RUTHFULLY YOURS

Worse things have happened in the last week or two. Worse things have been said. Yet what sticks in my mind and won’t go away are a few sentences that came out of Nancy Pelosi’s mouth during her marathon speech to the House last Wednesday.

She was there, on the House floor, to speak up for the so-called “Dreamers” – people who were brought illegally to America by their parents when they were children and who now want to be accorded legal residency, if not citizenship.

As Pelosi and other advocates for “Dreamers” have tirelessly asserted, some of them have made exemplary contributions to the United States. Others, however, in the course of agitating for residency status, have engaged in activities that hardly serve their cause.

They’ve waved Mexican flags. They’ve posed for pictures giving the finger to Mount Rushmore. They’ve cursed America, they’ve sneered and snarled at it – exhibiting a hostility to the country so intense that it makes one wonder just why they’re so eager to be Americans.

And yet they’ve been taken up as heroes by the left – even as others who’ve gone through the laborious and expensive process of securing U.S. residency legally have been made to feel like fools for doing it the right way.

It was because of the “Dreamers” that the Democrats closed down the government for a couple of days, causing military families to worry that their paychecks might not show up in the mail. And it was because of the “Dreamers” that Pelosi, age 77, broke the record for the longest speech ever given on the House floor – eight hours and ten minutes.

Before the Nunes memo was released, Democrats, the media and its intelligence sources insisted that it would undermine national security, reveal tradecraft secrets and even get agents killed.

Senator Cory Booker warned that it might be treasonously “endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community.” It was, but not in the way that he meant. The memo didn’t have anything resembling classified information it. Neither did the Grassley-Graham criminal referral which was heavily redacted to screen out all the “classified information.” What did the classified information consist of?

The Grassley-Graham criminal referral went through two FBI redactions. Julie Kelly at American Greatness compared the two versions to see what was hidden.

Most of the redactions in the first version, that were exposed in the second version, involved the problems with the FISA warrant application’s reliance on Christopher Steele. The references to the FISA warrant, which is classified, allowed figures in the FBI to redact it. But none of the references reveal anything damaging to our national security. They do raise serious questions about the FBI’s actions.

The FBI redacted the fact that the FISA warrant was thoroughly based on the Clinton-Steele dossier. Even if the FISA application is classified, Clinton opposition research isn’t. The FBI redacted the accusation that the FISA warrant had failed to state that Steele had been working for the Clinton campaign. That certainly isn’t classified information though it took a lot of work to expose.

The redaction even cut the FBI’s own revelation that Steele went rogue because he was upset at the reopening of the Clinton email investigation. The original documents that mention this may have been classified, but there is no legitimate national security reason for hiding this information from the public.

Revealing it exposes no “tradecraft” secrets that our enemies might exploit. It certainly won’t get anyone killed. Though it could and should get some of those responsible fired.

President Trump Friday refused to declassify the Democratic memo on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), sending it back for negotiation with the Justice Department over intelligence sources and methods. This intelligence memo feud has become a frustrating political back and forth that needs to be trumped with more transparency.

Mr. Trump claimed in a tweet on Saturday that Democrats laid a trap with their 10-page memo, deliberately adding classified material that they knew “would have to be heavily redacted, whereupon they would blame the White House for lack of transparency.” That may be true, but it worked. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer quickly sent out a statement, “what is he hiding?”

Our sources say the Democratic memo—six pages longer than the GOP version released a week ago—has three main themes. The first argues for the credibility of Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier that the FBI used as the bulk of its justification for a wiretap on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The second is that the FBI had good reason to surveil Mr. Page, and third is that the GOP memo is partisan.

None of this sounds like earth-shattering news since Democrats and their media echo chamber have been saying it for days. But keeping the memo classified plays into the Democratic narrative because the public can’t see the evidence behind their public claims. Let’s see what they’ve got.

The better remedy for these competing claims is to declassify all of the documents that House Intelligence Committee Members and staff used to compile the memos. This includes the full FBI application for a wiretap order from the FISA court—the original application and the three extensions. This would let the public see the full record and judge who is closer to the truth.

A significant part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s basis for investigating the Trump campaign’s Russia ties is looking more and more like a political hit job carried out by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Her campaign’s fingerprints are on at least three separate pieces of information fed to the FBI, including the Christopher Steele dossier Republicans say formed the basis of a secret warrant obtained to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

A former State Department official confirmed on the record Thursday that Clinton associates were funneling information to Steele as he was compiling a dossier commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign and DNC. That’s on top of the recent revelation that a top Department of Justice official fed the FBI information compiled by his wife, who was working for the firm Clinton and the DNC were paying to dig up dirt on Trump, Fusion GPS.

The dossier was quoted “extensively” in the FBI’s application to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, according to a memo released by Republicans on the House intelligence committee. In a January letter to the FBI made public this week, two Senate Republicans also said Steele’s information formed a “significant portion” of the warrant application.

“It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility,” Sens. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, and Lindsey Graham wrote in the letter referring Steele to the FBI for a criminal investigation.

Taken together, here’s what we know so far about the extent of Clinton’s involvement in the FBI’s case.

Now for the pivot.

Recall that just as Fusion GPS was working on behalf of the DNC and Hillary campaign in 2016, it was also working on behalf of a law firm defending the Prevezon case, a money-laundering case the US government brought against Russian national Dennis Katsyv. Katsyv’s Russian lawyer was Natalia Veselnitskaya. Yes, that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the one who met with Don Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016. (Some thoughts on Veselnitskaya’s little-noticed Senate testimony here.)

The Prevezon case was based on evidence provided by ex-American Bill Browder, a British citizen who became a billionaire in Russia. This evidence would go largely “unvetted,” as we say post-“dossier.” In his deposition, the primary US investigator on the case admitted as much. So, too, did the the author of a Council of Europe special report on the death of Browder’s accountant, Sergei Magnitsky. The connection here is that Magnitsky’s miserable death in a Russian prison is the basis of Browder’s campaign to sanction “complicit” Russians, which is a basis of the Prevezon law suit. Hence, the defense team effort, assisted by Fusion GPS research, to shred Browder’s evidence.

It is an odd feature of our caricature world that even to question Browder’s Magnitsky story is to “support Putin.” There is simply no other conceivable position or consideration in the public square, as administered by the Left and kindred Right. Thus, Fusion GPS, its key credentials for functioning in that public square tarnished by its anti-Browder/”pro-Putin” research, issued a statement negating the implications of that research to profess institutional support for Browder. Describing the firm’s role as collecting facts, Fusion GPS stated: “Occasionally, the facts turn out to be helpful to people we deplore, like Vladimir Putin, or undermine people for whom we have considerable sympathy, like William Browder.”

This was a brief but fascinating insight into Fusion GPS’s confessional mindset. The firm may well have uncovered evidence undermining the veracity of the Browder story, calling into gravest question his consequential international campaign, but evidence has no bearing on Fusion GPS’s “considerable sympathy” for the man. Professing anything less is to stray from the orthodoxy, and deviations will not be tolerated. This reminds me of … a lot of things, including the sundering of facts from conclusions historically associated with ideological, especially communist, zealotry. Note Fusion GPS resident Russia-expert Nellie Ohr and her apologetics on the Ukraine Terror Famine, and other “agonizing paradoxes” of Stalin’s communist dictatorship.

Last week, Sens. Grassley and Graham sent out a “batch of letters” listing 12 questions for (1) DNC Chair Tom Perez (c/o Perkins Coie’s Marc E. Elias); (2) Hillary for America campaign chairman Robby Mook (c/o Marc Elias); (3) former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz; (4) former DNC Chair Donna Brazile; (5) Hillary for America chairman John Podesta (c/o Marc Elias); (6) chief strategist Hillary for America Joel Benenson.

These are the top officials whose organizations, the Democratic National Committee and Hillary for America, bought and paid for the Trump-Russia “dossier,” brokered from Kremlin sources by retired MI6 agent Christopher Steele, under contract to GPS Fusion, and, to an unclear extent, the FBI.

What the senators seem be asking, in a nutshell, is whether these DNC/Hillary officials were charter members of the anti-Trump “coup.” Hard to imagine much in the way of voluntary answers. The questions, though, crack a little light on the direction of their investigation.

Question No. 12 is an eye-opener. It lists 40 people and entities from whom the senators seek dossier-client-communications “to, from, copying, or relating to.”

These include the Fusion GPS team; Christopher Steele and British associates; one genuine “Putin-linked” Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, and his British lawyer, Paul M. Hauser; two old Clinton circle intimates, “hatchet man” Sidney Blumenthal and “shady” Cody Shearer, who, we have recently learned, prepared a second anti-Trump report, which Steele also passed to the FBI; and, of course, the DOJ/FBI group.

The senators also want to see dossier-client communications with former DCIA and Gus-Hall-voter John Brennan, heretofore clinging to the outer, darker edges of the “coup” web; also Daniel J. Jones, a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer for Senator Feinstein. Ditto for whether the DNC/Hillary officials were communicating about the Steele “dossier” with State Department officials Jon Winer, Kathaleen Kavalec, Victoria Nuland.

What a very wide web of subversion Question No. 12 pencils in! Whether all of these people participated in the Dossier Conspiracy remains to be seen. However, ties already criss-cross the web in the case of Clinton associates Blumenthal, Shearer and State Department official Jonathan Winer.

Now we have it ostensibly from then-FBI Director James Comey as well as former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe that there might have been no surveillance of Carter Page without the Steele dossier. If so, that’s probably because the dossier provided the one thing the FBI lacked and was unlikely to find (because it didn’t exist): a reason to believe Mr. Page was important.

In the dossier accumulated by former British spy Christopher Steele, Mr. Page is a player. He meets secretly with Vladimir Putin’s No. 1 capo, Igor Sechin. Dangled in front of him is a gobsmacking bribe—a brokerage fee on the forthcoming privatization of a 19.5% stake in the giant Russian state oil firm Rosneft. All he has to do is arrange the lifting of U.S. sanctions, as if this were in the power of the elfin Mr. Page to deliver.

The story is implausible. Mr. Page has denied it under oath. Nothing has emerged to suggest the FBI confirmed it. Only Luke Harding, a British journalist who has written a book alleging Trump -Russia collusion, finds it inherently self-crediting. Why? Because Mr. Steele’s Russian “mole” apparently correctly anticipated the Rosneft deal that would finally be consummated in the closing hours of 2016. Even the Russian cabinet and Rosneft’s own board, Mr. Harding wrote last week at Politico.com, “only discovered the deal on December 7, hours after Sechin had already recorded his TV meeting with Putin revealing it.”

This nonsense actually points to why somebody might pluck out of the pending Rosneft deal and attach Mr. Page’s name to it. The partial sale, aimed at reducing the Russian government’s stake to 50% plus one share, had actually been conspicuously on the agenda for years. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree in 2014, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov started touting the expected proceeds in 2015, and Mr. Putin formally included them in the state budget in February 2016. CONTINUE AT SITE

On Thursday, February 8, 2018, Tucker Carlson featured Sonia Ossorio, president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). The portion begins here at 20:30. The interview occurred because Macy’s has decided to unveil Muslim garb – i.e., the hijab. The brainchild of Muslim convert Lisa Vogl, the items are part of Macy’s development program, The Workshop, which “helps nurture businesses owned by minorities and women.”

In the 1999 film titled Shackled: Women, Shiren Samieh explains that “the hijab comes from the Arabic word meaning ‘curtain,'” and as such, it is intended to be “a limitation” so that women are restricted in movement, thinking, and freedom. In fact, Islamic religious leaders maintain that a woman who is not covered will excite men, and women who are uncovered lead themselves to being raped.

In fact, “Islamic law ([s]haria) requires women to cover themselves. The head covering is interpreted as a symbol of male domination by most critics – and many Muslim women, who fight for the right to dress as they please. In 1994, a 21-year-old named Katia Bengana became the first casualty of the renewed Islamist terror campaign in Algeria after refusing to cover her hair. She defended her choice even as the gun was pointed at her head.

Some apologists insist that the veil is not mandated by the religion, although they do not have anything within the sacred texts to counter the passages in which Muhammad instructed its use. In fact, verse 24:60 says that the veil is optional only for unmarried women too old to have children.

Calling a coin toss “racist” is stretching things. So here come the race charlatans

When everything is about race, nothing is about race. The left plays the race card as often as it plays the Nazi or gender card, its hackneyed alternative to any substantive discussion about issues and policy. It’s much like those pull-string dolls: pull the string of a liberal and hear about race, gender, skin color, or immigration status. And not much else.

Race became the National Football League theme this year, as a bunch of privileged young athletes, being paid millions of dollars for playing a game, supported by an organization worth $75 billion, found it necessary to take a knee against the National Anthem. There they were, protesting the very country leaving them on the winning end of such income inequality.

The NFL season, thankfully, is in our rearview mirror for the next six months. Ahead is the Winter Olympics. Will the Olympic motto of “Faster, Higher, Stronger” be replaced by “Skin color and gender – darker and more confused”?

Rick Moran, on these pages, pointed out how the diversity police have infected the Olympic games, with unnecessary commentary on the skin color and sex orientation of athletes. Hopefully, the fastest and strongest athletes are at the games, regardless of identity factors, but we shall see if the virtue-signaling NBC commentators can resist the siren song of identity politics – much as the NFL has done.

Forty-six years ago, a group of hamfisted burglars bungled the task of bugging the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate building in Washington D.C. Two years later, Richard Nixon resigned as president a result of the failed cover-up that ensued. Although Barack Obama is no longer president, the abuses that occurred within the FBI and Justice Department under his watch already have the potential to eclipse the Watergate scandal in their historic significance and damage done to American government.

​A Beltway adage ​has it that “it’s always the cover-up that’ll get you, not the original transgression.” Often, this proves to be true, especially in the case of Nixon, but even more recently, given the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, which were over perjury and obstruction of justice, not actual abuse of power with a 22-year-old intern.
However, with the recent declassification of the Nunes and Grassley memos from the House and Senate, in this case the putative crimes are far more serious than a failed attempt to bug the private office of a political party. These crimes have the potential to shake American confidence in otherwise prestigious institutions like the FBI, and the sanctity of our constitutional rights as citizens, especially those afforded by the Fourth Amendment, specifically protection “against unreasonable searches and seizures” or warrants being issued without “probable cause.”