RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/26/are_thought_crimes_impeachable_141814.html

During special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, his legal “dream team” tried to make a secondary case that Donald Trump also obstructed efforts to prove Trump-Russian “collusion.”

Trump was said to have advised his lawyers and other subordinates, past and present, not to cooperate fully with the Mueller investigation. Yet the special counsel did not pursue any actionable cases of egregious interference by the White House.

Indeed, Mueller would never have concluded his $35 million, 22-month investigation had he not enjoyed cooperation from the White House.

White House employees were questioned freely by the special counsel. Documents were released. When the special counsel’s exhaustive investigation into purported Trump-Russia collusion found no such crime, the fallback claim of obstruction arose. Trump allegedly wanted to curtail Mueller’s parameters of inquiry into something that was proven not to be a crime.

Mueller found no grounds for a criminal referral on obstruction of justice. But he repeatedly hinted that Trump had thought about obstructing the non-crime of collusion.

In the Ukrainian melodrama, Trump is accused of the thought crime of considering the withholding of military assistance unless Ukraine investigated possible Ukrainian tampering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and also former Vice President Joe Biden’s intervention in Ukrainian politics on behalf of his son.

With the arrogance of the unelected and the power of the unaccountable, these witnesses to nothing revel in their veto over foreign policy.

When a member of the military pulls rank on a ranking member of Congress, when he politicizes his service by admonishing a public servant, when he acts as if the ribbons pinned to his jacket are more legitimate than the pin every congressman wears, when he uses his uniform to command attention—and attempts to commandeer authority—he indicts no one but himself.

When the man in question is Alexander Vindman, his opening statement is a closing argument for the opposition.

When the women in question are Fiona Hill and Marie Yovanovitch, their statements are nothing more than dross in a diplomatic pouch. 

All three statements read like dispatches from the administrative state. 

With the arrogance of the unelected and the power of the unaccountable, these witnesses to nothing—neither present at the creation of presidential policy nor privy to the president’s conversations about policy—revel in their veto over foreign policy. They testify to their Americanness by condemning the chief executive of the American people.

To Vindman, Hill, and Yovanovitch the personal is political. 

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/24/the-hatred-that-fuels-impeachment/

We are in new territory now. Hating a president is equivalent to finding him guilty of supposed high crimes. Impeachment is a casual affair. Hearsay is as valid as direct testimony.

Neither the NeverTrump Right nor the Progressive Left has yet offered a coherent defense of their de facto, three-year-long singular effort to delegitimize and ultimately remove Trump from office before the 2020 election.

We are now in the midst of a systematic effort to impeach a president on the basis of a thought crime. Trump’s purported quid pro quo sin was issuing a temporary hold on military assistance to Ukraine that supposedly transcended legitimate worries about rampant corruption—to include specifically investigating the suspicious behavior of a corrupt Ukrainian oil company and the compromised relationship of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son around it.

The anti-Trump writ is that it is impeachable even to delay to the Ukrainians lethal military assistance while citing the need to investigate the corruption of Ukrainians, including the career of Hunter Biden, whose father, the former vice president and “point man” on Ukraine, is now running for president.

Supposedly irrelevant to this inquiry is the prior policy of denying military aid to Ukraine, intervening in Ukrainian politics to fire a prosecutor by threatening a cutoff of even nonmilitary aid, and ignoring that the vice president’s son served as a lucrative functionary with a corrupt Ukrainian company while his father was adjudicating U.S. aid to Ukraine.

So why this disconnect? The reason is not “Ukraine,” merely the latest iteration in a long series of efforts, but rather existential hatred.

“Conservative” NeverTrump Disdain

The NeverTrumpers’ position, although rarely articulated, seems fairly clear.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/25/the

Academics and former agency heads have called for the Food and Drug Administration to become an independent agency, out from under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Although the FDA has real problems, giving it more independence isn’t the solution.

The argument may sound compelling. “Partisan political interposition has grown increasingly worrisome” at the FDA, said three academics in an article in the journal Science. They continued: “As the sole arbiter standing between a new drug application and a potential public health calamity, the FDA can hardly afford to be buffeted by undue political interference,” and should, therefore, become an independent agency. A group of former heads of the agency made a similar recommendation in January.

Yet political meddling has been extremely rare in recent years, and the genuine calamities in which the FDA has been involved have been self-inflicted wounds that might have been avoided with more, not less, accountability and oversight.

The FDA is ubiquitous in Americans’ lives, regulating products that account for more than $1 trillion dollars annually — 25 cents of every consumer dollar. Its regulation provides some measure of reassurance and tangible benefits, to be sure, but it has massive costs, direct and indirect. For example, bringing a new drug to market costs, on average, more than $2.5 billion.

Regulation that is excessive actually costs lives, both directly by withholding life-saving products, and also by diverting societal resources to gratuitous regulatory compliance.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/sham-interfaith-group-partners-cair-features-anti-joe-kaufman/

The Interfaith Action Group of Southwest Florida, like most interfaith groups, holds events with participants from different religions. It seems, though, when it comes to Islam, the group favors representatives from the radical Muslim organization CAIR. That was the case last month, as Interfaith Action featured, as one of its participants, the Communications Director of CAIR-Florida and someone who has actively spread anti-Semitism, Wilfredo Amr Ruiz. This article is meant to expose the sham that is the Interfaith Action Group and to warn religious leaders with good intentions from continuing to contribute to this thinly veiled display of intolerance.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR was established, in June 1994, as a key component of then-global head of Hamas Mousa Abu Marzook’s Palestine Committee, a now-defunct US-based Hamas support network. Former CAIR representatives have been convicted of terror-related crimes, and in 2008, the US government named CAIR a party to the financing of Hamas. Following the September 11th attacks, CAIR used its official website to solicit funds for charities associated with Hamas and al-Qaeda.

The Florida chapter of CAIR has consistently reflected the violent extremism of its parent organization. A prime example of this is the pro-Hamas rally CAIR-Florida co-sponsored, in July 2014, outside the Israeli Consulate in Miami, where attendees repeatedly shouted, “We are Hamas,” “Let’s go Hamas,” and “Hamas kicked your ass.” After the rally, the event organizer, Sofian Zakkout, posted photos from the event with the caption, “Thank God, every day, we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/23/trumps-disruptive-energy-vs-the-deep-state/

For the last 56 years, this time in November has been an occasion—at first pious and lachrymose, latterly perfunctory—to commemorate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That event was certainly a cultural cataclysm. America was a changed place after November 22, 1963.

But for all the reams of commentary that event elicited, there is one irony that has not perhaps been sufficiently appreciated. Although the president’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a rabid Communist, the murder was almost instantly reframed as an expression of right-wing hatred.

I say that this irony has not been sufficiently appreciated. I do not mean that it hasn’t been pointed out. It lies at the center of James Piereson’s fine book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, for example. But somehow in the texture of public sentiment, in the semi-articulated tissues of popular understanding, the notion that Kennedy was really, deep down killed by the equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” shows us how malleable, how susceptible to political manipulation is the Narrative, the assumed horizon of understanding.

There are contemporary lessons to be drawn from the metamorphosis of Kennedy’s assassination at the hands of a pro-Soviet Communist into an object lesson in the perils of right-wing animus.

The only Russian collusion on offer in 2016 was between the Hillary Clinton campaign and various Russian and Ukrainian operatives, but somehow we all got saddled with a nearly three-year, multimillion-dollar investigation into Donald Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia.

Get Ready for Media Obfuscation Like Never Before

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/the-first-glimpse-into-horowitzs-fisa-abuse-report/

CNN reports that an FBI attorney tampered with documents related to the Carter Page application. How much does it matter?

I s this the tip of a scandalous iceberg? Or is it a signal that Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s much anticipated report on investigative irregularities in the Trump-Russia probe will be much ado about nothing much?

A low-ranking FBI lawyer altered a document that was somehow related to the Obama Justice Department’s application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for a national-security surveillance warrant. The application, approved by the FISC in October 2016, targeted former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page — an American citizen, former naval intelligence officer, and apparent FBI cooperating witness — as a clandestine agent of Russia. Apparently, the document tampering made at least one of the application’s factual assertions seem more damning than it actually was.

The FBI attorney, who has not been identified, is also said to have falsified an email in an effort to provide back-up support for the fabricated claim. The lawyer, who was reportedly pushed out of the Bureau when the tampering incident came to light, was interviewed in Horowitz’s inquiry and is said to be a subject of the related criminal investigation being conducted by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham.

The news was broken on Thursday night by CNN. That in itself is noteworthy. The FBI’s former deputy director Andrew McCabe is a CNN contributor, and the Bureau’s former general counsel James Baker is a frequent CNN guest. The IG’s probe has scrutinized the conduct of both. CNN commentators also include other former federal law-enforcement officials, who have ties to the Bureau and to some of the former officials under scrutiny. CNN’s news story about the evidence tampering is sourced to “several people briefed on the matter,” who were not identified. The IG report is scheduled to be released on December 9, and witnesses have recently been permitted to review a draft of it under tight restrictions.