RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/08/san-franciscans-fiddle-streets-riddled-needles-feces/

One of the most annoying — and notorious — aspects of life in San Francisco is locals’ tendency to micromanage nearly all of everyday life, from shopping bags to perfumes to any attempt to use a carbon-fueled vehicle. When SF residents find someone in violation of their rules, whether or not formally codified, they call him on it in all their self-righteous glory.

Brock Keeling, the editor of a popular local site sf.curbed, is a “self-described and proud ‘militant pedestrian.’” He penned “Pedestrian Etiquette Guide: How To Use The Sidewalk Like A Good Person.” Those who activate his pet peeves are inherently bad, I guess. No treats for us.

According to Keeling, the need for sidewalk etiquette is enormous. There have been a lot of traffic fatalities, and, get this: “Ride-hailing companies have turned streets into cash cows. And said companies use San Francisco streets as testing grounds for driverless cars.”

God forbid Uber makes any profit. Of course, none of it proves that San Francisco pedestrians are incapable of using a sidewalk, but, nonetheless, Keeling came up with a total of 17 (seventeen!) rules, and posted them under the “Beginner’s Guide To San Francisco” category. Because in San Francisco, existing should be a chore.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/feds_knew_steele_dossier_was_politically_motivated_before_it_was_submitted_to_fisa_court_to_permit_spying_on_trump_campaign.html

John Solomon of The Hill has yet another scoop that demonstrates lying to the FISA Court, thereby enabling spying on the Trump campaign. He writes:

If ever there were an admission that taints the FBI’s secret warrant to surveil Donald Trump’s campaign, it sat buried for more than 2 1/2 years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.

And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/robert-mueller-trump-russia-investigation-history-witch-hunts/

Robert Mueller’s Russian-collusion investigation is often called a “witch hunt,” and there has been considerable debate over whether this is a proper description. For what it’s worth, the earliest known use of the phrase in American politics occurred a century ago this spring, and it involved Russian attempts to influence the U.S. government. In February and March of 1919, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on “Bolshevik Propaganda,” and at one point the following exchange occurred between Raymond Robins, a progressive economist who advocated recognizing the Bolshevik regime, and Senator Lee S. Overman (D., N.C.) (emphasis added):

Mr. Robins. . . . And, Senator, I believe that when we know the beast, with the united intelligence of the free men and women of America, I have faith enough in our institutions to believe that we will throw that foreign culture, born out of a foreign despotism, back out of our land, not by treating it with the method of tyranny, not by a witch hunt, nor by hysteria, but by strong, intelligent action, the intelligent action of Senators of the United States making a report that gets before the people the truth of the situation and mobolizes [sic] the consciences and the intelligence of the men and women of our land.

Senator Overman. What do you mean by witch hunt?

Mr. Robins. I mean this, Senator. You are familiar with the old witch-hunt attitude, that when people get frightened at things and see bogies, then they get out witch proclamations, and mob action and all kinds of hysteria takes place.

Senator Overman. This committee has been called a witch hunt.

Mr. Robins. I wish to make no possible sort of criticism of the committee. I wish to say that I have never been treated more fairly than I have been here.

Nowadays the phrase is generally understood to refer to the witch trials of colonial New England, which, in the popular mind, are thought to have differed from modern-day criminal trials in several ways:

a) the outcome was often determined in advance;
b) shoddy, fabricated, or unreliable evidence was accepted;
c) they were motivated by a desire to scapegoat members of disfavored groups; and
d) the whole thing was ridiculous because the crime being prosecuted does not exist.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nadler-v-barr/

The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Wednesday morning on holding Attorney General William Barr in contempt for refusing to make the full Mueller report widely available to Congress.

But the Justice Department is accusing congressional Democrats of playing politics. Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote in a letter on Monday that if congressional Democratic leaders really cared about transparency, they would have read an almost entirely unredacted version of the report that’s been available to them for weeks.

The Mueller report that was made available to the public on April 18 redacted four types of information: grand-jury material, sensitive intelligence, matters that could affect ongoing investigations, and material that would infringe on the privacy of “peripheral third parties.” Barr made a version of the report available to congressional leaders of both parties and the chairmen and ranking members of intelligence and judiciary committees in the House and Senate that only excluded grand-jury material, which legally must be kept secret. So far, none of the six Democrats provided with the opportunity to review this fuller version of the report has taken the opportunity to do so.

Boyd’s letter on Monday said that congressional Democrats’ refusal to read the fuller report already available to them “naturally raises questions about the sincerity of the committee’s interest in and purported need for the redacted material.”

So why haven’t congressional Democrats taken up Barr’s offer? They argue that the full report, including grand-jury material (which could be released via judicial order), needs to be made available to the entire Congress. And they say that if they were to take a look at what’s already available to them that would undercut their negotiating position.

“Every member of Congress ought to be able to see that version,” Mark Warner, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, tells National Review. “I think if I were to go, you’d lessen the case.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/robert-muellers-preposterous-rationale-for-tainting-the-president-with-obstruction-allegations/

Volume II of his report does exactly what he claimed to be avoiding.

In gross violation of Justice Department policy and constitutional norms, a prosecutor neither charges nor recommends charges against a suspect, but proceeds to smear him by publishing 200 pages of obstruction allegations. Asked to explain why he did it, the prosecutor says he was just trying to protect the suspect from being smeared.

This is the upshot of the Mueller report’s Volume II. It might be thought campy if the suspect weren’t the president of the United States and the stakes weren’t so high.

The smear-but-don’t-charge outcome is the result of two wrongs: (1) Mueller’s dizzying application of Justice Department guidance, written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), holding that a president may not be indicted while he is in office; and (2) the media-Democrat complex’s demand that only laws they like — those that serve their anti-Trump political purposes — be enforced.

On the matter of the OLC guidance, the Mueller report exhibits the same sleight-of-hand that I detailed in Monday’s column regarding its account of the George Papadopoulos saga — in which Mueller obscures the fact that the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation (“Crossfire Hurricane”) was opened on the false pretense that a Russian agent named Joseph Mifsud confided to Trump adviser Papadopoulos that Russia had thousands of Clinton emails, which Papadopoulos told Australian diplomat Alexander Downer the Kremlin planned to publish in a manner timed to damage Clinton for Trump’s benefit. To the contrary, if you wade through the fine print of Mueller’s report, you learn that Mifsud was not a Russian agent; there’s a good chance he did not tell Papadopoulos anything about emails; in relating to Downer that Russia might have damaging information on Clinton, Papadopoulos said nothing about emails or about Russia trying to help Trump; but, two months after they spoke and the hacked DNC emails were published, Downer (in consultation with the Obama State Department) leapt to the overwrought conclusions that Papadopoulos must have been referring to those emails (he wasn’t) and that Russia and the Trump campaign must be collaborating to undermine the election (they weren’t).

https://pjmedia.com/trending/brennan-and-clapper-are-still-working-as-agents-of-influence-for-russian-military-intelligence/

During the Cold War, all kinds of terms made it into our lexicon through spy stories. “Moles,” for instance, were direct traitors in political office, the military, or intelligence agencies. They were directly employed by the enemy and fed them classified information.

“Useful idiots” were people who unwittingly bought into the propaganda of the other side, and spread those ideas through a misplaced sense of right and wrong.

“Agents of influence,” are somewhere between the two. They aren’t directly employed by the enemy; but they spread enemy propaganda from a lofty position that influences ordinary people to believe it. And they do it on purpose.

Since 2016, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have acted as agents of influence for the Russian GRU—and they had to know it.

NBC News and CNN are not making these two guys rich because they know less about Russian intelligence operations than the average person; they obviously know more.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/08/trump_asserts_executive_privilege_over_full_mueller_report_140277.html

The White House is invoking executive privilege, reserving the right to block the full release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia probe, escalating President Donald Trump’s battle with Congress.

The administration’s decision was announced just as the House Judiciary Committee was gaveling in to consider holding Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress over failure to release the report.

Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler of New York declared the action by Trump’s Justice Department was a clear new sign of the president’s “blanket defiance” of Congress’ constitutional rights. “Every day we learn of new efforts by this administration to stonewall Congress,” Nadler said. “This is unprecedented.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the action was rather a response to the “blatant abuse of power” by Democratic Rep. Nadler.

“Neither the White House nor Attorney General Barr will comply with Chairman Nadler’s unlawful and reckless demands,” she said.