RUTHFULLY YOURS

The federal government is threatening to limit treatment options for doctors fighting cancer. A regulatory decision due Wednesday from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could undermine the care delivered to the more than 1.6 million Americans who are diagnosed with cancer each year.

At issue is whether reimbursements will be available to most physicians, hospitals and patients for a diagnostic technology known as next-generation sequencing. A cornerstone of the emerging field of precision medicine, NGS tests analyze molecular changes that occur in cancerous tumors and show up in biopsies.

To fight tumors, DNA-sequencing-based tests can determine how genes and mutations differ from one patient to the next. NGS tests enable oncologists to prescribe and administer customized, highly targeted drug therapies. The technology limits patients’ exposure to unnecessary toxic drugs and helps doctors make vital treatment decisions. Hundreds of thousands of cancer patients have already received NGS testing.

The proposed new CMS policy would abruptly change the way NGS testing is regulated and administered. It would drastically limit insurance coverage by requiring that tests be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Current NGS tests are conducted at accredited clinical laboratories and premier academic medical centers under strict regulation. They are as accurate and reliable as FDA-approved testing. There is no evidence that restricting reimbursement to FDA-approved tests would improve care.

Under the proposed policy, only one of hundreds of laboratories that currently offer NGS testing would meet all the new reimbursement requirements. The policy would in effect force clinicians and institutions to send all NGS testing to a single vendor, Foundation Medicine .

The House Intelligence Committee on Saturday released the long-awaited Democratic response to allegations the FBI abused its surveillance powers during the 2016 election. Committee Chairman Devin Nunes owes ranking Democrat Adam Schiff a thank you for assisting his case.

The 10-page Democratic memo begins by declaring that “The FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” Yet the facts it lays out show the opposite.

In particular the memo confirms that the FBI used an opposition-research document paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee as part of its application to surveil Carter Page, who was associated with the Donald Trump campaign.

Democrats dispute the degree to which the FBI relied on the dossier created by opposition-researcher Christopher Steele in applying for its FISA court order, but that’s beside the point. If the FBI had as much “compelling evidence” and “probable cause” as the memo asserts, it would not have needed to cite the Steele document. And the Democrats do not dispute that the Steele dossier was the FBI’s only source in its initial FISA application for its allegation that Mr. Page met with suspect Russians in Moscow in July 2016.

The Democratic memo makes no attempt to rebut the widely reported news that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told Congress that the FBI would not have sought a surveillance warrant without the dossier. Democratic Rep. Jim Himes claimed on “Fox News Sunday” that Mr. McCabe never said that, but then why not put that in the memo?

During Wednesday’s horrible fiasco of a “Town Hall”, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel spelled it out:

What I’m asking the law makers to give police all over this country is more power.

I was sufficiently struck by the above to write it down – because it was clear even then that Sheriff Israel is an incompetent deployer of the power he already has. The scale of his department’s appalling failure in the Parkland massacre gets worse almost hourly. I was on air with Tucker Carlson when I heard that Stoneman Douglas High’s on-site “school resource officer” – Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, uniformed, trained and armed – had declined to enter the building and had stayed safely outside until Nikolas Cruz had finished killing everybody.

After a day on supension without pay, Deputy Peterson has now “retired”, which assuredly comes with pay.

But, as I said, it gets worse. Three of his fellow deputies, from Sheriff Israel’s department, then showed up at the school and also decided not to enter the building but to remain crouched behind their vehicles until the shooting had stopped:

When Coral Springs police officers arrived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14 in the midst of the school shooting crisis, many officers were surprised to find not only that Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, the armed school resource officer, had not entered the building, but that three other Broward County Sheriff’s deputies were also outside the school and had not entered, Coral Springs sources tell CNN. The deputies had their pistols drawn and were behind their vehicles, the sources said, and not one of them had gone into the school.

With direction from the Broward deputies who were outside, Coral Springs police soon entered the building where the shooter was. New Broward County Sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene, and two of those deputies and an officer from Sunrise, Florida, joined the Coral Springs police as they went into the building.

By my arithmetic, that sounds like at least seven of Sheriff Israel’s deputies were at the school, but only two entered the building. Still, it seems to be a crackerjack police department in terms of response time: They’re first on the scene – and then they just sit back and watch at a safe distance. Or as Dr Jesse Kelly tweets:

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“There’s someone breaking into my house. Could you send the Broward County Sheriff’s Department to water my garden while I kill the intruder?”

Mueller scours Team Trump for Russian collusion as Dems marinate in it

Special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigators resemble axe-wielding firefighters frantically stomping through a house and not finding so much as a lit birthday candle. Meanwhile, the home next door burns to the basement.

Team Mueller’s never-ending hunt for reds in October 2016 has found zero evidence of Russian collusion among Team Trump. In contrast, Russian collusion among Democrats has been as hard to miss as a California wildfire. And yet they still miss it.

Team Mueller did find Russian interference in the 2016 election — and how! The February 16 announcement of federal criminal indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies was a Cold War flashback. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told journalists that Russians close to the Kremlin infiltrated the last presidential campaign “to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy.”

But Rosenstein threw a bucket of wet sand onto the Left’s simmering narrative that DJT = KGB. The Russian meddling began in 2014, well before Donald J. Trump’s campaign commenced. The Russians promoted Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s Democratic-primary bid and Green-party nominee Jill Stein’s general-election effort. After Trump won, the Russians organized pro-Trump and anti-Trump demonstrations, once in New York City on the same day. They also staged an anti-Trump rally in Charlotte.

Furthermore, Rosenstein said, “There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity.” Thus far, anyone on Team Trump who might have worked with Russians did so after being hoodwinked, not due to treason — as Democrats have shouted for more than a year.

Also, none of this should comfort Hillary Clinton. Rosenstein said: “There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.” So, rather than blame Russia for her epic fail, Hillary finally should concede that she lost a mismanaged campaign that barely visited Michigan and avoided Wisconsin as if it had been quarantined.

Mueller may be seeking to defend at least the investigative decisions made by the FBI and the Justice Department, institutions he served for many years.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been a busy fellow for the past week. Rapid fire, his indictment of several Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 election has been followed by a guilty plea, for lying to investigators, from a lawyer tied to Trump-campaign figures Paul Manafort and Richard Gates; a new indictment against Manafort and Gates that, as anticipated, added tax- and bank-fraud charges (in Virginia) to already existing money-laundering charges (in Washington); and finally, just breaking as this is written, a guilty plea from Gates on charges of defrauding the United States and lying to the FBI.

As President Trump’s champions emphasize, what is most notable about this array of allegations is an omission: Nowhere has the special counsel charged any kind of criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Of course, “collusion with Russia” was the suspicion — or, skeptics would counter, the carefully crafted political narrative — that launched the Mueller investigation. So has the collusion theory been abandoned? Is the fundamental rationale for the Justice Department’s appointment of a special counsel, which has addled the Trump administration for seven months, now a big “Never mind”?

I don’t think so. At least, I don’t think that’s the way Mueller is looking at it.

To be sure, not only is there no “collusion” allegation in the new indictments; the Trump campaign is barely mentioned. It has no ostensible relevance to the charges against Manafort, Gates, and the lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan. To the limited extent that the campaign is mentioned in the indictment against the Russian nationals, any contacts that campaign officials had with Russians are said to have been unwitting. That fact would seem to cut sharply against the notion of collusion, for had there been a collusive Trump–Russia relationship, there would have been no need for Russian operatives to dupe Trump-campaign officials.

Add to the mix the other charges Mueller has filed against Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, who have pled guilty. In neither instance did Mueller allege any kind of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime. Both defendants served the campaign, and both had contacts with apparent Putin-regime operatives (the Russian ambassador in Flynn’s case, more-shadowy figures claiming regime ties in Papadopoulos’s). Yet Mueller permitted each defendant to resolve the case by pleading guilty to a single count of making false statements to the FBI — a mere process crime, and one that, by branding them as liars, would undermine their effectiveness as cooperating witnesses if there were any eventual “collusion” case against other campaign figures. Again, this cuts against the idea that Mueller is contemplating a collusion case.

At the very least, I believe, Mueller intends to illustrate that he showed appalling judgment in putting his campaign in the hands of Manafort and Gates, who were up to their necks in collusion with agents of Putin’s regime.