RUTHFULLY YOURS

The president’s critics are trying to build an obstruction case based on reading Trump’s mind.

The thing to bear in mind is that the president of the United States does not “attempt” to fire anyone in the executive branch. The chief executive either fires an inferior executive official or he does not. “Attempt” does not enter into it.

Yet “attempt” is the foundation on which the New York Times’ Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman build their blockbuster report this weekend about the decision by President Trump — apparently on the advice of his first team of lawyers — to waive executive privilege and attorney-client privilege so that prosecutors on the staff of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III could interview White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn II.

I will in another column address the significance of the waiver. (To my mind, it bolsters the already strong argument that the president should not agree to be interviewed by the special counsel.) For now, let’s keep our eye on the ball: the question of whether there is an obstruction case against the president. The Times report is lengthy, but here is the critical passage:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-press-abets-a-coverup-1534544446?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

The two biggest shoes are yet to drop in the 2016 investigations. We still don’t know the origins and back story of the intercepted Russian intelligence document that was pivotal in James Comey’s unprecedented, ill-advised and possibly decisive (according to numerous Democratic and independent election analysts) interventions in the presidential race.

Depending on what report you credit, the information was false, it was planted by the Russians, or it accurately indicated an illegal conspiracy to obstruct justice by the Clinton campaign and Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch. If it was a Russian fabrication, then Mr. Comey was spoofed by the Kremlin into his improper intervention in the race. If the parties to the incepted exchange were simply misinformed, it’s hard to understand Mr. Comey’s reason for intervening.

Presumably some of the questions are answered in a still-secret annex to the inspector general’s report that criticized Mr. Comey’s performance, but even that won’t tell us everything we need to know. What did fellow intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, tell the FBI about this intercept? What did they advise Mr. Comey to do?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271064/obamas-n-word-tape-went-public-and-media-covered-daniel-greenfield

Even though the media admits that Omarosa has less credibility than a drunken sailor on shore leave, it keeps buzzing about the existence of a Trump “N Word” tape.

Does it exist? Doesn’t it exist? Will it change anything?

Obama’s own equivalent of the “N Word” tape was released after his time in office. It was a photo of him posing with Louis Farrakhan, the racist and anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan had praised Hitler and was the head of a hate group that believes white people are devils, created by genetic engineering, who will be wiped out.

That’s a whole lot worse than a racial slur. (Obama’s mentor Jeremiah Wright, whose black nationalist church the Obamas had attended, used his own racial slurs during services.)

The photo was released. And the media embargoed it. A handful of publications mentioned it.

To this date, no reporter has directly asked Obama about it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/08/16/trump_and_media_group-think.html

oday is the day that some 300 U.S. newspapers heeded the Boston Globe’s call for an organized demonstration against President Trump. The protest consists of editorials and columns denouncing the president for his frequent characterizations that the “fake media” is the “enemy of the American people.”

The problems with this scheme — one is tempted to use the word “collusion” — are so manifest it’s almost too easy to point them out. The most obvious is that it plays directly into the president’s hands, making the press look overtly partisan, while underscoring Trump’s basic point, which is that the media hates him so much we don’t follow our normal rules of behavior. When is the last time the Fourth Estate ran what amounts to a coordinated campaign?

A second concern is what we might call the Calvin Coolidge problem. When informed in 1933 that the famously taciturn former president had died, famed wit Dorothy Parker quipped, “How can they tell?” My point is that if 300 newspaper opinion writers decide to kick Donald Trump in the fanny, how are their readers expected to distinguish this day from any other?

My own objection to this organized effort can be found in the words to a Bruce Springsteen song, and a Howard Fast vignette from 70 summers ago, at a 1948 political convention in Philadelphia.

Many journalists of my generation venerate Bruce Springsteen. We love his music, parse his lyrics while contemplating our lives, and, truth be told, identify with his progressive politics. As is the case with all great art, however, his best songs have a universal application to the human condition, and such messages don’t always fit neatly into the paradigms of partisan politics.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/15/the-weekly-standards-t

In his online appeal for money after being fired this week, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok credited an unlikely source to vouch for his victim status: The Weekly Standard.

At one time a leading conservative magazine, the Standard declared last month that Strzok’s plight was merely an “overwrought tale of bias” and the case against him is “just sound and fury.” The article brushed off Strzok’s actions as “several bad judgment calls” and blasted Congressional Republicans for continuing a criminal investigation into the now-unemployed G-man.

Strzok is following only 32 people on his newly-verified Twitter account. Bill Kristol, the editor-at-large of the Standard, is one of them.

So, what’s with the fanboying between the Standard—an allegedly serious publication dedicated to advancing conservative principles—and a corrupt government bureaucrat who embodies everything the conservative movement fought against for decades?

I found an article in the Standard archives this week that might explain why. On July 24, 2016, just days before Strzok helped launch a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign, Kristol gave Strzok and the Obama Justice Department a big assist from the anti-Trump Right by posting a flawed and questionably-sourced article. “Putin’s Party” is compelling evidence that Kristol and the Standard were far from mere sideline observers as the Trump-Russia collusion scam took shape in the summer of 2016.

At the very least, the timing of the article suggests there was careful coordination between the central players—including the Hillary Clinton campaign—and Bill Kristol to derail Trump’s candidacy just weeks before the election. But the article’s content also serves to raise alarming questions about the claims by many Republicans that “conservatives” had no knowledge of or involvement with the Christopher Steele dossier.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/300_newspapers_publish_the_same_antitrump_editorial_today.html

Today marks another milepost on the funeral march of the American newspaper industry. Has there ever before been such a mass demonstration of self-unawareness as the collective expression of outrage this morning by the editorial boards of these ailing enterprises? Here is the editorial as it appears today in the Boston Globe, which no doubt will receive one or more journalism awards (journalists love to give each other awards for agreeing with each other) for its “courage” – as if howling mobs were outside their doors, and military vans on their way to seize the printing presses.

The editorial, indeed, raises the fear of being shut down right up front, relying on a poll supposedly indicating a public ready to send storm troopers into the nation’s newsrooms. Ginning up polls is a standard operating procedure for the media, who are well aware that by careful wording and sequencing on questions, you can shape the public response into the direction you are hoping for. In this case, Trump-haters are anxious to manufacture a purported threat to shut them down, which is something that nobody in a position of authority has ever even hinted at.

The notion that racism is solely about institutionalized white power simply doesn’t compute for most Americans.

People are making this so complicated.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times editorial board hired a technology writer, Sarah Jeong. When it was revealed that she had tweeted barbs against white people, conservatives formed a Twitter mob to demand her dismissal. While a few on the right said — or claimed — that they were offended by the substance of her tweets, the overriding passion derived from an understandable outrage about liberal double standards.

The argument took a familiar form: “If a white or conservative person said something like this about any other group, her career would be over!”

Many liberals responded that conservatives just don’t get it. There is no such thing as anti-white racism because racism is all about power. Whites — or white men — have power and other groups don’t.

Perhaps because this theory defies lived experience, progressives offered a new defense: “We don’t really mean it when we attack the pale patriarchy.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/political-violence-reporting-double-standard/The refusal by many media outlets to offer proportionate coverage empowers the worst elements of the radical Left.

Let’s take a short walk down memory lane. Not long ago, on January 2, 2016, a small group of armed protesters seized an unoccupied federal building in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is located in a relatively isolated area in eastern Oregon, and the occupied building itself was far from any populated area. The protests were related to a long-running land dispute between the federal government and Steve and Dwight Hammond — a dispute that culminated in a vindictive prosecution against the Hammonds, under the federal Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, for two “burns” that caused a trifling amount of damage (less than $1,000) to public lands.

The occupation created a media firestorm. It was covered from coast to coast, and #OregonUnderAttack trended on Twitter. The occupation was the news story for days. It spawned countless think pieces lamenting the rise of violence on the right — including a debate about whether the protesters were “domestic terrorists.” The protests continued until the last arrests in early February. On January 26, law enforcement shot and killed one of the protesters when he attempted to evade a roadblock, left his car, and seemed to reach for his waistband as he fled the scene on foot.

Again, all of this was covered, breathlessly, from beginning to end.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/14/media-conspiracy-theories-devin-nunes-getting-control/
The media claims it’s crazy for Devin Nunes to say in ‘secret’ audio that Democrats want to impeach President Trump and that he has political reasons for opposing Rod Rosenstein’s immediate impeachment.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee secretly bought and paid for an information campaign alleging treasonous collusion between Donald Trump and Russia to steal an election belonging to Clinton.

The campaign was run by Fusion GPS, which specializes in spreading information into the media. Fusion GPS principal Glenn Simpson and British ex-spy-for-hire Christopher Steele secretly met with myriad media companies during the campaign and after the election to spread their dramatic tales claiming that Trump campaign affiliates were working hand-in-hand with Russian operatives, and that the Russians had compromising information on President Trump.

They also got the information — which they claimed came from Kremlin operatives and other Russians with ties to Vladimir Putin — into the U.S. government to secure widespread spying on the Trump campaign.

Literally nothing of significance alleged in the information campaign has been proven to be true. Yes, Russia is a country with Putin as a leader, and yes Carter Page visited Russia, but two years into one of the most thoroughly investigated issues of our time, no evidence has been provided to come even remotely close to proving Page is a mastermind spy who secretly coordinated with Russian officials to bring down America’s next president. Or that Michael Cohen went to Prague to make arrangements with the Russian officials. Despite the dramatic claims of Paul Manafort’s involvement in this Russian plot, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has told the court that nothing in Manafort’s money-laundering trial will touch on this claim.