RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump and his administration worked to contain the fallout Tuesday after reports that he disclosed sensitive counterintelligence to Russian officials, with the president himself tweeting that he has the “absolute right” to share such information.

The information that was shared was provided by Israel, according to officials with direct knowledge of the matter.

In a news briefing Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s national-security adviser, Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster, said Mr. Trump’s conversation “was wholly appropriate” but that he believed the leaking of it put national security at risk.

Gen. McMaster wouldn’t discuss whether information Mr. Trump conveyed to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador was classified, but said that the president had “in no way compromised any sources or methods in this conversation.” He said Mr. Trump hadn’t been briefed on the source of the intelligence he discussed.

Earlier Tuesday, Mr. Trump tweeted that he has the “absolute right” as president to share “facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety,” before offering an explanation for why: “Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.”

Later Tuesday, after delivering joint remarks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the White House, Mr. Trump briefly addressed his meeting with Russian officials last week, saying it had been “very, very successful.”

“We’re going to have a lot of great success,” Mr. Trump said. “We want to get as many to help fight terrorism as possible.” He then exited the event. CONTINUE AT SITE

There is so much legal ignorance in the reporting and commentary about the “Russia investigation,” it is hard to keep up. The latest is that we need a special prosecutor because the firing of FBI director James Comey could amount to Watergate-type obstruction of justice.

The claim is half-baked, but I suppose it is an improvement. Up until now, as I pointed out over the weekend, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and the media-Democrat echo chamber agitating for a special prosecutor had forgotten the little matter of . . . a crime. Putting aside all the downsides of a special prosecutor that I have outlined on other occasions (e.g., the constitutional flaws of the arrangement, the fact that a special prosecutor is not actually independent of the president and Justice Department, the reality that a special prosecutor undermines an administration’s capacity to govern . . . ), it is foundational that there must be a crime before a prosecutor is assigned to investigate it.

Even under the 1983 Ethics in Government Act (which lapsed in 1999), Congress required a finding (by the attorney general) that there was information indicating a serious criminal-law violation before the appointment of a special prosecutor (or independent counsel) would be triggered. (See Section 591(a) of Title 28, U.S. Code.) By contrast, Trump detractors have failed to identify any penal-law violation as to which there is a basis to believe President Trump or someone in his campaign may be guilty.

The only criminal offense arising out of the Kremlin interference in the 2016 election is hacking. It is not enough to say there is no evidence that the Trump campaign was complicit in this hacking. We must add that U.S. intelligence agencies have told us who carried it out – Russian intelligence – and have further explained that the Russian scheme targeted both Republicans and Democrats.

So now, at last, we have a gambit to fill this gaping hole in the demand for a special prosecutor: Trump’s dismissal of the FBI director is said to interfere with the FBI’s ongoing Russia investigation; therefore, the theory goes, it could amount to obstruction of justice, a felony. This suggestion is legally and factually specious. It is based (not for the first time) on a misrepresentation of the kind of investigation the FBI is doing.

President Trump’s firing of James Comey revealed strange timing, herky-jerky methods, and bad political optics.

Certainly, in the existential political war that Trump finds himself in, it would have been wiser, first, to have rallied his entire White House team and congressional leaders around the decision and established a shared narrative, to have been magnanimous to the departing James Comey, and to have had obtained private guarantees from a preselected successor that he or she would serve and be appointed within a day or two.

But otherwise the firing was overdue.

The head of the FBI (quite outside his purview as an investigatory official) announced in summer 2016 to the nation that he had decided not to seek an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Then, again in the role of a presumed federal attorney, he seemed to reverse that judgment by reopening his investigation. Then he appeared to re-reverse that decision — all at the height of a heated presidential campaign.

Throughout such a bizarre sequence, Comey stuck to a (flawed) exegesis about the nature of federal statutes in question (intent is not a mitigating circumstance in the felonious insecure transmission of classified federal documents).

Comey de facto had assumed yet another new role in addition to his newfound claims to be both an investigator and a prosecuting federal attorney — that of legislator and judge.

Last summer, the many-headed Comey apparently believed that he would face no consequences for his moth-to-the flame desire for public showmanship — given the widely shared belief that Hillary Clinton was going to be president and that Loretta Lynch would probably continue on as attorney general. (Lynch met privately with Bill Clinton on the tarmac five days before Hillary Clinton’s FBI interview, and, around the same time, Clinton allies said that Hillary was considering retaining Lynch as the attorney general.)

In Comey’s case, in his public and congressional statements, he repeatedly emphasized that he was conducting an ongoing investigation of possible “collusion” between Putin and those who surrounded Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Yet at the same time, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had casually exonerated Trump from just those charges of collaborating with the Russians. Comey may have confirmed that in private to some senators.

In contrast, in the past, Comey had foolishly put some currency in an unsourced and unverified but tawdry and soon-leaked Fusion GPS dossier of supposed Trump sexual antics in Moscow — fake news stories generated, as Comey should have known, by opposition researchers funded first by Republican Never Trump operatives and then by the hit teams of the Clinton campaign.

Yet Comey was uncharacteristically quiet about ongoing disclosures that members of the Obama administration had unmasked names of people surveilled by intelligence agencies. At best, if true, the administration unduly revealed identities and then leaked them to the press; and at worst, it deliberately reverse-targeted political opponents, on the pretext that normal monitoring of Russian officials had, mirabile dictu, caught up Trump associates. Either way, it illegally leaked classified material.

Comey probably understood that keeping silent about FBI inquiries into alleged collusion with the Russians could earn bad enough press to endanger his career. And in the opposite fashion, he seemed to think it was wiser to remain mute about FBI investigations into why and how the administration had surveilled American citizens and then leaked their names to pet reporters.

In the end, Comey’s gymnastics were too clever by half, and he strategized himself out of a job. One of his legacies will be that Hillary Clinton broke the law in using an unsecured server, illegally passed on classified materials, destroyed a great deal of evidence, and participated in Clinton Foundation payola through the cheapening of her position as secretary of state — and got off not just scot-free but outraged that anyone would suggest she should face any consequences whatsoever.

Democrats and their media allies are whipping themselves into a frenzy in their quest to impeach the duly elected 45th president of the United States and drive him from office.

It is part of the Left’s collective mental breakdown. These people still cannot accept that Donald Trump defeated the anointed Hillary Clinton in November so they lash out at the president and his successors, often violently, as we’ve seen in recent months. This Trump Derangement Syndrome allows left-wingers to justify a growing laundry list of antisocial behavior in the furtherance of their goal. The same people pushing Trump’s impeachment sat by silently as Barack Obama, the most despotic, overreaching president since the great proto-fascist Woodrow Wilson, committed impeachable offenses nearly every day.

At the moment, the Left’s ire is focused on Trump’s unexpected decision last week to fire FBI Director James Comey. Trump explained to Comey in a letter that his employment was being terminated based on the recommendation of the Department of Justice. Both Republicans and Democrats had been furious with Comey in recent years because the unelected official inappropriately injected himself and the FBI into political matters. But now Trump’s enemies are claiming his termination of Comey’s employment constitutes obstruction of justice because the FBI is investigating far-fetched allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

This push to end the Trump administration came as MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough made a case for impeaching President Trump. With his new fiancee, co-host Mika Brzezinski at his side, the former Republican congressman from Florida declared in an authoritative-sounding voice that the president admitted he fired FBI Director James Comey last week “to end an investigation against the president and all the president’s men, which is exactly what happened.”

And I’m not being hyperbolic when I say it, if there are articles of impeachment ever drawn up, the first article of impeachment drawn up against Donald Trump will be the first article of impeachment drawn up against Richard Nixon, and that is obstruction of justice. Because I could find you a thousand Republican criminal defense lawyers across America who could say what Donald Trump has admitted already on national television could rise to the level of obstruction of justice.

This isn’t what actually happened even though the media keeps reporting over and over again that the “real” reason the president fired Comey was specifically to thwart an investigation into the Russian conspiracy theory nonsense.

For example, Dylan Matthews wrote a piece at Vox with the bold headline, “Firing James Comey to impede an investigation isn’t smoke. It’s fire.” But the article itself, which compares the circumstances surrounding the near-impeachment of President Richard Nixon, is a real letdown, rife with leaps in logic.

It takes as a given that Trump admitted he fired Comey for a nefarious, corrupt, self-serving purpose, something that is patently untrue. Nor is it clear that Trump violated any law, as Georgetown Law professor Jonathan Turley, an honest leftist, has said.

Matthews writes:

The fact of the matter is that without any more information than we already have, we already know Trump’s conduct is almost as outrageous as what Nixon acknowledged in the smoking gun tape. In Nixon’s case, what crossed the line, moving top leaders from his own party to go to the White House and tell Nixon that his presidency was over, was Nixon’s attempt to hamper the FBI’s investigation into Watergate.

And we know, for a fact, that Trump fired FBI Director James Comey because he was upset by the FBI’s investigation into his Russia ties.

We know that because Trump said so himself. Asked by NBC’s Lester Holt why he fired Comey, Trump replied, “I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.'”

But do we know “for a fact” what Matthews claims we know?

Trump’s comment about Russia came during the NBC interview last week and took the form of one of the president’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness answers. In one two-and-a-half segment in the interview, Holt badgered Trump, interrupting him an astonishing nine times, which surely could not have made it easy for Trump – or anyone – to stay firmly on-topic throughout.

“Look, he’s a showboat,” Trump said of Comey. “He’s a grandstander. The FBI has been in turmoil. You know that, I know that, everybody knows that. You take a look at the FBI a year ago, it was in virtual turmoil — less than a year ago. It hasn’t recovered from that.”

After acknowledging he met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote a detailed legal memo urging Comey’s dismissal, Trump said he accepted Rosenstein’s recommendations but added he was planning to fire Comey anyway.

“Oh, I was going to fire regardless of recommendation,” Trump said.

According to a transcript at Real Clear Politics, the rest of the conversation went like this with Trump jumping around from subject to subject. Part of the transcript is reproduced below so readers can get a sense of just how convoluted the discussion was.