RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/05/30/scorched_earth_lives_upturned_muellers_targets_speak_out.html

Veteran journalist Art Moore was editing a story on the Trump-Russia probe last October when he heard a knock at the door. He saw a couple of men in suits on the front porch of his suburban Seattle home and thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses making the rounds. But they weren’t missionaries there to convert him; they were FBI agents there to interrogate him, sent by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The G-men wanted to talk about WikiLeaks, specifically whether the Trump campaign had any connection to the hacktivist group’s release of thousands of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election.

The two FBI agents – cyber-crimes experts Jared Brown and Aleks Kobzanets, the latter of whom had a Russian accent – grilled Moore, an editor for the news site WND.com, for about 90 minutes. Among other things, they asked about former WND correspondent Jerome Corsi and whether he had any advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ dumps of Clinton campaign emails. Corsi, who is friendly with the president, had used Trump confidante Roger Stone as a source during the campaign.

“They were clearly on a fishing expedition,” Moore said, recounting the incident to RealClearInvestigations publicly for the first time.

“They seemed desperate to find something to hang onto the narrative” of Russian collusion, he said.

A former Associated Press and Christianity Today reporter who co-authored a best-selling book on homeland security, Moore said he believed the special counsel secretly looked through not just his personal emails and text messages, but also his phone records, even though the agents assured him he was not a target of investigation.

Weeks earlier, two other agents had shown up — also unannounced — at the suburban Virginia home of his boss, WND.com founder and editor Joseph Farah, asking similar questions about WikiLeaks. They focused on staff editorial conference calls Corsi had joined in August and October 2016. They asked who normally edited the stories filed by Corsi. Farah mentioned Moore, and another team of agents was deployed to Gig Harbor, Wash., where Moore works from home.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-great-jobs-report-11559839362

What will it take to stop the U.S. jobs machine? Data on capital expenditures and manufacturing are flashing warning signals, while rising tariffs threaten growth. But U.S. small firms in May continued to raise pay, add workers and make plans to hire even more. That’s the encouraging news in the latest monthly employment survey from the National Federation of Independent Business, due out later today.

NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg reports that job creation among the small employers in the survey “remained strong in May,” matching the April reading of a net addition of 0.32 workers per firm. He notes that demand for workers continues to outpace supply at small companies:

Sixty-two percent reported hiring or trying to hire (up 5 points), but 54 percent (up 5 points) reported few or no qualified applicants for the positions they were trying to fill. “Qualified” includes having position-appropriate skills but also encompasses appearance, attitude, social skills, [reasonable] wage expectations and work history. Twenty-five percent of all owners cited the difficulty of finding qualified workers as their Single Most Important Business Problem, equaling the record high.

Employees and employers are bound to have different opinions when it comes to the definition of reasonable wage expectations. Regardless, the tight labor market is forcing employers to pay up for talent. According to Mr. Dunkelberg:

Reports of higher worker compensation were unchanged at a lofty net 34 percent of all firms. Plans to raise compensation posted a 4 point gain to a net 24 percent. Overall, reports of rising compensation are holding at historically high levels.