RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/408425-trump-should-insist-on-declassification-of-mueller-documents

It has been 16 months this week since Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller III as a special counsel to “investigate any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” as described in Mr. Rosenstein’s May 17, 2017, letter appointing the special counsel.

But that appointment letter ignored the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) special counsel regulations set forth in 28 CFR SEC. 600 et seq., and the standards and regulations published by the DOJ in the “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” (DIOG) that require a predicate criminal offense before an investigation can be commenced.

Under the department’s guidelines, the agency is permitted “to conduct investigations to detect, obtain information about, and prevent and protect against federal crimes,” requiring some reasonable basis for commencing an investigation after having first identified “a particular crime or threatened crime.” Yet, the authorizing letter appointing the special counsel contained no “particular crime or threatened crime” by the president or his campaign, and none has been identified since, despite issuance of a later memo on Aug. 2, 2017, purporting to amplify the earlier appointment.

The president has now retracted his recent request for declassification and release of DOJ/FBI material that would shed defining light on the supposed crime (or, perhaps, lack thereof). It would be important in addition to have full, unredacted disclosure of the August 2017 Rosenstein memo to Mueller elaborating on his mission about which there should be no secrecy. But the DOJ and, now, the United Kingdom appear determined to continue to resist disclosure.

https://www.steynonline.com/8881/the-turning-point

I mentioned with Tucker the other night the condescension of Gentleman Jim Acosta, who airily presumes that, if you’re a woman, any woman, you believe the accuser and assume this Kavanaugh guy is a serial gang-rapist. That’s how it goes: Identity politics makes moron cultures of formerly sophisticated societies. So it was inevitable that when a picture from yesterday’s hearing popped up, of the judge with three females sitting behind him, the wankerati of Twitter immediately assumed that they were just three regular all-American women staring in disgust at the rape beast of Bethesda.

In fact, they were Kavanaugh’s wife, mother, and one of their dearest friends. And the reason they look like that is because they’re crushed and broken by what Dianne Feinstein, Blumenthal, Whitehouse and the other whatever-it-takes Democrats chose to do to them. It is a testament to the thoroughness with which these malign carbuncles on the body politic set about their task that, in a certain sense, one could forgive the Twitter mob its carelessness: Mrs Kavanaugh was all but unrecognizable from the woman who’d sat behind her husband just a fortnight ago. She was, indeed, a different person, and she will be for the rest of her life.

Dianne Feinstein did that to her, consciously. The Ranking Member is in a tricky position back home. She’s on the California ballot this November, but, having been outflanked on her left, she is not the official Democrat nominee. So she cannot afford to be insufficiently “progressive”, and thus concluded it was necessary to, in Kavanaugh’s words, “destroy” his family.

Nothing personal, just business. Roger L Simon writes today with cold fury:

A real rape had taken place but it wasn’t the one everyone was talking about. It was simultaneously a rape of Judge Kavanaugh, his family, and the American people themselves. The collateral damage was Dr. Ford, her friends, and her family. And the perpetrator was the Democratic Party, principally their Judiciary Committee members, their ranking member, and the minority leader.

The GOP base, and Trump supporters in particular, weren’t in the mood for the usual milquetoast pantywaist routine from Republicans. That Deputy County Attorney from Arizona seems an affable lady, but the effect of her performance, punctuated by the usual bollocks from showboating Dems about the “courage” it takes to “speak your truth” (a horrible relativist phrase), was to ensure that for the first half of yesterday’s charade the ritual sacrifice of Brett Kavanaugh was a done deal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-silverglate-on-kavanaugh-1538170255

From “Kavanaugh: A Legal Assessment—With Some Personal Reflections” by Harvey Silverglate,

When does “adolescence” occur? I’ve represented a lot of kids in trouble. And I can tell you that in the modern era, adolescence begins around age 12 and lasts through college graduation (or, for kids who don’t attend college, the age at which kids would graduate).

This is not just my opinion: Society has juvenile courts for transgressions committed in adolescence; the legal system does not want to give mere kids a permanent criminal record. Even at a time when too many juveniles are treated as adults, it is more often than not a widely accepted guiding principle that kids are given a pass by being treated and taught more than punished.

Among many of my friends in Cambridge and Boston, my view of [Brett] Kavanaugh is considered wrongheaded—if not reckless, even dangerous. So, I’ll make matters worse by saying that so much of the case being made against Kavanaugh is cynical, if not outright dishonest. It has nothing to do with his qualifications to be a Supreme Court justice. Nor is it reflective of how Kavanaugh’s most ardent critics really feel about the extent to which adults should be punished later in life for their adolescent transgressions. They would not want their own children, nor themselves for that matter, treated in the way they are campaigning for Kavanaugh to be treated. This is a classic example of the hypocrisy of the current socio-political moment.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/republicans-should-not-have-delayed-the-kavanaugh-vote/

“Maybe Republicans instructed Mitchell to refrain from asking Ford hard questions; or maybe, her experience notwithstanding, Mitchell took it on herself to conduct a gentle, confrontation-free examination. Either way, in the one and only chance they will ever have to question Ford, Republicans failed to highlight the deep flaws in her account.

Mitchell invited Ford to wax scientific about how “the etiology of PTSD is multi-factorial,” and to school Mitchell on the topography of Montgomery County. But if you were listening for basic questions about the alleged sexual assault, you listened in vain. This isn’t hard. A lawyer could have been completely respectful of Dr. Ford’s emotional distress and still have asked elementary questions:
Isn’t it a fact that you don’t know where or when this purported assault happened?
Isn’t it a fact that you can’t tell us how you got there?
You just know the house was several miles from your home, but it is a fact, is it not, that you can’t tell us how you got home?
You’ve told us that you were terrified running out of the house after the attack, but you can’t tell us who rescued you and drove you away?
You remember 36 years ago that you had exactly one beer at the party, you remember hearing your alleged attackers go downstairs, you remember exactly the route you took to get out of the house, yet you can’t tell us what happened after you left the house?

So, you’re sure the party happened, but you can’t say when it happened, you can’t say where it happened, you don’t know how you got there, you don’t know how you got home, and every person you’ve identified as a witness says that they have no memory of the party and that they never saw Brett Kavanaugh act the way you’ve described, isn’t that right?”