RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-raid-on-james-okeefe-project-veritas-department-of-justice-merrick-garland-11637091882?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Attorney General Merrick Garland still refuses to retract the memo he sent last month instructing the Department of Justice to scrutinize parents protesting at local school board meetings. Now his department may have committed another civil-liberties abuse with its raid on Project Veritas leader James O’Keefe.

Project Veritas is a right-wing media organization known for going undercover inside progressive institutions and using its findings to embarrass them. Early morning a week ago Saturday, FBI agents raided Mr. O’Keefe’s New York apartment, handcuffed him in the hallway and seized two cell phones. He has not been charged with a crime.

The subject of the investigation is apparently a diary believed to belong to President Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden. Project Veritas says it was given the diary by two individuals last year and chose not to publish it because its authenticity couldn’t be verified, then handed it over to law enforcement. The diary was later published by an obscure website.

It’s settled law that it’s not a crime for journalists to publish information that was obtained unlawfully. If it was a crime, most of America’s largest news organizations would be criminal enterprises. Project Veritas says the people who gave the group the diary said it was not stolen. How the diary was obtained, and how it came to be published by a different website, is still murky.

Yet the search warrant says Justice is investigating “possession of stolen goods” and related offenses, suggesting Project Veritas or its employees may be targets. Imagine if the Trump Administration raided New York Times editors’ homes after the publication of the President’s tax records—or even for an investigation into documents they did not ultimately publish.

Nothing that invasive ever happened. But partly in response to the furor over the Trump Administration’s supposed threat to press freedom, Mr. Garland published guidelines in July narrowing Justice’s ability to seize information from reporters. The policy said Justice “will no longer use compulsory legal process” against journalists “acting within the scope of newsgathering activities.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/19/the-white-houses-hammer-and-sickle/

Thursday’s Senate confirmation hearing on Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s choice to be comptroller of the currency, confirmed that she is the wrong person for the job. Flags the color of those that once were raised over Moscow were flying throughout the three-hour session.

Omarova is a professor of regulation of financial institutions, banking law, international finance, and corporate finance at Cornell. As comptroller of the currency, she would ensure that the “federal banking system operates in a safe and sound manner.”

The White House says she “​​is eminently qualified and was nominated for this role because of her lifetime of work,” and is “a leading academic” in her field. 

Her critics, however, see someone whose policy positions are far out of step with a market economy.

Britain’s Daily Mail has labeled her “​​Biden’s new comrade.” Townhall’s Katie Pavlich says Omarova is a “Communist” who “wants all bank accounts to be controlled by the Fed.” South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott said during Thursday’s hearing that “I cannot think of a nominee more poorly suited to be the comptroller of the currency based solely on your public positions, statements and the weight of your writings than you are.”

The Kazakhstan-born Omarova, educated at Moscow State University, where she had a Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship, which “recently disappeared from her resume,” and also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University, has described herself as a “free-market idealist.” She swears she knows “that Soviet-style communism doesn’t work.”

“I’ve lived through it. That system was deeply flawed. It’s dead.”

Yet she envisions the creation of “National Investment Authority,” which would bypass Congress and use public and private resources to fund “vital infrastructure and the real economy.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/17/america-at-the-intersection-of-woke-and-incompetent/

We may have never had such a poisonous combination of partisanship and incompetence at the highest levels of government as we do today.

For as long as most of us have been alive, there have been declarations that America’s best days are behind us and that we are in a slow, steady decline. Against this backdrop, there is a growing sentiment that our present leadership in Washington is something altogether different, and worse. 

We are still getting familiar levels of government waste and inefficiency, but along with those come seemingly unprecedented levels of radicalism and incompetence. This noxious combination was on full display with the recent Senate testimony of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. 

Washington is filthy with dogmatic bureaucrats, but Mayorkas stands out. He is willing to parrot the most absurd and provably false statements, such as his repeated insistence that the border is closed. When called before Congress, he defends this administration’s indefensible border policies with shameless diversions and obfuscation. 

At the heart of this administration’s border policy is a zealous adherence to far-Left ideology that flies in the face of common sense and traditional American principles. When Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked if the border is more under control now than during the Trump years, Mayorkas replied, “We have more control [of the border] that is consistent with our values as a nation.” 

This was a reference to the White House’s favorite talking point that Trump was “cruel” by instituting a zero-tolerance policy that temporarily separated parents from their children. But in its attempt to be all things anti-Trump at the border, this administration has empowered ruthless human trafficking cartels, enabled greater quantities of fentanyl and other illicit drugs to be brought into the country, and allowed untold numbers of children to be sexually assaulted as they are stockpiled into overcrowded detention centers. Isn’t that cruel? In what way is any of that consistent with our values as a nation?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/17/can-the-fbi-be-salvaged/

The Washington, D.C.-based Federal Bureau of Investigation has lost all credibility as a disinterested investigatory agency. Now we learn from a whistleblower that the agency was allegedly investigating moms and dads worried about the teaching of critical race theory in their kids’ schools.

In truth, since 2015, the FBI has been constantly in the news—and mostly in a negative and constitutionally disturbing light.

The fired former Director James Comey injected himself into the 2016 political race by constantly editorializing on his ongoing investigation of candidate Hillary Clinton’s email leaks. In a bizarre twist, the public learned later that Comey had allowed Hillary Clinton’s own private computer contractor, CrowdStrike, to run the investigation of the hack. The private firm was allowed to keep possession of pertinent hard drives central to the investigation. How odd that CrowdStrike’s point man was Shawn Henry, a former high-ranking FBI employee.

During the Robert Mueller special investigation, the FBI implausibly claimed it had no idea how requested information on FBI cell phones had mysteriously disappeared.

It was also under Comey’s directorship that the FBI submitted inaccurate requests for warrants to a FISA court. Elements of one affidavit to surveil Trump supporter Carter Page were forged by FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who later pleaded guilty to a felony.

The FBI hired the disreputable ex-British spy Christopher Steele as a contractor, while he was peddling his fantasy—the Clinton-bought dossier—to Obama government officials and the media.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker was reportedly the subject of a federal investigation. He allegedly conducted prominent meetings both with media outlets that later leaked lurid tales from the Steele dossier. He also met repeatedly with the now-indicted Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussman.

Comey himself, through third-party intermediaries, leaked to the media his own confidential memos detailing private meetings with President Trump. His assurances both to Congress and to Trump that the president was not the current subject of FBI investigations were either misleading or outright lies.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/stumbling_bumbling_kamala.html

Ooh-la-la!, oui, oui!  Kamala Harris has finally gone to Europe — and at taxpayers’ expense.  Yet despite CNN’s glowing description of the “chumming chemistry” between the vice president and France’s President Emmanuel Macron that “signaled a relationship back on track” after the canceled submarine contract crisis, the meeting did little by way of burnishing the vice president’s image.

Of course, nobody who has seen Kamala hovering behind the president like a straddle-legged, uniformed prison guard would expect her to sweep onto the continental scene with the same panache as, say, a Jackie Kennedy or Princess Di — and certainly not swathed in the same head-turning, headlining haute couture.  Nor does Kamala, pantsuits notwithstanding, generate the same interest as someone like Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps the intention of her boringly severe tailored “look” is to make her appear to be a no-nonsense woman of business.  The only problem is that thus far, Kamala has come across as all nonsense and very little business.  As for the outcome of the Paris meeting, Harris summed it up eloquently by saying, “We have a lot of follow-up stuff.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/adam-schiff-steele-dossier-death-shame-jonathan-turley

The famous philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once declared that “the only shame is to have none.” The problem with shame is it assumes a sense of guilt over one’s actions. In the age of rage, there appear fewer and fewer actions that are beyond the pale for politics. 

Take Adam Schiff and the Steele dossier. While even the Washington Post has admitted that it got the Russian collusion story wrong in light of the findings of Special Counsel John Durham, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is still insisting that he was absolutely right to promote the discredited Steele dossier.

Schiff’s interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” may be the final proof of the death of shame in American politics.

Schiff was one of the greatest promoters of the Steele dossier despite access to briefings casting doubt about Steele and the underlying claims. However, Schiff recently has attempted to defend himself by claiming that Steele was a respected former spy and that he was lied to by a Russian source.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/17/the-1619-project-books-goal-is-to-keep-slandering-america/

New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein recently introduced the forthcoming book version of the 1619 Project in a long essay that attempts to head off well-deserved criticism of the original project and the new book. Silverstein’s motive is to explain in advance that the nay-sayers have it all wrong. I don’t yet have the book, so it is possible that Silverstein is right, but judging from his preamble it looks like the new, expanded version of The 1619 Project is woven of the same wish fulfillment as the original.

Silverstein’s essay is meant to clear a path for readers who have heard some of the criticisms of that original and want to be reassured that the critics can safely be ignored. His approach, however, is not so much to refute the critics as it is to draw a map showing 1619 supporters how to evade them.

Think of the editor strapping on his silver skates to glide past a lot of the awkwardness that accompanied the 1619 Project’s early days. In the interests of keeping the record straight, let’s revisit 2019 and 2020.

At the Start

I covered this era pretty thoroughly in my book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. But there are other good sources, including Phillip Magness’s The 1619 Project: A Critique; Mary Grabar’s Debunking the 1619 Project; and David North and Thomas Mackaman’s edited volume, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and Racialist Falsification of History.

The 1619 Project has never faded from public view since The New York Times published it on August 18, 2019. On the opening page, Silverstein wrote it was an effort “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” “Doing so,” he added, “requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a county.”

Several statements by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s lead author and architect, jumped out as contrary to established facts. The six biggest errors are (1) that slavery was somehow new to America in 1619; (2) that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery from the threat of emancipation; (3) that Abraham Lincoln was a racist intent on separating blacks and whites; (4) that blacks “fought back alone” to secure their rights; (5) that plantation slavery was the foundation of American capitalism; (6) and that the nation’s entire history is best seen as a struggle by blacks against white supremacy.

Dig into The 1619 Project and you will find an abundance of other errors, but these are the tent poles that hold up the entire circus tent of falsehoods.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/white_house_messaging_chaos_inadvertently_reveals_the_sinister_intentions_of_bidens_puppet_masters.html

With Democrats quaking in their boots over the plunging public support for Joe Biden and the political party that sold him as a moderate and as physically and mentally capable of doing the job, the White House messaging team and their media supporters face an enormous challenge.  And they are bungling it as badly as the rest of the administration is bungling economic policy, diplomacy, and national security.  The gist of the messaging lately is:

Things are really going well; don’t believe your lying eyes or empty pocketbook
It’s your fault.
All this suffering is in a good cause, forcing you to go along with green new deal policies. You’re going to learn to like having less stuff.

First point: White House chief of staff Ron Klain, claimed by some to be the de facto real president, actually went gaslighting on CNN yesterday claiming that things are better now than a year ago.

“Well, look, I do think, as I said Jake, things are a lot better in this country than they were a year ago, with regard to COVID, with regard to the economy, but we have a lot of work left to do,” Klain stated.  “And I think voters are in show me don’t tell me mode, I don’t think they really care as much about what I’m saying on TV, or what you’re saying on TV as much as putting results into their lives.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/18/merrick-garland-must-go/

A new memo shows that Attorney General Merrick Garland lied to Congress about the FBI snooping on parent groups upset with local school boards for their use of Critical Race Theory in the classroom. If so, it doesn’t warrant a slap on the hand, but swift removal from office.

Presidents deserve to have the people they nominate serve their entire term. But that’s not the case when that person lies under oath to Congress and, by extension, the American people. That’s a criminal offense.

This allegation comes from an official letter sent to the Justice Department by Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking GOP member of the House Judiciary Committee, in response to an email from a whistleblower.

If you’ll recall, on Oct. 21, Garland appeared before Congress and said he couldn’t “imagine any circumstances in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor … a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorists.”  

He went on to say, “I do not think that parents getting angry at school boards for whatever reason constitute domestic terrorism. It’s not even a close question.”

The only problem is, neither statement is true.

Garland in fact proposed using the FBI to investigate parents indignant over schools subjecting their children to the Marxist, anti-American ideological propaganda of Critical Race Theory. For all we know, he’s still doing it.