RUTHFULLY YOURS

New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman abruptly resigned Monday night after the New Yorker published an article in which four women alleged he physically abused them.

Mr. Schneiderman denied the allegations and said they were unrelated to his work as attorney general. But he said in a statement that the accusations “will effectively prevent me from leading the office’s work at this critical time.”

His decision followed calls from New York leaders including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, to step down. The governor said he would ask a district attorney to begin an investigation immediately.

As the top law-enforcement officer in the state of New York, Mr. Schneiderman, 63 years old, was one of the leading regulators of Wall Street and has been a prominent critic of the Trump administration.

He also presided over efforts for the Weinstein Co. to be acquired and condemned co-founder Harvey Weinstein following allegations that he sexually assaulted women. Mr. Weinstein has said he didn’t engage in any nonconsensual sex.

The office of the New York attorney general represents one of the most powerful prosecutorial positions in the nation. The office has significant oversight of the financial and banking industries, both of which are largely based in and around in New York City. A spokesman for the office declined to comment. CONTINUE AT SITE

Taxpayers should soon be receiving some good news from Washington. President Donald Trump and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) appear to have found a way to enact modest federal spending restraint, despite resistance from some GOP senators. Faced with a number of Republicans who claim they cannot repeal their 2018 spending surge because they made a deal with Democrats, Mr. Trump and House GOP leaders instead aim to cut funding approved in previous years. This amounts to billions of dollars that bureaucrats never got around to spending, and now perhaps they never will.

The idea that Republicans were honor-bound to continue all the spending that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) recently extracted probably makes little sense to those outside of government. This is especially true because, to secure his new budget buster, Mr. Schumer had to break his own previous agreement with Republicans to abide by reasonable limits on discretionary spending.

The opportunity to impose some small measure of discipline now exists because spending rules make it easier to rescind federal spending than to approve it in the first place. Republicans needed 60 votes on the first go-round so they had to deal with Mr. Schumer unless they wanted another government shutdown. The result exceeded the 2018 and 2019 spending caps under the Budget Control Act by a total of nearly $300 billion. CONTINUE AT SITE

Gina Haspel reportedly offered last week to withdraw her nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The White House declined and now must stand behind her as she faces an unjustified assault involving the Bush administration’s enhanced-interrogation program.

Shortly after 9/11, the administration concluded that it needed to obtain as much actionable intelligence as possible to avert future attacks. It decided to explore, and ultimately adopted, the use of interrogation methods against some al Qaeda operatives far more rigorous than would have been permissible against lawful prisoners of war.

The administration was properly mindful of U.S. statutes and obligations under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Even unlawful enemy combatants may not be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment. Where to draw the line? It was not for the CIA, much less Ms. Haspel, to answer that question, but for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises federal agencies on the law.

OLC’s guidance, in the form of several memos issued in 2002 and 2003, was communicated through the CIA’s general counsel to agents in the field and was the basis on which the enhanced-interrogation program was carried out. The guidance was precise and unambiguous. It listed all the legally permissible interrogation techniques, backed up by appropriate safeguards. The details of this program were fully and repeatedly briefed to the so-called congressional Gang of Eight—the House and Senate majority and minority leaders and chairmen and ranking members of the intelligence committees. None raised a word of objection.

Liberals tried to criminalize contacts with Russia. What’s the excuse for their hypocritical silence about the former secretary of state’s “strategizing” with Iran?

If there is one word that has widened the gap between Democrats and Republicans in the past 16 months, it is “collusion.” Many on the left believe that the Donald Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton. Proof of any such plotting has yet to be produced and may never surface (perhaps because it didn’t happen). We can hope the probe being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller will ultimately get to the bottom of the affair. The suspicion that Trump’s apparent soft spot for the Vladimir Putin regime is somehow linked to what we do know about Russia’s attempts to interfere in the election has cast a shadow over his presidency in the eyes of his opponents.

But it’s clear that whatever the truth of the allegations about Trump, another prominent political figure has been colluding with a hostile foreign power. As the Boston Globe reported last week, former secretary of state John Kerry has been engaged in secret talks with Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, as the two have “strategized” about how to preserve the nuclear deal the pair helped negotiate. If true — and Kerry has not only not denied this activity but has reportedly discussed it with members of Congress and others whom he hopes will assist him in thwarting the Trump administration’s apparent intent to either junk or revise the pact — this crosses an important line between legitimate advocacy and illegitimate efforts to sabotage the actions of a sitting U.S. government.

If allegations about that sort of behavior sound familiar, it’s because similar charges were lodged against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, who resigned after a few weeks in office because he lied about contacts with Russia. Flynn pled guilty to lying but will apparently not be prosecuted because of when he held talks with the Russians: after Trump’s election though before his inauguration, when the Obama administration was still in charge.

Judges in Virginia and Washington have the special counsel reeling.

Well sure, we filed an indictment. And yeah, we took a victory lap in the big bells-n-whistles Main Justice press conference. But that doesn’t mean we, like, intended to have a trial . . .

That seems to be the Justice Department’s position on its mid-February publicity stunt, the indictment of 13 Russians and three Russian businesses for interfering in the 2016 election.

Let’s back up.

The courts were not kind last week to the Justice Department’s gamesmanship on the Russia probe, also known as the Mueller investigation, an investigation in which the cases prosecutors want to try are not about Russia, and the case about Russia prosecutors don’t want to try.

Judge Ellis and the Manafort Case in Virginia

First, in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Paul Manafort is facing one of the two indictments against him, Judge T. S. Ellis hammered Mueller’s prosecutors over the issues we have been hammering for a year:

(a) In appointing Mueller on May 17, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein failed to comply with federal regulations that control special-counsel investigations; and

(b) The secret August 2 memo, by which Rosenstein attempted to paper over this dereliction, is so facially uninformative and heavily redacted that the subjects of the investigation, the courts, and the public are still in the dark. The factual basis for a criminal investigation is still unknown, as are the boundaries of Mueller’s jurisdiction — with Mueller’s prosecutors paying lip service to the notion of limits, even as they argue that, essentially, there are none.