RUTHFULLY YOURS

This was the start of the lead story on the Washington Post’s Christmas Eve front page:

The Department of Homeland Security has begun preparing for a series of raids that would target for deportation hundreds of families who have flocked to the United States since the start of last year, according to people familiar with the operation.

As I told the reporter, I’ll believe it when I see it. A few further thoughts:

Why now? The surge of Central Americans across the border — both adults with kids in tow (who are the subjects of this latest leak) and the “unaccompanied” “minors” who got so much coverage — subsided after the summer of 2014 because the administration bribe-threatened Mexico into doing a better job of policing its own southern border. But now there’s a renewed surge, presumably because Mexico’s zeal is waning and because Central Americans see that the U.S. isn’t deporting many of those who came earlier. Heck, even deportations of criminals are dropping.

Border Patrol statistics show the magnitude of this new surge. In the first two months of the current fiscal year (October and November), border apprehensions of unaccompanied minors were more than double the same period last year, and apprehensions of “family units” nearly triple. If the rate continues, the flow of minors will approach the 2014 peak, and the flow of families will exceed it.

In itself, the White House may not consider that a problem, given the administration’s implicit belief that these people have a right to come here. But there’s an election in about 10 months, and not many voters share the Obama crowd’s anti-borders views. That’s why my colleague Dan Cadman notes that “the plan is fundamentally a political exercise.” The Democrats will gather in Philadelphia in late July for Herself’s coronation, and it could prove awkward for her if a renewed surge of illegals across the border is still in the news. Herself’s silence in response to the news of the planned raids, contrasted with Sanders’s and O’Malley’s fulminations against them, suggests she’s in on the whole thing.

According to a bombshell Wall Street Journal article by Adam Entous and Danny Yadron, published online late Monday, the National Security Agency provided the White House with intercepted Israeli communications containing details of private discussions between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. lawmakers and American Jewish groups on the Iran nuclear deal. If true, this could be the biggest scandal of the Obama presidency.

The Journal article explains that President Obama decided to stop NSA collection against certain foreign leaders after the backlash against Edward Snowden’s disclosure that the NSA had eavesdropped on German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone and monitored communications of the heads of state of other close U.S. allies.

According to the Journal story, President Obama did not halt NSA spying against Netanyahu. This is not a surprise, given the president’s chilly relations with the Israeli leader and Israel’s aggressive spying against the United States. It’s also not a surprise that the Obama administration sought intelligence on Netanyahu’s efforts to undermine the nuclear deal. But it is stunning to learn that NSA sent the White House intelligence on private discussions with U.S. congressmen on a major policy dispute between the White House and Congress.

According to the Journal article, to avoid a paper trail that would show that they wanted the NSA to report on Netanyahu’s interactions with Congress, Obama officials decided to let the agency decide how much of this intelligence to provide and what to withhold. The article cited an unnamed U.S. official who explained, “We didn’t say, ‘Do it.’ We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’”

This suggests major misconduct by the NSA and the White House of a sort not seen since Watergate. First, intercepts of congressmen’s communications regarding a dispute between Congress and the White House should have been destroyed and never left the NSA building. The Journal article said a 2011 NSA directive requires direct communications between foreign intelligence targets and members of Congress to be destroyed, but gives the NSA director the authority to waive this requirement if he determines the communications contain “significant foreign intelligence.”

Netanyahu’s discussions with members of Congress on a policy dispute between Congress and the president do not qualify as foreign intelligence. Destroying this kind of information should not have been a close call for NSA. Congress should immediately ask NSA director Michael Rogers and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to verify the Journal story and explain why intercepts of private discussions of members of Congress were provided to the White House. If this did happen, both officials should resign.

Not again! This past Saturday, a Chicago police officer responding to a 911 call shot and killed Quintonio LeGrier, an allegedly mentally ill man who had been threatening his father with a baseball bat and, bat in hand, was approaching the officer. The officer’s bullets also killed Bette Jones, an innocent bystander. There were 1,126 fatal shootings by police this past year. Half were shootings of persons with mental illness. In Chicago, as elsewhere, families and friends of the deceased called for better police training, echoing a call frequently made by mental-health advocates. But by limiting the proposed reforms to calls for police training, the families and public are letting these mental-health advocates off the hook for their own culpability.

The mental-health system has essentially severed the tie between gaining public mental-health funds and using them to serve the most seriously ill. Police chief (ret.) Michael Biasotti, former president of the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police, explained the phenomenon to Congress in 2014:

We have two mental-health systems today, serving two mutually exclusive populations: Community programs serve those who seek and accept treatment. Those who refuse, or are too sick to seek treatment voluntarily, become a law-enforcement responsibility. . . . [M]ental-health officials seem unwilling to recognize or take responsibility for this second, more symptomatic group.

Ever since the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement, Americans have been bombarded with assertions that black men face a unique and dangerous threat — not from members of their own community but from the very law enforcement officers who are sworn to “serve and protect” them. Hashtags such as #DrivingWhileBlack and #WalkingWhileBlack have perpetuated a narrative that black Americans risk being gunned down by police simply because of the color of their skin. Using individual anecdotes of police misconduct and the now-discredited “hands up, don’t shoot” rallying cry, Black Lives Matter has built a case that American police are out of control.

The conservative response is clear: While no one believes the police are perfect, on the whole they tend to use force appropriately to protect their own lives and the lives of others. Moreover, racial disparities in the use of force are largely explained by racial disparities in criminality. Different American demographics commit crimes at different rates, so it stands to reason that those who commit more crimes will confront the police more often. Yes, there are rogue officers — and those rogue officers should be prosecuted — but the police are still a force for good in our society.