RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON—U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) was upgraded from critical to serious condition on Saturday after he was wounded in a shooting at a Republican baseball practice outside Washington, D.C.

Medstar Washington Hospital Center released the update Saturday on behalf of the Scalise family. The congressman underwent another surgery Saturday, and the hospital said he is more responsive and speaking with family.

Mr. Scalise, the House majority whip, was one of five people shot when a gunman opened fire Wednesday as the Republican team practiced in Alexandria, Va.

The assailant, James Hodgkinson, had lashed out at President Donald Trump and other Republicans over social media and last year volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Scalise, 51 years old, was shot as he stood by second base, and he dragged himself into the outfield in a bid to reach safety, witnesses said. He has required surgery several times since the shooting.

Matt Mika, a lobbyist for Tyson Foods who was among those shot, also underwent additional surgery and doctors expect a full recovery.

Mr. Mika’s family said in a statement Saturday that he would remain in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital at least through the weekend. They said he is able to communicate through notes and signed the game ball from Friday’s congressional baseball game.

YOKOSUKA, Japan—A deadly collision with a cargo ship crushed the captain’s cabin of a U.S. destroyer and other sleeping quarters, giving sailors almost no time to save themselves as seawater flooded in, the commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet said Sunday.

The bodies of seven U.S. sailors missing after the USS Fitzgerald collided with the Philippines-registered ACX Crystal early Saturday have been recovered from inside the destroyer, U.S. defense officials said.

Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin said the impact crushed berthing cabins below the waterline and ripped open a large hole in the vessel. Bodies of the missing sailors were found in the berthing cabins, the Navy said.

The cabin of the ship’s captain, Bryce Benson, was also badly damaged.

“He’s lucky to be alive,” Vice Adm. Aucoin said, adding that Commander Benson, who was airlifted from the Fitzgerald, is in a stable condition in a nearby hospital.

Two berthing areas were crushed, housing more than 100 sailors. Many were asleep at the time of the collision.

Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, U.S. Seventh Fleet Commander, said there wasn’t a lot of time for sailor’s to react to the collision. Photo: toru hanai/Reuters

“The water inflow was tremendous” after the collision, Vice Adm. Aucoin said. “There wasn’t a lot of time” for sailors to react. “The crew had to work very hard to keep the ship afloat”

Vice Adm. Aucoin said he had ordered a full investigation into the cause of the collision, and would also cooperate with Japanese investigators looking into the incident.

A spokesman for the Japanese coast guard said its investigation was continuing, and Filipino crew members of the ACX Crystal had been questioned. He declined to discuss further details of the probe.

Nippon Yusen K.K . , the Japanese shipping company that operates the 728-foot-long ACX Crystal cargo ship, said all of the 20 crew members were unharmed. The company said it would fully cooperate with an investigation into the cause of the collision.

The region where the two ships collided is often busy with marine traffic.

Collisions at sea for the U.S. Navy are extremely uncommon, said Bryan McGrath, a former destroyer captain, who said they occur only once or twice a decade, if that. He said he couldn’t remember a recent collision that was this consequential. CONTINUE AT SITE

‘Pretty soon, all of this assassination talk will get someone shot,” I told my Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson on Tuesday afternoon.

And on Wednesday morning, it happened.

James T. Hodgkinson, 66, opened fire on an Alexandria, Va., baseball diamond where Republican lawmakers practiced for their annual charity face-off against Democratic colleagues. Hodgkinson, a registered Democrat, shot House Republican whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Capitol Police officers David Bailey and Crystal Griner, congressional staffer Zach Barth, and Tyson Foods lobbyist Matt Mika.

The would-be assassin, whom Officers Bailey and Griner fatally struck, was a far-left campaign volunteer for Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist., Vt.). To his credit, Sanders swiftly and forcefully declared: “I am sickened by this despicable act . . . and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms.”

As the Daily Caller detailed, Hodgkinson clearly and explicitly hated President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans.

Via Facebook, Hodgkinson said of Scalise: “Here’s a Republican that [sic] should Lose His Job, but they Gave Him a Raise.”

Hodgkinson called Trump “Truly the Biggest Ass Hole We Have Ever Had in the Oval Office.”

“Trump is a traitor,” Hodgkinson wrote. “Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

The shooter belonged to a Facebook group called “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans” and another named “Terminate the Republican Party.” After Hodgkinson’s attack, members of the “Terminate” online forum rejoiced. “Lol . . . this was no surprise,” Darryl W. Riley cracked. “We all knew this was gonna happen.” An even more depraved Mari-Ellen Cain cheered: “And it’s one, two, three shots you’re out at the old ball game!!!”

Represenative Jeff Duncan (R., S.C.) said that as he left the ballfield on Tuesday, Hodgkinson “asked me if this team was the Republican or Democratic team practicing. He proceeded to shoot Republicans.” According to the Washington Examiner, Duncan added: “I’m going to take it he was targeting Republicans this morning.”

News accounts, led by the Daily Caller, indicate that law-enforcement officials found a hit list in Hodgkinson’s pocket. It specifically named GOP representatives Mo Brooks of Alabama, Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, and Trent Franks of Arizona, all members of the House Freedom Caucus. Brooks and Duncan attended Tuesday’s practice. The list strongly suggests that Hodgkinson deliberately targeted his prey.

While Hodgkinson’s behavior exceeded that of other liberals, his brutality built upon the Left’s statements and actions since Election Day 2016.

Liberals and Democrats have spewed toxic anti-GOP rhetoric, excreted assassination-chic “art” that celebrates the ritual murder of President Trump, physically beaten Trump supporters, and perpetrated anti-Republican riots, anti-Trump vandalism, and even “anti-Fascist” arson. For the Left, “Love trumps hate” is less than a punchline. It’s a cruel, vicious lie.

Hodgkinson’s roughly 50 pulls on the trigger of his SKS 7.62 rifle likely were eased by the constant drumbeat of left-wing violence, blood-soaked imagery, and hateful rhetoric about Trump. This venom did not ooze from obscure, fringe sources. Rather it cascaded from the mainstream: platinum-record-earning musicians, TV stars, and a taxpayer-funded drama company operating in the heart of Central Park.

Madonna, the world-wide pop sensation, told the January 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C.: “Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”

Rapper Snoop Dogg produced a video in which he fires a gun beside the head of a clown dressed like Trump. Out pops a flag that reads: “BANG!”

“Can you imagine what the outcry would be if SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama,” President Trump replied via Twitter. “Jail time!”

Adam Pally, star of Fox TV’s Making History, told TMZ that if he could take a time machine and spend an hour with anyone, “I’d have to kill Trump or Hitler.”

Former CNN personality Kathy Griffin notoriously posed with a blood-drenched, mock-up of a severed head of Trump.

Lea DeLaria, a cast member of Netflix’s Emmy-award-winning Orange Is the New Black series explained how she would express herself politically: “Pick up a baseball bat and take out every fucking republican and independent I see.”

The Public Theater’s current production of Julius Caesar features a Trump-look-alike emperor being stabbed to death by Roman senators. As Polizette’s Edmund Kozak noted, “The play has reportedly received standing ovations when Trump/Caesar is assassinated.”

The Left tries to defend itself by claiming that “both sides do this.”

Nonsense.

President Donald Trump’s missteps have intensified the scandal that is consuming his administration.

One is tempted to put scandal in scare quotes. Trump is somehow enmeshed in a scandal based on actions that a president is fully entitled to take — such as dismissing the FBI director and weighing in on the merits of continuing an investigation of his former national-security adviser. It is, in addition, a scandal born of Trump’s desperation to publicize information that is true and that a president is fully entitled to publicize — such as the facts that the president had been assured by the FBI director on multiple occasions that he is not a criminal suspect, that the FBI director made the same representation to members of Congress, and that a months-long investigation had turned up no evidence of “collusion” between his campaign and the Kremlin.

Yet, a scandal it is: A specter of impropriety is undermining Trump’s administration, tanking his favorability ratings, and stalling his agenda. True, his media-Democrat enemies cast every story in the worst possible light. But there’s always a story, isn’t there?

That is largely Trump’s doing. The tweet-tirades about phantom wiretaps (which undermined his credibility to raise what may be a real Obama-administration abuse of foreign-intelligence powers). The decision to fire FBI director James Comey, not timed to occur when Trump justifiably dismissed dozens of Obama Justice Department appointees at the start of the administration (the new broom that sweeps clean), but triggered by a fit of pique over Comey’s selective public commentary on the “Russia investigation” — thus fueling the “obstruction” narrative. The multiple conflicting explanations for Comey’s removal. The bizarre decision to meet Russian diplomats the day after Comey’s dismissal and, shamefully, to berate the former director in their presence. And, of course, more tweets, such as the self-destructive suggestion of a Watergate-resonant White House taping system (that almost certainly does not exist).

But if Trump is his own worst enemy, his Justice Department is not far behind.

Four key decisions, three of them made after the president was inaugurated and the Justice Department came under his control, at least nominally, have done immense damage to his administration — in conjunction with Trump’s belief that fires are best doused with gasoline.

To understand why, I will reiterate my two-part working theory for why we have a mess, albeit one that, as a matter of law rather than appearances, falls woefully short of obstruction. First, Trump lobbied for the investigation of Michael Flynn to be dropped — something he could lawfully have ordered to be done — because he (a) was feeling remorse over Flynn’s humiliating removal as national-security adviser and (b) thought further investigation and potential prosecution would be overkill. Second, Trump’s decision to fire Comey — something he was lawfully entitled to do — was not an endeavor to influence the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign; it was the result of exasperation over Comey’s skewed public statements about the investigation, which created the misimpression that Trump was a criminal suspect.

On the latter score, I am not saying that Comey intended to mislead the public, although I imagine Trump probably believes he did. For what it’s worth, I accept the former director’s explanation: After his (self-induced) nightmare over the Hillary Clinton e-mails investigation, Comey was reluctant to announce that Trump was not a suspect; he feared that if Trump’s status later changed, he would have to correct his announcement, thus making matters worse for Trump (as his similar flip-flop did for Clinton).

If that was his fear, though, Comey should have refrained from any public comments at all — which is what law enforcement is supposed to do. Instead, during congressional testimony, he made an unnecessary announcement about the Russia investigation that led the media to report, and much of the public to believe, that Trump was a suspect in possible crimes. Once he did that, it was unreasonable to refuse to correct this misimpression by publicly acknowledging that Trump was not a suspect. It is all well and good to agitate over a “duty to correct,” but Comey glides past the more basic duty not to make gratuitous prejudicial statements in the first place. Trump fired the FBI director because he was being badly hurt by that testimony. He wanted it publicly known that he was not a suspect (which Comey had privately assured him, multiple times).

Trump saw Comey as the obstacle to that disclosure. Whether too uninformed or too paralyzed, the president did not grasp that he was entitled to order Comey to make the disclosure, or to do it himself (as he eventually did, only upon firing the FBI director).

“We relate all this because it shows how Mr. Mueller let his prosecutorial willfulness interfere with proper constitutional and executive-branch procedure. This showed bad judgment. He shares this habit with Mr. Comey.”

That didn’t take long. Barely a week after James Comey admitted leaking a memo to tee up a special counsel against Donald Trump, multiple news reports based on leaks confirm that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the President for obstruction of justice. You don’t have to be a Trump partisan to have concerns about where all of this headed.

President Trump has reportedly stepped back this week from his temptation to fire Mr. Mueller, and that’s the right decision. The chief executive has the constitutional power to fire a special counsel through the chain of command at the Justice Department, but doing so would be a political debacle by suggesting he has something to hide.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mr. Mueller, would surely resign, and other officials might resign as well until someone at Justice fulfilled Mr. Trump’s orders. The President’s opponents would think it’s Christmas. The dismissal would put the President’s political allies in a terrible spot and further distract from what are make-or-break months for his agenda on Capitol Hill. His tweets attacking the probe are also counterproductive, but by now we know he won’t stop.
There are nonetheless good reasons to raise questions about Mr. Mueller’s investigation, and those concerns are growing as we learn more about his close ties to Mr. Comey, some of his previous behavior, and the people he has hired for his special counsel staff. The country needs a fair investigation of the facts, not a vendetta to take down Mr. Trump or vindicate the tribe of career prosecutors and FBI agents to which Messrs. Mueller and Comey belong.

Start with the fact that Mr. Comey told the Senate last week that he asked a buddy to leak his memo about Mr. Trump specifically “because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” Did Mr. Comey then suggest Mr. Mueller’s name to Mr. Rosenstein? He certainly praised Mr. Mueller to the skies at his Senate hearing.

The two former FBI directors are long-time friends who share a similar personal righteousness. Mr. Mueller, then running the FBI, joined Mr. Comey, then Deputy Attorney General, in threatening to resign in 2004 over George W. Bush’s antiterror wiretaps.

Less well known is how Mr. Mueller resisted direction from the White House in 2006 after he sent agents with a warrant to search then Democratic Rep. William Jefferson’s congressional office on a Saturday night without seeking legislative-branch permission. The unprecedented raid failed to distinguish between documents relevant to corruption and those that were part of legislative deliberation. GOP Speaker Dennis Hastert rightly objected to this as an executive violation of the separation of powers and took his concerns to Mr. Bush.

The President asked his chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, to ask Mr. Mueller to return the Jefferson documents that he could seek again through regular channels, but the FBI chief refused. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was also unable to move the FBI director. When Mr. Bolten asked again, Mr. Mueller said he wouldn’t tolerate political interference in a criminal probe, as if the Republican Mr. Bush was trying to protect a corrupt Democrat. Mr. Mueller threatened to resign, and the dispute was settled only after Mr. Bush ordered the seized documents sealed for 45 days until Congress and Mr. Mueller could work out a compromise.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals later ruled that the FBI raid had violated the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause and Mr. Jefferson’s “non-disclosure privilege” as a Member of Congress, though the court let Justice keep the documents citing Supreme Court precedent on the exclusionary rule for collecting evidence.

By Natalie Andrews and Kristina Peterson
https://www.wsj.com/articles/scalise-remains-in-critical-condition-but-prognosis-has-improved-1497645790

WASHINGTON—Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) remained in critical condition on Friday but his prognosis has improved, a hospital official said, two days after a gunman shot the third-ranking House Republican at a baseball practice.

Jack Sava, the director of the surgery team at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, told reporters Friday that Mr. Scalise had been near death after he was shot in the hip Wednesday, as the bullet caused extensive damage and bleeding.

Dr. Sava said that the lawmaker arrived at the hospital unconscious and “in critical condition with an imminent risk of death,” but that his condition has improved significantly in the past 36 hours.
Mr. Scalise has undergone numerous surgeries and is expected to continue recovering, with the length of his hospital stay unknown. “My understanding is that he will be able to walk and hopefully run,” Dr. Sava told reporters in a briefing on Friday afternoon.

Everybody over 56 years old likely remembers the 18 ½ minute gap in Richard Nixon’s White House Watergate tapes after Nixon had ordered erasures to hide things he said concerning Watergate. In the current Comey craze of testimony, there’s a 105 ½ hour gap in James Comey’s testimony that proves that critical parts of Comey’s testimony is at best materially false, and, at worst, highly perjurious with the intent of committing crimes against the United States.

That 105 ½ hour gap is the time between when President Trump on Friday morning “tweeted” that “James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” and when Comey alleged in his recent Senate Intelligence Committee testimony that he “woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation.”

Between 9:32 Friday morning and let’s guess 3 am that next Monday night, there are approximately 105 and ½ hours. In short, Comey’s Senate testimony states that it took James B. Comey, Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the United States of America, 105 ½ hours after President Trump’s “tapes” tweet to realize “that there might be corroboration” of his memos. This is so ludicrous that it exposes his entire testimony as a web of perjury.

As a preface, this essay is not going to vet the already reported grave chronology inconsistency in Comey’s “memo” testimony.

Instead, first, let’s examine the exact documentary record regarding this 105 ½ hour gap.

President Trump’s tweet at 8:26 AM on 12 May 2017 read:

“James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Next, James B. Comey, Jr.’s Senate Intelligence Committee testimony under Republican Senator Susan Collins read as follows:

“COLLINS: And finally, did you show copies of your memos to anyone outside of the Department of Justice?

COMEY: Yes.

COLLINS: And to whom did you show copies?

COMEY: I asked – the president tweeted on Friday, after I got fired, that I better hope there’s no tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape.

And my judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself, for a variety of reasons. But I asked him to, because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it.

COLLINS: And was that Mr. Wittes?

COMEY: No, no.

COLLINS: Who was that?

COMEY: A good friend of mine who’s a professor at Columbia Law School.

US President Donald Trump and former FBI Director James Comey: Did Trump fire Comey because he showed insufficient zeal in uncovering the pattern of press leaks. Photo: Reuters file

The distinguished political scientist Angelo Codevilla coined the ominous term “cold civil war” to describe America’s precarious condition, adding, “Statesmanship’s first task is to prevent it from turning hot.” The attempted massacre June this week June 14 of Republican Congressmen and their staff by a deranged partisan of Sen. Bernie Sanders turned up the heat a notch, but it would be mistaken to attribute much importance to this dreadful outburst of left-wing rage. The augury of American fracture will not be street violence, but a constitutional crisis implicating virtually the whole of America’s governing caste. The shock troops in the cold civil war are not gunmen but lawyers.

A considerable portion of America’s permanent bureaucracy, including elements of its intelligence community, is engaged in an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny against the elected commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump. Most of the Democratic Party and a fair sampling of the Republican Establishment wants to force Trump out of office, and to this end undertook an entrapment scheme to entice the president and his staff into actions which might be construed after the fact as obstruction of justice. By means yet undisclosed, the mutineers forced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn from office and now seek to bring down the president for allegedly obstructing an investigation of Gen. Flynn that arose in the first place from the entrapment scheme.

One of the Republican Party’s most distinguished statesmen recently told a closed gathering that a “cold coup” is underway against the president. I do not know and have not sought to learn the substance of the allegations; Gen. Flynn has no choice as a matter of self-preservation but to hold his peace and presently cannot defend himself in public.

By no coincidence is Gen. Flynn the central character in this scenario. As I wrote in February, the CIA really is out to get him:

Flynn’s Defense Intelligence Agency produced a now-notorious 2012 report warning that chaos in Syria’s civil war enabled the rise of a new Caliphate movement, namely ISIS. For full background, see Brad Hoff’s July 2016 essay in Foreign Policy Journal: Flynn humiliated the bungling CIA and exposed the incompetence and deception of the Obama administration, and got fired for it. If anyone doubts the depth of CIA incompetence in Syria, I recommend an account that appeared this month in the London Financial Times.

As soon as details about the shooting spree at a baseball field in Virginia on Wednesday morning began to emerge, social media lit up with political arguments.

Before it was established that 66-year-old James T. Hodgkinson had arrived at the venue with the intention to kill members of the Republican Party, the heated debate focused on the assault rifle and pistol used in the attack, and the pros and cons of gun control. When the identity and motive of the perpetrator became clear, the fights took a turn for the worse.

Conservatives experienced a touch of schadenfreude at the realization that the perpetrator was a left-wing activist — a supporter of Bernie Sanders, the candidate in the Democratic Party’s primaries defeated by Hillary Clinton — with boundless hatred for U.S. President Donald Trump. Until now, the Right in America has been put on the defensive, accused of everything from racism to wanton disregard for the environment. That Hodgkinson was a member of the “enlightened” camp, which not only purports to have a monopoly on goodness, but considers gun ownership a crime in and of itself, was a source of deep embarrassment.

Sanders promptly and properly denounced the violence and distanced himself from the culprit.

Trump and members of Congress, many of whom were present during the shootings, also have been acting responsibly. House Speaker Paul Ryan announced, “We are united in our shock. We are united in our anguish. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.”

Facebook and Twitter users have been less noble, with Trump supporters attributing the truly vile atmosphere created by disgruntled voters, particularly prominent celebrities, to Hodgkinson’s rampage. They have been highlighting statements such as the one made by movie star Robert De Niro, who said in a pre-presidential election video that he’d “like to punch Trump in the face,” and the disgusting shenanigans of comedian Kathy Griffin, recently disgraced for parodying an Islamic State-like beheading of the president.

Though these critics are justifiably appalled at the escalating viciousness of anti-Trump rhetoric — which is aimed not only at the president himself, but at anyone who defends him — they need to be very careful when it comes to castigating an entire political camp for the actions of a deranged man with a history of physical abuse.

One key principle that sets conservatives apart from liberals is individualism. This is why we tend to support a free market, free speech and school choice, while rejecting the notion that fast-food chains cause obesity or that guns commit murder. This is not to say that we ignore the power of culture on society. On the contrary, it is the source of much of our angst and the cause of many of our ideological battles.

However, as a right-winger in Israel whose political position was held accountable for the climate that led to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995, I cannot in good conscience join the choir of my current American compatriots doing to the other side what was done to mine.

According to CBS Baltimore, the city is nearing 160 homicides and already before halfway through 2017. Shockingly, six people were murdered in the span of just 24 hours.

Because of the increase in violent crimes, Baltimore officers have been given mandatory 12-hour shifts where they will go door-to-door, canvassing the neighborhoods where most of the violence is taking place.

Baltimore has been troubled since the Black Lives Matter riots over the death of Freddie Gray who died in police custody. Then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was criticized for bowing to the rioters who injured police officers, giving those “who wished to destroy” the space to do so.

Inheriting that mess is Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh, who said illegal guns are the city’s biggest problem now.

“It should at least be a felony to carry an illegal gun,” Pugh said. “There’s too many illegal guns on streets of our city.”

Pugh is working to ensure criminals with violent backgrounds stay in jail and can’t get their hands on firearms.

Among the nearly 160 dead is 27-year-old Sebastian Dvorak, who was robbed and gunned down while out with his friends. His killer is still on the run.

Then there was the 37-year-old mother of eight children, Charmaine Wilson, who was murdered after a fight between a group of boys over a bike that belonged to one of her sons. Her killer hasn’t been found, either.

Baltimore police spokesman T.J. Smith said, “There is a murderer among us who is an absolutely monstrous human being. This is something that should outrage the entire community, entire city, because there are cowards walking around that took this mother, killed a woman over a dispute.”

Police are asking for tips or video to help in locating these suspects.