RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-dangerous-donald-trump-search-mar-a-lago-merrick-garland-justice-department-11660074118?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Monday’s unannounced Federal Bureau of Investigation search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home isn’t a moment for anyone to cheer. The Justice Department is unleashing political furies it can’t control and may not understand, and the risks for the department and the country are as great as they are for Mr. Trump.

As everyone knows by now, an FBI law-enforcement action of this kind against a former American President is unprecedented. Monday’s search needed a judicial warrant in service of probable cause in a criminal probe. The Justice Department has provided few details beyond what has been leaked to reporters, so it is hard to judge what the FBI was looking for.

The media leaks say the search is related to potential mishandling of classified documents or violations of the Presidential Records Act. If that is true, then the raid looks like prosecutorial overkill and a bad mistake. Document disputes are typically settled in negotiation, and that is how Mr. Trump’s disagreement with the National Archives had been proceeding.

Mr. Trump has already returned 15 boxes of documents, but the National Archives wants to know if the former President retained classified material he shouldn’t have. This is what appears to have triggered the FBI search, but it’s far from clear why this couldn’t be settled cooperatively, or at most with a subpoena.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/10/welcome-to-bidens-police-state-part-iii/

Try, if you can, to imagine the reaction if the Justice Department had, in President Donald Trump’s second year in office, orchestrated a raid of Hillary Clinton’s Chappaqua, N.Y., home, rummaging through rooms and cracking the Clintons’ safe looking for government documents she hadn’t turned over when she left the State Department.

You can bet, at the very least, that newspapers wouldn’t be carrying run-of-the-mill headlines such as “F.B.I. Searches Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Residence” or “FBI executes search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in document investigation.” The Washington Post thought the important story to tell was how “Top Republicans echo Trump’s evidence-free claims to discredit FBI search.” 

No, the press would be in a full meltdown. Democrats would be calling for Trump’s impeachment. Celebrities would be making videos in which they cry about the future of the country. Never Trumpers would be patting themselves on the back and shouting “I told you so.” Colleges would be canceling classes so students could comfort each other and draw in their school-issued coloring books. The gnashing and grinding of teeth could be heard from space.

Needless to say, it would have been the end of the Trump administration.

But this is the Biden administration we’re talking about. And when it acts dictatorial – which is more frequent with each passing month – it’s the ends that matter, not the means, because the ends are about delivering on a leftist agenda. Did Biden authorize this raid? How far up the chain of command did it go? Don’t expect the “watchdog” press to ask such questions.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/09/we-have-no-reason-to-trust-the-fbi/

If Republicans were doing any of this, Democrats would be calling it authoritarian. And they’d be right.

The day before Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016, The New York Times’ Paul Krugman claimed that the FBI—along with “Russian intelligence”—had “rigged the election.” Election denialism is perfectly acceptable behavior on the left. Krugman blamed the “rigged election” on “people within the F.B.I.” who, he asserted, “clearly felt that under Mr. Comey they had a free hand to indulge their political preferences,” by which he meant the investigation into Clinton’s email server. One can imagine the tenor of Krugman’s rhetoric if the investigation had been launched by the administration of Mitt Romney or George W. Bush or signed off on by AG Robert Bork.

Is it still the case that investigating a candidate for wrongdoing is “rigging” an election? Yesterday, Merrick Garland’s DOJ raided the home of a former president, and likely future presidential candidate, in a case regarding “potential mishandling of classified documents,” according to The Washington Post. Is that really it? We have long been told that “mishandling of classified documents” isn’t a serious crime.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/when-the-clintons-ransacked-the-white-house/?utm_source=

The year was 2001. George W. Bush had just defeated Al Gore in the infamous hanging-gigachad presidential election from hell. The policy differences between the candidates weren’t actually that substantial, at least compared to how they often are today; what had really distinguished the campaign was its de facto referendum on the personal character of the outgoing Bill Clinton.

And then, as though to drive the point home, Clinton went and ransacked the White House. As Donald Trump pointed out yesterday after Mar-a-Lago was raided, the departing Clintons were accused of stealing furniture, vandalizing federal buildings, and leaving a general mess for the Bush team to clean up.

The extent of the damage reported in the press was stunning. The Clintonistas allegedly left behind filthy carpets, slashed computer cords, and trash on the floor. Profane messages had been recorded on answering machines, graffiti had been painted on walls, and pornography had been left on computer screens. An extensive amount of stuff had been stolen, everything from furniture to silverware. In a jab at the new president, the “W” keys had been removed from computer keyboards.

Even Air Force One wasn’t safe. The columnist Tony Snow reported that the presidential plane “looked as if it had been stripped by a skilled band of thieves — or perhaps wrecked by a trailer-park twister.”

The Clintons acknowledged they had taken $190,000 in supposed “gifts,” including china, kitchenware, and TVs. They later offered to return $28,000 worth and pay for tens of thousands more after the donors clarified that they’d been, you know, giving to the White House and not the Clinton college fund. Still, the Clintons’ most pathetic bagmen were more than happy to run interference. They insisted once again, as they had for eight years, that nothing had been done wrong.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-rise-of-wokeness-in-the-military/

Thomas Spoehr is director of the Center for National Defense at the Heritage Foundation. He served previously for over 36 years in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of Lieutenant General. He earned a B.A. from William and Mary, an M.A. from Webster University, and an M.A. from the U.S. Army War College. While in the Army, he served in numerous leadership roles, including senior positions in the Pentagon and Commandant of the Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear School. His operational experiences include service with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 1st Armored Division. He participated in the 1983 invasion of Grenada, and in 2011 he served as Deputy Commanding General, U.S. Forces Iraq.

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on July 20, 2022, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. 

Complaints by veteran soldiers about younger generations who lack discipline and traditional values are as old as war itself. Grizzled veterans in the Greek phalanx, Roman legions, and Napoleon’s elite corps all believed that the failings of the young would be the ruin of their armies. This is not the chief worry of grizzled American veterans today. The largest threat they see by far to our current military is the weakening of its fabric by radical progressive (or “woke”) policies being imposed, not by a rising generation of slackers, but by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness.

https://quillette.com/2022/08/05/the-limits-of-radical-protest/

Bayard Rustin was one of the towering figures in the American civil rights movement. A democratic socialist and a lead organizer of the March on Washington, Rustin was also among the most forceful and compelling advocates for a sweeping set of social and economic changes intended to bring about what he described as “full racial equality.”

In February 1965—a year and a half after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and just seven months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act—Rustin published an essay in Commentary titled “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” This title captured a theme of Rustin’s work in the years to follow—he was a radical pragmatist who believed the campaign for civil rights was the starting point for a much larger struggle: the fight to build a fairer and more just society for all.

Rustin had just witnessed tectonic legal and political changes in the United States when he urged his fellow Americans to embark on this project. As he put it at the beginning of his essay, the “elaborate legal structure of segregation and discrimination, particularly in relation to public accommodations, has virtually collapsed.” But he argued that this merely marked the transition from one phase of economic and social mobilization to the next: “What is the value of winning access to public accommodations for those who lack money to use them? The minute the movement faced this question, it was compelled to expand its vision beyond race relations to economic relations, including the role of education in modern society.”