Jeff Sessions’ Successor Firing Robert Mueller would be a political mistake.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-sessions-successor-1541635200

EXCERPT

Mr. Trump does have a point that Mr. Sessions’ recusal compromised his leadership of the department and made it harder to exert supervision over the FBI.

Mr. Sessions’ temporary successor will be the AG’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who presumably will hold the job until a successor is nominated. It is important that the White House get this one right.

The Attorney General shouldn’t fire Mr. Mueller, as the President essentially said himself at his Wednesday news conference. Mr. Trump needs an individual of stature and judgment who will have the trust of the department’s lawyers, who is capable of independence, but who also understands that the Justice Department is part of the executive branch and not a law unto itself.

We are former attorneys general. We salute Jeff Sessions.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jeff-sessions-can-look-back-on-a-job-well-done/2018/11/07/527e5830-e2cf-11e8-8f5f-a55347f48762_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.893959254b9d

By William P. Barr ,
Edwin Meese III and
Michael B. Mukasey

William P. Barr was attorney general from 1991 to 1993. Edwin Meese III was attorney general from 1985 to 1988. Michael B. Mukasey was U.S. attorney general from 2007 to 2009.

Serving as U.S. attorney general is the honor and the challenge of a lifetime.

We are three former attorneys general who served in Republican administrations — from different backgrounds, with different perspectives and who took different actions while in office.

But we share the view that Jeff Sessions, who resigned at President Trump’s request on Wednesday, has been an outstanding attorney general.

Each of us has known Sessions over many years. All of us thought his record — as a U.S. attorney for 12 years, as a state attorney general, as a respected U.S. senator for 20 years — made him a nominee of unexcelled experience. As important, his deep commitment to the Justice Department and its mission made him a nominee of unexcelled temperament.

By any measure, he has fulfilled the promise of those qualifications.

Sessions took office after the previous administration’s policies had undermined police morale, with the spreading “Ferguson effect” causing officers to shy away from proactive policing out of fear of prosecution. Steep declines in the rate of violent crime from 1992 to 2014 were reversed in the last administration’s final two years, with violent crime generally up 7 percent, assault 10 percent, rape nearly 11 percent and murder 21 percent. Opioid abuse skyrocketed. Many people were concerned that the hard-won progress of earlier years would be lost.

Sessions made sure that didn’t happen. He reinstituted the charging practices that had been used against drug dealers before 2008. He leveraged the power of big data to locate those who were stealing taxpayer dollars and flooding the streets with opioids and other painkillers.

Casting Out a Man of Honor and Achievement By firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, President Trump puts his own agenda at risk. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/

President Donald Trump has finally sacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The only upside to this development is that it ends the grotesque public humiliation of a man of honor and courage. Trump persuaded himself that Sessions was fungible, in order to justify scapegoating him for the special counsel investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign. Trump was wrong about Sessions’s disposability, and wrong to blame him for the appointment of a special counsel, which was triggered by Trump’s own impetuous firing of FBI director James Comey. Now that same willfulness threatens the Trump agenda and, possibly, the integrity of the justice system itself.

Trump won the presidency by promising to restore the rule of immigration law after decades of bipartisan neglect. Sessions, serving as a senator from Alabama in 2016, was uniquely positioned to do so. No politician had devoted as much time to documenting the corrosive effects of low-skilled mass immigration on the country’s working class. Sessions was a nationalist long before Trump came on the scene. He knew the myriad tactics through which the nation’s career bureaucrats and immigration advocates had abetted mass illegal entry, and set out to block them. As attorney general, he used every lawful tool available to his office to fight the sanctuary-city movement, whereby local jurisdictions openly defy the federal government’s efforts to protect the public from illegal-alien criminals. Scofflaw cities and states across the country responded with a spate of lawsuits against Sessions; left-wing judges slapped the Justice Department with questionable nationwide injunctions to protect the sanctuary jurisdictions. Sessions sued right back. Sheriffs, the closest to the ground when it comes to public sentiment about law enforcement, understood what was at stake. “Jeff Sessions has probably been the most effective attorney general in the eyes of law enforcement in our nation’s history,” National Sheriffs’ Association executive director Jonathan Thompson told the Huffington Post in August 2018.

Christopher Carr A Famously Qualified ‘Victory’

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/11/famously-qualified-victory/

“In the aftermath of the downfall of the Soviet empire, it was said that the last refuge of Marxism were the universities’ sociology departments. The leftist messianic impulse soon revived and cultural Marxism has become entrenched in universities in the US, here and elsewhere. White middle class millennials have been infected. In the United States and elsewhere, we have an increased voting bloc of the supposedly educated who are oblivious to history and yet to be mugged by reality.”

Trump hailed the midterm results as a triumph, which perhaps better reflects his tendency to exaggerate than the fact of the matter. Yes, the GOP picked up Senate seats, but the loss of women and suburban voters, combined with the Democrats’ swing to the hard left, does not auger well.

After my misplaced forecast of a Romney win in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, I have studiously avoided political prognostications. However a couple of reflections seem appropriate in the aftermath of the 2018 mid- terms.

Greg Sheridan, along with a number of others, has credited President Donald Trump with a political victory. On the raw figures, compared with Bill Clinton in 1994, and Barack Obama in 2010 and 2014, the President’s party only suffered moderate losses in the House of Representatives, and made almost unprecedented gains in the Senate. Indeed, over the longer term, the swing against the Republicans in 2018 was below average.

Yet a note of caution is warranted. The Democrats of yesterday were not, as they are today, the party of an extreme left wing “resistance”. We may accuse Trump of verbal excesses and vulgarity, but much of the Democrat leadership seemed only too happy to foment harassment of their Republican opponents, and reluctant to condemn the violence of Antifa and other extremists groups and individuals who serve as the Left’s skirmishers and auxiliaries.

If the Democrats had emphasised civility and adhered to a centrist position, they would likely have made far more significant gains in the House, possibly even gained a majority in the Senate. Yes, on the raw figures, Trump did relatively well. But in terms of political cultur, we should be concerned that a very leftist Democrat Party was still able to capture a majority in the House.

A Mob Showed Up Outside Tucker Carlson’s House And Ordered Him To ‘Leave Town’

https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/07/protesters-tucker-carlson-house/

A left-wing mob showed up outside Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house Wednesday evening, posted pictures of his address online and demanded that he flee the city of Washington, D.C.

Carlson, a co-founder of The Daily Caller and host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was at the Fox News studio when the angry crowd showed up outside of his house…

Video the group, “Smash Racism DC,” posted to Twitter shows one of the mob’s ringleaders leading the crowd in chants of “racist scumbag, leave town!” and “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!”

Here are a few of the tweets and the video that Smash Racism DC posted to Twitter before their account was suspended:

Twitter Suspends ‘Smash Racism’ Account After Tucker Protest, But What About ‘Antifa Prof.’ Mike Isaacson? By Debra Heine

https://pjmedia.com/trending/twitter-suspends-smash-racism-account-after-tucker-protest-but-what-about-antifa-prof-mike-isaacson/

He tweeted: “Kill your local politicians.”

Twitter finally suspended the violent antifa group Smash Racism after it organized a mob to terrorize the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, forcing his wife, who was home alone at the time, to hide in a pantry until police arrived.

Oddly enough, a Washington, DC area Episcopal church apparently has no problem with violent antifa groups meeting in their church basement to organize their activities.

Smash Racism held three “From Resistance to Revolution” conferences at St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church in November and December of last year. For a house of God to be hosting these domestic terrorists, seems weirdly incongruous to say the least.

Meanwhile, former John Jay economics professor and (former?) Smash Racism co-founder Mike Isaacson (@VulgarEconomics) continues to have a Twitter account where he is allowed to threaten law enforcement and political figures on a regular basis.
Far Left Watch @FarLeftWatch
· Sep 25, 2018

Democrat Rashida Tlaib Dances with Palestinian Flag at Victory Party

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/07/democrat-rashida-tlaib-dances-with-palestinian-flag-at-victory-party/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+breitbart+%28Breitbart+News%29
Video of Democrat Rashida Tlaib dancing wearing the Palestinian flag at a victory party emerged Tuesday evening, after she won a largely uncontested race for the open seat in Michigan’s heavily Democratic 13th congressional district.

Tlaib is one of two Muslim women elected to Congress on Tuesday, along with Ilhan Omar, who replaced outgoing Rep. Keith Ellison in Minnesota’s 5th congressional district. Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress. Both Tlaib and Omar have extreme anti-Israel views. Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress.In the video, Tlaib delivered a victory speech in which she acknowledged her family watching from abroad in the Palestinian Authority-administered West Bank. She dedicated her victory, in part, to the Palestinian cause: “A lot of my strength comes from being Palestinian,” she said.

After Tlaib won her primary race in August, she published several anti-Israel tweets, and re-tweeted a fan who declared that Tlaib’s “first fight was for Palestine, always Palestine.”

Tlaib explicitly supports the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel and its replacement of a unitary Palestinian state. That position caused her to lose the endorsement of the far-left group J Street — which, while often adopting anti-Israel positions, nominally supports a two-state solution.

One other Palestinian-American was on the ballot on Tuesday: Ammar Campa-Najjar, the grandson of a Palestinian terrorist who was Yasser Arafat’s deputy and was involved in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, lost in California’s 50th congressional district.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Still the Smartest Guy in the Room By Joan Swirsky *****

https://canadafreepress.com/article/still-the-smartest-guy-in-the-room

Well, whaddaya know? In the midterm elections of November 6, 2018, the American people rewarded the president—for only the third time in almost a hundred years—with a net gain of three and possibly four Senate seats, lost half the House seats that his predecessor lost, and left the radical leftwing Democrats not rejoicing at their meager gains, but still chomping at the bit to bring down the president who has effectively destroyed everything they believed in, worked for, and thought they achieved over the past 75 years.

The Blue Wave that the leftist media has been predicting for a year now turned out to be a blue puddle, with even their most aggressive spokesperson, former House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, making nice and wanting to make deals with the man who sits in the Oval Office. And Republicans still control the Senate and can still boast that President Trump is solely responsible for:

Two rock-ribbed conservative justices on the Supreme Court (for the next 40 years!),
A booming economy,
Sky-high employment of women, blacks, Hispanics, and young people,
A significantly strengthened military,
Equitable foreign-trade deals,
And the beginning of The Wall, which promises to stop the rising tide of illegal aliens and sanctuary cities and the punishing price they cost hard-working Americans.

PLOTTING ANOTHER COUP

After President Trump’s annihilating defeat of Hillary Clinton in the November 2016 election—306 decisive Electoral votes to Hillary’s paltry 232—Americans witnessed an unprecedented reaction from what used to be called the loyal opposition. It was not the requisite graciousness of the disappointed loser. Nor was it the anticipated anger and frustration of those who knew their political philosophy and programs were about to be overturned.

Instead, when the new president was elected—and even before that, on the very day in June of 2015 that he announced his candidacy—the Grand Poobahs of D.C. who always considered themselves the smartest guys in the room by virtue of their educations, lofty positions, fancy credentials, grandiose senses of entitlement, and vaunted self-regard, got together and decided that:

They reviled the results of the election and the loss of the prestigious jobs they believed they’d maintain under a Democrat chief executive,
They feared that a Trump administration would discover the vast corruption of the previous Obama regime and act to prosecute the criminals involved,
They believed it was the job of these far-left socialists, communists, and jihadist sympathizers from Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, Obama’s Department of Justice, Obama’s Central Intelligence Agency, Obama’s National Security Council, et al, to destroy the Trump candidacy and, failing that, his presidency.
They resolved to put their brain trust together, their collective professional experiences, and do anything and everything in their power to depose or criminalize or impeach a duly elected President Trump.

And they fervently believed in their ability to actualize this plan because they had already successfully executed a coup d’√©tat only eight years before, ferreting Barack Obama—of dubious American citizenship and the paltriest of credentials—into the core of America’s body politic, concealing his past history, enlisting their reliable media whores to savage anyone who questioned his eligibility and even his very competence, and counting on their Hollywood stooges to use their vaseline camera trick to give the Obama persona a gorgeous glow.

The plot was hatched, and as Rudy Giuliani, one of the president’s lawyers, told TV host Sean Hannity in mid-August, ex-CIA director John Brennan was behind the entire bogus investigation into the alleged collusion of the Trump presidential campaign with Russian operatives.

The Resistance Factory House Judiciary’s top Democrat reportedly lays out impeachment strategies; search for evidence may follow. By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-resistance-factory-1541700256

Count Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) among those who seem to have learned nothing from Tuesday’s election results. In a series of conversations on an Acela train ride from New York to Washington, the ranking member of the House Judiciary committee reportedly discussed the aggressive use of congressional investigatory powers against both President Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Mr. Nadler, likely to be the new chairman of House Judiciary come January, seems not to have noticed that radicalism didn’t sell on Tuesday. Democrats gained a House majority by running impressive candidates who presented themselves to suburban voters as professional and moderate. As the Journal’s William McGurn has noted, one of the winning Democrats in a New Jersey swing district even positioned herself as an anti-tax candidate by pretending that the 2017 Trump tax cuts were actually tax hikes. In time we’ll know by their voting records whether the new suburban representatives really are moderates, but the strategy certainly worked on Tuesday.

Meanwhile the candidates who presented themselves as unapologetic leftists didn’t fare so well. The Journal’s Allysia Finley notes the gubernatorial campaign losses suffered by Andrew Gillum in Florida and Richard Cordray in Ohio, as well as the likely defeat of Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Ms. Finley adds:

In places where progressive candidates won, they tacked to the center. In Colorado, Rep. Jared Polis, who had backed “Medicare for all” legislation, modulated his politics by opposing state referendums that would raise taxes on high earners and limit fracking. During one debate, he described himself as a “convener in chief” who would work with both parties.

Sessions Out, Whitaker In — For Now, and Maybe for Good By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/matthew-whittaker-jeff-sessions-replacement-excellent-choice

/Matthew Whitaker is well credentialed and an excellent choice to assume the duties of attorney general.

Is Matthew Whitaker a placeholder who can manage Special Counsel Robert Mueller until President Trump decides on a permanent successor for ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions? It’s possible, but it’s also conceivable that Mr. Whitaker’s temporary gig as acting attorney general is an audition for the job. Feeling like he’s been burned once, and then saddled for the better part of two years with an AG he could no longer abide, the president may want a trial run before he settles on a “permanent” replacement. (I use scare-quotes because what, these days, is permanent?)

To repeat what I had occasion to say about a week ago, I am a Sessions fan, and I think he got a raw deal. That said, it was time for Trump and Sessions to part ways. The former AG should be proud that he performed admirably and was a very effective proponent of the president’s agenda. I continue to believe his recusal from the so-called Russia investigation was premature and overbroad, but there is no doubt that a recusal of some extent would have been necessary. The president is kidding himself if he thinks otherwise. And it was not Sessions but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — a Trump appointee — who decided to name a special counsel.

That is all water under the bridge at this point.

Matthew Whitaker joined the Trump Justice Department as Sessions’s chief of staff in October 2017. The date is relevant. The president has named him as acting attorney general under the Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (the relevant provisions are codified at Sections 3345 and 3346 of Title 5, U.S. Code). There has been some commentary suggesting that because Whitaker was in a job (chief of staff) that did not require Senate confirmation, he could not become the “acting officer” in a position (AG) that calls for Senate confirmation. Not so. The Vacancies Act enables the president to name an acting officer, who may serve as such for 210 days, as long as the person named has been working at the agency or department for at least 90 days in a fairly high-ranking position. Whitaker qualifies.

Whitaker has excellent credentials and influential backers. He served as Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief of staff until 2004, when President Bush appointed him United States attorney for the southern district of Iowa. To get the latter post, Whitaker certainly had to have the approval of Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), who even then was a senior member of the Judiciary Committee (which he now chairs). According to a New York Times profile of Whitaker, he was recommended to President Trump by the estimable Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief who has been critical to the president’s judicial appointments — perhaps the administration’s signal achievement. Whitaker is said to have very good chemistry with the president, and to have been an effective liaison between the Justice Department and the White House.

NOW WATCH: ‘Trump Supporters Fired Up For Midterms?’

Watch: 0:40
Trump Supporters Fired Up For Midterms?

I must say I am amused by the media pearl-clutching over the fact that Whitaker will presumably be assuming supervisory responsibility over the Mueller investigation.

Since Mueller came into the picture, that responsibility has been exercised, quite passively, by Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. He appointed Mueller on May 17, 2017, to take the reins of the Russia investigation that had been ongoing for several months. As I have detailed, Rosenstein has been laboring under blatant conflicts of interest.

To summarize, the special counsel has been scrutinizing the president’s firing of former FBI director James Comey in the obstruction aspect of his investigation. Rosenstein was a prominent participant in the firing and is thus an important witness. Rosenstein, moreover, signed off on the last FISA warrant application for surveillance against former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page, which is under investigation by Congress and DOJ’s inspector general. Rosenstein, using the Mueller investigation as part of his rationale, has stonewalled Congress’s demands for relevant information. The surveillance of Page is plainly germane to Mueller’s Russia investigation. Since Rosenstein’s actions are under scrutiny — and given that this is in addition to the just-described, patent conflict posed by his involvement in Comey’s firing — one would think Rosenstein would want to step aside rather than have his ethical sensibility questioned.

While the press remains remarkably indifferent to Rosenstein’s conflicts, it is all over what are said to be Whitaker’s — stemming from an opinion essay he wrote for CNN a couple of months before joining the Trump administration. It is being alleged that Whitaker contended that any probe of the president’s finances would be beyond the scope of Mueller’s jurisdiction; he is further accused of using President Trump’s derogatory phrase — “witch hunt” — to belittle Mueller’s investigation. That is an overwrought distortion of what Whitaker wrote.

The New York Times had asked President Trump if Mueller would be acting outside his mandate if he began investigating the Trump family finances. The president responded, “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.” The burden of Whitaker’s op-ed was to defend Trump’s statement, which — while curt and ambiguous — did not claim that Mueller would be in the wrong if his inquiry into Trump’s finances had some good-faith connection to Russia.

Whatever Trump may have meant, Whitaker was emphatic about what he found objectionable: the notion of an investigation unconnected to Russia — i.e., a fishing expedition into Trump’s finances without any articulable nexus to what Mueller was appointed to investigate, namely, Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

In part, Whitaker was countering the contentions posited by, well, your humble correspondent. I’ve maintained that Rosenstein’s order appointing Mueller set no real limits on the investigation. Having now reviewed Whitaker’s interpretation, I still respectfully disagree; but he nevertheless presented a forceful legal argument, based on a close reading of Rosenstein’s order, for the proposition that there are limits on the special counsel.

Whitaker, furthermore, did not say Mueller could not properly review Trump’s finances under any circumstances. He said that, to do so, Mueller would have to “return to Rod Rosenstein for additional authority.” That would, indeed, be the proper procedure (if we assume, as Whitaker does, that the order defines the parameters of Mueller’s jurisdiction).

Finally, Whitaker never said that Mueller’s investigation was a “witch hunt.” He said the investigation could become a witch hunt if Mueller were to investigate Trump’s finances in the absence of any connection to Russia and any formal broadening of the scope of his appointment by Rosenstein. That is manifestly true, a truth underscored by Rosenstein’s public insistence that Mueller is not, to borrow the deputy AG’s phrase, an “unguided missile.”

Concededly, I have raised concerns in the past about mixing punditry with prosecution; I’ve observed, for example, that I would be a poor choice to suggest as a putatively independent counsel in an investigation on which I had commented extensively, and about which I had expressed opinions, as a journalist. It is not that I doubt my capacity to be fair; it is that the investigation would lack the appearance of fairness and objectivity, no matter how fair I was. In the criminal-justice system, the appearance of propriety is nearly as important as the reality.

All that said, Whitaker has not commented extensively on the Russia investigation and the comments made in his op-ed should be uncontroversial. They do not question the worthiness of investigating Russia’s interference in the election, and they do not denigrate the Mueller investigation — they merely maintain that the investigation should stay within the bounds that Rosenstein has sought to assure the public it has respected.

Matthew Whitaker is well credentialed and appears to be an excellent choice to assume the duties of attorney general, at least temporarily (and perhaps permanently, though under the Vacancy Act, he could not be nominated to be AG while serving as acting AG). The removal of Rod Rosenstein as Mueller’s overseer is inevitable and overdue — which is not a condemnation of him, but a recognition that he should not be supervising an investigation in which his own actions are implicated. Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation appears to be at a ripe stage, and if Acting Attorney General Whitaker helps steer it to a prompt conclusion, that is all to the good.

Whitaker is being prejudged in some quarters as a Trump “loyalist.” That pejorative label is more a function of what the president has reportedly said that he’d like to have in an attorney general (and in other executive offices serving the president). It is not a function of anything Whitaker has actually done. Let’s see how he performs over the next few months. I’m betting he’ll do a fine job.

Andrew C. McCarthy — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. @AndrewCMcCarthy