RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is much speculation as to the significance of the search of the offices and hotel room of President Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen. To obtain a search warrant, prosecutors must demonstrate to a judge that they have probable cause to believe that the premises to be searched contain evidence of crime. They must also specify the area to be searched, the items to be seized and, in searches of computers, the word searches to be used.

At least that’s the constitutional requirement in theory, especially where the Sixth Amendment right to counsel is involved, in addition to the general Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches. Yet, in practice, judges often give the FBI considerable latitude, relying on the “firewalls” and “taint teams” they set up to protect the subject of the search from violation of his or her constitutional rights.

But the firewalls and taint teams are comprised of government agents who themselves may not be entitled to read or review many of the items seized. It is an imperfect protection of important constitutional rights. That’s why Justice Department officials must be careful to limit the searching of lawyers’ offices to compelling cases involving serious crimes. We don’t know at this point what the prosecutors are looking for but, if it relates to payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels, that would not seem to justify so potentially intrusive a search of Cohen’s confidential lawyer-client files.

It’s Equal Pay Day – an opportunity for activists to raise awareness about the perceived pay gap between America’s working men and women. It’s also an opportunity for politicians to attack gender bias in private companies, as they do throughout the year.

In October, we published our OpenTheBooks Oversight Report – Federal and State Government’s Gender Hiring Gap Oversight Report analyzing payrolls from federal agencies, Congress, the White House, and government positions at the state and local levels. We found it’s still a man’s world in government. Across the board, we found that men significantly outnumber women in the top-paid government positions.

However, it’s important to note that we didn’t find any evidence that men and women in the same position were paid differently – that would be illegal. We didn’t find a gender pay gap, but a gender hiring gap, meaning men far outnumber women in highly compensated executive positions.

For example, in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio issues Equal Pay Day proclamations, and, last year, made quite a spectacle hugging the “Fearless Girl” statute that faces the Charging Bull on Wall Street. Yet, 197 out of the 200 top-paid New York City workers are men. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s controlled payroll has just 12 females out of the top 100 most highly compensated city employees.

Here’s how some members of Congress are doing on their own executive-controlled payrolls:

On October 13th 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered a speech that defines this moment in our nation’s history. Part of that speech was put to a video. The entire transcript of that speech is below.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People. There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense.

The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exists for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself.

The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. As an example, just one single trade deal they’d like to pass, involves trillions of dollars controlled by many countries, corporations and lobbyists.

For those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests they partner with, our campaign represents an existential threat.

This is not simply another 4-year election. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government.

The political establishment that is trying everything to stop us, is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and foreign policies that have bled this country dry. The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs, as they flee to Mexico, China and other countries throughout the world. Our just-announced jobs numbers are anemic, and our gross domestic product, or GDP, is barely above one percent. Workers in the United States, were making less than they were almost 20 years ago – and yet they are working harder.

It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.

Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan – and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and across our country. They have stripped these towns bare, and raided the wealth for themselves and taken away their jobs.

The Clinton Machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this firsthand in the WikiLeaks documents in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.

The Stormy Daniels scandal could be more perilous for Trump than the Russia investigation has been.

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was caught hiding the sources of 1,300 large campaign donations, aggregating to nearly $2 million. The campaign also accepted more than $1.3 million in unlawful donations from contributors who had already given the legal maximum.

Under federal law, such campaign-finance violations, if they aggregate to just $25,000 in a calendar year, may be treated as felonies punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment — with offenses involving smaller dollar amounts punishable by incarceration for a year or more. (See Section 30109(d) of Title 52, U.S. Code, pp. 51–52 of the Federal Election Commission’s compilation of campaign laws.)

The Obama campaign did not have a defense; it argued in mitigation that the unlawful donations constituted a negligible fraction of the monumental amount it had raised from millions of “grass-roots” donors. Compelling? Maybe not, but enough to convince the Obama Justice Department not to prosecute the Obama campaign — shocking, I know. During the Christmas holiday season right after the 2012 campaign, with Obama safely reelected and nobody paying much attention, the matter was quietly settled with the payment of a $375,000 fine.

Is the $130,000 in hush money Donald Trump’s personal lawyer paid to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election a campaign-finance violation? Probably, although it’s a point of contention. Even if we stipulate that it is, though, we’re talking comparative chump change.

Yet, as that lawyer, Michael Cohen, has discovered, what was not a crime in the Obama days is the crime of the century now. Cohen’s Rockefeller Center law office in New York City was raided by the FBI on Monday. So was his room at the Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where he has been staying while his apartment is under renovation, the New York Times reports.

The agents seized voluminous files and records pursuant to court-authorized warrants obtained by federal prosecutors. The haul includes presumptively privileged communications between Cohen and his client, President Trump. As one would expect, the president exploded in anger, with Special Counsel Robert Mueller the main target. But his outburst was a misfire.

There is nothing like historical context to help evaluate and better understand current events. So, in regard to the mainstream media’s breathless, non-stop coverage of the self-levitating Trump-Russia collusion theory, consider this bit of trivia:

In 1991, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin opened the archives of the Soviet Central Committee, Western researchers quickly descended on Moscow to plow through the treasure trove of previously classified official documents.

Among those researchers was Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times and the BBC who found a May 14, 1983 letter from KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov. Bearing the highest security classification, it summarized a confidential offer by Senator Ted Kennedy to the Soviet leadership to help stop President Ronald Reagan’s aggressive, anti-Soviet defense policies.

The letter was written as the debate was heating up over Reagan’s proposed deployment of intermediate range missiles to counter the Soviets’ medium range weapons in Eastern Europe.

Sebastian reported his find in an article titled “Teddy, the KGB and the top secret file” which appeared in the February 2, 1992, London Times. And there the story remained unheeded and unheralded until 2006 when historian Paul Kengor published The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism in which he discussed Kennedy’s secret approach to the Soviets.

In an appendix to his book, Kengor reproduced Chebrikov’s classified missive unedited and unabridged along with extensive documentation establishing its authenticity.

Marked “Special Importance” and bearing the heading “Regarding Senator Kennedy’s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Y. V. Andropov,” the letter reported that former California Senator John Tunney had secretly contacted the Soviets on behalf of Kennedy. According to Chebrikov, Kennedy was “very troubled” by poor U.S.-Soviet relations which he blamed on “Reagan’s belligerence.” Kennedy was reported to be “very impressed with the activities of Y. V. Andropov and other Soviet leaders.”

The shocking raid on the office, home, and Manhattan hotel room of President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, directed by a rogue independent prosecutor is the latest outrage in an out-of-control investigation aimed at reversing the results of the 2016 election.

The raid Monday that was directed by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III was a “disgrace” and a “pure and simple witch hunt,” President Trump told reporters at the White House.

“It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.”

Trump’s comments fueled speculation that he will try to fire Mueller, something the president had been avoiding talking about publicly. Some lawmakers say terminating Mueller could lead to a constitutional crisis.

“We’ll see what happens. … Many people have said ‘you should fire him,’ ” Trump said when asked if he would give Mueller the boot. “Again, they found nothing and in finding nothing, that’s a big statement.”

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has threatened violent unrest if Trump fires Mueller. On Dec. 17 the nearly impeached Obama cabinet official tweeted:

“ABSOLUTE RED LINE: the firing of Bob Mueller or crippling the special counsel’s office. If removed or meaningfully tampered with, there must be mass, popular, peaceful support of both. The American people must be seen and heard – they will ultimately be determinative.”

When radicals like Holder say they want peaceful protests, they are lying. A nonviolent leftist demonstration is almost a contradiction in terms. Holder doesn’t care if people get killed as long as his preferred political objective is achieved. He’s absolutely fine with riots and arson, as long as they are carried out for the right reasons.

The Manhattan law office of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, made for an unusual target for federal agents, who raided it Monday morning.

Typically, federal agents need special permission to comb the files of an attorney, whose client communications are generally protected from disclosure, legal experts said. To obtain a federal warrant, Justice Department officials need a special finding that an attorney’s office contains crucial evidence, said Christopher Slobogin, a criminal-procedure expert at Vanderbilt Law School.

It is unclear if agents targeted client files or were searching for business records falling outside the scope of attorney-client privilege, though the lines separating them aren’t always clear. Steve Ryan, a lawyer for Mr. Cohen, said Monday that the search had resulted in the “seizure of protected attorney-client communications between a lawyer and his clients.”

When searching the offices of an attorney who is a subject of an investigation, “prosecutors are expected to take the least intrusive approach,” according to the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual, which instructs prosecutors to consider a subpoena before resorting to a search warrant.

The raid carries risks for the Justice Department, as well. The attorney-client privilege generally shields interactions between lawyers and clients from being deployed as evidence against a defendant. If government lawyers use privileged communications to build their case, a court could deem their entire prosecution tainted.

To guard against that, the Justice Department uses what are known as “taint teams,” groups of government attorneys who are segregated from Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and prosecutors involved in the investigation, said Daniel Goldman, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Taint teams are charged with sifting through seized files and determining what prosecutors can use.

Courts have approved the use of taint teams, but criminal defense lawyers have long criticized the practice as an example of the fox guarding the chicken coop. In rare cases, a judge could appoint an independent special master to review the files or examine seized documents him or herself.

Attorney-client privilege is intended to allow lawyers to give robust legal advice without worrying about incriminating a client. But attorney-client information may not be protected if the communications were in service of an illegal act, under the “crime-fraud exception” to the privilege. CONTINUE AT SITE

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has a disturbing new way to raise revenue: using government muscle to squeeze private organizations into “voluntarily” writing billion-dollar checks. That’s what he did to Fidelis Care, a nonprofit health plan affiliated with the Catholic Church, and its would-be buyer, Centene Corp.

In a murky deal announced on Good Friday, Fidelis and Centene agreed to pay the state $2 billion over four years. The payments are not technically required by law. But Fidelis and Centene agreed to them after a three-month pressure campaign by Mr. Cuomo, including overt and implied threats to seize the funds, block the sale or both.

Fidelis would seem an odd target for a gubernatorial money grab. Founded in 1993, it specializes in health coverage for the poor. With 1.6 million members, it is the largest purveyor of state-sponsored programs such as Medicaid managed care, Child Health Plus and the Essential Plan, as well as Medicare Advantage and commercial ObamaCare coverage. It has played a big role in reducing the state’s uninsured rate, and it has not been publicly accused of wrongdoing.

What sparked Mr. Cuomo’s campaign was Fidelis’s pending sale to Centene, announced in September, for a price of $3.75 billion. The bishops planned to put the money into a charitable foundation in support of health care for the needy. Mr. Cuomo argued that the state was entitled to $3 billion of the proceeds because Fidelis earned most of its revenue from state programs. By that logic, the state could skim the savings accounts of public employees when they retire.

He also cited the precedent of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, which yielded billions to the state when it converted to for-profit status in the mid-2000s. But that was a unique transaction under a narrowly tailored law that applies to no other company.

Despite lacking a legal claim to the money, Mr. Cuomo pursued it aggressively. Bills he submitted to the Legislature would not only have seized 80% of the proceeds from the sale but also raided Fidelis’s reserve accounts if the deal were canceled. The bishops would have paid either way. The sale needed regulatory approval from two state agencies, the departments of Health and of Financial Services, leaving it vulnerable to delay or rejection by Mr. Cuomo’s appointees. CONTINUE AT SITE

Washington is full of blather, bombast and bullsh-t, but a line about Robert Mueller was the most important thing spoken or written there last week:

“Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, declined to comment.”

Since Mueller’s office never says anything outside court publicly, who knew he had a spokesman or needed one?

The line was included in a Washington Post story that said Mueller told the White House that President Trump was not a target of the criminal investigation.

The story could be a big deal — if true. But the report is nonetheless remarkable because it was the first leak in memory that carried good news for Trump.

After breathless drip, drip, drip reports that had the president practically being frog-marched to a firing squad at dawn, the fever broke. Every dog has its day, and the Washington media decided this president’s day comes once every 15 months.

True to form, news outlets immediately pivoted back to their regularly scheduled programming of stories saying Trump is in imminent danger. The New York Times and ABC declared that George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, though a stranger to readers, is now Mueller’s hottest witness.

Enough.

The violent swings of the leaky pendulum make this an excellent moment to call timeout on the Mueller probe. What does he have, where is he going and when is he going to get there?

James Comey’s book comes out next week. While promoting “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership” the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation should face some tough questions. First, will he correct the postelection distortions by “friends and associates” meant to justify his decision to send the Oct. 28, 2016, letter to Congress? That letter—which announced the FBI was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails—almost certainly handed Donald Trump the presidency.

In an Oct. 29, 2016, internal memo, Mr. Comey claimed he was “obligated” to inform Congress because of a public commitment he had made during a congressional hearing. But that is untrue. On Sept. 28, 2016, Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) had asked what the FBI chief would do if anything new on the Clinton emails issue was discovered. Mr. Comey responded only that “we would certainly look at any new and substantial information.”

The FBI began reviewing emails found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop on Oct. 31, 2016, some four weeks after Mr. Comey was made aware of their existence. Agents completed their work on Nov. 5. Since it took less than a week to review the emails, couldn’t Mr. Comey have done so before informing Congress? If Mr. Comey argues he didn’t know how long it would take, the question remains: Why didn’t he look first? This is especially important given the undeserved political damage caused by the letter.

Mr. Comey also falsely claimed that the FBI needed to obtain a warrant before reviewing the Clinton emails on Mr. Weiner’s laptop. In fact, attorneys for Huma Abedin and Mr. Weiner told the New Yorker’s Peter Elkind that they would have “readily acceded” to FBI requests to review the Clinton emails without a warrant. But Mr. Comey and the FBI never asked. Why?

Then there is the still-unexplained delay between Mr. Comey’s being told about the Weiner-Clinton emails and obtaining a warrant. On Oct. 3, 2016, Mr. Comey first learned about the discovery of the new emails. Yet it wasn’t until Oct. 30 that he and the FBI obtained a warrant to look at them. Many conservatives believe Mr. Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe deliberately delayed the review to help Mrs. Clinton, but the opposite is the case.CONTINUE AT SITE