RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a series of tweets, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel explained why the media freakout over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s travel expenses is a bunch of hooey.

In the past week, multiple media outlets have published pieces freaking out over Pruitt’s travel expenses after it was discovered the EPA administrator flew first class on the taxpayer’s dime as a security precaution after he received multiple death threats. In a column for The Washington Post, Hillary Clinton’s longtime lackey John Podesta wrote that “Scott Pruitt Needs To Go.”

“Pruitt was forced to release documents indicating that he spent more than $105,000 on first-class flights in his first year at the EPA alone,” Podesta writes. “The Post recently reported that one week’s worth of travel in June 2017 by Pruitt and his staff cost about $120,000, which the EPA inspector general is investigating.”

As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway explained in a column yesterday, the media-invented scandal surrounding Pruitt’s travel expenses is largely manufactured garbage. You can read that in full here.

In a series of tweets, Strassel also explained that the travel costs of Pruitt and his staff are not unprecedented and that previous EPA heads actually spent more.

She also reiterated the statement from EPA ethics official Kevin Minoli dated March 30, which said Pruitt didn’t violate any laws or ethics rules when he stayed at a condo owned by environmental lobbyists.

According to the Washington Post, Robert Mueller says President Trump is not “a criminal target at this point.” The Post’s anonymous sources claim that the special counsel has conveyed that assurance to the president’s private attorneys.

That is good news for Trump. After all, between Mueller’s Gang of 17 alpha-prosecutors and the sundry scores of Justice Department lawyers and federal agents who were at this long before Mueller was appointed, the Russia investigation has been going on for nearly two years. By now, you would think that the focus of that effort would have become the formal “target” if there were any there there.

The president shouldn’t get too giddy, though. It’s nice not to be designated a target, but then there are those three little words, at this point.

Mueller is still investigating.

Let us revisit the “What’s My Client’s Status?” lesson in Investigations 101, the course we took during the Clinton-emails caper — in which no one’s status mattered much since, unlike in Mueller’s probe, no one was ever going to be charged.

In every investigation, a prosecutor drops relevant people in one of three buckets: target, subject, and witness. The two extremes are the easy ones to grasp. A “target” is virtually certain to be charged with a crime. A “witness” has relevant knowledge but is not suspected of any wrongdoing — think of the victim in a robbery. A defense lawyer always hopes the prosecutor will think of his client as a mere witness. While “target” is clearly the worst-case scenario, at least your choices are clear: Either cut a plea deal or fight the case at trial — no target is going to talk his way out of being charged.

“Subject” is the fuzzy category. A “subject” is someone whose behavior is being evaluated by the prosecutor and the grand jury. Usually, there is not enough evidence to charge . . . yet. As long as the investigation continues, a subject can become a target, and then a defendant, at any moment.

It’s said that everyone has a doppelganger. Well, in a weird twist to the saga of the high school shooting survivor-turned-gun control activist, David Hogg, it might just be true.

David Hogg of North Carolina has the same name as the David Hogg of Parkland, Florida; resembles the other teen; and is nearly the same age – he’s actually slightly younger, and he’s already studying engineering at the University of North Carolina.

He’s different from the Parkland David Hogg in two noticeable ways, though: he’s mature, and he favors gun rights.

He’s written a brilliant readable essay in the Wall Street Journal (paywall, unfortunately) on his own experience of being mistaken for the Parkland David Hogg. He wrote of the bad harassment and abuse a lot of trolls have thrown his way (which makes one wonder with a certain sympathy what the other David Hogg must be dealing with,) and how, actually, he’s in favor of gun rights, as well as gun education in schools. He tweets at @David_Hogg16

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has a good summary of the piece here, noting:

Although he empathizes with the Parkland students and appreciates their use of their First Amendment right, he said gun rights are important, too. This Hogg’s solution is not gun control, but instead mandatory gun education and armed security officers in schools.

Hogg’s op-ed in the Journal is a real gem. He states his views and comes off as kind and empathetic to all sides in the debate, injecting civility into a debate that has long lacked it on multiple sides. Take a look at this passage to his entirely worth reading op-ed:

Bit by bit, congressional investigators have wrested important truths from a recalcitrant Federal Bureau of Investigation about its suspect 2016 election dealings. But there’s one secret the G-men jealously guard: how central that Steele dossier was from the start.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes on Wednesday sent another letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray to demand yet again that they comply with an August 2017 subpoena and hand over, among other things, the electronic communication—“EC” in investigative jargon—that officially kicked off the counterintelligence investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion.

That EC has taken on a central importance thanks to the FBI’s own leaks. The bureau exploded it on the country at the end of last year after the news broke that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National had paid for the infamous dossier. The public still doesn’t know how much the FBI used it. Critics started asking: Was it part of the application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page ? Could it even have launched the investigation?

Thus the FBI’s scramble to minimize the dossier. And sure enough, the New York Times in December ran what became the “origin” story, titled “How the Russia Inquiry Began.” The story asserted definitively that the cause of the investigation “was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign.” It was rather information from an Australian diplomat claiming to have heard a drunk Trump junior aide, George Papadopoulos, talking about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Yet despite that claim being out there, the FBI and Justice Department have refused to verify it. The Nunes letter says the FBI has provided only a “heavily redacted” version of the EC and indicated on March 23 that it would “refuse to further unredact” the document.

The only plausible reason the FBI might have for denying House Intelligence access to an unredacted EC is that it contains intelligence from foreign sources. Intelligence-sharing agreements between allies sometimes include restrictions on dissemination. But it was precisely that intelligence that was already leaked to the press. We know the Papadopoulos story came via Australia, and we know what was said.

The media only recently reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was fed up with the FBI’s spurning Congress and ordered it to be more cooperative. Yet here it is again inviting a contempt citation, and that says something about how badly the FBI wants this EC kept out of sight. CONTINUE AT SITE

Just last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray released a statement saying he was unhappy with how the bureau was responding to “legitimate congressional requests” for information—and promised a “transparent and responsive” FBI. But already both the FBI and the Justice Department are back to their old tricks.

At issue is a memo related to the opening of a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia in 2016. Such information is crucial for Congress to get an accurate picture of how Justice and the FBI handled this investigation. House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) has written to both Director Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asking for an unredacted version for all committee members to see. The bureau says it will not provide the material because it is too sensitive.

Mr. Nunes notes this is ridiculous, given that the document “is not highly classified.” More to the point, if an Intelligence Committee made up of elected representatives of the American people is not qualified to see such material, no one is.

Mr. Nunes says he’s willing to go to federal court to enforce his subpoena. We are further told that the House leadership supports this and other efforts to compel cooperation from Justice and the FBI.

In a better world Mr. Wray and Mr. Rosenstein would have worked out a good faith solution. In the apparent absence of that good faith, we hope Congress is willing to use all its powers, including contempt and impeachment if necessary, to persuade Mr. Wray and Mr. Rosenstein it is in their interests to make good on the FBI’s promise of transparency and responsiveness.

Now more than ever, as the economy continues to pick up steam, it is vitally important to reduce the barriers to economic growth. Nowhere is this more important than in the manufacturing sector.

In manufacturing, lengthy permitting processes can still be the death knell for projects that would otherwise expand operations and create new jobs. The Clean Air Act (CAA) has created delays so great that they kill some projects in their infancy before the permitting process has even started. While there has been bipartisan support for addressing permitting delays, Congress has only recently laid out a starting point from which improving efficiencies in permitting can be obtained.

In the meantime, the Environmental Protection Agency has stepped in to make some common sense reforms that were long overdue. Citing President Trump’s push to streamline regulatory permitting, the EPA recently announced its intention to clarify the permitting process under the New Source Review (NSR) analysis, which pertains to potential increased emissions at project sites.

Simply stated, the CAA’s NSR considers whether a manufacturer’s expansion of operations will result in a significant increase in emissions. Then, if there is a projected significant increase, the agency looks to see if there are any potential offsets to mitigate the net increase. Previously, the EPA calculated off-sets during the first step of the review process in such a way that it added unnecessary time and complexity.

As testimony in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee revealed last year, going through the analysis could result in unnecessary delays even when there was no chance of a significant increase. In some cases, manufacturers decided to abandon projects altogether and put their resources elsewhere. The EPA’s proposed modification would address this problem by first asking whether there will be a significant increase in emissions, and if the answer is “no,” the project is allowed to move forward without a permit.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-pruitt-test-1522970943

Donald Trump demands loyalty up the chain of command, but loyalty down has been another matter. The latest test of loyalty down will be whether Mr. Trump stands behind Scott Pruitt as Washington’s green political machine tries to oust the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator for supposedly grave ethics offenses.

Mr. Pruitt’s real sin is that he is one of Mr. Trump’s most aggressive reformers, taking on green idols that others would bow before. In a year he has rescinded the waters of the U.S. rule that sought to regulate every pond in America; proposed to repeal the Clean Power Plan rule that sought to put coal out of business; urged the President to withdraw from the Paris climate pact; made a priority of cleaning up genuine pollution problems like Superfund sites; and this week began revising the destructive Obama-era fuel-economy standards.

If there has been a more consequential cabinet official, we haven’t seen him.

All of this has made Mr. Pruitt a target of the ruling iron triangle of bureaucrats, interest groups and the press. They’re creating smoke about his spending and ethics to get him fired because he is a political liability, as if they care about Mr. Trump’s liabilities.

https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2018/04/05/5-things-to-watch-in-the-march-jobs-report-4/

The Labor Department releases its broadest look at the U.S. job market for March on Friday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expect employers added 178,000 jobs during the month and see the unemployment rate ticking down to 4.0%. Here are five things to watch in the report.

1. A fresh low

Economists project the jobless rate will fall to 4% for the first time since 2000. (They expected it to happen in February, too, but the rate held at 4.1% for the fifth straight month.) An unemployment rate of 4% or less is extremely rare in the past 70 years of modern record-keeping. It has only occurred in the immediate aftermath of World War II, again when young men were being drafted into wars in Korea and Vietnam, and briefly at the end of the 1990s tech boom. The question, if the rate falls, is can a pattern be maintained for several years? Or is it a sign the economy is starting to overheat?

2. Still-hot hiring?

Employers added 313,000 workers to payrolls in February, the best month for hiring since July 2016. Despite a low unemployment rate suggesting a shortage of available workers, employers are hiring at a faster rate–adding more than 200,000 workers in four of the prior five months. Watch to see if employers can maintain that pace, even as economists project hiring to slow.

According to a report in the Washington Post, “Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III informed President Trump’s attorneys last month that he is continuing to investigate the president but does not consider him a criminal target at this point.” In other words, while Mr. Mueller still considers the president a subject of investigation, he has concluded, after nearly 11 months looking for something solid to use against President Trump, that he does not have enough evidence to charge the president with conspiring to collude with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election or, for that matter, with any other crime. Despite having gathered hundreds of thousands of documents for review, interviewed multiple witnesses, and gained guilty pleas for conduct unrelated to the Russian collusion investigation itself in return for full cooperation, Special Counsel Mueller has admitted that he lacks substantial evidence linking President Trump to the commission of any crime. Ironically, this matches the conclusion of former FBI Director James Comey himself before President Trump fired him.

While this development is obviously welcome news to President Trump, he is not entirely out of the woods yet. The Washington Post article added that Mr. Mueller informed the president’s lawyers that “he is preparing a report about the president’s actions while in office and potential obstruction of justice.”

The special counsel could suggest in his report that President Trump may have had a “corrupt intent” to interfere with the Russian collusion investigation by firing Comey, for example, or by asking Comey to go easy on former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, but has not accumulated enough evidence yet to go forward with an indictment. Not only would the special counsel’s discussion along such lines in his report heighten calls for extending the special counsel’s mandate indefinitely, for further congressional investigations and for impeachment. Such a report would place more pressure on the president to submit to an interview with the special counsel or a high-level member of his team. President Trump has indicated a willingness to consider such an interview against the advice of John Dowd, the lawyer who had led the president’s legal team dealing with the Mueller investigation until he resigned last month. If the president does agree to an interview, he needs to tread very carefully to avoid falling into a perjury trap or saying something that the Mr. Mueller can use as evidence of the “corrupt intent” necessary to make a credible case of obstruction of justice against the president.