RUTHFULLY YOURS

James Comey is proving himself to be a real sneak.

According to information in the Grassley-Graham memo, the former FBI director had a meeting with the White House on Jan. 5 about supposed Russian collusion in the 2016 election and then failed to disclose it to Congress, when he was asked about it in testimony. It turns out that the Obama inner circle, including Susan Rice, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, Comey, and President Obama were all pow-wowing together in the White House, and Susan Rice, who questioned whether incoming President Trump should be told at all about the Russian collusion investigation, wrote a memo to herself describing the encounter.

The fact that Comey showed up comes in direct contradiction with Comey’s sworn testimony to Congress, claiming he never met President Obama except on two unimportant occasions, the Daily Caller notes:

By failing to inform the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the meeting in his June 8, 2017, testimony, Comey may have deliberately and intentionally misled Congress about his interactions with the former president, especially a meeting so close to Trump entering the White House.

…and…

Previously, Comey contended he only met with the Obama twice, once in 2015 and another “to say goodbye in late 2016,” according the former FBI director’s June 8, 2017, testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) – once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016,” Comey’s opening statement read.

The best thing Bobby Rush ever did was in 2000 when he faced a primary challenge from State Senator Barack Obama. Rush defeated Obama 61 to 30 percent with other candidates making up the other 9 percent. rsk

WASHINGTON – Asked about President Trump’s remarks at Tuesday’s White House Black History Month ceremony, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), who hadn’t seen the event, asked PJM if the administration displayed a “lynching tree” there.

“Lynching? What did they have? A tree like out in Alabama they used to lynch with?” Rush asked during an interview Tuesday evening after the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Avoice Heritage Celebration recognizing African-American veterans.

When Rush was told there wasn’t a lynching tree at the White House, he replied, “Oh, they didn’t have that? He didn’t do a replica of a lynching tree?”

The theme of the White House’s Black History Month ceremony was “African-Americans in Times of War.” During the event, Trump reiterated his remarks about a record-low African-American unemployment. The rate in December was 6.8 percent; the lowest previous rate was 7 percent in April 2000. The current trend began falling in June 2013, when the rate was 14.2 percent.

FBI Director James Comey held a secret Oval Office meeting with President Barack Obama two weeks before Trump’s inauguration and may have deliberately misled Congress about it, according to an email sent by National Security Advisor Susan Rice that GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham partially unclassified

.http://dailycaller.com/2018/02/13/comey-obama-secret-meeting/

The meeting — which Comey never previously disclosed to Congress — occurred in the White House on Jan. 5, 2017. It included Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Rice deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and Comey. The topic of the meeting was potential Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

By failing to inform the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the meeting in his June 8, 2017, testimony, Comey may have deliberately and intentionally misled Congress about his interactions with the former president, especially a meeting so close to Trump entering the White House.

“President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office,” Rice wrote in an email written the day before the inauguration.

The National Archives gave Grassley and Graham “classified and unclassified emails” about the meeting.

Previously, Comey contended he only met with the Obama twice, once in 2015 and another “to say goodbye in late 2016,” according the former FBI director’s June 8, 2017, testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Back in early December, Trump fans started throwing stuff at me for suggesting that we await more information about FBI agent Peter Strzok before demanding that he be drawn and quartered.

Yes, it was clear that Strzok engaged in serious misconduct: The married G-man’s reported extramarital affair with his married FBI colleague Lisa Page was scandalous not only for the obvious reasons but as potential blackmail material against counterintelligence agents. Plus, Strzok appears to have been the main investigator in the Hillary Clinton emails case that the FBI and Justice Department bent over backwards not to prosecute; and there is reason to believe his rabidly anti-Trump text messages with his paramour crossed the line from arrogant political banter to unprofessional investigative decision-making.

But there were dissonant notes, too, cutting against the neat ditty about a high-ranking government agent acting on a corrupt partisan agenda. For one thing, I was hearing from people with good national-security credentials that Strzok was a highly effective counterintelligence agent.

And then there was Mike Flynn.

The first revelations about Strzok’s texts came only days after General Flynn, who had fleetingly served as President Trump’s first national-security adviser, pled guilty in the Mueller investigation to a charge of lying to FBI investigators. Strzok had conducted the interview with Flynn. Combine that with the fact that he had been a principal in all the important FBI interviews in the Clinton caper, and the presumption crystalized: Political hack Strzok went kid-gloves on the Hillary Gang and scorched-earth on Trump World.

The tom toms are beating for the head of Chief of Staff John Kelly for mishandling the White House response to spousal abuse allegations against former aide Rob Porter. Unless President Trump has lost confidence in the former Marine General, it isn’t clear what good his dismissal would do beyond satisfying Mr. Trump’s opponents.

Mr. Kelly didn’t help himself Monday by saying that the White House handling of the Porter accusations “was all done right.” He and others misjudged the uproar that similar and credible stories by Mr. Porter’s two former wives would unleash amid the #MeToo furor. He also seems to have given Mr. Porter the benefit of the doubt when the only real “due process” in the White House should be what helps or hurts the President.

But Mr. Kelly didn’t abuse those women, though you wouldn’t know it from the media denunciations. Our guess is that, amid the 25 items in his inbox, Mr. Kelly wanted to keep one of his best deputies if he could. This may be a violation of the #MeToo movement’s view that all accusations are instantly believable, but it isn’t by itself a firing offense.

The latest uproar concerns whether the White House was accurate in saying the FBI investigation into Mr. Porter’s security clearance was “ongoing.” FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress Tuesday that the FBI had “administratively closed” the Porter file last month. Mr. Porter was working under an interim clearance, and denial of a permanent clearance means someone must leave the White House. Mr. Kelly needs to get the complete story straight and make it public, but it isn’t clear that this discrepancy was intentional deception.

The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus. Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued.

Remember, in the FISA-gate scandal such likely widespread criminal behavior was predicated on two premises: 1) certainty of an easy Clinton victory, after which the miscreants would be not only excused but probably rewarded for their zeal; 2) progressive hubris in which our supposedly moral betters felt it their right, indeed their duty, to use unethical and even unlawful means for the “greater good” — to achieve their self-described moral ends of stopping the crude and reactionary Trump.

The wrongdoing probably includes attempting to warp a U.S. election, Russian collusion, repeatedly misleading and lying before the FISA courts, improperly surveilling American citizens, unmasking the names of citizens swept up in unlawful surveillance and then illegally leaking them to the press, disseminating and authenticating opposition smears during a political campaign, lying under oath to Congress, obstructing ongoing investigations, using federal funds to purchase ad hominem gossip against a presidential candidate, blatant conflicts of interests, weaponizing federal investigations, trafficking in and leaking classified information . . . The list goes on and on.

The State Department is now involved. Apparently anyone who was a former Clinton smear artist can pass fantasies to a sympathetic or known political appointee at State. And if the “dossier” fits the proper narrative and shared agenda, it gains credence enough to ensure that it is passed up to senior State officials and on to the FBI. Perhaps a private citizen with a grudge against a rival should try that as well.

These scandals will grow even greater before various congressional investigations expire.

But then what?

In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed a number of Capitol Hill lawmakers on the Trump-Russia investigation. One topic of intense interest was the case of Michael Flynn, the Trump White House national security adviser who resigned under pressure on Feb. 13 after just 24 days in the job.

There were widespread reports that Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about telephone conversations that he, Flynn, had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition in late December 2016. On Jan. 24, 2017, two of Comey’s FBI agents went to the White House to question Flynn, and there was a lot of speculation later that Flynn lied in that interview, which would be a serious crime.

“The Jan. 24 interview potentially puts Flynn in legal jeopardy,” the Washington Post reported in February. “Lying to the FBI is a felony offense.”

There was also a lot of concern in Congress, at least among Republicans, about the leak of the wiretapped Flynn-Kislyak conversation. Such intelligence is classified at the highest level of secrecy, yet someone — Republicans suspected Obama appointees in the Justice Department and intelligence community — revealed it to the press.

So in March, lawmakers wanted Comey to tell them what was up. And what they heard from the director did not match what they were hearing in the media.

Item 1: “People now marvel how it came to pass that he should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His . . . efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world.”

Item 2: “A tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.”

Item 3: “He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”

Item 4: “Heartfelt keening of shame and revulsion was heard throughout the land.”

These nuggets refer, of course, to the president. But which president? Items 1 and 2 refer to . . . whom? If you said “Donald Trump,” you are only half right. Item 2 does refer to President Trump. It is from David Remnick’s hysterical threnody in The New Yorker, published in the early hours of November 9, 2016. But Item 1 refers not to Trump but to Abraham Lincoln. And it comes not from some rabid secessionist but from the Salem Advocate, a newspaper published in Lincoln’s home state of central Illinois.

Items 3 and 4 are easy. Any woke member of The Resistance will guess that the “inferior character” must be Donald Trump. But it isn’t. The great orator Edward Everett was also referring to Lincoln. Item 4 comes to us from “Annals of Resistance,” a series of skirling anti-Trump dispatches in the Huffington Post.

It is not news that Lincoln, who won the election of 1860 with only 39.8 percent of the popular vote, was deeply unpopular. His popularity was in freefall until September 3, 1864, when General Sherman telegrammed the news “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Military triumph earned Lincoln a narrow victory over George McClellan in the 1864 election. He remained deeply unpopular, however, until John Wilkes Booth inaugurated the process of his beatification in April 1865.

I think of Lincoln and his contemporary unpopularity because of the secessionist mood that is still, in some fetid redoubts, rippling through the country. Most colleges and universities are gigantic petri dishes for the production of this toxin, as are many elite organs of opinion. The New York Review of Books, for example, warned that with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, “We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half.” Which is to say, since the Civil War.