RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mitt Romney announced Friday that he’s running for the U.S. Senate from Utah, and the timing on the same day as the Justice Department indictments of Russians for meddling in the U.S. presidential election was apt. Mr. Romney was right about the Russian threat in 2012, and Democrats who are now echoing him when it serves their political purposes against Donald Trump owe the former GOP presidential nominee an apology.

Start with Barack Obama, who derided Mr. Romney’s claim that Russia was a major U.S. geopolitical foe in the third presidential debate in 2012. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Mr. Obama said, to applause from the Democratic media establishment. In its endorsement of Mr. Obama, the Washington Post criticized Mr. Romney for “calling Russia America’s greatest foe” as an example of his lack of judgment.

Readers may recall that Mr. Romney made his comments about Russia after Mr. Obama was caught unaware talking on an open microphone with then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in March 2012:

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important to give me space,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Medvedev, the Vladimir Putin stand-in.

“Yeah, I understand,” Mr. Medvedev said.

Mr. Obama then said, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Mr. Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

“Israel learned the hard way. A terrorist school shooting forty years ago took the lives of over a hundred elementary school children. Since then, any school in Israel with a hundred students or more has armed guards and staff with concealed weapons. Why do we in America value our air travelers, our congresspeople, celebrities, the employees and contents of all public buildings, museums, etc. more than we treasure our schoolchildren? Given the world we now inhabit, it seems that our schools would and should have the best security available today. Those of us with little Ring doorbell cameras on our front porches have more security than most of our schools. ”

Not only is it hard to imagine the anger and grief the families of those killed by Nikolas Cruz are in at their Florida high school; it is impossible. We can sympathize and empathize, ache for their loss and be grateful that our own children were not there, and then feel guilty for being relieved that our children are safe.

An event like this one focuses all parents and grandparents like laser beams on their own young people. That such a thing has happened yet again in our country is unacceptable, and yet it happened…again. Despite years of flashing neon lights that this boy was not only mentally ill, but potentially dangerous, he apparently had no formal record of mental illness. Even though he had been told he could not enter his school with a backpack and was later expelled, even though the police had visited his home thirty-nine times between 2011 and 2018, he was able to buy that AR-15 at age 18! Even though we have laws meant to prevent persons who are mentally ill from acquiring guns, this kid passed a background check! This is yet another catastrophic failure of a whole panoply of law enforcement agencies, social services, and school authorities.

Adding insult to injury, the FBI barely bothered to check out the YouTuber who reported Cruz’s comment about becoming a “professional school shooter,” and the bureau completely ignored a second, specific warning in January about his intentions to kill people. Both tips to the FBI included his full name. As Jeanine Pirro reported on her program, Judge Jeanine, there are only thirteen Nikolas Cruzes in the U.S.! The FBI did not even bother to do a database search, and now seventeen people are dead.

Given the bare facts above, it is hardly surprising that the American people want to blame someone for the colossal failure of law enforcement. Mistakes were made, to put it mildly. But now many of the young survivors, their parents, and the usual suspects on the left are blaming Trump. Why? Because he supports the NRA? Because he did not immediately speak out about gun control?

“The attacks on free speech on college campuses have just gotten so great that we couldn’t continue to sit idly by and do nothing abut it,” she said. “The freedom to test the merits of a position and sharpen one’s own views by debating opposing viewpoints is really at the core of a liberal arts education, and yet at too many colleges around the country administrators find it more important to make sure that students feel comfortable and affirmed.”
WASHINGTON – Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand said leaving the Department of Justice is “bittersweet” and she “would have been happy to stay much longer” but could not pass up a leadership opportunity at Walmart.

“I have loved working at DOJ, both in the Bush administration and now, and I would have been very happy to stay much longer but sometimes in one’s career, as many of you have experienced, no doubt, something comes up unexpectedly and you just can’t pass it up and that’s all there is to it. So, moving on,” Brand said to laughter from the audience at a Federalist Society luncheon on Thursday.

Brand is formally leaving DOJ this week to become Walmart’s executive vice president of global governance and corporate security.

NBC News reported last week that Brand decided to step down due to “fear” of being asked to oversee the Russia probe should President Trump decide to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein, according to anonymous sources.

Brand said on Thursday that it’s been “a pleasure” serving with Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“Jeff Sessions is focused every day on protecting us from foreign terrorist threats, from violent crime in our cities,” she said. “He’s tackling the opioid crisis, he’s fighting gangs like MS-13 and, importantly, he’s focused every day on ensuring everything DOJ does promotes the rule of law, and that commitment is carried out every day by all of us at the department.”

Brand told the audience her prayers go out to the victims’ families after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., on Wednesday. The FBI was warned about a YouTube comment that the shooter had allegedly posted last year, which referenced carrying out a school shooting.

“Im going to be a professional school shooter,” read Nikolas Cruz’s comment.

After the tip, the FBI reportedly did not coordinate with local law enforcement. Separately, the FBI received a tip a month before the shooting from someone close to Cruz.

“The AG has already directed our office of legal policy to work with other agencies to study the intersection of mental health and criminality to try to prevent these kinds of crimes from happening again in the future,” Brand said during the speech.

Following her remarks, PJM asked Brand to explain what policy changes DOJ is exploring after the shooting but she did not respond.

Brand told the audience that DOJ has been using its “litigation authority” to protect First Amendment freedoms, particularly on college campuses.

“The attacks on free speech on college campuses have just gotten so great that we couldn’t continue to sit idly by and do nothing abut it,” she said. “The freedom to test the merits of a position and sharpen one’s own views by debating opposing viewpoints is really at the core of a liberal arts education, and yet at too many colleges around the country administrators find it more important to make sure that students feel comfortable and affirmed.”CONTINUE AT SITE

On Friday, Judge Emmet Sullivan issued an order in United States v. Flynn that, while widely unnoticed, reveals something fascinating: A motion by Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea based on government misconduct is likely in the works.

Just a week ago, and thus before Sullivan quietly directed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to provide Flynn’s attorneys “any exculpatory evidence,” Washington Examiner columnist Byron York detailed the oddities of Flynn’s case. The next day, former assistant U.S. attorney and National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy connected more of the questionable dots. York added even more details a couple of days later. Together these articles provide the backdrop necessary to understand the significance of Sullivan’s order on Friday.
What’s Happened in the Michael Flynn Case So Far

To recap: On November 30, 2017, prosecutors working for Mueller charged former Trump national security advisor Flynn with lying to FBI agents. The following day, Flynn pled guilty before federal judge Rudolph Contreras. Less than a week later — and without explanation — Flynn’s case was reassigned to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.

One of Sullivan’s first orders of business was to enter a standing order, on December 12, 2017, directing “the government to produce to defendant in a timely manner – including during plea negotiations – any evidence in its possession that is favorable to defendant and material either to defendant’s guilt or punishment.” Sullivan’s standing order further directed the government, if it “has identified any information which is favorable to the defendant but which the government believes not to be material,” to “submit such information to the Court for in camera review.”

The indictments are in.

Team Mueller indicted a bunch of Russians associated with a troll farm for interfering with an election in the United States. Russian troll farms generally don’t follow United States law. But foreigners are not allowed to interfere with elections in the United States. Unless they’re named Christopher Steele.

The Clinton campaign employed a British foreign agent who used Russian intelligence sources to put together opposition research meant to interfere with the results of a United States election. Collusion between the Clinton campaign, Steele and the Russians doesn’t require an endless fishing expedition.

Foreigners interfering in United States elections are not a new phenomenon. Muslims in Gaza famously ran a phone bank for Obama. A Hamas political adviser had declared that he hoped Obama would win.

There was no investigation. Nor did anyone indict the Gazans running the phone bank.

The indictment states that, “the Federal Election Campaign Act… prohibits foreign nationals from making any contributions, expenditures, independent expenditures, or disbursements for electioneering communications.” But Obama had chosen to accept untraceable donations from abroad. He had failed to ask for proof of citizenship and his website had even allowed donations from Iran and North Korea.

The chair of Nigeria’s stock exchange had organized an “Africans for Obama” fundraiser. The Albanian Socialist Prime Minister had been accused of a scheme to transfer $80,000 to an Obama fundraising committee. Gazans bought and resold Obama t-shirts from the campaign website. And no indictments.

None of that counts as election interference. And none of it generated an investigation of Obama.

Indicting civilians covertly employed by a foreign government to engage in propaganda in the United States is an unserious act. But Obama Inc. responded in the same futile way to Chinese hacking efforts. Responding to cyberwarfare with toothless indictments is not how you head off the next attack.

Let’s suppose for a minute that Hillary Clinton and all her fellow Resisters, along with all their allies in the Deep State, had accepted the results of the 2016 election, as has been the tradition and expectation. Remember Hillary’s sneering question to Donald at the debates – whether he would accept the election results? At that time, nobody thought Hillary would be the one to throw the temper tantrum when she lost, much less organize a resistance movement.

Suppose that, instead of anger and outrage over losing the election and launching what is turning out to be a suicidal frontal assault on Donald Trump, Hillary and her minions had set about to co-opt him with flattering news coverage and invitations to all the most glittering social events. In the past, that’s how it worked. The Powers that Be co-opted newcomers to the Executive and Legislative Branches of government with seduction – showering them with all the enticements within the political insider’s bags of goodies. It’s been done often before; the GOP is populated with legions of politicians who came to Washington promising the voters that they would be change agents. Instead, the so-called RINOs succumbed to the voices of the Sirens who control the media, the money, and the chairmanships. It is, as the saying goes, so much more pleasant and profitable “to go along to get along.” After all, who wants to endure a ceaseless torrent of negative coverage in the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the MSM?

This time, finding no sealed divorce proceedings to crack open at the last minute to rig the election and failing in destroying their opposition with character attacks, the Hillary forces’ insurance policy was to trump up charges of Russian collusion. I suppose it is the Arkansas-Chicago way. Plus, destroying your opponents does afford a certain amount of ego gratification. In fact, it’s been obvious for a long time that the Clinton way is akin to Conan the Barbarian’s – i.e., to “crush your enemies” is “what is best in life.”

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Professional politicians have produced a breed of humanitarian hucksters selling policies and products that benefit themselves rather than the American public they are entrusted to serve. Politicians are necessary in our representative government but career politicians are not. Term limits are necessary to protect the public against abuses of power created by career politicians living insulated lives inside Washington where their self-serving deals have become normative.

Historically politicians were citizen legislators who provided short term patriotic service to the country without remuneration. They were citizens from all walks of life bringing a variety of perspectives to Washington in service to their constituents. What happened? LOBBYISTS.

Lobbyists spent 1.45 billion dollars in 1998. In 2017 lobbyists spent 3.34 billion dollars. How is that money spent? What do lobbyists expect to receive for the billions of dollars they spend? Who benefits? LOBBYISTS, CLIENTS, and POLITICIANS with policies “for our own good” of course.

Opensecrets.org reports data on lobbying, lobbyists, and lobbying recipients. There is a lot of money changing hands. In 2016 Hillary was at the top of the list. Lobbyists are not charities distributing to the poor – lobbyists spend billions of dollars on politicians to convince the politicians to vote in favor of whatever the lobbyist is peddling. Here is the problem.

What the lobbyist is selling is rarely beneficial to the public but always beneficial to the lobbyist, the lobbyist’s client and to the politician. The longer the politician remains in office the longer he/she is tempted by the myriad of enticements offered by the lobbyist to provide favorable outcomes for the lobbyist’s generous clients. Lobbying is a business and lobbyists are extremely candid and unapologetic about their business goals.

Howard Finkelstein, the Broward County public defender whose office is representing Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., puts it bluntly:

This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from killing animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be a school shooter. If this isn’t a person who should have gotten someone’s attention, I don’t know who is. This was a multi-system failure.

Specifically, the FBI admits that it received two separate tips about Cruz. Last fall, a frequent YouTube vlogger noticed an alarming comment left on one of his videos. “I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” said a user named Nikolas Cruz. The vlogger alerted the FBI and was interviewed. But the agency subsequently claimed its investigators couldn’t locate Cruz, despite the highly unusual spelling of his first name.

Then, just six weeks ago, a person close to Cruz warned a call taker on the FBI’s tip line that the expelled student had a desire to kill and might attack a school. The bureau said that the information was not passed to agents in the Miami office. Florida governor Rick Scott has called for FBI director Christopher Wray to be fired. So has NRO’s Kevin Williamson in a powerful piece: “Fire the FBI Chief.” Other officials are calling for FBI heads to roll, but at a level below Wray’s. Florida attorney general Pam Bondi told Fox News, “The people who had that information and did not do anything with it, they are the ones that need to go.”

For his part, Director Wray is promising that his agency will conduct a full probe. Congressional oversight committees are skeptical about how complete that will be given the recent evidence of the FBI’s politicized role in the probes of Russia and the Trump campaign, along with the infamous anti-Trump “Steele dossier,” which the FBI relied on without verifying,

“The fact that the FBI is investigating this failure is not enough,” Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) said in a statement. “Law enforcement personnel constantly remind the public that ‘if you see something, say something.’ In this tragic case, people close to the shooter said something, and our system utterly failed the families of seventeen innocent souls.”

When Democrats talk about evil “Republican billionaires” like Sheldon Adelson and the dreaded Koch Brothers, it’s always in apocalyptic terms. They are trying to “buy” elections and hide their influence with “dark money” schemes.

Somehow, Democrats never get around to mentioning their own billionaires and the massive amounts of money contributed to Democratic causes by the likes of Tom Steyer, Mark Cuban, and J.B. Pritzker, who is running for governor of Illinois.

And, of course, George Soros.

Soros’s reach is international. He has a huge network of international do-gooder organizations that promote his pet causes. And he is a reliable, if sometimes shadowy, contributor to Democratic Party causes in the U.S.

But Soros’s son Alexander is emerging as a major player in Democratic politics. According to the Federal Election Commission, Alexander contributed $650,000 to Democratic campaigns and various committees in 2017.

Washington Free Beacon:

Alex’s generous contributions spanned across a number of liberal party committees and campaigns, including two donations totaling $203,400 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) recount and building funds, while providing an additional $33,900 to the committee during the primary period.

Alex also gave large amounts to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). Like his contributions to the DCCC, Soros gave the DSCC $203,400 for its recount and headquarters account, with another $33,900 going towards the primaries.

President Trump said Sunday Russia accomplished its goal of creating “discord, disruption and chaos” in the United States and now Russians are “laughing their asses off” at the U.S.

“If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!” Trump tweeted.
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!

Trump spent the early part of Sunday morning tweeting thoughts about Russian meddling in the 2016 election, criticisms of the Obama administration made by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and a $1.7 billion payment to Iran made by the Obama administration as a part of the nuclear deal.