RUTHFULLY YOURS

President-elect Donald Trump and his attorney-general designate Jeff Sessions come to office seeking to restore public confidence in the fairness and impartiality of federal law enforcement. After eight years of Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, Americans have lost confidence in the Department of Justice. Recognizing this, Trump declared on November 21 that he had ordered his transition team to prepare executive orders to sign “on Day One to restore our laws and bring back our jobs.”

The most urgent matter that Attorney General Sessions will face is that of deciding the fate of FBI director James Comey. Comey was appointed in 2013 for a statutory term of ten years. In principle, however, he can be removed by the president at any time. President Bill Clinton removed FBI director William Sessions about halfway through his term on charges that Sessions had misused official resources. Although President Clinton discharged Sessions for cause, the statute creating the FBI director does not limit the grounds for termination, and we believe that the president’s constitutional authority of removal would allow him to fire Comey for any reason. Rather than firing the FBI director, however, it is more likely that the president would first request his resignation. We think that Director Comey should leave office for the good of the FBI and the nation.

Last July, on the basis of the information available at the time, we defended Comey’s decision to suspend the investigation of Hillary Clinton. Contrary to his apparent judgment that there was no probable case that crimes were committed, we argued that the country would be better served if the voters, rather than the criminal process, determined Clinton’s fitness to be president. But after Comey’s announcement, disturbing facts emerged that raised doubts about the integrity of his investigation into Clinton. Thereafter came Comey’s sudden changes of heart shortly before the election, first in re-opening, and then in closing, that investigation. Since the election, Clinton has squarely blamed Comey for her defeat.

In these circumstances, we think that Comey is too compromised to remain as FBI director. He may well have acted honestly, impartially, and conscientiously at every phase of the investigation. We do not question his integrity; his true motivations, whatever they may have been, will undoubtedly come to light in time. And he may have found himself in the position of chief prosecutor rather than chief investigator through no fault of his own, but because Bill Clinton’s meeting on the tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch meant that she had to be disqualified from making the final judgment on whetheror not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

Nonetheless, Comey’s three interventions in the election were, perhaps, key factors in the outcome. His initial choice to prematurely close the investigation — as well as reports that his aides have attempted to shut down inquiries into the Clinton Foundation — squarely thrust the FBI into partisan politics. His decisions have cost him the confidence of the half of the voters who supported Clinton. Many Trump voters have also come to mistrust him.

Remember when Democrats and the left scored Donald Trump for worrying that the election might be “rigged”? Well, now that he’s won, the same crowd is demanding recounts in three battleground states on grounds that the Russians rigged the results.

On Saturday what’s left of the Clinton campaign said it will join the recount effort demanded by Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The conspiracy theory for which they have no evidence is that Russian hackers rigged voting machines to manipulate the results. The Obama Administration has said it detected no such hacking and that the elections were “free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”

But reality doesn’t matter in the fake-news world of the far left any more than it does on the far right. The recount may be a progressive gambit to raise money from the gullible, or perhaps to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. The ultimate Hail Mary would be to raise enough smoke about irregularities that individual electors would deny Mr. Trump the 270 votes he needs in the Electoral College.

Mr. Trump leads in 30 states with 306 electoral votes, and he would have to lose all three contested states to lose the election. He leads by some 71,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a little more than 20,000 in Wisconsin, and by nearly 11,000 in Michigan. If you think U.S. politics is polarized now, try handing the White House to Hillary Clinton now.

The silver lining may be to teach a lesson in electoral federalism. It’s all but impossible for hackers to rig U.S. elections because they are run locally and voting machines aren’t connected to a national internet network, as Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund explained on these pages in September. Progressives, not conservatives, want to nationalize election laws. So go ahead and do the recounts and then accept that Mr. Trump won fair and square.

It is interesting that a number of signatories of the Declaration of Independence later in their careers took actions that jeopardized the foundations of liberty, and specifically of freedom of speech, or the First Amendment of the Constitution.

The greatest enemy of liberty is fear. When people feel comfortable and well protected, they are naturally expansive and tolerant of one another’s opinions and rights. When they feel threatened, their tolerance shrinks. By 1798, the euphoria surrounding the American Revolution, the sense of common purpose and a common enemy, was gone. Everyone agreed that the new nation, founded amid high hopes and noble ideas was in danger of collapse. The one thing they could not agree on was who to blame. (p. 1)

What went on in the mid- to late-1790s has reverse parallels today. Where the Mainstream Media (MSM) today, by its own admission, intervened to slander, libel, and smear presidential candidate Donald Trump (now the President-Elect), to aid in and guarantee the election of a criminally irresponsible, scandal-rich, unstable Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, the writers and newspapers of the 18th century came under vicious attack from the government and the Federalists, the party of John Adams, who as President signed the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Congress. The MSM failed ingloriously in its efforts. But Adams, who was the main target of criticism by “Republican” (the name of the early Democratic Party) writers and newspapers, unleashed the dogs of censorship on them when he signed the Alien and Sedition Acts on June 18th, 1798.

The Sedition Act outlawed what one could call the 18th century equivalent of “hate speech.” It was impermissible and punishable now to hate President John Adams (the second President after George Washington) and the Federalists and their national and foreign policies, and to voice one’s anathema for them in print or vocally. Those who did so and drew the attention of large numbers of people were arrested and jailed. Adams and the Federalists would not otherwise have heard or read the dissatisfaction but for informers who reported the transgressions to Adams and his political allies.

A history of that time, Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech, by Charles Slack, came my way and further educated me on the pernicious consequences of the Sedition Act of 1798 and the scope of the evil. The consequences and injustices were wider than I had previously imagined. As Slack points out, one need not have been a conspicuous, widely known opponent of Adams, the Federalists, and the Sedition Act to attract the attentions of the 18th century speech “police.” An idle, disparaging remark overheard and reported by a neighbor could land the speaker in jail and earn an enormous fine, as well.

Here is the key section of the Sedition Act under which several men were prosecuted and jailed for “blaspheming” the government, President Adams, and other individuals in the government.

An Act in Addition to the Act, Entitled “An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States.”

SEC. 2. And be it farther enacted, That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years. [Italics mine}

This Thanksgiving, Americans can give thanks for the termination of one of the most pro-criminal administrations in American history, though the damage done to the criminal justice system may far outlast outgoing President Barack Obama’s tenure in office.

To date, President Obama has now freed more than a thousand prisoners as part of his crusade against a criminal justice system he considers to be racist.

With fewer than 60 days remaining in his second and final term of office, the most felon-friendly president in American history just “reduced the sentences of 79 people in prison for non-violent drug crimes,” bringing his total to 1,023 commutations of prison sentences, Quartz reports.

“Unlike pardons, commutations don’t officially constitute forgiveness of a crime. They reduce a prisoner’s sentence but don’t necessarily let them go free immediately. The details of the most recent 79 commutations weren’t immediately clear.”

The 1,023 figure does not include the 6,112 allegedly non-violent drug offenders freed a year ago under retroactively applied federal sentencing guidelines.

The president’s pardon power is unreviewable in any court in the land and cannot be modified by Congress. When it comes to federal offenses, the president is free to pardon or commute the sentence of anybody for anything anywhere in America.

To Obama the fact that African-Americans are the most incarcerated group in the U.S. is proof not that they commit a lot of crimes but that they are innocent victims of racist, systemic discrimination in a country where race relations haven’t improved much since Jim Crow.

Liberal foodies are crying in their craft beer about what’s to come under a Trump administration.

For the last eight years, the food movement — a collection of celebrity chefs, food writers, and organic-food executives — has been a star player in the Obama administration, dictating policies that range from expanding subsidized school meals to micromanaging food labels. These are the same folks who lecture us about what we should and shouldn’t eat, force-feed us the idea of local, organic, non-GMO food, and tie food production to climate change. And yes, they are mostly elites who vilify the people who make and grow our food (guess what, foodies? the farmers won).

All of that will likely end under fast-food lover President Trump. The president-elect said little about food policy on the campaign trail, but there’s plenty of reason to believe he will roll back some of the most ineffective policies and stop bad ones from advancing on his watch. The culinary elites were hoping to use food issues to promote their overall agenda of higher taxes and more regulations under a Clinton administration; that agenda is now toast.

Trump’s win curbs the political influence of top food activists, who were all-in on a Hillary Clinton victory. That includes celebrity chef Tom Colicchio (head of the liberal Food Policy Action group, which worked against Republican candidates), who stumped for Clinton in Pittsburgh the day before the election. In his rambling introduction, Colicchio slammed Ronald Reagan and said the Republican party “refuses to include everyone, that fights your right to vote, that is out there right now, making sure that people can’t vote” (if you’re a Republican, you might want to think twice about patronizing Mr. Colicchio’s pricy restaurants). His Twitter timeline is a non-stop rant against Trump and the GOP. A few days after the election, a still-stung Colicchio tweeted out, “Sure let’s rally around the racist” and compared the feeling in New York City to the days following 9/11.

Another food-movement leader, Stonyfield Farm chairman Gary Hirshberg, raised more than $600,000 for Clinton and is a close ally of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Hirshberg’s pet project is mandatory GMO (genetically modified organism) labels, and several e-mails released by WikiLeaks reveal that he lobbied hard to get Clinton to come out in favor of those labels (she did not). President Obama signed a GMO-labeling bill last summer, but the details still need to be worked out at the Department of Agriculture over the next two years, and Hirshberg was poised to get his way if Clinton won. Now there’s a chance that anti-labeling Republicans could reverse the policy altogether. And other Obama-era labeling laws pushed by food activists could be on the chopping block: The American Action Forum recommended last week that Congress repeal two costly labeling rules, including newly revised nutrition labels.

Throughout history, revolutionaries of all stripes have warped the meaning of words to subvert reality.

And now here we go again, with another effort — spearheaded by the media and universities — to use any linguistic means necessary to achieve political ends.

“Sanctuary city” is a euphemism for the local and state nullification of federal law — a subversive tactic that dates back to the nullification crises during the Andrew Jackson administration and, later, in the years leading up to the Civil War.

This makes a mockery of the simple constitutional principle that cities and states cannot subversively pick and choose which federal laws to obey.

The term “sanctuary” would never apply to conservative jurisdictions that in similar fashion sought to offer “sanctuary” to those dissidents who disobeyed federal gun registration, income tax, or environmental laws.

College administrators boast of offering counseling and therapeutic help to students and faculty members distraught over the recent election. They use terms like “divisive” and “polarizing” in describing the election, when in truth they wish to hide from their donors, alumni, and half the country their own abject and one-sided contempt for incoming president-elect Donald Trump.

Note that in the highly emotional elections of 2008 and 2012, universities did not offer commensurate counseling services — because their own preferred candidate won and was thus his victory was not “polarizing.” Once upon a time, campuses did not worry about whether independent faculty and conservative students were sullen and depressed in adolescent style over the implications of President-elect Barack Obama’s radical promises to “fundamentally change America.”

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened a response Wednesday if the U.S. extends sanctions against his country for another 10 years, just days after the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of an extension.

Mr. Khamenei, who has final say in most matters of state, didn’t say what action Iran would take if the sanctions are extended. The House voted almost unanimously last week to keep the Iran Sanctions Act in place for a decade more following its expiration at the end of this year.

Such an extension would violate the landmark nuclear deal brokered last year between Iran and six world powers including the U.S., Mr. Khamenei said in comments published to his official website, Khamenei.ir.

“If this sanction is put in place, it’s a violation of the [nuclear deal] and they should know that the Islamic Republic will certainly react against it,” he said.

Mr. Khamenei has asserted both during negotiations and after the deal was finalized that Iran would only remain committed to it as long as the U.S. and other powers honored their obligations. In June, after President-elect Donald Trump suggested reconfiguring the deal, Mr. Khamenei vowed to “light it on fire” in response.

Iran’s commitments under the deal include a reduction in the number of uranium enrichment centrifuges in operation, limits to the amount of nuclear material in its possession and international oversight of its nuclear program.

The House vote to renew the act signals wide agreement on a hard-line approach to Iran despite President Barack Obama’s nuclear diplomacy.

Mr. Trump staked out an antagonistic stance toward Iran during his presidential campaign, making criticism of the nuclear deal a familiar theme during rallies and debates. During the final presidential debate last month, he called it the “stupidest deal of all time.”