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Let Mueller Keep Digging The special counsel’s team raises questions about its own fairness and impartiality. By William McGurn

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

At a moment when the special counsel’s team is busy calling its own fairness and impartiality into question, why would Donald Trump even think of firing Robert Mueller ?

When the special counsel picked his team, almost half the lawyers he selected had donated to Hillary Clinton. Legally that may not be disqualifying. It was, however, highly imprudent for a man presiding over the nation’s most sensitive investigation. Not a single Mueller prosecutor had contributed to Mr. Trump.

Those donations now provide the context for more recent revelations about the partisan preferences of Team Mueller. Start with the lead FBI agent, Peter Strzok, who exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Hillary text messages with his mistress, an FBI lawyer named Lisa Page —who was then also working for Mr. Mueller. Andrew Weissmann, the lead prosecutor, not only attended Mrs. Clinton’s election-night soiree but turns out to have cheered an Obama holdover at the Justice Department, Sally Yates, for her refusal to carry out a presidential order. Meanwhile we learn that a senior Justice official, Bruce Ohr, met with both Trump dossier author Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson during the 2016 campaign—and that his wife worked for Fusion GPS.

These developments, alas, have encouraged two horrible responses from Republicans. The first is the call for Mr. Trump to sack Mr. Mueller, an idea news reports say is gaining traction inside the White House. The other is for a new special counsel to investigate the existing special counsel.
Robert S. Mueller. Photo: Universal History Archive/UIG via Bridgeman Images

Either would make a bad situation worse. If the president fires Mr. Mueller now, it will look as though he has something to hide; if another special counsel is appointed, it will further diminish the proper investigative authority here—i.e., Congress. There are better ways forward.

Start with the president. If it’s true that there is no obstruction or Russian collusion, his overriding interest lies in full transparency. In a recent piece for National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy asks why Mr. Trump doesn’t just order the declassification of material such as the FBI’s application for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to wiretap Trump associates, so Americans can see for themselves whether the FBI used or misused information from the infamous Steele dossier. Good question. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Alabama Sends a Message Roy Moore’s defeat shows that Steve Bannon is for losers.

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

Alabama voters can be forgiven if they preferred to sit out Tuesday’s special Senate election, but those who turned out narrowly elected Democrat Doug Jones to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The result is a painful lesson for the Alabama Republicans who nominated Roy Moore in the September primary. But it’s also a useful act of political hygiene for the national Republican Party given the accusations of sexual misconduct against the former judge.

The cost of defeat will be high and immediate. Despite his campaign vows to “cross the aisle” to work with Republicans, Mr. Jones will fit right in with Senate Democrats. He will be a reliable vote for Chuck Schumer on any important matter, including judicial nominees. Had he shown even a scintilla of moderation on abortion, for example, he would have won in a rout.

Mr. Moore’s defeat narrows the GOP majority’s margin to 51-49, which will give even more leverage to individual Senators who want to grandstand or satisfy a political constituency. Alabama evangelical Christians who supported Mr. Moore over appointed Sen. Luther Strange in the GOP primary should know that they have now made a conservative Supreme Court nominee less likely if Justice Anthony Kennedy retires in 2018. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins will hold the balance of judicial confirmation power, and watch the media lobby them in waves.

The good news is that Mr. Moore’s loss may give the GOP a better chance of holding the Senate majority next year. Democrats were primed to make Mr. Moore a national symbol of sexual harassment to drive turnout among women. GOP incumbents would have been asked about Mr. Moore every day.

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VIDEO: THE ENTRAPMENT OF MICHAEL FLYNN

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

This new Daniel Greenfield Moment presents Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center and editor of The Point atFrontpagemag.com.

Daniel discusses The Entrapment of Michael Flynn, unveiling a leftist political witch-hunt that is standing justice on its head.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2017/12/12/glazov-gang-the-entrapment-of-michael-flynn/

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

RALPH PETERES: WHY THE ARAB STREET DID NOT EXPLODE

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

In the wake of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last week (12/06), the “experts” crowding the media predicted strategic calamity: Vast, violent protests and a wave of terror would sweep the Muslim world in the coming days.

Instead, the largest demonstration anywhere this weekend was the funeral procession for Johnny Hallyday, the “French Elvis.” Nothing in the Middle East came close.

We have witnessed, yet again, the carefully phrased anti-Semitism of the pristinely educated; the global left’s fanatical pro-Palestinian bias; and the media’s yearning for career-making disasters.

But rather than waves of protest, the waiting world got tepid statements of disapproval from otherwise-occupied Arab government; demonstrations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that, combined, barely put a thousand activists in the streets; and yes, four deaths: two demonstrators and two Hamas terrorists hit by an Israeli airstrike.

Sunday (12/10) did see a smallish protest outside the US Embassy in Lebanon, but it was hardly Benghazi under Barack Obama.

Predictably, Turkish President and Self-Appointed Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan (officially our NATO ally) didn’t miss the chance to spew venom toward Israel, the US and Europe. But even in Turkey, things were all quiet on the Bosporus front.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Jerusalem Fiction Pretending that Israel’s capital is not in Jerusalem hasn’t helped the peace process one bit. By Matthew RJ Brodsky

Posted By on December 12th, 2017

President Trump’s recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and begin the process of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv does more than fulfill a campaign promise. It corrects a historic imbalance in U.S. policy and removes accumulated scar tissue that has restricted the flow of new perspectives after a quarter century of U.S.-mediated peace negotiations. It necessitates challenging old and worn assumptions on one of the issues at the heart of the conflict: the Jerusalem fiction.

The crux of the issue as it relates to any form of Palestinian–Israeli peace talks is who will control the Holy City, or Old City, of Jerusalem. That space accounts for 0.38 square miles of land, including where the Jewish temples once stood, and where the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, today houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It is also where the Western Wall is located, along with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Leaving aside the various religious claims on this tiny parcel of land, having a read on the modern-day history that shaped the city’s status is essential to understanding why U.S. policy has contributed to the negotiating stalemate and will ultimately be helpful in gauging the implications of a policy shift.

In 1947, the United Nations endorsed a partition plan for two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The Jerusalem-Bethlehem region was to be an enclave under international administration. While the Jews accepted the plan, the Arabs rejected it and launched a war to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state. Without the help of foreign powers, and to the surprise of many, the Jews prevailed, declaring the establishment and independence of Israel on May 14, 1948.

By the war’s end in 1949, Jordan controlled the West Bank, including the Old City of Jerusalem, which it annexed in 1950, along with the 2.3-square-mile surrounding environs, which it referred to as East Jerusalem. The Jordanians destroyed much of the Jewish Quarter, expelled most of its residents, and forbade Jews from entering the Holy City or East Jerusalem.

Israel, for its part, held onto a 15-square-mile portion of what it called West Jerusalem, on land it had long inhabited. That’s where the Israelis set up their government institutions, including the parliament (the Knesset) and supreme court. Meanwhile, no party to the conflict endorsed the view that Jerusalem should be an internationally administered enclave. As a result, U.S. policy shifted.

In 1949, the Truman administration officially recognized Israel with its expanded territory, beyond what was proposed in the 1947 U.N. partition plan, but did not recognize any portion of Israeli-held Jerusalem, instead stating that the city’s status should be resolved through negotiations. To that end, the U.S. embassy was established in Tel Aviv.

In the June 1967 war, Israel captured the West Bank and the Jordanian-held portion of Jerusalem and expanded the city’s municipal boundaries. Still, the U.S kept its embassy in Tel Aviv, preferring a stance of neutrality.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Port Authority Jihadist Attack: Why the Rush to Civilian Court? Intelligence agents need to know any information he has that might help us prevent another attack. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on December 12th, 2017

If the New York Times is correct, it looks like Akayed Ullah, the Bangladeshi jihadist whose bomb detonated prematurely at the Port Authority Bus Terminal near Times Square during the morning rush hour, is going to be charged with terrorism crimes in civilian federal court. He’ll be prosecuted by my former office, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York in lower Manhattan. The SDNY will be working the Joint Terrorism Task Force (mainly the FBI and the NYPD), just as these law-enforcement agencies are working together in the case of Saifullo Saipov, the West Side Highway jihadist who killed eight people and wounded a dozen others by ramming his rental truck into them a few weeks back.

Ultimately, this may be the right way to handle the case. But I do not understand the rush to bring Ullah into federal court.

Having been wounded by his improvised explosive device (likened to a pipe bomb, perhaps hidden in a vest), Ullah was taken into custody immediately after attempting the attack, a failed bombing in which a few people (other than Ullah) appear to have suffered minor injuries but, fortunately, no one was killed. He was no doubt grabbed by police from the NYPD and the Port Authority, with the feds coming in after the fact. Ullah apparently talked right after the attack, but it is not known (at least by me) whether he was read Miranda warnings. (I am betting he was not, since the “exigent circumstances” exception to Miranda would have permitted police to ask him whether there were any other explosives, and other questions along those lines, without advising him of his rights.)

Nevertheless, if he is going to be processed as a civilian defendant, police must have read him his rights in fairly short order — including his right not to speak to the police and to have an attorney present (i.e., to tell him not to say anything), on taxpayers’ dime, during any questioning. He will be presented in court, within a day or so, before a magistrate-judge on a complaint outlining the charges and probable cause supporting his arrest. He will be assigned counsel, and the court will advise him that he need not speak to government agents and probably should not say anything more if he has spoken to them already.

This is a foolish way to proceed.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Too Anti-Trump to Check The media’s errors over the last week all slanted one way. By Rich Lowry

Posted By on December 12th, 2017

It’s a wonder that President Donald Trump devotes so much time to discrediting the press, when the press does so much to discredit itself.

The media’s errors over the past week haven’t been marginal or coincidental, but involved blockbuster reports on one of the most dominating stories of the past year, Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. They all slanted one way — namely, toward lurid conclusions about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russians.

Every media outlet makes mistakes. It’s easier than ever to run with fragmentary or dubious information in a frenzied news cycle that never stops. But underlying the media blunders was an assumption — not based on any evidence we’ve yet seen — of Trump guilt in the Russia matter. This was news, in other words, too anti-Trump to check.

On the day it broke that Michael Flynn had pled guilty to lying to the FBI, Brian Ross of ABC News had a seemingly epic scoop. He reported that Flynn would testify that Donald Trump directed him to make contacts with Russian officials prior to the election. This was the collusion equivalent of a four-alarm fire. A New York Times columnist tweeted, “President Mike Pence, here we come.” The stock market dropped several hundred points.

Then Ross “clarified” the story to say that Trump instructed Flynn to reach out to the Russians after the election. This wasn’t a minor detail of chronology; it ripped the heart out of the story. Ross’s blockbuster went from a suggestion of collusion to a suggestion of the normal course of business during a presidential transition. ABC suspended Ross for a month.

CNN followed this up with its own botched report on how Don Trump Jr. allegedly got a heads-up email prior to the release of a batch of WikiLeaks emails during the campaign. The item rocketed around the Internet — accompanied by explosive imagery — and was repeated by other major news organizations. The only problem is CNN flubbed the date. The email came after the release of the documents, not before. Once again, supposed evidence of collusion evaporated upon contact with better-informed, follow-up reporting. CNN corrected its dispatch, and one of its correspondents called the episode “a black eye.”

Around the same time, Bloomberg reported that Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Trump records from Deutsche Bank, before clarifying to say that Mueller had subpoenaed people related to Trump, perhaps Paul Manafort. A Mueller move that would have crossed a Trump “red line” against investigation of his finances — risking a constitutional showdown — had become something more ambiguous.

If the press had less faith that Robert Mueller is on the verge of bringing the Trump presidency to its knees, it might exercise a little more discrimination. When your only frame of reference for the Mueller investigation is Watergate, everything looks like a proverbial smoking gun. When for professional reasons (the story of the century) and perhaps partisan ones (a hated Republican kicked out of the office) you’re rooting for the worst, you let your guard down.

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One Mueller-Investigation Coincidence Too Many Stacking the deck with anti-Trump staffers is proving to be a really bad idea. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 12th, 2017

Special prosecutors, investigators, and counsels are usually a bad idea. They are admissions that constitutionally mandated institutions don’t work — and can be rescued only by supposed superhuman moralists, who are without the innate biases inherent in human nature.

The record from Lawrence Walsh to Ken Starr to Patrick Fitzgerald suggests otherwise. Originally narrow mandates inevitably expand — on the cynical theory that everyone has something embarrassing to hide. Promised “short” timelines and limited budgets are quickly forgotten. Prosecutors search for ever new crimes to justify the expense and public expectations of the special-counsel appointment.

Soon the investigators need to be investigated for their own conflicts of interest, as if we need special-special or really, really special prosecutors. Special investigations often quickly turn Soviet, in the sense of “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has led what seems to be an exemplary life of public service. No doubt he believes that as a disinterested investigator he can get to the bottom of the once contentious charge of “Russian collusion” in the 2016 election. But can he?

A Mandate Gone Wild
Something has gone terribly wrong with the Mueller investigation.

The investigation is venturing well beyond the original mandate of rooting out evidence of Russian collusion. Indeed, the word “collusion” is now rarely invoked at all. It has given way to its successor, “obstruction.” The latter likely will soon beget yet another catchphrase to justify the next iteration of the investigations.

There seems far less special investigatory concern with the far more likely Russian collusion in the matters of the origins and dissemination of the Fusion GPS/Steele dossier, and its possible role in the Obama-administration gambit of improper or illegal surveilling, unmasking, and leaking of the names of American citizens.

Leaks from the Mueller investigation so far abound. They have seemed calibrated to create a public consensus that particular individuals are currently under investigation, likely to be indicted — or indeed likely guilty.

These public worries are not groundless. They are deeply rooted in the nature and liberal composition of the Mueller investigative team — whose left-leaning appointments just months ago had understandably made the liberal media giddy with anticipation from the outset. Wired, for instance, published this headline on June 14: “Robert Mueller Chooses His Investigatory Dream Team.” Vox, on August 22, wrote: “Meet the all-star legal team who may take down Trump.” The Daily Beast, two day later, chimed in: “Inside Robert Mueller’s Army.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Deep State Resisters at State Dept. Defy Jerusalem Directive Staunch opposition from The Swamp. December 12, 2017 Ari Lieberman

Posted By on December 12th, 2017

Following President Trump’s historic declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, West Bank and Gazan Arabs took to the streets in rage. They burned U.S. and Israeli flags. They cursed America, Israel and the Yahuds (Jews). Their imams cited verses from the Koran and the Hadiths about the usurpers and interlopers and the “descendants of apes and pigs.” In other words, it was business as usual for the Palestinians. Nothing had changed.

At the State Department too, it was business as usual. In a transparent effort to placate the Arab bloc, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the process of moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would take several years. Tillerson is said to have counseled Trump against recognition.

Then, at a Washington DC press briefing on December 7, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Satterfield was evasive when asked by AP journalist Matt Lee, “what country is Jerusalem in.” Satterfield acknowledged that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel but paradoxically could not say definitively that Jerusalem was located in Israel. Satterfield went on to note that consistent with current State Department policy, U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem would not be able to state their place of birth as “Israel” on their passports. The only options currently available to U.S citizens born in Jerusalem are to note either “Jerusalem” as their place of birth or if born prior to 1948, “Palestine.”

This then is the absurdity that the White House must contend with. It appears that the State Department, staffed with a cadre of career civil servants and employees of the diplomatic corps, is conducting its own foreign policy, one that deviates from the goals of the White House and undermines its objectives. This group is perhaps more fanatical in its opposition to the president’s historic declaration than some Arab leaders.

Their resistance is motivated by a myriad of reasons. Some simply hate Trump and this offers an opportunity to engage in obstructionism. Some are deeply anti-Semitic and their sympathies lie squarely in the Arab camp. Others view change and bold action as a threat and prefer the status quo. Whatever their motivations, they are working in concert to delay and obstruct the president’s bold new policy initiatives aimed at supporting a loyal ally and acknowledging reality while at the same time breaking the deadlock and reviving an anemic peace process based on a foundation of truth.

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Stop Paying Diplomatic Danegeld to Palestinian Arabs The ransom never works.Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 12th, 2017

President Trump last Wednesday announced that the United States formally recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and that work will start on physically moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The uproar over this announcement epitomizes the futility and duplicity that for seven decades has fed the lies lying at the heart of the conflict between Israel and Arabs. But Trump’s announcement should be just the beginning of a radical paradigm shift in how this country deals with the region.

One change is to abandon the appeasing gestures and empty diplomatic formulae that typify our feckless diplomacy. What Trump proposed is not a substantive change, but an acknowledgment of reality. Jerusalem already is Israel’s capital: its parliament, the Knesset, is already there, as are its supreme court, numerous government agencies, and the residence of its president. Visiting dignitaries meet their Israeli counter parts in Jerusalem. In every respect, Jerusalem functions as a national capital, except one: foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.

Keeping embassies in Tel Aviv, then, is an endorsement of the Arab lie that Jerusalem is a particularly sacred Islamic city, and so should be the capital of future Palestinian state. But going along with this canard merely validates propaganda and a revisionist history the purpose of which is to alienate Jews from their traditional homeland in order to achieve the ultimate aim: destroying Israel as a state. The truth is, Jerusalem has been a Jewish city for three thousand years, as documented in historical records and archaeological finds. Even a 1925 Muslim guide-book to Jerusalem said that the Temple Mount’s status as the site of the First Temple and the altar of King David “is beyond dispute.” Conquest, ethnic cleansing, and foreign occupation have not broken that claim, and for most of history Jews have been the majority of occupants––in 1948, more than twice as many Jews lived in Jerusalem than Arabs, and today 120,000 more Jews than Arabs live there.

Nor is the claim that Jerusalem is one of Islam’s holiest site accurate. That notion is a later one, based on a few vague Koranic verses, and it became significant only after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War as a propaganda tool for demonizing Israel and soliciting international support. Before 1967, Jerusalem was a provincial backwater for the Arabs, and the Palestinian’s founding charter, the 1964 Palestinian National Covenant, does not mention Jerusalem at all. But even if Jerusalem does have a special significance for Islam, that happened only by dint of conquest, invasion, and occupation. And yes, Israel recovered their holiest site by conquest during a defensive war. If we want, however, to assign title by adjudicating competing historical claims based on continuing cultural and religious connections, Muslims lose the debate. We need to stop taking seriously the demand that Jerusalem be the capital of some imagined Palestinian state that Palestinian Arabs by their violent deeds, and their serial rejection of four offers of a state, have done nothing constructive to create.

The claim to Jerusalem––like the “right to return” of the ever-metastasizing “Palestinian refugees,” and the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from lands their ancestors had inhabited nearly two thousand years before Islam existed––is a demand meant to forestall any final agreement that doesn’t further the Palestinian Arabs’ eliminationist aims. For states in the West, on the other hand, the claim facilitates doing nothing meaningful to resolve the dispute, and masks with duplicitous diplomacy their scapegoating and often outright anti-Semitic hostility to Israel.