RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week delivered two bits of very bad news for the Obama Administration: Top Republican lawmakers formally requested the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Justice Department’s conduct in 2016 and 2017, and long-withheld documents related to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal will finally be released to Congress.

It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.

The public behavior by several Obama officials since Donald Trump’s election has been shameful and shameless. It would be easy to write it off as sour grapes, to treat them like a sad group of ex-wives grumbling about why they got dumped. But their actions are more insidious—and unprecedented—than that. Bitter about their unexpected defeat in November 2016 and terrified that their Trump-Russia conspiracy scheme will be exposed in full by Congress, Obama loyalists have been working overtime to discredit the president, smear Republican lawmakers, and keep the focus on Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

Just days after Trump won the election, Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary, openly began to question the legitimacy of Trump’s victory and peddled Trump-Russia conspiracy tales to an eager, Trump-hating press corps. Obama holdover Sally Yates refused to enforce Trump’s travel ban in her position as acting Attorney General. (She is now emerging as a central figure in the case against Michael Flynn.)

Loretta Lynch, Obama’s last attorney general, recorded a video advocating violence to resist the new administration, comparing it to other great American struggles. “It has been people, individuals, who have banded together, who simply saw what needed to be done, who have made the difference,” Lynch said. “They’ve marched. They’ve bled. Yes, some of them have died. This is hard. Every good thing is.”

Former FBI director James Comey, who was fired by Trump in May 2017, routinely tweets cryptic—if not childish—political messages aimed at the president and Congress while defending the agency whose credibility he helped degrade:
James Comey
✔ @Comey
All should appreciate the FBI speaking up. I wish more of our leaders would. But take heart: American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up. Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy.

And ol’ Uncle Joe Biden told CNN’s Chris Cuomo last month that Trump is a “joke.”

On Thursday, President Trump, surrounded by steel workers in the Oval Office, signed a memo imposing tariffs on steel (25%) and aluminum (10%) that are imported to the United States.

He carved out two exceptions to the tariffs:

Canada and Mexico would be temporarily exempted from the tariffs, pending the outcome of the ongoing renegotiation of NAFTA. The U.S. will likely insist that products imported tariff-free into the U.S. use steel produced within NAFTA.
He directed USTR (U.S. trade representative) Robert C. Lighthizer to negotiate with those military allies that want to be excluded from the tariffs, but such exclusions would require trade reciprocity. The Trump administration is expert at using economic leverage to produce negotiated outcomes that benefit the United States.

This announcement marks a victory for the trade deficit hawks in President Trump’s inner circle of economic advisers, including Wilbur Ross, Trump’s secretary of commerce, and University of California at Irvine economics professor Peter Navarro, who was recently elevated to the ranks of the president’s top-level advisers.

The economic recovery being produced by President Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation is at stake. During the fourth quarter of 2017, real GDP grew at a 2.5% clip, which is good compared to growth rates during the Obama years, but it could have been much better. Here are the contributions to growth during the fourth quarter:

We’ve heard it all before: “start by believing.” “Believe survivors.” At a recent panel discussion at the Ottawa City Hall, where my wife, Janice Fiamengo, was one of three featured participants, the subject of #MeToo and “Believe All Women” came up during the Q&A. (See 1:35:34 to 1:38:27 of the embedded YouTube video below.) An audience member claimed that it behooved us in most cases to give credence to women bringing forth their stories of sexual abuse. The young woman was skeptical of the court process as a way of resolving issues of sexual violence in women’s favor and contended that we need “non-criminal” forms of restorative justice, some form of “healing or accountability.”

Janice and her co-panelists, authors Paul Nathanson and David Shackleton, quickly put paid to that notion. Non-legal judgments via social media and public shaming could be as onerous and punitive as legal sentencing, turning men who had not been proven guilty into social lepers and bankrupts. The legal system may be flawed, but, as Shackleton remarked, it is the best we have and is theoretically capable of improvement.

In fact, an argument against #MeToo and the concomitant pursuit of non-legal incrimination is often put forward by the subtler variety of feminists, such as Josephine Mathias in the National Post and Bari Weiss in the New York Times, but for a completely different reason. They maintain that false allegations in the public sphere, such as the Duke Lacrosse and Rolling Stone moments, may discredit the “Believe All Women” movement; in the words of Weiss, such fictions “will tear down all accusers as false prophets.” It is not the harm to innocent men that concerns Weiss, but the damage to female credibility. The movement must be maintained.

Here I would indicate that, contrary to the young questioner who distrusted the cumbersome apparatus of the courts, which lead only to “re-victimization,” as well as Shackleton’s faith in a self-corrective justice system, court judgments in our SJW era tend to favor women – and when they don’t, the cry goes up for a quasi-legal system based on the “preponderance of evidence” rather than the “presumption of innocence” model – that is, on whatever narrative the judge or adjudicator tends to believe as more persuasive, evidence be damned. After all, women who lie or collude are only victims too troubled to get their stories straight.

Maxine Moore Waters represents California’s 43rd congressional district. She has been in Congress since 1991, and previously served the 35th and 29th districts. The anti-Israel Arab America Association loves her….. rsk
‘Please Welcome Demonized Maxine Waters,’ Says Waters at D.C. Event By Nicholas Ballasy

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/please-welcome-demonized-maxine-waters-says-waters-d-c-event/

WASHINGTON – Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said President Trump is not going to change and become “more presidential,” arguing that members of his administration “insincerely appeal” to minority communities.

“Those of us who stand up for the kinds of issues we’re dealing with today are often demonized, so please welcome demonized Maxine Waters,” she said at the start of her speech during the VOICES Coalition’s briefing on “The FCC’s War on the Poor” on Capitol Hill.

“Part of the FCC’s mission is to ensure that all Americans can access communication networks and to ensure that these networks offer diverse programming and are operated and owned by people from diverse backgrounds,” Waters said. “One of the main ways we can achieve these goals is through net neutrality, which guarantees a free and open Internet.”

Waters said she’s received “thousands of calls” from constituents who said they value net neutrality. The congresswoman said she supports efforts to overturn the FCC’s repeal of the Obama-era net neutrality rules.

“This administration is doing everything it can to roll back years of progress,” she argued. “This administration’s attack on net neutrality is yet another attack on communities of color and we just can’t stand for it.”CONTINUE AT SITE

Sessions should appoint a Justice Department prosecutor to investigate the investigators.

‘What’s good for the goose . . .” is more an understandable impulse than a useful rule of thumb in legal controversies, particularly legal controversies in which an error has been made.

The White House and congressional Republicans have watched in ire as the Trump administration has been tied in knots by the no-boundaries Mueller investigation. “Okay,” they’re thinking, “now, it’s payback time.” There appear to have been highly irregular investigative tactics used in probing the Trump campaign — particularly, but not exclusively, by the Obama administration. Why not, then, appoint another special counsel to squeeze the squeezers? Why not turn the tables?

It’s a bad idea.

Original Sin: A Prosecutor but No Crime
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made a foundational error in appointing Robert Mueller to be special counsel to investigate . . . well . . . um . . . come to think of it, that was the error: The investigation has no parameters, and thus no limitations.

Investigations conducted by prosecutors are supposed to be rooted in known crimes — or, at the very least, articulable suspicion that known crimes have occurred. Under the governing regulations, to justify the appointment of a special counsel, those crimes must form the basis for two salient findings: (1) that the Justice Department has a conflict of interest so severe that it cannot conduct the investigation in the normal manner, and (2) that it is necessary to appoint, from outside the Justice Department, a quasi-independent prosecutor. This special prosecutor is to be given a grant of investigative jurisdiction limited to the crimes that the Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate — and no other crimes, unless the special counsel explicitly requests, and the Justice Department grants, an expansion of jurisdiction. (See here, where I address Paul Manafort’s claim that his indictment violates regulations limiting special-counsel jurisdiction.)