RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ryan-zinkes-parting-gift-11545689550

Ryan Zinke is resigning as Interior Secretary at the end of the year, though it’s fitting that he is finishing with one last policy bang. The Bureau of Land Management last week took a major step to open up a corner of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

BLM’s draft environmental impact statement tees up a 45-day public comment period and final rule that should launch lease sales for ANWR as early as 2019. Opponents say the process is rushed, but federal and state agencies have been planning for this since Congress set aside 1.6 million acres of ANWR’s 19.3 million acres for development in 1980. Congress finally authorized drilling as part of last year’s tax reform, and Interior envisions lease sales in 2019 of “not fewer than 400,000 acres”—or less than 3% of ANWR acreage.

That production will have widespread benefits, as the U.S. Geological Survey estimates ANWR’s coastal plain holds 10.4 billion barrels of oil. The region could pump 1.45 million barrels a day at peak production—a quarter of what the U.S. now imports from OPEC countries. The drilling will create thousands of jobs and tens of billions in federal revenue.

Mr. Zinke, a Navy SEAL before entering Congress from Montana, made a notable reform difference in two years. He made progress on a $12 billion infrastructure backlog in national parks, prioritized active forest management to mitigate wildfires, started to move some offices to the West from Washington, and gave front-line managers more authority. He also scaled back Barack Obama’s too-expansive monument designations, streamlined permitting for resource development, and ramped up leases for onshore and offshore oil drilling.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-phony-attack-on-william-barr-11545689892

William Barr is probably the best-qualified nominee for U.S. attorney general since Robert Jackson in 1940. Jackson had been solicitor general and would later serve on the Supreme Court. Mr. Barr has already served as attorney general under George H.W. Bush, as well as assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, the authoritative voice within the Justice Department on issues of law throughout the government.

Yet critics decry his nomination, or at least insist that he recuse himself from supervising special counsel Robert Mueller, because of an unsolicited memo he wrote last June to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who then had supervisory responsibility for the Mueller investigation, and Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, current head of the Office of Legal Counsel. The memo criticizes one obstruction-of-justice theory that some have speculated Mr. Mueller is pursuing.

The criticisms of Mr. Barr and his memo are meritless. The 19-page document does not fault the Mueller investigation of a possible criminal connection between the Trump campaign and Russia, or even any of its secondary and tertiary prongs such as the prosecutions of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and George Papadopoulos. It argues forcefully that the president cannot be guilty of obstruction of justice based either on his May 2017 firing of James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or his purported earlier request that Mr. Comey go easy on former national security adviser Mike Flynn.

Mr. Barr’s memo acknowledges that he has no inside knowledge on the facts of the case, and that factors unknown to him may be in play, including the possibility that Mr. Mueller has an entirely different—and legitimate—obstruction theory in mind.

Two prominent American Jewish leaders expressed strong concern on Monday over US President Donald Trump’s declaration of faith in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as part of his sudden decision to withdraw the 2,000 US troops presently assisting Kurdish and Arab allies in Syria.

“This most recent embrace of Turkey as a strategic partner in this ‘new’ US policy — relating to ISIS, Syria, the Kurds — should raise serious alarm bells in Israel and in the pro-Israel community,” Abraham Foxman, the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told The Algemeineron Monday.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper — associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center — meanwhile asked whether anyone could “seriously believe that Erdogan will block the land corridor Iran is creating across Syria into Lebanon,” one of the more serious long-term issues in Israel’s northern security theater.

“It’s difficult to fathom what it was that Erdogan promised Trump, and that is part of the existential challenge facing Israel,” Cooper told The Algemeiner.

Trump’s confidence that Erdogan will “eradicate” what remains of ISIS marks another dramatic turnaround in the US president’s turbulent relations with foreign leaders. Just in August, amidst a dispute over an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, who was imprisoned in Turkey, Trump declared a steep rise in steel and aluminum import tariffs on Turkey, along with sanctions against Turkish officials. In response, Erdogan urged a mass boycott in Turkey of the US electronics products, including Apple’s iPhone.

More recently, Turkey accused Trump of adopting a “comic” stance toward the murder in October of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul. However, in a sign that Trump was changing his attitude toward Erdogan’s Islamist government, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin claimed on Monday that the US president had agreed to pay an official visit to Turkey during 2019.

Both Foxman and Cooper were in agreement that Trump’s new alignment with Erdogan should be regarded with alarm by the American Jewish community, especially as the Turkish president’s frequent antisemitic outbursts are increasingly echoed by other senior Turkish officials — such as Foreign Minister Mesut Cavusoglu, who on Monday invoked the historic “blood libel” in slamming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “baby-killer.”