RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

A unanimous Supreme Court struck a blow for the plain reading of the law on Wednesday, but a pair of dueling concurrences deserve broader attention for what they say about the different methods of legal interpretation on the High Court today.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the full Court in rebuking the Securities and Exchange Commission for reinterpreting the Dodd-Frank Act despite the clear text of the statute (Digital Realty Trust v. Somers ). Paul Somers sued Digital Realty Trust , claiming protection as a whistleblower for filing a complaint about a securities violation. He might have sued under the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law that protects whistleblowers if they file complaints with the Labor Department within 180 days.

But instead he sued in federal court under Dodd-Frank, which lets whistleblowers who are retaliated against sue and receive double back pay. The problem is that Dodd-Frank defines a whistleblower as someone who provides information about a securities violation to the SEC. Mr. Somers didn’t do that, but the SEC claimed that didn’t matter because Congress intended the law to protect people like Mr. Somers no matter the law’s text.

Citing precedent, Justice Ginsburg rightly wrote that “‘When a statute includes an explicit definition, we must follow that definition,’ even if it varies from a term’s ordinary meaning. This principle resolves the question before us.” She then went on an extended and needless tour of congressional intent that may invite legal mischief down the road.