RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-and-racial-division-1543621887

Democrats are taking racial politics to new heights—and no wonder, since the tactic has again succeeded. This week Republican Senator Tim Scott said he will oppose the nomination of Thomas Farr, tapped for a federal judgeship in North Carolina. Senator Jeff Flake is voting no to showcase his opposition to Donald Trump, and the two GOP defections are enough to torpedo Mr. Farr’s appointment this year.

Mr. Scott cited legal work that Mr. Farr performed decades ago for North Carolina’s then-Senator Jesse Helms. After the 1990 election, the Justice Department accused Helms of trying to intimidate black voters by sending a postcard claiming that people who recently moved were ineligible to cast ballots. Mr. Farr defended Helms in the matter. But he told the Senate last year that he wasn’t consulted on the postcard’s content and didn’t know it had been sent until Justice sent a letter to the campaign.

A 1991 internal Justice memo, published this week, says that Mr. Farr, who also had coordinated “ballot security” for Helms in the 1984 election, discussed the idea of sending some kind of postcard in 1990, but that he counseled against it. Nonetheless, Mr. Scott said Thursday that the memo “shed new light on Mr. Farr’s activities” and “created more concerns.”

There’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mr. Scott, the Senate’s only black Republican. But Democrats will see Mr. Farr’s defeat as a vindication of their most underhanded and inflammatory racial tactics.
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Consider a second complaint against Mr. Farr: that the North Carolina Legislature retained him to defend its 2013 voter-ID law. “This is a man who stands for disenfranchisement of voters, particularly minority voters,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said this week. In a letter last year, four members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote that in Mr. Farr the White House could hardly have found a nominee “with a more hostile record on African-American voting rights.”William Barber II, a former leader of the North Carolina NAACP, called Mr. Farr “a product of the modern white supremacist machine.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13363/robert-mueller-modus-operandi

Even if Mueller could prove that members of the Trump team had colluded with Julian Assange to use material that Assange had unlawfully obtained, that, too, would not be a crime.

Merely using the product of an already committed theft of information is not a crime. If you don’t believe me, ask the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and other newspapers that used material illegally obtained by Assange with full knowledge that it was illegally obtained.

In the end, Mueller should be judged by how successful he has been in satisfying his central mission. Judged by that standard and based on what we now know, he seems to be an abysmal failure.

The recent guilty plea of Michael Cohen of lying represents the dominant trend in Mueller’s approach to prosecution. The vast majority of indictments and guilty pleas obtained against Americans by Mueller have not been for substantive crimes relating to his mandate: namely, to uncover crimes involving illegal contacts with Russia. They have involved indictments and guilty pleas either for lying, or for financial crimes by individuals unrelated to the Russia probe. If this remains true after the filing of the Mueller report, it would represent a significant failure on Mueller’s part.

Mueller was appointed Special Counsel not to provoke individuals into committing new crimes, but rather to uncover past crimes specifically involving alleged illegal coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian agents. No one doubted that Russia attempted to influence the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton. But Mueller’s mandate was not to prosecute Russians or to point the finger at Vladimir Putin. His mandate was to uncover crimes committed by the Trump campaign with regard to Russia’s attempts to influence the election.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-michael-cohen-show-1543534091

Special counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday gave cable TV countless more hours of programming with a new plea deal with Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen. In a criminal information in federal court, Cohen now says he lied to Congress about his contact with Mr. Trump about his negotiations in 2016 for a possible Trump Organization hotel deal in Moscow.

If you believe the heavy media breathing, Mr. Trump is now, or once again, a goner. At last here is a clear 2016 link between candidate Trump and Russia. Cohen must know more, and it’s only a matter of time before we learn that Mr. Trump was conspiring with Vladimir Putin in return for who knows what.

The reality: Who knows? The Steele dossier was supposed to be the smoking gun, but that turned out to be a fraud. Then the famous 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian functionaries was supposed to be proof of collusion, but nothing more has come of that.

On its face, the Cohen court filing is hardly a crime or impeachable evidence. The filing says Cohen explored a hotel deal in Moscow for about six months in 2016, and that Russians with ties to the Kremlin wanted to get Mr. Trump to visit Russia and meet Mr. Putin.

But the deal fell through for reasons that aren’t explained, and Mr. Trump never made the trip. On Thursday President Trump called Cohen a “liar,” which is demonstrably true. Mr. Trump also said there was “nothing wrong” in considering a private business deal when he wasn’t President, which is true in a criminal sense though it was dumb for a presidential candidate.

As usual, the best posture is to avoid hyperventilating and size up the evidence as it emerges. There is still no public evidence proving a Trump-Russia campaign conspiracy.