RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his testimony today before the Senate Judiciary Committee (on which I’ll have more to say in an upcoming column), FBI director James Comey has stuck by his claim that declining to bring charges against Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information was the right call because proof of intent was lacking. This is unsurprising. The director has repeated this analysis many times. It hasn’t gotten better with age, but given his insistence that “no reasonable prosecutor” could possibly disagree with him, I’m not holding my breath waiting for him to reverse himself.

In my column over the weekend, discussing a lengthy New York Times report about the Clinton e-mails investigation, I briefly rehashed why Comey is wrong about this:

This is a convoluted part of the story, stemming from the Justice Department’s effective rewriting of the applicable statute to avoid charging Clinton. As the Times tells it, the Justice Department and the FBI knew that to charge Clinton with a crime, it would not be enough to prove she had been “sloppy or careless”; instead, “they needed evidence showing that she knowingly received classified information or set up her server for that purpose.”

As I have contended before, this claim is specious on multiple levels. Subsection (f) of the pertinent statute (the Espionage Act, codified at Section 793 of Title 18, U.S. Code) makes it a felony to mishandle classified information “through gross negligence” — i.e., proving Clinton was sloppy or careless (or “extremely careless,” to use Comey’s own description) could have been sufficient. But beyond that, Clinton willfully set up a private network for the systematic handling of her State Department-related communications, in violation of federal record-keeping requirements of which she was well aware, and under circumstances in which she (a former senator who served for years on the intelligence Armed Services committee) was a sophisticated longtime consumer of classified information. She was keenly aware that her responsibilities as secretary of state would heavily involve classified information — whether it was “marked” classified or “born classified” because of the subject matter.

It is irrelevant whether Clinton’s purpose was to transmit or store classified information on the private, non-secure server; prosecutors are not required to prove motive. The question is whether she knew classified information would end up on the server, and her set-up made that inevitable.

That is, Clinton could have been prosecuted either for willfully mishandling classified information or for doing so through gross negligence.

As I elaborate in the column, the Times did not address the controlling statute in its 8,000-word article. Instead, the story was that Clinton could not be charged because of the purported Petraeus precedent. We are to believe that the evidence of former CIA director David Petreaus’s criminal intent was far stronger than Clinton’s, yet he was not charged with the felony mishandling of classified information (he was permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor); ergo, it would have been an abuse of prosecutorial discretion to charge Clinton with the felony.

I addressed this in the column as well:

This line of reasoning is fatuous — and it’s another instance of the Justice Department adopting Clinton campaign cant. Petreaus shared his classified diaries with a single person, a paramour who actually had a security clearance (albeit not one high enough to view what she was shown). Clinton’s offense was more extensive in duration and seriousness.

Assuming the accuracy of the Times’s account, Comey is quite right that Petraeus should have been indicted on much more serious charges (as I have contended). But the Justice Department’s dereliction in Petraeus’s case was hardly a justification for giving Clinton a pass on a more egregious offense that, unlike Petraeus’s, (a) almost certainly caused the compromise of government secrets to foreign intelligence services and (b) resulted in the destruction of tens of thousands of government records — a separate felony. Clinton’s misconduct should have been prosecuted under the governing law, not excused based on the sweetheart plea deal Petraeus got.

Some good news for readers who enjoy personal freedom and eating pizza: The Trump Administration this week delayed calorie rules that carried criminal penalties for errant pepperonis. Now Congress should rework the idea in legislation.

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Monday that the agency would delay a May 5 enforcement date for a rule that requires restaurants with more than 20 locations to post calorie counts on menu boards, ostensibly to encourage healthy choices and prevent a patchwork of state labeling schemes. The mandate was included in the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

But the resulting regulation has been thrice delayed because it required pizza chains to display per slice ranges for an estimated 34 million topping combinations. Imagine a sign that reads “200-800 calories per slice of one-topping medium pizza” with lists of individual accoutrements that span from 0-400 calories, with each one varying based on whether you add other toppings. Do you feel edified about your food choices?

The displays would be ripped up and replaced for every limited-time special. Franchisees—that is, local business owners, not Mr. Moneybags—would sign affidavits that “reasonable” efforts were made to ensure the accuracy of the placards. That’s an invitation for trial lawyers to drag every last pizza to a lab for verification. The penalties for noncompliance include a year in jail, and who knew that a job at Papa John’s could lead to a life of crime.

A bill in the House would eliminate the fines and hard time, as well as allow pizza places to display information online, where customers can already find it. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who deserves credit for the stroke of common sense, voted for an earlier version of the legislation. Congress should move on it before next year’s new enforcement date arrives, though the FDA could also revise the rule.

The FDA’s final guidance is riddled with amusing introspections on what constitutes a “combination meal” or how to label pumpkin lattes, but the less funny reality is that the pizza industry has spent years and millions of dollars fighting this insane rule-making. The Trump Administration is right to put those resources back in the productive economy.

Republicans and Democrats are jousting over who won the battle over this week’s omnibus spending bill, and we’ll give the call to Democrats because they fought to a draw while in the minority. Republicans will be hard pressed to use the power of the purse to set priorities until they return to regular budget order.

The $1 trillion agreement to fund the government through the end of this fiscal year on Sept. 30 is essentially a modest trade: Republicans got a boost in defense spending and a few policy riders, while Democrats got money for some domestic priorities. The agreement provides $15 billion in supplemental defense spending, which is overdue, even if that is only half of President Trump’s military request. The deal does not include Mr. Trump’s proposed cuts to the federal bureaucracy.

Republicans are right that the bill finally breaks the Obama -era rule that every defense dollar be matched by a domestic-spending dollar. Mr. Obama held the military hostage to his domestic agenda, and some Democrats wanted this damaging parity to continue as a price of their votes in the Senate. The GOP made clear this was a nonstarter, which is at least a down payment against military decline.

Democrats are crowing that they killed scores of Republican policy and spending “poison pills” and also won money for their priorities. They blocked funding for Mr. Trump’s border wall, though Republicans included some $12 billion for border and customs security. Democrats got an increase in National Institutes of Health spending, though many Republicans also supported that. Despite their claims, Democrats did not “preserve” funding for Planned Parenthood. The bill contains no direct dollars for that group, but rather funds grants that will be issued by Health and Human Services, which is unlikely to approve any for the controversial abortion provider.

Most of the domestic funding increases and decreases are GOP priorities. The bill contains $45 million to fund three more years of Washington, D.C.’s popular school voucher program, as well as money for western wildfire fighting and disaster-related repairs at NASA.

Conversely, the bill zeroes out dollars to the international Green Climate Fund (set up as part of the Paris climate accord), and it rescinds, consolidates or terminates more than 150 federal programs or initiatives, including such high priorities as the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation or the National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program. The bill cuts $81 million from the Environmental Protection Agency, returning it to 2009 levels.

The bill also continues the GOP deregulation drive. In particular, the bill forbids the IRS from spending to issue regulations that would change political standards for nonprofit social-welfare organizations, and it bars the Securities and Exchange Commission from issuing rules that require corporations to disclose political contributions. It also ends the federal attempt to regulate lead in ammunition or fishing tackle—a particular sore point with hunters and rural Americans.

Since its creation, the Deobandi movement has produced a number of militant offshoots, most notably the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and spread its tentacles around the world, including in the United States. Shafayat Mohamed returned from India and set up one such tentacle in Florida.

As Thomas Friedman wrote, “We talked to the boys. All of them thought America was evil and that Osama bin Laden was a hero.”

Much like its sister madrasa in Pakistan, the Darul Uloom Institute and its imam, Shafayat Mohamed, follow in the line of the most extreme elements of the Deobandi movement. The only difference is that one is more than 7,000 miles away from American shores, and the other is right in our backyard.

The Darul Uloom Institute — who? — in Pembroke Pines, Florida will hold its annual fundraising dinner and awards ceremony on May 6. If it is anything like last year’s gala, which saw honors go to a prominent local politician, a rabbi, and a pastor, you will hear some “moderate” messaging.

Do not, however, let this radical Islamic center’s attempt to ingratiate itself into mainstream American society fool you. Its history is mired in violence and hate.

The Darul Uloom Institute was founded by its imam, Shafayat Mohamed, in October 1994. Originally from Trinidad, Mohamed left for India in 1975, where he was educated at Darul Uloom Deoband, the school where the hardline Sunni Deobandi movement was established in May 1866. In a show of favor to his student, Darul Uloom Deoband selected Mohamed to lead a group of Americans in a 1979 tour of its facilities.

Since its creation, the Deobandi movement has produced a number of militant offshoots, most notably the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and spread its tentacles around the world, including in the United States. Mohamed returned from India and set up one such tentacle in Florida.

Shortly after its founding, Mohamed’s institute became affiliated with “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, a soon-to-be al-Qaeda operative who plotted to set off a radiological bomb in the U.S. Padilla, then a recent convert to Islam, was a student of Mohamed’s and attended the institute from 1995 through 1997. The following year, Padilla abandoned his wife and home in Florida for Egypt and then Pakistan, on his way to becoming a full-blown terrorist.

Mohamed has his own radical history. He has been thrown off a number of Broward County boards due to his extreme rhetoric against homosexuals. In February 2005, he published an article, “Tsunami: Wrath of God,” on the Darul Uloom website; he claims in it that homosexuality caused the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. Mohamed’s article does not target just gays. It also describes Jews and Christians — whom he calls “People of the Book” — as “perverted transgressors.”

The profile picture on Mohamed’s Facebook page shows him shaking hands with now-deceased Muslim leader Ahmed Deedat, with whom he said he “had a good relationship.” The photo with Deedat was taken in Durban, South Africa, at what was then named the Bin Laden Centre. Deedat, who according to the New York Times was “a vocal anti-Semite and ardent backer of Osama bin Laden,” personally received millions of dollars from Bin Laden and Bin Laden’s family for the center.