RUTHFULLY YOURS

The White House looks set to release the House Intelligence Committee memo on 2016 government surveillance abuses, which means the attacks on the document by Democrats, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the media are going to get wilder. To help navigate through the spin, here’s a handy guide for what to look for, and what to ignore:

• Rationale. Did the FBI have cause to open a full-blown counterintelligence probe into an active presidential campaign? That’s a breathtakingly consequential and unprecedented action and surely could not be justified without much more than an overheard drunken conversation or an unsourced dossier. What hard evidence did the FBI have?

• Tools and evidence. Government possesses few counterintelligence tools more powerful or frightening than the ability to spy on American citizens. If the FBI obtained permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Trump aide Carter Page based on information from the Christopher Steele dossier, that in itself is a monumental scandal. It means the FBI used a document commissioned by one presidential campaign as a justification to spy on another. Ignore any arguments that the dossier was not a “basis” for the warrant or only used “in part.” If the FBI had to use it in its application, it means it didn’t have enough other evidence to justify surveillance.

Look to see what else the FBI presented to the court as a justification for monitoring, and whether it was manufactured. Mr. Steele and his client, Fusion GPS, ginned up breathless news stories about the dossier’s unverified accusations in September 2016 in order to influence the election. The FBI sometimes presents news articles to the court, but primarily for corroboration of other facts. If the FBI used the conspiracy stories Mr. Steele was spinning as actual justification—evidence—to the court, that’s out of bounds.

• Omissions and misdirection. What else did the FBI tell the court? One would presume the bureau did its due diligence and knew Mr. Steele ultimately worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The FISA court puts considerable emphasis on the credibility of sources. Did the FBI inform the court of the Clinton connection? Or did it lean on the claim that the Fusion project was originally funded by Republicans? Such a claim might diminish the partisan stench. But it would also be a falsehood, since the dossier portion of the project was purely funded by Clinton allies. And if the FBI didn’t bother to ask who hired Mr. Steele or Fusion, that’s a scandal all its own.

Also, look to see whether the FBI informed the court that Mr. Steele was blabbing to the press. When he first approached the bureau in July, he hadn’t yet briefed the media. But by September he and Fusion were publicly spinning the dossier for their Democratic client, and the FBI would have known who was generating the stories. Did the FBI continue to attest something that clearly was no longer true?

• Duration of surveillance. The FBI may argue it had good cause to look into Mr. Page. But if months of wiretaps didn’t turn up anything (and surely we’d have heard if they did), the FBI also had a duty to cease such a liberty-busting intrusion. Ask how long this probe went on and whether it was justified, or if the FBI was simply giving itself an open-ended license to spy on a campaign.

Expect Trump critics to renew their effort to turn Mr. Page into a Manchurian aide, seizing on his every action or word while ignoring the small role he played in the campaign, not to mention his obvious oddness. This will be designed to make people forget that for all the focus on Mr. Page, he was and remains a private citizen, who apparently was subject to months of government monitoring based on what may prove nothing more than the gossip of a rival campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

It was educational to watch the audience during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in Congress the night of January 30th. The Democratic side of the House played dead.

The #Resistance is a hate group. It refuses to acknowledge the election of Donald Trump, even to the point of questioning his physical and mental fitness to be President, and includes in that mantra the implied accusation that Dr. Ronny Jackson, who examined Trump, is lying. It is willing to say anything to damage Trump, no matter how irrational outrageous and unproven. The “Resistance” goes further by attacking anyone associated by Trump, such as Nikki Haley, whom they suggested, was having an affair with him. It was prime meat for the Dems but the rumor went nowhere. You can’t grow rain forest trees in the Gobi Desert.

Overall, the Dems during the SOTUS behaved so predictably anti-Trump that it was a foregone conclusion that they would put on anguished or sour faces when he listed his achievements over the last year:

Reduced black and Hispanic unemployment figures

Two-point-four million new jobs

The Border wall

Merit –based immigration (and doing away with chain and visa immigration policies)

The ubiquity of bonuses for American employees (“crumbs” said Nancy Pelosi)

The decision to make Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

Ridding bureaucracies of unnecessary employees (an indirect assault on the Deep State)

Standing for the National Anthem (an assault on football’s “knee” stunts)

One year into the unlikely presidency of Donald J. Trump and how the political landscape has changed. This Scottish immigrant’s son turned billionaire Manhattan builder, reality-television star, staple of the New York City tabloid press, and bête-noire of his former friends on the institutional Left, who view him, as the Republicans once viewed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as a “traitor to his class.” To judge from the surly, sorrowful expressions on the Democrats’ faces on Tuesday night during the State of the Union, you might have thought the president had just shot their dog and was taunting them about it on national television.

During most of his pro-America applause lines, including Trump’s announcement of record low black unemployment, the Democrats sat on their hands. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) ostentatiously paraded out of the House chamber near the end of the speech, while Trump was praising the sacrifices of America’s war dead. Afterward, the American Civil Liberties Union complained the president had used the word “American” too many times for its taste.

Could their churlish animosity be any clearer?

But wait! It gets worse. As Trump’s approval ratings have risen in the wake of the stock-market rally, strong overall employment numbers, and the much-vilified tax cut, the Democrats’ pipe dream about a coming “blue wave” this fall looks increasingly like a California marijuana-induced notion. Just prior to delivering the speech, Trump had reversed Obama’s grandstanding, never-implemented executive order to close the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay. By the end of the day, the Democratic National Committee had ‘fessed up some disastrous fundraising numbers, revealing they have only $6.3 million cash on hand and are $6.1 million in debt.

In the very early nineties, the Democrats were as obsessed with cocaine as they are now are with Russia. The cocaine in question was alleged to have been bought by Vice President Dan Quayle. The 1992 election was coming up. The decades of corruption, slime and lies by the Clintons were about to pay off.

But that’s not how it looked then.

President George H.W. Bush was enjoying high approval ratings. Bill Clinton would weasel and claw his way to the front of the line largely because the election seemed like a lot cause for the Democrats.

But the Clintons still had plenty of dirty tricks left to play. The Quayle cocaine story was one of them. Like most discredited Democrat smears, it was forgotten once it was no longer needed. It’s hard now to understand how so many reporters and politicians could be sucked in by a ridiculous smear campaign.

One of the Quayle accusers had confessed to lying both to prison officials and to 60 Minutes.

“This guy not only flunked the lie detector test, but he broke down and cried in front of Morley Safer and said that he had made it up because he wanted to get out of jail,” Don Hewitt, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, recollected.

But the more the story came apart, the more new conspiracy theories were spawned to bolster it. Like Michael Wolff’s smears, it was too good for the left not to believe. Much like Russian collusion, the story quickly shifted from whether Quayle had actually bought drugs to whether the Bush administration had tried to cover it up. The shift from a specific criminal accusation to nebulous conspiracy theories that can never be disproven, but that empower open-ended witch hunts, are a hallmark of Dem smears.

With the much anticipated FISA-abuse memo expected to drop any second, the media are attempting to refocus the narrative onto possible obstruction of justice by President Trump and his subordinates.

Thursday, the New York Times led with a lengthy report on the Mueller investigation’s curiosity about a statement crafted under the president’s direction last July. It concerned the now infamous Trump Tower meeting a year earlier — i.e., on June 9, 2016 — between top Trump-campaign officials Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort and a Russian contingent led by the Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

To cut to the chase, Mueller appears to be homing in on the question of whether there was a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

While President Trump was deeply involved in the drafting of the statement, it was ultimately issued by a lawyer in the name of Don Jr., to whom the Times had directed its questions about the Trump Tower meeting. The statement was untrue and ill-considered. Worse, it conflicted with another misleading version of the Trump Tower meeting that the president’s legal team simultaneously provided to a different media outlet, Circa. As the Times report correctly asserts, both versions sought to conceal the true purpose of the Trump Tower meeting, namely: to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton from Russian-government sources.

It is not a crime to lie to journalists. From this premise, some Trump-friendly commentators have reasoned that the false statements about the meeting given by Trump subordinates to the Times and Circa have no relevance to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry. This is wrong.

In The Meaning of Conservatism and several other books, the English philosopher Roger Scruton argues for the importance of the first-person plural—the “We” that binds us together as a community, a people, a nation. Tuesday night, in his magnificent State of the Union Address, Donald Trump did something similar.

Trump’s speech was full of memorable lines: the “new American moment,” “Americans are Dreamers, too,” “complacency and concessions only invite aggression and provocation.” But perhaps the most memorable line, playing off the president’s campaign slogan, came at the end: “It is the people who are making America great again.”

Any dispassionate observer has to acknowledge that over the last year Donald Trump has given a series of great speeches. I use the word “great” advisedly. His speech in Riyadh about naming and battling Islamic terrorism; in Warsaw about supporting the core values of Western civilization; national security speeches emphasizing the ideal of peace through strength. Those were speeches for the history books. And on top of all those was Tuesday night’s speech at the Capitol. Its theme? Putting aside the partisan passions that divide us in order to go forward as a people united in the goal of making a better America.

Republican pollster and former Trump critic Frank Luntz was stunned by the address. The speech was, Luntz said in one tweet, “a perfect blend of strength and empathy.” In another, he added: “Tonight, I owe Donald Trump an apology. Tonight, I was moved and inspired. Tonight, I have hope and faith in America again.”

Many people agreed with him. And it is easy to see why. Over the past year, Donald Trump has racked up victory after victory. In his judicial appointments, in his energy policy, his attack on illegal immigration, his efforts to dismantle or at least pare back the Leviathan that is the administrative state, scrapping the individual mandate of Obamacare, hugely reducing the tax burden for both businesses and individuals, strengthening America’s military: in these and other initiatives he has taken bold steps to fulfill his campaign promises to return power from Washington to the People and “make America great again.”

It appears very likely that President Trump is going to allow the disclosure, in some form, of the memo on alleged FISA abuse authored by majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee under the direction of Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.). It could happen as early as today. As one would expect, both sides of the dispute over the memo are intensifying their pre-publication efforts to influence public reaction — as discussed here in last week’s column considering objections to the memo.

Since before the Republican-led committee voted (along partisan lines) to seek the memo’s declassification and publication, the FBI has been complaining that it was not permitted to review the memo. As I explained last week, this was a very unpersuasive complaint. Having stonewalled the committee’s information requests for several months, the Bureau and Justice Department are hardly well positioned to complain about being denied access; the committee, by contrast, has every reason to believe they would have slow-walked any review in order to delay matters further.

All that aside, the FBI was guaranteed access to the memo before its publication because of the rules of the process. Once the committee voted to disclose, that gave the president five days to object. During that five days, Trump’s own appointees at the FBI and DOJ would have the chance to pore over the memo and make their objections and policy arguments to their principal, the president, and to the rest of the Trump national-security team. This tells us the real objection was not that they were barred from reviewing the memo; it is that they were barred from reviewing it on a schedule that would make it more difficult to derail publication.

President Trump’s first State of the Union address was not heavy on national security issues. It did, however, make one critical point: In reviewing the international achievements of his first year in office, Trump was abundantly clear that the Obama era is over. Primarily retrospective assessments like Trump’s are perfectly legitimate for a president finishing his initial year, especially given what his policies are replacing.

Gone was President Obama’s self-congratulatory moral posturing, replaced by a concrete list of accomplishments that will inevitably increase the power of America’s presence in the world. Trump’s policy is not only not isolationist — as many of his opponents (and a few misguided supporters) contend — his pursuit of Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” approach actually demonstrates that Obama’s detached, ethereal retreat from American assertiveness internationally amounted to the real isolationism.

Most importantly, Trump again committed to palpably more robust military budgets and an end to the budget-sequester mechanism, the worst political mistake made by Republicans in Congress in living memory. Sequestration procedures were liberal dreams come true, forcing wasteful increases in domestic programs in order to obtain critical military funding. The sooner this whole embarrassing exercise is behind us, the better.

As Secretary of Defense James Mattis frequently points out, harking back to Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous comment, there cannot be an adequate American foreign policy without an adequate defense policy.

Trump chose to single out the need “to modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal,” the bedrock of America’s deterrence capabilities. Indeed, Trump went on, quite rightly, to cast doubt on the “Global Zero” notion of actively working to eliminate all nuclear weapons. For many of those who pursue “Global Zero,” the real target is not rogue states like Iran or North Korea, or strategic threats like Russia or China, but the United States itself. Trump basically said in response, “When the lions lie down with the lambs, call me.” Just so.

Donald Trump’s critics have moved beyond latter-day Cold Warrior mode into full blown McCarthyism. John Heilemann of MSNBC has taken to insinuating that Republican Devin Nunes, chairman of the House intelligence committee, might be a Russian plant. The congressman’s offense is producing and working to release a memo about the sources of the FBI’s surveillance of persons associated with the Trump campaign in 2016, which has made Nunes the most hated man in Washington for Democrats and the press.

The memo is portrayed as a blatant PR gimmick and a clear and present danger to America’s intelligence operations. But from what we know of Nunes and his colleagues, they have long been sincerely alarmed at what they’ve learned about how the FBI operated in 2016. The suspicions have been heightened by the bizarre stonewalling of the committee’s inquiry by a Republican-led Justice department (this background accounts for why the committee hasn’t worked closely with the DOJ on the memo).

As for endangering U.S. intelligence, the committee has scrupulously followed the process to declassify the document in such circumstances. Nunes or someone else could have simply leaked the document to a sympathetic reporter — this is how Washington usually works — but he has instead played by the rules. The White House is, per chief of staff John Kelly, currently scrubbing the document, and presumably anything that reveals sources and methods will be redacted.

We can’t know if the document is nearly as explosive as advertised until we see it. Perhaps the presuppositions of the committee Republicans have led them to an overly hostile interpretation of the material. (The FBI is already out with a statement saying that the memo leaves out important details.) But you don’t have to be Sean Hannity to be curious about the beginning of the investigation and its conduct, given the disturbing revelations of the last few months.

At the outset of all this, we favored a full investigation of the 2016 election controversies — from the Russian hacking to unmasking — to give the public as many facts as possible. Instead, the main investigation is taking place within the black box of a special-counsel probe. If nothing else, the Nunes memo will pull back the curtain on part of the story. The FBI and the Democrats can — and should — share their own versions. This is called public debate, and we assure the Red Hunters on the Left that this is not how the Kremlin conducts its affairs.