RUTHFULLY YOURS

With the much anticipated FISA-abuse memo expected to drop any second, the media are attempting to refocus the narrative onto possible obstruction of justice by President Trump and his subordinates.

Thursday, the New York Times led with a lengthy report on the Mueller investigation’s curiosity about a statement crafted under the president’s direction last July. It concerned the now infamous Trump Tower meeting a year earlier — i.e., on June 9, 2016 — between top Trump-campaign officials Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort and a Russian contingent led by the Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

To cut to the chase, Mueller appears to be homing in on the question of whether there was a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

While President Trump was deeply involved in the drafting of the statement, it was ultimately issued by a lawyer in the name of Don Jr., to whom the Times had directed its questions about the Trump Tower meeting. The statement was untrue and ill-considered. Worse, it conflicted with another misleading version of the Trump Tower meeting that the president’s legal team simultaneously provided to a different media outlet, Circa. As the Times report correctly asserts, both versions sought to conceal the true purpose of the Trump Tower meeting, namely: to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton from Russian-government sources.

It is not a crime to lie to journalists. From this premise, some Trump-friendly commentators have reasoned that the false statements about the meeting given by Trump subordinates to the Times and Circa have no relevance to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry. This is wrong.

In The Meaning of Conservatism and several other books, the English philosopher Roger Scruton argues for the importance of the first-person plural—the “We” that binds us together as a community, a people, a nation. Tuesday night, in his magnificent State of the Union Address, Donald Trump did something similar.

Trump’s speech was full of memorable lines: the “new American moment,” “Americans are Dreamers, too,” “complacency and concessions only invite aggression and provocation.” But perhaps the most memorable line, playing off the president’s campaign slogan, came at the end: “It is the people who are making America great again.”

Any dispassionate observer has to acknowledge that over the last year Donald Trump has given a series of great speeches. I use the word “great” advisedly. His speech in Riyadh about naming and battling Islamic terrorism; in Warsaw about supporting the core values of Western civilization; national security speeches emphasizing the ideal of peace through strength. Those were speeches for the history books. And on top of all those was Tuesday night’s speech at the Capitol. Its theme? Putting aside the partisan passions that divide us in order to go forward as a people united in the goal of making a better America.

Republican pollster and former Trump critic Frank Luntz was stunned by the address. The speech was, Luntz said in one tweet, “a perfect blend of strength and empathy.” In another, he added: “Tonight, I owe Donald Trump an apology. Tonight, I was moved and inspired. Tonight, I have hope and faith in America again.”

Many people agreed with him. And it is easy to see why. Over the past year, Donald Trump has racked up victory after victory. In his judicial appointments, in his energy policy, his attack on illegal immigration, his efforts to dismantle or at least pare back the Leviathan that is the administrative state, scrapping the individual mandate of Obamacare, hugely reducing the tax burden for both businesses and individuals, strengthening America’s military: in these and other initiatives he has taken bold steps to fulfill his campaign promises to return power from Washington to the People and “make America great again.”

It appears very likely that President Trump is going to allow the disclosure, in some form, of the memo on alleged FISA abuse authored by majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee under the direction of Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.). It could happen as early as today. As one would expect, both sides of the dispute over the memo are intensifying their pre-publication efforts to influence public reaction — as discussed here in last week’s column considering objections to the memo.

Since before the Republican-led committee voted (along partisan lines) to seek the memo’s declassification and publication, the FBI has been complaining that it was not permitted to review the memo. As I explained last week, this was a very unpersuasive complaint. Having stonewalled the committee’s information requests for several months, the Bureau and Justice Department are hardly well positioned to complain about being denied access; the committee, by contrast, has every reason to believe they would have slow-walked any review in order to delay matters further.

All that aside, the FBI was guaranteed access to the memo before its publication because of the rules of the process. Once the committee voted to disclose, that gave the president five days to object. During that five days, Trump’s own appointees at the FBI and DOJ would have the chance to pore over the memo and make their objections and policy arguments to their principal, the president, and to the rest of the Trump national-security team. This tells us the real objection was not that they were barred from reviewing the memo; it is that they were barred from reviewing it on a schedule that would make it more difficult to derail publication.

President Trump’s first State of the Union address was not heavy on national security issues. It did, however, make one critical point: In reviewing the international achievements of his first year in office, Trump was abundantly clear that the Obama era is over. Primarily retrospective assessments like Trump’s are perfectly legitimate for a president finishing his initial year, especially given what his policies are replacing.

Gone was President Obama’s self-congratulatory moral posturing, replaced by a concrete list of accomplishments that will inevitably increase the power of America’s presence in the world. Trump’s policy is not only not isolationist — as many of his opponents (and a few misguided supporters) contend — his pursuit of Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” approach actually demonstrates that Obama’s detached, ethereal retreat from American assertiveness internationally amounted to the real isolationism.

Most importantly, Trump again committed to palpably more robust military budgets and an end to the budget-sequester mechanism, the worst political mistake made by Republicans in Congress in living memory. Sequestration procedures were liberal dreams come true, forcing wasteful increases in domestic programs in order to obtain critical military funding. The sooner this whole embarrassing exercise is behind us, the better.

As Secretary of Defense James Mattis frequently points out, harking back to Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous comment, there cannot be an adequate American foreign policy without an adequate defense policy.

Trump chose to single out the need “to modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal,” the bedrock of America’s deterrence capabilities. Indeed, Trump went on, quite rightly, to cast doubt on the “Global Zero” notion of actively working to eliminate all nuclear weapons. For many of those who pursue “Global Zero,” the real target is not rogue states like Iran or North Korea, or strategic threats like Russia or China, but the United States itself. Trump basically said in response, “When the lions lie down with the lambs, call me.” Just so.