RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-pruitt-test-1522970943

Donald Trump demands loyalty up the chain of command, but loyalty down has been another matter. The latest test of loyalty down will be whether Mr. Trump stands behind Scott Pruitt as Washington’s green political machine tries to oust the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator for supposedly grave ethics offenses.

Mr. Pruitt’s real sin is that he is one of Mr. Trump’s most aggressive reformers, taking on green idols that others would bow before. In a year he has rescinded the waters of the U.S. rule that sought to regulate every pond in America; proposed to repeal the Clean Power Plan rule that sought to put coal out of business; urged the President to withdraw from the Paris climate pact; made a priority of cleaning up genuine pollution problems like Superfund sites; and this week began revising the destructive Obama-era fuel-economy standards.

If there has been a more consequential cabinet official, we haven’t seen him.

All of this has made Mr. Pruitt a target of the ruling iron triangle of bureaucrats, interest groups and the press. They’re creating smoke about his spending and ethics to get him fired because he is a political liability, as if they care about Mr. Trump’s liabilities.

https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2018/04/05/5-things-to-watch-in-the-march-jobs-report-4/

The Labor Department releases its broadest look at the U.S. job market for March on Friday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expect employers added 178,000 jobs during the month and see the unemployment rate ticking down to 4.0%. Here are five things to watch in the report.

1. A fresh low

Economists project the jobless rate will fall to 4% for the first time since 2000. (They expected it to happen in February, too, but the rate held at 4.1% for the fifth straight month.) An unemployment rate of 4% or less is extremely rare in the past 70 years of modern record-keeping. It has only occurred in the immediate aftermath of World War II, again when young men were being drafted into wars in Korea and Vietnam, and briefly at the end of the 1990s tech boom. The question, if the rate falls, is can a pattern be maintained for several years? Or is it a sign the economy is starting to overheat?

2. Still-hot hiring?

Employers added 313,000 workers to payrolls in February, the best month for hiring since July 2016. Despite a low unemployment rate suggesting a shortage of available workers, employers are hiring at a faster rate–adding more than 200,000 workers in four of the prior five months. Watch to see if employers can maintain that pace, even as economists project hiring to slow.

According to a report in the Washington Post, “Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III informed President Trump’s attorneys last month that he is continuing to investigate the president but does not consider him a criminal target at this point.” In other words, while Mr. Mueller still considers the president a subject of investigation, he has concluded, after nearly 11 months looking for something solid to use against President Trump, that he does not have enough evidence to charge the president with conspiring to collude with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election or, for that matter, with any other crime. Despite having gathered hundreds of thousands of documents for review, interviewed multiple witnesses, and gained guilty pleas for conduct unrelated to the Russian collusion investigation itself in return for full cooperation, Special Counsel Mueller has admitted that he lacks substantial evidence linking President Trump to the commission of any crime. Ironically, this matches the conclusion of former FBI Director James Comey himself before President Trump fired him.

While this development is obviously welcome news to President Trump, he is not entirely out of the woods yet. The Washington Post article added that Mr. Mueller informed the president’s lawyers that “he is preparing a report about the president’s actions while in office and potential obstruction of justice.”

The special counsel could suggest in his report that President Trump may have had a “corrupt intent” to interfere with the Russian collusion investigation by firing Comey, for example, or by asking Comey to go easy on former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, but has not accumulated enough evidence yet to go forward with an indictment. Not only would the special counsel’s discussion along such lines in his report heighten calls for extending the special counsel’s mandate indefinitely, for further congressional investigations and for impeachment. Such a report would place more pressure on the president to submit to an interview with the special counsel or a high-level member of his team. President Trump has indicated a willingness to consider such an interview against the advice of John Dowd, the lawyer who had led the president’s legal team dealing with the Mueller investigation until he resigned last month. If the president does agree to an interview, he needs to tread very carefully to avoid falling into a perjury trap or saying something that the Mr. Mueller can use as evidence of the “corrupt intent” necessary to make a credible case of obstruction of justice against the president.

Paul Manafort’s legal team has forced disclosure of a troubling secret memo issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that expanded the scope of the Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation beyond allegations of Russian election interference. Manafort’s lawyers have moved to have his initial and the subsequent superseding indictments for business dealings years ago dismissed because, among other reasons, Mueller had no legal authority beyond probing Russian election interference in the 2016 election when he was appointed by Rosenstein on May 17, 2017.

In response to Manafort’s motion for dismissal, this previously secret memo was revealed (with heavy redactions) expanding Mueller’s scope of investigation.

The first and obvious question is, why on Earth was this kept secret? It smacks of secret police, not an open and fair investigation.

But there is another, truly serious problem that William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection explains in his excellent lengthy article on the memo:

In terminal medical cases, doctors often deal with patients who move through “stages” that begin with denial. These so-called Kübler-Ross stages can be a long road toward acceptance. A weird form of Kübler-Ross seems to have taken hold of the media. Rather than refusing to accept indicators of impending death, many journalists and analysts seem incapable of accepting signs that the Trump presidency could survive.

That painful process was more evident Tuesday night when the Washington Post reported that special counsel Robert Mueller told the White House last month that Trump was not considered a “target” but only a “subject” of the investigation. After a year of being assured that “bombshell” developments and “smoking gun” evidence was sealing the criminal case against Trump, the dissonance was too great for many who refuse to accept the obvious meaning of this disclosure.

The U.S. Attorney’s manual defines a “subject” as a “person whose conduct is within the scope of the grand jury’s investigation.” It is a designation that can change but it is also a meaningful description of the current status of an individual. Mueller at this time apparently does not believe Trump meets the definition of a target or a “person as to whom the prosecutor or the grand jury has substantial evidence linking him or her to the commission of a crime and who, in the judgment of the prosecutor, is a putative defendant.” That would have been less notable when Mueller was appointed in 2017 than it is now, after more than a year, dozens of criminal counts, hundreds of thousands of documents, and a bevy of cooperating witnesses.

That Mueller does not believe there is “substantial evidence linking [Trump] to the commission of a crime” would seem to merit some, albeit grudging, recognition. However, there has been a disturbing lack of objectivity in the coverage of this investigation from the start. Throughout it, some of us have cautioned that the criminal case against Trump was far weaker than media suggested. Fired FBI Director James Comey himself told Congress that Trump was not a target of his investigation. Indeed, Trump was reportedly upset with Comey largely because Comey would not say that publicly.

We now have a redacted version of the deputy attorney general’s guidance to the special counsel.

Eight months ago, in August 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein secretly gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller specific guidance as to the crimes Mueller is authorized to investigate. The guidance came about ten weeks after Mueller’s May 17 appointment. This guidance purports to describe the grounds for criminal investigations, marking the limits of the special counsel’s jurisdiction.

As readers may recall, these columns have been critical of the deputy attorney general for failing to provide such guidance. Instead, I’ve contended, Rosenstein assigned Mueller to conduct a counterintelligence investigation, which is not a sound basis for appointing a special counsel; the regulations require grounds for a criminal investigation.

So . . . was I wrong? No, I was right.

We learned Tuesday morning, based on a Monday-night court filing by Mueller, that Rosenstein’s amplification of Mueller’s jurisdiction was set forth in a classified memorandum dated August 2, 2017. That memo was filed just one week after a July 26 column in which I comprehensively laid out the deficiencies in Rosenstein’s appointment order and suggested that he could cure the problem by “specify[ing] exactly what potential crimes the special counsel is authorized to investigate.” To be clear, I do not claim to be the only commentator who has criticized the deficiencies of Rosenstein’s appointment order, though I doubt others have done so as consistently and pointedly, including with proposals for bringing it into compliance. (See, e.g., “Mend, Don’t End, Mueller’s Investigation.”)

The Deficiencies of Rosenstein’s Order Appointing Mueller

To recap, Rosenstein appointed Mueller on May 17, 2017, days after President Trump’s botched firing of FBI director James Comey — a debacle in which the administration’s conflicting explanations for the director’s removal, coupled with the president’s reprehensible comments about Comey for the consumption of Russian diplomats he hosted at the White House, intensified Democratic calls for a special counsel.

‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

Samuel Johnson famously used that line in an attack on William Pitt for supposedly advancing his agenda under warped pretenses. During the McCarthy era and the 1960s anti-war movement against Vietnam, when leftists were called unpatriotic, they offered Johnson’s line as a riposte, quoting it ad nauseam, not as a serious counter-argument but as an accusation that the conservative establishment was smearing them.

When Harvey Weinstein was caught coercing female subordinates, assaulting actresses, and offering quid pro quo perks for quickie sex, he thought, in medieval fashion, that he could preserve his fortune and power by making politically correct offsets. Weinstein pompously announced that despite the charges of sexual assault, he should be given a pass because he was buying politically correct indulgences:

I am going to need a place to channel that anger so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party. I’m going to do it at the same place I had my Bar Mitzvah. I’m making a movie about our President, perhaps we can make it a joint retirement party.

Weinstein crammed a lot of firewalls into his apologia: His crimes were merely a matter of “anger” management. He was religiously devout. The ironic upside of assaulting women was that now he could be turned loose to devote his “full attention” to battling NRA. And he now would have time to use his cinematic talents to trash Trump. Why would liberal women hound someone promising a twofer destruction of the NRA and Trump?

Late-night host Steven Colbert tried a similar me con. He used obscene and homophobic imagery to smear Trump, in words that would have gotten a conservative fired: “In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.” The Left did not care that he had smeared the president of the United States, but Colbert potentially had committed a mortal sin in suggesting that a homosexual act was tawdry or embarrassing.

‘We need a Disney princess who’s had an abortion,” tweeted a Pennsylvania branch of Planned Parenthood last week. Though the tweet was deleted, Planned Parenthood Keystone chief Melissa Reed stands by it. “Planned Parenthood believes that pop culture . . . has a critical role to play in educating the public and sparking meaningful conversations around sexual and reproductive health issues and policies, including abortion,” she said in a statement to Fox News.

Feminist critics have been waging war on Disney princesses since the 1990s, and they’re gaining ground. Peggy Orenstein’s 2011 best seller, “Cinderella Ate My Daughter,” called the fairy-tale heroine a symbol of “the patriarchal oppression of all women.”

Disney has been listening. In 2016 the company launched the Dream Big, Princess campaign, which recasts Ariel as a speed-swimming champion, Rapunzel as a gymnast and Cinderella as a dance prodigy. In an obvious nod to the feminist notion that traditional princesses are “damsels in distress,” Disney has edited out the princesses’ signature inner virtues of integrity, courage, optimism and heart, and replaced them with feminist-approved—but ultimately shallow—physical achievement. CONTINUE AT SITE

Trying to Delegitimize the Prosecutor Is Not Obstruction It is protected speech in our system — lawful, even if unsavory. On their always intriguing podcast Skullduggery, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff and Dan Klaidman had Ken Starr as their guest on Friday. That was especially fitting in the wake of the 60 Minutes Stormy Daniels interview. As I pointed […]

Last week ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden signed a letter with a “bipartisan group of 115 national security leaders” that counsels the Trump administration and new National Security Advisor John Bolton not to jettison the nuclear deal with Iran. Hayden’s justification for this advice illustrates all the stale ideas and unexamined assumptions about foreign affairs that have brought us to this crisis in the first place––and why we need the return to realism we are likely to see with Bolton at the helm.

Hayden starts by admitting that the deal has problems. Iran was on the economic ropes because of the sanctions, and so should have been the “suppliant,” not us. Hayden’s delicate indirection refers to Obama’s shameful eagerness for a deal, any deal in fact, to burnish his foreign policy “legacy” and please the “international community” with his commitment to “multilateralism” and “smart diplomacy” instead of military power. Hayden also notes Obama’s “bait-and-switch when selling the deal to Congress,” a reference to the post facto concessions to the regime, like “abandoned or altered positions on no notice inspections,” which of course make the whole idea of monitoring Iran’s activities a mere aspiration.

Hayden also knows that Iran is a “bad actor.” But this vague cliché cannot accurately describe a repressive, brutal regime that has for nearly forty years soaked its hands in American blood, and now has replaced the U.S. as the dominant power in the Middle East. And it downplays Iran’s role in destabilizing the region as it creates a Shia crescent from Syria to Yemen, and builds a proxy attack-force on Israel’s borders in order to bring the mullahs closer to fulfilling their eschatological dream of “wiping Israel off the map.”

But the vagueness of “bad actor” allows Hayden to make an astonishing claim like this one: “Still, Iran is further away from a weapon with this agreement than they would be without it.” Apart from the either-or fallacy in believing that total war is the only alternative to a bad deal, what possible information does Hayden have that makes this credible? What empirical evidence can he produce to buttress the certainty of such a claim? By what means are the inspectors able to ascertain that Iran is in fact living up to the deal, or even to know the existence or location of all its nuclear development facilities? And what about the preposterous begged question in the letter’s claim that the “Iran will be prohibited from exceeding severe limits” by “continuing, unprecedented international monitoring”? How does “severe” square with the IAEA’s inability to monitor Iran’s compliance with Section T, which bans “activities which could contribute to the development of a nuclear explosive device”?