RUTHFULLY YOURS

On January 4, 2017, The New York Times printed a full-page ad calling on the American people to: “STOP THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME BEFORE IT STARTS.” Signers included Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground, a revolutionary- left group, known for its deadly bombings, and reportedly a friend of former President Barack Obama.

The January 4 ad having failed in its aim, the organization behind the ad — www.refusefascism.org — is bringing its Hate Trump/Pence message to the nation this Saturday, July 15, with protests scheduled mainly at locations in Deep Blue America, including New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angles. Boston, and Seattle. (Other cities include Detroit and Philadelphia, cities in states, Michigan and Pennsylvania, that narrowly voted for Trump/Pence.)

The theme of the July 15 demonstrations is “Protest and Demand — THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO!” As of the date of this writing, it is not clear if any Democrat — or Republican — anti-Trump elected officials will participate. Nor has it been suggested that officials from the Obama administration — National Security Adviser Susan Rice, or former CIA director John Brennan — will take part. Nor is there word that Senator John McCain will attend one of these Trump-Pence Hate gatherings to declare: This reminds me of my involvement in the Maidan protests in Kiev, a few years ago, when Ukraine overthrew its duly-elected president.”

Protest material does not set forth plans for the federal government, once Trump and Pence “GO!” Certainly, the July 15 demonstrations must have a deleterious impact on our democratic institutions, and erode confidence in our election process. And haven’t leftists been claiming, since November 8, that this has been the intention of the Kremlin?

Evan McMullin, in a New York Times op-ed piece, December 5, 2016, pointed out:

“Authoritarians often exaggerate their popular support to boost their perceived legitimacy. But the deeper objective is to weaken the democratic institutions that limit their power. Eroding confidence in voting, elections, and representative bodies gives them a freer hand to wield power.”

McMullin was identified by the Times as “a former C.I.A. officer [who] was a conservative independent presidential candidate in 2016.” The print title of his op-ed ,”The Constitution in Danger,” appears on-line, as “Trump’s Threat to the Constitution.”

In view of John Brennan’s apparently contributions to the “Trump must go” campaign, should we be surprised that “a former C.I.A. officer” sought to draw votes from candidate Trump and, after his election, charged Donald J. Trump as a threat to the Constitution, putting him in the Trump Hating mainstream?

Material promoting the July 15 Hate Trump demonstrations include this battle cry: “We will not accept the cruel and brutal future of the Trump/Pence Regime…they must GO!” This theme appears in the ravings of New York Times Trump Hate columnists and, certainly, in the Republican-Hate propaganda spewed by congressional Democrats, with nary a reply from the Republicans.

We interrupt this week’s Don Jr. loop to tell a tale of a real ethics scandal. It’s one perpetrated not by the Trump administration, but by the man atop Washington’s ethics-industrial complex: Walter Shaub.

If you’ve never heard of Mr. Shaub, you soon will. He is resigning as director of the Office of Government Ethics—effective next week—so that he can continue more publicly the war he’s been waging against the administration internally since last fall. Unquestioning media outlets are providing him a big podium for his accusations, so it’s worth noting some facts.

Mr. Shaub was already playing the indignant watchdog on Sunday, as he explained his resignation on ABC’s “This Week.” He complained that the White House was consistently “challenging OGE’s authority to carry out its routine and most basic functions.” Understanding those “functions” is critical to realizing the Shaub drama is so much grandstanding.

The OGE isn’t a watchdog or an inspector general’s office. As its own website makes clear, it doesn’t adjudicate complaints, investigate ethics violations, or prosecute misconduct. Rather, it was set up in 1978 to help the White House. Its job is to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions, a job undoubtedly more frustrating and messy under President Trump. Nonetheless, Mr. Shaub’s attempt to act as ethics czar, to ride herd on the Trump operation, is outside his office’s mission. It’s the act of a pious political operator who doesn’t like this president.

Only weeks after the election, as speculation swirled about how Mr. Trump would handle the ethical complexity of his business dealings while president, Mr. Shaub was already trolling, posting a series of sarcastic tweets about divestiture to the Office of Government Ethics’ official account. When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance. So much for the “help” part.

The best insight into Mr. Shaub’s methods can be seen in the long fallout from Kellyanne Conway’s bone-headed February attempt to defend Ivanka Trump by calling on Americans to buy her clothing line. Deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino, who leads the internal ethics team, reached out within minutes to reassure Mr. Shaub the situation would be reviewed. Mr. Shaub nonetheless waited only four days before dropping a public letter essentially demanding action against Ms. Conway.

In a Feb. 28 response to Mr. Shaub, Mr. Passantino noted that some of the OGE’s ethics regulations do not apply to White House staff. He nonetheless immediately reassured Mr. Shaub that a separate regulation did hold them to some of the same standards and that he had reschooled Ms. Conway in them. CONTINUE AT SITE

If the Trump administration has one overarching goal, it’s to Make America Great Again. But what does this mean? It means we are promoting MAGAnomics—and that means sustained 3% economic growth.

For most of our nation’s modern history, a healthy American economy meant one that grew at roughly 3.5%. That was the average growth rate between the late 1940s and 2007. Since then, it has hardly topped 2%.

The difference between those two growth rates is staggering. If the American economy had grown at only 2% between the end of World War II and 2000, average household income would have been roughly $26,000 instead of $50,000.
Over the next 10 years, 3% growth instead of 2% will yield a nominal gross domestic product that is $16 trillion larger, federal government revenues $2.9 trillion greater, and wages and salaries of American workers $7 trillion higher.

For merely suggesting that we can get back to that level, the administration has been criticized as unrealistic. That’s fine with us. We heard the same pessimism 40 years ago, when the country was mired in “stagflation” and “malaise.” But Ronald Reagan dared to challenge that thinking and steered us to a boom that many people thought unachievable. In the 7½ years following the end of the recession in 1982, real GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.4%. That is what a recovery looks like, and what the American economy is still capable of achieving.

The focus of MAGAnomics is simple: Grow the economy and with it the wealth of, and opportunity for, all Americans. It does that by focusing on fundamental principles that made the U.S. economy the greatest engine of prosperity in the history of the planet:

• Tax reform. We need to boost productivity. Fundamental to that is encouraging capital investment. We’ve seen for decades that growth in private-sector jobs correlates to growth in private business investment. When businesses invest in new plants and equipment, they tend to hire more people, who produce more. Lower tax rates and faster cost recovery are two levers that will reduce the cost of capital and thereby help ignite economic growth. And since 70% of business income goes to wages, the benefits flow to workers as well.

• Curbing unnecessary regulation. Much like commonsense tax reform, rolling back unnecessarily burdensome regulations will reduce the cost of doing business. When regulations increase costs, they decrease returns, leaving less capital to invest. If they are too burdensome, they discourage any investment at all, as businesses choose to forgo opportunities. This is important to all business, but especially to capital-intensive sectors like manufacturing. Overly zealous environmental regulations have played a role in pushing many U.S. businesses overseas. Requiring realistic and fact-based cost-benefit analyses of regulations will help protect both the environment and American jobs.

• Welfare reform. Growth also depends on the size of the workforce. Although the labor pool is aging, we are also seeing people who could be working but are staying home. We badly need them to go back to work. We believe that most want to do this but simply lack the opportunity. Our welfare system often creates disincentives for people to seek work. We intend to change that. We need to reform welfare to ensure it helps those truly in need of it, but does not encourage people to stay home.

• Smart energy strategy. The president’s “all of the above” energy strategy expands the economy’s growth potential. Yes, it puts coal miners back to work. But cheaper, cleaner, more abundant energy will also increase investment and employment across dozens of industries, from chemicals to automobiles. By ensuring reliable supplies and stable prices, the president’s energy plan will reduce uncertainty, especially in the manufacturing sector, thereby reducing the risks associated with building new plants and hiring more American workers.

• Rebuilding America’s infrastructure. The president’s plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure will create immediate job opportunities. More important, it will boost the long-term productivity of American industry. Rebuilding roads, bridges, airports and ports will pay dividends both now and in the future.

• Fair trade for America. The president is right in that the U.S. is frequently abused when it comes to international trade. Ensuring that other nations do not undermine our economy by unduly taxing our products, by dumping products here, or by stealing our intellectual property is essential to our economic future.

• Government spending restraint. When government spends a lot, it takes money away from private investment. And private investment is always a more efficient allocator of capital than government. We will continue to fund critical government functions, including a social safety net that gives people the comfort of knowing they will not be overlooked while encouraging them to be more willing to take chances. But we will watch every dollar to minimize waste. We will, in short, seek to take from you only what government actually needs to function.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and a contributing editor at National Review.

“Collusion” is a hopelessly vague term. Alas, the word has driven the coverage and the debate about possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Vladi­mir Putin’s regime. But it is a term nigh useless to investigators, who must think in terms of conspiracy. Collusion can involve any kind of concerted activity, innocent or otherwise. Conspiracy is an agreement to commit a concrete violation of law.

Thus has the collusion question always been two questions: First, was there any? Second, if so, collusion in what?

The first question, to my mind, is no longer open to credible dispute. There plainly was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This is firmly established by emails exchanged in June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and an intermediary acting on behalf of Russian real estate magnate Aras Agalarov. A Putin crony, Agalarov is also a business partner of President Trump.

The emails report that Agalarov had met with Russia’s chief government prosecutor and that the latter offered to provide “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia.” The intermediary, Rob Goldstone (a publicist for Agalarov’s pop-star son, Emin), told Trump Jr. that the information “would be very useful to your father” and — more significant — that it was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

In a subsequent email, Goldstone told Trump Jr. that Emin Agalarov wanted Trump Jr. to meet with a “Russian government attorney” who would be flying in from Moscow. Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting and elaborated that it would include then-campaign manager Paul Manafort as well as Jared Kushner, Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law.

The meeting took place at Trump Tower. The Russian attorney, whom Goldstone accompanied, was Natalia Veselnitskaya. She is a former regime prosecutor who now represents Putin cronies and lobbies the U.S. government to repeal the Magnitsky Act, a human rights provision enacted to punish Russia for torturing and killing a whistleblower. The act’s undoing is known to be a Putin priority.

Consequently, we now have solid documentary evidence that the Trump campaign, fully aware that Putin’s regime wanted to help Trump and damage Clinton, expressed enthusiasm and granted a meeting to a lawyer sensibly understood to be an emissary of the regime. Top Trump campaign officials attended the meeting with the expectation that they would receive information that could be exploited against Clinton.

That is collusion — concerted activity toward a common purpose. We can argue about whether the collusion amounted to anything, in this intriguing instance or over time. That is under investigation, and deservedly so. To my mind, though, it is no longer credible to claim there is no evidence of a collusive relationship. It is there in black and white.

Now we are on to the real question: Collusion in what? There are two aspects to this question: legal and political.

As a matter of law, mere collusion is not a crime. As noted above, it must rise to a purposeful agreement to carry out a substantive violation of law. It is not a crime to collude with a foreign government, even a hostile one, if the point is to accept information in the nature of opposition research. The suggestion that it might violate campaign law to accept information — as a “thing of value” — would raise significant constitutional questions while trivializing the conduct, which is egregious because of the nature of the relationship, not the money value of the information. To rise to the level of conspiracy, there would need to be proof, for example, that (a) violations of U.S. law were orchestrated by the Russian regime, and ( b) Trump campaign officials knew about them and were complicit in their commission.
At the moment, there is no such evidence. We will have to see what the investigation yields.

That, however, is not the end of the matter. The framers included impeachment in the Constitution in order to address violations not just of law but also of the public trust — transgressions in the nature of abuse of power or that otherwise demonstrate unfitness for office. Among the most profound concerns of our Constitution’s authors was the specter of a president who aligned with a foreign power covertly and against U.S. interests.

Of course, a political remedy is subject to political considerations. On the matter of unsavory relations with Russia (and other regimes, for that matter), we have gotten in the habit of tolerating much that ought not be tolerated, from politicians of both parties. Trump’s relationship with Putin’s regime should not be examined in a vacuum. But that said, it must be examined.

Christopher Wray, President Trump’s nominee to replace James Comey as FBI director, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He performed so well that key Democratic members of the committee such as Senator Dianne Feinstein said they were impressed and were inclined to vote for his confirmation. Senator Al Franken, a chronic skeptic of anything coming from the Trump administration, said to the nominee, “I think you had a good hearing today, and I wish you luck.”

Christopher Wray is eminently qualified for the position of FBI director, based both on his experience as well as his temperament. He served previously as a deputy attorney general in charge of the criminal division during President George W. Bush’s administration. Prior to that, his public service included a stint as assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, prosecuting individuals who committed a variety of crimes including bank robbery, gun trafficking, kidnapping and arson. Right after graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for United States Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, who described Mr. Wray as “balanced, thoughtful, deliberative” and “unflappable.”

Mr. Wray has a reputation for a calm demeanor. He avoids the limelight whenever possible. “Chris is a very gentle soul,” says Monique Roth, who served as his senior counsel at the Justice Department. “He’s not one of those grandstanders or ego-driven people. He’s very self-effacing and thoughtful.”

Indeed, Mr. Wray could be considered in one respect the antidote to Comey, who craved the spotlight. However, like Comey, he demonstrated his independence from political pressure while serving in the Bush Department of Justice. He joined Comey and Robert Mueller, who was then the FBI director and currently the special counsel overseeing the Russian investigation, in preparing to resign over a controversy involving a proposed domestic surveillance program.

Mr. Wray was asked repeatedly during his confirmation hearing whether, as FBI director, he would remain independent of the White House and partisan pressures. He assured the senators on several occasions that his loyalty would be only to the Constitution and the rule of law. He said that he was never asked to pledge his loyalty to the president and that he would not do so in any case. Mr. Wray said he would resign if asked by the president to do something he considered to be “illegal, unconstitutional or even morally repugnant” and could not talk the president out of taking that course of action.

“Nobody should mistake my low key demeanor for lack of resolve,” Mr. Wray declared. “Anybody who thinks that I would be pulling punches as the FBI director sure doesn’t know me very well.”

Mr. Wray offered his understanding of the FBI’s role, which is to do fact finding and accumulate evidence on which to base a recommendation whether to prosecute or not. Prosecutors, not the FBI, are responsible for the decision whether to prosecute. When asked whether former FBI Director Comey had acted responsibly in holding the press conference in which he held forth on his views of the Hillary Clinton e-mail imbroglio, Mr. Wray indicated what he would not do as FBI director. He said he would not hold a press conference disclosing derogatory investigatory information regarding an uncharged individual.

If Donald Trump recited “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a baseball game, it would be criticized as an alt-right dog whistle. So naturally spring-loaded opinions rained down in Poland after he delivered a defense of Western values.

Only this particular American president could say, “Let us all fight like the Poles—for family, for freedom, for country, and for God,” and elicit attacks from the left as sending subliminal messages to his isolated rural supporters, and from the anti-Trump right as a fake speech because he gave it. We live in a cynical age.

Angela Stent, a professor at Georgetown University, provided the reductio ad politics analysis: “He wants to show at least his domestic base that he’s true to all of the principles that he enunciated during the election campaign.”

The Trump “base.” It’s still out there, isn’t it?

It was conventional during the presidential campaign to think of the Trump candidacy as a beat-up bus caravan of marginalized American citizens, who someone called the deplorables. In the event, about half the total U.S. electorate somehow voted for the man who in Warsaw gave a speech that his opponent, Hillary Clinton—or any current Democrat—would never give.

To simplify: One side of this debate will never be caught in anything it considers polite company using that phrase of oppression—“the West.” Ugh.

For an enjoyably trenchant takedown of the left’s revulsion at the Trump speech, I recommend Robert Merry’s essay in the American Conservative, “Trump’s Warsaw Speech Threw Down the Gauntlet on Western Civilization.” As Mr. Merry says, this is a big, worthy debate, and one I think the Trump “base” instinctively understood in 2016.

In fact, that Warsaw speech on Western Civ was really about the current edition of the Democratic Party and its two-term leader, Barack Obama. Mr. Trump momentarily suppressed the urge to call out his opposition, so allow me.

The Trump “base” knew the 2016 presidential election—the contest between Mr. Obama’s successor and whoever would run against her—wasn’t just another election. It was a crucial event, deciding whether America would go on in the Western tradition as it had developed in the U.S. or continue its steady drift away from those ideas.

Progressives have an interest in ridiculing the Trump speech as a stalking horse for the heretofore obscure and microscopic alt-right because it deflects from their own political values—on view and in power the past eight years.

If there is one controlling Western idea developed across centuries in Europe, including by resort to war, it is that the individual person deserves formalized protection from the weight of arbitrary political authority, whether kings, clergy or dictators.

Bernard Bailyn, the great historian of the pre-revolution politics of the U.S. colonies, showed through a deep reading of colonial pamphleteering that the early Americans were ardently resentful of distant, central authority. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Left has been struggling to disassociate the anti-cop hatred spewed by the Black Lives Matter movement from the assassination of New York police officer Miosotis Familia during the Fourth of July holiday. Police Commissioner James O’Neill demolished those efforts in his blazing funeral oration for Officer Familia on Tuesday. Assassin Alexander Bonds “hated the police,” O’Neill said, because he had heard and read “countless times” in conversation, on television, and in the newspapers that the cops were the “‘bad guys.’” That hate “has consequences,” O’Neill warned. “When we demonize a whole group of people—whether that group is defined by race, by religion, or by occupation—this is the result.” Bonds had mental problems, but it’s no coincidence that they culminated in the deliberate slaying of a cop.

The Left denies that the Black Lives Movement is anything other than a reasonable movement for justice and insists that it has no connection with anti-cop violence. Never mind the “Fuck the Police” signs, the “Police = KKK” chants, the “Racist, Killer Cops” tee-shirts. Never mind the exclusive attention to a handful of officer-involved shootings and the refusal to acknowledge why officers focus on minority neighborhoods in the first place, or why they are more likely to encounter armed and resisting suspects there. Never mind the media stampede to justify riots as an understandable reaction to supposed police racism. While any given Black Lives Matter protest, however virulent its rhetoric, enjoys First Amendment protection, it is disingenuous to pretend that the all-consuming anti-police narrative is not making officers’ work more difficult and more dangerous. The anti-cop Left has no explanation for the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers last year. It turns its eyes away from the growing animosity and resistance that officers now encounter when they try to investigate suspicious behavior on the street. And most important, the anti-cop Left ignores the truth: we are not living through an epidemic of racially biased police killings of black males. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings, it favors blacks against whites, as four studies found last year. The widely held impression that blacks make up the majority of people killed by the police is entirely a media creation.

Most tellingly, the Left has nothing to say about the rise in black-on-black violence that the demonization of cops has produced. An additional 900 black males were killed in 2015 nationally compared with the previous year, the result of officers backing off of proactive policing. Commissioner O’Neill rightly asked where the demonstrations were in protest of Familia’s killing: “Why is there no outrage?” he wondered. But he could as well have asked where the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were in protest of the mindless and constant drive-by shootings of black civilians. A handful of grass-roots activists in Chicago and elsewhere have protested the slaying of children and the elderly, but not one Black Lives Matter leader has seen fit to organize against the rising street violence. Seven thousand blacks, overwhelmingly male, were killed in 2015—2,000 more deaths than all white and Hispanic homicide deaths combined, though black males are only 6 percent of the nation’s population. Not a peep of protest from Black Lives Matter agitators.

The people who are paying attention are the police, who analyze crime patterns on a minute-by-minute and corner-by-corner basis, seeking to break the grip of violence on a community. When no witnesses will cooperate in solving the latest drive-by shooting, the police work tirelessly to try to track down the shooter on their own.

Commissioner O’Neill celebrated what drove Familia and her colleagues to become police officers—the desire to improve people’s lives. “Cops are regular people who believe in the possibility of making this a safer world,” O’Neill said. “It’s why we run toward, when others run away.” But fewer and fewer individuals are choosing to take on what O’Neill called the “vast responsibility” of becoming a police officer, knowing that the first assumption that the media, the activists, and academia would make about them is that they are implicit, if not explicit, racists. Recruiting has dried up. And many police departments, pressured by the Obama Justice Department, are lowering hiring standards, including clean criminal-record requirements, in order to increase what is speciously referred to as “diversity.”

A pro-LGBT and feminist Muslim organization says it was expelled from tabling at the annual Islamic Society of North America convention earlier this month where self-proclaimed LGBT ally Linda Sarsour headlined as a keynote speaker.https://spectator.org/pro-lgbt-muslim-group-says-it-was-kicked-out-of-muslim-conference-where-linda-sarsour-spoke/

“We’re really sick and tired of the hypocrisy of them (ISNA) claiming to be LGBT allies,” said Ani Zonneveld, founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values, a faith-based human rights organization founded in 2007. “They’re only an ally when the camera is on.”

ISNA is the largest Muslim organization in North America and acts as an umbrella organization for numerous other Islamic groups and affiliated mosques. The organization was established in 1981 by the Muslim Student Association, and its founding members had connections with Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-i Islami, according to academic scholars on Islamism in America.

In 2015, President Barack Obama recorded a video message for the group’s convention, which annually draws tens of thousands of attendees. Women’s March board member Linda Sarsour spoke at the 54th ISNA convention held on June 30–July 3 in Chicago this year.

MPV partnered with the Human Rights Campaign to operate a tabling booth. There, MPV says their pamphlets advocating LGBT and women’s equality within Islam first drew the ire of an ultra-orthodox attendee. Soon after, they were asked to close shop and leave the venue by ISNA staff.

According to Frank Parmir, a convert to Islam and organizer with MPV-Columbus who staffed the booth with Michael Toumayan, HRC’s religion and faith program manager, a man in “Salafi garb” lectured them on homosexuality and sin. “To be a ‘real Muslim,’ one must assert that homosexuality is a sin,” Parmir recalled the man saying.

Parmir said within an hour after that encounter, a group of men in suits accosted them at the booth. Parmir identified one of the suited men as ISNA Conventions, Conferences, and Special Projects Director, Basharat Saleem. “He wasn’t sure that they could allow us to stay because of some of the literature and some of the positions we were advocating,” Parmir said. “They would have to think about it and get back to us.”

Saleem and ISNA did not respond to a request for comment.

Soon after, Parmir said another man “asked” MPV and HRC to vacate the premises. Parmir described the request as a veiled demand. Before leaving, Parmir and Toumayan met with Saleem and ISNA board director Farhan Syed to negotiate. Other men, including security, were also present, according to Parmir. “It finally became clear that HRC was not the problem,” Parmir said. “They were okay with HRC’s advocacy for gay rights. They were not okay with MPV’s advocacy that gays should find unrepentant inclusion with the Muslim community and that women should be given equality.”

Parmir said the men found MPV’s literature “stressful” and “upsetting” for convention attendees. According to Parmir, Syed attempted to be sensitive, citing his homosexual friends who “come to dinner,” but added the caveat that “they’re not Muslim.”