RUTHFULLY YOURS

The White House on Monday unveiled its plan to raise $1.5 trillion in capital for public works. This will cause sticker shock among Republicans, but the President’s innovative regulatory reforms deserve debate and may even garner some Democratic support.

President Trump is proposing to spend $200 billion in federal funds to leverage $1.3 trillion in state, local and private investment in public works. This bid is probably dead on arrival since Republicans have little appetite for more spending after blowing the budget sequestration caps last week.

Many bridges and airports need a face-lift, though claims of crumbling roads are overwrought and often politically motivated. One problem is that public works like other discretionary programs are being squeezed by entitlements, which constitute nearly two-thirds of federal spending. But even while politicians in Washington gripe that we—always the royal “we”—don’t spend enough on public works, they consistently prioritize other discretionary programs.

Consider: Of the $787 billion stimulus in 2009, only about $60 billion financed public works. Most was spent on safety-net programs and other progressive causes. More Hurricane Sandy recovery money went to “community development” than repairing train tunnels.

Many projects that do receive federal funding aren’t national priorities, such as California’s bullet train. That’s because the government typically awards “competitive” grants to politically favored projects rather than those that would produce the biggest economic benefits. The Obama Administration rigged cost-benefit analysis to reward projects that would promote public housing and reduce carbon emissions.

In all of the discussions about the political weaponization of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI, alleged corruption at the highest echelons of those agencies and serial abuse of the secret FISA process surrounding the 2016 election, one name has been conspicuously absent: President Barack Obama.

High-ranking officials and other major players in those agencies — which Obama oversaw — are increasingly embroiled in the growing scandal: James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, Andrew Weissmann, Sally Yates, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr.

Given the tight control Obama exercised over every part of his administration and agenda, the idea that any of these appointees and loyalists freelanced their activities without at least his tacit approval or that of his White House strains credulity.
These kinds of abuses of power were nothing new, given the Obama team’s long history of this type of misconduct on everything from the Benghazi terror attack to the political misuse of the IRS. They weaponized the most fearsome government agencies to target, monitor and presumably illegally unmask political opponents, including members of Congress, journalists reporting unfavorable stories, Trump allies and average Americans.

These dark institutional offenses didn’t just materialize out of thin air. One of the criticisms of President Nixon was that even though he wasn’t aware of the Watergate break-in, he had created an environment in which such an action was acceptable.

Two top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are questioning former national security adviser Susan Rice about an “unusual” message she sent to herself on Jan 20, 2017 — President Trump’s Inauguration Day.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) questioned Rice why she sent a note detailing a conversation she observed on Jan. 5 between then-FBI Director James Comey and then-President Barack Obama.

“It strikes us as odd that, among your activities in the final moments on the final day of the Obama administration, you would feel the need to send yourself such an unusual email purporting to document a conversation involving President Obama and his interactions with the FBI regarding the Trump/Russia investigation,” they wrote in a letter to Rice.

They said that in the message, Rice noted how Obama repeatedly emphasized during the meeting on Russian election hacking with Comey that he wants every aspect of the issue handled “by the book.”

“The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book,” Rice wrote, according to an excerpt included in the senators’ letter.

“From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming [Trump] team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

The Schiff memo, principally authored by Democratic staff on the House Intelligence Committee under the direction of ranking member Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), is the response to the Nunes memo, which was composed by the committee’s Republican staff under the direction of Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.). Substantively, the Schiff memo is unlikely to do Democrats much good, since the Nunes memo’s principal allegations have been corroborated — namely: The Obama administration (a) used the unverified Steele dossier to get a FISA warrant on former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page and (b) did not tell the FISA court that the dossier was a Clinton-campaign product.

Democrats nevertheless appear to have laid a trap to try to goad Republicans into objecting to their memo. The trick would enable Congressman Schiff to claim Republicans are hiding critical facts. Committee Republicans were shrewd enough to avoid the trap, but the Trump White House has been taken in.

This is an easy one: The president should release the memo with his own redactions. It would then be up to Schiff to make the next move: Either prove Republicans are concealing facts that damage the president or expose himself as a charlatan.

In my column over the weekend, I explained that the Nunes memo’s account had been verified by the Grassley-Graham memo. The latter is the document that accompanied the criminal referral by which two senior Senate Judiciary Committee members, Chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), recommended that dossier author Michael Steele be investigated for making false statements to the FBI.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes next plans to investigate the role former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump — including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it.

In his May 2017 testimony before the intelligence panel, Brennan emphatically denied the dossier factored into the intelligence community’s publicly released conclusion last year that Russia meddled in the 2016 election “to help Trump’s chances of victory.”

Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document (excerpt here), even though senior national security and counterintelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Last week, Nunes (R-Calif.) released a declassified memo exposing surveillance “abuses” by the Obama DOJ and FBI in their investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. It said the agencies relied heavily on the uncorroborated dossier to take out a warrant to secretly surveil a Trump adviser in the heat of the 2016 presidential election, even though they were aware the underlying “intelligence” supporting the wiretap order was political opposition research funded by Clinton allies — a material fact they concealed from FISA court judges in four separate applications.
Rep. Devin Nunes.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File

Nunes plans to soon release a separate report detailing the Obama State Department’s role in creating and disseminating the dossier — which has emerged as the foundation of the Obama administration’s Russia “collusion” investigation. Among other things, the report will identify Obama-appointed diplomats who worked with partisan operatives close to Hillary Clinton to help ex-British spy Christopher Steele compile the dossier, sources say.

Vanessa Trump, wife of Donald Trump, Jr. was taken to the hospital earlier today after opening an envelope filled with a suspicious powder, according to ABC News. She was examined at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center as a precaution, where she was tested and released. She and two others were also decontaminated at her apartment before being taken to the hospital.

The envelope was sent from Boston and addressed to Mrs. Trump’s husband, Donald Trump Jr. It included what sources describe as a threatening letter describing Trump Jr. as a terrible person and indicating that the sender was angry.

NYPD spokesman J. Peter Donald said:

“The substance was deemed to be nonhazardous and is being transported to a lab in New York City for further analysis.”

More specifically, the substance was identified as cornstarch.

The Secret Service also weighed in:

“The Secret Service and our law enforcement partners in New York City are investigating a suspicious package addressed to one of our protectees received today in New York, New York. This is an active investigation and we cannot comment any further.”

The Left, of course, found the targeting of Donald Trump, Jr.’s wife to be nothing more than a setup for jokes or even a right-wing conspiracy. Witness a few of the reactions on Twitter, courtesy of Paul Joseph Watson at InfoWars:

President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, said: “How disturbed must a person be to do what they did to a mother of five young children? This dangerous and reckless act goes beyond political differences.”

Before the Nunes memo was released, Democrats, the media and its intelligence sources insisted that it would undermine national security, reveal tradecraft secrets and even get agents killed.

Senator Cory Booker warned that it might be treasonously “endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community.” It was, but not in the way that he meant. The memo didn’t have anything resembling classified information it. Neither did the Grassley-Graham criminal referral which was heavily redacted to screen out all the “classified information.” What did the classified information consist of?

The Grassley-Graham criminal referral went through two FBI redactions. Julie Kelly at American Greatness compared the two versions to see what was hidden.

Most of the redactions in the first version, that were exposed in the second version, involved the problems with the FISA warrant application’s reliance on Christopher Steele. The references to the FISA warrant, which is classified, allowed figures in the FBI to redact it. But none of the references reveal anything damaging to our national security. They do raise serious questions about the FBI’s actions.

The FBI redacted the fact that the FISA warrant was thoroughly based on the Clinton-Steele dossier. Even if the FISA application is classified, Clinton opposition research isn’t. The FBI redacted the accusation that the FISA warrant had failed to state that Steele had been working for the Clinton campaign. That certainly isn’t classified information though it took a lot of work to expose.