RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/28/trump-russias_turning_and_the_knives_are_out_140430.html

Now that the Russia collusion allegations have evaporated, the long knives are out and President Trump’s antagonists are watching their backs. They have moved from accusing him of treason to pushing revisionist narratives that try to shift the blame for the debunked probe onto others.

This effort is expected to accelerate following Trump’s decision Thursday to empower Attorney General William Barr to declassify CIA, Pentagon, and Director of National Intelligence documents as necessary to access “information or intelligence that relates to the attorney general’s review” of the Russia probe.

In other words, he’s gaining the authority needed to investigate the investigators.

CIA sources immediately objected in the New York Times that assets’ lives would be at risk, stunting Langley’s ability to recruit. Perhaps. But the argument is a bit shopworn, raising the question whether intelligence managers are looking to protect their agents and sources, or aiming to protect themselves.

There are a growing number of indicators that the leading players in the 2016 election drama are turning on one another, making a mad dash for the lifeboats to escape being dragged under with the political Titanic that is Christopher Steele and his dossier. These are many of the same people who had been eager to exploit the dossier, that collection of memos paid for by the Clinton campaign and supposedly sourced from Russia. Once treated like the Rosetta stone of collusion, the Steele documents now seem even to Trump antagonists more like the Howard Hughes diaries.

A “former CIA official” has told Fox News that two of Trump’s most high profile accusers – former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Director of the CIA John Brennan – didn’t want anything to do with Steele’s opus. It was former FBI Director James Comey, the source said, who was pushing to use the dossier in the official Intelligence Community Assessment, issued in the final days of the Obama administration. Having failed at that, thanks to Clapper and Brennan’s diligence (or so the story goes), Comey went rogue and confronted President-elect Trump with the salacious highlights produced by Steele.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/28/a_hard_rains_gonna_fall_on_obamas_bad_cops_and_spies_140429.html

The skies are growing dark and increasingly ominous for dirty officials at the top of Obama-era law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Leading the “I’m really worried” list are James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch, and their senior aides, all political appointees. They expected Hillary Clinton to win in 2016 and bury any traces of malfeasance, just as they had buried hers. It didn’t work out that way.

Now they need protection themselves. House Democrats and anonymous leakers are busy providing it. Many are delicately called “current and former senior officials” by the New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media. Gee, I wonder who they are?

These defenders of the old guard are sliming Attorney General Bill Barr, who heads the investigation into their actions. They have good reasons, if not clean hands, for their attack. First, they want to keep as much secret as they can. Exposure can only harm them. Their main argument is that any disclosures will damage U.S. national security. Second, they want to paint the disclosures and forthcoming indictments as President Trump’s revenge, the illegitimate use of powerful agencies that should be nonpartisan. That, of course, is precisely what they are accused of doing.

Barr won’t be deterred. He did not return for a second stint as AG to pad his résumé or protect Donald Trump. He returned to clean out the Augean Stables. He needs to muck out the mess left by his predecessors and find the horses that left it.

Barr is determined to do that. He intends to find out how and why the Department of Justice embarked on an all-consuming, two-year project to investigate Trump’s alleged cooperation with Putin’s Russia to win the presidency. The investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no such cooperation (going well beyond saying he simply could not indict). Now, Barr wants to understand the origins of the probe and whether the tools used to launch it were lies or distortions — and were known to be so by DoJ, FBI, and CIA officials. Barr wants to know if U.S. intelligence agencies were used to spy illegally on Americans, or if they outsourced that to friendly foreign services and then recovered the information from them. He wants to know if the investigations really began in July 2016, as the FBI testified, or earlier, and what evidence was used to begin them.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/william-barr-declassification-authority-debate/

The media panic notwithstanding, the buck still stops with the president.

L ast week, President Trump conferred on Attorney General Bill Barr the authority to declassify documents relevant to his inquiry into what we can collectively call “the Russia investigation.” This includes not only “Crossfire Hurricane,” the counterintelligence probe formally opened by the FBI in late July 2016, but all of the relevant investigative threads, including those pursued by other intelligence agencies — such as the CIA’s collaborations with foreign intelligence services, beginning in 2015.

In other words, the public is about to learn a lot more about decision-making during the Obama administration. As night follows day, the Democrat-media complex went apoplectic. Gone are the days when the press always wanted more information because it perceived its role, vouchsafed by the Constitution, to be the public’s eye on government.

Much of the mainstream media is now in an all but openly declared partnership with one of our two major political parties. Consequently, when a Republican administration is in power or being questioned, classified leaks are the order of the day. When a Democratic administration is under the microscope, we get lectures on the wages of compromising intelligence secrets, especially methods and sources.

So, naturally, we are treated to hysterical reports that the attorney general — whose Justice Department cannot enforce the law effectively unless it can entice cooperation from reluctant sources — is going to expose covert operatives gratuitously, ensuring that no courageous spy or foreign intelligence service will ever risk cooperation with the United States again.

It is an absurd narrative.