RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former George W. Bush administration attorney general Alberto Gonzales penned an op-ed in the Washington Post today, giving Donald Trump some cover in his rampage against a Mexican American judge presiding over the lawsuit against Trump University.

It is crucial to understand the real issue in this matter. I am not judging whether Curiel is actually biased against Trump. Only he knows the answer to that question. I am not saying that I would be concerned about him presiding over a case in which I was a litigant. And if I were a litigant who was concerned about the judge’s impartiality, I certainly would not deal with it in a public manner as Trump has, because it demeans the integrity of the judicial office and thus potentially undermines the independence of the judiciary, especially coming from a man who could be president by this time next year. But none of these issues is the test. The test is whether there is an “appearance of impropriety” under the facts as they reasonably appear to a litigant in Trump’s position.

Certainly, Curiel’s Mexican heritage alone would not be enough to raise a question of bias (for all we know, the judge supports Trump’s pledge to better secure our borders and enforce the rule of law). As someone whose own ancestors came to the United States from Mexico, I know ethnicity alone cannot pose a conflict of interest.

But there may be other factors to consider in determining whether Trump’s concerns about getting an impartial trial are reasonable. Curiel is, reportedly, a member of a group called La Raza Lawyers of San Diego. Trump’s aides, meanwhile, have indicated that they believe Curiel is a member of the National Council of La Raza, a vocal advocacy organization that has vigorously condemned Trump and his views on immigration. The two groups are unaffiliated, and Curiel is not a member of NCLR. But Trump may be concerned that the lawyers’ association or its members represent or support the other advocacy organization. Coupled with that question is the fact that in 2014, when he certified the class-action lawsuit against Trump, Curiel appointed the Robbins Geller law firm to represent plaintiffs. Robbins Geller has paid $675,000 in speaking fees since 2009 to Trump’s likely opponent, Hillary Clinton, and to her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Curiel appointed the firm in the case before Trump entered the presidential race, but again, it might not be unreasonable for a defendant in Trump’s position to wonder who Curiel favors in the presidential election.

Gonzales makes the case Trump should be making. It’s not a question of Curiel’s Hispanic heritage. It’s the web of his connections that gives the appearance of bias in favor of Hillary Clinton and against Republicans. CONTINUE AT SITE

Political conflicts of interest galore go uncovered in witch hunt against Trump.

Can we talk a big, fat political conflict of interest? Can we talk the lawyers and the judge involved in the lawsuits against Trump University? Let’s throw in identity politics and, but of course, follow the money.

Well of course there’s a conflict.

What did you expect when you saw the breathless headlines blare about Trump University lawsuits? The impression being assiduously cultivated that Donald Trump, a billionaire ten times over, set up some sort of elaborate con to scam regular folks on real estate.

What’s not being said? What questions are not being asked? How about this? How about asking just who is pursuing these cases against Donald Trump? What if what’s really going on here is… a witch trial? A rigged game designed to produce a desired political end — the smearing of Donald Trump — to enable the political fortunes of Democrats generally, and Hillary Clinton specifically?

Let’s examine the players in this lawsuit.

The players are:

The Judge: U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the California federal judge in the Trump University law suit case.

The Lawyers: Two law firms: Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP and Zeldes Haeggquist & Eck LLP.

And let’s not forget another player, this one in New York. That would be:

The New York Attorney General: Eric Schneiderman.

The Play: As detailed here in Law360, this is how the game works:

Law360, Los Angeles (October 28, 2014, 4:00 PM ET) — A California federal judge has granted class certification in a Racketeer influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act suit accusing Donald Trump of scheming to make millions of dollars by falsely claiming attendees of Trump University LLC seminars would learn his real estate secrets.

… In addition to certifying the class, Judge Curiel on Friday appointed Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP and Zeldes Haeggquist & Eck LLP as class counsel.

Stop. Stop right there. Let’s parse.

Who is the “California federal judge” who not only granted “class certification” to the lawsuit against Trump — but then assigned the two law firms now involved with the case?

Oh Puleez! I admire David French but he and Kristolantics will do nothing, absolutely nothing to intimidate Trump or his supporters. Like McCarthy whom I respect and admire,I will, reluctantly vote for Trump. Unlike him, I think that Kristol and the holdouts are ridiculous and destructive and have painted themselves into a corner, wasting time and energy on a silly plan and aiding Hillary in her battle against Trump….rsk

“Thank God for David French.

As anyone familiar with David’s character, career, and oeuvre knows, there are about a million reasons to utter that sentence. But I offer thanks today for his public consideration of an independent run for the presidency. It’s a very American thing to do — or at least it would be in pre-Obama America.

Allow me to explain myself before the inevitable fusillade from Donald Trump’s shoot-first-ask-questions-later (if ever) legions — the trolls who may make it even harder for reluctant conservatives to board the Trump Train than does the Donald himself.

I expect to vote for Trump in November. As I’ve previously conceded, this is not exactly a momentous concession: I live in New Jersey, which is going to be carried by the Democratic nominee regardless of whom I vote for or whether I vote at all. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru wisely observes, the probability that any of our votes will determine the winner of the 2016 election “cannot meaningfully be distinguished from zero.”

More significantly, however, I intend to do everything in my (admittedly limited) power to help Donald Trump arrive at policies that promote American national security and prosperity. I hope that can be done in a cordial, if wary, alliance. That is, notwithstanding my skepticism, I hope Trump’s conservative supporters are correct that Trump is no longer the by-the-numbers left-leaning Democrat he was for so many years. I hope that he really has made a conversion, that conservatives really can have a mutually advantageous relationship with him.

Yet, I am not banking on the Road to Damascus — especially for a rider who vacillates between wanting nothing to do with Syria and salting the earth beneath it. I am perfectly prepared to provide help of the adversarial “tough love” variety. After all, what we really love and want the best for is the United States. The presidency is an important means toward that end, but it is not the end itself.

It keeps happening. In Chicago, Kansas City, South Bend, Janesville, Albuquerque, Costa Mesa, and countless other cities, gaggles of paid, increasingly violent left-wing agitators are doing their best to shut down the rights of Trump supporters to peacefully assemble. In some cases, they are even physically attacking people. Earlier this year in Chicago (ground zero for left-wing agitation), the protesters actually succeeded in shutting down a rally. All across the nation, people’s constitutional rights of free speech and free assembly are being threatened by unhinged and out-of-control radicals.

Last night in San Jose, yet another violent mob of far-left protesters assailed and assaulted Trump supporters as they were leaving a rally, in the latest example of this ongoing anti-democratic spectacle.

Trump supporters were assaulted and even pelted with eggs when they left a San Jose rally for the presumptive Republican nominee.

The crowd also stole Trump merchandise and set it on fire, and they yelled accusations of racism at Trump’s backers.

One Trump supporter told a news report that he had his Trump sign stolen and was then sucker-punched.

Some members of the media characterized the incidents as “fights.” These weren’t fights; they were violent assaults. In the photograph below, a terrified young guy is running for his life with the mob in close pursuit.

This is what passes for political engagement in 2016 America:
Protesters against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump chase a man leaving a Trump campaign rally on Thursday, June 2, 2016, in San Jose, Calif. A group of protesters attacked Trump supporters who were leaving the presidential candidate’s rally in San Jose on Thursday night. A dozen or more people were punched, at least one person was pelted with an egg and Trump hats grabbed from supporters were set on fire on the ground. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) Protesters against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump chase a man leaving a Trump campaign rally on Thursday, June 2, 2016, in San Jose, Calif. A group of protesters attacked Trump supporters who were leaving the presidential candidate’s rally in San Jose on Thursday night. A dozen or more people were punched, at least one person was pelted with an egg and Trump hats grabbed from supporters were set on fire on the ground. (AP Photo/Noah

The Republican establishment dismissed Donald Trump as a joke, then reacted to initial victories with confident predictions his salad days would wilt and fade. What didn’t resonate in Washington’s hermetically sealed echo chamber was disgust, not with the tycoon but with the elites.
The sentiment is familiar: ‘I hope the Republican Party nominates Donald Trump because it will be a bloodbath for them’, or words to that effect, is a social-media staple among non-Republicans. The seductive notion is that Trump is so unpalatable he will lose November’s presidential election in a landslide to Hillary Clinton. Therefore, or so the logic goes, Republicans would do better with someone less divisive. As a prevailing meme it serves not only as a reminder of the folly in taking advice from political enemies, but also of the punditocracy’s abysmal record of what are, quite frankly, delusional prognostications.

When the primaries season began, the conventional wisdom was ‘Republicans will never nominate Trump’. When the tycoon began to gain traction, it was ‘Trump will crash and burn’ and ‘he’s a temporary fad’. As he continued to gather delegates, wishful thinking coloured the prophecies, as in ‘they’ll wise up and pick Jeb Bush’. Each and every reading of the auguries proved untrue, a reminder that few things can equal the inertial mass of a political elite confronting a contrary reality. Whatever else Trump has achieved, he has certainly eroded the credibility of numerous political commentators.

The pundits’ mistake was to apply the rules of 2012 four years too late. When Trump denounced illegal aliens and the crimes many commit, the media establishment painted him as a racist and, tellingly, neglected to mention that his pledge to build a wall along the Rio Grande was prompted by, to cite but one example, the Mexican thug who had been deported five times before slipping over the border yet again to kill a young woman in San Francisco. Those who voted for Trump knew better. They grasped that there is already a border “wall” of sorts — armed patrols, cyclone wire, movement detectors – it’s just that it doesn’t work very well. In 2012, the racist tag worked just fine as a handy smear. Today, though, non-pundit Americans have watched the invasion of Europe, seen the erosion of borders and national sovereignty, made note of crimes committed by those with no legal right to be on US soil. In the world they inhabit, the world the elites refuse to acknowledge, what Trump says makes perfect sense.

Likewise, Trump’s pronouncements on Islamic immigration. After every latest Islamist massacre the elites grab the nearest photogenic imam, summon the media and proclaim Islam as the Religion of Peace™. Voters, however, recall 9/11 and, more recently, the San Bernadino massacre by a Muslim husband and wife who killed the very same workmates who organised a baby shower for them. Once again, Trump emerges as the candidate who best grasps reality.

Likewise, previous orthodoxies also have been called into question. Obama campaigned in 2008 on the implicit pledge that he would restore the world’s love for America by renouncing what he evidently regarded as its arrogant and imperialist hubris. The result? A shrunken global presence, a shameful deal with Iran’s religious fascists and a vacuum where once Pax Americana prevailed. These factors, compounded and manifested in the rise of the Tea Party, contributed to an overall feeling of disconnect between Main Street and its Washington betters.

With Trump as nominee, social conservatives might think that by not voting for him they are keeping their hands clean. These people fail to recognize that under a Clinton regime there will be no refuge from a systematic agenda that seeks to destroy the very notion of “nature” and of any restraint on federal power.

Trump is an old-fashioned Whig—and I am not referring to his hair.

In an excellent article at Public Discourse, Matthew Franck compared Donald Trump to Stephen Douglas, “the showboat orator, the bulldog debater, the racial demagogue, the slippery character seeking to wriggle free of Lincoln’s grasp, and finally the exhausted boozer losing his voice.” But the historical analogy could be read in a very different way.

As Allen Guelzo points out, “the greatest danger to democracy” in the 1840s “was not an insurrection of discontented laborers but the maneuverings of a pig-eyed aristocracy to strike up a dark alliance with the working classes, whispering that economic mobility was a chimera and that what the workers needed was subsidy and protection from mobility.” Clearly, the Democratic Party has been the demagogue party since its inception. The nineteenth-century Democrats offered slavery—not only racial slavery in the South, but also the slavery of cradle-to-grave socialism, as Orestes Brownson made clear in his essay “On the Laboring Classes.” The fact that we can imagine Trump as a new threat of demagoguery demonstrates quite brilliantly Alasdair MacIntyre’s old point: “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”

In a communique to donors (who else?) Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta tried to exculpate his candidate’s lawbreaking in the E-mailgate scandal. Alas for Hillary, Podesta’s attempt at exoneration has more holes than a golf course.

“ . . . we know that our opponents will continue to try to distract us with attacks,” Podesta wrote on May 28. But State Department Inspector General Steve Linick is no right-wing Clinton hater. The man behind last week’s brutal report on Clinton’s misdeeds was appointed by President Obama. Linick also served as an assistant U.S. attorney, starting in 1994 — during the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.

“Secretary Clinton has said her use of a personal email server was a mistake,” Podesta asserted.

A “mistake” is when one hits “reply all,” and dozens or hundreds of people unwittingly receive an embarrassing e-mail meant for one person.

E-mailgate was no such casual gaffe. It was a deliberate and planned conspiracy in which Hillary evaded standard State Department procedures, installed an outlaw personal computer server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., mansion — 267 miles northeast of Foggy Bottom, and then reportedly paid aide Bryan Pagliano $140,000 to maintain that illicit equipment. Pagliano’s supervisors, the IG discovered, “were unaware of his technical support of the Secretary’s e-mail system,” including “during working hours.”

After leaving State, Hillary had her server shipped to a facility in New Jersey associated with Platte River Networks, a Denver-based firm that lacked the security clearance to handle such sensitive gear. She then had the company try to wipe the server clean.

Some “mistake.”

“She believed she was following the practices of other Secretaries,” Podesta further claimed.

Ouch:

It’s zombie time at campaign Hillary. Behold the dead men walking! It was with strangely slow, narcotized numbness that the candidate and her phalanx of minions and mouthpieces responded to last week’s punishing report by the State Department’s Inspector General about her email security lapses. Do they truly believe, in the rosy alternate universe of Hillaryland, that they can lie their way out of this? Of course, they’re relying as usual on the increasingly restive mainstream media to do their dirty work for them. If it were a Republican in the crosshairs, Hillary’s shocking refusal to meet with the Inspector General (who interviewed all four of the other living Secretaries of State of the past two decades) would have been the lead item flagged in screaming headlines from coast to coast. Let’s face it—the genuinely innocent do not do pretzel twists like this to cover their asses.

There are fewer sharper critics of the American politico-cultural scene than Camille Paglia; that she generally comes to the wrong conclusions with her heart (she’s a Sanders supporter), her head does formidable work nailing the candidates’s strengths and weaknesses.

She’s right about Hillary, of course. Mrs. Clinton is the worst, and least-qualified, major party candidate in eons: a career criminal whose flouting of the law and nose-thumbing at the American people are finally coming to the ignominious end she so richly deserves. And — equal time! — she’s also spot-on regarding Donald Trump:

Over on the GOP side, Donald Trump continues to gain strength, despite the nonstop artillery barrage of Democratic operatives and their clone army in the mainstream media. Trump just rolls on and on, despite every foot-in-mouth gaffe that would stop a normal campaign cold. He’s terrific on the radio, I must say. Even though I do like Elizabeth Warren (I even believe she has Native American ancestry, although certainly not enough to qualify her for affirmative action), I burst out laughing in my car last week when I heard Trump confidingly say (like a yenta at Zabar’s deli), “She’s a woman that has been very ineffective—except that she has a big mouth.” His New York comic timing was spot on. I laughed out loud again this week when I heard Trump interrupt his press conference to tag an ABC reporter as “a sleaze”—at which I am sure thousands of other radio listeners heartily cheered. It’s been a long time since any major politician had the chutzpah to tell the arrogant, double-dealing East Coast media what most of the country thinks about them.

The news out of last week’s Cheryl Mills deposition was that the Clinton confidante didn’t say much about Hillary’s email server. Which only goes to show that Mrs. Clinton has a serious problem—and she knows it.

This is, after all, Cheryl Mills. For more than 20 years, she has served as the Clintons’ very own Winston Wolf ( Harvey Keitel in “Pulp Fiction”)—their fixer, their problem-solver. From impeachment right up through Benghazi and the server, Ms. Mills is the one constant in the behind-the-scenes obstruction. The less she talks, the more alarm bells ought to ring.
This was the measure to watch when Ms. Mills arrived last Friday to sit for an interview with attorneys for Judicial Watch, which has sued the State Department over missing federal records.

In early May the oversight group convinced a federal judge to order discovery into the creation and operation of Mrs. Clinton’s private server. Judicial Watch was granted permission to depose seven central figures, including Ms. Mills, who served as Hillary’s aide at the State Department and later as her private lawyer.

Mrs. Clinton claims she set up the home-brew server in an innocent act aimed at convenience, so it was notable that Ms. Mills marched into her deposition accompanied by no fewer than seven lawyers—three representing Ms. Mills herself, and two each from the Justice and State departments. Two of the government lawyers made clear that they were not only representing their departments but also guarding Ms. Mills in her capacity as a former federal employee. This is President Obama’s assist for Mrs. Clinton.

The lawyers earned their pay. The entire 270-page transcript of the deposition, which Judicial Watch released Tuesday, has an almost eye-glazing repetition about it.

A persistent Judicial Watch attorney attempts to ask Ms. Mills a straightforward question. Before she even finishes, Ms. Mills’s army of attorneys falls all over itself to object, to insist that the query is outside the “scope” of the inquiry or too vague, and to instruct the witness not to answer.