campaign how, in case Trump won, that they were developing, along with deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, what Strzok called an “insurance policy.” I can’t even imagine how badly these new facts will poll next month.

Our polling in November showed that 61 percent say the funding of the salacious GPS Fusion document should be investigated. Fifty-eight percent say that if Hillary Clinton and the Democrats funded the work, it could not be used by law enforcement. While this seems obvious to the public, Congress has not been able to get the answer to the question of just how this dossier was used and whether the FBI then paid some of the cost to legitimize it. Even greater numbers — 65 percent — said there needs to be an investigation of the Uranium One deal that netted the Clinton Foundation $140 million in foreign-based contributions that went undisclosed.

First there was Harvey Weinstein, whose appalling behavior toward women was so amply documented by the New York Times and the New Yorker. The dominoes began to fall. And soon they reached into my own industry.

It wasn’t just Bill O’Reilly. Now the cascading accusations were reaching deep into the heart of the mainstream media. Charlie Rose … Matt Lauer … Mark Halperin … even liberal outlets like NPR and the New Republic were not spared. For that matter, not even the New Yorker and the New York Times were spared: At the Times, star political reporter Glenn Thrush is under investigation, and the New Yorker has just fired its star political reporter, Ryan Lizza, over “improper sexual conduct.”

Some of these cases were clearly and inexcusably abusive – the actions egregious and the corroborating accounts damning.

Others, however, were less clear. Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic seems to have been accused mostly of making young women who were not his subordinates uncomfortable through risqué comments and the occasional clumsy pass. Thrush apparently is accused of hitting on younger women who work in his industry, and occasionally at his outlet, though he had no managerial power over them. And Lizza is accused of … what? We don’t know.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case known as Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd., and Jack C. Phillips v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Charlie Craig, and David Mullins. Phillips is the Lakewood, Colorado, baker who, citing religious reasons, refused in 2012 to make a wedding cake for Craig and Mullins, a same-sex couple.

So far, Craig and Mullins have been winning. When they took their case to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it ruled that when a baker refuses to sell a wedding cake to a couple because they’re gay, it amounts to an illegal refusal of service by a public accommodation on the basis of sexual orientation. Phillips, an evangelical Christian, took the case to the Colorado Court of Appeals, which in 2015 unanimously affirmed the commission’s ruling. This June, after the Colorado Supreme Court chose not to review the case, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear it, apparently because of one detail of Phillip’s defense: he said that his refusal was not an act of discrimination – he would’ve been glad to bake, say, a birthday cake for the couple – but he didn’t want to bake a wedding cake for them, because that would have felt to him like an implicit endorsement of something he found morally objectionable.

The most commonly heard argument for Phillips is that the First Amendment, by guaranteeing his freedom of religion, also guarantees his right to turn down any job that would involve him in an activity that is at odds with his religious beliefs. This argument doesn’t work for me, because my first reaction to it is to picture a devout Muslim doctor presented with the case of a gay or Jew or Muslim apostate who’s on the verge of death and whose life he, the doctor, is in a position to save. Let’s say the doctor, aware that Islam commands him to kill such people, not save them, allows the patient to die. Does he have First Amendment religious protections on his side?

Twenty-one years ago I edited an influential book of essays entitled Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy, which sought to stake out alternatives to the lockstep far-left positions on various subjects – marriage, religion, family, etc. – that dominated the gay-rights movement at the time. Many of the conservatives, moderates, libertarians, and classical liberals who contributed to Beyond Queer were early proponents of same-sex marriage at a time when the queer left regarded the very idea as a vile capitulation to straight, conservative values. Only later, when they realized that most gays wanted the right to marry, did the gay left change its tune. Now it’s the same gay left, which once despised gay marriage, that is out gunning for those, like Jack Phillips, who have moral misgivings about it.

Several of my old BQ confrères have weighed in on the cake case. They’re split. BQ contributor Dale Carpenter, who teaches law at SMU, has joined with Eugene Volokh (a heterosexual UCLA prof whom I know only by reputation) in writing a brief supporting Craig and Mullins. While acknowledging that a “freelance writer cannot be punished for refusing to write press releases for the Church of Scientology” and “a photographer…should not be punished for choosing not to create photographs celebrating a same-sex wedding,” Carpenter and Volokh distinguish between these actions and cake-making. Writing a press release, they contend, is a speech act; making a cake is not. “A chef, however brilliant, cannot claim a Free Speech clause right not to serve certain people at his restaurant, even if his dishes look stunning,” they write. “The same is true for bakers.”

The Department of Justice and the FBI are developing a credibility problem. The last two weeks have brought a blizzard of revelations about the anti-Trump political predilections of top FBI officials and prosecutors in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, perhaps none more eye-popping than a just-revealed text from Peter Strzok, a top FBI intelligence agent.

In August 2016, Strzok, who played a lead-investigator role in the Hillary Clinton–emails investigation, flatly stated that the FBI could not “take that risk,” referring to the possibility that Donald Trump might be elected president. He made the statement in a message to Lisa Page, a bureau lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Strzok referred to an alternative FBI “path” regarding Trump’s “unlikely” election that Page had proposed during a meeting they’d attended in “Andy’s office” — meaning deputy director Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s number-two official, second only to then-director James Comey.

While more context is necessary to understand the meaning of the text and what transpired in the meeting in McCabe’s office, the message raises the possibility that top bureau officials were infecting investigations with their personal political views. This would be a concern in any circumstance, but especially in this one. The FBI’s Clinton-email and Trump-Russia investigations have been extremely fraught politically — with the latter morphing into Mueller’s Russia probe, which conceivably could result in an impeachment referral.

Around the time of Strzok’s message, the FBI and the Obama Justice Department had come into possession of the anti-Trump “dossier” compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier was opposition research commissioned by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, through their lawyers. They had retained a research company, Fusion GPS, which hired Steele, who evidently paid Russian sources for what appears to be dodgy information.