RUTHFULLY YOURS

US President Donald Trump and former FBI Director James Comey: Did Trump fire Comey because he showed insufficient zeal in uncovering the pattern of press leaks. Photo: Reuters file

The distinguished political scientist Angelo Codevilla coined the ominous term “cold civil war” to describe America’s precarious condition, adding, “Statesmanship’s first task is to prevent it from turning hot.” The attempted massacre June this week June 14 of Republican Congressmen and their staff by a deranged partisan of Sen. Bernie Sanders turned up the heat a notch, but it would be mistaken to attribute much importance to this dreadful outburst of left-wing rage. The augury of American fracture will not be street violence, but a constitutional crisis implicating virtually the whole of America’s governing caste. The shock troops in the cold civil war are not gunmen but lawyers.

A considerable portion of America’s permanent bureaucracy, including elements of its intelligence community, is engaged in an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny against the elected commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump. Most of the Democratic Party and a fair sampling of the Republican Establishment wants to force Trump out of office, and to this end undertook an entrapment scheme to entice the president and his staff into actions which might be construed after the fact as obstruction of justice. By means yet undisclosed, the mutineers forced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn from office and now seek to bring down the president for allegedly obstructing an investigation of Gen. Flynn that arose in the first place from the entrapment scheme.

One of the Republican Party’s most distinguished statesmen recently told a closed gathering that a “cold coup” is underway against the president. I do not know and have not sought to learn the substance of the allegations; Gen. Flynn has no choice as a matter of self-preservation but to hold his peace and presently cannot defend himself in public.

By no coincidence is Gen. Flynn the central character in this scenario. As I wrote in February, the CIA really is out to get him:

Flynn’s Defense Intelligence Agency produced a now-notorious 2012 report warning that chaos in Syria’s civil war enabled the rise of a new Caliphate movement, namely ISIS. For full background, see Brad Hoff’s July 2016 essay in Foreign Policy Journal: Flynn humiliated the bungling CIA and exposed the incompetence and deception of the Obama administration, and got fired for it. If anyone doubts the depth of CIA incompetence in Syria, I recommend an account that appeared this month in the London Financial Times.

The rush to impeach President Trump is on by an opposition party that lacks the votes, evidence or legal basis for such a move. But since when did an illegal left-wing coup need any of those things?

No Dem has been more honest about the real motive for impeachment than Congressman Ted Lieu.

“We should not give him a chance to govern,” Lieu had declared after Trump had been in office for ten days. And he predicted that, “I do believe that if we win back the House of Representatives, impeachment proceedings will be started.”

What was the basis for impeaching President Trump after ten days in office? Lieu made it clear that if the Democrats won, they would try to impeach Trump no matter what.

That’s not how things work in the United States. But the left is running America like a banana republic.

More recently Lieu had mused that, “A recent poll came out saying that 46 percent of Americans want the president impeached, and certainly members of Congress take notice.”

And what better basis could there be for impeachment than popular Dem support for the move?

The latest poll from PPP, the notorious left-wing troll pollsters Lieu was relying on, shows 75% of Democrats support impeaching President Trump. PPP did not provide any justification. Nor was any needed. President Trump had to be forced out of office to reverse the results of the 2016 election.

The legal basis for such proceedings was as irrelevant as any coup in a banana republic.

Congressman Lieu is a member of the House Judiciary Committee. He’s indicated recently that he’s “researching” impeachment. His statement on being appointed to the Committee claimed that Trump had “lost the popular vote” and that he would “fight like hell on the Judiciary Committee” against him.

Since Lieu has made it clear that his pursuit of impeachment is based on partisan opposition, not evidence, any such action would be an unethical abuse of power whose goal is not justice, but a conspiracy to prevent the President of the United States from even having the “chance to govern”.

This could lead to censure and even expulsion; the Congressional alternative to impeachment.

Congressman Brad Sherman has drafted articles of impeachment for President Trump. The claims in Sherman’s draft contradict, in part, Comey’s testimony even as it claims to be based on it. But it still puts the California politician ahead as the first to put forward a written legislative call for impeachment.

But that’s only because most of his rivals can’t write.

Congressman Al Green (not the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who crooned “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”) called for the impeachment of President Trump on the House floor in the name of “liberty and justice for all” and also “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

And how better to stand for “government by the people” than with a shameless attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election and for “liberty and justice for all” than to undertake it baselessly?

“No one is above the law,” Al Green declared. Except maybe Green who was accused of sexual assault by a former aide. Green in turn accused her of blackmail. Put a little love in your heart indeed.

This isn’t Green’s first call for impeachment. A previous Green statement, which read like it was written by a high school dropout who had been watching too many legal dramas, (“A bedrock premise upon which respect for, and obedience to, our societal norms is ‘No one is above the law’”) concluded with “Our mantra should be I. T. N. – Impeach Trump Now.” That’s been the mantra ever since Trump won.

Sherman and Green are far behind Congresswoman Maxine Waters who has been calling for the impeachment of every Republican since Ulysses S. Grant. Last month, she complained that the public was “weary” that Trump still hadn’t been impeached. “I believe that this man has done enough for us to determine that we can connect the dots, that we can get the facts that will lead to impeachment.”

If anyone ought to be impeached, it’s Waters who funneled $750,000 to her daughter and used her influence to help arrange for the taxpayer bailout of a bank linked to her husband.

But Waters has made it obvious that it’s not about the law, it’s about undoing the election results.

At the Center for American Progress, Waters rejected waiting until the next election. “We can’t wait that long. We don’t need to wait that long.” Pointing to left-wing polls backing impeachment, she screeched. “What more do we need in the Congress of the United States of America?”

Maybe evidence?

Waters had already admitted that there was no actual evidence, but impeachment should move forward anyway. There isn’t any evidence for impeachment, but there is documented evidence that Waters can’t tell Crimea from Korea. Much as there is evidence that Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who also called for Trump’s impeachment, can’t tell Wikileaks from Wikipedia.

Sheila Jackson Lee insisted that Trump should be impeached if he doesn’t prove Obama’s eavesdropping.

“If you do not have any proof,” she rambled, “then you are clearly on the edge of the question of public trust and those actions can be associated with high crimes and misdemeanors for which articles of impeachment can be drawn.”

The only high crimes belong to Sheila Jackson Lee, who had once declared on CNN, “I represent Enron.” She should have gone to jail along with its top bosses.

Lee had also claimed that the Constitution is 400 years old and that she was a freed slave.

“I’m concerned about what happened when we get that call about North Korea in the middle of the night,” she blathered. “You have in office an individual that is unread and unlearned.”

And this is coming from a woman who had confused North Korea and Vietnam.

Meanwhile Sheila Jackson Lee had been investigated by the House Ethics Committee for a trip to Azerbaijan paid for by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan. SOCAR has a joint venture with Rosneft. Back then that meant Vladimir Putin. Maybe Sheila Jackson Lee ought to impeach herself.

“I think about impeachment every single day,” Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson said.

And well she should.

Johnson pushed Congressional Black Caucus scholarships that were supposed to go to “deserving students” to her relatives. She even sent letters directing that the money be paid to them, not the colleges, in violation of the foundation rules. And then she went on CNN and lied about it.

The loudest voices in Congress calling for impeachment don’t belong in Congress. That’s typical enough.

Shock waves rippled through Capitol Hill on Wednesday after a shooter targeted Republican lawmakers during a morning baseball practice, wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and four others.

“An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” Speaker Paul Ryan said from the House chamber, where most members gathered Wednesday afternoon following a security briefing on the incident.

Also shot were Zack Barth, an aide to Rep. Roger Williams of Texas; Matt Mika, a lobbyist who was volunteering at the practice; and two Capitol Police officers, Crystal Griner and David Bailey. The gunman died at the hospital, President Trump announced later.

Scalise’s office released a statement saying that prior to entering surgery, the Louisiana Republican was in good spirits and spoke to his wife by phone. MedStar Washington Hospital Center later tweeted that the congressman was “critically injured and remains in critical condition.”

The incident seemed to confirm the worst fears among some lawmakers that partisan rhetoric has reached a troubling, even dangerous level. Many expressed concern about their security, particularly in situations like a baseball practice where they gather together.

“It’s a concern we always have,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, “and … until the rhetoric changes, I think it’s a concern we’re always going to have.” He added that “everybody” is responsible, in his view, for deepening divisions.

Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, who witnessed the shooting, still wore his baseball uniform and cleats in the Capitol as he recounted the attack to reporters.

“What that rhetoric and that hatefulness has led to is members of Congress, I believe, having to dodge bullets today at a baseball practice for a game that we play for charity,” Davis said. “This should never happen, and we as Republicans and Democrats have to come together and say, as a team and as members of Congress … that this hate and this rhetoric has got to be toned down, it has got to stop.”

The shooter was identified as James T. Hodgkinson III, 66, from Illinois, according to various news outlets. Hodgkinson had volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and his Facebook page included a photograph of Sanders as its cover image. He had written anti-Republican and anti-Trump posts, including one with a picture of the president and the message that Trump is a “traitor” and “It’s time to Destroy Trump & Co.” He belonged to a number of anti-Republican groups, according to the Belleville, Ill., newspaper, including one called “Terminate the Republican Party.” The newspaper also released a number of letters to the editor Hodgkinson had written critical of the Republican Party, though none of the letters released specifically mentioned Trump.

Not one US senator asked former FBI Director James Comey to account for the sinister fact that the source of the explosive determination that “Russia hacked the DNC” computer system is a DNC contractor, not the FBI.

Not one US Senator asked why Comey’s FBI deferred to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s DNC when the DNC refused to permit FBI forensics specialists to examine the DNC computer system; or why the FBI was never able to examine John Podesta’s personal devices, either. Not one member of the Senate Intelligence Committe inquired as to why the DNC servers have not, after all of this time, ever been re-examined by the FBI; or whether it is just possible that this same DNC contractor putting forward the DNC/Russian hacking charge might have destroyed the DNC computer system.

The scene of the crime.

As mysterious and sensational as these unanswered questions are, so, too, are the reasons they have not been asked.

To be sure, there was this exchange:

BURR: Do you have any doubt that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 elections?

COMEY: None.

BURR: Do you have any doubt that the Russian government was behind the intrusions in the DNC and the DCCC systems, and the subsequent leaks of that information?

COMEY: No, no doubt.

Followed by this:

BURR: And the FBI, in this case, unlike other cases that you might investigate — did you ever have access to the actual hardware that was hacked? Or did you have to rely on a third party to provide you the data that they had collected?

COMEY: In the case of the DNC, and, I believe, the DCCC, but I’m sure the DNC, we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. But we didn’t get direct access.

The “third party” Comey and Burr discuss is a DNC contractor named Crowdstrike. How “high class” Crowdstrike really is becomes an open question on learning that Crowdstrike has had to retract signficant portions of a recent report — also on “Russia” “hacking” — following “a damaging series of questions over its credibility,” as the Daily Mail explains in detail here. The Daily Mail further reports that Crowdstrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch and president Shawn Henry themselves refused to testify in March before the House Intelligence Committee, although Committee spox Jack Langer put it more delicately: “They declined the invitation, so we’re communicating with them about speaking to us privately.”

That’s the way to get to the bottom of things never. No doubt special “Russia influence” counsel Robert Mueller will get similar non-results, having, as FBI director, promoted Shawn Henry to big cyber security jobs at least twice during Henry’s FBI career. It’s a safe bet such rapport can only serve to make the Mueller investigation even more non-illuminating to the American people. Isn’t it more and more apparent that this is the point? Ladies and gents, the dreaded Fix is in. Hocus-pocus and the president will be gone.

BURR: But no content?

COMEY: Correct.

BURR: Isn’t content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?

COMEY: It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks — the people who were my folks at the time — is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.

Here, of course, was the perfect opening for Burr, or any other Senator, to sit up, adjust his microphone and say:

Are you telling the American people, Mr. Comey, that there has been no independent corroboration of this “third party,” this DNC contractor’s investigation, of the DNC servers? That the FBI just took this incendiary information about “Russian hacking” from this “third party” — and that was that? Further, you have stated in previous testimony that the DNC repeatedly denied FBI requests for access to the servers. Why? What reasons did the DNC give you? How is it possible that you, as FBI director, allowed this to stand?

Mr. Comey, please share with the American people your own reasons for acquiescing to the DNC denial of FBI access to the DNC servers, even as the DNC claimed these servers had been breached by a hostile foreign power! Did you ever possibly consider overriding the DNC to ensure that the FBI could enter what was by all accounts a highly sensitive crime scene to conduct professional, non-partisan analysis?

If not, why not? In fact, Mr. Comey, I’d like to hear more about your deliberations. Who was part of the decision-making process that led you to outsource the investigation of a purported foreign cyber strike on the United States, with all of the ramifications for increased tensions and hostilities with a leading nuclear power, to any third party? Do you consider that good police work? And what does this say about the professionalism of the rest of the IC that has relied on this same “third party” for its assessments? And how “high-class” is this “entity,” anyway, when we now know it has had to retract significant sections of a recent report, also on “Russia” “hacking,” due to the exposure of shoddy data and practices?

Tell me, Mr. Comey, is the FBI now outsourcing all of its counter-intelligence investigations to such “high class entities” — ? Or only in this singularly controversial, momentous and internationally explosive one?

Why would that be so, Mr. Comey…?

Instead, Senator Burr — but it could have any one of them — changed the subject.

The fatalistic flip-out over Trump’s plan to exit from the Paris Climate Accord is the latest proof that the leaders of the political Left have learned absolutely nothing since November 8. Unlike Trump, who said during his Rose Garden announcement of the planned withdrawal that he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” these woke folks continue to overlook huge swaths of the American public as they try to win a global popularity contest, redistribute our wealth, and lecture us about how ignorant, uncaring, and unaware we are.

The drumbeat from tone-deaf celebrities, tech titans, bureaucrats, and political hacks began earlier this week on social media when it became clear Trump would finally act to undo one of Barack Obama’s legacy policies. On May 28, California billionaire and climate catastrophist Tom Steyer, who donated $87 million to Democratic candidates in 2016 alone, tweeted out his dire assessment of Trump’s expected move. Steyer said Trump would be “committing a traitorous act of war against the American people.” Within moments of Trump’s speech, Steyer said the administration “has just committed assault and battery on the future of the American people. There can be no excuse for this willful crime. Yes, by pulling out of the Paris Agreement, Donald Trump is betraying the moral, political, and economic leadership position America has achieved over centuries at the cost of American lives.”

Steyer was joined in agony by fellow Golden State tycoons including Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla, among other tech enterprises, who had threatened to stop working on two of Trump’s advisory councils if the president pulled out of the Paris agreement. Musk, whose holdings have benefited from nearly $5 billion in government support, tweeted May 31, “Don’t know which way Paris will go, but I’ve done all I can to advise directly to POTUS, through others in the WH & via councils, that we remain.” After Trump’s announcement, Musk tweeted, “Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.” Or for Musk’s bank account, considering how much more in likely government handouts the Paris deal would’ve meant for him. But Musk probably should turn his attention elsewhere: His solar-energy company, SolarCity Corp., is reportedly under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to disclose how many customers have canceled their solar-energy system orders.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple and a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, reportedly called the White House this week to urge Trump to stay in the pact. The man who heads an empire built off energy generated by fossil fuels is one of those Silicon Valley sillies who wrongly thinks we can — and need to — live off 100 percent renewables within the next few decades.

Celebrities who still haven’t learned that their endorsement of anyone or anything usually yields the opposite of the intended effect also weighed in on Trump’s move. Hollywood’s most prolific climate celeb — the bed-hopping, jet-setting, yacht-cruising Leo DiCaprio — said he hoped Trump would make the “moral” decision to stay in Paris, then tweeted shortly after the president’s announcement that “today, our planet suffered.” Unhinged showgirl Bette Midler tweeted that Trump’s exit gave “BigOil a windfall” and that “there has never in US history been such a destructive megalomaniac in the WH. Thank you to US press and other numbskulls who put him there.”

Mark Ruffalo, known more for his environmental activism than for his marginal acting, tweeted that if Trump left Paris, the president would “have the death of whole nations on his hands. People will be looking to the USA for retribution for what they loose [sic].” Actress Alyssa Milano, who is approximately 0 for 432 on helping political candidates win, tweeted: “Oh my God, you really are a monster. @realDonaldTrump.” But the topper could go to George Takei of Star Trek fame, who tweeted: “Trump is having us pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. Too bad someone didn’t tell his father that he shoulda pulled out too.”

Here’s the good news.

It’s 2017 and Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the House and more statewide offices than you can shake a big bundle of fake news papers at. And, potentially soon, a Supreme Court that takes its guidelines from the Constitution not Das Kapital and the National Social Justice Party.

Here’s the bad news, Republicans are still Republicans.

Whether it’s Flynn, Bannon, Gorka, Kushner, Clarke, they are all too eager to fall for the latest left-wing scandal. The media throws some chum in the water and watches the bloody fun as Republicans go after Republicans. Scandals are manufactured and strategically aimed to divide and conquer Republicans.

But the real target is the conservative agenda. Bogging down the White House in scandals keeps it from dismantling more of Obama’s regulations and orders. Every milligram of oxygen that foolish conservatives give the left’s narratives is a milligram taken from the lungs of the conservative agenda.

At the National Review, Jim Geraghty, who has loathed Trump since Day 1, seizes on the latest scandal targeting Jared Kushner. In recent days, the National Review has run four pieces on the fake scandal.

That’s an odd preoccupation for a conservative publication that ought to be more concerned with conservative policy priorities than parsing the shibboleths that the left is firing at President Trump.

But the National Review occupies a peculiar space between the Never Trumpers who have found cushy jobs on MSNBC and at the New York Times and mainstream conservative support for President Trump. It isn’t ready to leave the movement, but instead it insists on echoing media criticisms in a softer tone.

The Review takes the tone that it’s just asking questions. Those questions just happen to be the same ones that the media keeps on asking. If the mainstream media reads like an angry partisan blog, then the National Review sounds the way that the media used to when it was just biased instead of fake.

It just so happens that the Review is full of innumerable stories and posts about every media scandal. And its preferred pose is innocence. Like the rest of the media, it’s just asking questions.

What’s the big deal?

“What I don’t get is any reflexive defense of . . . Jared Kushner. Trump earned your vote, and presumably, some amount of trust. What did Kushner ever do for you?” Geraghty protests.

Presumably. In Geraghty’s world, winning the votes of conservatives, shouldn’t necessarily earn trust.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Thing That Wouldn’t Leave is back yet again, and still refusing to accept the results of the 2016 presidential election.

Hillary Clinton says that she “beat” Donald Trump—and Bernie Sanders—in a lengthy feature article by New York Magazine. “I beat both of them,” she said, evidently referencing her popular vote win over Trump.

While Clinton did defeat Sanders, who is not a Democrat, in the Democratic primary, she did not defeat Trump, who was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States in January.

In the story, Clinton discussed her post-election status as a member of the “Resistance” to Trump, but she also reflected on the 2016 campaign, which included a harder-than-expected fight against Sanders for the nomination.

Let’s start with the most salient point: it is utterly shameful for the defeated candidate to join a “resistance” against the lawfully elected winner, for no other reason than she lost. Americans despise a sore loser, and both Clinton and her entire graceless party have been wailing since last November about the cosmic unfairness of it all — all the more because they fully expected that the fix was in, and she would cake-waddle into the White House. As Johnny Caspar complains in Miller’s Crossing: “if you can’t trust a fixed fight, what can you trust?”

From the Newsweek article:

Talking about Comey, even the day after his firing, is a risky thing for Clinton to do. The last time she did it was in a conversation a week earlier with CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour at a Manhattan lunchtime gala for Women for Women International. Amanpour had asked Clinton about why she thought she had lost the election. “I take absolute personal responsibility,” Clinton replied. “I was the candidate, I was the person who was on the ballot. I am very aware of the challenges, the problems, the shortfalls that we had.” But she had also talked about other factors she believes contributed, citing FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver’s research on the impact of Comey’s October 28 letter. “If the election had been on October 27,” she said, “I’d be your president.”

But even the Left can’t stand her constant bellyaching:

After the exchange, Clinton and her aides had appeared upbeat. The crowd had been enthusiastic, and there was a sense that Clinton had done something that she has long found difficult in public: She had been herself — brassy, frank, funny, and pissed. But on cable news and social media, another reaction was taking shape. The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush, who has reported on Clinton for years, tweeted “mea culpa-not so much,” suggesting that the former candidate “blames everyone but self.” Obama-campaign strategist turned pundit David Axelrod gave an interview claiming that while Clinton “said the words ‘I’m responsible’ … everything else suggested that she really doesn’t feel that way.” Joe Scarborough called her comments “pathetic”; David Gregory suggested she was not “taking real responsibility for the fact that she was not what the country wanted.” And in the Daily News , Gersh Kuntzman delivered a column that began, “Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f— up and go away already.”

Coming from her friends, that’s good advice. Of course, she won’t take it. Her life has no purpose except to claw her way to power, even though she has absolutely no aptitude for it in any lawful way. First she married it, then she coasted into a Senate seat against a hapless opponent in a one-party state, then she was appointed to it. She is, in effect, the anti-Bubba: mean, classless, talentless and very, very angry. No wonder everybody hates her.