RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/19/collusion-dream-dead-conspiracy-lives/

The President of the United States did not conspire with the Russians. Neither did his family. Neither did his friends. Neither did his campaign. At the end of the Robert Mueller investigation – now clearly staffed and advanced by partisans who loathe this president – not one single American, after all that, has been indicted or charged with any crime for conspiring with the Russians in any way, shape, or form to steal the 2016 election. That is now an indisputable fact. The uncomfortable reality is that we spent two years being fed the most irresponsible allegations advanced by an ignorant punditocracy gone savage for this idea, which should raise all sorts of questions about our political, intelligence, and media elites who sold us this crazy story and promised the American people the proof that never came.

The juiciest portion of the report from the perspective of the media yesterday was the president’s outburst upon being told of the appointment of Mueller as special counsel following Jeff Sessions’ recusal and the firing of James Comey – from the searchable report here:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-vindicates-william-barr/

Barr has provided Congress with the full, at times gory details drawn from Mueller’s aggressive investigation.

Democrats and their media partners owe Bill Barr an apology. He won’t get one, it goes without saying.

Just to recap, the attorney general was accused of misrepresenting Mueller’s report; of providing a false summary of the report; of plotting to use grand-jury law and other secrecy provisions as a pretext to redact most of the report; and of calling an extraordinary press conference in order to exculpate the president by projecting a fraudulent version of the report.

These accusations were slanderously false.

Barr made Mueller’s bottom-line findings available on a Sunday, March 24, less than two full days after receiving the report from Mueller late on a Friday. Now that the 448-page tome is public, it is easy to see that it could not possibly have been redacted, in keeping with federal law, without a weeks-long review process.

If Barr had issued nothing while that painstaking process went on, he’d have been vilified for a cover-up. Instead, he quickly and accurately reported Mueller’s findings . . . and was of course vilified for purportedly lying about what the report said — notwithstanding that Mueller, no wallflower, was cooperating in the redaction process and would obviously not have abided a fictional account of his work.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/muellers-report-speaks-volumes-11555629994

By the fall of 2017, it was clear that special counsel Robert Mueller, as a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was too conflicted to take a detached look at a Russia-collusion story that had become more about FBI malfeasance than about Donald Trump. The evidence of that bias now stares at us through 448 pages of his report.

President Trump has every right to feel liberated. What the report shows is that he endured a special-counsel probe that was relentlessly, at times farcically, obsessed with taking him out. What stands out is just how diligently and creatively the special counsel’s legal minds worked to implicate someone in Trump World on something Russia- or obstruction-of-justice-related. And how—even with all its overweening power and aggressive tactics—it still struck out.

Volume I of the Mueller report, which deals with collusion, spends tens of thousands of words describing trivial interactions between Trump officials and various Russians. While it doubtless wasn’t Mr. Mueller’s intention, the sheer quantity and banality of details highlights the degree to which these contacts were random, haphazard and peripheral. By the end of Volume I, the notion that the Trump campaign engaged in some grand plot with Russia is a joke.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obstruction-of-nothing-11555630233

Robert Mueller is certainly thorough. The special counsel makes clear across the 488 pages of his report released Thursday that he and his band of prosecutors left no entrail unexamined in their two-year dissection of President Trump. Those who demanded this may not like the conclusions, but they can’t say Mr. Mueller didn’t hunt down every potential crime.

The report exposes some Trumpian excesses and lies, but it also shows that, on the most important issue and the charge that started it all, Mr. Trump has been telling the truth. He and his campaign did not conspire or coordinate with Russians to steal the 2016 election. Try as he did to find a crime regarding Russia or obstruction of justice, Mr. Mueller found nothing to prosecute.

The details validate the four-page public summary of the report’s conclusions that Attorney General William Barr released last month. The AG issued the full report with limited redactions related to grand-jury testimony and intelligence sources and methods. Democrats will claim secrets are hidden in the redactions, but Mr. Barr says he’ll let senior Members of Congress see most of those too. Claims of a coverup are spin for the anti-Trump media.

https://nypost.com/2019/04/18/pelosi-schumer-call-on-mueller-to-testify/

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer are calling for Robert Mueller to testify before Congress as soon as possible after what they described as Attorney General William Barr’s “partisan” handling of the special counsel report.

The top Democratic congressional leaders released a joint statement hours before a redacted version of the nearly 400-page report will be released and after The New York Times reported that White House lawyers and Justice officials have already discussed the report’s findings, according to The Hill.

“Attorney General Barr’s regrettably partisan handling of the Mueller report, including his slanted March 24th summary letter, his irresponsible testimony before Congress last week, and his indefensible plan to spin the report in a press conference later this morning — hours before he allows the public or Congress to see it — have resulted in a crisis of confidence in his independence and impartiality,” Pelosi and Schumer wrote.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/keep-digging-dems-youll-find-that-pony-somewhere-in-the-manure-pile-known-as-the-mueller-report/

Somewhere buried deep in the Mueller report is incontrovertible evidence that the president of the United States is a Russian spy. I know it. I just know it. It has to be there.

And I just know that Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice. How can he not be? He’s guilty of so much that the obstruction is, I’m sure, just the tip of the iceberg.

How do I know? Ask any Democrat.

I can’t decide whether it’s amusing or pathetic, this desperate desire by Democrats to will the Mueller report to say something it isn’t saying. An appropriate cultural reference might be that Democrats are searching for Captain Queeg’s missing strawberries even after they know the fruit has been eaten and the culprit found.

Classical? How about Democrat’s tearing the castle apart to find the emperor’s new clothes?

All of those “flipped” witnesses who Democrats believed would turn on their boss and dish the “real” dirt apparently had little to say. Kind of makes you wonder what Mueller got from these cooperating witnesses. Like Bullwinkle pulling a rabbit out of a hat: “Nothin’ up my sleeve…Presto!” (Wrong hat).

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/no-evidence-trump-was-aware-of-don-jr-s-meeting-with-russian-lawyer/

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation failed to produce evidence that then-candidate Trump was aware that his son, Donald Trump Jr., and other high-ranking campaign officials met with a Russian lawyer offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton in June 2016, according to the special counsel’s report released Thursday.

Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and at least five other people met with Kremlin-linked attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in Manhattan in order to obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton from Veselnitskaya.

After news of the meeting broke in July 2017, Trump dictated a statement to be released on Trump Jr.’s behalf in which he falsely claimed the meeting was held to discuss sanctions that restricted the U.S. adoption of Russian children.

“The president then dictated a statement to Hicks that said the meeting was about Russian adoption (which the president had twice been told was discussed at the meeting). The statement dictated by the president did not mention the offer of derogatory information about Clinton,” the report reads.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/william-barr-press-conference-no-obstruction-on-the-facts-of-the-case/

The most interesting new disclosure to come out of Attorney General William Barr’s press conference on the Mueller report was about obstruction of justice.

As I pointed out in a Fox News column this morning, the obstruction issue was one of the main reasons why the media-Democrat complex’s caterwauling about Barr’s unremarkable decision to hold a press conference was ludicrous. Special Counsel Mueller declined to render a prosecutorial judgment on whether obstruction charges should be brought against the president. Since it is the attorney general who made the judgment, for that reason alone it was worth hearing from him this morning.

The attorney general stated that the special counsel evaluated ten incidents with an eye toward whether they amounted to an obstruction offense. Barr elaborated that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disagreed with Mueller on whether these incidents even could have amounted to obstruction as a matter of law.

It is important to grasp what that means, and what it doesn’t, because I’ve heard some inaccurate commentary. Barr was not saying that Mueller found one or more of these incidents to constitute obstruction; Mueller was saying that the incidents involved actions that could theoretically have amounted to obstruction.

https://nationalconferenceofjewishaffairs.org

 The following letter to President Trump was hand-delivered at the White House by Rabbi Spero, who was attending a special gathering for key Jewish leaders:

“President Trump tweeted the appropriate response to Rep. Omar, who described the bombing of the Twin Towers as merely ‘some people did something.’ Omar trivialized 9/11, referring to it in a cavalier fashion.

The President correctly demonstrated via his video the enormity and the devastating catastrophe of 9/11. This has nothing to do with racism, rather the correct response to a disrespectful statement made by Omar regarding this country, demonstrating her gross indifference to the suffering of Americans.“Those that impute racism to the President’s tweet are living in their own make-believe world or, worse, are themselves trying to incite an issue of racism where such is not the case. People of truth and historical awareness cannot remain silent out of fear that their opposition will fabricate claims of racism.

“Freedom of expression is a two-way street. Patriotic Americans are as equally free to respond and give their opinions as are those, like Omar, who weekly express some type of hateful indictment of America. Let us not forget that Omar repeatedly agitates and incites her audiences to go out and ‘make people uncomfortable’.“Thankfully we have a man of President Trump’s candor and stature, who is willing to fight against the rewriting of history and protect the free speech of Americans defending their country.

Mr. Trump has issued an Executive Order protecting free speech from the politically-correct censorship prevalent on campuses and is, by his example, giving support to all those who wish to exercise their right to tell historic truth.”

One of the sponsors of this letter is Americans for a Safe Israel, an organization that I am proud to belong to since 1973.rsk

Dear Mr. President,

Thank you for your friendship towards the Jewish community in the United States and around the world, especially in Israel. Your unprecedented affinity for the Jewish People is all the more commendable, given the inexcusable and deplorable false accusations of Antisemitism which have dogged your presidency since its earliest days. We encourage the continuation of a warm relationship with the Jewish community built upon mutual respect.

We were distressed to read an open letter publicized by several American Jewish organizations, many of whom “boycotted” some of your previous overtures to the Jewish community, encouraging you to pressure Israel to compromise her rights as an independent democracy. One of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledges, made while campaigning for his recent re-election, was to extend Israeli sovereignty over Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
Throughout your presidency, you have done everything possible to keep your own campaign promises — with the move of the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, pledged by every President since Bill Clinton, being a prime example.

For decades, Israel has attempted to nurture coexistence with Arab communities which desire to live outside Israeli governance, while retaining control over its borders and national security in that very hostile part of the world. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama recognized that Israeli sovereignty would extend to Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria in any final peace agreement. It is unfair and unreasonable to hold these Jewish communities hostage to the continuing intransigence of the Palestinian Authority. And it is outrageous to suggest setting policy to kowtow to the Antisemitic, terrorist-financed effort to boycott the world’s only Jewish state.