RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump was elected president last November by winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation’s capital and major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country mired in stagnation and decay. “What truly matters,” he said in his Inaugural Address, “is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.”

Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, “the people” elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government — that happened last year — but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.

There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren’t supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.

Here was a case of current and former national security officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be disturbed. Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive, nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the voters.

But why should we believe that? And who elected these officials to make this judgment for us?

Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year’s election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was dismissed amid a torrent of mainstream-media reporting and disgraceful government leaks (but I repeat myself). Among the most intriguing was a New York Times report the morning after Flynn’s resignation, explaining that the former three-star Army general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was “grilled” by FBI agents “about a phone call he had had with Russia’s ambassador.”

No fewer than seven veteran Times reporters contributed to the story, the Gray Lady having dedicated more resources to undermining the Trump administration than the Republican Congress has to advancing Trump’s agenda. Remarkably, none of the able journalists appears to have asked a screamingly obvious question — a question that would have been driving press coverage had an Obama administration operative been in the Bureau’s hot seat.

On what basis was the FBI investigating General Flynn?
To predicate an investigation under FBI guidelines, there must be good-faith suspicion that (a) a federal crime has been or is being committed, (b) there is a threat to American national security, or (c) there is an opportunity to collect foreign intelligence relevant to a priority established by the executive branch. These categories frequently overlap — e.g., a terrorist will typically commit several crimes in a plot that threatens national security, and when captured he will be a source of foreign intelligence.

Categories (a) and (b) are self-explanatory. It is category (c), intelligence collection, that is most pertinent to our consideration of Flynn.

At first blush, this category seems limitless: unmooring government investigators from the constraints that normally confine their intrusions on our liberty (e.g., snooping, search warrants, interrogations) to situations in which there is real reason to suspect unlawful or dangerous activity. Intelligence collection, after all, is just the gathering of information that can be refined into a reliable basis for decisions by policymakers.

As we shall see, it is not limitless. But we should understand why it needs to be broad.

Most people think of the FBI as a federal police department that does gumshoe detective work, albeit at a high level and with peerless forensic capabilities. That, indeed, is how I thought of the FBI for my first eight years as a federal prosecutor, before I began investigating terrorism cases and became acquainted with the FBI’s night job. Turns out the FBI’s house has a whole other wing, separate and apart from its criminal-investigation division. Back in pre-9/11 days, this side of the house was called the foreign counter-intelligence division. Now, it is the national-security branch. Whatever the name, it is our domestic security service, protecting the nation against hostile foreign activity — espionage, other hostile intelligence ops, terrorism, acquisition of technology and components of weapons of mass destruction, and so on.

Most of the national-security branch’s work is done in secret, never intended to see the light of day in courtroom prosecutions. In some countries, including Britain, domestic security is handled by an agency (MI5) independent of domestic law enforcement (MI6). In our country, it is handled by a single agency, the FBI, based on the assumption (a sound one in my opinion) that the two missions are interrelated and that one can leverage the other more easily under one roof.

The FBI also has the foreign-intelligence gig because the Bureau is fully constrained by the Constitution and other federal law. Our other intelligence agencies — the best example is the CIA — are prohibited from “spying” inside the United States, largely because their foreign operations are outside the jurisdiction and fetters of American law. We understand that our security requires that our domestic security service have wide intelligence-gathering latitude; but we do not permit it to be limitless — it must respect our constitutional rights.

So how do we make sure the FBI does that if we’re giving it license to investigate people even when it does not suspect a crime or a threat? We do it by dividing the subjects of its intelligence investigations into three classifications and giving the FBI commonsense authority to deal with each.

1. Aliens acting as overt foreign agents
The first classification, and the easiest to grasp, consists of aliens who overtly work as foreign agents. Such a person — for example, Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador with whom General Flynn communicated — is a non-American (i.e., one who does not have the full-blown constitutional rights of an American citizen) and is openly acting on behalf of a foreign regime — in the case of Russia, a regime notoriously hostile to U.S. interests. Clearly, there is no problem with his being targeted by the FBI for intelligence-gathering purposes.

Note that, because the FBI is constrained by federal law, even overt foreign operatives have significant protections. It is still necessary, for example, for the FBI to get a judicial warrant to search a foreign agent’s home or intercept his phone and e-mail communications — and more on those warrants momentarily. Within the wide parameters of federal law, though, the FBI is free to monitor an overt foreign operative’s activities very aggressively, even when there is no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing or national-security threats. The presumption that our government is entitled to observe what foreign governments are up to on our soil is sufficient — and, of course, American officials operating overseas are routinely monitored by host governments (most of which are not so fastidious about civil liberties).

Editorial of The New York Sun | February 16, 2017
My only cavil is that Jeane Kirkpatrick abstained on a vote for UN resolution 487 which condemned Israel’s attack on the Osyrak reactor, entitled Iraq to sue for compensation, and urged Israel to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards. That was another really low moment in the UN….rsk

A star is born is our reaction to the first press briefing by President Trump’s new ambassador at the United Nations. The ex-governor of South Carolina was ridiculed by the Left when the president first sent her nomination up to the Hill, owing to her alleged lack of foreign policy chops. She certainly rang the wake up gong for that crowd this morning, after emerging from her first Security Council monthly meeting devoted to the Middle East. Tough as nails but with a smile and a layer of Southern charm.

The ambassador had just come from the regular monthly Security Council on Middle East issues. She said it was her first such meeting, and “it was a bit strange.” The Security Council, she said, is supposed to discuss how to maintain international peace and security. But the meeting, she said, was not about Hezbollah’s illegal buildup of rockets in Lebanon, it was not about the money and weapons Iran provides to terrorists, it was not how we defeat ISIS, it was not how we hold Beshar al-Assad accountable for the slaughter of thousands of civilians.

“No,” she said, “instead the meeting focused on criticizing Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East. I am new around here, but I understand that’s how the Council has operated month after month for decades. I am here to say the United States will not turn a blind eye to this anymore. I am here to underscore to the ironclad support of the United States for Israel. I am here to emphasize that the United States is determined to stand up to the U.N.’s anti-Israel bias.”

The ambassador made clear that the Trump administration will not support the kind of resolution from which the Obama administration’s ambassador — Samantha Power — shamefully abstained, though Mrs. Haley was too polite to name the humiliated Ms. Power. “The outrageously biased resolutions from the Security Council and the General Assembly only make peace harder to attain by discouraging one of the parties from going to the negotiating table.”

“Incredibly,” Mrs. Haley said, “the U.N. department of political affairs has an entire division devoted entirely to Palestinian affairs. Imagine that. There is no division devoted to illegal missile launches form North Korea. There is no division devoted to the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, Iran. The prejudiced approach to Israeli-Palestinian issues does the peace process no favors, and it bears no relationship to the reality of the world around us. The double standards are breathtaking.”

Trump did not cause the deep division in the country. It caused him. There are two very different Americas. I suspect that the half of the country that voted for Trump, that voted with wild enthusiasm, that roared at huge rallies, was not so much voting for Trump as against the other America. It was just that they had never had a chance before. The two countries have little in common and do not belong on the same geography.

Whether Trump proves to be the catastrophic buffoon he apparently aspires to be, the current protests illuminate a stark difference between his supporters and Hillary’s. The chasm is far deeper than just politics, embracing culture, taste, manners and morals. The groups are distinct and incompatible.

The difference begins with manners. Throughout the campaign Trump’s partisans forgathered in huge rallies, applauded, calmly went home, and later voted. At the same time we saw on Clinton’s behalf mobs of ill-bred, worse mannered, loutish, perennial adolescents blocking highways, shutting down rallies, engaging in vandalism and physically attacking supporters of Trump. Cars were destroyed, fires set, ATMs smashed. Black Lives Matter, always ghetto predators, were worst, but low-grade college students and their equally dismal professors joined in. They were obscene, infantile.

And naive: They apparently believe that they harm Trump though of course their behavior drives people in the other direction. I am no fan of Donald , but I look the foregoing and think Anything else.

The desire to shock of the eternally pubescent. Smirk, smirk, look at me, smirk, smirk.

We saw Ashley Judd, apparently an actress, addressing the “Women’s March.”

“I am not as nasty as racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege. I’m not as nasty as using little girls like Pokemon before their bodies have even developed. I am not as nasty as your own daughter being your favorite sex symbol, like your wet dreams infused with your own genes.”

The astonishing thing is not that some foul-mouthed twit came up with such cloacal gush, but that the “Women’s March” sponsored her, did not eject or even censure her.

Can you imagine any of Trump’s middle-American supporters accusing Obama of lusting for incest with his daughters? The two camps are different peoples. Half of the country seems culturally dominated from the ghetto. The other half embodies standards of behavior that have usually been thought congruent with civil society. While Trump himself is crass, making menstrual jibes on the air at Megyn Kelly for example, his supporters are not.

Any number of arguments can be adduced against Trump but so much of the outpouring of hostility, even from the intelligent, lacks thought. Thisaphobe, thataphobe, Nazi, misogynist. Putin’s Bitch. Most seem not to know what the words mean, or care.