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ERIC HOLDER REDUX?????RSK

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions said today that “fairness and justice” should be applied to personnel matters when enforcing “the highest standards of behavior” at the FBI.

Special counsel Robert Mueller removed FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page from his team in July after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered numerous text messages exchanged between the pair, who were engaged in an extramarital affair, that made disparaging remarks about President Trump, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and former Democratic Party presidential contenders Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

“The decision to remove Mr. Strzok off that case was made by Director Mueller, based upon the circumstances known to him,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told the House Judiciary Committee this week. “…I’ve discussed this general issue with Director Mueller on several occasion. He understands the importance of ensuring that there’s no bias reflected in the conduct of the investigation.”

Outside the White House today, Trump said that “it’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI, but we’re going to rebuild the FBI and it’ll be bigger and better than ever.”

At a Justice Department press conference today, Sessions said his team “will not be reluctant to admit error” and “will never fail to monitor our people and we’re going to insist on the highest standards of behavior.”CONTINUE AT SITE

House and Senate conferees signed their tax agreement on Friday, and the bill that seems headed for passage next week is—Minor Miracle Dept.—better than what either body first passed. The bill’s corporate reform is far superior to its muddled rewrite of the individual code, but on balance this is the most pro-growth tax policy in decades.

The bill’s biggest achievement is reforming at long last the self-destructive U.S. corporate tax code. The top U.S. rate of 35%—highest in the developed world—will fall to 21% on Jan. 1. Cash currently held overseas will be taxed at a 15.5% one-time “deemed” repatriation rate, and America will move to a territorial system that allows money to be taxed where it is earned. The bill includes rules to prevent companies from concealing taxable income, especially on intangible assets such as intellectual property. And it sweeps away billions of dollars worth of industry-specific loopholes that misallocate capital.

All of this will go a long way to restoring American competitiveness that has eroded over several administrations. Even Barack Obama acknowledged this problem, though he declined to do anything lest some large business end up with a tax cut.

The same economists who presided over the weakest recovery since World War II now say none of this is needed with the economy finally growing at 3%. But the faster growth never materialized when they were in power, and this expansion has been notable for slow business investment and weak productivity growth.

This GOP tax reform—including five years of 100% immediate business expensing—is aimed directly at that weakness to keep the expansion going even as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. This isn’t a demand-side “sugar high.” These business tax changes are supply-side reforms that will increase the economy’s productive capacity.

Reducing the cost of capital should raise business investment and invite a capital inflow to the U.S. More investment means more hiring and more productive workers, which is what increases wages. Especially with a tight labor market, the share of income that goes to workers should increase. After eight years of trying to redistribute income through higher taxes and more subsidies, why not try a return to growth economics?

Sixty-three percent of polled voters believe that the FBI has been resisting providing information to Congress on the Clinton and Trump investigations. This is a remarkable finding for an agency whose new head said a few days ago that the agency was in fine shape. No, it isn’t.

Fifty-four percent say special counsel Robert Mueller has conflicts of interest that prevent him from doing an unbiased job, also according to this month’s Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll. So, given this finding, the silence from the special counsel on the subject has become downright deafening.

These are significant findings about an operation that was supposed to bring more objectivity and less partisanship to the Trump-Russia investigation. Clearly these numbers indicate that there is a crisis in public confidence in both the FBI and Mueller. What makes these findings important is that, with Trump’s approval rating at 41 percent, these results include large numbers of voters who don’t like Trump yet who now agree that these investigations have veered off course.

After this poll was conducted, we learned that rogue agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page, both high-ranking members of the Mueller task force, discussed during the campaign how, in case Trump won, that they were developing, along with deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, what Strzok called an “insurance policy.” I can’t even imagine how badly these new facts will poll next month.

Our polling in November showed that 61 percent say the funding of the salacious GPS Fusion document should be investigated. Fifty-eight percent say that if Hillary Clinton and the Democrats funded the work, it could not be used by law enforcement. While this seems obvious to the public, Congress has not been able to get the answer to the question of just how this dossier was used and whether the FBI then paid some of the cost to legitimize it. Even greater numbers — 65 percent — said there needs to be an investigation of the Uranium One deal that netted the Clinton Foundation $140 million in foreign-based contributions that went undisclosed.

First there was Harvey Weinstein, whose appalling behavior toward women was so amply documented by the New York Times and the New Yorker. The dominoes began to fall. And soon they reached into my own industry.

It wasn’t just Bill O’Reilly. Now the cascading accusations were reaching deep into the heart of the mainstream media. Charlie Rose … Matt Lauer … Mark Halperin … even liberal outlets like NPR and the New Republic were not spared. For that matter, not even the New Yorker and the New York Times were spared: At the Times, star political reporter Glenn Thrush is under investigation, and the New Yorker has just fired its star political reporter, Ryan Lizza, over “improper sexual conduct.”

Some of these cases were clearly and inexcusably abusive – the actions egregious and the corroborating accounts damning.

Others, however, were less clear. Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic seems to have been accused mostly of making young women who were not his subordinates uncomfortable through risqué comments and the occasional clumsy pass. Thrush apparently is accused of hitting on younger women who work in his industry, and occasionally at his outlet, though he had no managerial power over them. And Lizza is accused of … what? We don’t know.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case known as Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd., and Jack C. Phillips v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Charlie Craig, and David Mullins. Phillips is the Lakewood, Colorado, baker who, citing religious reasons, refused in 2012 to make a wedding cake for Craig and Mullins, a same-sex couple.

So far, Craig and Mullins have been winning. When they took their case to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it ruled that when a baker refuses to sell a wedding cake to a couple because they’re gay, it amounts to an illegal refusal of service by a public accommodation on the basis of sexual orientation. Phillips, an evangelical Christian, took the case to the Colorado Court of Appeals, which in 2015 unanimously affirmed the commission’s ruling. This June, after the Colorado Supreme Court chose not to review the case, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear it, apparently because of one detail of Phillip’s defense: he said that his refusal was not an act of discrimination – he would’ve been glad to bake, say, a birthday cake for the couple – but he didn’t want to bake a wedding cake for them, because that would have felt to him like an implicit endorsement of something he found morally objectionable.

The most commonly heard argument for Phillips is that the First Amendment, by guaranteeing his freedom of religion, also guarantees his right to turn down any job that would involve him in an activity that is at odds with his religious beliefs. This argument doesn’t work for me, because my first reaction to it is to picture a devout Muslim doctor presented with the case of a gay or Jew or Muslim apostate who’s on the verge of death and whose life he, the doctor, is in a position to save. Let’s say the doctor, aware that Islam commands him to kill such people, not save them, allows the patient to die. Does he have First Amendment religious protections on his side?

Twenty-one years ago I edited an influential book of essays entitled Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy, which sought to stake out alternatives to the lockstep far-left positions on various subjects – marriage, religion, family, etc. – that dominated the gay-rights movement at the time. Many of the conservatives, moderates, libertarians, and classical liberals who contributed to Beyond Queer were early proponents of same-sex marriage at a time when the queer left regarded the very idea as a vile capitulation to straight, conservative values. Only later, when they realized that most gays wanted the right to marry, did the gay left change its tune. Now it’s the same gay left, which once despised gay marriage, that is out gunning for those, like Jack Phillips, who have moral misgivings about it.

Several of my old BQ confrères have weighed in on the cake case. They’re split. BQ contributor Dale Carpenter, who teaches law at SMU, has joined with Eugene Volokh (a heterosexual UCLA prof whom I know only by reputation) in writing a brief supporting Craig and Mullins. While acknowledging that a “freelance writer cannot be punished for refusing to write press releases for the Church of Scientology” and “a photographer…should not be punished for choosing not to create photographs celebrating a same-sex wedding,” Carpenter and Volokh distinguish between these actions and cake-making. Writing a press release, they contend, is a speech act; making a cake is not. “A chef, however brilliant, cannot claim a Free Speech clause right not to serve certain people at his restaurant, even if his dishes look stunning,” they write. “The same is true for bakers.”

The Department of Justice and the FBI are developing a credibility problem. The last two weeks have brought a blizzard of revelations about the anti-Trump political predilections of top FBI officials and prosecutors in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, perhaps none more eye-popping than a just-revealed text from Peter Strzok, a top FBI intelligence agent.

In August 2016, Strzok, who played a lead-investigator role in the Hillary Clinton–emails investigation, flatly stated that the FBI could not “take that risk,” referring to the possibility that Donald Trump might be elected president. He made the statement in a message to Lisa Page, a bureau lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Strzok referred to an alternative FBI “path” regarding Trump’s “unlikely” election that Page had proposed during a meeting they’d attended in “Andy’s office” — meaning deputy director Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s number-two official, second only to then-director James Comey.

While more context is necessary to understand the meaning of the text and what transpired in the meeting in McCabe’s office, the message raises the possibility that top bureau officials were infecting investigations with their personal political views. This would be a concern in any circumstance, but especially in this one. The FBI’s Clinton-email and Trump-Russia investigations have been extremely fraught politically — with the latter morphing into Mueller’s Russia probe, which conceivably could result in an impeachment referral.

Around the time of Strzok’s message, the FBI and the Obama Justice Department had come into possession of the anti-Trump “dossier” compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier was opposition research commissioned by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, through their lawyers. They had retained a research company, Fusion GPS, which hired Steele, who evidently paid Russian sources for what appears to be dodgy information.

Conventional wisdom is that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is asleep at the wheel – from recusing himself unnecessarily from the Trump-Russia collusion investigation to doing nothing about the politicization and weaponization of the Department of Justice. He also gave free rein to his deputy A.G., Rod Rosenstein, who is in turn allowing Special Counsel Robert Mueller unlimited time, money, and jurisdiction to investigate President Trump’s entire life.

Last summer, Trump expressed disappointment in Sessions, calling him “beleaguered,” wondering why Sessions wasn’t looking into Hillary Clinton’s emails and true election chicanery. Rudy Giuliani was floated as a possible replacement. Was Trump truly upset, or was this a calculated head fake?

In a recent blog posting, American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson, referencing Sundance from Conservative Treehouse, made the case that the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General is where the real action is taking place. Here was an explanation why Rosenstein gave evasive answers in recent congressional testimony and a suggestion that the OIG is laying out a case, slowly and methodically, with selective information release, before bringing the hammer down on the leakers and corruptocrats in the FBI and DOJ.

I want to take this a step farther, perhaps answering the question of where Jeff Sessions is and whether he is asleep, or just playing possum. Perhaps I can explain why he is acting not as a Trumpian pit bull, but instead like Mister Rogers ready for his afternoon nap.

Jeff Sessions is a political appointee, appointed by President Trump. The president, as we all know, is despised by Democrats, many establishment Republicans, and the media. Any actions Trump or Sessions take will be viewed through the lens of obstruction of justice. Firing Mueller or Rosenstein or shutting down the investigation would allow eager Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans to tut-tut over threats to the Constitution and to initiate impeachment proceedings.

Of the many astonishing revelations now emerging from the Russia investigation, not enough has been made of the fact that — that Zelig of the FBI who mysteriously appeared at every controversial moment — was second in command for counterintelligence.

That’s right, counterintelligence — that activity “designed to prevent or thwart spying, intelligence gathering, and sabotage by an enemy or other foreign entity.”

And yet that same Mr. Strzok was conducting a clandestine extra-marital affair with an FBI colleague over thousands of text messages that could be and likely were (more of that in a moment) intercepted by those same foreign intelligence agencies — or were, at the very least, recklessly exposed to them.

Now you don’t have to be James Jesus Angleton or even have read a novel by John le Carré to know one of the most important vulnerabilities in the intel world is just such dangerous liaisons, frequently used for blackmail of all sorts.

Yet, our second in command in counterintelligence conducted his in full digital view of anyone and did so replete with idiotically extreme comments about the president of the United States that would make our Peter a prime candidate for blackmail.

How exactly do you spell D-O-O-F-U-S?

Or, come to think of it, didn’t someone else do something just that dumb? Oh, yes, the very Mrs. Clinton who moved the entire email correspondence of the secretary of State onto a homebrew server stashed in a bathroom.

No wonder Strzok went easy on her and on her buddies Cheryl and Huma. It wasn’t just the extreme bias they all shared, it was the extreme cyber-stupidity they also shared. How could he call them “grossly negligent” when he was so “grossly negligent” himself? (He was also “grossly negligent” with his wife, but that’s another matter. Someone should get a good interview with her. She might have an interesting story to tell at this point.)

Which leads me back to the seemingly banal adverb likely or, more precisely, “reasonably likely.”

Newly released documents obtained by Fox News reveal that then-FBI Director James Comey’s draft statement on the Hillary Clinton email probe was edited numerous times before his public announcement, in ways that seemed to water down the bureau’s findings considerably. CONTINUE AT SITE

On Thursday, President Donald Trump celebrated his administration’s dedication to cutting government regulations, with a ceremony where he physically cut a huge strand of red tape. Corny, but impressive nonetheless.

“This excessive regulation does not just threaten our economy, it threatens our entire Constitution. And it does nothing, other than delay and cost much more,” President Trump declared. On the campaign trail, Trump had promised that for every new regulation, he would cut two old ones. On Thursday, he announced his administration had overshot that goal — annihilating 22 regulations for every new one.

In a statement that would make every small-government conservative glow with pride, the president declared, “Congress has abandoned much of its responsibility to legislate, and has instead given unelected regulators extraordinary power to control the lives of others.”

Conservatives have long complained of the way Congress really works. Rather than passing regulations directly so that individual congressmen are tied to every piece of government red tape, Congress passes a bill like the Clean Air Act. The act sets out a goal — Americans should have clean air — and sets up an agency to make rules to achieve that goal.

This practice separates the people’s representatives from the results of their lawmaking. If constituents complain, lawmakers can blame the agency, or promise to add yet another law to fix the problem in question. “So many of these enormous regulatory burdens were imposed on our citizens with no vote, no debate, and no accountability,” the president explained. CONTINUE AT SITE

I’m not in the habit of giving stock tips or making market calls. I’ve never claimed to be an investment strategist. But after spending years reporting on business and finance, I was convinced on the night of Nov. 8, 2016, that the conventional market wisdom was way off target.

As the night wore on and equity traders began to grasp that Donald Trump would become president, stock markets around the world started selling off. In the U.S., trading in S&P 500 futures would eventually be halted after a 5% decline. After midnight, Paul Krugman of the New York Times opined: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

I didn’t see it that way. For years I’d been hearing anguished people at companies large and small bemoan the growing federal burden of taxes and regulations. Now the U.S. would have a president who intended to reduce this hardship and prioritize economic growth.

When I sat down around 10:30 on election night for a Fox News panel discussion, Dow futures were down about 700 points. Markets like certainty; it was understandable that some investors were selling. Mr. Trump seemed to present more uncertainty than Hillary Clinton, who was essentially promising a continuation of the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s talk about ripping up the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, created big unknowns and potentially significant risks.

The election night selloff turned out to be a huge buying opportunity. Companies had been sitting on cash—not investing or hiring. ObamaCare compliance was a nightmare for many business owners. It made them wonder what other big idea from Washington would haunt them in the future. Mrs. Clinton was likely to increase business costs further, while Mr. Trump had vowed to reduce them. Even in the middle of the election-night market panic, the implications for corporate revenue and earnings growth seemed obvious.

The next morning, with the Trump victory confirmed, I told my colleague Martha MacCallum that I would be “buying the stock market with both hands.” Investors began doing the same. U.S. markets have added $6 trillion in value since the election, with investors around the world wanting in on America’s new growth story. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is now forecasting the third straight quarter of U.S. gross domestic product growth around 3%.

It’s not just an American growth story. For the first time in a long time the world is experiencing synchronized growth, which is why Goldman Sachs and Barclays among others have recently predicted 4% global growth in 2018. The entire world benefits when its largest economy is healthy, and the vibrancy overseas is reinforcing the U.S. resurgence.

As the end of the Trump administration’s first year approaches, it’s a good time to review the progress of the businessman elected on a promise to restore American prosperity.

Year One has been nothing short of excellent from an economic standpoint. Corporate earnings have risen and corporate behavior has changed, measured in greater capital investment. Businesspeople tell me that a new approach to regulation is a big factor. During President Obama’s final year in office the Federal Register, which contains new and proposed rules and regulations, ran to 95,894 pages, according to a Competitive Enterprise Institute report. This was the highest level in its history and 19% higher than the previous year’s 80,260 pages. The American Action Forum estimates the last administration burdened the economy with 549 million hours of compliance, averaging nearly five hours of paperwork for every full-time employee. CONTINUE AT SITE