RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON – Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) thanked the media for advancing the investigation of connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, arguing that Congress has not done its job.

“If it was not for the media, we wouldn’t be as far as we are now in understanding what has been going on. The Congress of the United States has not done their job. We have not been the balance, the check and the balance on the executive,” Waters said during the Center for American Progress Idea Summit on Tuesday. “Media, thank you. Dig in there, keep doing what you are doing. Keep unfolding and making it very apparent to all of the American citizens that something is tragically wrong with the president of the United States of America and his allies.”

Waters said she believes there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

“Just to think about the way that he gave up this classified information and the way that he has tried to obstruct the investigations by firing folks. You can’t find any better person than Sally Yates. Give her a big round of applause. And, of course, while I thought that [former FBI Director James] Comey should have been fired when he first got in, if he was really concerned about him – he wasn’t concerned about him. As a matter of fact he praised him all over the country. It was only when he asked for additional resources to be able to do a credible investigation that he got fired,” Waters said.

“So here you have the president of the United States, ladies and gentlemen, this is not normal. It’s something very wrong with this picture, and I don’t know when Americans are going to get so outraged that they will say to all of the elected officials, Republicans and Democrats and everybody, you have to do what you know you should be doing. You have to identify and lay out for the American public everything that he has done, these firings, these obstruction of justice, etc., and then the final analysis, Maxine Waters was right, you have to impeach him,” she added.

Waters said Congress should not wait until the 2018 midterm elections to seek impeachment.

“I know that there are those who are talking about we are going to get ready for the next election. No, we can’t wait that long. We don’t need to wait that long. He will have destroyed this country by then. We cannot wake up every morning to another crisis, to another scandal,” she said.

“We don’t have to be afraid to use the word impeachment. We don’t have to think that impeachment is out of our reach. All we have to do is make sure that we are talking to the American public and that we are keeping them involved and that we are resisting every day and challenging every day, and we are calling this president to account for what he is doing and what he is saying. I believe in this very strongly,” she added.

Waters argued that following the “money” and the “oil” would lead to connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. However, last month, Trump’s Treasury Department declined to issue Exxon, where Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was CEO, a waiver to drill in Russia.

UPDATED:http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3559/A-Seth-Rich-Chronology-Part-1.aspx

June 14, 2016: The Washington Post reports “Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee.” On what did the paper base this claim? The Post cites “committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.”

These “security experts” are with CrowdStrike, a private cyber security firm hired and paid by the DNC.

While reading the following chronology, it is important to bear in mind that the FBI has never examined the DNC computer network because the DNC prohibited the FBI from doing so. Also, that the FBI, under former Director Comey, not to mention President Obama and the “Intelligence Community,” thought this was perfectly ok.

In the June 14, 2016 story, DNC chief executive Amy Dacey explained to the Post what happened after she received a call from “her operations chief” about “unusual network activity” noticed by the IT team in “late April.”

That evening, she spoke with Michael Sussman, a DNC lawyer who is a partner with Perkins Coie in Washington. Soon after, Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who handled computer crime cases, called [CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry], whom he has known for many years.

I highlight “that evening” “DNC lawyer” “Perkins Coie” “Crowdstrike” and “many years” to highlight the political nature of this chain of damage control. Dacey spoke with Sussman, the DNC lawyer, that evening — instead of say, the FBI cyber crime unit that day. As a Perkins Coie partner, Sussmann is with the leading Democrat law firm: Perkins Coie has produced an Obama White House Counsel; a lawyer to ferry that copy of Obama’s “birth certificate” from Hawaii to the White House; and it has represented the DNC, Democrats in Congress, Obama’s presidential campaign, and, at that moment in June 2016, the Clinton presidential campaign.

With all of those Democrat interests in mind, the DNC and Perkins Coie choose to turn to CrowdStrike. Who, what is Crowdstrike? Here is one hair-raising theory. It is a fact that CrowdStrike’s Moscow-born co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council, a globalist, interventionist and swampist think tank, which gave Hillary Clinton its Distinguished International Leadership Award in 2013.

The political nature of the DNC’s choice of a politically connected cyber-security firm itself is not too surprising; what is five-alarm-shocking, though, is that the FBI has never verified the firm’s “Russian hacking” findings.

July 10, 2016: DNC staffer Seth Rich, whose title is reported as “voter expansion data director,” is murdered in the street near his home in Washington, DC. The police will attribute his murder to robbery, although nothing was stolen from Rich. His murder remains unsolved.

July 12, 2016: Bernie Sanders endorses Hillary Clinton

July 22, 2016: It is three days before the start of DNC convention, and Wikileaks starts releasing 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments from the Democratic National Committee. The emails document the DNC’s efforts to sink Bernie Sanders’ primary run against Hillary Clinton. DNC chairman Wasserman Schultz will resign over the election-meddling scandal within the week.

July 23, 2016: A spate of Trump-Putin stories begins to appear about now, including FP’s Julia Ioffe’s piece titled, “Is Trump a Russian Stooge?” A deflection to “Russian hacking” from DNC primary-rigging is immediately apparent, at least on the Left: “So what was once dismissed out of hand — that the DNC was actively working against the Sanders campaign — is now obviously true, but not a big deal.”

July 25, 2016: Sanders supporters boo DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz off the stage at national convention event over Wikileaks revelations of DNC collusion in Hillary Clinton’s favor. W-S resigns from the DNC on July 28, 2016.

August 1, 2016: Peter Schweizer publishes “From Russia with Money,” a stunning report on Clinton cronyism and corruption detailing multiple and profitable connections between Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, John Podesta, and Russia. (More info on Podesta and his Russian business dealings will follow from Wikileaks.) Hillary-tanked MSM ignore evidence of “Russian influence” on Clinton and Podesta both.

On or about August 9, 2016: During an interview (video above), Julian Assange brings up the recent murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich while discussing the great risks Wikileaks sources take. Wikileaks will contribute $20,000 to what grows to more $125,000 in reward money for information leading to arrest of the murderer(s) of Seth Rich. According to private investigator Rod Wheeler, no one has come forward to try to claim the money.

September 5, 2016: Washington Post reports DNI James Clapper is leading an investigation into Russian efforts to “sow distrust” in the presidential election and U.S. institutions.

The Kremlin’s intent may not be to sway the election in one direction or another, officials said, but to cause chaos and provide propaganda fodder to attack U.S. democracy-building policies around the world, particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

U.S. intelligence officials described the covert influence campaign here as “ambitious” and said it is also designed to counter U.S. leadership and influence in international affairs.

October 7, 2016: Washington Post: “US government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections.” The story reports on a joint statement released by the DNI and DHS. The paper only quotes this much:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” said a joint statement from the two agencies. “. . . These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

Also of October 7, 2016: The Washington Post releases Access Hollywood/Trump tape, although the published story is dated October 8, 2016.

Also on October 7, 2016: Wikileaks releases the first cache of Podesta emails.

October 17, 2016: Julian Assange accused a “state party” of severing his internet connection.

October 19, 2016: Hillary Clinton turns the DHS-DNI statement into “17 intelligence agencies” during a debate with Donald Trump:

CLINTON: We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election.

I find that deeply disturbing. And I think it is time —

TRUMP: She has no idea whether it is Russia, China or anybody else.

CLINTON: I am not quoting myself. I am quoting 17, 17 — do you doubt?

TRUMP: Our country has no idea.

A former news anchor, who was a cub reporter for the AP back the early 1960s, tells a story: One night, he was assigned to wait at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, where President John F. Kennedy was staying, and report back to his desk when the president returned for the night. This was done with a dime in a phone booth.

While waiting, the cub joined the other reporters and some off-duty secret service agents for a drink at the bar. Everyone was laughing about the code names the agents used for Kennedy’s different girlfriends. He says it is inconceivable that reporters and agents could have that conversation today, and even if he wanted to write about it back then, which he didn’t, his editor never would have allowed it.

What different times.

It’s not just this story that makes Kennedy, who would have been 100 years old next week, distinctly part of a by-gone era. His images on YouTube are mostly grainy black-and-whites. The majority of Americans today were not even born until well after his administration ended abruptly in November, 1963. Washington, the Executive Branch, the press and technology have changed so much, it’s hard to even remember.

Kennedy has been labeled the first “television president.” He was not. That was Truman, while Eisenhower presided over television’s exponential growth in the 1950s. The Kennedy reference refers to the fact that he was simply younger and more photogenic than his two grandfatherly predecessors.

Compared to today, Kennedy actually wasn’t even on television all that much — there weren’t many opportunities. All-news, 24-hour cable channels didn’t arrive until 1980. With no cable and antiquated technology, there were only three networks back then. Their major evening news shows ran just 15 minutes, five nights a week (as if there were no news over the weekend).

The Columbia Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting Company expanded to the present half-hour format just two months before Kennedy’s death. In Donald Trump’s first four months in office, he has probably surpassed all the television time of Kennedy during his entire presidency.

“Sir,” was the most common honorific used by reporters when addressing the president. There was greater respect for the office. Knowing certain secrets were kept, it was easier for Kennedy to be more forthright, as well.

In an interview with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley of NBC News in September 1963, Kennedy was caught off guard when Brinkley informed him that Harry Truman had criticized his proposed tax cuts that morning. “What did he say?” Kennedy asked Brinkley, genuinely surprised.

Instead of sounding defensive or upset that his staff hadn’t warned him, Kennedy laughed. “They catch him on those morning walks …” and Kennedy just shakes his head, smiling, as if to continue “the old man will say damn near anything,” showing a sense of humor and self-confidence at the same time.

In 1960, Kennedy was asked by Time magazine correspondent, Hugh Sidey, if he really understood how average Americans suffered in the 1930s. Kennedy admitted, “[I] really did not learn about the Depression until I read about it at Harvard. We had bigger houses, more servants and traveled more,” with no shame in his lack of awareness or his privilege.

This is basically a note to a Facebook acquaintance who specializes in advancing the “progressive-left” Wall of Hatred.

Part of what bothers me about the current conversation around Trump and Jews and Israel is the never-ending blatant hypocrisy.

In fact, what pisses me off about the nature of the conversation now is the very same thing that pissed me off about the nature of the conversation when Obama was in office.

That is, while Obama was running “the show” in the United States most Jews didn’t really care that he supported the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the fact that the Brotherhood called for the conquest of Jerusalem which is nothing less than calling for an Arab genocide of the Jews of the Middle East.

Per my ongoing conversation with Jonathan Eron I want to say loud and clear that, yes, Barack Obama did, in fact, support the Muslim Brotherhood. Eron, and not for the first time, has called me a liar for saying so, but the historical record on this matter is clear.

Barack Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood.

Here is a quote from The Atlantic in a June 3, 2009, article written by Marc Ambinder entitled,”‘Brotherhood’ Invited To Obama Speech By U.S.”

Ambinder writes:

“A sign that the Obama administration is willing to publicly challenge Egypt’s commitment to parliamentary democracy: various Middle Eastern news sources report that the administration insisted that at least 10 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s chief opposition party, be allowed to attend his speech in Cairo on Thursday.”

This, of course, represents just one small way in which the Obama administration supported an organization that, itself, supported the Nazis.

So, for those of you who despise Trump but enjoyed getting violated by Barack Obama, here is a clue:

The more that people like you shit all over Donald Trump the more I like the guy.

There are a few reasons for this. One is the obvious hypocrisy of your position. You honestly do not care that Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood despite the fact that the Brotherhood has been screaming for the genocide of the Jews since the time of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb who wrote “Our Struggle Against the Jews.”

Anyway, let’s start a list and we can add to it each time that you spread around your toxic hatred.

1) Obama supported the Brotherhood.

2) Obama lobbied for UN 2334 which robs the Jewish people of our patrimony on the land of our ancestors.

And, for the moment, let’s add:

3) Obama supported the empowerment of Iran and normalized their gaining of nuclear weaponry within the coming few years.

But the thing of it is since I know that Eron and the Haters are doing everything they possibly can to derail this presidency no matter what he does, it creates considerable sympathy in my heart for the guy.

So, I have to say, you’re doing a terrific job.

I did not vote for either Trump or Hillary, but now I am beginning to wish that I had voted for Trump out of sympathy for the poor bastard due to the fact that poisonous wretches puke vomit on him on a daily basis.

From where I sit, by throwing such garbage at the guy continually you have essentially immunized him from criticism.

Citing a term coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, Hoover Institution scholar Victor Davis Hanson explains that the allegations that President Trump worked with the Russians in any way are a “big lie” created by the Democrats with no evidence.

TUCKER CARLSON: Professor, you’re saying that this whole thing is basically nonsense, is that what you’re saying?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah. I think you have to go to the origins, causes, methodologies, and objectives. So, this thing started during the nomination process when a group of ‘Never Trump’ people commissioned a dossier from a retired British agent — the so-called Fusion/Christopher Steele dossier, that was pretty much ridiculous.

It was passed on, after Trump got the nomination, to the Clinton campaign.

And pretty much forgotten about. And then suddenly, when she did what no one thought she would do, and lost, Robby Mook’s analytics and data didn’t prove to be successful, and she didn’t go to the blue wall states, then all of a sudden a new narrative came. The Russians must have done it by the Wikileak trove process, and then this dossier somehow got in the hands of the FBI director, whether he paid for it of not, I think Sen. Grassley is investigazting that, and now we have this idea that Trump colluded, and this dossier was leaked to media sources, and it was pretty obscene, pretty outrageous, had things in it that could not have been true, and where are we now?

We’ve had the director of national intelligence James Clapper say it didn’t exist, Senators Dianne Feinsein and Chuck Grassley say this, FBI director Comey said there was not an ongoing investigation.

And then it was very unlikely, because Donald Trump, he didn’t dismantle Eastern European missile defense, he didn’t go to Geneva and press a plastic red button, he didn’t make fun of Romney for saying Russia was an existential enemy, he didn’t have a hot mic exchange with the Russian president saying he would be ‘more flexible’ after the election.

The entire ‘Reset’ appeasement of Russia came from the Clinton-Obama team, not Donald Trump. And now we’re here.

And it is very unlikely generally, because he actually ran as a Jacksonian, who was going to beef up U.S. defenses, and get tough with our enemies, our adversaries, our rivals abroad, so it wouldnt be necessarily logical for Putin to want him to be president, yet here we are.

And I think the real message we’re missing is, that there was evidence that some people in the Obama administration had surveilled people either Trump himself, or around Trump, and that that information had either been reverse targeted diliberately… or incidentally, it didn’t matter because the neames were unmasked and leaked to reporters.

So for the last six months, between this dossier, and this surveillance, we’ve had these illegal leaks, so if special investigator Mueller looks at the totality of this so-called “Russian collusion-surveillance” story, I think he will come to conclusions we don’t expect…

Let’s start with the obvious.

This woman was the Ambassador to the UN. Obama wanted her to be Secretary of State. She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Her family was wealthy and influential. Her father was a Federal Reserve governor and she went to a posh private school. She graduated from Stanford and Oxford. And was a Rhodes scholar.

And she’s illiterate.

“This is outrageous. The US President sitting down with a genocidaire!!! Have we totally lost our values? Crazy even by today’s standards. https://twitter.com/julianborger/status”

This is what a racial privilege affirmative action baby looks like.

Susan Rice thinks that “genocidaire” is a word. The word she’s going for is probably genocider. But that’s also grammatically incorrect. And the whole thing is laughable.

Rice got ahead on racial privilege despite coming from a wealthy and powerful family. She never had to work for anything. And this is the result. It’s a sad result too.

Back to her fake news, President Trump isn’t sitting down with Omar Al-Bashir. That’s fake news. But Rice’s Obama Regime did go easy on Sudan. And Obama made it clear he would not even intervene in the Muslim genocide there.

So yes, clearly we have no values.

Meanwhile Obama’s former UN Ambassador is focused on Mean Girls twitter trolling about the guy she was spying on.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein just did Donald Trump a favor.

It may not look like that from the perspective of the president. His Twitter feed is filled with eruptions about the fraudulence of the Russia investigation. But by appointing the former FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate the matter, Rosenstein has quieted a crisis that was consuming Trump’s presidency.

The storm has been gathering for more than a week. It started when Trump impetuously fired the FBI director, James Comey, claiming at first that he did so on the advice of Rosenstein. Then the president changed his story and told NBC News that he was going to fire Comey anyway and that part of this was because the bureau’s Russia investigation was dragging on.

The Comey camp soon struck back. First his allies leaked that Trump had asked Comey for his loyalty back in January over dinner. Then in a more damaging story, the New York Times reported on a memo Comey had written to record a conversation in which Trump asked him to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn, the national security adviser Trump fired after three weeks on the job.

To state the obvious, all of this made Trump look like he had something to hide. And it did not take long for Democrats to seize on this theme, mounting a campaign for a special counsel as a condition to approve the next FBI director.

Republicans also began to slide away from the leader of their party. Senator John McCain said the Russia scandal was beginning to resemble Watergate. Senator Bob Corker said the White House was in a downward spiral. A Republican committee chairman asked the FBI to hand over Comey’s notes of meetings with Trump. The Russia probe was consuming Trump’s presidency.

Now Rosenstein has offered the president a reset. Trump has a chance to try to focus on foreign and domestic policy. And in this respect the timing is fortunate.

Trump will travel to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy and Belgium on his first foreign trip as president, starting Friday. He plans to press Arab allies to form a new alliance against Iran. He hopes to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He has a chance to lock down greater spending commitments from NATO allies.

On the domestic front, Trump can now focus on getting his health-care legislation and tax cuts through the Senate.

This is not to say there are not risks. A special counsel has the authority to pursue all kinds of leads, even if they are not about collusion with Russia during the election. As anyone who remembers the 1990s can attest, these investigations can begin by looking into shady land deals in Arkansas and end up documenting a president’s sexual dalliances with a White House intern.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/447780/print

This is from a #Never Trump member…..

From the last Morning Jolt of the week:

When Does All That Evidence of Collusion Arrive?

Thursday night, White House communications officials were eager to spotlight these comments from legislators, admitting or confirming, that they had, so far, seen no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Sam Stein, Huffington Post: “But just to be clear, there has been no actual evidence yet.”

REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): “No, it has not been.”

Keep in mind, this is “Mad Maxine” Waters, who begins that interview by contending, “Lock her up, lock her up, all of that, I think that was developed strategically with people from the Kremlin, with Putin.” Right, right, there’s no way the Trump campaign could have possibly thought of that rallying cry on their own. That’s gotta be the work of Russian intelligence right there – you’ve cracked the case, Congresswoman!

Then there’s a Republican senator who hasn’t been a consistent Trump ally with the same assessment.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina: “There is no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians as of this date. I do not believe the president himself is a target or subject of any criminal investigation as of right now. So that’s what I know right now, and where this goes, I don’t know. Follow the facts where they lead.”

Perhaps the most significant comes from Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California:

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: “The last time we spoke, Senator, I asked you if you had actually seen evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and you said to me — and I’m quoting you now — you said, ‘not at this time.’ Has anything changed since we spoke last?”

SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA): “Well, not– no, it hasn’t.”

…

BLITZER: “But I just want to be precise, Senator. In all of the—you’ve had access from the intelligence committee, from the Judiciary committee, all of the access you’ve had to very sensitive information, so far you’ve not seen any evidence of collusion, is that right?”

SEN. FEINSTEIN: “Well, evidence that would establish that there’s collusion. There are all kinds of rumors around. There are newspaper stories, but that’s not necessarily evidence.”

Feinstein is the most intriguing, because think about how easily she could have fudged her answer: “I’ve seen things that trouble me, Wolf” or “I’ve seen things that raise serious questions” or some other word salad that avoid the word “no.”

And then there was this Reuters article, reporting that Michael Flynn and other advisers to Donald Trump’s campaign were in contact with Russian officials and others with Kremlin ties in at least 18 calls and emails during the last seven months of the 2016 presidential race,

The people who described the contacts to Reuters said they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing or collusion between the campaign and Russia in the communications reviewed so far. But the disclosure could increase the pressure on Trump and his aides to provide the FBI and Congress with a full account of interactions with Russian officials and others with links to the Kremlin during and immediately after the 2016 election.

(The Reuters story cites “current and former U.S. officials” as sources. Every time we see the words “former U.S. officials” we should keep in mind there’s a good chance the source would be more accurately characterized as a “former Obama administration official.” This doesn’t mean that former official is automatically lying, just that they have a particular agenda for leaking this information, and one that is being effectively withheld from readers.)

Democrats are increasingly convinced that the seemingly endless storm of allegations around Trump will inevitably lead to his impeachment, and an impeachment that will come soon, not late in Trump’s first term. They’re convinced that evidence of Trump violating the law exists, and they’re convinced that the FBI or the investigating committees in Congress will find it.

Are any Democratic lawmakers starting to fear that they’re not going to find that evidence? The intelligence community is presumably always watching the Russian government as closely as they can. The FBI counterintelligence guys presumably track Russian agents on our soil as much as possible. You figure the NSA can track just about any electronic communication between Russians and figures in the Trump campaign.

If there was something sinister and illegal going on between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, the U.S. government as a whole had every incentive in the world to expose that as quickly as possible. They didn’t expose it before Election Day, they didn’t expose it before the Electoral College voted, they didn’t expose it before Inauguration Day… How many months have the best investigators in the United States been digging into this?

In February, California senator Janet Nguyen (R-Santa Ana), the country’s first Vietnamese-American state legislator, whose district includes more than 100,000 people of Vietnamese descent, was removed from the Senate chamber after objecting to the lionization of deceased former state assemblyman and senator Tom Hayden, a communist collaborator during the Vietnam War. Nguyen was born in Saigon a year before the city fell to the North Vietnamese forces in 1975 and legally immigrated to the United States with her family four years later, settling in southern California.

When the posthumous lionization began of Hayden’s service of almost two decades in California state government, Nguyen was distressed. She knew Hayden as someone who had aided and given comfort to the communist enemy in her country of origin. She felt compelled to express the sentiments of her heavily refugee-populated district, whose families had suffered greatly because of North Vietnamese brutality. The community blames the U.S. anti-war movement for undermining the war effort and contributing to the eventual victory of the North Vietnamese communists.

During the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Hayden, a prominent and vocal voice for the North Vietnamese communists, had organized a campaign with Jane Fonda, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy to cut off American aid to the existing government of South Vietnam and cooperate with the Vietcong and Khmer Rouge. Hayden traveled to southeast Asia numerous times during the conflict to strategize with the enemy on defeating America’s anti-communist plan. When reports came to light that American soldiers were being tortured in communist captivity, he proclaimed the reports to be “propaganda.” Hayden and Fonda notoriously weakened the morale of American POWs by participating in broadcasts for the North Vietnamese in which they accused American troops of war crimes.

After Hayden’s passing October 23, 2016, the California Senate held a ceremony five months later on February 20, 2017, honoring his service to the state legislature. California Democratic Party chairman John Burton praised the former senator as “one of the great visionaries” and as “a guy with a lot of courage.” President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) crowed, “He dedicated his life to the betterment of our state and our great country through the pursuit of peace, justice and equity.” Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) applauded Hayden for his street activism against the Vietnamese war.

Bernie Sanders, among others, has lived long enough to become a genuine McCarthyite.

Twenty-nine years ago, Bernie Sanders spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. Now he sounds like a Martin Dies Democrat.

“President Trump, in a reckless and dangerous manner, has revealed highly classified information to the Russians at a meeting in the Oval Office,” Vermont’s junior senator declared this week, “information that could expose extremely important sources and methods of intelligence gathering in the fight against ISIS.”

If only the Russians still engaged in a cold war against the United States instead of a hot war against ISIS, the Kremlin’s meddling might receive a pass. It certainly did for many decades.

“Who is to say that [Ted] Hall’s decision and those of [Klaus] Fuchs, Morris Cohen, [Julius] Rosenberg, and others who gave atomic secrets to the Soviets did not contribute significantly to what John Lewis Gaddis has called ‘the long peace’ that followed World War II?” wondered UC-San Diego Professor Michael E. Parrish. Many Are the Crimes author Ellen Schrecker infamously rejected the tag of traitor for Americans aiding the Russians; she insisted they merely “did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism.”

To quote a thinker more revered in those circles than Trump, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Schrecker recently took to the pages of the Nation to discuss the possibility of a sequel of sorts to the McCarthy era during the Trump Administration. She appears wrong even when right. A witch hunt has indeed arrived. Donald Trump recognized as much in tweeting, “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.” It just didn’t come the way the I-was-for-the-Russians-before-I-was-against-them wing of the Democratic Party imagined it would.

Trump did not provide nuclear secrets to the Russians, as Julius Rosenberg did. He did not give the Russians the formula for printing American greenbacks that allowed them to counterfeit our currency, as Harry Dexter White did. He did not intentionally shape international agreements, as Alger Hiss did at Yalta and in San Francisco at the founding of the United Nations, to benefit the Russians. Trump allegedly discussed the plans of a common enemy. Surely if Franklin Roosevelt could share information about a common enemy with Joseph Stalin, then Donald Trump doing so with Vladimir Putin’s emissary does not violate any norms.

Trump, not the 535 members of Congress or the nine Supreme Court Justices or the 16 members of the New York Times editorial board, serves as commander in chief. One can argue that the president should not share certain pieces of information with certain countries. But questioning the wisdom of an act differs from questioning its legality. Beyond the classification system’s genesis stemming from an executive order, Article II of the Constitution vests the power to conduct foreign policy with the president. In combatting the terrorists’ war on the West, reasons abound for allies, even ones made so by a common enemy, to share information — not the least of which involves an expectation that the foreign government reciprocates.

To call the creation of a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration’s Russian ties “quite a coup” reveals a literal truth beneath the metaphor. The opposition party can perform the heavy lifting of winning back Congress, or, alternatively, it can bring the administration’s agenda to a sclerotic halt by pressuring for the creation of a special prosecutor.

Clausewitz called war “politics by other means.” In our passive-aggressive society, a special prosecutor is politics by other means.