RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/html/america-horrible-15970.html

American women live under a suffocating patriarchy. Rape culture flourishes in the United States. Toxic masculinity stunts the emotional and professional growth of American females. Sexual harassment and predation are ubiquitous in American workplaces. College campuses are maelstroms of sexual violence. Female students need safe spaces where they can escape abusive male power.

These propositions are self-evident to a large, interlocking establishment of government bureaucrats, progressive politicians, college administrators, faculty, “activists,” professionals, and journalists. Yet this same establishment is up in arms over a recent declaration by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions that female aliens caught trying to enter the country illegally will no longer be automatically considered for asylum by dint of claiming that they are victims of domestic abuse. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accuses the Trump administration of “staggering cruelty” in condemning “vulnerable innocent women to a lifetime of violence and even death.” The American Bar Association charged that Sessions would “further victimize those most in need of protection.” The executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Benjamin Johnson, denounced “this shameful chapter in our country’s history,” and promised a lawsuit.

Sessions was right to return asylum law to its original intent: offering protection to individuals persecuted by their government for membership in a socially distinct group. Domestic violence is a private crime, not a public one, and does not reflect general persecution of the sort that international law has codified as appropriate for asylum petitions. Asylum petitions have mushroomed 1,700 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to the New York Times, driven in significant part by domestic-abuse claims, often underwritten by extensive coaching and encouragement by hard-left advocates.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hillary-clinton-email-accessed-foreign-actors/

“Foreign actors” accessed Hillary Clinton’s emails, including one that was classified “secret,” according to a memo produced by two Republican-led House committees and obtained by Fox News.

The memo details the findings of congressional investigators who looked into whether the Department of Justice made politically motivated decisions over the past two years with respect to the Clinton and Trump-Russia investigations.

“Documents provided to the Committees show foreign actors obtained access to some of Mrs. Clinton’s emails — including at least one email classified ‘Secret,’” the memo says. The private accounts of Clinton staffers were also breached by unnamed foreign actors, according to the memo.

The memo also notes that the “secret” classification, which was applied to at least one of the hacked emails, refers to information that, if disclosed, could “reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.”

An internal FBI email sent in May 2016 by Peter Strzok, who was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe for demonstrating political bias, corroborates the contents of the memo.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/netflix-five-second-staring-rule/This is completely ridiculous and could end up hurting more than it helps.

Netflix has reportedly banned workers from looking at each other for more than five seconds as part of its new anti-harassment rules.

The new policy also bans the company’s film crews from asking their colleagues for their phone numbers, according to an article in the Sun.

“Senior staff went to a harassment meeting to learn what is and isn’t appropriate,” an on-set runner told the Sun. “Looking at anyone longer than five seconds is considered creepy.”

“You mustn’t ask for someone’s number unless they have given permission for it to be distributed,” the source continued. “And if you see any unwanted behaviour, report it immediately.”

FBI Agent Peter Strzok in Text to Lisa Page: ‘We’ll Stop’ Trump from Becoming President FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was intimately involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probe of Russian election-meddling, vowed to “stop” Donald Trump from reaching the White House in an August 2016 text message to FBI lawyer Lisa […]

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270430/911-spygate-national-security-deep-state-daniel-greenfield

On September 4, 2001, Robert Mueller took over the FBI. At his confirmation hearings, fraud had overshadowed discussions of terrorism. And as FBI Director, Mueller quickly diverged from the common understanding that the attacks that killed 3,000 people had been an act of war rather than a crime.

In 2008, Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, who had been unleashed from Guantanamo Bay, carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq. Al-Ajmi had been represented by Thomas Wilner who was being paid by the Kuwaiti government.

Wilner was a pal of Robert Mueller. And when the families were having dinner together, Mueller got up and said, “I want to toast Tom Wilner. He’s doing just what an American lawyer should do.”

“I don’t know what he was doing from inside the government. I’d like to find out,” Wilner mused.

We know some of what Mueller was doing. The same official who paved the way for raiding the president’s lawyer, who illegally seized material from the Trump transition team and whose case is based in no small part on illegal eavesdropping, fought alongside Comey against surveilling terrorists. Materials involving the Muslim Brotherhood were purged. Toward the dawn of the second Obama term, Mueller met with CAIR and other Islamist groups and a green curtain fell over national security.

But the surveillance wasn’t going anywhere. Instead it was being redirected to new targets.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/rod-rosenstein-subpoena-threat-shows-conflict-of-interest/He clings to his role in the process despite being a central witness in Comey’s dismissal.

The House Intelligence Committee is investigating whether the government has used the Justice Department’s awesome investigative authorities as a weapon against political adversaries. We learned yesterday that, in response to this very investigation, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . . . threatened to use the Justice Department’s awesome investigative authorities as a weapon against political adversaries.

That Rosenstein threatened to subpoena the committee’s records does not seem to be in serious dispute. There are differing accounts about why. House investigators say that Rosenstein was trying to bully his way out of compliance with oversight demands; the Justice Department offers the lawyerly counter that Rosenstein was merely foreshadowing his litigating position if the House were to try to hold him in contempt for obstructing its investigations. Either way, the best explanation for the outburst is that Rosenstein is beset by profound conflicts of interest, and he’s acting like it.

The first thing to bear in mind about the news reported Tuesday by Fox News’s Catherine Herridge is that the dispute in question — which is just one of many during a year of Justice Department stonewalling — happened five months ago, on January 10.

So, what was going on back then?

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/14/the-real-rising-extremism-in

As the adage goes, “Accuse your opponents of that which you are guilty.” Avoid the blame, or embarrassment, for your own vices by first declaring that your enemies are guilty of those same ills so that the disgust and attention are shifted away from you.

The American Left has all but mastered this tactic, having successfully accused the Republican Party—and the Right as a whole—of being bigoted, sexist, racist, and the like, while completely erasing the Democratic Party’s history as supporters of slavery, against women’s suffrage, and in favor of segregation and Jim Crow. Their dramatic switch came only when it was politically expedient for them to attempt it, as Lyndon Johnson understood with his infamous (private) declaration before signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (For those who aren’t aware . . . let’s just say Johnson had a blunt way of declaring that African-Americans would be loyal to Democrats for the next two centuries.)

But this tactic has never before been used so liberally (pardon the pun) as it is used today, where just about every person to the right of Joseph Stalin is “literally Hitler,” anyone who voted for Trump (if even reluctantly) is “alt-right,” and anyone who opposes open borders, multiculturalism, and globalism is “far-right.” Everyone from libertarians to Christians is part of some kind of fringe, although the definition of “fringe” now encompasses the bulk of the cloth.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/14/the-silencing-of-the-inspectors

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, an Obama Administration appointee, is scheduled to deliver a report this week on DOJ and FBI abuses during the 2016 campaign cycle. Remember: His last investigation of FBI misconduct advised a criminal referral for fired former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who allegedly lied to federal investigators.

McCabe and at least a half-dozen other FBI employees quit, retired, were fired, or were reassigned as a result of fallout from the politicization of the FBI. Yet, as Barack Obama left office, his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, strangely boasted that the Obama Administration “has been historically free of scandal.” Obama himself recently concluded of his eight-year tenure, “I didn’t have scandals.”

Those were puzzling assertions, given nearly nonstop scandals during Obama’s eight years in office involving the IRS; General Services Administration; Peace Corps; Secret Service; Veterans Administration; and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, not to mention the Clinton email server scandal, the Benghazi scandal and the 2016 Democratic National Committee email scandal.

For nearly eight years, the Obama Administration sought to cover up serial wrongdoing by waging a veritable war against the watchdog inspectors general of various federal agencies.

In 2014, 47 of the nation’s 73 inspectors general signed a letter alleging that Obama had stonewalled their “ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/strike-down-obamacare-says-justice-department-1528931393

Twenty states have filed a lawsuit against the federal government arguing that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional—and this time the federal government agrees. When the Justice Department filed a brief last week taking the states’ side, critics furiously insisted that the failure to defend ObamaCare is a threat to the rule of law. Don’t be moved by selective outrage. This refusal to defend is actually more restrained than President Obama’s. And, as before, the courts will decide the ultimate questions.

The new lawsuit, filed in February, arises from a change in the law. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act repealed the penalty for failing to purchase health insurance, while leaving in place language to the effect that doing so is mandatory. In 2012 Chief Justice John Roberts held that the individual mandate could pass constitutional muster only by being construed as a tax. Now that the tax is gone, the plaintiff states argue, the mandate must be considered an attempt to regulate commerce. As such, it’s unconstitutional under the views of a five-justice majority in the 2012 case.

The states further argue that other ACA provisions are inextricably linked with the mandate—a view with which four dissenters agreed in 2012 (and on which Chief Justice Roberts has not expressed an opinion).The Justice Department’s filing turns not on some independent executive judgment about the ACA but on a straightforward interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2012 precedent. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions informed Congress of the decision not to defend the ACA, he emphasized that the department’s decision will not prevent the courts from ultimately having the last word on the constitutional question. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-document-blackouts-1528931262

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray want Congress to trust them about the FBI’s actions in 2016. That would be easier if not for daily proof that they continue to play games when redacting documents.

Senate oversight Chairman Ron Johnson exposed the latest unjustified blackouts in a June 8 letter to Mr. Wray. The Wisconsin Republican is one of several Chairmen objecting to the FBI’s excessive redactions and its refusal to even supply the standard “log” with justifications for each redaction. Under pressure, Justice grudgingly invited Johnson staffers to review some documents in late May.

Those sessions revealed that the bureau is redacting in a way that stymies Congress’s ability to run down leads in its oversight of the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump investigations. Notably, Justice and the FBI have been redacting names or initials of employees involved in handling those cases. This frustrates Congress’s ability to seek more information or interviews with those individuals.

One initial batch of documents contained an Oct. 11, 2016 text message from FBI official Peter Strzok to his FBI paramour Lisa Page. It read: “Currently fighting with”—while the rest was redacted. The unredacted version reads: “Currently fighting with Stu for this FISA,” which may be a reference to the warrant the FBI obtained to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Who is Stu and what was that fight? Congress has a right to know.