RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/26/the_next_shoes_to_drop_after_the_mueller_report_139856.html

Footwear aplenty will fall as more details from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report are disclosed. The reckoning will come in several baskets and will fall on Democrats and Republicans alike, with major ramifications for 2020.

Basket No. 1: More information about the Mueller Report and the basis for its conclusions.The public wants that information and deserves it. Democrats will cry “coverup” if they don’t get everything. While Republicans emphasize “no collusion,” Democrats will concentrate their attention on Mueller’s indecision regarding President Trump’s possible obstruction of justice. Democrats will press Attorney General William Barr about the special counsel’s ambiguous conclusion—and Barr’s own definitive one–about the obstruction issue. Other Trump critics, who heretofore have described Bob Mueller as a modern-day Eliot Ness, will start crying, “Whitewash!”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/collusion-clingers-and-their-flat-earth-forebears/

Democrats just won’t take ‘no collusion’ for an answer.

Even after Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to the New World and back, some naysayers surely clung to their shattered superstitions like life preservers after a shipwreck. “Who cares what Columbus says?” they likely whined. “The Earth IS flat. Columbus must have turned around and come home before he fell over the edge.”

Today’s Democrats resemble those 15th-century bitter-enders. No matter what, many insist that Donald Trump and Russia colluded to win the White House. Even after special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation finally repudiated their destructive myth, they still scream: “Collusion!”

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) is the spiritual leader of the Congressional Collusion Caucus. He told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday: “I did say that there is ample evidence, and indeed there is, of collusion of people in the Trump campaign with the Russians.” Schiff told the Washington Post, “Undoubtedly there is collusion.” He added: “We will continue to investigate the counterintelligence issues. That is, is the president, or people around him, compromised in any way by a hostile foreign power?”

Rather than extract proof of these grave charges this week, my three phone calls and three e-mails to Schiff’s office and communications director Patrick Boland yielded silence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/natural-gas-global-energy-trend-clean-growing/

Renewables get the press, but natural gas is growing much faster.

While the Green New Deal continues to dominate energy discussions in the United States, the rest of the world continues to rely on coal, oil, and natural gas. And of those three, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Energy Agency, natural-gas consumption grew faster last year than any other form of energy, including renewables. That jump in global gas use reflects the soaring growth in U.S. production and exports of that same fuel.

Much of the media attention to the new IEA report focused on the increase in global carbon dioxide emissions, which rose by 1.7 percent last year. The IEA said the increase was due to “higher energy demand propelled by a global economy that expanded by 3.7 percent in 2018.” The report also noted the continuing growth in renewables, which increased by 4 percent.

Renewables such as wind and solar get lots of positive press. But last year renewables were eclipsed by the growth in global gas use, which jumped by 4.6 percent. At that rate, global gas demand could double within the next 16 years or so. The good news about the growth in global gas demand is that it is helping displace coal and liquid fuels for electricity generation — a change that, in turn, is helping reduce air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. During combustion, gas emits almost zero sulfur dioxide, and it produces about half as much carbon dioxide as coal and about 30 percent less than diesel fuel or fuel oil.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/03/28/campaign-colluded-russians-2016-hillary-clintons/

For more than two years, the campaign, presidential transition, and official government administration of Donald Trump operated under a cloud of suspicion that they had engaged in a treasonous conspiracy to steal the 2016 election from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Trump and his top associates were accused of collusion and of conspiring with the Russians to subvert American democracy.

The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency publicly declared Trump to be guilty of treason, an offense punishable by death. The former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the country’s premier law enforcement agency, intimated that the president had illegally obstructed justice.

In the end, none of it was true. After a nearly two-year-long investigation that issued 2,800 subpoenas, interviewed 500 witnesses, and used nearly 300 wiretaps and pen registers, Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no evidence of collusion by Trump or his associates.

But that doesn’t mean 2016 was free of Russian collusion. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that a 2016 presidential campaign willfully and deliberately colluded with Russians in a bid to interfere with American elections. It wasn’t Trump’s campaign that colluded with shady Russia oligarchs and sketchy Russian sources to subvert American democracy: it was Hillary Clinton’s.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/29/trumps_accusers_harmed_us_all_hold_them_accountable_139889.htmlBy

“Our government,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

Would that Brandeis could rise from the dead to oversee the investigation and likely prosecution of those whose determination to oppose Donald J. Trump was so fierce that they conspired to create a narrative of treason that has now been revealed to be a charade.

Let the reckoning begin.

I’m not talking about settling scores with the dozens of mainstream media figures who spent the last two years “informing” their viewers/listeners/readers that President Trump and his campaign had broken the law to conspire with the Russian government to fix the 2016 election. They were wrong, and they now have been proven wrong, by the very man in whom they placed their deep and abiding faith.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/20/mccains-key-role-in-fueling-post-election-trump-russia-hysteria/

In his 2018 book, The Restless Wave, the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) wondered aloud why he was sought out and given the infamous Steele dossier shortly after the 2016 presidential election.

After suggesting that anyone who questioned his role in handling the political document was indulging in “conspiracy theories,” McCain offered his explanation: “The answer is too obvious for the paranoid to credit. I am known internationally to be a persistent critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime and I have been a long while.”

It is true that McCain was an outspoken critic of Putin. But the big problem with McCain’s defense is that by the time he wrote those words—presumably the end of 2017, since the book was published in late May 2018—it already was public knowledge that the dossier had been authored and distributed by political pimps funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. When McCain was writing his book, many of the culprits were in serious legal jeopardy.

Christopher Steele, the dossier’s author, was being sued for defamation and was under congressional scrutiny in 2017. (McCain had sent his close associate, David Kramer, to meet Steele in London shortly after the 2016 election to track down gossip about the president-elect.) Steele also remains the subject of a criminal referral at the Justice Department for lying to federal officials.

McCain’s Senate colleagues were investigating Fusion GPS and its owner, Glenn Simpson, who produced and peddled the fabricated document, in the summer of 2017. (It was Simpson, not Steele as McCain suggested in his book, who gave Kramer the dossier in late November 2016; McCain would later provide that copy of the dossier to former FBI Director James Comey, who already had used the sleazily obtained and Democrat-funded opposition research to get a secret court’s approval to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.)

Kramer also testified before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 related to its probe of the dossier, and he later invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid further questioning.

And if his book was still in production in February 2018, McCain would have known that the FBI withheld crucial details about the dossier’s political provenance in a shameful scheme to violate the privacy rights of a U.S. citizen whose only offense was volunteering to help Trump in 2016. McCain knew it because he vehemently opposed the release of the bombshell memo authored by Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which detailed how the dossier was presented as evidence to the FISA court. The senator accused Trump and Nunes of attacking the FBI and for “looking at the investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows,” McCain wrote in a statement the day the memo was released. “If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.”

None of these facts are addressed in McCain’s book. Simpson and Fusion GPS are not mentioned, even though Simpson was McCain’s source for the dossier. There was no acknowledgement that McCain and his associates were complicit—either unwittingly or intentionally—in a wide ranging plot to sabotage the incoming president of the United States by sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the election and Trump’s alleged fealty to Putin. Instead, McCain wrote that anyone who doubts his actions can “go to hell.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/434711-new-york-prosecutors-throw-out-constitution-to-charge-manafort

This month, the greatest off Broadway production should be titled “The Prosecutors,” starring Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James. As in another dramatic comedy, “The Producers,” the state case against former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort seems designed to fail, leaving its prosecutors with the convenient windfall of public support and none of the burden.

The New York state charges that Vance filed against Manafort appear to run afoul of state and federal protections against double jeopardy, or being prosecuted twice for the same underlying conduct. The timing of the charges alone seemed right out of the playbook of “The Producers” character Max Bialystock, the corrupt Broadway figure who insisted that in New York the rule is “if you got it, flaunt it, flaunt it.” Accordingly, Vance waited just minutes after the Manafort sentencing to hit him with state charges, guaranteeing the maximum exposure and credit for his effort.

The problem is that the case appears not only constitutionally flawed but ethically challenged, coming right out of the Max Bialystock School of Prosecution. I have long been one of the longest and loudest critics of Manafort. He is a corrupt and despicable person who deserves the two sentences that could keep him in jail for the rest of his life. However, it is not his crimes but his association with President Trump that has driven the manic effort to charge him in New York. In this current age of rage over Trump, Manafort is a readily available surrogate for selective prosecution.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/19/peter-strzok-lie-spy-targeting-trump-campaign/

Last Thursday, Doug Collins, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, released the committee’s transcript of its interview of disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok. During the day-long questioning, Strzok sought to explain away the more deleterious text messages he sent to his mistress and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

When one considers Strzok’s explanation of his reference to an “insurance policy” in light of Page’s testimony, which Collins also released last week, and other previously known facts, there seem to be only two possibilities: Strzok was lying or an unknown spy was targeting the Trump campaign.

Strzok sent the “insurance policy” text to Page on August 15, 2016, just two weeks after the FBI’s launch of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,” the former deputy assistant director wrote to Page.
Strzok’s Answer

When questioned on the meaning of this text by members of the House Judiciary Committee, Strzok testified that “we had received information from a very sensitive source alleging collusion between the Government of Russia and members of the Trump campaign.”

“As is frequently the case in counterintelligence investigations and any national security investigations,” Strzok added, “there’s a tension between the protection of a sensitive source and method of pursuing the investigation related to that information.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/18/how-a-former-mccain-associate-obtained-the-steele-dossier-and-helped-advance-the-russian-collusion-narrative/

After receiving a subpoena to appear before the House Intelligence Committee last year, David Kramer, a close associate of the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The committee had additional questions to ask Kramer about his handling of the infamous Steele dossier, which he helped circulate on Capitol Hill and in the news media after the 2016 presidential election.

Now, we may know why.

Kramer’s recently unsealed court deposition in a lawsuit related to the dossier contains bombshell revelations that not only directly contradict media reporting about how McCain came into possession of the dossier, but Kramer’s December 2017 testimony also undercut claims made by McCain himself in his 2018 book. This might explain why Kramer refused to appear before the committee for a second time.

It’s important to revisit the history of the dossier. While the term is meant to confer seriousness (it sounds more official than “file”), the dossier is nothing more than unverified political opposition research produced by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who now runs a consulting firm in London. Steele was hired in mid-2016 by Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, also a political consulting firm, to dig up Russia-related dirt on then-candidate Trump. Simpson, in turn, was being paid by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

(Steele and Simpson have collaborated since 2009 on behalf of “oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs,” according to a 2017 article in The Guardian.)

Steele confessed that he never traveled to Russia, and instead relied on distant sources and hearsay for the dossier, which is a poorly formatted and in some places, ridiculous, collection of allegations about Trump and some associates. It’s nothing close to hard evidence—but that did not stop former FBI Director James Comey from presenting the dossier to a secret court in order to obtain a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign volunteer.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-jew-who-died-for-ilhan-omar-11552950199?mod=mhp

Rep. Ilhan Omar, a freshman Democrat from Minnesota, has become widely known for her attacks on supporters of Israel. Ms. Omar is a naturalized citizen whose Somali refugee family settled in the U.S. when she was a teenager. Tens of thousands of Somali refugees relocated to the U.S.—some 25,000 in the Minneapolis area—to escape the starvation, famine and civil war that turned Somalia into a lawless, failed state in the early 1990s.

Another name is worth recognition and remembrance, especially among Somali refugees: Lawrence Freedman. In 1992, the year after Ms. Omar’s family left Somalia, the U.S. sent troops there as part of a joint United Nations humanitarian effort. The U.S. intervention, Operation Restore Hope, began with the landing of U.S. troops near Mogadishu on Dec. 9.

Freedman was a U.S. Army veteran who earned two Bronze Stars in Vietnam. He was an original member of the Green Berets, reached the rank of sergeant major, and eventually became an instructor. He retired from the Army in 1990 and joined the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1992 the U.S. sent Freedman as part of an advance team to prepare the way for American troops in Somalia. On Dec. 23, two weeks after the troops had arrived, Freedman became the first American killed as part of the relief effort in Somalia.

Any American casualty is noteworthy, but Freedman’s sacrifice stands out because he was Jewish.

Thousands of Somali refugees who now live in Ms. Omar’s district had their freedom and security paid for with the blood of American soldiers—22 of them, including Freedman.