RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-constitutional-crisis-1527201552

Democrats and their media allies are again shouting “constitutional crisis,” this time claiming President Trump has waded too far into the Russia investigation. The howls are a diversion from the actual crisis: the Justice Department’s unprecedented contempt for duly elected representatives, and the lasting harm it is doing to law enforcement and to the department’s relationship with Congress.

The conceit of those claiming Mr. Trump has crossed some line in ordering the Justice Department to comply with oversight is that “investigators” are beyond question. We are meant to take them at their word that they did everything appropriately. Never mind that the revelations of warrants and spies and dirty dossiers and biased text messages already show otherwise.

We are told that Mr. Trump cannot be allowed to have any say over the Justice Department’s actions, since this might make him privy to sensitive details about an investigation into himself. We are also told that Congress—a separate branch of government, a primary duty of which is oversight—cannot be allowed to access Justice Department material. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes can’t be trusted to view classified information—something every intelligence chairman has done—since he might blow a source or method, or tip off the president.

That’s a political judgment, but it holds no authority. The Constitution set up Congress to act as a check on the executive branch—and it’s got more than enough cause to do some checking here. Yet the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation have spent a year disrespecting Congress—flouting subpoenas, ignoring requests, hiding witnesses, blacking out information, and leaking accusations.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has not been allowed to question a single current or former Justice or FBI official involved in this affair. Not one. He’s also more than a year into his demand for the transcript of former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s infamous call with the Russian ambassador, as well as reports from the FBI agents who interviewed Mr. Flynn. And still nothing.

Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, is being stonewalled on at least three inquiries. The House Judiciary and Oversight committee chairmen required a full-blown summit in April with Justice Department officials to get movement on their own subpoena. The FBI continues to block a fuller release of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia report.

Not that the documents that Justice sends over are of much use. Mr. Grassley this week excoriated the department for its routine practice of redacting key information, and for similarly refusing to provide a “privilege log” that details the legal basis for withholding information. His team recently discovered that one of the items Justice had scrubbed from the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page texts was the duo’s concern that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe had a $70,000 conference table. (Was it lacquered with unicorn tears?) A separate text refers to an investigation that the White House is “running,” but conveniently blacks out which one. The FBI won’t answer Mr. Johnson’s questions about who is doing the redacting.

This intransigence is creating an unprecedented toxicity between law enforcement and Congress, undermining what has long been a cooperative and vital relationship. It is also pushing lawmakers ever closer to holding Justice Department officials in contempt or impeaching them. Congress hasn’t impeached a member of the executive branch (presidents excepted) since the 19th century. Let’s agree such a step would amount to a real crisis. And the pressure to use these tools to get disclosure is growing, as congressional Republicans worry about losing their oversight authority in the midterms, and suspect the Justice Department is stringing them along for that very reason. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/24/watergate-done-legally-the-predicta

The tug-of war (and it is a war) between Fox News alongside a handful of Republicans on one hand, and the solid front of U.S. government agencies, the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media (Google included) on the other, is focused on who in the Department of Justice and the FBI did what and why to start the July 31, 2016 “Crossfire Hurricane” counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, to secure a FISA warrant for electronic intercepts of Trump advisers, and to vector Stefan Halper and possibly others to spy on them directly beginning around July 11. These details are so few and so jumbled as to obscure the considerably larger extent of the intelligence community’s involvement against Trump.

The following considers additional facts (not in dispute) from the perspective of my eight years of experience with the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. as a senior staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and as part of the group that drafted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (over my opposition).

The events of the past two years have confirmed the objections to FISA I stated in 1978: pre-clearance of wiretaps by a court that operates secretly, ex parte, and that is agnostic on national security matters, is an irresistible temptation to the party in power and its friends in the intelligence agencies to use the law to spy against their political opponents—that is, to do Watergate legally.

The Spying Legacy of 9/11
FISA was a bad idea, made worse after 9/11 by the addition of Section 702. It is a license to collect and use electronic data on Americans, so long as that collection is claimed to be “incidental” in the collection of data relating to foreigners. Since the claiming is done in secret, and the yearly court review can be finessed, officials’ self-restraint is all that keeps Section 702 itself from being an abuse. Item 17, “about queries,” specifically authorizes the collection of emails and phone calls of “U.S. persons.”

The first evidence that Obama Administration officials and their friends in the Community had used intelligence to try thwarting a political challenge came on November 17, 2016, when Donald Trump abruptly moved his transition headquarters from Trump Tower to Bedminster, New Jersey. The previous day, he had been visited by Admiral Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency. Rogers earlier had delivered the yearly Section 702 certification to the FISA court, saying that the Justice Department had improperly used that portion of the law to direct the NSA to listen in on Trump campaign headquarters. Just prior to Rogers’ delivery, John Carlin, head of the Justice Department’s national security division, tendered his resignation. Rogers was not happy. Trump even less so.

“I know that at home you call me ‘the old lady.’ Well, I’m a grandmother, and you’re a grandfather. And so from one grandparent to another, let me express my hope that our grandchildren will know a future of peace …” — Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Yesterday, two women were named at the head of what is seen as the center of power in the US, the Intelligence services: Gina Haspel and Kirstjen Nielsen.

It is this permanence of public service that, in the USA, assures that a president cannot be omnipotent; it is a true sign of democracy.

Some Arab leaders stood out, in part, by their sexist and disrespectful language against former Secretaries of State, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat referred to Golda Meir as the Old Lady. There was a famous discussion about it when Sadat came to the Knesset, and in front of the camera she said to him: “I know that at home you call me ‘the old lady.’ Well, I’m a grandmother, and you’re a grandfather. And so from one grandparent to another, let me express my hope that our grandchildren will know a future of peace…”

The Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, had what some referred to as a slightly eerie obsession with Condoleezza Rice, describing her as his “African Princess.”

Yesterday, two women were named at the head of what is seen as the center of power in the US, the Intelligence services: Gina Haspel and Kirstjen Nielsen.

Secretary Nielsen was brought to the helm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a department staffed with 200,000 employees. The DHS was created after 9/11 to pool together a number of disparate branches of the administration, from emergency management, to customs, border protection and immigration. It is an extremely important position.

The United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, remains — beyond imagining— the best performing foreign intelligence organization in the world, and therefore an essential tool for US foreign policy. Gina Haspel is the first woman to be named to Langley.

https://www.steynonline.com/8667/tinker-tailor-clapper-carter-downer-halper-spy

As I think most persons paying attention now realize, the investigation into foreign interference with the 2016 election was created as a cover for domestic interference with the 2016 election.

It was run at the highest (or deepest) Deep State levels by the likes of James Clapper and John Brennan, whose frantic and hysterical Tweets are like no utterances of any CIA director in history. That also explains one of the puzzling aspects of the last year that I’ve occasionally mentioned here and on TV and radio: If you were truly interested in an “independent” Special Counsel, why would you appoint Robert Mueller? He’s a lifetime insider and the most connected man in Washington – a longtime FBI Director, and Assistant Attorney-General and acting Deputy Attorney-General at the Department of Justice.

Exactly. His most obvious defect as an “independent” counsel is, in fact, his principal value to the likes of Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein: He knows, personally, almost every one in the tight little coterie of discredited upper-echelon officials, and he has a deep institutional loyalty to bodies whose contemporary character he helped create. In other words, he’s the perfect guy to protect those institutions. As for the nominal subject of his investigation, well, he’s indicted a bunch of no-name Russian internet trolls who’ll never set foot in a US courthouse. That’s not even worth the cost of printing the complaint. Rush Limbaugh has been kind enough to quote, several times, my line that “there are no Russians in the Russia investigation”. Which is true. Yet that doesn’t mean there aren’t foreigners. And an inordinate number of them are British subjects – or, to use today’s preferred term, “Commonwealth citizens”. All the action in this case takes place not in Moscow but in southern England.

When candidate Donald Trump claimed his 2016 campaign had been the target of a spying campaign, the old-line establishment media reacted with derision. Since Trump’s 2016 victory, it has become more apparent that the spying was real, and part of an intelligence operation to exonerate Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, frame the victorious president on fake charges of colluding with Russia, and ultimately drive him from office.

A key player for the previous administration is former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, who now holds forth on MSNBC. On Tuesday, Joy Behar asked Clapper if the FBI had been spying on the Trump campaign.

“No, they were not,” said Clapper, DNI from 2010-2017. “They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage or influence — which is what they do.”

Clapper also said, “With the informant business, well, the point here is the Russians. Not spying on the campaign but what are the Russians doing? And in a sense, unfortunately, what they were trying to do is protect our political system and protect the campaign.”

“Well,” Behar wondered, “why doesn’t he like that? He should be happy.”

Clapper agreed that “he should be,” but the president didn’t think so.

Obama administration officials in the DOJ and FBI saw the cases as inseparably linked.

‘Cruz just dropped out of the race. It’s going to be a Clinton Trump race. Unbelievable.”

It was a little after midnight on May 4, 2016. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was texting her paramour, FBI counterespionage agent Peter Strzok, about the most stunning development to date in the 2016 campaign: Donald Trump was now the inevitable Republican nominee. He would square off against Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ certain standard-bearer.

The race was set . . . between two major-party candidates who were both under investigation by the FBI.

In stunned response, Strzok wrote what may be the only words we need to know, the words that reflected the mindset of his agency’s leadership and of the Obama administration: “Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE.”

MYE. That’s Mid-Year Exam, the code-word the FBI had given to the Hillary Clinton emails probe.

“It sure does,” responded Page. Mind you, she was not just any FBI lawyer; she was counsel and confidant to the bureau’s No. 2 official, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

If the thousands of text messages between Ms. Page and Agent Strzok are clear on anything, they are clear on the thinking of the bureau’s top brass.

In its Trump antipathy, the media-Democrat complex has admonished us to ignore the Strzok-Page texts. FBI officials are as entitled as anyone else to their political opinions, we’re told; and if they found Trump loathsome, they were no different from half the country.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. Regardless of their politics (which, the texts show, are not as left-wing as some conservative-media hyperbole claims), these FBI officials are a window into how the Obama administration regarded the two investigations in which Strzok and Page were central players: Mid Year Exam and Trump-Russia — the latter eventually code-named “Crossfire Hurricane.”

The two investigations must not be compartmentalized. Manifestly, the FBI saw them as inseparably linked: Trump’s victory in the primaries, the opening of his path to the Oval Office, meant — first and foremost — that the Hillary investigation had to be brought to a close.

Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist and author of “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in a series of graphic-novel biographies.

On book tour in Ohio a few weeks ago, someone asked me if Donald Trump would finish out his term. The room was full of liberals and left-of-the-Democrats.

I pointed out that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats have said that they have no interest in impeachment even if their party wins back Congress. I predicted—with the usual caveats about the perils of political prognostication—that Mr. Trump would not only finish his term but win re-election, due to the divisions within the Democratic Party.

Loud gasps all around. Some people were so peeved—at me!—that I had to remind them: “I’m not a warlock. I don’t make anything happen.”

Many Democrats are surprised Mr. Trump has hung on this long. Magical thinking is legion on the left. A recent Rasmussen poll finds that 41% of Democrats believe the president will be impeached and removed from office by 2020—more than the 36% who think the voters will reject him in 2½ years.

But how would that happen? Despite its legal-linguistic trappings—“high crimes and misdemeanors,” “counts,” “hearings,” “trial”—impeachment is a political process. This GOP president has nothing existential to fear from this GOP Congress. Should a Big Blue Wave occur, Mrs. Pelosi’s plans don’t include divisive hearings—and even if Democrats won every Senate race, they’d still be well short of the two-thirds needed to remove Mr. Trump from office.

James Clapper has a brand new book to sell, which must be his excuse for forgetting Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes: “When in one, stop digging.” Yesterday, he appeared on The View and brought a metaphorical shovel with him. The entire nine-and-a-half-minute segment is embedded below, and it is worth watching if only to observe the bizarre facial expressions he manifested while tap-dancing around the truth of what he and other members of the cabal have been caught doing.

Fortunately for those in a hurry, Doug Ross put together a collage of his contortions that reveal his stress and discomfort – “[l]ooking down, looking away, grimacing, and gesticulating wildly,” in Ross’s description:

It is always possible to grab awkward faces off a video clip, but if you watch the clip below, you will see that Ross has not pulled this kind of trick. The man repeatedly grimaces and gestures in odd ways as he digs his hole deeper.

James Clapper, former head of the CIA, stated that the U.S. government’s spying on political candidates, especially ones he doesn’t approve of, was a legitimate action. A Daily Caller article, “Clapper Defends Spying On Trump Campaign as ‘A Legitimate Activity’,” by Julia Nista, on May21, quotes him:

Clapper, currently a CNN security analyst, said he is not OK with Trump ordering an investigation into the DOJ, saying, “that’s actually a very disturbing assault on the independence of the Department of Justice.”

“When this president or any president tries to use the Department of Justice as a private investigatory body, that’s not good for the country.”

Clapper said he is concerned about “politicizing what is a legitimate activity, and an important one, on the part of the FBI. They use informants and have strict rules and protocols under this.”

You have to wonder what Clapper’s notion of “politicizing” is when the DOJ was a tool of the Democrats, charged with the task of finding “dirt” on Trump during his campaign –hardly “independent”! – and after he occupied the White House.

In the meantime, the Gateway Pundit, on May 2nd, devoted some time to the belligerent utterings of another ex-CIA director, John Brennan, in Christina Laila’s “John Brennan’a Latest Cryptic Tweet Has People Asking ‘Is This a Threat to Trump?’”: