RUTHFULLY YOURS

Democrats and their media allies are whipping themselves into a frenzy in their quest to impeach the duly elected 45th president of the United States and drive him from office.

It is part of the Left’s collective mental breakdown. These people still cannot accept that Donald Trump defeated the anointed Hillary Clinton in November so they lash out at the president and his successors, often violently, as we’ve seen in recent months. This Trump Derangement Syndrome allows left-wingers to justify a growing laundry list of antisocial behavior in the furtherance of their goal. The same people pushing Trump’s impeachment sat by silently as Barack Obama, the most despotic, overreaching president since the great proto-fascist Woodrow Wilson, committed impeachable offenses nearly every day.

At the moment, the Left’s ire is focused on Trump’s unexpected decision last week to fire FBI Director James Comey. Trump explained to Comey in a letter that his employment was being terminated based on the recommendation of the Department of Justice. Both Republicans and Democrats had been furious with Comey in recent years because the unelected official inappropriately injected himself and the FBI into political matters. But now Trump’s enemies are claiming his termination of Comey’s employment constitutes obstruction of justice because the FBI is investigating far-fetched allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

This push to end the Trump administration came as MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough made a case for impeaching President Trump. With his new fiancee, co-host Mika Brzezinski at his side, the former Republican congressman from Florida declared in an authoritative-sounding voice that the president admitted he fired FBI Director James Comey last week “to end an investigation against the president and all the president’s men, which is exactly what happened.”

And I’m not being hyperbolic when I say it, if there are articles of impeachment ever drawn up, the first article of impeachment drawn up against Donald Trump will be the first article of impeachment drawn up against Richard Nixon, and that is obstruction of justice. Because I could find you a thousand Republican criminal defense lawyers across America who could say what Donald Trump has admitted already on national television could rise to the level of obstruction of justice.

This isn’t what actually happened even though the media keeps reporting over and over again that the “real” reason the president fired Comey was specifically to thwart an investigation into the Russian conspiracy theory nonsense.

For example, Dylan Matthews wrote a piece at Vox with the bold headline, “Firing James Comey to impede an investigation isn’t smoke. It’s fire.” But the article itself, which compares the circumstances surrounding the near-impeachment of President Richard Nixon, is a real letdown, rife with leaps in logic.

It takes as a given that Trump admitted he fired Comey for a nefarious, corrupt, self-serving purpose, something that is patently untrue. Nor is it clear that Trump violated any law, as Georgetown Law professor Jonathan Turley, an honest leftist, has said.

Matthews writes:

The fact of the matter is that without any more information than we already have, we already know Trump’s conduct is almost as outrageous as what Nixon acknowledged in the smoking gun tape. In Nixon’s case, what crossed the line, moving top leaders from his own party to go to the White House and tell Nixon that his presidency was over, was Nixon’s attempt to hamper the FBI’s investigation into Watergate.

And we know, for a fact, that Trump fired FBI Director James Comey because he was upset by the FBI’s investigation into his Russia ties.

We know that because Trump said so himself. Asked by NBC’s Lester Holt why he fired Comey, Trump replied, “I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.'”

But do we know “for a fact” what Matthews claims we know?

Trump’s comment about Russia came during the NBC interview last week and took the form of one of the president’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness answers. In one two-and-a-half segment in the interview, Holt badgered Trump, interrupting him an astonishing nine times, which surely could not have made it easy for Trump – or anyone – to stay firmly on-topic throughout.

“Look, he’s a showboat,” Trump said of Comey. “He’s a grandstander. The FBI has been in turmoil. You know that, I know that, everybody knows that. You take a look at the FBI a year ago, it was in virtual turmoil — less than a year ago. It hasn’t recovered from that.”

After acknowledging he met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote a detailed legal memo urging Comey’s dismissal, Trump said he accepted Rosenstein’s recommendations but added he was planning to fire Comey anyway.

“Oh, I was going to fire regardless of recommendation,” Trump said.

According to a transcript at Real Clear Politics, the rest of the conversation went like this with Trump jumping around from subject to subject. Part of the transcript is reproduced below so readers can get a sense of just how convoluted the discussion was.

Wanna see Democrats and media hacks weep? Hand them this list!

Since President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, a number of people have scrupulously monitored his accomplishments. They include Sean Hannity’s producer Sweet Baby James, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, and Jeff Dunetz, creator of the blog The Lid, among others. The listing below was compiled by the above-mentioned people and represents many but not all of the non-stop accomplishments of President Trump––the juggernaut––during his first three months in office.

But the list does not elaborate on the accomplishments of the first three weeks of the fourth month, which include, among other things, the completion of his cabinet appointments, signing a cybersecurity executive order for a sweeping review of the federal government’s digital vulnerabilities and the adoption of specific security practices; an unprecedented trade deal with China involving certain foods, natural gas, and biotech products; creating a voter-fraud commission to clean up the system; preparation for a devastating cyberattack against America’s electric grid; and the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Nor is there any mention of the hundreds if not thousands of personal phone calls the president has made to shakers and movers in the U.S. as well as world leaders.

If these accomplishments are not familiar, that’s because 99 percent of the media––the jerks––are a de facto arm of the Democratic National Committee and the far-left fringe, and are so terminally distressed by the fact that Mr. Trump won the presidency that they obstinately refuse to report what by any objective standards is the news. This is because:

They’ve been pushing leftist values for well over a half century and are unable to admit that their anti-Trump, pro-Hillary message was an utter and complete failure.
They are part and parcel of the vast, contaminated, rancid, crooked, pay-for-play, corrupt swamp that candidate Trump promised to drain, and President Trump is now draining.
The man they mock––for his syntax and phrasing, style of governing, unpredictability, and so-called contradictions––has both confounded and trumped them at every turn.

This is why they remain fixated on the fairy tale of a Trump-Russian connection. They have nothing else––as in nothing!
LIGHTNING

After Pres. Trump’s first month in office,

235,000 jobs were added to our economy in February, 100,000 more than expected;
40 percent fewer illegal immigrants crossed our border;
$3 trillion was added to the stock market;
Judge Gorsuch, a constitutionalist worthy of Justice Scalia’s seat, was nominated to the Supreme Court.

In his first 100 days:

appointments of Vice President Mike Pence, pro-life conservative;
Justice Neil Gorsuch, an originalist committed to the Constitution;
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, staunch conservative committed to the rule of law;
Defense Secretary James Mattis, a warrior committed to restoring America’s military;
Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, a former general committed to border security;
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a former CEO who understands how the real world works;
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson, a brain surgeon from a humble background;
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a doctor who understands health care;
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, an advocate of school choice and educational reform;
Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former governor of Texas and expert on the energy industry;
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, former CEO who understands the business world;
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a conservative committed to reining in big government;
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, a fearless advocate for American values;
U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, a true friend of Israel;
White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, a conservative warrior against crony capitalism and the left;
National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, an accomplished military commander;
and White House Counterterrorism Adviser Sebastian Gorka, committed to defeating radical Islam.

President Trump;

restored the U.S. alliance with Israel and welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House;
restored U.S. leadership in the world;
enforced red lines against the use of chemical weapons in Syria;
dropped the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB) on ISIS, sending a clear message to Iran and North Korea;
secured the Chinese cooperation in pressuring North Korea and the release of Aya Hijazi, American charity worker held in Egypt since 2014;
imposed a five-year ban on lobbying the government by former White House officials and a lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign governments by former White House officials;
repeatedly called out the liberal media for “fake news”;
repealed Obama mandate that forced states to fund Planned Parenthood;
signed executive order reinstating Reagan policy against taxpayer funding of overseas abortions;
stopped U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes abortions;
signed the following Executive Orders
to mandate a comprehensive plan to defeat ISIS,
to begin construction of the border wall and hire additional 5,000 border agents,
to order the Justice Department to cut funding to sanctuary cities,
to institute a temporary federal hiring freeze,
to institute a travel ban on individuals from a select number of countries embroiled in terrorist atrocities;
to withdraw from the Transpacific Partnership trade deal,
to mandate that two regulations will be repealed for every new one issued,
to institute a comprehensive approach to illegal immigration and crime; et al.

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump shared sensitive intelligence obtained from a close U.S. ally with Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador in a meeting last week, according to U.S. officials, potentially jeopardizing critical intelligence-sharing agreements in the fight against Islamic State.

Mr. Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office the day after firing Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey.

During the meeting with the Russian officials, Mr. Trump mentioned details about Islamic State in a way that revealed enough information for the Russians to potentially compromise the source, according to the officials, who said the intelligence came from the U.S. ally.

According to one U.S. official, the information shared was highly sensitive and difficult to acquire and was considered extraordinarily valuable. The Wall Street Journal agreed not to identify the ally because another U.S. official said it could jeopardize the source.

The Washington Post reported Mr. Trump’s disclosure and said White House officials called the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency to warn of Mr. Trump’s disclosure and its possible consequences.

National Security Adviser Denies Trump Gave Russians Secrets

In a brief statement to reporters, National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster responded to a Washington Post article that claims President Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office last week. Photo: AP

The White House denied on Monday that Mr. Trump disclosed any sources and methods of U.S. intelligence services or those of U.S. allies.

“I was in the room. It didn’t happen,” National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster said in a statement outside the White House.CONTINUE AT SITE

ISIS is recruiting an army of AK-47-brandishing women from the West who are just as bloodthirsty as the men they are marrying. Calling themselves “lionesses of Allah,” they are thought to now number more than 600, and they’re bearing the next generation of terrorists, whom they call “cubs of the caliphate.”

Many of these women are true believers who trust that even with horrific gore and bloodshed, they are helping carry out the holy work of Allah in restoring the ancient Islamic caliphate, and that once it’s reestablished, all believers will live in peace and harmony under Islamic rule.

Some of these ISIS brides living in Syria and Iraq have made the terrorist watchlist. Arguably the most dangerous is Sally Jones, 49, a British Muslim convert who goes by the nom de guerre Umm Hussain al-Britani. She is reportedly now on a British special-forces “kill list” after threatening Queen Elizabeth II.

Jones, who in her youth was a guitarist for an all-girl rock band, Krunch, has also been implicated in two foiled plots to kill Americans and is training her young son to follow in her footsteps.

She and other Western women are actively recruiting like-minded “sisters” to their twisted cause. Their primary duty is “to raise the next generation of lions in Islamic State,” as Jones’ good friend, Umm Muthanna al-Britani, another young British woman, put it in a tweet.

And ISIS pays them a generous stipend for each “cub” they deliver ($25 for each child per month, plus a $400 maternity bonus, and a $500 marriage bonus). This is a strategic move. With more of its men killed in battle, the terror group has to ensure its longevity.

But these moms celebrate death more than life. In fact, they incite their “brothers” to suicidal violence, even reminding them of the supposed heavenly rewards for achieving martyrdom while killing infidels. As Umm Osama, an online friend of Muthanna, once tweeted: “when you get so excited hoping for 7ooris” — the famous “72 virgins” — “remember this n say ‘Marhrah adDugma’ (u can do it).”

They don’t shed a tear if they lose a husband. If he dies in battle, they are “instantly transformed into a hero — the wife of a martyr,” or “shaheed,” Center for Terrorism and Security Studies fellow Mia Bloom said.

ISIS rewards such widows well. “U dnt hav 2 pay 4 ANYTHING if u r wife of a shaheed,” one Western woman in Syria wrote.

Politicians and media outlets have forfeited any semblance of trustworthiness in their manic efforts to bring down President Trump. Consider, for example, how Mrs Clinton’s supporters demanded the FBI chief be fired only to immediately reverse themselves when news of his dismissal broke.

Much of the response to President Trump’s sacking of James B. Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has been patently hypocritical and partisan. This is not hard to demonstrate. More challenging, and perhaps much more important, is to understand the wider context of the latest outburst of Trump Derangement Syndrome. What might be the real reasons, the ideological circumstances, which explain the determination of the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, bureaucratic executives, CEOs, Hollywood activists, educators, the professoriate and so on – the whole Left Power Elite, in other words – to damage and defame the Trump presidency at every turn.

The charge of hypocrisy almost goes without saying. Ever since Comey informed the Senate Judiciary Committee, on October 28, that the FBI was re-opening its investigation of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information during her time as US secretary of state (2009-13), the anti-Trump forces having been baying for Comey’s blood. Their indignation, given the announcement came just 11 days before Election Day, is understandable.

Not even the fact that, on November 6, two days before the election, he once again closed the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure at the Department of State, could he assuage their outrage. On May 3 this year, in front of Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI Director claimed to feel “” at idea that he could have played any role in effecting the outcome of the election. No mainstream journalist, no Hollywood activist, no Democratic Party spokesman is on record respecting James Comey’s insistence he did right thing: “Lordy, has this been painful. I’ve gotten all kinds of rocks thrown at me and this has been hard, but I think I’ve done the right thing at every turn.”

Certainly Clinton has never forgiven Comey. As recently as two weeks ago she was still blaming Comey’s October 28, 2016, letter to Congress – along with “Russian WikiLeaks” and, of course, misogyny – for her electoral defeat. Perhaps the pretence of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), once considered something of an outlier in the Democratic Party but these days no more unbalanced or outrageous than her colleagues, encapsulates up the situation best. President Trump’s dismissal of Comely cannot be supported because it does not meet the “smell test”, and yet were Hillary Clinton the occupant of the Oval Office, Waters would now be supporting Comey’s sacking: “If she had won the White House, I believe that given what he did to her, and what he tried to do, she should have fired him.”

The partisanship of the media against President Trump is obvious to anyone who is not, well, hyper-partisan against Donald J. Trump. For the mainstream media – in not only America but also the UK and Australia – the White House dismissal of FBI Chief Comey smacks of President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up and, more specifically, the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973, in which special prosecutor Archibald Cox was sacked and, nine months later, Richard M. Nixon departed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by helicopter in disgrace. This, surely, is to confuse adolescent fantasy with political commentary. The sacking of James Comey, as a number of wags wryly observed, constitutes a cover-up in search of a crime. The Democratic Party’s “tin foil hat” conspiracy that President Trump happens to be an agent of Putin’sRussiaisonlypuerile but, once and for all, allows the Republicans to clean the slate on the so-called McCarthy-era witch-hunts of the 1950s. The moral high ground occupied by American-style liberals, at any rate on the question of guilt-by-association, is over.

Progressives have been lamenting the erosion of “democratic norms” in the Trump era, but they’d have more credibility if they didn’t trample constitutional norms in their own rush to run President Trump out of town.

Start with Democratic Senator Mark Warner’s assertion on Fox News Sunday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should play no role in vetting the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“I think it’s inappropriate that the attorney general, who was supposed to recuse himself for anything dealing with the Russian investigation, and clearly the Russian investigation is tied into who the next FBI director is going to be because the President fired [FBI director James] Comey because of his ties to the Russian investigation,” Mr. Warner said Sunday.

Fox’s Chris Wallace : “You don’t believe he [Mr. Sessions] could be part of this?”

Senator Warner: “I don’t believe he should be part of this review process if he can have a true recusal.”

Mr. Wallace didn’t follow-up, so we will. Mr. Sessions has recused himself from the Russia probe, but the FBI director reports to the Attorney General on hundreds of other matters beyond that one investigation. The AG has not recused himself from those matters. Mr. Warner seems to be saying that Mr. Sessions’s narrow recusal disqualifies him from supervising the FBI director at all.

The long knives are out. The ultimate doomsday scenario for a constitutional republic in peacetime—calls for impeachment of the president—has now been augmented by a growing chorus of voices demanding a far less dramatic but nonetheless profoundly serious step: appointment of a special prosecutor. Even for this less drastic move, the calls are way off base. At a minimum, the suggestion is premature.

The developing narrative, trumpeted on the weekend talk shows, is that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein must appoint a special prosecutor to restore his long-established reputation for integrity and professionalism. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the entire matter.

The basic complaint is that the newly appointed second-in-command at the Justice Department lost public confidence by crafting a three-page memorandum to the attorney general that severely criticized then-FBI Director James Comey, whom President Trump quickly fired. At least one senator has already mocked Mr. Rosenstein’s May 9 memorandum as “laughable.” They are wrong.

Let’s see what the Rosenstein memorandum actually says. It is titled “Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI.” Mr. Rosenstein rightly praises the bureau as “our nation’s premier investigative agency.” Mr. Rosenstein singles out Mr. Comey for high praise as “an articulate and persuasive speaker about leadership and the immutable principles of the Department of Justice.” The memorandum goes on to praise the FBI chief for his long and distinguished public service.

Mr. Rosenstein then turns to the director’s profound failures during his stewardship of the FBI. Above all, the new deputy attorney general states: “I cannot defend the Director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton’s emails.” In this Mr. Rosenstein echoes the vehement complaints by Democrats during the 2016 campaign, and indeed comments only last week by Mrs. Clinton herself. Even Republicans had raised an arched eyebrow at what the director did and when he chose to do it. The deputy attorney general goes on to express befuddlement that Mr. Comey still refuses “to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken.”

The memorandum then identifies the fatal offense of any FBI leader—the usurpation of the authority of the Justice Department itself. In a power grab, Mr. Comey had announced the ultimate prosecutorial decision, namely that Mrs. Clinton would not be prosecuted. The FBI director had no authority to do that. That was not all. Mr. Comey, the memo went on, “compounded the error” by holding a press conference releasing “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation.” This was all way outside the foul lines of Justice Department professionalism.

Succinctly, but with devastating effectiveness, the Rosenstein memorandum demonstrates Mr. Comey’s egregious violations of long-settled Justice Department practice and policy. Mr. Rosenstein draws from the director’s testimony before Congress and his unprecedented letter to Congress days before the election. He addresses Mr. Comey’s argument that had he failed to insert himself once again into the presidential campaign—as voting was already under way in many states—it would have constituted “concealment.”

Balderdash, the deputy attorney general concludes, albeit in more polite language. Prosecutors, to say nothing of FBI directors, are not to set out a confidence-shattering bill of particulars with respect to any potential defendant’s conduct, and certainly not a presidential candidate in the heat of a national campaign.

Finally, the Rosenstein memorandum sets forth paragraph after paragraph recounting the scathing criticism of the director’s woefully timed election interference. The deputy attorney general demonstrates that his own conclusions are shared by a wide range of respected former officials of the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations. One example: President Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, is quoted as condemning Mr. Comey for having “chosen personally to restrike the balance between transparency and fairness, departing from the department’s traditions.” CONTINUE AT SITE