RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/flynn-highlights-new-strzok-notes-in-urging-dismissal-of-case/

Strzok’s notes are significant in what they confirm, but they probably do not reveal anything new.

Well, there is lots going on in Flynn World.

The president’s former national-security advisor, Michael Flynn, is obviously elated that, on Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit granted his petition for a writ of mandamus — i.e., it instructed District Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case against him. I have a column about the ruling up on the homepage.

As reported by NR’s Zachary Evans, moreover, Flynn defense lawyer Sidney Powell has filed an intriguing supplement the defense’s concurrence in the Justice Department’s dismissal motion. The supplement, also filed on Wednesday, includes notes said to have been handwritten by Peter Strzok, then a top FBI counterintelligence agent (and, of course, later fired for sundry misconduct).

It is being widely reported that the notes concern a now infamous White House meeting about Flynn that took place on January 5, 2017. (I began writing about that meeting as soon as we learned about it in early 2018, and it is central to my book about the Trump–Russia investigation, Ball of Collusion). The meeting included the top political and law-enforcement leadership of the Obama administration — President Obama, Vice President Biden, national-security advisor Susan Rice, deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and FBI director James Comey — notwithstanding the insistence of Obama apologists that the administration did not permit law enforcement to be influenced by politics. (I would counter that mixing the two was the administration’s M-O).

I suspect the Strzok notes are about the January 5 meeting, too. There is, however, confusion on this point.

The short supplement Ms. Powell filed states that Strzok’s notes are “believed to be of January 4, 2017” (emphasis added). Now, Powell received these notes from the Justice Department as part of its continuing review of the Flynn case (which was prosecuted by special counsel Robert Mueller’s staff). Obviously, she is privy to more information about the case than we are, and we do not know what, if anything, DOJ told her about the provenance of the notes. That said, I am skeptical about the January 4 dating.

Only in Seattle do the tree trimmers make $160,000 per year!

Today, our investigation is an Editor’s Pick at Forbes: Why Seattle And Their Police Department Is In Trouble.

Our auditors dug into how Seattle is actually spending taxpayer dollars. We found: 

tree trimmers lopped off $160,604
the chief librarian made $197,704
electricians earned $271,070
electrical lineworkers made $307,387
police officers earned up to $414,543 

Last year, 601 city employees out-earned the mayor ($199,593), and the mayor out-earned 49 out of 50 state governors (top pay: $202,000).  

The city council member ($131,336) leading the charge to defund the police made more than the members of the New York general assembly — the most highly compensated state legislature in the country ($130,000). 

Read our breaking oversight piece at Forbes where we outline all the details. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/25/falling-covid-19-death-rates-are-even-smaller-than-they-look/
Once again, the U.S. is undergoing a media-driven COVID-19 scare after a “spike” in infections. But as we noted earlier this week, the number of cases depends on the amount of testing. The key gauge to watch is deaths. They’ve been falling since April, and there’s strong reason to believe they’re lower than the official count suggests.

The dreaded Wuhan virus is no doubt a nasty bug, worthy of our vigilance and ongoing concern. That said, its virulence, as measured by the daily number of deaths, appears to be waning, as the chart with this piece, courtesy of the COVID-19 Tracking Project of the Atlantic, clearly shows.

The average number of daily COVID-19 deaths on a weekly basis has fallen from a peak of just over 2,000 to 700 or so. That’s a roughly 65% decline. And it’s no fluke. The figure has been dropping steadily since April.

Hold on. That last number for June 23 on the chart shows a huge jump. Should we be worried? Is this the much-dreaded surge some have been talking up?

Apparently not. A big part of that one-time gain came from a revision by one state: Delaware.

As the Youyang Gu, an MIT data scientist who created the COVID 19-projections.com site, tweeted: “To put the increase in deaths in context, Delaware added 69 deaths today: ‘The revision came from identifying 67 deaths dating back to April.’ So if you take out those 67 deaths, the week-over-week deaths have not changed.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/24/explosive-new-fbi-notes-confirm-obama-directed-anti-flynn-operation/

Handwritten notes from fired former FBI agent Peter Strzok show that Obama himself directed key aspects of the campaign to target Flynn during a Jan. 5, 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.

Newly released notes confirm President Barack Obama’s key role in surveillance and leak operation against Michael Flynn, the incoming Trump administration national security adviser. The handwritten notes, which were first disclosed in a federal court filing made by the Department of Justice on Tuesday, show President Obama himself personally directed former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to investigate Flynn for having routine phone calls with a Russian counterpart. He also suggests they withhold information from President Trump and his key national security figures.

The handwritten notes from fired former FBI agent Peter Strzok appear to describe a Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting between Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Comey, Yates, and then-national security adviser Susan Rice. The meeting and its substance were confirmed in a bizarre Inauguration Day email Rice wrote to herself.

It was at this meeting, which was confirmed by testimony from Comey and Yates, that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/federal-appeals-court-orders-judge-sullivan-to-dismiss-the-flynn-case/

A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this morning ordered Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the indictment against Michael Flynn, who fleetingly served as President Trump’s first national-security adviser.

In a majority ruling written by Judge Naomi Rao and joined by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, appointees of Presidents Trump and Bush 41, respectively, the court held that the executive branch has the constitutional power of prosecutorial discretion, including the authority to decide which cases to charge and whether to persist in charges once they’ve been brought. This power is in tension with Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which requires the Justice Department to seek “leave of the Court” before dismissing an indictment. While not deciding the potentially legitimate parameters of this requirement, the majority reasoned that it is for the protection of defendants from prosecutorial harassment.

Relying on the D.C. Circuit’s 2016 Fokker precedent, the court found that Rule 48(a) does not permit a thoroughgoing inquiry into the executive branch’s reasoning for dismissal — at least in a case in which the accused joins the prosecution in seeking a dismissal with prejudice (such a dismissal stands as a final judgment and bars the government from re-charging the defendant with the same offense at a later date).

https://canadafreepress.com/article/democrats-exposed-as-the-racists-theyve-always-been

A black vote of 20 percent, and quite possibly 30 percent for President Trump, will teach the Democrats that even their most cherished “value”––abortion––is not enough to keep the black population loyal to their historically empty promises and innate racism.

They say that out of every bad thing comes a good thing. Ask any mother who has been through a 20-hour labor!

The same can be said of the criminal behavior of the Marxist-inspired radicals––Antifa and Black Lives Matters––which eclipsed the legitimate outrage that followed the horrific murder of George Floyd by a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, MN.

This crime called for reform of the Minneapolis Police Department, which had ignored 18 grievances against Chauvin. But that is not what happened.

Instead, the peaceful protests against this savage act were obliterated by the professionally orchestrated, bountifully financed rampage of the above-mentioned anarchists-cum-terrorists through American cities and suburbs, leaving a massive swath of destruction that included dozens of black-owned businesses and dozens of white-owned businesses that employed black citizens. So much for Black Lives Matter!

What a beautiful tribute to George Floyd––God spare all of us such a memoriam!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/removal-of-sdnys-interim-u-s-attorney-is-washington-not-watergate/

Democrats weave a scandal out of an overdue personnel move.

On Saturday evening, I posted an extensive column on the homepage, exploring this weekend’s contretemps between Attorney General William Barr and Geoffrey Berman, the now-former interim United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (where I was a prosecutor for nearly 20 years).

The more one looks at this, the more clear it becomes that Democrats are contorting a long-overdue personnel move into a scandal. This is not an accident. We are four months from Election Day, and Barr has indicated we may be closer to some sort of reckoning in Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation. Barr’s deservedly stellar pre-Trump reputation notwithstanding, the president’s opposition is determined to discredit him and, derivatively, any malfeasance uncovered by Durham’s scrutiny of the Obama administration’s Trump-Russia probe.

It is dysfunctional of the Trump administration not to have installed a confirmed SDNY U.S. Attorney serving a four-year term. The post is among the most consequential in the Justice Department — indeed, in the government. Attorney General Barr has been trying to reestablish normalcy in that regard. For the reasons I laid out in the column, however, it is not easy to get nominees confirmed when Democrats hold both Senate seats in the state where the district is located.