RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/17/political-trials-should-be-tried-outside-of-the-beltway/

The justice system situated in our nation’s capital is toxic, destructive, and demonstrably unfair. Barr should move any trial out of Washington—West Virginia or North Carolina, perhaps?—and at least give the accused a fighting chance.

Attorney General William Barr is enlisting U.S. attorneys outside the Beltway either to investigate or review several high-level cases related to President Trump, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. Barr has asked federal prosecutors from “far-flung offices,” as the Post described it, located in remote places such as Connecticut and Chicago, to handle these sensitive matters.

Barr’s legal shuffling of the deck includes the egregious prosecution of Lt. General Michael Flynn; the investigation into Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign; and new material collected by Rudy Giuliani detailing alleged corruption in Ukraine possibly tied to U.S. politicians.

Given the accusations from Trump foes that Barr is doing Trump’s bidding from his corner office at the Justice Department, this otherwise rational move prompted convulsions of panic in the nation’s capital. Some distraught observers grimly warn that transferring politically charged cases out of the most politically obsessed town in the world is just what Joseph Stalin would do.

David Laufman, a former Justice Department official and Obama donor involved in the agency’s 2016 exoneration of Hillary Clinton, claimed he was “baffled” as to why any federal lawyer would accept such an assignment. “‘Why would they be associating themselves with investigations that are evocative of the manner in which repressive regimes throughout history have behaved?’” Laufman told Post reporters.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68638-fbi-unlawfully-passed-classified-intel-to-steele-2020-02-17

Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer hired by Hillary Clinton and the DNC through GPS Fusion to dig make up dirt on Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, is back in the news, along with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI. And the circular corruption just gets crazier.

“A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau’s most closely held secrets, according to unpublicized disclosures in the recent Justice Department Inspector General report on abuses of federal surveillance powers.” So begins the latest revelation of deep-state corruption, courtesy of Eric Felten and RealClearInvestigations.

Felten continues, “Much of the public reporting regarding this meeting has focused on the information Steele shared with the FBI — and the many reasons agents should have doubted its credibility. But largely neglected has been the opposite side of the equation — what the FBI told Steele. The Inspector General reports that the bureau revealed to him much of the highly classified information that it had gathered regarding alleged Trump-Russia links.” That included information on Trump campaign staffers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn — information known only by a select few FBI officials.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/17/doj-furor-latest-attempt-to-help-democrats-hide-spygate-undermine-elections/

When the cockroaches are all scurrying across the floor, you can be sure that somebody shone a light on their nest.

Another spin operation appears to be afoot to thwart Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the Russia collusion hoax and others perpetrated by high-ranking federal bureaucrats. The eye of the hurricane this weekend has focused on the Department of Justice, with news Friday that an assistant U.S. attorney declined to press charges against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for documented lying to federal investigators under oath.

Becket Adams explains that

In 2016, McCabe, who is now a paid CNN contributor, leaked sensitive details of the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation to the press. He then misled members of the FBI’s Inspection Division when they interviewed him about the leaks, according to a February 2018 Justice Department inspector general report. McCabe provided investigators with four misleading statements, three of which were while he was under oath.

Giving false statements to federal investigators is a crime. In fact, it is the same crime for which the Justice Department went after President Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

On Friday, news broke that Barr “has appointed the top federal prosecutor in St. Louis to review the criminal case against Michael Flynn – former national security adviser to President Donald Trump,” according to Reuters. This all occured in the same week an assistant U.S. attorney recommended up to nine years in prison for former Trump campaign associate Roger Stone on the grounds that he lied about gossiping about what WikiLeaks knew about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obama-personally-asked-the-fbi-to-investigate-someone-on-behalf-of-george-soros-says-alan-dershowitz/

In an interview with Breitbart News, Alan Dershowitz claimed he is in possession of documents that will show Barack Obama asked the FBI to investigate an unnamed person on behalf of George Soros. Those documents, he says, will come out during a lawsuit that will be filed in the future. Dershowitz said the only difference between Trump and other presidents influencing the Department of Justice is that Trump is open about it while the others “whispered.”

“I have some information as well about the Obama administration, which will be disclosed in a lawsuit at some point, but I’m not prepared to disclose it now, about how President Obama personally asked the FBI to investigate somebody on behalf of George Soros, who was a close ally of his,” he said. Dershowitz was responding to the over-the-top hand-wringing going on in the media after Donald Trump tweeted out his disgust at the sentencing recommendation of up to nine years for Roger Stone, which was announced by prosecutors at the Justice Department.

“We’ve seen this kind of White House influence on the Justice Department virtually in every Justice Department,” continued Dershowitz. “The difference is this president is much more overt about it. He tweets about it. President Obama whispered to the Justice Department about it.” Dershowitz then went on to give historical context and claimed that while not advisable, it’s perfectly constitutional for the president to completely control the Department of Justice, as has been done before. “The president could make a decision to really decide to control the Justice Department…Thomas Jefferson did it.”

Listen below.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/16/reaching-peak-progressivism/

In 2020 we have finally hit peak progressivism. The adjective “peak”—apex or summit— is often used to describe something that has reached its maximum extent but thereafter will insidiously decline—like supposed U.S. domestic oil production in 2000 when more oil was purportedly taken out of, rather than still in the ground. While the idea of peak oil in the days before fracking and horizontal drilling proved vastly premature, we likely are witnessing something like “peak progressivism” today.

By that I mean the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the accompanying progressive agenda now have reached an extreme—beyond which will only result in the steady erosion of radical ideology altogether.

The French Revolution hit “peak” coerced egalitarianism with the Jacobin takeover and so-called Reign of Terror. After all, when you begin guillotining fellow travelers on charges they are counterrevolutionaries and begin worshiping a new atheist secular power “Reason,” institutionalized as Robespierre’s “Cult of the Supreme Being,” you have mostly reached the limits of political radicalism and are into the territory of the nihilistic, if not the maniacal and absurd—with a rendezvous with Napoleon on the horizon.

From 2009 through 2016, Barack Obama recalibrated the Democratic Party’s liberalism into progressive radicalism. He opened the border and all but dismantled existing immigration law. Sanctuary cities sprang up with impunity. Executive orders bypassed the Congress. The Iran Deal ignored the Senate’s treaty-making responsibilities. Obama sought to nationalize healthcare. The concept of “diversity” replaced affirmative action, by redefining racial oppression as distinct from historical grievance and economic disparity and instead lumping together 30 percent of the population as nonwhite, and thus antithetical to the new buzz construct of “white privilege.” Fast and Furious, the surveillance of the Associated Press reporters, Benghazi, the weaponization of the IRS, and the use of CIA, FBI, and DOJ to seed the spurious Steele dossier were all written off as proof of the “most scandal free” administration in memory.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/two-year-terror-campaign-against-one-small-gop-daniel-greenfield/

Early Saturday morning, a bearded perpetrator in a hooded jacket, wearing gloves, smashed the glass door and windows of the Humboldt Republican headquarters with rocks. He poured an unknown liquid into the storefront office before escaping on a bike into the streets of Eureka in the pre-dawn hours.

There was one obvious clue. The bike had a giant BERNIE sticker on it.

When police caught up to the alleged perpetrator, Michael Valls attempted to escape on his bike, then he tried throwing the bike at the cops, and, when he was finally taken into custody, gave authorities a false name. But police caught him with the Trump flag that he had stolen from the vandalized office.

The Bernie Sanders supporter was charged with burglary, felony vandalism, attempted arson, resisting arrest, and providing a false name. The chemical liquid he had poured inside the office turned out to be flammable. Bail was set at only $25,000, and Valls was out of prison by Sunday. It is California after all.

And in an atmosphere of rising radical violence, maybe this story wouldn’t be so extraordinary.

But this wasn’t the first time that this happened to the Humboldt GOP HQ. It was the sixth time.

Not in a decade, but in only two years.

What we’re seeing here is the fruit of the corruption of America’s institutions of higher education, ensuring that the educated classes are dedicated socialists.

Roger Stone, a nasty, sleazy person who refused to participate in the Russian hoax, was convicted of lying to Congress and making ill-tempered threats that his “victim” found laughable. He was a first-time, non-violent, elderly offender so, of course, prosecutors tied to Bob Mueller decided to pay exquisite homage to the letter of the law, without reference to the spirit, and demanded of the judge that Stone get 7-9 years in prison. Political leakers and hardcore criminals get shorter sentences. Insiders like Andrew McCabe don’t even get prosecuted.

When Trump learned about the prosecutors’ demands he posted a tweet calling out this travesty. Simultaneously, and completely separately from Trump’s angry tweets, Bill Barr also learned for the first time about the sentencing request and pulled it, instead asking the judge to exercise her discretion when it came to sentencing Stone. While all this was going on, it turned out that the jury foreman lied about her animus towards Trump and his circle, as well as her knowledge about and hostility towards Stone.

The Democrats hate Barr because they understand that he is focused on the law as it should be, not on politics as it is. With Barr applying common sense and rationality to an extreme and partisan attack on an old man, the leftists think they’ve got him:

More than 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials called on Attorney General William P. Barr on Sunday to step down after he intervened last week to lower the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/why-wasnt-andrew-mccabe-charged/

The proof that he willfully deceived investigators appears strong, but the Justice Department likely felt there were too many obstacles to convicting him.

The Justice Department announced Friday that it is closing its investigation of Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s former deputy director, over his false statements to investigators probing an unauthorized leak that McCabe had orchestrated. McCabe was fired in March 2018, shortly after a blistering Justice Department inspector general (IG) report concluded that he repeatedly and blatantly lied — or, as the Bureau lexicon puts it, “lacked candor” — when questioned, including under oath.

Why not indict McCabe on felony false-statements charges? That is the question being pressed by incensed Trump supporters. After all, the constitutional guarantee of equal justice under the law is supposed to mean that McCabe gets the same quality of justice afforded to the sad sacks pursued with unseemly zeal by McCabe’s FBI and Robert Mueller’s prosecutors. George Papadopoulos was convicted of making a trivial false statement about the date of a meeting. Roger Stone was convicted of obstruction long after the special counsel knew there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy, even though his meanderings did not impede the investigation in any meaningful way. And in the case of Michael Flynn’s false-statements conviction, as McCabe himself acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee, even the agents who interviewed him did not believe he intentionally misled them.

I emphasize Flynn’s intent because purported lack of intent is McCabe’s principal defense, too. Even McCabe himself, to say nothing of his lawyers and his apologists in the anti-Trump network of bureaucrats-turned-pundits, cannot deny that he made false statements to FBI agents and the IG. Rather, they argue that the 21-year senior law-enforcement official did not mean to lie, that he was too distracted by his high-level responsibilities to focus on anything as mundane as a leak — even though he seemed pretty damned focused on the leak while he was orchestrating it.