RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/14

As the perpetrators of one of the most shameful scandals in American political history begin slowly to retreat, we are left to ponder one overarching question:

What now?

The tale we’ve been told for more than two years—that Donald Trump’s campaign team, possibly even the candidate himself, colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election—has been exposed as a lie. Various investigations into this alleged conspiracy are coming up empty and the accomplices are trying to change the subject. Even more pathetically, some still are clinging to the farce, desperate to salvage whatever still remains of their already sketchy credibility.

To describe it as a witch hunt, the president’s preferred term, is too generous. The American public has witnessed a seditious attempt by powerful interests garrisoned throughout our political complex to overthrow a sitting U.S. president. The orchestrated and failed coup has exceeded the routine combat of our two-party system, where out-of-power partisans disrupt and agitate the other side. No, this has been a full scale insurrection that has violated the boundaries of law, normalcy, and civility in an unprecedented way.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been complicit. The national news media have acted as hatchet men. Influential public officials, operating both inside and outside of government, have aided the stratagem. One of the main culprits just revealed—no, bragged—how a handful of corrupt bureaucrats plotted unlawfully to remove the president from the Oval Office based on the fantastical scheme.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/the_road_to_shariadom_in_america.html

The Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America (AMJA) is part of an international network of Muslim scholars that preaches shariah rule as a government system, even issuing a fatwa delineating sharia’s “superiority” over democracy. It is one of many Muslim organizations now dangerously and politically active in the United States. They include the 25-year-old Council of Islamic Relations, CAIR, self-described as a “Muslim civil rights organization” with an Islamic perspective on American public issues. More recent organizations – created in 2015 and similarly politically dedicated – include JETPAC, the Justice, Education and Technology Policy Advocacy Center, which encourages American Muslims to get involved in local politics, and MPower Change, committed to creating a political platform for Muslim issues and organizing around it.

All these politically active Muslim-American groups, prominent Muslims and other Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations within the U.S. publicly avow that they have no intention of implementing sharia in the U.S. Yet, their stated political goals, public statements and recent reports, betray their true intentions: to grow in political strength sufficient to replace our democracy with their religious governance.

More than 100 top Muslim leaders belong to AMJA, which began in 2003. Imams at over 3,100 U.S. mosques look to AMJA for instructional guidance to lead their congregations. The group’s name in Arabic, “The Group of Sharia Specialists in America,” implies its purpose: to impel Muslims to follow its comprehensive, sharia-compliant fatwas. Many of the group’s leaders attended Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, the world’s highest academy of Islamic learning and interpreter of the definitive sharia text – The Reliance of the Traveller.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-the-impeachment-fishing-expedition-11550188732

As William Barr begins his term as attorney general, House Democrats are aiming a “subpoena cannon” at President Trump, hoping to disable his presidency with investigations and possibly gather evidence to impeach him. Mr. Trump fired back in his State of the Union address: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” To protect the presidency and separation of powers, Mr. Barr should be prepared to seek a stay of all congressional investigations of Mr. Trump’s prepresidential conduct.

The president is not one among many, as are legislators and judges. Crippling his ability to function upsets the constitutional balance of power. For this reason, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has repeatedly concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or prosecuted. The same logic should apply to congressional investigations.

Congress is targeting Mr. Trump’s actions before becoming president because there are well-established constitutional limits, grounded in separation-of-powers doctrine, on its ability to investigate his official conduct. In U.S. v. Nixon (1974), the Supreme Court recognized a constitutionally based, although not unlimited, privilege of confidentiality to ensure “effective discharge of a President’s powers.” In Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the justices held that presidents and ex-presidents have absolute immunity against civil liability for official presidential acts.

Executive immunity for prepresidential activity is less clear. In Clinton v. Jones (1997), which arose out of Paula Jones’s accusation that Bill Clinton sexually harassed her while he was governor of Arkansas, the justices reasoned that Ms. Jones’s lawsuit could proceed because the burden on the presidency objectively appeared light. Specifically, because only three sitting presidents had been sued for prepresidential acts, the justices thought it “unlikely that a deluge of such litigation will ever engulf the presidency.”

The court did, however, consider the question of whether civil litigation “could conceivably hamper the President in conducting the duties of his office.” It answered: “If and when that should occur, the court’s discretion would permit it to manage those actions in such fashion (including deferral of trial) that interference with the President’s duties would not occur.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/reps_ilhan_omar_and_rashida_tlaib_and_the_normalizing_of_jewhatred_in_america.html

Editor’s note: A powerful statement that needs to be seriously considered by all Americans has been issued by Rabbi Aryeh Spero, spokesman for the National Conference on Jewish Affairs and a prolific contributor to American Thinker.

“It is becoming more obvious by the day–even by the tweet-hour–that newly elected Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is anti-Semitic and is peddling her anti-Israel and anti-Jewishness through the well-known and effective drip-by-drip method.

It is a strategy, as we have seen from Islamists in Europe, where an anti-Israel or anti-Jewish statement is made and then partially retracted after an uproar. It is repeated multiple times, followed by multiple half-hearted retractions with the goal and effect being the slow but inevitable seepage of anti-Jewish caricatures into the country’s political discourse and into the minds of its people.

“This successful strategy has poisoned Europe’s discourse against Jews and Israel and is being imported here with the arrival into Congress of Ms. Omar and Ms. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

“The question today is: Do the leaders of the U.S. Congress, and especially House Speaker Ms. Pelosi, have the conviction and will to oust this never-ending shower of anti-Jewish rhetoric as they would if such was being said against other groups. Will they permanently shut this down before it metastasizes as it has in Europe and is unfolding in front of our very eyes?

“There is no question that Ms. Omar’s playing-innocent type of apologies are done in such a manner to momentarily quell the outcry against her remarks while assuring her base that she has not capitulated to the powers outside her community. Her nonchalant use of anti-Semitic stereotypes and language is furthermore disturbing for it reflects a communal comfort with and approval of anti-Semitic ideas that most Americans deem beyond the pale.

https://www.city-journal.org/amazon-cancels-queens-hq

Amazon’s announcement that it will cancel its plans to build a major office complex in Long Island City is a huge defeat for Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio, who staked their political capital on the high-profile deal. The collapse of the deal is a victory, though, for the anti-gentrification, anti-development Left, which assailed the plan as a giveaway to a trillion-dollar company and its billionaire owner. They claimed that Amazon would drive up rents, destroy the local community, create noise pollution, and increase wealth inequality in New York. A typical response came from law professor and three-time loser political candidate Zephyr Teachout, who exulted on Twitter, “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! POWER OF THE PEOPLE. Speechless. Truth to power wins!”

What has “truth to power” won? It’s not as though Amazon was preventing the rise of sustainable, green, unionized, and well-paying manufacturing jobs in Long Island City, or stopping the construction of affordable low-income housing, along with schools and parkland. The area where the company planned to build its secondary headquarters has been the focus of economic development plans for decades. It is presently the site of parking lots, storage units, and empty, city-owned land. Now it will stay that way. Amazon was planning to rent 1 million square feet in the Citigroup Tower in Long Island City, which is largely vacant of tenants, and will now remain so.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/lindsey-graham-demands-andrew-mccabe-testify-to-explain-dojs-bias-against-trump/

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) demanded Thursday that former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe appear before the panel to address “bias against Trump” within the Department of Justice.

Graham’s call for McCabe to testify came hours after CBS aired an interview clip in which McCabe claimed he’d discussed the prospect of recruiting cabinet members to declare President Trump unfit for office with top DOJ officials shortly after the president fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017.

“After Mr. McCabe’s 60 Minutes interview, it is imperative that he, and others, come before the Senate Judiciary Committee to fully explain how and why a FISA warrant was issued against Carter Page and answer questions about what appears to be, now more than ever, bias against President Trump,” Graham said in a statement issued Thursday.

In the statement, Graham referenced a longstanding concern among conservative lawmakers that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant authorizing the surveillance of then-Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was obtained through FBI officials’ misleading a federal judge regarding the partisan source of the evidence against Page.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/02/14/trump_looks_to_end_numbers-only_bias_theory_governing_american_life.html

This will be a courageous move by the administration. Quotas are contrary to democracy….rsk

In what would be one of the Trump administration’s most far-reaching moves regarding race relations, top White House officials are planning a sharp pullback from federal efforts to correct imbalances in outcomes for minorities in everything from housing to hiring. On the table: a ban on the use of a controversial numbers-focused racial-bias theory known as “disparate impact.”

Federal regulators and lobbyists familiar with the change say the White House management and budget office is reviewing a proposed executive order, originally drafted by two conservative Washington think tanks, that would prohibit the use of “the disparate-impact approach in the enforcement or application of any civil-rights law.”

A catalyst for the move is White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, who is currently also serving as interim White House chief of staff and who, while serving in Congress, was a longtime critic of disparate impact. It is not clear whether President Trump has decided to issue the executive order, which would repudiate the underlying rationale for scores of regulations and thousands of government lawsuits alleging racial discrimination, resulting in billions of dollars in fines. Doing away with it would engender fierce opposition from Democrats.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/14/russia-hoax-begins-unravel-gaslighting-begins/

In episode 171 of “Seinfeld,” George Costanza makes up a story about having a house in the Hamptons in order to avoid attending an event with his dead fiancée’s parents, the Rosses. He soon learns they know of his deception but the Rosses nevertheless accept an invitation to the fictitious house.

George picks them up and begins driving towards a house that doesn’t exist. Both the Rosses and George maintain the pretense until George drives to the end of island past the last house in the Hamptons. George silently pleads for the Rosses to put an end to the charade. The lie’s momentum took on a life of its own as the players all continued acting their parts long after the truth was known.

The episode comes to mind as the media has started backing away from the Russia collusion hoax. Like Costanza, many of the media perpetrators seem to know a reckoning is coming. Politico warned Trump haters, “Prepare for disappointment.” Other examples of expectation managing can be found, such as here, here, here, and here. Mueller’s longtime top deputy at the FBI recently warned, “A public narrative has built an expectation that the special counsel will explain his conclusions, but I think that expectation may be seriously misplaced.”

Most recently, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that after almost two years of investigation, it has uncovered no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Attorneys assigned to the Mueller team have quietly begun to slip away before the outcome of the investigation is made public (here, here, and here).

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/14/andrew-mccabe-admits-top-natsec-officials-plotted-coup-trump/
After the James Comey firing, McCabe discussed removing Trump from office and began a counterintelligence investigation of Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.
February 14, 2019 By Madeline Osburn

Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe publicly admitted that after the firing of James Comey, national security officials strategized on invoking the 25th amendment to remove President Trump from office.

“There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Scott Pelley said he learned in his “60 Minutes” interview with McCabe.

Pelley described the top bureaucrats as “counting noses,” and speculating on where various cabinet members might stand on the question of the president’s removal.

“These were the eight days from Comey’s firing to the point that Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel. And the highest levels of American law enforcement were trying to figure out what to do with the president,” Pelley said.