RUTHFULLY YOURS

That the mayor of America’s largest city is planning to march with a convicted terrorist in next month’s Puerto Rican Day Parade illustrates a fundamental fact about the Left in America: From student activists all the way up to leading officials, not excluding the 44th president, they are willing to shrug off terrorism provided it has sufficient left-wing bona fides.

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio says he will march behind Oscar López Rivera, the convicted Puerto Rican terrorist who served 35 years in prison before President Obama commuted his sentence. Organizers of the parade, to be held June 11 on Fifth Avenue, say that not only will López Rivera lead it, but he will in a sense be designated the hero of the entire history of the celebration: He’ll be granted the title of “National Freedom Hero,” a designation never before bestowed on anyone.

López Rivera, an admitted leader of the 1970s Marxist terror group FALN, which sought independence for Puerto Rico under Communist leadership, was in 1981 sentenced to 55 years in prison, later increased to 70 as punishment for an escape attempt. After being arrested with six pounds of dynamite in his Chicago apartment and declaring at trial, “I am an enemy of the United States government,” he served a bit more than half of his sentence before Obama released him. Puerto Ricans have repeatedly voted against independence in a series of referenda, so López Rivera’s terrorist career amounted to killing innocent civilians — FALN carried out more than 100 bombings, including one at Manhattan’s landmark Fraunces Tavern in 1975 that killed four — to pursue a political goal not supported even by his fellow Puerto Ricans.

De Blasio this week shrugged at López Rivera’s hideous past.

“The organization he was affiliated with did things I don’t agree with, obviously, and they were illegal,” the mayor said at a press conference this week. “I don’t agree with the way he did it. But he did serve his time,” adding that López Rivera “renounced violence.”

He did? Here is what López Rivera, quoted in yesterday’s New York Times, said upon his release from a halfway house in Puerto Rico on Wednesday: “We are a colonized people, and according to international law, that says all colonized people have a right to struggle for its independence, using all methods within reach, including force.” (Emphasis mine.)

Worried about the public perception of pushing for the impeachment of President Trump less than four months into his presidency, Democratic Party leaders are warning their more excitable members to back off calling for Trump’s ouster.

The Hill:

Democratic leaders have a message for those members of their caucus beating the drum to impeach President Trump: not so fast.

“I would suggest … there needs to be a full investigation first,” Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said Wednesday. “We need to get to the facts, and let the facts lead where they may.”

In the eyes of several Democrats, however, the facts already lead to impeachment.

[…]

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) spoke out at a closed-door House Democratic Caucus meeting Wednesday morning to highlight the urgency of removing Trump, whom the Democrats increasingly see as a national security liability.

Almost simultaneously, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) took to the House floor to trumpet the impeachment call he’d sounded earlier in the week. He characterized his decision as a “position of conscience.”

It’s the first time in her long career that Rep. Waters has given a fig about “national security.” And Mr Green: Put a sock in it.

The impeachment debate is forcing Democratic leaders to walk a fine line in their approach to the ongoing Russia-Trump saga. On one hand, the Democrats want to keep the pressure on the White House and tap the energy the remarkable story is generating among members of their base, many of whom support the impeachment route. On the other, they don’t want to politicize their calls for an independent investigation.

“We have to be circumspect as we look at this tale of horrors,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). “Because we should not give the impression that we are obsessed with removing Donald Trump from office — it will only harden his supporters.

“Based on what I’ve read and heard, Mr. Trump is in trouble, and he doesn’t need any help to get into deeper trouble.”

Top Democratic leaders insist they’re not putting any pressure on their troops to shy away from impeachment calls.

“Members can come to their own conclusions, and we don’t pretend to stand here and speak on behalf of every single individual member of our caucus,” Crowley said.

The “case for impeachment” doesn’t exist — yet. What members have is a tissue of half-truths, unsubstantiated rumors, anonymously sourced reporting, and lots and lots of wishful thinking.

There has not been a shred of hard evidence — video or audio recordings, documents, eyewitness, first-person testimony, or anything else that would stand up in a court of law, much less the court of public opinion. CONTINUE AT SITE

Interest in Section 4 of the 25th Amendment is peaking. Multiple amateur constitutional scholars have advocated its use to remove President Trump from office, as an alternative to impeachment. But Section 4 is a tool for a different job. Its use under today’s circumstances has the potential to tear the country apart.

Section 4 is not a suitable substitute for impeachment. To be sure, impeachment sets a high bar: a majority in the House, then two-thirds in the Senate to convict and remove an official. Section 4 sounds easier: If the vice president and a majority of the cabinet declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the vice president becomes acting president.

Section 4 is a great solution if the president is missing or comatose, but a terrible one when he is conscious and in full control of his Twitter account. The first difficulty is that the president can contest the cabinet’s action. If he does, Congress assembles, debates and votes. Unless two-thirds of both House and Senate vote within 21 days to back the cabinet, the president retakes power. Because impeachment requires only a simple House majority, it is easier for the president to defeat a Section 4 action than to avoid impeachment.

Further, if the president loses a Section 4 vote, he is displaced only temporarily; nothing stops him from trying again. All he needs is the support, one time, of more than a third of either the House or Senate.

Some argue that impeachment is limited to high crimes and misdemeanors, making it inappropriate for the case of someone who is (as Mr. Trump’s calmer critics describe him) simply in over his head. But anyone who wields as much power as the president and who is grossly incompetent surely will have done something that rises to the level of an impeachable offense.

Section 4 is also horribly hazardous. The fatal flaw emerges from this passage: “When the President transmits . . . his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of [the cabinet] transmit within four days . . . their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

After reading that, who do you think holds presidential power during the four-day waiting period between the president’s declaration and the cabinet’s counterdeclaration? The answer is the vice president. The best reading of the text and the only reading of the crystal-clear legislative history is that the president does not immediately retake power.

Several intelligent but poorly informed commentators have gotten that wrong and said that the president would retake power immediately. A besieged president would have a tremendous incentive to look at the text, interpret it favorably to himself, and rally his supporters around that interpretation. He would assert that he had retaken power immediately and—showing his ability to discharge the powers and duties of his office—he would fire his disloyal cabinet and name more-agreeable allies as acting secretaries.CONTINUE AT SITE

Professional medical organizations have a simple guideline: It’s a bad idea for doctors to treat their friends or relatives. No matter how skilled, no matter how upright, a doctor who does risks losing his objectivity. The big question is whether this applies to Washington’s new scandal doctor, Robert Mueller.

In tapping Mr. Mueller as special counsel to look into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has certainly doused the political flames. Democrats were forced to tone down their chant for instant impeachment. Republicans were able to step back from the escalating headlines.

That’s because the new guy is as skilled and upright as they come. A Robert Mueller word-association game would go something like this: integrity, honor, respect, order, discipline, honesty, fairness. He is a decorated Marine, a Princeton grad, a respected federal prosecutor and a former FBI director. Mr. Mueller has tackled strongmen and terrorists, working under Republicans and Democrats. He has little use for the press or the limelight, which—in the current hysterical environment—is a singular qualification.

In short, nobody doubts Mr. Mueller will lead as professional an investigation as he is capable of conducting. It’s the “capable” bit that provides the one note of concern.

Mr. Mueller is no doctor. But he is part of the brotherhood of prosecutors. Justice Department attorneys have their squabbles and differences, but they count themselves as a legal elite, charged with a noble purpose. They largely keep their own counsel and aren’t much for outside criticism.

The FBI’s culture is even more famous and pronounced. Tens of thousands of special agents and staff from different backgrounds come together to protect the country from criminals and terrorists. Outside the military, no other Washington body rivals the FBI’s esprit de corps. CONTINUE AT SITE

A ranking Republican statesman this week told an off-the-record gathering that a “coup” attempt was in progress against President Donald Trump, with collusion between the largely Democratic media and Trump’s numerous enemies in the Republican Party. The object of the coup, the Republican leader added, was not impeachment, but the recruitment of a critical mass of Republican senators and congressmen to the claim that Trump was “unfit” for office and to force his resignation.

It’s helpful to fan away the psychedelic fumes of allegation and innuendo and clarify just what Trump might have done wrong. Trump will not be impeached, and he will not be harried out of office. But he faces a formidable combination of media hostility—what the president today denounced as a “witch hunt”—and a divided White House staff prone to press leaks. The likely outcome will be a prolonged dirty war of words that will delay Trump’s domestic agenda and tie down his loyalists with the chores of fire-fighting.

One thinks of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. Trump was elected by campaigning against the Republican Establishment as well as Obama, ridiculing their policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan and questioning their credibility. In the flurry of personal attacks, the underlying policy issues have faded into the background, and that gives the initiative to Trump’s enemies.

Nothing that has been alleged, much less proven, about President Trump comes close to the threshold for impeachment, as Prof. Jonathan Turley of George Washington University’s law school explained in a May 17 comment in TheHill.com. Even if Trump asked then FBI Director James Comey to go easy on Gen. Michael Flynn, Prof. Turley notes, “Encouraging leniency or advocating for an associate is improper but not necessarily” illegal. The charge of obstruction of justice presumes that there is an issue before the bar of justice, but as Turley adds, “There is no indication of a grand jury proceeding at the time of the Valentine’s Day meeting between Trump and Comey. Obstruction cases generally are built around judicial proceedings — not Oval Office meetings.”

The appointment of the respected former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to look into allegations of Russian interference in the November 2016 election strongly suggests that the Trump team feels it has nothing to fear from a thorough review. In the case Trump’s detractors appear to be bluffing. Press reports of contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian diplomats and businessmen appear to reflect the sort of conversations that every presidential campaign conducts with important foreign governments. It is not clear that Russia was responsible for the delivery of embarrassing Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks, moreover. Pro-Trump media report that a DNC staffer Seth Rich was Wikileaks’ source. Rich was murdered on a Washington street in July 2016, and a counter-conspiracy theory is circulating about his death.

Then there is the alleged leak of highly classified intelligence on the laptop bomb threat to airliners, of which Wall Street Journal editors intoned, “Loose Lips Sink Presidencies.” Exactly what the president told the Russians is under dispute, but the salient fact in the case is that presidents and cabinet members frequently leak classified information without prompting the condemnations that piled up on Trump. Obama’s then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta leaked the role of Pakistani physician Shakil Afridi in locating Osama bin Laden’s lair, and President Obama himself revealed that Seal Team 6 had killed Obama, making the unit a subsequent target for terrorists. Apart from inadvertent leaks, the Obama administration deliberately leaked British nuclear secrets to Russia, over bitter protests from London.

If you listen to breathless, Trump-loathing Democrats and their stooges in the liberal media, you would think President Donald J. Trump is the biggest traitor since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg sent Stalin the recipe for the atomic bomb.

As the Washington Post reported on Monday, President Trump met Russia’s foreign minister and its ambassador to Washington in the Oval Office on May 10. They discussed ISIS’s secret plans to detonate laptop computers aboard passenger jets. Trump said via Twitter Tuesday that he shared this intelligence — possibly from Israeli sources — because “I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.”

National-security adviser H. R. McMaster vigorously insisted on Monday that Trump did not do what the Left accuses him of doing, including revealing how and from whom America acquired details on ISIS’s laptop weapons.

“I was in the room,” McMaster said. “It did not happen.” He added: “At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.”

This story emerged after someone found President Trump’s handling of state secrets so worrisome that he or she blabbed those same secrets to the Washington Post. Go figure.

Despite the White House’s denials, Democratic volcanoes erupted afresh.

“Congress must immediately investigate this irresponsible action and take steps to ensure that Trump does no additional damage to U.S. national security in his dealings with Russia,” bellowed Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

“I just think it’s part of a pattern of recklessness that we’ve got to get a handle on,” said Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.

Representatives John Conyers of Michigan and Elijah Cummings of Maryland fumed in a joint statement: “After an unprecedented week in which many thought it would be impossible for President Trump to be any more irresponsible, he now may have sunk to a dangerous new low.”

According to the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler: “Applause in the newsroom as the Russia-leak scoop breaks the Hollywood Access record for most readers per minute.”

But where were these Democratic and left-wing Krakatoas when Obama gave Putin the identity and whereabouts of Great Britain’s nuclear missiles?

President Donald Trump flatly denied that he asked former FBI Director James Comey to end his investigation of former National Security adviser Mike Flynn.

At a press conference Thursday alongside Colombia’s president, Mr. Trump was asked whether he had asked Mr. Comey to end his probe. Mr. Trump responded: “No. No. Next question.”

On Tuesday, media outlets reported that Mr. Trump had made the request of Mr. Comey during a private dinner in February, citing Mr. Comey’s notes on the meeting. Those reports came one week after Mr. Trump had abruptly fired Mr. Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Before Thursday, Mr. Trump had not directly responded to the Comey account; any denials had come from the White House.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump also reiterated his position that he never colluded with Russia during last year’s election, although he left open the possibility that others may have done so.

“Believe me, there’s no collusion,” the president said, before adding a qualification: “I can only speak for myself.”

The president’s statements came Thursday afternoon at a joint press conference with the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, after a difficult several days for the administration.

Democrats and their media allies finally got their man. After weeks of political pressure, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein blinked late Wednesday and announced that he has named a special counsel to investigate Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. These expeditions rarely end well for anyone, and Democrats are hoping this one will bedevil the Trump Administration for the next four years.

“My decision is not a finding that crimes have been committed or that any prosecution is warranted,” said Mr. Rosenstein, which is nice but irrelevant. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused from the Russia probe, Mr. Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller III, who will now have unlimited time and resources to investigate more or less anything and anyone he wants.

While the decision will provide some short-term political relief, not least for Mr. Rosenstein, it also opens up years of political risk to the Trump Administration with no guarantee that the public will end up with any better understanding of what really happened.

The problem with special counsels, as we’ve learned time and again, is that they are by definition all but politically unaccountable. While technically Mr. Rosenstein could fire Mr. Mueller if he goes too far, the manner of his appointment and the subject he’s investigating make him de facto untouchable even if he becomes an abusive Javert like Patrick Fitzgerald during the George W. Bush Administration.

What the country really needs is a full accounting of how the Russians tried to influence the election and whether any Americans assisted them. That is fundamentally a counterintelligence investigation, but Mr. Mueller will be under pressure to bring criminal indictments of some kind to justify his existence. He’ll also no doubt bring on young attorneys who will savor the opportunity to make their reputation on such a high-profile investigation.

Mr. Mueller has experience in counterintelligence and at 72 years old has nothing to prove. But he is also a long-time Washington player close to the FBI whose director was recently fired, and he is highly attuned to the political winds. As they say in Washington, lawyer up.

Now at The Daily Caller

Flipping back the pages of my proverbial notepad I find a fair amount about Robert Mueller and his Bush-to-Obama tenure at the FBI.

Despite the rose petals bestrewing his path back to DC as special counsel, it was not a pretty thing. Summing up — as Patrick Poole began here in 2012, as former FBI special agent John Guandolo does here — Mueller’s FBI tenure should be remembered in large part for having been one long “Muslim outreach” to combat so-called Islamophobia, one long purge of Islamo-realism; and literally so, as when Mueller’s FBI purged lecturers and training materials for their supposed offensiveness to Muslims [read: truthfulness about Islamic teachings on jihad and sharia]. This purge was the result of an “inquiry” beginning in September 2011, described by Wired magazine as an “Islamophobia probe,” and which the magazine claims to have instigated. In February 2012 Wired reported, “The bureau disclosed initial findings from its months-long review during a meeting at FBI headquarters on Wednesday with several Arab and Muslim advocacy groups, attended by Director Robert Mueller.”

As a result, John Guandolo notes, “The FBI no longer teaches anything about sharia, the MB networks, or the Global Islamic Movement.”

Mueller’s legacy.

Here are some of my own reports on Mueller and his FBI — “They Call It Intelligence” (2010) “Uncle Sam Conducts Another `Anti-Islamic’ Purge” (2012), “The Continuum … Continues” (2012), “Making Islam (Not Terrorism) Disappear (2013), “Will FBI Director Mueller Ever Be Held Accountable For Anything? (2013).

That last piece appeared after the jihad attack on the Boston Marathon, where, it might well be argued, Mueller’s see-no-Islam FBI policies, honed over both the see-no-Islam Bush and Obama administrations, came to deadly fruition. In the explosive video clip above, Rep. Louie Gohmert extracts from Mueller the extraordinary admission that he, as FBI Director, did not know the mosque the Tsarnaev brothers attended – Islamic Society of Boston/ISB (Muslim Brotherhood) – was founded by Al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi. Director Mueller defended not sending FBI agents to the ISB [until] after the bombing because the FBI was there before the bombing doing `outreach’ with the Imam.”

Which brings me to my question. How can someone who has long engaged in the political and ideological exercise of blinding himself, the FBI, and the USG to Islamic influence on terrorism and subversion suddenly be expected to assess Russian influence on the Trump (and, a must, Clinton) campaign(s) free from politics and ideology?