RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Fox News Tuesday night, Laura Ingraham reported that yet another one of Robert Mueller’s deputies in his Russia investigation is compromised due to her track record as a blatant partisan.

Jeannie Rhee, who was hired by Mueller last summer to work on the probe, was the personal attorney of Ben Rhodes and also represented the Clinton Foundation, Ingraham revealed. “This information will put further pressure on Special Prosecutor Bob Mueller to resign.”

Rhee is the third member of the Mueller team this week who has been shown to be brazenly partisan. Two other members of the team have been revealed as highly questionable hires in recent days as well — Peter Strzok, an anti-Trumper who helped exonerate Hillary Clinton, and Andrew Weissmann, an unscrupulous prosecutor who told outgoing acting Attorney General Sally Yates in an email that he was “proud” of her for defying President Trump’s travel ban.

As bad as Strzok and Weissman are, Jeannie Rhee takes the cake.

BREAKING: A third partisan Mueller investigator — Jeannie Rhee — represented Obama national security hack Ben Rhodes, accused of “unmasking” Trump advisers, as an associate at Mueller’s Wilmer Hale law firm in DChttps://t.co/25dniYfLwi
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) December 6, 2017

She formerly worked in the Obama Justice Department as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, according to Fox News. Rhee was also the personal attorney for Ben “echo chamber” Rhodes, and the deputy national security adviser for President Barack Obama.

This could be a significant development because according to a report by Adam Kredo in the Washington Free Beacon last February, deep-state loyalists led by Rhodes had been working diligently behind the scenes to undermine the Trump White House and orchestrate the ouster of Michael Flynn, a strong opponent of the Iran nuclear deal.

Rhee was almost certainly part of that effort. CONTINUE AT SITE

America’s news reporters couldn’t get enough of last summer’s Charlottesville mayhem when the story tangentially involved Donald Trump. But when a special report commissioned by the city this week finally gives us something approaching a detailed story of what happened that awful day, the media couldn’t care less.

Read the report yourself. As with any governmental snafu, plenty of shortcomings are detailed in the city’s planning and actions, not to mention a dubious effort by the police chief after the fact to control the fact-finding. A bigger picture, though, suggests the city should have canceled the white-power groups’ permit on grounds that the city couldn’t assure their safety given the expected influx of counterprotesters.

Yes, this would have been to invite a First Amendment lawsuit. It would have meant, as the city’s lawyers argued, issuing a “heckler’s veto” to left-wing activists, who sadly were the primary threat of violence.

The white supremacists may be crazy but not the kind of crazy as to welcome being manhandled by a mob 40 times their size. And force majeure is a pretty good legal argument.

I should point out, this is my conclusion, not the report’s. The report, by former federal prosecutor Timothy J. Heaphy, a partner at Hunton & Williams, couldn’t be clearer that most Charlottesville residents revile the white supremacists, but the report’s first line also refers to Americans’ belief in “an ordered liberty that guarantees all Americans the right to express themselves in the public square.”

Five weeks before the rally in question, a KKK group from North Carolina, consisting of fewer than 60 people, held a permitted rally in Charlottesville. More than 1,500 counterprotesters showed up. The city urged left-wing groups to organize protest events away from the Klan rally. Under the slogan “don’t take the bait,” police advised local activists not to confront the Klan. The permit holder, Amanda Barker, asked the city not to publicize the permit until the last minute to discourage an influx of out-of-town activists—a request the town would have been wise to honor.

As part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government adjusts reimbursements to health-care providers up or down based on the quality and cost-effectiveness of their services, as measured by a set of standards established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The standards use metrics such as how long emergency-room patients must wait to be seen and how long it takes heart-attack victims to get stents placed in their blocked arteries. The intention is to encourage savings and sound practices and enhance patient satisfaction.

The problem is that these requirements have not only increased costs but also may promote poor practices. For example, the CMS goal of stenting a blocked coronary artery within 90 minutes of a heart attack has not been shown to decrease mortality. Moreover, rushing a chest-pain patient to surgery to meet an arbitrary time goal may increase the odds of misdiagnosing other life-threatening conditions such as tears in the aorta, the main artery carrying blood from the heart. Before the imposition of the 90-minute rule, doctors routinely took x-rays of patients with chest pain looking for an aortic rupture. Its presence is a contra-indication to the blood thinners routinely given to heart attack victims. Chest x-rays are no longer recommended by some cardiologists because they prolong the work-up by a few minutes, making it more difficult to meet the 90-minute goal. “Sometimes I just need five more friggin’ minutes,” said one presenter at a medical conference.

Said another practitioner, “It is likely that these CMS quality metrics of . . . door-to-balloon times less than 90 minutes have physically harmed patients and dramatically increased costs for unnecessary cath lab initiations.” Medicare’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program assumes that hospital readmissions within 30 days are evidence of poor care somewhere in the system and that the hospital should be the responsible party. Hospitals at the top of the curve for readmissions are penalized financially. No allowance is made for underserved areas that generally have sicker populations, with fewer options for outpatient care. “Many readmissions occur because hospitals are extra-vigilant when patients who’ve had scary episodes, such as heart attacks or severe pneumonia, have setbacks and turn up again in the emergency room,” according to a 2016 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Following introduction of the ACA guidelines, readmissions did go down, but mortality went up, according to a study published in November in JAMA Cardiology. “It’s possible that doctors may have made treatment decisions designed to avoid readmissions rather than to give patients the best possible care,” said UCLA’s Gregg Fonarow, the study’s senior author. Doctors might, for example, have postponed sending patients back to the hospital until after the 30-day window for readmission penalties had passed, allowing heart failure to worsen and decreasing survival odds. “Nationwide, there may have been thousands to tens of thousands of extra deaths in patients with heart failure resulting from this policy,” Fonarow said.

If the story hadn’t been verified by virtually every mainstream-media outlet in the country, you’d think it came straight from conspiratorial fever dreams of the alt-right. Yesterday, news broke that Robert Mueller had months ago asked a senior FBI agent to step down from his role investigating the Trump administration. This prince of a man was caught in an extramarital affair with an FBI lawyer. The affair itself was problematic, but so was the fact that the two were found to have exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Hillary Clinton text messages.

Here’s where the story gets downright bizarre. This agent, Peter Strzok, also worked with FBI director James Comey on the Clinton email investigation. In fact, he was so deeply involved in the Clinton investigation that he is said to have interviewed Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, and to have been present when the FBI interviewed Clinton. According to CNN, he was part of the team responsible for altering the FBI’s conclusion that Clinton was “grossly negligent” in handling classified emails (a finding that could have triggered criminal liability) to “extremely careless” — a determination that allowed her to escape prosecution entirely.

After the Clinton investigation concluded, Strzok signed the documents opening the investigation into Russian election interference and actually helped interview former national-security adviser Michael Flynn.

In other words, it looks like a low-integrity, reckless, biased bureaucrat has played an important role in two of the most important and politically charged criminal investigations of the new century. Yes, it’s good that Mueller removed Strzok when he discovered the text messages. No, Strzok is not solely responsible for the conclusions reached in either investigation. But his mere presence hurts public confidence in the FBI, and it does so in a way that further illustrates a persistent and enduring national problem: America’s permanent bureaucracy is unacceptably partisan.

A terrific catch by the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross, whose story you should read in full. It was widely known that Peter Strzok, the FBI agent dismissed by Mueller from the Russiagate probe due to anti-Trump bias, had had a lead role in the Hillary Emailgate investigation. But I hadn’t realized until now that he was one of the agents who interviewed top Clinton cronies Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.https://hotair.com/archives/2017/12/05/werent-huma-abedin-cheryl-mills-charged-lied-peter-strzok-fbi/

Or, more importantly, that they pretty clearly lied to his face about when they found out that Hillary had her own email server.

Strzok is the same agent who reportedly replaced “grossly negligent” with “extremely careless” in Comey’s statement on Emailgate after the probe ended, and he’s also one of the agents who conducted the interview with Mike Flynn that earned Flynn a charge of making false statements to federal officials. One agent with a bias, even a supervisor, doesn’t discredit an entire investigation with dozens of people involved, especially after he’s been kicked off by the top prosecutor because of it. But the question remains: If Mike Flynn’s lies were sufficient to warrant being charged, why weren’t Abedin’s and Mills’s?

Summaries of the interviews, known as 302s, were released by the FBI last year.

A review of those documents conducted by The Daily Caller shows that Mills and Abedin told Strzok and Laufman that they were not aware of Clinton’s server until after she left the State Department…

But undercutting those denials are email exchanges in which both Mills and Abedin either directly discussed or were involved in discussing Clinton’s server.

“hrc email coming back — is server okay?” Mills asked in a Feb. 27, 2010 email to Abedin and Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton who helped set up the Clinton server.

Comey was asked about Abedin’s and Mills’s lies during congressional testimony last year and spun his decision not to recommend charges by claiming that, hey, sometimes people misremember things and sometimes those things aren’t essential to a case. You don’t want to charge everyone who says something factually incorrect in an FBI interview with lying to a federal official. But the server wasn’t a peripheral matter and the Clinton cronies’ knowledge of it wasn’t immaterial. Comey’s rationale for not charging Hillary with mishandling classified information was that, while she may have been grossly negligent — sorry, I mean “extremely careless”! — there was no evidence that she intended to mishandle it. But setting up a private server which Team Clinton *knew* was destined to route classified information through it comes very close to intent, and Abedin and Mills would have been well positioned to speak to that knowledge. Putting some pressure on them by threatening to lock them up for false statements might have led to some interesting admissions about what Hillary Clinton imagined the purpose of her email server to be. The same charge helped convince Mike Flynn to play ball with Mueller. Why wasn’t similar pressure put on Abedin and Mills?