RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sessions should appoint a Justice Department prosecutor to investigate the investigators.

‘What’s good for the goose . . .” is more an understandable impulse than a useful rule of thumb in legal controversies, particularly legal controversies in which an error has been made.

The White House and congressional Republicans have watched in ire as the Trump administration has been tied in knots by the no-boundaries Mueller investigation. “Okay,” they’re thinking, “now, it’s payback time.” There appear to have been highly irregular investigative tactics used in probing the Trump campaign — particularly, but not exclusively, by the Obama administration. Why not, then, appoint another special counsel to squeeze the squeezers? Why not turn the tables?

It’s a bad idea.

Original Sin: A Prosecutor but No Crime
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made a foundational error in appointing Robert Mueller to be special counsel to investigate . . . well . . . um . . . come to think of it, that was the error: The investigation has no parameters, and thus no limitations.

Investigations conducted by prosecutors are supposed to be rooted in known crimes — or, at the very least, articulable suspicion that known crimes have occurred. Under the governing regulations, to justify the appointment of a special counsel, those crimes must form the basis for two salient findings: (1) that the Justice Department has a conflict of interest so severe that it cannot conduct the investigation in the normal manner, and (2) that it is necessary to appoint, from outside the Justice Department, a quasi-independent prosecutor. This special prosecutor is to be given a grant of investigative jurisdiction limited to the crimes that the Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate — and no other crimes, unless the special counsel explicitly requests, and the Justice Department grants, an expansion of jurisdiction. (See here, where I address Paul Manafort’s claim that his indictment violates regulations limiting special-counsel jurisdiction.)

Some recent inspector general reports from within various federal agencies show that the Trump administration is attempting to weed out abuse, fraud, and waste in government programs.

Early in his tenure as secretary of the Department of the Interior (DOI), Ryan Zinke asked for a briefing on DOI grant programs and found to his dismay that not a single person could tell him how much DOI disbursed in grants every year or what projects it had funded or was committed to funding. Saying he feared that the grant program was open to fraud and abuse, Zinke order DOI to review its major grants and cooperative agreements.

Zinke’s fears proved prescient. A February 20 DOI inspector general (I.G.)’s report found that Richard Ruggiero, head of the Department of International Conservation (DIC), which is within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), had violated federal ethics laws when Ruggiero took advantage of a federal cooperative agreement providing nearly $325,000 in funding to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The agreement financially benefited a family member who was an independent contractor with IFAW.

The I.G. report says that before Ruggiero took over DIC, the department had signed a cooperative agreement with IFAW to establish a professional training program for conservation leaders overseas, providing the $126,871 to fund the program. Within nine days of Ruggiero becoming DIC chief, the cooperative agreement was modified several times, extending the program for three years and increasing DIC’s grant to $324,108.

He couldn’t have meddled without its anti-Trump hysteria.https://spectator.org/christopher-steele-and-the-entitleds-echo-chamber/

In the fragmentary profiles of Christopher Steele, even in the glowing ones, he emerges not as a subtle spy but as a bumptious political activist. He has been described as “very left-wing,” a “little creep” who embraced socialism in college, an ambitious debating society president who invited a representative of the PLO to speak at Cambridge University, a “showy” but charmless operator ill-suited to intelligence work, an “idiot” whose mischief-making has made his old colleagues in British intelligence look like Kremlin-manipulated dupes. He is less James Bond than James Carville.

Even in the accounts by his apologists he comes off not as quiet and sober but oddly hyperactive and noisy. He is portrayed as running around with his hair on fire, second-guessing the FBI, disregarding the FBI’s instructions, lying to it, frantically briefing reporters, and so on. The apologists cast that hyperactivity as evidence of his earnestness and reliability. It is not. It is just evidence of his arrogant presumption and anti-Trump hysteria. Steele told the Justice Department official Bruce Ohr that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” Does that sound like an apolitical spy?

According to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Steele grew more frantic after the passage of Brexit, about which he felt “wretched,” she writes. Does that sound like an apolitical spy? No, it makes him sound like a typical member of the liberal international elite — anti-Brexit, anti-Trump, pro-Hillary.

Investors are cheering Friday’s report that the economy added 313,000 jobs in February while the labor force gained 806,000 entrants. This is remarkable for a recovery long in the tooth and shows that deregulation and tax reform are flowing into business confidence and hiring.

Payroll numbers were revised up by 54,000 for December and January, bringing the three month total to 727,000. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1%, but labor force participation ticked up three-tenths of a percentage point to 63%. The increase in the labor force was the largest since 1983 excluding months in which temporary census workers were hired.

Employment growth was broad-based with large increases in construction (61,000), retail (50,000) and manufacturing (31,000). Manufacturers have added 224,000 jobs over the last year, including 66,000 in metals. Much of this growth has been in machinery and secondary metals fabrication—e.g., welding and forging—which will be harmed by President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.

The best news is that the hiring burst may finally be pulling lower-skilled workers off the sidelines. Labor participation last month rose by 0.9 percentage points among blacks, 1.7 points among black teens and two points for workers without a high-school diploma.

In the wake of the shootings at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people, New York governor Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature should look closely at the state’s gun and mental-health policies—both are in need of reform. New York was ahead of the curve in 2013, when it passed the NY SAFE Act requiring therapists to report the names of mentally ill people under their care believed to be dangerous and to have guns. The law requires county mental-health directors to investigate the reports, and if appropriate, instruct criminal-justice authorities to seize guns from the disturbed individuals and enter their names into a database, with the goal of precluding them from purchasing guns in the future.

The legislature should amend the SAFE Act to require more than just the removal of guns; it should mandate that officials evaluate these mentally ill individuals for inclusion in Kendra’s Law, New York’s most successful program for dealing with potentially violent, mentally ill people who fail to comply with treatment. Kendra’s Law lets courts order individuals who have engaged in “one or more acts, attempts or threats of serious violent behavior toward self or others” to receive up to one year of treatment while they continue to live in the community. It has reduced incarceration, homelessness, and hospitalization by around 70 percent, saving taxpayers 50 percent of the cost of care.

Kendra’s Law itself needs to be made permanent and strengthened. We have identified more than 20 technical changes that would keep patients, the public, and police safer, but perhaps the most important change is to get the New York State Office of Mental Health to take leadership in implementing the law. At the Joint Budget Hearing on mental health in February, OMH Commissioner Ann Sullivan did not even mention Kendra’s Law, in spite of multiple questions from legislators on how to reduce the mental illness-to-jail pipeline. OMH regularly sends its speakers to community events, but none of the brochures they hand out tell family members how to get loved ones into Kendra’s Law. Governor Cuomo should insist that mental-health departments focus on helping the most seriously ill, rather than concentrating on the “worried well.”

A year ago, the Women’s March punctuated Trump’s inauguration with what was likely the largest single-day mass demonstration in American history. Today, it finds itself embroiled in an unexpected controversy after the initial refusal of several of its leaders to distance themselves from one of America’s leading anti-Semites, the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. It’s a conflict that stems from the long, entangled history between black and Jewish communities in the United States, in which friendship and friction are giving way to struggle over the dimensions of peoplehood. It also reveals anti-Semitism as a crucial blind spot of contemporary left-wing activism.

Like a series of other contemporary movements for social justice—Me Too, Time’s Up, Never Again—the Women’s March emphasizes accountability. Activists target not only perpetrators of different types of violence, but also what they see as their institutional enablers, from Hollywood bigwigs to the NRA and its congressional allies, in an effort to dismantle the structures that sustain social evils. The leadership of the group has taken on some high-profile activists, and it is now focusing on impressing its agenda on the 2018 midterms.

Mass movements are sewn together from a wide variety of sources, so they often sweep in unwanted companions as they move toward their goals. No one, however, expected to discover that three Women’s March co-chairs—Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory—had ties to Farrakhan. More mysterious and disturbing was the extended reluctance of the Women’s March, nearly a year since it became public, to acknowledge Farrakhan’s extremist views and disassociate themselves from them.

It all came to a head last week, after Farrakhan delivered his address to the annual Nation of Islam gathering for Saviours’ Day, the sect’s three-day holiday honoring its founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad. Farrakhan denounced “Satanic Jews,” said that “when you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door,” and at the climax of his speech, proclaimed, “White folks are going down, and Satan is going down, and Farrakhan by God’s grace has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew—and I’m here to say, your time is up.”

Naturally, this renewed interest in just what the Women’s March was thinking. Mallory further stoked controversy when a woman questioning her about Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism drew a response from a preacher asking her to condemn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and praying for Jesus to cast out the “wicked spirit laying on her heart.” Linda Sarsour surfaced to say the man was “too blessed,” and Mallory tweeted, “If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader!”

The California Democratic Party’s refusal to endorse the reelection of Senator Dianne Feinstein represents a breaking point both for the state’s progressives and, arguably, the future of the party nationwide. Feinstein symbolizes, if anyone does, the old Democratic establishment that, while far from conservative, nevertheless appealed to many mainstream businesses and affluent suburban voters. The rejection of Feinstein reveals the eclipse of the moderate, mainstream Democratic Party, and the rise of Green and identity-oriented politics, appealing to the coastal gentry . It offers little to traditional middle-class Democrats and even less to those further afield, in places like the industrial Midwest or the South. In these parts of the country, bread-and-butter issues that concern families remain more persuasive than gestural politics.

To its many admirers back east, California has emerged as the role model for a brave new Democratic future. The high-tech, culturally progressive Golden State seems to be an ideal incubator of whatever politics will follow the Trump era.

Certainly, California is an ideal place to observe this shift, as radicalism faces no restraints here. The Republican Party has little to no influence in politics and culture and not much even among business leaders. For the Democrats, this vacuum allows for a kind of internecine struggle resembling that of the Bolsheviks after the death of Lenin. And just as happened then, a new Stalinism of sorts seems to be emerging—in this case, to the consternation not only of conservatives but also of traditional liberals and moderates of the Feinstein stamp.

Yet as California Democrats exult in what they see as a glowing future, they are turning away from the models that once drove their party’s (and the state’s) success—a commitment to growth, upward mobility, and dispersed property ownership. California’s current prosperity is largely due to the legacy of Governor Pat Brown, who, a half-century ago, built arguably the world’s best transportation, water, and power systems, and created an incubator for middle-class prosperity. Ironically, the politician most responsible for undermining this achievement has been Pat’s son, Governor Jerry Brown. Long skeptical of his father’s growth-oriented, pro-suburban policies, Brown the Younger put strong constraints on growth, especially when these efforts concerned the fight against global warming—a quasi-religious crusade. Battling climate change has awakened Brown’s inner authoritarian; he has lauded the “coercive power of the state” and embraced “brainwashing” on climate issues.

“I know nothing,” isn’t just the motto of Sergeant Schultz. It’s also the Clinton motto. And Christopher Steele, the Brit whom the Clinton campaign hired to find out things for them, also knows nothing.

Or at least that’s the theme of the sprawling New Yorker profile of Steele, his dossier and his associates.

Steele, Jane Mayer, its authoress, tells us, is a brilliant researcher and we should take his word about all his allegations involving President Trump. Even the ones that aren’t true and don’t make any sense.

But he doesn’t know anything.

Take the Cody Shearer memo, the document authored by a Clinton plumber and which Steele passed along to the FBI as confirmation of his claims. The existence of the Shearer memo raised serious questions about whether the Clintons weren’t just paying Steele to dig up dirt, but were providing it. Some have speculated that Shearer’s smears were the original basis for Steele’s dossier.

But wait a minute.

Steele knew nothing. The New Yorker asks us to believe that their brilliant and trustworthy researcher passed along Shearer’s smears to the FBI without knowing who he was. ”Steele wasn’t aware that Shearer had longtime ties to the Clintons,” Mayer tells us, “as did Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton ally, who had given Shearer’s report to Winer.”

How could Steele ever be expected to know anything about the men whose material he was passing on to the FBI? Assuming, quite improbably, that Steele didn’t recognize the name of a close adviser to a former Secretary of State who had recently been involved in a foreign policy scandal, it would have taken him all of 60 seconds on Google to discover who Shearer and Blumenthal were.

Steele’s Sergeant Schultz routine betrays incompetence or dishonesty.

The revelation comes as the FBI is accused of targeting Trump campaign officials.

The FBI recruited computer technicians at Best Buy to inform them about illegal content on personal devices customers brought in for repairs, new Bureau documents show.

The informants were discovered after Best Buy’s Geek Squad technicians at a Kentucky repair shop found thousands of child-pornography images on California doctor Mark Rettenmaier’s computer. The documents from the ensuing court case showed that eight informants were cooperating with the FBI to turn over illegal content.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Department of Justice and finally obtained records the FBI had not revealed, which proved Best Buy had a long-term relationship with federal agents.

FBI agents would come and confiscate any device on which technicians found illegal content, take it to a field office, and, in some cases, obtain a warrant to search the device. Several informants received payments from $500 to $1000 for their cooperation.

Critics have raised possible Fourth Amendment issues with this unusual practice. Best Buy is sanctioned to search devices, but the FBI is supposed to obtain a warrant to do so. Providing a monetary incentive to employees would likely encourage them to perform searches that are unnecessary to the repair, the watchdogs say.

Last year, a Best Buy spokesman said the dealings the company had with federal agents occurred only if an employee happened upon illegal content by accident.

“We have a legal and moral obligation to turn that material over to law enforcement,” spokesman Jeff Shelman said.