RUTHFULLY YOURS

My weekend column dealt with the claim by Glenn Simpson that the FBI had a confidential informant embedded in the Trump campaign.

Simpson is the co-founder of Fusion GPS. In August 2017, he related to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the former British intelligence officer, Michael Steele, told him that the FBI had a spy in the Trump campaign. Steele, of course, is the former British spy who collaborated with Simpson in 2016 on a Clinton campaign anti-Trump research project, now known as the Steele dossier. The document sets forth sensational allegations of a Trump-Putin conspiracy. These claims, multiple hearsay accounts from anonymous Russian sources, have never been verified, according to statements by government officials. Major media outlets that were aware of the dossier allegations refrained from publishing them because they could not be corroborated.

Steele had good FBI contacts from his MI-6 days, and Simpson assented to his sharing the dossier information with the Bureau. Steele met with FBI agents in London in July 2016, and again in Rome three months later. According to Simpson, Steele told him that one of the reasons the FBI believed his allegations was that the Bureau had an informant inside the Trump campaign, leading Steele (and thus Simpson) to infer that his reports were being verified.

He hasn’t changed a lick in 47 years.

I’ve been asked a number of times about John Kerry’s unauthorized actions with Iran compared to Ted Kennedy’s unauthorized actions with the Kremlin. Kerry, this spring 2018, sought to undermine President Trump’s policies, whereas Kennedy, spring 1983, sought to undermine President Reagan’s policies.

Many people — including the president of the United States — want to know if Kerry’s actions constitute a violation of the Logan Act. It’s a question I’m frequently asked about Kennedy. The short answer, in both cases, is that I’m not the source to provide the answer. Congress is. The Democratic Congress in the 1980s didn’t hesitate to launch criminal proceedings against President Ronald Reagan and his staff (many of them fine men of great integrity) in a militant pursuit for impeachment over “Iran-Contra.” Liberal Democrats did so while turning a blind eye as their leader — House Speaker Jim Wright — buddied up to Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega in his own negotiations.

And Wright wasn’t secretary of state, just as John Kerry wasn’t secretary of state when he conferred with Iranian officials in secret meetings in New York. In what the Boston Globe described as a “rare move” of “unusual shadow diplomacy,” Kerry met with the Iranian foreign minister (among other high-level foreign officials) “to discuss ways of preserving the pact limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the second time in about two months that the two had met to strategize over salvaging a deal they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration, according to a person briefed on the meetings.”

That’s the very deal that President Trump was working to cancel just as Kerry was working to save it.

And that’s hardly the only Kerry outrage. No, this is old-hat. I’d like to remind all of Kerry’s affront decades ago. The date was April 22, 1971, 47 years to almost the exact day that Kerry met with the Iranians.

Gina Haspel’s appearance last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee created a certain buzz but was hardly the biggest spy story in town. That prize belonged to the snoop the FBI had planted in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. This was not a new story and veteran observers had been keeping close watch.

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review, had been “dead-on accurate” in his testimony that the FBI had a spy inside the Trump campaign for the stretch run of the 2016 race. In his Senate testimony on August 22, 2017, Simpson explained that Steele had met with at least one FBI agent in Rome, and the FBI had intelligence from an internal Trump campaign source, a human source inside the Trump campaign.

This was an explosive revelation and, following the publication of his testimony on January 9, 2018, Simpson did his best to walk it back. The revelations are now the subject of the ongoing battle between the House Intelligence Committee and the DOJ. Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has been keeping close track on that front.

The DOJ had finally “agreed to brief House Intelligence Committee members about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.” The DOJ knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, “but instead deliberately concealed it.”

As Strassel noted, House investigators even “sniffed out a name,” not a welcome development for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who like Special Counsel Robert Mueller appears to believe he is a head of state. Rosenstein accused the investigators of “extortion,” as though they were threatening his family for a ransom payment. Rosenstein also said it was a constitutional duty to refuse revelations of FBI files, and the DOJ trotted out what Strassel called the “daddy of all superspook arguments,” that lives were at stake.

Trump antagonist and left-wing character assassin Michael Avenatti, whom Tucker Carlson has taken to calling “that creepy porn lawyer,” is threating to sue journalists for a conservative-leaning media outlet for defamation for daring to report on the attorney’s highly questionable ethics and business dealings.

Avenatti’s uncharacteristic loss of self-control could indicate that the attorney is beginning to realize his vexatious lawsuit against President Trump to free plastic surgery-addicted X-rated film star Stormy Daniels to talk about the alleged affair she had with Trump – that she has already talked about at length over and over and over – is about to collapse.

The media-savvy attorney who has become a household name across America has to know he has close to zero chance of succeeding in his own defamation lawsuit because he is now a hugely famous public figure who no longer enjoys the same civil law protections he enjoyed when he was relatively unknown.

Or all of this could be an act, a kind of political theater aimed at an ulterior objective such as continuing to generate adverse publicity for President Trump to distract from his many impressive policy achievements.

The evidence continues to accumulate that Avenatti’s relentless assault on President Trump and his personal lawyer Michael Cohen is part of the Barack Obama-led anti-democratic insurgency to oust the duly elected 45th president of the United States from the White House.

A few days ago, I received a text message from “Stacey,” of the Real Justice PAC, notifying me of San Diego County’s upcoming June 5 elections. We “will have a chance to replace our Republican District attorney with a progressive Democrat,” she informed me.

Naturally, I wanted to learn more about the latest progressive crusade.

Real Justice claims to be an outgrowth of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. The group’s objective is to elect prosecutors who will “fight for social justice.” To this end, “big organizing” is required to mobilize “massive audiences” for a “big agenda.” Using the power of “social media, digital tools and the voices of a new generation of leaders like Shaun King who are organizing massive audiences to take action locally and nationally through rapid response campaigns.” The last thing anyone wants is a call from Shaun King’s people. That’s the guy with a conspicuous lack of melanin who co-founded Black Lives Matter.

All this talk of a “systematic, mass participation approach” and the aggressive unsolicited phone calls and text messages reminded me of another organization—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN).

ACORN’s mass participation program for electing social justice-minded bureaucrats entailed “enlisting millions of new and politicized voters.” ACORN called for mass democracy to “create an electoral environment hospitable to fundamental change in American society,” which required an “enlarged and politicized electorate” to “sustain and encourage the movements in American society that are already working for the rights of women and minorities.” And don’t forget “protection of the social programs, and . . . transformation of foreign policy.”

Anyone who watched the confirmation hearings of Gina Haspel should be astonished at the way most of the Democrats treated her. KSM, the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, and the Senate intelligence panel”s Democrats both agree that they are against the nomination of Gina Haspel to lead the CIA. He has written a letter to them giving information about Haspel, who in 2002 was a chief of base at a black-site prison in Thailand, where detainees were subjected to enhanced interrogation. Waterboarding was a big issue, but none thought to mention that it happened to only three terrorists. Maybe the Democrats should call KSM as a witness, since they appear to be singing the same tune of Kumbaya.

At best, these Democrats were playing Monday-morning quarterback, but more likely, the takeaway is that they are politically correct, while appearing to sympathize with the terrorists. New Mexico senator Martin Heinrich asked her, “Do you think that a transcript that says the detainees continued to scream has the same gravity, the same reality of an actual video?”

Is he kidding, or does he believe that Americans will ever feel sorry for these jihadist extremists who brutally killed 3,000 Americans? This just shows how out of touch the Democrats are with reality. Maybe Heinrich should think about the screams of those 3,000 people on 9-11 as they plunged to their deaths, were burned alive, or were dismembered. After all, KSM said how his brothers would relentlessly continue their attacks: “[e]ventually America will expose her neck to us for slaughter.”

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s texts shine a highly redacted light on how the Trump-Russia investigation began.

It was July 31, 2016. Just days earlier, the Obama administration had quietly opened an FBI counterintelligence investigation of Russian cyber-espionage — hacking attacks — to disrupt the 2016 election. And not random, general disruption; the operating theory was that the Russians were targeting the Democratic party, for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win the presidency.

FBI special agent Peter Strzok was downright giddy that day.

The Bureau had finally put to bed “Mid Year Exam.” MYE was code for the dreaded investigation of Hillary Clinton’s improper use of a private email system to conduct State Department business, which resulted in the retention and transmission of thousands of classified emails, as well as the destruction of tens of thousands of government business records. Strzok and other FBI vets dreaded the case because it was a go-through-the-motions exercise: Everyone working on it knew that no one was going to be charged with a crime; that Mrs. Clinton was going to be the next president of the United States; and that the FBI’s goal was not to be tarnished in the process of “investigating” her — to demonstrate, without calling attention to the suffocating constraints imposed by the Obama Justice Department, that the Bureau had done a thorough job, and that there was a legal rationale for letting Clinton off the hook that might pass the laugh test.

Early in the Obama presidency, National Review’s Jim Geraghty observed that all of Barack Obama’s promises come with an expiration date.

By that, Geraghty meant that Obama tended to have strongly held convictions, up until the moment they became politically inconvenient.

It turns out that President Obama’s few accomplishments are just as ephemeral.

Lacking Senate votes to ratify a treaty with Iran, Obama instead made a personal promise to honor the Iran deal. Last week, President Trump reversed that decision.

Obama long claimed he lacked authority to provide amnesty to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Then he did it anyway. The so-called Dreamers remain in political limbo, relying on the federal government to continue to ignore the law.

Obama signed the U.S. up for a climate change plan that won’t do anything to slow climate change. Trump took us out of it.

Blocked by Congress, Obama passed his Clean Power Plan by executive order and net neutrality through the FCC. What he did with “a phone and a pen,” Trump is undoing.

Obama’s signature health care law remains in place, but Congress repealed the individual mandate at its core. The damage it did to our health care system remains.

Barack Obama built his castles out of sand. He should not be surprised that they are being washed away by the next tide.

Australia has always been generous to those who come here seeking respectability and wealth, as the transported criminals who prospered after being shipped to their innocent new land came to appreciate. It’s a fine tradition — one Foreign Minister Julie Bishop appears keen to honour and to advertise. Hence the Facebook picture above, which Ms Bishop proudly posted this very Saturday morning on her Facebook page after the duo chinwagged about “empowering women”.

Mrs Clinton undoubtedly shares that enthusiasm for the opportunities to be grasped in Australia, as well she might in light of the many hundreds of millions of dollars poured into Clinton charities by Julia Gillard and, more recently, by Ms Bishop herself.

Such warmth! And, perhaps, a just-us-girls briefing as well.

You see, Mrs Clinton will be sitting down with the ABC’s Leigh Sales on Monday for a chat. Being a hugely well paid priestess in the national broadcaster’s temple of truth, the the 7.30 hostess might choose to explore topics like

the Clintons’ involvement with Haiti
running the State Department from an unsecured server in the basement bathroom closet
making 30,000 emails disappear
the remarkable series of coincidences that saw Bill Clinton pocket enormously lucrative speaking fees from companies and nations whose cases and causes were before the State Department, followed by the subsequent granting of those supplicants’ dearest wishes
her campaign’s funding of the so-called Russian Dossier

In the aftermath of last month’s shooting of Saheed Vassell, a mentally ill man menacing Brooklyn pedestrians with a tool that looked like a gun, Chirlane McCray conceded that “New Yorkers are right to ask if their city is doing enough to support [those] struggling with severe mental illness.” The answer is “no.” Continued tragedies prove that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature mental-health plan, ThriveNYC, is not helping those with the most serious mental illnesses.

The mayor and his wife have boasted about committing more than $850 million in funding over four years to ThriveNYC, which launched in 2015, but New York’s mental- health commissioner, Gary Belkin, admitted last year that just $165 million had been allocated to those with serious mental illness. Belkin has failed to specify how those funds were spent. In 2015, de Blasio also announced NYC Safe, a program specifically intended for the seriously mentally ill, who use a disproportionate amount of hospital or police services. But the city has published little data on the initiative other than to say that it is a small program, budgeted at $22 million a year.

In 2015, police received 150,000 calls about “emotionally disturbed persons,” or EDPs. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the mayor’s focus on the problem of mental illness, that number is now up to 165,000 calls. The mayor’s misallocation of mental- health spending has made police officers the first responders to incidents of acute mental illness, putting cops in the precarious position of negotiating with unstable individuals, who may be violent and irrational. These situations can be dangerous for everyone involved: of the 3,523 assaults on NYPD officers in 2016, 18.3 percent resulted from encounters with EDP. Last year, one of these encounters led to the death of Officer Miosotis Familia, shot by a schizophrenic man who had stopped taking his medication. And by offloading responsibility for dealing with the seriously mentally ill to the police, the city also puts patients at risk. Though the NYPD responds to the majority of EDP calls successfully and humanely, almost half of the department’s 501 Taser deployments in 2016 were in response to EDPs.