RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/08/robert-mueller-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain/

Robert Mueller, decorated Vietnam veteran, distinguished lawyer, two-term director of the FBI and, more recently,  Russiagate special counsel, recently testified for some seven hours before two select committees on Capitol Hill. What the world witnessed was sad, pitiful and largely farcical as the vague and mentally adrift champion of those who long hoped he would bring down an elected President saw their ambitions not merely dashed but pulverised. For Mueller it was bad; for Democrats it was much worse.

As soon as Donald Trump announced his presidential aspirations and entered the Republican primaries an almighty deluge of derision and ridicule was unleashed from all quarters. He was known primarily as the brash, domineering central character in the TV program The Apprentice, and less so as a very wealthy, successful property developer. Neither persona would serve to endear him to the masses, the elites of the punditocracy opined,  speaking mostly for themselves as it turned out. All forms of the media were especially savage. They branded him a vulgar buffoon and much worse. Comedians mockingly encouraged him to ‘run, please run, and let us enjoy your humiliation of failing’. By the time he looked like winning the nomination a nascent fear was rippling through the Washington swamp the candidate had pledged to drain. True, Hillary Clinton’s ascension to the Oval Office was accepted by the Left and like-minded as an inevitability, yet the signs were ominous. ‘Regular, everyday Americans’, the trans-Pacific counterparts of John Howard’s battlers, liked much of what he was saying and did not mind the way he was saying it. After he was confirmed as the Republican candidate for the presidency, the camp of Trump’s followers grew rapidly and Clinton’s supporters became concerned that the “unimaginable” might just possibly come to pass. In the top layers of this cabal a  strategy to prevent it or, failing that, to destroy it took root and flourished. The plan’s objective was no less than a fully fledged, bloodless political coup to unseat a duly elected president. Much of the conspiracy is well known already, including the identities of the plotters in the top tiers of the FBI, the CIA, other security organisations, in the Justice and State departments, among prominent politicians of both major parties.

What we do know — and Mueller did not at his marathon testimonies — is that the Clinton campaign paid a British ex-spy to gather (manufacture?) fallacious information from dubious Russian sources about Trump having engaged in salacious conduct involving prostitutes while staying years earlier in a Moscow hotel. This was disseminated throughout Washington and passed to tame reporters, the specific intention being to drive Trump from the office should he be elected. This plot was “the insurance” and involved American and British individuals and, though he laughs it off as a joke, the curious involvement of Alexander Downer.

People have long misunderstood and misrepresented Baltimore, my cherished hometown, but much of what President Donald Trump said this past weekend about Charm City was right on the nose. The president categorized Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” which sparked ire among his always-vocal choir of critics but offered no untrue information.

The president was responding to longtime Maryland Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, whose district includes Baltimore, who had issued an incendiary attack on acting Department of Homeland Security head Kevin McAleenan for conditions on the U.S. southern border. Cummings yelled at McAleenan during a House Oversight hearing, claiming he possessed an “empathy deficit” about migrant families at the border.

An Unfiltered Look

Disparaging remarks about Baltimore are not new. Politicians, celebrities, and even residents of the city have easily mocked the soaring crime rate, rodent infestation, and never-ending parade of local government scandals. The three most recently departed mayors have left in disgrace. One was convicted of fraud that involved stealing gift cards from needy families, and another is under active investigation for embezzling government funds.

A local Baltimore Fox affiliate even attempted to shine a light on their own problem in 2018 using an “unfiltered” look at the city with recently ousted Mayor Catherine Pugh. “Whoa, you can smell the rats,” Pugh said during the program as a camera crew followed her around the streets of the decaying city.

Trump critics, of course, called him a “racist” for shifting the spotlight from the southern border to the troubled, predominantly black city only 40 miles away from the nation’s capital.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/01/doj-ig-referred-james-comey-criminal-prosecution-leaking-classified-information/

The Department of Justice’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz is preparing a report recommending a criminal referral for FBI Director James Comey, concluding that he leaked classified memos and showed a lack of candor with investigators, according to a new report from The Hill.

Attorney General William Barr and DOJ prosecutors have reportedly found the IG report compelling but declined to follow through with charges because of a lack certainty surrounding Comey’s intent to break the law.

Investigative journalist John Solomon reported that the DOJ did not want to “make its first case against the Russia investigators with such thin margins and look petty and vindictive.”

The report shows that Comey transmitted classified information via an insecure email account and gave memos, some of which were classified up to the “secret” level, to his private lawyers.

One memo in question includes classified information Comey leaked to a friend, with the intention that it would be leaked to the media. Indeed, the New York Times reported information from the “confidential” memo, which said President Trump asked Comey to drop an investigation into then-national security adviser Michael Flynn.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/455616-james-comeys-next-reckoning-is-imminent-this-time-for-leaking

The Justice Department’s chief watchdog is preparing a damning report on James Comey’s conduct in his final days as FBI director that likely will conclude he leaked classified information and showed a lack of candor after his own agency began looking into his feud with President Trump over the Russia probe.

Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz’s team referred Comey for possible prosecution under the classified information protection laws, but Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors working for Attorney General William Barr reportedly have decided to decline prosecution — a decision that’s likely to upset Comey’s conservative critics.

Prosecutors found the IG’s findings compelling but decided not to bring charges because they did not believe they had enough evidence of Comey’s intent to violate the law, according to multiple sources. 

The concerns stem from the fact that one memo that Comey leaked to a friend specifically to be published by the media — as he admitted in congressional testimony — contained information classified at the lowest level of “confidential,” and that classification was made by the FBI after Comey had transmitted the information, the sources said.

Although a technical violation, the DOJ did not want to “make its first case against the Russia investigators with such thin margins and look petty and vindictive,” a source told me, explaining the DOJ’s rationale.

But Comey and others inside the FBI and the DOJ during his tenure still face legal jeopardy in ongoing probes by the IG and Barr-appointed special prosecutor John Durham. Those investigations are focused on the origins of the Russia investigation that included a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign at the end of the 2016 election, the source said.

“There are significant issues emerging with how the FISA was handled and other conduct in the investigation, and everyone involved remains under scrutiny,” a second source said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274441/police-prestige-declines-crime-increases-and-bruce-thornton

In the latest of a string of municipal police stand-downs, New York City officers slunk away after a jeering crowd dumped water on them. In a separate incident in Harlem, an officer was hit on the head with a hard-plastic bucket. This retreat from an assault on the law was not as consequential as that of Portland police who did nothing as journalist Andy Ngo got assaulted and injured by Antifa thugs, but it bespeaks a dangerous trend: The growing disdain for the prestige of law enforcement officers, who now are politically handcuffed and prevented from doing their jobs.

That this latest embarrassment happened in NYC makes it even more revealing. Throughout the Nineties, crime in the city plummeted: Violent crime dropped by more than 56%, and property crimes 65%. Murders peaked at 2245 in 1990, then started to decline, particularly after Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993 and instituted changes in policing, such as the “broken windows” crackdown on misdemeanors like subway turn-style-jumping that created an atmosphere of disorder and lawlessness. Along with more police on the streets, more criminals put in jail, and tactics like “stop-and-frisk” of suspects, these changes contributed to the steep decline in murders. By 1999, murders had fallen by 73%. In 2018, there were 289 murders, almost half as many as Chicago, which has about one-fourth the population of New York.

That success demonstrated how the prestige of the police, their success at stopping crimes, and the respect for their authority that follows from their active presence in the public square, deters potential miscreants and improves the quality of life for citizens––especially minorities, who are the most frequent victims of violent crime in big cities.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/white-cops-dont-commit-more-shootings/A new study debunks a common myth.

The Democratic presidential candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan promises that after his policing reforms, black mothers and fathers will no longer have to fear when their children “walk[] the streets of America” — the threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. President Barack Obama likewise claimed during the memorial for five Dallas police officers killed by a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin in July 2016 that black parents were right to fear that their child could be killed by a police officer whenever he “walks out the door.” South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has said that police shootings of black men won’t be solved “until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that the police shoot blacks “solely based on the color of their skin.”

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.

The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/al-sharpton-is-not-a-civil-rights-hero/

He’s made a career of inciting violence and vomiting lies. And Democrats have cheered him on.

Imagine David Duke being a regular, esteemed guest and former honored host on Fox News Channel. Imagine every Republican presidential candidate scrambling to praise him whenever he’s in the news. Imagine David Duke being given a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention or President Trump welcoming him to the White House and openly soliciting his support. Imagine Duke appearing on White House visitor logs more than 70 times during Trump’s administration.

Imagine all of this and you’ll have some idea of how the right and even, I think, the center of American political thought reacts to seeing Al Sharpton continue to be cosseted by the Democratic party and its allies in the media. Sharpton should long ago have been ruled out of bounds.

Employing the morally disastrous logic that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, the Democrats have allowed President Trump to troll them into extolling Sharpton. Trump is incorrect about many things, but he fairly described Sharpton as a racist. Sharpton is a “con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score,” Trump tweeted. “Hates Whites & Cops!” That’s a lot closer to the truth than the framing of Democrats, who bent the knee to Sharpton as though he were some sort of civil-rights hero rather than a huckster.

Kamala Harris
✔ @KamalaHarris .@TheRevAl has spent his life fighting for what’s right and working to improve our nation, even in the face of hate. It’s shameful, yet unsurprising that Trump would continue to attack those who have done so much for our country.
 
Joe Biden✔ @JoeBiden.@TheRevAl is a champion in the fight for civil rights. The fact that President Trump continues to use the power of the presidency to unleash racist attacks on the people he serves is despicable. This hate has no place in our country. It’s beneath the dignity of the office.
 
Elizabeth Warren✔ @ewarren@TheRevAl has dedicated his life to the fight for justice for all. No amount of racist tweets from the man in the White House will erase that—and we must not let them divide us. I stand with my friend Al Sharpton in calling out these ongoing attacks on people of color.

Sharpton holds the position of America’s Senior Spokesman for Civil Rights only because it’s been some time since he’s done anything so egregiously contemptible that it made the front page; the Left simply assumes short memories have sanitized Sharpton’s reputation. I almost wrote “inflammatory reputation,” but that word might be too literal given the arson attack that followed one of his most notorious hate campaigns.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274442/islamist-jew-hater-named-florida-young-democrat-joe-kaufman

From June 14th to the 16th, the Florida Young Democrats (FYD) held its 2019 convention, in Orlando, Florida. Participating at this year’s event was the Florida Democratic Party’s resident anti-Semite, Rasha Mubarak. Not only was Mubarak given the position of National Committeewoman, in FYD’s newly elected Board, but she also received the award for ‘Florida Young Democrat of the Year.’ Bestowing these honors upon Mubarak shows that the Florida Democratic Party is more than willing to overlook Mubarak’s bigotry and condone it.

This past April, FYD announced that Mubarak had joined its Board of Directors as the FYD Central Florida Regional Director. The announcement, as well, made mention of Mubarak’s involvement as (current) President of the Orlando chapter of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) and Central Florida Regional Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

As displayed on an earlier version of the PCRF website, PCRF has “worked with” a number of organizations associated with international terrorism. They include the Holy Land Foundation (HRF) and the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), US-based charities shut down in December 2001, and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), an al-Qaeda-linked charity which now goes by the name International Organization for Relief, Welfare & Development (IORWD). The former PCRF spokesperson, Rosemary Davis a.k.a. Shadya Hantouli, owned a website, palestine4ever.net, that featured an ornate gallery honoring Palestinian suicide bombers.

CAIR was established, in June 1994, as part of an umbrella group headed by then-global leader of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. CAIR has been cited by the US government for its involvement in the financing of Hamas. CAIR-Florida, itself, has been linked with support for Hamas. In July 2014, CAIR-Florida was the co-sponsor of a pro-Hamas rally held in Downtown Miami. After the rally, the event organizer, Sofian Zakkout, wrote, “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!” In August 2014, CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly tweeted, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of God.”