RUTHFULLY YOURS

Senior federal prosecutors are investigating Hillary Clinton, the sale of Uranium One, and the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a move that may lead to the appointment of another independent prosecutor, Fox News reports.

Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice ordered prosecutors to examine “certain issues” raised by congressional Republicans, according to a letter Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and other committee members, who have been demanding a special counsel be assigned to probe Clinton.

Former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III was appointed in May as a special counsel to investigate the Russia-Trump campaign electoral collusion conspiracy theory peddled by the Left to undermine the Trump administration. Since then former Trump campaign aides Paul J. Manafort Jr. and Richard W. Gates III have been indicted by Mueller’s fishing expedition for wrongdoings like tax evasion that are unrelated to the campaign.

Mueller has also been investigating Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group for their Russian entanglements. Podesta is the brother of Clinton campaign chairman and Center for American Progress founder John Podesta. “The Podesta Group, a longtime K Street fixture … will reportedly shut down by year’s end as the firm’s involvement in a lobbying campaign on behalf of pro-Russia forces in the Ukrainian government has fallen under scrutiny from both the press and Robert Mueller,” the Washington Examiner reports.

The Podesta Group lobbied for Uranium One, the Canadian-based energy company. In 2010, the Obama administration allowed Uranium One to be acquired by Russia’s Rosatom, which gave the company control over one-fifth of U.S. uranium-mining capacity to Russia, despite an ongoing FBI probe into a Rosatom subsidiary allegedly involved in racketeering. The Uranium One deal was approved by Hillary Clinton’s Department of State acting as one of nine institutional members of an inter-agency review board called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The approval came around the time her husband received the suspiciously large sum of $500,000 for a single speech from Russian sources. Donations from Russians and others hoping to cash in on a prospective Hillary Clinton presidency reportedly flooded the coffers of the corrupt, now-embattled Clinton Foundation.

Boyd wrote in the letter that “[t]hese senior prosecutors will report directly to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General [Rod Rosenstein], as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

If Republicans are serious about getting President Trump’s judicial nominees confirmed, they will have to rid themselves of the fiction of a politically neutral American Bar Association. The outfit’s recent antics provide ample reason to remove it from Senate vetting.

The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary last week informed the Judiciary Committee that Brett Talley is “not qualified” to serve as a federal judge. This is the fourth “not qualified” rating the ABA has slapped on Trump nominees, including Leonard Steven Grasz for the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mr. Grasz’s “not qualified” rating rests on a misrepresentation of the former Nebraska chief deputy attorney general’s views on judicial precedent. Mr. Grasz once argued in a 1999 article that lower courts shouldn’t stretch Supreme Court rulings into broader rights, but the ABA contorts this to suggest Mr. Grasz would ignore Roe v. Wade. Mr. Grasz explicitly wrote in the same article that “lower federal courts are obliged to follow clear legal precedent regardless of whether it may seem unwise or even morally repugnant to do so.”

As for Mr. Talley, nominated for the district court in Alabama, the ABA says he lacks the “requisite trial experience,” having never tried a case. This ignores that the 36-year-old has clerked for a federal district judge and a federal appellate judge, has worked at the whiteshoe Gibson Dunn & Crutcher firm, and served as the Deputy Solicitor General of Alabama.

Many nominees have been younger than Mr. Talley, and the ABA called Barack Obama nominee Goodwin Liu “well-qualified” despite no experience as a trial judge. The ABA also called Elena Kagan “well qualified” for the Supreme Court, as indeed she was, despite her lack of trial experience. But since the ABA found nothing amiss with Mr. Talley’s “integrity” or “temperament,” it settled on a concern with “requisite” experience.

In an August letter to Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, Senator Jeff Flake and four colleagues outlined the ABA’s long history of political liberal activism, and noted their concerns with the Senate outsourcing advice and consent to “unaccountable outside groups.” They also pointed out how useless ABA ratings are, given the number of judges who have been judged “not qualified” but were confirmed and have had distinguished bench careers.

ABA Standing Committee Chair Pamela Bresnahan wants Senate Judiciary to invite the ABA to more hearings. Mr. Grassley should respond by informing the ABA that hearings on judicial nominees will no longer have to wait for completed ABA evaluations.

Mr. Trump followed George W. Bush and scrapped the practice of letting the ABA pre-screen nominees for the White House. Yet the Senate continues to give the lawyers’ guild too much sway. There are more than enough judicial watchdogs on the left and right to inform the Senate.

‘Wall Street Journal’ columnist Kimberley Strassel makes the case to Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson that the Steele dossier, which was funded by the DNC and Clinton campaign to smear President Trump, is one of history’s most outrageous political tricks.

“We do a disservice when we even refer to it as a ‘Dossier,'” she explained. “That gives it too much mystique. This is an oppo research document of lower quality than even oppo research documents.”

“All campaigns do this, but usually you dig up a driving under the influence conviction, or you didn’t pay your taxes one year, you plant it in the press to make the candidate look bad. This is a document based on unnamed, anonymous Russian sources, apparently. They’re never been proven, a lot of them have been disproven,” Strassel continued. “But here’s where they have been particularly clever: They didn’t give it to the press, they sent it to the FBI and then they briefed the press, and then the press was able to claim that this was intelligence that the FBI possessed, which gave it some air of credibility.”

Host Tucker Carlson asks: “So, this bundle of opposition research changed American political history — and not in the ways that it normally would. You’re saying that this really is responsible for this chain reaction that has paralyzed Washington ever since?”

“Look at what happened!” Strassel said. “The Democrats like to say this document wasn’t even used during the election: Not true. We know that [Former MI-6 Russia desk leader] Christopher Steele, who put this document together has testified in court documents that he briefed the press in September [2016]. Yahoo News came out with a huge story saying the FBI was in possession of ‘intelligence’ showing potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government — the headlines were dominated by this. And the question that we still have yet to know: We know the FBI relied on this in some regard but did this document actually inspire the FBI to end up wiretapping a political campaign? Which is no small deal, by the way.”

America is in another of its Salem moments. Frenzy is almost a living, breathing monster. It moves from host to host, fueled by rumor, gossip, and self-righteous furor.

The Greeks knew well of the transitory nature of these mass panics. They claimed such fits were inspired by the Maniae, the three daughters of Night who were the goddesses of insanity, madness, and crazed frenzy. We’ve seen all three of them in action throughout the past year.

Collusion Everywhere and Nowhere
For about six months, cable news shows, the internet, and the major newspapers ginned up the charge of “Russian collusion”—as a means of explaining the otherwise inexplicable and unacceptable defeat of Hillary Clinton by someone without either political or military experience.

Pundits and talking heads without evidence echoed each other with ever more preposterous charges. Voting machines supposedly had been rigged by a monstrous man who later had stooped to remove the Martin Luther King bust from the West Wing. We were also told that all good souls of the Electoral College clearly should have vitiated their constitutional duties and denied Trump the presidency.

We were lectured at the height of the collusion frenzy that Trump would be 1) impeached, 2) removed by the emoluments clause, 3) forced to resign under the 25th Amendment, or 4) simply quit in shame.

If not, how many ways could (or should) one kill Trump? Hanging? Decapitation? Dismemberment? Combustion? Shooting? Stabbing? Jet crash? As the madness grew, no obscenity from Stephen Colbert or physical threat from Robert DeNiro or Johnny Depp or Kathy Griffin or even Snoop Dogg seemed to suffice to express hatred of Trump.

The font of this 24/7 hysteria was the Clinton campaign’s purchase of a leaked smear job from an opposition research firm, which in turn had hired a disreputable former British intelligence agent, who had paid for concocted Russian slanders designed to disrupt an election. The Fusion GPS/Steele dossier was peddled to U.S. intelligence agencies, some of whom may have seen it as valuable political fodder and thus used it as an excuse to surveille members of the Trump campaign and in turn, unmask the names of American citizens and allow them to be leaked to the press. “Collusion” may turn out to have been sired, grown, and spread from a single, fake, and partisan document.

Since the Trojan War, generations have always trashed their own age in comparison to ages past. The idea of fated decadence and decline was a specialty of 19th-century German philosophy.

So we have to be careful in calibrating generations, especially when our own has reached a level of technology and science never before dreamed of (and it is not a given that material or ethical progress is always linear).

Nonetheless, the so-called Baby Boomers have a lot to account for — given the sorry state of entertainment, sports, the media, and universities.

The Harvey Weinstein episode revealed two generational truths about Hollywood culture.

One, the generation that gave us the free-love and the anything-goes morals of Woodstock discovered that hook-up sex was “contrary to nature.” Sexual congress anywhere, any time, anyhow, with anyone — near strangers included — is not really liberating and can often be deeply imbedded within harassment and ultimately the male degradation of women.

Somehow a demented Harvey Weinstein got into his head that the fantasy women in his movies who were customarily portrayed as edgy temptresses and promiscuous sirens were reflections of the way women really were in Los Angeles and New York — or the way that he thought they should be. It was almost as if Weinstein sought to become as physically repulsive and uncouth as possible — all the better to humiliate (through beauty-and-the-beast asymmetry) the vulnerable and attractive women he coerced.

Two, Weinstein reminded us, especially in his eleventh-hour medieval appeals for clemency by way of PC attacks on the NRA and Donald Trump, that mixing politics with art was, as our betters warned, always a self-destructive idea.

Hollywood ran out of original thought about three decades ago, and the people noticed and so keep avoiding the theaters. How many times can a good-looking, young, green progressive crusader expose a corporate pollution plot, or battle a deranged band of southern-twangy Neanderthals, South African racists, or Russian tattooed thugs, or a deep-state CIA cabal in sunglasses and shiny suits? How many times can the nth remake of a comic-book hero be justified by updating him into a caped social-justice warrior from L.A.? Ars gratia politicorum is suicide.

The ruling generation in Hollywood is out of creative ideas mostly because it invested in political melodrama rather than human tragedy. It cannot make a Western, not just because Santa Monica’s young men long ago lost the ability to sound or act like Texans in 1880, but because its politics have no patience with the real world of noble people who are often doomed, or flawed individuals who are nevertheless defined by their best rather than worst traits, or well-meaning souls who can cause havoc, or courageous men who fight for bad causes.

It was the cackle that cost her an election.

The time was the 80s and the First Lady of Arkansas was chatting with Roy Reed. Reed was a New York Times bigwig, a civil rights hero and is currently a speaker for the Clinton School of Public Service.

Back then, Reed was working on a profile of the Clintons for Esquire. The profile was never published. The tapes of the interviews were stowed at the University of Arkansas until they were dug up in ’14.

And there’s Hillary Clinton laughing on tape about how she saved a 12-year-old girl’s rapist.

Kathy Shelton had been raped and beaten into a coma when she was twelve years old. Her rapist wanted a “woman lawyer.” Hillary Clinton took his case as a favor and used every dirty trick to get him off. Even though she admits on the tape that she knew her client was guilty, she accused his victim of being “emotionally unstable” and fantasizing about older men. And she used the little girl’s bloody underwear as the pivot of a blatant lie that got her client off with less than a year in prison.

All of that is bad enough.

It reminds us that there is nothing that Hillary Clinton won’t do to win whether it’s accusing an abused child of being a mentally ill slut or accusing her election opponent of cavorting with urinating Russian prostitutes. And that despite her best efforts to appear human, she has nothing resembling a soul.

But there’s the Clinton cackle. You can hear it throughout the tape. Even years later in the governor’s mansion, Hillary thought that getting a 12-year-old girl’s rapist off the hook was the funniest thing ever.

Roy Reed, the great media hero of the civil rights movement, never wrote about it. There were no outraged stories in the New York Times or Esquire. Just like Harvey Weinstein’s associates. They knew.

They knew and they said nothing.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t the last Democrat presidential candidate to have deeply troubling links to pedophiles.

Her husband was much worse.

Bill Clinton took dozens of rides on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express. The top Democrat donor’s plane earned its nickname because of its association with the abuse of young girls. Like Hillary’s client, the tastes of Bill’s bosom buddy allegedly ran to twelve year old girls. An FBI investigation found 40 victims.

“In the course of that press conference, Kelly described Donald Trump as a “decisive” and “thoughtful” man of action. I think his record to date corroborates that description even if his style (those tweets, those off-hand remarks) offend the delicate sensitivities of those who have not gotten over the fact that someone not of their tribe had the temerity to garner the support of enough people to be elected to the Presidency without their permission. I am a supporter of Donald Trump, but “Trumpism,” I conclude, is just a name. ”

I have given up on Trumpism. I realize this declaration will come as a surprise to some readers. I should mention, therefore, that it is a decision to which I came only after considerable reflection. It was not easy. I have plenty of friends who endorse Trumpism. I acknowledge that I did as well. I labored assiduously in those vineyards. But I have changed my mind.

Why?

A decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that I should declare the reasons that impelled me to this separation.

One factor was the increasingly surreal commentary that surrounds the whole enterprise of Trumpism. I have found that many of those discussing it would say the most bizarre things. At the end of the day, I simply could not reconcile what was being put forth under the banner of Trumpism with the political and social realities I saw operating all around me.

Everywhere I looked, I saw a vertiginous disconnection between what was described as Trumpism and what was actually happening. Eventually, the cacophony of cognitive dissonance was just too deafening. I realized that I could no longer support Trumpism.

In brief, I have concluded that “Trumpism” does not exist. Rather, it does exist, but only in the way a unicorn exists: in the dashing narratives of fabulists. “Trumpism” is an imaginary, mythical beast. Like the unicorn, it may be recognized from descriptions of its peculiar characteristics—for example, any self-respecting unicorn, as its name implies, has but one horn—and its exploits. But, again like the unicorn, it has only notional existence.

Just as there are many different stories about unicorns—some emphasizing its fierceness, some the magical healing powers of its horn—so there are different versions of that mythical figment, Trumpism.

To a large extent, “Trumpism” is a reflection or coefficient of disappointment. Donald Trump was not supposed to be President of the United States. Indeed, pundits, Hollywood celebrities, politicians from Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi on down assured us that the contingency was impossible. “Take it to the bank,” said Nancy Pelosi, “Donald Trump is not going to be President of the United States.”

One reason men and women in business are reluctant to go to Washington is the reception accorded Alex Azar Monday after President Trump said he will nominate the former Eli Lilly & Co. executive to lead the Health and Human Services Department. Mr. Azar was immediately criticized for, well, knowing too much about health care.

“It’s a pharma fox to run the HHS henhouse,” a talking head from Public Citizen told the Washington Post, which headlined the same piece “Trump’s pick to lower drug prices is a former pharma executive who raised them.” It seems that when Mr. Azar was president, Lilly “doubled the U.S. list price of its top-selling insulin drug.”

Well, sure, pharma executives are paid by shareholders to make money selling drugs. Profits drive drug innovation, so there wouldn’t be better treatments without profits, which sometimes requires raising prices. Pardon the reality of market economics.

No doubt Mr. Azar’s record will be parsed by Senate Democrats, but it’s always possible that knowing the industry makes Mr. Azar the right man to regulate it. He can’t do any worse than the Obama Administration, which cut a political deal with Big Pharma on drug pricing to win its support for ObamaCare. Mr. Azar has been a critic of ObamaCare, which may be the real explanation for the instant opposition.

Looks as if the American Bar Association picked the wrong judicial nominee to play politics with. If Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are smart, they will use the ABA’s appearance at a hearing Wednesday to call the group out.

The object of the ABA’s attention is Leonard Steven Grasz, a former Nebraska chief deputy attorney general who’s been nominated for the a seat on the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The ABA has slapped Mr. Grasz with a “not qualified” rating, saying he’s too biased and too rude to be a judge. Given that much of this rating is based on accusations that are not detailed and from accusers who remain anonymous, it reveals more about the organization that issued it than it does about Mr. Grasz.

“The ABA is running a smear campaign based on the idea that Steve is a kale-hating, puppy-kicking monster,” says a fellow Nebraskan, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse. “But no one in Nebraska on either side of the aisle recognizes that man.”

The ABA says its ratings are based on neutral and professional criteria, much the way a medical board might evaluate a doctor. Since President Eisenhower “first invited the ABA into the process,” the group says, it’s been standard practice for presidents to submit their judicial candidates to the ABA for vetting before announcing a nomination.

Well, yes and no. In just one indication of how politicized the ABA ratings have become, Democrats and Republicans long ago diverged on the ABA’s role in the nominations process. In 2001, George W. Bush halted the practice of giving the ABA first crack at vetting potential nominees; in 2009 Barack Obama revived it; and this year President Trump halted it again.