RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/obama-appointed-lawyers-thwart-trump-policies-immigration-energy/

To the Lawyer Left, elections represent a policy choice only when Democrats win.

As I write on Friday, the restraining order hasn’t come down yet. But it’s just a matter of time. Some federal district judge, somewhere in the United States, will soon issue an injunction blocking enforcement of the Trump administration’s restrictions on asylum applications.

The restrictions come in the form of a rule promulgated jointly by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and a proclamation issued by President Trump. In conjunction, they assert that an alien who wishes to apply for asylum in the United States must act lawfully: An alien who is physically present here and wishes to apply must be in the country legally; an alien outside the country who wishes to apply must present himself at a lawful port of entry — not attempt to smuggle his way in or force his way in as part of a horde (i.e., no invasions by caravan).

Of course, what used to be assumed is today deemed intolerable. It is no longer permitted to expect of non-Americans what is required of Americans — adherence to American law while on American soil.

Therefore, the fact that the administration’s action is entirely reasonable will not matter. No more will it matter that, contrary to numbing media repetition, the rule and proclamation derive from federal statutory law. Nor will it make any difference that, in part, the president is relying on the same sweeping congressional authorization based on which, just four months ago, the Supreme Court affirmed his authority to control the ingress of aliens based on his assessment of national-security needs.

Just two things will matter. The first is that the asylum restrictions represent a Trump policy that reverses Obama policies — specifically, policies of more lax border enforcement, and of ignoring congressionally authorized means of preventing illegal aliens from filing frivolous asylum petitions (with the result that many of them are released, evading further proceedings and deportation). The second is that, precisely to thwart the reversal of Obama policies, President Obama made certain that the vast majority of the 329 federal judges he appointed were progressive activists in the Obama mold.

The media-Democrat complex will tell you this is “the rule of law.” In reality, it is the rule of lawyers: the Lawyer Left on the front line of American decision-making, a line that runs through courtrooms, not Capitol Hill.

You can already hear the retort: Conservatives do the same thing — put conservative judges on the bench to dictate conservative results. Au contraire. Conservatives really do want the rule of law, as in the laws that Congress passes and the president signs. That is, we want the country run by accountable office holders who answer to us, whom we can remove if they make bad decisions. We are willing to live under laws we oppose, provided that we have a fair opportunity to repeal or amend them. To take an obvious constitutional-law example: Though we oppose abortion, we are not looking for robed right-wingers to “discover” a prohibition of abortion in, say, the due-process clause. We think it is a matter for legislation, primarily at the state level.

That is not what the Lawyer Left is doing. They talk a good game about “ground-up democracy,” but the actual goal is top-down control. Those judges — their judges — are in place to dictate policy outcomes, not to let democracy happen.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/burying-the-other-russia-story-1541810056

Arguably the most important power at stake in Tuesday’s election was Congressional oversight, and the most important change may be Adam Schiff at the House Intelligence Committee. The Democrat says his top priority is re-opening the Trump-Russia collusion probe, but more important may be his intention to stop investigating how the FBI and Justice Department abused their power in 2016. So let’s walk through what we’ve learned to date.

Credit for knowing anything at all goes to Intel Chairman Devin Nunes and more recently a joint investigation by Reps. Bob Goodlatte (Judiciary) and Trey Gowdy (Oversight). Over 18 months of reviewing tens of thousands of documents and interviewing every relevant witness, no Senate or House Committee has unearthed evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the presidential election. If Special Counsel Robert Mueller has found more, he hasn’t made it public.

But House investigators have uncovered details of a Democratic scheme to prod the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign. We now know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired Fusion GPS, which hired an intelligence-gun-for-hire, Christopher Steele, to write a “dossier” on Donald Trump’s supposed links to Russia.

Mr. Steele fed that document to the FBI, even as he secretly alerted the media to the FBI probe that Team Clinton had helped to initiate. Fusion, the oppo-research firm, was also supplying its dossier info to senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion.

House investigators have also documented the FBI’s lack of judgment in using the dossier to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against former Trump aide Carter Page. The four FISA warrants against Mr. Page show that the FBI relied almost exclusively on the unproven Clinton-financed accusations, as well as a news story that was also ginned up by Mr. Steele.

The FBI told the FISA court that Mr. Steele was “credible,” despite Mr. Steele having admitted to Mr. Ohr that he passionately opposed a Trump Presidency. The FBI also failed to tell the FISA court about the Clinton campaign’s tie to the dossier.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/history-tell-us-2018/

The lesson of 2018 is that the political class is addicted to drawing lessons. Every two years, after the ballots are counted and the winners declared, our reporters, pundits, officials, activists, and analysts turn immediately to the next election. What do these results portend? Will Trump be reelected? Will the suburbs stay Democratic? This emphasis on the future allows the political class to indulge in its favorite activity: mindless speculation. For once, it might be more useful to look backward rather than forward. History has much to tell us.

What it says is that the midterm was about average. The New York Times projects the Democrats will pick up some 35 seats, giving them at least a 12-seat majority in the 116th Congress. The fundamentals pointed to this result. Only 2 of the last 14 presidents (FDR and GWB) have gained House seats in their first midterm. Republican losses are in line with historical trends for a president with less than 50 percent support. The Democratic gain is a few seats higher than in 2006, while less than Republican gains in both 1994 (54 seats) and 2010 (63 seats).

President Trump’s approval rating in the exit poll was 45 percent. This is better than Reagan’s approval in 1982 (42 percent) and about the same as Clinton’s in 1994 (46 percent) and Obama’s in 2010 (45 percent). Trump’s approval is less than that recorded for Jimmy Carter in 1978 (49 percent) and George H.W. Bush in 1990 (58 percent). Carter and Bush lost seats in Congress too. Donald Trump may be an extraordinary man, but in political terms he is an ordinary president.

The difference between the House and Senate results is unusual. Not since 1970 has a president’s party lost seats in the House while gaining them in the Senate. Nor were Democratic gains in statehouses as large as expected. At this writing, they have won the keys to seven more governor’s mansions, but lost important contests in Ohio, Iowa, and New Hampshire. (Republican leads in Florida and Georgia have not been certified.) Democrats also won hundreds of state legislative seats, but nowhere near the amount needed to overcome the losses they experienced during the Obama presidency. The split decision makes a kind of sense: This year’s Senate map favored Republicans, even as a shift among suburban voters and independents helped Democrats.

The high number of House Republicans who did not seek reelection, combined with a liberal gusher of money, was a boon for the party of Pelosi. The Democrats out-raised and outspent Republicans in what the Center for Responsive Politics says is the most expensive midterm ever. This advantage was especially pronounced in the House, where Democrats raised $951 million to the Republicans’ $637 million. Money isn’t dispositive. But it helps.

“A society cannot be judged on the basis of its criminal, psychotic or evil members, but rather, on how it responds to them. The same goes for its anti-Semites. America—yes, Trump’s America—passes this test with flying colors. ”

In an interview with HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” ahead of Tuesday’s midterm congressional elections, New York Times op-ed staff editor Bari Weiss blamed U.S. President Donald Trump for the Oct. 27 massacre of Jews at the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Weiss was not singing an original aria in the anti-Trump opera.

Indeed, since his inauguration in January 2017, the president has been accused by his detractors of directly inciting racism among his supporters and of indirectly creating a xenophobic atmosphere conducive to violence. The mass shooting at the synagogue provided these detractors with the perfect opportunity to reiterate what they had been saying for a few days when makeshift mail bombs were sent to various well-known Democratic figures: that although Trump himself did not plant the bombs or shoot the Jews in shul, he was actually the culprit.

Weiss, then, was in good company among liberals, which is why her statements to Maher were received with wild applause from the studio audience and from anti-Trump columnists everywhere. But what gave her interview particular weight was the fact that the 11 Jews murdered while praying on Shabbat belonged to the synagogue where she had become a bat mitzvah. Two heartfelt columns she wrote about the tragedy and her personal connection to it served as the impetus for the interview in the first place.

Yet she did not squander her stage time merely on mourning the dead and bemoaning anti-Semitism. On the contrary, she used the platform to make a political plea to Jewish voters “to elect people to Congress and everywhere else that are going to protect” the “way we live in this country,” which is “an aberration in history … a miracle.” In other words, elect Democrats.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-sessions-successor-1541635200

EXCERPT

Mr. Trump does have a point that Mr. Sessions’ recusal compromised his leadership of the department and made it harder to exert supervision over the FBI.

Mr. Sessions’ temporary successor will be the AG’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who presumably will hold the job until a successor is nominated. It is important that the White House get this one right.

The Attorney General shouldn’t fire Mr. Mueller, as the President essentially said himself at his Wednesday news conference. Mr. Trump needs an individual of stature and judgment who will have the trust of the department’s lawyers, who is capable of independence, but who also understands that the Justice Department is part of the executive branch and not a law unto itself.

https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/07/protesters-tucker-carlson-house/

A left-wing mob showed up outside Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house Wednesday evening, posted pictures of his address online and demanded that he flee the city of Washington, D.C.

Carlson, a co-founder of The Daily Caller and host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was at the Fox News studio when the angry crowd showed up outside of his house…

Video the group, “Smash Racism DC,” posted to Twitter shows one of the mob’s ringleaders leading the crowd in chants of “racist scumbag, leave town!” and “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!”

Here are a few of the tweets and the video that Smash Racism DC posted to Twitter before their account was suspended:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/twitter-suspends-smash-racism-account-after-tucker-protest-but-what-about-antifa-prof-mike-isaacson/

He tweeted: “Kill your local politicians.”

Twitter finally suspended the violent antifa group Smash Racism after it organized a mob to terrorize the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, forcing his wife, who was home alone at the time, to hide in a pantry until police arrived.

Oddly enough, a Washington, DC area Episcopal church apparently has no problem with violent antifa groups meeting in their church basement to organize their activities.

Smash Racism held three “From Resistance to Revolution” conferences at St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church in November and December of last year. For a house of God to be hosting these domestic terrorists, seems weirdly incongruous to say the least.

Meanwhile, former John Jay economics professor and (former?) Smash Racism co-founder Mike Isaacson (@VulgarEconomics) continues to have a Twitter account where he is allowed to threaten law enforcement and political figures on a regular basis.
Far Left Watch @FarLeftWatch
· Sep 25, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-resistance-factory-1541700256

Count Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) among those who seem to have learned nothing from Tuesday’s election results. In a series of conversations on an Acela train ride from New York to Washington, the ranking member of the House Judiciary committee reportedly discussed the aggressive use of congressional investigatory powers against both President Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Mr. Nadler, likely to be the new chairman of House Judiciary come January, seems not to have noticed that radicalism didn’t sell on Tuesday. Democrats gained a House majority by running impressive candidates who presented themselves to suburban voters as professional and moderate. As the Journal’s William McGurn has noted, one of the winning Democrats in a New Jersey swing district even positioned herself as an anti-tax candidate by pretending that the 2017 Trump tax cuts were actually tax hikes. In time we’ll know by their voting records whether the new suburban representatives really are moderates, but the strategy certainly worked on Tuesday.

Meanwhile the candidates who presented themselves as unapologetic leftists didn’t fare so well. The Journal’s Allysia Finley notes the gubernatorial campaign losses suffered by Andrew Gillum in Florida and Richard Cordray in Ohio, as well as the likely defeat of Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Ms. Finley adds:

In places where progressive candidates won, they tacked to the center. In Colorado, Rep. Jared Polis, who had backed “Medicare for all” legislation, modulated his politics by opposing state referendums that would raise taxes on high earners and limit fracking. During one debate, he described himself as a “convener in chief” who would work with both parties.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/matthew-whittaker-jeff-sessions-replacement-excellent-choice

/Matthew Whitaker is well credentialed and an excellent choice to assume the duties of attorney general.

Is Matthew Whitaker a placeholder who can manage Special Counsel Robert Mueller until President Trump decides on a permanent successor for ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions? It’s possible, but it’s also conceivable that Mr. Whitaker’s temporary gig as acting attorney general is an audition for the job. Feeling like he’s been burned once, and then saddled for the better part of two years with an AG he could no longer abide, the president may want a trial run before he settles on a “permanent” replacement. (I use scare-quotes because what, these days, is permanent?)

To repeat what I had occasion to say about a week ago, I am a Sessions fan, and I think he got a raw deal. That said, it was time for Trump and Sessions to part ways. The former AG should be proud that he performed admirably and was a very effective proponent of the president’s agenda. I continue to believe his recusal from the so-called Russia investigation was premature and overbroad, but there is no doubt that a recusal of some extent would have been necessary. The president is kidding himself if he thinks otherwise. And it was not Sessions but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — a Trump appointee — who decided to name a special counsel.

That is all water under the bridge at this point.

Matthew Whitaker joined the Trump Justice Department as Sessions’s chief of staff in October 2017. The date is relevant. The president has named him as acting attorney general under the Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (the relevant provisions are codified at Sections 3345 and 3346 of Title 5, U.S. Code). There has been some commentary suggesting that because Whitaker was in a job (chief of staff) that did not require Senate confirmation, he could not become the “acting officer” in a position (AG) that calls for Senate confirmation. Not so. The Vacancies Act enables the president to name an acting officer, who may serve as such for 210 days, as long as the person named has been working at the agency or department for at least 90 days in a fairly high-ranking position. Whitaker qualifies.

Whitaker has excellent credentials and influential backers. He served as Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief of staff until 2004, when President Bush appointed him United States attorney for the southern district of Iowa. To get the latter post, Whitaker certainly had to have the approval of Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), who even then was a senior member of the Judiciary Committee (which he now chairs). According to a New York Times profile of Whitaker, he was recommended to President Trump by the estimable Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief who has been critical to the president’s judicial appointments — perhaps the administration’s signal achievement. Whitaker is said to have very good chemistry with the president, and to have been an effective liaison between the Justice Department and the White House.

NOW WATCH: ‘Trump Supporters Fired Up For Midterms?’

Watch: 0:40
Trump Supporters Fired Up For Midterms?

I must say I am amused by the media pearl-clutching over the fact that Whitaker will presumably be assuming supervisory responsibility over the Mueller investigation.

Since Mueller came into the picture, that responsibility has been exercised, quite passively, by Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. He appointed Mueller on May 17, 2017, to take the reins of the Russia investigation that had been ongoing for several months. As I have detailed, Rosenstein has been laboring under blatant conflicts of interest.

To summarize, the special counsel has been scrutinizing the president’s firing of former FBI director James Comey in the obstruction aspect of his investigation. Rosenstein was a prominent participant in the firing and is thus an important witness. Rosenstein, moreover, signed off on the last FISA warrant application for surveillance against former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page, which is under investigation by Congress and DOJ’s inspector general. Rosenstein, using the Mueller investigation as part of his rationale, has stonewalled Congress’s demands for relevant information. The surveillance of Page is plainly germane to Mueller’s Russia investigation. Since Rosenstein’s actions are under scrutiny — and given that this is in addition to the just-described, patent conflict posed by his involvement in Comey’s firing — one would think Rosenstein would want to step aside rather than have his ethical sensibility questioned.

While the press remains remarkably indifferent to Rosenstein’s conflicts, it is all over what are said to be Whitaker’s — stemming from an opinion essay he wrote for CNN a couple of months before joining the Trump administration. It is being alleged that Whitaker contended that any probe of the president’s finances would be beyond the scope of Mueller’s jurisdiction; he is further accused of using President Trump’s derogatory phrase — “witch hunt” — to belittle Mueller’s investigation. That is an overwrought distortion of what Whitaker wrote.

The New York Times had asked President Trump if Mueller would be acting outside his mandate if he began investigating the Trump family finances. The president responded, “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.” The burden of Whitaker’s op-ed was to defend Trump’s statement, which — while curt and ambiguous — did not claim that Mueller would be in the wrong if his inquiry into Trump’s finances had some good-faith connection to Russia.

Whatever Trump may have meant, Whitaker was emphatic about what he found objectionable: the notion of an investigation unconnected to Russia — i.e., a fishing expedition into Trump’s finances without any articulable nexus to what Mueller was appointed to investigate, namely, Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

In part, Whitaker was countering the contentions posited by, well, your humble correspondent. I’ve maintained that Rosenstein’s order appointing Mueller set no real limits on the investigation. Having now reviewed Whitaker’s interpretation, I still respectfully disagree; but he nevertheless presented a forceful legal argument, based on a close reading of Rosenstein’s order, for the proposition that there are limits on the special counsel.

Whitaker, furthermore, did not say Mueller could not properly review Trump’s finances under any circumstances. He said that, to do so, Mueller would have to “return to Rod Rosenstein for additional authority.” That would, indeed, be the proper procedure (if we assume, as Whitaker does, that the order defines the parameters of Mueller’s jurisdiction).

Finally, Whitaker never said that Mueller’s investigation was a “witch hunt.” He said the investigation could become a witch hunt if Mueller were to investigate Trump’s finances in the absence of any connection to Russia and any formal broadening of the scope of his appointment by Rosenstein. That is manifestly true, a truth underscored by Rosenstein’s public insistence that Mueller is not, to borrow the deputy AG’s phrase, an “unguided missile.”

Concededly, I have raised concerns in the past about mixing punditry with prosecution; I’ve observed, for example, that I would be a poor choice to suggest as a putatively independent counsel in an investigation on which I had commented extensively, and about which I had expressed opinions, as a journalist. It is not that I doubt my capacity to be fair; it is that the investigation would lack the appearance of fairness and objectivity, no matter how fair I was. In the criminal-justice system, the appearance of propriety is nearly as important as the reality.

All that said, Whitaker has not commented extensively on the Russia investigation and the comments made in his op-ed should be uncontroversial. They do not question the worthiness of investigating Russia’s interference in the election, and they do not denigrate the Mueller investigation — they merely maintain that the investigation should stay within the bounds that Rosenstein has sought to assure the public it has respected.

Matthew Whitaker is well credentialed and appears to be an excellent choice to assume the duties of attorney general, at least temporarily (and perhaps permanently, though under the Vacancy Act, he could not be nominated to be AG while serving as acting AG). The removal of Rod Rosenstein as Mueller’s overseer is inevitable and overdue — which is not a condemnation of him, but a recognition that he should not be supervising an investigation in which his own actions are implicated. Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation appears to be at a ripe stage, and if Acting Attorney General Whitaker helps steer it to a prompt conclusion, that is all to the good.

Whitaker is being prejudged in some quarters as a Trump “loyalist.” That pejorative label is more a function of what the president has reportedly said that he’d like to have in an attorney general (and in other executive offices serving the president). It is not a function of anything Whitaker has actually done. Let’s see how he performs over the next few months. I’m betting he’ll do a fine job.

Andrew C. McCarthy — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. @AndrewCMcCarthy