RUTHFULLY YOURS

In July 2016, the Obama administration announced its decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felony mishandling of classified information and destruction of government files. In the aftermath, I observed that there is a very aggressive way that the Justice Department and the FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case — one profoundly different from the way they went about the Clinton emails investigation. There, they tried not to make the case.

That observation bears repeating today, as we watch Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of any possible Trump-campaign collusion in Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is a former FBI director and top Justice Department prosecutor. To say he is going about the collusion caper aggressively would be an understatement. The earth is being scorched by the stunningly large team he has assembled, which includes 16 other prosecutors (among them, Democratic party donors and activists) along with dozens of investigators (mostly from the FBI and IRS).

At the end of October, Mueller announced the first charges in the case. In the intensive commentary that followed, another investigative development attracted almost no attention. But in terms of Mueller’s seriousness of purpose, it speaks just as loudly as the George Papadopoulos guilty plea and the indictment of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates.

Mueller succeeded in convincing a federal judge to force an attorney for Manafort and Gates to provide grand-jury testimony against them. As Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports, just as the charges against these defendants were announced with great fanfare, the U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., quietly unsealed a ruling compelling the testimony of the lawyer — who, though not referred to by name in the decision, has been identified by CNN as Melissa Laurenza, a partner at the Akin Gump law firm.

Interestingly, the jurist who rendered the 37-page memorandum opinion is Beryl A. Howell, who served for years as a senior Judiciary Committee adviser to the fiercely partisan Democratic Senator Pat Leahy (of Vermont) before being appointed to the bench by President Obama. Howell is now the district court’s chief judge. Why do I think that, in choosing to set up shop in Washington, Mueller and his team noted the district court’s local rule that vests the chief judge with responsibility to “hear and determine all matters relating to proceedings before the grand jury”? (See here, Rule 57.14 at p. 168.)

And why do I think that the Trump collusion case is not getting the kid-glove Clinton emails treatment?

What does America owe its veterans? Perhaps the best answer to this question came from my friend, Julie Ponzi, in response to a review I had written of Karl Marlantes’s Vietnam War novel, Matterhorn. She observed that by providing a real understanding of war and its sacrifices, memoirs and novels such as Matterhorn make it possible for “our fighting men to finally get some genuine gratitude. Not sympathy or pedestals; but real gratitude. .  .  . Every civilian should understand that the veteran has done nothing less, and also nothing more, than what is sometimes required to maintain liberty.”

Neither sympathy nor pedestals, but gratitude: How simple! But as Rosa Brooks has observed, there are three dominant images of veterans: the killer; the victim; and the hero. The first two date back to Vietnam. The third is an attempt to rectify the Vietnam view by overcompensation. Today, most Americans do not think of veterans as killers. But, alas, too many Americans see veterans as victims. Those Americans are wrong.

The view of veteran-as-victim was roundly rejected by our current secretary of defense, James Mattis, in a 2014 speech in San Francisco to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

During the question and answer portion of his speech at the Marine’s Memorial Club, Mattis said:

You’ve been told that you’re broken, that you’re damaged goods and should be labeled victims of two unjust and poorly executed wars. I don’t buy it. The truth, instead, is that you are the only folks with the skills, determination, and values to ensure American dominance in this chaotic world.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.

Mattis observed, how the veteran-as-victim narrative exerts a powerful influence over civilians. It can be seen in news stories that paint veterans as over-represented in rates of suicide, drug abuse, homelessness, and incarceration.

Rather than assuming all souls touched by combat must necessarily suffer from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Mattis offered an alternative, which he calls “post-traumatic growth,” echoing Nietzsche’s aphorism from Twilight of the Idols: “From life’s school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger.”

In Mattis’s view, PTG describes a reality that is far more common in veterans than PTSD, which is most veterans return from war with the potential to be stronger than before. The PTG orientation holds that what the returning veteran needs are time and support to realize that potential for growth.

To help celebrate the 242nd birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps, my wife and I recently visited one of the best museums in the Washington, D.C., area — the National Museum of the Marine Corps, located just outside Quantico Marine Base about a half-hour drive south of Washington in Virginia.

Most visitors to Washington spend their time visiting the Smithsonian museums, not realizing that another terrific museum is just a short drive away. From the splendid architecture of the building itself — it’s designed to look like the raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima — to the interior displays and exhibits, it provides an informed, educational, interesting, and frankly emotional tour through the storied and dramatic history of the Marines.

In fact, the second flag raised on Mt. Suribachi — the one captured by Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Joe Rosenthal in one of the most famous photographs in history — is actually on display in the museum.

You can’t help but get a taste of the toughness, professionalism, and go-for-broke style of the Marines as soon as you walk in the door. There, carved on the wall of the high atrium that is the center of the museum, are the words of a legend in the Marine Corps — Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph “Dan” Daily: “Come on you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”

Daily yelled those famous words at his men as they were charging the Germans during the Battle of Belleau Wood during World War I, a battle in which the Marines defeated much larger German forces while losing more men than had been killed and wounded in all of the prior battles of the Marines combined since their founding.

There is a special exhibit at the museum dedicated to the Battle of Belleau Wood. Daily received the Navy Cross for heroism during that battle and is one of only 19 men in the entire history of the U.S. to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor twice — once for his defense of the U.S. and foreign diplomatic delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and a second time in Haiti in 1915.

There are special exhibit halls dedicated to everything from the Continental Marine’s first sea battles as part of the fledgling U.S. Navy during the Revolution to the “shores of Tripoli,” the “Halls of Montezuma” during the Mexican-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Besides the major conflicts the Marines participated in, the museum also highlights the “savage wars of peace,” to quote Rudyard Kipling — the numerous battles fought by the Marines all over the world during official times of peace. Soon to come in 2018: exhibits showing the Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fusion GPS, the research firm commissioned by the Clinton campaign to compile the so-called Trump dossier, is also responsible for a second dossier — the information that Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya provided to top Trump-campaign officials in June 2016. The second dossier reportedly alleged financial misconduct by major contributors to the Clinton Global Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation.

Fusion dug up this information in connection with its work in behalf of Prevezon, a Russian company controlled by Putin cronies. At the time, Prevezon was the defendant in a multi-million-dollar asset-forfeiture suit brought by the Justice Department. The suit stemmed from the Putin regime’s fleecing of an investment fund called Hermitage.

Years earlier, to investigate the Russian government’s role in the fraud, Hermitage hired Sergei Magnitsky, a private lawyer in Moscow. His exposure of the Putin regime’s complicity led to his imprisonment, torture, and murder. That atrocity led Congress to pass the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which allows the federal government to seize and forfeit fraud proceeds. This, in turn, has led to a furious Kremlin campaign to smear Hermitage’s chief executive officer, Bill Browder, and to get the Magnitsky Act repealed. In the United States, that campaign has been spearheaded by Veselnitskaya.

It was the Magnitsky Act that the Justice Department used to sue Prevezon. Veselnitskaya is Prevezon’s lawyer in Moscow, and she helped the company retain American counsel to defend them in the suit — a lawyer ironically named John Moscow and his firm, Baker Hostetler. These lawyers hired Fusion GPS to do research on Browder and Hermitage for litigation purposes. It was in that role that Fusion prepared the dossier, which, as far as we currently know, did not actually implicate Mrs. Clinton directly in any misconduct.

My conjecture is that there are three explanations for what happened here, none of which excludes the others: (a) The Russians do not understand American political campaigns well enough to appreciate that alleged misconduct by a donor does not hurt a candidate if the candidate is not complicit in the misconduct; (b) the Putin regime attempted (unsuccessfully) to lure the Trump campaign into its anti–Magnitsky Act effort by convincing Don Trump Jr. and other campaign officials that there was a useful anti-Clinton angle to be exploited; and (c) the Putin regime calculated that, simply by taking a meeting with a Kremlin emissary on the promise of damaging information about Clinton, the Trump campaign would foolishly expose itself to blackmail by Putin.

Former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom unloaded on James Comey, Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama Thursday, charging that major crimes “20 times bigger than Watergate” are being swept under the rug while Attorney General Jeff Sessions “is in a coma.”

Appearing on Fox News’ Varney & Co., Kallstrom told the host that it “was obvious to anybody that knows anything” that former President Barack Obama was not going to let James Comey indict Clinton.

“It turns out — unfortunately — he was a political hack,” Kallstrom said flatly. “I think he maybe started out in an honorable way. His opinion of himself is sky high — just an unbelievable guy with just an arrogance about him…. It got him in trouble because I think he thought he was Superman and he found out that he wasn’t.”

Kallstrom blamed the Clintons for Comey’s descent into hackery.

“The dogs are always going to bite your heels when you’re dealing with the Clintons,” he explained. “Look how long the public, the American people have been dealing with the crime syndicate known as the Clinton Foundation… just look at what’s in the public domain. The Clintons have been taking advantage of their stations in life for so long.”

“Back in ’95, ’96 — somewhere around there — Bill Clinton let our guidance technology for our ICBM missiles go to China. Things like this that are very devastating,” he pointed out.

And then a few years down the road, “we sell 20 percent of our uranium,” Kalstrom added, referencing the corrupt Uranium One deal that routed millions of Russian dollars to the Clinton Foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on the federal government’s Committee on Foreign Investment.

Kallstrom also questioned why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was appointed to his position.

“What does he do as soon as he gets in there? He appoints a special counsel. Who is it? It’s Bob Mueller. Roll the tape backwards. Bob Mueller is the FBI director, Rosenstein is the U.S. attorney in Baltimore prosecuting people involved in this case.”

Kallstrom charged that Rosenstein was basically put in place at the DOJ by the Democrats, complaining that Sessions was forced to recuse himself while “this huge forest fire is burning up his real estate.”

“You don’t have to put your brother in there like Kennedy did,” he noted. “But put somebody in there that agrees with the policies you’re trying to put together. Then Rosenstein throws this hand grenade at you by naming this counsel — which is B.S. — and putting Mueller, who has a conflict of interest 20 miles wide, in on the job.”

He added, “I don’t know if it’s a conspiracy, but it sure smells like one.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Steele dossier has already become a thing of John le Carré-like intrigue—British spies, Kremlin agents, legal cutouts, hidden bank accounts. What all this obscures is the more immediate point: The dossier amounts to one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history. It was perpetrated by Team Clinton and yielded a vast payoff for Hillary’s campaign.

The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion in turn hired former U.K. spook Christopher Steele to assemble the (now largely discredited) dossier. That full dossier of allegations wasn’t made public until after the election, in January 2017. And the media and Democrats continue to peddle the line that it played no role during the election itself.

“Details from the dossier were not reported before Election Day,” ran a recent CNN story. Hillary Clinton herself stressed the point in a recent “Daily Show” appearance. The dossier, she said, is “part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated.”

This is utterly untrue. In British court documents Mr. Steele has acknowledged he briefed U.S. reporters about the dossier in September 2016. Those briefed included journalists from the New York Times , the Washington Post, Yahoo News and others. Mr. Steele, by his own admission (in an interview with Mother Jones), also gave his dossier in July 2016 to the FBI.

Among the dossier’s contents were allegations that in early July 2016 Carter Page, sometimes described as a foreign-policy adviser to Candidate Trump, held a “secret” meeting with two high-ranking Russians connected to President Vladimir Putin. It even claimed these Russians offered to give Mr. Page a 19% share in Russia’s state oil company in return for a future President Trump lifting U.S. sanctions. This dossier allegation is ludicrous on its face. Mr. Page was at most a minor figure in the campaign and has testified under oath that he never met the two men in question or had such a conversation.

Yet the press ran with it. On Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff published a bombshell story under the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Mr. Isikoff said “U.S. officials” had “received intelligence” about Mr. Page and Russians, and then went on to recite verbatim all the unfounded dossier allegations. He attributed all this to a “well-placed Western intelligence source,” making it sound as if this info had come from someone in government rather than from an ex-spy-for-hire.

The Clinton campaign jumped all over it, spinning its own oppo research as a government investigation into Mr. Trump. Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director, the next day took to television to tout the Isikoff story and cite “U.S. intelligence officials” in the same breath as Mr. Page. Other Clinton surrogates fanned out on TV and Twitter to spread the allegations.

The Isikoff piece publicly launched the Trump-Russia collusion narrative—only 1½ months from the election—and the whole dossier operation counts as one of the greatest political stitch-ups of all time. Most campaigns content themselves with planting oppo research with media sources. The Clinton campaign commissioned a foreign ex-spy to gin up rumors, which made it to U.S. intelligence agencies, and then got reporters to cite it as government-sourced. Mrs. Clinton now dismisses the dossier as routine oppo research, ignoring that her operation specifically engineered the contents to be referred to throughout the campaign as “intelligence” or a “government investigation.”

Making matters worse, there may be a grain of truth to that last claim. If the Washington Post’s reporting is correct, it was in the summer of 2016 that Jim Comey’s FBI obtained a wiretap warrant on Mr. Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If it was the dossier that provoked that warrant, then the wrongs here are grave. Mr. Page is suing Yahoo News over that Isikoff story, but he may have a better case against the Clinton campaign and the federal government if they jointly spun

Former FBI Director James Comey’s explanation for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton was always improbable. Now it seems impossible.

The Espionage Act makes it a crime to mishandle classified documents “through gross negligence” (18 USC 793-f). Punishment upon conviction carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

With 110 emails on Clinton’s private server that were classified at the time they were sent or received, the Democratic nominee for president could have been prosecuted on 110 separate felony counts. Yet Comey scuttled the case.

But a story in The Hill this week by John Solomon says a newly discovered document shows that then-FBI Director Comey authored a draft statement accusing Clinton of mishandling classified documents and being “grossly negligent.”

The document was confirmed by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was written a full two months before Clinton was ever interviewed by the FBI.

However, sometime later the words “gross negligence” were edited out with red lines. The words “extremely careless” were substituted. This would appear to show that Comey knew Clinton violated the law but subsequently resolved to conjure a way to exonerate her by altering the language.

Comey didn’t do a very good job. The two terms are largely synonymous under the law.

Both before and after a shady, Kremlin-tied lawyer met with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign officials in June 2016, she consulted with a top official of Fusion GPS, the firm now known to have been commissioned by the Clinton campaign to produce the infamous Trump dossier.

A report by Fox News suggests there may thus have been coordination regarding the dossier between the Fusion principal, Glenn Simpson, and the Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya. That possibility cannot be discounted. After all, we don’t know what their discussions entailed, even though Simpson has met behind closed doors with congressional investigators.

But there’s a more plausible explanation. Their consultations were almost surely dominated by — if perhaps not exclusively taken up with — the civil forfeiture federal prosecutors were then pursuing against Prevezon Holdings, a Kremlin-crony company for which both Fusion and Veselnitskaya were working. To understand why, recall what was going on in the case at the time.

There has been a great deal of news in recent weeks about Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and that retained Fusion — which, in turn, hired former British spy Christopher Steele to compile the dossier. Less attention has been paid to Baker Hostetler, the law firm that represented Prevezon, and that retained Fusion to do research in connection with the forfeiture case.

Prevezon is controlled by the Katsyv family — specifically Denis Katsyv, the son of Pyotr Katsyv, a high-ranking Russian transportation official and close confederate of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Veselnitskaya is a lawyer for the Katsyvs in Moscow, a big part of what makes her a trusted Kremlin operative.

A couple of thoughts on the passing parade:

~Political memoirs are almost always boring, self-serving, committee-written and unreadable – Hillary’s What Happened being merely an especially bloated example. So Donna Brazile, hitherto one of the Clintons’ loyalest acolytes, might have been expected to turn in a more or less typical insider account of a flop campaign, worth neither your time nor money. Instead, she has confirmed what some of us charged at the time – that the Democrat establishment succeeded in doing to Bernie what the GOP establishment tried but failed to do to Trump: steal the nomination away from the insurgent.

Sanders vs Trump would have made it a much tougher race, and I suspect Bernie could have held a couple of those rust-belt states. But that match-up never happened, because, while the Republicans’ institutional corruption is ineffectual, the Democrats’ is lethal and all too effective. Ms Brazile’s publisher should have made a last-minute title-change and called the book What Really Happened. As is customary with the Clinto Nostra, Donna is now being accused of being a squealer and a turncoat: As the union heavies say in On the Waterfront, you’re supposed to stay D’n’D – deaf and dumb. Ms Brazile, of course, was previously head of the DNC, which is dumb’n’complicit.

I heard, I believe, Jessica Tarlov talking about this the other day, and regretting that the Brazile fracas had reopened the party divisions between the Sanders progressive wing and the Clinton moderate faction. But that’s not really what the divide is, is it? The party split is between Sanders social-justice warriors and the Clintons’ dynastic kleptocracy. And if the latter is what “moderation” and “centrism” look like, why be surprised that Dem foot-soldiers are lurching lefter? Kleptocrat centrism appeals only to wannabes – whether Clinton bagmen like Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who’d like to get a piece of the sleazy deals with Kazakh oligarchs; or media suck-ups who wish they were getting Clinton-sized six-figure sums from Goldman Sachs for speeches nobody wants to listen to.

Beyond that, kleptocrat centrism has no takers: In leftie parties around the world, it requires some effort to wean youthful idealists off their starry-eyed utopianism, and corrupt, entitled, pay-for-play Clintonism isn’t going to cut it. I made this point at the dawn of the 2016 presidential cycle in early 2015:

Leaving the studio, I ran into [Democrat pollster Doug Schoen] emerging from makeup and he upbraided me for my hostility to Hillary – which I felt bad about, because I’ve always gotten on well with him, and we have a shared interest in demography and whatnot. Twenty months later, Doug has caught up to my view.

But few other centrist Dems have. Yet the question underpinning Donna Brazile’s book is pretty basic: What do genuinely moderate Democrats have to show for mortgaging their brand to the Clinton Foundation? Me again:

Hillary got rich, Bill got laid, republican virtue got screwed. Like the sickly leaders of late-Soviet politburos, both appear older and feebler than their years: once the star performer of the double-act, Bill staggers around like the Blowjob of Dorian Gray; the life has all but literally been sucked out of him. His straight-woman, once the reliably stolid, stone-faced Margaret Dumont of his cigar-waggling routine, now has to be propped up on street bollards and fed lines by her medical staff. When she shuts down and she’s out cold, who’s driving the pantsuit? Huma? Cheryl? Podesta? Bill and Hillary have been consumed by their urges. America would be electing the Walking Dead, insatiable and fatal to the touch, but utterly hollow.

As long as “centrism” is cornered by the Clintocracy, the Democrats will continue to drift left and lefter. Clean house, or go full antifa.