RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Department of Justice and the FBI are developing a credibility problem. The last two weeks have brought a blizzard of revelations about the anti-Trump political predilections of top FBI officials and prosecutors in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, perhaps none more eye-popping than a just-revealed text from Peter Strzok, a top FBI intelligence agent.

In August 2016, Strzok, who played a lead-investigator role in the Hillary Clinton–emails investigation, flatly stated that the FBI could not “take that risk,” referring to the possibility that Donald Trump might be elected president. He made the statement in a message to Lisa Page, a bureau lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Strzok referred to an alternative FBI “path” regarding Trump’s “unlikely” election that Page had proposed during a meeting they’d attended in “Andy’s office” — meaning deputy director Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s number-two official, second only to then-director James Comey.

While more context is necessary to understand the meaning of the text and what transpired in the meeting in McCabe’s office, the message raises the possibility that top bureau officials were infecting investigations with their personal political views. This would be a concern in any circumstance, but especially in this one. The FBI’s Clinton-email and Trump-Russia investigations have been extremely fraught politically — with the latter morphing into Mueller’s Russia probe, which conceivably could result in an impeachment referral.

Around the time of Strzok’s message, the FBI and the Obama Justice Department had come into possession of the anti-Trump “dossier” compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier was opposition research commissioned by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, through their lawyers. They had retained a research company, Fusion GPS, which hired Steele, who evidently paid Russian sources for what appears to be dodgy information.

Conventional wisdom is that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is asleep at the wheel – from recusing himself unnecessarily from the Trump-Russia collusion investigation to doing nothing about the politicization and weaponization of the Department of Justice. He also gave free rein to his deputy A.G., Rod Rosenstein, who is in turn allowing Special Counsel Robert Mueller unlimited time, money, and jurisdiction to investigate President Trump’s entire life.

Last summer, Trump expressed disappointment in Sessions, calling him “beleaguered,” wondering why Sessions wasn’t looking into Hillary Clinton’s emails and true election chicanery. Rudy Giuliani was floated as a possible replacement. Was Trump truly upset, or was this a calculated head fake?

In a recent blog posting, American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson, referencing Sundance from Conservative Treehouse, made the case that the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General is where the real action is taking place. Here was an explanation why Rosenstein gave evasive answers in recent congressional testimony and a suggestion that the OIG is laying out a case, slowly and methodically, with selective information release, before bringing the hammer down on the leakers and corruptocrats in the FBI and DOJ.

I want to take this a step farther, perhaps answering the question of where Jeff Sessions is and whether he is asleep, or just playing possum. Perhaps I can explain why he is acting not as a Trumpian pit bull, but instead like Mister Rogers ready for his afternoon nap.

Jeff Sessions is a political appointee, appointed by President Trump. The president, as we all know, is despised by Democrats, many establishment Republicans, and the media. Any actions Trump or Sessions take will be viewed through the lens of obstruction of justice. Firing Mueller or Rosenstein or shutting down the investigation would allow eager Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans to tut-tut over threats to the Constitution and to initiate impeachment proceedings.

Of the many astonishing revelations now emerging from the Russia investigation, not enough has been made of the fact that — that Zelig of the FBI who mysteriously appeared at every controversial moment — was second in command for counterintelligence.

That’s right, counterintelligence — that activity “designed to prevent or thwart spying, intelligence gathering, and sabotage by an enemy or other foreign entity.”

And yet that same Mr. Strzok was conducting a clandestine extra-marital affair with an FBI colleague over thousands of text messages that could be and likely were (more of that in a moment) intercepted by those same foreign intelligence agencies — or were, at the very least, recklessly exposed to them.

Now you don’t have to be James Jesus Angleton or even have read a novel by John le Carré to know one of the most important vulnerabilities in the intel world is just such dangerous liaisons, frequently used for blackmail of all sorts.

Yet, our second in command in counterintelligence conducted his in full digital view of anyone and did so replete with idiotically extreme comments about the president of the United States that would make our Peter a prime candidate for blackmail.

How exactly do you spell D-O-O-F-U-S?

Or, come to think of it, didn’t someone else do something just that dumb? Oh, yes, the very Mrs. Clinton who moved the entire email correspondence of the secretary of State onto a homebrew server stashed in a bathroom.

No wonder Strzok went easy on her and on her buddies Cheryl and Huma. It wasn’t just the extreme bias they all shared, it was the extreme cyber-stupidity they also shared. How could he call them “grossly negligent” when he was so “grossly negligent” himself? (He was also “grossly negligent” with his wife, but that’s another matter. Someone should get a good interview with her. She might have an interesting story to tell at this point.)

Which leads me back to the seemingly banal adverb likely or, more precisely, “reasonably likely.”

Newly released documents obtained by Fox News reveal that then-FBI Director James Comey’s draft statement on the Hillary Clinton email probe was edited numerous times before his public announcement, in ways that seemed to water down the bureau’s findings considerably. CONTINUE AT SITE

On Thursday, President Donald Trump celebrated his administration’s dedication to cutting government regulations, with a ceremony where he physically cut a huge strand of red tape. Corny, but impressive nonetheless.

“This excessive regulation does not just threaten our economy, it threatens our entire Constitution. And it does nothing, other than delay and cost much more,” President Trump declared. On the campaign trail, Trump had promised that for every new regulation, he would cut two old ones. On Thursday, he announced his administration had overshot that goal — annihilating 22 regulations for every new one.

In a statement that would make every small-government conservative glow with pride, the president declared, “Congress has abandoned much of its responsibility to legislate, and has instead given unelected regulators extraordinary power to control the lives of others.”

Conservatives have long complained of the way Congress really works. Rather than passing regulations directly so that individual congressmen are tied to every piece of government red tape, Congress passes a bill like the Clean Air Act. The act sets out a goal — Americans should have clean air — and sets up an agency to make rules to achieve that goal.

This practice separates the people’s representatives from the results of their lawmaking. If constituents complain, lawmakers can blame the agency, or promise to add yet another law to fix the problem in question. “So many of these enormous regulatory burdens were imposed on our citizens with no vote, no debate, and no accountability,” the president explained. CONTINUE AT SITE

I’m not in the habit of giving stock tips or making market calls. I’ve never claimed to be an investment strategist. But after spending years reporting on business and finance, I was convinced on the night of Nov. 8, 2016, that the conventional market wisdom was way off target.

As the night wore on and equity traders began to grasp that Donald Trump would become president, stock markets around the world started selling off. In the U.S., trading in S&P 500 futures would eventually be halted after a 5% decline. After midnight, Paul Krugman of the New York Times opined: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

I didn’t see it that way. For years I’d been hearing anguished people at companies large and small bemoan the growing federal burden of taxes and regulations. Now the U.S. would have a president who intended to reduce this hardship and prioritize economic growth.

When I sat down around 10:30 on election night for a Fox News panel discussion, Dow futures were down about 700 points. Markets like certainty; it was understandable that some investors were selling. Mr. Trump seemed to present more uncertainty than Hillary Clinton, who was essentially promising a continuation of the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s talk about ripping up the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, created big unknowns and potentially significant risks.

The election night selloff turned out to be a huge buying opportunity. Companies had been sitting on cash—not investing or hiring. ObamaCare compliance was a nightmare for many business owners. It made them wonder what other big idea from Washington would haunt them in the future. Mrs. Clinton was likely to increase business costs further, while Mr. Trump had vowed to reduce them. Even in the middle of the election-night market panic, the implications for corporate revenue and earnings growth seemed obvious.

The next morning, with the Trump victory confirmed, I told my colleague Martha MacCallum that I would be “buying the stock market with both hands.” Investors began doing the same. U.S. markets have added $6 trillion in value since the election, with investors around the world wanting in on America’s new growth story. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is now forecasting the third straight quarter of U.S. gross domestic product growth around 3%.

It’s not just an American growth story. For the first time in a long time the world is experiencing synchronized growth, which is why Goldman Sachs and Barclays among others have recently predicted 4% global growth in 2018. The entire world benefits when its largest economy is healthy, and the vibrancy overseas is reinforcing the U.S. resurgence.

As the end of the Trump administration’s first year approaches, it’s a good time to review the progress of the businessman elected on a promise to restore American prosperity.

Year One has been nothing short of excellent from an economic standpoint. Corporate earnings have risen and corporate behavior has changed, measured in greater capital investment. Businesspeople tell me that a new approach to regulation is a big factor. During President Obama’s final year in office the Federal Register, which contains new and proposed rules and regulations, ran to 95,894 pages, according to a Competitive Enterprise Institute report. This was the highest level in its history and 19% higher than the previous year’s 80,260 pages. The American Action Forum estimates the last administration burdened the economy with 549 million hours of compliance, averaging nearly five hours of paperwork for every full-time employee. CONTINUE AT SITE

Congress persists in its effort to pry the real story of the 2016 election out of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an agency notoriously reluctant to share secrets. The trick is telling the difference between legitimate secrets and self-serving ones.

The FBI—and the Department of Justice—would rather blur that distinction. In recent congressional appearances, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tossed around the word “classified” like confetti. Neither man answered a single substantive question, citing their obligation to protect the “integrity” of investigations, safeguard “sensitive” information, and show deference to an “independent” and “internal” inspector general reviewing the FBI’s handling of the 2016 election.

True, the FBI has plenty of things it needs to keep secret regarding national security and law enforcement. Let’s even acknowledge the bureau may be rightly concerned about turning some information over to today’s leak-prone Congress. Even so, in the specific case of its 2016 election behavior, the FBI is misusing its secrecy powers to withhold information whose disclosure is in the public interest.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson exposed two such instances this week, from his perch as chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Mr. Johnson received a letter Wednesday from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who graciously and nimbly provided information that the committee had requested last week.

That letter included some notable dates. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team is emphasizing its ejection of FBI agent Peter Strzok immediately upon learning about anti-Trump texts he exchanged with another FBI employee, Lisa Page, before the 2016 election. But when did the FBI learn of the messages? The inspector general’s investigation began in mid-January. The letter explains that the FBI was asked for text messages of certain key employees based on search terms, which turned up “a number of politically-oriented” Strzok-Page texts. The inspector general then demanded all of the duo’s text messages, which the FBI began producing on July 20.

Almost every supposedly informed prediction about President Donald Trump’s compulsive Twitter addiction has so far proved wrong.

He did not tweet his way out of the Republican nomination. Spontaneous social-media messaging did not lose Trump the general election race with Hillary Clinton. Nor has Trump tweeted his presidency into oblivion.

Instead, Trump’s tweets have not just bypassed the mostly progressive media; they’ve sent it into a tizzy. In near-suicidal fashion, networks such as CNN have melted down in hatred of Trump, goaded on by Trump’s Twitter digs.

Trump has often bragged that having a large following on social media — he has more than 44 million Twitter followers and connects with millions more via Facebook and Instagram — is “like having your own newspaper.”

He has a point.

While the media goes ballistic over Trump’s inflammatory Twitter attacks on “fake news,” the vast majority of Trump’s electronic messaging simply reports on his daily activities and various agendas.

Trump has created a Twitter empire with a reach that far exceeds the combined subscriber base of the New York Times and Washington Post, and he has vastly expanded on Barack Obama’s use of a presidential Twitter feed to connect with voters.

Almost all of the people who have climbed into the Twitter ring with Trump — from Hillary Clinton to the take-a-knee millionaire National Football League players — have come out on the losing end. Trump has proven far better than seasoned journalists and ego-driven celebrities at creating go-for-the-jugular put-downs of 240 characters or less.

Trump’s stream-of-conscious Twitter observations have sometimes proved eerily prescient. He tweeted warnings about the dangers of illegal immigration shortly before the tragic murder of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant with a lengthy criminal record. Soon after Trump retweeted incendiary and controversial videos about radical Islamic violence, earning him condemnation from British prime minister Theresa May, it was announced that two men had been arrested in London for plotting a terrorist attack and assassination — of none other than May herself.

Something’s rotten in the fairy-tale kingdom of progress. It is crumbling like the magical land of Fantastica after people stopped believing in it. Progs are melting like toons under the green shower of Judge Doom. Is our never-ending narrative finished? Comrade Red Square investigates.

Comrades!

170 years ago, Karl Marx began his Communist Manifesto by writing, “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.”

Marxism has since been upgraded with many new features and functions. The revolutionary class is no longer the workers, but the white-color coalition of identity pressure groups, spearheaded by transsexuals and financed by international currency manipulators. Imperialism and colonialism were replaced with globalism and mass migration. The violent revolution was replaced with the march through the institutions, class struggle with culture wars, and historical materialism with phallophobia.

Even the specter of communism has been replaced. As karmic retribution for Karl Marx’s known penchant to sexually harass his female subordinates, the world is now being haunted by the specter of Pussy™, with all the progressive powers entering into a holy alliance to enable this haunting and protect it from exorcism, even as it’s fixing to swallow the entire progressive movement, chew it up, and spit out the bones.

The haunting began on Friday, Oct. 7, 2016, when we released an 11-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which the merry bachelor Trump was recorded bragging about his status as a celebrity, which was why beautiful women in the industry allowed him to kiss them and “grab them by the pussy.” Designed to destroy Trump, this October surprise barely made a dent. We followed it up with a massive media campaign, in which the P-word was memefied in thousands of images, but the nation’s psyche remained unscathed. We organized million-strong marches of pussycomrades in pussyhats, but the country treated them as clowns.

Nothing in our playbook was working; we should’ve just stopped. But when a prog hits a wall, the answer is always to push harder. We became possessed by the P-specter. It made us fixated on P-issues, repeating the P-word like a magic spell and howling it at the moon as we channeled our rage toward white cisgendered hetero-males who we imagined were all guilty of P-grabbing. In the process we became impossible zero-tolerance prudes. If Marx were still around, we’d have called him a creep, pressured him to resign, and mocked his theories on late night shows. Our sexual revolution became a Freudian slip-and-fall mess. We began to purge everyone who didn’t live up to the new puritanical standard, even if it meant losing valuable comrades.

It wasn’t always like that.

Two Trump-hating FBI gumshoes investigating Hillary Clinton’s email treachery and alleged Russian interference in last year’s election traded crude, caustic barbs about President Trump while they plotted to undermine him, congressional overseers heard yesterday.

This shouldn’t be all that surprising given that Barack Obama gleefully weaponized the FBI, Department of Justice, and various intelligence agencies, and criminalized political differences in the process. A radical zealot with a desire to fundamentally transform the United States, the 44th president had a limited sense of boundaries. Obama was more Third World caudillo than president and he was never troubled by hijacking governmental powers to hurt his opposition, as the conservative groups targeted by his IRS can attest. His race-obsessed first attorney general, Eric Holder, turned the Justice Department into a virtual arm of the Democratic Party, using the agency to punish the Left’s enemies and let allies run wild. His second attorney general, Loretta Lynch, surreptitiously met with Bill Clinton in an airport hangar, presumably to cut a shady deal to let Hillary Clinton escape punishment for the many crimes she committed in office.

“It’s clear there was a nefarious conspiracy” between federal officials to defeat Trump, Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett told Sean Hannity after the hearing. Jarrett added that when the plot didn’t succeed, the conspirators switched to Plan B, which he described as, “Let’s just say there’s a crime and then we’ll just search for a crime.”

At the House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Rod Rosenstein, the second-highest-ranking official at the Justice Department and the man who appointed Russia probe-leading Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, gave a clean bill of health to Mueller’s ongoing witch hunt aimed at reversing last year’s election result.

“I know what he’s doing,” Rosenstein said. “He consults with me about their investigation, within and without the scope.”

The committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), expressed alarm at the ever-expanding investigation, saying, “We are now beginning to understand the magnitude of this insider bias on Mueller’s team.” As previously reported, there were nine Democrat donors on the team of 15, and one member had even worked for Hillary Clinton.

To be honest, I regret that Mr Moore will not be going to Washington. I have a high degree of tolerance for people whose lines are almost as good as the concoctions of professional satirists, and the Moores kept that up until the end. I don’t mean just Roy’s varying answers in his train-wreck interview with Sean Hannity on whether he’d dated teenage girls (“not generally”, and then, not “without the permission of her mother”). But I’m also thinking of Mrs Moore’s eve-of-poll rejection of charges that she and her husband “don’t care for Jews”:

Well, one of our attorneys is a Jew.

I was reminded of my late comrade Mordecai Richler’s novel St Urbain’s Horseman, wherein a Union Nationale junior minister is dispatched to refute accusations that Quebec’s government is similarly anti-semitic:

Speaking for myself, my accountant is a Jew and I always buy my cars from Sonny Fish.

In fact, I’m not sure Kayla Moore’s line isn’t funnier: I think “attorney” is droller in its implications than “accountant”, and “one of our” is the capper.

Presumably, the reason they need all those attorneys is all these statements from Seventies nymphettes that Roy was lurking in the back booth of the malt shop eying them up for most of his early middle age. America has statutes of limitations for a reason – because the accuracy of accusation diminishes considerably with the passage of time. Speaking for myself, as that Quebec minister would say, I prefer worldly courtesans d’un certain âge to giggling jailbait, and regard the most pitiful passage in the Starr Report to be the moment when Monica Lewinsky demands to know of the President of the United States whether he loves the new Sarah McLachlan album as much as she does. Could have been worse, I suppose. Could have been Hootie and the Blowfish. But, at any rate, Moore’s preferences as an eligible bachelor for the youngish end of Alabammy maidenhood doesn’t make him the Jimmy Savile of Dixie.

Back then, there were lots of 32-year-old men chasing 19-year-old girls – the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer, to cite only the most obvious example. It was a common plot in big worldwide hits: When the Oscar-winning Best Picture An American in Paris was shot, Leslie Caron was 19, and Gene Kelly was pushing 40; when the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady opened, Julie Andrews was 19, and Rex Harrison was pushing 50. You can’t find a single contemporary review of either that so much as notices the age difference. My old friend Alan Jay Lerner authored both scripts and won Oscars and Tonys respectively, and, as a practical matter, it was the only plot he knew how to write: My Fair Lady (1956) – older, sophisticated, mature bachelor takes young unformed girl in hand and moulds her; Gigi (1958) – older, sophisticated, mature bachelor takes young unformed girl, etc, etc; Lolita, My Love (1971) – older, sophisticated mature, etc, etc, etc …ah, but that was one reprise too many of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”.