RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Most Republicans do not want to denigrate President Trump, but neither do they want to elevate him. Benign neglect is the preferred path. The good of what he did – freeing up the economy from restrictive regulations and confining taxes, repatriating more than a trillion dollars in corporate cash, raising wages for the lowest income workers, and creating the most jobs ever for Black and Hispanic; taking real steps to resolve the border crisis; addressing the bureaucratic morass in Washington; calling out international governmental bodies for their undemocratic ways; getting NATO nations to pay a greater share of their defense; confronting enemies of freedom like Communist China, Russia and North Korea; signing the Abraham Accords and instigating Operation Warp Speed to get a COVOD-19 vaccine out in record time – was overshadowed by a supersized ego and mean-spirited, feckless Tweets.

Democrats, on the other hand, would like to keep the spirit of Donald Trump front and center. While it is true that his ardent Republican supporters do not want to give up on him, neither do Democrat leaders who see him as someone around whom they can rally their troops. Trump Derangement Syndrome helped Mr. Trump with the public when he was President because complaints about him were so outrageous. But it hurts the Republican Party and their chances today when anti-Trump opinions are voiced by other Republicans. “Prudent Republicans,” wrote Andrew McCarthy in the May 15th issue of National Review, “perceive that the best way to move on from Trump is to stop talking about him.” I agree.

If Republicans want to take control of the House and Senate in 2022, they will have to focus on issues, not on the personality of the former President. Single issue politicians detract from legitimate policy debates. In refusing to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump has done no more than what Al Gore did in 2000 and Hillary Clinton did in 2016. In all three cases (2000, 2016, 2020), there were certainly electoral irregularities, but there always have been. However, from what we now know, none of those elections would have been reversed. “If questioning the results of a particular election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath,” writes Mollie Hemingway in her forthcoming book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, “nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated following the 2016 election.” It is not that Mr. Trump’s character should be ignored, but that it must be kept in perspective.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/jeffrey_epstein_took_

What sort of goals would make it worthwhile to hang out with a convicted child sex offender if you are a megalomaniac billionaire?  The curious case of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates just got curiouser.  Anonymous sources, denials, millions of dollars in donations, and claims of lies surround a 2013 visit of Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein to the Strasbourg home of the then-chairman of Norway’s Nobel Committee, which awards the Peace Prize.  The visit was uncovered by Norwegian business daily DN, whose sister publication describes in English the visit and its denial:

Former Nobel Committee chair Thorbjørn Jagland denied having met Jeffrey Epstein when asked by the current chairperson. An investigation by Norwegian business newspaper DN reveals Jagland hosted Epstein and Bill Gates in his Strasbourg residence in 2013.

These uncredited photos via the U.K. Daily Mail allegedly show Epstein and Gates together in Strasbourg and reveal that Jagland, a career politician who was at the time serving as secretary general of the Council of Europe as well as chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, lived in a spectacular home in Strasbourg.  While E.U. positions pay very well, and even though he held two jobs, this house looks suspiciously lavish to me:

It might be worth noting that the first Nobel Peace Prize awarded after Jagland assumed the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee (whose five members are appointed by that nation’s parliament, where Jagland has previously served, including as a prime minister) was to Barack Obama — shortly after his inauguration as POTUS, before he had accomplished anything remotely worthy of the honor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-overhyped-story-on-new-yorks-trump-probe/

Despite all the clamor since news broke last night of a purportedly big development in the state of New York’s criminal investigation of former President Donald Trump’s real-estate organization, nothing very meaningful has happened. The development here has to do, merely, with who is investigating. Nothing has changed regarding what is being investigated.

For years, multiple New York state authorities have been eying the Trump organization and the former president himself. As I’ve previously outlined (see, e.g., here), the DA has homed in on suspicions of bank, insurance, and tax fraud, based on what has been reported (particularly by the New York Times) to be a decades-old pattern of inflating or deflating estimates of the value of Trump assets to seek financial advantage (e.g., higher values help with borrowing and real-estate coverage, lower values with tax obligations, and insurance premiums). Meanwhile, the Empire State’s attorney general, Letitia James, has been probing the same subject matter, in anticipation of using her authority to bring civil actions — the AG’s criminal-enforcement authority is more limited than the DA’s.

Last night’s news is that the two offices are now joining forces on the criminal aspect of the investigation. That’s all.

This is not surprising. As I explained back in February (in the column linked above), the DA’s office — which litigated the case all the way to the Supreme Court twice in order to get access to former president Trump’s financial records — has been staffing the probe up. Joining forces with the AG’s office means the DA’s criminal probe will have additional resources, including lawyers experienced in corporate-financial investigations.

James is an ambitious progressive politician who is frequently touted as a future gubernatorial candidate (maybe the not-too-distant future). It makes political sense that she would want a more prominent role in a probe of Trump, who is unpopular in New York (which President Biden carried by 2 million votes in 2020, and Hillary Clinton by 1.7 million in 2016). So the latest shuffling of the prosecutorial deck will add fodder to Trump’s claims that he, his family, and his organization are being subjected to an abusive political vendetta by New York Democrats. Nevertheless, the announcement that James and Vance will be working together, rather than pursuing the case on parallel tracks, does not change the subject matter under investigation.

It is worth adding, as I have noted before, that though the investigation has been going on for a long time, no one has been accused of a crime or sued civilly at this point.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/05/19/accused_russiagate_spy_kilimnik_speaks_-_and_evidence_backs_his_no_collusion_account_777328.html

The man cast as a linchpin of debunked Trump-Russia collusion theories is breaking his silence to vigorously dispute the U.S. government’s effort to brand him a Russian spy and put him behind bars.

In an exclusive interview with RealClearInvestigations, Konstantin Kilimnik stated, “I have no relationship whatsoever to any intelligence services, be they Russian or Ukrainian or American, or anyone else.”

Kilimnik, a longtime employee of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, spoke out in response to an explosive Treasury Department statement declaring that he had “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” during the 2016 election. That press release, which announced an array of sanctions on Russian nationals last month, also alleged that Kilimnik is a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf.”

Treasury’s claim came shortly after two other accusatory U.S. government statements about the dual Ukrainian-Russian national. In March, a U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment accused Kilimnik of being a “Russian influence agent” who meddled in the 2020 campaign to assist Trump’s reelection. A month earlier, an FBI alert offered $250,000 for information leading to his arrest over a 2018 witness tampering charge in Manafort’s shuttered Ukraine lobbying case, which was unrelated to Russia, collusion, or any elections.

Treasury provided no evidence for its claims, which go beyond the findings of the two most extensive Russiagate investigations: the 448-page report issued in 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the 966-page report issued in August 2020 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Treasury has declined all media requests for elaboration on how it reached conclusions that those probes did not. Two unidentified officials told NBC News that U.S. intelligence “has developed new information” about Kilimnik “that leads them to believe” (emphasis added) that he passed on the polling data to Russia. But these  sources “did not identify the source or type of intelligence that had been developed,” nor “when or how” it was received.

“Nobody has seen any evidence to support these claims about Kilimnik,” a congressional source familiar with the House and Senate’s multiple Russia-related investigations told RCI.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/05/19/feds_spent_300000_on_virtual_reality_penguin_study_777172.html

How does $300,000 to study penguins through a virtual reality experience sound?

That is what the University of Wisconsin got from the National Science Foundation in 2020 for Arctic and Antarctic research.

The $300,000 grant provides for a project called “Becoming Joey: Promoting Informal Learning Through Embodiment in an Adélie Penguin Virtual Reality Experience.”

To better understand the polar regions, the virtual reality research is “to encourage and support basic research that is best conducted in or can only be conducted in the Arctic and Antarctic.”

The goal is to understand the natural phenomena in the Antarctic and Arctic regions and their role in global systems, according to the grant summary.

The funding helps pay for postdoctoral fellowships in polar regions research, as well as undergraduate student research, laboratory equipment and for research opportunities for women, minority, and disabled scientists and engineers.

The Adélie penguin is found only on the Antarctic continent and is the smallest of the species of penguins found there.