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May 2017

The Bipartisan Case against James Comey The stated rationale for Comey’s firing was that he damaged the FBI’s credibility. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Jim Comey has been a good friend to me over the years. I have disagreed strenuously with a number of decisions he made in connection with the Hillary Clinton investigation — with his rationales and with the fact that he was presuming to exercise authority that was not his to exercise. The independence of law enforcement is critical, but at times he seemed to redefine “independent” as beholden to only those institutional guidelines he subjectively judged worthy of following. Still, I personally know him to be a good man. I know that he loves the country and the FBI, and that every decision he made — regardless of whether it was right or wrong — was made in what he sincerely believed was the best interests of both.

Last week, he testified that he was made “mildly nauseous” by the thought that his decisions had an impact on the outcome of the election. I know what he means: It describes how I’ve felt in criticizing someone I’ve been fond of since we started out as young prosecutors three decades ago — except I’d have omitted the “mildly.” The only solace I take in it is that I know Jim did what he understood his job required — and he knows he is not the only one who goes about things that way.

The memorandum issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to explain Comey’s dismissal Tuesday is well crafted and will make it very difficult for Democrats to attack President Trump’s decision. Rosenstein bases the decision not merely on Comey’s much discussed missteps in the Clinton e-mails investigation — viz., usurping the authority of the attorney general to close the case without prosecution; failing to avail himself of the normal procedures for raising concerns about Attorney General Lynch’s conflict of interest. He goes on specifically to rebuke Comey’s “gratuitous” release of “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal prosecution.” That “subject,” of course, would be Mrs. Clinton.

This (as I noted in a recent column) is exactly the line of attack Democrats have adopted since Clinton lost the election: Conveniently forget how ecstatic they were over Comey’s confident public assessment that the case was not worth charging, and remember only his scathing public description of the evidence — even though both were improper. Significantly, Rosenstein avoids any suggestion that Comey was wrong in concluding Clinton should not be indicted; nor does he in any way imply that Comey’s errors made it impossible to bring a wrongdoer to justice. That is, Rosenstein leaves unstated the partisan Republican critique of Comey. Instead, Clinton is portrayed as a victim. This will appeal to Democrats — especially since it will keep alive the fiction that Comey, rather than Clinton herself, is responsible for the Democrats’ stunning electoral defeat.

Rosenstein leaves unstated the partisan Republican critique of Comey.

Moreover, Rosenstein makes a point of quoting condemnations of Comey by Democrats prominent in law enforcement: former Obama attorney general Eric Holder and Clinton deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick. Recall that Comey endorsed Holder for AG. This was an important seal of approval at a time when critics (like yours truly) were arguing that Holder’s key participation in the Marc Rich pardon scandal was disqualifying: Comey had not only been a respected deputy attorney general in a Republican administration; he had for a time inherited the Marc Rich investigation as a prosecutor in New York, when Rich was among the FBI’s most wanted fugitives. Yet, Holder has blasted Comey for breaking with “fundamental principles” of the Justice Department, and thus undermining “public trust in both the Justice Department and the FBI” (in a way, I suppose, that Holder’s own citation for contempt of Congress did not).

Sally Yates: Much Ado about Nothing New Democrats used yesterday’s subcommittee hearing to air a lot of partisan innuendo, but they couldn’t make anything substantive stick. By Andrew C. McCarthy

If ever there were an example of why a congressional committee is a terrible vehicle for investigating misconduct with alleged criminal or national-security implications, it was Monday’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing. The session, a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, featured the much-anticipated testimony of Democratic diva Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General fired for insubordination by President Trump in the early days of his administration. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that the proceedings were heavy on politically charged innuendo and light on substance.

If you were looking for hard evidence of Trump collusion in a Russian influence operation, there was none to be found. And if you were hoping for insight into the only known crime to have been committed in this escapade — namely, the leaking of classified information to the media — the hearing chaired by Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) was a disappointment.

What we mainly heard was that the Obama administration really does not like Michael Flynn. Not exactly the late-breaking news.

President Obama fired Flynn after making him head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn was a naysayer on Obama’s foreign policy, particularly with respect to the Middle East — especially Iran and radical Islam. Flynn also made enemies throughout the so-called “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies because he called out our spooks on politicizing their analyses to paper over Obama’s policy failures. How surprising that many of these officials have no use for him either.

Thus, the schadenfreude runneth over in the Obama camp, which is clearly enjoying the general’s fall from grace. And one can hardly blame them for bursting into “I told you so” mode over lapses in judgment by President Trump’s original (and short-lived) national-security adviser — e.g., taking money in his post-military security-consulting career from enterprises tied to the murderous Putin regime and the government of Turkey’s Islamist thug, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Flynn defenders will get only so far observing that the autocratic Erdogan was beloved of the Obama and Bush administrations, too, and that the haul from Flynn’s Russian speaking gigs was a bare fraction of the cool $500,000 Bill Clinton got from a Kremlin-tied investment bank shortly before his wife, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, signed off on a government ruling that gave Russia control of one-fifth of U.S. uranium supplies. I myself have pointed out that Flynn (with co-author Michael Ledeen) wrote a bestselling book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies, in which he describes the Putin regime as a determined enemy bent on America’s destruction, and radical Islam as the ideology that animates the terrorist threat against our country. Given the general’s awareness of these facts, if he couldn’t perceive the unseemliness of profiting off the Russian and Turkish despots, then Democrats surely can’t be faulted for questioning his fitness, or Trump’s judgment in retaining him. Such critiques can hardly be dismissed as baseless, even if they are hypocritical, motivated by politics rather than security concerns, and grossly incomplete in the portrait they paint of Flynn’s distinguished military career.

Europe’s Death Wish: Edward Cline

“Nothing is creepier than Islam. Challenge Islamic racism, misogyny genocide, and so on.” I thought it would be just desserts to begin by paraphrasing Linda Sarsour and just turn back on her her statement that “Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” which has made the rounds on Twitter and national news. This groomed, but bag-headed, glib, taqiyya-fluent, BDS-champion, and stealth jihadist, has a loud mouth and is a publicity hound and resolutely anti-Trump. She was one of the organizers of the Women’s March in Washington. She has pulled lots of wool over the eyes of the liberal clueless.

But one prominent blogger and spokesman for the West, Bruce Bower, scratched his head and asked, following the dismally concluded French election of May 7th, in his PJMedia article, “What Happened in France?”:

How could Marine Le Pen have lost in a landslide?

Why, after the Brits chose Brexit, and Americans chose Trump, did the Dutch fail Wilders, and the French fail Le Pen?

How could a country that has been hit by several major terrorist attacks in recent years, and that has undergone a more profound social transformation owing to Islamic immigration, vote for business as usual?

… But if you’ve witnessed the reality of Islamization in cities like Rotterdam and Paris and Stockholm, you may well wonder: what, in heaven’s name, will it take for these people to save their own societies, their own freedoms, for their own children and grandchildren?

Bawer reviews the common rationale is that Europeans are still feeling guilty:

One way of trying to answer it is to look at countries one by one. For example, the Brits and French feel guilty about their imperial histories, and hence find it difficult to rein in the descendants of subject peoples. The Germans feel guilty about their Nazi past – and the Swedes feel guilty about cozying up to Nazis – and thus feel compelled to lay out the welcome mat for, well, just about anybody. The Dutch, similarly, are intensely aware that during the Nazi occupation they helped ship off a larger percentage of their Jews to the death camps than any other Western European country, and feel a deep need to atone.

Is it a matter of self-flagellation in the spirit of atonement? “Bible (Exodus 20:5-6; 34:6-7; Numbers 14:18) portray God as “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children.” Still another part of the Bible (Jeremiah 31:29; Ezekiel 18:2; Job 21:19) rejects this and teach that “sons [shall not] be put to death for their fathers.” The Bible is rich in such bipolar maxims.

I do not subscribe to the moral philosophy of inherited guilt or generational responsibility. Most imperial history should not be apologized for, especially where and when it concerns “the descendants of subject peoples” not to mention the descendants of people who also weren’t even alive during imperial depredations. Some of that history if awful, particularly the Belgian experience in the Congo.

However, were it not for imperial colonial policies, much of the known world would still be in the very Dark Ages, “brutish, nasty, and short.” In fact, where the West retreated and left indigenous populations at the mercy of their murderous tribalist leaders and masters, those people have largely reverted to that condition. (Look at Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia.)The West introduced technology, medicine, literacy, law, longer longevity, higher standards of living, and even the concept of freedom. Much of that is now disappearing. Pick any country on the African continent and it’s the same story, with remaining Westerners under attack, their property confiscated, and explicitly threatened with mass murder and genocidal extinction.

Every time I read some Third World complaint about Western colonialism, I can’t help but hark back to that gem of a Monty Python scene in The Life of Brian, and think, “What has the West given the complainers?”

Dublin Council flies Palestinian flag over city hall in ‘gesture of solidarity’

Dublin City Council, in Ireland’s capital, has voted to fly the Palestinian flag over city hall until the end of the month “as a gesture of our solidarity with the people of Palestine.”

The motion, passed Monday, was proposed by left-wing People Before Profit Councillor John Lyons, who said the move would support communities living under a form of “apartheid, worse than South Africa.” It was carried with the support of Sinn Féin and left-wing parties by 42 to 11, with seven abstentions. Center-right parties Fine Gael and Fine Fail opposed the motion.

The motion stated that the city council will fly the flag “as a gesture of our solidarity with the people of Palestine living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, with the Palestinian citizens of Israel denied basic democratic rights and with the over 7 million displaced Palestinians denied the right of return to their homeland.”

Writing on Facebook, Sinn Fein Councillor Larry O’Toole said he was “proud to speak in favor of and support the Palestinian flag flying over City Hall.”

‘Nakba Day,’ also known as ‘Day of Catastrophe,’ sees Palestinians commemorate their expulsion from their homeland between 1947 and 1949. This year will also mark the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War and Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) welcomed the announcement on Facebook, with Chairperson Fatin Al-Tamimi saying she was “speechless” as she thanked the Irish people for their support.

“The refugees created during this ethnic cleansing and their descendants now number in the millions, and all are shamefully still denied their internationally mandated Right of Return to their homeland,” she added.

In an letter to councilors ahead of the vote, Israeli Ambassador to Ireland Ze’ev Boker, said that flying the flag would be“highly politically charged,” adding that “some members of the Irish Jewish community are concerned by the negative message that the flying of the flag promotes.”

Sligo County Council, on Ireland’s west coast, also voted to fly the flag at its council building from May 15 until the end of the month.

Failing Those Who Served Us By Janet Levy

Three years after the 2014 Veterans Health Administration scandal erupted in headlines, outrage, investigations, and the resignation of then-secretary of veterans’ affairs Eric Shinseki, veterans still must contend with an agency that provides less than stellar service.

A government report issued in February found that the VA’s shift to using more private-sector care for veterans has its own problems. They include cumbersome authorization and scheduling procedures, inadequate provider networks, and the potential for veterans having to pay their own treatment costs. Plus wait times for care, the heart of the 2014 scandal, are still long: an average of 45 days for 53% of veterans.

Problematic health care, as well as the descent into homelessness for a growing number of our nation’s veterans, belies our posture of national pride in our troops. We label them heroes, and then we fail to properly provide for them.

The problems of inadequate health care began to surface in 2012 and 2013, when two doctors at the Phoenix VA Health Care System voiced concerns. The whistleblowers said they had witnessed substandard care, that VA officials had falsified health service wait times, and that 40 veterans died while waiting for health care. These claims were later verified by the Veterans Administration, and investigations began nationwide.

A 2014 General Accounting Office audit of 731 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics reported that roughly 100,000 veterans nationwide were experiencing long wait times for health care. Another VA report detailed specific techniques used to falsify wait times.

Still other allegations of mismanagement surfaced in 2014, when a congressional committee revealed that more than $380,000 in bonuses were awarded to directors and top executives of 38 VA facilities where falsification of records and delays in care were being examined. The money was part of $2.7 million in extra pay given in 2013 to top-ranking VA officials.

Further, a 2015 VA report found that the VA had such sloppy record keeping that 307,000 veterans out of 867,000 pending cases on the VA’s list of electronic records were actually deceased. VA officials could not conclude if the veterans had received care, were still waiting for care, or had even applied for care. Nonetheless, some concluded that those veterans had died while waiting for medical help.