RUTHFULLY YOURS

New York seems to be following in the footsteps of Los Angeles, where municipal politics has long met with collective uninterest. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who enjoys a large polling lead in his November reelection bid, took a vacation prior to his late August debate with Sal Albanese, a former city councilman little known to most New Yorkers. Earlier this year, when de Blasio feared that his mishandling of the city’s homeless problems and the multiple city, state, and federal investigations into his ethics violations might pose a threat, he concocted a new slogan for his 2017 campaign: “One city for all New Yorkers,” a pointed contrast with his winning 2013 message decrying New York’s “Tale of Two Cities.” He also announced that he would pay for the legal costs involved in his numerous mayoral shenanigans. But after federal attorney Preet Bharara decided against prosecuting him for trading campaign money for influence, de Blasio dropped his contrived slogan about unity, while also announcing that he’d changed his mind—city funds would be used to cover his multimillion-dollar legal costs, after all. A man who often naps after his morning workouts, de Blasio has dropped the pretense of working hard as mayor. Instead, he works hard at opposing President Donald Trump, even journeying to Berlin to join street demonstrators against the G-20 summit—rather than sticking around to console the family of NYPD officer Miosotis Familia, assassinated in her squad car that same week.

A similar mayoral dynamic can be seen in Los Angeles, where Democrat Eric Garcetti, running for reelection this year on an anti-Trump, pro-sanctuary-cities platform, won with a record 81 percent of the vote. But running virtually unopposed against a slate of also-rans, Garcetti garnered barely 330,000 votes in a city of almost 4 million people. That amounts to just 20 percent of registered voters—though that didn’t “beat” the record-low of 17.9 percent achieved by previous L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in his 2009 reelection victory. Garcetti’s easy victory left him with a campaign war chest amounting to $3 million—money that will serve him well should he try, in 2018, to succeed 84-year-old Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. It’s not clear yet whether Feinstein will retire, but even if she does, L.A. mayors, no matter how popular, have never been able to win statewide office.

The civic indifference that makes such incumbent dominance possible in both cities is driven by the same source: the sharp decline of middle-class voters for whom the city is a matter of civic responsibility, on the one hand, and the mounting power of public-sector interest groups, for whom the city is a matter of financial interest, on the other. By de Blasio’s good fortune, these same public-sector interest groups, particularly the teachers’ unions, will play a major role at the 2020 Democratic convention.

In his first term, de Blasio invested his limited energies in styling himself as a leading light of the party’s progressive wing. He was slow to endorse the “insufficiently progressive” Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, though he’d served as her campaign manager in her successful 2000 Senate run. De Blasio tried to leverage the popularity of Thomas Piketty’s much-noted book on capitalism and income inequality, but he was humiliated when none of the Democratic Party presidential candidates showed up at his forum on the growing class divide.

Undeterred, de Blasio will likely spend much of his second term trying to fashion himself into a plausible presidential candidate. His campaign will be initially underwritten by several million dollars in public funds distributed by the city’s Campaign Finance Board (created to ensure that monied interests don’t dominate city politics). The 56-year-old de Blasio can argue that he’s a more attractive candidate for millennial voters than Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who will be 71, or Bernie Sanders, who will be 78, come 2020. He can also tout his progressive bona fides by pointing to, among other policies, his institution of universal pre-K schooling in New York.

But before he can focus on events outside the five boroughs, de Blasio will turn his attention to undermining New York governor Andrew Cuomo, his rival for state and national power. De Blasio has been quietly backing Sex in the City star Cynthia Nixon, who seems to be preparing a challenge in 2018, when Cuomo will be seeking a third term. Nixon, who has lobbied for more education funding, is an identity-politics triple threat: a gay female with celebrity status who will run to Cuomo’s left. Even if she loses, she could tarnish the governor, thus enhancing de Blasio’s prospects.

What comes of de Blasio’s possible presidential run in 2020 is contingent, of course, on what happens over the next two years. Will his ethical failures come back to haunt him? “Emails, obtained through a records request, show [Jim] Capalino’s stable of lobbyists were so entrenched in the minutiae of de Blasio’s first term, they formed an unofficial, additional layer of government—sometimes instructing staffers how to do their jobs—all while advancing the interests of their paying clients,” Politico reported in August. The de Blasio ethics drama hasn’t seen its last act. Meantime, what becomes of President Trump? Will Hillary Clinton try to run again? Will any Democrat emerge from the heartland? How strong is California’s first-term senator, Kamala Harris? Harris, of Indian and Jamaican descent, is already looking to 2020. De Blasio has his own identity-politics card to play: his wife, Chirlane McCray, is African-American, allowing de Blasio to present himself as the candidate who closes the racial gap. Like Garcetti, de Blasio labors under a historical shadow: no New York mayor has moved on to higher office since the mid-nineteenth century. But no New York mayor has ever had a target quite like Donald Trump.

Two summers ago, a sobbing relative called to say that she’d just seen one youth stab another in the chest outside her front door in gentrifying Harlem. As she spoke, she noticed that the blood had splattered her shoes. The victim didn’t die, thank heaven, but staggered across the street and got help. It was a neighborhood annual reunion—barbecues blazing, salsa music blasting—and the victim and his assailant, simmering with decades’-long loathing now heightened by drug-dealing rivalry, exploded. I e-mailed my friend Bill Bratton, then still police commissioner, to say that a lack of quality-of-life policing in that neighborhood, including an official blind eye to petty dope traffic, clearly contributed to the do-what-you-want mind-set that prevailed in that precinct, whose former corruption once dubbed it the Dirty Thirty.

Bratton needed no convincing: he was an even truer believer than I in the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention—the idea that if cops let minor crimes of disorder, such as low-level marijuana selling or subway fare-beating or public urination (or, these days, masturbation), go unpunished, the malicious will conclude that anything goes and do what their evil hearts prompt. He soon had a narcotics squad patrolling the neighborhood, and within months, the police had won a score of convictions of the pushers.

Bratton is retired now; the city council has decriminalized crimes of disorder by mandating civil instead of criminal summonses for many of them, resulting in no criminal record and no arrest warrant if you don’t show up in court; and the successors to the narcotics cops who worked their magic in the Three-Oh in 2015 have lost interest in the ongoing problem. They’re just low-level kids, the detectives say; they’ll soon be back on the streets—and, more than anything, as they do not say, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his city council of unemployables have decided that justice demands that the acting-out of the disorderly and the criminal, ex officio victims of social injustice, should take precedence over the peace and safety of the hardworking and civil. Out go the backlog of quality-of-life warrants of the last decade and more. Why should the wrongdoings of yesteryear weigh on the employment chances of an utterly work-unready 28-year-old—though, of course, no one would even invoke that past transgression in a case that didn’t involve current lawbreaking, just as no cop made a major fuss about small quantities of pot possession, unless some larger offense was at issue.

Fortunately, city crime continues to drop, because the virtuous circle set going by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Commissioner Bratton, and carried on by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly, has its own momentum, proving, as Adam Smith said, that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”—it takes a long time to expend the social and cultural capital that so many cities and countries take for granted. As Gotham proved, you can legislate morality, in the sense that lawmaking and law enforcement can change behavior and beliefs. But laws, morals, and manners exist in a dialectical tension with one another, and what has changed for the better can also change for the worse—and more easily, since improvement is harder than destruction. With a Black-Lives-Matter mayor, city council, and electorate, with Antifa thugs supposedly now the good guys, and with contrary views silenced by the universities and the trendy totalitarians of Silicon Valley (who, between engineering classes, learned what is right and moral from their required Stanford PC-indoctrination course), I would suggest holding on to your hat. Thanks to the age of Kindle, though, at least we won’t have book burnings.

But the reason for controlling quality-of-life disorder is not only, or even primarily, that it lowers major crime. Order is what makes urban life possible. Civility—the art of living in a city—is not innate. We have to learn not to throw sand at other kids and to learn to raise our hands to be called on, to stand in line and take our turn, not to blast music from our apartment or car, not to display too much affection publicly, not to block the sidewalk or market aisle, not to yell on our cellphones or cram pizza into our maws on the street or public transport, not to litter, not to monopolize public spaces with our “expressive” behavior, not to cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, not to bother or offend others unnecessarily. We no longer teach civility in schools: instead of the “citizenship” that my generation learned, we impart “social justice,” which teaches grievance and resentment of others; and city officials, with an Obama edict’s backing, have hamstrung school discipline, fostering misbehavior. In college, we don’t teach free and civil discussion, tolerance of intellectual differences, or respect for learning but only a kid’s right to resent microaggressions and silence politically incorrect speech as “violence.” The result will not be urbanity.

The Democratic Party has put forth several narratives since their loss in 2016. They have stuck with those narratives no matter how absurd they have been: Trump was elected because Russia colluded with him. Trump is unstable and unfit. Everything Trump does is wrong, he is a tainted President.

So says the party of Hillary Clinton and Hollywood, the moral arbiters of America. And the leftist mainstream media has followed in the most scurrilous of ways. They have reported only what the Democratic Party narrative says they should report.

Until now.

Follow me here. How long has this search for Trump/Russia collusion been going on? How long has the leftist media been claiming Trump does everything wrong?

Since he was elected last November. They have been hunting him since he won.

But the ground has shifted. It’s been clear for a long time that the Trump/Russia collusion narrative has been just that. It’s been a fable repeated over and over again, the Democratic Party and its media shills hoping that something would stick, helping them regain power through mindless repetition of an empty narrative.

Until now.

Unfortunately for the left, there is not the tiniest bit of evidence to bolster their narrative. There is not a scintilla of truth that shows Donald Tramp colluded with Russia to win. $100,000 of Facebook ads, half of them after November 8, 2016? That’s proof? Lord help us. That is the dumbest idea of proof offered since Piltdown Man. Donald Trump Jr had a meeting with a with someone claiming to have dirt on Hillary and left the meeting early because he saw nothing? Wow. Indict him, and impeach his father.

And that’s all there is?

Yep. That’s all there is.

But now we have an explosion of information about Russian influence on….. *drum roll*…….the Uranium One deal. Perhaps the worst political scandal since Teapot Dome. And then there’s the so-called Trump dossier. Which apparently was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.

The Uranium One deal has been a powder keg since Peter Schweizer wrote about the scandal in the book Clinton Cash. It’s everything a scandal should be. Corruption, illicit bribes, Russians influencing a deal to control stockpiles of Uranium for their own use.

The Washington Post, in rare move of investigative journalism against Hillary and the Democrats, has reported what we all suspected: the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for the so-called “dossier” by Christopher Steele that is the basis for the charge of Russia collusion.

According to the Post, a law firm for the DNC paid to complete the report after a “Republican” donor had initially paid to start it. This shows the connection between the Never Trump Republicans and Hillary to defeat and destroy Trump. Now we need to know the identity of the Republican “donor.”

This news is probably the reason the DNC refused to have the FBI examine its email server and system. Such an investigation would probably have disclosed the communications between the DNC and the law firm that paid for the “dossier,” a fancy term used to dress up a garbage report.

Steele admitted that the charges in the garbage statement are unverified, another fancy term for false.

The Hillary-Steele garbage report, which is essentially a dirty tricks opposition report, was given to John McCain, the Democrats’ favorite Republican.

McCain gave it to the Comey FBI, which probably used it as the basis to investigate Trump that ultimately led to the Mueller special counsel appointment. One would think Comey would have had the FBI investigate the charges in the report, knowing that it was an opposition report, and question who authorized and paid for the report before he used it. Comey could have and should have discovered as soon as he received the report that Hillary had paid for it, which would have cast serious doubt on its accuracy. It should have been dismissed as Hillary campaign dirty tricks.

It was a cute move by Hillary’s campaign to use McCain as the bag boy to deliver the report to the FBI to give the report the air of legitimacy.

The swamp at work: Hillary uses a law firm to pay for the Steele report, the report is given to John McCain, and McCain gives it to Comey. The report is leaked to BuzzFeed; the Destroy Trump Media publicizes the charges, calling it “Russia collusion”; and we get Mueller wasting our tax dollars investigating Trump. But the Mueller investigation may backfire on the Democrats if Mueller investigates the ties between Manafort and Tony and John Podesta on behalf of the Russians on the Uranium One deal. At the center is Hillary using dirty tricks working through “buffers” to attack Trump.

Unfortunately, we have an attorney general, Sessions, who recused himself when there was no reason to recuse. A competent, forceful attorney general would have investigated the Steele report fully before such a decision and would have concluded that the Steele report was a Hillary-campaign dirty trick, not to be given any weight or credibility.

It is no surprise that Crooked Hillary paid for the garbage Steele report. The only surprise is that it took this long for it to be known.

Let’s give plausible accounts of the known facts, then explain why demands that Robert Mueller recuse himself from the Russia investigation may not be the fanciful partisan grandstanding you imagine.

Here’s a story consistent with what has been reported in the press—how reliably reported is uncertain. Democratic political opponents of Donald Trump financed a British former spook who spread money among contacts in Russia, who in turn over drinks solicited stories from their supposedly “connected” sources in Moscow. If these people were really connected in any meaningful sense, then they made sure the stories they spun were consistent with the interests of the regime, if not actually scripted by the regime.

The resulting Trump dossier then became a factor in Obama administration decisions to launch an FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, and after the election to trumpet suspicions of Trump collusion with Russia.

We know of a second, possibly even more consequential way the FBI was effectively a vehicle for Russian meddling in U.S. politics. Authoritative news reports say FBI chief James Comey’s intervention in the Hillary Clinton email matter was prompted by a Russian intelligence document that his colleagues suspected was a Russian plant.

OK, Mr. Mueller was a former close colleague and leader but no longer part of the FBI when these events occurred. This may or may not make him a questionable person to lead a Russia-meddling investigation in which the FBI’s own actions are necessarily a concern.

But now we come to the Rosatom disclosures last week in The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress.

Here’s another story as plausible as we can make it based on credible reporting. After the Cold War, in its own interest, the U.S. wanted to build bridges to the Russian nuclear establishment. The Putin government, for national or commercial purposes, agreed and sought to expand its nuclear business in the U.S.

The purchase and consolidation of certain assets were facilitated by Canadian entrepreneurs who gave large sums to the Clinton Foundation, and perhaps arranged a Bill Clinton speech in Moscow for $500,000. A key transaction had to be approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Now we learn that, before and during these transactions, the FBI had uncovered a bribery and kickback scheme involving Russia’s U.S. nuclear business, and also received reports of Russian officials seeking to curry favor through donations to the Clinton Foundation.

This criminal activity was apparently not disclosed to agencies vetting the 2010 transfer of U.S. commercial nuclear assets to Russia. The FBI made no move to break up the scheme until long after the transaction closed. Only five years later, the Justice Department, in 2015, disclosed a plea deal with the Russian perpetrator so quietly that its significance was missed until The Hill reported on the FBI investigation last week.

For anyone who cares to look, the real problem here is that the FBI itself is so thoroughly implicated in the Russia meddling story.

The agency, when Mr. Mueller headed it, soft-pedaled an investigation highly embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton as well as the Obama Russia reset policy. More recently, if just one of two things is true—Russia sponsored the Trump Dossier, or Russian fake intelligence prompted Mr. Comey’s email intervention—then Russian operations, via their impact on the FBI, influenced and continue to influence our politics in a way far more consequential than any Facebook ad, the preoccupation of John McCain, who apparently cannot behold a mountain if there’s a molehill anywhere nearby.

Which means that Mr. Mueller has the means, motive and opportunity to obfuscate and distract from matters embarrassing to the FBI, while pleasing a large part of the political spectrum. He need only confine his focus to the flimsy, disingenuous but popular (with the media) accusation that the shambolic Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin. CONTINUE AT SITE