RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/shouting-and-spitting-lefty-protesters-hound-fla-ag-pam-bondi-out-of-tampa-movie-theater/

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi had to be escorted out of a Tampa theater screening of the Mister Rogers documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” by police Friday night due to screaming protesters who hounded her throughout the building.

Enraged at Bondi over her recent actions on health care policy and her stance on immigration, the activists created what the Fla. AG’s spokesman called a “volatile scene,” getting into Bondi’s face, blocking her exit, and spitting on her.

Timothy Heberlein of Organize Florida took the video of Bondi leaving the theater flanked by law enforcement, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

“What would Mister Rogers think about you and your legacy in Florida? Taking away health insurance from people with pre-existing conditions, Pam Bondi!” Maria José Chapa, a labor organizer, screeches at Bondi in the video. “Shame on you!

“You’re a horrible person!” another protester bellows.

Bondi told the Times that the protest conflicted with Fred Rogers’ message of peace, love, and tolerance. “We were in a movie about anti-bullying and practicing peace and love and tolerance and accepting of people for their differences,” Bondi said. “That’s what Mister Rogers is all about. We all believe in free speech, but there’s a big difference there.”

The organizers didn’t plan to confront Florida’s top law enforcement official Friday night, Heberlein told the Times in an interview. But when one of them spotted Bondi in the ticket line before the film, he said they knew they had to say something.

According to Chapa, one of the organizers confronted Bondi before the movie over her February decision to join in a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — a move seen by many progressives as a threat to people with pre-existing conditions covered under the law.

“[Another protester] approached her first and she was trying to engage with her and ask her difficult questions, and she felt uncomfortable answering the questions,” Chapa told the Times. “And I guess she felt threatened because she called the police.”

The Tampa Police Department confirmed that they got a call from Florida Highway Patrol asking for help escorting Bondi out of the Tampa Theatre.

The issues surrounding Hillary Clinton’s emails just won’t go away, and the recently released DoJ inspector general’s report shows why.

Daily Caller:

According to the recently released inspector general report, on September 28 and 29, 2016 the New York office of the FBI immediately reported to the Washington headquarters its discovery of, first, 141,000 and then 350,000 emails on the laptop of Anthony Weiner – also known as “Carlos Danger,” a now-convicted sex offender. Mr. Weiner is the husband of Hillary Clinton’s inseparable aide Huma Abedin.

Now we know by October 4, the New York office had found 700,000 emails. The New York agents had seen and reported to FBI leadership they had seen email headers, all domain names, Mrs. Clinton’s initials on one sensitive but not classified document, and the missing BlackBerry backups.

The New York agents described it as the “entire file” of all Hillary Clinton emails from 2006 until 2016, including the BlackBerry messages that Comey himself had referred to as “the golden emails.”

What did the FBI do with this treasure trove of hundreds of thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton and her lawyers never turned over to the bureau?

Nothing – at least nothing to obtain evidence.

There was a flurry of activity at Headquarters. Strzok-Page texts show that Strzok, McCabe and Priestap discussed the Weiner laptop among themselves shortly after the “bomb” dropped in the video conference that day. In fact, Priestap and Strzok were waiting outside McCabe’s office to discuss it while McCabe was with Comey. There were also two calls between Comey and McCabe that evening.

Does anyone really think they were not having their own “oh s—” moment?

The FBI case agent in New York sure had one.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/facing_humiliation_mueller_backs_away_from_prosecution_of_russian_entities.html

The Mueller special counsel investigation purportedly was instigated to discover possible illicit Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election but now is backing away from the only indictments aimed at Russian entities, leaving only alleged process crimes (such as General Flynn’s alleged false statement to the FBI) and alleged crimes that occurred long before the Trump candidacy (such as Paul Manafort’s Ukrainian connection).

Devlin Barrett writes in the Washington Post:

In a pair of court filings Friday, the special counsel added four assistant U.S. attorneys to the case against Russian entities and people accused of running an online influence operation targeting American voters.

People familiar with the staffing decision said the new prosecutors are not joining Mueller’s team, but rather are being added to the case so that they could someday take responsibility for it when the special counsel ceases operation. The case those prosecutors are joining could drag on for years because the indictment charges a number of Russians who will probably never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom. Russia does not extradite its citizens.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/alexis-de-tocqueville-on-presidential-scandals/
We need a republican remedy, not a bureaucratic one, to the disease of executive-branch abuses of power.

In the aftermath of Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s report on FBI misconduct during highly sensitive investigations of Hillary Clinton’s emails, we might turn to an unlikely source for wisdom: Alexis de Tocqueville.

In the midst of any contemporary agitation, it’s always useful to turn to Tocqueville. And he can offer plenty of resources for us to think about our contemporary scandal-ridden Washington, its breaches of the rule of law, and its accompanying investigations. Rumors of wrongdoing and federal inquests are nothing new. They usually find presidents at one point or another during their tenure in office: Watergate, Iran-Contra, Whitewater, Lewinsky, Valerie Plame, and now the accusations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The Obama administration largely escaped, though it may not have been for lack of evidence on certain matters. But to classify properly the power of scandal and investigation in our time requires thinking about how a modern democracy will hold itself accountable to the sovereignty of the people. We should labor for a republican remedy to the disease of executive-branch abuses of power. The bureaucratic remedy we have instead sought has only made us sicker.

Special Prosecutor Tocqueville

Near the end of Democracy in America, Tocqueville addressed the issue in a chapter entitled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.” Passages in this chapter are prescient in their description of what we now call the administrative state. Tocqueville fears that a tutelary “protective power,” one that “is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentile,” will come to rule democracies. This power, strangely, is exercised under the shadow of the sovereignty of the people, to guide and keep them free. Such consolidated rule will concede to the people a popular vote at regular intervals knowing that it, ultimately, holds the only authentic authority.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/aclu-abandons-free-speech-embraces-progressive-advocacy/The group has transformed from defender of constitutional principles to advocate for progressive causes.

An internal memorandum confirms it: The American Civil Liberties Union is on the brink. The ACLU memo, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, deals with the question of how the group should balance “competing values” when choosing whether to defend free-speech cases in court. “Speech that denigrates [marginalized] groups,” the memo reads, “can inflict serious harms.” Accordingly, “the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values” constitutes a reason not to defend it. This from a group that proudly touts its 1978 decision to stand up for the First Amendment rights of a group of neo-Nazis in Skokie, Ill. If the Skokie case demonstrated the ACLU’s “unwavering commitment to principle,” what does this memo evince?

Founded under radical auspices, the American Union Against Militarism became the National Civil Liberties Bureau and then the ACLU under socialist Roger Baldwin. The name changes prefigured its transformation from a left-wing political agitator to a principled defender of constitutional rights. Over the next three decades, as the ACLU defended the notion of the public square, litigated against loyalty oaths, and helped the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, it continued to entrench itself in the political mainstream.

The backbone of the ACLU is its legal advocacy. But under the leadership of executive director Anthony Romero, that litigation wing has been increasingly buttressed by a political-lobbying outfit that exists to raise awareness — and revenue. Romero has broadened the scope of the ACLU beyond issues of speech, militarism, and racial segregation. Now, the ACLU proudly touts its efforts on “reproductive freedom,” “economic justice,” and stopping those who “use religion to discriminate.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/fbi-doj-bias-only-president-trump-can-address/

The president runs the executive branch, after all.

I confess to being more weary than dizzy from the Dr. Gowdy–and–Mr. Trey routine. Just three weeks ago, Representative Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee, assured us that everything was peachy with the FBI — no way, no how did the bureau “spy” on the Trump campaign when it deployed an “informant” to pry information from Trump-campaign officials. As Mollie Hemingway pointed out at the time, Gowdy had not seen relevant documents the FBI and Justice Department have been withholding from Congress — in fact, his spokeswoman said he did not even know what documents and records have been subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee (on which Gowdy also sits).

This week, Gowdy did a 180: back on the warpath, slamming the politically biased Feebs over “prejudging” the outcomes of the Clinton-emails and Trump-Russia investigations and delivering a chest-beating vow that the House would “use its full arsenal of constitutional weapons to get compliance” with its subpoenas — a threat that includes holding recalcitrant FBI and DOJ officials in contempt.

Whatever.

If I seem frustrated by Representative Gowdy, it is the frustration of an admirer. He is singular among lawmakers in his ability to ask piercing questions and drive home important points. But often there is little follow-through after a hearing’s highlight reel, and some of the scintillating rhetoric is, well, extravagant. The House is most certainly not going to use its “full arsenal of constitutional weapons” to pressure stonewalling agencies.