RUTHFULLY YOURS

What exactly is Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigating? The basis in law—regulation, actually—for Mr. Mueller’s appointment is a finding by the deputy attorney general that “criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted.”

According to some reports, the possible crime is obstruction of justice. The relevant criminal statute provides that “whoever corruptly . . . influences, obstructs or impedes or endeavors [to do so], the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had,” is guilty of a crime. The key word is “corruptly.”

President Trump’s critics describe two of his actions as constituting possible obstruction. One is an alleged request to then-FBI Director James Comey that he go easy on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was under investigation for his dealings with Russia and possible false statements to investigators about them. According to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump told him, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” because “he is a good guy.”

An obstruction charge based on that act would face two hurdles. One is that the decision whether to charge Mr. Flynn was not Mr. Comey’s. As FBI director, his job was to supervise the investigation. It is up to prosecutors to decide whether charges were justified. The president’s confusion over the limits of Mr. Comey’s authority may be understandable. Mr. Comey’s overstepping of his authority last year, when he announced that no charges were warranted against Hillary Clinton, might have misled Mr. Trump about the actual scope of Mr. Comey’s authority. Nonetheless, the president’s confusion could not have conferred authority on Mr. Comey.

The other is the statutory requirement that a president have acted “corruptly.” In Arthur Andersen LLP v. U.S. (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the following definition: that the act be done “knowingly and dishonestly, with the specific intent to subvert or undermine the integrity” of a proceeding. Taking a prospective defendant’s character into account when deciding whether to charge him—as Mr. Comey says Mr. Trump asked him to do—is a routine exercise of prosecutorial discretion. It is hard to imagine that a properly instructed jury could decide that a single such request constituted acting “corruptly”—particularly when, according to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump also told him to pursue evidence of criminality against any of the president’s “ ‘satellite’ associates.”

The second act said to carry the seed of obstruction is the firing of Mr. Comey as FBI director. The president certainly had the authority; it is his motive that his critics question. A memorandum to the president, from the deputy attorney general and endorsed by the attorney general, presented sufficient grounds for the firing: Mr. Comey’s usurpation of the prosecutor’s role in the Clinton matter and his improper public disclosure of information unfavorable to Mrs. Clinton. But the president’s detractors have raised questions about the timing—about 3½ months into the president’s term. They have also cited the president’s statement to Russian diplomats days afterward that the firing had eased the pressure on him.

Election 2016: Late in 2016, we created a stir by suggesting that Donald Trump was likely right when he claimed that millions of noncitizens had illegally voted in the U.S. election. Now, a study by a New Jersey think tank provides new evidence that that’s what happened.

Last November, just weeks after his Electoral College win that gave him the presidency, then President-elect Donald Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

The reaction was angry and swift, with the left accusing him of being an “internet troll” and of hatching a “Twitter-born conspiracy theory.”

At the time, we noted that a group called True The Vote, an online anti-voter-fraud website, had claimed that illegals had cast three million votes last year. The media and left-wing groups immediately portrayed True The Vote as a fringe group with little credibility.

The only problem is, a study in 2014 in the online Electoral Studies Journal made a quite similar claim: In the 2008 and 2010 elections, they said, as many as 2.8 million illegal noncitizen votes were cast, “enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes and congressional elections,” said the study, authored by Jesse T. Richman and Gushan A. Chattha, both of Old Dominion University, and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

The bombshell was this: “Noncitizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.”

It got little coverage in the mainstream media, and what coverage it did get was almost entirely dismissive.

Now comes a new study by Just Facts, a libertarian/conservative think tank, that used data from a large Harvard/You.Gov study that every two years samples tens of thousands of voters, including some who admit they are noncitizens and thus can’t vote legally.

The findings are eye-opening. In 2008, as many as 5.7 million noncitizens voted in the election. In 2012, as many as 3.6 million voted, the study said.

In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were 21.0 million adult noncitizens in the U.S., up from 19.4 million in 2008. It is therefore highly likely that millions of noncitizens cast votes in 2016. CONTINUE AT SITE

The “collusion” narrative was a fraud, plain and simple. We know that now. Hopefully, it won’t take another six months to grasp a second plain and simple truth: Collusion’s successor, the “obstruction” narrative, is a perversion.

The Left loves narrative. The ever-expanding story manipulates time, space, and detail to fit a thematic framework. Political narrative has some surface appeal, but it is deeply flawed. It obscures plain and simple truth.

So let’s stick with the plain and simple: The essence of obstruction is to frustrate the search for truth. Its antithesis is to demand the exposure of fraud.

Donald Trump’s political enemies are trying to build an obstruction case on the antithesis of obstruction: the president’s insistence that the collusion fraud be exposed.

Over a period of weeks, Trump came to understand what was being done to him. His exasperation was evident in his every bull-in-a-china-shop turn. An ardently pro-law-enforcement candidate, he came to office believing the FBI was in the fraud-exposure business. He thus could not comprehend why then–FBI director James Comey would not assure the public of what Comey was privately assuring both the president and the public’s representatives in Congress, namely: The notion that the president was a suspect was false. Implicitly, the narrative that Trump had colluded with Putin to steal the election was false.

To be clear, the Russia investigation is not a fraud. The Trump collusion narrative is. Russia did try to interfere in our election, as it always does. And there were associates of Trump’s who had business with Russian interests. Nothing unusual about that either. No one had shadier business with Kremlin cronies than Bill and Hillary Clinton. The difference is that the Clintons did collude in the Russian regime’s acquisition of American uranium assets. There is no evidence that Trump colluded in Russia’s election meddling. To stoke suspicions to the contrary was fraudulent.

The president justifiably believed this cloud of suspicion was grievously harming his fledgling administration. Despite both the dearth of collusion evidence and Comey’s acknowledgment — in non-public Capitol Hill briefings — that Trump was not a suspect, congressional Democrats continued to peddle the collusion narrative. The narrative became the rationale for “The Resistance.”

After the flame-out of the “Electoral College has destroyed democracy” storyline, the Left moved on to “collusion” as the Original Sin that rendered Trump illegitimate. Thus, Democrats rationalized, it was imperative to deny cooperation with Trump on any matter of governance — the approval of executive officials needed to run the government, the confirmation of judges, the Obamacare collapse, tax reform, Syria, debt ceiling, Afghanistan, jihadist attacks in the U.S. and Europe. Anything. The point of the collusion narrative was to delegitimize Trump in the public mind; cooperating with him, treating him as the legitimate president of the United States, was out of the question.

From Trump’s perspective, it was inconceivable that someone as sophisticated as Jim Comey could not see what was happening, how the cloud of suspicion enveloping Trump was damaging his administration. Over time, Comey’s explanations for why he needed to remain silent publicly made less and less sense to the president.

The rationale that it would ultimately serve Trump well if the FBI went about its business and cleared him in the normal course was a presumptuous elevation of the bureau’s work over the rest of the government’s. What, after all, is the normal course? The FBI had been investigating for months and months. Not only had it found no collusion; it had signed on (with the CIA and NSA) to an Obama-engineered report that not-so-subtly suggested a cui bono theory of Trump collusion in Putin’s machinations.

It wasn’t just the failure to dispel suspicions about Trump; the bureau appeared to be fueling them.

It often has been observed that philosophy really got going when people started thinking seriously about the distinction between appearance, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. Plato is full of meditations on this theme, from the stick that appears bent when half submerged in a bowl of water to the texture and real significance of our experience of the everyday world.https://amgreatness.com/2017/06/22/potemkin-progressivism/

The moral is: things are not always as they seem.

Alas, it is one thing to enunciate that moral in the abstract, quite another to take account of its operation on the ground.

Grigory Potemkin famously exploited our habit of innocence about appearances when he deployed a series of fake villages along the banks of the Dnieper River. His aim was to soothe his erstwhile lover Catherine the Great with the illusion of general prosperity as she floated past the smart-looking façades. After she passed, the ensemble would be hastily disassembled, moved down river, and reassembled to greet the Empress anew.

There is a lot of Potemkin in the current ululations of the Left. Thousands upon thousands of unhappy females congregate on the Washington Mall to prance around in their vagina costumes and pussy hats while whining about Donald Trump.

Is the behavior of today’s Left just a façade, or is could it be indicative of something more substantive and troubling behind the door?

U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) jumps up and down on the floor of the House warning about Trump’s possible “collusion” with the Russians. The siege machines of the mainstream media wheel themselves into place to repeat, elaborate, fantasize about what Schiff and his anti-Trump colleagues dream about, hurling little spit balls of accusation and innuendo over the walls of the public’s incredulity.

Hollywood, the academy, the “arts community” join hands to chant their anti-Trump mantras, hoping for deliverance from the awful truth of the election of 2016. Their aim? A sartori, a nirvana in which no one had ever heard of Donald Trump but only the pants-suited deliverer of their dreams.

Everywhere there is talk of “resistance,” disruption, unrest, even impeachment. This, even though the thing being resisted is the result of a free, open democratic election and the call for impeachment is not in response to any evidence of a crime, much less a “high crime or misdemeanor” to propel such a proceeding.

And now we have Robert Mueller, bosom buddy of James Comey, as special counsel. Like Santa Claus, he is making his list and checking it twice, filling his sleigh with Obama and Clinton attack dogs, and preparing to make his round-the-town journey to distribute presents to every deserving boy and girl Democrat. He has his verdict. All he needs now is a tort, and that’s what those salivating Obama-and-Clinton terriers are for: digging, digging, digging. There has to be something, somewhere that they can pin on Trump!

Looked from the outside, you might think that the “progressive” Left were on the march, that they were a rising force, voice of the people, popular-sentiment-against-entrench-interests,” etc., etc.

That may be the appearance. The reality is that Republicans control the Presidency, the House, the Senate, 67 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, and 33 Governorships, their largest number since 1922.

Just the other day, we were treated to the most expensive House race in the nation’s history as money from Hollywood, Manhattan, and Martha’s Vineyard poured in to back Jon Ossoff, the great white hope to shatter the juggernaut of Republican victories. The Dems picked the one really soft-spot in Georgia (Trump had taken it by only 1 percent in 2016) and spent at least $23.6 million to defeat Karen Handel, a weakish candidate but a Republican and therefore a possible scalp. It was supposed to be a “referendum on Trump.” And maybe it was. But the referendum did not go the way the Democrats hoped it would and Handel offed Ossoff 52 percent to 48 percent. By my count, that makes the special election score since November 9: Republicans 5, Democrats 0.

So there are grounds for thinking that the hysteria on the Left is just so much infantile caterwauling: they did not get the all-day sucker they were promised so they are going to sit down in the middle of the floor and wail and wail and wail. Litigate, too, no doubt, but even that will be conducted in tantrum tones.

I think that conclusion is mostly right. And I believe that Trump would be well advised to leave the Democrats in their bawl room, their boudoir (French for “room for pouting in”) while he gets on with the business of running, and improving, the country, which, by the way, he is doing very well.