RUTHFULLY YOURS

Winston Churchill repeatedly warned the British Nation of what would happen before that fateful act of appeasement towards Hitler and the Nazis by the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, took place at Munich. As Churchill feared, it inexorably led to the catastrophe of World War Two.

Churchill’s words ring eerily true for all of us – be it in Britain, the United States or what is left of Western Europe – as we now face the rising peril of unbridled Islamo-Nazi supremacy and infiltration. His words most certainly rang unnervingly true as we witnessed and endured the appalling political correctness and appeasement towards Islam during the eight long years of the Barack Hussein Obama presidency.

It was desolating to witness the descent of the United States of America; a victorious nation that truly was – and is – a shining beacon in an often dark and frightening world but was fundamentally being changed for the worse by a foreboding presence in the White House.

But political correctness and the insanity of multiculturalism still continues, led by the European Union and by so many Western failed democracies as they act like dhimmies towards the barbaric Islamic scourge of jihad and terror that threatens to destroy all that is left of freedom and Judeo-Christian civilization.

We will soon mark the 16 year old anniversary of that other fateful day in September, 2001; the day when a horrific atrocity in the name of Allah was perpetrated against two of America’s icons: the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The barbarity of 9/11 in which so many innocents died was an act of utter evil. But an enfeebled world, shackled by the unholy trinity of political correctness, multiculturalism and diversity, largely failed then as now to confront that evil, giving future historians much to contemplate.

So here are Churchill’s words that now can so sadly be applied to what is left of much of the United States, Britain and the West:

“I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, down the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends.

“A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet … if mortal catastrophe should overtake the British Nation, historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs.

“They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered itself to be brought low, and cast away all that had been gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory – gone with the wind!”

Donald Trump is now the duly elected president, a principled man, an American patriot, who desires to return America to that shining beacon in a world gone mad. But he is confronted by a veritable and relentless campaign of hate to remove him from office through the machinations of an increasingly extreme leftwing Democrat party and a mainstream media that spews fake news ad nauseam.

The Supreme Court has done some of its best work in recent years on the First Amendment, and that continued with an 8-0 decision Monday protecting unpopular speech. The Justices ruled that an Asian-American rock band called The Slants can’t be denied a federal trademark because the government fears the name might offend someone.

Simon Tam, front man for The Slants, sought to register the name with the Patent and Trademark Office as a rebuke to those who use it as a pejorative. The government denied the trademark, citing a Lanham Act provision that bans trademarks that “may disparage . . . persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols.” The Court ruled that this clause is unconstitutional (Matal v. Tam).

The idea that the government has an interest in suppressing viewpoints that offend “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”

The government claimed trademark registration is a form of government free speech, but that was also dismissed by Justice Alito. “If a trademark qualifies as government speech,” he wrote, the government “is babbling prodigiously and incoherently,” endorsing competing products and making contradictory statements.

The effort to “cleanse” commercial speech of any offense is also a nonstarter since there are many kinds of merchandise that “disparages prominent figures or groups and the line between commercial and non-commercial speech is not always clear.” Think anti-Trump T-shirts.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurrence making a useful point about how government could abuse such leverage over speech. “A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence.”

In other good news, the Justices on Monday continued to police legal forum shopping. In Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California, the Justice ruled 8-1 that California courts don’t have jurisdiction to decide injury claims for some 592 out-of-state plaintiffs when the defendant company isn’t based there and the injuries didn’t occur there.

The law already prohibits violence and threats of violence, and law enforcement authorities are supposed to prosecute those — intimidation, destruction, damage, vandalism, simple and aggravated assault. What “hate crimes” are not already covered by the law?

Why would the House of Representatives find it necessary to make such redundant statements, if not in order to redefine the concept of a hate crime? Perhaps by including “hate speech”? The current resolution includes most of the major ethnic and religious minorities in the United States, so it will have a far better chance of passing, as it will more easily fool Representatives into thinking that the contents of the resolution are harmless.

Would it not be appropriate for the politicians sponsoring and voting for these resolutions first of all to find out what drives the organizations responsible for drafting them? The Investigative Project on Terrorism has authored a damning 88-page report about the Muslim Public Affairs Council. American politicians do not seem to have taken much interest in it.

On April 4, 2017, the US Senate passed Senate Resolution 118, “Condemning hate crime and any other form of racism, religious or ethnic bias, discrimination, incitement to violence, or animus targeting a minority in the United States”. The resolution was drafted by a Muslim organization, EmgageUSA (formerly EmergeUSA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). On April 6, 2017, EmgageUSA wrote the following on their Facebook page:

“Thanks to the hard work of Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Susan Collins and Senator Kamala Harris we have achieved the approval of Senate Resolution 118, an anti-hate crimes bill drafted by Emerge-USA. It is days like this that Americans are reminded of this country’s founding principles: equal opportunity, freedom, justice. We are proud to help support the protection of these rights #amoreperfectunion #theamericandream”.

Senate Resolution 118 calls on

“…Federal law enforcement officials, working with State and local officials… to expeditiously investigate all credible reports of hate crimes and incidents and threats against minorities in the United States and to hold the perpetrators of those crimes, incidents, or threats accountable and bring the perpetrators to justice; encourages the Department of Justice and other Federal agencies to work to improve the reporting of hate crimes; and… encourages the development of an interagency task force led by the Attorney General to collaborate on the development of effective strategies and efforts to detect and deter hate crime in order to protect minority communities…”

The resolution refers to hate crimes against Muslims, Jews, African-Americans, Hindus, and Sikhs and was sponsored by Senator Kamala Harris and co-sponsored by Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Senator Susan Collins.

On April 6, almost the exact same text was introduced as House Resolution H.Res. 257, “Condemning hate crime and any other form of racism, religious or ethnic bias, discrimination, incitement to violence, or animus targeting a minority in the United States”. A House Resolution can be reintroduced as legislation.

“I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.” Nick Carroway, The Great Gatsby
Substitute Comey for Carroway and you have a sense of the arrogance and hypocrisy embedded in the former’s testimony. James Comey is expert at navigating the obstacles that constitute Washington’s politics. The former FBI Director came across as more of a prosecutor than an investigator and public servant. Having used bait-and-switch tactics over the past year, Mr. Comey gladdened, infuriated and appeased Democrats, while he irritated, enthused and angered Republicans. Like his predecessor, J. Edgar Hoover, he thought himself invincible.

His testimony was Orwellian. Words meant what he wanted them to mean. To “leak” a memo about a private meeting with the President, via a third party, to The New York Times was okay. Yet, it was not alright to tell the press that the President was not under investigation regarding Russian interference in the election, even though he wasn’t. It was his duty, he alleged last July, to lay out the prosecutorial case against Hillary Clinton for using a private e-mail server while Secretary of State, but he felt it his responsibility to determine that no reasonable jury would convict her. Nevertheless, he felt bound, in October, to say she was still under investigation. He said he had no doubt that Russia interfered in the election, yet offered no evidence.

Mr. Comey told Senators that Mr. Trump lied as to why he (Mr. Comey) was fired, but was less direct with the President. He construed the word “hope,” as uttered by Mr. Trump regarding Michael Flynn, as implying obstruction, knowing full well it would mean his good friend, special counsel Robert Mueller, would have to investigate the allegation. (If “hope” becomes standard for obstruction of justice charges, all of Washington will be under indictment, as will most Americans.) James Comey testified that he agreed to accept (then) Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s request that the investigation into Mrs. Clinton be referred to as a “matter,” last July, knowing that to do so was wrong. Yet he did not feel obliged to disagree. His performance throughout his testimony suggested he was being either devious or he was a poltroon… or perhaps both. If he truly felt wronged, a courageous, honorable man would have resigned.

Mr. Comey has abused his position as Director of the FBI, certainly since last July. But, while he may have the ethics of a warthog, he is not stupid. For the last nine months, like Uriah Heep, the unctuous Mr. Comey bobbed and weaved around the Scylla of Washington politics and the Charybdis of ethical behavior – that is until he encountered Mr. Trump, an outsider to Washington politics, a man who had promised to “drain the swamp,” a place where he (Mr. Comey) was one of its most prominent denizens. Whether you hate him or love him, all agree that Mr. Trump is no master of subtlety. The President fired Mr. Comey unceremoniously, something unexpected by a man who felt untouchable. As one who tried to please everyone, Mr. Comey would have been well served to have re-read the story in Aesop’s Fables of “The man, the boy and the donkey” – the moral of which is, you can’t please everyone.

Once fired by Mr. Trump, Democrats forgave Mr. Comey his transgressions regarding Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch. Since his firing, Mr. Comey has cast his lot with those who see Mr. Trump as an illegitimate President, an autocrat, they claim, with a far-right agenda – a President who should be hastened from office, regardless of the cost to our democracy. In testimony, Mr. Comey offered the excuse that the leaking of his memo was for self-protection against a President he did not trust. He said it was justified if the consequence was the hiring of a special counsel. Since Mr. Comey was unable to bring the President down on charges of colluding with the Russians over last November’s election, he now hopes his friend Mr. Mueller will find obstruction of justice as cause for impeachment.

You have to wonder how liberals think this works. So, a manifestly conflicted special counsel leading a pack of maxed-out Democrat donors decides Donald Trump has to be kicked out of office for “obstructing justice” regarding a cynical lie about him cavorting with the Kremlin and…then what? President Pence, until they do the same thing to him? Or do we just skip right to President Felonia von Pantsuit, shrug our shoulders, and give up on our foolish dream of having a say in our own governance?

Straightforward from here is…chaos.

Because normal Americans are woke to the scam. No, the affidavits of a zillion DC/NY establishment types attesting to Robert Mueller’s impeccable integrity – ever notice how the guy trying to hose us always has the establishment’s “impeccable integrity” merit badge – are not going to make us unsee the fact that he’s carrying water for an establishment that thinks we need to just shut up and obey.

Now, pulling off the soft coup is going to be harder than they think. The establishment has not thought this out. They sort of assume that if they squelch Trump then everything somehow just goes back to them being in unchallenged control. Wrong.

Mueller can’t indict Trump – that stupid Constitution, always getting in the way! No, the goal is for Mueller and his crack team of committed liberal activist lawyers to generate some head-shaking, tsk-tsk, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, report claiming Trump “obstructed” the probe into Hillary’s Trump/Russia collusion lie that even the liberals reluctantly acknowledge never happened.

But their problem is that impeachment is a purely political act – this isn’t going to get tried before some leftist DC judge and a 96% Democrat DC jury. No, they have to convince the Republican members of the House of Representatives to impeach and, well, have you taken a look at a political map of the US lately? It’s as red as a baseball field full of conservatives after a Bernie Bro shows up with a rifle.

Now, in the circle of jerks that is DC, congressmen are bombarded with the Trump obstruction narrative. Many neutered professional conservatives, eager to return to the old status quo where they sort-of mattered, are helping our enemies. Some of these congressmen are themselves Fredocons, weak and stupid, and are listening. Some might be swayed – except in a couple weeks they have to go home and be around normal people, and they’re going to hear something completely different.

Normal people aren’t falling for it.

Has anyone out there actually met a Trump voter who said something like this?

I supported Trump, but now I don’t because his refusal to passively sit back and let a Washington insider with an obvious conflict of interest and his Democrat staff drive him out of office on the basis of a Hillary-driven lie far outweighs Neil Gorsuch, pulling out of the climate scam, beating ISIS, and repealing Obamacare.

At six in the morning, a man is startled awake by an insistent pounding on his front door. He opens it to find armed government agents. One group of them begins to ransack the man’s home. Two others take him outside and put him into the back seat of a nondescript government vehicle. One of the armed government agents sits on either side of him, trapping him. As he sits, blinking and confused in his pajamas, they begin to bark questions at him. Was he at a particular meeting, on a particular date, with a political figure who is under suspicion of wrongdoing? The man, confused and afraid and thoroughly intimidated, makes a bad choice — he answers, and he lies. He says he was not at the meeting. The armed government agents smile. They already have witnesses placing the man at the meeting. They already have a recording of the man at the meeting. His lie does not deter, mislead, or even mildly inconvenience them. But now they have him, whether or not he’s done anything wrong before — now he’s lied to the government, a serious crime.

That scenario is not from some totalitarian foreign country or some fictional dystopia. It’s from America, here and now. It happened just like that to one of my clients, interrogated at dawn by the FBI. It represents the vast power of law enforcement — especially federal law enforcement — to turn investigations of crimes into schemes to produce new crimes.

Federal criminal investigative power is in the news as President Trump and his associates face an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Reports — and some ill-considered tweets by the president — suggest that Mueller’s focus may be not just Russian shenanigans but obstruction of the investigation into the same. Trump supporters are enraged; some Trump detractors are delighted. Nobody should be comfortable, unless they are at ease with vast and flexible law-enforcement power over citizens, especially controversial ones. Our system gives federal prosecutors and investigators — from locals across the country to the rare and elite like Mueller — extraordinary power to turn Americans’ lives upside down and prosecute not just prior crimes but any very common and human missteps their frightened targets make in reaction to the investigation.

Commentators are expressing shock — and in many cases pleasure — that President Trump and his associates could face criminal exposure not for original wrongdoing but for their reaction to accusations of wrongdoing. Nobody who has paid attention to American criminal justice for the last generation should be shocked. It is routine — mundane, even — for federal investigators to convict people not for the subject of the investigation but for how they reacted to it.

Can we all stipulate that no one ever wants to be the subject of an investigation? If you are innocent of wrongdoing, the fact that there is no meritorious criminal case is often beside the point.

There is a stigma attached to being an investigative subject. Many people who do not appreciate how politicized the legal system has become will conclude that if you are under investigation, you must have done something wrong. Some other people who know precisely how politicized the legal system has become, and like it that way, will exploit the fact that you are under investigation to stigmatize you. Public perception aside, being the subject of an investigation is also debilitating because of the time it takes to defend oneself, the financial burden of retaining lawyers (and, for a public official, retaining press agents who can deal with the media frenzy), and the anxiety that makes it difficult to focus on one’s job and other responsibilities.

President Trump is now in the grip of this situation. This weekend, it produced some of the more excruciating news coverage in recent memory as one of his lawyers, Jay Sekulow, was tendentiously grilled on the question of whether the president has conceded that he is under investigation.

Like many Trump problems, this one was caused by a Trump tweet. Foolishly allowing himself to be baited by a Washington Post report that special counsel Robert Mueller is now weighing whether the president committed an obstruction crime, Trump tweeted: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt[.]”

Clearly, Trump is exasperated over what he sees as much ado about nothing. Constitutionally, the president does not need a reason to fire the FBI director, who — like every unelected subordinate official in the executive branch — serves at the president’s pleasure. Before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general, wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be dismissed. In the subsequent furor over Comey’s dismissal — largely stoked by Trump’s conflicting reasons for firing the director, which first adopted but then parted company with Rosenstein’s memo — Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel. In that role, Mueller is not independent — he answers to Rosenstein (because Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, is recused). So technically, Trump is correct: The man who wrote the memo endorsing Comey’s removal has authorized an investigation that is reportedly probing whether that removal somehow constituted a felony.

Impeachment.

See, it’s not that hard. All together now: Impeachment . . . impeachment . . . impeachment.

Don’t be fraidy-scared. It’s okay to say the “I-word.” Really.

Apparently, Team Trump doesn’t think so.

It was painful to watch Trump apologists fan out in the media to defend the president over the weekend. They have a persuasive argument to make against the obstruction probe reportedly being pursued by special counsel Robert Mueller. But it cannot be made without discussing impeachment.

It seems Team Trump has calculated that the word “impeachment” must be resisted — that utterances of it would cross a psychological barrier, normalize public consideration of it, begin to create the political conditions in which it could actually happen.

It is a bad strategic call. It is like telling your advocates: “Go explain two-plus-two. But whatever you do, don’t mention the word ‘four.’”

Here is how this works.

There is no legal obstruction case against President Trump. As we have repeatedly explained, obstruction requires prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a public official acted corruptly in endeavoring to influence or interfere with an investigation. To establish the corrupt mental state, prosecutors must prove that the official knew what he was doing was against the law.

The president’s actions here, no matter how much one might judge them ham-handed or inappropriate, were not against the law. A president has prosecutorial discretion: He may lawfully shut down an investigation, to say nothing of merely influencing it. And the intelligence services exist to serve the president: He may lawfully terminate any intelligence-collection effort he chooses to.

In point of fact, Trump did not shut down the investigation of Michael Flynn or the counterintelligence probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. Since he had the authority to bring these investigations to a screeching halt, he cannot have acted corruptly by taking lesser lawful action. Period.

The claim that Trump may be guilty of a prosecutable obstruction crime is premised on a legal error – namely, that the FBI and the Justice Department are a separate branch of government, independent of the executive. In fact, they are subordinate to the president. The power they exercise, as inferior officers, is the president’s power. It does not matter whether an FBI director finds it troubling that a president makes suggestions to him about how a case should be handled. The president gets to do that. If the FBI director finds that intolerable, he can resign. The director’s comfort level is constitutionally irrelevant.

Prosecutorial discretion is part of a continuum of executive police powers that includes the ultimate interference in law-enforcement: the pardon power. No matter how offended we are when a president pardons (or commutes the sentences of) serious criminals, the matter is unreviewable by the courts. The president may not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice over it, even though it seems like a profound obstruction of justice, because the president has the indisputable authority to take the action.

The appointment of Robert Mueller, James Comey’s BFF, as special counsel stinks to high heaven. Forget the bipartisan encomia to Mueller’s “ethics” and “professionalism” and “integrity” and all the other usual question-begging praise the elite shower on each other to justify their power and privilege. Such mutual admiration and reciprocal puffery is just one of the ways that DC is “Hollywood for ugly people,” given that both industries are in the business of selling sows’ ears as silk purses. We heard all the same praise about Comey, who has been exposed as self-righteous, conniving, and cowardly, his ethics trimmed to his careerism. He proves that all political appointees and “public servants” should be judged guilty until proven innocent.

And right now Mueller demands particular scrutiny and suspicion. Why should we ordinary citizens, who don’t know him from Adam, believe that he can set aside his friendship with Comey and be fair and objective? Especially after Comey confessed he leaked his memo about Trump’s comments because he “thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel,” and he is likely to be a witness? And mirabile visu, that special counsel just happens to be his close friend? And a Democrat, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, just happens to be the one making the appointment of a man under whom he served from 1990-93? And what about new information that Mueller was interviewed by Trump to replace Comey? Was the topic of why Comey was fired part of the interview, which could make him a witness in his own investigation?

Worst of all, this same DOJ, along with the FBI and maybe Mueller’s team, is still springing leaks that are poisoning the integrity of the nascent investigation. It seems to me that a man of such high integrity as Mueller would have put the investigation on hold until the leakers were rooted out, in order to insure the integrity of the investigation. But then, a man of integrity wouldn’t agree to head up an investigation that involves one of his closest friends, who has an axe to grind against the target of the investigation. Nor is Mueller’s past record of substituting his will for the law reassuring. In 2006 he raided the offices of Representative William Jefferson without getting permission from the legislative branch. He seized documents not pertinent to the investigation, and refused to return them when asked by the executive. As the Wall Street Journal writes, Mueller “let his prosecutorial willfulness interfere with proper constitutional and executive-branch procedure,” a bad habit he shares with Comey.

The Department of Justice has become an advocate for the establishment of mosques in America. It is as if there were some congressional affirmative action mandate. The DOJ’s own statistics reveal a sharp escalation in intervention efforts on behalf of Islamic complainants, mostly involving mosque disputes with local zoning authorities. Alarmingly, these interventions reveal a pattern of generous settlements that benefit mosques while bypassing municipal laws and disregarding legitimate neighborhood concerns.https://amgreatness.com/2017/06/16/department-justice-privileging-mosques/

During the Obama Presidency, DOJ lawyers ran roughshod over local officials, as long as the complaining party was a mosque. Trump’s Justice Department must reverse these tendencies.

The atmosphere of DOJ intimidation cannot be overstated. Negotiated settlements between the DOJ, local zoning authorities, and mosque officials take place against a backdrop of DOJ threatening long, prohibitively costly litigation. The drive for ever more concessions, and more cash, confronts communities whose small governments cannot compete with DOJ’s $28 billion budget and legions of lawyers. Importantly, DOJ treats these settlements as if they were precedents even though, by sidestepping the courts, the settlements bypass judicial precedents that could protect legitimate community interests.

In two recent cases, mosque applicants in Sterling Heights (Michigan) and Basking Ridge (New Jersey), received cash settlements because they were denied permits according to local zoning procedures. These settlements failed to protect vital neighborhood interests in traffic safety, parking limits, and livability concerns.

Just one example of neighborhood hardships that result from deferential permit agreements, the Dar al Farooq mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota is currently holding services for the entire month of Ramadan with overflow parking and lighted lots until 1:00 and 3:00 a.m.—in a residential neighborhood.

The Sterling Heights settlement is illustrative of abusive DOJ meddling.

The atmosphere of DOJ intimidation cannot be overstated. Negotiated settlements between the DOJ, local zoning authorities, and mosque officials take place against a backdrop of DOJ threatening long, prohibitively costly litigation.

The mosque had applied to build a 28,000 square foot facility on 4.35 acres of land. The building’s dome was to be 58 feet high and the minarets 66 feet high. The surrounding neighborhood has been settled by many Chaldean Christians who fled Iraq and Islamist oppression. An imposing Islamic structure was not met with enthusiasm to put it mildly. But federal law focuses on whether the decision-makers are biased. It demands that local government officials give all sides equal consideration. It does not require that neighborhood residents greet this kind of application with enthusiasm.

The proposed mosque for Sterling Heights, Michigan.

In this case, there were many legitimate concerns that the local planning commission investigated, concerns that contributed to the unanimous conclusion that the mosque was ineligible for the indicated property. Indeed, the major disputes arose because mosque representatives provided incomplete information and they were unwilling to address zoning concerns.