RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/statute-of-limitations-will-be-hotly-disputed-in-assange-case/

The indictment that the Justice Department filed against Julian Assange in the Eastern District of Virginia charges him with a conspiracy to commit computer fraud. The conspiracy statute is Section 371 of the penal code, and the computer fraud offenses that were the objectives of the conspiracy are parts of Section 1030.

According to the indictment, Assange and Manning (then known as Bradley, now as Chelsea) conspired in 2010. Manning was prosecuted by the armed forces. The Justice Department’s indictment against Assange was not returned until 2018 — eight years later.

The five-year statute of limitations that applies to most federal crimes is prescribed for both conspiracy and computer fraud.

So how is the Justice Department able to prosecute Assange on an indictment filed 3 years after the prescribed limitations period.

It appears that the Justice Department is relying on an exception, in Section 2332b of the penal code, that extends the statute of limitations to eight years for “acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries.”

Now, conspiracy to commit computer fraud is a very serious offense, and Assange’s is at the top of the seriousness range because it involved publication of defense secrets that endangered lives, including the lives of our troops. And there’s no doubt that the conspiracy transcended national boundaries — Assange was outside the U.S. when he collaborated with Manning. But is it really an act of terrorism?

It may be . . . at least as the operative term — federal crime of terrorism — is defined by Section 2332b.

Under subsection (g)(5) of that statute, an offense is considered a “federal crime of terrorism” if it satisfies two elements: (1) it “is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct”; and (2) it is a violation of one of a long list of offenses, which includes “section . . . 1030(a)(1) (relating to protection of computers)[.]”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-barr-is-right-to-review-why-trump-russia-investigation-began

In his testimony Wednesday before a Senate Appropriations Committee subcommittee, Attorney General William Barr made statements that were so clearly correct, they should be no more controversial than asserting that the sky is blue. The fact that they are causing consternation is what should alarm people.

Barr told senators that “I think spying did occur” in the Trump-Russia investigation conducted by (among others) the Justice Department and the FBI during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“The question,” Barr elaborated, “is whether it was adequately predicated.” Because “spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” he explained that he would undertake an internal review, focusing on what the original rationale was for the spying.

We should long ago have known what the rationale was. You know, as surely as you are reading this, that if an incumbent Republican administration had green-lighted a Justice Department and FBI investigation of the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign, we would already be fully informed about what triggered the investigation.

Democrats would have been unified in demanding it, the media would have echoed those demands in an endless loop and – if there had been an abuse of power – all the pertinent heads would by now have rolled.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russiagates-collateral-victims-11555022432

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russiagates-collateral-victims-11555022432The Mueller report has exonerated President Trump and his campaign of Russian collusion. What about others who were smeared alongside him? Last year some reporters investigated me as a possible colluder. It has damaged my reputation and my business.I’m a private real-estate and energy investor in California, a donor to Republican political candidates and sometime lobbyist. On Feb. 1, 2018, McClatchy Newspapers published the first of four big stories on me—four parts!—with the opening headline: “Master of selfies with GOP pols, Soviet émigré has a confounding past.”The stories suggested I have a “checkered past” and mix with “shady characters” and “controversial” foreign politicians. One noted that I have a limited liability corporation, which can be “used for a wide array of nefarious purposes.” McClatchy also falsely claimed I have had “run-ins with the law” (later softened to “legal troubles”). Others in the media picked up the smears, retweeting and speculating without asking me for comment.McClatchy is right that I am a Soviet émigré. I was born in Ukraine and brought to America as a child in the 1970s by my parents, Jewish immigrants fleeing communism.I never met President Trump. I never raised money for his campaign, as the McClatchy stories implied. I did raise money for Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio—and even contributed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In the general election, I voted for someone else. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/are-more-indictments-of-obama-officials-coming/

Yesterday we learned that Gregory Craig, the former White House counsel for Barack Obama, expects to be indicted on criminal charges for lobbying he did for the Ukrainian government back in 2012. The case against Craig originated from the Mueller investigation. Craig was not White House Counsel at the time, but between this and Attorney General William Barr’s revelation that he believes the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign and that it is being investigated, it’s hard not feel as though the tide is turning, and we might start seeing Obama officials finally get put under the microscope for various acts of corruption.

Democrats and the media have pounced on Barr’s statement, trying to paint it as a wacky conspiracy theory that was completely unjustified. The truth is, we have known definitively that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign for quite some time. There’s no reason for Democrats or the media to pretend that this is an unjustified claim. The New York Times even reported on it back in 2017 before Trump took office.

For years now, Barack Obama has insisted that he had scandal-free administration. Often cited as evidence for this claim is the lack of indictments of Obama administration officials. Of course, what is often ignored is the fact that the Obama administration was notorious for protecting its officials by stonewalling and obstructing investigations and hiding behind executive privilege. If there’s anything we can conclude from Barr’s statement it’s that after two years of a bogus Russian collusion investigation we appear on the verge of getting to the bottom of the real story that has been ignored: the illegal spying on the Trump campaign by the Obama administration, and the bogus origins of the Russian collusion hoax.CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/11/ex-obama_counsel_expects_charges_in_mueller-related_probe_140025.html

Former Obama administration White House counsel Greg Craig expects to be charged in a foreign lobbying investigation spun off from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, his lawyers said.

“Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge and the government’s stubborn insistence on prosecuting Mr. Craig is a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion,” the attorneys, William Taylor and William Murphy, said in a statement Wednesday.

The investigation into Craig comes as the Justice Department is cracking down on unregistered foreign lobbying and consulting. Federal prosecutors in New York have been investigating two prominent Washington lobbying firms in a similar probe, and Justice Department officials in Washington have been increasingly willing to prosecute people who they believe intentionally conceal their lobbying work from the federal government.

The scrutiny of Craig stems from an investigation of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his work on behalf of a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. If filed, the charges would come about three months after Craig’s former law firm agreed to pay more than $4.6 million and publicly acknowledge that it failed to register with the government for its work for the Ukraine.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/of-ilhan-omar-anti-semitism-and-america/

It was only a matter of time. And in this case, it didn’t take long at all.

After Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) made her racist remarks about the “evil” and “hypnotic” influence of Israel, the undue influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington, (“it’s all about the Benjamins”), and the dual loyalty of American Jews, Democrats were on track to censure her by name from the floor of the House. But it never happened. Nancy Pelosi proved too weak.

After almost a week of wrangling, the committee that drafted the final statement on the scandalous freshman representative released a final text that never mentioned her by name, her statements, or any need for her to apologize for her bigotry. (Not coincidentally, Omar sits on this very committee.) In fact, the final language was such generic and anodyne boilerplate that it could have been issued at any time, by either party, for any reason or no reason at all.

That the Speaker of the House was so timid in the face of such shocking behavior should surprise no one.

Behold the face of the Democratic Party: minority, young, and racist. This is the fruit of identity politics. Be it Omar, who is on the cover of the current issue of Newsweek, Rashida Talib (D-Mich.) who signaled the need to obliterate Israel on her first day in office, or the leader of the pack, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), a proud supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement, the “new faces” of the DNC constitute a united front in their hatred for our Semitic brethren.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/will-william-barr-get-justice-for-carter-page/

It all started with Carter Page. The biggest scandal in the history of American politics originated with carefully cultivated public suspicions about whether Page, a Naval Academy graduate and campaign volunteer, was a conduit between Team Trump and the Kremlin.

In spring 2016, Page emerged as the first alleged culprit in the nascent Trump-Russia collusion plotline. Bogus allegations about him were included in the infamous Steele dossier; he was the subject of relentless media coverage and public harassment; the FBI enlisted an informant to gather information on him in secret; and his own government accused him of being a Russian agent as it wiretapped him for a year under false pretenses.

Now it appears Attorney General William Barr finally will get to the bottom of why Page first became the target of Trump foes on the Right, then ultimately, of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration. This comes two years to the day since the Washington Post first published illegally leaked details about the FISA warrant on Page, which was obtained by James Comey’s FBI in October 2016.

Barr is poised to hold Page’s antagonists accountable. “The office of the inspector general has a pending investigation into the FISA process in the Russia investigation,” Barr told the House Appropriations committee on Tuesday.

When asked specifically whether the Justice Department also was investigating who illegally disclosed the existence of Page’s FISA warrant, Barr indicated he would await the criminal referrals expected to come this week from Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) regarding the same matter.

Further, Barr has acknowledged that he believes the Trump campaign was spied on in 2016. “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal. Yes, I think spying did occur,” Barr told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. Page was one of a handful of Trump associates also pursued by an FBI informant during the campaign.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/california-has-become-americas-cannibal-state/

For over six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax.

The state legislature sold that confiscatory tax rate on the idea that it was a temporary fix and would eventually be phased out. No one believed that. California voters, about 40 percent of whom pay no state income taxes, naturally approved the extension of the high rate by an overwhelming margin.

California recently raised gas taxes by 40 percent and now has the second-highest gas taxes in the United States.

California has the ninth-highest combined state and local sales taxes in the country, but its state sales tax of 7.3 percent is America’s highest. As of April 1, California is now applying that high state sales tax to goods that residents buy online from out-of-state sellers.

In late 2017, the federal government capped state and local tax deductions at $10,000. For high earners in California, the change effectively almost doubled their state and local taxes.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/10/barr-confirms-multiple-intel-agencies-implicated-in-anti-trump-spy-operation/

“Spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Attorney General William Barr told a Senate committee on Wednesday morning. Barr’s comments came in the context of potential Justice Department reviews of the Trump-Russia investigation and how it began in 2016.

While it is important that the top law enforcement in the United States publicly acknowledged that the Obama administration and its intelligence agencies surveilled its domestic political opponents during the heat of a presidential election, it is what he said next that was most startling: that the CIA and other federal agencies in addition to the FBI may have been involved. “I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily, but intelligence agencies more broadly,” he said.

The FBI, which has incredibly friendly relations with the media, has taken the brunt of the public outcry against the anti-Trump operation. That project included the use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, national security letters, human informants, and strategic leaking to craft a narrative of treasonous collusion with Russia to steal an election from Hillary Clinton. It even included leaks of classified records from former FBI director James Comey, which he said was done for the purpose of launching a special counsel investigation as retaliation for his firing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/spying-did-occur-11554932442

The Attorney General of the United States told a Senate subcommittee today that the federal government spied on a U.S. political campaign in 2016. Now Americans need to know which executive branch officials were responsible for turning Washington’s formidable surveillance powers against the party out of power.

The Journal reports:

Attorney General William Barr will ask a team inside the Justice Department to examine the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia, he told Congress on Wednesday, responding to lingering Republican concerns about law enforcement decisions during the 2016 election.

Mr. Barr characterized the law-enforcement activities that were directed at people affiliated with the Trump campaign as “spying,” telling a Senate panel that he will examine the gamut of intelligence activities that were directed at members of the campaign in 2016, looking at how and why surveillance decisions were made.

“I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Mr. Barr said in a hearing, invoking Vietnam-era intelligence abuses, such as the surveillance of antiwar activists as a reason to raise these questions. “Spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated.”

It is a big deal, even if much of the press corps runs every development in this story through the filter of whether it is good news or bad news for Donald Trump. It is unconditionally bad news for the citizens of a free society if it becomes acceptable for the government to spy on domestic political opponents.