RUTHFULLY YOURS

A 2016 text message between two FBI officials who worked on both the Clinton email investigation and the Russia inquiry says that President Obama “wants to know everything we are doing.”

It’s not clear from the September 2, 2016 text message between then-Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page whether it was a general comment about Mr. Obama’s oversight of the FBI or a description of his interest in a particular matter.

And it doesn’t automatically mean Mr. Obama was up to no good. The FBI and the rest of the Justice Department work for the President, although this fact can be easy to forget while consuming much of contemporary media coverage. But hands-on management by Mr. Obama could explain a lot about both the Clinton email investigation and the Obama administration’s electronic surveillance of a Trump associate.

Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page were conducting an extramarital affair, which created a dangerous vulnerability to blackmail given that they worked on counterintelligence matters. So they were not exactly model employees. Further, their texts showing extreme bias against the President and his voters are part of a highly disturbing record of electronic communications. When presented with content from their text messages, Special Counsel Robert Mueller dismissed Mr. Strzok from his team conducting the Russia probe.

Chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) and his colleagues on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs had to learn about the texts in a news account and have lately been prying them out of Justice.

This week Mr. Johnson’s majority staff has released a new tranche of text messages and reports on what they’ve found:

Although sometimes cryptic and disjointed due to their nature, these text messages raise several questions about the FBI and its investigation of classified information on Secretary Clinton’s private email server. Strzok and Page discussed serving to “protect the country from the menace” of Trump “enablers,” and the possibility of an “insurance policy” against the “risk” of a Trump presidency. The two discussed then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch knowing that Secretary Clinton would not face charges—before the FBI had interviewed Secretary Clinton and before her announcement that she would accept Director Comey’s prosecution decision. They wrote about drafting talking points for then-Director Comey because President Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.” Strzok and Page also exchanged views about the investigation on possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign—calling it “unfinished business” and “an investigation leading to impeachment,” drawing parallels to Watergate, and expressing Strzok’s “gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”

It is the entrance of President Obama into the Strzok-Page drama that raises the most interesting questions. Both the decision to abandon the normal Justice process to exonerate Hillary Clinton and the decision to seek warrants to surveil the political opposition certainly don’t look like calls that get made by middle management. Of course many Americans would hope that such decisions are never made at all. But given their extremely unusual character they would almost certainly require sign-off from a very senior official.

Again, there is very little context for the comment about President Obama wanting to “know everything” about the FBI. But it does perhaps suggest an answer as to why, for example, former FBI Director James Comey would assume a power he did not hold in deciding that Justice prosecutors would not charge Mrs. Clinton for her mishandling of classified information.

When explaining all the perfectly good reasons for firing Mr. Comey last May, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote about this incident and about Mr. Comey’s bizarre public statements regarding Mrs. Clinton’s conduct:

In response to skeptical questions at a congressional hearing, the Director defended his remarks by saying that his “goal was to say what is true. What did we do, what did we find, what do we think about it.” But the goal of a federal criminal investigation is not to announce our thoughts at a press conference. The goal is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to justify a federal criminal prosecution, then allow a federal prosecutor who exercises authority delegated by the Attorney General to make a prosecutorial decision, and then – if prosecution is warranted – let the judge and jury determine the facts.

WASHINGTON — The day before what would have been another shutdown, Republicans and Democrats struck a 2-year, nearly $400 billion budget deal that upon passage will segue into Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) promised DACA debate.

The deal removes sequestration budget caps for two years, increases defense spending and also boosts funding for domestic programs that were priorities for Democrats, such as opioid addiction programs. It also raises the debt ceiling until 2019.

It was unclear if the Senate deal will get enough support when it goes to the House.

“The compromise we’ve reached will ensure that, for the first time in years, our armed forces will have more of the resources they need to keep America safe. It will help us serve the veterans who have bravely served us. And it will ensure funding for important efforts such as disaster relief, infrastructure, and building on our work to fight opioid abuse and drug addiction,” McConnell said on the Senate floor this afternoon.

“This bill is the product of extensive negotiations among Congressional leaders and the White House. No one would suggest it is perfect,” he acknowledged. “But we worked hard to find common ground and stay focused on serving the American people… and the agreement will clear the way for new investment in our nation’s infrastructure — a bipartisan priority shared by the president and lawmakers in both parties.”

McConnell noted that after passage, the Appropriations committees “will have six weeks to negotiate detailed appropriations and deliver full funding for the remainder of fiscal year 2018.”

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he and McConnell “worked well together for the good of the American people.”

“We had serious disagreements, but instead of just going to our own separate corners, we met in the middle and came together with an agreement that is very good for the American people and recognizes needs that both sides of the aisle proffered,” Schumer said on the floor. “…After months of fiscal brinkmanship, this budget deal is the first real sprout of bipartisanship. And it should break the long cycle of spending crises that have snarled this Congress and hampered our middle class.”

This time last week, there was growing tumult in Washington over the memo produced by House Intelligence Committee Republicans alleging “FISA abuse” in the Trump-Russia investigation. There were dire warnings that the release of the GOP memo would endanger national security, that doing so would be “extraordinarily reckless” without proper FBI and Justice Department review, and that the FBI had “grave concerns” about “material omissions of fact” that would “fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

The GOP memo survived a starkly partisan process in the Intelligence Committee. Republicans voted unanimously to make it public, while Democrats voted unanimously against making it public. It was released last Friday with President Trump’s approval.

Now, another memo is in the pipeline, this one produced by the committee’s Democratic minority, and things are much quieter.

First, in a sharp contrast to last week, Republicans joined Democrats to vote unanimously to release the Democratic memo. Second, there haven’t been high-profile warnings about endangering national security. And third, there haven’t been alerts that the memo has critical omissions.

All that raises eyebrows among some Republicans on Capitol Hill who have read the Democratic memo. They say it contains much more classified information than the Republican memo did. The GOP paper was written so that it had a minimum of classified information in it, they explain, and indeed, after inspecting it, the FBI asked for just one small change.

Tick, tick, tick… we’re getting closer and closer to the “What did the president know and when did he know it?” moment in the biggest political scandal in American history. What looks like a sitting president authorizing the use of the vast spy apparatus of the federal government on the opposing party candidate for president would, if proven, be far bigger than Watergate – a mere burglary intended to spy on the opposition. Pay attention because you may want to tell your children or grandchildren what it was like watching this all unfold in 2018.

Up until the present moment, Barack Obama has been missing in all the discussions of surveillance misbehavior. And most curiously, Obama has been almost invisible, staying quiet, and not using his expensive Washington, DC mansion (shared with Valeire Jarrett) as a base for leading the opposition to President Trump, as many of us expected him to do. He is the only president I can remember who didn’t get out of DC when his term in office expired, yet he has been as invisible as if he were Truman retired to Independence or Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg. He hasn’t even spoken out about the opposition to his presidential monument planned for public park land in Chicago, My optimistic guess is that he realizes his peril and is dummying up.

In a move calculated to infuriate the Democrats, the latest batch of text messages between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page was leaked to Fox News first, and there are some striking revelations. Officially embargoed until 6 AM Eastern Time today, FNC was ready with the first item to reach the nation, followed minutes later by an AP dispatch, which headlined that the lovebirds admired James Comey. The Washington Post and other outlets saw fit to go with the innocuous emphasis. No kidding!

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should not be fired. He is a distinguished public servant with a bipartisan reputation for fairness. But there is a real question whether he should be recused from participating in any investigation by the special counsel of alleged obstruction of justice by the president.

Five facts are indisputable. First, Rosenstein is currently supervising Robert Mueller, who he appointed to be special counsel to investigate the Russia matter and all ancillary issues. Second, these ancillary issues include any possible obstruction of justice growing out of the Russia investigation. Third, President Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey may be an important building block in any possible obstruction case against the president. Fourth, Rosenstein played a central role in that firing, having written the memorandum justifying the president’s action. Fifth, Rosenstein would be an important — perhaps the most important — witness in any investigation of the reasons behind the firing.

The question is whether a lawyer should both supervise an investigation and be an important witness in that very investigation. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself because he might have been a witness or subject of the Russia investigation. Rosenstein might be a more central witness in any obstruction of justice investigation by the prosecutor who he is supervising.

As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president — much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either prior political office or military service. As unintended proof of his accomplishments, Trump’s many liberal opponents have gone from initially declaring him an incompetent to warning that he has become effective — insanely so — in overturning the Obama progressive agenda.

Never Trump Republicans acknowledge that Trump has realized much of what they once only dreamed of — from tax reform and deregulation to a government about-face on climate change, the ending of the Obamacare individual mandate, and expansion of energy production.

Trump so far has not enacted the Never Trump nightmare agenda. The U.S. is not leaving NATO. It is not colluding with Vladimir Putin, but maintaining sanctions against Russia and arming Ukrainians. It is not starting a tariff war with China. The administration is not appointing either liberals or incompetents to the federal courts.

A politicized FBI, DOJ, and IRS was Obama’s legacy, not Trump’s doing, as some of the Never Trump circle predicted. Indeed, the Never Trump movement is now mostly calcified, as even some of its formerly staunch adherents concede. It was done in by the Trump record and the monotony of having to redefine a once-welcomed conservative agenda as suddenly unpalatable due to Trump’s crude fingerprints on it.

On the short side, Trump has still not started to build his much-promised border wall, to insist on free but far fairer trade with Asia and Europe, or to enact an infrastructure-rebuilding program. Nonetheless, Trump’s multitude of critics is unable to argue that his record is shoddy and must instead insist that his list of achievements is due mostly to the Republican Congress. Or they claim he is beholden to the legacy of the Obama administration. Or they insist that credit belongs with his own impressive economic and national-security cabinet-level appointments. Or that whatever good came of Trump’s first year is nullified by Trump’s persistent personal odiousness.

At the conclusion of Trump’s first year, the stock market and small-business confidence are at record highs, and consumer confidence has not been higher in 17 years. Trump’s loud campaign promises to lure back capital and industry to the heartland no longer look quixotic, given new tax and deregulatory incentives and far cheaper energy costs than in most of Europe and Japan.