RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271121/well-find-out-about-brennan-lloyd-billingsley

John Brennan became head of the Central Intelligence agency in 2013 and after leaving in 2017 he retained his security clearance, which President Trump recently revoked. Brennan is threatening a lawsuit, a prospect that delights the president’s lead lawyer.

“I’d volunteer to do that case for the president,” Rudy Giuliani told Fox News. “I’d love to have Brennan under oath for I don’t know how many days, two or three days? We’ll find out about Brennan.” As the former New York mayor is doubtless aware, there is plenty to find out. Consider, for example, Brennan’s role in the famous passport case.

Back in 2008, State Department contractors “unnecessarily reviewed” the passport file of Illinois Senator Barack Obama. The breach came without the knowledge of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who called the senator to apologize. “I myself would be very disturbed if I learned somebody had looked into my passport file,” Rice told reporters.

According to the State Department, two of the contract employees were fired for the security breach and a third was disciplined but remained on the job. The department did not reveal the identities of the employees nor what they might have been looking for in the presidential candidate’s passport file. On the other hand, some information did emerge.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/war-of-attrition-against-president-trump/

Precisely how does Bill Clinton’s main legal fixer turn up as Michael Cohen’s attorney in a plea bargain with a special prosecutor?

If you put that kind of plot line in a political thriller, the public would laugh you off the newsstand book racks. Nonetheless, we now have Lanny Davis, special counsel to the president for Bill Clinton during 1996-1998, declaring to CNN: “It’s my observation that Mr. Cohen has knowledge that would be of interest to the special counsel about the issue of whether Donald Trump, ahead of time, knew about the hacking of emails, which is a computer crime.” On Tuesday Davis told MSNBC that Cohen knew about “the possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election.”

There you have it, boys and girls: None of this has anything to do with paying off floozies who claimed to have done the dirty with a presidential candidate. No one cares about that. It’s about using the legal system to extract “confessions” from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen that will keep the Black Legend alive of a Russian hack of the 2016 elections. Cohen has no more knowledge of this, I am ready to wager, than he does of space aliens colonizing Chicago. Nonetheless, the swamp and their pet jackals in the media will spin new allegations until the public gets dizzy.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/23/there-is-nothing-illegitimate-about-the-brett-kavanaugh-nomination/

Perhaps one day a court will find that Donald Trump had conspired with his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to pay non-disclosure agreements meant to silence his mistresses. Perhaps one day the House will impeach Trump for breaking those campaign finance laws, and then, maybe the Senate will also remove him from office.

Those are the mechanisms that have been provided by the Constitution to thwart a president from nominating justices to the Supreme Court. I’m afraid there’s no clause in the document that empowers angst-y liberal pundits and politicians to question the legitimacy of duly confirmed justices.

But much like their ideal Supreme Court, Democrats have set about fabricating brand new extra-constitutional standards that happen to always align with their partisan aims. Their latest concocted stipulation states that anyone nominated by a president under suspicion of criminality becomes “illegitimate.”

Democratic Sens. Mazie Hirono and Ed Markey canceled meetings this week with prospective Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Markey said the nominee was “illegitimate” because the president was “all but named as a co-conspirator.” A similar sentiment was repeated by many Democrats and liberal pundits. The Supreme Court itself, contends The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, would become “fundamentally illegitimate.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/09/10/the-last-victim/

On January 23, 2014, the Florida Parole Commission sent Frank Fuster a letter informing him that, owing to a recent policy change, it had determined that his initial interview was scheduled for March 2134. No, that isn’t a misprint. His first parole hearing is scheduled in 120 years. And this for a crime that, by any fair reading of the evidence, not only did Fuster not commit but never even happened.

Thirty-three years ago, Fuster, along with his young wife, Ileana, was convicted of sexually abusing children at his suburban Florida home, where Ileana provided day care. He is the last person charged in the mass sex-abuse-in-day-care scares that made headlines from the 1980s to the mid ’90s to remain in prison. Part of a broader obsession with child sex abuse — therapist-induced repressed “memories” of incest destroyed thousands of families — the day-care cases were a modern version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, down to allegations of Satanic rituals by caregivers. They stand as a warning to those who look condescendingly at our Salem ancestors, incredulous that judges and public alike would believe girls writhing and shrieking that they were at that moment being pinched by the accused sitting far away in the dock. As a young attorney, Robert Rosenthal cut his teeth on the day-care cases, winning reversals on appeal in a number of them.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/08/22/dershowitz_candidate_entitled_to_pay_hush_money_committed_no_election_crime.html

Alan Dershowitz said the only campaign violation that could have happened is if former Trump attorney Michael Cohen did break a campaign finance law on his own volution and called the situation a “Catch-22” on MSNBC this afternoon.

MSNBC HOST: Can I ask about a couple things, Alan? .. You said last night, ‘All Cohen has to do is say the president directed me to do it. That’s the kind of embellishment people put on a story when they want to avoid dying in prison.’ Are you suggesting Cohen lied under oath?

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Well, we don’t know. All we know is what Judge Ellis said.

Judge Ellis said is when you put pressure on somebody like Cohen, there is an incentive to embellish the story and make it better because he’s now facing 4 years. So if he comes up with strong evidence against the president that will be reduced to 2 years, 3 years, or 1 year. …

I have no idea whether Cohen is telling the truth or not, but the interesting thing is, if Cohen is telling the truth it’s a catch-22 for the prosecution. Let me lay this out for 60 seconds…

Here’s the issue: The president is entitled to pay hush money to anyone he wants during a campaign. There are no restrictions on what a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. So if, in fact, the president directed Cohen to do it as his lawyer and was going to compensate him for it, the president committed no crime. if Cohen did it on his own —

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/despite-comey-assurances-vast-bulk-of-weiner-laptop-emails-were-never-examined/

When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had “reviewed all of the communications” discovered on a personal laptop used by Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.

At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the “hundreds of thousands” of emails residing on the machine, which had been a focus of a sex-crimes investigation of Weiner, a former Congressman.

Comey later told Congress that “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as “duplicates” of emails they’d previously seen. Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked “night after night after night” to scrutinize the remaining material.

But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.

In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-kavanaugh-legitimate-1534979653

We figure we’ve seen everything, but then Chuck Schumer keeps providing a daily education in weird political science. The Senate Democratic leader on Tuesday attempted the double bank shot of claiming that Brett Kavanaugh shouldn’t be confirmed for the Supreme Court because Michael Cohen copped a guilty plea.

“It is unseemly for the President of the United States to be picking a Supreme Court Justice who could soon be, effectively, a juror in a case involving the President himself,” Mr. Schumer declared, picking up a trope that has quickly become part of the liberal echo chamber. Senators Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) and Ed Markey (his own private Idaho) cancelled meetings with Judge Kavanaugh, with Mr. Markey saying he is now an “illegitimate” nominee.

So let’s see. Donald Trump is the elected President with the power of appointment under the Constitution, but because his former lawyer has pleaded guilty to evading taxes and paying off a couple of Mr. Trump’s alleged mistresses, Mr. Trump no longer enjoys the powers of the Presidency under Article II. This novel interpretation of presidential authority somehow eluded James Madison.

As for Judge Kavanaugh being a “juror” for Mr. Trump if he is confirmed to the High Court, the Chief Justice presides over Senate impeachment trials. Associate Justices have no role. The jury is 100 Senators, who get a vote only after the House impeaches a President.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-mueller-cant-subpoena-trump-1534973736

Donald Trump’s lawyers have signaled he won’t agree to a voluntary interview with special counsel Robert Mueller. If Mr. Mueller insists, he will have to subpoena the president. To enforce a subpoena, the special counsel would have to go to court and meet a highly exacting standard, showing what he wants and why he needs it. He would be unlikely to succeed, given that Mr. Trump already has cooperated extensively with the investigation, producing 1.4 million documents and making dozens of White House staffers available for interviews.

The leading precedent is a 1997 opinion, In re Sealed Case, by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The case involved the independent counsel investigation of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, who was accused of receiving unlawful gifts. The independent counsel sought to obtain sensitive documents produced in the course of an internal White House inquiry. These materials involved the preparation of a report to then-President Clinton himself. Although Mr. Clinton had directed that most of the materials be provided, he asserted executive privilege to withhold some items.

At issue in particular was information regarding whether Mr. Clinton should discipline or fire Mr. Espy, who did resign. To justify producing such sensitive materials involving “the exercise of [the president’s] appointment and removal power, a quintessential and non-delegable presidential power,” the court required the independent counsel to demonstrate with “specificity” why he needed the materials and why he could not get them, or equivalent evidence, from another source. (Mr. Espy was acquitted in 1998.)

Mr. Mueller’s initial charge was to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. But his investigation has expanded to cover whether Mr. Trump has obstructed justice. The president’s critics say his obstructive acts include urging then-FBI Director James Comey to “go easy” on former national security adviser Mike Flynn, subsequently firing Mr. Comey, and his public criticism of Mr. Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

There are significant factual disputes about these episodes, but all involve the president’s exercise of his core constitutional powers as chief executive, including the power to appoint and remove high-level executive-branch officials, to supervise the performance of their duties (as in the Espy case), and to determine law-enforcement priorities. We have argued in these pages that the president cannot obstruct justice by exercising the discretionary powers of his office, especially in determining whether and why to fire high-level presidential appointees like Mr. Comey. According to the two leaked letters from Mr. Trump’s lawyers to Mr. Mueller, they take essentially the same view. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cohen-joins-the-resistance-1534962801

Michael Cohen’s lawyer is on the talk-show circuit teasing the possibility that his client might have the long-sought evidence of Russian collusion for special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr. Mueller for his part must be wondering why Team Cohen seems to be doing everything it can to present the former Trump attorney as an unserious partisan axe-grinder rather than a credible witness.

The website Mediaite asks:

So why, exactly, has Lanny Davis been all over television and radio Wednesday morning — hours after his client, Michael Cohen, accepted a deal to plead guilty on eight counts of various violations?

The answer came into focus a bit on Megyn Kelly Today, as the lawyer made a direct appeal to viewers to give money to Cohen so that he can “continue to tell the truth.”

Mr. Davis expressed the hope that Americans would visit a website, michaelcohentruth.com, to donate money. Mr. Davis may have been confused about the name of the site. As of this afternoon the address brings web visitors to a Trump campaign website. It seems unlikely that those attending the Kelly show were aware that Mr. Davis was inadvertently sending potential donors to Team Trump, but they seemed amused anyway. According to Mediaite:

The audience straight up laughed at Davis’s plea for cash.

“I don’t know if they’re ready to donate, Lanny,” host Megyn Kelly said.

But that didn’t stop the attorney from trying to get in the pockets of those watching at home.

“I would say the reaction of your audience may be they are not as interested in getting the truth out about Donald Trump as many other people in the country,” Davis said. “Approximately 60 percent of the country would not have the reaction of your audience.”

This last comment brought murmurs and boos from a clearly skeptical crowd.

More skepticism may result as people ponder the unique representation that Mr. Davis is providing to Mr. Cohen. The Washington Post notes:

Asked on NPR whether Cohen would accep