RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/paul-manafort-sentencing-washington-dc-federal-court/

The 47 months from a Virginia court was a side show. Today’s sentencing is the main event.C ritics who last week blasted the light 47-month sentence imposed on Paul Manafort by Judge T. S. Ellis of the federal district court in Alexandria, Va., may lack familiarity with both the federal sentencing guidelines and the peculiarities of Manafort’s case. As I observed in my weekend column, he is going to get slammed when he gets sentenced today by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the federal district court in Washington, D.C.

I am not telling you this based on some crystal ball I’ve been hiding. You just need to read Manafort’s plea agreement in the Washington case.

Manafort should have had only one case, not two. Even though the charges are different, the two cases were based on the same fact pattern, and they have always been two parts of the same whole. Manafort was tried twice instead of once, strictly because of his own choice.

Prosecutors would have preferred to file the whole case in Washington. But the case involved some counts (the tax counts, in particular) as to which Manafort was entitled to be tried in the venue of the offense — in Virginia, where he resided. Defending oneself in a trial is prohibitively expensive for those who have means to hire their own counsel; and trials are emotionally wrenching for an accused and his family. So most defendants waive venue objections; that allows all the counts to be tried once, in one district. But Manafort calculated that Virginia would be a friendlier place for him than Washington: He hoped to beat the case there, and maybe gain some momentum that might miraculously help him in Washington — or at least improve his argument for a pardon. He was largely wrong — convicted on all the counts the Virginia jury decided, and the hung jury on the other charges meant he could be tried again if the special counsel chose to do so. Consequently, Manafort pled guilty in the Washington case because it made no sense to fight on.

Judge Ellis may be sympathetic to Manafort, and he may have been trying to convey a signal, by the light sentence, that he thought the prosecution was overkill (i.e., that no matter how serious Manafort’s offenses are, he would never have been prosecuted if he had not gotten involved in Donald Trump’s campaign). But the Virginia sentencing exercise was theater. No matter what Ellis did, Manafort was going to be sentenced to heavy time in Washington.

In his Washington plea agreement, Manafort and his counsel agreed that his sentencing-guidelines range, at a minimum, calls for 210 to 262 months’ imprisonment (roughly 18 to 22 years). I say “at a minimum” because the agreement’s guidelines calculation includes a caveat that Manafort’s downward adjustment (2 “offense level” points) for accepting responsibility by pleading guilty could be withdrawn if Mueller’s office presses the contention that Manafort proceeded, post-plea, to lie in his failed cooperation attempt. If he is at offense level 39 instead of the currently projected 37, Manafort’s sentencing range spikes up to 262 to 327 months (roughly 22 to 27 years).

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/13/schiff-trump-impeachment-russia-probe-1219471

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said Wednesday that even if a report from special counsel Robert Mueller exonerates President Donald Trump, impeachment talk might remain on the table.

Schiff (D-Calif.), whose committee is still investigating the president’s ties to Russia during to the 2016 presidential election, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that if neither Mueller nor his panel find definitive evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice by Trump, he would consider that to be the end of the collusion inquiry, the most likely grounds for impeachment.

Still, he said, “there may be grounds for removal of office or there may be grounds for indictment after he leaves office that the Congress discovers.”

He pointed out that Mueller’s narrow mandate may have precluded the special counsel from investigating “whether the Russians were laundering money for the Trump Organization,” something Schiff said his committee is looking into.

“Our predominant concern on my committee is: Was this president, is this president compromised by a foreign power?” the California Democrat said.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ex-fbi-lawyer-lisa-page-admitted-obama-doj-ordered-stand-down-on-clinton-email-prosecution-gop-rep-says

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page admitted under questioning from Texas Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe last summer that “the FBI was ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross negligence in the handling of classified information,” the congressman alleged in a social media post late Tuesday, citing a newly unearthed transcript of Page’s closed-door testimony.

Page and since-fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, who were romantically involved, exchanged numerous anti-Trump text messages in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, and Republicans have long accused the bureau of political bias. But Page’s testimony was perhaps the most salient evidence yet that the Justice Department improperly interfered with the FBI’s supposedly independent conclusions on Clinton’s criminal culpability, Ratcliffe alleged.

“So let me if I can, I know I’m testing your memory,” Ratcliffe began as he questioned Page under oath, according to a transcript excerpt he posted on Twitter. “But when you say advice you got from the Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to —”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/12/why_pelosi_folded_on_trumps_i

The nation’s top elected Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has now declared publicly that her party will not impeach President Trump. In a lengthy Washington Post interview published Monday, Pelosi left the door slightly ajar, saying her decision could change if “compelling” new evidence emerged. Still, hers was a significant announcement, signaling a major change in the party’s trajectory.

Why did Pelosi make the decision? Why now? What are the benefits and perils for her party and for Pelosi’s leadership?

The longtime congresswoman is a savvy strategist, and her decision was purely strategic. She made no apology for two years of unproven charges, no admission her party had been fundamentally wrong in its most basic and vocal claim since the 2016 election: that Donald Trump is not the legitimate president of the United States. He is illegitimate, they charge, because the election itself was tilted by Russia. The most incendiary charge is that Trump worked with the Russians to rig the results.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/11/another-double

Two years ago this month, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was in the midst of a political firestorm.

As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes was uncovering the shocking news that the Obama Justice Department had launched an investigation into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. On March 4, 2017, President Trump infamously tweeted he had discovered that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found.”

FBI Director James Comey was scheduled to testify before Nunes’s committee later that month. Comey would confirm publicly for the first time that his agency had indeed opened up a counterintelligence probe in July 2016 into four Trump campaign associates—including campaign manager Paul Manafort—after he intentionally withheld that bombshell from top lawmakers for eight months.

The scandalous operation that the Obama Justice Department thought would be concealed forever after Hillary Clinton won the presidency, instead was at risk of being exposed by Nunes. The totality of the scheme—which also involved the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, Obama’s key advisors, a secret court, and FBI informants among other culprits—slowly was coming into view, jeopardizing the careers of top law enforcement officials as well as throwing into doubt the entire basis for the nascent Trump-Russia collusion plotline.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/03/11/ten-ways-president-trumps-agencies-spent-100b-in-a-use-it-or-lose-it-shopping-spree-in-sept-

“Federal agencies used your money to buy fidget spinners.And CrossFit equipment, and alcohol, and lobster tail, snow crab, and steaks. They purchased $300 million in passenger vehicles, and $500 million in public relations, marketing, and advertising…”

For federal agencies, Christmas comes in September.

In the final month of the fiscal year, federal agencies scramble to spend what’s left in their annual budgets. Agencies worry that spending a smaller amount than Congress appropriated this year might mean they’ll receive less money next year.

So, rather than admit the department could run efficiently on a smaller budget, federal agencies embark on a shopping spree. This is the “use it or lose it” spending phenomenon – and it happens every year on the taxpayer dime.

Our OpenTheBooks oversight report on the fiscal year 2018 use-it-or-lose-it spending spree quantified $97 billion in contracts signed during the month of September.

In the final seven days of the year, federal agencies blew through $53 billion in contracts – that’s $1 in $10 of all contract spending on the year, in the final week.

The problem isn’t new and it isn’t going away. In fact, it’s getting worse. Our report shows a 15 percent increase in use-it-or-lose-it contracts from last year to this year. From 2015, that’s a 39 percent increase.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/democrats-for-the-people-act-election-reform-bill-unconstitutional/

At some level, you have to give House Democrats some credit for ambition. They may have just sent to the Senate the most comprehensively unconstitutional bill in modern American history. It’s called the “For the People Act,” and it’s a legislative buffet of bad ideas.

The alleged purpose of the bill, H.R. 1, is to “expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants.” In reality, the bill represents an extraordinary federal power grab. At every turn, it grants federal regulators more power. Time and again, it renders federal election law more complex — creating a chilling effect on political communication through sheer uncertainty and confusion.

The free-speech problems are so obvious that free-speech organizations on the left and right are united in opposition. Comprehensive analyses from the Institute for Free Speech and the American Civil Liberties Union are worth reading in their entirety and raise remarkably similar concerns.

At a time of extraordinary public harassment, boycotts, intimidating public shame campaigns, the act would expand financial-disclosure requirements, including in some circumstances requiring public disclosure of the names and addresses even of donors who did not know about or perhaps even support the political message of the organization they funded. Donors may give money, for example, to fund one aspect of an organization’s mission only to be involuntarily exposed as a “political donor” when the organization chooses — without the donor’s knowledge or consent — to mention a politician by name in a different context. As the ACLU points out, “it is unfair to hold donors responsible for every communication in which an organization engages.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/09/18-real

“In the post-Trump era, the phrase “rule of law,” has come to take on an Orwellian opposite, like “Freedom is slavery” or “Ignorance is strength.” The violations of the law committed to “get Trump” are characterized as necessary steps to protect the law at the same time partisan legal minds declare every Trump action to be illegal or unconstitutional. Little or no analysis is applied in service to the one law that seems to have displaced 2,000 years of legal tradition: Hurting Trump is “legal.” Helping trump is “illegal.” It’s as simple as that.”

Donald Trump, we are told over and over and over again, threatens the “rule of law.” To pick a piece at random, I note that Joel Mathis of The Week recently wrote, “When we talk about Trump and the rule of law, mostly we talk about how he’s flouting and evading the constraint of laws he doesn’t like: His newly declared state of emergency to circumvent Congress’ refusal to appropriate funds for a Mexican border wall is just the best recent example.” You don’t have to take my word for the absurdity of this claim that the emergency declaration flouts the rule of law; read the New York Times: Trump has, at a minimum, a colorable legal claim for this emergency declaration.

In the Mathis example, as in most of these cases, the “violation” generally amounts to a policy difference or the departure from a “norm” like the one used to buck presidential oversight of powerful federal agencies.

The suffocating sanctimoniousness of the “Trump-is-threatening-the-rule-of-law” crowd is exceeded only by their hypocrisy. Don’t believe me? Here is a list of 18 actual violations of the law and Constitution done in service of removing Trump from office. I’ll bet you can’t find a single objection from any of these “rule-of-law” hand wringers to these flagrant and unpunished transgressions of the law.

Unmasking: Obama Administration officials “unmasked” hundreds of Americans who were caught up in government surveillance of foreign nationals. It’s illegal for the government to spy on Americans without a warrant. So when an American is heard speaking to a target of a legal foreign wiretap, the government is supposed to take action to shield the American from the effect of the surveillance. Without those safeguards, it’s just the government spying on an American citizen without a warrant. Hundreds of Americans were outed (unmasked) by former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power and other Obama officials in the closing months of Obama’s tenure, despite the fact that Power as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. had no reason to be perusing the private conversations of American citizens.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/09/a-

You really have to give it to the suits in Barack Obama’s intelligence services and Department of Justice (many of whom, of course, are still strutting about in Donald Trump’s administration). It was quite a web they wove, and tangled with complexity. Yet their prodigious practice also made it nearly impenetrable to anyone not inside their charmed circle.

That adamantine carapace of impenetrability is a sign of their high style, their assiduity, the reason that a “word of encouragement” did not come amiss.

Put your hand on your heart. Can you really tell me what happened and who all the major players are in the Get Trump farce that has been occupying the nation for more than two years now? There have been various worthy efforts to unpack the drama—I’ve made a few myself—but at bottom it is like Russia according to Winston Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

Part of the problem is the shifting roles of the main players. Or rather, the shifting roles that elevate one or more players at one moment only to demote them back to the chorus a week or two later. How many people were suddenly cast into starring roles only, a few days or weeks later, to find themselves pushed back into bit-player status? George Papadopoulos: remember him? For a brief shining moment, he was the key to the whole “Russian Collusion” mythos. The New York Times told us so. But after he strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage he faded from sight and now is heard no more.