RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trolling-the-mueller-report-11554333841

Democrats are still reeling from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusion that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russians in 2016. But they’ve now hit upon a political comeback strategy: Accuse Attorney General William Barr of a coverup.

That’s the context for Wednesday’s decision by House Democrats to authorize subpoenas, on a partisan vote, demanding that Mr. Barr immediately hand over the entire Mueller report and its supporting evidence. This is intended to give the impression, abetted by a press corps that was fully invested in the collusion story, that Mr. Barr is somehow lying about Mr. Mueller’s real conclusions.

That’s preposterous, since Mr. Barr’s four-page letter quotes directly from Mr. Mueller’s report. The AG surely understood on releasing the summary of conclusions last week that he would be open to contradiction by Mr. Mueller if he took such liberties. Mr. Barr also knew he’d be called to testify before Congress once the rest of the report is released.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14005/mueller-report-waiting

We can reasonably expect that those investigators who favored accusing the President with obstruction will lay out their case against Trump. This raises the legal and ethical question of whether it is proper for prosecutors publicly to disclose the evidence and arguments against the subject of a criminal investigation who is not being charged.

The law cannot be ignored. The law requires the Attorney General not to disclose grand jury evidence without a court order. It also requires the non-disclosure of privileged material, including executive privilege, and of legitimately classified material. The public, and even Congress, will therefore have to wait until the Attorney General completes his legal review. The courts should not shortcut that review by enforcing subpoenas from partisan Congressional committees.

Remember that the report, however redacted, will be a one-sided document, based on uncrossexamined witnesses selected by prosecutors. No witnesses favorable to the subjects of the investigation will have testified before the grand jury. An investigation by a special counsel is not a search for objective truth. It is a search for incriminating evidence sufficient to charge.

The waiting game is on as politicians and pundits try to read the tea leaves regarding the soon-to-be-released Mueller Report. We know the major conclusions: no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia; and no charges of obstruction by President Trump, based on a division of opinion among the investigators and a decision by the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General. What we do not know is how critical the report will be, especially with regard to obstruction. We can reasonably expect that those investigators who favored accusing the President with obstruction will lay out their case against Trump. This raises the legal and ethical question of whether it is proper for prosecutors publicly to disclose the evidence and arguments against the subject of a criminal investigation who is not being charged.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-democrats-request-trump-tax-returns/
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal formally requested President Trump’s personal and business tax returns on Wednesday, setting up what will likely become a protracted and high-profile legal battle between the administration and Congressional Democrats.

In a letter sent to the IRS, Neal requested Trump’s personal income taxes from 2013 to 2018, as well as the tax returns associated with eight of his business entities, and cited his oversight role to justify the request.

“Under the Internal Revenue Manual, individual income tax returns of a President are subject to mandatory examination, but this practice is IRS policy and not codified in the Federal tax laws,” Neal wrote in the letter, which was first obtained by CNN. “It is necessary for the committee to determine the scope of any such examination and whether it includes a review of underlying business activities required to be reported on the individual income tax return.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/03/with-mueller-hopes-gone-so-goes-progressive-unity/

The Democratic Party has lots of radical new ideas, and lots of radical presidential candidates and politicos.

But the common hatred of President Donald Trump has united otherwise quite disparate Democratic leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.); former Vice President Joe Biden; Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.); and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

These diverse progressive politicians all shared faith in special counsel Robert Mueller and his “dream team.” They believed over the last two years that the Mueller investigation was slowly grinding down Trump. T-shirts were sold with the slogan “God Protect Robert Mueller.”

The unifying progressive creed assumed that the Mueller’s team would eventually find Trump unequivocally guilty of “collusion” with Russia. That buzzword was the non-criminal euphemism for felonious conspiracy to rig an election.

The hunt for collusion would end with the holy grail of Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. In 2020 there would be an almost automatic progressive takeover of government.

Periodic leaks from Mueller’s team during the investigation’s 22 months prompted giddy media anticipation that “the walls were closing in on” Trump. It always seemed that the “noose was tightening” around him, and that yet another “bombshell” was about to go off.

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-residents-rebelling-homelessness

For the past five years, like many of its West Coast counterparts, Seattle has endured a steady expansion of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, crime, and street disorder. But the activist class—a political and cultural elite comprising leaders in government, nonprofits, philanthropy, and media—has enforced a strict taboo on declaring the obvious: something is terribly wrong in the Emerald City.

Last month, veteran Seattle reporter Eric Johnson of KOMO violated that taboo with a shocking, hour-long documentary called Seattle is Dying, which revealed how the city has allowed a small subset of the homeless population—drug-addicted and mentally-ill criminals—to wreak havoc. Johnson’s portrait is backed up by evidence from King County homelessness data, by city attorney candidate Scott Lindsay’s “prolific offender” report on 100 homeless individuals responsible for more than 3,500 criminal cases, and by my own reporting on the homelessness crisis.

In the past two weeks, Seattle Is Dying has garnered 38,000 shares on Facebook and nearly 2 million views on YouTube. The report has clearly resonated with anxious, fearful, and increasingly angry Seattle residents. Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.” The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is “not spending enough to really solve the problem.” For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-judiciary-committee-votes-to-subpoena-mueller-report/

The House Judiciary Committee Wednesday approved subpoenas demanding that the Justice Department provide Congress with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full, final report on the results of the his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The Committee voted 24 to 17 in favor of a resolution that authorizes subpoenas for the unredacted version of the special counsel’s report, all accompanying exhibits and attachments, and the evidence Mueller used to write it.

Attorney General William Barr submitted a four-page summary of the almost-400-page report to Congress last week and promised in a meeting with the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Friday to release a redacted version of the full report by “mid April, if not sooner.” Barr’s summary said Mueller did not find any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin but did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice during the investigation.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) said that Barr is “refusing” to cooperate with him in legally obtaining certain materials but added, “I will give him time to change his mind” before issuing the subpoenas.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/culture-news/282694/justice-david-wecht-antisemitism

A sitting American justice from the state of the Pittsburgh massacre speaks out on First Amendment rights, Christchurch, and the dangers of a pivotal moment in our history.

Rarely, if ever, has a sitting American judge spoken out publicly on the threat of anti-Semitism in America. However, here, Justice David N. Wecht, a judge serving on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the highest court in the state and the oldest Supreme Court in the nation, has chosen to speak out boldly and firmly about what he perceives to be a national crisis.

The Honorable David N. Wecht was elected by the citizens of Pennsylvania to a 10-year term on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2015. His father’s parents ran a grocery store not far from where Justice Wecht was sworn in. Before his election to the state’s Supreme Court, he served four years on the Pennsylvania Superior Court (the state’s intermediate appellate court). He attended Yale University and Yale Law School, where he served as notes editor of the Yale Law Journal, and then clerked for Judge George MacKinnon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Justice Wecht and his wife were married at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Tree of Life was the site of the Oct. 27, 2018, attack in which 11 Jews were murdered by a white supremacist.

I interviewed Justice Wecht in March of this year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/andrew-cuomos-outrageous-budget-deal/

New York’s Democratic governor has given his blessing to a package laden with billions in new taxes and spending.

The leaders of the state of New York just voted themselves a huge pay raise. Andrew Cuomo is about to become the highest-paid governor in the country with a $250,0000 salary. His lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, will get a bump to $220,000, meaning she’ll be better compensated than the governor of California, who is stuck at $202,000. Members of the state Senate and Assembly will see raises from $79,500 to $110,000 in January and to $130,000 in 2021. Not bad for a part-time job.

It’s all part of the orgy of spending that Cuomo just approved in the Empire State’s annual budget, which was passed in the wee hours of Sunday morning after the usual bonanza of craziness. The state’s already-extravagant spending just jumped to $175.6 billion in 2019–2020. That’s a “double whopper with extra cheese,” in the words of City Journal contributing editor Bob McManus, a 13 percent increase (in real, inflation-adjusted dollars) from 2010–2011, when the state’s population was less than 1 percent smaller than it is now.

New York state spends more than twice as much per capita as Florida, and that’s excluding the gargantuan additional spending of New York City, which is on track to outspend Florida this year on its own. If you, like nearly half of the state’s residents, live in New York City, your state and municipal governments are spending more than $13,000 a head annually. Even California isn’t so loose with its purse strings.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/maxine-waters-jussie-smollett-charges-dropped-correct/

Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) claimed over the weekend that Cook County prosecutors did the “correct thing” by dropping the charges pending against Empire actor Jussie Smollett after a grand jury indicted him for staging a hate crime.

“It’s the correct thing that the charges were dropped,” Waters told Extra in a Sunday interview. “First of all, we probably will never know all of the details. We’ve heard a lot of information. No one was hurt — that is, physically, killed, shot — he never committed a crime before, he forfeited the bail, and it’s this kind of situation where they close the case all over the country every day. I have learned this isn’t unusual.”

Cook County state’s attorney Kimberly Foxx announced Tuesday that she had dropped disorderly-conduct charges against Smollett due to his history of community service and the nature of the crime.

“After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case,” a statement from Foxx’s office said.