RUTHFULLY YOURS

America’s longest running soap opera is not General Hospital. It’s the Congressional Hearing, usually a venue for pontificating, show-boating, histrionics, preening for the cameras, insulting political enemies, and accomplishing little of value. Meanwhile the real work of the Republic either gets neglected or proceeds in silence at a glacial pace.

James Comey was the star of last week’s latest episode of the eternal DC soap. The one-time FBI director stayed true to his character, preening morally, striking Boy Scout poses, indulging faux-folksy interjections like “Lordy,” pretending to be sober and judicious, but all the while revealing the instincts of a bureaucratic cartel sicaria. He was obviously thirsting for revenge against the hated DC outsider and “liar” who unceremoniously fired him, so much so that he admitted to cowardice on multiple occasions, from failing to immediately confront Trump over his supposed sinister “direction” (Comey’s translation of Trump’s “hope”) that Mike Flynn get let off the hook; to his groveling obedience to AG Loretta Lynch’s politicized, justice-obstructing order to call the investigation into Hillary Clinton a “matter.” He displayed a brazen arrogance in admitting to leaking a memo, written in his professional capacity, to the New York Times through a cut-out, perhaps one of numerous other leaks emanating from this self-proclaimed pillar of professional rectitude even before he was fired.

So we got a few more details about a man we already knew was a publicity hound and power -hungry operator. But that portrait was painted back in July of last year, when Comey publicly laid out the predicates for an indictment of Hillary Clinton, then usurped the authority of the AG to let Hillary (and Loretta “Tarmac” Lynch) off the hook based on a legally irrelevant consideration of “intent.” The only thing interesting last week was watching how far Comey would debase himself to square the many duplicitous circles he had spun over the last few years.

Great fun for political junkies, but what useful purpose will be served by that spectacle? The media are happy, since they get free programming and more chum for their talking heads. They’re celebrating the 19 million viewers who supposedly tuned in, though that sum represents a little more than 10% of registered voters. Normal citizens were working their jobs and tending to their lives. From their perspective, the drama inside the Beltway cocoon is bureaucratic white noise. If they think about it at all, it’s to wonder whether the guilty leakers will be hunted down and punished, or just be “investigated” for months and months and then, like Hillary, given a pass. And Hillary is just one of numerous miscreants that need exposing and punishing for their corruption of the public trust in order to serve their political preferences or careerist ambitions.

American politics is now, in large part, a fight about whether or not Donald Trump will be impeached.

No one is saying it explicitly, but these are the stakes in the Russia controversy and its spinoffs and in the 2018 midterms. If Democrats take the House with anything like a comfortable majority, they will be hard-pressed to resist their base’s drive to give Trump a mark of dishonor shared only by Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.

Presidents have been hated by the other side before, but rarely with this sort of intensity and immediacy. With the exception of Abraham Lincoln (seven Southern states seceded before he took office), it usually takes time for critics to work up a good, unbridled loathing. Herbert Hoover had to preside over the beginning of the Great Depression. Richard Nixon had to bomb Cambodia and get embroiled in Watergate. Donald Trump just had to show up.

The Left’s anti-Trump rhetoric has been catastrophist from the beginning. The initial travel ban represented a constitutional crisis. So did the firing of acting attorney general Sally Yates. And so, of course, did the cashiering of FBI Director James Comey.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, once frequently mentioned as a potential Democratic Supreme Court pick, wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago titled “Trump Must Be Impeached.” Must doesn’t allow for wiggle room. Tribe maintains that “impeachable offenses could theoretically have been charged from the outset of this presidency.”

Left-wing New York Times columnist Charles Blow writes about “the critical and increasingly urgent question for many: Will Trump be impeached — or indicted — and when? The anticipation has produced a throbbing anxiety. There is so much emotional investment in Trump’s removal that I fear that it blinds people to the fact that it is a long shot and, in any case, a long way off.” Yes, impeachment might have to wait till early 2019. Who has the patience?

It may be that Democrats don’t take the House, or even if they do, they pull up short on impeachment. A House impeachment vote would almost certainly only be a symbolic gesture. The chances of getting the two-thirds of the Senate necessary to remove Trump from office are close to nil, unless there’s an offense that collapses his support among Republican senators.

Here are the ironies of Donald Trump as president.

1) For the Left (both Political and Media)

The Left was mostly untroubled for eight years about the often unconstitutional abuses of Barack Obama — given that they saw their shared noble aims as justifying almost any means necessary to achieve them.

There was the not uncommon Rice-Gruber-Rhodes-Holder sort of deception (on Benghazi, on the conduct of Bowe Bergdahl, on the Affordable Care Act, the Iran deal, on Fast and Furious, etc.) — a required tactic because so much of the Obama agenda was antithetical to the wishes and preferences of the American electorate and thus had to be disguised and camouflaged to become enacted.

There was the pen-and-phone mockery of established federal law (the suspension of the ACA employer mandate, the Chrysler creditor reversal, the non-enforcement of federal immigration law, the institutionalization of sanctuary-city nullification). There was the constant mythmaking (from faux red lines, deadlines, and step-over lines to the fatuity of the Cairo Speech and Iran-deal harangues).

There were the abuses of presidential power (the surveillance of journalists, the selective release of the bin Laden trove to pet journalists, the likely surveilling, unmasking, and leaking through reversed targeting of political enemies).

No one worried much when Obama promised on a hot mic to Medvedev that he would be more flexible with the Russians after his reelection, as if they were to conform to a desired sort of behavior in service to Obama that would earn them dividends from him later on — the kind of unapologetic partisan “collusion” that would have earned Trump a Comey-induced indictment. No one cared that Obama pulled all peacekeepers out of Iraq and thereby ruined what the surge had saved.

Nor did anyone fret much about the serial scandals at the GSA, the VA, the IRS, and the Secret Service, or his disastrous reset policy with Russia and the implosion of the Middle East or the strange spectacles of Obama’s interview with GloZell or polarizing Oval Office guests, such as the rapper whose album cover portrayed celebrations over a dead white judge.

True, none of these were impeachable or even major offenses. But all of them recalibrated the bar of presidential behavior.

So along came the next Republican president, empowered by Obama’s exemptions to do almost anything he wished, albeit without the thin exculpatory veneer of Ivy League pretension, multicultural indemnity, and studied smoothness.

In biblical “there is a season” fashion, for every sermon about not building your business, making too much money, or profiting at the wrong time, there was a Trump retort to profit as never before.

For every too-frequent gala golf outing of a metrosexual Obama decked out in spiffy attire, there is a plumper Trump swinging away, oblivious to the angry pack of reporters that Obama once so carefully courted.

For every rapper with an ankle bracelet that went off in the White House, there is now a White House photo-op with Ted Nugent.

The extent of the cover-up and the obstruction of justice in Fast and Furious is mind-boggling

As liberal McCarthyism continues searching for Russian monsters under Trump administration beds, it might serve us well to remember the Obama administration scandals, for which there were no special prosecutors appointed, no grand juries convened, not even a leaked memo to the New York Times via a friendly professor at Columbia University.

A few years ago, President Obama called the scandals swirling around his administration “phony scandals”. As The Hill reported in 2013:

“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball,” Obama said in an economic address at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill…

Obama on Wednesday did not specify which controversies were “phony,” but the administration has been attacked over National Security Agency surveillance programs leaked to the public, the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, the Department of Justice’s seizing of media phone records, and last year’s attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Phony scandals are those that do not have a smidgeon of evidence of a crime, like alleged Trump collusion with the Russians or obstruction of an investigation that was never stopped or even slowed down. Phony scandals do not produce body bags as the Obama administration produced in Benghazi and during Operation Fast and Furious — the Obama administration’s gun-running operation in which it armed Mexican drug lords and cartels with heavy weapons for which the U.S. Border Patrol had no match or protection. That gun-running operation led to the murder of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

On Wednesday, in the shadow of the Russia investigations and the testimony of former FBI Director James Comey, the House Oversight Committee produced a fact-laden report documenting the collusion between the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama and Mexican drug cartels and the obstruction of justice by Attorney General Eric Holder in this, er, “matter”. As Fox News reported:

Members of a congressional committee at a public hearing Wednesday blasted former President Barack Obama and his attorney general for allegedly covering up an investigation into the death of a Border Patrol agent killed as a result of a botched government gun-running project known as Operation Fast and Furious.

The House Oversight Committee also Wednesday released a scathing, nearly 300-page report that found Holder’s Justice Department tried to hide the facts from the loved ones of slain Border Patrol Brian Terry – seeing his family as more of a “nuisance” than one deserving straight answers – and slamming Obama’s assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress access to records pertaining to Fast and Furious….

Terry’s death exposed Operation Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) operation in which the federal government allowed criminals to buy guns in Phoenix-area shops with the intention of tracking them as they were transported into Mexico. But the agency lost track of more than 1,400 of the 2,000 guns they allowed smugglers to buy. Two of those guns were found at the scene of Terry’s killing.

“More than five years after Brian’s murder, the Terry family still wonders about key details of Operation Fast and Furious,” the committee’s report states. “The Justice Department’s obstruction of Congress’s investigation contributed to the Terry family’s inability to find answers.”

That executive privilege was even — we are not making this up — extended to cover Eric Holder’s wife. The extent of the coverup and the obstruction of justice in Fast and Furious is mindboggling. The statute of limitations has not run out and perhaps it is time to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate those, President Obama and Eric Holder, who are arguably guilty of criminal negligence in the death of agent Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexican nationals. As former ATF agent John Dodson wrote in 2015 in the Washington Times:

A political firestorm erupted when it was revealed that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), as part of a program dubbed “Operation Fast and Furious,” had provided Brian Terry’s murderers with the weapons used to take his life.

1.In May he said he was “mildly nauseous” about the possibility he effected the election, but has no regrets…..He also claimed that the Clinton e-mail investigation and Loretta Lynch gave him a “queasy feeling.” He seems prone to visceral symptoms.

2.He admits that he is not “Captain Courageous” and did not stand up to a man who was “pressuring him” or report the incident, and that he bowed to Loretta Lynch’s request to call an investigation “a matter” and did not report the incident.

3.He contradicts himself often….After disclosing that Hillary Clinton used her private e-mail for classified material in “the matter”,in July he exonerated her, stating that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” although she and her aides had been “extremely careless”with classified material. Never mind that there was destruction of evidence- more than 30,000 e-mails disappeared, and Mrs. Clinton lied about it.

4.At the Congressional hearing on “the matter” he caved to a serious grilling by Representative Jim Jordan and Trey Gowdy, with the weaselly response ““You can call us wrong, but don’t call us weasels….. We are not weasels.” Okay then, not weasels just duplicitous, perfidious, untrustworthy, partisan, dishonest and Janus-faced?

5.Again, at the recent testimony to Congress he went off message by revealing that he had leaked a memo to a friend who leaked it to the New York Times, and then disclosed how former Attorney General Loretta Lynch actually tried to subvert an investigation and how he failed to report the “matter.” The latter was not leaked…maybe he was too queasy

6. He revealed that Donald Trump was not under investigation; the Russians had not hacked the election; and Trump encouraged him to proceed with the Russian investigation;- all of which blurred his anti-Trump campaign. Not leaked.

Finally, CNN- Gurgly Gergen, overwrought Toobin, and Borger hated him and painted him as a political hack before they loved him and praised his intellect and probity. They were right the first time.

Would you hire this lawyer? rsk

The commentary about James Comey’s memoranda has been all over the map. The former FBI director says he made memos contemporaneous to, or immediately after, all nine of the meetings or phone calls he recalls having had with Donald Trump, when the latter was president-elect and, later, president. Comey acknowledges that he orchestrated the leak of at least one memo — or rather, a snippet mined from its contents — to the New York Times. All of the memos, he testified, have now been surrendered to the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley does a good job in The Hill outlining much of the relevant law. One major issue is whether these documents belonged to Comey, in the sense of being his property rather than the government’s. That is the position he took in his testimony. Like Turley, I think the former director is wrong.

As a longtime prosecutor, I have a black-and-white test for this sort of thing: Would a judge in a criminal trial consider the documents to be government property for purposes of federal discovery law?

That law requires the government to disclose to the defense any prior statement made by a witness, written or otherwise recorded, that is in the government’s possession. It also mandates that the government disclose any information that is material to the preparation of the defense (such as evidentiary exhibits that the prosecution plans to introduce into evidence). Finally, the government must produce any exculpatory evidence — meaning, any evidence that (a) suggests the accused is not guilty, (b) contradicts the prosecution’s theory of the case, or (c) could be used to impeach a witness’s testimony.

Comey’s notes may fall into all three of those disclosure categories. Let’s imagine that Democrats get their dream scenario: President Trump is charged with obstruction. (As I’ve observed several times — see, for instance, here and here – there is no prosecutable obstruction case, but let’s stick with the hypothetical.) Comey could be a witness at trial; his memos could be evidence; and the memos contain exculpatory information (e.g., Comey’s recollection of Trump’s actual words expressing “hope” that the FBI would drop the Flynn investigation are inconsistent with the inference Comey now draws that Trump was ordering him to drop the Flynn investigation).

With that as our hypothetical, what would happen if a prosecutor in the case argued to the presiding judge that the government did not need to disclose Comey’s notes because they are his personal property and not in the government’s possession? Rest assured, the judge would blow a gasket, and rightly so.

The memos were written by an FBI official, apparently on FBI equipment, and related directly to FBI investigative business. Indeed, the fact that investigative business was central to Trump’s conversations with the former director is what induced Comey to write the memos: He perceived the president’s statements as political intrusion into law-enforcement investigations and intelligence probes. The memos were thus government property, and the then-director was obliged to make sure they were retained in government files.

That does not mean it would have been improper for Comey to keep a copy of them for himself. But doing that would not change the character of the memos as government property, and it would not relieve Comey of the obligation to comply with all government disclosure restrictions on the contents of the memos. At the Federalist, Bre Payton reproduces a copy of the standard FBI employment agreement, making a persuasive argument that Comey’s memos are government property and that the former director’s disclosure of information in them to unauthorized persons violated the employment agreement’s terms.

“Republicans of all stripes must be made to acknowledge and accept that Trumpism is an experiment that failed,” Noah Rothman wrote in Commentary.

It was October 2016 and Rothman was declaring the terms on which Never Trumpers would accept the surrender of Republicans after Trump’s defeat. Some “examples must be made”, but after some political purges, the GOP could be reunited around “free trade” and “an internationalist foreign policy”.

But instead of losing, Trump won. The disasters that Rothman was predicting, the loss of Congress and the White House, never came about. And the scorned prophets of Never Trump, instead of apologizing or being offered terms for rejoining the GOP, continued forecasting disaster and doom for the heretics.

Like Democrats, Never Trumpers were still stuck on an election that Trump wasn’t supposed to win. Democrats had predicted a Hillary victory and Never Trumpers predicted a Republican disaster. Both Democrats and Never Trumpers want to reverse the results of the election. The Democrats invent vast conspiracies and the Never Trumpers predict disasters that will never happen.

Never Trumpers are obsessed with proving to Republicans that electing Trump was a disastrous mistake.

So everything is a disaster. Trump is infuriating Europeans alienating Muslims, abandoning NATO and destroying the planet. The sky is always falling. The apocalypse is just around the corner. And when it finally arrives, Rothman and the rest of the gang can lay out their terms for reunifying the GOP around illegal alien amnesty, destructive trade practices and open borders for terrorist refugees.

Even after the election, President Trump still can’t win.

The Navy is Preparing the MQ-4C Triton Maritime Drone for Service in the Pacific Theater; the drone is now being configured with collision avoidance technology and advanced maritime sensors enabling it to zero in on enemy ships at sea.

The Navy and Northrop Grumman are updating software and sensors on a new high-tech, autonomous maritime drone designed to identify and zero in on enemy ship targets at sea, service and industry officials said.

The Navy’s Triton autonomous drone, called the MQ-4C, is now receiving a “3.1 software” integration as part of a technical plan for the aircraft to be operational by 2018. The first Tritons are slated to deliver sometime later this year, developers said.
“3.1 software gets you to the point where you can use the sensors in an operational environment,” Tom Twomey, senior manager business development, Triton, Northrop Grumman, told Scout Warrior in an interview.

The sensor package being designed for the aircraft includes what the Navy calls a multi-function array sensor, or MFAS.

The Triton’s electronics include an electro-optical/infrared sensor, a 360-degree active electronically scanned array radar and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), among other things, Navy developers have said. The sensors create a common operational maritime picture including images, data and full-motion video. An electronic support measure is also able to detect maritime signals.

Synthetic Aperture Radar, or SAR, sends an electromagnetic signal forward and then analyzes the return signal to paint a picture or “rendering” of the terrain below. SAR is primarily used for land missions, whereas ISAR is especially engineered to zero in on targets in a maritime environment.

“Inverse synthetic aperture radar is a mode that allows you to stop on one particular target and get an ID on that. It gives you a picture of a ship showing the superstructure in order to see if, for example, it is a tanker or warship. It can pick steel out of the water,” Twomey said.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/06/11/feinstein-calls-for-probe-of-loretta-lynch-handling-of-email-investigation/

The ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has called for an investigation into former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s actions in connection with the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Senator Diane Feinstein was reacting to comments made by former FBI Director James Comey during testimony on Capitol Hill that Lynch asked him to downplay the Clinton investigation.