RUTHFULLY YOURS

Christopher Wray was supposed to bring a new candor and credibility to the FBI after the James Comey debacle, but the country is still waiting. The director’s testimony Thursday to the House Judiciary Committee suggests he has joined the Justice Department effort to stop the public from learning about the bureau’s role in the 2016 election.

Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte invited Mr. Wray to answer the multiplying questions about the bureau’s 2016 political interference. This includes the role that the Steele dossier—opposition research financed by the Clinton campaign—played in the FBI’s decision to investigate the Trump presidential campaign. The committee also wants answers about reports that special counsel Robert Mueller demoted Peter Strzok, a lead FBI investigator in both the Trump and Hillary Clinton email investigations, after Mr. Strzok exchanged anti-Trump texts with his mistress, who also works at the FBI.

Mr. Wray spent five hours stonewalling. The director ducked every question about the FBI’s behavior by noting that the Justice Department Inspector General is investigating last year’s events.

Is Mr. Wray concerned that Mr. Strzok edited the FBI’s judgment of Mrs. Clinton’s handling of her emails to “extremely careless” from “grossly negligent” in a previous draft? The grossly negligent phrase might have put Mrs. Clinton in legal jeopardy, but Mr. Wray said he couldn’t answer because that is subject to the “outside, independent investigation.”

Is Mr. Wray taking steps to ensure his top ranks are free of political “taint”? He couldn’t say because of the “outside, independent” investigation.

Ohio Republican Jim Jordan noted that the only way for Congress to know if the FBI used the Steele dossier to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign is for the FBI to provide its application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “Is there anything prohibiting you from showing this committee [that application]?” Mr. Jordan asked.

It’s become de rigeur for public figures and media personalities to repeat the tired mantra: Always believe the women. This refers, of course, to any accusation of sexual harassment, no matter how far in the past it took place and even if it was interpreted at the time as innocent flirting.

Leftists seized on the harassment lawsuits that took place at the Fox News Network last year, when Andrea Tantaros, Gretchen Carlson, and other broadcasters walked away with multimillion-dollar settlements after accusing the late chairman, Roger Ailes, and the host with through-the-roof ratings, Bill O’Reilly, of sexual harassment.

Seeing that their Russian-collusion fairy tale was going in the wrong direction––indeed pointing every day to massive collusion between Democrats and Russia––the by-now hysterical anti-Trumpers figured that the sexual-harassment gig was a sure-fire way to bring down their nemesis and rake in some big bucks at the same time.

In true Keystone Kop form, however, it was overwhelmingly Democrats who started falling like flies––movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey, editor Leon Wieseltier, Today Show host Matt Lauer, comedian Louis C.K., Congressman John Conyers, Senator Al Franken, on and on.

But Republicans did not go unscathed. Judge Roy Moore, candidate for a senate seat in Alabama, whose accusers waited 40 years to come out of their victim closets, managed to spend those 40 years in public life, including running for office, without a single accusation being hurled in his direction.

What’s wrong with this picture?

For one thing––and it’s a big thing––all the people who say “always believe the women” are operating on the presumption of guilt! What happened to the constitutional right to the presumption of innocence, to innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?

Uh uh…not for the leftists who have spent the past fifty or more years crying “separation of church and state” to defend their loathing of Christianity, and “a woman’s right to choose” to defend their fetish for pre-birth infanticide. To them, ironically, the sanctity of the law stops, both figuratively and literally, when lawyer Gloria Allred enters the scene.

National Geographic teaches us that the growth and decay of swamp roots increase the accumulation of soil. The animals living in the swamp feed on fallen leaves and other material. The droppings of wildlife including animals, fish, and birds help fertilize the swamp. So it is in Washington – political animals, fish, birds, and plants living in a well-calibrated ecosystem dangerous to outsiders. President Trump has threatened the delicate balance of the established Washington swamp ecosystem and the swamp creatures are uniting to destroy him.

Swamp life and career politicians adapt to fluctuating water levels and weather conditions. Elections that destabilize the equilibrium are managed with absorption of the excess water and a return to the balance of nature that swamp life requires. President Trump has disrupted the status quo of political life in Washington and the establishment Democrat/Republican ecosystem is in total disarray and struggling to survive – they cannot resorb the water – they are desperate and determined to destroy the disruptor.

The current Mueller investigation is a joint effort of the Washington establishment to remove President Trump from office. Mueller’s “EPA” – Effort to Prove Anything – seeks to restore equilibrium to the corrupt political establishment. Political analyst Cliff Kincaid has written a superb article chronicling the troubling ascendance of Mueller.

Mueller, lauded as a non-partisan man of integrity by both Democrats and Republicans, has exposed himself as a primary swamp creature determined to destroy President Trump. So far Mueller’s “EPA investigation” into Russian meddling in the 2016 election has exonerated candidate Trump of any collusion and instead exposed secretary of state Hillary Clinton for actually colluding with the Russians to sell 20% of American uranium assets. No problem for swampster Mueller – in a move of stunning investigative overreach he simply expanded the scope of his witch hunt with a suspicious lack of opposition from Republicans. Currently the Mueller “EPA” is conducting an unauthorized, unrestricted, unlimited investigation into President Trump personally. Why?

It is always about the delicate balance of the ecosystem. President Trump promised America that he would grow the economy and drain the swamp to make America great again. Voters could finally see that career politicians like the Clintons, Pelosi, Obama, Bernie Sanders (the pretend socialist), Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell all came into office with very little and left as millionaires with full benefit packages guaranteed for life. Voters recognized that lawmakers were making laws that benefitted themselves at taxpayer expense. They could see the lives of the politicians improving but their own lives deteriorating. Voters were no longer satisfied with the established political ecosystem – they voted for change. They voted to drain the swamp.

On Friday, the woman who presented her yearbook as evidence that Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore sexually assaulted her admitted that she herself had written at least part of the inscription. Beverly Young Nelson, who is represented by notorious lawyer Gloria Allred, admitted to adding to Moore’s inscription, although she still claims he originally wrote it.

“He did sign it,” Nelson insisted to ABC News’ Tom Llamas. He asked her, “And you made some notes underneath?” She then admitted, “Yes.”

Last month, Nelson joined a chorus of accusers, claiming that Roy Moore groped and attempted to rape her when she was 16. To substantiate her claims, Nelson produced a yearbook with the inscription, “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say Merry Christmas. Christmas 1977. Love, Roy Moore… Roy Moore, DA. 12-22-77 Olde Hickory House.”

Allred, Nelson’s lawyer, originally said the entire message was penned by Moore, but on Friday Nelson revealed that at least the note “12-22-2017 Olde Hickory House” was her handwriting.

This may seem nit-picky, but Moore’s lawyer Phillip Jauregui raised questions about the alleged signature last month, noting that Moore’s signed name ended with the letters “D.A.” Moore was not a district attorney at the time, but an assistant district attorney.

Despite Nelson’s claim that she had never had contact with Moore since the alleged incident, she did actually interact with Moore in 1999, when she filed for divorce against her husband.

Jauregui noted that Moore’s assistant when he was presiding over Nelson’s divorce proceedings was named Delver Adams. Adams typically stamped his initials on court filings, leading to signatures reading “Roy Moore, D.A.” The presence of that “D.A.” after the signature and the fact that Nelson had a court action involving Moore in 1999 suggest the signature may be a forgery.

At the time of Jauregui’s statement, reporters noted that the “D.A.” from Adams did not look similar to the “D.A.” in the yearbook. That fact does not explain the existence of “D.A.” after Moore’s signature in the yearbook, however.

This admission might call the entire signature into question. Even if Nelson’s accusation is entirely false, however, there are still other women claiming Moore pursued them inappropriately when they were teenagers.

Gloria Allred did her side no favors by representing Nelson. As The Weekly Standard’s Chris Deaton reported, those who defend Moore despite the allegations cite Allred’s involvement as a reason. If the yearbook signature is indeed a forgery, that will diminish Allred’s credibility even further. CONTINUE AT SITE

Will he or won’t he?

Will President Trump order the disclosure of any warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the FISA Court) in which the Justice Department and FBI presented any information derived from the Steele dossier?

We don’t need to imperil national security. There is no need to disclose the entirety of any application. There is no need to expose intelligence sources or methods of gathering information — they can be redacted. We don’t even need to see any actual application; a declassified summary of the relevant information will do. We just need to know if what administration supporters are saying is true: In seeking surveillance authority on the rationale that Trump associates were acting as agents of a foreign power, did the Justice Department and the FBI present the FISA court with the Steele dossier as if it were a product of U.S. intelligence reporting — rather than what it really was, a political opposition-research product commissioned by the Clinton campaign?

That is an explosive charge. So, at the very least, will the president order the Justice Department to provide any such FISA applications to the House Intelligence Committee — preferably along with an explanation of why the president’s own appointees at the Justice Department and the FBI have been defying the committee’s requests for information?

Even before controversy arose over the Steele dossier, many of us were prepared to believe that there was more evidence that the Obama Justice Department and intelligence agencies had been put in the service of the Clinton campaign than that the Trump campaign had colluded in a Russian espionage operation against the 2016 election. Now, the Trump administration’s most effective advocates on Capitol Hill and in the media have made a plausible circumstantial case that the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to conduct court-authorized spying on the Trump campaign.

http://jamieglazov.com/2017/12/07/glazov-moment-top-10-facts-about-flynns-plea/In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie shares the Top 10 Facts About Flynn’s Plea, unveiling what the establishment media doesn’t want you to know. Don’t miss it!And make sure to watch Jamie’s stirring speech delivered at a recentAmerican Freedom Alliance conference in Los Angeles. where he focused on United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Jihad,reflecting on how: “I thought we escaped the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union came to us.”

One of the most dishonest and pernicious phrases in the cultural-Marxist lexicon—much favored by Barack Hussein Obama during his eight years in office—goes like this: “The arc of history bends toward justice.” The former president borrowed the phrase from Martin Luther King, Jr., who lifted it from the abolitionist Theodore Parker; attached to the moral struggle of the civil-rights movement, it has become a club with which to beat troglodyte conservatives into submission.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/07/the-arc-of-history-bends-toward-what-exactly/

But this is arrant nonsense. As I observe in my forthcoming book, The Fiery Angel:

This fantastic notion derives from the Hegelian-Marxist belief in history as an abstract, almost sentient, force akin to the old notion of Destiny, but with a bastardized Christian teleological impulse. Indeed, the entire Leftist notion of “progress” and its political expression, “progressivism,” stems from it. An “arc of history” that “bends toward justice” is the next best thing to God.

The obvious derivation of this concept, from both the spirituality of Christianity and the rationalism of the Enlightenment—a Deity as the great Watchmaker in the sky, overseeing the orderly ticking of the universe—should be at once obvious. Given the Leftist fondness for Darwin’s theory of natural selection and of the origin of species, this is an odd, contradictory theory for atheists to hold. But, to quote the Emperor in Amadeus, there it is.

The problem, of course, is that they don’t believe in God—the “invisible man in the sky,” to use one of their choice terms of derision. They consider almost any form of religious belief—except Islam!—to be little better than prehistoric superstition, as outmoded as Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, and Wotan. That the concept of a Deity established itself at the origins of humanity and is found in every culture and civilization is to them simply proof of how widespread this confederacy of dunces really is.

But they do believe in something very like God, which they call by various names, including “justice” and its political corollary, “independence.”

Which brings us to the FBI.

The media echo chamber spent the week speculating about whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller can or will nab President Trump on obstruction-of-justice charges. All the while it continues to ignore Washington’s most obvious obstruction—the coordinated effort to thwart congressional probes of the role law enforcement played in the 2016 election.

The news that senior FBI agent Peter Strzok exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Hillary text messages with another FBI official matters—though we’ve yet to see the content. The bigger scandal is that the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Mr. Mueller have known about those texts for months and deliberately kept their existence from Congress. The House Intelligence Committee sent document subpoenas and demanded an interview with Mr. Strzok. The Justice Department dodged, and then leaked.

The department also withheld from Congress that another top official, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, was in contact with ex-spook Christopher Steele and the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS. It has refused to say what role the Steele dossier—Clinton-commissioned oppo research—played in its Trump investigation. It won’t turn over files about its wiretapping.

And Mr. Mueller—who is well aware the House is probing all this, and considered the Strzok texts relevant enough to earn the agent a demotion—nonetheless did not inform Congress about the matter. Why? Perhaps Mr. Mueller feels he’s above being bothered with any other investigation. Or perhaps his team is covering for the FBI and the Justice Department.

Seventy-six years ago on Dec. 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese fleet surprise-attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the home port of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Japanese carrier planes killed 2,403 Americans. They sunk or submerged 19 ships (including eight battleships destroyed or disabled) and damaged or destroyed more than 300 planes.

In an amazing feat of seamanship, the huge Japanese carrier fleet had steamed nearly 3,500 miles in midwinter high seas. The armada had refueled more than 20 major ships while observing radio silence before arriving undetected about 220 miles from Hawaii.

The surprise attack started the Pacific War. It was followed a few hours later by a Japanese assault on the Philippines.

More importantly, Pearl Harbor ushered in a new phase of World War II, as the conflict expanded to the Pacific. It became truly a global war when, four days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

The Japanese fleet had missed the three absent American carriers of the Pacific Fleet. Nonetheless, Japanese admirals were certain that the United States was so crippled after the attack that it would not be able to go on the offensive against the Japanese Pacific empire for years, if at all. Surely the wounded Americans would sue for peace, or at least concentrate on Europe and keep out of the Japanese-held Pacific.

That was a fatal miscalculation.

The Japanese warlords had known little of the tireless efforts of one Democratic congressman from Georgia, Carl Vinson.

For nearly a decade before Pearl Harbor, Vinson had schemed and politicked in brilliant fashion to ensure that America was building a two-ocean navy larger than all the major navies of the world combined.