RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/08/35-key-people-involved-russia-hoax-need-investigated/

As their desperate search for collusion continues, Democrats want to interview 81 people. Try this list instead.

Funny how things change. The Washington Post couldn’t say a nice thing about congressional Republican efforts to investigate the Obama administration and FBI shenanigans that occurred before and after the 2016 election. That’s if they even covered these efforts at all.

But with Democrats controlling the House, and that legislative body’s subpoena power, the establishment media’s line has changed. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have just sent letters to 81 people, all associated with President Trump or the Russia probe, demanding answers on Russian election interference.

This is part of Democrats’ effort to continue their hunt for proof of Russia collusion—although they are already sure that Trump is guilty—as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation appears to be winding down. To cover these events, the Post’s Philip Bump wrote an article titled: “The 81 people and organizations just looped into the Trump probe—and why they were included.” Of course, the article is totally unquestioning of the House Democrats’ desired narrative and motivations.
Investigated, But Not for the Reasons Dems Give

It isn’t worth it to go through Bump’s whole article, but even the commentary about the first name on the list—Rinat Akhmetshin—omits glaring and important facts. Bump says Akhmetshin “joined his colleague Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer linked to the Kremlin, at the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower predicated on providing information that would undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” But, Bump says, “the focus of the meeting instead reportedly focused on the Magnitsky Act—a law that resulted in sanctions on numerous prominent Russians.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/07/the-

When the American Conservative Union asked if I wanted to address CPAC this year, of course I said yes. Then came several weeks of discussion as to what the subject of my speech should be. This is the biggest event of its kind in the nation, with more than 200 speakers and this year in excess of 10,000 attendees, more than half under the age of 25, so I am not envious of the job Matt Schlapp and Dan Schneider have to do to pull off such a feat. (Especially when your speakers include the president and the vice president and all the security that entails).

The topic we eventually settled on was the threat Russia poses to America, a subject I am always happy to address given my family history. With parents who suffered under a Stalinist dictatorship and a father who escaped from a Communist political prison, providing a reality-check on the menace posed by a Russia still run by a KGB colonel comes easy.

However, on the day, eight minutes into my speech I decided I needed to change tack. Russia is a threat, but it is not the Soviet Union. Instead I felt compelled to talk about the real threat we face as the free-est nation on God’s Earth: the rise of socialism within our borders.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/barack-obama-is-still-trying-to-rewrite-his-presidential-legacy/

He continues to lie about what happened during his two terms.

Have you been following Obama’s post-presidency career as a comedian? Well, I have. His most commonly used bit was the claim that he didn’t have any scandals during his presidency. Though his usual audience tends not to laugh but to cheer at this claim, it is easily debunked by anyone who paid attention during that time.

It appears that Obama is now testing out some new material. In addition to his “I didn’t have any scandals” bit, he’s now working in a couple new ones:

Former President Barack Obama says he tried to build a culture centered around problem-solving and not personal gain while in the White House.

He said on Wednesday it was an effective strategy for any organization that also prevents “big scandals and indictments.”

Obama’s comments drew applause from a crowd of about 9,000 people at a business conference in Salt Lake City.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273044/maajid-nawaz-pulls-race-card-defense-isis-bride-joshua-winston

An airsoft shooting range in England is using a picture of ISIS bride from London Shamima Begum for people to hone their shooting skills on, and Maajid Nawaz isn’t happy about it. “We must be better than our enemies,” Pope Maajid tells us, whilst railing against using a jihadist’s face for target practice, calling it “disgusting and inhumanly degrading behaviour.” Old habits die hard with Maajid, in my opinion — here he is defending a terrorist. Maajid quickly goes on to tell us, “It won’t be long before this face is replaced by just any brown or black face,” as if people at that shooting range are firing at Shamima Begum not because she is a jihadist, but because she is brown. “The Shamima Begum 2-tier citizenship debacle *is* connected to race,” Maajid insists. He is trying to get us to believe that race wars in the UK are already unfolding before his eyes.

The real war occurring in the UK today is against non-Muslim men and non-Muslim girls. These two groups of people are the biggest victims, if Maajid wants to start talking about war. Non-Muslim boys are being neglected in favour of Muslims. They are dropping out of school earlier, more are living in poverty, and they have the highest levels of illiteracy in the UK today (not to mention suicide rates), thanks to all of the enforced Cultural Marxism that is taking place, which sees non-Muslim men being excluded from certain jobs and a lot of apprenticeships and college and university places, generally on the basis of race. If Maajid wants to continue going down the race war route, then he should take a look at the white non-Muslim underage girls who are victims of brown (since Maajid is talking about skin tone, as if it had something to do with resentment against Shamima Begum) Pakistani Muslim men. There’s your race war right there, Maajid. Or perhaps he can cast an eye over Twitter this past week alone: multiple videos have surfaced of lone non-Muslim boys being battered unconscious by packs of Pakistani Muslim youths. And, as always, when a non-Muslim is battered or killed or robbed by a Pakistani Muslim, there’s rarely a “hate crime” label attached to it, as there is whenever anything, no matter how random, happens to a Muslim.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-c-mccarthy-would-mueller-indict-trump-for-attempting-to-fire-mueller

With indications that special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report is imminent, talk of “no collusion” is dominating chatter by the president, his fans, and his critics. That is, a finding of no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia is widely anticipated. Yet, my sense is that, more than on collusion, Mueller may focus on the obstruction aspect of his investigation.

I want to examine an element of that, involving the status of Mueller himself.

New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt have highlighted Trump’s purported “attempts” to fire Mueller, which mainly involved “trying to get” then-White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire him. What does this reporting tell us? Well, we know prosecutors are investigating whether the president obstructed the Russia investigation. How could bombast about firing Mueller bear on that issue when, of course, Trump never actually fired him?

The answer may be found in that word: attempt.

The Times reporting presages that Mueller has homed in on the parts of federal obstruction laws that address not only interference with a proceeding but also “attempts” to do so. Could the special counsel be poised to argue that Trump committed obstruction by attempting to fire the special counsel?

If that is the theory, it is meritless. In the context of the chief executive’s dismissal of subordinates, the concept of attempt is inapposite. A president either fires someone or he doesn’t.

Actually, there are at least three problems with trying to inflate Trump’s spasms of anger over Mueller into an obstruction felony.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/deep-state-nothing-new-american-politics/

The so-called deep state is often weaponized to reflect current orthodoxies.

All great empires of the past created deep states.

The permanent bureaucracies and elite hangers-on adapted as imperial conditions dictated. Imperial Spain’s El Escorial outside Madrid, the courts of Renaissance Venice, and Byzantium’s Constantinople, or the thousands who lived at 18th-century Versailles, were all thronged with court functionaries. They were the embryos of nonstop dramas of intrigue and coups, and often immune to periodic changes even in autocratic heads of state.

The Byzantine emperor Justinian savagely curbed the influence of his bureaucratic opponents only through the infamous slaughter of the Nika riots of AD 532. The key for the deep-state careerist was always survival, even more than public service. The ubiquitous fifth-century B.C. Athenian Alcibiades was variously an Athenian democratic imperialist, a suspected oligarchic sympathizer, a wanted outlaw of the Athenian state, a turncoat working for Sparta, a returning Athenian democrat, and an aristocratic exile under the protection of Persia — the common denominator being a manipulative skilled survivor of the politics of the Greek city-state.

Similar was the much later example of the “versatile” French minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. Talleyrand for more than 40 years was a fixture of the permanent Paris court and thus in succession an advocate and betrayer of the Ancien Régime, the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the restored monarchy. His loyalty was to the career of Monsieur Talleyrand rather than to France, much less to monarchy, the revolution, republican government, or dictatorship.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/anti-semitism-louis-farrakhan-democratic-party/

The ‘It’s anti-Zionism, not anti-Semitism’ dodge doesn’t wash.

The Democrats have a couple of problems: One is that they have spent many years complaining about being labeled “socialists” only to see their party come to be dominated by self-proclaimed socialists such as Senator Bernie Sanders (the gentleman from Vermont is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination but is not a member of the party) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, in spite of her pricey education, does not give the impression that she could be relied upon to spell bourgeoisie.

“Don’t call us socialists!” they used to say.

Now?

“Don’t call us anti-Semites!”

Well.

If the Democrats have a minor socialist problem, they have a major problem in the form of Jew-hating weirdos, preeminent among them the Reverend Louis Farrakhan of the so-called Nation of Islam. Farrakhan has been an out-and-proud Jew-hating weirdo for many decades now, but Democrats still feel the need to make gestures of obeisance before him: Anti-Trump leaders such as Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March have embraced Farrakhan and courted his favor. Barack Obama came a-calling in 2005 when he was ramping up his political career. The Congressional Black Caucus has consulted him. Bill Clinton stood alongside him at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, implicitly elevating the cult leader. California Democrats Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters attend Farrakhan’s public events, and Obama-administration veteran Eric Holder recently posed for a picture with him.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/06/four-different-lies-james-clapper-told-about-lying-to-congress/

Five years ago to this month, former director of national intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress, and he has been scrambling to make excuses for the ongoing lies and leaks ever since.

In March 2013, Sen. Ron Wyder asked Clapper under oath if the U.S. government was collecting “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper paused and said, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” Three months later, Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing that the National Security Agency was in fact collecting in bulk domestic call records and other various internet communications on millions of Americans.

This was the first of many “untruths,” as Clapper likes to call them. Here are other lies Clapper has cooked up since trying to explain his false statements under oath.1. He Lied Because He ‘Simply Didn’t Understand’ The Question

In an apology letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein written about four months after the hearing, Clapper said he gave the “clearly erroneous” answer because he “simply didn’t think of” the call-record collection.

Even though Clapper had received the committee’s questions the day before his testimony, he maintains he did not realize that Wyden was asking about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and was answering a question regarding a different program, specifically Section 702 of FISA.

“I didn’t realize what he was talking about,” Clapper said at the University of Chicago last May. He repeated the lie again to CNN’s John Berman on Tuesday after news broke that the Trump administration is planning to end the NSA’s spying program.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/432808-its-not-about-collusion-its-about-obstruction-and-impeachment

“There was no collusion!”

As President Trump demonstrated in his feature-length CPAC speech, he is that rare combination of bottomless energy, canny comic timing, disregard for norms, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The last manifests itself in manic refutation of the Democrat-media narrative that the Trump campaign was in a traitorous conspiracy with the Kremlin. At this point, if you ask the president what time it is, or to pass the salt shaker, he’ll tell you, “There was no collusion!”

Mr. Trump has always said this, even as evidence of non-criminal but indecorous Trump-Russia contacts mounted (the Trump Tower New York meeting with Kremlin-operative Natalia Veselnitiskaya, the Trump Tower Moscow project, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s ties to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs). Plainly, though, “no collusion” has become a mantra now because the president expects that special counsel Robert Mueller’s reputedly imminent report will conclude that there was no criminal collusion — no Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy to steal the 2016 election.

The White House is attempting to shape expectations: Even if the special counsel’s report catalogues unsavory conduct and connections, it will be portrayed as exoneration if there was no “collusion” in the sense of criminal collaboration.

Not so fast.