RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/philip-haney-whistleblower-and-happy-warrior-frontpagemagcom/

Joe Martin is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel, a graduate of the National Defense University, and served with 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and as a Military Congressional Fellow to the United States Senate Majority Leader. His operational experience includes deployments to Afghanistan, Qatar, Kuwait, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela.

We met at a conference here in Washington DC several years ago, and I knew him from his reputation based on the national reporting after he had been a whistleblower to Congress about malfeasance in the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama Administration. He struck an appearance like Dr. Emmett Brown and his delivery was not unlike Ben Stein’s economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. His appearance, delivery, dry sense of humor and gaiety were disarming, making it deceptively easy to underestimate him. ­­­

An etymologist and self-proclaimed nerd, Phil was relentless in his pursuit of those who were infesting our country and attacking our way of life. Among the enemies this quirky bug hunter pursued were Osama Bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation and their offspring – the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) as well as the subversive operatives in the Obama administration… many of whom are still working for the Department of Homeland Security.

 The leaders of those [Muslim Brotherhood] organizations were deliberately and intentionally brought into the [Obama] Administration to help promote and create both domestic and foreign policy and this status continues to this very day.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawyers-cast-a-stone-at-william-barr-11582477289?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Whatever the outcome of a case, then-Attorney General Robert H. Jackson observed in 1940, “the government . . . has really won if justice has been done.” It’s worth keeping that truth in mind as we consider the dispute over Attorney General William Barr and Roger Stone.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson last week sentenced Mr. Stone to 40 months in prison—a term within the range Mr. Barr had suggested when he overruled prosecutors who recommended a term of seven to nine years. The attorney general’s move generated accusations that he was doing President Trump’s bidding by showing leniency to Mr. Trump’s friend and former political adviser. It even prompted a petition, signed by more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees, demanding Mr. Barr’s resignation.

Before we address these attacks directly, we think it useful to consider a few data points in Mr. Barr’s recent tenure. Notwithstanding his own skepticism about aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, he allowed that probe to run its course. Mr. Barr supported the decision not to prosecute Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and frequent critic of Mr. Trump, despite overwhelming evidence that Mr. McCabe not only lied when he denied leaking information about an investigation but also berated others for the leak to deflect suspicion from himself.

Mr. Barr has said publicly that he believes Mr. Stone’s prosecution was warranted, and that, given his conviction, so is a prison sentence. And the attorney general has pointedly criticized the president—rightly, in our view—for commenting publicly about cases pending in court and before the Justice Department. That is not the behavior of someone doing the president’s bidding.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/fixing-the-fbi-and-cia

Like most of what ails us today, the seeds of the current crisis in republican governance — the severance of Washington’s omnipotent law enforcement and intelligence apparatus from democratic accountability — were sown in the 1960s and ’70s. That was when we began to erase the salient distinction between law and politics. Under the guise of “national security,” we insulated governmental actions and policies from the reckoning of our citizens, whose safety and self-determination hang in the balance.

Fast forward to 2020. The FBI, in its bungling partisanship, very likely swung the 2016 presidential election away from its preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton. The sprawling “community” of intelligence agencies (led by the FBI and CIA) covertly used dubious foreign sources to justify monitoring an American political campaign and, later, a U.S. presidential administration. To do so, it invoked daunting foreign-counterintelligence surveillance powers, based on a fever dream that its bête noire, Donald Trump, was an agent of the Kremlin. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently chastised the FBI for feeding it false and unverified information — the secret court apparently calculating that this extraordinary public expression of wrath will divert attention from its own shoddy performance in approving highly intrusive spy warrants based on sensational, blatantly uncorroborated rumor and innuendo.

As usual, Washington is reacting with high-decibel inertia. In an era of hyperpartisanship, Democrats defend the politicization of the law enforcement and intelligence that resulted in the Trump-Russia investigation. Republicans, meanwhile, wail about being victimized — even as the victim-in-chief ham-handedly dabbles in his own mini-version of the abuse: the Ukraine kerfuffle, in which the president sought, however futilely, to leverage the investigative and foreign affairs powers of the executive branch for domestic political advantage.