RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-cannot-be-pressured-out-of-white-house/

Why would Trump ever quit?

The walls supposedly are always closing in on Donald Trump. The end is always beginning.

He’s going to quit. He’s going to be impeached and removed. He’s going to decide not to run again. Somehow or other, he’s going to relieve everyone of the responsibility of ever thinking of him again, and especially of the responsibility of defeating him in an election.

This is the perpetual backdrop to media commentary about Trump. It rocketed around the Internet a couple of months ago when Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker said Trump might not serve out his term. Fake Washington Post editions recently distributed in Washington were about Trump quitting. Such scenarios are a constant topic in private conversations.

The allure of all this is obvious. It is the promise of deliverance. After tormenting his enemies for so long, Trump’s going to make it easy for them. He’s just going to go away.

It is true that the odds of Trump somehow not serving out his term are, given his erratic personality and the wild card of the Mueller investigation, higher than those for a normal president serving in normal times. But they are still slim.

Perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report will send a torpedo into Trump’s bow. It seems more likely that a report will contain damaging and embarrassing revelations that, whatever the initial shock, will be quickly absorbed by the political system and especially Trump’s supporters.

The velocity of the news cycle, driven in part by the sheer volume and pace of Trump controversies, works in his favor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/womens-march-leader-refuses-to-acknowledge-israels-right-to-exist/

Embattled Women’s March co-chairwoman Tamika Mallory refused to acknowledge the state of Israel’s right to exist during a recent interview on PBS’s The Firing Line and seemed to suggest that, unlike Palestinians, Israelis were not “native” to the region.

Mallory, who has been forced in recent days to confront questions about her association with notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, acknowledged during the interview that “all people have the right to exist” but would not address the legitimacy of the Israeli state.

“I’m not Jewish, so for me to speak to that is not fair . . . because I’m speaking of the people who we know are being brutally oppressed at this moment,” Mallory told PBS’s Margaret Hoover. “Everyone has a right to exist. . . . I just don’t feel that everyone has a right to exist at the disposal of another group.”

“I believe that all people have the right to exist. And that Palestinians are also suffering with a great crisis. And that there are other Jewish scholars who will sit here and say the same,” she added. “I’m done talking about this, you can move on.”

The Women’s March lost the support of the Democratic National Committee and a host of other prominent liberal groups this week after Mallory defend her past praise for Farrakhan during a Monday appearance on The View.

“I didn’t call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric. I called him the greatest of all time because of what he’s done in black communities,” Mallory said Monday when asked about a February social-media post in which she labeled Farrakhan the “GOAT.”

More than half of the roughly 500 partner organizations that supported the nationwide Women’s March demonstration last year have abandoned the organization ahead of this year’s protests, which will take place Saturday in Washington, D.C. and other cities across the country.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-bruce-ohr-told-the-fbi-11547770923?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=pop&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Everybody knew. Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department understood fully in the middle of 2016—as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump—that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That’s the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven’t been released, but parts were confirmed for me by congressional sources.

Mr. Ohr testified that he sat down with dossier author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016, and received salacious information the opposition researcher had compiled on Mr. Trump. Mr. Ohr immediately took that to the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andy McCabe and lawyer Lisa Page. In August he took it to Peter Strzok, the bureau’s lead investigator. In the same month, Mr. Ohr believes, he briefed senior personnel in the Justice Department’s criminal division: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz, lawyer Zainab Ahmad and fraud unit head Andrew Weissman. The last two now work for special counsel Robert Mueller.

More important, Mr. Ohr told this team the information came from the Clinton camp and warned that it was likely biased, certainly unproven. “When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information,” he testified. “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware.”

He said he told them that Mr. Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected,” and that his own wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier. He confirmed sounding all these warnings before the FBI filed its October application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page. We broke some of this in August, though the transcript provides new detail.

The FBI and Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to muddy these details, with cover from Democrats and friendly journalists. A January 2017 memo from Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, flatly (and incorrectly) insisted “the FBI’s closely-held investigative team only received Steele’s reporting in mid-September.” A May 2018 New York Times report repeated that claim, saying Mr. Steele’s reports didn’t reach the “Crossfire Hurricane team,” which ran the counterintelligence investigation, until “mid-September.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/14/smoke-out-resistance

The Daily Caller is taking the rare step of publishing this anonymous op-ed at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose career would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.

As one of the senior officials working without a paycheck, a few words of advice for the president’s next move at shuttered government agencies: lock the doors, sell the furniture, and cut them down.

Federal employees are starting to feel the strain of the shutdown. I am one of them. But for the sake of our nation, I hope it lasts a very long time, till the government is changed and can never return to its previous form.

The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall. It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.

On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. I wish I could give competitive salaries to them and no one else. But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t.

Why would they? We can’t fire them. They avoid attention, plan their weekend, schedule vacation, their second job, their next position — some do this in the same position for more than a decade.

They do nothing that warrants punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on process. “Process is your friend” is what delusional civil servants tell themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative chores.

Process is what we serve, process keeps us safe, process is our core value. It takes a lot of people to maintain the process. Process provides jobs. In fact, there are process experts and certified process managers who protect the process. Then there are the 5 percent with moxie (career managers). At any given time they can change, clarify or add to the process — even to distort or block policy counsel for the president.

Saboteurs peddling opinion as research, tasking their staff on pet projects or pitching wasteful grants to their friends. Most of my career colleagues actively work against the president’s agenda. This means I typically spend about 15 percent of my time on the president’s agenda and 85 percent of my time trying to stop sabotage, and we have no power to get rid of them. Until the shutdown.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/leaked_bruce_ohr_testimony_may_be_the_key_to_unraveling_the_biggest_political_scandal_in_american_history.html

The mobilization of law enforcement and intelligence assets by the Obama administration in 2016 to spy on the presidential campaign of rival party candidate Donald Trump is the biggest political scandal in our history. The Mueller probe of Trump is a cover-up, as are leaks to friendly media by anonymous former officials. Yet the pieces are falling into place to burn through the dust clouds and see the underlying crimes.

John Solomon of The Hill is one of our leading sources for the real story obscured by the guilty parties and their media allies. Fully uncovering it will require prosecution of related crimes, and the testimony of cooperating witnesses in the interest of mitigating their legal consequences, up to and including prison time.

Testimony given by former FBI top lawyer Bruce Ohr that has been leaked to Solomon provides, in Solomon’s words:

… the most damning evidence to date that FBI and DOJ officials may have misled federal judges in October 2016 in their zeal to obtain the warrant targeting Trump adviser Carter Page just weeks before Election Day.

Misleading a federal judge is a big crime.

Ohr has testified that the officials who submitted the FIA warrant applications knowingly lied, because he warned them that the Fusion-GPS dossier was opposition research from the Hillary Campaign:

The then-No. 4 Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele’s Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative’s work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and might be biased.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/16/the-fbi-has

If you’re not the first lady, being alone in the Oval Office with the president of the United States is a rare occurrence. Even visiting heads of state will be accompanied by an interpreter, or an official notetaker, when they meet privately with the most powerful man in the world.

So I will never forget the day, in June 2017, when I found myself in front of the Resolute Desk, with just President Donald Trump in the room with me.

I was there for something that pertained to my job as strategist to the president—if memory serves, it was to discuss our plan to undo the 44th president’s disastrous Iran Deal—when the topic of Russia came up.

Suddenly the president stopped, looked at me, and said: “They will find nothing because there is nothing.”

Since he shared that declaration with me, good men like General Mike Flynn have been charged with process crimes, shady characters like Paul Manafort have been convicted of wire fraud, and young men such as George Papadopoulos have served time in federal prison as a result of their foolish self-aggrandizing. Yet, none of the charges made or convictions brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller have linked the activities of the Trump campaign with the Kremlin, which of course, was Mueller’s mandate.

Two years later, at a reported cost of well over $25 million, not one charge or conviction has proven the original allegation of “Russian collusion.” At any other time, this would have led otherwise reasonable people to say: Enough! Time for Mueller and his team—a dozen of whom are registered Democrat donors—to close shop and for the former FBI director to end what President Trump justifiably has called a “witch hunt.”

Instead, the Left, and the Left’s domesticated media, have escalated their attacks.

Monday, as the president was preparing to board Marine One on the North Lawn, Kristen Welker, a member of the White House Press Corps working for NBC, actually asked him whether he is working for Russia.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/15/walls-are-closing

Those of us who have closely followed the unfolding scandal at the Justice Department— particularly how the FBI abused its power not only to spy on the Trump presidential campaign but also on the president himself—have been frustrated with the inaction both of the White House and Congress. Documents have not been declassified as promised; letters by top lawmakers have gone unanswered with no consequence; and not one perpetrator in the biggest political scandal in history has been held accountable.

The New York Times over the weekend confirmed the worst suspicions: Andrew McCabe, a disgraced FBI official caught lying to federal investigators and fired by Trump, and his corrupt lackeys opened up a criminal and counterintelligence probe into President Trump on the flimsiest of evidence in May 2017.

Further, statements from William Barr, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, seem to indicate he would be deferential to Special Counsel Robert Mueller rather than focus on the real scandal. It was unclear whether a change in leadership at the Justice Department and on the Senate Judiciary Committee (Lindsey Graham took the reins from Charles Grassley this year) would restart stalled congressional inquiries.

A Clean-Up Pledge
But Barr’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday assuaged those concerns.

Republican senators expressed outrage that the FBI had investigated a sitting U.S. president, and Barr seemed to share their disgust. Graham brought up the Times article and asked Barr to “promise me and this committee to look into this and tell us whether or not a counterintelligence investigation was opened up by somebody at the FBI, Department of Justice against President Trump?” Barr confirmed he would. Graham read aloud derogatory texts, some including profanity, about Trump between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272547/californias-cair-collaborator-judge-deborah-barnes-lloyd-billingsley

Last Friday in Sacramento, U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Barnes submitted a 116-page recommendation that the conviction of Hamid Hayat be vacated. It was Barnes’ latest attempt to free Hayat, convicted in 2006 of providing support to terrorists, in the first major prosecution of terrorism after the 9/11 attacks.

Barnes’ ruling charges that Hayat’s lawyer Wazhma Mojaddidi, a former president of the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento, put on an ineffective defense for Hayat. After Friday’s ruling, Mojaddidi told the Sacramento Bee, “I am elated to hear that he could be freed soon after unjustly spending so many years in prison.”

Sacramento CAIR executive director Basim Elkarra said in a statement that Hayat “did not receive a fair trial” and Dennis Riordan of Hayat’s defense team opined that Barnes’ ruling was “effectively a finding of actual innocence.” The courts have established otherwise and Friday’s ruling was the latest episode in a long campaign of strange judicial rulings and bizarre courtroom capers.

CAIR and the Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) judge-shopped Deborah Barnes, a relative newcomer to California’s Eastern District. Barnes spent much of her career in the office of California’s attorney general, where she worked on environmental issues. In effect, the judge would become a member of Hayat’s legal team.

Barnes’ June 7, 2017 order raised “serious questions concerning the competency of the defense.” That was the very defense Hayat’s team wanted, led by CAIR rising star Wazhma Mojaddidi. After she failed, the judge wasn’t done, and in January of 2018 Barnes ordered an evidentiary hearing on the Hayat case that proved revealing on several fronts.

https://www.city-journal.org/san-diego-homelessness

Last month, the downtown San Diego franchise of the Burgerim restaurant chain closed its doors, contending that chaotic conditions caused by large numbers of homeless people in and around nearby Horton Plaza Park had driven customers away and made it impossible to operate, even during the Christmas season. The shuttering of the Burgerim location, which had been open for little over a year, was a warning signal to the San Diego business community—and to city hall, too. Burgerim would not be leaving quietly. The franchisee, backed by parent company Burgerim USA, intended to sue in state court, claiming that neither its landlord nor the City of San Diego had lived up to their responsibilities to keep the city’s historic Gaslamp Quarter clean and suitable for business.

Burgerim’s legal action will be of special interest to members of the multi-billion-dollar homelessness industry nationwide. (In Seattle alone, $1 billion a year gets spent on the city’s 11,500 homeless people). San Diego County’s homeless number about 8,500, which means this beautiful Southern Californian region has the nation’s fourth-largest homeless population (after New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle), a rank it has held for several years. The San Jose area is fifth.

Despite the many billions spent on homelessness, however, the problem is getting worse, especially in California. Along with homeless encampments come deadly outbreaks of hepatis A, typhus, and other communicable diseases, driven by attending drug addiction. Some parts of the city are littered with syringes. A desperate San Diego now steam-cleans its streets and sidewalks. Even in expensive neighborhoods, unguarded greenery is often strewn with trash and toilet paper, revealing where homeless people have spent the night. The city tries to keep the squalor at bay with improved shelter programs. It even plans to provide 500 bins, where the homeless can stash their belongings, but that effort alone will cost the city about $2 million a year in overtime for the cops who guard the lockers. Advocates suggest that these overtime millions could be better spent placing hundreds of homeless in their own studio apartments.

Will Burgerim’s lawsuit have any effect on this complex, expensive, and apparently intractable social issue? Can retail and restaurant tenants really use the courts to force landlords and municipal governments to protect them against a problem that no one seems able to solve?

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/did-robert-mueller-find-evidence-of-collusion-yet/

Making the click-through worthwhile: Do we want the FBI launching counterintelligence investigations of presidents and other elected officials on its own authority?

Who Watches the FBI Watchmen?

The New York Times reported this weekend:

In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

Today the boss writes:

The Times story is another sign that we have forgotten the role of our respective branches of government. It is Congress that exists to check and investigate the president, not the FBI. Congress can inveigh against his foreign policy and constrain his options. It can build a case for not reelecting him and perhaps impeach him. These are all actions to be undertaken out in the open by politically accountable players, so the public can make informed judgments about them.

The Times went to note that special counsel Robert Mueller “took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed, days after F.B.I. officials opened it. That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller’s broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them. It is unclear whether Mr. Mueller is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it.”