RUTHFULLY YOURS

Passions ran high in Philadelphia after the British departed in June 1778, ending their months-long occupation. Bands of patriots tarred-and-feathered Tories who refused to sign “loyalty oaths.” A few months later, two elderly Quakers accused of treason were tried before Pennsylvania Chief Justice Thomas McKean. Though neither had taken up arms against the rebels, one was said to have encouraged giving the British information on rebel plans and helped guard city gates during the occupation. The other admitted that he had encouraged support for the crown, though he had also helped families of American prisoners gain access to them.

Their respective juries found both defendants guilty, and McKean sentenced the old men to death by hanging. Dozens of petitions for clemency were sent to Pennsylvania’s executive council, and just days before their scheduled executions McKean sought pardons for both. “It was vintage McKean,” says biographer David McKean in “Suspected of Independence.” Strongly committed to the rule of law “as the most effective check on ever-changing popular attitudes,” McKean believed that its application “needed to be guided by compassion.” In this case, the pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears.

Though the two Quakers were the only defendants in his court ever to be convicted of treason and put to death, McKean acquired a reputation, endorsed by some historians, as a “hanging judge.” David McKean (a direct descendant of his subject) says that the chief justice generally “showed leniency to the Loyalists after the British vacated Philadelphia.” Even before the British arrived, he set free 29 Quakers who had been detained as suspected Tory sympathizers.

McKean served 22 years as Pennsylvania’s chief justice, and in the republic’s early years, says the author, his court may have been “more powerful” than the nascent U.S. Supreme Court. Some years later, a multi-volume work about the body of law that McKean developed became “a touchstone for courts throughout the country,” including the Supreme Court. “Perhaps no one other than Chief Justice John Marshall did more than McKean to establish an independent judiciary,” Mr. McKean asserts.

The author of three previous books on American political history, David McKean was an official at the State Department until earlier this year, when he was confirmed as U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg. “I never really gave my ancestor a lot of thought,” he writes, until he began to notice fleeting references to him in histories of the period. Unfortunately, Thomas McKean did not keep a diary and was not a prolific letter writer, so events generally loom larger than his intimate perception of them in this brisk biography. CONTINUE AT SITE

When is a payment for hostages not a ransom? When the Obama Administration says so.

That’s how the State Department has tried to spin a $1.7 billion settlement the U.S. reached with Tehran in January, when the nuclear deal was finalized and Tehran released five American hostages, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. The Administration insists the payment merely settled a separate dispute related to the aborted sale of military equipment to the Shah of Iran in 1979.

New reporting by the Journal’s Jay Solomon and Carol Lee blows apart this story. On the day the U.S. hostages came home from Iran, an unmarked cargo plane landed in Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport with cash amounting to $400 million of euros, Swiss francs and other currencies. U.S. law forbids direct dollar transactions with Iran, and the $400 million in cash wasn’t disclosed to Congress. Justice Department officials objected but were overruled.

One reason the Administration is keen to deny that the cash was ransom is because it had already paid a high price by freeing seven Iranians charged or convicted of U.S. crimes and dropping extradition requests for 14 others. But the Iranians weren’t satisfied.

As the Journal reports, “U.S. officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.” Cash is an excellent way to pay terrorists, fund Hezbollah in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, and buy dual-use, nuclear-related hardware—which Iran continues to do, according to reports from Germany’s intelligence services.

The Administration is pretending this money is being used for strictly kosher purposes. “The revenue that’s flowing to Iran is being used to support its currency, to provide moneys to the departments and agencies, build up its infrastructure,” CIA Director John Brennan said last week. Has he heard the word fungible?

The Iranians are less shy about their hostage taking. Iran’s negotiating team for the settlement payment “was largely staffed by members of its domestic spy service,” the Journal reports. Iranian defense officials told the press the cash was “a ransom payment.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Another example of Hillary Clinton’s chicanery…and one can only ask…where is the outrage? rsk

Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Debacle: Arming Jihadists in Libya . . . and Syria Looking ahead to the next installment of e-mails from WikiLeaks By Andrew C. McCarthy

As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya — indeed, that ISIS is ISIS — thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian “rebels” — including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS — just as, at Mrs. Clinton’s urging, our government had armed Libyan “rebels” (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton’s favor. Now the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton’s key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist “rebels,” the Syrian “rebels” who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

The Daily Wire and other outlets are reporting on Assange’s comments, published by Democracy Now. Clearly, we should not take Assange’s word for what is to be gleaned from the hacked records, which he says include some 17,000 e-mails “about Libya alone.” Let’s see if he has what he says he has. But it is worth setting the stage, because what is known is outrageous and has not been given nearly enough attention — largely because Beltway Republicans were complicit in the Obama-Clinton policy of allying with Islamists, and thus have shown no interest in probing the inevitably disastrous fallout.

As I have been pointing out for years, for example, we have never gotten to the bottom of why the State Department, under Mrs. Clinton’s direction, had an installation in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.