RUTHFULLY YOURS

It takes some kind of convoluted thinking to turn Glenn Simpson into a victim.

After all, the Fusion GPS chief is one of a handful of people primarily responsible for concocting and peddling the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax for the past three years. There is not an investigation or a news article or a human target related to the Trump-Russia scheme that doesn’t have Simpson’s fingerprints on it. When the complete story of the biggest political scandal in U.S. history finally is written, Glenn Simpson will be the prologue.

But his pals in the elite media see Simpson as a martyr, a victim of congressional investigators hounding an innocent guy just trying to make a buck. News coverage about Simpson’s refusal to answer questions on Capitol Hill bordered on laughable—if not satirical—and willfully overlooked big parts of Simpson’s tale of self-inflicted woe.

Members of both the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees called Simpson back this week to testify amid new information that disputes his previous statements to Congress. After defying their request, he was served with a subpoena to appear; for nearly an hour on Tuesday morning, Simpson invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Now before I get too deep into the headlines from the elite media, let’s think back just six months ago when Michael Cohen took the Fifth in connection with the Stormy Daniels lawsuit. Reporters and pundits exploded with glee, insisting Cohen’s move was a “huge development” that could lead to more trouble for the president.

But Simpson’s constitutional tactic, on the other hand, was met either with sympathy or silence. The Washington Post downplayed Simpson’s appearance simply as part of the “probe into how FBI and Justice Department officials conducted themselves during investigations of Trump’s Russia ties and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.” (Nah, Washington Post, Congress actually is trying to figure out who lied, who misled a FISA court, who illegally leaked classified information and who was part of an unprecedented, politically-motivated FBI investigation into a presidential campaign. These are, like, real crimes, not trivial matters like whether or not they returned emails on time. But whatevs.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271675/fed-judge-hillarys-top-crony-committed-perjury-daniel-greenfield

The FBI didn’t investigate Hillary Clinton’s email crimes. It covered them up by helping destroy the evidence while handing out immunity agreements like candy. It was one of the worst abuses of power in an administration already swimming in abuses of power.

At the heart of it all were Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

Mills was Hillary’s right-hand woman who had been accused of playing a role in various cover-ups. Including this one.

In a combative exchange at a hearing Friday in Washington, D.C., a federal judge unabashedly accused career State Department officials of lying and signing “clearly false” affidavits to derail a series of lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said he was “shocked” and “dumbfounded” when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton’s server, according to a court transcript of his remarks.

“I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in — by the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case,” Lamberth said during Friday’s hearing.

The Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG), Michael Horowitz, noted in a bombshell reportin June that it was “inconsistent with typical investigative strategy” for the FBI to allow Mills to sit in during the agency’s interview of Clinton during the email probe, given that classified information traveled through Mills’ personal email account. “[T]here are serious potential ramifications when one witness attends another witness’ interview,” the IG wrote.

Mills was wrongly allowed to act as if she were Hillary Clinton’s lawyer.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/russell-kirk-american-cicero/

It behooves us to honour the codifiers of conservative core values. Among that pantheon of great thinkers, Kirk’s prodigious output warrants both reflection and genuflection — not least right now in Australia, where what passes for conservativism could use a refresher course in fundamental principles.

Tomorrow, October 19, marks the centenary of the birth of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk (left), who died in 1994. Kirk’s name may not be familiar to many Australians, even to Australian conservatives, but he is uniformly regarded as being the father of modern philosophical American conservatism, revived almost miraculously after World War II at a time of liberal ascendancy.

Kirk stands as a public intellectual (a term often misapplied these days) alongside those two modern British giants of conservative thought, Sir Roger Scruton and Michael Oakeshott. And he stands beside William F. Buckley Jr as the American most influential in steering conservatism towards modern America and modern America towards conservatism.

Kirk was an historian, a cultural critic, a literary critic, a classics scholar, a Burke scholar, a novelist, an academic, an essayist extraordinaire, a commentator, a fellow traveller with the Southern agrarians. A small town American rural town dweller. A self described (as noted by Kirk’s biographer Bradley Birzer) “gothic romantic” and “Bohemian Tory”. In Scruton’s words, a mind “turned away from the world.” Wishing for an “aristocracy of scholars.” Sounds promising.