RUTHFULLY YOURS

Where is there any indignation at the WSJ that our presidents have honored Mahmoud Abbas, a dyed in the wool terrorist whose finger prints are on atrocities committed against innocent civilians including babies swaddled in cribs in every corner of Israel? rsk
What’s the difference between last Monday’s suicide bomb attack at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing in New York that also killed the innocent?

The answer is no difference save for the body counts and the causes for which the innocent were targeted. Which makes it all the more outrageous that the Speaker of the New York City Council and her allies on the board of the Puerto Rican Day Parade would honor a leader in a terror organization that was responsible for more than 120 bombings in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Speaker is Melissa Mark-Viverito, and the terrorist is Oscar López Rivera, a leader in the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN in Spanish) who was serving a 70-year prison term until President Obama commuted his sentence in January. Because Ms. Mark-Viverito supports Puerto Rican independence, and because the FALN committed its bombings on behalf of Puerto Rican independence, she supports her allies on the parade board who have honored López Rivera as a “National Freedom Hero” for this year’s June 11 parade.

This is incredibly insulting to the city’s law-abiding Puerto Rican residents—and they know it. Among the first to withdraw from the parade was the New York Police Department’s Hispanic Society. Others who have dropped out include Goya Foods, the New York Yankees and JetBlue Airways . Mayor Bill de Blasio is still a go, as he’s never seen a left-wing cause he couldn’t endorse. Governor Andrew Cuomo, after weeks of dithering, finally decided on Friday that he won’t run to the front of this parade.

Especially after the massacre in Manchester this week, these progressive politicians stand exposed for putting identity politics above the community values of public safety and respect for the law. As bad as Ms. Mark-Viverito’s judgment has been, López Rivera wouldn’t be able to attend any parade if Barack Obama hadn’t freed a man no morally different from the killers who plotted death in Manchester.

The Trump -Russia business is finally coming into clearer, more rational focus. Former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, in testimony this week, offered no evidence of Trump campaign cooperation with Russian intelligence. Instead he spoke of CIA fears that Russia would try to recruit/blackmail/trick Trump colleagues into being witting or unwitting agents of influence.

This is a realistic fear of any incoming administration. It’s especially realistic in the case of an “outsider” campaign full of naive, inexperienced and unvetted individuals. But it’s quite different from “collusion.”

The other shoe was dropped by the Washington Post. Finally we have details of an alleged email exchange showing influential liberals trusting in then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch to corral an inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s email practices. According to the Post, this email appears not to exist. It was cited in a secret Russian intelligence document that inspired FBI chief James Comey to usurp the attorney general’s role and publicly clear Mrs. Clinton of intelligence mishandling. Allegedly, he feared the real email (which didn’t exist) would surface and discredit any Justice Department announcement clearing Mrs. Clinton.

Are you now thinking of the Trump dossier circulated by former British agent Christopher Steele, which also felt like a Russian plant? While the political circus in Washington has focused on purloined Democratic emails and fake news spread during the election by Russian bots, the more effective part of Moscow’s effort may have been planting fake leads to prod U.S. enforcement and intelligence agencies to intervene disruptively in the campaign.

This also should shed new light on today’s anti-Trump leakers in the intelligence agencies: They may be the real unwitting agents of Russian influence.

There are plenty of lessons to go around. Mr. Trump, if he ever really thought Vladimir Putin was his friend, probably has wised up by now. He should have wised up the moment the Steele document came into view, supposedly based on plumbing Mr. Steele’s peerless Russian intelligence contacts. It always appeared possible, even likely, that Mr. Steele was the semi-witting vehicle for Russian rumors designed expressly to undermine Mr. Trump just as Russia was also trying to undermine Mrs. Clinton.

Plenty of people in Washington could also afford to rethink how their partisan idiocy makes them soft touches for such Russian disruption efforts. That includes Rep. Adam Schiff, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. It includes Mr. Trump too. Overdue is an inquiry into a possible Russian role in flogging the birther conspiracy and the 9/11 truther miasma. Mr. Trump, who loves a conspiracy theory, might consider how he and his ilk showed Russia a vulnerability in American political discourse that it could exploit.

Let’s remember that ex-FBI chief Robert Mueller’s mission is to investigate Russian influence in the election, not the narrow matter of Trump collusion. Whether Russia suborned or tried to suborn people like Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Michael Caputo is a necessary question. Whether Russia exploited Facebook to proliferate fake anti-Hillary news is a necessary question. But so is the provenance of the Steele document and the fake email purporting a Democratic coverup of Hillary Clinton’s server activity. If the FBI’s Mr. Comey allowed himself to be manipulated by Russian intelligence into intervening in the race, that’s something we need to know about. And we need to know about the leaks.

Mr. Brennan, the former CIA chief, has pointed out that these leaks are palpable, unambiguous crimes. Recall that Russia twice sent us detailed warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. President Trump is entitled to share terrorism intelligence with Russia’s ambassador. The only criminal leak occurred when anonymous officials relayed the classified content of these briefings to the press. CONTINUE AT SITE

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being tarred as a racist—again—for bringing the law fully to bear on illegal drug traffickers. Mr. Sessions has instructed federal prosecutors to disclose in court the actual amount of drugs that trafficking defendants possessed at the time of arrest. That disclosure will trigger the mandatory penalties set by Congress for large-scale dealers.

Mr. Sessions’s order revokes a 2013 directive by former Attorney General Eric Holder telling prosecutors to conceal the size of traffickers’ drug stashes so as to avoid imposing the statutory penalties. Contrary to the claims of Mr. Sessions’s critics, this return to pre-2013 charging rules is neither racist nor an attack on addicts.

The impetus to eliminate open-air drug markets has historically come from law-abiding residents of minority neighborhoods, as books by both Michael Fortner and James Forman have documented. In 1973 a Harlem pastor named Oberia D. Dempsey called for mandatory life sentences for heroin and cocaine dealers, because the “pusher is cruel, inhuman and ungodly. . . . He knows that he’s committing genocide but he doesn’t care.” In 1986 Brooklyn Congressman Major Owens introduced a bill to increase federal crack penalties. “None of the press accounts really have exaggerated what is actually going on,” he said. In 1989 Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson pledged to make “the drug dealer’s teeth rattle” and proposed seizing dealers’ assets.

Today people living under the scourge of open-air drug dealing still face the constant threat of violence. Only months ago Chicago mourned 11-year-old Takiya Holmes, struck by a stray bullet fired by a 19-year-old marijuana dealer. Former FBI Director James Comey once described the aftermath of a raid in northwest Arkansas that busted 70 drug traffickers. “As our SWAT teams stood in the street following the arrests of the defendants,” he said in a 2015 speech, “they were met by applause, hugs and offers of food from the good people of that besieged community.” The town was predominantly black, and so were nearly all the drug dealers.

The argument that Mr. Sessions’s order penalizes addiction also falls flat. For a mandatory federal sentence to come into play, a dealer has to be caught with an amount of drugs that clearly reveals large-scale trafficking. To trigger a mandatory 10-year sentence, a heroin trafficker, for example, must be caught with a kilogram of the drug, a quantity that represents 10,000 doses and currently has a street value of at least $100,000.

No one who gets caught smoking a joint is going to be implicated by Mr. Sessions’s order. The number of federal convictions for simple possession is negligible: only 198 in 2015. Most of those were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges, usually of marijuana. Last year the median weight of marijuana possessed by those convicted of simple possession was 48.5 pounds. To trigger a mandatory penalty for marijuana trafficking, a dealer would need to be caught with more than 2,200 pounds of cannabis.

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump is actively discussing major changes in the White House, including having lawyers vet his tweets and shaking up his top staff, as he grapples with the fallout from probes into his campaign’s dealings with Russia, according to several senior administration officials and outside advisers.

Other revisions on the table include adding a roster of outside lawyers to help deal with the legal ramifications of the Russia investigation, officials and allies said. “Everything is in play,” one Trump adviser said.

Meetings devoted to White House operations are scheduled for next week, after the president returns from his overseas trip, officials said. The anticipated moves are the latest sign of how the probe into Russia’s interference in last year’s election, and the circumstances of the president’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, is defining the new administration.

“We have nothing to announce,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Friday.

Mr. Trump has previously queried advisers about major changes, only to stick by his current staff and leave in place internal processes. But as he prepares to return from the nine-day foreign trip this weekend, the situation at home is threatening to consume his administration, his allies said. Before he left, the Justice Department appointed former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to oversee the probe, which is focused on whether there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election and may also include looking into the firing of Mr. Comey earlier this month.

“He’s 100% focused on this,” said a White House official, noting that the president slept only two hours in Saudi Arabia the night before his widely anticipated speech on Islam that he spent little time rehearsing.

Mr. Trump has denied any collusion between his campaign and Russia and has said he fired Mr. Comey because he was doing a bad job. He also said he had been a “showboat.”

One major change under consideration would see the president’s social media posts vetted by a team of lawyers, who would decide if any needed to be adjusted or curtailed. The idea, said one of Mr. Trump’s advisers, is to create a system so that tweets “don’t go from the president’s mind out to the universe.” CONTINUE AT SITE

This is written by a “Never Trumper” who has not let up on his criticism, so this column is very important….rsk

A strange madness is gripping the federal judiciary. It is in the process of crafting a new standard of judicial review, one that does violence to existing precedent, good sense, and even national security for the sake of defeating Donald Trump. We’ll call this new jurisprudence “Trumplaw,” and its latest victim is once again the so-called Trump travel ban. The perpetrator is the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

This afternoon, the Fourth Circuit upheld a nationwide injunction on Trump’s temporary halt on immigration from six majority-Muslim countries — each of which is either a state sponsor of terrorism (Sudan and Iran) or overrun with terrorist violence, with entire regions under jihadist control (Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia). Indeed, some of these countries no longer have a recognizably functional government.

Here is the essence of the court’s ruling: Trump’s campaign statements were so grotesque that they not only (1) hurt the feelings of a Muslim resident so much that he was granted standing to challenge an executive order that did not apply to him, but also (2) rendered an otherwise lawful executive order so damaging that the harm to the plaintiff’s feelings (and his wife’s possibly delayed entry into the United States) outweigh the government’s asserted national-security interest in pausing to reexamine foreign entry from hostile and war-torn countries.

Since Trumplaw is such a novel form of jurisprudence, it’s exceedingly hard to square with existing precedent. So, when existing precedent either doesn’t apply or cuts against the overriding demand to stop Trump, then it’s up to the court to yank that law out of context, misinterpret it, and then functionally rewrite it to reach the “right” result.

Take, for example, the Fourth Circuit’s reading of a Supreme Court case called Kleindienst v. Mandel. In Mandel, a collection of scholars demanded that the U.S. grant a non-immigrant visa to Belgian Marxist journalist. The government had denied him entry under provisions of American law excluding those who advocated or published “the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism.” Make no mistake, the First Amendment protects the right to advocate or publish Marxist doctrines every bit as much as it protects the free exercise of the Islamic faith. Yet the Supreme Court still ruled against the Belgian journalist:

We hold that, when the Executive exercises [its] power negatively on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason, the courts will neither look behind the exercise of that discretion, nor test it by balancing its justification against the First Amendment interests of those who seek personal communication with the applicant.

The meaning is clear. If the order is supported by legitimate and bona fide reasons on its face, you simply don’t go beyond the document. By that standard, the executive order is easily and clearly lawful. On its face, the order asserts a legitimate and bona fide national-security justification. On its face, the order isn’t remotely a Muslim ban. On its face it doesn’t target the Muslim faith in any way, shape, or form. On its face it describes exactly why each nation is included. The Fourth Circuit, however, interpreted Mandel to argue that the Court looked only at the face of the document to determine whether its supporting reasons were legitimate, not whether they were “bona fide.” It could go “behind” the document to determine “good faith.”

The FBI says it won’t give Congress the memos written by former FBI Director James Comey that reportedly gave his impressions of conversation he had with President Trump.

They say they must check with Special Counsel Mueller first and that there are “other considerations.”

Politico:

The House Oversight Committee and other congressional panels requested the memos earlier this month after The New York Times reported that Comey wrote in one that Trump had asked him to shut down the FBI’s investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Trump denied the allegation.

In a letter to Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the FBI’s assistant director for congressional affairs, Gregory Brower, said the bureau can’t provide the memo until it consults with Robert Mueller, the new special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s election meddling.

In light of Mueller’s appointment “and other considerations,” Brower wrote, “we are undertaking appropriate consultation to ensure all relevant interests implicated by your request are properly evaluated.” Brower pledged to update the Oversight panel “as soon as possible.”

Chaffetz responded to Brower’s letter on Thursday by restating his demand for the memos and setting a new deadline of June 8.

“Congress and the American public have a right and a duty to examine this issue independently of the special counsel’s investigation,” Chaffetz said. “I trust and hope you understand this and make the right decision – to produce these documents to the committee immediately and on a voluntary basis.”

“All relevant interests”? The only “relevant interest” that should concern the FBI is a speedy resolution by the people’s representatives to a situation that is harming the president and — not coincidentally — the Republican Party.

And how long does it take to get the special counsel on the phone and ask him if it’s OK to release the memos to Congress?

The FBI is slow walking the investigation and is resisting cooperating with Congress, letting Trump dangle while his political enemies savage him. Can you say “revenge”?

Note to FBI: Stop playing cutesy with the most important pieces of evidence you have and give the damn memos to Congress.