RUTHFULLY YOURS

A couple of weekends ago, we urged the Justice Department to restore the rule of law to the protection of classified information by enforcing the Espionage Act as it is written, rather than as it was distorted in the Hillary Clinton emails investigation. That appears to be happening.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the arrest of a former CIA officer on a felony charge of unlawfully retaining classified information. Jerry Chun Shing Lee (a/k/a “Zhen Cheng Li”) is charged in a complaint with one count of unlawfully retaining classified information, a felony carrying a potential ten-year prison sentence.

Sneak and Peek

There is surely more going on here than meets the eye. Lee, a naturalized citizen, lived in Hong Kong after retiring from the CIA in 2007, at the age of 43. An Army veteran, he had worked for the agency for 13 years as a case officer in various overseas postings. His missions required top-secret clearances, which were terminated as a matter of course when he left the CIA.

Five years later, he decided to move his family back to the United States, to live in Northern Virginia. By then, whatever he had been up to since leaving the agency — activities that are not described in the affidavit supporting the arrest complaint — had drawn intense government interest. En route to the mainland U.S. from Hong Kong, he and his family stopped in Honolulu for several days. There he was the subject of physical surveillance by the FBI. Moreover, the bureau and the Justice Department had obtained a search warrant for his hotel room — meaning they must have suspected him of serious wrongdoing before he ever got to Hawaii.

The search warrant was of the “sneak and peek” variety. Such warrants allow agents to enter the premises covertly, look around, and take pictures. The agents normally do not seize anything, however, even though they are not forbidden to do so, because they want the subject to remain unaware that he is being watched. It is a technique used when the government sees an opportunity to confirm suspicions while also continuing the investigation. This way, they can keep surveilling the suspect, take note of whom he meets with, and figure out if there is a criminal conspiracy — which, in a case like this, might well involve espionage. On that score, it would be interesting to know what Lee’s overseas postings were and how much they may have involved, for example, interaction with Chinese intelligence.

The ruling class won’t rest until Trump accepts its lies.

Journalists are forever harping on Trump’s “lies.” But what really bothers them is his blunt truth-telling. His refusal to conform to their political correctness infuriates them.

Political correctness is just one big lie — a denial of reality in the name of this or that “sensitivity” or ideological demand of the moment. The media devotes almost all of its coverage to policing deviations from those lies. That is why Trump’s ruthlessly reality-based approach to politics is such a shock to its system. The media had grown used to skittish Republicans jumping to attention and discussing issues only within the parameters of decreed lies. A “responsible” Republican wasn’t supposed to notice the problems of illegal immigration from high-crime, high-poverty countries. He wasn’t supposed to notice the militancy of Islam. He wasn’t supposed to notice any number of problems. Rather, he was expected to second the lying sanctimony of the media. Trump came along and exposed that charade, and the media has never forgiven him since.

The media goes on and on about the importance of “facts” in the age of Trump. But it could not care less about facts. It operates entirely in the realm of feelings. It spends most of its energy suppressing facts in the name of feelings. Almost every single controversy it has ginned up against Trump revolves around some fact or truth the media wishes suppressed for the sake of protecting the feelings and interests of a liberal constituency.

Go down the media’s feverishly assembled lists of Trump’s “racism” and all you will find are dissents from the approved lies of the media. CNN’s hosts recite these lists like robots, then crowd their shows with panelists who call for the most color-conscious policies imaginable. The casual reverse racism contained in the remarks of guests fresh from this or that “black pride” rally are never questioned.

After reaching a certain age, one is rarely shocked by human behavior; one thinks of oneself as having gotten used to the ways of the world. But I have to admit that the scale of the revelations that began with Rowan Farrow’s exposé of Harvey Weinstein genuinely shocked me. Charlie Rose “groping female colleagues and walking around naked in their presence”? Met conductor James Levine molesting a boy of fifteen and continuing to do so for years? Matt Lauer installing a door lock under his desk to facilitate sexual assaults on colleagues? Kevin Spacey trying to rape a 14-year-old boy?

Two or three stories like this wouldn’t have shaken my world. But one after another of them, coming to light day after day? Mind-blowing. I never imagined that so many respected (in some cases beloved) public figures could be such sleazeballs – and creepily creative ones, at that. As an old friend of mine wrote the other day on Facebook, “It’s strange to suddenly discover in late middle age that I’ve always been even more of a straight-arrow type than I knew at the time.” It’s even stranger to make this discovery knowing that you were once, long ago, as I was, a white-bread, well-behaved-to-a-fault young gay guy who thought his sexual orientation made him the most aberrant thing in town.

The reckoning that Weinstein and others of his ilk have faced is necessary and gratifying. But the longer this has gone on, the less it has looked like a righteous round-up of rogues and the more like a witch hunt by people who are determined to take down every man who ever looked at a woman the wrong way. Last Saturday, front and center on the New York Times website was an article claiming that fashion photographer Bruce Weber had subjected male models to “unnecessary nudity and coercive sexual behavior.” One of the models said Weber had grabbed his equipment: “We never had sex or anything, but a lot of things happened. A lot of touching. A lot of molestation.”

The same article accused another photographer, Mario Testino, of subjecting male models to “sexual advances that in some cases included groping and masturbation.” I don’t know anything about Testino, but what I’ve seen of Weber’s oeuvre over the years consists largely of pictures that, oozing eroticism, seem to document the placid interludes in the midst of pansexual orgies. In other words, these models should have had a good idea of what they were getting into. As grown men, in any case, they were perfectly capable of saying no, of pushing away the hand of a photographer two or three times their age (Weber is now 71), and, if necessary, of simply putting on their clothes and walking away.