RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/trump-was-always-the-target-of-the-russia-investigation/

The IG report confirms it.

Donald Trump was always the target.

The point of the Russia investigation was to make a case against Donald Trump. Preferably, the case would drive him from office. At a minimum, it would render him unelectable by the 2020 stretch run. The kind of case was less important than the objective: criminal prosecution or impeachment. In accordance with the collusion narrative, the latter would mean trying to show that Trump was compromised by the Kremlin.

That is the astonishing takeaway from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on former FBI director James Comey’s handling of his memos.

In truth, it’s not that astonishing. It happens to be the theory of my new book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. Obviously, if a book can show that Donald Trump was in the FBI’s crosshairs all along, that fact had to have been knowable for some time.

Still, if you’re going to write a book about a mind-blowing theory, it is gratifying to have that theory confirmed — notwithstanding how alarming it may be for the state of our republic.

It is an offhanded confirmation. The burden of the IG report is not to break news about the true purpose of the Trump-Russia investigation. It is to assess former director Comey’s conduct in generating, maintaining, and disseminating information in the memos he made about most of his interactions with President Trump. On that score, the IG report is scathing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jim-comeys-higher-virtue-11567121926

Beware the righteous man with power. That’s the great lesson of James Comey, as the 79-page report released Thursday by the Justice Department Inspector General makes clear. The former FBI director willfully violated multiple rules as he sought revenge against Donald Trump while pursuing his own self-interest in the name of higher virtue.

The report focuses on how Mr. Comey handled seven memos he wrote in 2017 about his interactions with Mr. Trump. IG Michael Horowitz finds that in treating his memos as personal documents rather than official FBI records, improperly storing them at home, failing to inform the bureau he had them, or leaking them to the press, Mr. Comey ignored FBI and Justice protocols and broke his employment agreement.

“By not safeguarding sensitive information” and “by using it to create public pressure for official action,” Mr. Comey “set a dangerous example” for every FBI employee, the IG says. Mr. Comey admitted that he violated the rules to cause the appointment of a special counsel after Mr. Trump fired him in May 2017.

“Comey said he was compelled to take these actions ‘if I love this country . . . and I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI,’” the report says. But the IG concludes that if everyone violated the rules “to achieve a personally desired outcome” as Mr. Comey did, “the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly.”

Translated from the bureaucratic prose: Mr. Comey thought he was above the rules because he wanted to save the country from Mr. Trump. No doubt J. Edgar Hoover felt a similar afflatus as he wiretapped Martin Luther King.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sneaky-leaky-james-comey-11567121062

Of all the tall tales James Comey has told, none compare to the line he fed President Trump at their infamous January 2017 dinner. As recounted in the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director’s memo about that evening, “I said I don’t do sneaky things, I don’t leak, I don’t do weasel moves.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general begs to differ. In a new report about Mr. Comey’s handling of those memos, Michael Horowitz demonstrates that Mr. Comey in 2017 was consistently leaky and sneaky. The report refutes any claim that the then-director was justified in taking these actions. He repeatedly, and knowingly, broke the rules.

For more than two years, we’ve heard Mr. Comey’s characterization of his actions, popularized by an adoring media: He felt compelled to memorialize his private discussions with the president, to protect the FBI. He had no choice but to use an intermediary to leak memo contents, to save the nation by forcing the appointment of a special counsel. He was entitled to do so because the memos were his personal papers, and by that time he was a “private citizen.”

The inspector general calmly and coolly dismantles these claims. There’s good reason to suspect Mr. Trump was the focus of the bureau’s counterintelligence probe from the start, since that is the only way to explain the FBI’s outrageous decision to hide the probe from the president. The inspector general reports that Mr. Comey’s first briefing of the president-elect, on Jan. 6, 2017, was partly done in the hope that “Trump might make statements about, or provide information of value to,” that probe. That may be the real reason everyone on the FBI leadership team agreed “ahead of time that Comey should memorialize” what happened.

Mr. Horowitz’s report methodically skewers Mr. Comey’s claim that his memos were “personal” and therefore his to keep and use.  CONTINUE AT SITE

Conference of Jewish Affairs 90 Washington Valley Road, Suite 1261 Bedminster, NJ 07921

(212) 252-6861   conferenceofjewishaffairs@gmail.com

For Immediate Release

Contact: Rabbi Aryeh Spero (212) 252-6861

ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE IS, ONCE AGAIN, FAILING THE JEWISH PEOPLE.

AS ATTACKS AGAINT JEWS IN NY INCREASE IN VIOLENCE AND NUMBER, ADL FAILS TO NAME THOSE GROUPS BEHIND THE ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACKS.

AND TONIGHT… ADL WILL GIVE COVER TO ANTI-SEMITIC, ANTI-ISRAEL CONGRESSWOMAN RASHIDA TLAIB 

BY APPEARING WITH HER AT DEARBORN, MICHIGAN ADL-ENDORSED EVENT:

August 28, 2019 — This past weekend brought another series of dangerous assaults against Jews in Brooklyn, first in Crown Heights and later in Williamsburg. The attacks came on the heels of an already accelerated pace of violent attacks targeting Jews in the New York City area. Police reports indicate that anti-Semitic assaults are up 55% this year, which is atop an already increased rate from the previous years.

All evidence indicates that the bulk of the New York City attacks are coming from members of the Black, Hispanic, and Muslim community. Perhaps that is why the national ADL, under the new leadership of Jonathan Greenblatt, has been relatively silent in identifying and bringing to light these individuals, in contrast to its vociferous and specific condemnation when the perpetrators are labeled by the ADL “right-wing” or “white” individuals. Further, there have been attacks recently against rabbis and others in Berlin, severe physical attacks, by those speaking Arabic or those chanting Allahu Akhbar.

We understand that condemning perpetrators from minority groups that have expressed hostility to Jews is an uncomfortable endeavor for the ADL given its on-going political alliance with many of the leaders of these groups. Acknowledgment of anti-Semitism within these groups runs counter to the ADL template. Nevertheless, the national ADL must be honest by equally spotlighting and condemning perpetrators no matter what their background.

Public condemnation is a vital mechanism in focusing leaders of groups on ostracizing violent members and denouncing bigoted attitudes within their respective community. Ignoring realities and not holding people accountable allows the prejudice to remain.  Having a lower level regional ADL office express alarm or focus simply on hate and intolerance is woefully inadequate, especially now that anti-Semitism coming from prominent segments of those groups has reached a tipping point.

Now, the ADL in the Detroit metro area has signed-on to and endorsed an event against “hate” at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, knowing full well that many of the participants – including Rashida Tlaib — and groups are notoriously anti-Israel and have expressed anti-Jewish feelings. The ADL was willing to partner with these groups in behalf of what it considers a greater concern, namely condemning what it labels hateful to Islamic groups.

Conference of Jewish Affairs believes that the purpose of the ADL, with its budget of over $65 million* a year, should be, as was its historic mission, to prioritize the safety and security of Jews.  Indeed, many groups the ADL calls minorities are no longer minorities in relation to a shrinking Jewish community, which now, population-wise, is far smaller than those groups. Fighting general bigotry and intolerance is very worthwhile, but cannot supersede what should be the ADL’s foremost mission of defending Jews, no matter who their attackers. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/james-comey-hoist-upon-his-own-self-regard/

There will be a lot of damning sections in the new Department of Justice Inspector General report on former FBI director James Comey, but this section in the conclusion is perhaps the most important:

[FBI] employees may disagree with decisions by prosecutors, judges, or higher-ranking FBI and Department officials about the actions to take or not take in criminal and counterintelligence matters. They may even, in some situations, distrust the legitimacy of those supervisory, prosecutorial, or judicial decisions. But even when these employees believe that their most strongly-held personal convictions might be served by an unauthorized disclosure, the FBI depends on them not to disclose sensitive information.

Even when these employees believe that their most strongly-held personal convictions might be served by an unauthorized disclosure, the FBI depends on them not to disclose sensitive information. Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility. By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees—who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information. Comey said he was compelled to take these actions “if I love this country…and I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI.”

However, were current or former FBI employees to follow the former Director’s example and disclose sensitive information in service of their own strongly held personal convictions, the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly, as Comey himself noted in his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony… This is no doubt part of the reason why Comey’s closest advisors used the words “surprised,” “stunned,” “shocked,” and “disappointment” to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/andrew-mccabe-sues-justice-department-seeks-clemency/

The former deputy director’s FBI coddled Clinton and addled Trump. Now he seeks clemency . . . even as he sues the Justice Department.

Hillary Clinton checked every box for a violation of the Espionage Act. So much so that, in giving her a pass, the FBI figured it better couch her conduct as “extremely careless,” rather than “grossly negligent.” The latter description was stricken from an earlier draft of then-director James Comey’s remarks because it is, verbatim, the mental state the statute requires for a felony conviction. It wouldn’t do to have an “exoneration” statement read like a felony indictment.

In point of fact, the careless/negligent semantic game was a sideshow. Mrs. Clinton’s unlawful storage and transmission of classified information had been patently willful. In contemptuous violation of government standards, which she was bound not only to honor but to enforce as secretary of state, she systematically conducted her government business by private email, via a laughably unsecure homebrew server set-up. Her Obama administration allies stress that it was not her purpose to harm national security, but that was beside the point. The crime was mishandling classified information, and she committed it. And even if motive had mattered (it didn’t), her purpose was to conceal the interplay between her State Department and the Clinton Foundation, and to avoid generating a paper trail as she prepared to run for president. No, that’s not as bad as trying to do national-security harm, but it’s condemnable all the same.

While Clinton’s mishandling of classified information got all the attention, it was just the tip of the felony iceberg. Thousands of the 33,000 emails she withheld and undertook to “bleach bit” into oblivion related to State Department business. It is a felony to misappropriate even a single government record. The destruction of the emails, moreover, occurred after a House Committee investigating the Benghazi massacre issued subpoenas and preservation directives to Clinton’s State Department and Clinton herself. If Andrew Weissmann and the rest of the Mueller probe pit-bulls had half as solid an obstruction case against Donald Trump, the president would by now have been impeached, removed, and indicted.

https://nypost.com/2019/08/29/james-comey-is-proof-the-deep-state-is-something-to-fear/

For nearly three years now, those who promise to save us from the wicked clutches of President Donald Trump have bombarded America with lectures about the “rule of law.” Yet, over and over again, these self-styled champions of justice feel free to disregard the law whenever it suits them. The latest example is former FBI Director James Comey.

A new report by the Office of the Inspector General for the Justice Department found that Comey had written FBI memos, illicitly passed them on to a lawyer friend, who in turn leaked them to a friendly New York Times reporter who had been spreading the Russian conspiracy theory.

Why? Because Comey was interested in extracting revenge on the man who had fired him, Donald Trump.

Comey, the report found, had leaked “investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.”

That outcome, as Comey had admitted to Congress, was to “prompt the appointment of a special counsel” to investigate the president’s alleged conspiracy with the Russian government to win the 2016 election. By doing this, the DOJ inspector general, who is widely considered both meticulous and unbiased, found that Comey had “set a dangerous example” and “releas[ed] sensitive information” to “create public pressure for official action.”

It worked. And by manufacturing an investigation into the president — one that he didn’t have enough evidence to pursue in an official capacity — Comey had not only abused his power but plunged the nation into two years of hysterics about Russian interference.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/08/28/top_us_intel_office_dragging_feet_on_russiagate_files_for_trump_insiders_say_120135.html

More than three months after President Trump granted his attorney general unprecedented power to declassify intelligence files, key U.S. intelligence agencies are still withholding documents related to the Trump-Russia affair, say people with direct knowledge of White House discussions on the subject.

The source of the logjam: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which Trump is in the process of shaking up after the resignations last month of its director, Dan Coats, and principal deputy, Sue Gordon. “Establishment” officials in that agency are still dragging their feet, say the sources, who spoke on condition that they not be further identified.

Sources who have seen the documents generally described their contents to RealClearInvestigations. They said the material still under wraps includes: 

Evidence that President Obama’s CIA, FBI, and Justice Department illegally eavesdropped on the Trump campaign — cases separate from the FBI’s disputed FISA court-approved surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/this_is_what_energy_independence_looks_like.html

The U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas.

Let me reveal my age and remember that I watched President Richard M. Nixon call for “energy independence” many years ago.   His successors have more or less said the same thing.

It appears that President Nixon’s call may soon be reality.  In fact, it looks like we may be “drowning the world” with oil, according to Nick Cunningham:   

The U.S. is still expected to account of the bulk of new drilling and the vast majority of new production, with much of that coming from shale. 

Already, the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. 

And the pace has accelerated in recent years.