RUTHFULLY YOURS

Politicians and media outlets have forfeited any semblance of trustworthiness in their manic efforts to bring down President Trump. Consider, for example, how Mrs Clinton’s supporters demanded the FBI chief be fired only to immediately reverse themselves when news of his dismissal broke.

Much of the response to President Trump’s sacking of James B. Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has been patently hypocritical and partisan. This is not hard to demonstrate. More challenging, and perhaps much more important, is to understand the wider context of the latest outburst of Trump Derangement Syndrome. What might be the real reasons, the ideological circumstances, which explain the determination of the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, bureaucratic executives, CEOs, Hollywood activists, educators, the professoriate and so on – the whole Left Power Elite, in other words – to damage and defame the Trump presidency at every turn.

The charge of hypocrisy almost goes without saying. Ever since Comey informed the Senate Judiciary Committee, on October 28, that the FBI was re-opening its investigation of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information during her time as US secretary of state (2009-13), the anti-Trump forces having been baying for Comey’s blood. Their indignation, given the announcement came just 11 days before Election Day, is understandable.

Not even the fact that, on November 6, two days before the election, he once again closed the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure at the Department of State, could he assuage their outrage. On May 3 this year, in front of Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI Director claimed to feel “” at idea that he could have played any role in effecting the outcome of the election. No mainstream journalist, no Hollywood activist, no Democratic Party spokesman is on record respecting James Comey’s insistence he did right thing: “Lordy, has this been painful. I’ve gotten all kinds of rocks thrown at me and this has been hard, but I think I’ve done the right thing at every turn.”

Certainly Clinton has never forgiven Comey. As recently as two weeks ago she was still blaming Comey’s October 28, 2016, letter to Congress – along with “Russian WikiLeaks” and, of course, misogyny – for her electoral defeat. Perhaps the pretence of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), once considered something of an outlier in the Democratic Party but these days no more unbalanced or outrageous than her colleagues, encapsulates up the situation best. President Trump’s dismissal of Comely cannot be supported because it does not meet the “smell test”, and yet were Hillary Clinton the occupant of the Oval Office, Waters would now be supporting Comey’s sacking: “If she had won the White House, I believe that given what he did to her, and what he tried to do, she should have fired him.”

The partisanship of the media against President Trump is obvious to anyone who is not, well, hyper-partisan against Donald J. Trump. For the mainstream media – in not only America but also the UK and Australia – the White House dismissal of FBI Chief Comey smacks of President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up and, more specifically, the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973, in which special prosecutor Archibald Cox was sacked and, nine months later, Richard M. Nixon departed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by helicopter in disgrace. This, surely, is to confuse adolescent fantasy with political commentary. The sacking of James Comey, as a number of wags wryly observed, constitutes a cover-up in search of a crime. The Democratic Party’s “tin foil hat” conspiracy that President Trump happens to be an agent of Putin’sRussiaisonlypuerile but, once and for all, allows the Republicans to clean the slate on the so-called McCarthy-era witch-hunts of the 1950s. The moral high ground occupied by American-style liberals, at any rate on the question of guilt-by-association, is over.

Progressives have been lamenting the erosion of “democratic norms” in the Trump era, but they’d have more credibility if they didn’t trample constitutional norms in their own rush to run President Trump out of town.

Start with Democratic Senator Mark Warner’s assertion on Fox News Sunday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should play no role in vetting the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“I think it’s inappropriate that the attorney general, who was supposed to recuse himself for anything dealing with the Russian investigation, and clearly the Russian investigation is tied into who the next FBI director is going to be because the President fired [FBI director James] Comey because of his ties to the Russian investigation,” Mr. Warner said Sunday.

Fox’s Chris Wallace : “You don’t believe he [Mr. Sessions] could be part of this?”

Senator Warner: “I don’t believe he should be part of this review process if he can have a true recusal.”

Mr. Wallace didn’t follow-up, so we will. Mr. Sessions has recused himself from the Russia probe, but the FBI director reports to the Attorney General on hundreds of other matters beyond that one investigation. The AG has not recused himself from those matters. Mr. Warner seems to be saying that Mr. Sessions’s narrow recusal disqualifies him from supervising the FBI director at all.

The long knives are out. The ultimate doomsday scenario for a constitutional republic in peacetime—calls for impeachment of the president—has now been augmented by a growing chorus of voices demanding a far less dramatic but nonetheless profoundly serious step: appointment of a special prosecutor. Even for this less drastic move, the calls are way off base. At a minimum, the suggestion is premature.

The developing narrative, trumpeted on the weekend talk shows, is that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein must appoint a special prosecutor to restore his long-established reputation for integrity and professionalism. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the entire matter.

The basic complaint is that the newly appointed second-in-command at the Justice Department lost public confidence by crafting a three-page memorandum to the attorney general that severely criticized then-FBI Director James Comey, whom President Trump quickly fired. At least one senator has already mocked Mr. Rosenstein’s May 9 memorandum as “laughable.” They are wrong.

Let’s see what the Rosenstein memorandum actually says. It is titled “Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI.” Mr. Rosenstein rightly praises the bureau as “our nation’s premier investigative agency.” Mr. Rosenstein singles out Mr. Comey for high praise as “an articulate and persuasive speaker about leadership and the immutable principles of the Department of Justice.” The memorandum goes on to praise the FBI chief for his long and distinguished public service.

Mr. Rosenstein then turns to the director’s profound failures during his stewardship of the FBI. Above all, the new deputy attorney general states: “I cannot defend the Director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton’s emails.” In this Mr. Rosenstein echoes the vehement complaints by Democrats during the 2016 campaign, and indeed comments only last week by Mrs. Clinton herself. Even Republicans had raised an arched eyebrow at what the director did and when he chose to do it. The deputy attorney general goes on to express befuddlement that Mr. Comey still refuses “to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken.”

The memorandum then identifies the fatal offense of any FBI leader—the usurpation of the authority of the Justice Department itself. In a power grab, Mr. Comey had announced the ultimate prosecutorial decision, namely that Mrs. Clinton would not be prosecuted. The FBI director had no authority to do that. That was not all. Mr. Comey, the memo went on, “compounded the error” by holding a press conference releasing “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation.” This was all way outside the foul lines of Justice Department professionalism.

Succinctly, but with devastating effectiveness, the Rosenstein memorandum demonstrates Mr. Comey’s egregious violations of long-settled Justice Department practice and policy. Mr. Rosenstein draws from the director’s testimony before Congress and his unprecedented letter to Congress days before the election. He addresses Mr. Comey’s argument that had he failed to insert himself once again into the presidential campaign—as voting was already under way in many states—it would have constituted “concealment.”

Balderdash, the deputy attorney general concludes, albeit in more polite language. Prosecutors, to say nothing of FBI directors, are not to set out a confidence-shattering bill of particulars with respect to any potential defendant’s conduct, and certainly not a presidential candidate in the heat of a national campaign.

Finally, the Rosenstein memorandum sets forth paragraph after paragraph recounting the scathing criticism of the director’s woefully timed election interference. The deputy attorney general demonstrates that his own conclusions are shared by a wide range of respected former officials of the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations. One example: President Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, is quoted as condemning Mr. Comey for having “chosen personally to restrike the balance between transparency and fairness, departing from the department’s traditions.” CONTINUE AT SITE