RUTHFULLY YOURS

Famed civil libertarian and attorney Alan Dershowitz said recently of the ongoing shenanigans surrounding Robert Mueller’s investigation: “Just as the first casualty of war is truth, so, too, the first casualty of hyper-partisan politics is civil liberties.”

Indeed. The American people are up against a rogue ruling class that cares only about protecting the power they have taken from us; they don’t give a damn about civil liberties or justice, in general.

We were reminded of this recently when President Trump pardoned Scooter Libby. The pardon highlighted former FBI Director James Comey’s corruption in unleashing prosecutorial abuse by a special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, who then railroaded the conviction of an innocent man. The pardon corrected a miscarriage of justice; it was no Marc Rich pardon (though that had its own Comey and Clinton Foundation connections) and, contrary to Comey’s assertion, it was not an attack on justice or the rule of law. Comey has now hired Fitzgerald as his personal attorney.

Regarding the character of the special counsel, Dershowitz described Mueller’s personal involvement in “the most scandalous miscarriage of justice in the modern history of the FBI,” where four men were sent to prison for murders they were known not to have committed. They remained locked up for nearly 30 years, after which a judge awarded them $102 million for false imprisonment.

Unelected bureaucrats are acting with similar disdain for the people’s will. PowerLine’s John Hinderaker writes how, in contradiction to our Constitution, James Comey and others like former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates have declared the FBI and “permanent staff of the DOJ” are “independent of, and superior to, the president . . . a permanent bureaucracy in Washington that is impervious to the wishes of the voters,” making “the administrative state . . . the greatest contemporary threat to the liberty of Americans.”

Unparalleled government abuses of power are about to become public. The question is what we, the people, will do in response to this overt attempt by deep state players to strip us of our freedom.

Four recent developments drive home the unsettling nature of our situation:

First, Charles Lipson writes how Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) “is making a deeply troubling allegation: An official investigation was mounted against an American presidential campaign with no official information to support it. If so, then U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were weaponized for partisan purposes.”

Andrew McCarthy, on the implications for equal justice under the law: “Too many Trump critics have abandoned all pretense of respecting due process.” Byron York adds: “…the generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head. Now, the question is: Can the accused prove the charges false? Increasingly, the president’s critics argue that the dossier is legitimate because it has not been proven untrue.”

Second, a redacted version of the House Intelligence Committee’s final report appeared on Friday, clearing Trump’s campaign of colluding with Russia but describing three troubling matters: First, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn did not lie to FBI special agents. Instead, what Michael Walsh calls the Left’s “Star Chamber of Horrors” apparently forced Flynn to accept a guilty plea to stanch his financial bleeding, which included selling his home.

Watching the disgusting (and decidedly unfunny) performance of the comedienne Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night, I thought of two things. One was, “What would her mother think of this shockingly vulgar and carelessly cruel exhibition?” I’d say the same thing about Ms. Wolf’s children, if she had any, which I believe she does not.

The second thing I thought of was Edmund Burke’s mournful observations, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, about the moral coefficients of the destructive antinomian impulses that coruscated through France in 1789-1790. The date is important. Burke, although he saw clearly that “in the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows,” was writing before the Terror. The depredations he foresaw and cataloged had so far affected mainly manners and morals—the human heart, not yet heads separated from bodies. That would come later.

Of course, we know what was to come. Burke merely foretold it. Yet the insight of hindsight makes Burke’s observations all the more poignant. “All the pleasing illusions,” Burke wrote,

which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason [note the irony]. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.