RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21286/antitrust-matters-matter

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

United States antitrust laws regulate the organization and conduct of business corporations on state and national levels to provide fair competition for the benefit of consumers. Why are they necessary?

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has the answer:

“Free and open markets are the foundation of a vibrant economy. Aggressive competition among sellers in an open marketplace gives consumers – both individuals and businesses – the benefits of lower prices, higher quality products and services, more choices, and greater innovation. The FTC’s competition mission is to enforce the rules of the competitive marketplace – the antitrust laws. These laws promote vigorous competition and protect consumers from anticompetitive mergers in business practices. The FTC’s Bureau of Competition, working in tandem with the Bureau of Economics, enforces the antitrust laws for the benefit of consumers.”

The Sherman Antitrust Act, passed by Congress in 1890 under President Benjamin Harrison, was the first Federal act that outlawed interstate monopolistic business practices. It is considered a landmark decision because previous laws were limited to intrastate businesses.

In 1890 Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii were not even states. The Transcontinental Railroad that connected the eastern United States with the Pacific coast was in its infancy. That was then, this is now. Today there are 50 states, world travel is commonplace, and antitrust matters matter to every person on Earth.

Why? What do antitrust matters have to do with me? The answer is EVERYTHING.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/15/tying-hillarys-emails-to-the-

The 568-page report released Thursday by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz may help explain why the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the probe of the Donald Trump campaign team’s possible ties to Russia appear to bleed into each other.

The IG report, titled “Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election,” details the FBI’s investigation and eventual closure of the case regarding Clinton’s use of a private, non-government email account, and her private server. The report devotes particular attention to former FBI director James Comey’s July 5, 2016 statement exonerating Hillary Clinton from criminal wrongdoing in her handling of classified intelligence.

The report, according to its executive summary, looked at the changes FBI leadership made in several drafts of Comey’s statement. In particular, it focused on “a paragraph summarizing the factors that led the FBI to assess that it was possible that hostile actors accessed Clinton’s server . . . and at one point referenced Clinton’s use of her private email for an exchange with then President Obama while in the territory of a foreign adversary.”

Horowitz’s report is referring to a draft of Comey’s speech dated June 30, 2016, at 9:50 a.m., which states:

[Clinton] also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email.

In the draft circulated at 4:24 p.m. the same day, the reference to the president, as the IG report remarks, “was changed to ‘another senior government official,’ and ultimately was omitted.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/ig-report-fbi-no-bias-conclusion-may-not-supported/But who knows?

You’ve got to hand it to Michael Horowitz: The Justice Department inspector general’s much-anticipated report on the Clinton-emails investigation may be half-baked, but if it is, it is the most comprehensive, meticulously detailed, carefully documented, thoughtfully reasoned epic in the history of half-bakery.

Why say do I say the report “may be half-baked”? Why don’t I just come out and declare, “The report is half-baked”? Well, I figure if I write this column in the IG’s elusive style, we’ll have the Rosetta Stone we need to decipher the report.

See, you probably sense that I believe the report is half-baked. But if I say it “may be” half-baked . . . well, technically that means it may not be, too. I mean, who really knows, right?

If that annoys you, try wading through 568 pages of this stuff, particularly on the central issue of the investigators’ anti-Trump bias. The report acknowledges that contempt for Trump was pervasive among several of the top FBI and DOJ officials making decisions about the investigation. So this deep-seated bias must have affected the decision-making, right? Well, the report concludes, who really knows?

Not in so many words, of course. The trick here is the premise the IG establishes from the start: It’s not my job to draw firm conclusions about why things happened the way they did. In fact, it’s not even my job to determine whether investigative decisions were right or wrong. The cop-out is that we are dealing here with “discretionary” calls; therefore, the IG rationalizes, the investigators must be given very broad latitude. Consequently, the IG says his job is not to determine whether any particular decision was correct; just whether, on some otherworldly scale of reasonableness, the decision was defensible. And he makes that determination by looking at every decision in isolation.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/15/the-fbi-hates-trump-

During his recent book tour, ex-FBI Director James Comey made it clear that he detests Donald Trump.

Comey mocked Trump’s appearance—commenting on his “orange skin” and the bags under his eyes—and compared the president to a mob boss. He said Trump is unfit to be president, and even questioned his marriage. On Twitter, Comey taunts the president with self-aggrandizing tweets and suggests Trump’s day of reckoning will soon arrive. During an interview last spring, Comey’s wife admitted she and her daughters voted for Hillary Clinton and attended the Women’s March to protest Trump’s presidency the day after the inauguration.

But as the old saying goes, a fish rots from its head, and that certainly is the case with Comey’s FBI. (Trump fired Comey in May 2017.) Several passages in the Justice Department’s Inspector General report on the agency’s handling of the Clinton email investigation illustrate the FBI’s culture of contempt for Trump, before and after the election.

Comments from key law enforcement officials—lawyers and investigators—about Trump were vile, demeaning, and childish. But their ridicule was not isolated to Trump. These public servants were unsparing in their contempt for the voters—the very people who fund their salaries and pensions.

The Case of Strzok and Page
Let’s start with Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the FBI lovers who are connected to the Clinton email probe, the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. We know from previously-reported text exchanges that Strzok and Page harbored a deep disdain for Trump and a political preference for Clinton. The IG report confirms their bias after reviewing more than 40,000 messages between the two:

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12507/aclu-leftist-partisan

The director of the American Civil Liberties Union has now acknowledged what should have been obvious to everybody over the past several years: that the ACLU is no longer a neutral defender of everyone’s civil liberties; it has morphed into a hyper-partisan, hard-left political advocacy group. The final nail in its coffin was the announcement that for the first time in its history the ACLU would become involved in partisan electoral politics, supporting candidates, referenda and other agenda-driven political goals.

The headline in the June 8, 2018 edition of The New Yorker tells it all: “The ACLU is getting involved in elections – and reinventing itself for the Trump Era.” The article continues:

“In this midterm year, however, as progressive groups have mushroomed and grown more active, and as liberal billionaires such as Howard Schultz and Tom Steyer have begun to imagine themselves as political heroes and eye Presidential runs, the A.C.L.U., itself newly flush, has begun to move in step with the times. For the first time in its history, the A.C.L.U. is taking an active role in elections. The group has plans to spend more than twenty-five million dollars on races and ballot initiatives by Election Day, in November.”

Since its establishment nearly 100 years ago, the ACLU has been, in the words of The New Yorker, “Fastidiously nonpartisan, so prudish about any alliance with any political power that its leadership, in the 1980’s and 90’s, declined even to give awards to likeminded legislators for fear that it might give the wrong impression.” I know, because I served on its National Board in the early days of my own career. In those days, the Board consisted of individuals who were deeply committed to core civil liberties, especially freedom of speech, opposition to prosecutorial overreach and political equality. Its Board members included Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, right-wingers and left-wingers — all of whom supported neutral civil liberties.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270466/fbi-ig-report-slap-wrist-joseph-klein

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz has released his 500 plus-page report, which purports to shine a light on the mishandling at top levels of the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation of the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she served as Secretary of State under former President Obama. Such mishandling included violations of Department of Justice standards and FBI protocols. The report from the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (“OIG”) criticized certain actions and decisions of former FBI Director James Comey, together with those of other senior FBI officials who were involved in the probe, including former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. Mr. McCabe is already the subject of an earlier criminal referral from the OIG for his alleged unauthorized leaks to the media and lying to federal investigators about his media contacts. Special FBI agent Peter Stzrok and Lisa Page, an attorney who has since left the FBI, were targeted in this report for their blatantly anti-Trump text messages. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch was also criticized for exercising bad judgment in connection with her infamous tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton.

Mr. Horowitz’s report focused on process and procedures. The inspector general made clear when he launched his investigation in January 2017 that “his review will not substitute the OIG’s judgment for the judgments made by the FBI or the Department regarding the substantive merits of investigative or prosecutive decisions.” Moreover, this report did not address whether the Department of Justice or FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to obtain a surveillance order against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, or the government’s reliance on former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified “dossier” in its FISA court application, which the OIG is investigating separately.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-progressive-slumlord-1529019608

Affordable housing is a progressive mantra these days, and taxpayers are exhorted to put more money into public housing. But then we learn that America’s great progressive political hope, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, is essentially the nation’s pre-eminent slumlord.

That’s the sorry truth exposed this week in a scathing civil complaint and consent decree released by U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman over the New York City Housing Authority (Nycha). The complaint exposes how the authority neglected basic repairs and upkeep while taking active steps to deceive inspectors and cover up its ineptitude and wrongdoing.

This is no small agency. Nycha runs 176,066 public housing apartments in 2,462 buildings in 326 developments across the city. One of every 14 New Yorkers—400,000 people—calls Nycha home. Nycha is the largest public housing agency in America, larger than the next 11 agencies combined.

The federal complaint reads like something out of Upton Sinclair. On lead paint, for example, it finds that “since at least 2011, Nycha senior managers have known that Nycha was violating [federal Housing and Urban Development] lead paint requirements.” Nineteen children have been found to have lead poisoning, and in 2016 alone Nycha logged more than 38,000 complaints related to paint and plaster issues.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-disgrace-of-comeys-fbi-1529019418

The long-awaited Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation makes for depressing reading for anyone who cares about American democracy. Self-government depends on public trust in its institutions, especially law enforcement. The IG’s 568-page report makes clear that the FBI under former director James Comey betrayed that public trust in a way not seen since J. Edgar Hoover.

We use the Hoover analogy advisedly, realizing that the problem in this case was not rampant illegal spying. Though IG Michael Horowitz’s conclusions are measured, his facts are damning. They show that Mr. Comey abused his authority, broke with long-established Justice Department norms, and deceived his superiors and the public.

While the IG says Mr. Comey’s decisions were not the result of “political bias,” he presided over an investigating team that included agents who clearly were biased against Donald Trump. The damage to the bureau’s reputation—and to thousands of honest agents—will take years to repair.

The issue of political bias is almost beside the point. The IG scores Mr. Comey for “ad hoc decisionmaking based on his personal views.” Like Hoover, Mr. Comey believed that he alone could protect the public trust. And like Hoover, this hubris led him to make egregious mistakes of judgment that the IG says “negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270463/comey-i-didnt-know-i-knew-weiner-was-married-huma-daniel-greenfield

James Comey doesn’t know a whole lot. Whenever he’s asked to testify, out spill a lot of Clintonesque claims of ignorance. But even by the standard of things that Comey doesn’t know, this section from the IG report is truly impressive.

James Comey doesn’t know what he knows.

Act 1: Comey plays really dumb.

“Comey told the OIG that he recalled first learning of the presence of the additional emails on the Weiner laptop at some point in early October 2016, although Comey said it was possible this could have occurred in late September. Comey explained: I was aware sometime in the first week or two of October that there was a laptop that a criminal squad had seized from Anthony Weiner in New York and someone said to me that—and I’m thinking it might have been Andrew McCabe, but someone said to me kind of in passing, they’re trying to figure out whether it has any connection to the Midyear investigation. And the reason that’s so vague in my head is I think—I never imagined that there might be something on a guy named Anthony Weiner’s computer that might connect to the Hillary Clinton email investigation, so I kind of just put it out of my mind.”

Aww shucks. You can’t expect a small town sheriff to stay on top of all this big city stuff. Who knows which aspiring politician the chief gatekeeper to Hillary Clinton is married to? Not an outsider like Jimbo Comey.

Act 2: Comey plays really, really dumb

“Comey described himself as having a “reasonably good memory” and speculated, “[T]he reason I didn’t index it is, it was a passing thing that almost seemed like he might be kidding, and so I don’t think I indexed it hard.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/14/8-times-doj-inspector-general-slammed-james-comey-blistering-report/

The Justice Department’s inspector general repeatedly criticizes former FBI director James Comey’s handling of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails all throughout the newly released, 586-page report.
1. Comey Baited, Switched DOJ in Proclaiming Hillary’s Innocence

Comey misled former deputy attorney general Sally Yates and former attorney general Loretta Lynch about issuing a joint statement regarding his decision to not pursue criminal charges against Clinton for disseminating classified information via a private, unsecured e-mail server during her tenure as secretary of state. “Unbeknownst to them,” the report says, Comey began drafting a statement about the end of the investigation into her e-mails, known throughout the report as the “Midyear investigation,” to deliver by himself.

He says he did this to protect “a sense of justice more broadly in the country—that things are fair, not fixed, and they’re done independently.”

Comey admitted that he kept the announcement a secret from DOJ officials because he didn’t want them to tell him not to do it. He informed Yates and Lynch about the announcement only after the FBI had already alerted the press. The IG criticized this move to usurp the attorney general, calling it “extraordinary and insubordinate.”

“We found none of his reasons to be a persuasive basis for deviating from well-established Department policies in a way intentionally designed to avoid supervision by Department leadership over his actions,” the report stated.
2. Comey Has Messianic Tendencies

Comey thought that he alone could save the integrity of the investigation into Clinton’s e-mails. Because he believed his co-workers’ reputations were tainted beyond repair, he reasoned that he alone could save the integrity of the case. Read it for yourself.

We determined that Comey’s decision to make this statement was the result of his belief that only he had the ability to credibly and authoritatively convey the rationale for the decision to not seek charges against Clinton, and that he needed to hold the press conference to protect the FBI and the Department from the extraordinary harm that he believed would have resulted had he failed to do so.

3. Comey Never Seriously Considered Making Hillary Testify Before A Grand Jury

Remember when Clinton announced that her longtime aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson were her new attorneys — making them unable to testify against her? They were also allowed to be in the room with Clinton while the FBI interviewed her, a move the IG slammed as “inconsistent with typical investigative strategy.”

This unusual accommodation was made because the FBI was never going to make Clinton testify in front of a grand jury, the report says. This decision was also made during a time when Comey was determined that, absent a shocking twist in the case or an outright lie from Clinton herself during the interview, they would not pursue criminal charges against the former first lady.