RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/390922-gop-senate-report-says-obama-officials-gave-iran-access-to-us

A new Senate GOP-authored report alleges that top officials in the Obama administration secretly authorized Iran to convert assets to the U.S. dollar, even after the officials repeatedly assured Congress that no such financial transactions would take place under the 2015 nuclear deal.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, unveiled the new report on Wednesday, claiming top government officials granted a “license” that would allow the “conversion of Iranian assets worth billions of U.S. dollars using the U.S. financial system.”

“Senior U.S. government officials repeatedly testified to Congress that Iranian access to the U.S. financial system was not on the table or part of any deal,” the report reads.

“Despite these claims, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, at the direction of the U.S. State Department, granted a specific license that authorized a conversion of Iranian assets worth billions of U.S. dollars using the U.S. financial system,” it continues.

The transactions didn’t go through, however, because two U.S. banks refused to comply with the administration’s request to convert the money over legal and reputational concerns, the report says.

The report cites multiple instances where top officials such as Treasury Secretary Jack Lew pledged before Congress and the public that Iran would not have access to the U.S. financial system, both before and after authorizing the license.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/05/what-didnt-trump

How can a president obstruct justice when he did not know there was any justice to obstruct?

For more than a year, Donald Trump’s foes have pinned their impeachment hopes on the idea that the president obstructed justice when he allegedly told then-FBI Director James Comey in February 2017 to “let this go.” Comey claims that remark was about Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, who had just been forced to resign amid allegations he lied about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the transition.

The widespread (unconfirmed) assumption, then and now, is that Flynn was under some kind of investigation and that Trump’s off-the-cuff, vague remark (which the president denies) is evidence he was pressuring Comey to drop the case—and therefore obstructing justice.

Although Flynn did meet with FBI investigators in January 2017 (without a lawyer present and without notifying the White House), it is unclear whether Flynn was the subject of a formal investigation or the agency was simply looking for clarification about the conversations.

But a letter written by Trump’s lawyers to Special Counsel Robert Mueller and leaked over the weekend to the New York Times now reveals that the Justice Department refused to give a direct answer about whether Flynn was indeed under investigation at the time. According to the letter, a private meeting between Trump’s personal lawyer and then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates on January 27, 2017, went down like this:

Among the issues discussed was whether dismissal of Flynn by the President would compromise any ongoing investigations. Yates was unwilling to confirm or deny that there was an ongoing investigation but did indicate that the DOJ would not object to the White House taking action against Flynn.

Therefore, Trump’s lawyers argue, there “could not possibly have been intent to obstruct an ‘investigation’ that had been neither confirmed nor denied to White House Counsel, and that they had every reason to assume was not ongoing.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270368/why-mueller-getting-desperate-daniel-greenfield

$16.7 million. That’s the bill for the Mueller investigation.

The last spending phase, from October to March, included $2.7 million in salaries with another $532,340 in travel expenses. And there’s no sign that this hideously expensive circus is ever going to end.

The latest high-wire act in the circus is yet another accusation aimed at Paul Manafort. This time, Mueller’s favorite target is being accused of witness tampering. Like most of Mueller’s favorite charges, such as making false statements, this isn’t a crime being uncovered, but arises from the investigation.

The accusation is also obviously a means to an end. Mueller had bet everything on pressuring Paul.

The pre-dawn no-knock raid of Manafort’s home was unnecessary, but intimidating. And Mueller’s people were grousing ever since Manafort had been released from house arrest.

In December, they wanted to rip up his agreement because he had supposedly been working on an editorial which violated the gag order, even though it was never published. This time around there’s another claim that he was in contact with his old buddies “in an effort to influence their testimony and to otherwise conceal evidence”. Now the goal may be to move Manafort from home to prison.

The low U.S. labor force participation rate has several causes, but a major one is the disincentive to work created by government programs. The Republican Party’s growth wing has spent years developing ideas for addressing these incentives not to work and rise up the economic ladder, and the results are starting to show.

Last month to almost no attention the House Ways and Means Committee moved a bill from Chairman Kevin Brady that would update the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, known as TANF. This program is the result of the Newt Gingrich-Bill Clinton 1996 welfare reform.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Doar noted recently that TANF on the whole is a success. The program has declined as a share of 1996 spending while Medicaid and food stamps have exploded. One big reason is because TANF is a block grant to states, unlike the Medicaid racket that allows states to draw down more federal dollars for every new enrollee. The program even survived attempts at sabotage by the Obama Administration like expanding waivers for work requirements.

The current system requires states to engage 50% of families in work activities. But that means states can write off some of the tougher cases. And gimmicks like a “caseload reduction credit” allow states to buy down the 50% rate to a much lower benchmark or even 0% of families. Mr. Brady’s bill would require that 100% of recipients engage in work or training as a precondition of receiving benefits.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/economy-jobs-report-more-openings-than-seekers/

The U.S. economy reached a record 6.7 million job openings in April, the Department of Labor stated Tuesday, hundreds of thousands more than the number of unemployed workers.

March and April both saw the number of job openings outstrip the number of unemployed workers.

There were 6.7 million job openings in April and only 6.35 million job seekers. The previous month saw 6.63 million job openings, more than the 6.59 million unemployed workers.

The number of openings has never been higher than the number of job seekers since the government started counting employment opportunities in 2000.

May saw 223,000 jobs added to the U.S. economy.

Obama defies the Constitution but sounds ‘presidential.’ Trump follows it but sounds like a loudmouth from Queens.

Donald Trump blusters nonstop. He offers contrasting messages about whether, on any given day, he might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. His tweets are certainly not presidential, at least as the adjective is usually understood.

At perpetual campaign rallies, Trump mocks his critics, caricaturing their voices and slamming them with adolescent epithets like “Cryin’ Chuckie Schumer.” He accuses House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of being an enabler of M-13 gang members after she chastised him for calling such psychopaths “animals.” Trump has defined his own uncouthness, which so incenses his opponents, as “the new presidential.”

Yet so far, after over a year of intense investigation, Special Counsel Mueller has found no evidence that Donald Trump — or even his low-level subordinates — had ever colluded with Russian government interests to hijack the 2016 election and defeat Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Mueller has shown himself desperate to indict almost anyone connected with the Trump campaign with almost any charge he can think of — other than colluding with the Russians to warp an election, his original mandate.

Call the Trump paradox “crass lawfulness.” What drives Trump’s critics nearly crazy is not any evidence that Trump has broken federal laws per se. Instead, their rub is that there are somehow no criminal statutes against a president boorishly acting “unpresidential” in his loud quest to supercharge the economy, while undoing the entire agenda of his predecessor, who was so dearly beloved by the media, universities, Hollywood, and identity-politics groups.

Certainly, President Obama’s teleprompted speeches were mellifluous. As some sort of postmodern preacher, Obama often sermonized to Americans about the predetermined “arc of history” that purportedly bent all of us inescapably toward his own just moral version of the universe.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/masterpiece-cakeshop-setback-liberty/

This was a straightforward free-expression case, and the Court could have resolved the dispute in favor of liberty.

I must respectfully disagree with the editors regarding the Supreme Court’s ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop.

Professor Steve Vladek is right: The decision is “remarkably narrow.” One cannot help but be struck by the majority’s reticence from the outset: “Whatever the outcome of some future controversy involving facts similar to these, the Commission’s actions here violated the Free Exercise Clause.” Mind you, this is from the pen of Anthony Kennedy, a judicial supremacist who ordinarily interrupts his liberty bender only to scold the People — formerly known as the sovereign — to pipe down and quit grousing once the Robed Nine have spoken.

On this one, though, Justice Kennedy assures the Left it can grouse away. This ruling, in grudging accommodation of religious conviction, will not necessarily bear on the outcome “of some future controversy involving facts similar to these.”

To be sure, I am all for a Lincolnian construction that reduces Supreme Court rulings to a duly narrow resolution of the dispute between the litigating parties, leaving it to the republic to govern itself accountably. But that is not what’s going on here. This case is a one-off. The justices, manifestly pained, side ever so ambiguously with religious liberty, a founding principle of the nation, over gay marriage, a trendy progressive cause that would not remotely have been threatened in Colorado had Jack Phillips been left in peace to honor his convictions.

Kennedy’s sweet-mystery-of-life jurisprudence is all about exploring the exotic contours of liberty to discover heretofore unknown substantive safeguards. Not in this case, though. Confronted by a liberty twofer — an attack on free-expression rights that also burdens religious liberty — the justices punt on substantive protections for traditional religious exercise and speech (the latter liberty that could and should have decided the case in Mr. Phillips’s favor); they agitate, instead, over procedural flaws in the state’s adjudication of the conscience question.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/debbie-wasserman-schultz-shield-tech-aide-capitol-hill-hacking-probe/

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) intervened in a Pakistani land dispute on behalf of her then-IT aide, Imran Awan, before pressuring House officials to kill an investigation into his hacking of House servers, according to a new Daily Caller report.

Awan, who worked as an IT aide for roughly two-thirds of House Democrats, was found to have gained “unauthorized access” to House servers in July 2016. The finding came just three days after Wikileaks released the first batch of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, at a time when Wasserman Schultz led the DNC.

Unlike most of her Democratic colleagues, who promptly fired Awan upon learning of the investigation, Wasserman Schultz became “frantic, not normal” and began “making the rounds” to pressure House officials to kill the probe, according to the Caller‘s sources. She subsequently attacked House chief administrative officer Phil Kiko, calling him a “f***ing Islamophobe.”

Wasserman Schultz reportedly enjoyed a close relationship Awan. The Caller‘s House sources claimed she had told Kiko she invited the entire Awan family to her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, and that she “helped [Awan] with a land deal.”

https://spectator.org/team-muellers-illegal-unethical-hunt-for

In the early 1970s, when I was a freshly minted Special Attorney with the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the U.S. Justice Department, my fellow newly hired colleagues and I attended a lecture at Main Justice given by John Dowd, a well-regarded veteran prosecutor. His topic was the then little known and almost never used Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

Dowd explained in detail the vast sweep of the statute and described the mind-boggling powers that Congress had conferred on us. In those long gone days of limited federal jurisdiction, we had a hard time processing what he was saying. According to him, Congress had effectively federalized almost every form of state criminal activity and had provided draconian and almost unimaginable punitive measures designed to strip defendants of their liberty and property.

Frankly, we thought Dowd was crazy. As he described it, RICO seemed too good to be true. But it wasn’t. We soon learned that he wasn’t nuts but a prophet, and, within a few short years, RICO became a standard prosecutorial bat that we enthusiastically swung with both hands.

I lost track of John Dowd until he became co-lead counsel of the president’s legal team dealing with Robert Mueller’s investigation of purported collusion between the Trump campaign and unnamed Russian operatives. To my dismay, I watched Dowd and co-counsel Ty Cobb pursue a course of complete transparency and cooperation with Mueller. According to media reports, they voluntarily produced over a million pages of documents and made administration witnesses available for interrogation. All of this was premised on the stated belief that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia and that the president did not obstruct justice by firing FBI Director James Comey.