RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_ig_report_theyre_guilty_but_its_okay.html

The IG report is really Comey 2.0. Comey spent a long time describing how Hillary had broken the law but then concluded that it was okay. Similarly, the IG report lists example after example of political bias but declares that it had no impact on the Hillary email whitewash.

The IG report on the Clinton email investigation is proof positive that the entire DC justice establishment is corrupt; that they view themselves a rulers not public servants.

First we were told that Comey was a straight shooter whom we could trust. Then we were told the same about Mueller, Rosenstein, and now the IG. Yet in every case we’ve discovered that they are biased political actors who put the interests of the Deep State and the Democratic Party ahead of their sworn duty to uphold the law. It’s time for all conservatives to acknowledge that there are few if any honest people at the top levels of the FBI or the DoJ.

Not surprisingly highly biased people will resort to big lies to protect their power and the big government ideology they embrace.

The big lie in the Comey report was that because Hillary supposedly had no intent to mishandle classified data there was no crime. Yet a Navy seaman who demonstrated no intent to mishandle classified data was sent to prison. Further, the law says that intent is not a requirement.

There are many laws that can be broken even if the person lacks intent. Take manslaughter — if person A kills person B accidently because person A was very careless, then person A is guilty even though they never intended to kill person B.

http://www.atimes.com/tag/spengler/
The US president’s opponents in the the upper chamber aim to overturn his carefully constructed compromise with Beijing over the Chinese telecom giant ZTE

The bright line that separates Donald Trump’s foreign policy from his predecessors is the question of regime change. Between the collapse of communism in 1989 and the departure of the Obama Administration, the American foreign policy establishment embraced the “end of history” premise that liberal democracy would replace all the autocracies of the past, and that the goal of American foreign policy was to hasten the inevitable march of history. Trump, by contrast, puts American interests first and will make deals that reinforce the position of the Chinese, Russian, or North Korean regimes if the outcome is in America’s interest.

Now Trump’s opponents in the Republican Party – the neo-conservative caucus including Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – have thrown a monkey wrench into the works, in the form of legislation that would overturn Trump’s carefully-constructed compromise with China over the Chinese telecom giant ZTE.

American diplomacy achieved a landmark result in Trump’s Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un, offering the repugnant North Korean leader legitimacy and the prospect of regime continuity in return for his nuclear weapons program. The president’s “Art of the Deal” negotiating style had less to do with the constructive outcome than old-fashioned diplomacy under the skillful guidance of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Consultation with allies, back-channel exchanges with the other side, and a proposal that both sides could live with. Asia Times published on June 10 former South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan’s guide to getting a “yes” from Pyongyang, and a Pompeo adviser told me that South Korean insights were incorporated into the American initiative.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/06/18/trumps-approval-rating-just-reached-its-highest-level-yet-in-the-gold-standard-of-presidential-indicators/23462168/

President Donald Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time high of 45% in the Gallup weekly tracking poll.
And his disapproval rating has hit a near-low of 50%.
His current approval rating at his point in his presidency lines up with the ratings of other presidents at similar points in their first terms.
His new spike in approval could take a hit due to the backlash against the administration’s controversial policy that has led to separating families at the border.

President Donald Trump’s approval rating has reached an all-time high of 45% in a Gallup poll released on Sunday.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/18/the-dream-and-the-nightmare

After World War II, only the United States possessed the capital, the military, freedom, and the international good will to arrest the spread of global Stalinism. To save the fragile postwar West, America was soon willing to rebuild and rearm war-torn former democracies. Over seven decades, it intervened in proxy wars against Soviet and Chinese clients, and radical rogue regimes. It accepted asymmetrical and unfavorable trade as the price of leading and saving the West. America became the sole patron for dozens of needy clients—with no time limit on such asymmetry.

Yet what would become the globalized project was predicated on lots of flawed, but unquestioned assumptions:

The great wealth and power of the United States was limitless. It alone could afford to subsidize other nations. Any commercial or military wound was always considered superficial and well worth the cost of protecting the civilized order.

Only by piling up huge surpluses with the United States and avoiding costly defense expenditure through American military subsidies, could the shattered nations of Asia and Europe supposedly regain their security, prosperity and freedom. There was no shelf life on such dependencies.

American popular culture, democracy, and free-market consumer capitalism would spread beyond the West. It created a new world order of sameness and harmony—predicated on the idea that the United States must ensure, at great costs, free trade, free commerce, free travel, and free communications in a new interconnected global world. The more American largess, the more likely places from Shanghai to Lagos would eventually operate on the premises of Salt Lake City or Los Angeles. The world would inevitably reach the end of history as something like Palo Alto, the Upper West Side, or Georgetown.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270488/deep-state-and-tyranny-bruce-thornton

The Department of Justice Inspector General’s Report released last week didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, but merely added more damning evidence for the corruption of the FBI and its investigations over the last few years. More worthy of comment, as Andy McCarthy writes, is its refusal to use common sense and note the obvious interconnections among the various bad actors, and the bond of political bias, seasoned with careerism and arrogance, that united them.

But the problems we are confronting reflect deeper dangers than the professional corruption of some functionaries of corrupt executive agencies armed with the coercive power of the state. The true moral of the story is the dangers to freedom of centralized and concentrated power––the very dangers consensual governments, including our own, were created to minimize.

The issue of political bias, which the IG report scanted, has to be understood in the larger nature of the large-scale bureaucratic public institutions that comprise the Deep State. In other words, the structure and functioning of the institution itself creates a bias that selects progressive employees. The bias insidiously becomes a second nature of which they often are no more conscious than a fish is that it’s wet.

Leftist ideology from Marxism to Progressivism is particularly useful for creating such self-serving agencies. American progressivism was founded on the conceit that “technopolitics,” the notion that modernity requires specialists and experts in the “human sciences” who can most efficiently manage the state. The old democratic and republican notion that virtue, practical experience, and common sense, none of which is dependent on university credentials, are adequate for citizens to govern no matter their wealth, lineage, or education.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fbi-inspector-general-report-directly-criticized-president-obama/

On Thursday, the Justice Department inspector general released a sprawling 568-page report on the handling of the Hillary Clinton emails investigation in 2015-16 by the FBI and DOJ. There’s far too much in the report to detail here in one bite, as it covered (among other things):

The decision not to charge Secretary Clinton or anyone else for the mishandling of State Department emails, some containing classified information, by routing them through her now-infamous “homebrew” server (a decision that looks ever more reckless now that we have all focused more intently on the voracious email-hacking appetite of hostile powers such as Russia and China);
The also now-notorious tarmac meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, and the impact of Lynch’s refusal to recuse herself from the investigation;
The decisions by Jim Comey to make public statements in July and October 2016 in the midst of the election;
The ethical conflicts of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe (over his wife’s receipt of campaign donations from Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe), and McCabe’s role in slow-walking the followup investigation of Anthony Weiner’s laptop;
The ethical conflicts of Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik and his ties to John Podesta and the Clinton campaign;
Jim Comey’s own use of a Gmail account for official FBI business, as well as that of others at the FBI;
The affair between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page and their various text messages (some more related to the Russia investigation, which was outside the scope of the IG report) bashing Trump;
The ethical tangles of the FBI’s decision to allow Hillary Clinton to be represented at her interview by lawyers who were also key witnesses;
Pervasive FBI leaks and the receipt of various financial benefits by FBI agents from the media; and
An FBI Twitter document dump on the Clinton Foundation a week before the election.

Nobody comes out of this report looking good, and it is hard to blame voters who come away feeling vindicated in the view that that the entire class of elected officials, civil servants, and the press are a corrupt racket.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/misconduct-at-fbi-department-of-justice/

And they won’t be solved by whining about criticism.

What do you do with an FBI agent, sworn to uphold the law, who flagrantly violates the law in a rogue investigation aimed at making a name for himself by bringing down some high-profile targets?

Why . . . you promote him, of course.

At least that is the way the Justice Department answered that question in the case of David Chaves, an FBI agent who serially and lawlessly leaked grand-jury information, wiretap evidence, and other sensitive investigative intelligence to the media in his quest to make an insider-trading case against some celebrities. And when finally called on it, the Justice Department circled the wagons: proceeding with its tainted prosecution, referring the now-retired Chaves for an internal investigation that has gone exactly nowhere after nearly two years, and using legal maneuvers to block the courts and the public from scrutinizing the scope of the misconduct.

The Ethos of Law Enforcement
It has become a refrain among defenders of the FBI and Justice Department that critics are trying to destroy these vital institutions. In point of fact, these agencies are doing yeoman’s work destroying themselves — much to the chagrin of those of us who spent much of our professional lives proudly carrying out their mission.

The problem is not the existence of miscreants; they are an inevitable part of the human condition, from which no institution of any size will ever be immune. The challenge today is the ethos of law-enforcement. You see it in texts expressing disdain for lawmakers; in the above-it-all contempt for legislative oversight; in arrogant flouting of the Gang of Eight disclosure process for sensitive intelligence (because the FBI’s top-tier unilaterally decides when Bureau activities are “too sensitive” to discuss); in rogue threats to turn the government’s law-enforcement powers against Congress; and in the imperious self-perception of a would-be fourth branch of government, insulated from and unaccountable to the others — including its actual executive-branch superiors.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/inspector-general-report-reveals-fbi-bias-in-clinton-email-investigation/

There is much to admire in Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s highly anticipated report on the FBI’s Clinton-emails investigation. Horowitz’s 568-page analysis is comprehensive, fact-intensive, and cautious to a fault.

It is also, nonetheless, an incomplete exercise — it omits half the story, the Russia investigation — and it flinches from following the facts to their logical conclusion. The media and the Left are spinning the report as a vindication of the FBI from the charge of bias, when the opposite is the truth.

The IG extensively takes on numerous issues related to the decision not to charge former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for, primarily, causing the retention and transmission of classified information on the non-secure “homebrew” server system through which she improperly and systematically conducted government business. (Our Dan McLaughlin usefully catalogues the topics Horowitz addresses here.) If there is a single theme that ties the sprawling report together, however, it is bias.

Or, as the report put it, “the question of bias.” It should not really be a question, because the evidence of anti-Trump bias on the part of the agents who steered the Clinton probe — which was run out of headquarters, highly unusual for a criminal investigation — is immense. In fact, the most hair-raising section of the report, an entire chapter, is devoted to communications among several FBI officials (not just the infamous duo of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page), which overflow with abhorrence for Trump (“loathsome,” “an idiot,” “awful,” “an enormous d**che,” “f**k Trump”) and his core supporters (“retarded,” “the crazies,” one could “smell” them). More alarmingly, the agents express a determination to stop Trump from becoming president (e.g., Strzok, on being asked if Trump would become president, says “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it”; and on being assured that his election is highly unlikely, opines that “we can’t take that risk” and that the bureau needs “an insurance policy” against him).

Despite marshaling this damning proof of bias, Horowitz spends much of his report discounting it with respect to individual investigative decisions.

https://canadafreepress.com/article/thank-you-punchy

I remember as a young teenager going by myself to see “On the Waterfront” at the Whalley Theater in New Haven. I was so mesmerized by the performance of Marlon Brando (30-years old at the time) that it took a dozen more viewings—really, that’s how many times I saw the film, maybe more—before I realized that the greatest actors of the day—Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger—were also featured in the movie.

In the years since that spellbinding experience, I saw dozens more movies, many with tremendously talented stars and amazing performances. But Brando remained a towering icon to me, unchallenged by any of his many idolaters and competitors.

But 20 years later, in 1974, Godfather: Part II debuted, and 31-year-old Robert De Niro, playing the young godfather-to-be, Vito Corleone, hypnotized me as Brando had decades before.

In fact, I remember walking out of the theater and, like a crazy person talking out loud to myself, I said, “I’m sorry, Marlon.” In fact, at that moment, I left Marlon for Robert. Not that I still didn’t—and still do—love Brando for the artistry he has given to the world. But for me, it was De Niro all the way, in spite of the silly films he has made in recent years to keep his decadently lavish lifestyle afloat.