RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON—Nominees to lead the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency are encountering resistance in the Senate, where critics of President Donald Trump’s are prepared to make their confirmation battles a referendum on his foreign-policy positions.

Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director and Mr. Trump’s pick to be the next secretary of state, is in danger of receiving an unfavorable committee recommendation, over concerns that his past hawkish statements complicate his ability to conduct diplomacy. While the full Senate could still vote to confirm him, that would mark the first time in more than 70 years the chamber would have bypassed a committee to do so.

Gina Haspel, the nominee to lead the CIA and now the agency’s deputy director, is expected to face questions about her involvement in a post-9/11 interrogation program that detractors say amounted to torture. Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) said he would oppose her nomination over her role in the interrogation program, while Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.)—who was tortured while a prisoner of war in Vietnam—has asked for additional details about Ms. Haspel’s involvement.

Several other Republicans have told The Wall Street Journal they have concerns about Ms. Haspel and haven’t decided whether to support her nomination. One Democrat was unsatisfied with her answers in a private briefing about her role in the destruction of videos of the interrogations, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Gina Haspel, now the CIA’s deputy director, is expected to face her confirmation hearing in coming weeks. Photo: handout/Reuters

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to vote on Mr. Pompeo’s nomination as soon as next week, while the White House has yet to formally submit Ms. Haspel’s nomination to the Senate. The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to hold a confirmation hearing for her in the coming weeks. CONTINUE AT SITE

At a hearing in Manhattan federal court Monday afternoon, a judge denied a request by President Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to prevent investigators from reviewing materials seized from Cohen’s office and residences.

Cohen, who describes himself as the president’s “fixer,” has not been charged with any crimes at this point. Clearly, though, he is the focus of a serious criminal investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY). Yesterday’s hearing before District Judge Kimba Wood addressed the question of whether last week’s raids violated the attorney–client (A-C) privilege of President Trump and Cohen’s other clients — though there turn out to be precious few of those.

Yet we are already way beyond that question. Anti-Trump journalists are titillated by a side issue: the hearing’s revelation that talk-radio and Fox News host Sean Hannity, an ardent Trump supporter, has been identified as one of Cohen’s clients. But the real news is that prosecutors say Cohen has been under investigation for months. The probe involves a range of crimes, “many of which have nothing to do with his work as an attorney, but rather relate to Cohen’s own business dealings,” the government explained.

Consequently, even before the raids, the court authorized the FBI and prosecutors to search various email accounts maintained by Cohen. While the government reports that “zero emails were exchanged [by Cohen] with President Trump,” the existence of this monitoring means prosecutors long ago had to implement procedures to safeguard the A-C privilege.

The raids, then, are almost beside the point. The investigation is apparently far along, a grand jury is considering evidence, and the revelation that the probe is largely unrelated to Cohen’s law practice makes sense since he doesn’t appear to have much of one.

Four takeaways.

1. Scope of the Cohen Investigation
In this weekend’s column, I posited that the SDNY would probably not go through the legal complications attendant to searching a lawyer’s premises unless crimes more serious than a potential campaign-finance violation were involved. The government was obviously exploring such questions as whether felony fraud or extortion had been committed in inducing two women to remain mum about sexual liaisons they claim to have had, a decade ago, with Donald Trump. Still, we do not know the full range of the Cohen investigation.

It is probably safe to assume that the SDNY investigation has no relation to supposed Trump-campaign collusion with Russia. If it did, Special Counsel Robert Mueller would have tried to fold it into his ongoing probe rather than referring it to the SDNY. But beyond that deduction, all we can say is that the probe involves more than Cohen’s legal representation of clients, which appears to be more of a sideline than a steady occupation.

On Sunday evening, ABC preempted its regularly scheduled programming to broadcast an exclusive interview conducted by “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos with former FBI Director James Comey. The star treatment is part of an all-out publicity campaign that Comey, fired by President Trump less than one year ago, has launched to promote his new book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.” How Comey’s portrayal of himself as a virtuous man selflessly devoted to the public interest fits with his rush to cash in on public service by disclosing details of his relationship with a sitting president is one of the salient questions Stephanopoulos failed to pose Sunday night.

ABC’s chief political anchor did elicit from Comey a variety of denunciations of Trump. They were newsworthy but no surprise. Was anyone caught off guard, for example, when the disgruntled former employee who has traded barbs with the president on Twitter likened him to a New York City mob boss?

It was also, alas, no surprise that Stephanopoulos failed to ask Comey many questions that touch on eminently newsworthy issues and directly address the rule of law and the integrity of law enforcement agencies to which Comey proclaims devotion.

Here are 10:

1) In December 2003, you were deputy attorney general. When then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself, it fell to you to determine whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate the leak, in spring of that year, of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment. You named your good friend (and godfather to your daughter) Patrick Fitzgerald, who conducted a long, drawn-out investigation that resulted in the 2007 conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby (pardoned by President Trump on Friday) for obstruction of justice, making a false statement, and perjury — but not for leaking Plame’s employment. Indeed, by early autumn 2003 — a few months before you appointed Fitzgerald — Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had informed the FBI that he leaked Plame’s employment. By that time, the CIA had determined that the leak did not harm national security. If, as acting attorney general, you were aware in December 2003 of the leaker’s identity and that the leak had not harmed national security, why did you appoint a special counsel?

Comey, McCabe, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch, Andrew Weissmann, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Harry Reid, Samantha Power, Clinton attorney Jeannie Rhee . . .

If collusion is the twin of conspiracy, then there are lots of colluders running around Washington.

Robert Mueller was tasked to find evidence of Trump and Russia collusion that might have warped the 2016 campaign and thrown the election to Trump. After a year, his investigation has found no concrete evidence of collusion. So it has often turned to other purported Trump misadventures. Ironically, collusion of all sorts — illegal, barely legal, and simply unethical — has been the sea that Washington fish always swim in.

Christopher Steele, hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign through a series of firewall intermediaries, probably paid Russian sources for gossip and smears. If there is a crime of collusion, then Clinton-campaign contractors should be under investigation for seeking Russian help to find dirt on Trump, to spread smears around throughout the DOJ, FBI, and CIA, and to make sure that the dirt was leaked to the press in the final weeks of the campaign — for the sole “insurance” purposes of losing Trump the election.

Some sort of collusion likely occurred when the Obama DOJ and FBI sought FISA-court requests to surveille Carter Page and, indirectly, possibly many other members of the Trump campaign. On repeated occasions, they all made sure the FISA-court judges were not apprised that the Steele dossier, the chief basis for these requests, was paid for by the Clinton campaign, that the dossier was not verified by the FBI, that the dossier was the source of media stories that in circular fashion were used to convince the FISA judges to grant the surveillance requests, and that the FBI had severed relations with Steele on the basis of his unreliability. Such a collusion of silence was similar to James Comey’s admission that he apprised President Trump of every iota of lurid sexual gossip about him — except that his source was a dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton and written by a campaign operative hired to find dirt on Trump and who had been working with Comey’s FBI to get FISA approval to spy on Trump’s own aides.

Last year, the court jester of the Never Trumpers declared that, “The onus is on the president-elect to prove he’s not Putin’s puppet.”

Last week, the President of the United States ordered the strikes that took out Syria’s chemical weapons research facility, its primary Sarin nerve gas facility and another chemical weapons facility.

Putin was not pleased. But neither was Max Boot, who had accused Trump of being Putin’s puppet. Boot had already gone from attacking Trump for being weak on Assad to urging, “Let Assad Win.”

Who’s the puppet now?

In March, Boot had urged Trump to launch cruise missiles against the perpetrators of the chemical attacks. Now that Trump did it, Boot is dismissing the very thing he wanted and attacking Trump for not overthrowing Assad. Even though Boot had just disavowed regime change in, “Let Assad Win.”

What is Max Boot’s real position on Syria? He doesn’t have one. He only has a position on Trump.

Never Trumpers like Max Boot wanted us to believe that they opposed Trump on foreign policy grounds. But Syria shows that they don’t have a foreign policy. Only an anti-Trump policy.

They don’t care about Syria. And they don’t care about Russia. All they care about is destroying Trump. Like Boot, their old national security journalism has been replaced by national security trolling. The national security trolls no longer discuss foreign policy, but how much they despise President Trump.

Boot flip-flopped on Assad. If hostilities with Russia grow, his next column will be, “Let Putin Win.”

The most striking thing about the reaction of Never Trumper national security trolls to the Syrian strikes was their lack of interest in the topic. Most remained fixated on pushing Mueller scandal narratives.

“If Pres. Trump takes appropriate action against Assad this #NeverTrumper will of course support him,” Bill Kristol tweeted on April 6. The next day he tweeted a quote about events in Syria from an anti-Israel leftist ,”No decent person can ignore what’s happening.” On the 8th, Kristol blamed Trump for Assad’s chemical weapons use.

Once the bombings began, Kristol’s support consisted of tweeting about more Mueller scandals.