RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-bet-on-the-wrong-horse-says-an-unrepentant-101-year-old-spy-1529707003

Three decades after the Cold War, stories of Russian infiltration may come as a surprise to Americans. But some of us are old enough to remember that Russian skullduggery and espionage have a long history, going back to the inception of the Soviet Union in 1917.

The most infamous chapter was the atomic espionage case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage and executed in June 1953. Even at the time, many people didn’t know there was a third defendant tried with the Rosenbergs. His name was Morton Sobell ; he was convicted and imprisoned for conspiracy to commit espionage. Born half a year before the October Revolution, he is still alive at 101.

I first visited him at his Manhattan apartment in 1982. He had freedom, girlfriends, a Social Security check. My early interviews with him hinted at how much he wanted to let the world know he had been a great spy—but he was torn. Was he a martyr who had helped the Soviets, or a scapegoat for the U.S. government? There was a tension between wanting to do the right thing for the U.S.S.R. by proclaiming his innocence and his egotistical need for attention by making his crimes known.

Julius Rosenberg recruited Mr. Sobell in December 1943 to spy for the Soviet Union. In June 1947, Mr. Sobell was hired by the Reeves Instrument Corp., which was working on ballistic-missile defense systems. The classified information he gave the Soviet Union was later used against America in both Korea and Vietnam.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/muellers-fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree-1529707087

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation may face a serious legal obstacle: It is tainted by antecedent political bias. The June 14 report from Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, unearthed a pattern of anti-Trump bias by high-ranking officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Some of their communications, the report says, were “not only indicative of a biased state of mind but imply a willingness to take action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.” Although Mr. Horowitz could not definitively ascertain whether this bias “directly affected” specific FBI actions in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, it nonetheless affects the legality of the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry, code-named Crossfire Hurricane.

Crossfire was launched only months before the 2016 election. Its FBI progenitors—the same ones who had investigated Mrs. Clinton—deployed at least one informant to probe Trump campaign advisers, obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wiretap warrants, issued national security letters to gather records, and unmasked the identities of campaign officials who were surveilled. They also repeatedly leaked investigative information.

Mr. Horowitz is separately scrutinizing Crossfire and isn’t expected to finish for months. But the current report reveals that FBI officials displayed not merely an appearance of bias against Donald Trump, but animus bordering on hatred. Peter Strzok, who led both the Clinton and Trump investigations, confidently assuaged a colleague’s fear that Mr. Trump would become president: “No he won’t. We’ll stop it.” An unnamed FBI lawyer assigned to Crossfire told a colleague he was “devastated” and “numb” after Mr. Trump won, while declaring to another FBI attorney: “Viva le resistance.”

The report highlights the FBI’s failure to act promptly upon discovering that Anthony Weiner’s laptop contained thousands of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. Investigators justified the delay by citing the “higher priority” of Crossfire. But Mr. Horowitz writes: “We did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on [the] investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias.”

Similarly, although Mr. Horowitz found no evidence that then-FBI Director James Comey was trying to influence the election, Mr. Comey did make decisions based on political considerations. He told the inspector general that his election-eve decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation was motivated by a desire to protect her assumed presidency’s legitimacy. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/22/trumps-message-full-transparency

In the media’s rush to exploit the plight of migrant children this week, the public testimony of Michael Horowitz has been buried or, more likely, ignored by the news media.

Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, testified for more than 10 hours on Capitol Hill, taking questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday and from a joint congressional committee on Tuesday.

Since the June 14 release of his 568-page report on the department’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, Horowitz has been criticized for concluding that the agency’s decision to forego charges against Clinton was unrelated to the political views of those in charge.

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations,” Horowitz said, “including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed, or that the justifications offered for these decisions were pretextual.”

That finding seems to runs afoul of much of the report’s content, which included a trove of text messages showing top FBI brass favored Hillary Clinton and despised Donald Trump. (The report did suggest that the decision by lead investigator Peter Strzok to prioritize the Trump-Russia counterintelligence probe over the Weiner laptop investigation in September-October 2016 was not “free from bias.”)

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-The-peril-of-politicized-antisemitism-560599
Trump shows his friendship and respect for Israel every single day.

A Google search of the terms “Trump Nazi,” brings up 70,900,000 results.

There are a number of distressing aspects to this state of affairs.First and foremost, it is pure libel to call US President Donald Trump a Nazi.

His daughter Ivanka is Jewish. His daughter-in-law is Jewish. Half his grandchildren are Jewish and his non-Jewish ex-daughter-in-law is half Jewish.

How many Nazis have Hanukka celebrations in their homes starring their Jewish grandchildren?

Beyond his Jewish immediate family, Trump has shown extraordinary friendship to the Jewish state. It isn’t simply that Trump kept the promise none if his predecessors kept and moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, although that would have sufficed to prove his friendship.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pulitzer-prize-winning-columnist-charles-krauthammer-dies-at-68-

Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist whose incisive critiques made him an influential voice in Washington for decades, died Thursday. He was 68.

Mr. Krauthammer had said earlier this month that he was battling an aggressive form of cancer and his doctors told him he had weeks to live.

A Harvard-educated psychiatrist, Mr. Krauthammer was paralyzed below the neck in a freak diving accident in his 20s while in medical school. He used a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

After practicing medicine for a few years, he moved to Washington to direct planning in psychiatric research during the Carter administration and became a speech writer for Walter Mondale.

He then began contributing articles and political commentary to the New Republic, where he would eventually become a full-time writer and editor. In 1984, he won a National Magazine Award and began writing a regular column for the Washington Post. The column later was nationally syndicated.

“This is a hugely sad day for me, and I know in that I’m no different than so many Post readers,” said Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor, on Thursday. “For decades Charles has written a column of unparalleled principle and integrity, not to mention humor and intellectual virtuosity. There will be no replacing him.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/a_screaming_rabid_radical_employed_by_the_department_of_justice.html

A far-left mob claimed a public relations victory this week, surrounding and screaming at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she dined in a Mexican restaurant, eventually driving her out. The news stories featuring the screamers drew hundreds and hundreds of stories in the press. But what was really notable was who was doing it – the lowlife division of the Deep State: an openly far-left activist actually employed by the U.S. Department of Justice. Daily Caller had the story:

One of the activists who chased Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen out of a Mexican restaurant Tuesday night over the Trump administration’s immigration policies is an employee of the Department of Justice, The Daily Caller News Foundation has confirmed.

Members of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America crashed Nielsen’s meal with a demonstration full of chants and other outbursts.

One of those participants, Allison Hrabar, actually works for the Trump administration — as a paralegal in the DOJ.

“Kirstjen Nielsen, you’re a villain, locking up immigrant children,” activists can be heard saying in a video.

Now, you expect someone working at the Department of Justice to be an even-tempered person, someone concerned about fairness to all, whether on the right or the left, someone who actually believes in the law, and not someone who would politicize government, as Hugo Chavez did. Whoops, forgot – both Hugo Chavez and the activist involved in this protest, Allison Hrabar, are socialists, meaning, party over state, along with the end justifies the means.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/mueller-investigation-obstruction-ig-report-should-end/

The same logic that spared FBI and Justice Department officials harsher treatment in Michael Horowitz’s report should inoculate the president.

While generally cautious about criticizing Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Clinton-emails investigation, Trump supporters have taken aim at its chief logical flaw: Although key investigators harbored anti-Trump and pro-Clinton bias, and even made statements indicating an intention to act on that bias, the IG did not find that this bias was the proximate cause of any particular investigative decision.

This conclusion is easy to rebut; I did so myself in a column last week. Yet, the Trump camp should also be embracing it. Why? Because if this is the Justice Department’s position, then Special Counsel Robert Mueller has no business investigating the president for obstruction.

The IG’s rationale has been vulnerable to attack because of the way it has been distorted by FBI director Christopher Wray and congressional Democrats. They blithely assert that the IG found no bias in the FBI’s decision-making. That claim insults our intelligence.

The report documents a surfeit of political animus. Chapter Twelve, in which the IG marshals text messages and other recorded communications between investigators, is breathtaking. The report does not say that the investigators’ manifest loathing of Trump, their expressed intent to derail his presidential bid, and their desire to bring about his impeachment were irrelevant. It says that (a) because there were legitimate policy considerations that could have informed every one of their investigative decisions, and (b) because, as a matter of law, the FBI and Justice Department have broad discretion to make such judgment calls, (c) it is not the IG’s place to second-guess those decisions.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/21/scandals-sanitized-with-linguistic-

Throughout Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s massive report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation are lots of strange things. One of the weirdest is the extent to which the FBI went to make up words and phrases to disguise reality.

An early draft of the 2016 FBI report on the email scandal was reportedly subjected to linguistic surgery to exonerate the former secretary of state, who at the time was the Democratic nominee for president. Clinton was originally found to be “grossly negligent” in using an illegal email server. That legalistic phrase is used by prosecutors to indict for violation of laws governing the wrongful transmission of confidential government documents.

Yet the very thought of a likely President Clinton in court so worried the chief investigator, FBI Director James Comey, that he watered down “grossly negligent” to the mere “extremely careless.”

FBI investigators also had concluded that it was “reasonably likely” foreign nations had read Clinton’s unsecured emails. Comey intervened to mask such a likelihood by substituting the more neutral word “possible.”

Former President Barack Obama was found to have improperly communicated with Clinton over her illegal server while she was in a foreign country. Obama had denied that fact by falsely claiming that he never knew of her server until much later, after it was publicized.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-expression-1529533065

The American Civil Liberties Union has explicitly endorsed the view that free speech can harm “marginalized” groups by undermining their civil rights. “Speech that denigrates such groups can inflict serious harms and is intended to and often will impede progress toward equality,” the ACLU declares in new guidelines governing case selection and “Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities.”

This is presented as an explanation rather than a change of policy, and free-speech advocates know the ACLU has already lost its zeal for vigorously defending the speech it hates. ACLU leaders previously avoided acknowledging that retreat, however, in the apparent hope of preserving its reputation as the nation’s premier champion of the First Amendment.

But traditional free-speech values do not appeal to the ACLU’s increasingly partisan progressive constituency—especially after the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. The Virginia ACLU affiliate rightly represented the rally’s organizers when the city attempted to deny them a permit to assemble. Responding to intense post-Charlottesville criticism, last year the ACLU reconsidered its obligation to represent white-supremacist protesters.

The 2018 guidelines claim that “the ACLU is committed to defending speech rights without regard to whether the views expressed are consistent with or opposed to the ACLU’s core values, priorities and goals.” But directly contradicting that assertion, they also cite as a reason to decline taking a free-speech case “the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/up_to_60_organizations_may_sue_splc_for_defamation.html

According to a report from Tyler O’Neill at PJ Media, up tto 60 mostly conservative organizations may sue the Southern Poverty Law Center for being included in the organization’s list of “hate groups.” The SPLC just settled a defamation suit for more than $3 million with Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, whom the SPLC branded an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

Dozens of Christian and conservative groups have been similarly unfairly tarred by the SPLC as “hate groups,” and it appears they will exact their own revenge on the organization.

The SPLC published its “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” in 2016, listing Nawaz for an ever-changing list of reasons. The left-wing group first falsely claimed Nawaz had called for “an outright ban on the niqab,” or veil. This first charge disappeared from the website, and Quilliam accused the SPLC of “reverse engineering their justification to keep Maajid Nawaz on their list.” The SPLC later justified attacking him because he visited a strip club for his bachelor party.

Worse, the Islamist Muslim owner of the strip club who leaked the story to the press said he wanted to punish Nawaz for “being an atheist.” The SPLC, Quilliam argued, was “acting like religious police.”

“I’ve memorized half of the Quran, I am a Muslim, I am born and raised a Muslim, I learned classical Arabic, I’ve spent time in prison,” Nawaz declared last year, shortly after announcing his lawsuit. “You know who else lists heretics? The jihadists. We know what happens when you list heretics among Muslims in this way: They end up dead.”

The SPLC statement of apology was self-serving:

“The Southern Poverty Law Center was wrong to include Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation in our Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists,” Cohen said. “Since we published the Field Guide, we have taken the time to do more research and have consulted with human rights advocates we respect.”