RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/18/intelligence-community-has-made

Nations require intelligence to see their way through the dark alleys of international relations. For that reason, and above all in the modern era, they build up intelligence services to maintain up-to-the-moment awareness of initiatives and tendencies in states that can bear on their interests.

Ultimately, however, the intelligence of the head of state must marry the intelligence provided by his lieutenants in order to act prudently in the world. But act he must, with or without intelligence. The measure of prudence will be far more difficult to attain without reliable intelligence. And the magnitude of the difficulty increases exponentially when the nation so afflicted is a giant among nations, the most powerful of all.

The effect of the soft coup attempt by U.S. intelligence officers has been to leave President Trump blinded in the world.

Why should anyone be surprised when the president displays lack of confidence in agencies that have demonstrated the most vigorous and calculated attempts to destroy him and thwart his attempts to govern? The entire possibility of success for the soft coup attempt depends upon blinding him. The deliberate timing of the announcement of the latest Mueller indictments served only to confirm the propriety of President Trump’s diffidence.

But where does that leave the president, and more importantly, the United States? Here we begin to unpack the measure of Trump’s judgment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/bad_day_for_president_trump_but_worse_day_for_his_critics.html

Let’s be honest, it was not a good press conference for President Trump. As my friend Barry Casselman said, it “was simply and inexcusably a blunder.”

I was not expecting President Trump to yell at Putin on the world stage. However, he could have expressed himself differently.

It was not the end of the world as we know it. The sky and the stars are not falling. Finally, let’s give this meeting a few months and see what comes out of it.

At the same time, his critics always end up throwing President Trump a lifesaver, as Liz Peek wrote:

Trump’s critics responded with customary vitriol and excess, attacking the president in such extreme terms that his supporters only dig in even deeper.

Democrats and never-Trumpers cannot help themselves; over the past two years, the public has grown weary of the non-stop, five-alarm fires, and they have tuned out.

Trump’s critics fail the most basic of tests. You can’t cry wolf over and over again without making a fool out of yourself.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/17/the-collusion-of-lawyers-is-finally-collapsing/

Colluding, like canoodling, is all the rage. Robert Mueller, like a dog chasing his tail, has been trying for more than a year to find evidence that President Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russians to cook the 2016 election, which fate, providence, fortune and destiny decreed properly belonged to Hillary Clinton.

So far as anyone beyond his circle of thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers know, Mr. Mueller has not come up with anything more than a few indictments of second- and third-tier aides, helpers, hangers-on, and lawyers that a nice girl would not take home to meet the folks.

Now The New York Times reports that the FBI colluded with the Australian ambassador to the United States, of all unlikely people, to find something to lend credence to the Russian collusion. Maybe, the FBI calculated, collusion could be catching. Mr. Mueller has demonstrated that he is not afraid to venture into the tall weeds in pursuit of Trump villainy (if any).

“Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016,” The New York Times reported this week in a dispatch both exhaustive and exhausting, “the FBI dispatched a

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/17/tell-us-again-why-we-need-a

We needed a special counsel for this?

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Friday announced federal charges against another gang of Russian operatives who allegedly stole some emails from some Democrats in 2016 and posted them on the internet. The Rooskie conspirators will never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom; no American was involved in the criminal conduct; there is no evidence that the online chicanery influenced a single vote in the 2016 presidential election.

As the media and politicians predictably flipped out—“ZOMG, America was attacked!”—most journalists overlooked a key point: Rosenstein transferred the case from the special counsel’s office back to the Justice Department’s National Security Division. So even though Special Counsel Robert Mueller signed the 11-count indictment, the Justice Department will take it from here.

Let’s break this down, shall we? Rosenstein appoints Mueller. Mueller conducts an investigation (that has already been completed by Congress) into a dozen Russian intelligence officers who allegedly breached the computer systems of a few political organizations. Mueller signs the indictments. Rosenstein—not Mueller—announces the charges and fields questions from the media (Mueller is again nowhere in sight.) Rosenstein transfers responsibility for the prosecution from the special counsel back to the DOJ.

Oh, and by the way, none of it has to do with Mueller’s original marching orders, which are to find “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/anti-defamation-league-anti-trump-anti-semitism/How a Democratic operative led the venerable hate-monitoring group off a partisan cliff.

The moment President Trump concluded his announcement of the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Anti-Defamation League fired off a tweet. In it, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tore into Kavanaugh as lacking the “independence and fair treatment for all that is necessary to merit a seat on the nation’s highest court.”

The tweet teased a press release that obliquely demanded that the Senate reject the nomination. The timing made it clear that there would be no questions or deliberative process before the venerable group, which for more than century has played the role of both defender of the Jewish community against anti-Semitism and monitor of hate crimes, made up its mind about Kavanaugh. Considering that the ADL was quicker to publicly oppose the nomination than were some members of the Democratic caucus who were certain “no” votes on the appointment, the group’s haste showed that it had planned to oppose anyone nominated by Trump.

It is no surprise that many liberal groups — including some that are all-in on what some on the left are treating as an apocalyptic fight for the future of the High Court — are reflexively opposed to anyone Trump may nominate. But the ADL’s presence in the ranks of those who are supplying the organizational muscle for the resistance to Trump might come as a surprise to those who haven’t been paying much attention to the group in recent years. Though it spent its first century of existence being careful to avoid getting labeled as a partisan outfit, in the three years since the ADL’s longtime national director Abe Foxman retired, Greenblatt has steadily pushed the group farther to the left and, in so doing, more or less destroyed its reputation as being above politics. After the ADL has repeatedly involved itself in partisan controversies, it is impossible to pretend that Greenblatt’s vision of the group isn’t fundamentally that of a Democratic-party auxiliary that is increasingly overshadowing and marginalizing its still-vital role as the nation’s guardian against anti-Semitism.