RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-12-the-labor-department-thinks-it-can-fix-the-lack-of-racial-diversity-at-major-law-firms

On Wednesday of this week, a guy named Craig Leen — Director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs in the Department of Labor — showed up in Manhattan to hold a “town hall” meeting with representatives of major law firms. The event was covered at law.com here, and then commented on by Paul Mirengoff at Power Line here. The headline of the law.com piece is “Government Warns Law Firms of Consequences for Diversity Failures.” Mirengoff characterizes the DOL’s effort as “seek[ing] to impose a radical diversity agenda on law firms.”

The gist of Leen’s presentation was that you guys have a big problem here that you need to “fix,” or there will be consequences. From law.com:

Craig Leen . . . told industry representatives at a town hall meeting in New York that the scarcity of women and minorities at firms in leading roles has been noted by the office, and it will be taking a closer look. Leen said in a brief interview after the meeting that “there is evidence of low representation at law firms and financial firms, and our goal is to fix it and work with them to do so.” . . . Leen said during Wednesday’s meeting that the office looks at systemic issues, “and we are seeing serious issues.”

So what’s your game plan, Craig? The law.com article describes Leen making veiled threats of cutting off federal contracts for firms that don’t meet some unstated targets. He made these remarks to the right group, since there is no collection of people more filled with a deep sense of guilt over their success than major law firm leaders. On the other hand, since federal contracts are a very small part of the business of major law firms, the chance of Leen’s threat having any meaningful effect is about zero.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/william-barr-attorney-general-smear-campaign/

The campaign against Attorney General Bill Barr is in full swing. We are told that he’s a tawdry tool of Donald Trump, that he’s disgracing himself and sullying his reputation, that he’s the equivalent of a Roy Cohn, the sleazy lawyer who once represented Trump back in New York.

The criticism of Barr reached a crescendo this week after he used the word “spying” in congressional testimony to refer to the surveillance of Trump campaign officials in 2016. The reaction to his testimony was absurdly over-the-top. Yes, the word “spying” has a negative connotation, but it’s functionally indistinguishable from “surveiling.” To wit: The FISA court that approves the FBI’s surveillance is sometimes referred to in the press as the “spy court.”

There is no doubt that Trump officials were surveilled or spied on. The FBI famously acquired a FISA warrant against Carter Page, who briefly served as a Trump foreign-policy adviser. It is true that the FBI began surveilling Page in October 2016 after he left the campaign, but the warrant allowed it to look back at his communications during his time with the campaign.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-probe-fbi-investigation-questions/

The Mueller probe was a national trauma.

Attorney General William Barr dared to use the “s-word.”

He said in congressional testimony that the Trump campaign had been spied on by the U.S. government. Pressed by incredulous Senate Democrats, he clarified: “I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated.”

“Spying” has a negative connotation, so perhaps “surveilling” would be the better way to put it. But a key question is indeed whether there was “improper surveillance” of the campaign, as Barr stated at another point in the hearing.

Barr is committed to reviewing the conduct of the Russia investigation, which is getting denounced as an outrage by his critics. But why shouldn’t the attorney general seek to understand his department’s role in the high-stakes investigative melodrama of the past two years?

The Mueller probe was a national trauma. Its boosters didn’t experience it as such, of course. They enjoyed it and played it up and hoped for the very worst. But it cast a shadow over the White House, occupied an inordinate share of the nation’s political attention, and saddled innocent people with large legal bills.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/statute-of-limitations-will-be-hotly-disputed-in-assange-case/

The indictment that the Justice Department filed against Julian Assange in the Eastern District of Virginia charges him with a conspiracy to commit computer fraud. The conspiracy statute is Section 371 of the penal code, and the computer fraud offenses that were the objectives of the conspiracy are parts of Section 1030.

According to the indictment, Assange and Manning (then known as Bradley, now as Chelsea) conspired in 2010. Manning was prosecuted by the armed forces. The Justice Department’s indictment against Assange was not returned until 2018 — eight years later.

The five-year statute of limitations that applies to most federal crimes is prescribed for both conspiracy and computer fraud.

So how is the Justice Department able to prosecute Assange on an indictment filed 3 years after the prescribed limitations period.

It appears that the Justice Department is relying on an exception, in Section 2332b of the penal code, that extends the statute of limitations to eight years for “acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries.”

Now, conspiracy to commit computer fraud is a very serious offense, and Assange’s is at the top of the seriousness range because it involved publication of defense secrets that endangered lives, including the lives of our troops. And there’s no doubt that the conspiracy transcended national boundaries — Assange was outside the U.S. when he collaborated with Manning. But is it really an act of terrorism?

It may be . . . at least as the operative term — federal crime of terrorism — is defined by Section 2332b.

Under subsection (g)(5) of that statute, an offense is considered a “federal crime of terrorism” if it satisfies two elements: (1) it “is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct”; and (2) it is a violation of one of a long list of offenses, which includes “section . . . 1030(a)(1) (relating to protection of computers)[.]”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-barr-is-right-to-review-why-trump-russia-investigation-began

In his testimony Wednesday before a Senate Appropriations Committee subcommittee, Attorney General William Barr made statements that were so clearly correct, they should be no more controversial than asserting that the sky is blue. The fact that they are causing consternation is what should alarm people.

Barr told senators that “I think spying did occur” in the Trump-Russia investigation conducted by (among others) the Justice Department and the FBI during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“The question,” Barr elaborated, “is whether it was adequately predicated.” Because “spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” he explained that he would undertake an internal review, focusing on what the original rationale was for the spying.

We should long ago have known what the rationale was. You know, as surely as you are reading this, that if an incumbent Republican administration had green-lighted a Justice Department and FBI investigation of the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign, we would already be fully informed about what triggered the investigation.

Democrats would have been unified in demanding it, the media would have echoed those demands in an endless loop and – if there had been an abuse of power – all the pertinent heads would by now have rolled.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russiagates-collateral-victims-11555022432

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russiagates-collateral-victims-11555022432The Mueller report has exonerated President Trump and his campaign of Russian collusion. What about others who were smeared alongside him? Last year some reporters investigated me as a possible colluder. It has damaged my reputation and my business.I’m a private real-estate and energy investor in California, a donor to Republican political candidates and sometime lobbyist. On Feb. 1, 2018, McClatchy Newspapers published the first of four big stories on me—four parts!—with the opening headline: “Master of selfies with GOP pols, Soviet émigré has a confounding past.”The stories suggested I have a “checkered past” and mix with “shady characters” and “controversial” foreign politicians. One noted that I have a limited liability corporation, which can be “used for a wide array of nefarious purposes.” McClatchy also falsely claimed I have had “run-ins with the law” (later softened to “legal troubles”). Others in the media picked up the smears, retweeting and speculating without asking me for comment.McClatchy is right that I am a Soviet émigré. I was born in Ukraine and brought to America as a child in the 1970s by my parents, Jewish immigrants fleeing communism.I never met President Trump. I never raised money for his campaign, as the McClatchy stories implied. I did raise money for Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio—and even contributed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In the general election, I voted for someone else. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/are-more-indictments-of-obama-officials-coming/

Yesterday we learned that Gregory Craig, the former White House counsel for Barack Obama, expects to be indicted on criminal charges for lobbying he did for the Ukrainian government back in 2012. The case against Craig originated from the Mueller investigation. Craig was not White House Counsel at the time, but between this and Attorney General William Barr’s revelation that he believes the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign and that it is being investigated, it’s hard not feel as though the tide is turning, and we might start seeing Obama officials finally get put under the microscope for various acts of corruption.

Democrats and the media have pounced on Barr’s statement, trying to paint it as a wacky conspiracy theory that was completely unjustified. The truth is, we have known definitively that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign for quite some time. There’s no reason for Democrats or the media to pretend that this is an unjustified claim. The New York Times even reported on it back in 2017 before Trump took office.

For years now, Barack Obama has insisted that he had scandal-free administration. Often cited as evidence for this claim is the lack of indictments of Obama administration officials. Of course, what is often ignored is the fact that the Obama administration was notorious for protecting its officials by stonewalling and obstructing investigations and hiding behind executive privilege. If there’s anything we can conclude from Barr’s statement it’s that after two years of a bogus Russian collusion investigation we appear on the verge of getting to the bottom of the real story that has been ignored: the illegal spying on the Trump campaign by the Obama administration, and the bogus origins of the Russian collusion hoax.CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/11/ex-obama_counsel_expects_charges_in_mueller-related_probe_140025.html

Former Obama administration White House counsel Greg Craig expects to be charged in a foreign lobbying investigation spun off from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, his lawyers said.

“Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge and the government’s stubborn insistence on prosecuting Mr. Craig is a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion,” the attorneys, William Taylor and William Murphy, said in a statement Wednesday.

The investigation into Craig comes as the Justice Department is cracking down on unregistered foreign lobbying and consulting. Federal prosecutors in New York have been investigating two prominent Washington lobbying firms in a similar probe, and Justice Department officials in Washington have been increasingly willing to prosecute people who they believe intentionally conceal their lobbying work from the federal government.

The scrutiny of Craig stems from an investigation of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his work on behalf of a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. If filed, the charges would come about three months after Craig’s former law firm agreed to pay more than $4.6 million and publicly acknowledge that it failed to register with the government for its work for the Ukraine.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/of-ilhan-omar-anti-semitism-and-america/

It was only a matter of time. And in this case, it didn’t take long at all.

After Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) made her racist remarks about the “evil” and “hypnotic” influence of Israel, the undue influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington, (“it’s all about the Benjamins”), and the dual loyalty of American Jews, Democrats were on track to censure her by name from the floor of the House. But it never happened. Nancy Pelosi proved too weak.

After almost a week of wrangling, the committee that drafted the final statement on the scandalous freshman representative released a final text that never mentioned her by name, her statements, or any need for her to apologize for her bigotry. (Not coincidentally, Omar sits on this very committee.) In fact, the final language was such generic and anodyne boilerplate that it could have been issued at any time, by either party, for any reason or no reason at all.

That the Speaker of the House was so timid in the face of such shocking behavior should surprise no one.

Behold the face of the Democratic Party: minority, young, and racist. This is the fruit of identity politics. Be it Omar, who is on the cover of the current issue of Newsweek, Rashida Talib (D-Mich.) who signaled the need to obliterate Israel on her first day in office, or the leader of the pack, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), a proud supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement, the “new faces” of the DNC constitute a united front in their hatred for our Semitic brethren.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/will-william-barr-get-justice-for-carter-page/

It all started with Carter Page. The biggest scandal in the history of American politics originated with carefully cultivated public suspicions about whether Page, a Naval Academy graduate and campaign volunteer, was a conduit between Team Trump and the Kremlin.

In spring 2016, Page emerged as the first alleged culprit in the nascent Trump-Russia collusion plotline. Bogus allegations about him were included in the infamous Steele dossier; he was the subject of relentless media coverage and public harassment; the FBI enlisted an informant to gather information on him in secret; and his own government accused him of being a Russian agent as it wiretapped him for a year under false pretenses.

Now it appears Attorney General William Barr finally will get to the bottom of why Page first became the target of Trump foes on the Right, then ultimately, of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration. This comes two years to the day since the Washington Post first published illegally leaked details about the FISA warrant on Page, which was obtained by James Comey’s FBI in October 2016.

Barr is poised to hold Page’s antagonists accountable. “The office of the inspector general has a pending investigation into the FISA process in the Russia investigation,” Barr told the House Appropriations committee on Tuesday.

When asked specifically whether the Justice Department also was investigating who illegally disclosed the existence of Page’s FISA warrant, Barr indicated he would await the criminal referrals expected to come this week from Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) regarding the same matter.

Further, Barr has acknowledged that he believes the Trump campaign was spied on in 2016. “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal. Yes, I think spying did occur,” Barr told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. Page was one of a handful of Trump associates also pursued by an FBI informant during the campaign.