RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former president Obama actually said the following at his secret MIT speech, according to the transcript obtained by Reason magazine: “We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us. I know that seems like a low bar.”

It seems as though Obama set a tremendously high bar as to what would embarrass him.

It should have been embarrassing to Obama and his supporters when:

He continually lied by saying you could keep your doctor and your health plan and that premiums would go down when Obamacare passed.

He had a gun-running operation called Fast and Furious, where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives lost track of over 2,000 guns it allowed to be sold to Mexican drug cartels and people died. Obama claimed he had no idea about the project but claimed executive privilege to hide documents.

His IRS targeted political opponents, violating their free speech and freedom of association rights granted by the Constitution.

He sicced his Justice Department goons on the Little Sisters of the Poor, suing them for daring to believe they had religious freedom.

Planned Parenthood personnel were caught bragging that they crunched and crushed babies for profit. Somehow, Obama, the media, and other Democrats didn’t have any empathy for the babies and weren’t embarrassed at all about this appalling practice. Nor did they do anything to hold Planned Parenthood accountable, ignoring the law.

He left people to die in Libya while he and Hillary concocted a lie to protect their political power. He even lied to the families of those who died and had Susan Rice continually lie to the public, showing that he and Hillary have zero empathy for those who died and their families. His minions arrested and imprisoned a man they knowingly falsely blamed for an anti-Mohammed video. And people say Trump has no empathy and doesn’t discharge his duties as president.

My column that posted last night is an in-depth analysis of the Schiff memo, the response of House Intelligence Committee Democrats to the Nunes memo published by committee Republicans. I offer a variety of reasons why the response principally proffered by the committee’s ranking member, Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), fails to defend the issuance of FISA court surveillance warrants against an American citizen tied to the Trump campaign, Carter Page, in a counterintelligence investigation seeking to probe suspected ties between Donald Trump and Russia. The warrant was issued based on uncorroborated hearsay allegations from unknown sources, compiled in the so-called Steele dossier. The FBI and Justice Department failed to disclose that these allegations were generated by an opposition-research project commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

As I argue in the column, the Schiff memo leaves no doubt that the key allegation supporting issuance of the warrant is the Steele dossier’s claim that, while on a well-publicized trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page met with two top Putin regime operatives, Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin. Page credibly denies the meetings; former British spy Christoper Steele’s claim that they happened is based on unidentified hearsay sources that he concedes he never confirmed; and all indications are that the FBI never corroborated them. In congressional testimony, Former FBI director James Comey described the dossier’s allegations about Donald Trump as “salacious and unverified.” Furthermore, according to a memo published by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee members — Chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) — then-director Comey conceded that the Bureau did not corroborate Steele’s sources and relied on the fact that Steele had given the FBI reliable information in the past. (See Grassley-Graham memo, p.2.)

At the Washington Examiner, Byron York picks up on something I wish I had highlighted: The Schiff memo’s focus on past Russian intelligence efforts (in 2013) to recruit Page to become an agent for Russia. As Byron notes, the Schiff memo claims that “Steele’s information about Page was consistent with the FBI’s assessment of Russian intelligence efforts to recruit him and his connections to Russian persons of interest.”

The fact that a foreign power is trying to recruit an American to become an agent for that foreign power is not a sufficient basis to issue a surveillance warrant against the American under FISA. It would, of course, be sufficient to issue a warrant against the foreign spies who are making the recruitment efforts, but it is not enough for a warrant against the American citizen who is the target of the recruitment effort.

Readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit will recall the philosopher’s withering comments about “the dogmatism of mere assertion” which yields naught but an empty and deceptive feeling: self-certitude.

I thought about Hegel’s comments this morning when looking through the Democrats’ attempted rebuttal of the memo released earlier this month by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.

It is interesting to compare the two memos, both as rhetorical artifacts and as substantive contributions to the debate over possible “Russian collusion” in the 2016 presidential election. Even a comparison of their physical appearance is revealing. Let’s start there.

The Republicans’ memo, overseen by Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is a four-and-a-half-page précis of findings from an ongoing oversight investigation into the behavior of the FBI and Department of Justice during the 2016 election cycle. It is prefaced by a brief letter from presidential counsel Donald McGahn to Congressman Nunes laying out the rationale for declassifying the memo and releasing it to the public. Each page of the memo is marked “UNCLASSIFIED” and the legend “TOP SECRET NOFORN” (for “no foreign nationals”) on each page is struck through with a heavy black stroke. Otherwise it is clean.

The Democrats’ memo, overseen by ranking minority member Adam Schiff, spills on to a tenth page. It is probably only about a half again as long as the Republicans’ memo, however, because—in addition to bearing the “Unclassified” stamps and strike-throughs of the “top secret” advisories—its text is littered with redactions: many passages of the text are blotted out. Were those redactions required by the FBI? By the executive branch? It was not said. Nor was it said why the Democrats did not take the redactions on board and present a clean text. I do not know the answer. My suspicion is that they wanted the blocks of black to stand as mute, non-specific but nonetheless graphically incriminating witnesses to their allegations.

For example, much of the memo deals with Carter Page, the American businessman who briefly served as a volunteer foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign. In a section of the memo headed “Page’s Connections to Russian Government and Intelligence Officials” we encounter the following: “As DOJ described in detail to the Court, Page had an extensive record as”—as what? We don’t know. The juicy news is submerged beneath a minatory stroke of black.

Similarly, after informing us that a “Russian intelligence officer targeted Page for recruitment”—eyebrow raising, what?—we read that “Page showed”—another black stroke, starving knowledge but inflaming the imagination. What did Page show? Interest? Did he promise to smuggle the nuclear launch codes into Moscow? We don’t know. But we can think the worst.

Open the Books CEO Andrew Andrzejewski on the push for more transparency on federal government workers’ pay.

The government is keeping the salary information of more than 250,000 employees secret, according to Andrew Andrzejewski, the CEO of OpenTheBooks.com, a website that tracks government spending.

Over the past 11 years, OpenTheBooks has compiled the salaries and bonuses of 2 million federal government workers and posted them online by zip code.

But this year the government concealed the salaries of 255,000 employees, Andrzejewski said.

“It’s one in five federal bureaucrats,” Andrzejewski told Stuart Varney on FOX Business’ “Varney & Co.” “Their salaries are now redacted, and we estimate that the total payroll funded by the American taxpayer now hidden in the swamp is $20 billion.”

The House Democratic surveillance memo is out, and it should worry Americans who care about privacy and due process. The memo defends the conduct of the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation in obtaining a series of warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The Democrats argue that Christopher Steele, the British former spy who compiled the Trump “dossier” on which the government’s initial warrant application was grounded, was credible. They also claim the FISA court had the information it needed about the dossier’s provenance. And they do not dispute former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s acknowledgment that the FBI would not have sought a FISA order without the Steele dossier.

The most troubling issue is that the surveillance orders were obtained by withholding critical information about Mr. Steele from the FISA court. The court was not informed that Mr. Steele was personally opposed to Mr. Trump’s election, that his efforts were funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or that he was the source of media reports that the FBI said corroborated his dossier. These facts are essential to any judicial assessment of Mr. Steele’s veracity and the applications’ merits.

The FBI should have been especially wary of privately produced Russia-related dossiers. As the Washington Post and CNN reported in May 2017, Russian disinformation about Mrs. Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch evidently prompted former FBI Director James Comey to announce publicly the close of the investigation of the Clinton email server, for fear that the disinformation might be released and undermine the bureau’s credibility.

In addition, even assuming the dossier was accurate regarding Mr. Page, its allegations are thin. Mr. Page was said to have met in Moscow with Russian officials, who raised the potential for cooperation if Trump was elected; Mr. Page was noncommittal. The most significant claim—that those officials offered Mr. Page a bribe in the form of Russian business opportunities—suggests he was not a Russian agent. Existing operatives don’t need to be bribed.

There was no good reason to withhold from the FISA court any information regarding Mr. Steele, his anti-Trump biases, or the dossier’s origin as opposition research. The court operates in secret, so there was no danger of revealing intelligence sources and methods. The inescapable conclusion is that the information was withheld because the court would have been unlikely to issue the order if it knew the whole truth.

That’s a problem because following the rules and being absolutely candid with the court is even more essential in the FISA context than in ordinary criminal investigations. Congress enacted FISA in 1978 to create a judicial process through which counterintelligence surveillance could take place within the U.S., even when directed at American citizens, consistent with “this Nation’s commitment to privacy and individual rights.” CONTINUE AT SITE

My son Mark, whose mind is more capacious, objective and generous than mine, nicely formulated the Donald Trump problem for thoughtful conservatives. “I approve of almost everything he has done,” my son remarked, “and I disapprove of almost everything he has said.”

Second the motion. I approve of the Neil Gorsuch appointment, the moving of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the removal of often-strangling regulations from much commerce, the opening of the Keystone pipeline, the tax-reform law, and more.

I disapprove of the bragging tweets, the touchiness, the crude put-downs of anyone who disagrees with him (“Little Marco, ” “insecure Oprah, ” “Sloppy Steve, ” and the rest), the unrestrained vulgarity. America has had ignorant, corrupt, vain, lazy presidents before, but in Donald Trump we have the first president who is a genuine boor.

In many realms of life, a boor’s rude, unmannerly nature can be forgivable. A wise stockbroker, who makes his clients lots of money, might get away with being a boor. A boorish winning football coach— Mike Ditka, take a bow—is livable if not likable. Showbiz has never been without its boors, from George Jessel to Whoopi Goldberg. Even a boorish friend is possible, if he is also loyal, generous and honorable. But a boorish president of the United States presents a problem.

The presidency, like the monarchy in England, has a symbolic along with a practical aspect. The president is meant to represent the nation at its best. What precisely that means can vary greatly in a country as wide and differentiated as ours. Dwight David Eisenhower was a different model of our best than was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry S. Truman was different again, and yet in his own way he represented the country, in its Middle Western, small-business, common-sensical strain.

Democrats scramble to misdirect in defense of their own as the Nunes memo remains unrebutted.

On Saturday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, released his memorandum in an attempt to rebut the Republican memorandum that HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) released on February 2.

As I wrote on February 5, the Nunes memo describes the FBI’s and the Department of Justice’s abuses of their law enforcement powers to spy on the Trump campaign and its advisors during and after the 2016 election.

The Schiff memo is cleverly written, making several assertions by which it attempts to confuse and misinform on the issues. It flails and fails in Schiff’s effort to discredit the principal findings of the Nunes memo.

The key points made by the Nunes memo are:

(1) that the FBI relied on the Steele dossier, a compilation of anti-Trump information that the FBI had not verified, and swore to its truth to obtain surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a one-time Trump campaign advisor; and

(2) that the FBI failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), from which the warrants were sought, that the Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

President Trump not only wiped out any shred of Mr. Obama’s so-called legacy, he effectively destroyed the fantasy of a magical genie that has guided the former community organizer’s lifelong obsessive mission to destroy America.

Imagine a guy in his mid-thirties walking on a beach in Hawaii and seeing an object that actually looked like the genie lamp he read about in his childhood—the kind of lamp he could rub until a genie popped out and granted his most fervent wish.

Being a pretty ordinary guy—you know, the kind who hung out smoking pot, who slacked off in school, who didn’t get the girl and actually hated and was jealous of the guys who did—he asked for power.

Poof—the Genie granted him his wish, power beyond his wildest dreams.

To be sure, the Genie certainly didn’t know that this ordinary guy didn’t want merely to embarrass the guys he was jealous of, he wanted to destroy them. And not through the ordinary methods—knives, guns, poison, et al, although all of them might play a part one day—but through politics!

The most important thing the Genie didn’t know was that all those cool, get-the-girl guys were only symbols for the thing Mr. Ordinary hated most—America!

But too late—the Genie had given him the power to mobilize the entire world against the country he claimed was the place of his birth.

It confirms that the FBI and the DOJ relied heavily on uncorroborated, third-hand, anonymous sources in their FISA application.

Maybe Adam Schiff has more of a sense of humor than I’d have given him credit for. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat begins his long-awaited memo — the minority response to the Nunes memo that was penned by staffers of the committee’s Republican majority — by slamming Chairman Devin Nunes’s unconscionable “risk of public exposure of sensitive sources and methods for no legitimate purpose.” The Schiff memo, which has been delayed for weeks because the FBI objected to its gratuitous effort to publicize highly classified intelligence, including methods and sources, then proceeds to tell its tale through what appear to be scores of blacked-out redactions of information Schiff pushed to expose.

Heavy Reliance on Steele Dossier Confirmed
The FBI and the Justice Department heavily relied on the Steele dossier’s uncorroborated allegations. You know this is true because, notwithstanding the claim that “only narrow use” was made “of information from Steele’s sources,” the Democrats end up acknowledging that “only narrow use” actually means significant use — as in, the dossier was the sine qua non of the warrant application. The memo concedes that the FISA-warrant application relied on allegations by Steele’s anonymous Russian hearsay sources that:

Page met separately while in Russia with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of Roseneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and Igor Divyekin, a senior Kremlin official. Sechin allegedly discussed the prospect of future U.S.-Russia energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia.” Divyekin allegedly disclosed to Page that the Kremlin possessed compromising information on Clinton (“kompromat”) and noted the possibility of its being released to Candidate #1’s [i.e., Donald Trump’s] campaign. . . . This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

This passage puts the lie to two of the main Democratic talking points:

1) This was obviously the most critical allegation against Page. The Democrats attempt to make much of Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016, but the uncorroborated Sechin and Divyekin meetings, which Page credibly denies, are the aspect of the Moscow trip that suggested a nefarious Trump–Russia conspiracy. That’s what the investigation was about. Far from clandestine, the rest of Page’s trip was well publicized and apparently anodyne. And saliently — for reasons we’ll get to in due course — Page was clearly prepared to talk to the FBI about the trip if the Bureau wanted to know what he was up to.

It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.

Moreover, because Page was an American citizen, FISA law required that the FBI and the DOJ show not only that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power (Russia), but also that his “clandestine” activities on behalf of Russia were a likely violation of federal criminal law. (See FISA, Section 1801(b)(2)(A) through (E), Title 50, U.S. Code.) It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.

Whenever a lunatic perpetrates a mass shooting the calls for additional gun control are immediate and the consequences predictable: more restrictions on law-abiding owners, who don’t need them, while homicidal types ignore and defy the law as they always do and will.

One week after the Florida high school killings CNN hosted a “stacked” Town Hall meeting. This is Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, at the meeting, berating Dana Loesch a spokeswoman for the NRA. “You just told this group of people that you are standing up for them. You’re not standing up for them, until you say I want less weapons.” Interruption follows for cheering and loud applause.

Proverbs 26:11 comes to mind: “As a dog returns to his vomit. So a fool [the typical bleeding-heart Democrat in this case] repeats his folly.” Luckily and fortunately, Americans have President Trump, who I will come to.

What the Sheriff didn’t say, because it hadn’t yet leaked out, was that one of his deputies, Scot Peterson, who served as the ‘armed resource officer’, had remained sheltered from harm outside of the school while the shooting was going on. Another three of his deputies who arrived on the scene stayed crouched behind their police vehicle. Peterson was suspended and has since resigned.

Sheriff Israel was also at pains to deflect attention from the FBI’s failure to follow up specific warnings passed on them and his own department’s failure to do anything about Nikolas Cruz despite receiving many complaints. Only one person was to blame he intoned. Really? Then what is the point of him and his fainthearted deputies?

One message from this episode, as if we didn’t know, is that the police cannot be relied upon to protect us or our families.

I was once attacked by a no-good, estranged boyfriend of one of my daughters outside of my house. I tried ineptly, as best as I could, to fight him off and was lucky that an ex-truck driver neighbor intervened to help me out. In the meantime, my wife at the time had called the police. They arrived too late for the main event. He had long since run off threatening to set a gang on me.

For a while I carried a tightly rolled-up newspaper in my briefcase to ward off potential attackers. I don’t exactly recall, but I might have seen this used effectively by James Bond. How effective it would have been in my hands I will leave you to guess.

Most of us are protected because of where we live and the people we mix with. There is another, less safe world on our doorsteps but, to a large extent, the two worlds do not intersect. Watch out if and when they do. Then you will have no protection worth spit.

America is a gun-owning society, as is Switzerland. According to the latest UNODC figures, the homicide rate in America is over seven times that in Switzerland. And, as point of interest, five times that in non-gun-owning Australia. America is a more dangerous place to live – particularly in some places, in some cities. Would you like to have a gun to protect yourself and your family? Or, are you content to rely on the police arriving in the nick of time?