RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/24/cbo-report-1-4-million-lost-health-insurance-since-2016-and-obamacare-is-to-blame/

The number of uninsured climbed by 1.4 million from 2016 to 2018, according to a report out last week from the Congressional Budget Office. Naturally, this led those on the left to blame the Trump administration for its Obamacare “sabotage.”

But the data in that report — which was released on the same day the Mueller report came out and largely ignored — tells an entirely different story.

All of the increase in the uninsured over the past two years — all of it — is the result of the massive rate increases Obamacare’s mandates and regulations caused. According to the Health and Human Services Dept., premiums in the individual insurance market doubled from 2013 to 2017. They shot up again in 2018.

For those eligible for Obamacare subsidies, the rate increases were meaningless. The amount they had to pay didn’t change much, and in many cases went down.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/former-fbi-official-admits-hillary-clinton-emails-were-found-in-obama-white-house/

A former top FBI official has admitted under oath that a repository of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email records was obtained by the Obama White House and housed in the Executive Office of the President.

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch recently coaxed the admission out of the former assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, Bill Priestap, as part of a court-ordered discovery regarding Clinton’s unauthorized email server.U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled earlier this year that discovery could commence examining Clinton’s use of the server and ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides to be deposed or answer written questions under oath.

The court said that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”Judicial Watch asked Priestap to identify representatives of Clinton, her former staff, and government agencies from which “email repositories were obtained” by the FBI.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thank-you-don-mcgahn-11556057923

President Trump should be savoring the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation with no charges of collusion or obstruction of justice, but as ever he can’t stand prosperity. His post-report scrap with former White House counsel Don McGahn shows how this President is so often his own worst enemy.

As part of his obstruction “analysis,” Mr. Mueller recounts that in June 2017 Mr. Trump asked Mr. McGahn to ask Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to say Mr. Mueller had conflicts of interest and couldn’t remain as special counsel. Mr. McGahn took notes but no action, sought advice from White House colleagues, and planned to resign until the President dropped the subject.

Mr. Trump tweeted in response to the report to “watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” and his spokesmen have cast doubt on Mr. McGahn’s account. Mr. McGahn says the account is accurate, though the dispute has given Democrats an opening to rehash the episode and they’ve subpoenaed Mr. McGahn to appear before the House Judiciary Committee.

We believe Mr. McGahn, but the needless dispute highlights several realities of the Trump Presidency. One point is that this episode is not evidence of obstruction of justice, despite claims by the Democratic-media chorus. Mr. Trump would have had every constitutional right to fire Mr. Mueller, an inferior officer at the Justice Department. Mr. Trump let Mr. McGahn and others talk to Mr. Mueller and turn over notes, which is the reason Mr. Mueller knows about all this.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/23/will-the-supreme

Court watchers seem to think that the Supreme Court will end up overturning a lower court ruling and allow the Trump administration to add a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.

The New York Times, for example, led its coverage of the arguments on Tuesday by saying: “The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready on Tuesday to allow the Trump administration to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census, which critics say would undermine its accuracy by discouraging both legal and unauthorized immigrants from filling out the forms.”

Let’s leave aside the newest euphemism for illegal immigrants. (Immigrants who are here illegally are “unauthorized”? Does that mean bank robbers can say they’re just making an “unauthorized withdrawal”?)

The practical case against adding a citizenship question falls apart once you start looking at it.

Here are the main arguments:

Asking about citizenship has no place in the census.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/23/7-glaring-omissions-mueller-report-kill-credibility/

Robert Mueller’s special counsel was presented to the American public as unimpeachable. From its beginning, a distinct minority in politics and media, including several Federalist writers, were skeptical, citing the special counsel’s past prosecutorial abuses, the past alleged misconduct of its pivotal investigators, and the team’s peculiar partisan makeup.

Once in action, its seemingly limitless powers, heavy-handed usage of such powers, and more questionable if not dubious indictments, far removed from “collusion,” seemed to confirm our worst fears. While there is much within the Mueller report that further suggests this skepticism was well-founded, what is perhaps most probative is what the report omitted.

The following are seven of the most glaring omissions from the collusion section of the redacted Mueller report—since collusion, not obstruction, was the theory from which the investigation stemmed.

https://amazingsaleonline.com/bibcntfas/?sxid=4zxvbykj4b41&c=0.0146875&siteid=3955&campaignid=35239&placementid=68179&channel=News&subchannel=Conservative+News&creative=

Democrats are trying to spin the Mueller Report as welcome news. Good luck with that. Legally, they’ve got no case left. Politically, they are making a serious mistake.

They do have some material to work with, especially the report’s second volume, which portrays a vulgar, deceitful president. The details are new, but the portrait itself is not. What’s new are some cases where the president came close to obstructing justice, according to the special counsel’s investigators. Even so, they did not say he crossed the line.

The most important news, of course, is the report’s basic findings. It clearly demonstrates Russia tried to influence the 2016 election and favored Trump, but it kills the assertion that Trump or his campaign cooperated with them. For two years, Democrats and the mainstream media said the opposite about Trump — repeatedly, loudly, insistently. To continue that attack now is ludicrous. That doesn’t mean they will retract, apologize, or return their Pulitzer Prizes. They prefer to change the subject.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bob-woodward-fbi-cia-reliance-on-garbage-steele-dossier-needs-to-be-investigated/

Veteran reporter Bob Woodward said Monday that the intelligence community’s reliance on the infamous Steele dossier “needs to be investigated” in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s failure to corroborate many of the document’s key claims.

Woodward told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that he was disturbed to learn that the CIA cited information included in the Clinton-funded dossier in a rough draft of their January 2017 intelligence-community assessment detailing Russian election-interference efforts.

“What I found out recently, which was really quite surprising, the dossier, which really has got a lot of garbage in it and Mueller found that to be the case, early in building the intelligence-community assessment on Russian interference, in an early draft, they actually put the dossier on page two in kind of a breakout box,” Woodward said.

“I think it was the CIA pushing this. Real intelligence experts looked at this and said ‘No, this is not intelligence, this is garbage,’ and they took it out,” he continued. “But in this process, the idea that they would include something like that in one of the great stellar intelligence assessments, as Mueller also found out, is highly questionable. Needs to be investigated.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/22/unredact-all-of-it/

The Mueller Report confirms what some of us have suspected from the beginning: There was no collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The investigation that monopolized the attention of the media, Capitol Hill, the White House, and the American public for two years is over.

Collusion truthers who’ve embarrassed themselves and misled the country about the existence of imaginary crimes are trying to move seamlessly from collusion to obstruction of justice claims. Demands for impeachment based on vague allegations of obstruction now contaminate the same cable news programs, political websites, and media outlets that falsely warned Americans for more than two years that Donald Trump was Vladimir Putin’s puppet. The self-immolation of our national news media continues.

This continuing trip with hyperbole serves one purpose: To obfuscate the real scandal, which is how the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence apparatus was weaponized to sabotage a rival presidential campaign and then to try to oust the duly elected president of the United States.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-21-lets-investigate-for-obstruction

Now that the 488 page Mueller Report is out, and we are informed that the whole “Russian collusion” story was a hoax from the get go, you may have the feeling that, at least, Mueller and his people had a basic clue as to what they were doing. If so, then you clearly haven’t yet looked at the 182 page Volume II. This is the part of the Report that supposedly addresses “obstruction of justice” by the President. The conclusion of Volume II is that, “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach [the] judgment [that the President did not commit obstruction.]”

Let’s see. The President never fired Mueller or any of his people, or restricted the scope of their investigation, even though he had the constitutional authority to do so. The President never instructed Mueller who should or should not be charged, or for what crimes, even though he had the constitutional authority to do so. The President never claimed either attorney-client or executive privilege. The President produced over a million pages of documents. So what exactly is there about “obstruction” that supports writing this 182 pages of blather?

It’s simple. In the alternative universe that these people inhabit, it can be “obstruction of justice” if an elected official takes a constitutionally authorized action, in particular the exercise of what is known as “prosecutorial discretion,” while thinking the wrong thoughts. Indeed, in this alternative universe, it can be “obstruction of justice” if an elected official does nothing whatsoever with regard to an investigation over which he has constitutional authority, as long as somewhere along the way he happens to think the wrong thoughts. In short, everything the President does or does not do is subject at all times to an independent budget-free investigation to determine if it was done for “corrupt” reasons. If so, he is guilty of obstruction.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/439817-trump-tower-meeting-a-shining-example-of-what-not-to-investigate

Tit-for-tat is the worst instinct in politics. Bad law begets worse law. Our worst vindictive instincts can undermine our most cherished liberties.

That’s what I had to tell myself, more than once, in reading the Mueller report’s analysis of the closest thing to “Trump-Russia collusion” in the 2016 campaign — the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting of June 9, 2016. Because if special counsel Robert Mueller is right, then there ought to be another withering two-year investigation, tout de suite, of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s far worse election-law violations.

According to Mueller, the derogatory information about Hillary Clinton at issue in the Trump Tower meeting could have been an illegal in-kind foreign contribution to a political campaign. The prosecutor, however, declined to charge it out of an abundance of caution and magnanimity. To be sure, Trump Tower was amateur hour. By contrast, the Clinton campaign did not merely accept a dubious Russian offer of help; it actively solicited derogatory Trump information from foreign sources, then channeled this “opposition research” into government intelligence channels — with a resulting disinformation coup for Moscow.