RUTHFULLY YOURS

Special counsel Robert Mueller is used to getting kid-glove treatment. That changed Friday in a federal courtroom in Virginia, where Judge T.S. Ellis directed a blunt challenge to the Mueller team prosecuting former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on charges of tax and bank fraud, some of which date back to 2005.

“I don’t see what relation this indictment has with what the special counsel is authorized to investigate. You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud,” Judge Ellis told Michael Dreeben, who was representing Mr. Mueller in court. “What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”

Judge Ellis won’t win a diplomacy-in-judging prize, but his sharp words expose a central problem with the evolution of the Mueller probe. Though he was appointed to investigate collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016, Mr. Mueller’s indictments thus far have concerned other matters—lying to the FBI, or in Mr. Manafort’s case actions relating to his business with Ukraine.

Mr. Manafort’s team wants Judge Ellis to throw out the charges on grounds they exceed Mr. Mueller’s original mandate. And the judge’s questions leave the Mueller team in a difficult position. Essentially Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors now have to argue that even if they violated the Justice Department’s rules, it shouldn’t matter.

Mr. Dreeben of Team Mueller responded that the indictment doesn’t exceed the special counsel’s mandate, but the judge wants to see specifically the full and unredacted August 2, 2017 memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein saying what Mr. Mueller could pursue. The judge put it this way: “What we don’t want in this country, we don’t want anyone with unfettered power. It’s unlikely you’re going to persuade me the special counsel has unlimited powers to do anything he or she wants.”

https://www.openthebooks.com/
The federal government doled out 560,771 grants in fiscal year 2016, totaling $583 billion. On average, each grant exceeded $1 million.
Research shows pork-barrel spending is bipartisan, as the top 50 grant-receiving districts are represented by 27 democrats and 23 republicans. The top 10 congressional districts are evenly split: 5 democrats and 5 republicans.

Consider just a few examples of taxpayer abuse:

*Virtual Reality Platform to Teach Children in China How to Cross the Street – $183,750 from the Department of Health and Human Services funded a virtual reality platform in China to teach safe pedestrian techniqueNew *

*Condom Design with More Lubrication – $200,601 in taxpayer money funded a new condom design that lowers the chance of breakage and increases “satisfaction between partners.”

*Cigar Taste Test – $114,375 funded a study to determine whether cigar flavor affected its addictiveness.

*Sex Ed for Prostitutes in California – $1.5 million funded “safer sex and needle” education for prostitutes in California even though prostitution is illegal in the state.

*Space Racers: An Animated Children’s Cartoon – $2.5 million in NASA funding supported the production of two seasons of a children’s cartoon series about galactic adventures.
These grants flowed to state governments ($505 billion); higher education institutions ($35 billion); for profit organizations including Fortune 100 companies ($2.5 billion); nonprofit organizations ($19.8 billion); and more.

Fortune 100 companies received $3.2 billion in federal grants between fiscal year 2014 and 2016. Boeing can’t argue it needed $774 million in federal grants while reporting nearly $95 billion in 2016 annual revenue.

How can we rein in this insanity? The people must bring the heat, so the politicians see the light on fiscal restraint.

Imagine if a right-wing version of Robert Mueller, backed by a properly pro-Trump legal team, had sent former President Barack Obama the same sort of questions that Mueller allegedly delivered this week to President Trump. The special counsel might dress them up in legalese, innuendo, and with perjury-trap IEDs, thereby casting suspicion with the mere nature of the questions.

If so, the interrogatories might run like the following—

President Obama:

What did you mean when you were heard, by accident, on a hot mic, providing the following assurances to outgoing Russian Prime Minister Medvedev: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space . . . This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility”?

Did you and the Russian government have any private agreements to readjust Russian-American relations during your own 2012 reelection campaign? Were there other such discussions similar to your comments to Prime Minister Medvedev?

If so, do you believe such Russian collusion had any influence on the outcome of the 2012 election?

Did your subsequent reported suspension of, or reduction in, some planned missile defense programs, especially in Eastern Europe, have anything to do with the assurances that you gave to the Russian Prime Minister?

Did the subsequent Russian quietude during your 2012 reelection campaign have anything to do with your assurances of promised changes in U.S. foreign policy?

Did you adjudicate U.S. responses to Russian behavior on the basis of your own campaign re-election concerns?

More specifically, what exactly did you mean when you asked the Russian Prime Minister for “space”? And further what did you intend by suggesting that after your 2012 election you would have more “flexibility” with the Russian government?

Would you please define “flexibility” in this context?

What do you think Prime Minister Medvedev meant when he replied to your request for space, and your promise for flexibility after the election, with: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you . . . I understand . . . I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Did you hear subsequently from the Russians that Prime Medvedev had delivered the message that you had intended for Vladimir Putin?

An antifa group in Los Angeles celebrated May Day by holding a small march, hanging a Trump effigy, and advocating for “revolutionary violence” against the “capitalist state” in order to “create real political power.”

“We must carry out military actions against the enemies of the people!” a member of the L.A. cell of the Red Guards said in a speech published on their blog.

The Red Guards is a Maoist group that hopes to duplicate in the United States the anarchy and terror Chairman Mao’s Red Guards inflicted on China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The group also identifies as “antifascist” and has cells throughout the United States.

Hundreds of thousands of leftists throughout the world mobilized for the annual “International Workers; Day” on May 1 to advocate for various social justice causes and celebrate communism.

While May Day protests in France, Turkey, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere turned violent, Wednesday’s protests in the United States tended to be relatively calm. As PJ Media reported, 22 police cruisers in Portland were vandalized yesterday. Additionally, three Red Guards members in Charlotte, North Carolina, and four Red Guards members in Kansas City, Missouri, were arrested for protest-related shenanigans. However, most American May Day protesters conducted their far-left activities in a peaceful manner.The same cannot be said for the rhetoric of the protesters. CONTINUE AT SITE

No matter how much sane Democrat strategists desperately want her to go away, Hillary Clinton refuses to leave the stage.

“As the 2020 presidential race ramps up, plenty of top Democrats we talk to would prefer new energy and faces to Clinton nostalgia/redemption,” Axios reports.

That’s an understatement.

Eighteen months after the American people told Hillary exactly where to go, the soulless political operative the great William Safire called a “congenital liar,” is everywhere. Promoting her whiny What Happened memoir and hurting her party by keeping her almost innumerable misdeeds front and center. Likening Republicans to Klansmen and Nazis. Supporting the left-wing Resistance to President Trump. Embarrassing her fellow Democrats with her abusive rhetoric aimed at half of America.

In recent travels overseas, Hillary has been badmouthing President Trump and her fellow Americans. During a March visit to India, Hillary viciously unloaded on her enemies – in particular, the 63 million Americans who voted for President Trump in 2016. Ordinary Americans are pessimistic, racist, sexist hicks, she said.

“If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won,” she said. “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.”

“‘You know you didn’t like black people getting rights,” she said. “You don’t like women getting jobs. You don’t like seeing that Indian Americans [are] succeeding more than you.”

Special Counsel and former FBI boss Robert Mueller is on record that President Trump is not a target of his investigation, yet the questions he wants to ask the president have now been leaked to the media. Since the questions are fully predictable and totally without significance, President Trump should not waste his time. On the other hand, the president, and all Americans, might pony up a few questions for Herr Mueller his own self.

Investigations normally pursue a crime. What crime, exactly, are you investigating? Given the time and money you have put in, the people have a right to know.

Special Counsel Mueller, if you operate in search of collusion, what statute, exactly, would you use to prosecute collusion? Please supply the numbers in the U.S. code.

Special Counsel Mueller, you have been called a man of great integrity. Why did you front-load your investigative team with highly partisan supporters of Hillary Clinton? Were independent, non-partisan lawyers not available?

If your target is Russian influence in general, Special Counsel Mueller, why are you not investigating the Clinton Foundation and its dealings with Russia? Have you consulted the book Clinton Cash?

Special Counsel Mueller, what is your understanding of Fanny Ohr? She is the Russia expert, wife of demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr, who worked for Fusion GPS on the Steele dossier. In your expert opinion, why might Fanny Ohr have acquired a short-wave radio license about that time? Was it to communicate with Russian contacts and avoid detection? Did the FBI monitor any of Ohr’s communications?

During his first 15 months as president, Donald Trump has postured as the bad cop.

He railed about NATO members welching on their promised contributions to the alliance. Trump rhetorically reduced North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to “short and fat” and “rocket man.” He ordered the dropping of a huge bomb on the Taliban and twice hit Syrian chemical weapons sites. He talked of trade wars and hitting back at China.

Through all the bombast and follow-ups, Trump’s supposedly more sober and judicious appointees—especially former National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, along with Defense Secretary James Mattis—played good cops against the outnumbered lone-wolf Trump.

This script was well known from the days of Richard Nixon and his national security adviser and then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Nixon often postured as if he were eager to bomb the North Vietnamese to smithereens, to go to Dr. Strangelove levels to stand down the Soviets, or to unleash Israel to do whatever it took to defeat its enemies.

Then Kissinger was sent over to reassure both troubled allies and tense enemies. He pleaded for modest concessions to ward off what might be far worse. He confided to leaders that Nixon was a madman who terrified Kissinger as much as he did the world abroad.

Former first lady Michelle Obama surfaced at a Reach Higher 2018 College Signing Day event at Temple University in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Speaking on behalf of her Better Make Room initiative, Michelle was gussied up in a black jumpsuit and a denim jacket and sounded a bit like rapper Common.

During her keynote speech, the former FLOTUS paused in all the right places and used ghetto-talk and hip-hop hand gestures to keep with the flow of her sing-songy exhortation to 8,000 Philadelphia high school students signing up for college. After sharing sad experiences from her childhood, the former first lady officially announced that despite the discouragement of “haters,” she became America’s “forever first lady.”

In other words, despite Melania Trump being the current “first lady,” much as Michelle’s husband Barack fancies himself “forever president of the United States,” according to Mrs. Obama, she is, and always will be, America’s “forever first lady.” Based on the cheering coming from the audience, the kids agreed.

Here’s what Rapping Michelle had to say:

Robert Mueller has plenty of questions for President Trump, and maybe he will get to ask them. Most of them seemed like perjury traps rather than real questions for the president and, surprisingly, they contain very little that wasn’t in the public domain though prior leaks. In other words, the president is not a target because they have nothing implicating him, and so they want to use the interview to create such material.

But the conduct of the investigation by the special counsel and his team has raised a lot of questions as to its foundation, conflicts of interest, fairness and methods. Most of the public, based on the last Harvard Caps-Harris Poll, supports Robert Mueller going forward with his investigation, but I wonder whether that would still be the case if he were required to answer a few questions himself.
When you interviewed for FBI director with President Trump, had you had any conversations with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, FBI Director James Comey or any other current or former officials of the U.S. government about serving as a special counsel? Didn’t you consider going forward with the interview or being rejected as FBI director to create the appearance of conflict?

When you picked your team, what was going through your mind when you picked zero donors to the Trump campaign and hired many Democratic donors, supporters of the defiant actions of Sally Yates, who at the time was deputy attorney general, and prosecutors who had been overturned for misconduct? What were you thinking in building a team with documented biases?

When you were shown the text messages of FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, why did you reassign them and not fire them for compromising the investigation with obvious animus and multiple violations of procedure and policy? Why did you conceal from Congress the reasons for their firing for five months and did you discard any of their work as required by the “fruits of a poisonous tree” doctrine?

What were your personal contacts with Rod Rosenstein and James Comey during the investigation as special counsel and before that as a private attorney? Would you be considered a friend of James Comey? Would that personal relationship not disqualify you as a prosecutor on the case under Justice Department guidelines?

The Justice Department should not permit the president to be interrogated on so paltry and presumptuous a showing.

I am assuming the authenticity of the questions that Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly wants to ask President Trump. The questions indicate that, after a year of his own investigation and two years of FBI investigation, the prosecutor lacks evidence of a crime. Yet he seeks to probe the chief executive’s motives and thought processes regarding exercises of presidential power that were lawful, regardless of one’s view of their wisdom.

If Bob Mueller wants that kind of control over the executive branch, he should run for president. Otherwise, he is an inferior executive official who has been given a limited license — ultimately, by the chief executive — to investigate crime. If he doesn’t have an obvious crime, he has no business inventing one, much less probing his superior’s judgment. He should stand down.

The questions, reported by the New York Times, underscore that the special counsel is a pernicious institution. Trump should decline the interview. More to the point, the Justice Department should not permit Mueller to seek to interrogate the president on so paltry and presumptuous a showing.

When should a president be subject to criminal investigation?
It is a bedrock principle that no one is above the law. The Framers made clear that this includes the president. But, like everything else, bedrock principles do not exist in a vacuum. They vie with other principles.

Two competing considerations are especially significant here. First, our law-enforcement system is based on prosecutorial discretion. Under this principle, the desirability of prosecuting even a palpable violation of law must be balanced against other societal needs and desires. We trust prosecutors to perform this cost-benefit analysis with modesty about their mission and sensitivity to the disruption their investigations cause.

Second, the president is the most essential official in the world’s most consequential government. That government’s effectiveness is necessarily compromised if the president is under the cloud of an investigation. Not only are the president’s personal credibility and capability diminished; such an investigation discourages talented people from serving in an administration, further undermining good governance. The country is inexorably harmed because a suspect administration’s capacity to execute the laws and pursue the interests of the United States is undermined. Naturally, this is of little moment to rabid partisans who opposed the president’s election and object to his policy preferences. By and large, however, Americans are not rabid partisans; they want the elected president to be able to govern, regardless of which party is in charge.