RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/brett-kavanaugh-rush-to-judgment-on-newest-scotus-judge/

A piece by Richard Wolf that ran over the weekend in USA Today posits that the anticipated “conservative takeover of the Supreme Court . . . has been stalled by a budding bromance between” Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s newest member, Brett Kavanaugh. The author’s principal evidence: Their disagreement in only one of 25 cases that have been decided so far this term with Kavanaugh’s participation. (The newest justice has not participated in six other cases decided to date.) They parted ways in Stokeling v. United States. There Roberts joined Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in dissent from the majority’s holding that the Armed Career Criminal Act includes a robbery offense that requires a defendant to have overcome a victim’s resistance.

If that much agreement sounds remarkable, consider that most of those cases were decided unanimously and that no pair of justices disagreed with each other on the Court’s judgment over the course of those 25 cases more than nine times. For some perspective on just how early it still is, note that the Court’s previous term had 19 decisions in which the justices split 5–4. Most of this term’s decisions have yet to be issued, and the highest concentration of sharply divided ones tends to come later in the term.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/many-unhappy-trump-returns-11554667487

Donald Trump promised in 2016 that he’d release his tax returns but he never has, and voters elected him anyway. Now Democrats are demanding that the IRS release six years of Mr. Trump’s returns to them, triggering a political and legal fight that voters will ultimately have to judge.As in so much else, Mr. Trump is the exception to modern Presidents in refusing to make his returns public. In 2015 he suggested that he’d release them eventually, telling ABC News in October that “at some point I’ll release it.” In February 2016 he told ABC’s John Dickerson that he’d release them “I would say, over the next three, four months. We’re working on them very hard. And they will be very good.”

We’ve long thought this is information voters ought to have. One argument for tax transparency are Bill and Hillary Clinton, who while running in 1992 released their returns going back to 1980. Why not earlier?Well, after they were in the White House we learned that their 1978 and 1979 returns reported income from Hillary’s miraculous trading in cattle futures. Revealing those implausible trades abetted by Friends of Bill would have told voters much about the first couple’s habit of skirting legal norms.The same standard should hold for Mr. Trump, who in early 2016 began floating the excuse that he can’t release his returns while they are being audited. This must be some audit because he’s still using that line. It’s unlikely that he’s covering up some illegality if he’s been audited as persistently as he claims.More likely, Mr. Trump wants to block the disclosure of politically embarrassing details. Perhaps he doesn’t make as much money as he wants people to believe. Perhaps he pays relatively little in taxes given real-estate depreciation and other loopholes. Perhaps he donates little to charity, as tax returns revealed about Joe Biden when he was running for Vice President. Maybe this information would have made no difference in 2016 given that Mr. Trump’s opponent was the ethically impaired Mrs. Clinton, but voters can’t judge what they aren’t allowed to see.

https://nypost.com/2019/04/05/investor-rips-ocasio-cortez-as-financially-illiterate-at-sharpton-conference/

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was ripped as “financially illiterate” Friday for her role in killing the Amazon deal at the same Midtown conference where she was a featured speaker a couple of hours earlier.

“The people campaigning against the Amazon campus are financially illiterate,” Tracy Maitland, president and chief investment officer of Advent Capital Management, said during a panel discussion at the National Action Network conference in Midtown.

Afterwards Maitland told The Post, “This was a disgrace. I partially blame AOC for the loss of Amazon. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. That’s scary. We have to make sure she’s better educated or vote her out of office.”

Maitland said the misimpression created by Ocasio-Cortez and other Amazon critics was that the state and city were giving the company a blank $3 billion check.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/04/22/the-folly-of-the-mueller-investigation/

A hysteria without a cause; a report without a point

The pointlessness of it all. That is the major takeaway from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s much-anticipated final report on the Trump/Russia probe.

After an exhaustive 22-month investigation, Mueller found that there was no criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. This was already manifest to anyone who had closely followed the investigation — anyone, that is, who had taken note that no predicate crime was specified when Mueller was appointed (the special-counsel regulations require one), or anyone who had read the indictments Mueller filed, which demonstrated that Russia’s operations predated Trump’s entry into the 2016 campaign, that some of them were actually anti-Trump in nature, and that Russia (which is notoriously adept at espionage) neither needed nor sought American collaborators. “There is no allegation,” observed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in announcing charges against Russian operatives brought by the special counsel he had appointed, “that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity.” Never was such an allegation even hinted at against the president, nor against any of his associates, a handful of whom were charged either with crimes that had nothing to do with the 2016 campaign or with process crimes (mostly lying to investigators) that were not committed until after the campaign was over.

Mueller was even arguably needed to answer only one question: Did President Trump obstruct justice? On that, Mueller abdicated, refusing to render a prosecutorial judgment. This dereliction of duty in his final act further elucidated that there was neither a legal basis nor a practical need for the appointment of a special counsel.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/recession-false-alarm-11554506440

Friday’s solid labor report ought to ease fears that the U.S. economy is skidding toward recession. Employers added a healthy 196,000 jobs in March while unemployment held at 3.8%, confirming that the labor market continues to expand following a freeze in February and should continue despite economic problems abroad.

Job growth has averaged 180,000 for the last three months, which is down from 223,000 in 2018, but still strong for an economic expansion that’s going on a decade. Average hourly earnings climbed 3.2% in March and have moderated over the past few months, which suggests rising wages are unlikely to push up prices and fuel wage-push inflation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/business/david-malpass-world-bank.html?action

David Malpass, President Trump’s pick to be president of the World Bank and a longtime critic of the influence wielded by the bank and other multilateral institutions, was unanimously approved by its executive board on Friday.

Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Malpass, the Treasury under secretary for international affairs, in February. He will begin his five-year term on Tuesday, the executive directors said in a statement. He succeeds Jim Yong Kim, who stepped down abruptly in January to join an investment firm.

In a note to World Bank employees on Friday, Mr. Malpass, 63, said the organization was capable of “measurable successes” like raising median incomes, improving debt transparency and increasing private-sector development. He urged the bank’s staff to “work tirelessly” toward “a stronger, more stable global economy for all.”

The mission of the bank, which was created in 1944 and is collectively owned by nearly 200 countries, includes reducing global poverty, providing financial aid to needy countries and fighting the effects of climate change. Last year, it provided $20.5 billion for projects involving renewable energy, agriculture and emissions management.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-attorney-general-grand-jury-information/

Democrats will complain, but the attorney general can’t be faulted for following the law.

In disclosing the Mueller report, Attorney General William P. Barr will have to redact grand-jury information. That is the upshot of the ruling today by a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

I flagged this case, now called McKeever v. Barr (formerly McKeever v. Sessions), last week. It did not arise out of the Mueller investigation, but it obviously has significant ramifications for the Mueller report — in particular, how much of it we will get to see.

At issue was this question: Does a federal court have the authority to order disclosure of grand-jury materials if the judge decides that the interests of justice warrant doing so; or is the judge limited to the exceptions to grand-jury secrecy that are spelled out in Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure? The D.C. Circuit’s McKeever ruling holds that the text of Rule 6(e) controls. Consequently, judges have no authority to authorize disclosure outside the rule.

This is significant for the Mueller report because Rule 6(e) does not contain an exception to secrecy that would permit disclosure to Congress.

The case involves a writer, Stuart McKeever, who was researching a book on the disappearance of Columbia University professor Jesús de Galíndez Suárez in 1956. It was suspected that Galíndez, a very public critic of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, was kidnapped and flown to the D.R., where he was murdered. In the course of a federal investigation, suspicion fell on John Joseph Frank, a former FBI agent and CIA lawyer, who later worked for Trujillo. Frank was eventually prosecuted for failing to register as a foreign agent but never charged with any involvement in Galíndez’s murder.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/04/dear-citizen-collusion-truther-you-own-this-too/

Hey, what’s up . . . wait, where are you going?

Why the dark glasses? Did you dye your hair? What’s with all the deleted tweets and Facebook posts lately?

Oh, I get it. Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Ruskies to throw the 2016 election, you want to move on. Act like it never happened. Or at least pretend that you weren’t part of the whole damn hoax from the start.

But . . . not so fast.

It wasn’t just the entire American media infrastructure—every broadcast network, cable news outlet, opinion page, political website, blue-checked social media account, washed-up D.C. pundit, unhinged MSNBC host, irrelevant Bush hanger-on, complicit Obama lackey, and Clinton bitter clinger who fell for the Trump-Russia collusion fairy tale. It wasn’t just every Democratic lawmaker and candidate—and a good chunk of the establishment Republican elite—who peddled a bogus story for two years. It wasn’t just every Hollywood actress, producer, legend, fluffer, has-been and late night host who caterwauled for months about Trump’s treachery.

You did it, too, my fellow citizen.

For two years, you helped do the dirty work of the vanquished Hillary Clinton campaign and the sore-loser Democratic Party. You reposted memes on your Facebook and Instagram pages that depicted Donald Trump as a Putin puppet, even suggesting tongue-in-cheek (in a way that you’d call homophobic if the other side did it) that Trump was Putin’s gay lover. You warned your neighbors that Trump’s son was a traitor. You insisted to your co-workers that, yes, Trump’s campaign team was populated by Russian agents and that the president’s attorney general, his secretary of state, his education secretary, his national security advisor, his son-in-law—among others—were Kremlin plants in the new administration.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mueller-coverup-gambit-11554420235
The only surprising thing about the new “coverup” accusation against Attorney General William Barr is that it took it two weeks to get there. The question is whether Republicans fall for this naked effort to revive the collusion-and-obstruction narrative.

Democrats and the media are still smarting over special counsel Robert Mueller’s no-collusion findings, but their “coverup” fallback has its advantages. They can claim Mr. Barr’s four-page summary of the report is a sham, that he’s hiding the real truth. That’s nonsense, but it allows them to continue stoking Trump-Russia collusion fantasies.

It also aids the Democrats in their larger goal: getting their hands on a fully unredacted report, along with its underlying documentation, before the public can see it. That way, they could plumb the voluminous documentation for more wild allegations and personal smears—and leak away.

The “coverup” claim is only one of the levers Democrats are pulling, aided by friendly scribes at the New York Times and Washington Post, who published stories Thursday claiming anonymous members of the Mueller team are dissatisfied with the Barr summary. The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday also authorized subpoenas for an unredacted report and documents. And Democrats everywhere are accusing Republicans of hypocrisy. How dare Republicans spend two years demanding documents from the Justice Department about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s behavior in 2016, but now accept a redacted report?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/doj-defends-barrs-summary-of-mueller-report-from-critics/

The Justice Department on Thursday defended Attorney General William Barr’s short outline of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, hours after the New York Times reported that some members of Mueller’s team were concerned Barr had downplayed the results of the investigation to make it seem more favorable to President Trump.“Given the extraordinary public interest in the matter, the Attorney General decided to release the report’s bottom-line findings and his conclusions immediately – without attempting to summarize the report – with the understanding that the report itself would be released after the redactions process,” read a statement from DOJ spokesperson Kerri Kupec. “The Department continues to work with the Special Counsel on appropriate redactions to the report so that it can be released to Congress and the public.”Barr’s four-page outline of the report’s conclusions stated that Mueller had found no collusion between the Trump team and the Kremlin but left open the question of whether the president had obstructed justice during the investigation. It also made clear that Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had concluded there was not enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction.