RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/columns/marc-a-thiessen-obama-took-lying-to-new-heights-with/article_3162e8c6-6b1c-11e8-bb09-83e6f2650005.html

When it comes to the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration increasingly appears to have been a bottomless pit of deception.

First, President Barack Obama failed to disclose to Congress the existence of secret side deals on inspections when he transmitted the nuclear accord to Capitol Hill. (They were only uncovered by chance when then-Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., learned about them during a meeting with International Atomic Energy Agency officials in Vienna.) Then, we learned that the Obama administration had secretly sent a plane to Tehran loaded with $400 million in Swiss francs, euros and other currencies on the same day Iran released four American hostages, which was followed by two more secret flights carrying another $1.3 billion in cash.

Now, in a bombshell revelation, Republicans on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, have revealed in a new report that the Obama administration secretly tried to help Iran use U.S. banks to convert $5.7 billion in Iranian assets, after promising Congress that Iran would not get access to the U.S. financial system — and then lied to Congress about what it had done. (Full disclosure: My wife works for Portman).

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mulvaney-fires-all-25-members-of-cfpb-advisory-board/

Now this is what I call “draining the swamp”:

The Daily Caller:

Mick Mulvaney, acting director of a controversial consumer finance bureau, fired an advisory board after the members criticized the new leadership for not taking their advice.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced Wednesday that the 25 current Consumer Advisory Board members will be replaced, and will be ineligible to reapply to the board, the Washington Post reports.

Eleven advisory board members held a news conference Monday calling out Mulvaney for canceling several meetings — which are required to take place under the Dodd-Frank Act which created the agency.

“It appears the bureau does not want to engage with us,” Ann Baddour, chair of the Consumer Advisory Board and part of Texas Appleseed, a financial, non-profit, said in a conference call reported by The Intercept. “Staying silent would violate our ethical responsibility to the bureau and the American people.”

The criticisms didn’t sit well with the CFPB, and one spokesman suggested the board missed the perks of taxpayer-funded trips to the capital.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-goes-on-a-spending-diet-1528413010

If the Trump White House has a congressional ally in its latest big objective, it’s Rep. Tom Graves. The Georgia Republican is an appropriator, though not a business-as-usual spender. That’s exactly the administration’s new message: We’re done with the usual.

With the economy reaping the fruits of tax cuts and regulatory reform, the Trump administration looks to be getting serious about a neglected campaign promise: spending restraint. Publicly, it’s laying out a strategy to roll back the bloat in last year’s omnibus. Privately, it’s letting Republicans know that the president won’t shy from taking his own party’s lawmakers to task for failure. He’ll have to, or risk flaming out on that crucial pledge.

Candidate Trump promised often to reduce the size of government. He vowed never to run an Obama-size deficit. His budgets have proposed dramatically slashing nondefense spending. Yet the tax cuts widened the deficit. And while Congress’s $1.3 trillion omnibus delivered on defense spending, Democrats demanded huge new outlays for domestic agencies. So Mr. Trump is presiding over trillion-dollar deficits after all.

Whether the president cares much about the economic consequences, he understands the optics. The shellacking the omnibus got from conservative media allies was behind his hesitation to sign the bill, and it inspired his public declaration that he’d “never sign another” like it. With tax cuts done, and his economic team gelling under spending hawk Larry Kudlow, the focus has turned to keeping the promise on spending.

Enter Mr. Graves, who has spent his three years on the House Appropriations Committee shaking up the system. His subcommittee on financial services two weeks ago passed a $23.4 billion fiscal 2019 spending bill—$585 million less than the set spending level. In order to prevent any other committee from swooping in to grab that money, he used the bill to create what he’s calling the Fund for America’s Kids and Grandkids. The $585 million goes in this fund and by law cannot be spent on any other government program until the U.S. is deficit-free. “Just because you can spend it, doesn’t mean you should,” Mr. Graves says. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/who_leaked_portions_of_ig_report_and_why.html

Coverage of the leaked portions of the long delayed and much anticipated report from the inspector general of the Department of Justice has generally focused on how damaging it is to James Comey. But I think the leakers had an entirely different agenda.

ABC News, which received the leaks and broke the news, headlined, “DOJ watchdog finds James Comey defied authority as FBI director, sources say.” Certainly, this conclusion is not complimentary toward Comey, but it seems to me that this is one of the most congenial to Comey of all the possible revelations that could be coming and may actually work to soften the coming blows when the report is released.

First of all, to whose authority was Comey insubordinate? That would be Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates, both of whom may well be subject to criticism in the final report. Neither woman is much admired by conservatives.

Second, who was harmed by Comey’s insubordination? ABC reports:

The draft of Horowitz’s wide-ranging report specifically called out Comey for ignoring objections from the Justice Department when he disclosed in a letter to Congress just days before the 2016 presidential election that FBI agents had reopened the Clinton probe, according to sources. Clinton has said that letter doomed her campaign.

This is exactly what Hillary partisans have complained about, even stating that this could have cost her the election. Now, who would have an interest in portraying Hillary as the victim?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/andrew-mccabe-seeks-immunity-judiciary-committee/The Judiciary Committee shouldn’t give it to him.

Timing is everything in life. House speaker Paul Ryan has decided to back Representative Trey Gowdy’s (foolish) suggestion that there was nothing irregular about the FBI’s use of an informant to investigate the Trump campaign. Ironically, Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director who was deeply involved in that investigation, picked the same time to make it known that he will not testify before Congress unless he is granted immunity from prosecution.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, to which McCabe’s lawyer made the request, should tell him “No thanks.” McCabe should be reminded that he is free to assert the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination if he believes truthful answers would put him in jeopardy, but there should be no immunity.

Besides the Russia probe, McCabe oversaw the Clinton-emails investigation after being appointed deputy director in February 2016. As the bureau’s No. 2 official, he had very broad supervisory responsibility over investigations nationally and globally. But his oversight of the Clinton case was much closer than usual for a deputy director, because the FBI took the highly unusual step of running the investigation out of headquarters. The FBI generally avoids doing that for a variety of prudent reasons, not least that its field offices across the country are removed from Washington’s intense political environment.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/07/carter_page_russian_spy__or_fbi_honor_scout.html

The FBI’s interview with Carter Page in March 2016 is one of the seminal events of the Trump-Russia probe. Democrats have long pointed to it as evidence of the bureau’s longstanding fears that Page might be a Russian spy and to downplay the role of the Clinton-financed dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele in securing a FISA surveillance warrant against Page.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, ranking Democrat on the House intelligence panel. Top photo: Carter Page at a Moscow press conference in December 2016.

“The FBI interviewed Page multiple times about his Russian intelligence contacts, including in March 2016,” Rep. Adam Schiff and other Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee argued in their 10-page memo defending the Obama Justice Department’s monitoring of Page. “The FBI’s concern about and knowledge of Page’s activities therefore long predate the FBI’s receipt of Steele’s information.”

But new information challenges that account. In an interview with RealClearInvestigations, Page insists that the interview in question – held at then-U.S. attorney Preet Bharara’s office in New York — had “absolutely nothing” to do with the Trump campaign or Russian collusion. Instead of being grilled about shadowy ties, he says he answered questions “related to events in 2013, in a case where I had served as a witness in support of the FBI.”

In 2013, a Russian national working as an unregistered foreign agent at a Russian bank in Manhattan sought information from Page, a longtime energy consultant, related to U.S. efforts to develop alternative energy resources, according to court papers filed by the FBI. Although Page thought the man was a legitimate banker after meeting him at an energy symposium in New York City, he was a Russian agent under federal investigation. He was later caught on surveillance dismissing Page as an “idiot.”

The FBI informed Page in 2013 that the Russians might be trying to recruit him.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/06/06/trump-signs-law-expanding-vets-healthcare-choices/673906002/

WASHINGTON — President Trump signed legislation Wednesday paving the way for a major overhaul of the Department of Veterans Affairs and expanded access for veterans to VA-funded care in the private sector.

The measure, which passed both chambers of Congress last month with overwhelming bipartisan support, delivers on a key campaign promise for Trump, who pledged to provide veterans with more non-VA health care choices.

“What a beautiful word that is — choice — and freedom to our amazing veterans,” Trump said at the signing ceremony. “All during the campaign I’d go out and say, ‘why can’t they just go see a doctor instead of standing in line for weeks and weeks and weeks?’ Now they can go see a doctor.”

Working out the details of exactly how and when that will happen is now up to agency officials tasked with drawing up regulations under the law.

If confirmed, Trump’s pick to lead the VA, Robert Wilkie, would lead that effort. Criteria to be considered include wait times for VA appointments, quality of VA care and distance from a VA facility.

Known as the VA MISSION Act, the law directs the VA to combine a number of existing private-care programs, including the so-called Choice program, which was created in 2014 after veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix VA.

Two veterans from Texas who traveled to Washington to be at the signing said the Choice program has been extremely helpful for them. Laura Vela, who served in the U.S. Army, and Air Force veteran Antonio Garcia said they previously had to drive nearly four hours each way to reach the nearest VA hospital in San Antonio.

“To me, it’s the perfect program,” said Garcia, who had his knee replaced last year by a health care provider about a half mile from his home in Brownsville.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12033/swamp-strikes-back

The culture of the D.C. metropolitan area is one of wealth, privilege and self-proclaimed sophistication. The bureaucrats and insiders know what is best for you, best for your business, best for themselves, and they can make a nice living without being disrupted. Trump campaigned on disrupting this comfortable power perch; that is what they most hate about him.

The Russian collusion investigation has not found any collusion because the investigation was never about collusion. It was always about an out-of-control federal government, emboldened by the lawless age of Obama, and flexing its newfound muscle. The Russian collusion investigation is about a clash of cultures, with one culture being the culture of D.C. insiders, and the other being the folks who pay their salaries.

Each week, Robert Mueller’s Wonderlandian investigation into “Russian Collusion” appears “curiouser and curiouser”. Each week, it appears that the entire investigation never really had anything to do with Russian collusion, at least in the Trump campaign; only in the Hillary Clinton campaign, where all the investigators have been conscientiously not looking.

First, Mueller indicted General Michael Flynn for not telling the truth to an FBI squad that appeared unexpectedly at the White House to question him, when now it turns out that Peter Strzok, who interrogated him, said he had not lied. It also now turns out that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe may later have altered Strzok’s interrogation notes, and then destroyed the evidence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/obama-administration-iran-deal-failure-and-reckoning/The Obama administration’s ‘norms’ and ‘values’ included deception and weakness.

The “scandal-free” Obama administration sure liked to lie a lot. This morning, America awoke to yet another revelation that Obama officials misled Congress about their dealings with Iran.

A Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report alleges that the administration secretly sought to give Iran access — albeit briefly — to the U.S. financial system by sidestepping sanctions kept in place after the 2015 nuclear deal, despite repeatedly telling Congress and the public it had no plans to do so. Specifically, the Obama Treasury Department issued a license that would have allowed U.S. banks to participate in a scheme to convert $5.7 billion in Iranian funds into U.S. dollars and then euros. The American banks declined to participate, “citing the reputational risk of doing business with or for Iran.” The license wasn’t unlawful, but, to quote the Associated Press, it “went above and beyond what the Obama administration was required to do under the terms of the nuclear agreement.”

In other words, the Obama administration tried to do Iran an immense financial favor, one not required by the deal itself, to uphold the mythical “spirit” of the agreement (yes, that’s their off-the-record excuse). Iran had reportedly complained that it “wasn’t reaping the benefits it envisioned,” and the Obama administration attempted to help — even though it had publicly assured Americans that “Iran will be denied access to the world’s most important market and unable to deal in the world’s most important currency.”

‘If we wish to preserve a free society,” Friedrich Hayek observed, “it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a cautionary example.

Mr. Cuomo issued a statement in April warning financial institutions that they faced “reputational risk” if they do business with the National Rifle Association: “I am directing the Department of Financial Services to urge insurers and bankers statewide to determine whether any relationship they may have with the NRA or similar organizations sends the wrong message to their clients.” Soon after, the DFS hit an insurance company and a broker working with the NRA on policies for gun owners with large fines for license violations. The one-two punch of the warning and fines sent a chilling message to corporations with lawful business ties to the NRA.

This wasn’t the first time Mr. Cuomo had used extralegal coercion. In February he tried to change the rules in the middle of a transaction in which Fidelis Care, a nonprofit health insurer operated by the Diocese of Brooklyn, was purchased by a for-profit company, Centene . The governor demanded a massive cut because Fidelis earned much of its revenue from state-funded programs like Medicaid—money that was for services rendered.

Mr. Cuomo threatened both to withhold state approval of the sale and to push a bill through the Legislature confiscating the money whether or not the sale took place. They couldn’t stand up to the threats and will pay Mr. Cuomo a $2 billion ransom.