RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-will-turn-over-the-2016-rocks-11574812212?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

A forthcoming report by the Justice Department inspector general will look into the FBI’s formal handling of the Steele dossier and its launching of a counterintelligence investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign. Far more consequential, though, was the FBI’s informal role in allowing itself to be used to inject the dossier into the political sphere to spark the Russia collusion folly.

And where is the similar report on the CIA under John Brennan ? His promotion of the Russia collusion canard was bad enough. Unexamined is his role in promoting the still-secret Russian “intelligence” used to justify FBI Director James Comey’s chaotic intercessions in the matter of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The story is worth retelling. Mr. Comey’s rationale, not disclosed until after the election, we may suppose was of crucial importance to somebody who makes himself out to be such a stickler for doing the right thing. Yet his public explanations have been a tissue of absurdities. He claims the secret Russian intelligence might have leaked and discredited a Justice Department decision to clear Mrs. Clinton, but how did his usurping the DOJ’s decision improve matters? The information still could have leaked. Plus didn’t his own actions discredit the DOJ?

He says he was protecting the FBI, that an FBI decision would be more credible than a Justice Department decision. This is laughable. On the eve of the convention, the FBI was going to deprive the president’s party of its nominee even as the reviled Mr. Trump was storming to the GOP nomination? It would have been institutional hara-kiri. Nobody believes the FBI’s decision was any less foreordained than the Justice Department’s.

Making further mincemeat of Mr. Comey’s rationale, the inspector general has revealed that his FBI colleagues judged the Russian intelligence to be “objectively false” and possibly a Kremlin plant. If the Russians can fake one email chain to discredit the Justice Department, they can fake another to discredit the FBI. Again, how did Mr. Comey fix any problem?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-11-25-no-amount-of-disastrous-failure-can-kill-the-fantasy-of-a-government-directed-great-society

It was 1964 — I was in the 8th grade — when Lyndon Johnson, newly elevated to the presidency by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, announced the launch of the “War on Poverty” and the imminent coming of the “Great Society.” The U.S. economy was in the midst of achieving new levels of prosperity unprecedented in human history. For the first time, the resources appeared to be at hand to eradicate poverty and to reach for universal fairness and justice. All that was needed was to put the powers of government to work to apply the available societal resources to the problems at hand; and presto! the problems would be solved. This was obvious to all thinking people. Experts within the government agencies would quickly set to work to devise the programs that would use the gusher of federal tax revenue to end poverty and bring about universal fairness and justice in short order.

Running on a platform emphasizing the War on Poverty and the Great Society, Johnson swept to a landslide victory in the 1964 election. The landslide brought with it super legislative majorities in both houses of Congress. Programs designed by the experts to eradicate poverty proliferated rapidly, both before and after the 1964 election — Medicaid, the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, the Food Stamp program, Project Head Start, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and on and on.

Fifty-five years on, is it possible to name any public policy disaster in the United States greater than the disaster of the War on Poverty and Great Society? Over the half-century-plus, spending on so-called “anti-poverty” programs has soared from initial levels of a handful of billions of dollars per year, to current amounts well in excess of a trillion dollars per year (including federal, state and local spending). Meanwhile, the so-called “poverty rate” has barely budged (it’s been between about 11% and 15% for the whole five plus decades), and the number of people deemed to be “in poverty” by the official measure has about doubled as the population has grown.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15218/marijuana-impact

Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University, is quoted in the media observing that marijuana drug addiction is quietly becoming a stealth public health crisis.

During the new year, Gatestone will be empaneling experts to examine this potential threat to the motoring public, those in the workplace, and young people.

As the nation moves towards the widespread legalization of marijuana, Gatestone Institute has announced plans for a series of symposiums during 2020 that will closely examine the potential impact of those actions on the nation’s children, occupational safety, and transportation.

Gatestone’s founder and president, Nina Rosenwald, observed:

“We have seen the tragic, unintended consequences of other formerly regulated substances on our young people and the nation’s population as a whole. From the most recent disturbing deaths among our youth from vaping to what is now a death toll of 9,000 children and adolescents from opioid poisonings over nearly two decades, there is little doubt that our children are the most vulnerable to what we don’t know about these types of chemicals. And that is only part of the equation as we seek to more fully understand the potential impact of legalized marijuana on our society.”

Unintended consequences from a little understood threat

Of equal concern to Gatestone Institute is the evolution of marijuana with far more potent mixtures now being produced with the potential for grave consequences in the workplace and on the streets of our towns and cities.

Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University, is quoted in the media observing that marijuana drug addiction is quietly becoming a stealth public health crisis.

“It wasn’t obvious to me 25 years ago, when nine percent of self-reported cannabis users over the (prior) month reported daily or near-daily use. I always was prepared to say, ‘No, it’s not a very abusable drug. Nine percent of anybody will do something stupid.’ But that number is now [something like] 40 percent.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/theres-less-to-the-mcgahn-ruling-than-meets-the-eye/

Contrary to popular belief, the former White House counsel has been ordered to show up, not to testify — and even that is being appealed.

You might assume that the girth of the nearly 120-page opinion Judge Ketjani Brown Jackson issued Monday means that an issue of great consequence to the House impeachment inquiry has been decided. But you’d be wrong. And you’d be further misled if you put much stock in the headlines breathlessly announcing that the federal district court in Washington, D.C., has ordered that former White House counsel Don McGahn “must testify to Congress.”

What Judge Jackson actually ordered is that McGahn must show up in compliance with the House Judiciary Committee’s subpoena. She did not direct him to provide any actual testimony. That is, the ruling sidesteps the question that actually matters: To what extent may McGahn invoke executive privilege (in addition to other potential privileges) to avoid answering lawmakers’ questions?

The ruling is nevertheless being appealed.

The case involves the Mueller Report’s obstruction volume. Yes, I know it seems like two or three impeachment gambits ago, but House Democrats still want to impeach President Trump over several incidents that the special counsel described as possible obstruction but did not recommend indictment for (and that Attorney General Bill Barr and then-deputy AG Rod Rosenstein concluded did not establish obstruction). McGahn was a central witness on this part of the investigation. He was interviewed extensively by Mueller’s team and provided memoranda of his interactions with Trump. The White House has always taken the position that making McGahn available to a prosecutor (i.e., an intra-executive-branch exchange) did not waive any privilege claims the president may have if Congress seeks information from McGahn (i.e., an inter-branch demand).

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-impeachment-inquiry-where-are-democrats-going/

Absent new, damning evidence, the impeachment script may not play out as Democrats wish.W here are the Democrats going next?

Prior to this past week, for days Adam Schiff had concocted a pretty effective fix. He conducted secret impeachment inquiries in the House basement. Schiff kept quiet about his rigged rules. He orchestrated selective media leaks from the opening statements of favorable witnesses and then more or less threatened with ethical violations any Republican member who copied his tactics and leaked their own often effective cross-examinations.

The result was that the public heard only from Schiff about Schiff’s damning slam-dunk hearings. A drip-by-drip melting of both Trump’s polls and resistance to impeachment followed.

Schiff emerged for brief soundbites, bit his lip, and for a minute or two regretted the tragedy of having to hear damaging testimony about his own president.

But then I suppose Schiff’s Hubris finally lured in Nemesis.

Schiff’s overweening ambition and ego drove him into a full-fledged, prime-daytime soap opera. Previously washed and rinsed witnesses returned for televised cross-examinations with Schiff in the star inquisitor role. He apparently thought he could outperform his own Republican colleagues on camera — people he had blatantly misrepresented for weeks.

But television allowed the country to conclude that seeing and hearing Schiff all day long was a different experience from catching minute- or two-minute glimpses of him. The TV version was entirely toxic.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/will-justice-trump-be-served-doj-inspector-general-bruce-thornton/

Advance hints about the conclusions of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation into the abuses of the FISA process are starting to trickle out. Rather than the “historic,” as Trump put it, bombshell exposing deep-state miscreants gaming the system to take down the president, the report, to be released December 9, will document mere “sloppiness” and “mistakes” on the part of lower-level functionaries. But more important, it also will absolve more highly placed officials of any political bias.

The 500-page report may not confirm this preview. Perhaps it will address what Andrew McCarthy identifies is the real question:

On four separate occasions, the FBI and the Justice Department solemnly told the FISC there were grounds to believe that Carter Page and others in the Trump campaign, potentially including Donald Trump himself, were complicit in a criminal conspiracy with the Kremlin. The question is: What was their compelling basis for making that explosive representation, which breached the American norm against government intrusion in our political process?

We’ll have to wait for the answer to that question.

But these leaks are grounds for suspicion. Back in June, Horowitz made a similar determination about James Comey––incompetent at following proper protocol, but not “politically biased.” Given that ample evidence of Comey’s political agenda had long been public, common sense suggests that those of us concerned about the politicization of our judicial and investigative agencies have some reason to worry about Horowitz’s new report.

Equal justice under the law is the bedrock of constitutional governments. This principle was serially violated during the Obama years, when those responsible for the abuse of the IRS for partisan political gain, and for the ATF’s Fast and Furious operation, which was basically running guns to Mexican cartels, were never punished, despite the death of an American citizen by a gun provided by the ATF. Then there’s Hillary Clinton’s ongoing immunity for patent crimes related to violating security protocols with her private server, and running a pay-to-play State Department to enrich the Clinton Foundation.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/26/how-the-medias-impeachment-push-harms-democrats/

Right up through the end of Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-Calif.) impeachment hearings, the media were impeachment’s most enthusiastic supporters. While they’ve been convinced of the need to impeach President Donald Trump for several years now, the hearings convinced them even more of the urgent need to do so.

The media weren’t entirely clear on exactly what grounds he should be impeached, a problem shared by Schiff and his team, but that didn’t dint their enthusiasm one bit.

Instead of making the case that Trump had committed some sort of high crime or misdemeanor meriting immediate removal, they instead just asserted that an unspecified crime had occurred and that witnesses had testified unambiguously that it had occurred. People who actually suffered through the hearings might be forgiven for not having the same impression.

Sure, viewers saw a bunch of hand-selected bureaucrats assert that Bad Orange Man wanted Ukraine to investigate various things, but we already knew that from Trump’s release of the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president and his many public statements on the matter. The question was never about whether Trump wanted these investigations, or even whether one involved the Bidens, but whether it was criminal, much less impeachable, to want these things from a country that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in American taxpayer funds each year.

Trump’s well known efforts were so anodyne and frankly ineffective that — despite the media’s promises of bombshells after bombshells — the best evidence there was for him wanting these things were his own public statements, and not any of the testimony from third- or fourth-hand witnesses.