RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/five-times-the-obama-administration-investigated-itself/

Each time they cleared itself of any wrongdoing.

Last week, Twitter declared that their own study of tweets by Democrats and Republicans last year proved there was no anti-conservative bias on their social media platform. It was amusing to see how the folks at Twitter considered this definitive proof that they don’t hold a bias against conservatives. It reminded me of how so many times the Obama administration attempted to control the narrative of their own scandals by investigating themselves and then clearing themselves of wrongdoing, with the expectation that the matter would be settled. Here are five examples of times the Obama administration investigated itself in the hopes of burying a scandal.

5. The Senate Seat For Sale Scandal

Few people seem to remember that even before Obama took office his presidential transition was under a cloud of scandal. Just over a month before he was to take office, Obama was implicated in a scandal involving his soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich had hoped to get a Cabinet position or ambassadorship in exchange for appointing an Obama-backed individual to replace him in the Senate. Obama’s top choice had been Valerie Jarrett, and offered to appoint Jarrett “in exchange for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services in the President-elect’s cabinet,” but she eventually opted to follow Obama to the White House as his top advisor.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/15/bill_barr_dirty_cops_and_the_oj_simpson_trial_140053.html

When Attorney General Bill Barr testified last week that, yes, “spying did occur” in the government’s Trump-Russia investigation and that spying on a political campaign is a “big deal,” the Democrats were apoplectic. How could he dare say such a thing? The saintly James Comey went even further. He told an audience that he didn’t even know what spying meant. No, siree, he had no idea.

Barr’s candor is what Michael Kinsley famously called a “Washington gaffe,” where the naked truth somehow slips out. Naturally, it set off a firestorm.

Democrats demanded an immediate retraction but got only an anodyne rewording. Use a synonym and call it “surveillance.” The real question, Barr explained, was not whether there was spying—there obviously was—but whether it was legally justified. That is precisely what he intends to find out, he told Congress. He will also find out if the spymasters lied to Congress, about which he has now received criminal referrals.

The Democrats’ ferocious pushback confirms the gravity of the issue. Their fears are well-founded. The Obama administration politicized the Department of Justice, FBI, and intelligence agencies, and a serious investigation is very likely to find criminal wrong-doing. The response of top Democrats is to smear Barr as a partisan hack.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/15/democrats-freaked-barr-said-trump-campaign-spied/

There are two reasons the political media establishment is growing increasingly hostile towards Attorney General William Barr: First, he serves under President Donald Trump. Second, he is not only the messenger of the demise of the Russiagate conspiracy theory that the Deep State and its aiders, abettors, and enablers in the political media establishment worked so hard to perpetuate, but he could also be the source of the demise of the establishment itself, if he ends up exposing their whole sordid affair.

Should Barr conduct a thorough investigation of the Russiagate investigators, and the associated leakers and colluders, and dispense justice to the fullest extent of the law, it would drive a stake through the heart of the establishment writ large by demolishing the unjust system of double standards from which it has benefited, while punishing its foes.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/13/pursue-those-indictments/

Last month, Chris Buskirk wrote a column for the Spectator USA describing Representative Devin Nunes as “a hero of the Republic.” It was well-deserved praise. Nunes, a Republican Congressman from a rural district in California was, until January, chairman of the House Permanent Special Committee on Intelligence (he is now the ranking member). Nunes has worked tirelessly for more than two years to expose what our masters in deep-state Washington would bury from the glare of public scrutiny: the evidence that the entire Trump-Russian collusion narrative was a partisan effort, first, to undermine the Trump presidential campaign and, when that failed, to cover up the effort while still working assiduously to destroy the Trump presidency.

As Buskirk points out, without Nunes’s terrier-like efforts—conducted, it has to be pointed out, against the background of scurrilous and unremitting calumnies from the Democrats and their bought-and-paid-for megaphones in the media—the public would likely be totally in the dark about what really happened over the course of 2016 as the Obama Administration and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endeavored to “dirty up” Trump and his colleagues, calmly at first, and then with growing hysteria as Trump, against all the odds, emerged as a serious challenger and eventual victor in the election that all the smartest people knew, just knew, that Hillary had sewn up.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/why-isnt-assange-charged-with-collusion-with-russia/

The government would have a chance to prove in court that Russia was WikiLeaks’ source.

Prior to the publication of the stolen Democratic-party emails and internal documents, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks exhorted Russian government hackers to send them “new material.”

That is what we are told by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Russian intelligence officers. (I won’t offend anyone by calling them “spies” — after all, they were just doing electronic surveillance authorized by their government, right?) Assange wanted the Russians to rest assured that giving “new material” to WikiLeaks (identified as “Organization 1” in the indictment) would “have a much higher impact than what you are doing” — i.e., hacking and then putting the information out through other channels.

But time was of the essence. It was early 2016. If Hillary Clinton was not stopped right there and then, WikiLeaks warned, proceedings at the imminent Democratic national convention would “solidify bernie supporters behind her.” Of course, “bernie” is Bernie Sanders, the competitor who could still get the nomination. But if Assange and the Russians couldn’t raise Bernie’s prospects, WikiLeaks explained, Mrs. Clinton would be a White House shoo-in: “We think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”

In a nutshell: Knowing that Russia had the capacity to hack the DNC and perhaps Clinton herself, WikiLeaks urged it to come up with new material and vowed to help bring it maximum public attention. By necessity, this desire to hurt Clinton would inure to Sanders’s benefit. And sure enough, WikiLeaks eventually published tens of thousands of the Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence.

So . . . I have a few questions.

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/04/does-ilhan-omar-believe-zionists-jews-are-responsible-for-9-11like-al-azhars-then-u-s-representative-sheikh-gameia-did/

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s now infamous speech at a Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) event March 23, 2019, was ostensibly about “justice” in Islam. Indeed Ms. Omar, acknowledging that although she wasn’t a hafiz (i.e., an extremely devout Muslim who memorizes the entire Koran; female=“hafiza”), nevertheless riveted her discussion on Koran 4:135. This verse highlights the supremacy of Islam in deciding what is “just”—namely, following the dictates of Allah, exclusively. The intimately related following verses, 4:136, and, especially 4:137, make plain those also provided Islam’s message via Muhammad, who chose to reject it—Jews and Christians—will not be guided, and more ominously, not forgiven, this “transgression.” (for confirmation, see these authoritative Koranic commentaries, here, here, on Koran 4:137).

Appropriately, public attention has been focused on Ilhan Omar’s statement at this CAIR meeting that the cultural jihadist organization,

was founded after 9/11/2001 [note: CAIR was founded in 1994, as a Hamas affiliate] because they recognized that some people did something, and [Muslims] were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.

Amidst the cacophony of well-deserved denunciations leveled at the good Congresswoman for her insensitivity, it is worth asking exactly whom she considers the “some people” that “did something.” This question must be posed to her directly. Why? As Pew polling data have revealed, consistently less than 30% of Ilhan Omar’s co-religionists, Arab and non-Arab Muslims alike, from a “high” of 28% of Lebanese Muslims, to only, 9%, 12%, and 20% of Muslims from Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia, respectively, believe that Arab Muslims were responsible for the 9/11/2001 jihad carnage.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-12-the-labor-department-thinks-it-can-fix-the-lack-of-racial-diversity-at-major-law-firms

On Wednesday of this week, a guy named Craig Leen — Director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs in the Department of Labor — showed up in Manhattan to hold a “town hall” meeting with representatives of major law firms. The event was covered at law.com here, and then commented on by Paul Mirengoff at Power Line here. The headline of the law.com piece is “Government Warns Law Firms of Consequences for Diversity Failures.” Mirengoff characterizes the DOL’s effort as “seek[ing] to impose a radical diversity agenda on law firms.”

The gist of Leen’s presentation was that you guys have a big problem here that you need to “fix,” or there will be consequences. From law.com:

Craig Leen . . . told industry representatives at a town hall meeting in New York that the scarcity of women and minorities at firms in leading roles has been noted by the office, and it will be taking a closer look. Leen said in a brief interview after the meeting that “there is evidence of low representation at law firms and financial firms, and our goal is to fix it and work with them to do so.” . . . Leen said during Wednesday’s meeting that the office looks at systemic issues, “and we are seeing serious issues.”

So what’s your game plan, Craig? The law.com article describes Leen making veiled threats of cutting off federal contracts for firms that don’t meet some unstated targets. He made these remarks to the right group, since there is no collection of people more filled with a deep sense of guilt over their success than major law firm leaders. On the other hand, since federal contracts are a very small part of the business of major law firms, the chance of Leen’s threat having any meaningful effect is about zero.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/william-barr-attorney-general-smear-campaign/

The campaign against Attorney General Bill Barr is in full swing. We are told that he’s a tawdry tool of Donald Trump, that he’s disgracing himself and sullying his reputation, that he’s the equivalent of a Roy Cohn, the sleazy lawyer who once represented Trump back in New York.

The criticism of Barr reached a crescendo this week after he used the word “spying” in congressional testimony to refer to the surveillance of Trump campaign officials in 2016. The reaction to his testimony was absurdly over-the-top. Yes, the word “spying” has a negative connotation, but it’s functionally indistinguishable from “surveiling.” To wit: The FISA court that approves the FBI’s surveillance is sometimes referred to in the press as the “spy court.”

There is no doubt that Trump officials were surveilled or spied on. The FBI famously acquired a FISA warrant against Carter Page, who briefly served as a Trump foreign-policy adviser. It is true that the FBI began surveilling Page in October 2016 after he left the campaign, but the warrant allowed it to look back at his communications during his time with the campaign.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-probe-fbi-investigation-questions/

The Mueller probe was a national trauma.

Attorney General William Barr dared to use the “s-word.”

He said in congressional testimony that the Trump campaign had been spied on by the U.S. government. Pressed by incredulous Senate Democrats, he clarified: “I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated.”

“Spying” has a negative connotation, so perhaps “surveilling” would be the better way to put it. But a key question is indeed whether there was “improper surveillance” of the campaign, as Barr stated at another point in the hearing.

Barr is committed to reviewing the conduct of the Russia investigation, which is getting denounced as an outrage by his critics. But why shouldn’t the attorney general seek to understand his department’s role in the high-stakes investigative melodrama of the past two years?

The Mueller probe was a national trauma. Its boosters didn’t experience it as such, of course. They enjoyed it and played it up and hoped for the very worst. But it cast a shadow over the White House, occupied an inordinate share of the nation’s political attention, and saddled innocent people with large legal bills.