RUTHFULLY YOURS

J. Edgar Hoover’s abuse of power as FBI director led Congress and the Justice Department to put new checks on that most powerful and secretive of offices. By the time Congress finishes investigating James Comey’s role in the 2016 presidential election, those safeguards may be due for an update.

Powerful as Hoover was, even he never simultaneously investigated both major-party candidates for the presidency. Mr. Comey did, and Americans are now getting a glimpse of how much he influenced political events.

Mr. Comey’s actions in the Hillary Clinton email probe are concerning enough. He made himself investigator, judge and jury, breaking the Justice Department’s chain of command. He publicly confirmed the investigation, violating the department’s principles. He announced he would not recommend prosecuting Mrs. Clinton, even as he publicly excoriated her—an extraordinary abuse of his megaphone. Then he rekindled the case only 11 days before the election.

An inquiry by the Senate Judiciary Committee has now shown that Mr. Comey’s investigation was a charade. He wrote a draft statement exonerating Mrs. Clinton in May, long before he bothered to interview her or her staff. This at least finally explains the probe’s lackluster nature: the absence of a grand jury, the failure to follow up on likely perjury, the unorthodox immunity deals made with Clinton aides.

But the big development this week is a new look at how Mr. Comey may have similarly juked the probe into Donald Trump’s purported ties to Russia. The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation took a sharp and notable turn on Tuesday, as news broke that it had subpoenaed the FBI and the Justice Department for information relating to the infamous Trump “dossier.” That dossier, whose allegations appear to have been fabricated, was commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and then developed by a former British spook named Christopher Steele.

But the FBI had its own part in this dossier, and investigators are finally drilling down into how big a role it played, and why. The bureau has furiously resisted answering questions. It ignored the initial requests for documents and has refused to comply with the House committee’s subpoenas, which were first issued Aug. 24. Republicans are frustrated enough that this week they sent orders compelling FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appear before the committee to explain the obstruction.

One explanation is that the documents might show the FBI played a central role in ginning up the fake dossier on Mr. Trump. To this day, we do not know who hired Fusion GPS to gather the dirt. The New York Times early this year reported, citing an anonymous source, that a wealthy anti-Trumper initially hired Fusion to dig into Mr. Trump’s business dealings, but the contract was later taken over by a Clinton-allied group. That’s when Fusion shifted its focus to Russia and hired Mr. Steele. CONTINUE AT SIT

U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia was responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee e-mail accounts, leading to the publication of about 20,000 stolen e-mails on WikiLeaks.

But that finding was reportedly based largely on the DNC’s strange outsourcing of the investigation to a private cybersecurity firm. Rarely does the victim of a crime first hire a private investigator whose findings later form the basis of government conclusions.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is many things. But so far he has not been caught lying about the origin of the leaked documents that came into his hands. He has insisted for well over a year that the Russians did not provide him with the DNC e-mails.

When it was discovered that the e-mails had been compromised, then–DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz weirdly refused to allow forensic detectives from the FBI to examine the DNC server to probe the evidence of the theft. Why did the FBI accept that refusal?

That strange behavior was not as bizarre as Wasserman Schultz’s later frenzied efforts to protect her information-technology specialist, Imran Awan, from Capitol Police and FBI investigations. Both agencies were hot on Awan’s trail for unlawfully transferring secure data from government computers, and also for bank and federal-procurement fraud.

So far, the story of the DNC hack is not fully known, but it may eventually be revealed that it involves other actors beyond just the Russians.

There is not much left to the media myth of James Comey as dutiful FBI director, unjustly fired by a partisan and vindictive President Donald Trump. A closer look suggests that Comey may have been the most politicized, duplicitous, and out-of-control FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover.

During the 2016 election, Comey, quite improperly, was put into the role of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state. That proved a disaster. Comey has admitted under oath to deliberately leaking his own notes — which were likely government property — to the media to prompt the appointment of a special counsel. That ploy worked like clockwork, and by a strange coincidence it soon resulted in the selection of his friend, former FBI director Robert Mueller.

Comey earlier had assured the public that his investigation of Clinton had shown no prosecutable wrongdoing (a judgment that in normal times would not be the FBI’s to make). It has since been disclosed that Comey offered that conclusion before he had even interviewed Clinton.

That inversion suggests that Comey had assumed that whatever he found out about Clinton would not change the reality that the Obama administration would probably drop the inquiry anyway — so Comey made the necessary ethical adjustments.

Comey was also less than truthful when he testified that there had been no internal FBI communications concerning the infamous meeting between Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, and then–attorney general Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac. In fact, there was a trail of FBI discussion about that supposedly secret rendezvous.

Before he fired Comey, Trump drafted a letter outlining the source of his anger. But it seemed to have little to do with the obstruction of justice.

New York’s unrepentant small-c communist mayor Bill de Blasio showed his true colors in a new New York magazine interview, reaffirming his radical roots and speaking of his plans to unleash a veritable Reign of Terror against wealthy, productive people.

In the interview, the America-hating, Puerto Rican terrorist-celebrating Democrat mayor reminds voters that he has learned nothing during his disastrous tenure at Gracie Mansion. The takeaway is that he believes taxes are too low not only in his city but throughout America, police haven’t been persecuted enough, criminals haven’t been coddled and subsidized enough, and President Trump is a dangerous racist demagogue whose fascistic policies need to be fought.

The great Anglo-American tradition, going back to the founding era and before, of strong governmental protection of private property is a bad thing, he believes. Get rid of property rights and utopia will be just over the horizon.

Like any leftist ideologue, de Blasio views markets – that is, the everyday choices made by free people – as an evil force that needs to be bludgeoned into submission by bureaucrats. Capital must be compelled, or better yet, abolished. Socialism works, he maintains, and people would see that if only the sclerotic, authoritarian system he adores were imposed on them by somebody smart and competent, like him, for example.

De Blasio told his interviewer he wants to see the end of private property and would like government to centrally plan more or less all living and financial arrangements. Yes, the mayor of New York City, the financial capital of the United States, actually said that.

When discussing property rights, de Blasio is a tedious garden-variety Marxist dreaming of imposing a dictatorship of the proletariat on his subjects. Come to think of it, the man sounds like Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. Asked about fulfilling his much-repeated promise to reduce the scourge of income inequality, also known as freedom, he lectured:

What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development.

A “socialistic impulse”? Nothing could be more un-American.

De Blasio, like so many academics and activists, is trapped in a communist fantasy of his own making. Central planners should be telling every New Yorker how to live, the modern-day Bolshevik insists, even though a hundred years of hard evidence, including a Mount Everest-size pile of corpses, proves him wrong.

A story fantastically strange, dancing between lowbrow and stupid, and it matters: this masterwork of a news item belongs in a time capsule, one day making the case to our descendants that we were, at least, blessed to live in interesting times.

Because this sort of thing happens in 2017, an alt-right crank who hasn’t won anyone’s trust beyond that of his loyal travelers seems to have become the white-whale obsession of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

Also, a multi-national public relations campaign which occupied much of August — a campaign seemingly intended to repair General McMaster’s reputation with the President of the United States, to sully the reputation of Trump loyalists whom McMaster had removed from the National Security Council, and to drive out Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, all in one shot — may have been unintentionally destroyed by said alt-Right crank tweeting the words …

“Spirit Animal” :

✔ @Cernovich

McMaster what’s your spirit animal? @Breitbartnews is Honeybadger.

Mike Cernovich posted this tweet on August 11. To an objective observer, that’s inscrutable nonsense. And — also objectively — it’s creepy.

But when considered with its actual context, and pivotally, its timing, that rational observer should be driven to conclude that, ahem, the “McMaster what’s your spirit animal” tweet is a political thunderbolt with ramifications much beyond what Cernovich appears to have intended.

Here goes:

Sources within the Trump Administration claim that the “spirit animal” tweet is a reference to a small meeting that McMaster and select others within the National Security Council held in the days prior to August 11.

At that meeting, attendees reportedly joked about each other’s “spirit animals.” Indeed, as of this writing, I cannot neither confirm nor deny that a prominent member of the NSC is imbued with the soul of a platypus.

Since August 11, Cernovich has offered other information that also points to him having sourcing within the NSC. However, the “spirit animal” tweet reportedly represented a more concerning breach. Yet even so, the breach itself is of less evident concern to McMaster and his supporters than is the fact of its August 11 publication.

Why?

Because if Cernovich still had a source leaking to him on that date or in the days immediately prior, then the tweet necessarily deconstructs much of the past month’s administration-orchestrated media defense of General McMaster’s personnel decisions.

Insurers have until Sept. 5 to reveal what they will charge for coverage through Obamacare’s exchanges next year. They are required to finalize their rates by Sept. 5 — and sign their contracts by Sept. 27. The numbers they’ve released thus far aren’t pretty.

In Iowa, insurer Medica is seeking a 43.5 percent increase. BlueCross Blue Shield of South Carolina put in for a 33 percent increase. Molina, which is pulling out of most states’ exchanges, wants a 55 percent boost in the few markets where it will remain. In Idaho, one insurer is asking for an 81 percent jump.

Obamacare’s defenders — and insurers themselves — have attributed these rate hikes to the “uncertainty” Republicans have injected into the marketplace. First with their on-again, off-again effort to repeal the law, and second with their indecision about ending the law’s Cost Sharing Reduction subsidies.

But a new analysis of premium data from the past four years provides evidence that two regulations at the heart of Obamacare are largely to blame for years of rate hikes. Those regulations are the law’s guarantee of coverage to all and its requirement that insurers charge the same premium to all people of the same age, regardless of health status or history.

The analysis was conducted by McKinsey for the Department of Health and Human Services. The consulting firm looked at rate hikes in four states: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Tennessee. Premiums in each had doubled or tripled since 2013 — the year before Obamacare went into effect.

In Georgia, the average premium for the equivalent of a mid-level “Silver” plan for a 40-year-old male went from $94 a month in 2013 to $323 a month in 2017. In Tennessee, it went from $104 a month to $431.

Some critics of Obamacare have claimed that the law’s “essential health benefit” mandates, which require policies to cover certain treatments, bear much of the blame for these premium hikes. According to McKinsey they have raised premiums, but not much. These mandates contributed as little as 5 percent to the hikes in Georgia and Ohio, 7 percent in Pennsylvania, and 1 percent in Tennessee

Obamacare’s taxes and fees have boosted premiums, too — but only between 3 and 7 percent. The general growth of health costs is responsible for 10 percent of the premium increases in the four states studied.

The biggest reason for Obamacare’s rate hikes? Two of its most popular provisions, guaranteed issue and community rating. These are the technical terms for Obamacare’s ban on insurance companies denying coverage or charging people who are sick more.

The McKinsey report found that in Georgia, these mandates added between 44 and 52 percent to premiums. In Ohio, they were responsible for 41 to 50 percent of the hikes — and in Pennsylvania, as much as 62 percent. In Tennessee, guaranteed issue and community rating accounted for between 73 and 76 percent of premium increases.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. A study by Milliman, a consultancy, in 2013 predicted that Obamacare’s guaranteed issue and community rating rules would sharply increase premiums.

Further, several states experimented with guaranteed issue and community rating in the 1990s. All of them saw premiums spiral upward, insurance companies drop out of the market, and consumers stop buying individual policies. Most of those states ended up either abandoning the two rules altogether or seriously watering them down.