RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson refused to answer key questions during his seven-hour closed-door appearance Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee, Fox News reported Wednesday. But he did acknowledge that he personally discussed allegations in the Steele dossier with members of the media, even though he did not speak to the sources behind the allegations himself to verify whether they were true.

Moreover, he reportedly said that he leaked details from the dirty dossier to reporters right before the 2016 election because he was “upset” that then-FBI director James Comey had reopened the Clinton email case.

Simpson told investigators he never spoke to the underlying sources of the document, never traveled to Russia and did not verify the dossier beyond comparing the claims to “open source” media reporting.

The source said Simpson also told investigators he was “upset” when then FBI Director James Comey re-opened the Hillary Clinton email investigation in late October 2016, and Simpson wanted to push back.

Simpson’s attorneys negotiated the details of his appearance before the committee last week, agreeing to voluntarily testify rather than be subpoenaed.

“Throughout this entire year, the White House and its allies on the Hill and elsewhere have attempted at every turn to smear Fusion GPS because of its connection to the Steele dossier,” Simpson’s attorney Joshua Levy said Tuesday.

Levy admitted that Steele and Simpson had briefed reporters on the dossier last year, but insisted that neither Simpson nor Fusion GPS paid members of the media to publish stories of any kind.

Banker turned human rights activist Bill Browder has accused Fusion of hiring journalists to plant stories in the media.

Fusion, meanwhile, continued to fight the Intel Committee’s request for their bank records in court on Wednesday.

According to The Daily Caller, Steele has revealed in court papers in London that “he was directed by Fusion to brief reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo! News and The New Yorker in September 2016.”

Steele also gave an interview via Skype to Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who published an article about Steele’s allegations on Oct. 31, 2016.

Levy maintains that the dossier is legitimate.

“What they did do is they contracted with Christopher Steele…. This experienced British intelligence official came back with a report that now in hindsight looks quite accurate,” Levy said.

Fox News is standing by its report that Simpson met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya before and after the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign officials. CONTINUE AT SITE

American politics has become an endless fox hunt. The hounds’ heads jerked up this week on news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, responding to a request from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, had asked the Justice Department’s career lawyers to look into the possibility of appointing a second special prosecutor, to investigate Hillary Clinton.

Set aside for a moment what the precise meaning of “investigate” might be. The day doesn’t pass anymore without a demand, from the Oval Office or the ozone, that someone should “look into” some political malefaction. Theoretically, we could have public officials being led to the executioner’s block weekly in Washington.

Indeed, the movement to name a second special prosecutor flows from the fact that the Washington press corps in January decided en masse to “look into” the notion that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to defeat Mrs. Clinton, a thought dropped into the water by the departing Obama administration.

What followed was a river of stories purporting Trump-Russian collusion. Months later, it remains true that the federal code recognizes no crime called “collusion.” Eventually the river of collusion stories joined with Oval Office mania over them to produce special prosecutor Robert Mueller. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Southern Poverty Law Center has established itself as the nation’s most vocal and prominent hate-group watchdog in the nation.

The organization was founded in 1971 by Morris Dees Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama. Before co-founding the SPLC, Dees was a law partner and serial entrepreneur with Millard Fuller. Still in their twenties, they became millionaires. Fuller then went his own way, dedicating his life to helping the poor, ultimately founding Habit for Humanity in 1976.

Morris Dees went another direction. He and another law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., created the Southern Poverty Law Center to counter racial discrimination in the South and finish off the Ku Klux Klan. And the SPLC had some remarkable successes in its first several decades, implementing a legal strategy of using civil lawsuits to secure court judgments against targeted organizations and then having the courts seize assets to cripple them or force their closure.

A marketing wizard, Dees has grown the SPLC into an organization with a staff of 250 in four states. It has a shiny and sleek headquarters building in Montgomery and a net worth in 2015 of $350 million, of which a considerable portion is held in offshore accounts. The media often parrots its point of view uncritically, as it labels more than 1,000 organizations across the nation as hate groups. Using sophisticated marketing methods, it is the recipient of tens of millions of dollars annually from individual and corporate donors, most of whom believe they are helping to counter “hate groups.”

But tragically, Dees and the SPLC are now fueled by the same passionate animus that fueled the Klan and white supremacists. The alleged “hate groups” that the SPLC targets now are often Christian organizations which follow the same doctrines and beliefs that the church has followed for the past two millennia. Critics of Islamic extremism are labelled as anti-Muslim extremists. Politicians who support traditional marriage such as Ben Carson are called out as “extremists.” Several examples of the pain and damage that the SPLC has inspired are illustrative.

Earlier this year, James Hodgkinson, who liked the SPLC on his Facebook page, shot House of Representatives Whip Steve Scalise and four other Republicans while they were at a baseball practice early one morning in Washington. Another fan of the SPLC, Floyd Lee Corkins II, shot a security guard at the offices of Family Research Council in Washington in 2012. Family Research Council, one of the nation’s most respected conservative think tanks, was labelled a “hate group” by the SPLC because it supported traditional Christian morality in regard to sexuality and marriage.

Another illustration comes from Middlebury College, the elite Vermont school where tuition runs $61,000 a year. In March, a student mob prevented American Enterprise Institute Fellow Charles Murray from speaking. Later the mob attacked the Middlebury political science professor accompanying him, Allison Stanger, causing her to be taken to the emergency room of a nearby hospital with a neck injury and a concussion after being thrown to the ground. Mr. Murray is a highly distinguished political scientist, sociologist, and author. The SPLC on its website had labeled him a “white nationalist” — a false and even absurd claim as Mr. Murray has multi-racial children. Gullible students, armed with the hatred spewed out by SPLC, showed the depth of the ideological civil war in the United States, as the left-wing fascists at Middlebury shut down free speech in a manner reminiscent of the book burners in Nazi Germany.

Republicans, whether in the White House or on Capitol Hill, do not seem to appreciate how much they may be undermining what they say they want — a serious investigation of the Clinton Foundation and such related matters as the Uranium One transaction, the interplay between the foundation and the operation of the State Department during Secretary Clinton’s tenure, and the question of whether that interplay explains the use of the improper private email system and the destruction of tens of thousands of emails.

The president has been railing about his own Justice Department’s apparent inaction (after signaling, post-election, that he did not want to see the Clintons further investigated and prosecuted). A group of House Republicans has taken up this cause and is pushing for the appointment of a special counsel. In essence, it is a tit-for-tat maneuver: There is a special-counsel probing Trump ties to Russia, they reason, so why not a special-counsel to probe Clinton ties to Russia?

This suggests a basic misunderstanding about what triggers a special-counsel investigation: There must be potential offenses that warrant investigation as to which the Justice Department has a conflict of interest that would make its conducting the investigation inappropriate.

Preliminarily, we should note that there is no such thing as an independent counsel. In our constitutional system, prosecution is an executive power, so even special counsels ultimately report to the Justice Department’s leadership. That being the case, we should never have a special counsel unless one is absolutely necessary. It is pernicious to have a prosecutor who is assigned to make a case on a single target (or set of targets). These prosecutors are insulated from the pressures of an ordinary prosecutor’s office, where cases have to compete for resources and only the meritorious ones are pursued. Thus, the sorry history of the special counsel (and its predecessors — the “special prosecutor” and “independent counsel”) is empire-building, investigations that go on for years, and cases involving trivial charges often far removed from the suspected offense that was the original rationale for appointing the special counsel.

Senior federal prosecutors are investigating Hillary Clinton, the sale of Uranium One, and the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a move that may lead to the appointment of another independent prosecutor, Fox News reports.

Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice ordered prosecutors to examine “certain issues” raised by congressional Republicans, according to a letter Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and other committee members, who have been demanding a special counsel be assigned to probe Clinton.

Former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III was appointed in May as a special counsel to investigate the Russia-Trump campaign electoral collusion conspiracy theory peddled by the Left to undermine the Trump administration. Since then former Trump campaign aides Paul J. Manafort Jr. and Richard W. Gates III have been indicted by Mueller’s fishing expedition for wrongdoings like tax evasion that are unrelated to the campaign.

Mueller has also been investigating Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group for their Russian entanglements. Podesta is the brother of Clinton campaign chairman and Center for American Progress founder John Podesta. “The Podesta Group, a longtime K Street fixture … will reportedly shut down by year’s end as the firm’s involvement in a lobbying campaign on behalf of pro-Russia forces in the Ukrainian government has fallen under scrutiny from both the press and Robert Mueller,” the Washington Examiner reports.

The Podesta Group lobbied for Uranium One, the Canadian-based energy company. In 2010, the Obama administration allowed Uranium One to be acquired by Russia’s Rosatom, which gave the company control over one-fifth of U.S. uranium-mining capacity to Russia, despite an ongoing FBI probe into a Rosatom subsidiary allegedly involved in racketeering. The Uranium One deal was approved by Hillary Clinton’s Department of State acting as one of nine institutional members of an inter-agency review board called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The approval came around the time her husband received the suspiciously large sum of $500,000 for a single speech from Russian sources. Donations from Russians and others hoping to cash in on a prospective Hillary Clinton presidency reportedly flooded the coffers of the corrupt, now-embattled Clinton Foundation.

Boyd wrote in the letter that “[t]hese senior prosecutors will report directly to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General [Rod Rosenstein], as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

If Republicans are serious about getting President Trump’s judicial nominees confirmed, they will have to rid themselves of the fiction of a politically neutral American Bar Association. The outfit’s recent antics provide ample reason to remove it from Senate vetting.

The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary last week informed the Judiciary Committee that Brett Talley is “not qualified” to serve as a federal judge. This is the fourth “not qualified” rating the ABA has slapped on Trump nominees, including Leonard Steven Grasz for the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mr. Grasz’s “not qualified” rating rests on a misrepresentation of the former Nebraska chief deputy attorney general’s views on judicial precedent. Mr. Grasz once argued in a 1999 article that lower courts shouldn’t stretch Supreme Court rulings into broader rights, but the ABA contorts this to suggest Mr. Grasz would ignore Roe v. Wade. Mr. Grasz explicitly wrote in the same article that “lower federal courts are obliged to follow clear legal precedent regardless of whether it may seem unwise or even morally repugnant to do so.”

As for Mr. Talley, nominated for the district court in Alabama, the ABA says he lacks the “requisite trial experience,” having never tried a case. This ignores that the 36-year-old has clerked for a federal district judge and a federal appellate judge, has worked at the whiteshoe Gibson Dunn & Crutcher firm, and served as the Deputy Solicitor General of Alabama.

Many nominees have been younger than Mr. Talley, and the ABA called Barack Obama nominee Goodwin Liu “well-qualified” despite no experience as a trial judge. The ABA also called Elena Kagan “well qualified” for the Supreme Court, as indeed she was, despite her lack of trial experience. But since the ABA found nothing amiss with Mr. Talley’s “integrity” or “temperament,” it settled on a concern with “requisite” experience.

In an August letter to Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, Senator Jeff Flake and four colleagues outlined the ABA’s long history of political liberal activism, and noted their concerns with the Senate outsourcing advice and consent to “unaccountable outside groups.” They also pointed out how useless ABA ratings are, given the number of judges who have been judged “not qualified” but were confirmed and have had distinguished bench careers.

ABA Standing Committee Chair Pamela Bresnahan wants Senate Judiciary to invite the ABA to more hearings. Mr. Grassley should respond by informing the ABA that hearings on judicial nominees will no longer have to wait for completed ABA evaluations.

Mr. Trump followed George W. Bush and scrapped the practice of letting the ABA pre-screen nominees for the White House. Yet the Senate continues to give the lawyers’ guild too much sway. There are more than enough judicial watchdogs on the left and right to inform the Senate.

‘Wall Street Journal’ columnist Kimberley Strassel makes the case to Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson that the Steele dossier, which was funded by the DNC and Clinton campaign to smear President Trump, is one of history’s most outrageous political tricks.

“We do a disservice when we even refer to it as a ‘Dossier,'” she explained. “That gives it too much mystique. This is an oppo research document of lower quality than even oppo research documents.”

“All campaigns do this, but usually you dig up a driving under the influence conviction, or you didn’t pay your taxes one year, you plant it in the press to make the candidate look bad. This is a document based on unnamed, anonymous Russian sources, apparently. They’re never been proven, a lot of them have been disproven,” Strassel continued. “But here’s where they have been particularly clever: They didn’t give it to the press, they sent it to the FBI and then they briefed the press, and then the press was able to claim that this was intelligence that the FBI possessed, which gave it some air of credibility.”

Host Tucker Carlson asks: “So, this bundle of opposition research changed American political history — and not in the ways that it normally would. You’re saying that this really is responsible for this chain reaction that has paralyzed Washington ever since?”

“Look at what happened!” Strassel said. “The Democrats like to say this document wasn’t even used during the election: Not true. We know that [Former MI-6 Russia desk leader] Christopher Steele, who put this document together has testified in court documents that he briefed the press in September [2016]. Yahoo News came out with a huge story saying the FBI was in possession of ‘intelligence’ showing potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government — the headlines were dominated by this. And the question that we still have yet to know: We know the FBI relied on this in some regard but did this document actually inspire the FBI to end up wiretapping a political campaign? Which is no small deal, by the way.”

America is in another of its Salem moments. Frenzy is almost a living, breathing monster. It moves from host to host, fueled by rumor, gossip, and self-righteous furor.

The Greeks knew well of the transitory nature of these mass panics. They claimed such fits were inspired by the Maniae, the three daughters of Night who were the goddesses of insanity, madness, and crazed frenzy. We’ve seen all three of them in action throughout the past year.

Collusion Everywhere and Nowhere
For about six months, cable news shows, the internet, and the major newspapers ginned up the charge of “Russian collusion”—as a means of explaining the otherwise inexplicable and unacceptable defeat of Hillary Clinton by someone without either political or military experience.

Pundits and talking heads without evidence echoed each other with ever more preposterous charges. Voting machines supposedly had been rigged by a monstrous man who later had stooped to remove the Martin Luther King bust from the West Wing. We were also told that all good souls of the Electoral College clearly should have vitiated their constitutional duties and denied Trump the presidency.

We were lectured at the height of the collusion frenzy that Trump would be 1) impeached, 2) removed by the emoluments clause, 3) forced to resign under the 25th Amendment, or 4) simply quit in shame.

If not, how many ways could (or should) one kill Trump? Hanging? Decapitation? Dismemberment? Combustion? Shooting? Stabbing? Jet crash? As the madness grew, no obscenity from Stephen Colbert or physical threat from Robert DeNiro or Johnny Depp or Kathy Griffin or even Snoop Dogg seemed to suffice to express hatred of Trump.

The font of this 24/7 hysteria was the Clinton campaign’s purchase of a leaked smear job from an opposition research firm, which in turn had hired a disreputable former British intelligence agent, who had paid for concocted Russian slanders designed to disrupt an election. The Fusion GPS/Steele dossier was peddled to U.S. intelligence agencies, some of whom may have seen it as valuable political fodder and thus used it as an excuse to surveille members of the Trump campaign and in turn, unmask the names of American citizens and allow them to be leaked to the press. “Collusion” may turn out to have been sired, grown, and spread from a single, fake, and partisan document.

Since the Trojan War, generations have always trashed their own age in comparison to ages past. The idea of fated decadence and decline was a specialty of 19th-century German philosophy.

So we have to be careful in calibrating generations, especially when our own has reached a level of technology and science never before dreamed of (and it is not a given that material or ethical progress is always linear).

Nonetheless, the so-called Baby Boomers have a lot to account for — given the sorry state of entertainment, sports, the media, and universities.

The Harvey Weinstein episode revealed two generational truths about Hollywood culture.

One, the generation that gave us the free-love and the anything-goes morals of Woodstock discovered that hook-up sex was “contrary to nature.” Sexual congress anywhere, any time, anyhow, with anyone — near strangers included — is not really liberating and can often be deeply imbedded within harassment and ultimately the male degradation of women.

Somehow a demented Harvey Weinstein got into his head that the fantasy women in his movies who were customarily portrayed as edgy temptresses and promiscuous sirens were reflections of the way women really were in Los Angeles and New York — or the way that he thought they should be. It was almost as if Weinstein sought to become as physically repulsive and uncouth as possible — all the better to humiliate (through beauty-and-the-beast asymmetry) the vulnerable and attractive women he coerced.

Two, Weinstein reminded us, especially in his eleventh-hour medieval appeals for clemency by way of PC attacks on the NRA and Donald Trump, that mixing politics with art was, as our betters warned, always a self-destructive idea.

Hollywood ran out of original thought about three decades ago, and the people noticed and so keep avoiding the theaters. How many times can a good-looking, young, green progressive crusader expose a corporate pollution plot, or battle a deranged band of southern-twangy Neanderthals, South African racists, or Russian tattooed thugs, or a deep-state CIA cabal in sunglasses and shiny suits? How many times can the nth remake of a comic-book hero be justified by updating him into a caped social-justice warrior from L.A.? Ars gratia politicorum is suicide.

The ruling generation in Hollywood is out of creative ideas mostly because it invested in political melodrama rather than human tragedy. It cannot make a Western, not just because Santa Monica’s young men long ago lost the ability to sound or act like Texans in 1880, but because its politics have no patience with the real world of noble people who are often doomed, or flawed individuals who are nevertheless defined by their best rather than worst traits, or well-meaning souls who can cause havoc, or courageous men who fight for bad causes.