RUTHFULLY YOURS

The stunning revelation by longtime operative Donna Brazile that the Hillary Clinton campaign secretly took control — literal control — of the Democratic National Committee a year before Hillary became the party’s nominee is the talk of American politics.

As it should be.

Brazile’s piece in Politico describes her shock at the discovery of formal legal paperwork between the two entities when she took the reins at the DNC in August 2016. Brazile had been tapped for the job when DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign. Leaked emails had shown how Schultz had been putting her finger on the scale to help Clinton while the insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign was making a serious bid to seize the party nomination away from New York’s favorite carpetbagger.

Her account features ridiculous and unbelievable melodramatics — she says she “gasped” when she found out the truth and that she “lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music” to calm her before she called Sanders to deliver the awful news.

But silly though Brazile’s prose is, her account is vitally important not only for all those who want to understand how American politics works but also for the future of Brazile’s beloved party.

First, it raises key questions about what was happening as Clinton faced a time of trial in the middle of 2015. Her reputation was taking hits as her evasions and denials and untruths about what had happened to the private email server she had set up illegitimately in 2009 seemed to mushroom on a daily basis.

As this was happening, she found herself with only two semi-serious challengers for the nomination — Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

There was another person out there — then-Vice President Joe Biden. Though grieving over the tragic loss of his son Beau, Biden was still seriously considering a late entry into the race. Indeed, it would not be until October that Biden would declare himself out of contention.

Consider, then, that a formal agreement signed by the DNC and the Clinton campaign was executed in August 2015, two months before Biden made his decision.

The agreement, according to Brazile, “specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.”

Since assuming office, the Trump administration has been dogged by allegations of either harboring or promoting anti-Semitism. This false narrative has primarily been spearheaded by Trump’s detractors whose motives are at best questionable.

The sudden interest in the subject of anti-Semitism by the Left is puzzling to say the least. During Obama’s tenure, there were over 7,000 recorded acts of Jew-hatred in the United States, many of which occurred at America’s institutions of higher learning. Campus hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have been the driving force behind Judeophobic activities on college campuses. Yet the New York Times, Washington Post and other establishment media outlets have been largely silent on the issue of Islamist inspired anti-Semitism.

Few among the Left took the Obama administration to task for failing to recognize the seriousness of the situation. Obama exhibited little interest in addressing this scourge and seemed content with limiting his anti-Jewish bias initiatives to hosting yearly Passover Seders with his obsequious friends and wishing Jews a Happy New Year on Rosh Hashanah. Obama’s allies, including those within the establishment media, seemed content with this do-nothing approach.

Contrary to what the establishment media and many within the Left would have us believe, it is in fact the Obama administration that allowed the malevolent cancer of antisemitism to fester and expand. By contrast, the Trump administration has adopted a robust, proactive approach toward combatting antisemitism both nationally and internationally.

Last week, Trump appointed Kenneth L. Marcus assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education. Marcus has been an outspoken critic of the Office for Civil Rights under Obama’s term for what he characterized as its failure to address anti-Semitic incidents masquerading as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism. In 2010 he wrote, “On college campuses — and especially in protests brought by the anti-Israel boycotts, divestment and sanctions movement — it is now widely understood that attacking ‘Jews’ by name is impolitic, but one can smear ‘Zionists’ with impunity.”

Marcus advocates the use of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to combat anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activity on college campuses. Under Title VI, “If a recipient of federal assistance is found to have discriminated and voluntary compliance cannot be achieved, the federal agency providing the assistance should either initiate fund termination proceedings or refer the matter to the Department of Justice for appropriate legal action.” The statute has teeth, and universities falling into non-compliance risk losing taxpayer funding.

The appointment, which barely registered a blip on the mainstream media’s radar, was highly significant for those monitoring incidents of Jew-hate on college campuses and comes of the heels of a revealing report issued by the campus watchdog group AMCHA, documenting how pro-BDS faculty pose a direct threat to Jewish students.

Past reports submitted by AMCHA documented the direct link between Muslim Brotherhood front groups like the SJP, and anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses. For example, According to AMCHA, anti-Semitic incidents are eight times more likely to occur at the universities that host groups like the SJP and its alter ego, the Muslim Student Association (MSA). The new study however, provides troubling proof of the existence of a direct link between pro-BDS faculty and anti-Semitic activity.

“The studies found that schools with one or more faculty boycotters were between four and seven times more likely to play host to incidents of anti-Jewish hostility, and the more faculty boycotters on a campus, the greater the likelihood of such anti-Semitic acts.”

President Trump and congressional Republicans unveiled their huge tax reform bill focused on the middle class yesterday, promising the proposed “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” will stimulate strong economic growth as it makes the mammoth, out-of-control tax code simpler and fairer.

The proposal is “a great bill,” and “another important step toward providing massive tax relief for the American people,” the president said, adding he hoped the measure will become law before Christmas.

“Today is a great day for the American worker,” Trump said. “Over the past 10 months, we’ve witnessed something remarkable happening to our country, a lot of change, a lot of difference. We’ve hit close to 60 records in the stock market since November 8, that very big day,” Trump said, a reference to the day he was elected president.

“Ninety-five percent of people will be able to fill out a tax form the size of a postcard,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) said.

“It’s going to make life very simple,” Trump said. “The only people that aren’t going to like this is H&R Block, they’re not going to be very happy.”

The promise of tax reform has already gotten the Singapore-based high-tech business Broadcom Limited to commit to returning to the United States where it was founded, Trump said. “With this commitment, more than $20 billion in annual revenue will come back to our cities, towns, and the American workers.”

At the White House, the head of Broadcom, Hock Tan, explained that he is an American, “as are nearly all my direct managers, my board members, and over 90 percent of my shareholders. So today, we are announcing that we are making America home again.”

“Our commitment to re-domicile into the United States is a huge reaffirmation to our shareholders, to the 7,500 employees we have across 24 states in America today, that America is once again the best place to lead a business with a global footprint.”

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) yesterday unveiled the “chairman’s mark,” an early version of the legislation. Undoubtedly changes will be made when Brady’s committee takes up the measure, a process expected to begin next week. The Senate and its committees of jurisdiction will also weigh in. There is a chance the legislation will be substantially rewritten over the weekend before the markup in the Ways and Means Committee.

The reform plan would collapse the current seven individual income tax brackets – 10, 15, 25, 28, 33, 35, and 39.6 percent into just four – 12, 25, 35, and 39.6 percent – according to a summary of major details of the legislation provided by Jared Walczak and Amir El-Sibaie of the Tax Foundation.

The retention of the top marginal rate of 39.6 percent is an example of a pointless appeasement effort aimed at social justice warriors. The gambit has already failed. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) is already portraying the tax plan as a giveaway to “the wealthiest one percent” of Americans “at the expense of the great middle class.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) decried the plan as “everything America doesn’t want,” adding, “like a fish, if it stays out in the sunlight too long, it stinks.”

The proposed tax cuts aren’t enough for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). “If you don’t cut the top 1 percent, you don’t really have a significant tax cut,” Paul said. “What they’ve done is, they’ve bought into the class warfare on the individual side.” Those at “the top part of the spectrum” need tax relief “because the top part of the spectrum pays most of the taxes.”

“We have to understand that the owners of our businesses — the people we work for — are richer than us. They pay more taxes,” he said. “But if you lower their taxes, they will either buy stuff or hire more people. If you raise their taxes, it goes into the nonproductive economy, which is Washington, D.C., and it will be squandered.”

“So at the top, there’s not going to be much of a tax cut. There will be some. And in the middle, there’s going to be a little bit — there’s mostly going to be eliminating deductions. And at the bottom, the bottom already don’t pay much income tax and will continue not to pay much income tax,” Paul said.

Lowering the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, as proposed, however, would “be huge” for the country, he said.

The best news out of this is, lowering the corporate rate will help the country. And I think we will see growth. Already we’re seeing about 3 percent growth in the country because of the enthusiasm for President Trump and his policies. I think we’re going to get 4 or 5 percent growth if we get this thing through, within a year or two.

The standard deduction for single personal income tax filers will rise from the current $6,350 to $12,000, according to the Tax Foundation. For heads of household, it will jump from $9,350 to $18,000. For married couples, it will climb from $12,700 to $24,000. The additional standard deduction and the personal exemption will be eliminated. The alternative minimum tax (AMT) on both individuals and corporations will be abolished.

Charitable deductions will remain but the property tax deduction will be capped at $10,000. The remaining state and local tax deductions and other itemized deductions will be eliminated. The proposal on state and local taxes is already running into opposition from lawmakers representing high-tax states. Chairman Brady has acknowledged the concerns of blue-state Republicans and is trying to come up with a compromise.

The mortgage interest deduction will be retained but will be capped at $500,000 of principal for new home purchases. The construction industry seems certain to fight the change. There will also be changes to the exclusion of capital gains on home sales. The moving deduction, educator expense deduction, and exclusions for employer-dependent care programs, among others, will be eliminated.

The plan would not eliminate the tax penalty established under Obamacare for failure to have health insurance, as some had hoped.

On Wednesday President Trump had seemed to hint repeal of the provision was in the works. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he tweeted, “to Repeal the very unfair and unpopular Individual Mandate in ObamaCare and use those savings for further Tax Cuts[.]”

The health care expense deduction, first instituted during World War II, would be scrapped, according to Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News. Only taxpayers whose medical expenses exceed 10 percent of their adjusted gross income may take advantage of it.

Because of that threshold, and because it is available only to people who itemize their deductions, the medical expense deduction is not used by many people — an estimated 8.8 million claimed it on their 2015 taxes, according to the IRS.

But those 8.8 million tax filers claimed an estimated $87 billion in deductions; meaning that those who do qualify for the deduction have very high out-of-pocket health costs.

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, said getting rid of the deduction was “anti-senior.”

The Ways and Means Committee denies that gutting the deduction would “be a financial burden.”

Our bill lowers the tax rates and increases the standard deduction so people can immediately keep more of their paychecks — instead of having to rely on a myriad of provisions that many will never use and others may use only once in their lifetime.

Changes will be made to the regime of family tax credits.

The personal exemption for dependents will be replaced with a child tax credit that will rise from the current $1,000 to $1,600. The phaseout threshold will go from $115,000 to $230,000 for those filing as married. “The first $1,000 would be refundable, increasing with inflation up to the $1,600 base amount,” according to the Tax Foundation. There will also be “a new $300 nonrefundable personal credit and a $300 nonchild dependent nonrefundable credit, subject to phaseout. The $300 credit expires after 5 years.”

Grave-robbing will be phased out. The widely hated tax on dying after a lifetime of paying taxes will be abolished after six years. In the meantime, the estate tax exemption will go up to $10 million, which will be indexed for inflation.

The corporate income tax rate would fall to 20 percent from the current 35 percent. Trump had pushed a 15 percent rate during the election campaign. There would be a new 25 percent maximum tax rate on pass-through business income, which would be subject to anti-abuse rules.

Slashing the corporate income tax rate “is an extremely important move,” according to Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center. “We still need to see how they will treat revenue earned overseas to assess the corporate plan fully.”

The reform proposal would do away with the Section 199 manufacturing deduction and the New Market Tax Credit along with “like-kind exchanges for personal property (retained for real property), and deductions for entertainment.” It also cancels “credits for orphan drugs, private activity bonds, energy, rehabilitation, and contributions for capital, among others,” according to the Tax Foundation.

The plan also appears to drive a stake through the heart of the extraterritorial enforcement of U.S. tax laws, moving to “a territorial tax system, in which foreign-source dividends and profits of U.S. companies are not subject to U.S. tax upon repatriation.” The move will lead to the repatriation of trillions of dollars from outside the country, the Trump administration says. Extraterritoriality in tax law is destructive, eliminating the possibility of countries competing to be tax havens, and used to be considered fundamentally unfair in this nation of ours that was founded on limited government principles.

As the Supreme Court articulated in 1991 in EEOC v. Aramco, it is widely accepted nowadays that “Congress has the authority to enforce its laws beyond the territorial boundaries of the United States,” but it hasn’t always been that way. Taxing Americans overseas had long been considered an abuse of the government’s powers until the modern era.

In the 1909 Supreme Court case, American Banana Co. v. United Fruit Co., Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced what is now called the “presumption against extraterritoriality,” expressing his disgust that the U.S. could apply its laws to other sovereign countries. In Holmes’ time, “U.S. law was based almost exclusively on the territorial principle – the idea that the power of American law ends at the country’s boundaries,” according to law professor William S. Dodge.

It’s important to remember that Thursday’s roll-out of the House plan for pro-growth tax reform is just the first step in a long legislative path. It’s important to remember that the current economic recovery, slow as it’s been, is getting very old and won’t last forever. It’s important to remember that health care policy remains unreformed. Stocks are not cheap and the federal debt is not small. Last week this column noted that it’s still too early to call Trumponomics a success. Still, recent news is making it harder to stifle a sense of optimism about the prospects for American revival.

The National Federation of Independent Business survey of owners of small firms shows another solid month of job creation in October and there’s more good news for both longtime employees and recent hires: “Owners are raising compensation at rates not seen since 2000,” says NFIB chief economist William Dunkelberg.

Long term, workers need to keep getting more efficient at making goods and services to earn raises. Across the economy, there’s good news on that front as well. The Journal reports:

U.S. workers boosted output per hour this summer at the best rate in three years, a sign that long sluggish productivity gains might finally be breaking out.

Nonfarm business-sector productivity, measured as the goods and services produced per hour worked, increased at a 3.0% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter, the Labor Department said Thursday. The gain was better than economists had expected and the largest quarterly improvement since the third quarter of 2014.

Last quarter’s increase could be skewed due to the effects of the recent hurricanes, but the broader trend points to firmer productivity gains after the measure trended near zero much of 2015 and 2016. Through the first nine months of this year, worker productivity advanced at a 1.5% annual rate—putting 2017 on pace to be the best year for efficiency gains since 2010, when the economy was first emerging from a deep recession.

Employers and employees are still waiting for the promised tax relief from Washington but it seems that other parts of the Trump agenda are beginning to have an impact. This morning your humble correspondent was fortunate to appear on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business program and also fortunate to be able to ask Mike Ryan of UBS about the impact of the Trump deregulatory agenda. Mr. Ryan, who is the chief investment officer for the Swiss bank’s wealth management business in the Americas, said that Washington’s new regulatory restraint is not only fostering business confidence but already helping companies improve earnings. Mr. Ryan added that the benefits go beyond the repeal of particular burdensome rules. He said that ”stopping the regulatory encroachment”—providing assurance that Washington is not preparing to spring expensive new surprises on the private economy—is a boon to business investment.

As of the start of October, federal red tape scorekeeper Wayne Crews found that Mr. Trump was off to an historic beginning. Mr. Crews measures the number of pages of new and proposed rules spewing forth from Washington. Last month he reported:

The Federal Register stands at 45,678 pages. Last year at this time, Barack Obama’s Federal Register stood at 67,900 pages. (Obama’s 2016 Federal Register set an all-time-record: 97,110 pages).

Compared to Obama at this time last year, Trump’s page count is down 32 percent so far in his first year.

It took a few years for Ronald Reagan to achieve his ultimate, one-third reduction in Federal Register pages following Jimmy Carter’s then-record Federal Register. So by this metric, Trump is moving much faster. CONTINUE AT SITE

A new report tallying the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States from the beginning of the year through the end of September found a 67 percent surge compared to last year.

The Anti-Defamation League audit found the greatest increases in schools, with jumps in bullying and vandalism seen from grade school through college.

A bump in anti-Semitic incidents was also recorded after the August “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., at which one counterprotester was killed when a suspect photographed earlier in the day with white supremacists ran his car into a group of demonstrators.

In the first three quarters of the year in 2016, there were 779 reported anti-Semitic incidents, including 29 cases of assault, 322 cases of harassment and 428 cases of vandalism.

In the first three quarters of this year, harassment reports more than doubled: there were 1,299 reported anti-Semitic incidents, including 12 cases of assault, 703 cases of harassment and 584 cases of vandalism.

ADL CEO and national director Jonathan A. Greenblatt said he was “astonished and horrified” by the steep rises in anti-Semitic incidents.

“While the tragedy in Charlottesville highlighted this trend, it was not an aberration,” Greenblatt said in a statement. “Every single day, white supremacists target members of the Jewish community — holding rallies in public, recruiting on college campuses, attacking journalists on social media, and even targeting young children.”

Greenblatt said many school incidents go unreported. “We are deeply troubled by the rising number of anti-Semitic incidents, bullying, and hate in our nation’s schools and we don’t think the statistics paint a full picture of what is happening,” he said.

In Healdsburg, Calif., in May, students taunted a sixth-grade boy with swastikas and lighters, telling him he would burn “like they did in the Holocaust.” In Radington Beach, Fla., in March, a Jewish student was taunted with Holocaust memes and a classmate drew a swatiska and concentration camp prison number on his arm. In Longmont, Colo., in April, a Jewish high school student who had been the target of anti-Semitic slurs for weeks was assaulted.

After Charlottesville, where white nationalist demonstrators carried Nazi imagery and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” the daily average of 2.36 anti-Semitic incidents rose to 4.3 per day.

The ADL’s global index of anti-Semitic sentiment around the world found in 2015 that 10 percent of Americans, or some 24 million Americans, hold anti-Semitic views, with even distribution across gender, age groups and religion. Thirty-three percent polled on a number of canards said Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, 16 percent said Jews have too much power in the business world, 16 percent said Jews have too much power in international financial markets, 20 percent said Jews talk about the Holocaust too much, and 14 percent said people hate Jews because of the way they behave. CONTINUE AT SITE

Virginia’s gubernatorial race was rocked recently by a commercial, paid for by the Latino Victory Fund, depicting a white man trying to run down a group of nonwhite children with his pickup truck. As a black boy and a girl wearing a hijab walk on a peaceful sidewalk, they hear the roar of a turbocharged engine, and a companion yells, “Run!” The truck, flying the Confederate battle flag, and bearing a don’t tread on me Gadsden-flag license plate in front, is otherwise unadorned, except for a gillespie for governor bumper sticker, as its driver aims to slaughter the innocent kids. Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate in what has become a national bellwether campaign, is presented as the standard-bearer for white racist political violence.

Just a few days after the ad aired, of course, a Muslim terrorist from Uzbekistan drove a truck into a walkway of pedestrians and bicyclists in Manhattan. Sayfullo Saipov was devoted to the triumph of the Islamic State and the preservation of its vanishing caliphate. The Latino Victory Fund’s anti-Gillespie commercial would have been more accurate if its pickup-truck driver had turned out to be the dad of the little hijabi girl running for her life.

The ad was pulled after yesterday’s attack. “We knew our ad would ruffle feathers,” said Latino Victory Fund president Cristóbal Alex, as if congratulating himself. Alex didn’t address the cognitive dissonance that his commercial would surely evoke in any informed viewer, or the inversion of reality that is the hallmark of leftist political rhetoric about immigration and the jihadi threat. The Virginia governor’s race has focused heavily on the immigration debate, with Gillespie—who holds positions somewhat to the left of the national Republican Party on amnesty and reform—taking a firm stance in favor of enforcement against illegal immigrant gang members, including MS-13, which has a strong presence in Virginia. Democratic candidate Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam has focused his campaign on the blue suburbs of northern Virginia, reaching out especially to the state’s expanding Asian population.

Casting electoral politics as the old, white America versus the new, vibrant, multiethnic America is a seductive strategy for Democrats, who can’t resist looking at actuarial charts and population graphs that show a nonwhite-majority electorate by 2050, at the latest. But as Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2016 campaign demonstrated, politicians must be elected by today’s voters, not tomorrow’s. The “inevitability” strategy backfires, in part because white voters generally don’t like being told to expedite and celebrate their coming demise.

The strategy also backfires because rhetoric about the wonders of unfettered immigration meets the reality of horrible terrorism committed by immigrants or their children. The Latino Victory Fund—whose very name suggests ethnic triumphalism—tried to cast even mild immigration-restrictionist sentiment as white supremacism, and to depict Charlottesville murderer James Fields as the typical Gillespie voter. But the reality of terrorism in America is that it is widely and correctly associated with political Islam.

New York City is an incredibly diverse place.

Here, an Uzbek Muslim immigrant in on a visa diversity lottery can run over Argentinian tourists, an Egyptian-Palestinian Muslim can shoot a Danish musician on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, Saudi Muslims can fly planes into the World Trade Center killing people from 77 countries, an Afghan Muslim can plant pressure cooker bombs in Chelsea, a Lebanese Muslim can open fire on a van of Jewish students and a Pakistani-Kuwaiti and Iraqi Muslim can bomb the World Trade Center.

Truly, diversity is our terror.

Nationally, the perpetrators and plotters of Islamic terrorism in just the last ten years have included Pakistanis (San Bernardino, Garland, UC Merced), Chechens (Boston Marathon bombing), Afghans (Orlando shootings), Somalis (Portland Christmas Tree bomb plot, Minnesota mall stabbing, Ohio State Car Ramming, Columbus Machete Attack), Palestinians (Fort Hood, Chattanooga recruitment shootings) and Iraqis (Bowling Green plot).

That’s a whole lot of diversity. And it’s killing us.

What do an Uzbek and an Algerian have in common that makes them both want to kill people in New York City? Their native countries are thousands of miles apart and they don’t even share a common language or culture. They do however share a common religion that tells them to kill non-Muslims.

Diversity is a strength of Islamic terrorists. It unites Chechen-Avar mutts like the Tsarnaev brothers who set off a pressure cooker bomb in Boston with the Nigerian ‘Underwear Bomber”, and the Palestinians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Somalis, Egyptians, Iraqis, Saudis, Lebanese, Syrians, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians and Afghans bombing, stabbing, ramming and shooting their way across America and Europe.

Islam unites Muslims from around the world around the high purpose of killing non-Muslims.

Muslims don’t get along with each other. That’s why there are Sunnis fighting Shiites in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It’s why Al Qaeda, ISIS and assorted Islamists were fighting each other in Syria. But what they’re fighting over is who gets to kill, conquer and enslave the rest of the world. They’re pushing and shoving each other to be the first in line to bring terror and death to the entire planet.

Their diversity has a common purpose. Our diversity is expressed in our victimhood.

Brits die in New York and Americans die in London. Italians and Germans are wounded in Barcelona. Spanish citizens, Italians and an Israeli woman fall victim to an attack in Berlin. A German teacher and two students die in a terrorist attack in Nice. Americans die in Paris, in London and in Jerusalem.

But that’s where our diversity ends. It doesn’t unite us. Instead it divides us.

American and European governments threaten to sanction Burma for fighting Muslim terrorism. The White House pressures Israel to make concessions to Palestinian Islamic terrorists. The British, Canadian and German governments criticize the White House for a Muslim travel ban. We back our Islamic terrorists and the Russians back theirs. Argentina, where most of the victims in the New York terror attack came from, conducted a government cover-up of Iran’s role in the AMIA bombing.

This is what our diversity looks like. Instead of standing together and forming a common front against a civilizational enemy, we sell each other out to show our Islamic foes that we’re really on their side.

And hope they kill us last.

“The last thing we should do is start casting dispersions on whole races of people or whole religions or whole nations,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio insisted. “That only makes the situation worse.”

Since Robert S. Mueller has pursued President Trump’s people so aggressively, we need to go back to the letter which appointed him as special prosecutor. It told him to look for signs of coordination between Trump’s campaign supporters and the Russian government. But that’s not all it said. The overarching purpose of Mueller’s appointment was “to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”

The distinction matters. There’s nothing wrong with seeking a rapprochement with the Russians. Sure, I know they’ve been beastly. But those are precisely the kinds of people you want to rein in, and the best way of doing so is by opening up a dialogue with them. There are deals waiting to be made with them, good for them, good for us, good even for the Ukrainians and Syrians.

If thinking like that is a crime, then I have to plead guilty. With my wife and Bob Tyrrell, I helped draft Trump’s major campaign speech on foreign policy, which he delivered at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel on April 27, 2016. In it, we had inserted some language signaling a willingness to reach out to Russia. “We can see how the rapid expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia might have troubled it, how it might have been taken as a threat,” we wrote. That line, perhaps too fawning, didn’t make it into the speech as delivered, and what was substituted was “Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out.”

So are there foreign policy thought crimes now? Have foreign policy differences been criminalized? That’s what you’d think, reading the Washington Post on Tuesday morning. “Trump Official Urged Russian Outreach,” blared the headline. Well, how bout dat? Cash me outside.

Suppose next that, unlike me, the Trump official tries to broker a meeting with Russian officials, as George Papadopoulos did. But if you want a rapprochement with Russia, just how would you go about doing that, except by taking to Russians? Papadopoulos also wanted the trove of Hillary Clinton emails the Russians supposedly had. These were emails that she had illegally withheld, and that would have gone to the question of Russian interference in the election. Except nothing happened. Papadopoulos was a naïf who believed he was dealing with Putin’s niece when a casual perusal of Wikipedia would have told him that Putin doesn’t have a niece. As a private citizen, Papadopoulos did try to reach out to Russian officials, and in theory that would be a breach of the 1799 Logan Act, but that’s a dead letter. No one has been prosecuted under it, and it’s openly broken by people from both parties. Such as Obama. So they didn’t charge Papadopoulos with that.

So what did they get Papadopoulos for? The crime of talking to the feds without a lawyer at his side. They charged him with the crime of making a false statement about something which, had he told the truth, would not have been a crime. That’s how they nailed Martha Stewart, and that’s the crime to which Papadopoulos pled guilty.

And just what were the lies? Papadopoulos told the FBI that he had met a British academic and “Putin’s niece” before he joined the campaign. It turns out that he met them only after he did so. The FBI says that impeded their investigation, but can anyone explain why it might have made a difference? If you’re looking for coordination, the timing doesn’t matter if the discussions with the foreign nationals were ongoing, as they were.

Reform in Washington is always difficult, but at the Environmental Protection Agency it’s also dangerous. Since the Trump Administration took office, the agency has investigated more than 70 credible threats against EPA staffers, with a disproportionate number menacing Administrator Scott Pruitt and his family. The EPA responded by beefing up his security detail, but Mr. Pruitt’s political opponents are now trying to hold these warranted precautions against him.

Mr. Pruitt has received more than five times as many threats as his predecessor, Gina McCarthy. These include explicit death threats. Some have referenced Mr. Pruitt’s home address. Federal law enforcement has determined that some of those threatening Mr. Pruitt are likely capable of carrying out acts of violence. EPA security has already caught suspects prowling around the administrator’s neighborhood.

Mr. Pruitt would doubtless prefer the absence of threats to the presence of security. But his critics have suggested he’s part of the problem. Mr. Pruitt is a “pallid, oily anti-environment corporate shill,” SFGate columnist Mark Morford wrote last week, and “when you send death threats to the world and all who live on her, the world will, quite naturally, send them right back.”

Reps. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) and Grace Napolitano (Calif.) have called for the inspector general to launch an investigation into Mr. Pruitt’s security measures. The expenditures “constitute potential waste or abuse of taxpayer dollars,” they wrote in an Oct. 4 letter. The duo also claimed that “there is no apparent security threat against the Administrator to justify such a security detail or expenditures.”

But the EPA inspector general’s office—in addition to the agency’s criminal enforcement division and protective service—recommended 24/7 security for Mr. Pruitt based on the unprecedented threats. A lean team of agents share the responsibility for safeguarding Mr. Pruitt, and their salaries will cost taxpayers roughly $2 million a year. The EPA’s other safety precautions include a $15,780 upgrade of the card-access system in EPA offices.

Mr. Pruitt didn’t invent these threats, and Cabinet members shouldn’t have to fear violence as a price of public service. When the federal government protects Cabinet members from those who would harm them for doing their jobs, it is protecting American democracy.

President Trump’s declaration that opioid abuse is a public-health emergency is sparking debate about addiction. Tragically, myths and misinformation are blocking the path to preventing more deaths.

Start with the causes of the opioid crisis. On “Face the Nation,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, chair of Trump’s opioid commission, blamed over-prescribing doctors. “This crisis started not on a street corner somewhere. This crisis started in the doctor’s offices and hospitals of America.” That’s untrue, Governor.

It contradicts scientific evidence and lets drug abusers off the hook. At least three quarters of opioid-pill abusers and almost all heroin addicts got hooked without ever having been prescribed pain medication for an injury or illness, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Emergency-room records show only a fraction — 13 percent — of opioid-overdose victims began taking drugs because of pain, according to the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine. The media feature many stories about patients who needed pain killers and later became addicts, but these are exceptions, not the rule.

Experimenting with opioids — whether heroin or pills — is almost always a choice. A bad choice. Young adults account for 90 percent of first-time abusers. To protect the next generation from making that mistake, Trump proposes a “massive advertising campaign to get people, especially children, not to want to take drugs in the first place.” The liberal media mock Trump’s proposal as a throwback to the 1980s, but in fact he’s on the mark.

For decades, popular music has glamorized drug use. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel pays lip service to tackling tough political issues, but his guest line-up this week includes Ty Dolla $ign, whose music videos showcase drug use.

Trump’s offering an alternative message. History proves it can work. In 2012 and 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ran hard-hitting and graphic ads against smoking, with ex-smokers talking about their own lung disease, cancer, and other miseries. The ads cut smoking among youth and convinced 400,000 smokers to quit for good.

Trump’s campaign should be just as terrifying. Show hospitalized teens with their arms amputated because of infections from heroin needles and brain-damaged overdose victims in nursing homes.

Warning about opioid abuse sounds like a no-brainer. So why do activists like Kassandra Frederique and Dionna King of the Drug Policy Alliance deplore “the persistent stigma of drug use”? As if we’re not supposed to hurt addicts’ feelings. With drug overdose deaths at record highs, that’s misguided.

You no longer see smoking in movies or on television. Stigmatizing cigarettes worked. So why de-stigmatize opioids? We can help those already hooked without doing that.

Christie calls addiction a “disease.” It’s true that some people succumb to it more than others. But new research suggests the disease metaphor could be hurtful. Addicts who believe they have the free will to quit have a much higher success rate than those who think of themselves as diseased, according to new research from the University of Minnesota and Florida State University. Quitting Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s isn’t possible, but getting off drugs is.

Harvard professor Gene Heyman insists addicts can choose to stop using drugs once “the penalties for excessive use become overwhelming,” such as losing their job or kids.