RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/04/where-is-carter-pages-

Two years ago this month, President Obama’s FBI began investigating Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Four campaign associates were targeted: campaign manager Paul Manafort; Trump’s foreign policy advisor and Obama’s former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael Flynn; and foreign policy aides George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.

The timing was not coincidental. Polling in late July 2016 showed the presidential race tightening following a relatively successful Republican National Convention and a messy Democratic National Convention marked by intraparty strife. The FBI was still under fire after James Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton from any wrongdoing related to her private email server.

Although the reigning political wisdom at the time was that Hillary Clinton would easily defeat Trump in November, top FBI officials wanted a backup plan in the event their favored candidate lost. In August 2016, then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe reportedly met with lead FBI investigator Peter Strzok and FBI counsel Lisa Page to concoct an “insurance policy” in case of a Trump victory.

And so began the first known federal investigation into a sitting president’s political foe and potential successor in U.S. history.

No Charges
Two years later, three of the four original suspects remain in legal trouble. Paul Manafort is now on trial and being held in solitary confinement, indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in two separate jurisdictions for charges unrelated to alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security advisor who resigned after being set-up by Obama holdovers, is awaiting sentencing for pleading guilty to one count of lying to federal agents. And George Papadopoulos is scheduled to be sentenced next month on one charge of making false statements to federal investigators.

The only man still not charged with any crime is Carter Page. Two years later, the Trump campaign volunteer who was accused of being a secret agent for the Russians is a free man. And the FBI has yet to explain why.

Page—an Eagle Scout and Naval Academy graduate—arguably has suffered the greatest personal price. After helping the FBI nab a Russian foreign agent in 2016, Page suddenly became an FBI target when then-candidate Trump announced Page would serve as one of his foreign policy advisors. (Page has never met Trump and was not paid by the campaign for his work.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-versus-mueller-bill-clinton-starr-strat

The Clinton playbook works. But that does not commend it.

President Trump is using an interesting strategy. Interesting, not novel. It is the same “scandalize the prosecutor” strategy that the Clinton camp used against Ken Starr in the 1990s. Far from being condemned back then, it was aided and abetted by the same media-Democrat complex that today clutches its pearls in anguish.

One aspect of this strategy has many legal commentators aghast: the bombastic performance of my old boss, Rudy Giuliani. He has always been brash, but in the role of Trump’s lead lawyer, he no longer seems like the meticulous pro of yesteryear. Thus, he’s been lampooned: a cartoonish figure who can’t keep his story straight. But have you seen the approval polls of the Russia investigation since he took over the president’s defense team? Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe is now viewed unfavorably by 45 percent of Americans, according to a recent Washington Post/George Mason University poll. That’s up markedly from 31 percent at the start of the year.

We’ll come back to that in a second.

First, let’s assess the latest iteration of this strategy: President Trump’s tweet storm on Wednesday. Clearly, all the tweets (seven in total) had one objective: to attack the Mueller probe. But we must split them into two groups because their ramifications are different. Group 1 (the firstthree tweets and the last one) presents a full frontal assault on Mueller and his staff, with a sideswipe at Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal, which paved the way for the special counsel’s appointment and remains a stone in the president’s shoe. Group 2 (here, here, and here) addresses Mueller’s prosecution of Paul Manafort, in which a trial is underway in a Virginia federal court.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21466/trump-derangement-syndrome-a-prelude-to-anarchy http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The election of President Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the emotional stability of those living in subjective reality because they cannot tolerate the threat of objective reality that President Trump represents. The clash between subjective reality and objective reality has launched what is now known as Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDR) or more recently Trump Anxiety Disorder (TAD). The incursion of objective reality is so threatening to anti-Trumpers that they break down psychologically and require medication and psychological services.

In times of severe emotional stress such as death, divorce, loss of a job, it is not uncommon for individuals to have a period of adjustment when they need time to come to terms with the reality of their new situation. In extreme cases of traumatic stress individuals may even withdraw from reality until they are strong enough to deal with the facts of their new situation. What is different about anti-Trumpers is that their coping mechanisms are so underdeveloped that they are traumatized by election outcomes and refuse to accept the loss of their preferred candidate. What happens? They suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDR).

Mark Alexander posted an article he wrote 8.1.18 titled, “Therapists Rebrand ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome'” exploring the subject:

“The pop culture Urban Dictionary defines Trump Derangement Syndrome as “a mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their dislike of Donald Trump, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason. Symptoms for this condition can be very diverse, ranging from hysterical outbursts to a complete mental break. . . I would suggest that the increasing frequency and intensity of hysterics associated with TDR is greatly exacerbated by the unmitigated, constant consumption of hateful Democrat/mainstream media propaganda, 24/7/365. The result is a mass movement of those so intent on undermining Trump that they are now far off the reality reservation and utterly obsessed with defeating peace and prosperity.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-in-florida-the-time-has-come-for-photo-id-for-voting/

President Trump, speaking at a rally in Tampa, Fla., resurrected the issue of photo ID at the polls, suggesting that all voters should be required to show ID when they vote for president, senator, governor, or congressman.
“The time has come for voter ID, like everything else,” the president told supporters, “voter ID.”

“If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID,” said Trump. “You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID. And you need your picture.”

“In this country the only time you don’t need it in many cases is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman,” Trump continued. “It’s crazy. It’s crazy. But we are turning it around.”

While many were quick to brand Trump as out of touch for not knowing that you don’t need a photo ID to buy groceries, his underlying premise — that we need better election security — was on point.

For years Democrats have fought every effort to secure our elections, crying “racism” in response to even the most minor changes to state voting laws.
PJM’s Roger Simon wrote last week that he was pleasantly surprised to learn that his new home state of Tennessee requires voters to present a photo ID at the polls — unlike his former home state of California, where he wasn’t asked to show any identification.

In fact, Tennesee is one of only a handful of states that require a photo ID to vote.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-are-the-fbi-and-cia-hiding-1533078662

Did the Central Intelligence Agency lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation down a rabbit hole in the counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign?

Although the FBI’s case officially began July 31, 2016, there had been investigative activity before that date. John Brennan’s CIA might have directed activity in Britain, which could be a problem because of longstanding agreements that the U.S. will not conduct intelligence operations there. It would explain why the FBI continues to stonewall Congress as to the inquiry’s origin.

Further, what we know about the case’s origin does not meet the threshold required by the attorney general guidelines for opening a counterintelligence case. That standard requires “predicate information,” or “articulable facts.”

From what has been made public, all that passes for predicate information in this matter originated in Britain. Stefan Halper, an American who ran the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge, had been a CIA source in the past. Recent press reports describe him as an FBI informant. Joseph Mifsud, another U.K.-based academic with ties to Western intelligence, met with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos on April 26, 2016. Mr. Mifsud reportedly mentioned “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Then, on May 10, Mr. Papadopoulos met with Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer in London, to whom he relayed the claim about “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton.

Peter Strzok, the FBI’s deputy assistant director, went to London Aug. 2, 2016, two days after the case was opened, ostensibly to interview Mr. Downer about his conversation with Mr. Papadopoulos. But what about the earlier investigative activity? The FBI would not usually maintain an informant in England. It is far likelier that in the spring of 2016 Mr. Halper was providing information to British intelligence or directly to the CIA, where Mr. Brennan was already pushing the collusion narrative.

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that “intelligence agencies” were looking into the collusion allegations in spring 2016. The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that British intelligence had been suspicious about contacts between associates of Mr. Trump’s campaign and possible Russian agents. That prompted Robert Hannigan, then head of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, to pass information to Mr. Brennan. With only these suspicions, Mr. Brennan pressured the FBI into launching its counterintelligence probe. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.city-journal.org/html/closing-skills-gap-16083.html

According to the Department of Labor, more than 6.5 million jobs remain unfilled because employers can’t find workers with the necessary skills. Some of this shortfall may reflect the fact that U.S. unemployment rate is historically low, but much of it stems from inadequate worker training. The problem shows up clearly in the widening wage gap for skilled work, which extends beyond the well-documented distinction between the earnings of the college-educated and those with only a high school diploma or less. Across the spectrum of work, the premium for skill continues to grow.

As the baby boomers retire, many skilled workers will leave the productive economy. Just to sustain existing levels of productivity, their replacements will need to rise to their predecessors’ skill level quickly. Global competition will continue to exert pressure, regardless of President Trump’s tariffs. Low wages in emerging economies have drawn manufacturing of simpler, low-value-added products offshore, leaving our high-wage economy with little choice but to turn to more complex, high-value-added products, which demand a better-trained workforce. Rapid technological progress will make its own demands for skilled labor: nearly one in five of today’s jobs did not exist in 1980. More recently, artificial intelligence has threatened to replace less-skilled workers—and even some higher-skilled ones—through automation. American workers will need to upgrade their skills continuously to stay ahead of these economic pressures.

Washington has been slow to respond until now. The Trump White House has supported the expansion of apprenticeship programs and is now pressing legislation to increase access to technical education, most notably through the Perkins Career and Technical Education bill. Executive orders aim to expand training, which the White House refers to as “workforce development.” Adding to such ad hoc efforts, the administration has promised to develop a concerted strategy for “training and retraining” workers for “high-demand industries.”

A recent report by the Council of Economic Advisors lays out the difficulties in meeting the training challenge. Though all interested parties—individuals, employers, government entities, even social-welfare organizations—have strong incentives to train more workers, each group also faces impediments to success. Few individuals can afford to pay the costs or take the necessary time away from work for retraining. Nor is it clear which training or which credential fits the work on offer. Employers, fearful that workers will take their newly acquired skills to competitors, are reluctant to contribute to outside training programs. Government and nonprofits devoted to workforce development are struggling to identify the best ways to get workers trained in a timely fashion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/rod-rosenstein-impeachment-bad-idea/

This is not the way to hold the executive branch accountable.

In what was, at best, a serious tactical error, a relative handful of House conservatives attempted to file articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The effort was quickly abandoned owing to a lack of support — including from many Republican lawmakers who believe it is essential to hold investigative agencies accountable for abuses of their legal authorities during the 2016 campaign. The impeachment gambit risks setting back that cause.

There are five articles that purport to allege impeachable offenses. I say “purport” advisedly. It is not just that no actionable misconduct on Rosenstein’s part has been established at this point. More fundamentally, some of the articles do not even state “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the applicable constitutional standard for impeachment and removal.

There are several other flaws, but I’ll deal with the two most important. First, the sponsors of the impeachment gambit conveniently overlook the fact that the deputy attorney general has a boss: President Trump. Their use of Rosenstein as a political piñata cannot obscure their studied failure to mention that the president could order the disclosure they demand at any time. This undermines Congress’s worthy examination of investigative abuses by bolstering the Democrats’ claim that Republicans are engaged in political theater to discredit the Mueller probe.

Second, Santa Claus has a better chance of being impeached than Rod Rosenstein. An impeachment attempt that is overwhelmingly defeated encourages the very misconduct it targets.

Judgment Calls Are Not Impeachable Offenses — Articles I and V
High crimes and misdemeanors are egregious violations of an official’s public trust, as I outlined in Faithless Execution, my 2014 book on the role of impeachment in our constitutional framework. For a balanced, accessible explanation of this topic, I also commend to readers Professor Cass Sunstein’s recent book, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

Impeachable offenses need not be criminal-law violations; indeed, many abuses of government power are not codified as crimes in the penal code. And there is no judicial check on impeachment; Congress alone decides how it’s used. But the Framers were quite clear that impeachment is not intended to address policy differences or good-faith legal positions that turn out to be wrong (or, at least, to be rejected by the courts). They designed the impeachment power so that it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to use that way. An impeachment gambit that fails to pass the House by a majority vote, to say nothing of removing the official from office with a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate, only emboldens the alleged wrongdoer.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/robert-mueller-investigation-perception-inequality/

What is disturbing about the Mueller investigation is not per se that a special counsel is looking into charges of wrongdoing known as “collusion,” but that he is indicting or leveraging suspects, amid a larger landscape of related perceived wrongdoers, who so far have not been subject to the same federal zeal.

We do not know all the details, but the public wonders exactly why Michael Flynn was leveraged to confess about lying to federal authorities (in theory, in part due to surveillance obtained by questionable FISA warrants), while, for example, Clinton aides Human Abedin and Cheryl Mills were given partial immunity for their reported misleading statements about their knowledge of the Clinton email server.

People rightly wonder whether there will be consequences facing Andrew McCabe for allegedly lying about leaking to federal investigators, or for the flagrant way that John Brennan has so serially prevaricated under oath to Congress (about Senate staff computers, drone collateral damage, and the seeding of the Steele dossier).

If it turns out that DOJ and FBI officials deliberately misled FISA justices by not disclosing that they knew the Steele dossier was a product of Clinton-purchased opposition research, or that the collaborative news accounts they cited to the court were in truth circular offspring of the Steele dossier, then certainly they should be held legally accountable. The logical inference would be that they feared such full and honest disclosures might endanger the granting of the warrants.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/origins-of-second-civil-war-globalism-tech-boom-immigration-campus-radicalism/
Globalism, the tech boom, illegal immigration, campus radicalism, the new racialism . . . Are they leading us toward an 1861?

How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?

Almost every cultural and social institution — universities, the public schools, the NFL, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Grammys, late-night television, public restaurants, coffee shops, movies, TV, stand-up comedy — has been not just politicized but also weaponized.

Donald Trump’s election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.

We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography — always history’s force multiplier of civil strife. Red and blue states ensure that locale magnifies differences that were mostly manageable during the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton.

What has caused the United States to split apart so rapidly?

Globalization
Globalization had an unfortunate effect of undermining national unity. It created new iconic billionaires in high tech and finance, and their subsidiaries of coastal elites, while hollowing out the muscular jobs largely in the American interior.

Ideologies and apologies accumulated to justify the new divide. In a reversal of cause and effect, losers, crazies, clingers, American “East Germans,” and deplorables themselves were blamed for driving industries out of their neighborhoods (as if the characters out of Duck Dynasty or Ax Men turned off potential employers). Or, more charitably to the elites, the muscular classes were too racist, xenophobic, or dense to get with the globalist agenda, and deserved the ostracism and isolation they suffered from the new “world is flat” community. London and New York shared far more cultural affinities than did New York and Salt Lake City.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/30/progressive

Donald Trump has certainly changed the rules of presidential behavior, through his nonstop campaign rallies, tweets, and press conferences. What his critics call lowering the bar of presidential decorum by unfettered and often crude invective, Trump dubs the “new presidential.”

His style has become a sort of “don’t-tread-on-me” combativeness. In truth, Trump at home and abroad is mostly retaliatory. His theory seems to be that no slight should go unanswered. When Trump retorts in kind or trumps the original attack, he believes he adds yet another brick to his wall of deterrence—and exposes the sometimes dormant and disguised irrational hatred of the Left.

But what the Left loses in its slugfests with Trump are some once-supposed cherished leftist principles, justified by the short-term advantage of nullifying the Trump agenda.

Indeed, it is eerie that almost all the canons of progressive orthodoxy no longer apply. And they will no longer be taken seriously after Trump is long gone. Certainly, those lost principles will be impossible to reassert when Democrats return to power and seek sanctuary in the very ideas they have now so utterly trashed.

Liberals, who now warn of Trump’s “war on the press” long ago excused Eric Holder’s monitoring of the Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen. And they had no problem with John Brennan lying under oath when he claimed the Obama CIA had not monitored the computers of Senate staffers (he would lie brazenly again under oath about drone collateral damage and his role in seeding the Steele dossier).

Likewise, they snoozed after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress in his denial of government surveillance of U.S. citizens. Both were seen at the time to be useful liars. Their partisanship and exemption from any consequences for past lying under oath led to lucrative cable news gigs—proof, as it were, of their innate Trump hatred. Their legacy is that lying under oath now is not a sin, much less illegal.