RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/don-mcgahns-immunity-11558479763

Democrats are fuming that Don McGahn skipped a Congressional hearing on Tuesday, and they plan to hold the former White House counsel in contempt. But Mr. McGahn has every constitutional right not to appear, and this isn’t a close legal call.

“Our subpoenas are not optional,” declared House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, speaking to the TV cameras in front of an empty witness table with Mr. McGahn’s name card. The symbolism is more apt than Mr. Nadler recognizes. Congress’s authority to force one of President Trump’s intimate advisers to appear before Congress is also empty.

This isn’t a novel legal doctrine. For nearly 50 years, multiple administrations have held that Congress cannot compel the appearance of a close adviser to the President. That judgment has been backed by numerous legal memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, starting in 1971 when future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran the shop. The view was reinforced and invoked by Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/robert-mueller-resists-democrats-request-to-testify-publicly/

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is resisting congressional Democrats’ request that he testify publicly about details of his investigation that were not included in his final report, the Washington Post first reported Tuesday.

Mueller and his representatives have reportedly reached an impasse in their negotiations with House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, who would like him to speak publicly about a range of issues, including whether the president could be charged with obstruction of justice absent Department of Justice guidelines that prohibit the indictment of a sitting president.

As they navigate the question of whether the obstructive behavior attributed to Trump in the Mueller report warrants impeachment, a number of top Democrats have repeatedly insisted that lawmakers must hear from Mueller himself before a decision can be made. They have also suggested that they would like to question Mueller about whether he believes Attorney General William Barr’s summary of his report misrepresented its findings.

Barr told the Wall Street Journal that he has no problem with Mueller testifying before Congress, but Democrats have accused the Department of Justice of intentionally delaying negotiations over any such testimony. Trump has said it is Barr’s decision whether Mueller can appear before Congress.

News of the impasse comes hours after former White House counsel Don McGahn failed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about Trump’s alleged efforts to interfere in the Mueller probe.

“Let me be clear: This committee will hear Mr. McGahn’s testimony, even if we have to go to court to secure it,” Nadler said after the hearing.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/20/why-did-obama-allow-comey-to-brief-trump-on-the-russian-prostitute-story/

We are three years into the biggest political scandal in American history and former President Barack Obama has yet to be asked about his role in orchestrating the international subterfuge that Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with the Kremlin to rig the 2016 presidential election.

Not one journalist has posed a single question to Obama about what officials in his White House knew—or when they knew it—despite multiple ongoing investigations by the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill. The more than decade-long media swoon for the 44th president continues unabated.

But Attorney General William Barr might do the work that the news media refuses to do.

In an interview with Fox News host Bill Hemmer on Friday, Barr indicated his office is looking into “some very strange developments” that occured between the election and Inauguration Day.

One of these events, Barr told Hemmer, was the meeting on January 6, 2017 between President-elect Trump, his transition team, and Obama’s top intelligence chiefs, including former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273826/house-democrats-seek-brennans-malignant-advice-joseph-klein

Disgraced former CIA director John Brennan will be briefing House Democrats early this week on his perspective regarding the current situation in Iran. No doubt, he will use the opportunity to once again take a shot at President Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Obama administration’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran and to blame the president for escalating tensions with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Brennan said late last week on NBC, for example, that it is the United States under the Trump administration whose drums are “beating the loudest” in any march towards war with Iran.

Last year, in one of his many deranged rants, Brennan tweeted that “Donald Trump simultaneously lied about the Iranian nuclear deal, undermined global confidence in US commitments, alienated our closest allies, strengthened Iranian hawks, & gave North Korea more reason to keep its nukes. This madness is a danger to our national security.”

House Democrats are wasting time listening to Brennan on Iran. It’s a lame attempt to bolster Brennan’s reputation as a so-called national security expert and divert attention as more damaging facts come out about his abuse of power as CIA director during and shortly after the 2016 presidential election campaign.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/will-the-deep-state-conspirators-ever-be-held-accountable/

Democrats and their complicit media wildly overpromised on how damaging the Mueller report would be to President Trump. They paid a huge price when Mueller did not deliver. Collusion diehards like Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler look delusional with their ongoing search for something that never existed.

The Deep State coup attempt stands busted cold, its perpetrators caught red-handed in unbelievable and un-American actions aimed at covering up Hillary Clinton’s inarguable illegalities and overturning an election whose result they could not abide.

For Trumpservatives the schadenfreude was sweet. But now, those vindicated supporters of the president must caution against being overpromised to themselves. To what extent, if any, will Russia-Gate actors like Lynch, Simpson, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Strzok, Page and the rest be held accountable for their alleged criminality?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/byron-york-mueller-changed-everything

From now on, the Trump-Russia affair, the investigation that dominated the first years of Donald Trump’s presidency, will be divided into two parts: before and after the release of the Mueller report. Before the special counsel’s findings were made public last month, the president’s adversaries were on the offensive. Now, they are playing defense.

The change is due to one simple fact: Mueller could not establish that there was a conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to fix the 2016 election. The special counsel’s office interviewed 500 witnesses, issued 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants, and obtained nearly 300 records of electronic communications, and still could not establish the one thing that mattered most in the investigation.Without a judgment that a conspiracy — or collusion, in the popular phrase — took place, everything else in the Trump-Russia affair began to shrink in significance.

Of course, TV talking heads are still arguing over obstruction. But with the report’s release, the investigation moved from the legal realm to the political realm. And in the political realm, the president has a simple and effective case to make to the 99.6% of Americans who are not lawyers: They say I obstructed an investigation into something that didn’t happen? And they want to impeach me for that?

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/05/18/spy_vs_spy_euphemism_at_the_fbi.html

While Washington pols and pundits angrily debate who counts as a spy, and whether any such exotic creatures have ever been employed by the FBI, new evidence is emerging that the FBI not only uses spies, but has done so extensively, including in the Trump-Russia investigation.

On Thursday, CNN host John Berman asked former FBI general counsel James Baker: “Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign as the attorney general suggested?” Baker didn’t initially say no, but rather objected that the word “spy” has negative connotations.

Baker then seemed to switch the question from whether spying occurred to its intent, saying: “There was no intention by myself or anybody else I’m aware of to intrude or do activities with respect to the campaign.” Then he continued his sentence with a clause that significantly modified even that claim. There was no intrusion of the Trump campaign, he said, done “in order to gather political intelligence to find out what the political strategies were.” The FBI was only interested in what the campaign was up to regarding Russia.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-did-america-give-up-on-mass-transit-don-t-blame-cars?utm_source=pocket-newtab

One hundred years ago, the United States had a public transportation system that was the envy of the world. Today, outside a few major urban centers, it is barely on life support. Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak. Annual per capita transit trips in the U.S. plummeted from 115.8 in 1950 to 36.1 in 1970, where they have roughly remained since, even as population has grown.

This has not happened in much of the rest of the world. While a decline in transit use in the face of fierce competition from the private automobile throughout the 20th century was inevitable, near-total collapse was not. At the turn of the 20th century, when transit companies’ only competition were the legs of a person or a horse, they worked reasonably well, even if they faced challenges. Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive. This drove even more riders away, producing a vicious cycle that led to the point where today, few Americans with a viable alternative ride buses or trains.

Now, when the federal government steps in to provide funding, it is limited to big capital projects. (Under the Trump administration, even those funds are in question.) Operations—the actual running of buses and trains frequently enough to appeal to people with an alternative—are perpetually starved for cash. Even transit advocates have internalized the idea that transit cannot be successful outside the highest-density urban centers. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/19/he-did-it-not-me/

“No longer are Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe along with a host of others insisting that they acted nobly. No longer are they in solidarity in their defiant opposition to Donald Trump. Now, for the first time, they are pointing fingers at one another, because they have come to realize that their prior criminality may not be rewarded, praised, or even excused, but rather prosecuted. And so in response, we now hear: “He did it, not me!”

There is something Kafkaesque about the current round of investigating possible FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, and National Security Council wrongdoing during the 2016 election, Trump transition, and early presidency.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller had been permitted to range well beyond his mandate of “Russian collusion.” He outsourced much of the selection of his “dream team” and “all-star” staff of attorneys to his deputy, Andrew Weissman. In turn, Weissman—who commiserated with Hillary Clinton at her ill-fated “victory” party on the evening of her defeat—stocked the team with Trump-haters, liberals and progressives, Clinton donors, a few who had previously served as attorneys for the Clinton Foundation, and Clinton or Obama aides. Most of these were themselves briefed during the early dissemination of the fraudulent Steele dossier.

Yet after all the bias, prosecutorial leveraging, the process crimes, the perjury traps, and after 22 months, $34 million, and a 440-plus page report, Mueller’s “hunter-killer” team did not establish that President Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the 2016 election.

In fact, Mueller could not find prosecutable “obstruction” of justice by Trump to impair the investigation of what Mueller concluded was not a crime.