RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a quarter century in law enforcement, I never encountered anyone more confident, or with more reason to be confident, than Jim Comey. The former Bush Justice Department deputy attorney general turned Obama Justice Department director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has earned bipartisan plaudits for a reason: He is as able as it gets. The nation got to see that this week: first, in his tour de force press conference both damning and clearing Hillary Clinton; then, just 48 hours later, in his deft jousting with a Republican-led House committee rankled by his decision to give a pass to the Democrats’ putative presidential nominee.

So well did Director Comey perform that you barely noticed his rationale withering away.

In arguing that Mrs. Clinton should not face felony charges of grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, the director illustrated that Mrs. Clinton is overwhelmingly guilty of grossly negligent mishandling of classified information. It made me wonder how many dozens — scores? hundreds? — of defendants Comey, in his 15 stellar years as a federal prosecutor, had convicted on a bare fraction of the proof he outlined against the former secretary of state.

Comey piled fact upon fact showing intentional misconduct — the setting up of a non-government, non-secure e-mail server system for the conduct of official business, in violation of guidelines Clinton was obliged not only to follow but to enforce; the transmission of classified information (including some of the government’s most closely guarded intelligence secrets) — information Clinton had to know was classified at the time it was sent, some of which was even marked classified (notwithstanding her serial denials of that tell-tale fact); the herculean effort to destroy any trace of thousands of government files, notwithstanding over a year’s worth of vows that no government-related information had been included in the 32,000 e-mails she attempted to delete rather than surrender to the State Department.

On and on Comey went: shredding one Hillary lie after another; all but guaranteeing that her “extreme carelessness” had resulted in the penetration of her communications by foreign intelligence services; pointedly rebuking Clinton’s recklessness in discussing top-secret intelligence via a homebrew system so amateurishly unsecure she’d have been better off using your teenager’s Gmail account.

In the end, nevertheless, he let her off the hook. Bursting with pride over the bureau’s forensic prowess and investigative energy, he left the listener certain his agents had built the slam-dunk case to end all slam-dunk cases, only to conclude with a thud that the case was too weak to charge. Not only too weak but so wanting, he proclaimed, that no reasonable prosecutor could think otherwise.

Turns out there are a lot of unreasonable prosecutors. Can it be that too many of them are retired and cranky, that from up here in the peanut gallery, the job looks a lot easier than it is?

Maybe . . . but I don’t think so.

A protest was launched today by Black Lives Matter near the White House, where demonstrators said they were “fed up” with reports over the killings of blacks by police. Members of the black caucus of the House of Representatives are to meet with FBI Director James Comey to discuss the deaths of two black men — Philandro Castile and Alton Sterling — at the hands of police in Minnesota and Louisiana, respectively.

However, the deaths of whites at the hands of police receive much less attention, even in cases where the circumstances of the deaths are controversial. Examples include the death of Gilbert Collar (18), a white student at the University of South Alabama. Collar was naked and under the influence of drugs when he was shot to death by Trevis Austin, a black police officer.

Austin was cleared of the deed in 2012 by a Mobile County grand jury. Little attention was focused on the case outside of Alabama. Collar’s family filed a federal lawsuit against the police that is ongoing.

A study published last week by The Washington Post offers significant details about police shootings:

White officers shooting unarmed black men amounted to less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings.

In about 75 percent of those incidents, police were under defending themselves or civilians.

Most of those killed were wielding weapons, suicidal or mentally disturbed, or ran when ordered to stop.

Nearly a third of police shootings involved car chases that began with a minor traffic stop.

Writing in the New York Post today, Michael Walsh wrote “The Myth of the Killer Cop Epidemic,” and disputed what he called the widespread narrative of “homicidal goon” cops run amok in black neighborhoods. This narrative, Walsh wrote, “ignores the fact that black violent-crime rates are far higher than those of whites. According to the Department of Justice, blacks committed 52.5 percent of the murders in America from 1980 to 2008, when they represented 12.6 percent of the population.”

Regarding a December 2015 study by the Washington Post on police shootings, he noted that of the 965 person killed by police that year, only 90 were unarmed, and the majority of those were white. He also noted the shocking reality of murder in President Barack Obama’s hometown. Walsh wrote: “The worst neighborhoods in Chicago — say, West Garfield Park, where gangs run rampant — have a higher murder rate (116.7 per 100,000) than world murder capitals like Honduras (90.4). But no, best not to mention. That only distracts from the real problem — the cops trying to stop it.”

“Instead, what people hear most of the time from groups like Black Lives Matter or Al Sharpton is inflammatory rhetoric that distorts reality and indiscriminately demonizes the police. Showing some awareness Thursday of this lopsided public perception, Mr. Obama said it is possible to express support for the police “while also saying there are problems across our criminal justice system.” Mr. Obama’s attempt at balance might have more resonance if once he said Black Lives Matter’s view of American justice is wrong.”

It was only two years ago, in the summer of 2014, that the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York’s Staten Island made it clear that tensions were rising dangerously between the police and the urban neighborhoods they patrol. It hasn’t stopped.

That December, two policemen were assassinated on a Brooklyn street. The following April brought the Baltimore riot and the Freddie Gray case.

Now Dallas.

Mayor Mike Rawlings said a lone shooter killed five Dallas police officers and wounded seven others in an ambush attack carried out during a march, which was protesting the shootings this week of black men in Louisiana and Missouri by police offers.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown described the words of one suspect, Micah Xavier Johnson, before he was blown up by a police robot bomb: “The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter. He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
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America today has the feel of a country flirting dangerously with the 1960s. Back then, disruptions to civic and social order overwhelmed America’s political leadership, which found itself constantly behind the curve of events, on defense. We aren’t there yet, but a familiar deficit of political leadership exists today as social tensions rise.

In the 1960s and ’70s, various individuals and groups said that police brutality against black people justified a violent response. They included Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. The Black Panthers famously coined the phrase, “off the pigs.”

Violence followed. Some of it consisted of ambush attacks or shootouts between police and group members. One of the most dramatic events, in January 1972, was the late-night gunning down of two New York City cops by three assailants on Manhattan’s lower east side.

Nothing then, however, reached the scale of the sniper attack in Dallas this week. Dallas represents an historically unprecedented escalation of anti-police violence.

President Obama entered office with the belief that significant and persistent racial inequities existed in American life, a matter he has raised frequently in public appearances. He did so again Thursday while in Warsaw, after the shootings in Louisiana and Missouri.

He said the two deaths “are symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.” He then cited several statistical studies “to try to put in context why emotions are so raw around these issues.” But he added, “To be concerned about these issues is not to be against law enforcement.”

We don’t gainsay Mr. Obama’s sincerity, and racial disparities exist, but one may ask: Why on Friday, after the Dallas murders, did the city’s police chief, who is black, wonder out loud about support for people on law-enforcement’s front line? “We don’t feel much support most days,” Chief Brown said. “Let’s not make today most days.”

If Chief Brown and many like him in American law enforcement don’t think they get much support, it is because they don’t—until after the cops are dead. Then, as always, come the official condolences. CONTINUE AT SITE

The FBI and the “Liberal understanding of events ratified as a matter of morals and etiquette.”

So. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has now told the American people the following, as reported here at Fox News, bold print supplied:

Comey testifies Clinton email claims ‘not true’ at heated Hill hearing

FBI Director James Comey testified Thursday that Hillary Clinton’s claims — some made under oath — about her use of a private email server were “not true,” fueling Republican questions about whether in doing so she committed a felony.

In a wide-ranging appearance before the House oversight committee, Comey also said Clinton’s email practices put America’s secrets at risk and her actions constituted the “definition of carelessness.”

At the same time, Comey staunchly defended the bureau’s decision not to pursue charges. He also said, “We have no basis to conclude that [Clinton] lied to the FBI.”

Yet he acknowledged that lying under oath is a felony, as some Republicans point to statements she made last October before the House Benghazi committee — and plan to request an investigation. At that hearing, Clinton had claimed that nothing she sent or received was marked classified.

The always perceptive Andrew McCarthy, the Comey friend and former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the man who prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center mastermind the Blind Sheik — had this to say of Comey’s decision over at the Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM to host Stephen K. Bannon:

“I thought the case [Comey] laid out was as bulletproof as it gets. And it seemed to me when he got all the way down the field, he moved the goalposts. So he added elements that the government doesn’t have to prove under the statute as Congress has written it in order to shrink from recommending that charges be brought. To my mind, that’s difficult to square on a lot of levels.”

The racial divide in this country, as it exists today, is completely manufactured. It is manufactured by the political and activist class, and for reasons symbiotic to one another.

Politicians need to divide our nation so as to pit demographic against demographic; in order to create political party “battle lines.” This is how they create an “us against them” scenario. True Statesmen and public servants seek to better the nation in ways that are good for all of the population, not just a sympathetic demographic. That does not exist in our country today. True government of and for the people is dead.

Activists – mostly products of the victimhood and grievance class – need to divide to define special interest demographics, again to pit “us against them.” It is how they attain power and influence, as well as wealth for their “movements.” This is serious wealth. One need only look at the personal trappings of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton to understand this.

Are there bad cops? Yes. Are there good cops that make bad decisions? Yes. But these are anomalies, not the status quote as the fraudulent #BlackLiveMatter movement, race-baiters and the Obama Administration would have you believe.

As a former first-responder I can tell you that even in the most remote locations, each day a man or woman puts on a badge to go to work, they simply want to do their jobs and come home to their families and friends. There is no other agenda than that. It is a goal. And sometimes, as in Dallas, that goal goes unachieved.

The manufactured racial divide now instituted in our nation is starting to take lives; it is fomenting in acts of domestic terrorism. At this point, the militants taking the shots are Black militants. They are targeting law enforcement and the first-responder community. It is perverted.

The fear among the situationally aware is that other intellectually stunted or militantly activist people and/or organizations that are not Black will be moved to retaliate. Many who are of the mind that a “race war” was by design; conceived and facilitated by Progressives attempting to maintain power through the chaos of “national emergency” will assume vindication at this possibility.

But this fear can only become a reality if thinking Americans – which are the overwhelming majority of our people – abandon the color blind society that we created for ourselves through the pain and growth of the 1960s and 1970s. If we do not give into the divisiveness of fear, they cannot achieve their goal of dividing America for purposes of maintaining power and fundamental transformation.

In The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin elaborates on Marx’s demonic ravings about a violent revolution to create a state of “armed workers” that will itself “begin to wither away.” Madness. Beginning with the first Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union under Lenin, all such revolutions have only created monstrous dictatorships, which, far from withering away, have slaughtered millions and millions of their own and other peoples all over Planet Earth.

Did five more die in Dallas last night?

Lenin saw police as the front line of the enemy — the enemy, of course, being existing society, which had to be destroyed.

…at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism — the proletariat — and enables it to crush, smash to smithereens, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine — the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy — and to substitute for it a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of the armed masses of workers who develop into a militia in which the entire population takes part.

In “What Is To Be Done?” Lenin set forth the strategy:…the Social-Democrat’s [Communist’s] ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.

A tribune of the people who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence …. Sounds like the Black Panthers back in the 1960s, and the Communist Party USA in the Daily Worker, The People’s World, and the like. Today, it sounds like Black Lives Matter. It also sounds like President Obama, who, from the very start of his administration, has reacted and “taken advantage of every event,” as Lenin put it, to “generalize … and produce a single picture of police violence.” This has created revolutionary pressures inside Obama’s Justice Department. Last night, revolutionary violence on the streets of Dallas took the lives of five police officers.

It was clear from FBI director James Comey’s congressional testimony Thursday that he thinks Hillary Clinton lied to the American people, even if he was reluctant to say it in so many words.

But then he didn’t need to. We’ve known for over a year that Clinton has been lying about her server. She lied about the reason she set it up — she claimed she wanted the convenience of using just one device. She claimed she never sent or received any classified e-mail. She claimed she handed over all of her work-related e-mails. She claimed that her stealth system had been approved. She claimed that her lawyers read every one of her e-mails before opting to hand them over or delete them.

Except for that last lie, all of these — and there are many more — were proven to be falsehoods a long time ago.

Of course, lying to the American people is not a crime. If it were, most politicians would be waiting their turn to use the weights in the prison yard.

I do not buy Comey’s explanation for why he decided not to recommend prosecution to the Justice Department. He concedes that there is little difference between “gross negligence” — the standard in the relevant law — and extreme carelessness, his description of Clinton’s conduct. But Comey says that the DOJ does not prosecute cases of “gross negligence” unless there is criminal intent. The problem is that the whole reason there is a statute criminalizing gross negligence in mishandling classified information is to cover cases where there wasn’t criminal intent.

Comey argues that the relevant law, on the books for 99 years, is constitutionally suspect because it doesn’t require criminal intent for prosecution. It’s a strange argument given that lack of criminal intent is no defense in cases of negligent homicide and many other crimes. Also, the federal government routinely invokes “disparate impact” theory in civil-rights cases, when the whole point of disparate impact law is to punish allegedly unintended harms.

Those of us who grew up in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s were acutely sensitive to issues of policing. At that time, the city legendarily was a mess, and crime was out of control. Among the many problems in the city was that good policing was uncommon, and the police in any event were overworked and under supported. The police were known more for movies such as Fort Apache, The Bronx that did little credit to their work in keeping the city safe. These problems led to the formation of the Knapp Commission in 1970 and subsequent reforms, but real change took longer than expected.

Mayor David Dinkins, for example, had a tense relationship with the police. (“He never supports us on anything,” an officer was reported as saying by the New York Times in 1992.) It was not until Rudy Giuliani became New York’s mayor in 1994 and installed William Bratton as police chief that the crime rate started to drop, dramatically. As usual with a Heather Mac Donald analysis, in her new book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, she has the figures handy:

Crime in New York dropped 12 percent in Bratton’s first year in office and 16 percent the next year, while crime rates in the rest of the nation were virtually flat. The New York crime rout became national news, spurring other police departments to adopt similar data-intensive, proactive tactics.

New York showed that it was possible to reduce crime, and other major cities who had suffered similar spikes in crime in the 1960s through the 1980s followed suit. Partially as a result, big cities have never been safer.

For some, the lessons of these years was that good policing makes a difference to city life for all citizens, including the poorest and most vulnerable. In this new book, Mac Donald portrays the war on cops in cities across the country and among elite circles, and how it serves ideological, not policing, goals. Her book is made more relevant by controversy surrounding the “Ferguson effect,” according to which crime increased in cities after violent protests against police occurred. Mac Donald was the first to identify this effect, which she traces to anti-police rhetoric and then the resulting wariness of police to enforce the law and arrest lawbreakers. Academics who initially challenged the reasons for this wave of violence have now largely retracted that challenge. This is part of a larger movement of what she calls “the delegitimation of law and order.”

James Comey, the FBI director, said in a statement Tuesday that the FBI would not recommend Hillary Clinton for indictment for using a private e-mail address and server for work communication while secretary of state. But he also detailed the findings of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s private server — disproving eight major lies she has told multiple times since the investigation into her private server began.

Here are those eight lies, debunked.

1. Lie: She didn’t send or receive any e-mails that were classified “at the time.”

Clinton told this to reporters at a press conference March 10, 2015. She repeated it at an Iowa Democratic fundraiser July 25 and at a Democratic debate February 4, 2016.

Once the investigation into Clinton’s e-mails began, the FBI began retroactively classifying some of the work-related e-mails she had released. So Clinton probably opted to dodge the issue by qualifying her statement, saying that no e-mails she sent were classified “at the time.”

Truth: Comey said that the FBI found at least 110 e-mails that were classified at the time Clinton sent or received them — 52 e-mail chains in all, including eight Top Secret (the highest classification level) chains.

2. Lie: She didn’t send or receive any e-mails “marked classified” at the time.

Clinton made this claim most recently July 3, 2016, on Meet the Press. She first made the claim August 26, 2015, at an Iowa news conference. She repeated it at Fox News town hall March 7, 2016; at a Democratic debate March 9; at a New York news conference March 1; and on Face the Nation May 8.

Clinton again appeared to spin the facts emerging in the investigation. This time, she suggested that even if the FBI were now classifying some of her e-mails, she couldn’t be held responsible since the e-mails lacked any mark of classification at the time they were sent or received. Some wondered what she even meant by “marked” classified, while others pointed out that lack of markings was no defense for mishandling the information — which the secretary of state, of all people, should have judged to be sensitive.

Truth: Comey confirmed suspicions about Clinton’s claim by noting that a “small number” of the e-mails were, in fact, marked classified. Moreover, he added: “Even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”

3. Lie: She turned over all of her work-related e-mails.

Clinton said this on MSNBC September 4, 2015; at a Fox News town hall March 7, 2016; and at a New York press conference March 10.

It’s important to remember that Clinton made this claim about the 30,000 e-mails she and her attorneys chose to provide to the State Department. After turning over paper copies of these 30,000, she and her attorneys then unilaterally deleted another 32,000 that they deemed personal.

Truth: The FBI found “thousands” of work-related e-mails other than those Clinton had provided; they were in various officials’ mailboxes and in the server’s slack space.

FBI director James Comey’s explanation of the case against the case against Hillary Rodham Clinton — “Sure, she pretty clearly did what she’s accused of doing but hey man aren’t penguins cute is that a squirrel man hey check it out a squirrel!” — is a fascinating floor routine of intellectual gymnastics in and of itself, dissected in these pages by several very fine lawyers and others with much more of interest to say on the strictly legal question than I have. But it is worth considering the context.

The context is this: America is a lawless state.

Comey spelled out in some detail exactly how Mrs. Clinton broke the law before all that oogedy-boogedy about how she didn’t really break the law. That must be a source of some amusement to Tom DeLay. DeLay, you may remember, was the House majority leader, a Republican, who was indicted on charges stemming from violating a law that had not — concentrate on this for a second — even been passed at the time he was alleged to have violated it. DeLay was driven from office, politically and financially ruined, and damn near jailed before the case was laughed out of court — years later, of course. We’re hearing a lot just now about “mens rea,” the legal principle that criminal culpability requires the positive intention to do wrong. That this should get Mrs. Clinton off the hook is questionable — she clearly set up her illegal private e-mail server for the purpose of obstructing the State Department’s ordinary legal oversight — but, in any case, it was no obstacle to the indictment of DeLay on charges that he willfully violated a law that had yet to be passed. DeLay, once a pest-control man by trade, was derided as “the Exterminator” by his enemies. It should have just been the “Terminator,” with prosecutors in the present going after him for laws passed in the future.

Mrs. Clinton’s non-exoneration exoneration must be of some interest to former Texas governor Rick Perry, too. Mrs. Clinton cannot be indicted on plain evidence, but Perry was indicted on felony charges for — in case you have forgotten — vetoing a bill. Texas has a special prosecutor for political corruption, a woman who has a terrible problem with drinking and driving, and who was arrested on DUI charges and subsequently videotaped threatening to use the powers of her office, which are fearsome, to have police personnel jailed — jailed — for refusing to give her special treatment. Perry argued that this woman had no business being in charge of a public ethics office, being, as she was, the most notorious violator of public ethics in Texas at the time, which is no small thing. He said he would veto funding for her office so long as she remained the head of it, and followed through. His case was eventually laughed out of court, too, but not until he’d been obliged to open his presidential campaign with felony indictments hanging over his head, specious as they were.