RUTHFULLY YOURS

NEW LONDON, Conn.—President Donald Trump advised graduates to “never give up” even when subjected to unfair attacks, in remarks at a commencement address Wednesday that came as he faces new questions over his conversations with fired FBI director James Comey.

“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media,” Mr. Trump said. “No politician in history has been treated more unfairly. You can’t let them get you down.”

The commencement address Wednesday at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy marked the president’s first public comments—he stayed off Twitter Wednesday morning—after Tuesday evening’s reports that he asked then-FBI Director Comey to end the agency’s investigation of Gen. Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser, during a private dinner in February, as Mr. Comey recorded in a memo that is now being shared with reporters after his abrupt firing last week.

“I hope you can let this go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo, which was described in detail by a person close to Mr. Comey.

The White House has denied the Comey account.

Mr. Trump has also faced fire over reports that he revealed sensitive intelligence during last week’s Oval Office meeting with the Russian foreign minister. CONTINUE AT SITE

MAY 17TH 2017

Here is what is on President Trump’s agenda today:

In the morning, President Trump will depart the White House for Joint Base Andrews en route to Groton, Connecticut.
The President will then give remarks at the United States Coast Guard Academy Commencement Ceremony.
In the afternoon, the President will depart Groton, Connecticut, for Washington, D.C., en route to the White House.

Media reveals classified information and that’s cool

After spending more than 24 hours going completely bonkers about the alleged content of a meeting between the White House and Russian officials, the media — ever obsessed with itself and its importance — chose to up the ante, insert itself into the story and release classified information to the world.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, President Trump, along with NSC Advisor H.R. McMaster, Deputy NSC Advisor Dina Powell and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, met with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, last week. “Someone” leaked out part of the discussion that concerned intelligence the U.S. had about an ISIS terror threat involving laptops and airplanes. The leaker went to the Washington Post and the Washington Post reported that Trump shared classified information with the Russians — and the media and left went wild. There was much concern.

We do not know what was said in the meeting and at least initially, we did not know where the intelligence came from or what exactly that intelligence was. The media and the left were shrieking like banshees about how sharing this information was a breach of classified information and how our allies would not share intelligence with us any longer because Trump can’t keep a secret. Impeachment was mentioned, but it’s always mentioned so that’s nothing new. Also of little concern: leaking classified information to the media.

All three of the U.S. officials at the meeting denied confidences were breached or that inappropriate information was shared with the Russians, and McMaster told the media Trump did not even know the origin of this intelligence — but that did not stop the spiral of hysteria.

And then all of a sudden…those concerns went away when the New York Times revealed that the country that shared that information with the U.S. is Israel.

The classified intelligence that President Trump disclosed in a meeting last week with Russian officials at the White House was provided by Israel, according to a current and a former American official familiar with how the United States obtained the information. The revelation adds a potential diplomatic complication to an episode that has renewed questions about how the White House handles sensitive intelligence.

Israel is one of the United States’ most important allies and runs one of the most active espionage networks in the Middle East. Mr. Trump’s boasting about some of Israel’s most sensitive information to the Russians could damage the relationship between the two countries and raises the possibility that the information could be passed to Iran, Russia’s close ally and Israel’s main threat in the region.

Israeli officials would not confirm that they were the source of the information that Mr. Trump shared, which was about an Islamic State plot. In a statement emailed to The New York Times, Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, reaffirmed that the two countries would maintain a close counterterrorism relationship.

The public went from knowing Trump told the Russians the U.S. has knowledge of a terror plot involving laptops and airplanes, something we already know since there was a very public ban against flying into the U.S. with carry-on laptops from certain countries, to knowing who provided this information to us, precisely the issue the media and the left was so concerned about.

The NYT writes:

It was not clear whether the president or the other Americans in the meeting were aware of the sensitivity of what was shared. Only afterward, when notes on the discussion were circulated among National Security Council officials, was the information flagged as too sensitive to be shared, even among many American officials, the officials said.

Should Mike Pence become president, the Left will surely lead us in a national chorus of “Whew! Back to normal.” Correct? After all, our friends in the Democratic party have been saying for many months that President Trump is not normal, that he is uniquely unfit for office, that his brand of mendaciousness, volatility, poor character, and immaturity have no precedent in the Oval Office, that he is a Nazi sympathizer and even a fascist, that he is an extremist who exists outside the bounds of ordinary political disagreement.

Mike Pence, on the other hand, is so normal that one of the things that the late-night comics mock him for is being too normal. If the Resistance or Trump’s own folly actually succeeds in separating Trump from his current office, then the Left will sing hosannas to the Pencian restoration of the agreed boundaries of disputation. The political temperature will recede from scalding to balmy. The volume dial will spin sharply in a counterclockwise direction. Hysterical shrieking will be replaced by reasoned conversational tones.

Right? Of course not.

If Trump leaves office prematurely for any reason, President Pence will immediately be denounced as far worse. In fact, it would happen before he even took office. In fact it’s already happening. That this is true is testament to the fundamentally unprincipled nature of the Left. Whatever looks like a winning strategy on Thursday is what matters, even if it nullifies everything you said you believed on Monday.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen did some preliminary construction work on what will become the new party line if it appears Pence is likely to replace Trump in office. In his absurd May 15 take — “Trump doesn’t embody what’s wrong with Washington. Pence does.” — Cohen blasts Pence for being a “bobblehead” who nods too much when standing near Trump at press conferences, for publicly stating things that Trump told him, and for having failed to quit being Trump’s running mate while Trump said rude things. In other words, Pence is worse than Trump for being in Trump’s proximity while Trump misbehaves. By that standard every hack and flack who went on TV to defend Bill Clinton in 1998 is worse than Clinton, including the person who blamed the true reports about his misconduct on the lies of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

On April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The president acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, its importance had been vastly overstated.

On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey publicly stated that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in using a private email server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The director acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, it was just a small percentage of the emails involved.

Case dismissed.

Could there be more striking parallels? A cynic might say that Obama had clearly signaled to the FBI and the Justice Department that he did not want Mrs. Clinton to be charged with a crime, and that, with this not-so-subtle pressure in the air, the president’s subordinates dropped the case — exactly what Obama wanted, relying precisely on Obama’s stated rationale.

Yet the media yawned.

Of course, they’re not yawning now. Now it is Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, sending Comey signals. So now, such signals are a major issue — not merely of obstruction of justice, but of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Trump hysteria seems to be a permanent condition, a combustive compound of media-Democrat derangement surrounding a president who keeps providing derangement material. Let’s try to keep our feet on the ground, but with a commitment to get the evidence and go wherever it takes us.

For now, we don’t have much evidence. Essentially, we’ve got single statement, mined by the New York Times from a memo that no one outside a tight circle inside the FBI has seen — indeed, that the Times has not seen. According to anonymous sources, the memo was written by then–FBI director Comey shortly after a private meeting with President Trump — only two of them in the room after Trump asked other officials to leave. This was on February 14, the day after National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigned over inaccurate statements he made to senior administration officials in recounting conversations he’d had with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

Trump is said to have told Comey, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Other than telling us that Comey replied, “I agree he is a good guy,” the Times provides no context of the conversation. Its report gives no indication of whether the memo provides such context.