RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Wednesday the White House released the annual Economic Report of the President. No surprise, Democrats like Jason Furman, who served as the top economic adviser in the Obama White House, say President Trump’s economic forecasts are much too optimistic. Mr. Trump says that his tax cuts and deregulation will restore robust growth and Mr. Furman calls the Trump growth estimates “absurd.”

The national press corps, which spends a good deal of time cataloging every inaccurate statement from Mr. Trump, may be particularly receptive to the Furman message. But as they dig into this issue, they ought to give some credit where it’s due.

Specifically, reporters may want to consult Table S-9 in the economic report Mr. Trump released last May. The press will note that the President and his economic team predicted 2.3% real economic growth for the calendar year 2017.

Based on the current reading from the Commerce Department released last month, the Trump forecast was right on the money.

Is it a surprise to find a Stalin apologist at the center of the Steele dossier scandal?

Gotta hand it to Special Counsel Robert Mueller: He knows how to set off a stick of dynamite. I refer, of course, to his office’s recent indictment of thirteen Russians in Russia, which we are now to chase after, yelling “Pearl Harbor!” on the Left and “No collusion!” on the Right, forgetting all about the coalescing revelations of corruption and conspiracy and, yes, Russian influence, to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016, and, failing that, to destroy the Trump presidency.

The key is still in the “dossier” spying scandal.

Nellie Ohr is the “dossier” spying scandal’s woman in the middle.

To one side of Ohr, there is the Fusion GPS team, including fellow contractor Christopher Steele. To the other, there is husband Bruce Ohr, who, until his “dossier”-related demotion, was No. 4 man at the Department of Justice, and a key contact there for Steele.

As central as Nellie Ohr’s placement is, her role in the creation of the “dossier” remains undefined. For example, the House Intelligence Committee memo on related matters vaguely tells us that Nellie Ohr was “employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump”; the memo adds that Bruce Ohr “later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research.” Senator Lindsey Graham more sensationally told Fox News that Nellie Ohr “did the research for Mr. Steele,” but details remain scarce.

Still, relevant facts have emerged. These include Nellie Ohr’s study in the USSR in 1989; her fluency in Russian and Ph.D. in Russian history in 1990; a 2010 CIA affiliation, which practically makes her former MI6 agent Steele’s “opposite number”; and the extremely curious detail, harkening back to earlier eras of spycraft, that on May 23, 2016, around the time she came on board Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr applied for a ham radio operator’s license.

Notably, the “dossier” men in her life have tried to shield Ohr from public scrutiny, even at professional risk. Her husband, as the Daily Caller News Foundation reports, failed to disclose his wife’s employment with Fusion GPS and seek the appropriate conflict-of-interest waiver, which may have been an important factor in his demotion from associate deputy attorney general late last year.

Under Senate and House questioning, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson consistently failed to disclose Nellie Ohr’s existence as one of his firm’s paid Russian experts, let alone that he hired her for the red-hot DNC/Clinton campaign Trump-Russia project.

Even Christopher Steele may have tried to keep Nellie Ohr “under cover.” Steele, put forth as the “dossier” author ever since its January 2017 publication in BuzzFeed, does not appear to have let on to his many media and political contacts that he had “dossier”-assistance from at least two fellow Fusion GPS Russian experts, Nellie Ohr and Edward Baumgartner. Baumgartner, interestingly, was a Russian history major at Vassar in the 1990s when Nellie Ohr taught Russian history there.

Thus, Nellie Ohr’s exact activities inside one of the great Russian-American disinformation campaigns of all time remain opaque. What most observers don’t realize, though, is that we already have a window onto her thinking through her strongly-etched, ideological view of Soviet history.

This is in contrast to what we know of Steele, aside from his widely reported anti-Trump animus. We may read that Steele was widely known as a “confirmed socialist” while president of the Cambridge Union debating society in 1986; we may see, thirty blank years later, that he chose to break the sensational outlines of his relationship with the FBI and role in its investigation of the Trump campaign in Mother Jones, a media outlet named for a famous American socialist; but Nellie Ohr has a paper trail.

It requires a special degree of mendacity to compare Robert Mueller’s recent indictments to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Only someone desperate to get attention, or to please his new Trump-hating masters at a top news organization, or to improve his name recognition to sell his new book, would be shameless enough to equate one of America’s most horrific attacks to an unproven attempt by a handful of shady Russians to sway votes in a presidential election. One might even feel tempted to pity such a soulless, craven opportunist because, clearly, his brain is broken.

But you can’t feel sorry for Max Boot, the NeverTrump neoconservative whose tirades against the president and the Republican Party just earned him a primo spot in the Washington Post. Instead, you should feel sorry for the families and friends of the 9/11 victims Boot just exploited for clicks.

Boot called the alleged election interference by 13 Russian social-media agitators, “the second-worst foreign attack on America in the past two decades. The Russian subversion of the 2016 election did not, to be sure, kill nearly 3,000 people. But its longer-term impact may be even more corrosive by undermining faith in our democracy.”

Think about that for a moment. Boot, an historian who advocated going to war in Iraq, thinks a few Russian-funded Facebook campaign ads will have a longer-term impact than a massive terrorist attack on U.S. soil that killed 2,977 people, injured more than 6,000, and remains one of the most traumatic events in U.S. history. According to Boot’s logic, a Rooskie ploy to get a few unsavory hashtags trending is worse than the following: Fort Hood (13 dead), San Bernardino (14 dead), Pulse nightclub in Orlando (49 dead), Hudson bike path (eight dead), and Boston marathon (three dead). All because his candidate—Hillary Clinton—lost the election.

I dare Boot to try to persuade the parents of Martin Richard that low-level Twitter chicanery during a presidential election is a more devastating blow to our country than the murder of their child.

Boot went further, blaming Trump for “ignoring” the Russian threat—less than 48 hours after the Mueller indictments were announced. In more 9/11 comparisons, Boot accused the president of “refus[ing] to appoint a commission to study how to safeguard America,” much like the Bush Administration did after the 9/11 attacks. (Fun fact, Mr. Historian: The 9/11 Commission was formed 14 months later.) Nonetheless, Boot lamented how “we are at war without a commander in chief.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for allegedly conspiring to sow confusion in the 2016 presidential election. The chance of extraditing any of the accused from Vladimir Putin’s Russia is zero.

Some of the Russians’ Keystone Cops efforts to disrupt the election favored Donald Trump (as well as Bernie Sanders). Yet Mueller’s team made it clear that the Russians neither colluded with any U.S. citizens nor had any material effect on the election’s outcome.

But from here on out, there will be ironies, paradoxes, and unintended consequences with just about everything Mueller does.

Is it now time to prosecute foreigners for attempting to interfere with a U.S. election? If so, then surely Christopher Steele, the author of the Fusion GPS dossier, is far more culpable and vulnerable than the 13 bumbling Russians.

Steele is not a U.S. citizen. Steele colluded with Russian interests in compiling his lurid dossier about Donald Trump. Steele did not register as a foreign agent. And Steele was paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to find dirt on political rival Trump and his campaign.

In other words, Steele’s position is far worse than that of the Russians for a variety of reasons. One, he is easily extraditable while the Russians are not. Two, his efforts really did affect the race, given that the dossier was systematically leaked to major media and served as a basis for the U.S. government to spy on American citizens. Three, unlike with the Russians, no one disputes that American citizens—Hillary Clinton, members of the Democratic National Committee, and anti-Trump partisan Glenn Simpson and his Fusion GPS team—colluded by paying for Steele’s work.

At West Point, folks are not easily impressed. They’ve seen Grant, Lee, Pershing and Patton, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Abrams, Schwarzkopf and Petraeus. But this week West Point welcomed a new man to its ranks: Peter Wang.

Wang is the 15-year-old freshman gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida by a former schoolmate. Wang might have escaped, but he was killed holding a door for others to flee before him. When the bullets found him, Wang was wearing the uniform of the Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps.

The young man’s goal was to attend West Point and serve as an officer in the U.S. Army. This was not to be. But in his selfless service, West Point recognized a brother. So on Tuesday, the same day young Wang was laid to rest, the academy honored his dream by offering him, posthumously, a letter of acceptance to the West Point Class of 2025.

Wang was one of 17 innocents whose lives were so cruelly taken and whose families are now left bearing the unbearable. Much of the focus is on Nikolas Cruz, the young man who pulled the trigger, and what steps we might take to prevent similar attacks.

That is all worthy and sensible. But the nation also does well to acknowledge the courage we saw that day, whether assistant coach Aaron Feis shielding his students from the bullets with his body, geography teacher Scott Beigel killed as he helped others to safety, or a young man standing his post at an escape. We join West Point in a salute to the newest member of that Long Gray Line, Cadet Peter Wang.