RUTHFULLY YOURS

Acceptance has morphed into transphilia: the culture is pushing it as cool or trendy.
A recent study of adolescents in the state of California by researchers at UCLA found that an eyebrow-raising percentage now identify as “nongender conforming.”

“We found that 27 percent of youths age 12 to 17 in California, or about 796,000, are GNC,” the study stated.

The study grouped the kids into three definitions: “gender conforming,” “androgynous,” or “highly nongender conforming.” They found that 20.8 percent were categorized as “androgynous,” and an additional 6.2 percent as “highly nongender conforming.”

This is a huge number that does not align with any prior studies, such as the 4.1 percent of the population of the country that Gallup found identify as LGBT — and only a fraction of that 4.1 percent were “T.”

How could the UCLA researchers possibly come up with such a result? Could one state have such a disproportionate percentage of the nongender conforming population? Further, could a massive percentage of that population happen to be kids aged 12-17?

Sorry, I’m not buying that. So what gives? CONTINUE AT SITE

The Trump administration’s recently unveiled National Security Strategy is an excellent and overdue statement of intent. But unless it is ruthlessly prioritized, political and budgetary realities will make it little more than a wish list. And in regard to nuclear weapons, it hardly departs from the insufficient Obama -era policy of replacing old equipment rather than modifying each element of the nuclear triad to meet new challenges.

National survival depends on many factors: the economy, civil peace, constitutional fidelity, education, research, and military strength across the board. Each has a different timeline and resiliency. Nuclear forces, on the other hand, may have a catastrophically short timeline combined with by far the greatest immediate effect.

Alone of all crucial elements, the failure of America’s nuclear deterrent is capable of bringing instant destruction or unavoidable subjugation, as the deterrent’s unarrested decline will lead to either the opportunity for an enemy first strike or the surrender of the U.S. on every foreign front and eventually at home.

Believers in total nuclear abolition fail to recognize that if they are successful, covert possession of just a score of warheads could mean world mastery. And though they, like everyone else, are routinely deterred (from telling off the boss or driving against the flow of traffic), they fail to extend their understanding to nuclear deterrence. They seem as well not to grasp that whereas numerical reduction from tens of thousands of warheads would reduce the chances of accident, below a certain point it would tempt an aggressor by elevating the potential of a successful first strike. Nor do they allow that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—which have through their conduct of war and in suppressing their populations callously sacrificed more than 100 million of their own people—subscribe to permissive nuclear doctrines and thresholds radically different from our own.

The Obama administration understood nuclear rejuvenation to mean merely updating old systems rather than changing the architecture of the deterrent to match Russia’s and China’s programs, as well as advances in technology. Given that short of abject surrender the sole means of preventing nuclear war is maintaining the potential to inflict unacceptable damage upon an enemy and/or shield one’s country from such damage, what are our resources, and against what are they arrayed?

The “nuclear triad” commonly referred to is rather a pentad, its land, air, and sea legs joined by missile defense and the survivability of national infrastructure. America’s land leg comprises static, silo-based missiles, which (other than in the potentially catastrophic launch-on-warning posture) are vulnerable not only to nuclear strike, but, with soon-to-come millimeter accuracy, even to conventional warheads. Russia, China, and North Korea have road-mobile missiles (and Russia, additional rail-based ones), making their land legs more survivable and in the case of tunnel systems—of which we have none and China has 3,000 miles—unaddressable and uncountable.

The U.S. air leg consists of ancient bombers and outdated standoff cruise missiles, both vulnerable to Russian and Chinese air defense, along with only 20 penetrating bombers, the B-2. To boot, the planes are concentrated on only a handful of insufficiently hardened bases.

Our sea-based nuclear force, the least-vulnerable leg, for many years included 41 ballistic-missile submarines, SSBNs. These dwindled to 18, then 14, and, with the new Columbia class set to enter service beginning only in 2031, a planned 12. A maximum of six at sea at any one time will face 100 Russian and Chinese hunter-killer subs. At the same time, the oceans are surrendering their opacity to space surveillance and Russian nonacoustic tracking. Even a deeply running sub disturbs the chemical and sea-life balance in ways that via upwelling leave a track upon the surface.

Russia is moving to 13 SSBNs with high-capacity missiles that carry many maneuverable warheads; China, with 4 SSBNs, is only beginning to build. A possible new dimension is Russia’s announced, but as yet unseen, autonomous stealth undersea nuclear vehicle, capable of targeting the high percentage of U.S. population, industry, and infrastructure on the coasts. We have no such weapon and Russia presents no similar vulnerability.

American ballistic-missile defense is severely underdeveloped due to ideological opposition and the misunderstanding of its purpose, which is to protect population and infrastructure as much as possible but, because many warheads will get through, primarily to shield retaliatory capacity so as to make a successful enemy first strike impossible—thus increasing stability rather than decreasing it, as its critics wrongly believe. Starved of money and innovation, missile defense has been confined to midcourse interception, when boost-phase and terminal intercept are also needed. Merely intending this without sufficient funding is useless. As for national resilience, the U.S. long ago gave up any form of civil defense, while Russia and China have not. This reinforces their ideas of nuclear utility, weakens our deterrence, and makes the nuclear calculus that much more unstable. CONTINUE AT SITE

Let’s see. The Clinton campaign hires Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, to investigate the Trump campaign. Fusion hires a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who produces a dossier based on Russian sources full of rumor, hearsay and an occasional fact to allege collusion between the Kremlin and Trump campaign. The dossier gets to the FBI, which uses it to justify opening a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign, perhaps including a judicial warrant to spy on Trump officials. Then Fusion has Mr. Steele privately brief select media reporters, ensuring that the dossier’s contents become public before the election.

And now Fusion GPS complains about being a victim? Only in Washington, folks.
***

That’s the sob story spun by Fusion GPS founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch Wednesday in a New York Times op-ed that matches the Steele dossier for disinformation. The Fusion duo portray themselves as valiantly working to “highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties” by providing the FBI with “intelligence reports” that corroborated “credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia.”

For exercising their “right under the First Amendment,” Fusion laments that it has been subject to Congressional harassment and a “succession of mendacious conspiracy theories,” including by us. Oh my.
Glenn R. Simpson, co-founder of the research firm Fusion GPS, arrives for a scheduled appearance before a closed House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Nov. 14, 2017. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

Fusion is talented at producing dirt for hire, including for Russians to smear human-rights activist Bill Browder. The problem is the veracity of its work, and the cofounders don’t name a single example in their op-ed of something that proves the dossier’s claim of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Eighteen months after the dossier hit Washington, the FBI, special counsel Robert Mueller and Congress have also offered no public validation of its collusion allegations.

The Fusion boys pat themselves on the back for “having handed over our relevant bank records,” but the firm stonewalled Congressional committees for most of 2017, refusing to divulge the names of its clients (the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee) and even suing to prevent access to its bank records. In court documents, Fusion has also admitted to paying journalists during the election, though it refuses to disclose the names, amounts or purposes of the payments.

President Donald Trump’s public divorce from his former chief strategist Steve Bannon on Wednesday was everything one would expect from the demise of such a combustible duo: explosive, damning and suffused with intrigue.

After Bannon was quoted in a forthcoming book suggesting Trump’s family members and campaign chairman Paul Manafort acted in a “treasonous” or “unpatriotic” matter by holding a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer during the campaign, the president fired back in an acerbic four-paragraph statement, saying Bannon had “lost his mind.”

The question now for the political provocateur who is Trump’s former campaign chairman and the current head of Breitbart News: Has he lost his clout?

“There are people who are ideological allies,” a White House staffer says when asked about Bannon’s future. “But in terms of actual allies, no. This was the final straw. Bannon just ended whatever was left of his relationship with the president.”

Bannon’s reputation was bruised following last month’s special Senate election in Alabama, in which he antagonized the Republican Party by doggedly backing Roy Moore despite disturbing accusations of sexual harassment and assault lodged against the candidate. Moore lost what was once considered an unloseable race to Democrat Doug Jones, who was sworn in Wednesday, capping an outcome Trump blamed on Bannon.

Despite his blatant miscalculation and the animosity he stirred among traditional Republicans, Bannon’s enduring influence was that he purportedly had a direct line to Trump – the White House confirmed they spoke by phone last month – and could help mold the president’s thoughts on policy and political strategy.

Now, that line appears lacerated.

My weekend column argued that the Democrats and the media are scrambling to pull together a new origination account of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. The original origination account has become a political liability because it centered on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser who featured prominently in the so-called Steele dossier. The dossier, a compilation of Russia-sourced reports authored by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, is now known to have been a Clinton campaign-funded opposition-research project. Though its key allegations seem never to have been verified by the FBI, the dossier was apparently used by the Obama Justice Department in applying to the FISA court for a surveillance warrant targeting Page as a Russian agent enmeshed in a corrupt plot against the 2016 election.

On cue, the Times has now published a defensive op-ed by the two founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that produced the Steele dossier. What is most striking about this offering by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch is what it studiously avoids addressing: the specific allegations in the dossier.

Simpson and Fritsch, former Wall Street Journal reporters, decry “the Republicans’ fake investigations” of the Obama Justice Department’s use of the dossier. Indeed, they lead with the obligatory Watergate comparison to Republicans seeking to protect Richard Nixon — notwithstanding that a more apt comparison would be to the Nixon administration’s efforts to use intelligence agencies to spy on political adversaries. Yet, while the authors attest to the sterling reputation of Steele, they elide any mention of his claims — i.e., of the sensational allegations of a traitorous conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that Fusion GPS, while working for the Clinton campaign, generated and tried mightily to publicize through the Clinton-friendly media.

Instead, Simpson and Fritsch erect a strawman: What their work has really been about, they now say, is “decipher[ing] Mr. Trump’s complex business past.” This includes scrutinizing financial ties between Trump’s business conglomerate and Russian interests. It is from this effort that Republicans and other Obama administration critics are supposedly trying to deflect attention.

Over the holidays, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, leaked word to the hate-Trump media that in the coming year of 2018, he would not stop with a simple failure to find any truth in the “Russian collusion” charges against POTUS Trump. In a display of truly Stalinist police abuse, Mr. Mueller will keep going until he finds a crime, any crime at all.

The FBI, apparently led by Trump-hater Strzok, performed a raid on the Paul Manafort home while the family was still asleep, a surprise intimidation tactic commonly used by Hitler’s Gestapo against innocent civilian families, with the purpose of frightening and punishing unarmed victims without due process. In the absence of a pattern of illegal defiance of the law by Manafort, the Strzok team flagrantly violated the law and should be disciplined, if not fired altogether. But Manafort was apparently cooperating.

Also over the holidays, the New York Times tried to revise its previous story about the Steele dossier, claiming that the fraudulent “evidence” presented to the FISA court was not based on the Steele dossier at all, but was confessed by a minor Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, and attributed to Russian sources. By revising the narrative to make Papadopoulos responsible for a report on Russian disinformation to Australian officials, who passed it on to the U.S., the Times is erasing the timeline of its previous allegations. The Russia collusion accusation has collapsed, and the NYT is busily revising history. The public has previously been told that Christopher Steele, the “former” MI6 spy, was hired by various Trump enemies to make up the Russian collusion dossier.

Mueller’s witch hunt is a blatant affront to the United States Constitution, especially Amendments I-IV. It is unconscionable, and if the Executive Branch cannot intervene due to political pressure, the United States Supreme Court must step out of its role of passive bystander and permit a direct appeal to the highest court by the legally abused parties, prominently (but not solely) Paul Manafort and family.

Previous special prosecutors have been allowed to blackmail scapegoats like Martha Stewart and Scooter Libby into confessions of process crimes for which they were never initially charged. This is the logic of a “bill of attainder” and “ex post facto law,” legal snares to enable a conviction on anything the victim is accused of, even if it is a process crime obtained as a result of double-binding the victim into lying under oath. It is the legal logic of bloody witch-hunting mobs, which wants to see a bloody carcass, any carcass at all for any reason at all. It is repugnant to the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Two Fusion GPS cracker jacks have penned a curious editorial for The New York Times to try and repair their business image (honestly, who would hire these guys? Clients aren’t keen on hiring firms at the center of federal and congressional criminal investigations) and to re-calibrate the RUSSIA collusion investigation yarn which is in tatters.

No matter what spin these dervishes are spitting out in the Times, here’s what you need to know: Fusion GPS, paid by a cut out for the Clinton campaign and the DNC, hired a former British spook to get dirt on President Trump. The Ex-spook got his information from RUSSIAN government operators and then the Trump hating spooksuits at the FBI and DOJ used this RUSSIAN propaganda to trick the FISA court into permission to spy on Hillary Clinton’s political opponent.

It’s that simple.

The garbage editorial tries to make the case that there are mountains of evidence of Trump’s relationship with the RUSSIANS and how their “salacious and unverified” dossier merely corroborated “credible allegations” of a Trump-RUSSIA partnership to win the election for Trump.

BUT WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?

Such evidence is only ominously hinted at in the op-ed but never provided and it’s certainly not apparent based on the information leaked by Trump-foes like Rep. Adam Schiff and former director of national intelligence James Clapper. Even holier-that-thou former FBI director James Comey has admitted the details in the dossier remain “salacious and unverified.” So how exactly did their work product corroborate this phantom evidence that has never been revealed?

But the Times set up this partisan stinkbomb op-ed with a sad attempt at narrative shift the day before. In a story titled “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt” the Times wants you to forget that back in April 2017, they reported a lengthy and detailed story all about purported RUSSIAN collaborator Carter Page as the center of the RUSSIA collaboration nexus. Now, with this new story, The New York Times introduces RUSSIA collusion reboot.

The House Intelligence Committee has set a deadline of Wednesday for the Department of Justice and FBI to turn over documents related to the Christopher Steele dossier purporting to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. If they fail to comply, Speaker Paul Ryan will need to back up Congress’s institutional prerogatives and hold the individuals responsible to contempt proceedings and possible impeachment.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray have had the subpoenas since Aug. 24, but they have responded with excuses, delays and misdirection. The Justice Department has refused to provide Congress with the most basic documents demanded under the subpoenas. These include reports detailing the FBI’s interactions with sources such as Mr. Steele, who was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was funded by associates of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Justice also refuses to make available crucial witnesses, including FBI agent Peter Strzok (a lead investigator in the Trump-Russia probe), former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr (whose wife worked for Fusion GPS) and FBI attorney James Baker (former FBI Director Jim Comey’s right-hand man). Justice is also still sitting on months of anti-Trump text messages between Mr. Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

This isn’t acceptable, and neither Justice nor the FBI has offered a valid reason for their resistance. Senior Intelligence Committee members and staff are cleared to read classified information, and Congress has the constitutional authority to oversee the executive branch whose offices it funds. The excuse that such requests interfere with a Justice Department Inspector General probe wouldn’t pass a middle-grade separation-of-powers exam.

A contempt brawl would not be fun, but Congress has already abandoned too much power to the executive. Mr. Ryan risks turning oversight into a power without enforcement ability. A Republican Congress holding Republican office-holders responsible for flouting subpoenas would send a useful signal across the government. And it might give President Trump or White House Counsel Don McGahn new incentive to intervene with Justice and order compliance.

1) If the FISA Court orders to explore the purported Trump-Russian collusion were predicated on phony Steele/Fusion GPS documents and suppositions that prove largely untrue (Comey himself testified under oath that he could not verify their contents), then are subsequent transcripts of court-approved surveilled conversations somewhat poisoned? And, if so, not permissible to be used in collation with later sworn FBI statements to prove inconsistencies, lying, or obstructing? Would someone like Flynn eventually have grounds to appeal his confession?

2) Given the overwhelming progressive consensus by summer 2016 that Trump was not going to be president and that his likely post facto blame for his defeat would fall on deaf ears (Obama before the election had both predicted that Trump would not win and that he would have no grounds to complain of outside interference in the results), why did the amateurish Clinton-created Fusion GPS dossier win such a shelf life, to be peddled around the FBI, discussed by the Obama White House, bandied about by the intelligence agencies, and worked on by the spouse of a DOJ high official?

Was the dossier seen as some sort of insurance, or an amusing trifle without consequences — given that a Clinton administration would have no interest in learning whether there was any impropriety among those who trafficked in it (or rather gratitude for doing just that), and who probably would be working for Hillary Clinton anyway?

3) In an era in which “diversity” is a national mantra, why didn’t Mueller’s law team reflect much geographical, institutional, political, ideological, and career diversity?

Surely there were hundreds of blue-chip attorneys with DOJ or FBI experience, who lived outside of New York and Washington, who did not go to Ivy League law schools, who did not work in Mueller’s former firm or even New York or D.C. firms, who were reticent about expressing preferences in the 2016 election, who did not give, say, over $100 to a presidential candidate, who were never involved in prior investigations of Hillary Clinton, and who had never represented or had contact with the Clinton Foundation or Obama officials.