RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Manhattan law office of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, made for an unusual target for federal agents, who raided it Monday morning.

Typically, federal agents need special permission to comb the files of an attorney, whose client communications are generally protected from disclosure, legal experts said. To obtain a federal warrant, Justice Department officials need a special finding that an attorney’s office contains crucial evidence, said Christopher Slobogin, a criminal-procedure expert at Vanderbilt Law School.

It is unclear if agents targeted client files or were searching for business records falling outside the scope of attorney-client privilege, though the lines separating them aren’t always clear. Steve Ryan, a lawyer for Mr. Cohen, said Monday that the search had resulted in the “seizure of protected attorney-client communications between a lawyer and his clients.”

When searching the offices of an attorney who is a subject of an investigation, “prosecutors are expected to take the least intrusive approach,” according to the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual, which instructs prosecutors to consider a subpoena before resorting to a search warrant.

The raid carries risks for the Justice Department, as well. The attorney-client privilege generally shields interactions between lawyers and clients from being deployed as evidence against a defendant. If government lawyers use privileged communications to build their case, a court could deem their entire prosecution tainted.

To guard against that, the Justice Department uses what are known as “taint teams,” groups of government attorneys who are segregated from Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and prosecutors involved in the investigation, said Daniel Goldman, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Taint teams are charged with sifting through seized files and determining what prosecutors can use.

Courts have approved the use of taint teams, but criminal defense lawyers have long criticized the practice as an example of the fox guarding the chicken coop. In rare cases, a judge could appoint an independent special master to review the files or examine seized documents him or herself.

Attorney-client privilege is intended to allow lawyers to give robust legal advice without worrying about incriminating a client. But attorney-client information may not be protected if the communications were in service of an illegal act, under the “crime-fraud exception” to the privilege. CONTINUE AT SITE

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has a disturbing new way to raise revenue: using government muscle to squeeze private organizations into “voluntarily” writing billion-dollar checks. That’s what he did to Fidelis Care, a nonprofit health plan affiliated with the Catholic Church, and its would-be buyer, Centene Corp.

In a murky deal announced on Good Friday, Fidelis and Centene agreed to pay the state $2 billion over four years. The payments are not technically required by law. But Fidelis and Centene agreed to them after a three-month pressure campaign by Mr. Cuomo, including overt and implied threats to seize the funds, block the sale or both.

Fidelis would seem an odd target for a gubernatorial money grab. Founded in 1993, it specializes in health coverage for the poor. With 1.6 million members, it is the largest purveyor of state-sponsored programs such as Medicaid managed care, Child Health Plus and the Essential Plan, as well as Medicare Advantage and commercial ObamaCare coverage. It has played a big role in reducing the state’s uninsured rate, and it has not been publicly accused of wrongdoing.

What sparked Mr. Cuomo’s campaign was Fidelis’s pending sale to Centene, announced in September, for a price of $3.75 billion. The bishops planned to put the money into a charitable foundation in support of health care for the needy. Mr. Cuomo argued that the state was entitled to $3 billion of the proceeds because Fidelis earned most of its revenue from state programs. By that logic, the state could skim the savings accounts of public employees when they retire.

He also cited the precedent of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, which yielded billions to the state when it converted to for-profit status in the mid-2000s. But that was a unique transaction under a narrowly tailored law that applies to no other company.

Despite lacking a legal claim to the money, Mr. Cuomo pursued it aggressively. Bills he submitted to the Legislature would not only have seized 80% of the proceeds from the sale but also raided Fidelis’s reserve accounts if the deal were canceled. The bishops would have paid either way. The sale needed regulatory approval from two state agencies, the departments of Health and of Financial Services, leaving it vulnerable to delay or rejection by Mr. Cuomo’s appointees. CONTINUE AT SITE

Washington is full of blather, bombast and bullsh-t, but a line about Robert Mueller was the most important thing spoken or written there last week:

“Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, declined to comment.”

Since Mueller’s office never says anything outside court publicly, who knew he had a spokesman or needed one?

The line was included in a Washington Post story that said Mueller told the White House that President Trump was not a target of the criminal investigation.

The story could be a big deal — if true. But the report is nonetheless remarkable because it was the first leak in memory that carried good news for Trump.

After breathless drip, drip, drip reports that had the president practically being frog-marched to a firing squad at dawn, the fever broke. Every dog has its day, and the Washington media decided this president’s day comes once every 15 months.

True to form, news outlets immediately pivoted back to their regularly scheduled programming of stories saying Trump is in imminent danger. The New York Times and ABC declared that George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, though a stranger to readers, is now Mueller’s hottest witness.

Enough.

The violent swings of the leaky pendulum make this an excellent moment to call timeout on the Mueller probe. What does he have, where is he going and when is he going to get there?

James Comey’s book comes out next week. While promoting “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership” the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation should face some tough questions. First, will he correct the postelection distortions by “friends and associates” meant to justify his decision to send the Oct. 28, 2016, letter to Congress? That letter—which announced the FBI was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails—almost certainly handed Donald Trump the presidency.

In an Oct. 29, 2016, internal memo, Mr. Comey claimed he was “obligated” to inform Congress because of a public commitment he had made during a congressional hearing. But that is untrue. On Sept. 28, 2016, Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) had asked what the FBI chief would do if anything new on the Clinton emails issue was discovered. Mr. Comey responded only that “we would certainly look at any new and substantial information.”

The FBI began reviewing emails found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop on Oct. 31, 2016, some four weeks after Mr. Comey was made aware of their existence. Agents completed their work on Nov. 5. Since it took less than a week to review the emails, couldn’t Mr. Comey have done so before informing Congress? If Mr. Comey argues he didn’t know how long it would take, the question remains: Why didn’t he look first? This is especially important given the undeserved political damage caused by the letter.

Mr. Comey also falsely claimed that the FBI needed to obtain a warrant before reviewing the Clinton emails on Mr. Weiner’s laptop. In fact, attorneys for Huma Abedin and Mr. Weiner told the New Yorker’s Peter Elkind that they would have “readily acceded” to FBI requests to review the Clinton emails without a warrant. But Mr. Comey and the FBI never asked. Why?

Then there is the still-unexplained delay between Mr. Comey’s being told about the Weiner-Clinton emails and obtaining a warrant. On Oct. 3, 2016, Mr. Comey first learned about the discovery of the new emails. Yet it wasn’t until Oct. 30 that he and the FBI obtained a warrant to look at them. Many conservatives believe Mr. Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe deliberately delayed the review to help Mrs. Clinton, but the opposite is the case.CONTINUE AT SITE

Some former agents, once defenders of the ousted FBI director, aren’t fans of his current high-profile persona.

When President Trump suddenly fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017, quite a few retired bureau officials eagerly defended Comey’s record as director, and denounced Trump’s abrupt, seemingly self-serving decision. But some of those same retired FBI agents are now turned off by the pugnacious, high-profile persona of the former director as he prepares to launch the book tour for his autobiography, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.

In 25 years at the FBI, James Gagliano handled a wide variety of duties — criminal investigator, undercover agent, supervisory special agent, SWAT team leader, member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, acting legal attaché at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, and head of a bureau satellite office. He’s currently an adjunct assistant professor at St. John’s University and a CNN contributor. Back in June 2017, when Comey was preparing to testify before the Senate, Gagliano said, “Nobody’s going to question Comey’s honor and his character” and said he was “disgusted” with the way that Trump treated the former director.

Now, Gagliano says he was once a “mild fan” of Comey, but has been unhappy with the former director’s decision to venture into the public eye, writing a tell-all book and promoting it on a highly visible press tour.

“This current effort to meet the president in the public square, at his own game of slinging mud and punching and contributing smugness to the debate, it’s a bad look for him,” Gagliano says. “I think it’s going to diminish the FBI, and I think it’s going to diminish whatever’s left of Comey’s reputation.”

Former special agent Bobby Chacon, who now works in Hollywood as a technical advisor and story consultant, has had a similar change of heart. Back when President Trump didn’t even tell Comey that he was fired in person or by phone, Chacon bristled. “Nobody deserves to be treated like that,” he told the Guardian. But since then, he has come to concur that Comey is burning through the goodwill he accumulated over the course of his career in the bureau.

“I liked him when I worked at the bureau, although who the director was never really impacted my day-to-day life in the bureau too much,” Chacon says now, adding that he began to develop some concerns about Comey beginning with the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. He wondered why a grand jury wasn’t empaneled in that investigation, a move that he contends would have somewhat insulated the bureau from political controversy by leaving the decision to indict or not indict in others’ hands.

The concept of free speech, so central to the American experience, is facing a trial in our society. This is not the first time, and surely won’t be the last, in which competing interests wrestle to define the term.

But it is our time to debate it, and those who would trammel speech in the name of justice, or patriotism, or anything really, are relying on several very flawed premises in their attempts to silence their fellow citizens. It’s time to tackle them, one by one, and establish a positive argument for free speech that recognizes it is a blessing, not a burden.

Much of the confusion regarding the idea of free speech stems from a fundamental misunderstanding that somehow the First Amendment of the Constitution invented and constrains the idea. This is hogwash.

In 399 BC, Socrates was tried, convicted, and executed for violating speech codes. For more than 2,000 years since then, Western culture has played a game of tetherball over speech, sending it this way and that. But the heart of the issue has nothing to do with government. It has to do with whether we, as individuals, value tolerance for perspectives we disagree with.

In the past decade or so, many people — usually but not always those on the Left — have distorted the concept of free speech in an effort to suppress it. Their arguments are not deep; they are not even shallow. It is useful, however, to look at and dismantle them so we are not tempted to snatch from ourselves the rights generations past established for us.

Not being willing any longer to be manipulated is not succumbing to isolationism. Wondering whether the United States can afford another liability is not mindless nationalism. Questioning whether America can afford the status quo here and abroad is not heresy. Assuming we can borrow our way out of any inconvenience is largely over.

What helped elect Trump was a collective weariness with demands put on a country $20 trillion in debt. America is currently running a $57 billion a month trade deficit.

The poverty of inner-city Detroit, or rural Central California, or West Virginia does not suggest an endlessly opulent nation, at least as a visitor might conclude from visiting Manhattan, Chevy Chase, or Presidio Heights.

NATO was designed to protect Western Europeans from Soviet expansionism and to allay fears of traditional Russian nationalism. It transmogrified into a vital Western alliance that might use collective deterrence and action to preserve shared democratic values.

But if a distant United States is to continue anchoring such a key defensive league, then surely its front-line member states of a prosperous Europe must meet or exceed their own freely agreed upon levels of defense spending.

Instead, until recently, most did not.

The unspoken premise for such nullification was that the United States needs NATO more than the NATO states in Europe need the United States. Or given that America is so big and powerful a patron, surely it could always afford to subsidize an errant client.

Mexico assumed that a rich neighbor could, in perpetuity, serve as a refuge of last resort for its impoverished citizens, thereby providing a safety valve and precluding any need for its own internal reform.

The United States was supposedly so affluent that it could both offer entitlements to illegal aliens and, given such aid, not care whether many of them sent $60 billion back home (what is a mere $60 billion out of a multi-trillion dollar economy?) to Central American and Mexico.

When occasionally the United States recoiled a bit, Mexico could always accuse an essentially open-border America of being restrictionist and xenophobic. One wonders how exactly would Mexico’s hostility be expressed—by vows not to receive remittances, or to demand repatriation of its lost citizens, or unilaterally to leave NAFTA, or to elect a nationalist president who would build a wall?

It was one thing for the Communist Party organ, the Daily Worker, that pre-Twitter roadmap of every zig and zag of Kremlin directives, to have ramped up the information-war against Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s by turning the name of our greatest anti-communist hero into an epithet mouthed by the Left.

It is quite another for conservatives nearly 70 years later to keep pounding what was, after all, Stalin’s line. It was Stalin’s line not for his health, of course, but for his long war to destroy the USA at home: specifically, to destroy the anti-communist resistance, personified, circa 1950, by the fearless junior senator from Wisconsin. There are many markers attesting to the Kremlin’s mainly unacknowleged ideological victory in this same war, from our own Marxist college campuses, to a numbing list of cultural debasements, to Russian hypersonic missiles, courtesy the seemingly invisible “reset” tech transfer scheme called Skolkovo. To this list of markers I would add the quick-trigger, full-throated conservative chorus against “McCarthyism.”

It seems hard to imagine, but at some point long ago most Americans rejected the Daily Worker and everything it stood for outright — communism, Stalin, subversion, the works. Now, we don’t really know what any of it means (see capture of the US education system, already under communist siege by 1920). Even astute conservative commentators draw a blank on the entire battle that the Daily Worker & ilk very successfully prosecuted against us on our own home front. Manchurian-candidate-style, they go to veritable Marxist slogans for intellectual ammunition, as we see in the selection of best-brightest comments above.

Here’s an idea: How about reconsidering the origins of “McCarthyism” and understanding them for what they are — the very real seeds of our Marxian destruction and collective shambles.

To set the scene, imagine that post-WWII-time when Americans were still trying to assess the depths and toxicity of the original Swamp, which started to come into public view after nearly two decades of unchecked communist infiltration during most of the 1930s and 1940s. Presently, along came 41-year-old Senator McCarthy with that explosive list of federal security cases, which he presented on the floor of the US Senate in February of 1950.

President Trump’s political adversaries and globalists, including the media pundits, are frantically yelping about how the President’s proposed tariffs against Chinese imports would spark a “Trade war.”

In point of fact, concerns about a trade war with China are late — very late — and have nothing to do with Trump’s proposed tariffs.

In reality China has, for decades, engaged in a one-sided “trade war” with the United States that doesn’t involve tariffs but wide-spread and wide-scale theft of intellectual property.

One-sided relationships are not relationships!

Foolishly, a succession of previous administrations have facilitated this outrageous situation.

My previous FrontPage Magazine article, Educating America’s Adversaries focused on the lunacy of the United States hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to study STEM (Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines and also providing them with optional practical training at U.S. corporations unwittingly providing them with the opportunity to engage in industrial espionage.

My article today is predicated on an April 4, 2018 Justice Department press release, Chinese Scientist Sentenced to Prison in Theft of Engineered Rice, that reported on the sentencing of a Chinese scientist, Weiqiang Zhang, for his crimes that, although not related to military concerns, are related to intellectual property theft (trade secrets), specifically genetically engineered rice seeds with potentially profound implications.

Hours after we published an editorial Friday about the Justice Department’s refusal to turn over a document subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee, Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) received an official response from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd.

It was cleverly spun. Mr. Boyd played up the access to the secondary information Mr. Nunes had demanded—access to the application and renewals for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants on one-time Trump associate Carter Page. Mr. Boyd describes his department’s response as “extraordinary accommodation.”

Upon inspection, however, the focus on the FISA warrants looks more like an effort to distract attention from Mr. Boyd’s refusal even to mention Mr. Nunes’s main request of FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. That request was for the “electronic communication,” or memo, that officially launched the counterintelligence investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

On Friday Trey Gowdy, an Intel Committee member who has seen a redacted form of the memo, said Justice has redacted the “good stuff.” He means information that would tell whether the counterintelligence investigation was credible, and how and whether the FBI vetted the information. “All of that,” Mr. Gowdy said, “is in a paragraph I can’t read.”