RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/31/how-impeachment-works/
Lessons from the failed Republican effort to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency

Impeachment chatter is suddenly in vogue. It was strictly déclassé during the Obama years. To hear congressional Republicans tell it, the Clinton fiasco of the late Nineties proved both that the Constitution’s procedure for removing corrupt presidents is futile and that invoking it guarantees political carnage for the accusers.

Today’s Democrats, as the saying goes, never got the memo. Or perhaps they have known all along that their counterparts learned precisely the wrong lessons from President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Now that the impeachment of Presi­dent Donald J. Trump is a realistic contingency, though, getting those lessons right is vital.

The problem with Clinton’s impeachment was not the impeachment process itself. It is difficult by design, as it must be for stability’s sake. But it is hardly obsolete. It did, after all, drive a president from office — Richard M. Nixon, who resigned on the cusp of impeachment — just 25 years before articles of impeachment were filed against Clinton.

No, the problems were twofold. First was the nature of the impeachable offenses. It is not the case, as is commonly assumed, that they were salacious, but that they were remote from the core duties of the presidency. Second was the mulish insistence on pursuing impeachment when the public was clearly opposed to it. An impeachment effort cannot succeed without the tireless building of a political case in favor of removal, a case that achieves a critical mass of public support before impeachment is sought.

Hindsight is always 20/20, of course. I was still a Justice Department prosecutor during most of Bill Clinton’s second term as president, not a journalist doing public commentary. But I favored his impeachment, just as most Republicans and conservatives did. It is easy to see now that the episode has had an enduring, poisonous effect on our politics. Still, 20 years later, with a Republican president in office, it seems a wee bit self-serving to pronounce, finally, that we were wrong.

In truth, I have not waited 20 years. Clinton’s impeachment was a focus of my 2014 book Faithless Execution. At the time, the backstretch of the Obama presidency, the political class and most of the public were not of a mind to ponder the Constitution’s ultimate remedy for presidential misconduct and overreach.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ryan-zinkes-parting-gift-11545689550

Ryan Zinke is resigning as Interior Secretary at the end of the year, though it’s fitting that he is finishing with one last policy bang. The Bureau of Land Management last week took a major step to open up a corner of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

BLM’s draft environmental impact statement tees up a 45-day public comment period and final rule that should launch lease sales for ANWR as early as 2019. Opponents say the process is rushed, but federal and state agencies have been planning for this since Congress set aside 1.6 million acres of ANWR’s 19.3 million acres for development in 1980. Congress finally authorized drilling as part of last year’s tax reform, and Interior envisions lease sales in 2019 of “not fewer than 400,000 acres”—or less than 3% of ANWR acreage.

That production will have widespread benefits, as the U.S. Geological Survey estimates ANWR’s coastal plain holds 10.4 billion barrels of oil. The region could pump 1.45 million barrels a day at peak production—a quarter of what the U.S. now imports from OPEC countries. The drilling will create thousands of jobs and tens of billions in federal revenue.

Mr. Zinke, a Navy SEAL before entering Congress from Montana, made a notable reform difference in two years. He made progress on a $12 billion infrastructure backlog in national parks, prioritized active forest management to mitigate wildfires, started to move some offices to the West from Washington, and gave front-line managers more authority. He also scaled back Barack Obama’s too-expansive monument designations, streamlined permitting for resource development, and ramped up leases for onshore and offshore oil drilling.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-phony-attack-on-william-barr-11545689892

William Barr is probably the best-qualified nominee for U.S. attorney general since Robert Jackson in 1940. Jackson had been solicitor general and would later serve on the Supreme Court. Mr. Barr has already served as attorney general under George H.W. Bush, as well as assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, the authoritative voice within the Justice Department on issues of law throughout the government.

Yet critics decry his nomination, or at least insist that he recuse himself from supervising special counsel Robert Mueller, because of an unsolicited memo he wrote last June to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who then had supervisory responsibility for the Mueller investigation, and Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, current head of the Office of Legal Counsel. The memo criticizes one obstruction-of-justice theory that some have speculated Mr. Mueller is pursuing.

The criticisms of Mr. Barr and his memo are meritless. The 19-page document does not fault the Mueller investigation of a possible criminal connection between the Trump campaign and Russia, or even any of its secondary and tertiary prongs such as the prosecutions of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and George Papadopoulos. It argues forcefully that the president cannot be guilty of obstruction of justice based either on his May 2017 firing of James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or his purported earlier request that Mr. Comey go easy on former national security adviser Mike Flynn.

Mr. Barr’s memo acknowledges that he has no inside knowledge on the facts of the case, and that factors unknown to him may be in play, including the possibility that Mr. Mueller has an entirely different—and legitimate—obstruction theory in mind.

Two prominent American Jewish leaders expressed strong concern on Monday over US President Donald Trump’s declaration of faith in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as part of his sudden decision to withdraw the 2,000 US troops presently assisting Kurdish and Arab allies in Syria.

“This most recent embrace of Turkey as a strategic partner in this ‘new’ US policy — relating to ISIS, Syria, the Kurds — should raise serious alarm bells in Israel and in the pro-Israel community,” Abraham Foxman, the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told The Algemeineron Monday.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper — associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center — meanwhile asked whether anyone could “seriously believe that Erdogan will block the land corridor Iran is creating across Syria into Lebanon,” one of the more serious long-term issues in Israel’s northern security theater.

“It’s difficult to fathom what it was that Erdogan promised Trump, and that is part of the existential challenge facing Israel,” Cooper told The Algemeiner.

Trump’s confidence that Erdogan will “eradicate” what remains of ISIS marks another dramatic turnaround in the US president’s turbulent relations with foreign leaders. Just in August, amidst a dispute over an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, who was imprisoned in Turkey, Trump declared a steep rise in steel and aluminum import tariffs on Turkey, along with sanctions against Turkish officials. In response, Erdogan urged a mass boycott in Turkey of the US electronics products, including Apple’s iPhone.

More recently, Turkey accused Trump of adopting a “comic” stance toward the murder in October of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul. However, in a sign that Trump was changing his attitude toward Erdogan’s Islamist government, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin claimed on Monday that the US president had agreed to pay an official visit to Turkey during 2019.

Both Foxman and Cooper were in agreement that Trump’s new alignment with Erdogan should be regarded with alarm by the American Jewish community, especially as the Turkish president’s frequent antisemitic outbursts are increasingly echoed by other senior Turkish officials — such as Foreign Minister Mesut Cavusoglu, who on Monday invoked the historic “blood libel” in slamming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “baby-killer.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/23/the-neverending-mysterious-

Certainly, no one should defend a top-ranking federal employee’s lying to federal investigators or to his superiors in the Trump Administration, if that is what former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn did, as evidenced by his own confession.

Note if Flynn lied to President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence about details of his private conversations, then that is unethical and understandably should be grounds for dismissal. The distinction, however, is whether Flynn deserved to be fired or to be in jail.

What put Flynn in legal jeopardy were the general’s statements to FBI investigators that purportedly were false, and allegedly given deliberately to mislead two federal investigators.

I express doubt here only because of media reports and leaks that Special Counsel Robert Mueller later either pressured Flynn for a confession, by strategies of financial exhaustion or leveraged him by threats to indict his son, or both.

Without that pressure, one wonders how Flynn might have explained his earlier alleged inconsistencies in recounting a private off the record conversation with a foreign diplomatic official to two FBI officials. That is, had he had adequate legal resources or not faced prosecutorial threats to indict his son, would he have later claimed that months earlier that he had been dishonest to Peter Strzok and his fellow FBI investigator?

Had Flynn at the time been apprised of why Andrew McCabe was sending his agents over to the White House, Flynn would have had choices, perhaps Lois Lerner-like to plead the Fifth, or in James Comey fashion he initially could have told chief interrogator Peter Strzok on 245 occasions that he did not know or did not remember, or he simply could have told investigators in James Clapper fashion that he was giving the least untruthful version of the story.

https://theweek.com/articles/813343/mueller-delusion?utm_source=ntnlreview&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=nationalreview_partnership

It’s December, and you know what that means. It’s Mueller time!

Michael Flynn, the moderately distinguished ex-lieutenant general who served for all of 24 days as Trump’s national security adviser and said some rude things on the campaign trail, narrowly avoided being sentenced to community service on Tuesday after pleading guilty to lying about a perfectly normal conversation with a Russian diplomat in late 2016. Judge Emmet Sullivan was in fine form, accusing Flynn of having “arguably” sold out his country, which is code for “getting caught in an obvious perjury trap.” Flynn’s sentencing will now be delayed until next year so he has more time to cooperate with Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe into Russian election interference. So far his assistance has led to the indictment of two former business associates who are accused of having illegally lobbied for the extradition of a Muslim cleric on behalf of the Turkish government. Turkey and Russia share a sea border, folks.

We don’t know why Flynn lied, but we also have no idea why the FBI was asking him gotcha questions in the first place. It wasn’t authorized by James Comey, the FBI director at the time. There are really only two possible reasons. One is that sentient adults considered indicting Flynn under the terms of the Logan Act, which is the prosecutorial equivalent of announcing a snipe hunt. Another is that Andrew McCabe, then the deputy director at the bureau, went rogue, the way law enforcement officers at every level do every day. I’ll let readers decide which is more likely.

It is possible to be of two minds about Flynn’s brief political career. His “Lock her up!” chants during the 2016 presidential campaign were unbecoming of a military man. But these antics concealed a frequently thoughtful perspective on foreign policy. In a 2015 interview with The Intercept, he blamed the war in Iraq for the rise of the Islamic State and dismissed the Obama administration’s use of drones as a “failed strategy.” “When you drop a bomb from a drone,” he said, “you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good.” What a comfort to think that he has been replaced by John Bolton.

Meanwhile Mueller is doing a good impersonation of a delusional power-crazed middle-school librarian. “Did you ever have a conversation with Rob and Pat in this library? Did you use your library voice? Okay, was it on a Tuesday? No, it was actually a Wednesday, and you, sir, are getting detention. Oh, what’s that? You happen to know that Kev and Phil were smoking cigarettes on the loading dock back in the seventh grade? Thank you, thank you so much! No, that’s all right, I can ring their employers.”

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21910/the-betrayal-of-america-who-do-you-trust http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/http://lindagoudsmit.com

“Who do you trust?” is the foundational question in human relationships. Social relationships, family relationships, business relationships, romantic relationships, intimate friendships, professional relationships, political relationships – human relationships rely on trust. The existence of trust or the absence of trust defines human relatedness.

Parents tell their children when they are very young, “Whatever you do don’t lie to me.” Why? Because trust is the foundation of love.

Cheating is a catastrophic betrayal in adult love relationships. Why? Because successful relationships require trust.

So it is in politics. The existence of trust or the absence of trust defines human relatedness in both the private and public sectors.

Our representative government is founded on the principles of trust. We vote for candidates who we believe will keep their promises. Politics in the United States is currently experiencing seismic trust issues. Over the years it has become painfully obvious that politicians make deceitful promises on the campaign trail to get themselves elected. Then came Donald J. Trump, the political outsider who actually meant what he said when he promised to make America great again by putting America first. What happened?

President Trump has been stymied in his America first efforts since he took office by Democrats AND Republicans. Why? What would create a bilateral effort to stop a duly elected President from keeping his promises to strengthen America? If you want to know the motive look at the result.

President Trump’s America first policies are designed to benefit American workers, American families, legal American citizens, the American economy, the American military, and American businesses on Main Street. President Trump’s policies are unapologetically preferential and protective of American national interests. So, why would any American politician reject America first policies?

The motive for the stupefying, well-organized, multi-faceted, well-funded domestic and international campaign to destroy President Trump is GLOBALISM – a synonym for one world government. Globalists need a weakened America to impose supranational one world government. What?

Let me be clear. Globalism does not mean global trade. Global trade is the legitimate international commerce between sovereign countries. Globalism is the internationalized political infrastructure of the new world order under the auspices of the corrupt United Nations.

Globalists are the existential enemy of American sovereignty, independence, and they are desperately trying to destroy America first President Donald Trump and every one of his America first initiatives. Globalism is at war with Americanism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/william-barr-attorney-general-nomination/

A response to Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner

University of Chicago law professors Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner have penned an op-ed for the New York Times in which they argue that William P. Barr is disqualified to serve as President Trump’s attorney general. Their rationale is that the advisory memorandum Barr wrote to Justice Department officials this past June, arguing against the validity of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s obstruction theory, raises questions about his objectivity and fitness.

Coming from such estimable scholars, the Hemel-Posner column is surprisingly vapid. In fact, it is so unconvincing, I can only conclude that it is the start of a two-part strategy: Set the table by staking out an aggressive but untenable position that Barr — an eminently qualified former attorney general — is not suitable to be AG; then, Democrats can appear oh so reasonable in ultimately arguing that Barr must at least recuse himself from oversight of the Mueller investigation. The latter would be a meritless contention, though one we are certain to hear.

Hemel and Posner concede that Barr explicitly disclaimed knowledge about many of the facts of Mueller’s investigation. Moreover, far from attacking the legitimacy of Mueller’s overall investigation, or claiming that a prosecutor may not validly investigate the president for obstruction, Barr asserts that a president may indeed be cited for obstruction by “sabotaging a proceeding’s truth-seeking function.”

Barr’s quarrel, the professors correctly state, is with what press reports indicate is an expansive construction of Section 1512(c) of the federal penal code. As I explained in a National Review column earlier this week, Barr contends that application of the obstruction statute is limited to innately wrongful acts of evidence and witness tampering; it cannot be stretched to cover prerogatives of the presidency (e.g., issuing pardons, dismissing subordinate officials, exercising prosecutorial discretion by weighing in on the merits of an investigation) that a prosecutor believes may have been improperly motivated. Otherwise, not only would the chief executive potentially be divested of his constitutional authority; the administration of justice would be damaged because this theory would apply to all executive officials — including, for example, prosecutors making strategic decisions in litigation, or making personnel and management decisions.