RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Senate Intelligence Committee released James Comey’s prepared testimony a day early on Wednesday, and it looks like a test of whether Washington can apprehend reality except as another Watergate. Perhaps the defrocked FBI director has a bombshell still to drop. But far from documenting an abuse of power by President Trump, his prepared statement reveals Mr. Comey’s misunderstanding of law enforcement in a democracy.

Mr. Comey’s seven-page narrative recounts his nine encounters with the President-elect and then President, including an appearance at Trump Tower, a one-on-one White House dinner and phone calls. He describes how he briefed Mr. Trump on the Russia counterintelligence investigation and what he calls multiple attempts to “create some sort of patronage relationship.”

But at worst Mr. Comey’s account of Mr. Trump reveals a willful and naive narcissist who believes he can charm or subtly intimidate the FBI director but has no idea how Washington works. This is not new information.
When you’re dining alone in the Green Room with an operator like Mr. Comey—calculating, self-protective, one of the more skilled political knife-fighters of modern times—there are better approaches than asserting “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” Of course the righteous director was going to “memorialize” (his word) these conversations as political insurance.

Mr. Trump’s ham-handed demand for loyalty doesn’t seem to extend beyond the events of 2016, however. In Mr. Comey’s telling, the President is preoccupied with getting credit for the election results and resentful that the political class is delegitimizing his victory with “the cloud” of Russian interference when he believes he did nothing wrong.

Mr. Comey also confirms that on at least three occasions he told Mr. Trump that he was not a personal target of the Russia probe. But Mr. Comey wouldn’t make a public statement to the same effect, “most importantly because it would create a duty to correct” if Mr. Trump were implicated. This is odd because the real obligation is to keep quiet until an investigation is complete.

More interesting is that Mr. Trump’s frustration at Mr. Comey’s refusal raises the possibility that the source of Mr. Trump’s self-destructive behavior isn’t a coverup or a bid to obstruct the investigation. The source could simply be Mr. Trump’s wounded pride.

The most troubling part of Mr. Comey’s statement is his belief in what he calls “the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch,” which he invokes more than once. Independent? This is a false and dangerous view of law enforcement in the American system.

Mr. Comey is describing an FBI director who essentially answers to no one. But the police powers of the government are awesome and often abused, and the only way to prevent or correct abuses is to report to elected officials who are accountable to voters. A director must resist intervention to obstruct an investigation, but he and the agency must be politically accountable or risk becoming the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover.

https://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2017/06/07/comeys-notes-and-the-wages-of-the-special-counsel-investigation/

The editors of the Wall Street Journal detail a controversy brewing in Congress over James Comey’s private memos. We use “private” here in the sense that these are memoranda the former FBI director wrote to himself. They are not “private” in the sense of belonging to Comey; clearly, they are government records of FBI business.

I would wager, moreover, that significant parts of the memos may be classified: Recall the Obama Justice Department’s prosecution of former CIA director David Petraeus. That case centered on journals that General Petraeus had kept when he was commanding American and allied military forces. According to the Justice Department’s outline of the case against Petraeus, his diaries contained highly classified information, including notes of the general’s conversations with the president of the United States. Although Petraeus was under no obligation to make these notes, and although they were clearly (and quite properly) intended for his own use, they were obviously not his property. They related to government business, were thus government files, and — to the extent they contained classified information — were required to be retained in a repository designed to protect such materials.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, in conjunction with its Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, has issued a letter asking Comey to answer a series of questions. These include questions about his memos. Based on a New York Times report, we know only of a snippet of one such memo, said to detail a meeting between the former director and the president. Trump, it is related, expressed hope that the FBI would drop an investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

The Times indicated that Comey may have written many more memos-to-self. The Judiciary Committee letter asks him to provide copies of any such memos he has retained.

The former director is said to have refused, rationalizing that he is now a private citizen and need not comply.

To be sure, we are not talking about a subpoena, which is a lawful demand for production of evidence; the committee’s letter is a request for voluntary cooperation. Nevertheless, the Journal has a point when it argues that Comey, who has voluntarily agreed to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee in highly anticipated testimony on Thursday, should not be able to pick and choose which committees he will indulge and which requests he will entertain.

Naturally, the question arises as to whether Comey is the only source the Judiciary Committee can turn to for the information it seeks. Since any such memos are FBI property, one would think the committee could seek them directly from the FBI and the Justice Department (of which the FBI is a component agency).

Moreover, if Comey is stymying the committee, one might think the Trump administration would want to intervene. Since the president appears to be at odds with the former FBI director over what was said in their various conversations, it could cast the president in a favorable light were he to direct the Justice Department to cooperate with all congressional committees regarding the production of documents.

Alas, we run headlong into the complication discussed here in mid-May, when I was arguing against the appointment of a “special counsel,” particularly in the absence of any apparent crime to be investigated. Special counsels, whom the public thinks as independent prosecutors, tend to paralyze an administration’s capacity to govern and to exercise its judgment.

There is still no crime. Nevertheless, special counsel Robert Mueller has been appointed to head up the sprawl that is spreading under the heading of “the Russia investigation.” This probe lacks a specific criminal transaction to target — i.e., it lacks the thing that gives direction and discipline to other investigations. Thus, virtually anything tangentially connected to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election can be brought into Mueller’s capacious jurisdiction. That includes any discussion the former FBI director had with the president regarding Flynn — even if whatever Flynn is being investigated for (failure to disclose speaking fees in Russia? Failure to register as a foreign agent for work done for Turkey?) turns out to be far afield from Russia’s “cyberespionage” activities during the campaign.

Consequently, the Trump White House must fear that any order it might give the Justice Department to cooperate with the Republican-controlled Congress’s investigations would be spun by Democrats and their media friends as interference with Mueller’s investigation. Similarly, the Judiciary Committee and other congressional investigative bodies do not want to be seen as impeding Mueller. So, they are apt to avoid demanding of him the sorts of documents they would ordinarily demand in conducting oversight of the Justice Department.

The result is that the public is likely to be kept in the dark about many relevant matters that might have become known had there not been a special counsel appointed.

Here is another example of how this could play out at Thursday’s hearing. When the president fired Comey, he took pains to say that the former director had told him on three separate occasions that he was not under investigation. Pre-hearing reporting suggests that Comey does not remember it this way. The matter is thus being teed up as though one or the other man must be lying.

We’ll have to see what happens, but to my mind, the seeming contradiction may be reconcilable. According to Comey’s own prior testimony, the Russia investigation is a counterintelligence investigation. As I have repeatedly pointed out, a counterintelligence investigation is very different from a criminal investigation. It does not have “subjects” and “targets,” which are terms-of-art in criminal investigations, designating suspects who may be indicted by the grand jury. The purpose of a counterintelligence investigation is to focus on a foreign power — in this instance, Russia — in order to determine what threats it might pose to American interests.

It is not the purpose of a counterintelligence investigation to build a prosecutable criminal case against a suspect. Nevertheless, if evidence of criminal wrongdoing turns up, the FBI’s national security division reserves the right to refer that evidence to its criminal division and the Justice Department, which can then determine whether prosecution is warranted.

It could well be that President Trump, a non-lawyer, was told the Russia investigation is a counterintelligence investigation, which would not be designed to build a case against him or anyone else.

If so, he might understandably have taken that to mean he is not a suspect under investigation. At the same time, Comey realizes that you never know what evidence an investigation will turn up until it has been completed. Since the Russia investigation had not been completed, the former director may well believe that could not, and did not, make commitments regarding any information that had not yet been uncovered.

That’s just my educated speculation — and, as noted above, we’ll have to see what happens. But given the complications posed by the special counsel investigation, I doubt we are going to get to the bottom of all the questions that need answering in a Senate committee hearing.

The media are pitching James Comey’s Thursday testimony as the biggest since Watergate, and the former FBI director may provide high Trump ian drama. Let’s hope Congress also challenges Mr. Comey on matters he’d rather not talk about.

The politically savvy Mr. Comey has a knack for speaking in congenial forums such as the clubby Senate Intelligence Committee he’ll address Thursday. By contrast he is refusing to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee—where he came under a grilling in May, days before he was fired—though there is no bar to him testifying more than once.

Circa News is also reporting (and we have confirmed) that Mr. Comey is refusing to answer seven questions sent to him in a letter from Judiciary on May 26. The bipartisan request is from Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein, as well as the chairman and ranking Member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism.

The questions are aimed at discovering how the contents of Mr. Comey’s famous “memo” to himself came to be splashed across the press. This still private memo reportedly says President Trump asked Mr. Comey to back off an investigation into former National Security AdviserMichael Flynn, and its contents surfaced in the New York Times not long after Mr. Comey was fired—courtesy of an unidentified Comey “associate.”

The Judiciary letter asks if Mr. Comey created other memos about interactions with Justice Department officials or Mr. Trump; if he shared the contents of his memos with people inside or outside the Justice Department; if he retained copies of the memos, and if so to turn them over to the committee.

We’re told Mr. Comey replied via email that he didn’t have to answer the questions because he is now a “private citizen.” But that same private citizen will be opining in front of a national TV audience before a committee investigating serious questions of law and intelligence. Mr. Comey shouldn’t be able to pick and choose which of his memos he sends to Congress and which he can keep for his memoirs. If Mr. Comey wrote those memos while FBI director, as his talkative pals claim, the memos are government work product and he has a duty to provide them to investigators.

The “private citizen” excuse is useful in that it exposes that Mr. Comey’s main goal will be providing testimony against Mr. Trump while reviving his own reputation. Tip for Thursday viewing: Notice if Mr. Comey answers questions selectively, ducking those he doesn’t like behind the cover of Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation.

The Intelligence Committee shouldn’t let him get away with it. If Mr. Comey wants a public stage to tell his side of the Trump story, fair enough. But he should also be required to provide actual copies of his memos (if they exist), disclose with whom he shared them, and where they are now stored. He should also tell the country if President Trump was a target of the Russia investigation while he supervised it at the FBI.

Oh, and someone should also ask Mr. Comey if it’s true, as the Washington Post has reported, that the FBI probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails was triggered by a phony document provided by Russian intelligence. The point of this Congressional oversight is to help the public understand how Russia tried to meddle with American democracy, and Mr. Comey’s duty didn’t end with his dismissal.

When the fourth bomb exploded in lower Manhattan on New Year’s Eve 1982, Detective Richard Pastorella took shrapnel from his stomach to his scalp. It blinded him, maimed his right hand, left him nearly deaf. Surgeons used 22 titanium screws to hold together his ruined face.

“When my granddaughters present me with crayon drawings and are pleased to show them to me, I have to pretend that I can see them and enjoy their effort,” Detective Pastorella later testified. “I have sacrificed my pride, my dignity and will never be free.”

Now the leader of the terrorists who maimed him is free. President Obama granted Oscar López Rivera clemency in January. This weekend he will march in New York’s Puerto Rican Day Parade.

López Rivera was the “prime recruiter” for the terrorist group FALN, as well as “a key trainer in bombing, sabotage, and other techniques of guerrilla warfare,” according to his presentencing report. From 1974 to 1983, his group carried out more than 130 bombings, killing six. He has shown little remorse. Last month he insisted that “colonized people” have the right to use “all methods within reach, including force.”

The Puerto Rican Day Parade had originally designated López Rivera its first-ever National Freedom Hero. After massive backlash, organizers tried to save face. He stepped down from his “formal role,” they announced, but will still march.

So will the city’s far-left political elite. Although both of the state’s U.S. senators said they wouldn’t march, Mayor Bill de Blasio was willing to do so even when the terrorist was the official parade honoree. His office called the uproar “needless controversy.” City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito overtly supported López Rivera.

That’s part of a broader trend: Over the past year, the far left has repeatedly venerated terrorists and murderers. Take Rasmea Odeh. In 1969 her group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, murdered two college students by planting a bomb in a box of sweets in a Jerusalem grocery.

Odeh awaits deportation after lying about her terrorism conviction on U.S. immigration papers. According to the feminist website Jezebel, she “epitomizes the progressive left movement and exemplifies the women to whom we should be listening.” The Women’s March gave Odeh a prominent role as it orchestrated the Day Without Women strike. She has also gone on the campus speaking circuit.

Another leftist cause célèbre: Leonard Peltier, serving a life sentence for murdering two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. He and other assailants ambushed the men, riddling their cars with at least 125 bullets. As one agent lay wounded and another tried to surrender, Peltier shot both point-blank.

The Standing Rock alliance of environmentalists, Hollywood progressives and Native American activists have fought for Peltier’s release, portraying his conviction as a legacy of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre.

The progressive media insists that it’s conservatives who are violence-prone—especially in the era of Trump. But it’s the left that champions monsters like Oscar López Rivera, Rasmea Odeh and Leonard Peltier.

Some concerned Democrats are worried that their party may have lost the key blue-wall states because of its elitism, manifested as disdain for Americans between the coasts.

Perhaps emblematic of their worry is the strange metamorphosis of Hillary Clinton’s two presidential campaigns. In 2008, as Bill Clinton 2.0, she drank boilermakers, bragged about bowling and shooting, boasted about her resonance with the “white” working class, and clobbered Obama on his Pennsylvania clingers speech.

But after Obama’s win — and his assumed new formula of registering record numbers of minority voters and seeing them often vote in a bloc on the basis of racial solidarity — Clinton thought she too could follow this new pathway to Democratic victories. So she made the understandable political contortions

This time around, Clinton was bent on out-Obaming Obama’s “clingers” with her own “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” Her campaign was based on pandering to identity-politics groups — while she had cashed in on Wall Street in what can be fairly called a payola scheme with Bill to enrich the Clinton Foundation and thus indirectly themselves. The result was both a cultural and economic affront to what used to be the bedrock of the Democratic party.

Americans neither hate nor envy meritocratic elites. Here in one of the poorer areas of the nation in rural southwestern Fresno County, the poor admire the skilled surgeons who operate on their children. Most of the new agri-barons are up-by-their-bootstraps ethnics: Basques, Punjabis, and descendants of the Okie diaspora and the 1960s waves of immigrants from Mexico who may now farm more than 2,000 or 3,000 acres of orchards and vineyards and on paper be worth $10 or $15 million, though they dress in old clothes and drive run-down pickups. They are looked upon as success stories worthy of emulation because most talk and act like the people who work for and with them.

So perhaps what drives proverbially average Americans crazy is not the success and money of others, but the condescension and hypocrisy of what a particular elite says contrasted with how it lives: The disconnect recalls the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, the televangelist who on Sunday mornings three decades ago used to break into tears as he loudly condemned the sins of the flesh, while he privately indulged his worldly appetites.

Elites, whose lifestyles lead them to burn lots of carbon, rail about the Paris accords to those who get by burning lots less. What is galling is to see how little the elites’ green rhetoric is backed up by their green behavior. Could Hollywood celebrities at least for a year swear off the use of their private jets that emit more carbon emissions in a year than entire small towns in Ohio?

Why do not college professors who are strident activists for climate change agree to limit their intercontinental jet trips to one a year? Could our pundits and politicians who warn Middle America to brace for radical changes in their lifestyles at least agree to live in houses smaller than 2,500 square feet?

How do our elites square the circle of identity politics and big money? The notion that reparatory admissions and hiring are based on race and gender presupposes that past endemic bias has led to oppression that in turn had hit hard the livelihoods of the Other. But what happens when after a half-century of affirmative action, many who receive preferences are richer than those whom they accuse of white privilege?

In the Mount Sinai Medical School, Class of 2020, there is a brilliant and beautiful and charming student who calls me “grams.” rsk

New York’s 45-bed Jews’ Hospital opened for patients on this date in 1855. It would change its name to the Mount Sinai Hospital after the Civil War. Founded by Sampson Simson, a philanthropist, on land that he owned on 28th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in Manhattan, the hospital found its resources especially taxed by the war-wounded of the Union Army and by the draft riots of 1863, which took the lives of scores of black New Yorkers. Mount Sinai began appointing women to professional positions in 1872, and founded a school of nursing in 1881, which graduated 4,700 nurses (only one man among them) in its ninety years of existence. Mount Sinai was also the first hospital to use kidney dialysis in the U.S., to combine chemotherapy with radiation to combat breast cancer, to use a cardiac stress test, and to perform a fetal blood transfusion, among many other medical firsts. During the Holocaust, Mount Sinai gave jobs to many doctors fleeing Nazi Germany as early as 1933 and became a new home for a large number of émigrés. In 2005, Mount Sinai established one of the leading stem-cell research centers in the U.S. In 2013 Dr. David L. Reich became the first openly gay physician to serve as president of the hospital.

“During the first few years that it functioned, most patients were immigrants to the U.S. As the Jews’ Hospital was a charitable enterprise, its directors depended on donations from Jewish friends and members, as well as payments from the government, to provide enough to subsidize care. . . . [In 2013, the] hospital boasted 2,510 physicians, 1,097 residents and fellows, 2,278 nurses, 58,332 inpatient discharges, 644,527 outpatient and 102,639 emergency room visits. . .” –Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, Jerusalem Posthttp://jewishcurrents.org/the-jews-hospital/

He will be running against Republican Governor Rick Snyder. A quote from his issues page: ”

As governor, I will support our immigrant communities and fight for a pathway to citizenship. It’s time for Michigan to be a leader and consider what it can do to be a ‘Sanctuary State’.

Abdul El-Sayed was born and raised in Michigan. His family reflects the diversity of our state, including immigrants who left Egypt in pursuit of greater opportunity in America, and farmers, teachers, and small-business owners who have lived in Gratiot County, Michigan for generations. Abdul is a product of Michigan public schools. He captained his high-school football, wrestling, and lacrosse teams, and went on to play lacrosse for the University of Michigan. He graduated in 2007, where he was honored to deliver the student commencement speech alongside President Bill Clinton.

Abdul went on to become a Rhodes Scholar, earning a doctorate from Oxford University and a medical degree from Columbia University. As a public health professor, Abdul became an internationally recognized expert in health policy and health inequalities.

At 30, Abdul became the youngest health official of a major American city when he was brought home by Mayor Mike Duggan to rebuild Detroit’s Health Department after it was privatized during the city’s bankruptcy. As Health Director, he was responsible for the health and safety of over 670,000 Detroiters, working tirelessly to ensure government accountability and transparency, promote health, and reduce cross-generational poverty.

After witnessing the systematic failures of government only a few miles away in Flint, Abdul worked hard to ensure that children attending Detroit schools and daycares were drinking lead-free water. He has also served expectant mothers and women by creating programs aimed at reducing infant mortality and unplanned pregnancy. He built a program to give schoolchildren across the city glasses if they needed them. Abdul also stood up for children with asthma by taking on corporations that wanted to pump more harmful pollutants into our air, working with them to reduce emissions and invest in parks.

Though the work continues, under Abdul’s leadership, the Detroit Health Department has become a state and national leader in public health innovation and environmental justice, in one of the fastest municipal public health turnarounds in American history.

Abdul is called to public service by a core belief in people. He believes that all people can thrive when we value each other and our communities, we seek to protect and defend our vulnerable, and when we create the kinds of opportunities that empower people to dream for a better future.

Abdul lives in Detroit with his wife, Sarah, a mental health doctor. He loves water sports, working out, good biographies, coffee, and Michigan sports.

An evening stranded on an O’Hare airport runway is enough to make anyone mad, and on Monday Donald Trump responded with a plan for improving American air travel. The President endorsed spinning off air-traffic control from the Federal Aviation Administration, a decades-old idea that would improve passenger experience and safety.

Mr. Trump announced principles for converting air-traffic control into a nonprofit. The new entity would be governed by a board of directors, including representatives for airlines, unions, airports and others. Instead of taxes, the outfit would be funded by user fees, which is how Canada has financed air-traffic services since 1996. The outline makes small tweaks to House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster’s proposal that stalled last year.

The proposal is being dismissed as one of Mr. Trump’s eccentric obsessions, though Al Gore supported a version in the 1990s. President Trump is right that while “every passenger has GPS technology in their pockets, our air-traffic control system still runs on radar,” circa 1945. The FAA’s modernization program known as NextGen is expected to crash through its 2025 deadline by as much as a decade.
One illustration is electronic flight strips. U.S. towers use pieces of paper to monitor a flight’s progress, even as FAA has promised to transition to digital slips, among other technology updates. How’s that going? The product will be rolled out somewhere between 2020 and 2028—to only 89 of the busiest towers, as the Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole has detailed. Canada’s air-traffic system NavCanada deployed electronic strips a dozen years ago.

In May the Transportation Department Inspector General offered some reasons why the FAA so routinely fails to deliver new technology: “overambitious plans, unreliable cost and schedule estimates, unstable requirements, software development problems, poorly defined benefits, and ineffective contract and program management.” Is that all?

FAA regulates itself, so a separation would end this conflict-of-interest and allow the agency to focus on safety and certification. This reform is endorsed by the International Civil Aviation Organization, and only the most cynical on the left could claim a spinoff threatens passenger safety. Democrats will say Mr. Trump is auctioning off air traffic to big business, but the principles are explicit that the entity must be a nonprofit. The outline gives airlines only two seats on the 13-member board.