RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/byron-york-mueller-changed-everything

From now on, the Trump-Russia affair, the investigation that dominated the first years of Donald Trump’s presidency, will be divided into two parts: before and after the release of the Mueller report. Before the special counsel’s findings were made public last month, the president’s adversaries were on the offensive. Now, they are playing defense.

The change is due to one simple fact: Mueller could not establish that there was a conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to fix the 2016 election. The special counsel’s office interviewed 500 witnesses, issued 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants, and obtained nearly 300 records of electronic communications, and still could not establish the one thing that mattered most in the investigation.Without a judgment that a conspiracy — or collusion, in the popular phrase — took place, everything else in the Trump-Russia affair began to shrink in significance.

Of course, TV talking heads are still arguing over obstruction. But with the report’s release, the investigation moved from the legal realm to the political realm. And in the political realm, the president has a simple and effective case to make to the 99.6% of Americans who are not lawyers: They say I obstructed an investigation into something that didn’t happen? And they want to impeach me for that?

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/05/18/spy_vs_spy_euphemism_at_the_fbi.html

While Washington pols and pundits angrily debate who counts as a spy, and whether any such exotic creatures have ever been employed by the FBI, new evidence is emerging that the FBI not only uses spies, but has done so extensively, including in the Trump-Russia investigation.

On Thursday, CNN host John Berman asked former FBI general counsel James Baker: “Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign as the attorney general suggested?” Baker didn’t initially say no, but rather objected that the word “spy” has negative connotations.

Baker then seemed to switch the question from whether spying occurred to its intent, saying: “There was no intention by myself or anybody else I’m aware of to intrude or do activities with respect to the campaign.” Then he continued his sentence with a clause that significantly modified even that claim. There was no intrusion of the Trump campaign, he said, done “in order to gather political intelligence to find out what the political strategies were.” The FBI was only interested in what the campaign was up to regarding Russia.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-did-america-give-up-on-mass-transit-don-t-blame-cars?utm_source=pocket-newtab

One hundred years ago, the United States had a public transportation system that was the envy of the world. Today, outside a few major urban centers, it is barely on life support. Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak. Annual per capita transit trips in the U.S. plummeted from 115.8 in 1950 to 36.1 in 1970, where they have roughly remained since, even as population has grown.

This has not happened in much of the rest of the world. While a decline in transit use in the face of fierce competition from the private automobile throughout the 20th century was inevitable, near-total collapse was not. At the turn of the 20th century, when transit companies’ only competition were the legs of a person or a horse, they worked reasonably well, even if they faced challenges. Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive. This drove even more riders away, producing a vicious cycle that led to the point where today, few Americans with a viable alternative ride buses or trains.

Now, when the federal government steps in to provide funding, it is limited to big capital projects. (Under the Trump administration, even those funds are in question.) Operations—the actual running of buses and trains frequently enough to appeal to people with an alternative—are perpetually starved for cash. Even transit advocates have internalized the idea that transit cannot be successful outside the highest-density urban centers. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/19/he-did-it-not-me/

“No longer are Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe along with a host of others insisting that they acted nobly. No longer are they in solidarity in their defiant opposition to Donald Trump. Now, for the first time, they are pointing fingers at one another, because they have come to realize that their prior criminality may not be rewarded, praised, or even excused, but rather prosecuted. And so in response, we now hear: “He did it, not me!”

There is something Kafkaesque about the current round of investigating possible FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, and National Security Council wrongdoing during the 2016 election, Trump transition, and early presidency.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller had been permitted to range well beyond his mandate of “Russian collusion.” He outsourced much of the selection of his “dream team” and “all-star” staff of attorneys to his deputy, Andrew Weissman. In turn, Weissman—who commiserated with Hillary Clinton at her ill-fated “victory” party on the evening of her defeat—stocked the team with Trump-haters, liberals and progressives, Clinton donors, a few who had previously served as attorneys for the Clinton Foundation, and Clinton or Obama aides. Most of these were themselves briefed during the early dissemination of the fraudulent Steele dossier.

Yet after all the bias, prosecutorial leveraging, the process crimes, the perjury traps, and after 22 months, $34 million, and a 440-plus page report, Mueller’s “hunter-killer” team did not establish that President Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the 2016 election.

In fact, Mueller could not find prosecutable “obstruction” of justice by Trump to impair the investigation of what Mueller concluded was not a crime.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fran-lebowitz-sorry-everybody-misinterpreted-we-should-turn-trump-over-to-the-saudis-who-got-rid-of-that-reporter/

Back in 2013, a rodeo clown in Missouri caused a national scandal by wearing an Obama mask. Somehow it was a threat to the president’s life. A mask. On a rodeo clown. In Missouri. And it was also racist, of course, because Obama’s dad was black.That was then. This is now. Hillary lost, so anything goes.

Right, Fran Lebowitz?

Brent Baker‏ @BrentHBakerOn HBO’s @RealTimers on Friday night, guest #FranLebowitz suggested murdering @realDonaldTrump: “We should turn him over to the Saudis, his buddies. The same Saudis who got rid of that reporter. Maybe they could do the same for him.” #RealTime

Ha ha, funny joke. Even the L.A. audience seems reluctant to cheer too loudly.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/18/new_doj_investigation_has_haunted_fbi_for_months.html

John Durham, the prosecutor tapped by Attorney General William Barr to investigate how Trump-Russia allegations emerged and spread within federal law enforcement, has already been looking into whether the FBI’s former top lawyer, James Baker, illegally leaked to reporters.

In fact, the U.S. attorney from Connecticut appears to have begun that work more than seven months ago, to judge from an underreported transcript of an October congressional interview with Baker. The Baker interview, at which Durham was not present, suggests that the prosecutor nevertheless has some people very worried.

Baker testified about the Trump-Russia affair on Oct. 3 before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

In that session, the former FBI general counsel admitted that versions and variations of Christopher Steele’s dossier were being turned in to the bureau from the strangest of places. Baker said he had even heard about it from David Corn, Washington bureau chief of left-leaning Mother Jones, who wrote one of the first pieces on the dossier, in October 2016. But in one of those company-town connections that happen frequently in Washington, Baker said he was not just a contact or source for Corn; they were also old pals.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/17/how-the-fbi-broke-the-rules-using-christopher-steele/

Attorney General Bill Barr recently asked a question that all Americans should be asking: “How did we get to the point where . . . the evidence is now that the president was falsely accused of colluding with the Russians and accused of being treasonous and accused of being a Russian Agent?” Barr added that the evidence now shows the accusations were “without a basis” and that “two years of his administration have been dominated by allegations that have now been proven false.”

To answer that question, we have to go back and look at two dysfunctional relationships the FBI had with confidential informants. In both cases, the FBI was duped into working for the informant rather than the other way around.

The FBI should have learned its lesson from the spectacular scandal surrounding Whitey Bulger, the kingpin of the notorious Winter Hill gang in Boston whose work as an FBI informant allowed him to expand his criminal empire. As we are now seeing with Christopher Steele, of “Steele dossier” infamy, the FBI learned nothing from the Bulger case and failed to follow the guidelines put in place to prevent what happened with Bulger from happening again.

Bulger’s Double-Cross
In the fall of 1975, FBI agent John Connolly met with Bulger in the agent’s car on an abandoned Boston street corner. What would follow was the FBI’s greatest scandal involving a confidential informant subverting the vast powers of the government in order to target his enemies. This stain on the history of the Department of Justice should have led to effective reforms but instead it only foreshadowed more of the same.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/the-steele-dossier-and-the-verified-application-that-wasnt/

Former officials are fighting over who deserves blame.

H ere’s what you need to know: In rushing out their assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Obama-administration officials chose not to include the risible Steele-dossier allegations that they had put in their “VERIFIED APPLICATION” for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) because . . . wait for it . . . the allegations weren’t verified.

And now, the officials are squabbling over who pushed the dossier. Why? Because the dossier — a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed, based on anonymous Russian sources peddling farcical hearsay, compiled by a well-paid foreign operative (former British spy Christopher Steele) — is crumbling by the day.

As I write, we mark the two-year anniversary of Robert Mueller’s appointment to take over the Russiagate probe — which is fast transforming into the Spygate probe. Special Counsel Mueller inherited the investigation seven months after the Obama Justice Department and FBI sought a FISC warrant to monitor former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page. By then, it was already acknowledged that dossier information was “salacious and unverified,” to quote congressional testimony by former FBI director James Comey.

That was problematic on a number of levels.

If dossier claims were still unverified when Comey testified to Congress in mid 2017 (and thereafter), then those claims could not have been verified when the Obama Justice Department and FBI submitted it to the FISC as a “VERIFIED APPLICATION” in October 2016. It also had to have been unverified on January 6, 2017, when the Obama administration chose to include a sliver of the dossier in the briefing of President-elect Trump — the day after intelligence chiefs met with President Obama in the Oval Office and discussed what Russia information should be shared with the incoming Trump team.