RUTHFULLY YOURS

He hasn’t changed a lick in 47 years.

I’ve been asked a number of times about John Kerry’s unauthorized actions with Iran compared to Ted Kennedy’s unauthorized actions with the Kremlin. Kerry, this spring 2018, sought to undermine President Trump’s policies, whereas Kennedy, spring 1983, sought to undermine President Reagan’s policies.

Many people — including the president of the United States — want to know if Kerry’s actions constitute a violation of the Logan Act. It’s a question I’m frequently asked about Kennedy. The short answer, in both cases, is that I’m not the source to provide the answer. Congress is. The Democratic Congress in the 1980s didn’t hesitate to launch criminal proceedings against President Ronald Reagan and his staff (many of them fine men of great integrity) in a militant pursuit for impeachment over “Iran-Contra.” Liberal Democrats did so while turning a blind eye as their leader — House Speaker Jim Wright — buddied up to Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega in his own negotiations.

And Wright wasn’t secretary of state, just as John Kerry wasn’t secretary of state when he conferred with Iranian officials in secret meetings in New York. In what the Boston Globe described as a “rare move” of “unusual shadow diplomacy,” Kerry met with the Iranian foreign minister (among other high-level foreign officials) “to discuss ways of preserving the pact limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the second time in about two months that the two had met to strategize over salvaging a deal they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration, according to a person briefed on the meetings.”

That’s the very deal that President Trump was working to cancel just as Kerry was working to save it.

And that’s hardly the only Kerry outrage. No, this is old-hat. I’d like to remind all of Kerry’s affront decades ago. The date was April 22, 1971, 47 years to almost the exact day that Kerry met with the Iranians.

Gina Haspel’s appearance last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee created a certain buzz but was hardly the biggest spy story in town. That prize belonged to the snoop the FBI had planted in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. This was not a new story and veteran observers had been keeping close watch.

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review, had been “dead-on accurate” in his testimony that the FBI had a spy inside the Trump campaign for the stretch run of the 2016 race. In his Senate testimony on August 22, 2017, Simpson explained that Steele had met with at least one FBI agent in Rome, and the FBI had intelligence from an internal Trump campaign source, a human source inside the Trump campaign.

This was an explosive revelation and, following the publication of his testimony on January 9, 2018, Simpson did his best to walk it back. The revelations are now the subject of the ongoing battle between the House Intelligence Committee and the DOJ. Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has been keeping close track on that front.

The DOJ had finally “agreed to brief House Intelligence Committee members about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.” The DOJ knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, “but instead deliberately concealed it.”

As Strassel noted, House investigators even “sniffed out a name,” not a welcome development for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who like Special Counsel Robert Mueller appears to believe he is a head of state. Rosenstein accused the investigators of “extortion,” as though they were threatening his family for a ransom payment. Rosenstein also said it was a constitutional duty to refuse revelations of FBI files, and the DOJ trotted out what Strassel called the “daddy of all superspook arguments,” that lives were at stake.

Trump antagonist and left-wing character assassin Michael Avenatti, whom Tucker Carlson has taken to calling “that creepy porn lawyer,” is threating to sue journalists for a conservative-leaning media outlet for defamation for daring to report on the attorney’s highly questionable ethics and business dealings.

Avenatti’s uncharacteristic loss of self-control could indicate that the attorney is beginning to realize his vexatious lawsuit against President Trump to free plastic surgery-addicted X-rated film star Stormy Daniels to talk about the alleged affair she had with Trump – that she has already talked about at length over and over and over – is about to collapse.

The media-savvy attorney who has become a household name across America has to know he has close to zero chance of succeeding in his own defamation lawsuit because he is now a hugely famous public figure who no longer enjoys the same civil law protections he enjoyed when he was relatively unknown.

Or all of this could be an act, a kind of political theater aimed at an ulterior objective such as continuing to generate adverse publicity for President Trump to distract from his many impressive policy achievements.

The evidence continues to accumulate that Avenatti’s relentless assault on President Trump and his personal lawyer Michael Cohen is part of the Barack Obama-led anti-democratic insurgency to oust the duly elected 45th president of the United States from the White House.

A few days ago, I received a text message from “Stacey,” of the Real Justice PAC, notifying me of San Diego County’s upcoming June 5 elections. We “will have a chance to replace our Republican District attorney with a progressive Democrat,” she informed me.

Naturally, I wanted to learn more about the latest progressive crusade.

Real Justice claims to be an outgrowth of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. The group’s objective is to elect prosecutors who will “fight for social justice.” To this end, “big organizing” is required to mobilize “massive audiences” for a “big agenda.” Using the power of “social media, digital tools and the voices of a new generation of leaders like Shaun King who are organizing massive audiences to take action locally and nationally through rapid response campaigns.” The last thing anyone wants is a call from Shaun King’s people. That’s the guy with a conspicuous lack of melanin who co-founded Black Lives Matter.

All this talk of a “systematic, mass participation approach” and the aggressive unsolicited phone calls and text messages reminded me of another organization—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN).

ACORN’s mass participation program for electing social justice-minded bureaucrats entailed “enlisting millions of new and politicized voters.” ACORN called for mass democracy to “create an electoral environment hospitable to fundamental change in American society,” which required an “enlarged and politicized electorate” to “sustain and encourage the movements in American society that are already working for the rights of women and minorities.” And don’t forget “protection of the social programs, and . . . transformation of foreign policy.”