RUTHFULLY YOURS

We interrupt this week’s Don Jr. loop to tell a tale of a real ethics scandal. It’s one perpetrated not by the Trump administration, but by the man atop Washington’s ethics-industrial complex: Walter Shaub.

If you’ve never heard of Mr. Shaub, you soon will. He is resigning as director of the Office of Government Ethics—effective next week—so that he can continue more publicly the war he’s been waging against the administration internally since last fall. Unquestioning media outlets are providing him a big podium for his accusations, so it’s worth noting some facts.

Mr. Shaub was already playing the indignant watchdog on Sunday, as he explained his resignation on ABC’s “This Week.” He complained that the White House was consistently “challenging OGE’s authority to carry out its routine and most basic functions.” Understanding those “functions” is critical to realizing the Shaub drama is so much grandstanding.

The OGE isn’t a watchdog or an inspector general’s office. As its own website makes clear, it doesn’t adjudicate complaints, investigate ethics violations, or prosecute misconduct. Rather, it was set up in 1978 to help the White House. Its job is to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions, a job undoubtedly more frustrating and messy under President Trump. Nonetheless, Mr. Shaub’s attempt to act as ethics czar, to ride herd on the Trump operation, is outside his office’s mission. It’s the act of a pious political operator who doesn’t like this president.

Only weeks after the election, as speculation swirled about how Mr. Trump would handle the ethical complexity of his business dealings while president, Mr. Shaub was already trolling, posting a series of sarcastic tweets about divestiture to the Office of Government Ethics’ official account. When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance. So much for the “help” part.

The best insight into Mr. Shaub’s methods can be seen in the long fallout from Kellyanne Conway’s bone-headed February attempt to defend Ivanka Trump by calling on Americans to buy her clothing line. Deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino, who leads the internal ethics team, reached out within minutes to reassure Mr. Shaub the situation would be reviewed. Mr. Shaub nonetheless waited only four days before dropping a public letter essentially demanding action against Ms. Conway.

In a Feb. 28 response to Mr. Shaub, Mr. Passantino noted that some of the OGE’s ethics regulations do not apply to White House staff. He nonetheless immediately reassured Mr. Shaub that a separate regulation did hold them to some of the same standards and that he had reschooled Ms. Conway in them. CONTINUE AT SITE

If the Trump administration has one overarching goal, it’s to Make America Great Again. But what does this mean? It means we are promoting MAGAnomics—and that means sustained 3% economic growth.

For most of our nation’s modern history, a healthy American economy meant one that grew at roughly 3.5%. That was the average growth rate between the late 1940s and 2007. Since then, it has hardly topped 2%.

The difference between those two growth rates is staggering. If the American economy had grown at only 2% between the end of World War II and 2000, average household income would have been roughly $26,000 instead of $50,000.
Over the next 10 years, 3% growth instead of 2% will yield a nominal gross domestic product that is $16 trillion larger, federal government revenues $2.9 trillion greater, and wages and salaries of American workers $7 trillion higher.

For merely suggesting that we can get back to that level, the administration has been criticized as unrealistic. That’s fine with us. We heard the same pessimism 40 years ago, when the country was mired in “stagflation” and “malaise.” But Ronald Reagan dared to challenge that thinking and steered us to a boom that many people thought unachievable. In the 7½ years following the end of the recession in 1982, real GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.4%. That is what a recovery looks like, and what the American economy is still capable of achieving.

The focus of MAGAnomics is simple: Grow the economy and with it the wealth of, and opportunity for, all Americans. It does that by focusing on fundamental principles that made the U.S. economy the greatest engine of prosperity in the history of the planet:

• Tax reform. We need to boost productivity. Fundamental to that is encouraging capital investment. We’ve seen for decades that growth in private-sector jobs correlates to growth in private business investment. When businesses invest in new plants and equipment, they tend to hire more people, who produce more. Lower tax rates and faster cost recovery are two levers that will reduce the cost of capital and thereby help ignite economic growth. And since 70% of business income goes to wages, the benefits flow to workers as well.

• Curbing unnecessary regulation. Much like commonsense tax reform, rolling back unnecessarily burdensome regulations will reduce the cost of doing business. When regulations increase costs, they decrease returns, leaving less capital to invest. If they are too burdensome, they discourage any investment at all, as businesses choose to forgo opportunities. This is important to all business, but especially to capital-intensive sectors like manufacturing. Overly zealous environmental regulations have played a role in pushing many U.S. businesses overseas. Requiring realistic and fact-based cost-benefit analyses of regulations will help protect both the environment and American jobs.

• Welfare reform. Growth also depends on the size of the workforce. Although the labor pool is aging, we are also seeing people who could be working but are staying home. We badly need them to go back to work. We believe that most want to do this but simply lack the opportunity. Our welfare system often creates disincentives for people to seek work. We intend to change that. We need to reform welfare to ensure it helps those truly in need of it, but does not encourage people to stay home.

• Smart energy strategy. The president’s “all of the above” energy strategy expands the economy’s growth potential. Yes, it puts coal miners back to work. But cheaper, cleaner, more abundant energy will also increase investment and employment across dozens of industries, from chemicals to automobiles. By ensuring reliable supplies and stable prices, the president’s energy plan will reduce uncertainty, especially in the manufacturing sector, thereby reducing the risks associated with building new plants and hiring more American workers.

• Rebuilding America’s infrastructure. The president’s plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure will create immediate job opportunities. More important, it will boost the long-term productivity of American industry. Rebuilding roads, bridges, airports and ports will pay dividends both now and in the future.

• Fair trade for America. The president is right in that the U.S. is frequently abused when it comes to international trade. Ensuring that other nations do not undermine our economy by unduly taxing our products, by dumping products here, or by stealing our intellectual property is essential to our economic future.

• Government spending restraint. When government spends a lot, it takes money away from private investment. And private investment is always a more efficient allocator of capital than government. We will continue to fund critical government functions, including a social safety net that gives people the comfort of knowing they will not be overlooked while encouraging them to be more willing to take chances. But we will watch every dollar to minimize waste. We will, in short, seek to take from you only what government actually needs to function.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and a contributing editor at National Review.

“Collusion” is a hopelessly vague term. Alas, the word has driven the coverage and the debate about possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Vladi­mir Putin’s regime. But it is a term nigh useless to investigators, who must think in terms of conspiracy. Collusion can involve any kind of concerted activity, innocent or otherwise. Conspiracy is an agreement to commit a concrete violation of law.

Thus has the collusion question always been two questions: First, was there any? Second, if so, collusion in what?

The first question, to my mind, is no longer open to credible dispute. There plainly was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This is firmly established by emails exchanged in June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and an intermediary acting on behalf of Russian real estate magnate Aras Agalarov. A Putin crony, Agalarov is also a business partner of President Trump.

The emails report that Agalarov had met with Russia’s chief government prosecutor and that the latter offered to provide “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia.” The intermediary, Rob Goldstone (a publicist for Agalarov’s pop-star son, Emin), told Trump Jr. that the information “would be very useful to your father” and — more significant — that it was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

In a subsequent email, Goldstone told Trump Jr. that Emin Agalarov wanted Trump Jr. to meet with a “Russian government attorney” who would be flying in from Moscow. Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting and elaborated that it would include then-campaign manager Paul Manafort as well as Jared Kushner, Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law.

The meeting took place at Trump Tower. The Russian attorney, whom Goldstone accompanied, was Natalia Veselnitskaya. She is a former regime prosecutor who now represents Putin cronies and lobbies the U.S. government to repeal the Magnitsky Act, a human rights provision enacted to punish Russia for torturing and killing a whistleblower. The act’s undoing is known to be a Putin priority.

Consequently, we now have solid documentary evidence that the Trump campaign, fully aware that Putin’s regime wanted to help Trump and damage Clinton, expressed enthusiasm and granted a meeting to a lawyer sensibly understood to be an emissary of the regime. Top Trump campaign officials attended the meeting with the expectation that they would receive information that could be exploited against Clinton.

That is collusion — concerted activity toward a common purpose. We can argue about whether the collusion amounted to anything, in this intriguing instance or over time. That is under investigation, and deservedly so. To my mind, though, it is no longer credible to claim there is no evidence of a collusive relationship. It is there in black and white.

Now we are on to the real question: Collusion in what? There are two aspects to this question: legal and political.

As a matter of law, mere collusion is not a crime. As noted above, it must rise to a purposeful agreement to carry out a substantive violation of law. It is not a crime to collude with a foreign government, even a hostile one, if the point is to accept information in the nature of opposition research. The suggestion that it might violate campaign law to accept information — as a “thing of value” — would raise significant constitutional questions while trivializing the conduct, which is egregious because of the nature of the relationship, not the money value of the information. To rise to the level of conspiracy, there would need to be proof, for example, that (a) violations of U.S. law were orchestrated by the Russian regime, and ( b) Trump campaign officials knew about them and were complicit in their commission.
At the moment, there is no such evidence. We will have to see what the investigation yields.

That, however, is not the end of the matter. The framers included impeachment in the Constitution in order to address violations not just of law but also of the public trust — transgressions in the nature of abuse of power or that otherwise demonstrate unfitness for office. Among the most profound concerns of our Constitution’s authors was the specter of a president who aligned with a foreign power covertly and against U.S. interests.

Of course, a political remedy is subject to political considerations. On the matter of unsavory relations with Russia (and other regimes, for that matter), we have gotten in the habit of tolerating much that ought not be tolerated, from politicians of both parties. Trump’s relationship with Putin’s regime should not be examined in a vacuum. But that said, it must be examined.

Christopher Wray, President Trump’s nominee to replace James Comey as FBI director, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He performed so well that key Democratic members of the committee such as Senator Dianne Feinstein said they were impressed and were inclined to vote for his confirmation. Senator Al Franken, a chronic skeptic of anything coming from the Trump administration, said to the nominee, “I think you had a good hearing today, and I wish you luck.”

Christopher Wray is eminently qualified for the position of FBI director, based both on his experience as well as his temperament. He served previously as a deputy attorney general in charge of the criminal division during President George W. Bush’s administration. Prior to that, his public service included a stint as assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, prosecuting individuals who committed a variety of crimes including bank robbery, gun trafficking, kidnapping and arson. Right after graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for United States Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, who described Mr. Wray as “balanced, thoughtful, deliberative” and “unflappable.”

Mr. Wray has a reputation for a calm demeanor. He avoids the limelight whenever possible. “Chris is a very gentle soul,” says Monique Roth, who served as his senior counsel at the Justice Department. “He’s not one of those grandstanders or ego-driven people. He’s very self-effacing and thoughtful.”

Indeed, Mr. Wray could be considered in one respect the antidote to Comey, who craved the spotlight. However, like Comey, he demonstrated his independence from political pressure while serving in the Bush Department of Justice. He joined Comey and Robert Mueller, who was then the FBI director and currently the special counsel overseeing the Russian investigation, in preparing to resign over a controversy involving a proposed domestic surveillance program.

Mr. Wray was asked repeatedly during his confirmation hearing whether, as FBI director, he would remain independent of the White House and partisan pressures. He assured the senators on several occasions that his loyalty would be only to the Constitution and the rule of law. He said that he was never asked to pledge his loyalty to the president and that he would not do so in any case. Mr. Wray said he would resign if asked by the president to do something he considered to be “illegal, unconstitutional or even morally repugnant” and could not talk the president out of taking that course of action.

“Nobody should mistake my low key demeanor for lack of resolve,” Mr. Wray declared. “Anybody who thinks that I would be pulling punches as the FBI director sure doesn’t know me very well.”

Mr. Wray offered his understanding of the FBI’s role, which is to do fact finding and accumulate evidence on which to base a recommendation whether to prosecute or not. Prosecutors, not the FBI, are responsible for the decision whether to prosecute. When asked whether former FBI Director Comey had acted responsibly in holding the press conference in which he held forth on his views of the Hillary Clinton e-mail imbroglio, Mr. Wray indicated what he would not do as FBI director. He said he would not hold a press conference disclosing derogatory investigatory information regarding an uncharged individual.