RUTHFULLY YOURS

While news seems to be breaking in every direction, there are two storylines in the continuing saga of allegations about Russian meddling in the 2016 election and Obama-administration spying on Team Trump.

The first, as Victor Davis Hanson has outlined, involves the recusal — at least temporarily — of House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes. You have to admire the Democrats’ moxie: Having spent months exploiting unauthorized disclosures of classified information to undergird their dark (but thus far unsupported) claims of Trump-campaign collusion in Russia’s machinations, they now force a House Ethics Committee investigation against Nunes based on claims that he “may have made unauthorized disclosures of classified information.”

Nunes vehemently denies the allegation as “entirely false and politically motivated.” Still, had he not stepped aside until the ethics probe was completed, there would have been calls to remove him, which would have put Speaker Paul Ryan in the hot seat. That’s something neither Ryan nor Nunes would want.

More importantly, as Nunes admirably recognized, it would have been a major distraction from the political-spying aspect of the Intelligence Committee investigation. By stepping aside, Nunes will be able to defend himself without derailing the committee’s work. Meanwhile, he has bequeathed leadership of the probe to Representative Mike Conaway (R., Tex.), with assistance from Representatives Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) and Tom Rooney (R., Fla.). Forge ahead, gents.

The other development involves yet another impulsive outburst from President Trump. During a news conference at which he appeared jointly with Jordan’s King Abdullah II (aside: why do they put Roman numerals after Arabic names?), Trump was asked whether he thought Susan Rice, Obama’s national-security adviser, had committed a crime by unmasking the identities of Trump-team members — i.e., American citizens who were caught up in foreign intelligence collection. He replied, “Do I think? Yes, I think.” Our media-obsessed president further conveyed his sense that the alleged political spying “is one of the big stories of our time.”

Trump detractors pounced. The Washington Post, for example, ran its report under the headline “Susan Rice may have committed a crime, Trump says without providing evidence.” Trump’s latest remark is thus portrayed as a replay of his much-derided March 4 tweets — the ones accusing President Obama of having “my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”

Both outbursts were ill considered, but they’re not all that similar. This time, Trump was answering a journalist’s loaded question, not railing on his own. Still, he should have passed — hard as that seems to be for him.

I hope President Trump has not forgotten who elected him and why.

Here is a hint – people inside-the-Beltway did not elect you, Mr. President, and it wasn’t to maintain the status quo.

In fact, despite what you might be hearing, Mr. President, the views of Stephen Bannon are probably closer to those of the people who elected you, than the inside-the-Beltway venomous habitants that are populating your administration in ever increasing numbers.

And, by the way, why is Obama political operative John Koskinen still head of the IRS?

The removal of Bannon from his seat on the National Security Council (NSC) is illustrative, a restoration of the status quo ante and an example that the Trump Administration can benefit from on-the-job training. That is, they have learned the art of inside-the-Beltway media spin, also known to ordinary Americans as disinformation.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the NSC should be non-political, but let’s not kid ourselves. Bannon’s removal was a reaction to the Susan Rice scandal [1], that is, “politicization” of the NSC (and virtually every other element of the Obama Administration), not mission accomplished.

The Trump Administration’s spin claims [2] that Bannon’s appointment to the NSC was temporary, to “de-operationalize” or “de-politicize” Rice’s NSC (are Rice’s people still there?) and, bizarrely, to monitor Trump’s first national security adviser, General Michael Flynn.

The Democrats and old-guard news media (forgive the redundancy) are pathologically obsessed with the hypothesis that Team Trump and Russia rigged last November’s presidential election. If Donald J. Trump so much as played Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slav on his stereo, these leftists deduce, he was in cahoots with the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, the same folks who spy a KGB agent behind every filing cabinet in Trump’s White House are aggressively apathetic about Hillary and Bill Clinton’s policies, decisions, and actions that gave aid and comfort to Russia.

Hillary’s much-mocked “Russian reset” established the tone for the Clintons’ coziness with the Kremlin. On March 6, 2009, during a trip to Geneva, she presented Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov a small, red button. Hillary thought it was emblazoned with the Russian word for “reset.” Her team mistranslated and the button actually read “overload.” Nonetheless, Clinton and Lavrov jointly pressed the symbolic button. And a new era in U.S.–Russian relations erupted.

While visiting Moscow on March 24, 2010, Hillary explained the Reset’s purpose: “Our goal is to help strengthen Russia.”

Hillary said this in an interview with veteran broadcaster Vladimir Pozner of Russia’s First Channel TV network. Pozner is a Soviet-era relic who still communicates in barely accented English. During the Cold War, he popped up on American TV and radio programs and presented the views of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Pozner’s pleasantries made him and his totalitarian bosses seem blandly benign.

The shadiest deal that the Clintons hatched with Russia is called Uranium One. This outrage should mushroom into Hillary and Bill’s radioactive Whitewater scandal.

Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining mogul and major Clinton Foundation donor, led a group of investors in an enterprise called Uranium One. On June 8, 2010, Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, announced plans to purchase a 51.4 percent stake in the Canadian company, whose international assets included some 20 percent of America’s uranium capacity.

Because this active ingredient in atomic reactors and nuclear weapons is a strategic commodity, this $1.3 billion deal required the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Secretary of State Clinton was one of nine federal department and agency heads on that secretive panel.

Now it’s time for Democrats to sweat.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered on a key Trump campaign promise yesterday, brushing away an arcane procedural hurdle and in the process clearing the way for the swift Senate confirmation of originalist Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.

It is also the first in what promises to be a long series of crushing major defeats for Democrats in the current Congress who are desperate to placate their increasingly rabid far left-wing base.

The “nuking” of the filibuster rule yesterday bodes well for President Trump’s agenda. Trump is in a good position to remake the Supreme Court because so many of its members are elderly and are likely to vacate their seats over Trump’s four- or eight-year presidency. Three of the current eight justices are of retirement age. Left-wing Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are 84 and 78, respectively. Swing vote and occasional conservative Anthony Kennedy, who is 80, was appointed by President Reagan.

The senior Kentucky senator led the way as Senate Republicans invoked the so-called nuclear option yesterday, voting 52 to 48 along party lines to abolish the filibuster for nominations to the Supreme Court. Rule changes supposedly require a supermajority vote – 67 senators voting aye – in the Senate but four years ago under then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) the supermajority requirement was ignored and filibusters were disallowed for all judicial nominees below the Supreme Court. Lowering the 67-vote requirement to that of a simple majority is the so-called nuclear option, also known as the constitutional option.

Although there was never a formal requirement that a Supreme Court nominee had to garner 60 votes to be confirmed, Democrats’ insistence that one had to be observed forced McConnell’s hand. The matter is now settled. Going forward, high court nominees, including Gorsuch, will need only a simple majority of senators to be confirmed.

It needs to be pointed out that the filibuster is entirely a creation of the Senate. The Constitution is silent on the matter. For those not versed in parliamentary arcana, under Senate rules any member is entitled to filibuster, that is, talk a bill to death or prolong debate indefinitely to prevent a matter from being voted on. A filibuster may be ended only if enough senators vote to invoke “cloture,” that is, vote to cut off debate.

McConnell denounced Democrats’ move to filibuster Gorsuch, saying it was part of a “much larger story” wherein the Left has been trying to politicize the judiciary and the confirmation process for years.

“It’s a fight they have waged for decades with a singular aim, securing raw power no matter the cost to the country or the institution,” he said on the floor of the Senate. “It underlies why this threatened filibuster cannot be allowed to succeed.”

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) whined on cue about Judge Gorsuch for the media.

The pernicious lie that President Trump’s claim he was wiretapped by President Obama is “baseless” is being regurgitated in the mainstream media virtually nonstop in the 24/7 news cycle.

These people are so desperate to hang Trump that they embraced the ridiculous “piss-gate” dossier promoted by political hack Ben Smith’s cat-video website Buzzfeed.

At the same time as we are assured by Never Trumpers that Trump is making things up, the so-called evidence of Team Trump’s allegedly nefarious connections and collusion with the Russian government to subvert the American electoral process is treated as Holy Writ. The Left and the mainstream media – but I repeat myself – gravitate to the evidence that hurts Trump, ignoring the rest.

It’s that simple. And there is an impressive evidentiary double-standard at work in the weighing of evidence, much of which apparently has been politicized.

But as far as I can tell, nobody has clearly pointed out the seeming arbitrariness in the media taking the word of one group of spies over the other.

We know that the evidence supporting both the anti-Trump and pro-Trump claims reportedly comes from unnamed sources within the same U.S intelligence community (IC). If anyone with direct personal knowledge of evidence backing either claim has gone on the record, I’ve missed it (and I spend all day long on the Internet).

Why should we believe one set of anonymous IC sources over another? We don’t know who these people are – on either side — and what axes they may have to grind. And we shouldn’t blindly trust these intel people, either. There may be plenty who are honest and honorable, but there are plenty who aren’t. (See McMullin, Evan, and Rice, Susan.) At this point at least, we’re in no position to assess the evidence. All we have so far is one set of faceless spooks anonymously providing evidence that contradicts what the other spook cohort reportedly said.

We’ve just come out of the roughest, nastiest presidential transition in my lifetime, made so by Barack Obama, the most despotic, overreaching president since the great proto-fascist Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat like Obama. While Obama smiled for the television cameras and pretended to be cooperating with the Trump people, behind the scenes he worked zealously to lay minefields to safeguard his destructive, anti-American legacy.

There is no parallel in American history for the Obama administration’s not-so-metaphorical war against the incoming Trump administration. Obama has even taken the extremely unusual step of staying behind in the nation’s capital to vex and harass his successor. He has rented an Embassy Row mansion not far from the White House, built a wall around it to keep prying eyes away, and arranged for his senior White House advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to live there. He is also using his well-funded nonprofit, Organizing for Action, to do his dirty work.

Obama’s strategy is working. The constant drumbeat about Russian meddling has helped to keep Trump’s approval numbers low enough that he can’t get his agenda through Congress.

But let’s go over how we got here.

We interrupt the Russia-scandal program to ask two simple questions of one of the nation’s top law-enforcement officers: What exactly is FBI Director Jim Comey doing about the only crime that has so far been revealed in this Russia probe? And is he too conflicted even to be doing it?

That crime is of course the leaking that toppled Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The media and Democrats have done their best to avoid covering this, for the simple reason that some of them were complicit. Yet in the entire speculative drama over Russian interference in American elections, so far this is the only crime that is beyond any doubt.

It’s a serious crime, too. Someone in the U.S. government obtained highly classified information about a conversation between an incoming presidential adviser and a foreign official. Someone then leaked Mr. Flynn’s name and the contents of that conversation to the press, resulting in his resignation. As even Mr. Comey recently confirmed, the leaking of such material is an “extraordinarily unusual event.” It is also a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison.

Why? Because such leaks expose American intelligence sources and methods, putting national security at risk. Moreover, leaking the names of private citizens under surveillance (with the express intent to cause harm) is among the grossest violations of civil liberties. It is what police states do.

The Washington Post story about Mr. Flynn’s conversation cited as its sources “nine current and former officials” who “had access to reports from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” That means at least nine current or former Obama administration officials or bureaucrats should be looking at criminal charges.

Which brings us to Mr. Comey. Leaks are in the FBI’s purview, and this case ought to be a slam dunk. Unlike in some leak investigations, Mr. Comey has a trail of bread loaves to follow. Someone in the U.S. government had to take the first step of “unmasking”—requesting the identity of—Mr. Flynn. There are records of such requests, easily accessible by the FBI. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON—Senate Republicans voted to end the filibuster of Supreme Court nominations Thursday, setting the stage for the rapid elevation of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the high court and removing a pillar of the minority party’s power to exert influence in the chamber.

Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation by the Senate, expected Friday, would return the Supreme Court to full strength for the first time in 14 months, since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of last year. It means Judge Gorsuch could be a key vote on coming cases, including the high court’s possible consideration of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order on immigration and visas.
The confirmation would also give the president a much-needed win, after setbacks in recent weeks on a health-care bill and the immigration order, as well as shake-ups and dissension among the White House staff. It would allow Mr. Trump to quickly put his stamp on the high court, replacing one conservative justice with another and keeping a promise to conservative activists that he made during the presidential campaign.

The battle’s aftermath appears less positive for the Senate, where it became unusually personal.

Democrats successfully pressured House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes on Thursday to recuse himself from that committee’s Russia probe. This is how today’s Washington thanks Members who do their jobs.

Officially, Mr. Nunes stepped aside after the House Committee on Ethics said he was under investigation for accusations that he disclosed classified information. This followed complaints filed by progressive groups to the separate Office of Congressional Ethics (a Nancy Pelosi creation) claiming Mr. Nunes broke the law when he announced he’d seen reports proving the Obama White House received intelligence about Trump transition officials and unmasked at least one identity.

Mr. Nunes’s real offense is believing he should investigate both sides of the Russia story—whether the Trump team colluded with the Russians, and the equally important question of whether Obama officials were snooping on their political opponents. Mr. Nunes had brought the role of Mr. Obama’s former National Security Adviser Susan Rice into the light.

It is ironic that Mr. Nunes’s carefully worded press briefing was done in part to root out the real scandal of who in the Obama Administration gave the media the unmasked name and classified conversations of Donald Trump’s first National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn.

The House Ethics Committee will make the final call on whether Mr. Nunes inappropriately discussed classified information. Democrats failed in their primary goal of stripping Mr. Nunes of his chairmanship. While he retains the rest of his Intelligence Committee duties, the Russia probe is now taken over by Michael Conaway (Texas), Trey Gowdy (South Carolina) and Tom Rooney (Florida).

This trio has a duty to finish what Mr. Nunes started. That means getting to the bottom of both internal snooping on U.S. citizens and any Trump-Russia ties.