RUTHFULLY YOURS

Australian reporters assigned to cover the United States pack their leanings — Left ones, of course — with their socks when they jet off to relay the action in Washington. Either that or they are bone lazy. There is a ripper scandal unfolding on Capitol Hill but explaining it in full has been too much trouble

Any investment of faith in the Australian media’s reporting of events in Washington will not produce a dividend, as must be obvious after more than 12 months of monkey-see/monkey-cut-and-paste dispatches from our less-than-intrepid foreign correspondents. This is perhaps understandable, given the prevailing Left slant of all local newsrooms, especially the ABC and Fairfax. When their journalists leave for stints Stateside they pack their prejudices along with their socks. Having departed Australia imbued with their media colleagues’ prevailing view that Donald Trump is a scoundrel who must surely be impeached, they naturally turn for story ideas, if not enlightenment, to like-minded American outlets. Hence are Australians served served endless “scoops”about Russian chicanery, the First Lady’s alleged emotional estrangement from her husband and what are purported to be his white-supremacist sympathies.

How derelict is the Australian media in covering the US? Just ask yourself how much you have heard or read about, to name but two scandals, the Obama administration’s bugging of troublesome reporters and its weaponisation of the Internal Revenue Service against political opponents. More recently the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s hacked campaign emails always seem to mention the theft without detailing what was stolen. References to “spirit cooking” and the rigging of the primaries against Bernie Sanders don’t fit the narrative of the world’s smartest, most decent, honest and upright woman having been foiled in her ambitions by Russian perfidy don’t fit the narrative, so they get scant attention, if any attention at all.

Fortunately, unlike the bad old days, the internet makes it possible to keep tabs on developments from a distance and circumvent the media’s gatekeepers. Thus, when fallen-silent Fairfax Media correspondent Paul McGeough reports that Trump’s election unleashed a wave of horrific hate crimes, you can use Google to check the veracity of his story’s headline, “Make America hate again: how Donald Trump’s victory has emboldened bigotry “. Were you to cross-reference the litany of alleged assaults against this site, which tracks bogus “hate crimes”, you’ll find all but one or two incidents have been refuted by police. What you won’t find on the web or anywhere else is an Age, SMH or Canberra Times renunciation of the original reporting — an omission that brings me to the point I’d like to make about the current situation in the US, as understood by an interested layman.

The only thing the bureaucratic resistance hates more than President Trump is the disclosure of their own salaries. It’s a classic case of the bureaucracy protecting the bureaucracy, underscoring the resistance faced by the new administration.

Recently, Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (pictured) for all federal employee names, titles, agencies, salaries, and bonus information. We’ve captured and posted online this data for the past 11 years. For the first time, we found missing information throughout the federal payroll disclosures. Here’s a sample of what we discovered from the FY2017 records:

254,839 federal salaries were redacted in the federal civil service payroll (just 3,416 salaries were redacted in FY2016).
68 federal departments redacted salaries. Even small agencies like the National Transportation Services Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation redacted millions of dollars in salaries.
$20 billion in estimated payroll now lacks transparency.
A 7,360 percent increase in opacity hides one out of every five federal salaries.

Who’s the bureaucrat in charge? Not a Trump appointee – the president doesn’t even have a current nominee at OPM. So, the buck stops with new acting Director Kathleen McGettigan, a 25-year staffer who assumed the position because she was the next in line, not because the White House appointed her.

Ever watch one of those games in which it looks like the road team is inadvertently doing everything it can to give the game away but the home team is too inept to capitalize?

Welcome to the “Trump-Russia” investigation and the pro-Trump media’s coverage of the latest “stunning” revelation: a text in which two top FBI counterintelligence officials discuss the fact that the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

This has much of the conservative media crowing: The text, commentators exclaim, shows that Obama lied four months earlier when he claimed — hilariously, to be sure — that he never interfered in law-enforcement matters.

Uh, guys, counterintelligence is not law enforcement. If Obama demanded an intelligence briefing, that indicates he was doing what he was supposed to be doing as president.

Your play here is not that Obama is a liar. It is that the president is supposed to “interfere” in intelligence investigations. That makes the Trump-Russia obstruction narrative patently absurd.

If I sound a bit snarky, please cut me some slack. Since a time well before Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, I have been harping on the critical distinction between counterintelligence investigations and criminal investigations. It is often missed, even by lawyers if they are unacquainted with national-security law. You can’t blame people for being confused: Both kinds of inquiries are called “investigations,” just as apples and oranges are both “fruits,” but they are very different things.

Criminal investigations are about prosecuting people who violate the penal law. Political officials are generally supposed to stay out of them because we are a rule-of-law society — we want individual cases to be decided strictly by the law, not by political considerations.

There is not, nor should there be, complete independence between politics and this law-enforcement mission: Law enforcement is an executive political responsibility; the president is accountable for it; he sets the government’s law-enforcement priorities; prosecutors and investigators exercise the president’s power, not their own; and the president has undeniable constitutional authority to wade into investigations — even to the point of pardoning law-breakers. Still, by and large, the president should not interfere in criminal cases. If the president does interfere, he should do so transparently: Issue a pardon or order the investigation closed, and take the political heat for it; don’t stage-manage a farce to make it look like your crony is being exonerated by a real investigation when everyone knows you will not permit charges to be filed (see, e.g., the Clinton emails case).

The most bitter dispute over the Nunes memo involves Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. This might seem odd since the memo, published last week by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Devin Nunes (R. Calif.), does not address the Mueller investigation. Rather, it homes in on potential abuses of foreign-intelligence-collection authorities by Obama-era Justice Department and FBI officials, said to have occurred many months before Mueller was appointed.

Nevertheless, it is simply a fact that many ardent supporters of President Trump claim the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation is destroyed by revelations in the Nunes memo — particularly, the improper use of the unverified Steele dossier to obtain a FISA-court warrant to spy on Carter Page, who had been a Trump campaign adviser. The idea is that without the Steele dossier, there would be no Trump-Russia narrative, and thus no collusion investigation — which is how Trump supporters perceive the Mueller probe.

Naturally, this has prompted a vitriolic response. Trump critics see the Mueller investigation as the path to impeachment, and thus anathematize Chairman Nunes as a Trumpist hack bent on razing the FBI — longtime bête noire of the Left, which, through the alchemy of Trump derangement, has suddenly become great a pillar of Our Values.

But the Trump-deranged have only themselves to blame.

The Watergate scandal of 1972–74 was uncovered largely because of outraged Democratic politicians and a bulldog media. They both claimed that they had saved American democracy from the Nixon administration’s attempt to warp the CIA and FBI to cover up an otherwise minor, though illegal, political break-in.

In the Iran-Contra affair of 1985–87, the media and liberal activists uncovered wrongdoing by some rogue members of the Reagan government. They warned of government overreach and of using the “Deep State” to subvert the law for political purposes.

We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.

But none of these government officials told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the warrant requests were based on an unverified dossier that had originated as a hit piece funded in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump during the current 2016 campaign.

Nor did these officials reveal that the author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, had already been dropped as a reliable source by the FBI for leaking to the press.

When the question of who cooked up the gross, repulsive contents of the Steele Dossier is asked, is anyone surprised the name of Hillary Clinton’s consigliere, Sid Blumenthal, comes up?

Blumenthal has that kind of mind, and sure enough we read of him again. This time, there’s a new memo, created by Senate Republicans Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham about the creation of the Steele dossier, and apparently one of the contributors was Sid Blumenthal. According to Fox News:

Last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., made a criminal referral regarding Steele to the FBI. The referral, parts of which were declassified Monday, included a reference to “a foreign source [who] gave information to an unnamed associate of Hillary and Bill Clinton, who then gave information to an unnamed official in the Obama State Department, who then gave the information to Steele.”

In another section, the referral stated that Steele received information from “a foreign sub-source who is in touch with (redacted), a contact of (redacted), a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to (redacted).'”

Rep. Trey Gowdy, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, strongly hinted to Fox News that the “friend of Hillary Clinton” was Blumenthal:

When host Martha MacCallum asked if he was referring to Blumenthal, Gowdy answered, “That’d be really warm. You’re warm, yeah.”

We now have a side-by-side comparison of two FBI-redacted versions of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s criminal referral of Christopher Steele for lying to the FBI. After releasing a heavy-redacted memo on Monday, committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) put out an updated version late Tuesday after the FBI removed several of its earlier redactions. It offers a glimpse into what the Bureau initially considered to be classified information, and seems to justify what Grassley called his “loss of faith in the ability of the Justice Department and the FBI to do their job free of partisan, political bias.” (You can read my initial take on the memo here.)

The memo also supports many of the key findings by the House Intelligence committee, including Steele’s secret dealings with the press and the failure of the Justice Department and the FBI to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the political funding and source of the so-called dossier.

Written by Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on January 4, the memo presents disturbing evidence about how the FBI, DOJ, Steele, and Fusion GPS, with the help from one well-known reporter, colluded to convince the FISA court to surveil Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. The original redactions were not made to protect national security or safeguard a valuable source: They were made to cover-up the way the FBI manipulated the FISA warrant process and relied mostly—if not solely—on a dishonest, politically-funded foreign operative to gain approval to spy on a U.S. citizen.

Sometimes Donald Trump is right. The President set off another tempest in a teapot in Britain Monday with a tweet telling the truth about the U.K. National Health Service. Criticizing Democrats for proposing single-payer in America, Mr. Trump said Britain’s NHS is “broke and not working.”

In classic Trump style, he undermined his credibility in the same tweet by wrongly claiming Brits are marching against the NHS because they know the system is broken. Recent protests against Prime Minister Theresa May have been orchestrated by the left to demand more cash, not reform. The real scandal is that so many British politicians and commentators who know better claim the NHS is working fine.

The NHS is in the middle of its annual winter crisis—wherein central planners forget which season follows spring, summer and autumn and must reschedule surgeries and leave the ill in hospital hallways because the health service hasn’t prepared for its busiest time. Hospitals are running at 95% occupancy, and patients are waiting longer for urgent treatment. Only 85% of emergency-room patients were seen within four hours of arrival in December, the lowest share on record and well short of the NHS goal of 95%. January was probably worse.

The pressure for more spending is constant but it must compete against other demands in a country with already high tax rates. Spending on the NHS has increased by 1.3% annually in inflation-adjusted terms since 2010. That’s faster than British living standards are growing as wage increases have lagged inflation since the 2008 financial panic.

The case of the FBI and Christopher Steele gets curiouser and curiouser. In the latest news, GOP Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham late Tuesday released a less redacted version of their criminal referral letter to the Justice Department concerning Mr. Steele, who wrote the now famous dossier alleging Russian collusion with Donald Trump. The letter supports the recent House Intelligence Committee claims of surveillance abuse and offers new evidence that the Clinton campaign may have been more involved than previously known.

Democrats claim the House Intel memo distorts the FBI’s actions in obtaining in October 2016 an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor former Trump aide Carter Page. But the Grassley-Graham referral makes public for the first time actual text from the FBI’s FISA application, as well as classified testimony the FBI gave the Senate Judiciary Committee about the dossier and FISA application.

In particular, the referral rebuts the Democratic claim that the FBI told the FISA court about the partisan nature of the Steele dossier. “The FBI noted to a vaguely limited extent the political origins of the dossier,” says the letter. And “the FBI stated that the dossier information was compiled pursuant to the direction of a law firm who had hired an ‘identified U.S. person’—now known as Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS,” the firm that hired Mr. Steele.

But, adds the referral letter, “the application failed to disclose that the identities of Mr. Simpson’s ultimate clients were the Clinton campaign and the DNC [Democratic National Committee].” That’s not being honest with the judges who sign off on an eavesdrop order.

A 2016 text message between two FBI officials who worked on both the Clinton email investigation and the Russia inquiry says that President Obama “wants to know everything we are doing.”

It’s not clear from the September 2, 2016 text message between then-Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page whether it was a general comment about Mr. Obama’s oversight of the FBI or a description of his interest in a particular matter.

And it doesn’t automatically mean Mr. Obama was up to no good. The FBI and the rest of the Justice Department work for the President, although this fact can be easy to forget while consuming much of contemporary media coverage. But hands-on management by Mr. Obama could explain a lot about both the Clinton email investigation and the Obama administration’s electronic surveillance of a Trump associate.

Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page were conducting an extramarital affair, which created a dangerous vulnerability to blackmail given that they worked on counterintelligence matters. So they were not exactly model employees. Further, their texts showing extreme bias against the President and his voters are part of a highly disturbing record of electronic communications. When presented with content from their text messages, Special Counsel Robert Mueller dismissed Mr. Strzok from his team conducting the Russia probe.

Chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) and his colleagues on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs had to learn about the texts in a news account and have lately been prying them out of Justice.

This week Mr. Johnson’s majority staff has released a new tranche of text messages and reports on what they’ve found:

Although sometimes cryptic and disjointed due to their nature, these text messages raise several questions about the FBI and its investigation of classified information on Secretary Clinton’s private email server. Strzok and Page discussed serving to “protect the country from the menace” of Trump “enablers,” and the possibility of an “insurance policy” against the “risk” of a Trump presidency. The two discussed then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch knowing that Secretary Clinton would not face charges—before the FBI had interviewed Secretary Clinton and before her announcement that she would accept Director Comey’s prosecution decision. They wrote about drafting talking points for then-Director Comey because President Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.” Strzok and Page also exchanged views about the investigation on possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign—calling it “unfinished business” and “an investigation leading to impeachment,” drawing parallels to Watergate, and expressing Strzok’s “gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”

It is the entrance of President Obama into the Strzok-Page drama that raises the most interesting questions. Both the decision to abandon the normal Justice process to exonerate Hillary Clinton and the decision to seek warrants to surveil the political opposition certainly don’t look like calls that get made by middle management. Of course many Americans would hope that such decisions are never made at all. But given their extremely unusual character they would almost certainly require sign-off from a very senior official.

Again, there is very little context for the comment about President Obama wanting to “know everything” about the FBI. But it does perhaps suggest an answer as to why, for example, former FBI Director James Comey would assume a power he did not hold in deciding that Justice prosecutors would not charge Mrs. Clinton for her mishandling of classified information.

When explaining all the perfectly good reasons for firing Mr. Comey last May, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote about this incident and about Mr. Comey’s bizarre public statements regarding Mrs. Clinton’s conduct:

In response to skeptical questions at a congressional hearing, the Director defended his remarks by saying that his “goal was to say what is true. What did we do, what did we find, what do we think about it.” But the goal of a federal criminal investigation is not to announce our thoughts at a press conference. The goal is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to justify a federal criminal prosecution, then allow a federal prosecutor who exercises authority delegated by the Attorney General to make a prosecutorial decision, and then – if prosecution is warranted – let the judge and jury determine the facts.