RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Judiciary Committee sent Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate Monday on an 11-9 “party-line vote,” as the press likes to say. What a shame. All nine committee Democrats lined up like the Rockettes to oppose the nominee whose qualifications and temperament are universally hailed.

At least 41 Democrats led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have also committed to filibuster Judge Gorsuch on the Senate floor, so he will need 60 votes to be confirmed. This will force Republicans to change Senate rules to break what would be the first partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee in history. Democrats and their media friends want to portray Republicans as the radicals in this case, but Democrats are the precedent-busters.

Mr. Schumer is howling that Republicans stole this Court seat because they didn’t give a vote to Merrick Garland last year. But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared before Barack Obama nominated Judge Garland that there would be no vote on any nominee in the election year. He was merely echoing the standard that Mr. Schumer had set when he declared in 2007 that Democrats would block any nominee that George W. Bush would send up in his final year as President.

Democrats have no good reason to oppose Judge Gorsuch so they are inventing bad reasons. Montana Democrat Jon Tester, who likes to portray himself as a centrist, announced that he’ll oppose the judge for what he didn’t say. “I cannot support a nominee who refuses to answer important questions,” he said, as if more than 2,000 Gorsuch opinions don’t provide enough insight into his jurisprudence. If the Judge wasn’t as gabby in the confirmation hearing as Mr. Tester would like, the reason is that Democrats would have used anything provocative he said to defeat him. But now even saying nothing offensive is disqualifying. What a crew.

Well, what do you know. On the matter of who “unmasked” the names of Trump transition officials in U.S. intelligence reports, we now have one answer: Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser.

A U.S. intelligence official confirms to us the bombshell news, first reported Monday by Bloomberg, that Ms. Rice requested the name of at least one Trump transition official listed in an intelligence report in the months between Election Day and Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Ms. Rice received summaries of U.S. eavesdropping either when foreign officials were discussing the Trump team, or when foreign officials were conversing with a Trump transition member. The surveillance was legally authorized, but the identities of U.S. citizens are typically masked so they cannot be known outside intelligence circles. Ms. Rice asked for and learned the identity of the Trump official, whose name hasn’t been publicly disclosed and our source declined to share.

Our source did confirm that Ms. Rice also examined dozens of other intelligence summaries that technically masked Trump official identities but were written in such a way as to make obvious who those officials were. This means that the masking was essentially meaningless. All this is highly unusual—and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in antiterror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.

We’re told by a source who has seen the unmasked documents that they included political information about the Trump transition team’s meetings and policy intentions. We are also told that none of these documents had anything to do with Russia or the FBI investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. While we don’t know if Ms. Rice requested these dozens of reports, we are told that they were only distributed to a select group of recipients—conveniently including Ms. Rice.

White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”

The National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.

The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.

Rice did not respond to an email seeking comment on Monday morning. Her role in requesting the identities of Trump transition officials adds an important element to the dueling investigations surrounding the Trump White House since the president’s inauguration.

Both the House and Senate intelligence committees are probing any ties between Trump associates and a Russian influence operation against Hillary Clinton during the election. The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Representative Devin Nunes, is also investigating how the Obama White House kept tabs on the Trump transition after the election through unmasking the names of Trump associates incidentally collected in government eavesdropping of foreign officials.

On this new special edition of Anni Cyrus’s “Top 10”, Anni discussesObama’s Top 10 Betrayals of the American People, unveiling the treacherous record of a Radical-in-Chief.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2017/04/04/obamas-top-10-betrayals-of-the-american-people/

As Democrats and the scientific establishment howl over President Trump’s proposed budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Congress is investigating whether that agency misspent U.S. tax dollars to fund two European cancer institutions now under scrutiny for conflicts of interest and dubious science. Key lawmakers are also trying to understand the nature of the cozy relationship between federal bureaucrats with budgets and foreign researchers who are eager to accept grants to promote a political agenda at taxpayers’ expense.

On March 24, House Science, Space, and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price (who oversees NIH) requesting information about millions of dollars paid to the Ramazzini Institute, an obscure but controversial cancer non-for-profit based in Italy. The funds were given out by NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), run by Linda Birnbaum; she is also, coincidentally, a Ramazzini fellow.

Birnbaum seems to be at the center of a tangled web of federal contracts, agenda-driven scientists and the largely unaccountable organizations that give them cover. Smith accuses Birnbaum’s office of awarding at least $92 million to Ramazzini and Ramazzini fellows since 2009: “The Committee is concerned that contracts awarded to the Ramazzini Institute and its affiliates may not meet adequate scientific integrity standards. If true, this raises serious questions about the integrity of the acquisition process at NIEHS.” Of the payments made directly to Ramazzini, several are from sole-source contracts that did not go through a bidding process. According to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, which filed suit this month seeking public documents about the payments, NIH has awarded Ramazzini fellows more than $315 million in grants since 1985; Chairman Smith says that it’s “unclear what services were rendered” under NIH contracts with Ramazzini.

According to the Ramazzini Institute’s website, it achieves “extremely important results at international level [sic] in research into carcinogenic substances present in the environment we live in and in the food that we eat.” Ramazzini claims to work with NIH to develop “experimental data from long-term cancerogenesis bioassays . . . and make available to the scientific community the data of the studies published, and therefore to allow qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the risk and other research.” Despite this claim, no scientific research or budget information is available on their website.