RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some former agents, once defenders of the ousted FBI director, aren’t fans of his current high-profile persona.

When President Trump suddenly fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017, quite a few retired bureau officials eagerly defended Comey’s record as director, and denounced Trump’s abrupt, seemingly self-serving decision. But some of those same retired FBI agents are now turned off by the pugnacious, high-profile persona of the former director as he prepares to launch the book tour for his autobiography, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.

In 25 years at the FBI, James Gagliano handled a wide variety of duties — criminal investigator, undercover agent, supervisory special agent, SWAT team leader, member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, acting legal attaché at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, and head of a bureau satellite office. He’s currently an adjunct assistant professor at St. John’s University and a CNN contributor. Back in June 2017, when Comey was preparing to testify before the Senate, Gagliano said, “Nobody’s going to question Comey’s honor and his character” and said he was “disgusted” with the way that Trump treated the former director.

Now, Gagliano says he was once a “mild fan” of Comey, but has been unhappy with the former director’s decision to venture into the public eye, writing a tell-all book and promoting it on a highly visible press tour.

“This current effort to meet the president in the public square, at his own game of slinging mud and punching and contributing smugness to the debate, it’s a bad look for him,” Gagliano says. “I think it’s going to diminish the FBI, and I think it’s going to diminish whatever’s left of Comey’s reputation.”

Former special agent Bobby Chacon, who now works in Hollywood as a technical advisor and story consultant, has had a similar change of heart. Back when President Trump didn’t even tell Comey that he was fired in person or by phone, Chacon bristled. “Nobody deserves to be treated like that,” he told the Guardian. But since then, he has come to concur that Comey is burning through the goodwill he accumulated over the course of his career in the bureau.

“I liked him when I worked at the bureau, although who the director was never really impacted my day-to-day life in the bureau too much,” Chacon says now, adding that he began to develop some concerns about Comey beginning with the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. He wondered why a grand jury wasn’t empaneled in that investigation, a move that he contends would have somewhat insulated the bureau from political controversy by leaving the decision to indict or not indict in others’ hands.

The concept of free speech, so central to the American experience, is facing a trial in our society. This is not the first time, and surely won’t be the last, in which competing interests wrestle to define the term.

But it is our time to debate it, and those who would trammel speech in the name of justice, or patriotism, or anything really, are relying on several very flawed premises in their attempts to silence their fellow citizens. It’s time to tackle them, one by one, and establish a positive argument for free speech that recognizes it is a blessing, not a burden.

Much of the confusion regarding the idea of free speech stems from a fundamental misunderstanding that somehow the First Amendment of the Constitution invented and constrains the idea. This is hogwash.

In 399 BC, Socrates was tried, convicted, and executed for violating speech codes. For more than 2,000 years since then, Western culture has played a game of tetherball over speech, sending it this way and that. But the heart of the issue has nothing to do with government. It has to do with whether we, as individuals, value tolerance for perspectives we disagree with.

In the past decade or so, many people — usually but not always those on the Left — have distorted the concept of free speech in an effort to suppress it. Their arguments are not deep; they are not even shallow. It is useful, however, to look at and dismantle them so we are not tempted to snatch from ourselves the rights generations past established for us.

Not being willing any longer to be manipulated is not succumbing to isolationism. Wondering whether the United States can afford another liability is not mindless nationalism. Questioning whether America can afford the status quo here and abroad is not heresy. Assuming we can borrow our way out of any inconvenience is largely over.

What helped elect Trump was a collective weariness with demands put on a country $20 trillion in debt. America is currently running a $57 billion a month trade deficit.

The poverty of inner-city Detroit, or rural Central California, or West Virginia does not suggest an endlessly opulent nation, at least as a visitor might conclude from visiting Manhattan, Chevy Chase, or Presidio Heights.

NATO was designed to protect Western Europeans from Soviet expansionism and to allay fears of traditional Russian nationalism. It transmogrified into a vital Western alliance that might use collective deterrence and action to preserve shared democratic values.

But if a distant United States is to continue anchoring such a key defensive league, then surely its front-line member states of a prosperous Europe must meet or exceed their own freely agreed upon levels of defense spending.

Instead, until recently, most did not.

The unspoken premise for such nullification was that the United States needs NATO more than the NATO states in Europe need the United States. Or given that America is so big and powerful a patron, surely it could always afford to subsidize an errant client.

Mexico assumed that a rich neighbor could, in perpetuity, serve as a refuge of last resort for its impoverished citizens, thereby providing a safety valve and precluding any need for its own internal reform.

The United States was supposedly so affluent that it could both offer entitlements to illegal aliens and, given such aid, not care whether many of them sent $60 billion back home (what is a mere $60 billion out of a multi-trillion dollar economy?) to Central American and Mexico.

When occasionally the United States recoiled a bit, Mexico could always accuse an essentially open-border America of being restrictionist and xenophobic. One wonders how exactly would Mexico’s hostility be expressed—by vows not to receive remittances, or to demand repatriation of its lost citizens, or unilaterally to leave NAFTA, or to elect a nationalist president who would build a wall?

It was one thing for the Communist Party organ, the Daily Worker, that pre-Twitter roadmap of every zig and zag of Kremlin directives, to have ramped up the information-war against Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s by turning the name of our greatest anti-communist hero into an epithet mouthed by the Left.

It is quite another for conservatives nearly 70 years later to keep pounding what was, after all, Stalin’s line. It was Stalin’s line not for his health, of course, but for his long war to destroy the USA at home: specifically, to destroy the anti-communist resistance, personified, circa 1950, by the fearless junior senator from Wisconsin. There are many markers attesting to the Kremlin’s mainly unacknowleged ideological victory in this same war, from our own Marxist college campuses, to a numbing list of cultural debasements, to Russian hypersonic missiles, courtesy the seemingly invisible “reset” tech transfer scheme called Skolkovo. To this list of markers I would add the quick-trigger, full-throated conservative chorus against “McCarthyism.”

It seems hard to imagine, but at some point long ago most Americans rejected the Daily Worker and everything it stood for outright — communism, Stalin, subversion, the works. Now, we don’t really know what any of it means (see capture of the US education system, already under communist siege by 1920). Even astute conservative commentators draw a blank on the entire battle that the Daily Worker & ilk very successfully prosecuted against us on our own home front. Manchurian-candidate-style, they go to veritable Marxist slogans for intellectual ammunition, as we see in the selection of best-brightest comments above.

Here’s an idea: How about reconsidering the origins of “McCarthyism” and understanding them for what they are — the very real seeds of our Marxian destruction and collective shambles.

To set the scene, imagine that post-WWII-time when Americans were still trying to assess the depths and toxicity of the original Swamp, which started to come into public view after nearly two decades of unchecked communist infiltration during most of the 1930s and 1940s. Presently, along came 41-year-old Senator McCarthy with that explosive list of federal security cases, which he presented on the floor of the US Senate in February of 1950.

President Trump’s political adversaries and globalists, including the media pundits, are frantically yelping about how the President’s proposed tariffs against Chinese imports would spark a “Trade war.”

In point of fact, concerns about a trade war with China are late — very late — and have nothing to do with Trump’s proposed tariffs.

In reality China has, for decades, engaged in a one-sided “trade war” with the United States that doesn’t involve tariffs but wide-spread and wide-scale theft of intellectual property.

One-sided relationships are not relationships!

Foolishly, a succession of previous administrations have facilitated this outrageous situation.

My previous FrontPage Magazine article, Educating America’s Adversaries focused on the lunacy of the United States hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to study STEM (Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines and also providing them with optional practical training at U.S. corporations unwittingly providing them with the opportunity to engage in industrial espionage.

My article today is predicated on an April 4, 2018 Justice Department press release, Chinese Scientist Sentenced to Prison in Theft of Engineered Rice, that reported on the sentencing of a Chinese scientist, Weiqiang Zhang, for his crimes that, although not related to military concerns, are related to intellectual property theft (trade secrets), specifically genetically engineered rice seeds with potentially profound implications.

Hours after we published an editorial Friday about the Justice Department’s refusal to turn over a document subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee, Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) received an official response from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd.

It was cleverly spun. Mr. Boyd played up the access to the secondary information Mr. Nunes had demanded—access to the application and renewals for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants on one-time Trump associate Carter Page. Mr. Boyd describes his department’s response as “extraordinary accommodation.”

Upon inspection, however, the focus on the FISA warrants looks more like an effort to distract attention from Mr. Boyd’s refusal even to mention Mr. Nunes’s main request of FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. That request was for the “electronic communication,” or memo, that officially launched the counterintelligence investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

On Friday Trey Gowdy, an Intel Committee member who has seen a redacted form of the memo, said Justice has redacted the “good stuff.” He means information that would tell whether the counterintelligence investigation was credible, and how and whether the FBI vetted the information. “All of that,” Mr. Gowdy said, “is in a paragraph I can’t read.”

In a series of tweets, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel explained why the media freakout over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s travel expenses is a bunch of hooey.

In the past week, multiple media outlets have published pieces freaking out over Pruitt’s travel expenses after it was discovered the EPA administrator flew first class on the taxpayer’s dime as a security precaution after he received multiple death threats. In a column for The Washington Post, Hillary Clinton’s longtime lackey John Podesta wrote that “Scott Pruitt Needs To Go.”

“Pruitt was forced to release documents indicating that he spent more than $105,000 on first-class flights in his first year at the EPA alone,” Podesta writes. “The Post recently reported that one week’s worth of travel in June 2017 by Pruitt and his staff cost about $120,000, which the EPA inspector general is investigating.”

As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway explained in a column yesterday, the media-invented scandal surrounding Pruitt’s travel expenses is largely manufactured garbage. You can read that in full here.

In a series of tweets, Strassel also explained that the travel costs of Pruitt and his staff are not unprecedented and that previous EPA heads actually spent more.

She also reiterated the statement from EPA ethics official Kevin Minoli dated March 30, which said Pruitt didn’t violate any laws or ethics rules when he stayed at a condo owned by environmental lobbyists.

According to the Washington Post, Robert Mueller says President Trump is not “a criminal target at this point.” The Post’s anonymous sources claim that the special counsel has conveyed that assurance to the president’s private attorneys.

That is good news for Trump. After all, between Mueller’s Gang of 17 alpha-prosecutors and the sundry scores of Justice Department lawyers and federal agents who were at this long before Mueller was appointed, the Russia investigation has been going on for nearly two years. By now, you would think that the focus of that effort would have become the formal “target” if there were any there there.

The president shouldn’t get too giddy, though. It’s nice not to be designated a target, but then there are those three little words, at this point.

Mueller is still investigating.

Let us revisit the “What’s My Client’s Status?” lesson in Investigations 101, the course we took during the Clinton-emails caper — in which no one’s status mattered much since, unlike in Mueller’s probe, no one was ever going to be charged.

In every investigation, a prosecutor drops relevant people in one of three buckets: target, subject, and witness. The two extremes are the easy ones to grasp. A “target” is virtually certain to be charged with a crime. A “witness” has relevant knowledge but is not suspected of any wrongdoing — think of the victim in a robbery. A defense lawyer always hopes the prosecutor will think of his client as a mere witness. While “target” is clearly the worst-case scenario, at least your choices are clear: Either cut a plea deal or fight the case at trial — no target is going to talk his way out of being charged.

“Subject” is the fuzzy category. A “subject” is someone whose behavior is being evaluated by the prosecutor and the grand jury. Usually, there is not enough evidence to charge . . . yet. As long as the investigation continues, a subject can become a target, and then a defendant, at any moment.

It’s said that everyone has a doppelganger. Well, in a weird twist to the saga of the high school shooting survivor-turned-gun control activist, David Hogg, it might just be true.

David Hogg of North Carolina has the same name as the David Hogg of Parkland, Florida; resembles the other teen; and is nearly the same age – he’s actually slightly younger, and he’s already studying engineering at the University of North Carolina.

He’s different from the Parkland David Hogg in two noticeable ways, though: he’s mature, and he favors gun rights.

He’s written a brilliant readable essay in the Wall Street Journal (paywall, unfortunately) on his own experience of being mistaken for the Parkland David Hogg. He wrote of the bad harassment and abuse a lot of trolls have thrown his way (which makes one wonder with a certain sympathy what the other David Hogg must be dealing with,) and how, actually, he’s in favor of gun rights, as well as gun education in schools. He tweets at @David_Hogg16

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has a good summary of the piece here, noting:

Although he empathizes with the Parkland students and appreciates their use of their First Amendment right, he said gun rights are important, too. This Hogg’s solution is not gun control, but instead mandatory gun education and armed security officers in schools.

Hogg’s op-ed in the Journal is a real gem. He states his views and comes off as kind and empathetic to all sides in the debate, injecting civility into a debate that has long lacked it on multiple sides. Take a look at this passage to his entirely worth reading op-ed:

Bit by bit, congressional investigators have wrested important truths from a recalcitrant Federal Bureau of Investigation about its suspect 2016 election dealings. But there’s one secret the G-men jealously guard: how central that Steele dossier was from the start.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes on Wednesday sent another letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray to demand yet again that they comply with an August 2017 subpoena and hand over, among other things, the electronic communication—“EC” in investigative jargon—that officially kicked off the counterintelligence investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion.

That EC has taken on a central importance thanks to the FBI’s own leaks. The bureau exploded it on the country at the end of last year after the news broke that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National had paid for the infamous dossier. The public still doesn’t know how much the FBI used it. Critics started asking: Was it part of the application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page ? Could it even have launched the investigation?

Thus the FBI’s scramble to minimize the dossier. And sure enough, the New York Times in December ran what became the “origin” story, titled “How the Russia Inquiry Began.” The story asserted definitively that the cause of the investigation “was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign.” It was rather information from an Australian diplomat claiming to have heard a drunk Trump junior aide, George Papadopoulos, talking about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Yet despite that claim being out there, the FBI and Justice Department have refused to verify it. The Nunes letter says the FBI has provided only a “heavily redacted” version of the EC and indicated on March 23 that it would “refuse to further unredact” the document.

The only plausible reason the FBI might have for denying House Intelligence access to an unredacted EC is that it contains intelligence from foreign sources. Intelligence-sharing agreements between allies sometimes include restrictions on dissemination. But it was precisely that intelligence that was already leaked to the press. We know the Papadopoulos story came via Australia, and we know what was said.

The media only recently reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was fed up with the FBI’s spurning Congress and ordered it to be more cooperative. Yet here it is again inviting a contempt citation, and that says something about how badly the FBI wants this EC kept out of sight. CONTINUE AT SITE