RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-progressive-slumlord-1529019608

Affordable housing is a progressive mantra these days, and taxpayers are exhorted to put more money into public housing. But then we learn that America’s great progressive political hope, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, is essentially the nation’s pre-eminent slumlord.

That’s the sorry truth exposed this week in a scathing civil complaint and consent decree released by U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman over the New York City Housing Authority (Nycha). The complaint exposes how the authority neglected basic repairs and upkeep while taking active steps to deceive inspectors and cover up its ineptitude and wrongdoing.

This is no small agency. Nycha runs 176,066 public housing apartments in 2,462 buildings in 326 developments across the city. One of every 14 New Yorkers—400,000 people—calls Nycha home. Nycha is the largest public housing agency in America, larger than the next 11 agencies combined.

The federal complaint reads like something out of Upton Sinclair. On lead paint, for example, it finds that “since at least 2011, Nycha senior managers have known that Nycha was violating [federal Housing and Urban Development] lead paint requirements.” Nineteen children have been found to have lead poisoning, and in 2016 alone Nycha logged more than 38,000 complaints related to paint and plaster issues.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-disgrace-of-comeys-fbi-1529019418

The long-awaited Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation makes for depressing reading for anyone who cares about American democracy. Self-government depends on public trust in its institutions, especially law enforcement. The IG’s 568-page report makes clear that the FBI under former director James Comey betrayed that public trust in a way not seen since J. Edgar Hoover.

We use the Hoover analogy advisedly, realizing that the problem in this case was not rampant illegal spying. Though IG Michael Horowitz’s conclusions are measured, his facts are damning. They show that Mr. Comey abused his authority, broke with long-established Justice Department norms, and deceived his superiors and the public.

While the IG says Mr. Comey’s decisions were not the result of “political bias,” he presided over an investigating team that included agents who clearly were biased against Donald Trump. The damage to the bureau’s reputation—and to thousands of honest agents—will take years to repair.

The issue of political bias is almost beside the point. The IG scores Mr. Comey for “ad hoc decisionmaking based on his personal views.” Like Hoover, Mr. Comey believed that he alone could protect the public trust. And like Hoover, this hubris led him to make egregious mistakes of judgment that the IG says “negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270463/comey-i-didnt-know-i-knew-weiner-was-married-huma-daniel-greenfield

James Comey doesn’t know a whole lot. Whenever he’s asked to testify, out spill a lot of Clintonesque claims of ignorance. But even by the standard of things that Comey doesn’t know, this section from the IG report is truly impressive.

James Comey doesn’t know what he knows.

Act 1: Comey plays really dumb.

“Comey told the OIG that he recalled first learning of the presence of the additional emails on the Weiner laptop at some point in early October 2016, although Comey said it was possible this could have occurred in late September. Comey explained: I was aware sometime in the first week or two of October that there was a laptop that a criminal squad had seized from Anthony Weiner in New York and someone said to me that—and I’m thinking it might have been Andrew McCabe, but someone said to me kind of in passing, they’re trying to figure out whether it has any connection to the Midyear investigation. And the reason that’s so vague in my head is I think—I never imagined that there might be something on a guy named Anthony Weiner’s computer that might connect to the Hillary Clinton email investigation, so I kind of just put it out of my mind.”

Aww shucks. You can’t expect a small town sheriff to stay on top of all this big city stuff. Who knows which aspiring politician the chief gatekeeper to Hillary Clinton is married to? Not an outsider like Jimbo Comey.

Act 2: Comey plays really, really dumb

“Comey described himself as having a “reasonably good memory” and speculated, “[T]he reason I didn’t index it is, it was a passing thing that almost seemed like he might be kidding, and so I don’t think I indexed it hard.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/14/8-times-doj-inspector-general-slammed-james-comey-blistering-report/

The Justice Department’s inspector general repeatedly criticizes former FBI director James Comey’s handling of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails all throughout the newly released, 586-page report.
1. Comey Baited, Switched DOJ in Proclaiming Hillary’s Innocence

Comey misled former deputy attorney general Sally Yates and former attorney general Loretta Lynch about issuing a joint statement regarding his decision to not pursue criminal charges against Clinton for disseminating classified information via a private, unsecured e-mail server during her tenure as secretary of state. “Unbeknownst to them,” the report says, Comey began drafting a statement about the end of the investigation into her e-mails, known throughout the report as the “Midyear investigation,” to deliver by himself.

He says he did this to protect “a sense of justice more broadly in the country—that things are fair, not fixed, and they’re done independently.”

Comey admitted that he kept the announcement a secret from DOJ officials because he didn’t want them to tell him not to do it. He informed Yates and Lynch about the announcement only after the FBI had already alerted the press. The IG criticized this move to usurp the attorney general, calling it “extraordinary and insubordinate.”

“We found none of his reasons to be a persuasive basis for deviating from well-established Department policies in a way intentionally designed to avoid supervision by Department leadership over his actions,” the report stated.
2. Comey Has Messianic Tendencies

Comey thought that he alone could save the integrity of the investigation into Clinton’s e-mails. Because he believed his co-workers’ reputations were tainted beyond repair, he reasoned that he alone could save the integrity of the case. Read it for yourself.

We determined that Comey’s decision to make this statement was the result of his belief that only he had the ability to credibly and authoritatively convey the rationale for the decision to not seek charges against Clinton, and that he needed to hold the press conference to protect the FBI and the Department from the extraordinary harm that he believed would have resulted had he failed to do so.

3. Comey Never Seriously Considered Making Hillary Testify Before A Grand Jury

Remember when Clinton announced that her longtime aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson were her new attorneys — making them unable to testify against her? They were also allowed to be in the room with Clinton while the FBI interviewed her, a move the IG slammed as “inconsistent with typical investigative strategy.”

This unusual accommodation was made because the FBI was never going to make Clinton testify in front of a grand jury, the report says. This decision was also made during a time when Comey was determined that, absent a shocking twist in the case or an outright lie from Clinton herself during the interview, they would not pursue criminal charges against the former first lady.