RUTHFULLY YOURS

Australian reporters assigned to cover the United States pack their leanings — Left ones, of course — with their socks when they jet off to relay the action in Washington. Either that or they are bone lazy. There is a ripper scandal unfolding on Capitol Hill but explaining it in full has been too much trouble

Any investment of faith in the Australian media’s reporting of events in Washington will not produce a dividend, as must be obvious after more than 12 months of monkey-see/monkey-cut-and-paste dispatches from our less-than-intrepid foreign correspondents. This is perhaps understandable, given the prevailing Left slant of all local newsrooms, especially the ABC and Fairfax. When their journalists leave for stints Stateside they pack their prejudices along with their socks. Having departed Australia imbued with their media colleagues’ prevailing view that Donald Trump is a scoundrel who must surely be impeached, they naturally turn for story ideas, if not enlightenment, to like-minded American outlets. Hence are Australians served served endless “scoops”about Russian chicanery, the First Lady’s alleged emotional estrangement from her husband and what are purported to be his white-supremacist sympathies.

How derelict is the Australian media in covering the US? Just ask yourself how much you have heard or read about, to name but two scandals, the Obama administration’s bugging of troublesome reporters and its weaponisation of the Internal Revenue Service against political opponents. More recently the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s hacked campaign emails always seem to mention the theft without detailing what was stolen. References to “spirit cooking” and the rigging of the primaries against Bernie Sanders don’t fit the narrative of the world’s smartest, most decent, honest and upright woman having been foiled in her ambitions by Russian perfidy don’t fit the narrative, so they get scant attention, if any attention at all.

Fortunately, unlike the bad old days, the internet makes it possible to keep tabs on developments from a distance and circumvent the media’s gatekeepers. Thus, when fallen-silent Fairfax Media correspondent Paul McGeough reports that Trump’s election unleashed a wave of horrific hate crimes, you can use Google to check the veracity of his story’s headline, “Make America hate again: how Donald Trump’s victory has emboldened bigotry “. Were you to cross-reference the litany of alleged assaults against this site, which tracks bogus “hate crimes”, you’ll find all but one or two incidents have been refuted by police. What you won’t find on the web or anywhere else is an Age, SMH or Canberra Times renunciation of the original reporting — an omission that brings me to the point I’d like to make about the current situation in the US, as understood by an interested layman.

The only thing the bureaucratic resistance hates more than President Trump is the disclosure of their own salaries. It’s a classic case of the bureaucracy protecting the bureaucracy, underscoring the resistance faced by the new administration.

Recently, Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (pictured) for all federal employee names, titles, agencies, salaries, and bonus information. We’ve captured and posted online this data for the past 11 years. For the first time, we found missing information throughout the federal payroll disclosures. Here’s a sample of what we discovered from the FY2017 records:

254,839 federal salaries were redacted in the federal civil service payroll (just 3,416 salaries were redacted in FY2016).
68 federal departments redacted salaries. Even small agencies like the National Transportation Services Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation redacted millions of dollars in salaries.
$20 billion in estimated payroll now lacks transparency.
A 7,360 percent increase in opacity hides one out of every five federal salaries.

Who’s the bureaucrat in charge? Not a Trump appointee – the president doesn’t even have a current nominee at OPM. So, the buck stops with new acting Director Kathleen McGettigan, a 25-year staffer who assumed the position because she was the next in line, not because the White House appointed her.

Ever watch one of those games in which it looks like the road team is inadvertently doing everything it can to give the game away but the home team is too inept to capitalize?

Welcome to the “Trump-Russia” investigation and the pro-Trump media’s coverage of the latest “stunning” revelation: a text in which two top FBI counterintelligence officials discuss the fact that the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

This has much of the conservative media crowing: The text, commentators exclaim, shows that Obama lied four months earlier when he claimed — hilariously, to be sure — that he never interfered in law-enforcement matters.

Uh, guys, counterintelligence is not law enforcement. If Obama demanded an intelligence briefing, that indicates he was doing what he was supposed to be doing as president.

Your play here is not that Obama is a liar. It is that the president is supposed to “interfere” in intelligence investigations. That makes the Trump-Russia obstruction narrative patently absurd.

If I sound a bit snarky, please cut me some slack. Since a time well before Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, I have been harping on the critical distinction between counterintelligence investigations and criminal investigations. It is often missed, even by lawyers if they are unacquainted with national-security law. You can’t blame people for being confused: Both kinds of inquiries are called “investigations,” just as apples and oranges are both “fruits,” but they are very different things.

Criminal investigations are about prosecuting people who violate the penal law. Political officials are generally supposed to stay out of them because we are a rule-of-law society — we want individual cases to be decided strictly by the law, not by political considerations.

There is not, nor should there be, complete independence between politics and this law-enforcement mission: Law enforcement is an executive political responsibility; the president is accountable for it; he sets the government’s law-enforcement priorities; prosecutors and investigators exercise the president’s power, not their own; and the president has undeniable constitutional authority to wade into investigations — even to the point of pardoning law-breakers. Still, by and large, the president should not interfere in criminal cases. If the president does interfere, he should do so transparently: Issue a pardon or order the investigation closed, and take the political heat for it; don’t stage-manage a farce to make it look like your crony is being exonerated by a real investigation when everyone knows you will not permit charges to be filed (see, e.g., the Clinton emails case).