RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’m taking a “wait and see” attitude on FBI agent Peter Strzok, who is now enmeshed in a political storm involving both the Clinton and the Trump investigations. You know why? Well . . . it’s because I can’t stand the Clintons.

What difference does that make? Well, because I didn’t like them any better in 2001.

That was when I used to run the satellite U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York — the office based in White Plains that oversees federal law enforcement in six counties north of the Bronx. This venue gave me supervision for a time over a piece of the Clinton pardons investigation, the probe that arose out of clemency grants Bill Clinton issued in the last hours of his presidency. One involved four defendants convicted of a massive financial fraud in New Square (which is in Rockland County). They were members of a Hasidic upstate community that tended to vote as a bloc, and so the theory was that Clinton had commuted their prison sentences in exchange for the community’s electoral support for his wife, Hillary Clinton, who then was running for the Senate.

As readers of these columns may recall, I believe the Clinton pardons were deeply corrupt, and that the officials involved in them should never again have been permitted to hold positions of public trust. But whether people are fit for political office is a very different question from whether they should be subjected to a federal criminal prosecution. On that question, I was a strong “no.”

It didn’t matter how I felt about Bill and Hillary personally or politically — which was no secret to my law-enforcement friends and colleagues. This was a strict legal matter, and my sworn duty, like that of every other Justice Department prosecutor, was to enforce the law without fear or favor. President Clinton had the unreviewable authority to grant clemency. While the unsavory rationale for the commutations was obvious, it was far from clear that a politically motivated pardon was actionable, even if we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there had been a corrupt quid pro quo arrangement — which we couldn’t. End of story.

Walk around any college campus, and you will see the names of distinguished faculty and generous donors adorning most of the buildings. Likewise, many campuses feature statues, memorials, or plaques dedicated to individuals or events of historical significance to that particular school, or the school’s home state. Such monuments typically seek to connect us with the past by preserving the memory of someone or something of consequence—institutional history.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/06/monumental-dishonesty/

Remembering the past is not the same as celebrating it, but erasing the past dooms us to forget the lessons it offers—both good and bad.

Although the coverage in the media has dissipated, the craze for monument destruction has not abated in the wake of the Charlottesville uproar this summer. Indeed it has spread, especially on college campuses. Oregon State University is just one school where the mania has reached a fever pitch. Not content to erase all memory of those with confirmed pro-slavery views (in a state that never allowed slavery), OSU has now moved on—in many cases without solid or tangible evidence—to remove the names of persons rumored or “suspected” of possibly harboring such regrettable views.

But OSU is not unique in its willingness to tear down its past.

In recent years, other universities—including my alma mater, the University of Texas—have begun renaming buildings and mothballing statuary recognizing Confederate-era figures who have fallen out of political fashion. The stated concern is that students with delicate sensibilities might be offended by a reminder of uncomfortable periods in history, in the unlikely event that they even bothered to notice the objectionable statues or were aware of the figures whose names are engraved on the pedestal or building wall. Texas was part of the Confederacy, so cleansing the UT campus of imagery related to the Civil War effectively expunges an important part of the state’s heritage.

I suspect that the real motive for removing historical references is not to make the campus “inclusive,” or to provide students with a “safe space,” but rather of advancing identity politics—pitting people against one another based on group characteristics. Another factor is a simple desire on the part of the Left—now dominant in higher education—to exert its power. As John Davidson has noted, “the purpose of this relentless war on the past is not really to adjudicate America’s historical sins or educate the young about them, but to justify political force in the present day.”

“There’s always conflicting recollections of facts,” FBI Director Comey said.

It was a year ago and Comey was explaining why Hillary’s close aide, Cheryl Mills, not only received an immunity agreement in exchange for turning over her laptop, but a pass on lying to the FBI.

The FBI Director claimed that Mills had to receive immunity because the laptop might be protected by attorney-client privilege. Mills, like Hillary Clinton, had worked as a lawyer. But they were both government officials working for the State Department. Hillary wasn’t Mills’ client. The government was.

Comey and his people knew the law. They chose to ignore it to protect a key Hillary aide from rolling over. Mills was the woman Hillary would send in to clean up her dirty laundry. Mills had taken point on the email server cover-up. If anyone knew where the bodies were buried, she did. Instead not only did she get an immunity agreement, but the FBI also agreed to destroy the computers after the search.

Mills had told the FBI that she didn’t know about Hillary’s email server. But the FBI had notes and emails proving that Mills was lying. And when Comey was asked about it, he came out with, “There’s always conflicting recollections of facts.”

No doubt.

That is what the lawyer of the woman who had been caught lying to the FBI might have been expected to argue. But there were no charges, instead the FBI Director was presenting her defense.

George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn were charged with lying to investigators. But lying to investigators isn’t a crime when you’re Hillary Clinton.

Or one of her associates.

Hillary Clinton had told the FBI that she had no idea that the “C” stood for confidential. Instead of laughing in her face or arresting her, the FBI boss testified personally to her truthfulness.

Hillary Clinton, Mills and Huma Abedin made what appear to be false statements to the FBI.

On Fox News Tuesday night, Laura Ingraham reported that yet another one of Robert Mueller’s deputies in his Russia investigation is compromised due to her track record as a blatant partisan.

Jeannie Rhee, who was hired by Mueller last summer to work on the probe, was the personal attorney of Ben Rhodes and also represented the Clinton Foundation, Ingraham revealed. “This information will put further pressure on Special Prosecutor Bob Mueller to resign.”

Rhee is the third member of the Mueller team this week who has been shown to be brazenly partisan. Two other members of the team have been revealed as highly questionable hires in recent days as well — Peter Strzok, an anti-Trumper who helped exonerate Hillary Clinton, and Andrew Weissmann, an unscrupulous prosecutor who told outgoing acting Attorney General Sally Yates in an email that he was “proud” of her for defying President Trump’s travel ban.

As bad as Strzok and Weissman are, Jeannie Rhee takes the cake.

BREAKING: A third partisan Mueller investigator — Jeannie Rhee — represented Obama national security hack Ben Rhodes, accused of “unmasking” Trump advisers, as an associate at Mueller’s Wilmer Hale law firm in DChttps://t.co/25dniYfLwi
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) December 6, 2017

She formerly worked in the Obama Justice Department as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, according to Fox News. Rhee was also the personal attorney for Ben “echo chamber” Rhodes, and the deputy national security adviser for President Barack Obama.

This could be a significant development because according to a report by Adam Kredo in the Washington Free Beacon last February, deep-state loyalists led by Rhodes had been working diligently behind the scenes to undermine the Trump White House and orchestrate the ouster of Michael Flynn, a strong opponent of the Iran nuclear deal.

Rhee was almost certainly part of that effort. CONTINUE AT SITE

America’s news reporters couldn’t get enough of last summer’s Charlottesville mayhem when the story tangentially involved Donald Trump. But when a special report commissioned by the city this week finally gives us something approaching a detailed story of what happened that awful day, the media couldn’t care less.

Read the report yourself. As with any governmental snafu, plenty of shortcomings are detailed in the city’s planning and actions, not to mention a dubious effort by the police chief after the fact to control the fact-finding. A bigger picture, though, suggests the city should have canceled the white-power groups’ permit on grounds that the city couldn’t assure their safety given the expected influx of counterprotesters.

Yes, this would have been to invite a First Amendment lawsuit. It would have meant, as the city’s lawyers argued, issuing a “heckler’s veto” to left-wing activists, who sadly were the primary threat of violence.

The white supremacists may be crazy but not the kind of crazy as to welcome being manhandled by a mob 40 times their size. And force majeure is a pretty good legal argument.

I should point out, this is my conclusion, not the report’s. The report, by former federal prosecutor Timothy J. Heaphy, a partner at Hunton & Williams, couldn’t be clearer that most Charlottesville residents revile the white supremacists, but the report’s first line also refers to Americans’ belief in “an ordered liberty that guarantees all Americans the right to express themselves in the public square.”

Five weeks before the rally in question, a KKK group from North Carolina, consisting of fewer than 60 people, held a permitted rally in Charlottesville. More than 1,500 counterprotesters showed up. The city urged left-wing groups to organize protest events away from the Klan rally. Under the slogan “don’t take the bait,” police advised local activists not to confront the Klan. The permit holder, Amanda Barker, asked the city not to publicize the permit until the last minute to discourage an influx of out-of-town activists—a request the town would have been wise to honor.

As part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government adjusts reimbursements to health-care providers up or down based on the quality and cost-effectiveness of their services, as measured by a set of standards established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The standards use metrics such as how long emergency-room patients must wait to be seen and how long it takes heart-attack victims to get stents placed in their blocked arteries. The intention is to encourage savings and sound practices and enhance patient satisfaction.

The problem is that these requirements have not only increased costs but also may promote poor practices. For example, the CMS goal of stenting a blocked coronary artery within 90 minutes of a heart attack has not been shown to decrease mortality. Moreover, rushing a chest-pain patient to surgery to meet an arbitrary time goal may increase the odds of misdiagnosing other life-threatening conditions such as tears in the aorta, the main artery carrying blood from the heart. Before the imposition of the 90-minute rule, doctors routinely took x-rays of patients with chest pain looking for an aortic rupture. Its presence is a contra-indication to the blood thinners routinely given to heart attack victims. Chest x-rays are no longer recommended by some cardiologists because they prolong the work-up by a few minutes, making it more difficult to meet the 90-minute goal. “Sometimes I just need five more friggin’ minutes,” said one presenter at a medical conference.

Said another practitioner, “It is likely that these CMS quality metrics of . . . door-to-balloon times less than 90 minutes have physically harmed patients and dramatically increased costs for unnecessary cath lab initiations.” Medicare’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program assumes that hospital readmissions within 30 days are evidence of poor care somewhere in the system and that the hospital should be the responsible party. Hospitals at the top of the curve for readmissions are penalized financially. No allowance is made for underserved areas that generally have sicker populations, with fewer options for outpatient care. “Many readmissions occur because hospitals are extra-vigilant when patients who’ve had scary episodes, such as heart attacks or severe pneumonia, have setbacks and turn up again in the emergency room,” according to a 2016 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Following introduction of the ACA guidelines, readmissions did go down, but mortality went up, according to a study published in November in JAMA Cardiology. “It’s possible that doctors may have made treatment decisions designed to avoid readmissions rather than to give patients the best possible care,” said UCLA’s Gregg Fonarow, the study’s senior author. Doctors might, for example, have postponed sending patients back to the hospital until after the 30-day window for readmission penalties had passed, allowing heart failure to worsen and decreasing survival odds. “Nationwide, there may have been thousands to tens of thousands of extra deaths in patients with heart failure resulting from this policy,” Fonarow said.

If the story hadn’t been verified by virtually every mainstream-media outlet in the country, you’d think it came straight from conspiratorial fever dreams of the alt-right. Yesterday, news broke that Robert Mueller had months ago asked a senior FBI agent to step down from his role investigating the Trump administration. This prince of a man was caught in an extramarital affair with an FBI lawyer. The affair itself was problematic, but so was the fact that the two were found to have exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Hillary Clinton text messages.

Here’s where the story gets downright bizarre. This agent, Peter Strzok, also worked with FBI director James Comey on the Clinton email investigation. In fact, he was so deeply involved in the Clinton investigation that he is said to have interviewed Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, and to have been present when the FBI interviewed Clinton. According to CNN, he was part of the team responsible for altering the FBI’s conclusion that Clinton was “grossly negligent” in handling classified emails (a finding that could have triggered criminal liability) to “extremely careless” — a determination that allowed her to escape prosecution entirely.

After the Clinton investigation concluded, Strzok signed the documents opening the investigation into Russian election interference and actually helped interview former national-security adviser Michael Flynn.

In other words, it looks like a low-integrity, reckless, biased bureaucrat has played an important role in two of the most important and politically charged criminal investigations of the new century. Yes, it’s good that Mueller removed Strzok when he discovered the text messages. No, Strzok is not solely responsible for the conclusions reached in either investigation. But his mere presence hurts public confidence in the FBI, and it does so in a way that further illustrates a persistent and enduring national problem: America’s permanent bureaucracy is unacceptably partisan.

A terrific catch by the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross, whose story you should read in full. It was widely known that Peter Strzok, the FBI agent dismissed by Mueller from the Russiagate probe due to anti-Trump bias, had had a lead role in the Hillary Emailgate investigation. But I hadn’t realized until now that he was one of the agents who interviewed top Clinton cronies Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.https://hotair.com/archives/2017/12/05/werent-huma-abedin-cheryl-mills-charged-lied-peter-strzok-fbi/

Or, more importantly, that they pretty clearly lied to his face about when they found out that Hillary had her own email server.

Strzok is the same agent who reportedly replaced “grossly negligent” with “extremely careless” in Comey’s statement on Emailgate after the probe ended, and he’s also one of the agents who conducted the interview with Mike Flynn that earned Flynn a charge of making false statements to federal officials. One agent with a bias, even a supervisor, doesn’t discredit an entire investigation with dozens of people involved, especially after he’s been kicked off by the top prosecutor because of it. But the question remains: If Mike Flynn’s lies were sufficient to warrant being charged, why weren’t Abedin’s and Mills’s?

Summaries of the interviews, known as 302s, were released by the FBI last year.

A review of those documents conducted by The Daily Caller shows that Mills and Abedin told Strzok and Laufman that they were not aware of Clinton’s server until after she left the State Department…

But undercutting those denials are email exchanges in which both Mills and Abedin either directly discussed or were involved in discussing Clinton’s server.

“hrc email coming back — is server okay?” Mills asked in a Feb. 27, 2010 email to Abedin and Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton who helped set up the Clinton server.

Comey was asked about Abedin’s and Mills’s lies during congressional testimony last year and spun his decision not to recommend charges by claiming that, hey, sometimes people misremember things and sometimes those things aren’t essential to a case. You don’t want to charge everyone who says something factually incorrect in an FBI interview with lying to a federal official. But the server wasn’t a peripheral matter and the Clinton cronies’ knowledge of it wasn’t immaterial. Comey’s rationale for not charging Hillary with mishandling classified information was that, while she may have been grossly negligent — sorry, I mean “extremely careless”! — there was no evidence that she intended to mishandle it. But setting up a private server which Team Clinton *knew* was destined to route classified information through it comes very close to intent, and Abedin and Mills would have been well positioned to speak to that knowledge. Putting some pressure on them by threatening to lock them up for false statements might have led to some interesting admissions about what Hillary Clinton imagined the purpose of her email server to be. The same charge helped convince Mike Flynn to play ball with Mueller. Why wasn’t similar pressure put on Abedin and Mills?

CNN could hardly contain its joy — or its exaggerations — in discussing Mike Flynn’s guilty plea. The cable channel provided wall-to-wall coverage, with barely a glance at the other big news: the first major tax bill in decades. The only thing missing was a Bronco chase on the L.A. Freeway.

President Trump’s apologists and his lawyers were spinning just as hard in the other direction. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

In the days since the news broke, both sides have stuck to their talking points and turned the volume up to 11.

Let’s strip away the partisan hyperbole and sort out what we really know.

First, with Flynn’s plea alongside Paul Manafort’s indictment, Robert Mueller and the Office of Special Counsel have now snagged the two biggest fish they could catch, outside the Trump family itself. They are using every lure and net a prosecutor has. Manafort and Flynn have every incentive to cough up whatever dirt they have, and Flynn’s deal promises to do so. If that doesn’t worry the White House inner circle, they must be in a bunker.

Ah, but what dirt does the prosecutor have? Only Mueller, Trump and their inner circles know. Only they know whether senior Trump aides have committed underlying crimes or given false testimony. CNN doesn’t know. Fox doesn’t know. ABC doesn’t know and had to withdraw an incorrect report that the president himself was implicated. (The stock market was not amused.) Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) doesn’t know, even though he was smiling from ear to ear on TV and doing everything short of dancing and waving a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

What should worry the Trump team most is that Mueller presumably would not offer Flynn such a sweet plea deal if he didn’t have valuable information to proffer on higher-ups. And there aren’t many people above the national security adviser.