RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who has decided not to seek re-election, has lately been trading insults with President Trump over social media—and via traditional media as well. Mr. Corker seems to be enjoying his new freedom to speak his mind without the normal political restraints, and perhaps this can be written off as the congressional equivalent of senioritis. But even if voters no longer get to issue a report card on the good senator, perhaps a little context is in order.

While our President seems to have a knack for getting into ugly public disputes, a timeline constructed by CNN suggests that in this case Mr. Corker has been the aggressor. His criticisms have not been subtle. The senator has repeatedly attacked the President’s competence, stability and integrity.

Since Mr. Corker has lately been issuing public judgments about Mr. Trump’s integrity, it should also be noted–and here, too the CNN timeline is instructive–that Mr. Corker’s comments about Mr. Trump in 2016 were much more favorable than in 2017.

This is interesting because in 2016 Mr. Corker was under consideration for various jobs in a Trump Administration. It is also interesting because if one has sincere concerns about a candidate’s fitness for office, airing them before the election is obviously more valuable to voters than withholding them until after all the votes have been cast. It is also interesting that someone could listen to Mr. Trump for years, including during the long campaign of 2015-2016, and then decide–after observing him assemble a blue-chip cabinet–that he is somehow unfit to lead.

Now Mr. Corker is telling Mr. Trump to butt out of congressional discussions on how to fit all the party’s tax reform priorities into a package that cuts taxes by only $1.5 trillion over 10 years. This seems like the appropriate moment to note that Mr. Corker is the reason why the party has to hold such a difficult discussion. He would only agree to $1.5 trillion in a negotiation with Sen. Pat Toomey and others who wanted to cut more. CONTINUE AT SITE

The chairmen of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees on Tuesday announced a joint investigation into how the FBI handled last year’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of State.

“Decisions made by the Department of Justice in 2016 have led to a host of outstanding questions that must be answered,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in a joint statement.
The two Republican leaders said they have questions about the FBI’s decision to openly declare the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information, while quietly investigating Trump campaign associates.

They said they also want to know why the FBI decided to formally notify Congress of the Clinton probe on two separate occasions; why the FBI — rather than the Justice Department — recommended that Clinton not be charged after the investigation concluded; and the reasoning behind their timeline for announcing such decisions.

“The Committees will review these decisions and others to better understand the reasoning behind how certain conclusions were drawn. Congress has a constitutional duty to preserve the integrity of our justice system by ensuring transparency and accountability of actions taken,” their statement continued.

Former FBI director James Comey apparently began drafting his statement that the FBI would not recommend charges months before his July 2016 announcement.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) first announced in late August that Comey had drafted a statement on Clinton months before making a public statement, saying the decision was drawn up “before the FBI had interviewed key witnesses.”

The revelation sparked a flurry of questions about why Comey waited months after beginning to draft a statement to announce the end of the investigation in the midst of a heated presidential race.

President Trump fired Comey earlier this year, citing his handling of the Clinton probe. Special counsel Robert Mueller, however, is investigating whether Trump fired Comey to obstruct justice in the Russia probes. Comey was leading the inquiry at the time.

The top Democrats on these panels, Oversight’s Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Judiciary’s Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), slammed the decision as an attempt to distract the public eye from the Russia meddling investigation that they said is picking up speed.

A year ago this week, I flew to Cleveland, rented a car, and spent the next ten days driving across eastern Ohio and Pennsylvania, stopping in small towns and cities to talk to people about the upcoming presidential election.

Like most journalists and political pundits, I thought Hillary Clinton would win, but narrowly, in part because of places like Trumbull County, Ohio, and Luzerne County, Michigan—places that had historically voted Democrat but I thought might go for Trump. To use a now-cliché term, I suspected these “white working class” communities, many suffering from decades of industrial decline, felt left behind by the Democratic Party and ignored by the GOP. I thought voters frustrated by the establishment in Washington DC might just vote for a political novice like Trump, warts and all.

It turns out, I was right—more so than I realized. Enough people in the Rust Belt voted for Trump (against all expectations he won Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin) to hand him the Electoral College and send him to the White House. A year later, many media and political elites still don’t understand why or seem the least bit curious to find out. The mainstream media, convinced it’s the last line of defense against a fascist Trump regime bent on shredding the Constitution, has sunk to pedantic meme-making in response to credible charges of bias and incompetence in its coverage of the administration.

The Democratic Party has begrudgingly admitted it needs to talk more about the economy and reach out to voters in the middle, even as Democrats themselves have steadily moved left on everything from abortion to health care. For their part, Republicans continue to be divided among Never-Trumpers, befuddled conservatives, and pro-Trump populists who’ll support the president no matter what he says or how little his administration accomplishes.
Many Trump Voters Were Looking For a Scapegoat

Lost in all of this are the people across the Midwest who actually voted for Trump. They had their reasons, some of them good and some of them terrible. But a common theme was a seething discontent with the status quo, and not just the political establishment of the two major parties but also the media, which many people told me was part of the problem.

Oftentimes, this discontent was directed at the wrong things, the misfortunes of a town blamed on the wrong causes. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the town of East Liverpool, Ohio, a hollowed out place that sits on a bluff overlooking a bend in the Ohio River some 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. I stopped there on a weekday afternoon and found the downtown eerily silent and nearly abandoned.

One of the only storefronts that wasn’t boarded up or vacant was a gaming shop, video games and board games and such, whose owner, a heavyset woman in her fifties, was more than happy to talk politics. She was voting for Trump, she said, because she was sick of both parties and their inaction on illegal immigration, which she said was ruining the country.

At first, this struck me as odd. East Liverpool is the second largest town in Columbiana County, which is 95.5 percent white and virtually devoid of immigrants, legal or illegal. It’s possible the owner of that store had never encountered a single immigrant in her town. But when you consider what’s happened to East Liverpool, it makes sense that some residents would look for something or someone to blame.

Its industry—East Liverpool was once known as the “pottery capital of the world”—has been gutted by globalization. Its population has shriveled by more than half since 1970. Its claim to fame last summer was a Facebook post by the city police department that went viral: a photo of a man and woman slumped over in their car seats, mouths agape, overdosed on heroin while in the backseat, a four-year-old boy looks on.

Trump won 68 percent of the vote in Columbiana County. The last time the county went for a GOP presidential candidate by anything close to that margin was the 1928 election of Herbert Hoover.

It wasn’t just embittered small business owners in dying towns like East Liverpool who blamed Democrats or globalization on the problems they saw around them and saw a glimmer of hope in Trump. All across eastern Ohio I met Democrats who told me they were planning to vote for Trump: a woman in Youngstown who’d been a Democrat her entire life but was registering Republican this year and volunteering for the Trump campaign; a gay man in Akron whose small business was crushed by government regulations; a retired Army veteran in Warren who was sick of the Democratic Party’s leftward drift on social issues.

“Meanwhile, the administrative state expands, the debt is headed for $21 trillion, crass identity politics tear the nation apart, the effort to restore deterrence abroad grows ever more dangerous, and the campuses, Hollywood, the NFL, and the media are reminding us that progressive politics are now our culture’s orthodoxy, vital for success in nearly all fields. And dealing with all that is the only conservative fight that counts.”

For all the talk of a Civil War in the Republican party over Donald Trump, 90 percent of Republicans ended up voting for him.

Bitterness Over the 2016 Election?

So a vocal Never Trump Republican establishment had not much effect on the 2016 election. Voters do not carry conservative magazines to the polls. They are not swayed much by talking heads, and on Election Day they do not they print out conservative congressional talking points from their emails.

John McCain and Susan Collins are as renegade now as they were obstructionist in 2004. If in 2016 it is said that John McCain cannot forgive President Trump for his 2016 primary statements, it was also said in 2004 that John McCain could not forgive President Bush for how he won the 2000 primaries. Trump is called a Nazi and a fascist. But so was George W. Bush in 2006. Reagan in the campaign and during his first few months as president was slandered as a pleasant dunce as often as Trump is smeared as a mean dunce. If neocons are now on MSNBC in 2017 trashing a Republican president, paleocons were doing the same in 2006 over Iraq. Parties always have dissidents.

Donald Trump got about the same percentage of the Republican vote (about 90 percent) as John McCain won in 2008 — slightly less than Mitt Romney’s supposed 93 percent in 2012. If Romney’s 93 percent is the standard of party fealty (Obama usually pulled in about 92 percent of the Democratic vote), then it is hard to know whether the 3 percentage points fewer of Republicans who could not stomach McCain were about the same as the 3 percentage points fewer who were Never Trump. In either case, 90 percent party loyalty was not good enough for McCain, and even 93 percent did not win Romney an election. Both, unlike Trump, lost too many Reagan Democrats and Independents in the swing states of the Electoral College.

So the present civil war did not translate into much in 2016. United or divided, the Republicans have lost the popular vote in four out of the last five national elections — 2000, 2008, 2012, and 2016 — not because large numbers of Republicans voted for the Democratic candidate, but because there are not enough Republicans to begin with. And their candidates were not able to capture enough Independents and Democrats, or to motivate enough first-time or lapsed Republicans to register and turn out to vote, or to flip new demographic groups to conservatism.

Trump won no more of the voters who turned out and who identified as “conservative” than did Romney. But again, Trump apparently did get Democrats, Independents, and lapsed and previously uncounted Republicans to vote in key states in a way that Romney and McCain did not. The few Republicans that Trump lost were more than made up by others who were won over. (This raises the question of whether there was a cause-and-effect relationship between the two phenomena. But I doubt that the reason working-class voters turned out to vote for Trump was that most writers at National Review and The Weekly Standard were against him.)

There should not be any bitterness over the successful 2016 election, unless the pro-Trump side believes that they could have won the popular vote or more Senate seats if they’d had Never Trump support, or unless the Never Trumpers wish that more Republicans had stayed home or voted for some else. Otherwise, the civil war of opinion makers changed few opinions in 2016.

Ideological Fissures?

Among the voters themselves, the populist-nationalist wing is said to be irreconcilable with the establishment mainstream. But it is hard to see where too many of the lasting irreconcilable differences lie — other than the same old gripe over politicians who get entrenched in Washington and the “mavericks” who want to take their place and likely turn into what they once damned.

Both sides in the civil war favor increased investment in defense and especially missile defense. Both are mostly now foreign-policy realists in the sense that McMaster, Mattis, Kelly, Haley, Pompeo, Tillerson, and most of the cabinet could work in a Marco Rubio administration. Both factions are strong on the Second Amendment. Both favor bans on most forms of abortion. Both like Trump’s judicial appointments. Both oppose identity politics. On illegal immigration, the establishment opposes a wall and likely strict enforcement, but in any national election (see Romney’s 2012 positions), their view sounds no different from Trump’s. On Obamacare, the mainstream is a bit more reluctant to repeal rather than reform, but both sides may end up supporting either.

Progressives have taken their Trump derangement syndrome to a whole new level…

Thousands of anguished libs in Boston and Philadelphia will be taking part in scream fests on Nov. 8 to commemorate the anniversary of Donald Trump’s election. Liberals in other cities around the country are likely to step up to the crazy plate as well as the big day draws near.

Over 4,000 Facebook users in the Boston area have RSVP’d to attend the event they’re calling “Scream helplessly at the sky on the anniversary of the election.” Another 33,000 have expressed interest in attending the event at the 383-year-old Boston Common.

The organizers say in a Facebook post: “Come express your anger at the current state of democracy, and scream helplessly at the sky!”

“This administration has attacked everything about what it means to be American,” Johanna Schulman, an activist and one of the organizers of the event, told Newsweek. “Who wouldn’t feel helpless every day? Coming together reminds us that we are not alone, that we are part of an enormous community of activists who are motivated and angry, whose actions can make a difference.”

Their actions may make a difference, to be sure, but perhaps not in the way they are intending. The sight of these unhinged minions binging on bitterness, self-pity, and outrage coming together to collectively howl at the moon is something that will drive more Americans into the arms of Trump.

“While the event calls upon people to Scream Helplessly, we want to convert that sense of helplessness into resistance, into action, and maybe even into optimism,” Schulman told Newsweek. “Although it is important to acknowledge the tragedy that befell our country on November 9th, we cannot let it defeat us!”

In Philadelphia, 538 people also plan to “scream helplessly at the sky” to mark Trump’s one-year anniversary as seen in a similar Facebook post. More than 3,000 people are “interested” in attending the event.

The event description reads: “Let’s have a primal scream for the current state of our democracy! Gather together after work at Philadelphia’s City Hall.”

The event is hosted by Philly UP (Philadelphia United for Progress), which describes itself as a “grassroots, feminist, intersectional group of passionate Philadelphia progressives.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Once again, as in the case of Hillary and Uranium One, the search into alleged collusion between Team Trump and Russia has backfired with the announcement that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Tony Podesta, the brother of former Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, and the Podesta Group and its connections with Ukraine. Even Robert Mueller and his team of Democratic donors ad operatives sometimes go where the evidence really leads:

The probe of Podesta and his Democratic-leaning lobbying firm grew out of Mueller’s inquiry into the finances of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, according to the sources. As special counsel, Mueller has been tasked with investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Manafort had organized a public relations campaign for a non-profit called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECMU). Podesta’s company was one of many firms that worked on the campaign, which promoted Ukraine’s image in the West.

The sources said the investigation into Podesta and his company began as more of a fact-finding mission about the ECMU and Manafort’s role in the campaign, but has now morphed into a criminal inquiry into whether the firm violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, known as FARA.

There is more to this story than the legacy media has been willing to report to this point, including John Podesta’s dealings with Russia and Hillary and the Democratic Party’s collusion with Ukraine to slime Team Trump. John Podesta is the doofus whose password was found to be “password” in the Russian hacking investigation and may have violated federal disclosure laws for not disclosing he was paid to sit on the board of various Russian entities:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, may have violated federal law when he failed to fully disclose details surrounding his membership on the executive board of Joule Unlimited and the “75,000 common shares” he received. The energy company accepted millions from a Vladimir Putin-connected Russian government fund.

Podesta joined the executive board of Joule Unlimited Technologies — a firm partly financed by Putin’s Russia — in June 2011 and received 100,000 shares of stock options, according to an email uncovered by WikiLeaks. Podesta’s membership on the board of directors of Joule Unlimited was first revealed in research from Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer.

In a bombshell announcement, Judicial Watch announced that the State Department has not even searched the majority of Hillary Clinton emails that it obtained from the FBI during the criminal investigation into Clinton’s conduct as Secretary of State. In a statement on Monday, the transparency advocacy group declared that the State Department told a federal court that it has yet to process 40,000 of 72,000 pages of Clinton records that the FBI recovered last year. The revelation came during a federal court hearing in Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking the former top diplomat’s emails that were sent or received during her tenure from February 2009 to January 31, 2013 (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00687)).

The hearing before Judge James E. Boasberg, focused on the State Department’s processing of the tens of thousands of emails Clinton failed to disclose when she served as Secretary of State under Barack Obama. Some were sent by her top aide, Huma Abedin, and found by investigators on the laptop of her estranged husband Anthony Weiner. Thus far, the State Department has processed 32,000 pages of emails and released a small number. However, another 40,000 pages remain to be processed.

According to Judicial Watch, Judge Boasberg ordered the State Department on October 19 to “explain how its anticipated increase in resources will affect processing of records in this case and when the processing of each disk is likely to be completed.” The State Department under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions have previously argued before the court that there was diminished public interest in the Clinton emails.

In November 2016, the State Department was ordered to produce no less than 500 pages of records a month to Judicial Watch, emails of which the FBI found in its investigation into Clinton’s non-government email system. The State Department has produced 23 batches of documents so far. At the current pace, said a statement from Judicial Watch, the Clinton emails and other records won’t be fully available for possible release until at least 2020. Clinton attempted to delete 33,000 emails from her non-government server. The FBI investigation recovered or found a number of these missing emails, many of which were government documents.

The lawsuit was originally filed in May 2015.

Despite having both an expansive budget and a large legal team, Special Investigator Robert Mueller likely will not find President Trump culpable for any Russian collusion—or at least no court or congressional vote would, even if Mueller recommends an indictment.

That likelihood becomes clearer as the Trump investigators—in Congress, in the Justice Department, and the legions in the media—begin to grow strangely silent about the entire collusion charge, as other scandals mount and crowd out the old empty story. This news boomerang poses the obvious question—was the zeal of the original accusers of felony behavior with the Russian collusion merely an attempt at deflection? Was it designed to protect themselves from being accused of serious crimes?

What Did the FBI Do?
It was bad enough that the original narrative had the authors of the so-called Fusion GPS/Steele dossier leaking their smears to the media. Worse, the FBI, in the earlier fashion of the Clinton campaign, may have paid to obtain the Fusion concoction

Now it appears that some of the leakers who had the file in their possession also may have belonged to the American intelligence community. Did the FBI pass around its purchased smears to other intelligence agencies and the Obama administration in the unspoken hope that, in seeing the file had been so sanctioned and widely read, some intelligence operative or one of the Obama people would wink and nod as they leaked it to the press?

And why did the progenitors of the Steele dossier fraud—the Fusion GPS consortium and former Wall Street Journal reporters (a firm that had a prior history of smearing political enemies with “opposition research”) and working indirectly on behalf of Russian interests—reportedly behind closed doors invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying about the dossier, its origins, and its funding before the House Intelligence Committee?

Increasingly, James Comey seems to be caught in contradictions of his own making. The former FBI director may well have misled the U.S. Congress in deliberate fashion, both about the timeline of events that led him to recommend not charging Hillary Clinton and about his denials that the FBI had communications about the bizarre “accidental” meeting on an Arizona tarmac between the U.S. Attorney General and Bill Clinton. How does an FBI Director get away with leaking his own notes, ostensibly FBI property, to the media with the expressed intent of leveraging the selection of a special prosecutor, only to succeed in having his friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, appointed to that very post—an official who presumably and earlier had been investigating possible Clinton collusion with Russian uranium interests?

So Many Questions, So Few Answers
Apart from noting how strange and surreal it was, no one yet knows the full relationship between former Democratic National Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her IT “expert,” the now-indicted Imran Awan. Why would Wasserman-Schultz go out of her way to protect him and by extension his network from government investigations—even as Awan’s criminal familial enterprises, as well as his unauthorized and perhaps illegal conduct concerning government communications, were being exposed? Why is Awan apparently eager to talk to prosecutors about his relationships with Wasserman-Schultz and other congressional representatives? Why did an “in-the-know” Wasserman-Schultz apparently allow Awan to act so illegally for so long? In other words, the behavior of the former head of the DNC seems inexplicable.

After initial denials, Susan Rice now admits that she unmasked the names of private U.S. citizens swept up in Obama administration intelligence surveillance and seems to have no regrets about it. Samantha Power, the Obama administration’s former U.N. ambassador, does not deny that she, too, unmasked names—but strangely is reported to have argued that she was not responsible for all the unmaskings that appear under her authorizations on the transcripts. If true, does that astonishing statement mean that she has amnesia or that her own staff or others improperly used her name to access classified documents? Has anyone ever admitted to unmasking American citizens under surveillance, and then claimed that her authorizations were not as numerous as they appear in documents? And what were the connections between those who unmasked and those who illegally leaked information to the press?

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has broadened his investigation, originally focused on Donald Trump’s ties with Russia, to a major Hillary Clinton bundler who worked for Ukraine’s Party of Regions, a political group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, also worked for this party.

Recent reports have implicated Mueller in an alleged FBI cover-up. The FBI had been investigating the Russian firm Rosatom for years before the Obama administration approved its acquisition of 20 percent of U.S. uranium in the Uranium One deal. The FBI kept the investigation secret, even when it could have prevented such a monumental purchase.

At the same time, Hillary Clinton (who was on the very board which approved the Uranium One deal) stood to benefit from the deal, as a Russian bank promoting Uranium One stock had paid her husband half a million for a speech (and directed millions to Clinton Foundation-linked companies). At the same time, the FBI acted quickly to bust a Russian spy ring because it got too close to Clinton.

Mueller — who as head of the FBI seems likely to have known about the Rosatom investigation and covered it up, just as the FBI switched into overdrive to protect Hillary Clinton — has broadened his investigation of Trump-Russia into a line of questioning that might finally implicate the other side of the 2016 election, Clinton herself.

On Monday, NBC News reported that Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group are now the subjects of Mueller’s federal investigation. NBC News cited three unnamed sources, who may have leaked the information on Mueller’s orders — in order to suggest impartiality after these recent stories implicated Mueller.

The Podesta probe grew out of Mueller’s inquiry into Manafort’s finances, NBC News reported. Manafort had organized a public relations campaign for the non-profit European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECMU). The Podesta Group also worked on that campaign.

According to NBC News’ sources, the Podesta investigation began as a fact-finding mission about Manafort’s role in the ECMU, but later broadened into a criminal inquiry into whether or not the firm violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). [An allegation PJ Media reported last April.] That act requires those who lobby on behalf of foreign governments, leaders, or political parties to file disclosures about spending and activities with the Justice Department. CONTINUE AT SITE

Ever since it became clear back in 2015 that Donald Trump would be a serious candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Democrats have blasted him for supposedly “demonizing” his opponents and using highly aggressive statements to push his message. He wasn’t polite, he was stoking up tensions, and so on. You know the drill.

That kind of criticism coming from Democrats is absolutely fascinating because it’s so incredibly hypocritical. The politicians who demonize their opponents are Democrats. Case in point? Rep. Maxine Waters’ speech at the Ali Forney Center in New York City on October 13 where she said the following:

“I’m sitting here listening, watching, absorbing, thinking about Ali even though I never met him. And with this kind of inspiration, I will go and take Trump out tonight.”

“Take out Trump tonight”? Can you imagine the uproar such a statement would’ve caused if, say, Sen. Ted Cruz had said this about Barack Obama? Waters would’ve been all over TV arguing that Cruz called for Obama’s death, that Republicans are downright dangerous, and that Cruz is guilty of hate speech. But if she says something like this about a Republican president? Ah well, no biggy.

Obviously, statements like this one are incredibly troubling. As conservative radio talker Dana Loesch tweeted earlier today:
Dana Loesch

✔ @DLoesch

Some might say this type of talk from an elected official isn’t helpful. https://twitter.com/foxnews/status/922410086898814976 …

Include me in that “some,” because only a few months ago a leftist activist opened fire on congressional Republicans playing a game of baseball. In that shooting, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was severely wounded.

Waters and her ilk may defend her by arguing that she was talking about impeachment only, not about actual violence. OK, let’s assume that to be true. Doesn’t she realize that her words can be interpreted completely differently, especially by wackos with serious psychological issues? Or does she just not care?