RUTHFULLY YOURS

New Year’s Eve gets people thinking about resolutions. Alas, when a year passes, a mothballed prosecutor finds himself thinking about the statute of limitations. As 2018 beckons, it has me thinking about Paul Combetta — the Platte River Networks technician who used the “BleachBit” program to destroy thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails when they were under congressional subpoena and preservation orders.

It is not just the tick-tock of the criminal clock that has me thinking about Combetta — about how much longer his obstructive destruction of government files in March 2015 could still be subject to investigation and prosecution. The statute of limitations is five years. Time’s a-wastin’, but there could still be a live case for a while.

The other reason Combetta leaps to the front of the mind is . . . Robert Mueller.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein assures us that Special Counsel Mueller is doing a first-rate job probing the possible (but thus far undiscovered) complicity of Trump associates in Russia’s election meddling. That being the case, I’m wondering: Would the Trump Justice Department be up for applying Mueller’s approach to the Clinton caper?

No, I’m not suggesting that DOJ direct the FBI to break into Mr. Combetta’s home with guns drawn in the dead of night, as Mueller did with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. I’d save the brass-knuckles tactics for hardened criminals, as the law intends. I’m talking about the aggressive but wholly legitimate step Mueller has taken: Calling BS on attempts by criminal suspects to use lawyers to conceal their schemes.

Back in November, we catalogued the stark contrasts between Mueller’s brand of hardball and the kid-gloves treatment given to subjects of the Clinton-emails investigation. The most significant of these involved the attorney–client privilege. Mueller persuaded a federal judge to force an attorney for Manafort and his co-defendant (Richard Gates) to testify against them in the grand jury.

Naturally, the defense attempted to rely on the attorney–client privilege to shield communications between the lawyer and the suspects from disclosure. But Mueller successfully countered that, under the crime-fraud exception to that privilege, communications are not deemed confidential if they are in furtherance of a crime, fraud, or civil wrong — which includes a scheme to dupe the government or undermine an investigation.

When the 2016 presidential election ended, the media somehow found the time to expose one of the greatest scandals of that or any other election cycle: active efforts of the Democratic National Committee favoring Hillary Clinton’s nomination and undermining the campaign of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Now it appears that former interim DNC Chairman Donna Brazile’s revelations about her party’s interference in the primaries may only have been a small taste of what really happened. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee may also have been part of a broad effort to undermine Trump that involved the FBI, the Department of Justice, intelligence agencies, and—irony of ironies!—Russian spies. This anti-Trump cabal has escaped public notice almost entirely, given the media’s obsession with the transparently false narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.

This is all the more reason why Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs to shine a light on this outrageous and potentially criminal conduct.

Although there are many indicators of election meddling on the part of the Left, the most important is the existence of the so-called Steele Dossier, a compilation of unflattering facts, pseudo-facts, and blatant fabrications designed to undermine the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The dossier was the work of British spy-for-hire Christopher Steele, paid for initially by anti-Trump conservatives. Later, the DNC and the Clinton campaign bankrolled Steele’s efforts, and the dossier, to the tune of millions of dollars. The dossier was shopped around to various media outlets, which, to their credit, mostly scoffed at its contents.

The FBI, however, took the dossier seriously enough to use it to begin an investigation of the Trump campaign and to obtain a warrant against Trump associate Carter Page. The FBI even offered to pay Steele to continue his work. And from where did the most salacious and bogus claims in the dossier come? Russian spies supplied these tidbits, in exchange for cash from Steele, who ultimately received funding from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

Now, opposition research is perfectly legitimate. Paying the agents of a foreign state to reveal and/or concoct damaging information about one’s political adversary, however, is manifestly unethical, and it remains an open question whether the Democrats or the Clinton campaign committed crimes in the course of their effort to discredit and defeat Trump. That the party which engaged in this outrageous behavior would then turn around and baselessly accuse its opponents of doing the same thing is, well, breathtaking in its audacity.

Trying to take Trump seriously, Michael’s Barone’s column in the Washington Examiner on Thursday, is significant for at least two reasons. One is that anything Barone writes is certain to be thoughtful, authoritatively researched, and grounded in reality. His columns, like his work in general, are not fired mainly by ideology but by a desire to understand. What Cardinal Newman said of Aristotle could, mutatis mutandis, be said of Barone: about most things, to think like him is to think correctly.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/29/taking-trump-seriously/

But there is another sense in which this particular column is significant. Given Barone’s stature as a conservative but non-ideological commentator, his judicious and fair-minded assessment may mark a turning point in the broader public reception of President Trump’s initiatives.

Remember: the moment that Donald Trump achieved the impossible, defeating the anointed candidate Hillary Clinton, a vast coalition formed like a toxic mold to blight his presidency and deny him the legitimacy that he had won at the ballot box and the Electoral College.

Irony-free females in pink “pussy hats” marched in their thousands to protest against Trump’s “vulgarity”; B-list Hollywood narcissists made embarrassing videos in which they pleaded with members of the Electoral College to renege on their responsibility to vote for their party’s candidate; frenzied commentators at CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other outposts of woke hysteria regurgitated rumors, fantasies, innuendos, and gossip on the basis of “sources” indistinguishable from their personal political animus; black-masked members of Antifa and kindred covens of criminal disgruntlement rampaged on college campuses, destroying property and injuring people with whom they disagreed in order to protest the violence and intolerance of Donald Trump; the entire academic establishment, that sprawling congeries of preening though unearned smugness and moral self-infatuation, contracted in one brow of hate-spewing woe to demonstrate its unwavering commitment to sclerotic ideological conformity.

“The Embarrassing Ravings of a Mad Uncle”
All across the fruited plain, pampered members of the entitled class shouted at others to “check their privilege” while signaling their approval of a “resistance” movement whose only reality was a resistance to the results of a free, open, and democratic election. On the one hand, it was a perfect illustration of what Charles Mackay called “the madness of crowds”; on the other, it was a vivid embodiment of something Sigmund Freud might have congregated under the heading of “infantile neurosis.”

One of the nice things about being a writer in 2018 is that SJWs will continue to find new and absurd ways to get their feelings hurt. Even if nothing else is happening, I can always count on a group of SJWs providing me with something to write about. This time, a horde of them provided me a gift by taking to Twitter to express their dismay at a photo of chopsticks accompanying a New York Times story about a new Japanese restaurant.

The restaurant, called Jade Sixty, will be opening in NYC soon. The Times article reports that “a good portion of the menu at this new restaurant is pure New York steakhouse: nine cuts of beef, surf & turf, whole chicken and seafood platters. But the rest of the menu looks to Asia for inspiration, offering soup dumplings, chicken won tons, rock shrimp tempura, chicken yakitori, crispy spring rolls and a deep list of sushi specialties.”

Sounds delicious. And since my wife has an office in NYC, I look forward to sampling the menu.

In an attempt to help the soon-to-open restaurant spread the word, the New York Times included a photo of food accompanied by chopsticks. Apparently, the Times didn’t realize how important it is to get the chopsticks placement correct. They found out the hard way that the incorrect placement of chopsticks is racist. To be fair to the Times, I would bet that over 99.9 percent of the population wouldn’t have thought about it, either.

Predictably, HuffPost joined in the whining and smugly pointed out that “the chopstick photo is a reminder that the Times has been occasionally tone deaf towards Asian food and culture despite their ubiquity in New York City.”