RUTHFULLY YOURS

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should not be fired. He is a distinguished public servant with a bipartisan reputation for fairness. But there is a real question whether he should be recused from participating in any investigation by the special counsel of alleged obstruction of justice by the president.

Five facts are indisputable. First, Rosenstein is currently supervising Robert Mueller, who he appointed to be special counsel to investigate the Russia matter and all ancillary issues. Second, these ancillary issues include any possible obstruction of justice growing out of the Russia investigation. Third, President Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey may be an important building block in any possible obstruction case against the president. Fourth, Rosenstein played a central role in that firing, having written the memorandum justifying the president’s action. Fifth, Rosenstein would be an important — perhaps the most important — witness in any investigation of the reasons behind the firing.

The question is whether a lawyer should both supervise an investigation and be an important witness in that very investigation. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself because he might have been a witness or subject of the Russia investigation. Rosenstein might be a more central witness in any obstruction of justice investigation by the prosecutor who he is supervising.

As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president — much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either prior political office or military service. As unintended proof of his accomplishments, Trump’s many liberal opponents have gone from initially declaring him an incompetent to warning that he has become effective — insanely so — in overturning the Obama progressive agenda.

Never Trump Republicans acknowledge that Trump has realized much of what they once only dreamed of — from tax reform and deregulation to a government about-face on climate change, the ending of the Obamacare individual mandate, and expansion of energy production.

Trump so far has not enacted the Never Trump nightmare agenda. The U.S. is not leaving NATO. It is not colluding with Vladimir Putin, but maintaining sanctions against Russia and arming Ukrainians. It is not starting a tariff war with China. The administration is not appointing either liberals or incompetents to the federal courts.

A politicized FBI, DOJ, and IRS was Obama’s legacy, not Trump’s doing, as some of the Never Trump circle predicted. Indeed, the Never Trump movement is now mostly calcified, as even some of its formerly staunch adherents concede. It was done in by the Trump record and the monotony of having to redefine a once-welcomed conservative agenda as suddenly unpalatable due to Trump’s crude fingerprints on it.

On the short side, Trump has still not started to build his much-promised border wall, to insist on free but far fairer trade with Asia and Europe, or to enact an infrastructure-rebuilding program. Nonetheless, Trump’s multitude of critics is unable to argue that his record is shoddy and must instead insist that his list of achievements is due mostly to the Republican Congress. Or they claim he is beholden to the legacy of the Obama administration. Or they insist that credit belongs with his own impressive economic and national-security cabinet-level appointments. Or that whatever good came of Trump’s first year is nullified by Trump’s persistent personal odiousness.

At the conclusion of Trump’s first year, the stock market and small-business confidence are at record highs, and consumer confidence has not been higher in 17 years. Trump’s loud campaign promises to lure back capital and industry to the heartland no longer look quixotic, given new tax and deregulatory incentives and far cheaper energy costs than in most of Europe and Japan.

There were many damning revelations in the Nunes memo released by a House Intelligence Committee vote. But the most damning of them all doesn’t raise questions about process, but about motive.

The memo told us that the FISA application would not have happened without the Steele dossier. The document known as the Steele dossier was a work product of the Clinton campaign. Not only was Christopher Steele, the former British intel agent who purportedly produced the document, working for an organization hired by the Clinton campaign, but he shared a memo with the FBI from Cody Shearer, a Clinton operative, listing some of the same allegations as the ones in his dossier. That memo has raised questions about whether Steele had been doing original research or just dressing up a smear by Shearer.

A redacted memo by Senate Judiciary Committee members Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham also states that there was a second Steele memo based on information that Steele had received from the State Department and which had been passed along by “a friend of the Clintons.” Victoria Nuland, a Clinton protégé and top State Department official who helped cover up the Benghazi attack, recently went on a media tour in which she revealed that Steele had passed along his material to State.

Shearer and Nuland are both Clinton associates. Under President Clinton, Nuland had been Strobe Talbott’s Chief of Staff. Shearer was Strobe Talbott’s brother-in-law and his connection to the Clintons.

Not only was the Steele dossier a work product of the Clinton campaign, but the State Department, which had been run by Hillary Clinton and staffed by many of her loyalists at the top, had been used to route information to Steele from the Clintons, and then route information back from Steele. Clintonworld had not only paid for the Steele dossier, but influenced its content and passed it around.

The joke is on Hillary, perhaps the least self-aware person ever to be a major party presidential candidate (with the possible exception of John Kerry).

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton predicted Monday during a human rights event at Georgetown University that climate change will force women to “bear the brunt of looking for the food, looking for the firewood, looking for the place to migrate to …”

Such migration won’t be led by men, she maintained, but rather by women “when all of the grass is finally gone as the desertification moves south and you have to keep moving your livestock or your crops are no longer growing.”

For a former secretary of state, she is amazingly out of touch with the demographic makeup of the wave of refugees that has overwhelmed Europe: overwhelmingly males, most of military service age. But hey, she’s never let facts get in the way of her demagoguery before.

Obviously, she’s never heard the old joke about newspaper headlines on the day the world ends.

God decided He was finally fed up with the human race and decided to end it for good. He called up a reporter at the New York Times to tell him the news: The world would end the day after tomorrow.

The reporter tried to talk God out of it, but God was firm and wouldn’t be swayed. The reporter then asked if he had an exclusive. God said that He was going to call three other newspapers.

Headlines the next day:

The New York Times: “God says world to end tomorrow; story and analysis on page B11.”

The Wall Street Journal: “God says world to end tomorrow; market to close early”

USA Today: “IT’S OVER!”

The Washington Post: “God says world to end tomorrow; women and minorities hardest hit.”

But the biggest joke of all is the name of the ceremony at which she delivered her craziness:

…the annual Hillary Rodham Clinton awards ceremony hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in Washington, D.C.

It can be hard to keep track of Obama-era targeting of the political opposition by federal administrative agencies. But this week brings fresh hope that such abuses will not be repeated.

The Journal reports:

President Donald Trump will nominate Charles Rettig, a California tax lawyer, to run the Internal Revenue Service, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Rettig will take one of the most thankless jobs in Washington.

Of course in recent years it has been thankless for especially good reason. During the Obama administration, the tax agency targeted conservative organizations for exceptional scrutiny and even harassment. Last year the IRS settled lawsuits brought by organizations that had been mistreated simply because they advocated for limited Constitutional government. The government shelled out millions of dollars to settle one suit involving 428 organizations, according to an October report in the New York Times. In a separate case brought by different organizations, an apology for the IRS’s egregious conduct was enough to resolve the litigation.

Reported the Times:

The settlements were the conclusion of two legal battles that have dogged the I.R.S. since the initial lawsuits were filed after a 2013 treasury inspector general’s audit that found groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names received more scrutiny over their applications for tax-exempt status. The revelations plunged the I.R.S. into a firestorm that ultimately led to the ouster of its acting commissioner and prompted accusations that the agency was being used as a political weapon by the Obama administration.

While Mr. Obama did force the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner in the wake of the scandal in 2013, he made no serious effort to reform the agency and proclaimed that the targeting had involved “not even a smidgen of corruption” long before his government had finished investigating.

Here is one more reason why the Nunes memo is consequential: Its release prompted the Justice Department and FBI to grant the Senate Judiciary Committee’s request to declassify portions of its criminal referral of dossier author Christopher Steele for making false statements to federal officials. The new information corroborates a key allegation in the Nunes memo that “Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI.”

Shortly after the president authorized the publication last Friday of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo, Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray asking them again to declassify parts of the referral.

“Much of the information in the declassified [House Intelligence] memorandum overlaps with the information in the criminal referral made by Senator Graham and me,” Grassley wrote. “That information has now been declassified and can no longer properly be deemed as classified in our criminal referral. Accordingly, I ask that you immediately review the classified referral in light of today’s declassification and provide a declassified version of it to the Committee.”

‘Hide the Ball’
Just as the FBI had attempted to halt the Nunes memo’s release, Bureau officials initially tried to block portions of Grassley’s January 4 referral from public view, insisting it contained classified information and warning that the Bureau was “deeply concerned that granting exceptions to this policy would send a troubling signal.” Grassley blasted the FBI’s excuse from the Senate floor on January 24, accusing FBI leadership of “falsely claiming that three of our unclassified paragraphs each contain the same or single classified fact,” because the sections in question are from “non-government sources and do not claim to repeat or confirm any information from any government document.”