RUTHFULLY YOURS

Newly redacted text messages discovered by congressional investigators reveal that an embattled FBI agent at the center of the Russia investigation controversy was close friends with a District of Columbia judge who recused himself from the criminal case over former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, congressional members said, and text documents show.

The never before seen text messages, which were a part of the texts given to Congress by the Department of Justice, show that FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his paramour FBI attorney Lisa Page discussed Strzok’s relationship with U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras, who presided over a Dec. 1, 2017, hearing where former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Strzok was removed from Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office last year after anti-Trump text messages between him and his FBI agent lover were discovered by the DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz. But on Dec. 7, without warning, Judge Rudolph Contreras was removed as the presiding judge on Flynn’s case. Little information was given at the time as to why Contreras was removed.

“We’re asking the department of justice and the FBI to give us the documents we need to do proper oversight…”
Mark Meadows (R-NC)

DOJ officials did not immediately respond for comment.

In a text message chain from Page to Strzok on July 25, 2016, she writes, “Rudy is on the FISC! Did you know that? Just appointed two months ago.” At that point, the pair continues to discuss other issues but comes back to Contreras, “I did. We talked about it before and after. I need to get together with him.” Then later Strzok appears to return to his discussion about Contreras.

A Democratic lawmaker in Massachusetts adopted the “Me Too” slogan, suggesting that a sign honoring a Civil War hero above the entrance to the Massachusetts State House constitutes an act of sexual harassment.

“R U a ‘General Hooker’? Of course not! Yet the main entrance of the Mass State House says otherwise. #MeToo,” State Rep. Michelle Du Bois (D-Brockton) tweeted Wednesday. She suggested that the #MeToo movement is “not all about rape & harassment but also women’s dignity. A ‘funny’ double entendres misrepresented as respect for a long dead general?”

Friday’s firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, based on a report from the Office of Professional Responsibility, is only the beginning of what is likely to be the most explosive series of revelations in American history.

Forget Watergate. It will be the distant past once the Inspector General’s reports—there apparently will be more than one—start to come out. This will be the “Gate of Gates.”

From the FBI and across the intelligence agencies an astonishing number of people are going to find themselves accused, one can safely predict at this point, of some atrocious behavior in a free republic. And it will not just be the small change of Peter Strzok (the dimwitted director of counter-intelligence) and his gal pal Lisa Page. It will include—on one level or another—James Comey, Loretta Lynch, John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice and, almost inevitably, Barack Obama, not to mention others known and unknown.

All these people’s reputations will be damaged forever for the pathetic purpose of getting Hillary Clinton elected president and later for their determination to manipulate the FBI and intelligence agencies to wound as severely as possible Trump’s presidency. That they didn’t stop to think that they might be wounding America at the same time is extraordinarily selfish and nauseating.

Further, that a Russia collusion investigation was employed by these people for their nefarious purposes is darkly ironic because their technique itself reeks of Stalin’s NKVD.

In the case of Mike Flynn particularly, they worked under the famous dictum of Comrade Beria: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

This is, however, a great day for our country since so many of our citizens have lost confidence in the FBI. This can be the beginning of a new and better FBI.

Democrats, who are all over Twitter at the moment defending McCabe, are making a huge mistake. They will be embarrassed when the details come out. The Office of Professional Responsibility is not a partisan adjunct of the Republican Party or anything close. Furthermore, it was the Democratic Party that called for the Inspector General to investigate. He was appointed by Obama. As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for. CONTINUE AT SITE

Twitter is often the intellectual equivalent of a tavern at 2 a.m., but it has illuminating moments. An example came Friday when Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard populist, offered a hilarious commentary on her proudest political accomplishment—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“I’m giving @MickMulvaneyOMB one last chance to answer my questions about his actions at the @CFPB. If he won’t, he should be called immediately to testify under oath before my colleagues and me on the Senate Banking Committee,” the Senator thundered to her 4.3 million Twitter followers. Mick Mulvaney is the acting head of the CFPB, and it seems he is not suitably attentive to Ms. Warren’s demands.

Like Donald Trump, Ms. Warren might want to let an editor see her tweets before she sends them. Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute quickly responded to Ms. Warren by tweeting, “If only the CFPB had any meaningful accountability to Congress . . .”

Someone get the smelling salts because Ms. Warren is down for the count.

As Mr. Murray and readers of these columns know, Ms. Warren designed the CFPB as an independent agency like no other precisely so it could ignore Congress. The bureau is funded not with an annual appropriation like the rest of the government, but by the Federal Reserve based on a request from the head of the CFPB. Congress thus can’t use its constitutional power of the purse to enforce public accountability.

Unlike other so-called independent agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the CFPB also isn’t composed of a bipartisan set of commissioners. It’s a one man show whose five-year term transcends elections and thus Administrations.

Anyone who follows coverage of racial politics in America will notice how often Asians are elided in opinion surveys, and how often they are portrayed in an incoherent and nakedly instrumental manner. Mother Jones, for instance, emblazoned the headline “Silicon Valley Firms Are Even Whiter and More Male Than You Thought” over a story disclosing that Google’s workforce was 60 percent white (less than the share of white people in the general population) and 34 percent Asian (nearly six times greater than the share of Asians in the general population). Asians aren’t seen as a “real” minority—nobody has them in mind when they speak of minorities, and thus the hiring of many Asians does not count for those in pursuit of “diversity.” This exclusion has been formalized into the bureaucratic euphemism “underrepresented minority,” which means “minorities who are not Asian.”

A lawsuit filed by a white recruiting manager at YouTube last week alleged that the company imposed unlawful quotas for hiring black, Hispanic, and female candidates while ceasing to hire white and Asian males. The quasi-monopolistic tech behemoth is now being sued for discriminating against women, men, conservatives, leftists, and white, and Asian males, even as it is also being sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for failing to turn over data on its diversity numbers. Asian-American advocates took to social media to decry the use of Asian-Americans as a “wedge” against those seeking diversity, yet again adopting the oddly reflexive deference to all such pushes for “diversity” that explicitly intend to increase the number of “underrepresented minorities” at the expense of Asians. Gaze at this pattern of events long enough, and you can glimpse the vulnerability of the system of tense compromises that have structured the American racial compact since the 1990s.

There has always been something faintly ludicrous about the “Asian-American” identity. A survey conducted in 2012 by the Pew Research Institute of the attitudes of the six largest (Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean) of the more than 30 distinct nationalities collected under the umbrella of the “Asian-American” identity found that fewer than 15 percent of respondents considered themselves to be “Asian-Americans.” All races are, to varying degrees, artificial constructs. The “Asian-American” identity is an artificial construct that scarcely anyone claims.

There is no reason to expect otherwise. The term was coined by a handful of Yale College student activists of Chinese and Japanese descent in the 1960s. As immigrants from Asia began to arrive in large numbers in the 1970s, the term came to encompass successive waves of immigrants from a growing list of countries. It became a bureaucratic designation adopted by the government in 1977. No one chose it for themselves. Others applied it to them.

The House Intelligence Committee closed its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, concluding there is “no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.” Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), who led the committee’s probe, said his team interviewed 73 witnesses and reviewed more than 300,000 documents over the past 14 months.

But the media overlooked one damning nugget. The committee report disputes a key finding by President Obama’s intelligence team that Vladimir Putin and his regime “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” According to Conaway, trained analysts examined the underlying documents of the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (which remain classified) and he said “the piece about Putin’s purported preference for Trump, we think, is not supported by the evidence. We disagree with them.”

Then why did the Intelligence Community make that claim? “That [IC review] started in early December and was finished in January, coinciding with an attack on the Trump presidency throughout that timeframe, and seemed to underpin that narrative that somehow Putin had more effect on the election than he should have, and delegitimize the Trump presidency,” Conaway told Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “That was a part of that narrative.”

Translation: Days before Trump’s inauguration, known political operatives—FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper—released a report with the imprimatur of the world’s most powerful intelligence apparatus to bolster the pernicious plotline that Putin helped Trump win the election and was henceforth an illegitimate president.

Considering the shameful post-election conduct by top Obama officials, including Comey and Brennan, and the possibility that Clapper leaked information to the press after he briefed Trump on the IC report, is anyone surprised? How many rats do we have to smell before we fumigate the nest? When will Americans get clear answers, and when will people publicly be held accountable for their role in propagating this ruse?

“It is important that when we refer to gun violence, we do not overlook the impact of police brutality and militarized policing, or see police in schools as a solution. We also recognize the United States has exported gun violence through imperialist foreign policy to destabilize other nations. We raise our voices for action against all these forms of gun violence.”

On the one-month anniversary of the shooting massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students and teachers across the country walked out of school at 10 a.m. Wednesday morning. Spearheaded by the Youth Empower branch of the Women’s March group, the walkout included at least 3,136 events nationwide.

Many demonstrations included 17 minutes of silence — one minute for each person who was killed by gunman Nikolas Cruz, who is in police custody. Prosecutors on Tuesday indicated they would seek the death penalty.

The Women’s March organizers described their impetus for the walkout this way: “We are living in an age where young people like us do not feel safe in our schools. This issue is personal for all of us, especially for those of us who are survivors of gun violence. We are walking out for all people who have experienced gun violence, including systemic forms of gun violence that disproportionately impact teens in black and brown communities.”

They added: “It is important that when we refer to gun violence, we do not overlook the impact of police brutality and militarized policing, or see police in schools as a solution. We also recognize the United States has exported gun violence through imperialist foreign policy to destabilize other nations. We raise our voices for action against all these forms of gun violence.”