RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his latest jet-setting travels, this time to Canada, President Obama warned of ‘authoritarianism’ taking hold, in what his media ally, CNN, helpfully revealed was a veiled attack on President Trump. Politics for Obama, doesn’t seem to stop at the water’s edge. In his frustrated ex-presidency, it appears he really is determined to be The Backseat Driver in Chief, and is about as useful.

Obama said that everyday people who felt left behind by government and a changing world could find authoritarians alluring. He said people who felt at a loss with the democratic process could “try anything,” but that liberal values would win out over time.
“I am convinced that the future does not belong to strongmen,” Obama said.

He can take a look in the mirror on that one.

Obama’s sudden, newfound claim to be a champion of liberty rings hollow, given that he spent most of his presidency issuing executive orders instead of working democratically with Congress to enact actual laws. He prefered to follow the Hugo Chavez model and rule by decree, justifying it with ‘I won.’ His Obamacare ‘legacy’ came about by strongarming his own party base with thuggish Chicago-style tactics and garnered not a single Republican vote, rendering it a house of cards with the inevitable reaction. Like Chavez, he also politicized the state and made it a one-party operation now known as the swamp. He targeted political dissidents through the good offices of the Internal Revenue Service and spied on reporters and world leaders. And the damage he did to homeland security, the military, and intelligence services, pretty well assured that the U.S. had neither borders nor secrets, given his administration’s hiring of the likes of Ed Snowden, Bradley Manning, Reality Winner, and come to think of it, Hillary Clinton with her illegal, unsecured private server. All of these Obama hires were leftists who used their state offices to advance their politics, not safeguard the state — and on his watch all of them got away with it.

So spare us when he puts his claims in as a champion of democracy with newfound great concerns about authoritarianism. He never cared about that when he was in power.

Obama gave a laundry list of all the beliefs and acts he had, all of which drove U.S. voters to elect President Trump.

He said low-civic engagement and a lack of belief in the average person’s ability to affect change in government weaken democratic institutions and are responsible for the advance of “reactionary” politicians.

As if such ‘lack of belief’ is baseless for people whose coal-industry jobs and industry were something he vowed to destroy and did a good deal of damage to. Any talk of ‘average persons’ from his storied jet-set bubble come off as pathetic, too — both out of touch and dripping of contempt — and voters know it.

Obama called on people, in the face of uncertainty, to stand by some of the very post-World War II economic and political institutions Trump has repeatedly called into question.

Notice that he doesn’t seem to think anything is wrong with these institutions — unelected eurotrash bureaucrats calling the shots in the United Nations, at the World Bank, in the European Union, at the World Court and other international institutions, ruling over peoples’ lives living high on the hog, often tax-free, with zero accountability. He just defends them for the sake of defending them, because they share his left-elitist views. It’s all about the rice bowl, it’s all about the Chicago Way writ large.

Representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the now-controversial chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is a bit different from what Washington expects in its politicians.

He grew up in the agricultural cornucopia of the Central Valley of California — fruits, vegetables, beef, dairy products, and fibers — the concrete expression of a myriad of hard-working ethnic groups. Their diverse ancestors fled poverty and occasional horrors in Armenia, Basque Country, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, the Punjab, Southeast Asia, and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl.

Central to this mix of immigrants, farmers, and ranchers is a valley culture of pragmatism, bluntness, and tenacity.

Of all these groups, none are more unabashedly patriotic and outspoken than Portuguese-immigrant dairy farmers, most from the islands of the Azores.

I live in rural Fresno County at the juncture of three congressional districts. All three are currently represented by Portuguese-Americans from farming families and from both parties: Nunes (22nd district); my own representative, David Valadao (R., 21st district); and Representative Jim Costa (D., 16th district). All three keep getting re-elected for their accessibility, informality, and commitment to the traditional values of their districts.

Nunes became a controversial public figure nationally when he revealed that the surveillance of foreign governments by American intelligence agencies may have resulted in the inappropriate monitoring of members of the Trump transition team — and perhaps some private citizens, too — and the unmasking of their identities.

What followed this disclosure could have mirror-imaged the script of director Frank Capra’s classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

It all started when Nunes said he had received unsolicited information of wrongdoing from one or more whistleblowers. Unfortunately for Nunes, he approached complaints of improper surveillance in a Central Valley sort of way (but a most un-Washington manner).

I visited Montpelier last fall in the company of a Professor of History and I was dismayed that the entire tour was devoted to his ownership of slaves and virtually nothing to his contribution to our enduring democracy …rsk

“The effect is a bit like dismissing the Magna Carta because it catered to distasteful 13th-century English barons. But Madison is, in many ways, the least understood founder. In his work in the Continental Congress and on the Constitution, he served as philosopher, negotiator, deal-maker. After being thoroughly upset by how his ideas were altered, he remained a passionate advocate of the Constitution. He wrote much of it, along with the Bill of Rights. He nudged and argued and lobbied. He gave in, rebelled, waged war, celebrated democracy and abhorred it. He was, in short, this nation’s first brilliant politician. And he is remembered, surely, not because of the slaves he owned but because of the mechanisms he helped establish that ultimately led to their slow and pained liberation. But we, like Madison, are creatures of our time, so that idea might have to wait.”

If you stand on an upper-level patio of James Madison’s finely restored home at his Virginia plantation, Montpelier, and look westward, you see a sweep of open lawn leading to fields and the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance; one of Madison’s visitors noted that the setting sun’s rays were cast into the home with great effect.
If, in contrast, you turn toward the mansion’s “South Yard,” you see something that, for 150 years or so, had all but disappeared into shadow, leaving traces only in an old map and in archaeological relics: modest buildings, now reconstructed, in which once dwelled some of the more than 100 slaves who made Montpelier lovely and profitable for three generations of Madisons.
These quarters reflect a jarring fact, once sidelined but now made central: Many architects of the world’s most enduring representative government—the first dedicated to universal liberty—also held vast numbers of slaves. In recent years, that fact has led to exhibitions at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Now Madison’s Montpelier (mont-PEEL-yer) offers an exhibition that begins in the home’s basement and extends into the imagined interiors of these out-buildings: “The Mere Distinction of Colour.”

Madison (1751-1836), who became the nation’s fourth president, was aware that something was awry. In the early 1780s, we learn, Madison believed one of his slaves was “thoroughly tainted” by exposure to free blacks in Philadelphia, but Madison affirmed that he would not punish him for “coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, & worthy the pursuit, of every human being.” That tension would not lessen over time; nor would Madison’s irresolute hope to wash away this “original sin.”

In this, Madison was, unfortunately, a man of his time. This 5,300-square-foot exhibition—created under the oversight of Christian Cotz , Montepelier’s director of education, with designs by Proun Design and Northern Light Productions—begins with reminders of slavery’s centrality. In a panel showing American presidents we are asked to push a button to see which presidents owned slaves. Thirteen of the first 18 light up. George Washington, we are told, owned 318 slaves. Zachary Taylor was “the last president to enslave people while in office.” Ulysses S. Grant, who freed his only slave in 1859, was the last president to have ever owned any.

The Senate Intelligence Committee released James Comey’s prepared testimony a day early on Wednesday, and it looks like a test of whether Washington can apprehend reality except as another Watergate. Perhaps the defrocked FBI director has a bombshell still to drop. But far from documenting an abuse of power by President Trump, his prepared statement reveals Mr. Comey’s misunderstanding of law enforcement in a democracy.

Mr. Comey’s seven-page narrative recounts his nine encounters with the President-elect and then President, including an appearance at Trump Tower, a one-on-one White House dinner and phone calls. He describes how he briefed Mr. Trump on the Russia counterintelligence investigation and what he calls multiple attempts to “create some sort of patronage relationship.”

But at worst Mr. Comey’s account of Mr. Trump reveals a willful and naive narcissist who believes he can charm or subtly intimidate the FBI director but has no idea how Washington works. This is not new information.
When you’re dining alone in the Green Room with an operator like Mr. Comey—calculating, self-protective, one of the more skilled political knife-fighters of modern times—there are better approaches than asserting “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” Of course the righteous director was going to “memorialize” (his word) these conversations as political insurance.

Mr. Trump’s ham-handed demand for loyalty doesn’t seem to extend beyond the events of 2016, however. In Mr. Comey’s telling, the President is preoccupied with getting credit for the election results and resentful that the political class is delegitimizing his victory with “the cloud” of Russian interference when he believes he did nothing wrong.

Mr. Comey also confirms that on at least three occasions he told Mr. Trump that he was not a personal target of the Russia probe. But Mr. Comey wouldn’t make a public statement to the same effect, “most importantly because it would create a duty to correct” if Mr. Trump were implicated. This is odd because the real obligation is to keep quiet until an investigation is complete.

More interesting is that Mr. Trump’s frustration at Mr. Comey’s refusal raises the possibility that the source of Mr. Trump’s self-destructive behavior isn’t a coverup or a bid to obstruct the investigation. The source could simply be Mr. Trump’s wounded pride.

The most troubling part of Mr. Comey’s statement is his belief in what he calls “the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch,” which he invokes more than once. Independent? This is a false and dangerous view of law enforcement in the American system.

Mr. Comey is describing an FBI director who essentially answers to no one. But the police powers of the government are awesome and often abused, and the only way to prevent or correct abuses is to report to elected officials who are accountable to voters. A director must resist intervention to obstruct an investigation, but he and the agency must be politically accountable or risk becoming the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover.

https://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2017/06/07/comeys-notes-and-the-wages-of-the-special-counsel-investigation/

The editors of the Wall Street Journal detail a controversy brewing in Congress over James Comey’s private memos. We use “private” here in the sense that these are memoranda the former FBI director wrote to himself. They are not “private” in the sense of belonging to Comey; clearly, they are government records of FBI business.

I would wager, moreover, that significant parts of the memos may be classified: Recall the Obama Justice Department’s prosecution of former CIA director David Petraeus. That case centered on journals that General Petraeus had kept when he was commanding American and allied military forces. According to the Justice Department’s outline of the case against Petraeus, his diaries contained highly classified information, including notes of the general’s conversations with the president of the United States. Although Petraeus was under no obligation to make these notes, and although they were clearly (and quite properly) intended for his own use, they were obviously not his property. They related to government business, were thus government files, and — to the extent they contained classified information — were required to be retained in a repository designed to protect such materials.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, in conjunction with its Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, has issued a letter asking Comey to answer a series of questions. These include questions about his memos. Based on a New York Times report, we know only of a snippet of one such memo, said to detail a meeting between the former director and the president. Trump, it is related, expressed hope that the FBI would drop an investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

The Times indicated that Comey may have written many more memos-to-self. The Judiciary Committee letter asks him to provide copies of any such memos he has retained.

The former director is said to have refused, rationalizing that he is now a private citizen and need not comply.

To be sure, we are not talking about a subpoena, which is a lawful demand for production of evidence; the committee’s letter is a request for voluntary cooperation. Nevertheless, the Journal has a point when it argues that Comey, who has voluntarily agreed to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee in highly anticipated testimony on Thursday, should not be able to pick and choose which committees he will indulge and which requests he will entertain.

Naturally, the question arises as to whether Comey is the only source the Judiciary Committee can turn to for the information it seeks. Since any such memos are FBI property, one would think the committee could seek them directly from the FBI and the Justice Department (of which the FBI is a component agency).

Moreover, if Comey is stymying the committee, one might think the Trump administration would want to intervene. Since the president appears to be at odds with the former FBI director over what was said in their various conversations, it could cast the president in a favorable light were he to direct the Justice Department to cooperate with all congressional committees regarding the production of documents.

Alas, we run headlong into the complication discussed here in mid-May, when I was arguing against the appointment of a “special counsel,” particularly in the absence of any apparent crime to be investigated. Special counsels, whom the public thinks as independent prosecutors, tend to paralyze an administration’s capacity to govern and to exercise its judgment.

There is still no crime. Nevertheless, special counsel Robert Mueller has been appointed to head up the sprawl that is spreading under the heading of “the Russia investigation.” This probe lacks a specific criminal transaction to target — i.e., it lacks the thing that gives direction and discipline to other investigations. Thus, virtually anything tangentially connected to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election can be brought into Mueller’s capacious jurisdiction. That includes any discussion the former FBI director had with the president regarding Flynn — even if whatever Flynn is being investigated for (failure to disclose speaking fees in Russia? Failure to register as a foreign agent for work done for Turkey?) turns out to be far afield from Russia’s “cyberespionage” activities during the campaign.

Consequently, the Trump White House must fear that any order it might give the Justice Department to cooperate with the Republican-controlled Congress’s investigations would be spun by Democrats and their media friends as interference with Mueller’s investigation. Similarly, the Judiciary Committee and other congressional investigative bodies do not want to be seen as impeding Mueller. So, they are apt to avoid demanding of him the sorts of documents they would ordinarily demand in conducting oversight of the Justice Department.

The result is that the public is likely to be kept in the dark about many relevant matters that might have become known had there not been a special counsel appointed.

Here is another example of how this could play out at Thursday’s hearing. When the president fired Comey, he took pains to say that the former director had told him on three separate occasions that he was not under investigation. Pre-hearing reporting suggests that Comey does not remember it this way. The matter is thus being teed up as though one or the other man must be lying.

We’ll have to see what happens, but to my mind, the seeming contradiction may be reconcilable. According to Comey’s own prior testimony, the Russia investigation is a counterintelligence investigation. As I have repeatedly pointed out, a counterintelligence investigation is very different from a criminal investigation. It does not have “subjects” and “targets,” which are terms-of-art in criminal investigations, designating suspects who may be indicted by the grand jury. The purpose of a counterintelligence investigation is to focus on a foreign power — in this instance, Russia — in order to determine what threats it might pose to American interests.

It is not the purpose of a counterintelligence investigation to build a prosecutable criminal case against a suspect. Nevertheless, if evidence of criminal wrongdoing turns up, the FBI’s national security division reserves the right to refer that evidence to its criminal division and the Justice Department, which can then determine whether prosecution is warranted.

It could well be that President Trump, a non-lawyer, was told the Russia investigation is a counterintelligence investigation, which would not be designed to build a case against him or anyone else.

If so, he might understandably have taken that to mean he is not a suspect under investigation. At the same time, Comey realizes that you never know what evidence an investigation will turn up until it has been completed. Since the Russia investigation had not been completed, the former director may well believe that could not, and did not, make commitments regarding any information that had not yet been uncovered.

That’s just my educated speculation — and, as noted above, we’ll have to see what happens. But given the complications posed by the special counsel investigation, I doubt we are going to get to the bottom of all the questions that need answering in a Senate committee hearing.