RUTHFULLY YOURS

When legal bloodhounds and baying critics fail to take out Trump, what’s next? The Resistance wants Trump’s head — on the chopping block.

On the domestic and foreign fronts, the Trump administration has prompted economic growth and restored U.S. deterrence. Polls show increased consumer confidence, and in some, Trump himself has gained ground. Yet good news is bad news to the Resistance and its strange continued efforts to stop an elected president in a way it failed to do in the 2106 election.

Indeed, the aim of the so-called Resistance to Donald J. Trump is ending Trump’s presidency by any means necessary before the 2020 election. Or, barring that, it seeks to so delegitimize him that he becomes presidentially impotent. It has been only 16 months since Trump took office and, in the spirit of revolutionary fervor, almost everything has been tried to derail him. Now we are entering uncharted territory — at a time when otherwise the country is improving and the legal exposure of Trump’s opponents increases daily.

First came the failed lawsuits after the election alleging voting-machine tampering. Then there was the doomed celebrity effort to convince some state electors not to follow their constitutional duty and to deny Trump the presidency — a gambit that, had it worked, would have wrecked the Constitution. Then came the pathetic congressional boycott of the inauguration and the shrill nationwide protests against the president.

Anti- and Never-Trump op-ed writers have long ago run out of superlatives. Trump is the worst, most, biggest — fill in the blank — in the history of the presidency, in the history of the world, worse even than Mao, Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler.

Next was the sad effort to introduce articles of impeachment. After that came weird attempts to cite Trump for violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. That puerile con was followed by plans to declare him deranged and mentally unfit so that he could be removed under the 25th Amendment. From time to time, Obama holdovers in the DOJ, National Security Council, and FBI sought to leak information, or they refused to carry out presidential orders.

As the Resistance goes from one ploy to the next, it ignores its string of failed prior efforts, forgetting everything and learning nothing. State nullification is no longer neo-Confederate but an any-means-necessary progressive tool. Suing the government weekly is proof of revolutionary fides, not a waste of California’s taxpayer dollars.

Anti- and Never-Trump op-ed writers have long ago run out of superlatives. Trump is the worst, most, biggest — fill in the blank — in the history of the presidency, in the history of the world, worse even than Mao, Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler. So if Trump is a Hitler who gassed 6 million or a Stalin who starved 20 million, then logically Trump deserves what exactly?

A seismic shift in the cultural and political American landscape this weekend emanated from an unlikely epicenter: superstar rapper Kanye West, who tweeted a controversial endorsement of black conservative commentator Candace Owens. Nothing triggers leftist anger quite like blacks thinking for themselves, and not like they do. So the left erupted with predictable fury toward both West and Owens.

Kanye, whose ubiquitous wife Kim Kardashian was a prominent supporter of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, has drawn leftist fire before. First, he incurred online scorn from the left and right in 2015 for announcing his serious intention to run for President in 2020. Then shortly after the 2016 presidential election, he shared with a California audience that he didn’t vote, but if he had, he “would’ve voted for Trump,” an admission that was unusual to say the least for a celebrity of his stature, black or white. It angered and bewildered fans so much that they actually expressed concern about Kanye’s mental health.

In December of 2016, he met briefly with Trump, who referred to Kanye at the time as his “friend,” to discuss “multicultural issues,” primarily the topic of violence in Chicago where Kanye was raised. This showed some surprising independence of mind and considerable courage on Kanye’s part, considering that black-on-black violence in blighted urban centers controlled by Democrat politicians is a scourge the left is silent about.

Then this past Saturday morning, Kanye dropped a bombshell tweet, declaring, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” As of this writing it has been retweeted over 21,000 times and “liked” over 81,000 times. A few minutes later he followed up with another seemingly supportive message, “only free thinkers,” which holds similarly high numbers of retweets and “likes.”

Owens is a millennial black conservative commentator known to her 183,000 subscribers on YouTube as “Red Pill Black.” Her recognition factor was increased last September by an interview with fellow former lefty Dave Rubin on his immensely popular YouTube talk show, The Rubin Report. In that interview she discussed her journey from left to right, her issues with the left’s corrosive identity politics, and her thoughts on activist journalists essentially serving as media “hitmen.” Rubin has continued to be a big supporter of Owens.

WASHINGTON – Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said Facebook’s 20,000 content reviewers bring their political “bias to work” and have blocked content that’s not related to issues such as terrorism.

Blackburn mentioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Silicon Valley an “extremely left-leaning place” during his recent Senate hearing under questioning from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

“We don’t ask people their political affiliation when they are hired,” Zuckerberg said at the hearing.

Blackburn said Congress should examine “guardrails” that could be put in place to prevent content that might offend certain people for political reasons from being blocked.

“He has 15-20,000 content reviewers and managers. So one of the things we have to realize is they bring that bias to work and then, as they develop an algorithm, how are they manipulating that algorithm?” Blackburn said during a Family Research Council discussion last Tuesday, “Losing Our Voices: Who Owns Free Speech on the Internet?”

The Russians say he did, and while some might say, well, these are the same Russians who helped put together the Steele dossier filled with “salacious and unverified” material, and may once again be playing with us, there is evidence that Brennan, the man who voted for communist Gus Hall for president, did make the trip in March 2016 for purposes unknown:

“It’s no secret that Brennan was here,” claimed Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov. “But he didn’t visit the Foreign Ministry. I know for sure that he met with the Federal Security Service (the successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and someone else.”

No further remarks clarify what Brennan was allegedly doing in Moscow or what he discussed with the FSB. Syromolotov insists it had nothing to do with Russia’s withdrawal from Syria.

Sputnik News, a Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlet, quotes CIA Director of Public Affairs Dean Boyd as affirming that Brennan did, in fact, discuss Syria during the visit. “Director Brennan,” he allegedly said, “reiterated the US government’s consistent support for a genuine political transition in Syria, and the need for [President Bashar] Assad’s departure in order to facilitate a transition that reflects the will of the Syrian people.”

The website GlobalSecurity.Org goes into somewhat more detail about Brennan’s Moscow trip without clearing up confusion about what the purpose of the trip might have been:

The Russians say he did, and while some might say, well, these are the same Russians who helped put together the Steele dossier filled with “salacious and unverified” material, and may once again be playing with us, there is evidence that Brennan, the man who voted for communist Gus Hall for president, did make the trip in March 2016 for purposes unknown:

“It’s no secret that Brennan was here,” claimed Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov. “But he didn’t visit the Foreign Ministry. I know for sure that he met with the Federal Security Service (the successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and someone else.”

No further remarks clarify what Brennan was allegedly doing in Moscow or what he discussed with the FSB. Syromolotov insists it had nothing to do with Russia’s withdrawal from Syria.

A key, if under-covered, aspect of the “Pakistani mystery man” story is that Imran Awan, the Pakistani-born IT aide of former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, took a laptop with username RepDWS after he was banned from the House computer network for “unauthorized access to data,” and then left it in a phone booth with a letter to prosecutors.

On Friday, President Donald Trump tweeted: “Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails.”

Trump appears to have accurately identified a key issue with the “Pakistani mystery man” that comes straight from court documents.

Lawyers for Pakistani-born Imran Awan currently have a copy of the contents of a laptop with the username RepDWS
Wasserman Schultz wanted to block prosecutors from seeing what was on it
Imran’s lawyers have attempted to set up a situation where it is up to Imran whether prosecutors can see the laptop, claiming “attorney client privilege”
Other analysts say the laptop should be fair game for review

Each twist has increased the intrigue:

On Feb. 2, 2017, Imran was banned from the House computer network for making “unauthorized access” to congressional data, according to the House inspector general
This happened not long after Wasserman Schultz was fired from the DNC after a cyber breach, yet she refused to fire Imran or even put him on paid leave, claiming that an IT aide didn’t need to access the internet to do his job
Wasserman Schultz’s refusal to fire him meant he had continued physical access to the congressional office buildings, even though all of his other part-time employers fired him and he knew there was an ongoing criminal investigation
On April 5, 2017, despite not being allowed to connect to the House network, he was in possession of a laptop with the username RepDWS and left it in a phone booth, where it was picked up by police who confiscated it because they recognized that it was left there by a criminal suspect

Washington’s self-righteous establishmentarians talk of professionalism when they act unprofessionally. They refer at length to their intellectual and professional pedigrees when they prove incompetent. And they cite their morality and ethics when they possess neither.

And then, adding insult to injury, when the public expresses abhorrence at their behavior, they accuse critics of unprofessionalism, a lack of patriotism, or reckless demagoguery.

A James Clapper can lie to Congress under oath about intelligence surveillance of U.S. citizens; a John Brennan can lie about CIA monitoring of U.S. Senate computers, or mislead Congress about the absence of any collateral damage in the use of drones. Yet we are supposed to give both further credence based on their emeriti titles or to believe their current Captain Renault-like outrage over President Trump’s lack of presidential decorum? But what in their past has earned them the moral high ground? Claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely “secular,” or redefining jihad as “a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam”?

Are we supposed to believe that Robert Mueller did not overreach by spinning off an investigation of Trump consigliere and lawyer Michael Cohen?

Why? Because we are also told that a regional federal prosecutor would have to have had good cause to order raids on Cohen? Because a federal judge would have had to have seen such credible evidence before anyone dared enter Cohen’s office and residence? Because another federal justice believes it is in the national interest that we know Michael Cohen knows Sean Hannity?

Once Bitten, Twice Shy
Trust in the Obama-era directorships of the Justice Department, FBI, and, indeed, the federal courts themselves are now horses that have long ago left the proverbial judicial barn. Should the public also believe that no sober and judicious FISA court judge would ever have approved surveillance of American citizens without asking where the evidence came from, who compiled it, who, if any, paid for it, or had a vested interest in seeing it used for a warrant? Should the public believe that its FBI director, and various deputy attorney generals, would never have dared keep from a FISA court information about their own submitted evidence?

The news reports have all focused on the FBI’s second-in-command leaking information to the Wall Street Journal – or authorizing subordinates to do so — and then lying to investigators about it. This is big news, provided that account is borne out by a subsequent criminal indictment and successful prosecution.

The news will be even bigger if Andrew McCabe pursues a scorched-earth policy against his FBI superior, James Comey, who started the investigation of his deputy. Even a prosecutor fresh out of law school ought to be able to flip McCabe, who is facing serious jail time and thinks he has been betrayed. Such men are dangerous.

McCabe’s testimony is the best way to learn why the FBI and Department of Justice seemingly mishandled everything related to Hillary Clinton and how the intelligence agencies routinely funneled classified material on Donald Trump to friendly news agencies. If there was a high-level conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Clinton investigation or to use the so-called “Deep State” to smear Trump, McCabe would know a lot about it.

He could also respond to the stunning allegation recently leveled by Rep. Devin Nunes, the California Republican who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. On Sunday, Nunes told Fox News anchorwoman Maria Bartiromo, “We now know that there was no official intelligence that was used to start this investigation” of Trump’s aides. Nunes has read the classified materials, and he is making a deeply troubling allegation: An official investigation was mounted against an American presidential campaign with no official information to support it. If so, then U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were weaponized for partisan purposes. McCabe would know about that, too, or know if it is untrue.

One of the hardest things to learn in politics is that just because you agree with someone and he is on “your team,” that doesn’t mean you can trust him, accept what he says at face value, or know for certain what’s in his heart.

Good character is often independent of ideology. Just as we must guard against temptation in our own lives, so too must we guard against blindly believing apparent allies. The fact that someone is being hunted down by your opponents doesn’t necessarily mean he’s worth defending.

Take two examples from this month, one from the left and one from the right.

The Justice Department’s inspector general (appointed by Barack Obama) has referred former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe for potential prosecution after establishing that he lied over and over to investigators about leaking to the media. James Comey, who was McCabe’s boss at the FBI, says he is certain that McCabe isn’t telling the truth about having kept him apprised of the press leak. But Comey himself cast doubt on the inspector general in an interview last week on NPR:

Even if the process was sound, and I’ve no doubt it was sound given the nature of the people involved in the inspector general’s office, there’s corrosive doubt about whether it’s a political fix to get Andy McCabe somehow.

By all evidence, McCabe is a staunch Democrat whose wife received $750,000 for her 2015 Virginia state-senate campaign from a top Hillary Clinton ally. (She lost the race.) Despite the conflict of interest, he declined to recuse himself from the FBI’s probe of Hillary’s emails until one week before the 2016 election. Liberal activists are setting up a legal defense fund for McCabe. Because he is seen as a Trump “resister,” he must be defended.

But blind loyalty on the left is matched by some on the right. This month, former GOP representative Steve Stockman of Texas was convicted on 23 felony charges. Stockman, a certified public accountant, used the prestige of his office to solicit $1.25 million from a pair of conservative donors for his campaign and various charities. But he wound up spending the loot on everything from hot-air-balloon rides and flights to Africa to an alcohol-rehab program for an aide and to a trip to Disneyland. He spent $24,000 to give his relatives “heirloom quality advent books.” All this was funneled through a web of 17 sham businesses and shell bank accounts in four states and the Virgin Islands.

The charge that Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election was never serious. The Democratic National Committee’s civil suit in that regard makes the unseriousness transparent. “Obstruction of justice” is the charge Democrats want to use to remove him from office. And in fact, Trump’s campaign, his election, and presidency, have done a lot of obstruction. He has thwarted longstanding bureaucratic policies and has fired bureaucrats. Whether that has obstructed justice or favored it depends on the meaning of “justice.”

The following explains the “justice” that the Democratic Party and its ruling class retinue correctly accuse Donald Trump of obstructing. Their justice, however, is contrary to the one embodied in the U.S. Constitution; never mind Plato’s classic sense of justice on which America’s founders relied. This classical notion of justice begins with guarding that which rightly belongs to each, and is founded on a political order that reflects the proper order of souls.

America’s Founders, having revolted against a legitimate government that was justly reputed to be perhaps mankind’s most liberal, had to explain to themselves, to their contemporaries, and to posterity why what they were doing was just. All them had read and revered William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. But all the procedures described therein, of which the Americans approved, had been based on the idea that the sovereign power of the permanent state flows legitimately from the existence of the kingdom, which the king embodies. The easy part was to argue that King George III had forfeited that power by abusing it, and hence the regime’s legitimacy. The more significant challenge was to show that there is no such thing as a sovereign power that exists independent of the people.

James Wilson, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, taken part in the constitutional convention of 1787, and served on the first U.S. Supreme Court, made this argument most fully in 1790 at the dedication of America’s first law school, to an audience of the founders, from Washington on down.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee went on the record yesterday on the latest issues surrounding the endless investigation of President Donald J. Trump and his associates. These comments from the chair of the House committee that conducted its own investigation of alleged Russian collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign (and concluded there was no collusion) came at the start of what promises to be another week packed with news about the ongoing efforts by opponents of President Trump, inside and outside of the government, to take him down.

From Fox News:

REP. DEVIN NUNES (R-CA) TELLS SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES WITH MARIA BARTIROMO “…THERE WAS NO INTELLIGENCE” IN REACTION TO THE FBI’S DECISION TO INVESTIGATE THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN

In an interview presented Sunday morning on FOX News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, discussed the intelligence behind the FBI’s decision to investigate the Trump campaign, former FBI Director James Comey’s memos that were recently released, and the Inspector General’s criminal referral against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Highlights are below.

Video (11 minutes):