RUTHFULLY YOURS

The appointment of Robert Mueller, James Comey’s BFF, as special counsel stinks to high heaven. Forget the bipartisan encomia to Mueller’s “ethics” and “professionalism” and “integrity” and all the other usual question-begging praise the elite shower on each other to justify their power and privilege. Such mutual admiration and reciprocal puffery is just one of the ways that DC is “Hollywood for ugly people,” given that both industries are in the business of selling sows’ ears as silk purses. We heard all the same praise about Comey, who has been exposed as self-righteous, conniving, and cowardly, his ethics trimmed to his careerism. He proves that all political appointees and “public servants” should be judged guilty until proven innocent.

And right now Mueller demands particular scrutiny and suspicion. Why should we ordinary citizens, who don’t know him from Adam, believe that he can set aside his friendship with Comey and be fair and objective? Especially after Comey confessed he leaked his memo about Trump’s comments because he “thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel,” and he is likely to be a witness? And mirabile visu, that special counsel just happens to be his close friend? And a Democrat, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, just happens to be the one making the appointment of a man under whom he served from 1990-93? And what about new information that Mueller was interviewed by Trump to replace Comey? Was the topic of why Comey was fired part of the interview, which could make him a witness in his own investigation?

Worst of all, this same DOJ, along with the FBI and maybe Mueller’s team, is still springing leaks that are poisoning the integrity of the nascent investigation. It seems to me that a man of such high integrity as Mueller would have put the investigation on hold until the leakers were rooted out, in order to insure the integrity of the investigation. But then, a man of integrity wouldn’t agree to head up an investigation that involves one of his closest friends, who has an axe to grind against the target of the investigation. Nor is Mueller’s past record of substituting his will for the law reassuring. In 2006 he raided the offices of Representative William Jefferson without getting permission from the legislative branch. He seized documents not pertinent to the investigation, and refused to return them when asked by the executive. As the Wall Street Journal writes, Mueller “let his prosecutorial willfulness interfere with proper constitutional and executive-branch procedure,” a bad habit he shares with Comey.

The Department of Justice has become an advocate for the establishment of mosques in America. It is as if there were some congressional affirmative action mandate. The DOJ’s own statistics reveal a sharp escalation in intervention efforts on behalf of Islamic complainants, mostly involving mosque disputes with local zoning authorities. Alarmingly, these interventions reveal a pattern of generous settlements that benefit mosques while bypassing municipal laws and disregarding legitimate neighborhood concerns.https://amgreatness.com/2017/06/16/department-justice-privileging-mosques/

During the Obama Presidency, DOJ lawyers ran roughshod over local officials, as long as the complaining party was a mosque. Trump’s Justice Department must reverse these tendencies.

The atmosphere of DOJ intimidation cannot be overstated. Negotiated settlements between the DOJ, local zoning authorities, and mosque officials take place against a backdrop of DOJ threatening long, prohibitively costly litigation. The drive for ever more concessions, and more cash, confronts communities whose small governments cannot compete with DOJ’s $28 billion budget and legions of lawyers. Importantly, DOJ treats these settlements as if they were precedents even though, by sidestepping the courts, the settlements bypass judicial precedents that could protect legitimate community interests.

In two recent cases, mosque applicants in Sterling Heights (Michigan) and Basking Ridge (New Jersey), received cash settlements because they were denied permits according to local zoning procedures. These settlements failed to protect vital neighborhood interests in traffic safety, parking limits, and livability concerns.

Just one example of neighborhood hardships that result from deferential permit agreements, the Dar al Farooq mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota is currently holding services for the entire month of Ramadan with overflow parking and lighted lots until 1:00 and 3:00 a.m.—in a residential neighborhood.

The Sterling Heights settlement is illustrative of abusive DOJ meddling.

The atmosphere of DOJ intimidation cannot be overstated. Negotiated settlements between the DOJ, local zoning authorities, and mosque officials take place against a backdrop of DOJ threatening long, prohibitively costly litigation.

The mosque had applied to build a 28,000 square foot facility on 4.35 acres of land. The building’s dome was to be 58 feet high and the minarets 66 feet high. The surrounding neighborhood has been settled by many Chaldean Christians who fled Iraq and Islamist oppression. An imposing Islamic structure was not met with enthusiasm to put it mildly. But federal law focuses on whether the decision-makers are biased. It demands that local government officials give all sides equal consideration. It does not require that neighborhood residents greet this kind of application with enthusiasm.

The proposed mosque for Sterling Heights, Michigan.

In this case, there were many legitimate concerns that the local planning commission investigated, concerns that contributed to the unanimous conclusion that the mosque was ineligible for the indicated property. Indeed, the major disputes arose because mosque representatives provided incomplete information and they were unwilling to address zoning concerns.

In every single week of the Trump presidency, the investigators and attorneys of FBI Director James Comey or, subsequently, of special counsel Robert Mueller, have leaked information that President Donald Trump was under investigation for either colluding with the Russians or obstructing justice—allegations so far without any substantiating evidence.https://amgreatness.com/2017/06/19/trumps-way-progressive-labyrinth/

In the case of Comey, we now know that his office or sympathetic third-parties leaked to the press false stories that Trump was under FBI investigation at precisely the time that the careerist Comey was privately reassuring the president himself that he was in fact not being investigated.
The appointment of Mueller was a concession to opposition demands that Trump appoint a Lawrence Walsh-type Special Prosecutor. The Comey-Mueller investigations and leaks occur simultaneously with House Intelligence member Adam Schiff’s passive-aggressive and often pompous announcements of evidence of Russian collusion—including raising the specter of a Grand Jury investigation—that are never followed by any evidence.

Since January 2017, the Congress ceased being a legislative body. It is now a Star-chamber court determined to decapitate the presidency.

Never in the history of the republic have there been so many legislative and political simultaneous efforts to 1) sabotage the Electoral College, 2) sue to overturn the presidential vote in key swing states, 3) boycott the Inauguration, 4) systematically block presidential appointments, 5) surveille, unmask, and leak classified or privileged information about the elected president, 6) nullify federal law at the state and local level, 7) sue to remove the president by invoking the Emoluments Clause, 8) declare Trump unfit under the 25th Amendments, 9) demand recusals from his top aides, 10) cherry-pick sympathetic judges to block presidential executive orders, 11) have a prior administration’s residual appointees subvert their successor, and 12) promise impending impeachment.

And that is only the political effort to remove the president.

Simultaneously, the media, Hollywood, popular culture, street theater, and the universities hand-in-glove seek to remove Trump from office through the dissemination of fake news as well as deep state leaks—coarsening the culture to such a degree that Trump is reduced to an impotent pariah.

In terms of losing state legislatures and governorships, the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidency, the Obama progressive project has all but ruined the Democratic Party. And with such catastrophic losses of political power, the left grows less introspective and only more venomous—as if invective can do what appeals to voters have not.

The hydra-headed Resistance issues both explicit and metaphorical threats of presidential assassination, descends to scatological and obscene smears, cheers on campus disruptions and street theater, and persists in constant harangues in the press that Trump is unfit to remain President.

Why the unhinged furor?

The Washington D.C. nomenklatura advanced forward last week with its slow-moving coup d’état against America’s constitutionally elected President.

But even after the federal bureaucracy’s further progress toward undoing the 2016 election, I confess to a faint hope that Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III — supposed embodiment of upper class, non-partisan, lawyerly virtue — might actually conduct a fair, focused and swift inquiry into the matter assigned him.

In the end, though, the sensible old lawyer’s voice in my head whispers that this hope is more pipedream than prediction of events.

Here’s the latest state of affairs, no doubt soon to be out of date:

After staffing up during the week preceding last with heavy Democrat contributing lawyers of dubious objectivity, last week Mr. Mueller appeared to abandon, or at least heavily downgrade, the alleged raison d’etre for his office — investigating the Russia collusion fantasy. Now, per the Washington Post — always eager to provide a stage for someone leaking ill about the President — Mr. Mueller will focus on whether the President “obstructed justice” and on the business dealings of the President’s close advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

So already, almost before his army of lawyers has swung into battle, the Special Counsel’s inquiry has metastasized from its original focus — sleuthing out whether President Trump or his campaign “colluded” with the Russian government during the election — into entirely new subjects.

Keep in mind the language of Mr. Mueller’s assignment, as articulated on May 17 by Rod Rosenstein: To investigate:

“any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from that investigation.”

The new subjects of Mueller’s inquiry are not only remote from that recent but apparently forgotten assignment, but they begin to sketch the outline of a lawyer who is stocking up on matters of inquiry for a long-haul investigation.

In sum, as each week passed following Mr. Mueller’s May 17 appointment, the man has behaved less like an independent counsel and more like the designated agent for America’s Trump-despising Washington-New York would-be rulers — like someone who knows he is charged with providing a colorable legal predicate for a long-ago decision by America’s elites to destroy the President and prevent him from serving out the term he was accorded by America’s electorate and Constitution.

As of, today, Monday June 19, 2017, here is where matters stand for the President of the United States:

Though constitutionally and decisively elected to office, President Trump must carry out his duties — that include sole responsibility for protecting the American homeland in a world where North Korea fires missiles every month and Islamic fanatics commit atrocities on a near daily basis — while a former FBI Director, unrestrained by budget, personnel, duration of authority, or substantive area of inquiry, deliberately harasses, hounds, and distracts him and his appointed officials while attempting to find something — after last week, apparently anything — that could be twisted into a warrant for the President’s impeachment and removal from office.

“Watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many.”

That’s a compelling verse – call it a proverb – from the New Testament. It’s a great admonition for all of us. It’s one the left will pay for not knowing.

During the early days of the Clinton impeachment, then-“journalist” George Stephanopoulos gave an insider threat to the world, clearly from the Clintons. He said that if Republicans continued their attempts against them, the earth would be scorched. If they went down, everyone else would, too.

Here is the exchange, from 1998.

Sam Donaldson: “Are you suggesting for a moment that what they’re beginning to say is that if you investigate this too much, we’ll put all your dirty linen right on the table? Every member of the Senate? Every member of the press corps?”

George Stephanopoulos: “Absolutely. The president said he would never resign, and I think some around him are willing to take everybody down with him.”

It is now safe to say the Democrats have followed that scorched earth promise, that they now fully embrace the Clinton bitterness and corruption. It’s beyond anything we have witnessed.

Take a look around. This absurd quest to dehumanize Trump, to form narrative after narrative fabricated on lies to try to destroy him, to destroy his ability to govern, to make him into a criminal, comes from the bitter wells of the Clintons. After all, he ended Hillary’s (and Bill’s) dream of regaining the Clintons’ glory. Make no mistake: the Clintons and their team are ravaging everything in a concerted effort to punish anything or anyone that took them down. Trump is the symbol, but anyone moderate, or right of center, is now the target. We, all of us on the right, are the target as well. Just like in Stephy’s quote.

Look at the poisoned fruit they have grown. Any celebrity that dared even hint to give Trump a chance was destroyed by the liberal Twitter-verse, having to grovel at the feet of the left. Multiple episodes of violence have erupted against non-leftist speakers on campus. Any attempt by any congressional Democrats to help Trump is seen as treason to the cause, provoking virtually all of their party members to ever angrier statements and over-the-top efforts to bring Trump down. Kathy Griffin feigns cutting off the head of Trump as a comedy act, and it took 24 whole hours (rather than minutes) to fire her. Violence from the left is condoned and encouraged, and no Democrat adult has come against it until today.