RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/29/the-incorrigible

As I wrote last week, the Republican Congress largely has failed to hold accountable the masterminds behind the biggest political scandal in U.S. history: The unprecedented weaponization of our law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to spy on a presidential campaign and sabotage an incoming administration.

The man primarily responsible for executing the scheme, former FBI Director James Comey, exited the Trump Administration as a martyr and a hero. Republican lawmakers blasted the president for his (totally justified) firing of the deceptive FBI director in May 2017, lauding his public service and reputation even as the disturbing details of the way his agency spied on the Trump campaign and hid the probe from Congress were coming into view.

After successfully escaping any accountability for his actions, it’s no surprise that Comey now is threatening to thwart Congress once again. On Thanksgiving morning, Comey responded on Twitter to a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee: “Got a subpoena from House Republicans. I’m still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a ‘closed door’ thing because I’ve seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion. Let’s have a hearing and invite everyone to see.”

Now, it would take way too much space to mock the irony of Comey’s concerns about leaking and distortion. We know Comey’s top deputies were illegally leaking information to the press right up until the time he was fired. He also arranged for a friend to leak personal memos he wrote about his private interactions with the president to the press.

But here is the most galling part of Comey’s response: The man who once led the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world is threatening to defy a legally issued congressional subpoena unless the interview is conducted on his terms.

And the reason isn’t that Comey has nothing to hide—it’s that he has plenty to hide and he knows a public setting would provide him precisely the cover he needs.

He “Can’t Answer in an Open Setting”
During open testimony on Capitol Hill last year, Comey repeatedly invoked the defense, “it’s classified” as a way to avoid publicly disclosing crucial information about his agency’s conduct in 2016 and 2017. He dodged questions about the infamous Steele dossier, a thoroughly discredited political document produced by an opposition research firm that had been hired by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to dig up Russia-related dirt on Trump. Comey cited the dossier as key evidence on his October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/here_we_go_stormy_daniels_claims_she_really_didnt_give_michael_avenatti_permission_to_sue_trump_for_her.html

Obviously, she wants something.

Stormy Daniels is back in the news, following the ignominious loss of her court case against President Trump, where she was ordered to pay the latter’s legal costs. Now she says the actual lawsuit against Trump and the fundraising for her legal costs were all done without her permission. According to Fox News:

Adult-film actress Stormy Daniels claimed Wednesday that her attorney, Michael Avenatti, sued President Trump for defamation without her approval and launched a second fundraising campaign to raise money “without my permission or even my knowledge … and attributing words to me that I never wrote or said.”

In a statement to The Daily Beast, Daniels said that “Avenatti has been a great advocate in many ways,” but she added: “in other ways Michael has not treated me with the respect and deference an attorney should show to a client.”

“For months I’ve asked Michael Avenatti to give me accounting information about the fund my supporters so generously donated to for my safety and legal defense,” Daniels said. “He has repeatedly ignored those requests. Days ago I demanded again, repeatedly, that he tell me how the money was being spent and how much was left.”

Apparently, there wasn’t a problem with the fundraising to pay her legal bills (to Avenatti) before the judge’s ruling against her came down. And if she went along anyway, well, we have another instance of “here we go,” which is Daniels’s most defining quote. Apparently, she goes along with anything so long as she gets paid, and on this one, she gets to pay instead. Thus the woman the New York Times hails as a “new feminist hero.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/418879-is-mueller-team-bludgeoning-to-get-narrative-it-wants

Either Robert Mueller has the case of the century, tons of incriminating email and is now close to unveiling the collusion with the Russians that has been so widely repeated, or the investigation has come up empty-handed and he is now trying to bludgeon some peripheral figures into plea deals to give the appearance of collusion. It sure has created a lot of public confusion.

While we have to leave the door open to the first theory, recent actions of the special counsel sure look like a last-minute overreach to draw in fringe characters who did little more than make inquiries or tried to seem in the know about the purloined Clinton campaign emails.

To add to these mixed messages, a bombshell came out in the Guardian, that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort allegedly met repeatedly in person with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Such activity would definitely have changed the whole complexion of the case. But with both Assange and Manafort’s denials and a full denial from Manafort’s attorneys, it is more likely the Guardian was “had” with fake Ecuadorian embassy notes. There would be cameras filming everyone going into the embassy, where Assange took asylum in 2012, and holding three in-person meetings would have generated lots of collateral emails and calls — you don’t just show up at an embassy out of the blue and knock on the door. Once examined, the story is, frankly, preposterous.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/29/welcome-back

Like a long-running entertainment, the Boy Scout Show, starring the lugubrious Robert Mueller as the big bully himself, is back. Off the air for some months as the people who brought you “Senator Spartacus Battles Brett Kavanaugh” and “Midterm Mayhem,” along with a special workshop on “How Democrats Can Manufacture Ballots at the Last Moment to Steal an Election,” the Big Bully Boy Scout is once again entertaining thousands across the fruited plain.

Well, it’s entertaining the media pundits in Washington and New York, anyway.

The producers of this interminable entertainment have learned a thing or two from other soap operas. For one thing, some of your favorite characters who had seemed to be written out of the script have made miraculous recoveries and, word has it, are signed for important parts in the entire season that just got underway.

Paul Manafort, for example, whom script writers seemed to have killed off last season, is back with gusto. The Bully Boy Scout and his stable of potty prosecutors (potty prosecutor No. 1: Anthony Weismann, who rumor has it is looking for another major U.S. company to destroy this season, the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen having whetted his appetite) are whining loudly about old Paul.

The season opener brought Manafort back with a bang as headlines blared that he broke his plea agreement with Big Bully Mueller. Part of the excitement revolved around the fact that no one who was not part of the inner circle had any idea what the sharp tooth emissaries of state power were talking about.

The charge was that Manafort lied “to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement.” But “a variety of subject matters” covers a multitude of possibilities, which of course is exactly the point of this Kafkaesque charade in which dozens of people are swept up in the insatiable maw of prosecutorial frenzy.

https://www.city-journal.org/keeping-mentally-ill-out-of-jails

Stephen Eide joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss how America’s health-care system fails the mentally ill, and the steps that cities and states are taking to keep the mentally ill out of jail and get them into treatment.
Audio Transcript

Seth Barron: We’re back with another edition of 10 blocks. This is your host, Seth Barron, associate editor of City Journal. People in big cities around the country regularly encounter individuals who are clearly troubled and often seriously mentally ill. Despite decades of work and attention to the issue, our society has not yet come up with an effective way to treat the mentally ill in a humane manner. In fact, many of these people wind up getting arrested, either for minor or serious crimes and then cycle in and out of the jail system, which has become the nation’s de facto mental health treatment facility. I’m joined now by Steven, I’d senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Contributing Editor to City Journal. He writes frequently on the intersecting issues of mental illness and homelessness, and has a piece in the current issue of City Journal entitled “Keeping the Mentally Ill Out of Jail.” Hi Steve. Thanks for joining us.

Stephen Eide: Hey Seth, so nice of you to have me on.

Seth Barron: So Steve, why is this a problem? Why aren’t the mentally ill in mental hospitals?

Stephen Eide: Well, that’s the way that we used to do it. When we talk about the public mental health care system, what the government does to help them mentally ill, it used to do that in only one way. Up until the 1950s, we ran these massive mental asylums, mental institutions that house hundreds of thousands of people. For various reasons, we decided to phase that system out, through a process known as deinstitutionalization. So now for the most part, we try to treat mentally ill, even people with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, in the community, and outpatient for forms of treatment as much as possible. That has meant a somewhat fragmented system of delivery for mental health care. And oftentimes people have difficulty accessing the treatment that they need for their particular condition. And one of the reasons why we know that this approach does not work very well, why we regularly debate how to reform mental health care is the large numbers of mentally ill people in jails and prisons. In fact, in every state, the largest mental health facility, inpatient mental health facility you could say, is a jail which has a larger patient load than the than the largest state mental hospital at this point. So, this is a problem. In various ways, we try to address this rate of high levels of mental illness amongst our incarcerated population.

Seth Barron: Yeah. But what’s the problem with sending these people to jail if they’ve committed a crime? Are you in favor of an insanity defense?

Stephen Eide: Yes, but for most part, when we talk about the very large population mentally ill behind bars, we’re not talking about people who are guilty by reason of insanity. That’s a real sliver. And we’re really talking about jails, places where people go after they’ve been arrested before their case has been processed, before their offense, has been adjudicated. The idea I think is that most of these people are there because they’re sick, not because they’re criminals. Many of them are picked up for low level offenses, nonviolent offenses, and had they received proper treatment, they wouldn’t be there, but because they’re not receiving treatment, that’s where they wind up and many of them as many kind of journalistic exposes show, such as a series of the Virginia pilot newspaper last year, their condition tends to worsen while they’re behind bars.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tax-cut-working-better-than-advertised-1543446448

Despite concerns over trade disputes and a slowing global economy, the corporate tax rate cut enacted in December of 2017 continues to encourage the business investment that leads to higher productivity and higher wages for American workers. Today the government reported that such investment was higher than it initially reported for the third quarter of the year.

Last month your humble correspondent noted:

The country has lately been so prosperous that we’ve had the luxury of being disappointed in some of the underlying data in Friday’s report of robust 3.5% economic growth for the third quarter. This column was as disappointed as anyone that business investment didn’t show another sharp increase after the stellar numbers posted in previous quarters.

But the overall growth reported by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis was strong. And former Bush economist Larry Lindsey’s consulting firm Lindsey Group argues in a recent note to clients that it’s bound to look even stronger as the data becomes more refined…

In that note Mr. Lindsay told his clients that it “seems quite reasonable that there will be an upward revision in equipment investment (and possibly other investment as well) in the post-election report for the third quarter.”

This column observed “it is extremely reasonable to assume that America’s new competitive corporate tax system will continue to attract investment to the United States.”

That assumption looks even better today, now that the Commerce Department has reported that non-residential fixed investment rose 2.5% at an annual rate in the three months ending in September, up from 0.8% in the earlier estimate. Within this overall category of business investment, spending on equipment was revised to estimated growth of 3.5%, up sharply from an earlier 0.4% estimate.

As for the overall economy, it is on track to hit the White House target of 3% growth for the year. And Mr. Lindsey sees more of the same on the horizon, telling this column via email, “My guess is high twos for fourth quarter and an average of 3 for 2019.”

Get ready for more speeches featuring America’s 44th President asserting ownership of the growth breakout that never managed to arrive during his eight years in the White House. Today Jack Crowe at National Review writes:

Former President Barack Obama claimed credit Tuesday for the recent boom in U.S. oil production immediately after praising the Paris Climate Accords, which committed the U.S. to dramatically reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

“I was extraordinarily proud of the Paris accords because — you know, I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy, and by the way, American energy production,” Obama told the audience gathered at Rice University’s Baker Institute on Tuesday night. “You wouldn’t always know it but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas — that was me, people.”

While U.S. oil production surged by nearly 100 percent over the course of Obama’s two-term presidency, the vast majority of that oil was extracted from state and private lands as the Obama administration took steps to curtail oil production on federal lands.

This column thinks that America’s prosperity revival has room to run, but prudent investors should always be on the lookout for the end of the Trump bump. We’ll know it’s really over when the former President stops pretending it’s his economy. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fake-news-obama-tries-to-take-credit-for-americas-oil-boom/

Ever since Trump turned our country around, his predecessor, Barack Obama, has been trying to take credit for Trump’s successes. The economy, unemployment, the stock market… you name it, he’s been going around the country and the world telling whoever will listen that he deserves the thanks for all the economic progress that failed to occur while he was in office.

Yesterday, his “you didn’t build that, I did” approach to rewriting his legacy continued at a gala at Rice University in Houston, where he tried to claim credit for America becoming the world’s number one oil producing country.

“I was extraordinarily proud of the Paris accords because… I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy and, by the way, American energy production—you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas — that was me, people.”

Actually, it wasn’t.

While it’s true that oil production increased on his watch, that was in spite of Obama, not because of him. Here’s the real story.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/evaluating-paul-manaforts-alleged-violation-of-his-plea-agreement/

Keep your eye on the pardon dynamic.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has informed a federal court that Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement by repeatedly lying to investigators. Prosecutors thus consider the agreement null and void and have asked the court to set a sentencing date immediately.

The alleged breach was outlined in a brief submission to district judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, and reported by the New York Times Monday evening. The submission by Andrew Weissmann and other lawyers on Mueller’s team does not describe Manafort’s allegedly false statements, other than to say that they involve “a variety of subject matters.” Prosecutors are planning to file a sentencing memorandum “that sets forth the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies, including those after signing the plea agreement.”

In the submission, prosecutors acknowledge that Manafort “believes he has provided truthful information and does not agree with the government’s characterization or that he has breached the agreement.”

On the surface, it doesn’t seem that Manafort’s dispute can get him very far. But when we look closer, we realize that this is about more than a plea; it is about a pardon.

When it comes to claimed breaches of a plea agreement, the prosecutor holds the dominant position. Defendants who plead guilty and agree to cooperate, as Manafort did on the day before his Washington trial was to begin, do so with the understanding that the value of the cooperation is the prosecutor’s call. If the prosecutor decides the information provided is not useful — or, worse, that the defendant has lied — the defendant does not get to withdraw his guilty plea. Further, if the prosecutor decides the defendant has breached the agreement, the government is under no obligation to support reductions in sentence that the defendant hoped to achieve by entering the agreement.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/26/john-roberts-wrong-americas-courts-obviously-politicized/
FROM AUSTRALIA—-UPFRONT FROM DOWN UNDER

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ attempt to defend the independence of the judiciary, in light of President Trump’s comments that courts are politicized, did more harm than good.

Last week, after San Francisco-based federal judge Jon Tigar blocked enforcement of the administration’s recently updated asylum regulations, President Donald Trump condemned the decision, calling Tigar an “Obama judge.” “It’s a disgrace what happens in the Ninth Circuit,” Trump complained to reporters, adding that in practically every case plaintiffs file in the Ninth Circuit “we get beaten and have to go to the Supreme Court and we win.”

Chief Justice John Roberts responded to the president’s criticism with his own: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said in a statement issued Wednesday by the Supreme Court. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for,” Roberts concluded, in a nod to the then-upcoming national holiday.

As is his wont, Trump took to Twitter, telling the chief justice we “do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” The next day Trump hit the theme again in a pair of tweets that began, “Justice Roberts can say what he wants, but the 9th Circuit is a complete & total disaster.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/monica-lewinsky-bill-clinton-told-me-to-lie-about-affair-in-sworn-affidavit/

Then-president Bill Clinton urged Monica Lewinsky to lie to investigators about their affair while under oath, Lewinsky revealed in the final episode of the new A&E docuseries The Clinton Affair.

Lewinsky, 45, described in the episode how Clinton called her at 2:30 a.m. one morning to inform her that she was on the witness list in the Paula Jones case and urged her to submit a sworn affidavit denying their affair in order to avoid being deposed.

“I was petrified. I was frantic about my family and this becoming public,” Lewinsky said through tears. “Thankfully, Bill helped me lock myself back from that and he said I could probably sign an affidavit to get out of it, and he didn’t even know if 100 percent I would be subpoenaed.”

Lewinsky, then a 24-year-old White House intern, was subpoenaed days later and, in response, reached out to Clinton’s friend, attorney Vernon Jordan, who introduced her to another attorney and Clinton associate, Frank Carter.

“Frank Carter explained to me if I’d signed an affidavit denying having had an intimate relationship with the president it might mean I wouldn’t have to be deposed in the Paula Jones case,” she said. “I did feel uncomfortable about it but I felt it was the right thing to do, ironically, right? So, the right thing to do, to break the law.”

Lewinsky then speculated that Clinton still trusted her to lie to investigators at that point because he returned from vacation on Martha’s Vineyard with a number of gifts for her.