RUTHFULLY YOURS

The new year brings many a revisiting of the Hillary Clinton email server case, including one at the hands of the Justice Department inspector general (that’s where all those FBI text messages are coming from), though his inquiry likely defines the matter too narrowly to get at the really important issues.

We should also stress that some kind of a revisiting would bedevil a Clinton administration now if Hillary Clinton had been elected instead of Donald Trump.

Way back in 2014, had Mrs. Clinton returned her “personal” emails and devices to the State Department instead of destroying them, it would have closed matters for most Americans.

After all, the Obama administration knew of and condoned her private server, amounting to an implicit endorsement of her unorthodox handling of classified materials.

But she didn’t, and the administration was not about to prosecute its heir apparent, especially after she became the sole alternative to Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump.

President Obama’s public statements on the case could not have been clearer. He essentially directed his Justice Department that Mrs. Clinton did nothing wrong, as arguably a president is entitled to do.

The part that never made sense was why FBI Director James Comey intervened to do the president’s bidding so the Justice Department wouldn’t have to.

It was unnecessary and improper. Whatever its wisdom, no serious person of either party believes the outcome was anything but predetermined. Mr. Comey simply intruded himself as a more plausible vehicle to carry out the administration’s will on the “matter” than Attorney General Loretta Lynch would have been. That much is clear by applying even the minimalist interpretation to the text messages of his lead investigator on the case, Peter Strozk, as well as other evidence surfaced by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Mr. Comey gave different reasons in public and private for his action. In closed congressional session, he pointed to intercepted Russian intelligence that he said could be used to discredit the Justice Department. That is, he relied on information from one or more U.S. intelligence agencies. It doesn’t tax the imagination to suppose Mr. Comey and fellow intelligence officials were operating on a shared premise that a Clinton presidency was inevitable and needed to be protected from email-related risks.

Since then, Obama intelligence officials have leaked intelligence and planted scurrilous innuendo about Mr. Trump, apparently aimed at giving credibility to the “collusion” narrative and discrediting his victory. But what Mr. Comey did was worse. Again, I’m not saying it was realistic or desirable that Mrs. Clinton be prosecuted, but the choice not to prosecute was a political decision that the Obama administration and Obama Justice Department had a duty to make and to own. CONTINUE AT SITE

The “secular stagnation” thesis is having a bad year. Readers will recall that this idea, popularized by former Obama White House economist Larry Summers, held that America is fated to endure slow economic growth. This conveniently justified the Obama era’s historic slow growth as an inevitable deus ex machina, and Mr. Summers’s policy advice was for government to borrow more money to spend on public works.

A year after the Obama economists left town, stagnation may be following them back to Harvard. The Commerce Department announced Friday that the U.S. economy grew 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2017, below what most economists expected but the third straight quarter of solid growth.

The details of the GDP report were stronger than the top line that was reduced by the volatile categories of trade and inventories. A fall in inventories accounted for most of the decline in growth from the third quarter, but inventories ebb and flow and the measure will rebound in future quarters. Exports rose more slowly (6.9%) than imports (13.9%), which reduced the trade contribution to GDP.

Consumer spending rose a healthy 3.8% in the quarter, while business nonresidential investment climbed 6.8%. The latter continues the trend during 2017 of rising capital spending, which underperformed across the Obama years. It’s not too much to say that capital was on strike as CEOs and small-business owners tried to avoid becoming a target of new taxes or Obama regulators.

The three-day government shutdown last Saturday has sharpened the debate about which party has the advantage going into the midterm elections in November, and which will profit from another possible shut-down if the February 8 deadline for coming up with a solution for the expiring DACA program isn’t met. More interesting than these analyses and prognostications is what they say about the pundits’ estimation of the American people’s ability to sort out the style “sizzle” from the policy-success “steak” come November.

The Democrat instigators of the current shutdown are for now paying a political price for bluffing and then caving to the Republicans, even though Republicans usually are blamed by the media and voters who have tarred them as the mean and greedy party of small government that always wants to starve the big-government Leviathan. Before the shutdown this received wisdom got support from A Washington Post poll that reported 48% of those polled would blame Republicans, 20 points more than those who’d blame the Dems. In fact, a later poll put 58% of voters blaming the Democrats.

Despite this seeming victory for Republicans, however, many still see the outlook for November as dim. Trump’s approval ratings, which are around 40%, 15 points behind his disapproval numbers, are at a historical low. The generic ballot poll asking people which party they prefer in November has the Dems ahead by 8 points. Democrats have been winning special elections lately, including a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama that had been Republican for 30 years, and most recently a the 10th State Senate district in Wisconsin, one held by Republicans for 17 years. The general consensus of Trumpophobes (e.g. here) from both parties is that the president’s abrasive and vulgar Tweets and comments, and his callous, if not racist, dismissal of immigrants during negotiations with Democrats in Congress, are undermining the party and threatening its success in November.

September 2009.

Obama hadn’t even been in office for a whole year when he gave in to Moscow’s biggest demand by dropping the missile defense shield for Poland and the Czech Republic. During his campaign, he had enthusiastically backed the defensive program, declaring, “We have to send a clear signal that Poland and other countries in that region are not going to be subject to intimidation and aggression.”

Like all of his campaign promises that were based on political triangulation, law enforcement, counterterrorism, Jerusalem and gay marriage, it was a campaign lie to be thrown out after the election.

Putin praised Obama’s sellout of our allies as a “brave decision.” In his first year, President Trump touted the sale of Patriot missiles to Poland. That was a truly brave decision.

After the Russian invasion, Obama refused to provide Ukraine with military assistance. While he had handed out weapons to Islamist terrorists in Syria and Libya, the Ukrainians were only offered MREs. The same administration that covertly shipped a fortune in foreign currency on unmarked cargo planes to Russia’s Iranian allies took months to meet Ukrainian requests for boots and spare tires.

The Trump administrated unapologetically approved the sale of sniper rifles to the Ukrainians.

“I’m aware of not only the extraordinary work that you’ve done on behalf of the Russian people,” Obama had gushed during his meeting with Putin. There were no protests from the same media that has since then repeatedly suggested that Trump’s praise for Putin indicated a soft spot for dictators.

Looking back at Obama’s first year and Trump’s first year, it’s easy to assess who was giving Moscow more. It wasn’t just missile defense. In the spring of ’09, Hillary was in Moscow toting a misspelled Reset Button swiped from a swimming pool. But it was Obama who had first urged a “reset or reboot”. That was the month he sent a secret hand-delivered letter to Russia offering to kill the missile shield. The Russians turned down his proposed deal, but he went through with the appeasement anyway.

Trashing missile defense was just one step in a larger effort to revive Jimmy Carter’s defense policies. In his first year, Obama began the push to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. CTBT would have allowed the Russians (and everyone else) to build up their nuclear arsenals while crippling our own. The new START treaty was drafted in ’09 and signed next year. And Russian violations of it were ignored.

Here’s the solution.https://spectator.org/what-trump-can-and-must-do-about-mueller/

No, don’t fire him. That way is boobytrapped. Instead, use your power as President to exercise control over him, in accordance with the rule of law.

Where there is smoke, there is fire. Somewhere, right now in Washington, there is a fire raging, just out of sight, but entirely out of control.

The fire is the unimaginable. Everything that is publicly known in and about Washington, and trumpeted by the so-called “mainstream” media, is actually the opposite of the truth.

Instead of Trump being guilty of obstruction of justice, and about to be bounced out of office through impeachment, it is actually the FBI, and President Obama’s Justice Department, that are guilty of obstruction of justice, with top figures about to be bounced into prison, or worse.

Instead of Trump being guilty of collusion “with the Russians” for help in defeating Hillary, it is Hillary Clinton who colluded with the Russians to try to defeat Trump. Hillary actually financed the Fusion GPS “dossier,” which served as the foundation for the FISA warrant authorizing espionage by the Obama Administration against the opposition party’s candidate for President.

Instead of Trump committing crimes that warrant impeachment and sending him to prison, it is Hillary Clinton who committed crimes that warrant sending her to prison. She is the one who sold out control over 20% of America’s uranium supply to Putin’s cronies, for $150 million in payoffs to the Clinton Foundation, in broad daylight as Obama’s sitting Secretary of State, in the biggest and most brazen corruption scandal in American history, by far.

That was in addition to revealing America’s top intelligence secrets by conducting her official business as Secretary of State on an unprotected email server that she should have known was subject to open access by foreign spies, which is a criminal violation of America’s intelligence laws.

Rep. Adam Schiff has many talents, though few compare to his ability to function as a human barometer of Democratic panic. The greater the level of Schiff hot, pressured air, the more trouble the party knows it’s in.

Mr. Schiff’s millibars have been popping ever since the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on which he is ranking Democrat, last week voted to make a classified GOP memo about FBI election year abuses available to every House member. Mr. Schiff has spit and spun and apoplectically accused his Republican colleagues of everything short of treason. The memo, he insists, is “profoundly misleading,” not to mention “distorted” and “political,” and an attack on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He initially tried to block his colleagues from reading it. Having failed, he’s now arguing Americans can know the full story only if they see the underlying classified documents.

This is highly convenient, given the Justice Department retains those documents and is as eager to make them public as a fox is to abandon the henhouse. Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had to threaten a contempt citation simply to get permission for his committee to gain access, and even then investigators had to leave Capitol Hill to view them, and were allowed only to take notes. Mr. Nunes has no authority to declassify them. The best he can do in his continuing transparency efforts is to summarize their contents. Only in Schiff land is sunshine suddenly a pollutant.

The Schiff pressure gauge is outmatched only by the Justice Department and the FBI, which are now mobilizing their big guns to squelch the truth. That included a Wednesday Justice Department letter to Mr. Nunes—written by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, designed as a memo to the media, copied to its allies in Washington, and immediately leaked to the public. And the department wonders why anyone doubts the integrity of all its hardworking professionals.

Mr. Boyd gets in his cheap shots, for instance slamming Mr. Nunes for moving to release a memo based on documents that Mr. Nunes hasn’t even “seen.” He apparently thinks Rep. Trey Gowdy —the experienced former federal prosecutor Mr. Nunes asked to conduct the review of those docs—isn’t qualified to judge questions of national security. He hyperventilates that it would be “reckless” for the committee to make its memo public without first letting the Justice Department review it and “advise [the committee] of the risk of harm to national security.” Put another way, it is Mr. Boyd’s position that the Justice Department gets to provide oversight of Congress. The Constitution has it the other way around.

The bigger, swampier game here is to rally media pressure, and to mau-mau Mr. Nunes into giving the department a veto over the memo’s release. Ask Sen. Chuck Grassley how that goes. Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently sent a referral to the department for a criminal probe into dossier author Christopher Steele. He then in good faith asked the department its views on an unclassified portion of that referral that he wants to make public. The department invented a classified reason to block public release, and has refused to budge for weeks.

The Boyd letter is also a first step toward a bigger prize: President Trump. Under House rules, a majority of the Intelligence Committee can vote to declassify the memo. Mr. Trump then has up to five days to object to its release. If he doesn’t object, the memo goes public. If he does, a majority of the House would have to vote to override him. CONTINUE AT SITE

We have now reached the “false equivalence” act of the NeverTrump Show. In this episode, we find the president’s foes on the Right equating the outrage of his supporters over potential corruption at the FBI regarding the Hillary Clinton email investigation with the outrage his detractors over Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia election-collusion investigation.

For months, many NeverTrumpers willfully avoided any mention of the now crisis-level misconduct that occurred at President Obama’s Justice Department in the months before and after the 2016 election. (I ask you to scan the Twitter timeline of your most reviled NeverTrumper to compare the number of tweets mentioning Stormy Daniels versus Peter Strzok.) Thanks to the exceptional work of Chairman Devin Nunes’ House Intelligence Committee and fearless reporters such as Sara Carter and Andrew McCarthy, we learn more unsettling news each week about how the top players in these two crucial investigations have conducted themselves.

The latest scandal involves retrieved and missing texts between Peter Strzok, a top FBI official who was instrumental in both the Clinton email and Trump-Russia investigations until he was demoted in August 2017, and his mistress Lisa Page, a Bureau lawyer also working on the Trump-Russia probe. Aside from the damning content in several texts between the two, the FBI now claims it did not “capture” messages sent between the lovers’ phones from December 16, 2016—a few days after Obama’s press secretary Josh Earnest laid out a long narrative to the White House press corps about the evidence pointing to the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia and suggesting Congress investigate it—and May 17, 2017, the exact day Mueller was appointed special counsel.

This, in addition to last week’s intelligence committee vote to make available to all House members a four-page memo detailing how the politically funded and motivated Steele dossier was used to gain FISA authority to spy on the Trump campaign, has most Republicans justifiably infuriated. Typically mild-mannered congressmen called the memo “jaw-dropping,” “deeply disturbing,” “shocking,” and compared it to tactics used by the KGB. Pundits and editorial boards, including the Wall Street Journal, are demanding the House make the document public. A #releasethememo hashtag even trended on Twitter last week.

All hell is breaking loose in D.C. The next few weeks will be the most shocking in America’s history. The revelations about to be made public will shake this nation to its core.

Liberals who watch only CNN and MSNBC probably haven’t a clue what’s about to hit them. Trust me, that light at the end of the tunnel is a train headed straight for the Democrat Party.

We all know — thanks to former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile — that Hillary rigged the Democrat presidential primary against Bernie Sanders. That was a precursor of what was to come.

Does it shock anyone that someone brazen enough to rig a presidential primary would also try to rig the general election?

Don’t look now, but Donald J. Trump may be the first person in world history to win an election rigged against him. Hillary — with the backing of Barack Obama and the leadership of the FBI and Department of Justice — fixed the general election so Trump couldn’t win. And Trump — this relentless bull in a china shop — won anyway.

No wonder Hillary was so confident in the days leading up to Election Day. No wonder she was so shocked and distraught on election night. Keep in mind the point of fixing the election. It wasn’t just about Hillary winning. It was about covering up her crimes.

A week after the election, groups inside and outside the government, some calling themselves Obama Anonymous, had begun meeting to plan the “resistance” to Trump. Unlike the angry protesters in the streets, this resistance wasn’t a new organization. It consisted of Washington D.C. government lifers.

At the CFPB, there was a group calling itself Dumbledore’s Army. Within the FBI and the DOJ, there was a nameless “secret society”. Its details are being derived from text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok, a disgraced member of Mueller’s team, and his mistress, Lisa Page, who worked for FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Previous Strzok texts had spoken of taking out “insurance” against a Trump win. This was all the more significant since Strzok had investigated Hillary and interviewed Flynn. He was a crucial figure in both the investigations of Hillary Clinton and President Trump.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy revealed that the day after Trump won the election, texts between Strzok and Page suggested, “Perhaps this is the first meeting of the secret society.”

Like the CFPB’s Dumbldore’s Army, the reference may have been meant to make the conspiracy seem more lighthearted, but joking names for secret organizations within the government don’t make their dangerously subversive nature a laughing matter. Meanwhile many of the text messages from Strzok and Page have fallen victim to the same technical glitch that claimed Lois Lerner’s emails, Hillary’s emails and the video where Obama’s State Department spokeswoman admitted lying to the media about Iran.

The missing text messages from members of the FBI’s secret society cover the five months where President Trump took office and the Mueller investigation to remove him from that office began.

James Comey is changing his story.

With the heat on about the Federal Bureau of Investigation manipulation of the U.S. election to “get” Trump the news of the day, it seems that his old tale of leaking FBI documents to a Columbia Law School professor pal, Daniel Richman, is now that the guy was his attorney all along.

According to The Federalist:

A friend of former FBI director James Comey who leaked sensitive FBI memos to The New York Times in the wake of Comey’s firing in 2017 now claims to be Comey’s personal attorney. Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, told The Federalist via phone on Tuesday afternoon that he [is] now personally representing Comey.

The revelation comes in the wake of news that Comey was interviewed by the special counsel’s office last year. According to The New York Times, the line of questioning from the office of [S]pecial [C]ounsel Robert Mueller focused on memos that Comey wrote and later leaked after he was fired from his job by President Donald Trump. A review of FBI policies governing the handling of sensitive government documents suggests [that] Comey violated FBI policy by leaking the memos, which were produced on government time, using government equipment, and directly related to his official government responsibilities, according to Comey’s own testimony before Congress.

The Federalist’s Sean Davis, who got the scoop, reports that Richman got at least one classified document from the Comey pile, which wouldn’t be legal even if he had been Comey’s attorney.

At the same time, the new claim to attorney representation in the Comey-Richman relationship looks a lot like a bid to shield the both of them from answering questions from Congress, due to attorney-client privilege. Comey, recall, was Mister Noble Whistleblower when, upon being fired, he told Congress he had written up some memos and then got Richman to leak them to the press.

Given that Richman is an old pal of Comey’s, it looks like an effort to weasel out of potential legal troubles now that the long knives are out for the FBI – and could easily be an agreement between friends. How convenient that they are both lawyers, too.

It underlines that the heat is on, and Comey sounds as though he’d prefer to avoid any responsibility for his role in this growing bonfire of a fiasco. If so, maybe the media’s loud claims that the problems are all in the congressional inquiries and Special Counsel Robert Mueller is zeroing in on President Trump aren’t the real direction this news is going. The sudden claim to attorneyship from Comey looks a lot like a weaselly effort to get out of any accountability for his strange exoneration of Hillary Clinton and his agency’s inexplicable continuous targeting of President Trump.