RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

News broke last week about possible Russian wrongdoing in the U.S., and it didn’t involve the Trump campaign. The Hill reported that in 2009 the FBI “gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States.”

The FBI kept that information from Congress and the public, the Hill reported, even as Hillary Clinton’s State Department in 2010 approved a deal that transferred control of more than 20% of America’s uranium supply to a Russian company. The Hill also reported the FBI had documents showing that during this period Russia engineered the transmission of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

The FBI director at the time: Robert Mueller, now special counsel in charge of investigating “Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election and related matters.” The revelations can only heighten anxieties about Mr. Mueller, the FBI and the rule of law.

The special counsel’s open-ended mandate covers not only “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” but also “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

Because Mr. Mueller has interpreted his mandate expansively, his effort may become the most politically disruptive federal investigation of our young century—more than the FBI’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private email server and mishandling of classified information, more than Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the 2003 disclosure of CIA employee Valerie Plame’s identity.

All three investigations have one important characteristic in common: James Comey, Mr. Mueller’s successor as FBI director, played a dubious role in each.

In December 2003, after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the Plame matter, then-Deputy Attorney General Comey named Mr. Fitzgerald—a close friend who was godfather to one of Mr. Comey’s children—as special counsel to head the Justice Department’s “investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure” of Ms. Plame’s employment.

Unknown to the public then, and still not widely known, that potential crime had already been solved. By early fall 2003, the CIA had determined that revealing Ms. Plame’s identity caused no injury to national security, while the FBI knew it was not a White House official—as many Democrats and liberal pundits ardently believed—but rather Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who was columnist Robert Novak’s source for the original Plame story.

Mr. Fitzgerald declined to prosecute Mr. Armitage, but he played hardball with the Bush White House. Over several years, Mr. Fitzgerald inflicted severe damage by feeding the false accusation that the president had lied the nation into the Iraq war. The only criminal charges he prosecuted were generated by his investigation. He won a 2007 conviction of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, for obstruction of justice, false statements and perjury. The conviction was based on small inconsistencies Mr. Fitzgerald discovered in (or created from) more than 20 hours of Mr. Libby’s FBI interrogation and grand-jury testimony. Star prosecution witness Judith Miller wrote in her 2015 memoir that Mr. Fitzgerald had withheld crucial information and manipulated her memory, inducing her to testify falsely against Mr. Libby.

In contrast, then-FBI Director Comey played softball with the 2015-16 Hillary Clinton investigation. Despite the gravity of the matter—military service members can be court-martialed and discharged for sending classified information on nonsecure systems—Mr. Comey mostly avoided issuing subpoenas and cooperated with the Obama Justice Department in obscuring the investigation’s criminal character. He permitted Mrs. Clinton and her team to destroy evidence and granted generous immunity deals to her advisers. He drafted a statement exonerating Mrs. Clinton months before the FBI interviewed her. And his FBI neither recorded the interview nor compelled her to answer questions under oath. CONTINUE AT SITE

Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who has decided not to seek re-election, has lately been trading insults with President Trump over social media—and via traditional media as well. Mr. Corker seems to be enjoying his new freedom to speak his mind without the normal political restraints, and perhaps this can be written off as the congressional equivalent of senioritis. But even if voters no longer get to issue a report card on the good senator, perhaps a little context is in order.

While our President seems to have a knack for getting into ugly public disputes, a timeline constructed by CNN suggests that in this case Mr. Corker has been the aggressor. His criticisms have not been subtle. The senator has repeatedly attacked the President’s competence, stability and integrity.

Since Mr. Corker has lately been issuing public judgments about Mr. Trump’s integrity, it should also be noted–and here, too the CNN timeline is instructive–that Mr. Corker’s comments about Mr. Trump in 2016 were much more favorable than in 2017.

This is interesting because in 2016 Mr. Corker was under consideration for various jobs in a Trump Administration. It is also interesting because if one has sincere concerns about a candidate’s fitness for office, airing them before the election is obviously more valuable to voters than withholding them until after all the votes have been cast. It is also interesting that someone could listen to Mr. Trump for years, including during the long campaign of 2015-2016, and then decide–after observing him assemble a blue-chip cabinet–that he is somehow unfit to lead.

Now Mr. Corker is telling Mr. Trump to butt out of congressional discussions on how to fit all the party’s tax reform priorities into a package that cuts taxes by only $1.5 trillion over 10 years. This seems like the appropriate moment to note that Mr. Corker is the reason why the party has to hold such a difficult discussion. He would only agree to $1.5 trillion in a negotiation with Sen. Pat Toomey and others who wanted to cut more. CONTINUE AT SITE

The chairmen of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees on Tuesday announced a joint investigation into how the FBI handled last year’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of State.

“Decisions made by the Department of Justice in 2016 have led to a host of outstanding questions that must be answered,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in a joint statement.
The two Republican leaders said they have questions about the FBI’s decision to openly declare the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information, while quietly investigating Trump campaign associates.

They said they also want to know why the FBI decided to formally notify Congress of the Clinton probe on two separate occasions; why the FBI — rather than the Justice Department — recommended that Clinton not be charged after the investigation concluded; and the reasoning behind their timeline for announcing such decisions.

“The Committees will review these decisions and others to better understand the reasoning behind how certain conclusions were drawn. Congress has a constitutional duty to preserve the integrity of our justice system by ensuring transparency and accountability of actions taken,” their statement continued.

Former FBI director James Comey apparently began drafting his statement that the FBI would not recommend charges months before his July 2016 announcement.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) first announced in late August that Comey had drafted a statement on Clinton months before making a public statement, saying the decision was drawn up “before the FBI had interviewed key witnesses.”

The revelation sparked a flurry of questions about why Comey waited months after beginning to draft a statement to announce the end of the investigation in the midst of a heated presidential race.

President Trump fired Comey earlier this year, citing his handling of the Clinton probe. Special counsel Robert Mueller, however, is investigating whether Trump fired Comey to obstruct justice in the Russia probes. Comey was leading the inquiry at the time.

The top Democrats on these panels, Oversight’s Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Judiciary’s Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), slammed the decision as an attempt to distract the public eye from the Russia meddling investigation that they said is picking up speed.

A year ago this week, I flew to Cleveland, rented a car, and spent the next ten days driving across eastern Ohio and Pennsylvania, stopping in small towns and cities to talk to people about the upcoming presidential election.

Like most journalists and political pundits, I thought Hillary Clinton would win, but narrowly, in part because of places like Trumbull County, Ohio, and Luzerne County, Michigan—places that had historically voted Democrat but I thought might go for Trump. To use a now-cliché term, I suspected these “white working class” communities, many suffering from decades of industrial decline, felt left behind by the Democratic Party and ignored by the GOP. I thought voters frustrated by the establishment in Washington DC might just vote for a political novice like Trump, warts and all.

It turns out, I was right—more so than I realized. Enough people in the Rust Belt voted for Trump (against all expectations he won Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin) to hand him the Electoral College and send him to the White House. A year later, many media and political elites still don’t understand why or seem the least bit curious to find out. The mainstream media, convinced it’s the last line of defense against a fascist Trump regime bent on shredding the Constitution, has sunk to pedantic meme-making in response to credible charges of bias and incompetence in its coverage of the administration.

The Democratic Party has begrudgingly admitted it needs to talk more about the economy and reach out to voters in the middle, even as Democrats themselves have steadily moved left on everything from abortion to health care. For their part, Republicans continue to be divided among Never-Trumpers, befuddled conservatives, and pro-Trump populists who’ll support the president no matter what he says or how little his administration accomplishes.
Many Trump Voters Were Looking For a Scapegoat

Lost in all of this are the people across the Midwest who actually voted for Trump. They had their reasons, some of them good and some of them terrible. But a common theme was a seething discontent with the status quo, and not just the political establishment of the two major parties but also the media, which many people told me was part of the problem.

Oftentimes, this discontent was directed at the wrong things, the misfortunes of a town blamed on the wrong causes. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the town of East Liverpool, Ohio, a hollowed out place that sits on a bluff overlooking a bend in the Ohio River some 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. I stopped there on a weekday afternoon and found the downtown eerily silent and nearly abandoned.

One of the only storefronts that wasn’t boarded up or vacant was a gaming shop, video games and board games and such, whose owner, a heavyset woman in her fifties, was more than happy to talk politics. She was voting for Trump, she said, because she was sick of both parties and their inaction on illegal immigration, which she said was ruining the country.

At first, this struck me as odd. East Liverpool is the second largest town in Columbiana County, which is 95.5 percent white and virtually devoid of immigrants, legal or illegal. It’s possible the owner of that store had never encountered a single immigrant in her town. But when you consider what’s happened to East Liverpool, it makes sense that some residents would look for something or someone to blame.

Its industry—East Liverpool was once known as the “pottery capital of the world”—has been gutted by globalization. Its population has shriveled by more than half since 1970. Its claim to fame last summer was a Facebook post by the city police department that went viral: a photo of a man and woman slumped over in their car seats, mouths agape, overdosed on heroin while in the backseat, a four-year-old boy looks on.

Trump won 68 percent of the vote in Columbiana County. The last time the county went for a GOP presidential candidate by anything close to that margin was the 1928 election of Herbert Hoover.

It wasn’t just embittered small business owners in dying towns like East Liverpool who blamed Democrats or globalization on the problems they saw around them and saw a glimmer of hope in Trump. All across eastern Ohio I met Democrats who told me they were planning to vote for Trump: a woman in Youngstown who’d been a Democrat her entire life but was registering Republican this year and volunteering for the Trump campaign; a gay man in Akron whose small business was crushed by government regulations; a retired Army veteran in Warren who was sick of the Democratic Party’s leftward drift on social issues.