RUTHFULLY YOURS

There were many interesting moments in Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress – starting with the gazillionaire child-man’s decision to follow Larry Kudlow’s advice and eschew his usual garb for a suit and tie. “I’m tired of that t-shirt, hoodie stuff,” remarked Larry. “The guy’s running one of the largest corporations of the world, for heaven’s sake.” This was reported by the leftie lads at ThinkProgress under the headline “Trump official rants about Zuckerberg’s clothes”.

I’m with Larry on this one. One of the reasons my old boss Conrad Black was resented by large sections of the proletariat (and, eventually, a decisive sliver of his Chicago jury) was that he looked like the masses’ idea of a rich man, bespoke and luxuriously upholstered. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Conrad out in public in a top hat, but he was wearing one metaphorically. Like 19th century robber-baron cartoons and the Monopoly man, he hewed to time-honored preconceptions of the plutocrat. Zuckerberg does not. He is, as Larry noted, a “chief executive” of a “corporation”, but he talks of it as if he’s running a kindly charity – his customers are “the community”, and all he does is “connect” them, a word that means harvesting your personal information as Planned Parenthood harvests your body parts. Streamlining traditional business models by discreetly transforming the customer into the product has proved infinitely more lucrative than making widgets. But it is necessary to be somewhat coy about this, and, if you think at this stage that the hoodie is not a consciously selected prop in this strategy, I’ve a bridge-building community-outreach social-media data-mining operation in Brooklyn to connect you with.

My favorite exchange yesterday came when Senator Dan Sullivan took the microphone. He’s a Republican from Alaska, but he could as easily have been a Democrat of a certain disposition. He observed that Mr Zuckerberg had created his spectacularly lucrative global behemoth in his college dorm room at the age of nineteen. And then he said: “Facebook is an ‘Only in America’ story, right?”

The witness looked befuddled – as I do in, say, Marseille, when a bit of local vernacular runs up against the limits of my conversational French.

So Senator Sullivan attempted to clarify what he meant. “You couldn’t do this in China, right?”

Zuckerberg considered the matter, sincerely. “Well, Senator,” he said, “there are some very strong Chinese Internet companies.”

“Come on, I’m trying to help you,” growled the plain-spoken Sullivan, throwing in the towel. “Gimme a break, you’re in front of a bunch of senators: the answer is yes.” The audience laughed. But the child-man seemed genuinely nonplussed.

It has been a yeasty couple of weeks for President Trump. Last Monday, he, like the rest of us, learned that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had his home, office, hotel, and safe deposit box hoovered by gumshoes at the direction of prosecutors from the Southern District of New York. They carried away the stuff by the boatload—documents, computers, cell phones, tablets: the lot. If you discerned the dogged hand of Special Counsel Robert Mueller in this breathtaking episode, you would not be wrong. Although carried out by feds in N.Y., who apparently had been investigating Cohen “for months,” it was done at the behest of the special counsel.

Exactly what that portends for President Trump is unclear. Andrew McCarthy spoke for many when he outlined the reasons it might place the president in serious legal jeopardy.

Maybe so. As of this writing, the reasons for the raid have included looking into Mr. Cohen’s alleged non-disclosure agreements with Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, and certain other members of the fair sex who claim to have had intimate relations with the president, or people close to the president, at some point in the past. The feds are also said to be interested in the infamous “Access Hollywood” video in which Donald Trump, in 2005, was taped saying crude things about how women were pushovers for celebrities. Cohen’s interest in a taxi business has also been bruited about. And just a few hours ago, Robert Mueller reported that he now has evidence that Cohen was in Prague in 2016 just as the opposition dossier compiled by Christopher Steele and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee said he was. Cohen vigorously denies the claim. “I have never been to Prague in my life,” he tweeted.

Well, either he has or he hasn’t. We’ll see.

While we wait for answer, ask yourself this: what does all this have to do with the central reason a special counsel was appointed in the first place, namely, “to investigate any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump”? Well might you ask.

Meanwhile, there is this breaking development. Just a short while ago, federal agents, apparently with guns drawn, raided St. Andrew’s Episcopal in Maryland, where the president’s youngest child, Barron, who just turned 12, goes to school. Early reports are confusing, but this is sure to be a major story. One unnamed source close to the special counsel’s office has said that the feds are investigating suspicious interest in Russia among several teachers at St. Andrew’s, some of whom travelled to Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign, two of whom were photographed in sight of the Kremlin. There are also reports that one of the teachers placed near the Kremlin surreptitiously passed as yet undisclosed documents to Barron in a secluded hallway between classes. Barron himself was photographed speaking alone with a Russian student at school. Anonymous sources have identified the student as the youngest son of Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, whom Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first national security advisor, also spoke to. The special counsel is also said to be looking into irregular payments made to Barron Trump’s lemonade stand business, which The Washington Post—citing a source close to John Brennan, former head of the CIA under President Obama—claims was unregistered. Some pundits have expressed skepticism about the heavy-handed behavior of the FBI in this case, but Rachel Maddow expressed the consensus opinion in Washington when she said that the whole future of our democratic society is at stake. “Robert Mueller is a national hero, a real straight arrow,” she said. “It is imperative that we let him follow the evidence wherever it may lead.” Steven Hatfill, the government virologist whom Mueller wrongly fingered for the 2001 anthrax attacks, was unavailable for comment, probably because he is off somewhere enjoying the $5.8 million settlement he won from the government and various media outlets who hounded the poor man on the authority of Robert Mueller. CONTINUE AT SITE

They were among the most powerful men of the last decade. They commanded armies of armed agents, had the ability to bug and wiretap almost anyone, and had virtually unlimited budgets. They were the leadership of the FBI, the CIA and the director of national intelligence under President Obama. Each day, it becomes clearer that they are the real abusers of power in this drama.

The book by former FBI Director James Comey and the daily hyperbolic John Brennan sound bites are perhaps the final reveal of just how much hubris and vitriol they had. Comey’s book, according to reports, contains nothing new of legal consequence to Trump (while suggesting that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch has something to worry about), but it unmasks the hatred that Comey had for Donald Trump from the beginning. It impeaches Comey’s fitness to have ever held high, nonpartisan office.

Whether you are a Democrat who can’t stand Trump, a Hillary Clinton supporter who feels robbed by Comey, or a Trump supporter, any use of wiretapping and vast prosecutorial machinery against our political campaigns and sitting presidents always has to be viewed skeptically and should meet the highest standards of conduct and impartiality. The post-election actions of these former officials makes suspect their actions as officials.

It was, after all, Comey who went to the president during the transition seeking a one-on-one meeting to tell him about the inflammatory dossier, but who critically omitted telling the president that the dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. These facts, he knew, if revealed at that moment in January, would have ended further inquiry. This was no effort to inform the president and douse the fires of unverified and salacious information, but one to inflame the president and spread the stories everywhere.

President Trump recently tweeted that firing former FBI director James Comey was something he was glad he did.

James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH. He is a weak and…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2018

….untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case, and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst “botch jobs” of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2018

There’s some merit to that thought, because it turns out Comey wasn’t just the one at the heart of appointing his buddy, Robert Mueller to his current ‘get-Trump’ role as special counsel for the very-bogus Russia collusion investigation. He as also the guy who appointed Scooter Libby’s dishonest prosecutor, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, to a similar post.

Here’s what the Wall Street Journal editorial page (subscription) noted in its editorial titled ‘Justice for Scooter Libby:’

As it happens, Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed by his good friend, James Comey, who was then Deputy Attorney General. This is the Jim Comey who told Congress last year that his goal in leaking information to the press about his conversations with Donald Trump after he was fired was to trigger a special counsel investigation that is now led by Mr. Mueller. This special counsel’s work isn’t done, but the Fitzgerald episode is worth keeping in mind as it unfolds.

Which makes one wonder if the reason President Trump pardoned Libby, who committed no crime and who got the book thrown at him, was to root out all markers of Comey’s destructive presence, which included his history of appointing dishonest prosecutors, first Fitzgerald, and now Mueller, who has a history of problematic prosecutions-at-any-cost of his own. Everyone knew Libby was innocent, but President Bush put pleasing the left first in his failing to pardon him. Trump killed two birds with one stone by pardoning Libby, a guy he said he doesn’t even know, rebuking the pious, pompous Comey, as well as the status-seeking Bush.

President Trump now has real legal peril. The potential jeopardy stems from the investigation that came to light this week when the FBI conducted raids on the office and residences of his lawyer and self-professed “fixer,” Michael Cohen.

I’ve never thought “collusion with Russia” posed jeopardy. If there had been anything criminal to that storyline, the politicized anti-Trump factions in the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies would have leaked it. And, notwithstanding Trump’s nauseating nods to Putin, the administration has taken enough aggressive steps against Russia that it is past time for the Kremlin to broadcast the big kompromat file if it exists.

I’ve also never thought Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s other known angle, obstruction, posed a great risk. There is a line between foolishness and crime. For important policy reasons, a president should not weigh in with the FBI director on the merits of investigating a friend and political ally; and it would be better if he did not make personnel moves that could be perceived as efforts to influence witnesses or affect the course of an investigation. But as long as a president’s actions — e.g., firing the FBI director, discussing the possibility of pardons — are on their face legal and within his legitimate constitutional authority, I do not believe they can validly predicate an obstruction prosecution. (In theory, they could be grist for impeachment, which involves a political inquiry into abuse of power, not a legal proceeding to establish the essential elements of a statutory crime.)

The matter now under investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), however, is a very live criminal investigation. Anyone potentially connected to it should be worried.

Much of the commentary about the SDNY investigation puts the cart before the horse. When Cohen’s law office, hotel residence, and home were searched pursuant to court-approved warrants this week, there were howls about a purportedly unconscionable violation of the attorney–client privilege. As I pointed out in the aftermath, however, whether this was an egregious constitutional affront or textbook investigative rigor depends on (a) exactly what was under investigation and (b) whether the materials sought from Cohen were, in fact, privileged attorney–client communications.

Apparently Jim Comey’s FBI had in its leadership an official even more self-serving than the director. His name is Andrew McCabe, and a report released Friday from the Justice Department’s inspector general confirms that Mr. McCabe was fired for leaking to a Wall Street Journal reporter to “advance his personal reputation at the expense of Department leadership”—and then lying about it.

The IG report contradicts the accounts put forward by Mr. McCabe and his wife, Jill, at the time he was sacked on March 16. In separate op-eds for the Washington Post, Andrew McCabe and Jill McCabe each played the Trump victim card. Mr. McCabe said that “divisive politics and partisan attacks” played a role in his firing. Dr. McCabe blamed “the president’s wrath.”

The IG report makes clear that Mr. McCabe was fired for good reason: because he leaked information to the press, and then he denied it to investigators. The IG concludes he was guilty of “lack of candor” multiple times, sometimes with a lawyer present, and at least three times under oath. And though he would later change his story, he did so only when he knew the IG was closing in on the truth.

The IG says Mr. McCabe even lied to and about Mr. Comey, who was then FBI director. He lied to him when he denied knowing who had leaked the information about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation the director had refused to confirm even to Congress. And Mr. McCabe lied when he told investigators he had told Mr. Comey what he had done.

For a man who claims to be all about the bureau, perhaps the IG’s most damning line is the one noting that “no other senior FBI official corroborated McCabe’s testimony that, among FBI executive leadership, ‘people knew that generally’ he had authorized the disclosure.”

On April 7, 2015, these columns said the next Republican President should pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby “in his first week in office.” President Trump waited a little longer, but in pardoning the former chief of staff to Dick Cheney on Friday Mr. Trump rectified a legal injustice and corrected one of George W. Bush’s worst decisions.

Above all, Mr. Trump pardoned an innocent man. In an op-ed nearby, David Rivkin and Lee Casey recount the story of Mr. Libby’s unjust prosecution amid the political uproar over the leak of the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame. Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald never did prosecute the leaker, who was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. But in his zealous pursuit of Mr. Cheney, Mr. Fitzgerald railroaded Mr. Libby for lying to the FBI based in large part on the testimony of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Ms. Miller says she testified truthfully at the time, but she later concluded based on new information that she had been led into false testimony by Mr. Fitzgerald. As the White House press secretary said Friday in a pardon statement: “In 2015, one of the key witnesses against Mr. Libby recanted her testimony, stating publicly that she believes the prosecutor withheld relevant information from her during interviews that would have altered significantly what she said.”

Mr. Fitzgerald had called her testimony “critical” to the case in his summation for the jury, and Ms. Miller says that the prosecutor twice said that he would drop all charges against Mr. Libby if he offered evidence against Mr. Cheney. Mr. Libby had no evidence to trade, and Mr. Fitzgerald then set out to ruin Mr. Libby for supposedly lying about a non-crime.

Andrew McCabe, onetime acting FBI director, leaked a self-serving story to the press and later lied about it to his boss and federal investigators, prompting a stunning fall from grace that ended in his firing last month, says a bombshell report released Friday by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz, appointed by President Barack Obama, had been reviewing FBI and DOJ actions leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

The report, handed over to Congress on Friday and obtained by Fox News, looked at a leak to The Wall Street Journal about an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation.

The report says that McCabe authorized the leak and then misled investigators about it, leaking in a way that did not fall under a “public interest” exception.

“[W]e concluded that McCabe’s decision to confirm the existence of the CF investigation through an anonymously sourced quote, recounting the content of a phone call with a senior department official in a manner designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of department leadership, was clearly not within the public interest exception,” the report says.

McCabe was fired from his role as FBI deputy director last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions just days before he would have been eligible for a lifetime pension after it was determined that he misled investigators reviewing the bureau’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s email server.

Fire Mueller. Pass a law so Trump can’t fire Mueller. Meanwhile, let’s impeach Rosenstein and Wray.

There’s a lot of dingbattery going around.

Elementary Constitutional Principles
In our system, we have a unitary executive. All executive power is vested in a single official, the president of the United States. That means subordinate executive officers do not have their own power; they are delegated to exercise the president’s power. When they act, they are, in effect, the president acting.

Let’s say you are exercising your own power, and you do something that I disagree with but that is within the bounds of reason. I have no choice but to respect the exercise of your discretion. But if you are exercising my power, which means that I am accountable for your actions, it is my way or the highway. And I don’t need a reason to dismiss you; I get to do it simply because I’d rather have somebody else exercising my power. I don’t need cause, and I don’t need to explain myself.

That is how it is with the president. It’s his power. On this, the Constitution imposes only one notable limitation: The chief executive is not permitted to hire top executive officers at will; they must be confirmed by the Senate. Once they are confirmed, though, he may fire them at will.

Prosecutorial power is executive in nature. Federal prosecutors therefore exercise the president’s power. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Counsel Robert Mueller have no power of their own; they exercise President Trump’s prosecutorial power for as long as that arrangement suits President Trump. The president does not need cause to fire them. He does not need to explain any dismissal to Congress — “Gee, it’s Thursday and I feel like firing someone” is good enough.

If lawmakers believe the president is abusing his power by firing good public servants arbitrarily, they can impeach the president. Or they can try to bend the president into better behavior by cutting off funding, refusing to confirm nominees, or holding oversight hearings that embarrass the administration. Congress has these powerful political tools. But it does not have legal means to usurp the president’s constitutional power. Those powers do not come from Congress. They come from Article II. The Constitution cannot be amended by a mere statute or a regulation. Congress may not enact a law that purports to place conditions on the president’s power to dismiss subordinates who exercise his powers.

Among the many occasions of unintended comedy that the election of Donald Trump has vouchsafed a grateful world, perhaps none is more comic than that huddled mass of garrulous disappointment calling itself “The Resistance™.” Hillary Clinton had hardly got outside her last goblet of Chardonnay in the wee hours of November 9, 2016 before “the resistance party,” a “grassroots movement fighting against the hateful and authoritarian agenda of Donald Trump and the radical right,” was infesting the internet. Mrs. Clinton herself waited until May 2017 to announce her new political organisation aimed at funding “resistance” groups that are “standing up to President Donald Trump.” Media pundits across the country warned their audiences against “normalising” the President. “Trump is not a legitimate President,” screamed one typical member of the fourth estate, “Normalising fascism, the marriage of authoritarianism and nationalism with a business controlled government, is wrong.”

You can understand their anguish. Someone they did not favor was elected president of the United States in a free, open, democratic election. Can you believe it? Their candidate lost. Even worse, the opposing candidate was elected without their permission, over their strenuous objections, unremitting ridicule, and against their hermetically sealed certitude that such a thing was impossible, impossible! O tempora, O mores! The 2016 presidential election worked the way the Constitution said it was supposed to work, not the way Hollywood millionaires, Ivy-educated pundits, angry feminists, or partisan opponents wanted it to work. Clearly, end times are nigh.

No wonder the Resistance™ is so voluble and tenacious. Just a couple of days ago the comedy site Vox, reporting on the many rallies against President Trump that continue to provide free entertainment at college campuses and other redoubts of privilege across the country, noted that “While the rallies people are attending may not always be Trump-specific, they are certainly Trump-related.” Indeed they are.