RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/progressive-effort-delegitimize-william-barr/

The current progressive effort to demonize attorney general William Barr is creepy, but then again not so strange. He came into the office with singular experience and an excellent reputation from past service. As attorney general, he has followed the law to the letter in handling the release, redactions, and dissemination of the Mueller report. His summaries of the report proved factual. They were not contested by Robert Mueller or his team. His decision not to pursue “obstruction” was not just his own, but logically followed from the Mueller report that did not find enough evidence to make such a positive recommendation. His congressional testimony that there was “spying” during the 2016 campaign is, of course, factually undeniable, and Barr added the qualifier of being interested in finding whether such surveillance was warranted or not.

As for the charge that Barr, a former Bush appointee, is Trump’s “hand-picked” choice –how odd, given that all attorney generals are presidents’ hand-picked selections. How could they not be?

It is not as if Barr has referenced himself, in Eric Holder’s partisan fashion, as Trump’s “wing-man.” Nor has he ordered surveillance on, for example, a Fox News reporter, or had the communication records of 20 Associated Press journalists seized, as happened during the Obama administration in efforts to stop leaks of unwelcome news stories. Nor has he been held in contempt of Congress for failure to turn over subpoenaed documents under the cover of a presidential order of executive privilege. There is no suggestion that Barr has abused the perquisites of the office, for example, by using a government jet to go to the horse races with his family. He has avoided controversial value judgements about the nature of the American people and polarizing rhetoric.

So, more likely, the effort to delegitimize the professional Barr is the opening, preemptory salvo in the second and quite different round of investigations.

Soon Mr. Barr will be tasked with collating and adjudicating criminal referrals and arguments for indictments coming variously from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, possibly special counsel John Huber, Devin Nunes the ranking Republican and former chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and perhaps later even from Lindsey Graham, Chair of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, along with any conclusions arising from federal attorneys within the Justice Department itself.

In toto, these sources variously may present evidence to Barr on matters of lying to federal investigators, perjury, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and abuse of government surveillance — and the charges could, in ironic fashion, involve top-ranking former administrative state investigators during the Obama administration, who for the last two years have been quite prominent as cable news analysts and, in their memoirs at least, as self-described ethicists. Add that there will be a completely different sort of news cycle as it intensifies in approach of the 2020 election. In such investigations, no one has any idea what possible defendants may do or say to federal prosecutors in efforts to lessen their own criminal exposure.
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In sum, the progressives’ preventative efforts to destroy Barr’s reputation take on a certain sort of sick partisan logic, especially as he is neither the sort to recuse himself during cycles of journalistic hysteria nor to appoint a special counsel, after the ill-starred odyssey of the Mueller all-stars and dream team. Given his age, past tenures, reputation, and professional demeanor, Barr does not seem to be much worried over transient unpopularity, partisan criticism, political pressure, or making tough decisions that might adversely affect his future career.

So the fear is not that Barr broke or will ever break the law, but rather just the opposite: He seems the sort who will follow the law wherever it leads him and without worry over the consequences — and that reality is now apparently seen by some as quite scary indeed.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/is-the-mueller-report-the-son-of-the-steele-dossier_2887555.html
Hesitant about working my way through the Mueller report, I found myself gratified to hear Rep. Devin Nunes’s assessment of the thing.“The Mueller report ignored a wide range of abuses committed during the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. And now, with the revelation that the Special Counsel was authorized at the outset to investigate Carter Page for allegedly colluding with Russians to hack the election, it’s clear that false allegations from the Steele dossier played a major role not only in the FISA warrant application on Page, but in the appointment of the Special Counsel as well.” (Emphasis added.)

As numb as we are to the machinations of the anti-Trump conspiracy, this is a crowning outrage.

According to Nunes, there is only one item of relevance in the entire 450-page document. While it is an item of significance, it confirms something many have long suspected.

Nunes explained that on page 11 there is a veiled disclosure to the effect that the “scope memo,” the directive Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller in August 2017, included “the Steele dossier, the Clinton dirt, the Clinton-paid-for dirt as part of the memo for the special counsel that directed the special counsel what to do.”

Nunes elaborated on the implications:

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22578/america-and-the-family-business-rule

There is an old saying in family businesses, “The first generation starts a business. The second generation runs it. The third generation ruins it.”

Metaphorically, our American family business is in the third generation.

Our Founding Fathers rejected monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, theocracy, and formed the United States of America as a Constitutional Republic – the greatest experiment in individual freedom and upward mobility anywhere in the world. What happened?

To answer that question we must examine the historical context of the three generations.

Our Founding Fathers lived at a time in history when “We the people” had little value. Societies were structured along binary feudal lines and divided between the ruling elite and the enslaved population who served them. Slavery was a matter of degree – from physical chains and ownership of another human being, to caste systems that predetermined social position, to social structures where populations were subjects of ruling monarchs, oligarchs, or subjects of the tyranny of religious theocratic rule.

Our Founding Fathers had a different idea. They decided to build a more perfect union, a representative democracy that valued the people of society and entrusted them with the responsibility of elections to choose their own leaders. It was a radical experiment in social policy that reflected a seismic shift in social attitudes.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/forget-trump-here-are-five-reasons-why-obama-should-have-been-impeached/

As Democrats privately admit to themselves that there was no Russian collusion, they’ve also shifted gears to focus on the question of obstruction of justice. Despite the Mueller investigation being loaded with anti-Trumpers, even they weren’t able to say that any obstruction occurred. If there’s anything the release of the Mueller report has exposed, it’s not criminal behavior or even impeachable offenses of President Trump, but rather the hypocrisy of Democrats who are willing to call anything an impeachable offense with Trump but pretended the corruption that occurred under Barack Obama was all above board. By any reasonable standard, Congress had multiple impeachable offenses they could have gone after Obama for, but didn’t. Their turning a blind eye to Obama’s corruption completely undermines their efforts today to scandalize Trump and proves that they see two standards of justice: one for Democrats, and one for Republicans. Here are five examples of impeachable offenses that Obama should have been held accountable for, but wasn’t.

5. Illegally creating new laws and entering treaties

Obama’s dictatorial approach to governing would manifest itself many times during his presidency, and any one of them should have had Congress using their check on executive overreach, the power to impeach, but for reasons that can’t be justified, it never happened. One such example is Obama’s unilateral writing of immigration law. It is quite clear that Congress has the power to write immigration law, but Obama decided that since Congress wouldn’t act (and by that, he meant to do exactly what he wanted) he’d simply create a law with his executive pen. When the DREAM Act failed to pass Congress he simply began enforcing it without Congress’s consent by issuing an executive order, known as DACA. It was unconstitutional (even Obama repeatedly admitted that he didn’t have to power to create immigration law) and his blatant disregard for the Constitution should have resulted in articles of impeachment being drafted immediately. Lack of accountability to Congress emboldened Obama to expand DACA, but that expansion was quickly fought and defeated in the courts.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/what_trump_is_guilty_of.html

Donald Trump, the President of the United States, behaved like any innocent man would behave having been framed by fabricated propaganda prepared by foreign intelligence agents, and paid for by his political enemies.

He behaved like any innocent man might when prosecutors hounding him were enabled and appointed by his political enemies. He behaved like any innocent man might when he realized that his prosecutors included the chief counsel of the Clinton Family Foundation and Barack Obama’s deputy assistant attorney general and that the chief witness against him was represented by Hillary Clinton’s longstanding lawyer whom the Washington Post called “The Ultimate Clinton Loyalist.”

He acted like any innocent man might who realized that his home, phone lines, offices, and associates were being spied on, wiretapped, surveilled, followed, photographed, and even infiltrated by paid spies and foreign agents sent by his domestic political enemies who deliberately set him and his family up in a sting operation. Meanwhile, the self-same people vehemently denied that the spying took place.

In other words, he acted against the blatant injustice by pushing back against criminal operatives conspiring to frame him.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-special-counsel-investigations/

So much for collusion. The media conversation has now officially moved on from the obsession of the last two years to obstruction of justice.

That’s because the first volume of the voluminous Mueller report, the half devoted to what was supposed to be the underlying crime of a Trump conspiracy with Russia, came up completely empty. It tells us very little that’s new. There’s no particularly sinister information about Carter Page, the bit player the FBI repeatedly told the FISA court was probably a Russian agent. The operators who portrayed themselves as closest to WikiLeaks or Russia were usually braggarts and liars exaggerating their importance. Nothing came of the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Paul Manafort wasn’t at the center of conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, but operating in his greedy self-interest.

The Trump campaign was amateurish and without scruple in exploiting the WikiLeaks disclosures, but we all could have agreed on that long ago, without a years-long special-counsel investigation. Indeed, given how unlikely collusion always was and how far the evidence gathered by Mueller is from showing it, one wonders why the special counsel couldn’t have issued an interim report long ago, dispelling the persistent — and poisonous — idea that Trump was about to be proven a traitor.

The business end of the Mueller report is the second volume, on obstruction. The investigation ended up following the typical pattern of special-counsel probes on a much larger scale — fixating on process crimes even when there is no underlying offense. Only in this case, the target was the president of the United States.

The report implicitly picks an argument with Attorney General William Barr over the question whether a president can obstruct justice in the course of exercising his lawful powers. We are inclined to Barr’s view that he can’t. Regardless, the case against Trump is ambiguous, as even Mueller acknowledges.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/inquisitio-requiescat-in-pace/

The variously dubbed dream team/all stars/hunter-killer/army of Mueller’s lawyers, after 22 months, $30 million, and 400 pages plus of legalese did not find “Russian collusion,” the original reason to be of their investigation. At what early point the team realized that fundamental truth is of importance, but will never be fully disclosed.

Nor did team Mueller find actionable “obstruction” efforts (promiscuous use of executive privilege, firings of Mueller team members, refusal to let high Trump staffers be questioned, etc.) to impede its investigation of a non-crime as lawyers went into every rumored Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump, Jr. etc. cul de sac. In exasperation Mueller leveraged almost anyone peripherally related to the Trump campaign either to indict him on mostly process crimes, or to air their incriminating “Trump said this” versions of private conversations.

And because Mueller felt it necessary to include in his report suggestions of Trump’s mercurial talk, obfuscations, and shenanigans that did not constitute actual crimes as opposed to thought crimes (those falsely accused of a felony have a tendency to become furious and sound off), the question arises that, if Mueller felt it so necessary to include in his report any material he swept up as he vacuumed around, why not at least suggest that the FBI Director and members of DOJ did not honestly inform a FISA court of the true nature of the evidence for their writ — given the centrality of surveilled conversations within the Mueller report?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/targeting-bill-barr-11555714643

Pivoting from their failed Russia-Trump collusion narrative, Democrats and the press corps have discovered a new political villain: William Barr. They claim the Attorney General is misleading the public, but their real goal is to warn Mr. Barr from following through on his promise to investigate abuses by the FBI and Obama Administration officials.

The rap is that Mr. Barr didn’t tell the truth about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report when he summarized its conclusions in late March. “It’s a disgrace to see an Attorney General acting as if he’s the personal attorney and publicist for the President of United States,” tweeted presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, in a typical broadside.

Mr. Barr was trying to satisfy the Democratic demand to see the report as soon as possible while he vetted the details for material that had to be redacted for sound legal and intelligence reasons. His four-page summary fairly characterized its conclusions on collusion and obstruction of justice while promising the full report soon. He even quoted Mr. Mueller’s line that the report “does not exonerate” Mr. Trump. A summary couldn’t contain the details that Mr. Mueller took 488 pages to describe, and now those details are public warts and all.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Backlash is defined as a strong and adverse reaction or protest by a large number of people, especially to social or political developments. What we saw in the Middle East and North Africa beginning in late 2010 and going into the spring of 2011 and what we see today in Sudan and Algiers are backlashes against authoritarian governments. History does not proceed in straight lines. It is replete with consequential setbacks. Sometimes they are for the better – the English Civil War of 1642, the American Revolution in 1775, the world-wide women’s suffrage movement that began in the 19th Century, and the U.S. Civil Rights movement that ran through the 1950s and ‘60s. Sometimes they are for the worse, like the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of National Socialism in Germany, following the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. And sometimes the verdict is unclear, like Brexit. In 2016, it was a backlash against elitism and the establishment that catapulted Mr. Trump into the White House.

In any society there will always be groups that rise up to make a point, highlight a grievance, or correct a wrong. Generally, they are without (or with limited) violence. They manifest a dynamic society and, while temporarily disruptive, they often change things for the better. We think of women’s liberation in the 1960s and the more recent gay-rights movement, positive developments that reflected changing mores. Other backlashes are political, like Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, with the intent to garner power rather than righting a social or cultural wrong. It is how we move forward. They are not unlike creative destruction in economics, a term used by Joseph Schumpeter to describe innovations in manufacturing.

Now, it is the continued enmity toward Mr. Trump that is causing Democrats to push beyond the boundaries of decency and common sense, even disrespecting those non-Trumpians whose conservative ideas and opinions differ from their own. Consider a few non-issue issues that are claimed vital to leftist elites, but are of little concern to middle class voters:

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/trump-and-the-crisis-of-separated-powers/90653/

The denouement of the Special Counsel investigation — unfolding on the Imax of the Internet — illuminates nothing so much as the fact that our republic is in a crisis of separated powers. It shows that a special counsel can come close to destroying a presidency even in cases where, as now seems clear in respect of President Trump, there was neither collusion with a foreign power nor obstruction of justice.

This is what happens when our press, politicians, and prosecutors ignore the constitutional principle of separated powers and press for or set up either an independent or special prosecutor. Such a blunder destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency, damaged President Reagan’s, nearly kneecapped President George H.W. Bush’s, and almost destroyed Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Yet rarely has the crisis of separated powers been thrown into such sharp relief as in the case of Mr. Trump. Feature the press conference at which Attorney General Barr presented Robert Mueller’s report. The moment came as Mr. Barr was being questioned in respect of Mr. Mueller’s decision neither to prosecute nor to exonerate the President in respect of obstruction of justice. Mr. Mueller left it to Mr. Barr.