RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson refused to answer key questions during his seven-hour closed-door appearance Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee, Fox News reported Wednesday. But he did acknowledge that he personally discussed allegations in the Steele dossier with members of the media, even though he did not speak to the sources behind the allegations himself to verify whether they were true.

Moreover, he reportedly said that he leaked details from the dirty dossier to reporters right before the 2016 election because he was “upset” that then-FBI director James Comey had reopened the Clinton email case.

Simpson told investigators he never spoke to the underlying sources of the document, never traveled to Russia and did not verify the dossier beyond comparing the claims to “open source” media reporting.

The source said Simpson also told investigators he was “upset” when then FBI Director James Comey re-opened the Hillary Clinton email investigation in late October 2016, and Simpson wanted to push back.

Simpson’s attorneys negotiated the details of his appearance before the committee last week, agreeing to voluntarily testify rather than be subpoenaed.

“Throughout this entire year, the White House and its allies on the Hill and elsewhere have attempted at every turn to smear Fusion GPS because of its connection to the Steele dossier,” Simpson’s attorney Joshua Levy said Tuesday.

Levy admitted that Steele and Simpson had briefed reporters on the dossier last year, but insisted that neither Simpson nor Fusion GPS paid members of the media to publish stories of any kind.

Banker turned human rights activist Bill Browder has accused Fusion of hiring journalists to plant stories in the media.

Fusion, meanwhile, continued to fight the Intel Committee’s request for their bank records in court on Wednesday.

According to The Daily Caller, Steele has revealed in court papers in London that “he was directed by Fusion to brief reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo! News and The New Yorker in September 2016.”

Steele also gave an interview via Skype to Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who published an article about Steele’s allegations on Oct. 31, 2016.

Levy maintains that the dossier is legitimate.

“What they did do is they contracted with Christopher Steele…. This experienced British intelligence official came back with a report that now in hindsight looks quite accurate,” Levy said.

Fox News is standing by its report that Simpson met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya before and after the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign officials. CONTINUE AT SITE

American politics has become an endless fox hunt. The hounds’ heads jerked up this week on news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, responding to a request from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, had asked the Justice Department’s career lawyers to look into the possibility of appointing a second special prosecutor, to investigate Hillary Clinton.

Set aside for a moment what the precise meaning of “investigate” might be. The day doesn’t pass anymore without a demand, from the Oval Office or the ozone, that someone should “look into” some political malefaction. Theoretically, we could have public officials being led to the executioner’s block weekly in Washington.

Indeed, the movement to name a second special prosecutor flows from the fact that the Washington press corps in January decided en masse to “look into” the notion that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to defeat Mrs. Clinton, a thought dropped into the water by the departing Obama administration.

What followed was a river of stories purporting Trump-Russian collusion. Months later, it remains true that the federal code recognizes no crime called “collusion.” Eventually the river of collusion stories joined with Oval Office mania over them to produce special prosecutor Robert Mueller. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Southern Poverty Law Center has established itself as the nation’s most vocal and prominent hate-group watchdog in the nation.

The organization was founded in 1971 by Morris Dees Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama. Before co-founding the SPLC, Dees was a law partner and serial entrepreneur with Millard Fuller. Still in their twenties, they became millionaires. Fuller then went his own way, dedicating his life to helping the poor, ultimately founding Habit for Humanity in 1976.

Morris Dees went another direction. He and another law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., created the Southern Poverty Law Center to counter racial discrimination in the South and finish off the Ku Klux Klan. And the SPLC had some remarkable successes in its first several decades, implementing a legal strategy of using civil lawsuits to secure court judgments against targeted organizations and then having the courts seize assets to cripple them or force their closure.

A marketing wizard, Dees has grown the SPLC into an organization with a staff of 250 in four states. It has a shiny and sleek headquarters building in Montgomery and a net worth in 2015 of $350 million, of which a considerable portion is held in offshore accounts. The media often parrots its point of view uncritically, as it labels more than 1,000 organizations across the nation as hate groups. Using sophisticated marketing methods, it is the recipient of tens of millions of dollars annually from individual and corporate donors, most of whom believe they are helping to counter “hate groups.”

But tragically, Dees and the SPLC are now fueled by the same passionate animus that fueled the Klan and white supremacists. The alleged “hate groups” that the SPLC targets now are often Christian organizations which follow the same doctrines and beliefs that the church has followed for the past two millennia. Critics of Islamic extremism are labelled as anti-Muslim extremists. Politicians who support traditional marriage such as Ben Carson are called out as “extremists.” Several examples of the pain and damage that the SPLC has inspired are illustrative.

Earlier this year, James Hodgkinson, who liked the SPLC on his Facebook page, shot House of Representatives Whip Steve Scalise and four other Republicans while they were at a baseball practice early one morning in Washington. Another fan of the SPLC, Floyd Lee Corkins II, shot a security guard at the offices of Family Research Council in Washington in 2012. Family Research Council, one of the nation’s most respected conservative think tanks, was labelled a “hate group” by the SPLC because it supported traditional Christian morality in regard to sexuality and marriage.

Another illustration comes from Middlebury College, the elite Vermont school where tuition runs $61,000 a year. In March, a student mob prevented American Enterprise Institute Fellow Charles Murray from speaking. Later the mob attacked the Middlebury political science professor accompanying him, Allison Stanger, causing her to be taken to the emergency room of a nearby hospital with a neck injury and a concussion after being thrown to the ground. Mr. Murray is a highly distinguished political scientist, sociologist, and author. The SPLC on its website had labeled him a “white nationalist” — a false and even absurd claim as Mr. Murray has multi-racial children. Gullible students, armed with the hatred spewed out by SPLC, showed the depth of the ideological civil war in the United States, as the left-wing fascists at Middlebury shut down free speech in a manner reminiscent of the book burners in Nazi Germany.

Republicans, whether in the White House or on Capitol Hill, do not seem to appreciate how much they may be undermining what they say they want — a serious investigation of the Clinton Foundation and such related matters as the Uranium One transaction, the interplay between the foundation and the operation of the State Department during Secretary Clinton’s tenure, and the question of whether that interplay explains the use of the improper private email system and the destruction of tens of thousands of emails.

The president has been railing about his own Justice Department’s apparent inaction (after signaling, post-election, that he did not want to see the Clintons further investigated and prosecuted). A group of House Republicans has taken up this cause and is pushing for the appointment of a special counsel. In essence, it is a tit-for-tat maneuver: There is a special-counsel probing Trump ties to Russia, they reason, so why not a special-counsel to probe Clinton ties to Russia?

This suggests a basic misunderstanding about what triggers a special-counsel investigation: There must be potential offenses that warrant investigation as to which the Justice Department has a conflict of interest that would make its conducting the investigation inappropriate.

Preliminarily, we should note that there is no such thing as an independent counsel. In our constitutional system, prosecution is an executive power, so even special counsels ultimately report to the Justice Department’s leadership. That being the case, we should never have a special counsel unless one is absolutely necessary. It is pernicious to have a prosecutor who is assigned to make a case on a single target (or set of targets). These prosecutors are insulated from the pressures of an ordinary prosecutor’s office, where cases have to compete for resources and only the meritorious ones are pursued. Thus, the sorry history of the special counsel (and its predecessors — the “special prosecutor” and “independent counsel”) is empire-building, investigations that go on for years, and cases involving trivial charges often far removed from the suspected offense that was the original rationale for appointing the special counsel.