RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of Washington’s favorite games is afoot and the rumor mill is running hot with names of potential replacements for FBI Director James Comey.

In hard news, the association representing FBI agents has endorsed former Rep. Mike Rogers for the position. Rogers is a former special agent at the bureau, well liked on the Hill, and considered an expert on terrorism and national security. His name was mentioned prominently in connection with several intelligence agency positions during the Trump transition. If Trump wants a safe pick, Rogers is probably the one.

But, as The Daily Caller points out, the DoJ has apparently narrowed its list of candidates to four—and Rogers isn’t among them.

In a bid fill the empty slot as soon as possible, a source with knowledge of the interview process told Politico that officials will interview acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, GOP Sen. John Cornyn, former DOJ Criminal Division Chief Alice Fisher and former U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia from Manhattan.

President Donald Trump abruptly fired James Comey from the position Tuesday, a move that surprised Comey. He wasn’t informed of the move in advance and realized what had happened while he was speaking to bureau employees in Los Angeles and news flashed on the screen behind him. He initially thought it was a funny prank. But that prank turned out to be entirely genuine.

The decision was so quiet that White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon also discovered the news in the same way as Comey, namely from TV. Trump reportedly kept important staff in the dark because he was concerned about the news leaking.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein are set to conduct interviews starting in the afternoon on Saturday. These four candidates are not the only people under consideration for the position. More candidates will likely be interviewed at a later date. Around 11 people in total are under consideration.

Sessions and Rosenstein are separately conducting interviews for interim FBI director, a spot currently held by Andrew McCabe.

President Donald Trump told reporters Saturday it’s possible he could nominate someone for the position as early as next Friday before he leaves for a trip abroad. While on Air Force One, Trump said that the candidates for FBI director are “outstanding people” and “very well known.”

‘Jumped the shark” is an overused expression straight out of 1970s situation comedy. It is the most charitable interpretation of the moment President Donald Trump pressed “Tweet” on Friday morning. After nearly four months of the once jaw-dropping novelty of presidential tweeting (the equivalent, in dog years and media exhaustion, of five sit-com seasons), the routine has grown stale, the former reality-TV star apparently out of “don’t touch that dial” ideas.

So, while his staffers fanned out to douse overheated media-Democrat Watergate analogies to his firing of FBI director James Comey, the president was on social media suggesting that he might be recording his conversations in the White House:

Is there a Rosemary Woods for Twitter?

Alas, this was not the only piece of bizarre Trump-Comey news. It was reported by several media outlets that the then-director was summoned to a late-January dinner at the White House, where Trump pressed him for a loyalty pledge. Comey is said to have demurred, promising the president nothing more, or less, than honesty. If it happened, and happened that way, Comey is to be lauded for giving one of the only two appropriate responses. The other would have been to resign.

The story is disputed: Comey’s side of it comes from secondhand sources. For his part, Trump told NBC News that it was Comey who wanted the meeting so he could lobby to keep his job — although Trump became non-committal when asked whether it was he or Comey who initiated the dinner invitation.

Trump further maintains that the dinner was the first of three times that Comey assured him that he was not under investigation. To be clear (as National Review explains in an editorial): Comey has testified that the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s meddling in the election. Though he said the investigation is exploring ties between Trump associates and Russia, a counterintelligence investigation is not a criminal investigation.

There is thus no reason to believe that the president is or has been the subject of a criminal investigation, even though Trump can’t seem to help himself from raising that specter. The president also reloaded and shot himself in the other foot, telling NBC that Comey’s pursuit of the Russian meddling probe did, in fact, influence his decision to fire Comey. Trump made clear that this is because he sees the investigation as baseless, not because he has anything to fear. Still, this new version of events contradicts the White House line from days earlier: viz., Comey’s termination was based on his deviations from law-enforcement protocols and had nothing to do with Russia.

It is the latest in a series of depressing chapters. Most pressingly, it will be more difficult now for the president to recruit a highly respected, instantly credible law-enforcement pro — a Ray Kelly type, to my mind — to replace Comey.

“We know Director Comey was leading an investigation in [sic] whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians, a serious offense.” So inveighed Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D. N.Y.), according to a report by PJ Media’s Bridget Johnson. Senator Schumer added, “If there was ever a time when circumstances warranted a special prosecutor, it is now.”

No, it’s not.

Readers of these columns will recall that I am a naysayer on the constitutional chimera interchangeably called a “special prosecutor” or an “independent counsel.” I won’t rehash all the arguments yet again. Suffice it to say there is no such thing as a prosecutor who exercises prosecutorial power independent of the executive branch. Were the Trump administration to cave in to media-Democrat pressure and appoint a “special prosecutor,” that lawyer would be chosen by the Trump Justice Department and answer to the president.

As night follows day, the next line of politicized attack would be that President Trump had rigged the investigation by choosing a crony to make the scandal disappear.

Special prosecutors notoriously guarantee a number of headaches for an administration. Unlike other prosecutors’ offices, they do not have to limit the resources devoted to a single case because of other enforcement needs. Their investigations inevitably metastasize far beyond the original inquiry because there is no supervisor to keep them focused on the subject matter and ensure that the investigation is completed in a reasonable time. The arrangement is a perverse assignment of a prosecutor to a single target (or set of targets) with a mandate to make a case against him – whatever case can be made, however long it takes. Because political cases have a high public profile, and the special prosecutor would inevitably be accused of a whitewash if he decides an indictment is not warranted, there is unusually great pressure to file some charge – even if it is a “process crime” (i.e., an offense, such as making false statements to investigators, that relates not to the conduct that was under investigation but to obstruction of the investigation itself).

Just as important, special prosecutors severely degrade an administration’s capacity to govern. They paralyze officials, pitting them against each other when they should be cooperating on the president’s agenda. They divert time, energy, and resources away from the conduct of official responsibilities so that the prosecutor’s investigative demands can be answered.

The only upside an administration supposedly gets in exchange for bearing these debilitating burdens is that appointing a special prosecutor signals to the public that the administration is not afraid of an “independent” investigation. But if the president is going to be accused of rigging the investigation anyway, what’s the point?

Let’s put all that aside for a moment, though. If we’re already talking about a special prosecutor, it means we have ignored what is supposed to be a rudimentary requirement: the crime.

You don’t need a prosecutor unless you first have a crime.

If the point of the exercise is to explore threats posed by Russia, that’s not a job for a prosecutor; it is a job for the president, the intelligence agencies, and Congress. We have prosecutors to prosecute crime; absent crime, there is no place for them. And special prosecutors only come into the picture when the suspects are people (generally, executive branch officials) as to whom the Justice Department has a conflict of interest. But those suspects must be suspects in a crime – not just in some untoward or sleazy form of behavior.

So what is the crime? What is the federal criminal offense that could be proved in a court of law under governing law and evidentiary rules?

“Collusion” – the word so tirelessly invoked – is not a crime. It is used pejoratively, but it is just a word to describe concerted activity. Concerted activity can be (and usually is) completely legal. Lots of unsavory activity in which people jointly participate is legal, even if we frown on it. In order to be illegal, concerted activity must rise to the level of conspiracy.

A conspiracy is an agreement to commit a crime. Not to do something indecorous or slimey; it must be something that is actually against the law, something that violates a penal statute. In the crim-law biz, the crime that conspirators agree to try to accomplish is known as “the object of the conspiracy.” If the object is not against the law, there is no conspiracy – no matter how much “collusion” there is.

So, in the ballyhooed “Russia investigation,” what is the object of the purported conspiracy? Notice that although Senator Schumer casually asserts that “a serious offense” has been committed, he does not tell us what that offense is.

That’s because there isn’t one.

Sorry to be the downer at the pep rally, but it is simply not a federal crime for a foreign country to intrude on an American election by spreading information or misleading propaganda that favors one candidate or damages another. To draw an analogy, it is shameful for the American media systematically to scald Republicans while carrying the Democrats’ water; but there is nothing illegal about it.

An outlandish billboard depicting President Donald Trump surrounded by a nuclear blast and money signs resembling swastikas was funded with taxpayer dollars, Judicial Watch alleged Thursday.

The billboard, erected in downtown Phoenix on March 17, also features a pin of a Russian flag on the president’s lapel. And if you look closely, the mushroom clouds look like clown faces. The work was commissioned by “arts advocate” Beatrice Moore, a longtime patron of the arts, and created by Los Angeles-based artist Karen Fiorito.

Fiorito told azfamily.com back in March that she chose the offensive symbolism to reflect “power, money, and dictatorship.”

When neighbor Jeff Whiteman first saw the Nazi Trump image staring “right back at him through his kitchen window,” he was appalled. “It’s pretty drastic. I thought swastikas were very crude and violent,” he said.

But Fiorito was unapologetic. “There are people who say, ‘Well, it’s offensive,’ but the current administration, its policies, the people that are put in power are offensive to me,” she said.

“I worked with Karen Fiorito over 10 years ago, and she created the anti-Bush W billboard for this site then,” Moore posted on her Facebook page on March 17. “Deciding we needed an anti-Trump billboard, I contacted Karen and hired her to design the current signage for the billboard, which we had printed and installed.”

James the Great and James the Less: Clapper defends Comey

James Clapper, Obama’s DNI chief, tried to aid James Comey, Obama’s FBI director. Clapper, in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, said Comey felt uneasy about having dinner with President Trump on January 27, 2017 because he felt it might compromise the FBI.

According to Clapper:

“He mentioned that he had been invited to the White House to have dinner with the president and he was uneasy with that[.] … Comey didn’t want to create “the appearance of compromising the integrity of the FBI.”

Too bad NBC had Andrea Mitchell instead of real journalist interview Clapper. A journalist would have questioned Clapper by asking:

Did Comey believe that the integrity of the FBI was compromised when Terry McAuliffe, friend of Hillary, donated $700,000 to the political campaign of Jill McCabe, wife of assistant FBI director Andrew McCabe? McCabe was involved in investigating Hillary for her illegal use of a private unsecured email server. Did Comey ask McCabe to recuse himself, or better yet, give back the $700,000? Was McCabe warned, reprimanded, or otherwise spoken to about this?
Was the integrity of the FBI compromised when Comey questioned Hillary not under oath and gave immunity to Hillary’s assistants? Granting immunity is usually the function of the Justice Department in consultation with the FBI.
Was the integrity of the FBI compromised when Comey took it upon himself to make the decision whether to indict Hillary instead of following procedure to give the results of the investigation to the Justice Department for its review as to whether to indict?
Was the integrity of the FBI investigation of Hillary compromised when Bill Clinton met with Comey’s boss, Obama’s attorney general, Lynch, days before Comey gave Hillary a pass?
Was the integrity of the FBI compromised when Comey listed all the facts that warranted an indictment of Hillary but declined to indict because he added the requirement of “intent” that is not in the statutes – and worse, the issue of intent is for a judge or jury to infer from the facts?

The bottom line is that it is not the integrity of the FBI that is the issue. It is the integrity of James Comey.

Of course, Clapper is not the best witness for credibility. He admitted that he lied to Congress about the NSA’s bulk collection of data – not exactly a minor issue.

Or maybe Comey can use John Brennan, but Brennan also lied when he denied that the CIA had hacked the computers of Senate staff members.

Who else from the Obama administration can help Comey? Susan Rice, the liar of Benghazi? Hillary? Bill Clinton, perjurer?

The Washington spectacle continues in the aftermath of President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, and unlike Ringling Bros. it won’t be closing soon. As a service to readers, we thought we’d sort the fact from the suspicion, hyperventilation and bluster and sum up what we’ve learned from the latest tumultuous week in the Trump Presidency.

• Whatever Mr. Trump’s calculations, Mr. Comey’s departure is good for the FBI, the Justice Department and the country. The President and White House first said Tuesday that he had acted based on the recommendation of his top two Justice officials. On Thursday he told NBC News that he was going to fire Mr. Comey anyway, and that he had the FBI’s Russia-Trump probe on his mind.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but with Mr. Trump who knows? He often acts on one impulse then changes his explanation later. The main problem of his Presidency is that he treats his own statements as a form of public entertainment rather than acts of persuasion to build public trust. This is self-destructive, but it means everyone else has to discount what he says and focus even more than with most politicians on the substance of what he does.

Mr. Comey’s political calculations—most of them aimed at preserving his personal standing—had damaged the bureau. His dismissal sent a message that the FBI director is politically accountable through the Attorney General and Deputy AG.

• Rod Rosenstein deserves better treatment—from Democrats and Mr. Trump. The Deputy AG’s memo on Mr. Comey’s 2016 behavior is persuasive and a public service. It bears the hallmark of a straight shooter concerned with the accountability that is essential to a credible rule of law.

Democrats are now saying they don’t trust him, though a chunk of the memo quoted what Democratic legal veterans had written. They should be pleased to have someone of recognized integrity in such a crucial Justice role. So should Mr. Trump, whose initial public statements appeared to load the responsibility for Mr. Comey’s dismissal on Mr. Rosenstein.

The Washington Post report that Mr. Rosenstein threatened to resign has since been contradicted—it doesn’t sound like his M.O.—but Mr. Trump should still apologize to him.

• The various Russia probes will continue with even more vigor. Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, a Comey loyalist, told Congress this week that he has seen no attempt to interfere with its investigation. He said the FBI has ample resources for the job and that he wasn’t aware of a request by Mr. Comey for more. This contradicted another media report.

If Mr. Trump hoped to cover something up, sacking the FBI director is exactly the wrong way to do it. Every G-man with a mediocre lead will leak if he thinks politicians are trying to sit on evidence. The next FBI director will be watched like a Russian agent for any hint of political favoritism. The House and Senate intelligence committees have also been given new impetus for thorough investigations.

• There still is no serious evidence of Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 campaign. The worst detail so far is Michael Flynn’s denial (he says he forgot) that he had met with the Russian ambassador. The various other names who’ve flashed as targets of media suspicion are small-timers (Carter Page) or Beltway bandits ( Paul Manafort ) who look more like mercenaries than conspirators.

Perhaps such evidence will emerge. If it does, Mr. Trump’s Presidency isn’t likely to survive. If it doesn’t, he could emerge politically stronger for having his denials vindicated.

Just before the French election I installed the Le Monde app on my phone. French news doesn’t interest me except as it impacts financial markets or (rarely) geopolitics. That was a mistake; the lead story in France’s top national daily yesterday at 7 a.m. EST involved a “tutu protest” against the allegedly homophobic Wyoming senator Mike Enzi, in which men and women donned frilly ballet skirts for a gay rights demonstration. President-elect Emmanuel Macron is scrambling to field candidates for the National Assembly elections and proclaiming a grand reorganization of the European Union–but Le Monde reminds us what the French are really about. Trust them to point up the things we most dislike about ourselves.

Pace James Carville, we need a sign that reminds us: “It’s the culture, stupid.” One big idea unifies all of Nietzsche’s offspring–the Marxists, the Freudians, the French Existentialists, the critical theorists, the Deconstructionists, the queer theorists, and that is the right to self-invention. That is the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on human beings, for we are not clever or strong enough to reinvent ourselves. To the extent we succeed, we become monsters.

In the Judeo-Christian past, human beings had a destiny, men to earn bread by the sweat of their brow and women to bear children in pain. People knew that their impulses must be subordinated to the requirements of God and nature. Since the French Revolution, progressives have sought to overthrow the regime of obligation in favor of the right to self-definition. Before the 2016 presidential election, they thought they had succeeded. Justice Anthony Kennedy enshrined it in common law, in the Obergefell gay-marriage decision: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”

If you choose your identity at whim, your life has no meaning. That is true in the most parsimonious sense of the word: if you can arbitrarily decide to be a gender-fluid bestialist as well as a F to M to F trans-entity, then your life can “mean” any number of different things, all of them equally arbitrary. The term “meaning” implies a unique meaning, which in term implies a meaning that has grounds for being there (“unique” doesn’t imply that you have only one chance to choose your gender self-designation from among the fifty provided by Facebook, after which you are stuck with it forever). The progressives made their stand on transgender issues because it appears to be the triumph of self-invention over nature and tradition. That is a cruel joke on the tiny number of individuals who feel compelled to live their lives in the gender opposite to that of their birth. They have no choice in the matter, and live difficult lives.

Although President Donald J. Trump fired former FBI director James Comey this week, Obama should have sacked him last July. Comey’s behavior in the E-mailgate investigation suggests either staggering incompetence or a clumsy effort to whitewash Hillary Clinton’s crimes.

• During Hillary Clinton’s July 2 interrogation at FBI headquarters, she was not under oath. How could the FBI possibly reach “the last step of a year-long investigation” — as Comey described it at a July 7 House Government Oversight Committee hearing — with the focus of that probe answering questions without a potential perjury conviction hanging over her head? Especially given Hillary’s peanut-allergy-like aversion to the truth, not swearing her in confirmed either the FBI’s grotesque ineptness or a deliberate loophole through which Hillary could slither away.

Clinton’s defenders say that, had she lied, she still could have been prosecuted for making false statements to federal officials. If so, why bother to put any American under oath?

Making Hillary raise her right hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God, would have reminded her of her solemn duty to come clean. This also would have exposed her to possible prosecution under both the perjury and false-statements statutes. But Team Comey could not be bothered with any of this. Perhaps they couldn’t handle the truth.

• Former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills participated in this session as one of Hillary’s nine attorneys, even though she is deeply implicated in many of Hillary’s misdeeds. Thus, a potential witness or even co-conspirator in Hillary’s possible prosecution offered legal aid as the FBI quizzed her. None of Comey’s people considered this a problem?

• Comey steered clear of Hillary’s three-and-a-half hour interview. Given the unusual and enormous stakes, he should have faced her or, at least, supervised nearby. From an adjacent room, he could have offered guidance, monitored Hillary for inconsistencies, and instructed his staffers to ask pointed follow-up questions.

• Hillary’s maid, Marina Santos, had regular access to Hillary’s classified documents, via secured communications equipment in her Washington, D.C., mansion. Santos reportedly printed records for the former secretary of state to read at home, apparently including Obama’s Presidential Daily Brief. Regardless, Paul Sperry reported in the New York Post, “It also appears the FBI did not formally interview Santos as a key witness in its investigation.” How could Comey possibly have let Santos go uninterrogated?

• The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of Cheryl Mills and Clinton campaign aide Heather Samuels. This extraordinary promise was part of Mills’ and Samuels’ immunity deals.

However, veteran Washington attorney Joseph DiGenova told Sirius XM host David Webb that FBI agents refused to destroy these computers, in hopes that congressional investigators would subpoena them. DiGenova said in October that when he learned that these laptops still existed, “I could not believe that the Republicans had not gotten their hands on them even yet.”

Wherever the laptops of these top Clinton henchwomen are today, why on Earth would the FBI even agree to junk evidence in this case — be it damning or exculpatory? If any of the judges involved in this case asked for those laptops, what did the FBI expect to say? “Sorry, your honor. We planned to throw them into a furnace.”

President Trump’s decisive removal of FBI director James Comey predictably triggered an avalanche of Democratic-party criticism. Dropping their own bitter attacks of Comey without missing a beat, Democrats rallied to Comey’s defense. They compared Trump’s decision to Richard Nixon’s discharge of special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate investigation and claimed that, in Jeffrey Toobin’s words, the U.S. was undergoing “the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies.” “They will put in a stooge who will shut down this investigation,” Toobin sagely opined.

Trump’s critics are the captives of their overwrought imaginations. The Watergate analogy is hackneyed. Trump made the right call. Comey had to go for the nation’s best interests. Indeed, Trump’s biggest mistake was one of timing – he should have told Comey to pack his bags on January 21, 2017, rather than waiting until the White House had become embroiled in controversy over the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Several months ago, we urged Comey to do the nation the service of resigning. We argued that his repeated and clumsy interventions in last year’s presidential election had lost him the confidence of the public at large — left, right, and center. No FBI director – certainly none who professed to be concerned with the Bureau’s integrity and good standing – should have remained in office under those circumstances. By resigning, Comey would not have had to admit any fault on his part. Instead, he chose to stay on, apparently considering himself to be at once politically unassailable and also indispensable to the investigation of Trump’s campaign. He was dead wrong on both counts. His arrogance has cost him dear. Captain Ahab, meet Moby Dick.

Critics claim that, by firing Comey, Trump has attempted to abort the FBI’s investigation into alleged Russian hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s files and efforts to influence the presidential election. Color us skeptical about the alleged political collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that any of Vladimir Putin’s schemes actually affected the outcome of the election. We are also unsure what federal law President Trump allegedly violated. Even if some of his campaign aides might have failed to register as foreign agents, or, in a worst-case scenario, even might have colluded with foreign powers, there appears to be no evidence that these alleged ties influenced the Trump campaign or the White House. Hillary Clinton lost because she was a terrible candidate and Trump won because he appealed to parts of the electorate that have suffered from economic globalization.