RUTHFULLY YOURS

If only the National Security Agency were as good at keeping secrets as Lois Lerner. When news that the IRS had targeted conservative groups led to congressional hearings, the former director of the Exempt Organizations division declared her innocence and then clammed up. Now she and her former IRS associate, Holly Paz, are asking a federal judge to seal forever their depositions in a lawsuit that the IRS settled last month for $3.5 million.

Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz say they or their families have endured harassment or death threats. But Edward Greim, the attorney for the roughly 400 tea-party clients who sued, notes in reply that the last threat Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz cited was from early 2014.

Leave aside that the usual way of dealing with threats or harassment is to notify police or the FBI—not to keep information about an abuse of power by public officials from the public. Every other party is united for disclosure: the defense (i.e., the government, which has admitted wrongdoing and apologized); the plaintiffs; and the Cincinnati Enquirer, which has filed a motion to lift the seal.

In his initial decision in May, federal Judge Michael Barrett said he could see the wisdom of confining access to the testimony to the lawyers during discovery. But he added that others could ask to lift the order later, and Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz would then “bear the burden of overcoming the presumption of access to court documents.”

That moment is here. American taxpayers who will fork out $3.5 million for Ms. Lerner’s actions have a right to hear how she justified what she did at the IRS.

The charge to which retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty may tell us a great deal about the Robert Mueller investigation.

The first question is, why did Flynn lie? People who lie to the FBI generally do so because, if they told the truth, they would be admitting to a crime. But the two conversations that Flynn falsely denied having were not criminal. He may have believed they were criminal but, if he did, he was wrong.

Consider his request to Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., to delay or oppose a United Nations Security Council vote on an anti-Israel resolution that the outgoing Obama administration refused to veto. Not only was that request not criminal, it was the right thing to do. President Obama’s unilateral decision to change decades-long American policy by not vetoing a perniciously one-sided anti-Israel resolution was opposed by Congress and by most Americans. It was not good for America, for Israel or for peace. It was done out of Obama’s personal pique against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than on principle.

Many Americans of both parties, including me, urged the lame-duck Obama not to tie the hands of the president-elect by allowing the passage of a resolution that would make it more difficult to achieve a negotiated peace in the Middle East.
As the president-elect, Donald Trump was constitutionally and politically entitled to try to protect his ability to broker a fair peace between the Israelis and Palestinians by urging all members of the Security Council to vote against or delay the enactment of the resolution. The fact that such efforts to do the right thing did not succeed does not diminish the correctness of the effort. I wish it had succeeded. We would be in a better place today.

Some left-wing pundits, who know better, are trotting out the Logan Act, which, if it were the law, would prohibit private citizens (including presidents-elect) from negotiating with foreign governments. But this anachronistic law hasn’t been used for more than 200 years. Under the principle of desuetude — a legal doctrine that prohibits the selective resurrection of a statute that has not been used for many decades — it is dead-letter. Moreover, the Logan Act is unconstitutional insofar as it prohibits the exercise of free speech.

In Washington, the ostensible story is rarely the real story. We know, for example, that former President Clinton engineered a meeting with President Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, on the tarmac of the Phoenix Airport on June 27, 2016.

That’s the official story, replete with the charming and intentionally disarming detail that all they talked about was their grandchildren. It was just coincidental, don’t you know, that at the time the FBI was looking into Hillary Clinton’s use of a “personal” email server to send, receive and store classified information.

And it was also simply coincidental that just a few days later, the director of the FBI – who served under Attorney General Lynch – announced that he wouldn’t recommend a prosecution of Hillary Clinton.

Richard Nixon must be rolling over in his grave.

What we haven’t known, until now, is that a frantic scramble erupted in the halls of the FBI to cover up this meeting. In fact, the FBI turned its sharp light not on the scandalous meeting between the attorney general and Bill Clinton – but rather on one of the whistleblowers who got the word out.

The organization I head, Judicial Watch, asked the FBI on July 7, 2016, for any records that might pertain to the infamous tarmac meeting. We had to sue after we were ignored by the agency.

Then the FBI told us flat-out that it couldn’t find any records. And we now know that was flat-out untrue. Because, in responding to another one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, the Justice Department gave us heavily redacted documents that showed there were additional documents tucked away at the FBI headquarters.

If not for Judicial Watch’s lawsuits these documents would still be hidden today.

The oh so reasonable professor is married to corrupt Obama UN Ambassador Samantha Power who has yet to credibly explain her record unmasking of Trump campaign officials. She set a record as a hack for the Obama administration….rsk
The Founders would be concerned if Trump won with help from a foreign nation on unfriendly terms with the U.S. But we don’t have the facts yet.

Talk of impeaching President Trump surged after Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser and transition aide, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. But what is the real meaning of the Constitution’s mysterious provision authorizing removal of the president and other federal officials for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”? Is the growing interest in impeachment simply wishful thinking by Trump’s political opponents?

Before we get to current events, let’s insist on a principle of political neutrality.

Under the Constitution, presidents have four-year terms. It’s not legitimate to call for impeachment simply because you abhor the president or think that he is making terrible blunders.

If you are inclined to think that he has committed an impeachable act, you should immediately ask yourself: Would I also think that if I voted for him and thought he was doing a terrific job?

Not many years ago, an ad for a newspaper warned that, “If you miss a day, you miss a lot.”

Now you don’t need a day to miss a lot. Mere seconds of ­inattention can get you behind the curve. What, you didn’t hear about the latest predator to fall on his sword?

The gusher of startling events puts us neck deep in the curse of interesting times. We are in the midst of cultural reckoning over sex, could be on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea and may experience an economic boom as Congress moves closer to historic tax reform.

Then there’s the White House, where the dynamics of upheaval are entering a crucial phase. Although many deplorables believe they finally have a government looking out for them, much of Washington and the American left are preparing to dance on the grave of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Their celebration got an early start Friday with the guilty plea of Gen. Michael Flynn and his pledge to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller. The news persuaded James Comey, the insufferably self-righteous former FBI boss, and the Democratic media that the clock is ticking on Trump’s time in the Oval Office.

That is one way to look at Flynn — if you assume he has beans to spill. He was close to Trump but it’s worth noting that Flynn pled guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI, including about a phone conversation he had with a Russian official last Dec. 29 — seven weeks after the election.

That’s the same call that got Flynn fired after less than a month as Trump’s national security adviser because he lied to the vice president about whether the conversation covered sanctions.

So it’s clear that Flynn is a serial liar, but decidedly unclear whether he knows anything that would put Trump in jeopardy. It’s important that the content of his conversations with Russians are not the ­basis of his admitted crime and do not appear to be illegal.

Here’s what I’d be tempted to do if I were President Trump: I’d direct the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, including any Obama-administration collusion in that enterprise.

I would make sure to call it a “counterintelligence investigation,” putting no limitations on the special counsel — just as with the investigation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been unleashed to conduct into Trump “collusion” with Russia. That is, I would not restrict the prosecutor and investigators to digging for specified criminal violations. Or, indeed, any criminal violations. I’d just tell the special counsel, “Have at it” — with unbound authority to scrutinize the negotiations surrounding the eventual Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

Would I really expect the special counsel to find that Obama officials conspired with the mullahs to obtain nukes for Tehran? No . . . but hey, as the “Trump collusion with Russia” crowd says, “You never know.” Meantime, under the guise of investigating this highly unlikely “collusion,” I’d want the special counsel to scrutinize closely any variances between what Obama-administration officials were telling Congress and the public about the negotiations and what they were telling the Iranians; to probe any side deals the administration agreed to but failed to disclose to Congress; and to consider whether any laws or policies were violated in such matters as President Obama’s payment of a cash ransom in exchange for American hostages held by Iran.

Why would I do this? Well, because I disagree with Obama-administration foreign policy, of course. Under the Mueller “collusion” precedent, it is evidently now American practice to criminalize foreign-policy disputes under the pretext of conducting a counterintelligence investigation.

It is difficult to come to any other conclusion based on the guilty plea that Mueller just pried out of Michael Flynn.

Let’s think about what has happened here.

The Justice Department did not, as the pertinent special-counsel regulations require, identify specific crimes it suspected had been committed by Trump-campaign officials. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disclosed no factual predicate calling for a criminal investigation from which Trump’s Justice Department would be ethically required to recuse itself.

Kurt Lewin, the 20th century German-American psychologist, is recognized as the founder of social psychology – the study of how the personality, attitudes, motivations, and behavior of the individual influences and is influenced by the group.

Lewin studied group dynamics and organizational development and challenged the prevailing “nature vs nurture” debate on behavior. Departing from conventional psychological theory, he developed a mathematical equation of behavior which claimed that an individual’s immediate situation – not necessarily past influences – was a strong determinant of behavior.

Lewin’s equation, B = f (P,E) contends that behavior is a function of the person in his environment, what he called that person’s “life space” or “field.” Lewin theorized that neither nature nor nurture was enough to explain an individual’s behavior – that it was the interaction between the individual and his constantly changing environment that produced the result.

There are fields and vectors in mathematics. Force-field analysis examines all the factors/forces that influence a person or group’s behavior. Lewin believed that a person’s behavior exists as a function of his total field/environment (life space) which is dynamic and constantly changing. It is the psychological equivalent of the famous Heraclitus quote, “No man steps in the same river twice.”

Lewin introduced the concept of “genidentity” defined as identity through and over time. Since no two lives have the same life experience, no two lives can be living in the same reality. This multiple-reality construct denies an objective reality and embraces reality as a subjective perceptual phenomenon.

Consider this example: A man is walking down the street. There are four people nearby. The first person says there is a man walking down the street. The second person says there is a person walking down the street. The third person says I’m not sure who is walking down the street. The fourth person says there is a woman walking down the street.

Former Trump-administration national-security adviser Michael Flynn is expected to plead guilty today to lying to the FBI regarding his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

Flynn, who is reportedly cooperating with the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, is pleading guilty in federal district court in Washington, D.C., to a one-count criminal information (which is filed by a prosecutor in cases when a defendant waives his right to be indicted by a grand jury).

The false-statement charge, brought under Section 1001 of the federal penal code, stems from Flynn’s conversation on December 29, 2016, with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. At the time, Flynn was slated to become the national-security adviser to President-elect Donald Trump. The conversation occurred on the same day that then-president Barack Obama announced sanctions against Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. It is believed to have been recorded by the FBI because Kislyak, as an agent of a foreign power, was subject to monitoring under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Mueller has charged Flynn with falsely telling FBI agents that he did not ask the ambassador “to refrain from escalating the situation” in response to the sanctions. In being questioned by the agents on January 24, 2017, Flynn also lied when he claimed he could not recall a subsequent conversation with Kislyak, in which the ambassador told Flynn that the Putin regime had “chosen to moderate its response to those sanctions as a result of [Flynn’s] request.”

Furthermore, a week before the sanctions were imposed, Flynn had also spoken to Kislyak, asking the ambassador to delay or defeat a vote on a pending United Nations resolution. The criminal information charges that Flynn lied to the FBI by denying both that he’d made this request and that he’d spoken afterward with Kislyak about Russia’s response to it.

The explosion of sexual harassment and assault claims, some going back forty years, is the inevitable consequence of the sexual revolution. Long before Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual escapades led him to impeachment, our culture had normalized public sexual behavior and mores once hidden away in the private realm, and kept there by laws, morals, and customs. Like many of our social pathologies today, our sexually saturated public culture and the unleashing of sexual predators are the bitter fruit of the free love movement of the Sixties.

Those who didn’t live through that period cannot imagine how quickly and radically our society was transformed. And that change was encouraged by certain species of dubious Pop-Freudian psychological ideas that had been combined with left-wing theories of political revolution. This synthesis was predicated on the delegitimization of the “bourgeois” virtues, morals, and values that had created the “false consciousness” empowering capitalist oppression. “If it feels good, do it” and “Fuck authority” became the most important personal and political imperatives.

Thus sexual liberation became an instrument of political “liberation,” and both revolutions enabled personal liberation, a weird mash-up of radical individualism and communist collectivism. Listen to Herbert Marcuse, denizen of the Frankfurt School and guru of the New Left:

The civilized morality is reversed by harmonizing instinctual freedom and order: liberated from the tyranny of repressive reason, the instincts tend toward free and lasting existential relations––they generate a new reality principle.

So too another popular intellectual of the Sixties, renegade classicist Norman O. Brown:

The life instinct, or sexual instinct, demands activity of a kind that in contrast to our current mode of activity can only be called play. The life instinct also demands a union with others, and with the world around us, based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism and erotic exuberance.

One can see this political justification for “free love” in the 1969 Wellesley commencement address of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wrote her senior thesis on the most consequential theorist of modern left-wing activism, Saul Alinsky. “We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living,” Rodham said. Her three sexually charged adjectives reveal the by then preposterous union of the sexual and the political revolution that starts with “questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government,” Rodham continues, and enables “human reconstruction,” a phrase echoing the leftist “new man” necessary for achieving the collectivist utopia of social justice and equality.