RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rap superstar Kanye West continues to confound his critics, both progressive and conservative, by sparking a crucial conversation about racial politics. I have previously written here and here on FrontPage Mag about Kanye’s controversial support for President Donald Trump and his defense of black conservative commentator Candace Owens, whose message that blacks need to exchange their victim mentality for a victor mentality resonated with Kanye. Despite volley after volley of media assaults suggesting that Kanye is a race traitor and even questioning his sanity, he hasn’t given an inch of ground, which is unheard of for a celebrity. Now he has triggered renewed leftist outrage by uploading a single on his website that Jerome Hudson at Breitbart News called “one of the boldest political statements in rap history.”

Titled “Ye Vs. The People,” the song features Kanye justifying his iconoclastic new stance in a rap dialogue with actor-rapper T.I., who represents the typical objections raised against Kanye for roaming off the Democrat plantation.

EXPLICIT LYRICS AHEAD

“Where you tryna go with this?” T.I. begins. Kanye replies, “You just readin’ the headlines, you don’t see the fine print / You on some choosin’-side shit, I’m on some unified shit.”

T.I. retorts that Kanye’s support of Trump, including posting a photo of himself with a MAGA hat, is selfish and short-sighted. “Bruh, I never ever stopped fightin’ for the people,” explains Kanye. “Actually wearin’ the hat’ll show people that we equal.”

Famed civil libertarian and attorney Alan Dershowitz said recently of the ongoing shenanigans surrounding Robert Mueller’s investigation: “Just as the first casualty of war is truth, so, too, the first casualty of hyper-partisan politics is civil liberties.”

Indeed. The American people are up against a rogue ruling class that cares only about protecting the power they have taken from us; they don’t give a damn about civil liberties or justice, in general.

We were reminded of this recently when President Trump pardoned Scooter Libby. The pardon highlighted former FBI Director James Comey’s corruption in unleashing prosecutorial abuse by a special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, who then railroaded the conviction of an innocent man. The pardon corrected a miscarriage of justice; it was no Marc Rich pardon (though that had its own Comey and Clinton Foundation connections) and, contrary to Comey’s assertion, it was not an attack on justice or the rule of law. Comey has now hired Fitzgerald as his personal attorney.

Regarding the character of the special counsel, Dershowitz described Mueller’s personal involvement in “the most scandalous miscarriage of justice in the modern history of the FBI,” where four men were sent to prison for murders they were known not to have committed. They remained locked up for nearly 30 years, after which a judge awarded them $102 million for false imprisonment.

Unelected bureaucrats are acting with similar disdain for the people’s will. PowerLine’s John Hinderaker writes how, in contradiction to our Constitution, James Comey and others like former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates have declared the FBI and “permanent staff of the DOJ” are “independent of, and superior to, the president . . . a permanent bureaucracy in Washington that is impervious to the wishes of the voters,” making “the administrative state . . . the greatest contemporary threat to the liberty of Americans.”

Unparalleled government abuses of power are about to become public. The question is what we, the people, will do in response to this overt attempt by deep state players to strip us of our freedom.

Four recent developments drive home the unsettling nature of our situation:

First, Charles Lipson writes how Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) “is making a deeply troubling allegation: An official investigation was mounted against an American presidential campaign with no official information to support it. If so, then U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were weaponized for partisan purposes.”

Andrew McCarthy, on the implications for equal justice under the law: “Too many Trump critics have abandoned all pretense of respecting due process.” Byron York adds: “…the generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head. Now, the question is: Can the accused prove the charges false? Increasingly, the president’s critics argue that the dossier is legitimate because it has not been proven untrue.”

Second, a redacted version of the House Intelligence Committee’s final report appeared on Friday, clearing Trump’s campaign of colluding with Russia but describing three troubling matters: First, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn did not lie to FBI special agents. Instead, what Michael Walsh calls the Left’s “Star Chamber of Horrors” apparently forced Flynn to accept a guilty plea to stanch his financial bleeding, which included selling his home.

Watching the disgusting (and decidedly unfunny) performance of the comedienne Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night, I thought of two things. One was, “What would her mother think of this shockingly vulgar and carelessly cruel exhibition?” I’d say the same thing about Ms. Wolf’s children, if she had any, which I believe she does not.

The second thing I thought of was Edmund Burke’s mournful observations, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, about the moral coefficients of the destructive antinomian impulses that coruscated through France in 1789-1790. The date is important. Burke, although he saw clearly that “in the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows,” was writing before the Terror. The depredations he foresaw and cataloged had so far affected mainly manners and morals—the human heart, not yet heads separated from bodies. That would come later.

Of course, we know what was to come. Burke merely foretold it. Yet the insight of hindsight makes Burke’s observations all the more poignant. “All the pleasing illusions,” Burke wrote,

which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason [note the irony]. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Last Wednesday, Sen. Tester (D-MT) released a laundry list of anonymously-sourced, unsubstantiated allegations against the current White House Physician and, until last Thursday, President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Veterans Affairs. The Montana Senator accused Jackson of a wide range of misconduct, from overprescribing medications to drunkenly wrecking his government vehicle. Tester also accused Jackson of being frequently drunk on the job, based on a lurid tale (anonymously sourced, of course) about a Secret Service intervention to prevent a severely-inebriated Jackson from disturbing a sleeping President Obama during an international trip in 2015. Jackson, the story goes, was pounding on a hotel room door next to the President’s in the early hours of the morning.

Admiral Jackson vehemently denied the allegations and refused to withdraw for several days, before finally pulling his candidacy in the face of a media feeding frenzy and eroding Republican support. Jackson maintains his innocence, however, and appears to be telling the truth. Tester, by contrast, appears to have slandered the professional and personal reputation of a man who served in the Navy for twenty-three years, including as the physician in charge of resuscitative medicine at Camp Taqaddum, just outside of Fallujah, in 2006.

On Friday afternoon, the Secret Service released the following statement:

Over the last 48 hours, media outlets have alleged that U.S. Secret Service personnel were forced to intervene during a Presidential foreign travel assignment in order to prevent disturbing (former) President Barack Obama. The Secret Service has no such record of any incident; specifically, any incident involving Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson.

If Tester’s only motivation was to determine the content of Jackson’s character so his fellow senators could make an informed decision, why didn’t he confirm the accuracy of the charge with the Secret Service before he blasted it into the newsfeeds and nightly broadcasts of millions of Americans?

Nobody knows how to game the system for personal gain like an Illinois lawmaker. The political class voted themselves tens of millions of dollars in lifetime pension payouts. It’s time to end their ‘pension palace.’

Consider just one gross example. Have you ever heard of retired back-bench state senator John Friedland?

Millions of dollars in pension payouts flowed to John Friedland since 1992. Friedland earned $35,661 as a state senator, plus another $46,500 as a part-time employee at the Fox River Water Reclamation District. When he retired from the General Assembly, he received a one month full-time pay spike at the water district for $8,000 – causing his legislative pension to start at $80,856 instead of $30,312. Today, Friedland is pulling down $172,981 per year, due to lucrative ‘cost of living’ adjustments.

Although the ‘Friedland loophole’ was closed, Illinois state legislators still have one of the sweetest retirement deals in the country – and it’s at an amazing cost to taxpayers.

According to General Assembly Retirement System (GARS) disclosures, 137 lawmakers chose to participate in the state pension system while the rest have thankfully opted out. To fund these future retirement annuities, the state government made a $21.7 million payment in 2017, meaning each participating lawmaker’s future pension cost taxpayers $158,547 last year.

See the top all-time GARS pensions here.

At OpenTheBooks.com, we checked out who’s receiving what, when, and after how long – and it’s not pretty. For example, the largest pension of all-time goes to a 31-year long-forgotten state senator. After retiring from Springfield in 2000 – with a pension spiking stop at the Chicago schools – Arthur Berman (D) receives $20,849 every month. Annually, Berman receives $250,191 – that’s four times more than he ever made as a Springfield lawmaker.

The House Intelligence Committee released its long-anticipated and highly redacted Russian intelligence report Friday clearing President Donald Trump’s campaign from “colluding” with Russians in the 2016 presidential election and chiding the intelligence community for “significant intelligence tradecraft failings” as the committee found no evidence to date that collusion had occurred.

The 248-page report, of which some pages were completely redacted after review by FBI and DOJ officials, have raised the ire of committee Republicans and will lead to a review of the report once again in an effort to un-redact elements of the report that the Committee says does not relate to the classified material. Numerous Congressional committees have complained openly that the DOJ and FBI continue to “stonewall” their investigations and have slow rolled documents needed for adequate oversight of the highly controversial investigations into Trump and the Bureau’s handling of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for government business.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-CA, said in a press release that due to public interest and the importance of the report the Committee chose to make the report public. Nunes has had to threaten Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray with contempt of Congress before documents have been provided. It’s a battle that he continues to fight but one that has slowed down the progress of the Committee’s investigations, say congressional sources, familiar with the investigations.

Nunes stated in the press release that “we object to the excessive and unjustified number of redactions, many of which do not relate to classified information. The Committee will convey our objections to the appropriate agencies and looks forward to publishing a less redacted version in the near future.”
Three Major Takeaways from the Russia Report’s Findings:
1. Flynn Didn’t Lie

Former National Security Advisor Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the embattled three-star general who was fired by the White House for allegedly misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his conversation with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, did not lie to the FBI special agents who interviewed him at the White House in January 2017.

This is important because Flynn eventually plead guilty to one count of making false statements about his December 2016 phone conversation with Kislyak to DOJ Special Counsel Robert Mueller, “even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents did not detect any deception during Flynn’s interview.”

“I explained that he could count on me to always tell him the truth. I said I don’t do sneaky things, I don’t leak, I don’t do weasel moves.” So said then-FBI Director James Comey, according to his own memo, to a recently inaugurated President Donald Trump on Jan. 27, 2017, at a private White House dinner.

In early May 2017, Trump fired Comey. Contrary to FBI policy, Comey promptly leaked four of the seven memos—at least one may have contained classified information—that he wrote concerning his conversations with the president. In short order, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself) appointed Comey’s friend and former colleague Robert Mueller as special counsel. Mueller’s task was to continue the counterintelligence investigation Comey initiated in July 2016 into possible cooperation between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Within weeks of Mueller’s appointment, Comey testified to Congress that he had hoped his leaks would trigger such a result.

Apparently, Comey did not tell the president the truth when he assured him that he doesn’t do sneaky things, he doesn’t leak, and he doesn’t do weasel moves.

Launched last week with a massive media campaign, Comey’s new book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” aims to cement his reputation for impeccable honor and irreproachable integrity. Instead, the book confirms that on matters of great public interest, he doesn’t always tell the truth.

Any author can make mistakes. Even the most meticulous sometimes get a date wrong, blur a crucial detail, overlook an important aspect of context. And it is distressingly ordinary for a writer, on behalf of a pet point, to exaggerate small matters and minimize large ones.

While promoting his memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, former FBI director James Comey sat for what turned out to be a tough but fair and refreshingly civil interview by Bret Baier, host of Fox News’s Special Report. (See Part 1 and Part 2.) Owing to President Trump’s comparatively unhinged interview earlier in the day on Fox & Friends, the Trump–Comey feud over alleged leaking of classified information is drawing most of the media attention. But something more important is less apparent: Comey has implicitly confirmed what we’ve been saying here for well over a year: In the Clinton emails caper, the fix was in.

Before we turn first to leaking, some disclosure. I am fond of Jim Comey and have been for 30 years. I vigorously disagree with both his handling of the Clinton emails investigation and the manner in which the FBI has conducted what is supposed to be a classified, counterintelligence probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — not a public, government-orchestrated campaign of insinuation that Trump was complicit in Russian perfidy.

No doubt because of my personal regard for him and respect for his high-end ability, I am inclined to cut the former director slack. He was thrust into a no-win situation: It is not his fault that Democrats nominated a criminal suspect, or that Republicans nominated an irregular politician heedless of the norms of discretion and distance that a president should maintain when dealing with his law-enforcement subordinates. Comey aside, I had no better friends in nearly 20 years as a federal prosecutor in New York than Dan Richman, the Columbia Law School prof through whom Comey transmitted information to the New York Times, and Pat Fitzgerald and Dave Kelley, Comey’s lawyers. These aren’t just former colleagues of mine; they are old friends. I haven’t tried to speak to any of them about this matter, but my esteem for them weighs on me — as does my duty to be an honest analyst. How well I resolve that tension is not for me to say; I can just tell you it is real.