RUTHFULLY YOURS

The batrachian (toad like) Senator Grassley jumps into the swamp…..shame on him…..rsk

WASHINGTON—The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to open an investigation into the circumstances surrounding President Donald Trump’s removal of James Comey as FBI director, a probe that could examine the thorny question of whether Mr. Trump improperly interfered in an ongoing investigation by doing so.

“The Judiciary Committee has an obligation to fully investigate any alleged improper partisan interference in law enforcement investigations,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and committee chairman, said in a letter released Wednesday. “It is my view that fully investigating the facts, circumstances, and rationale for Mr. Comey’s removal will provide us the opportunity to do that on a cooperative, bipartisan basis.

“The American people deserve a full accounting of attempts to meddle in both our democratic processes and the impartial administration of justice,” Mr. Grassley said.
Mr. Comey was removed from his position last month by Mr. Trump. In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month, Mr. Comey said he had felt directed by the president to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Mr. Trump denies he gave such instructions.

The White House initially said Mr. Comey was removed for performance reasons, but Mr. Trump later suggested he was dismissed in part over the continuing Russia investigation.

Mr. Grassley’s letter came in response to a push from Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. Ms. Feinstein has asked for Judiciary to conduct its own probe in addition to the other investigations unfolding on Capitol Hill. The Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over federal law enforcement, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation. CONTINUE AT SITE

Attorney General Jeff Sessions took aim at unhinged Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theorists, pushing back against left-wingers’ wild claims that by doing his job he somehow betrayed America.

The comments by the former Republican senator from Alabama came during heated testimony yesterday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sessions denied, as he has done before, that he had any inappropriate contact with Russian officials or that he plotted with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government to influence the 2016 election.

Sessions’ testimony came the day after Newsmax Media CEO Christopher Ruddy, a longtime friend of the president, claimed Trump was considering firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is heading the investigation into the Russian conspiracy theory. A few hours before Sessions testified, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein was asked by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.) if he would fire Mueller. Critics have accused Mueller of a litany of conflicts of interest that they claim ought to disqualify him as an investigator.

“Senator, I’m not going to follow any order unless I believe those are lawful and appropriate orders,” Rosenstein said during a hearing about President Trump’s $27.7 billion fiscal 2018 budget for the Department of Justice. Mueller “may be fired only for good cause, and I am required to put that cause in writing. That’s what I would do. If there were good cause, I would consider it.”

The attorney general’s appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee was marked by several testy exchanges with Democrats. The senior Democrat and vice chairman of the committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, set the noticeably prosecutorial tone for his side by interrupting Sessions repeatedly. “The Russians massively interfered,” in the 2016 election, Warner claimed.

In his opening statement, Sessions said:

Let me state this clearly, colleagues. I have never met with or had any conversation with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election in the United States. Further, I have no knowledge of any such conversations by anyone connected to the Trump campaign. I was your colleague in this body for 20 years, at least some of you. And the suggestion that I participated in any collusion that I was aware of, any collusion with the Russian government to hurt this country which I have served with honor for 35 years, or to undermine the integrity of our democratic process is an appalling and detestable lie.

As attorney general, “I recused myself from any investigation into the campaign for president, but I did not recuse myself from defending my honor against false allegations.”

A grandstanding Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) accused Sessions of being less than forthcoming about his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

I believe the American people have had it with stonewalling. Americans don’t want to hear the answers are privileged and off limits or they can’t be provided in public or it would be inappropriate for witnesses to tell us what they know. We are talking about an attack on our democratic institutions and stonewalling of any kind is unacceptable.

Sessions forcefully denied that declining to answer questions about presidential communications constituted stonewalling. “I am following the historic policies of the Department of Justice,” he said.

Throughout the hearing Sessions repeatedly told senators that he wasn’t invoking executive privilege on behalf of President Trump. His default position was that conversations he had about official government business with Trump should be treated as presumptively confidential, at least until the president can make an informed decision about whether to shield the information by invoking executive privilege.

“I’m protecting the president’s constitutional right by not giving it away before he has a chance to review it,” Sessions told Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).

George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” In the former USSR, censorship, rewriting of history and eliminating undesirable people became part of Soviets’ effort to ensure that the correct ideological and political spin was put on their history. Deviation from official propaganda was punished by confinement in labor camps and execution.

Today there are efforts to rewrite history in the U.S., albeit the punishment is not so draconian as that in the Soviet Union. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu had a Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee monument removed last month. Former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton wanted the statue of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, as well as the graves of Forrest and his wife, removed from the city park. In Richmond, Virginia, there have been calls for the removal of the Monument Avenue statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. It’s not only Confederate statues that have come under attack. Just by having the name of a Confederate, such as J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, Virginia, brings up calls for a name change. These history rewriters have enjoyed nearly total success in getting the Confederate flag removed from state capitol grounds and other public places.

Slavery is an undeniable fact of our history. The costly war fought to end it is also a part of the nation’s history. Neither will go away through cultural cleansing. Removing statues of Confederates and renaming buildings are just a small part of the true agenda of America’s leftists. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and there’s a monument that bears his name — the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. George Washington also owned slaves, and there’s a monument to him, as well — the Washington Monument in Washington. Will the people who call for removal of statues in New Orleans and Richmond also call for the removal of the Washington, D.C., monuments honoring slaveholders Jefferson and Washington? Will the people demanding a change in the name of J.E.B. Stuart High School also demand that the name of the nation’s capital be changed?

These leftists might demand that the name of my place of work — George Mason University — be changed. Even though Mason was the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which became a part of our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, he owned slaves. Not too far from my university is James Madison University. Will its name be changed? Even though Madison is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution,” he did own slaves.

ASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave his version Tuesday of parts of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony expressing his concerns about meeting alone with President Trump, while emphatically denying to his former Senate colleagues that he colluded with Russia during the presidential campaign.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters aboard Air Force One as President Trump flew back from Milwaukee today that he watched parts of the hearing, “thought that Attorney General Sessions did a very good job and, in particular, was very strong on the point that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.”

The Sessions testimony unfolded as the FBI has been conducting an ongoing investigation into Russia’s campaign operations since July, and special counsel Robert Mueller has been compiling a team of prosecutors to start his investigation.

On April 27, 2016, Trump gave a foreign policy address at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington at which he, Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were among attendees at a VIP reception. CNN reported that Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session last week that Sessions and Kisylak could have met on the sidelines, as indicated by intercepts of Russian communications.

Sessions told the committee that the reception area included “two to three dozen people” and said he didn’t remember having a conversation with Kislyak. “Certainly, I can assure you, nothing improper, if I’d had a conversation with him,” he said. “And it’s conceivable that that occurred. I just don’t remember it.”

“I didn’t have any formal meeting with him,” the attorney general said later in the hearing. “I’m confident of that. But I may have had an encounter during the reception.”

Sessions, who had been named to Trump’s national security advisory board the previous month, said he “came there as a interested person, very anxious to see how President Trump would do in his first major foreign policy address — I believe he’d only given one major speech before, that one, maybe, at the Jewish AIPAC event.”

“So it was an interesting time to — for me to observe his delivery and the message he would make,” he added. “That was my main purpose of being there.”

During his opening statement, Sessions told senators: “I was your colleague in this body for 20 years, at least some of you, and I — and the suggestion that I participated in any collusion — that I was aware of any collusion with the Russian government to hurt this country, which I have served with honor for 35 years, or to undermine the integrity of our democratic process, is an appalling and detestable lie.”

Testifying before the committee last week, Comey recounted a Feb. 14 Oval Office meeting in which he said “the attorney general lingered by my chair” before leaving the room, at which point Trump, according to the former FBI director, said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting [Mike] Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Comey says that “shortly” after the Oval Office meeting, he was speaking with Sessions on the subject of Trump’s concerns about leaks when he “took the opportunity to implore the attorney general to prevent any future direct communication between the president and me.”

Seven months later, how are Trump voters feeling about their decision? Gary Abernathy of Hillsboro, Ohio’s Times-Gazette was a rare newspaper editor who endorsed Donald Trump for President in 2016. On Friday, he provided an update from his community of 6,600 people:

Interestingly, the conservatives I speak with do not really consider Trump one of them. Rank-and-file Republicans tend to view Trump more as an independent who ran under the Republican banner.

But for the most part, they’re still with him. They appreciate Trump’s “America first” agenda, not because they believe in isolationism, but because they believe the U.S. and its citizens should be the government’s top priority.

The president’s tweets can be as annoying to his supporters as to his opponents, and if there is a common criticism it is that he should tweet less. But his inability so far to overhaul health care, enact tax reform, destroy the Islamic State or “drain the swamp” is largely blamed on overreaching courts and the open “resistance” that appears dedicated to opposing anything Trump wants.

The 2016 election made clear how little the average voter in the Midwest has in common with the average journalist on either coast. But your humble correspondent is struck by how much the Trump analysis offered by small-town Midwesterners squares with the view of Trump voters who live and work in Manhattan. Yes, there are a few, and just like the much larger population of Trump voters in Middle America, they understand his faults but tend to appreciate his goal of American revival.

Meanwhile back in Ohio, Mr. Abernathy finds that constant negative coverage of Mr. Trump in the national media is still not having the intended effect, and may even be backfiring:

While Trump carried Highland County heavily, there are people here who did not vote for him and who do not care for him. But overall, despite the avalanche of negative news stories, Trump’s support remains firm. Hillsboro’s mayor mentioned recently that he has noticed Trump yard signs popping up again, either in a show of support or a sign of defiance.

Imagine a movie scenario. The nation is at war for its very survival, following an unprovoked assault on the Twin Towers in Manhattan and on the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 innocent people. But the nation has been infiltrated, sabotaged, and subverted by the enemy, in close alliance with the radical left, which controls what Karl Marx called the Organs of Propaganda: The schools and media. Two of our worst enemies, North Korea and Iran, are working in close cooperation to develop nuclear weapons and ICBMs, which could destroy our cities with only 15 minutes warning time.

We are therefore at war, quite possibly a war that will end in national catastrophe for us and the civilized world.

This is an important point, because the U.S. Constitution defines “treason” as “aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States in time of war.”

The President of the United States has been elected in a close election, and promises to clean out the swamp in Washington DC. He is therefore attacked by the swampocrats, who have long controlled the media, the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the legislature. (See: Ben Bradlee and Watergate; See the New York Times and the Pentagon Papers.)

But the losing party whips up open rebellion around the country against the winning party, and manages to stoke enough suspicions about the President of the United States using its control of the media to compel the appointment of an independent prosecutor. But the track record of independent prosecutors is entirely corrupt. The Watergate “independent” prosecutor confessed to colluding with the Nixon-hating media of that time. The anti-George W. Bush “independent” prosecutor jailed an entirely innocent man for a “process crime,” Scooter Libby. The currently appointed “independent” prosecutor is a personal friend of the Machiavellian former head of the FBI, who tried to trap the President by leaking a completely fictional rumor of Russian collusion in the last election, for which not a shred of evidence has been produced, based on a completely fraudulent “dossier” made up by a former agent of British intelligence. The fired FBI head has admitted on national television to sending a fraudulent document to be leaked to the New York Times in order to trigger an “independent” prosecutor appointment against the duly elected President of the United States.

Meanwhile the United States is at war, a war started and prosecuted by two major Muslim oil powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Admiral James Lyons, a highly respected retired flag officer, has described the infiltration, sabotage, and mass migration of ideologically indoctrinated enemies, beginning as early as the 1970s. The House Intelligence Committee has just fired three Pakistani IT specialists, three brothers with the last name Awan, who had extensive access to the confidential emails and documents of the committee’s computer system. The fired IT contractors were not arrested, but are now in a jihadist country, Pakistan, being celebrated as public heroes. Pakistanis obviously believe the three brothers were an espionage ring at the very center of the House of Representatives, where highly secret documents are routinely shared. The fired brothers have been publicly defended by the former head of the Democratic Party National Committee, Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, and the former Democratic Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi. Not one member of the House Intelligence Committee has admitted to knowing anything about the three fired Awan brothers. They are playing dumb, and our media are doing nothing.

Before turning to the controversies inspired by the Public Theater’s new production of Shakespeare’s “ Julius Caesar ” at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, consider what makes the title character such a tyrant. The evidence is strangely scant. We hear from Brutus that he was ambitious. He valued theatrical display as a political tool. And while boasting of being as constant as the Northern Star, he inconsistently gave into whim and superstition.

Be that as it may, fearsome tyrant he is taken to be. But in this production, the real tyrant is not Caesar, but its director, Oskar Eustis. He more clearly comes across as ambitious, inconsistent, with little regard for limits, manipulating his audience by playing to popular taste. Perhaps, given such directorial tyranny, I might follow the example of the play’s conspirators, justly take dagger in hand, and add a bloody gouge to his self-inflicted wounds.
If that idea seems rather tasteless, is it any more so than Gregg Henry, as Caesar, impersonating not a Roman tyrant but President Donald Trump ? Or Tina Benko, as Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, appearing as a slinky model with a Slavic accent meant to suggest Melania Trump (though Ms. Benko sounds more like a Transylvanian Israeli)?

Maybe every director is entitled to some political posturing, particularly with Shakespeare who, like Bach, can take a lot of interpretive abuse before he becomes something else. But Mr. Eustis’s territorial claims are imperial. In the program notes, he boasts: “I can say without embarrassment that I decided to open our summer season with Julius Caesar as of November 9, 2016.” In other words, he saw Trump as Caesar the day after Election Day, he thinks that point of view is self-evident, and he still sees the analogy.

Let’s say he’s correct. So when Caesar emerges from a bathtub in this production, stark naked and displaying himself for conspirators and audience alike, no doubt we are meant to think of Trumpian narcissism. What then are we to think of when this erstwhile president is lying in a puddle of blood in the Roman Senate?

Ay, there’s the rub. It is not surprising that Delta Air Lines and Bank of America announced they were pulling out of sponsorship of the production.

But, given Mr. Eustis’s political perspective, such corporate opposition must be like the coronet Caesar covets. It is an honor, which increases because he finds it so wrong-headed. He has said the play is really a “warning parable” about the dangers of fighting for democracy using undemocratic means. Brutus and Cassius come to no good. The play opposes assassination; it does not glorify it.

University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier visited North Korea over New Year’s in 2015 as a tourist, and on Tuesday the 22-year-old returned home to the U.S.—in a coma.

Mr. Warmbier traveled to North Korea for a five-day tourist trip, despite State Department warnings and the North’s long record of taking Americans hostage. As he was preparing to leave with his fellow travelers in January 2016, he was detained and accused of stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel. The next month he gave a tearful public confession, and that March he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for a “hostile act” against the state.

Mr. Warmbier’s parents told the Associated Press Tuesday that they recently learned their son has been in a coma since March 2016, or shortly after his show trial. They say North Koreans told U.S. authorities that their son contracted botulism and never awoke after he was given a sleeping pill. “We want the world to know how we and our son have been brutalized and terrorized by the pariah regime,” Fred and Cindy Warmbier said in their statement.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declined to comment on Mr. Warmbier’s condition “out of respect for the privacy” of the family. But a U.S. official told the New York Times that the U.S. had recently obtained intelligence indicating the young man had been repeatedly beaten in custody. A United Nations commission documented in 2014 that “the use of torture is an established feature of the interrogation process” in North Korea.

Otto Warmbier’s fate underscores the grotesque nature of former basketball player Dennis Rodman’s latest visit this week with his pal Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang. Kim still holds three other American hostages, and any American who visits is tempting torture and death.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a Senate panel on Tuesday that he never met with any Russian officials last year to discuss the presidential campaign and any suggestion that he colluded with them to help Donald Trump was “an appalling and detestable lie.”

Mr. Sessions defended his role in firing former FBI Director James Comey, saying his decision to step aside from campaign-related investigations didn’t apply to broad oversight of the Justice Department. He also refused to discuss the content of any conversations he had with President Trump on the subject.

Mr. Sessions, a former Republican senator from Alabama and a top adviser to Mr. Trump during the campaign, spoke forcefully before the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying he needed to defend himself from “scurrilous” accusations.

Mr. Sessions was at times combative and folksy in answering and parrying questions as he sought to dispel some of the shadows cast in part by Mr. Comey’s testimony last week about the attorney general’s behavior.

Mr. Sessions alternated between strong denials and hazy recollections, saying he couldn’t recall whether he had a passing encounter with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington or any other undisclosed interactions with Russian officials.

Tuesday’s hearing became heated at times, as Mr. Sessions said he didn’t appreciate the “innuendo being leaked out there about me” while Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) suggested Mr. Sessions was “stonewalling” by declining to answer questions about his conversations with the president.

Mr. Sessions said he was protecting the president’s “constitutional right” to keep such conversations confidential and citing a Justice Department policy on not commenting on conversations between the attorney general and the president.

Such answers didn’t satisfy the Democratic senators on the committee.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D., N.M.) accused Mr. Sessions of blocking the Senate inquiry. “You took an oath,” the senator said. “You raised your right hand here today and said that you would solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And now you’re not answering questions. You’re impeding the investigation.”

Testimony last week from Mr. Comey before the same panel intensified attention on Mr. Sessions’ interactions with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. But he said his two meetings with Mr. Kislyak had nothing to do with the campaign. “I have never met with or had any conversations with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election,” Mr. Sessions said. He also said he had “racked my brain” to see if he could recall a third meeting but couldn’t.

The Senate Intelligence Committee and several other congressional panels are investigating Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. The Russian government denies that, and Mr. Trump has called the probes a “witch hunt.” He has said no one on his campaign coordinated with the Kremlin.

The attorney general’s highly anticipated testimony came after Mr. Comey portrayed Mr. Sessions as an attorney general who did little to manage a relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Comey that was becoming increasingly problematic. The former FBI director also hinted that there were reasons Mr. Sessions had to step away from the investigation into Russian interference in the election beyond what was publicly known. CONTINUE AT SITE