RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/comey-acknowledges-strzok-page-damaged-fbi-it-made-us-all-look-bad/

Former FBI director James Comey conceded Thursday night that former FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, damaged the Bureau’s reputation through their political partisanship.

Strzok and Page have been publicly excoriated by Republicans and allies of President Trump ever since the release of anti-Trump text messages they exchanged while they were working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

“Considering the high standards that we set for law enforcement, what do you think should have been the consequences for Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Andrew McCabe?” an audience member asked Comey during a CNN townhall Thursday night.

“I think, given the standards that we have — especially we in the FBI have — there should have been, and was, severe discipline around their behavior,” said Comey. “As [CNN host] Anderson [Cooper] said, very different episodes of behavior. Everyone has opinions — about political issues, about religious issues, and sports issues. You can’t bring them to work and have them affect your work. There have to be severe consequences. FBI employees must tell the truth, always. And if they don’t, I don’t care what it’s about, it’s going to be investigated and there’s going to be severe consequences.”

Comey went on to explain that he was unaware of the bias exhibited by Strzok and Page at the time Strzok was serving as the lead investigator of Russian interference in the election, but admitted that the revelations about Strzok and Page’s hostility toward Trump damaged the FBI’s credibility.

“So, do you acknowledge that this whole episode with Strzok and Page, that it damaged the reputation of the FBI and that it perhaps tarnished the investigation?” asked Cooper.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/william-barr-vs-eric-holder-a-tale-of-two-attorneys-general/

The differences between the cases are informative.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has declared it a “constitutional crisis” that Attorney General William Barr refuses to divulge the small parts of the Mueller report that contain grand-jury material. By a straight party-line vote, the House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Barr in contempt of Congress.

What did Pelosi think when Barr’s predecessor, Eric Holder, refused to divulge documents to a congressional committee and was held in contempt? “Ridiculous!” she said. What did Holder and Obama say? That the House subpoena was a violation of “separation of powers.”

To partisans, the difference between the cases is obvious. Barr is defending Trump; Holder was Obama’s self-proclaimed “wing man.” That is enough for many journalists and most politicians. The rest of us might want to know: What is the legal or constitutional difference between Holder’s refusal to provide documents and Barr’s?

Here is the background of the Holder contempt. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), a unit of Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ), conducted an operation called “Fast & Furious,” intended to track illegal gun sales. In fact it put hundreds of weapons in the hands of Mexican criminal gangs, leading to the death of an American officer. On February 2, 2011, after news of the operation emerged, Holder’s assistant attorney general sent a letter to Congress declaring that the Obama administration had no knowledge of the operation. This letter was false, as Holder later admitted.

A congressional committee wanted to know why it had been misled. BATFE employees leaked to Congress that the department was still suppressing the truth about the operation and retaliating against whistleblowers. The committee wanted to dig into that. It demanded DOJ documents “relating to actions the Department took to silence or retaliate against Fast and Furious whistleblowers,” so that it could determine “what the Department knew about Fast and Furious, including when and how it discovered its February 4 letter was false, and the Department’s efforts to conceal that information from Congress and the public.”

The committee’s first request for documents came early in March of 2011. The department did not comply with the request. On March 31, the committee issued its first subpoena. Again the department failed to comply. Over the next six months, the committee held a series of hearings, and Holder eventually admitted that the Fast & Furious operation had been “fundamentally flawed” and that DOJ’s February 4 letter denying administration knowledge was “inaccurate.” DOJ released thousands of pages of documents, but refused to give Congress all the documents it was asking for.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/two_stunning_revelations_on_russia_hoax_investigation_yesterday_from_dc_superlawyers_victoria_toensing_and_joe_digenova_.html

Washington, D.C. super-lawyers Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing have consistently been ahead of the news on the course of the unfolding scandal of spying on the Trump campaign and administration.  Appearing last night on Lou Dobbs’s Fox Business Network show, the two law and marriage partners revealed that the DoJ inspector general has already concluded that the last three of four FISA warrants were illegally obtained.Moreover, with the revelation from John Solomon that that “[n]ewly unearthed memos show a high-ranking government official who met with Steele in October 2016 determined some of the Donald Trump dirt that Steele was simultaneously digging up for the FBI and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was inaccurate, and likely leaked to the media,”

Horowitz is re-opening the investigation into the legitimacy of the first of four FISA applications.Watch:Make no mistake: this means that crimes were committed and criminal referrals from the I.G. are coming.  Those who signed the applications — a group that includes James Comey and Rod Rosenstein — face criminal prosecution.The second revelation from the duo is, if anything, even more shocking: the FBI attempted to set up a sting on George Papadopoulos by offering him $10,000 in cash — which he left on the hotel room bed where it was offered to him.  

The trap this represented was fully revealed when Papadopoulos returned to the USA and customs agents unsuccessfully searched for the $10,000.  One of them told Papadopoulos, “This is what happens when you work for Donald Trump.”  They make the point that the rot at the FBI is not confined to a few appointees at the top.  A large number of lower-ranked officials were involved in these stings and associated frauds, and not a single one spoke up as a whistleblower.  A heartening assertion from the two well connected figures is that they are confident that justice will be done — that grand juries and indictments are in process. Watch:

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/10/skyrocketing-attacks-nyc-jews-ignored-race/

Imagine that members of a religious minority were being frequently physically assaulted in America’s largest city at alarming rates. Imagine if members of that minority were being cold-cocked or spit on randomly for doing nothing more than being who they are and dressing how they dress. Imagine what a powerful and important story this would be to our country, how mobilized the media and government would be to stop it. But what if I told you that this is happening in New York City right now, and nobody seems to care very much? How can this be? I’ll explain it.

Orthodox Jews in New York City, specifically in Brooklyn, have experienced alarming rates of physical assault over the past year. The New York Police Department says that hate crimes in the city are up 67 percent this year. Of those, a whopping 80 percent have been anti-Semitic hate crimes. Just this week an Orthodox Jew just walking down the street was attacked from behind, punched in the head by an attacker who then ran away. In another incident this week, an Orthodox Jew was attacked by a group of men, one of whom shouted “You (expletive) Jew.”

This is an all too familiar story in Brooklyn these days, and there is a reason it isn’t being treated as a crisis by our media or government. That reason is that many if not most of the assailants are black or Hispanic men. In an article in The New York Times last October that was careful to point out, although without much evidence, that people of all descriptions are committing acts of anti-Semitism, Ginia Bellafante writes (emphasis mine), “In fact, it is the varied backgrounds of people who commit hate crimes in the city that make combating and talking about anti-Semitism in New York much harder.”