RUTHFULLY YOURS

On November 28 last year, Abdul Razak Artan — a student at Ohio State — launched a terror attack on campus by attempting to run over fellow students and to stab others. He was shot and killed by campus police. Artan was hailed by the Islamic State as one of their “soldiers.”

But an attorney for the family says they are “mystified” about what drove him to commit this terror attack.

Information from the investigators’ case file shows a note written to his family pledging allegiance to the Islamic State and chastising them for being “moderate Muslims”:

The Associated Press reports:

A man responsible for a car-and-knife attack at Ohio State University last year left behind a torn-up note in which he urged his family to stop being “moderate” Muslims and said he was upset by fellow Muslims being oppressed in Myanmar, The Associated Press has learned.

Abdul Razak Ali Artan also told his parents in the note, reassembled by investigators, that he “will intercede for you in the day of Judgment,” according to the investigative case file of the attack obtained through an open records request.

“My family stop being moderate muslims,” says the handwritten note transcribed by investigators and found by Artan’s bed in his family’s apartment.

Artan also wrote: “In the end, I would like to say that I pledge my allegiance to ‘dawla,’” an Arabic word that means state or country and a likely reference to the Islamic State group. “May Allah bless them.”

He concludes by saying he’s leaving his property to his beloved “but yet ‘moderate mother.’”

Artan’s family was baffled by that note, which caused them a great deal of anguish, said Bob Fitrakis, a Columbus attorney representing the family. To this day, the family has no idea why Artan took those actions, he said Thursday.

“The family is mystified by what happened. They’re absolutely clueless,” Fitrakis said.

It should be noted that on the day of the attack, a Facebook post on an account attributed to Artan said he was “willing to kill a billion infidels”:

Here is what Americans this week were told counted as “news”: Jared Kushner’s past meetings. Russians. James Comey’s upcoming testimony. Russians. Hillary Clinton’s latest conspiracy theories. Russians. Bob Mueller’s as-yet-nonexistent investigation (into Russians). Kathy Griffin, Mr. Met and, of course, “covfefe.” Total words printed on these subjects? At least a duodecillion.

Here’s what actually happened this week, the “news” that holds real consequences for real Americans:

• Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed an order to begin reopening Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve to oil and gas exploration, reversing the Obama administration’s ideologically driven 2013 shutdown. The order even aims at opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to production—a move that is decades overdue. This could not only buck up the listless Alaskan economy but cement the U.S. as an oil and gas powerhouse.
• In related news, the Dakota Access Pipeline finally went live.

• The Fish and Wildlife Service took steps that may stop the Obama administration’s last-minute endangered-species listing for the Texas Hornshell, a freshwater mussel. That listing, based on outdated science, threatens significant harm to the Texas economy and was done over the protest of state officials and local industry.

• Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross surprisingly said that he was open to completing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, a far-reaching trade agreement being negotiated with the European Union.

• Sen. John Thune, the upper chamber’s third-ranking Republican, said his caucus had moved beyond meetings and on to “drafting” the base language of an ObamaCare replacement. The No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn, vowed the Senate would “absolutely” have a bill by “the end of July at the latest.”

And on and on. The Environmental Protection Agency stayed crushing regulations. The U.S. tested the first ground-based system for intercepting ballistic missiles. New numbers showed the private economy adding a rip-roaring 253,000 jobs in May.

Who is to blame for this real-news blackout? The press, obviously. But the co-culprit: Donald Trump.

Americans know that much of the mainstream media is biased in how it presents stories. The dirty little secret is that journalists’ far greater power rests in what they choose to—or not to—report. The country is no better informed about exactly how Russia interfered in the election than it was in October, when intelligence agencies issued a statement expressing their belief that Moscow had helped hack emails. Not a single useful fact has since been added, nor a single investigation completed, nor a single official report produced. Until those inquiries are completed, we will have no new real facts. Yet every day, a new Russia story.

Few expect better from today’s ratings-obsessed media. Especially given its new mission of working with Democrats and Never Trumpers to take down a presidency. That means spewing strategic leaks and suppositions, which create new controversies, which are spun into yet more distant scandals. We are these days reading exposes about former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s work for a Turkish businessman, which is utterly removed from the original question of Russian “collusion.”

The result is a surreal situation in which the near-hysterical press coverage of Trump the man (and potential Russian operative) is utterly divorced from the substantive actions his administration takes or the progress it makes. Mr. Trump’s cabinet, which includes some of the best reformers in the conservative world, is methodically implementing a far-reaching deregulatory agenda. Congress is moving ahead on key promises. CONTINUE AT SITE

The next time President Donald J. Trump thinks about national-security leakers, he should shout this four-letter word:

“Jail!”

Washington has become riddled with leaks. They far exceed gossip whispered to journalists to hamper political rivals. Breaking news that Steve Bannon oversalts his eggs or Reince Priebus blasts his speaker phone would be distracting and foster strife, not harmony. Such infantilism merits discipline or, ultimately, dismissal.

Relentless leaks of state secrets are something completely different.

When reports of President Trump’s combative discussion with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull emerged in February, they reflected poorly on Trump. This may have been what senior officials intended when they peddled these secrets. These leakers also sent world leaders a simple message: Whatever you tell Trump may be in the papers within hours. So, watch your words. Or avoid his calls.

This obstructs U.S. diplomacy.

Likewise, one or more leakers gave the Washington Post secrets about Trump’s discussions with Russian diplomats about ISIS’s plans to bomb jets with weaponized laptops. Reports that Israel uncovered this plot seemed designed to portray Trump as reckless with foreign intelligence. But the leakers, not Trump, blasted the Israeli angle worldwide.

Notorious leaks about ISIS’s deadly attack on Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester, England, appeared crafted to humiliate him during his European tour. This leak earned a public rebuke by British prime minister Theresa May and a high-profile, albeit temporary, suspension in Anglo-American intelligence sharing.

Not good.

Washington’s blabocracy pre-dates Trump. Soon after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, word spilled on how America tapped Dr. Shakil Afridi to pay a house call on a Pakistani residence and confirm that it was bin Laden’s home. Perhaps some Obamite wanted the world to know how clever the previous administration was. Alas, this leak outed Dr. Afridi. He now is serving a 33-year prison sentence for cooperating with Washington. The enemy now knows this technique. Pro-U.S. physicians who might want to help America fight radical Islamic terrorism now will think thrice before doing so.

Under G. W. Bush, some idiot revealed that America had intercepted bin Laden’s satellite phone in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s line soon went dead.

Not helpful.

A former Green Beret, Lt. Colonel Michael G. Waltz, explained on Tuesday’s Fox & Friends: “ISIS, al-Qaeda, and these other groups have English-speaking cells that scour American newspapers and look for leaks, so that they can react and change their tactics.”

President Trump must lead the charge against these scoundrels.

“I believe when you leak the kind of information that seems to be routinely leaked, at a high, high level of classification,” homeland-security secretary John Kelly told NBC’s Meet the Press, “I think it’s darn close to treason.”

“The main felony that can (and should) be charged in this situation is the Espionage Act (18 USC 793),” former U.S. attorney and counter-terrorism specialist Andrew McCarthy told me. “Subsections (d) and (f) call for a penalty of up to ten years in prison. It is really essential to prosecute some people, to stop these leaks.”

When did the definition of “leadership” in America become “the courage and foresight to ignore the United States Constitution”?

The fact that the sun rose again this morning was less predictable than the media-Democrat hysteria over President Trump’s entirely reasonable decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Convention on climate change. The decision was clearly right on the merits: The pact, which would do nothing meaningful to address global temperatures, is an exercise in progressive preening, touted by hypocrites who zip to and from climate confabs in their private jets — the kind of “Do as I say, not as I do” lovers of humanity (but loathers of people) who never take one plane when two are available.

To anyone but a zealot in the Church of Climate, it is obvious that carbon emissions are best reduced not by central planning but by a private sector free to innovate and respond to the market demand for environmentally responsible products and practices. That is how the United States leads, how it is already driving down emissions, and how it can promote the generation of wealth and know-how that — far better than dubious statistical models and rose-tinted crystal balls — would enable 22nd-century Americans to address their environmental challenges.

All that aside, however, President Trump’s decision should have been obvious and indisputable, not momentous. That it was not is a measure of detachment from our constitutional moorings.

The Paris Convention is a treaty. Under the Constitution, a treaty does not become law binding on the United States unless the president submits it to the Senate, obtains two-thirds approval there, and then ratifies the treaty. (Contrary to popular belief, the Senate does not ratify treaties; the president does the ratifying, but only if the Senate has consented.) That never happened to the climate agreement. It never had a chance of happening.

In this instance, as in others, President Obama conspired with his fellow transnational progressives to defeat the Constitution he had sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. He waited until late 2016, the eleventh hour of his presidency, to sign the agreement. As with the Iran deal, he had no intention of submitting it to the Senate, because there was no way it would be approved there. Because the pact would have punished American companies and workers, Obama knew that pushing Democratic senators into a vote, and boxing Hillary Clinton into a high-profile campaign debate, would have been a body blow to his party’s hopes of retaking the Senate and winning the White House.

The Left’s objective was to impose the Paris agreement without making Democratic office-seekers accountable for it. That is exactly what the Constitution is designed to prevent.

Here is the basic problem for transnational progressives: If the U.S. Constitution remains vital, their ultimate goal of global governance is unattainable.

Their premise is that the Westphalian model, a world ordered by nation-states pursuing their interests, is passé. History, they tell us, has refined us into a single world community, united by common values — eerily like sharia-supremacists’ claim that the ummah is a single world community of Muslims, united by Allah’s law.

By contrast, the Constitution is designed to enable the United States to secure its prosperity, interests, and security in a world where we hope for the best but prepare for the worst — hostile countries and other alien threats. The goal of the Constitution is to protect our nation against the globe’s many troublemakers, not to tame our nation in the name of global stability.

The perfect exemplar of the Constitution’s approach is the treaty clause (art. II, sec. 2, cl. 2). Its requirement of supermajority Senate consent is a presumption against international agreements.

The perfect exemplar of the Constitution’s approach is the treaty clause. Its requirement of supermajority Senate consent is a presumption against international agreements.

Seventy-five years ago this Sunday, some 150 Japanese warships, 250 warplanes and 25 admirals were steaming toward a small atoll 1,300 miles northwest of Oahu. Imminent was the most crucial naval battle of World War II—Midway.

Aboard the Yamato, the world’s largest battleship, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto retired to his quarters each evening to play chess. He had spent his final nights in port with his geisha, Kawai Chiyoko. Departing, he sent her verses: “Today too I ache for you / Calling your name / Again and again / And pressing kisses / Upon your picture.”

His present concerns were less sentimental. For six months, Japan’s navy had battered Allied forces across 8,000 miles of ocean, from Pearl Harbor to Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka). Still, Yamamoto worried that the American fleet was wounded but still dangerous. “We have scorched the snake,” as Macbeth had put it, “not killed it.”

His American counterpart, Adm. Chester Nimitz, relaxed by pitching horseshoes. Steady, calm, old-school—his most violent oath was “Now see here!”—Nimitz marshaled his forces for battle, waiting for the unsuspecting Japanese.

Weeks earlier, with strikes expected toward Australia, Washington had ordered Nimitz’s aircraft carriers to the far South Pacific. Others feared assaults on Hawaii, perhaps San Francisco or San Diego. Or the Panama Canal, Alaska . . . even Siberia.

But in a windowless basement near the fleet’s Pearl Harbor headquarters, codebreakers under Cmdr. Joe Rochefort pored over intercepted Japanese radio traffic. Independent, impolitic, single-minded, Rochefort “left the basement only to bathe, change clothes, or get an occasional meal to supplement a steady diet of coffee and sandwiches,” one officer recalled. “For weeks the only sleep he got was on a field cot pushed into a crowded corner.”

Rochefort’s team could decode about one-eighth of an average message, filling in the gaps by educated intuition. For example, the messages called the proximate Japanese objective “AF.” But where was “AF”? Midway, Rochefort concluded. The authorities in Washington scoffed. Why would Japan dispatch a massive armada to seize a tiny atoll?

Nimitz, responsible for millions of square miles of ocean, had scant means to repel the Japanese anywhere, let alone everywhere. With his fleet, and perhaps the entire Pacific war, at stake, “I had to do a bit of hard thinking,” he would recall.

As the Navy’s heavyweights vacillated, Nimitz decided to gamble on the out-of-step Rochefort. He recalled his three carriers from the South Pacific to defend Midway. Time was short. The USS Yorktown had been damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea and had recently returned to Pearl Harbor trailing a 10-mile oil slick. Repair estimates ranged up to three months.

The fatalistic flip-out over Trump’s plan to exit from the Paris Climate Accord is the latest proof that the leaders of the political Left have learned absolutely nothing since November 8. Unlike Trump, who said during his Rose Garden announcement of the planned withdrawal that he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” these woke folks continue to overlook huge swaths of the American public as they try to win a global popularity contest, redistribute our wealth, and lecture us about how ignorant, uncaring, and unaware we are.

The drumbeat from tone-deaf celebrities, tech titans, bureaucrats, and political hacks began earlier this week on social media when it became clear Trump would finally act to undo one of Barack Obama’s legacy policies. On May 28, California billionaire and climate catastrophist Tom Steyer, who donated $87 million to Democratic candidates in 2016 alone, tweeted out his dire assessment of Trump’s expected move. Steyer said Trump would be “committing a traitorous act of war against the American people.” Within moments of Trump’s speech, Steyer said the administration “has just committed assault and battery on the future of the American people. There can be no excuse for this willful crime. Yes, by pulling out of the Paris Agreement, Donald Trump is betraying the moral, political, and economic leadership position America has achieved over centuries at the cost of American lives.”

Steyer was joined in agony by fellow Golden State tycoons including Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla, among other tech enterprises, who had threatened to stop working on two of Trump’s advisory councils if the president pulled out of the Paris agreement. Musk, whose holdings have benefited from nearly $5 billion in government support, tweeted May 31, “Don’t know which way Paris will go, but I’ve done all I can to advise directly to POTUS, through others in the WH & via councils, that we remain.” After Trump’s announcement, Musk tweeted, “Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.” Or for Musk’s bank account, considering how much more in likely government handouts the Paris deal would’ve meant for him. But Musk probably should turn his attention elsewhere: His solar-energy company, SolarCity Corp., is reportedly under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to disclose how many customers have canceled their solar-energy system orders.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple and a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, reportedly called the White House this week to urge Trump to stay in the pact. The man who heads an empire built off energy generated by fossil fuels is one of those Silicon Valley sillies who wrongly thinks we can — and need to — live off 100 percent renewables within the next few decades.

Celebrities who still haven’t learned that their endorsement of anyone or anything usually yields the opposite of the intended effect also weighed in on Trump’s move. Hollywood’s most prolific climate celeb — the bed-hopping, jet-setting, yacht-cruising Leo DiCaprio — said he hoped Trump would make the “moral” decision to stay in Paris, then tweeted shortly after the president’s announcement that “today, our planet suffered.” Unhinged showgirl Bette Midler tweeted that Trump’s exit gave “BigOil a windfall” and that “there has never in US history been such a destructive megalomaniac in the WH. Thank you to US press and other numbskulls who put him there.”

Mark Ruffalo, known more for his environmental activism than for his marginal acting, tweeted that if Trump left Paris, the president would “have the death of whole nations on his hands. People will be looking to the USA for retribution for what they loose [sic].” Actress Alyssa Milano, who is approximately 0 for 432 on helping political candidates win, tweeted: “Oh my God, you really are a monster. @realDonaldTrump.” But the topper could go to George Takei of Star Trek fame, who tweeted: “Trump is having us pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. Too bad someone didn’t tell his father that he shoulda pulled out too.”

The thing to remember is that there’s a big difference between perceiving “pressure” and believing that you have witnessed the obstruction of an FBI investigation, a federal felony.

Take this to the bank: Over the next week, before the much-anticipated Senate testimony of former FBI director James Comey, the media-Democratic complex is going to spare no effort to convince you that the words “pressure” and “obstruction” are synonyms – you know, like the words “collusion” and “crime.”

They’re not.

It may very well be that former FBI director James Comey is prepared to testify, consistent with a leaked report of a memorandum written to himself, that he felt President Trump pressured him to drop the FBI’s investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser.

Even if this were true, it would not mean Comey believed the president had committed felony obstruction. No one grasps this better than the former FBI director himself.

On that score, I’ve been surprised, since the story of Comey’s memo-to-self broke, to have been asked about the purported “contradiction” between the memo and Senate testimony the then-director gave in early May.

According to the memo (which has not been made public and from which only a selectively mined snippet has been reported), on February 14, President Trump told Comey, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Based on this, CNN, relying on “a source close to the issue” (hmmm), claims that Comey is prepared to testify that he felt “pressured” to pull the plug on the investigation.

Compare this with his May 3 testimony. Answering questions put by Senator Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii), the then-director averred that he had never been directed by superiors to halt an FBI investigation.

Contrasting the two statements, Comey’s more fervid detractors accuse him of perjury. Should Comey testify next week that Trump pressured him in February, they reckon that either a) this claim or b) his May testimony that he’d never been “told to stop something for a political reason” would have to be false testimony.

It is a specious contention. First, Senator Hirono did not ask Comey about any direction given to him by the president. Her questions were about orders from the FBI director’s Justice Department superiors. (The FBI is part of DOJ, and the director is subordinate to the attorney general.)

More important, let’s assume that a question about whether he’d ever gotten a shut-down order from DOJ obliged Comey to include in his response any shut-down order he’d ever received from a president. (This assumption runs counter to perjury law, but let’s pretend.) The bottom line would still be that an order simply is not the same thing as pressure. Asserting that you have never been ordered to do something does not imply a representation that you have never been pressured to do that something.