RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Deep-state holdovers embedded like barnacles in the federal bureaucracy are hell-bent on destroying President Trump.” So said Sean Hannity recently, and Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal took him to task for it. Stephens accused Hannity of right-wing paranoia. He quoted Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and asked whether Hofstadter’s description applies to the right wing mindset of today:

“America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesman who are at the very centers of American power.”

By the time Hofstadter wrote these words, progressives had already gone a long way toward transforming the political system of the United States. As the Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood it, a primary purpose of government is to secure the property rights of individuals, which they believed are the foundation of all other rights. (Try to imagine freedom of the press without privately owned newspapers, or freedom of religion – in a country that is expelling religion from the public square – without privately owned church buildings on privately owned land.) This purpose manifested itself most broadly in the structure of the Constitution, which was intended to limit the power of democratic majorities, correctly regarded by the Framers as the greatest threat to private property and, thus, to individual liberty.

But in the early 20th century, the progressives set out to make America more democratic – through the 17th Amendment, for example, which substituted popular election of U.S. senators for their selection by the respective state legislatures. Their purpose in democratizing America was not to empower the people, but, rather, to “democratically” abolish the Constitutional barriers that had kept property rights secure for a century, thus freeing governments at all levels to intervene in the economic affairs of the nation, legislating wages, working conditions, hours of employment, and countless other matters.

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and the author of “Clinton Cash,” explained on Fox News Tuesday how a Russia connection to the Clinton campaign and Obama presidency is much bigger and more troubling than anything Democrats have accused Team Trump of.

During his appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Schweizer alleged that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta probably violated federal law when he failed to disclose his stock holdings in a Kremlin-funded company.

“In 2011, John Podesta joins the board of this very small energy company called Joule Energy based out of Massachusetts,” Schweizer said. “About two months after he joins the board, a Russian entity called Rusnano puts a billion rubles — which is about 35 million dollars — into John Podesta’s company. Now, what is Rusnano? Rusnano is not a private company, Steve. It is a fund directly funded by the Kremlin. In fact, the Russian science minister called Rusnano Putin’s child. So you have the Russian government investing in one of John Podesta’s businesses in 2011, while he is an advisor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department.”

“Does anyone in Trump’s circle rise to the level where there’s this kind of money involved?” asked host Steve Doocy.

Schweizer answered that he hadn’t seen anything like that yet. “Nobody that has an advisory role in the White House has had this money exchange. And certainly the money hasn’t exchanged as far as we know while they have been advising the president,” he said, pointing out that while he was an advisor in the Obama White House, Podesta owned stock shares with “Putin’s Child” and failed to disclose it.

“So then in 2013, he goes to the White House, to be a special counselor to Barack Obama, and that requires that you, you know, have financial disclosures every year,” he explained. “In his financial disclosure form in 2013, he not only fails to disclose these 75,000 shares of stock that he has in Joule Energy, which is funded in part by the Russian government. He also fails to disclose that he is on one of the three corporate boards that this entity has. It’s got this very complex ownership structure. He discloses he is on the company in Massachusetts, that is he on the board of a company in the Netherlands, but he fails to disclose that he is also on the executive board of the holding company. That’s a clear violation of the disclosure rules that I think needs to be looked at.”

He added, “What makes the Podesta case clear is there was a transfer of money and there was a transfer of a lot of money that stood to make John Podesta a lot of money. That is unique and that’s extremely troubling because at the time that transfer is taking place he is advising Hillary Clinton at the State Department. We know that from the Podesta emails that he is helping her make personnel decisions, speech decisions, policy decisions. He is meeting with her monthly. It’s a transfer of money from a foreign government, at the time that he is advising America’s chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton.”

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) allegedly “caused a scene” at an Upper East Side Manhattan restaurant Sunday night when he bawled out a well-known and well-connected woman because she voted for President Trump. “She voted for Trump!” he reportedly bellowed.

According to witnesses, Schumer continued the harassment after the woman and her husband left the restaurant, following them outside and yelling more insults.

The senator was dining with friends at Sette Mezzo when he confronted Joseph A. Califano Jr. — the former U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare under President Jimmy Carter — and his wife, Hilary, who were trying to enjoy a quiet dinner.

Onlookers said Schumer was incensed that Hilary — the daughter of William S. Paley, the founder and chairman of CBS — had voted for Trump, even though her husband, Joseph, is a well-known Democrat.

One witness said of the restaurant rant, “They are a highly respected couple, and Schumer made a scene, yelling, ‘She voted for Trump!’ The Califanos left the restaurant, but Schumer followed them outside.” On the sidewalk, Schumer carried on with his fantastical filibuster: “ ‘How could you vote for Trump? He’s a liar!’ He kept repeating, ‘He’s a liar!’ ”

Hilary confirmed the confrontation, telling Page Six, “Sen. Schumer was really rude . . . He’s our senator, and I don’t really like him. Yes, I voted for Trump. Schumer joined us outside and he told me Trump was a liar. I should have told him that Hillary Clinton was a liar, but I was so surprised I didn’t say anything.”

This isn’t the first time Senator Schumer has gotten emotional about President Trump. After Trump announced his immigration order back in January, Schumer held a press conference at which he called the order “mean spirited” and shed copious tears.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lack-of-house-intelligence-1490742032

Devin Nunes is refusing Democratic calls to resign as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and rightly so. If Mr. Nunes is going to step down for speaking out of school to the White House about his probe, then ranking Democrat Adam Schiff should also resign for spreading innuendo without evidence across the airwaves.

Mr. Nunes blundered when he informed the White House about some information he received without first telling committee Democrats. The intelligence panel is one of the least partisan on Capitol Hill, and Mr. Nunes handed Democrats an opening to cast doubt on his fairness. He should protect his own credibility more than he protects the White House, which has nothing to worry about if President Trump’s claims about his lack of Russian ties are true.

But the main reason Democrats are mad at Mr. Nunes is because he’s raising an issue they’d rather avoid—to wit, that he’s seen documents showing that U.S. intelligence agencies may have “incidentally” collected information about people connected to Mr. Trump.

We know from leaks to the media that one of those people was former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who lost his job over the news. These columns have been asking since the Flynn news broke whether there was a proper FISA court order for this eavesdropping, or why if it was incidental was it spread widely enough to leak? Such information is supposed to be “minimized” and not widely shared so innocent Americans are protected if they happen to speak to a foreigner who is surveilled.

Mr. Trump was wrong to claim that Mr. Nunes has vindicated his famous tweet of three weeks ago that President Obama had wiretapped him in Trump Tower. Mr. Nunes has said he’s seen no evidence of that. But the issue of whether and why the Obama Administration was listening to Trump officials is important for the public to know. The U.S. government must have a very good reason for eavesdropping on political opponents, and civil libertarians would be shouting if Mr. Flynn were a Democrat.

Which brings us to Mr. Schiff, who while posing as a truth-teller is becoming more partisan by the hour. The California Democrat started out telling everyone that there is “circumstantial evidence of collusion” between Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. He later escalated to claiming “there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” without providing any such evidence. If Mr. Schiff is so confident of the Russia-Trump connection, why not wait for the evidence to come out?

Meanwhile, Mr. Schiff evinces no interest in discussing, or even investigating, what happened to Mr. Flynn and why. Maybe he’s shouting so much about Mr. Nunes because he doesn’t want to know the answers to the questions the Republican is asking.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266261/democrat-filibuster-judge-gorsuch-matthew-vadum

Desperate to placate their increasingly rabid far left-wing base, ethically-flexible Senate Democrats are planning to launch a filibuster against a Supreme Court nominee for the first time in a half-century and only the second time in American history.

Their insistence on this course of action could very well lead to the abolition of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) said a few days ago that his Senate colleagues will not allow President Trump’s nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia to be voted on because he’s not a left-winger who views the Constitution as an endlessly malleable social-justice plaything.

“After careful deliberation I have concluded that I cannot support Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court,” Schumer said on the Senate floor after Gorsuch’s marathon confirmation hearing wrapped up.

“Judge Gorsuch was unable to sufficiently convince me that he’d be an independent check on a president who has shown almost no restraint from executive overreach,” Schumer said with a straight face after compiling a near-perfect record of supporting President Obama’s overreaches over the last eight years.

“Second, he was unable to convince me that he would be a mainstream justice who could rule free from the biases of politics and ideology,” added the senior senator from New York.

It was just four years ago that Schumer voted to exercise the so-called nuclear option by changing the rules of the Senate by a simple majority vote instead of the usual supermajority. The rule approved at that time banned the use of the filibuster against all judicial nominees below the Supreme Court.

But that was then and this is now. Schumer is now opposed to changing the rules by a simple majority vote.

“The answer isn’t to change the rules, it’s to change the nominee,” he said last week.

As part of their strategy, Democrats are now trying to convince Americans that Gorsuch cannot be confirmed unless he garners 60 votes in the Senate, as opposed to a simple majority.

Gorsuch “should have a hearing and he should meet the voting standard that Supreme Court nominees are held to of 60 votes, a standard that was met by Elena Kagan as well as Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s choices,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said last month.

This idea that a Supreme Court nominee must receive 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster is both passé and pure fantasy.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446210/devin-nunes-investigation-chairman-house-intel-committee-michael-flynn

Let us stipulate that it would be difficult for House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) and the Trump White House to have handled a critical intelligence matter any worse.

Still, the questions Nunes has raised are more important than the fact that he shot himself in the foot while pursuing the answers.

The chairman says he was invited by an unidentified intelligence official to review classified documents on the White House grounds — at the Old Executive Office Building, it appears, where the National Security Council has secure facilities for that purpose. These documents purportedly show that communications from Trump transition officials, and perhaps Trump himself, were intercepted during intelligence-agency monitoring of foreign powers; and Nunes says the monitoring in question appears unrelated to Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election.

Nunes reports that the documents he was shown suggest that the Obama administration may have been using its foreign-intelligence powers to shadow the incoming Trump team. Though the communications in question were lawfully intercepted, Nunes suggests that the identities of Trump officials should have been “masked” (i.e., concealed) under standard minimization rules that guide the dissemination of classified foreign intelligence throughout the “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies. Instead, the identities of the Trump officials were revealed and widely transmitted to people with no apparent need to know about the officials’ communications — some of which, in Nunes’s description, had “little or no apparent foreign-intelligence value.”

Nunes’s account cannot be verified because the documents he reviewed have not been disclosed, nor reviewed by anyone else who is talking. Meanwhile, rather than first sharing what he learned with members of the important committee he chairs, Nunes went to the White House to brief President Trump.

This is bizarre for two reasons. First, the classified information Nunes reviewed belongs to the executive branch, which the president leads. Trump does not need to be briefed by a member of Congress; he can direct the appropriate intelligence officials to brief him — and could then declassify and publicize any information he believes the public should have (redacting any information that could compromise critical intelligence secrets, methods and sources). Second, Nunes, who served on the Trump transition team, leads a committee responsible for getting to the bottom of both alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and the executive branch’s potential abuse of its foreign-intelligence collection power. By opening himself up to the charge that his first loyalty is to the White House rather than to his committee’s investigation, Nunes damages both his own credibility and the perception that his committee can conduct a reliable investigation.

In an anti-climactic finish to a legal saga that has dragged on far too long, the case of the United States versus Rasmea Odeh has finally come to an end. Under the terms of a plea agreement worked out between justice department officials and Odeh, the terrorist fraudster who lied when filling out her naturalization papers will be required to plead guilty to violating 18 U.S.C §1425(a) which criminalizes knowingly procuring naturalization contrary to law. She will also be stripped of her U.S. citizenship and deported but will not have to serve jail time.

In 1969, Odeh was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a foreign terrorist organization designated as such by the U.S. State Department. In February of that year, Odeh, acting in concert with additional members of the terrorist PFLP gang, planted two bombs in a Jerusalem supermarket and additional explosive devices at the nearby British consulate office.

The bombs at the consulate office caused only minor property damage but one of the bombs at the supermarket claimed the lives of two Israeli university students – Leon Kaner, 21, and Edward Jaffe, 22 and injured nine others. The second explosive, insidiously timed to go off upon arrival of first responders, was miraculously detected and diffused by security personnel.

On March 1, 1969 Odeh and the other members of the terror cell were apprehended. She confessed to her role almost immediately. There was also an abundance of physical evidence linking her to the crime. Odeh received a life sentence but was released in a prisoner swap after serving just 10 years – five years for each life she took.

After living in Lebanon and then Jordan, she made her way to the United States, joining her father who was already in the country. In 1995, Odeh filled out an application for an immigrant visa and alien registration and falsely checked off “no” when asked if she was ever convicted of a crime.

In 2004, she applied for U.S. citizenship and fraudulently filled out naturalization papers in connection with her application, lying about her membership in the PFLP and her past arrest record and incarceration. She orally repeated the lies to a Department of Homeland Security officer.