RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON (AP) — Brushing aside opposition from the Justice Department, Republicans on the House intelligence committee voted to release a classified memo that purports to show improper use of surveillance by the FBI and the Justice Department in the Russia investigation.

The four-page memo has become a political flashpoint, with President Donald Trump and many Republicans pushing for its release and suggesting that some in the Justice Department and FBI have conspired against the president.

The memo was written by Republicans on the committee, led by chairman Rep. Devin Nunes of California, a close Trump ally who has become a fierce critic of the FBI and the Justice Department. Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether Trump’s campaign was involved.

Republicans have said the memo reveals grave concerns about abuses of the government surveillance powers in the Russia investigation. Democrats have called it a selectively edited group of GOP talking points that attempt to distract from the committee’s own investigation into Russian meddling.

The vote on Monday to release the memo is an unprecedented move by the committee, which typically goes out of its way to protect classified information in the interest of protecting intelligence sources and methods. The memo was delivered by courier to the White House on Monday evening. Trump now has five days to object to its release by the committee.

The White House said late Monday that the president will meet with his national security team and White House counsel to discuss the memo in the coming days.

For more than a year now, Democrats have been driven into hysterics on a weekly basis by highly selective, often partisan leaks fed to them in 900-word increments by the political media. Whether these sensationalist stories were debunked or not, no Democrat demanded that every scrap of information related to their leaks be declassified immediately to ensure that the nation see the appropriate context. It’s a process, we were told.

You’ll notice that many of the same process-oriented folks, now preemptively dismissing the four-page summary memo alleging surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and FBI as a bunch of conspiracy theories, have a different set of standards for Rep. Devin Nunes and Republicans.

“FISA warrants typically are big thick documents, 50-60 pages,” John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director, recently wrote. “If the Nunes memo about one is just 4 pages, you can bet it’s a carefully picked bowl of cherries. Made all the more dishonest by holding back the minority rebuttal memo. A real debate needs both. Someone fears that.” Indeed.

McLaughlin is repeating a well-worn talking point. As far as I can tell, none of the critics of the memo have argued that the contentions are untrue, only that the contentions are out of context, misleading, cherry-picked, and so on. But since the memo — which is culled from a year-long investigation — isn’t an indictment or the entire story, there’s no real reason we shouldn’t use it to help ascertain whether there were potential abuses in intelligence-gathering in the Obama administration. Once we have an outline, we can take the issues on one at a time, or disregard all of them.

Adam Schiff is portrayed by many in the media as a straight shooter. His record in reality is of fanning the flames of every single Trump-Russia collusion allegation out there.

Yesterday the House Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence voted to release a four-page summary document alleging surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and FBI. The committee’s memo has been available to all 435 House members for more than a week. Some of those who read it described it as “troubling,” “shocking,” “jaw-dropping,” “sickening,” and “criminal.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray reviewed the memo on Sunday. As soon as the committee had finished voting, ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff ran to the cameras to spin the news. From that point, he began explaining things in a non-truthful manner. This inability or unwillingness to accurately convey information is not a surprise so much as a regular feature of his work with journalists, but it’s worth noting how that played out in just one few-hour span.
1: Omitting Facts About Committee Business

For background, Schiff has spent the last week and a half upset that the majority’s memo alleging abuses was available for House review. He and his fellow Democrats had voted against making such a memo available to the House, much less the public. He said it was reckless to discuss anything in the memo and that it compromised national security. A compliant media lapped it up. He announced, though, that he had created a counter-memo in support of the Trump-Russia collusion theory we keep hearing about.

December 7, 1941, the date of infamy when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor killing 2,400 Americans and wounding 1,178. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded decisively by addressing Congress and unambiguously seeking a formal declaration of war on Japan.

September 11, 2001, the date of infamy when 19 mostly Saudi Al-Queda Muslims living in the U.S. attacked New York City killing 3,000 Americans and wounding 6,000. President George W. Bush responded ambiguously by addressing the nation and declaring a War on Terror without naming the enemy. Instead, he disarmed America by assuring the country that Islam is a religion of peace.

Roosevelt’s War on Japan was far more successful than Bush’s War on Terror. Why?

Sixty years ago Americans had not yet been attacked by political correctness, moral relativism, or historical revisionism – the three basic tenets of radical left-wing liberalism that support collectivism. Americans unapologetically loved their country, their families, and their God. Roosevelt’s America was still the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Individualism is the foundation of America that values freedom for individuals over collective or state control. Individualism is the infrastructure that supports our Constitution and protects our right to live freely with minimal government interference. Individualism encourages independence, adulthood, personal responsibility, and allegiance to the United States of America. Individualism and the meritocracy incentivizes production and created the most powerful and freest country in the world.

Sixty years ago collectivism was in its nascent stages in America. Collectivism is the practice of giving a group priority over each individual in the group. Collectivism encourages dependence, perpetual childhood, government control, and allegiance to a world community without national borders or national sovereignty. Collectivism is the enemy of individualism. Collectivism is the enemy of a free and sovereign United States.

After WWII the enemies of the United States did not go quietly into the night – they adjusted to military defeat by changing strategies. Instead of targeting soldiers and military installations they targeted civilians and cultural institutions to destroy America from within by shattering the infrastructure of American individualism – no bullets required. This is how it works.

The re-education of America is a longterm information/indoctrination war targeting the entire population of children and adults. From its inception the information war was a Culture War on America designed to eliminate patriotism, minimize family influence, and eradicate the religious authority of the church – the cultural pillars that support individualism. To win an informational war it is necessary to indoctrinate and propagandize the children as early as possible and the adults as much as possible.

The re-education of America began after WWII with a marketing campaign designed to sell collectivism to adults through the media. The effort required rebranding to sell it to Americans who were culturally averse to collectivism and committed to individualism. Communism was renamed socialism and socialism sold as globalism. Collectivism was falsely advertised as the compassionate selfless political system that provides social justice and income equality.

The Page-Strzok text exchanges might offer a few answers. Or, as Lisa Page warned her paramour as early as February 2016, at the beginning of the campaign and well before the respective party nominees were even selected:

One more thing: she [Hillary Clinton] might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi?

The traditional way of looking at the developing scandals at the FBI and among holdover Obama appointees in the DOJ is that the bizarre atmospherics from candidate and President Trump have simply polarized everyone in Washington, and no one quite knows what is going on.

Another, more helpful, exegesis, however, is to understand that if we’d seen a Hillary Clinton victory in November 2016, which was supposed to be a sure thing, there would now be no scandals at all.

That is, the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity.

On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1 percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails. Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of the United States?

Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation” in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation.