RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gina Haspel, Trump’s pick to succeed Mike Pompeo as head of the CIA, is a thirty-year veteran of the agency, one well respected by intelligence professionals from both parties. If confirmed, she will be the first woman to run our most important security agency. But despite this feminist victory, the Dems are likely to muddy the waters at her confirmation hearings by smearing her with allegations she oversaw “torture” at a black site in Thailand in 2002. Typical of what we can expect is the New York Times editorial titled, “Having a Torturer Lead the CIA,” even as the charge about the black site was shown to be untrue.

Once again, the party bereft of ideas and principle resorts to emotional obfuscation and accusation to advance their ideological prejudices. So, once again, it is necessary to lay out the facts and partisan hypocrisy behind the “torture” charge that has damaged our ability to gather the intelligence necessary to defend our safety and security.

Start with the imprecise or even willfully distorted language that always perfumes unsavory ideologies. In everyday use, “torture” can mean anything from a visit to the dentist to the sadistic mayhem of brutal regimes like Iran or North Korea. As a result, indiscriminate, lurid connotations and emotions attend the use of a word like “torture,” which of course is what makes it so useful for partisan smears.

Laws, however, have to be more precise. The statute concerning torture in U.S. law defines it as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.” The law further clarifies “severe mental pain or suffering” as “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering.”

Former attorney general Eric Holder scolded Jeff Sessions for the “rushed” firing of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe under pressure from the White House. Holder said Sessions needs “to have the guts” to stand up to President Donald Trump.

This is the same Eric Holder who on June 28, 2012 became the first U.S. attorney general in history to be held in both criminal and civil contempt by the House of Representatives in a 255-67 vote, with 17 Democrats voting for the measure (the rest of the Democrats walked out of the House, refusing to vote).

Peculiarly enough, in the first part of his claim, Mr. Holder may be not too far from the truth. Jeff Sessions really does “need to have the guts”…to consider starting a DOJ investigation of Holder’s activity in 2009-2015, when he “served” our country as the U.S. attorney general. And Sessions knows it as well as anyone. It was Republican Senator Jeff Sessions who gave a well deserved objurgation to Mr. Holder on June 17, 2009, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Back at that time, Sessions was of the opinion that after spending only five months on the job, Holder put into question the integrity and independence of the Department of Justice.

According to then-senator Jeff Sessions, in just a few months, A.G. Eric Holder, among other things, ignored recommendations of the Office of Legal Counsel on the constitutionality of a D.C. voting bill, refused a request from law enforcement officials to keep interrogation methods confidential, and released dangerous detainees from American prisons.

The list of Holder’s “achievements” as A.G. could be continued to eternity. On February 18, 2009, during Black History Month. Eric Holder called USA a “nation of cowards” on racial issues, stirring much controversy and even a statement from President Obama mentioning that he “would use different language” talking about the same issue. Mr. Holder refused to prosecute the famous case of voters intimidation by the Black Panthers in Philadelphia and called only black Americans “my people” while supposedly representing the whole American nation.

President Trump is right in saying that a special counsel should never have been appointed to investigate the so-called Russian connection. There was no evidence of any crime committed by the Trump administration. But there was plenty of evidence that Russian operatives had tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, and perhaps other elections, in the hope of destabilizing democracy. Yet, appointing a special counsel to look for crimes, behind the closed doors of a grand jury, was precisely the wrong way to address this ongoing challenge to our democracy.

The right way would have been (and still is) to appoint a nonpartisan investigative commission, such as the one appointed following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to conduct a broad and open investigation of the Russian involvement in our elections. This is what other democracies, such as Great Britain and Israel, do in response to systemic problems. The virtue of such a commission is precisely the nonpartisan credibility of its objective experts, who have no political stake in the outcome.
Such a commission could have informed the American public of what Russia did and how to prevent it from doing it again. It would not seek partisan benefit from its findings, the way congressional committees invariably do. Nor would it be searching for crimes in an effort to criminalize political sins, the way special counsels do to justify their existence and budget. Its only job would be to gather information and make recommendations.

We’ve been there before, in the crash of the dot-com bubble of 2000, when we believed that downloading pop music and porn would drive the economy of the future. We’ve done it again: We made another tech bubble on the premise that Americans would write the apps and Asians would make the hardware, and the miracle of connectivity would bring the world together in Mark Zuckerberg’s utopian vision. Internet community and Artificial Intelligence were the two blasts of hot air that inflated the bubble. Social media as a substitute for actual human interaction and computation as a substitute for human thought were going to waft us into the future.

Yesterday’s double crash of these delusions was the sort of irony that makes one intimate the hand of God in human history.

The crown jewel of Artificial Intelligence shattered when Uber’s autonomous SUV ran over Ms. Elaine Herzberg at the corner of Curry and Mill Street in Tempe, Arizona. And the concept of Internet community vaporized when news reports alleged that Cambridge Analytica improperly retained Facebook profiles of 50 million users. Facebook promptly lost 7% of its stock market value in yesterday’s trading, and other big tech names fell by 3% to 4%.

As his plot to destroy Trump backfires, his squeals grow louder.It was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who coined the phrase the “dustbin of history.” To his political opponents, he sputtered, “You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!”

It is no coincidence that John Brennan, who supported the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party in the 1970s (he has acknowledged that he thought his vote for its presidential candidate Gus Hall threatened his prospects at the CIA; unfortunately, it didn’t), would borrow from Trotsky’s rhetoric in his fulminations against Donald Trump. His tweet last week, shortly after the firing of Andrew McCabe, reeked of Trotskyite revolutionary schlock: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”

America will triumph over a president it elected? That’s the raw language of coup, and of course it is not the first time Brennan has indulged it. In 2017, he was calling for members of the executive branch to defy the chief executive. They should “refuse to carry out” his lawful directives if they don’t agree with them, he said.

With the decisive midterm elections just months away, Democrats are finally rolling out a long-awaited jobs program in hopes of wooing disaffected, working-class voters back to their party this November.

Their message is sure to win the hearts and minds of millions of blue-collar workers in the heartland who abandoned the party in 2016 to vote for Donald Trump. It is unflinching in its commitment to protect the most vulnerable employees—those who are at-risk of having their jobs taken away on a whim by powerful forces—and rendered unable to pay their bills or find other work.

It is “The Special Counsel Independence Protection Act.” Or, as I prefer to call it, the Robert Mueller Job Protection Act.

What, you say? You thought this effort would target steelworkers or coal miners or tradesmen who are struggling to find work? You hoped this would appeal to small business owners who are drowning under rising healthcare costs and expensive federal regulations? You expected a compelling plan from party leaders desperate to take control of Congress next year that would earn back voters in the 206 counties that flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016?

Oh, LOL! You don’t think Democrats actually give a rip about the deplorables in “backward” areas of the country where nothing ever happens and no one of value lives, do you? As Hillary Clinton just reminded us, Democrats are all about serving our betters in “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving-forward” areas of the country. You losers in Mattoon, Illinois? Suck it.

These brave warriors are charging the Trump Tower at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to defend Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his merry band of Democrat donors, er, investigators, and make sure their jobs are protected ad infinitum. Despite the obvious vicissitude of the Mueller investigation—which has yet to find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime before the presidential election—bold coastal liberals are staking their political fortunes on the taxpayer-funded probe they have wagered will destroy Trump’s presidency.

Although the legislation was introduced last year and has since stalled, Democrats are re-upping their plea after President Trump tweeted about Mueller over the weekend. In response, Senator Christopher Coons (D-Del.) issued this statement:

I understand that many of my colleagues don’t believe that President Trump will fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller without cause, and some have cited that as their reason for not backing the legislation I’ve introduced. Unfortunately, the statements and actions from the President and his lawyer over the weekend have led me to believe that the Special Counsel is now at real, immediate risk of being removed, and I believe the Senate needs to pass legislation to ensure that does not happen.

Sometimes the hysteria of crowds causes them to overlook the obvious. Here is a series of 12 questions that do not seem to trouble anyone, but the answers to these should expose why so many of the people today alleging scandals should themselves be considered scandalous.

1) Had Hillary Clinton won the election, would we now even know of a Fusion GPS dossier? Would assorted miscreants such as Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, or Peter Strzok now be under a cloud of suspicion? Or would they instead have been quietly lionized by a President Clinton grateful for noble services in the shadows rendered during the campaign?

2) If Clinton had won, would we now know of any Russian-supplied smears against Donald Trump? Would a FISA judge now be complaining that he was misled in a warrant request? Would likely Attorney General Loretta Lynch be reassigning Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr for his consultations with Fusion GPS operatives? Or would Russian operatives alone be likely, at an opportune moment, to threaten to leak to the media that they had given salacious material to Clinton operatives to ensure her election, and thus they were to be owed for their supposed help in ensuring a Clinton victory? Would anyone be now listening to a losing candidate Donald Trump making wild charges that he had been smeared in the closing days of his campaign by leaks of a Clinton cabal that drew on Russian help?

3) Are any Russian related interests currently still donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation? Why is Bill Clinton not being asked to speak by various groups—including those with Russian-ties—for $500,000 and above per talk? Is he now less persuasive than he was between 2009 and 2015?

4) Why did Andrew McCabe believe that two Democratic political action funds, one controlled by Clinton “best friend” Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, donated a total of $675,288 to his wife’s campaign for a rather obscure state senate post? What percentage of Jill McCabe’s actual campaign budget did the $675,288 comprise? And why after her defeat would Andrew McCabe still not recuse himself from directing FBI inquiries into allegations of (likely next president and past generous benefactor) Hillary Clinton’s prior improper use of an email server while Secretary of State? Does quid pro quo refer really more often to simultaneous benefactions or rather sequential ones?

As President Trump deliberates on whether to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a look at Mueller’s record of indicting ham sandwiches ought to give him pause.

Mueller, as The Federalist points out, botches high-profile cases and can drag them out for a decade. Reporter Daniel Ashman found this case with Mueller’s name on it, the anthrax attacks case dating back to 2001. That was when some maniac or terrorist, some beast, sent anthrax powder in the mail to news agencies, injuring people who opened the packages. I worked at Forbes magazine in New York at the time and remember how the mail was quarantined, depriving us of that communication line, and I remember how terrified people were at this nasty coda to the horrific 9/11 terror attacks.

The Federalist reports:

The anthrax letters began just a week after the 9/11 attack. While planning the airplane hijackings, Al-Qaeda had been weaponizing anthrax, setting up a lab in Afghanistan manned by Yazid Sufaat, the same man who housed two of the 9/11 hijackers. Two hijackers later sought medical help due to conditions consistent with infection via anthrax: Al Haznawi went to the emergency room for a skin lesion which he claimed was from “bumping into a suitcase,” and ringleader Mohamed Atta needed medicine for “skin irritation.” A team of bioterrorism experts from Johns Hopkins confirmed that anthrax was the most likely cause of the lesion. Meanwhile, the 9/11 hijackers were also trying to obtain crop-dusting airplanes.

So how did Mueller’s investigative team handle the case?

Mueller issued a statement in October of 2001, while anthrax victims were still dying: the FBI had found “no direct link to organized terrorism.” The John Hopkins team of experts was mistaken, the FBI continued, Al Haznawi never had an anthrax infection. The crop-dusting airplanes they needed was possibly for a separate and unrelated anthrax attack.