RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

In movies, novels, music, and art, progressives murder their enemies, including presidents, in myriad ways.We live in a society in which gratuitous violence is the trademark of video games, movies, and popular music. Kill this, shoot that in repugnant detail becomes a race to the visual and spoken bottom.

We have gone from Sam Peckinpah’s realistic portrayal of violent death to a gory ritual of metal ripping flesh, as if it is some sort of macabre ballet. Rap music has institutionalized violence against women and the police — to the tune of billions in profits, largely as a way for suburban kids to find vicarious street authenticity. And this idea of metaphorically cutting, bleeding, or shooting those whom you don’t like without real consequences has seeped into the national political dialogue.

For example, why does popular culture wink and nod at the widespread metaphorical killing of Republican presidents? Liberals used to believe that words mattered and images had consequences; the casual glorification of carnage trivialized violence and only made it more acceptable — and likely.

In 2017, the obsessive hatred of Trump led, for instance, to many obscenities: Madonna told us she dreamed of blowing up the White House, comedian Kathy Griffin posed with a bloody facsimile of Trump’s head, Snoop Dog shot a Trump likeliness in a video, a Shakespearean company ritually stabbed Trump-Caesar every night on stage, Johnny Depp joked, “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president? … It has been a while, and maybe it is time.”

The indictments are in.

Team Mueller indicted a bunch of Russians associated with a troll farm for interfering with an election in the United States. Russian troll farms generally don’t follow United States law. But foreigners are not allowed to interfere with elections in the United States. Unless they’re named Christopher Steele.

The Clinton campaign employed a British foreign agent who used Russian intelligence sources to put together opposition research meant to interfere with the results of a United States election. Collusion between the Clinton campaign, Steele and the Russians doesn’t require an endless fishing expedition.

Foreigners interfering in United States elections are not a new phenomenon. Muslims in Gaza famously ran a phone bank for Obama. A Hamas political adviser had declared that he hoped Obama would win.

There was no investigation. Nor did anyone indict the Gazans running the phone bank.

The indictment states that, “the Federal Election Campaign Act… prohibits foreign nationals from making any contributions, expenditures, independent expenditures, or disbursements for electioneering communications.” But Obama had chosen to accept untraceable donations from abroad. He had failed to ask for proof of citizenship and his website had even allowed donations from Iran and North Korea.

The chair of Nigeria’s stock exchange had organized an “Africans for Obama” fundraiser. The Albanian Socialist Prime Minister had been accused of a scheme to transfer $80,000 to an Obama fundraising committee. Gazans bought and resold Obama t-shirts from the campaign website. And no indictments.

None of that counts as election interference. And none of it generated an investigation of Obama.

Indicting civilians covertly employed by a foreign government to engage in propaganda in the United States is an unserious act. But Obama Inc. responded in the same futile way to Chinese hacking efforts. Responding to cyberwarfare with toothless indictments is not how you head off the next attack.

On Friday night, Dr. Sebastian Gorka gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller some unsolicited advice regarding his ongoing investigation.The former deputy assistant to President Trump and now Fox News contributor insisted that “nothing’s going to happen” as a result of the recent indictments of 13 Russian nationals because they’re already in Russia and “we can’t extradite them.”

Well, Gorka came up with an alternative for the special counsel.

“I’ve got a tip for Robert Mueller,” Gorka said. “Some other people messed with our elections, and they’re right here in America. It’s Hillary Clinton. There’s the DNC. There’s Fusion GPS. And there’s Hillary’s lawyer. They messed with the election. They stole the candidacy from Bernie Sanders and then they gave false information to a FISA court. So Mr. Mueller, if you want to actually put some people in prison, start with the Americans that perverted our election here in America.”

“Well said,” Sean Hannity reacted.

Fox News contributor Sara Carter piled on with the politicization of the Justice Department, citing FBI lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page as well as former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, accusing them of “having an agenda.”

Australian reporters assigned to cover the United States pack their leanings — Left ones, of course — with their socks when they jet off to relay the action in Washington. Either that or they are bone lazy. There is a ripper scandal unfolding on Capitol Hill but explaining it in full has been too much trouble

Any investment of faith in the Australian media’s reporting of events in Washington will not produce a dividend, as must be obvious after more than 12 months of monkey-see/monkey-cut-and-paste dispatches from our less-than-intrepid foreign correspondents. This is perhaps understandable, given the prevailing Left slant of all local newsrooms, especially the ABC and Fairfax. When their journalists leave for stints Stateside they pack their prejudices along with their socks. Having departed Australia imbued with their media colleagues’ prevailing view that Donald Trump is a scoundrel who must surely be impeached, they naturally turn for story ideas, if not enlightenment, to like-minded American outlets. Hence are Australians served served endless “scoops”about Russian chicanery, the First Lady’s alleged emotional estrangement from her husband and what are purported to be his white-supremacist sympathies.

How derelict is the Australian media in covering the US? Just ask yourself how much you have heard or read about, to name but two scandals, the Obama administration’s bugging of troublesome reporters and its weaponisation of the Internal Revenue Service against political opponents. More recently the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s hacked campaign emails always seem to mention the theft without detailing what was stolen. References to “spirit cooking” and the rigging of the primaries against Bernie Sanders don’t fit the narrative of the world’s smartest, most decent, honest and upright woman having been foiled in her ambitions by Russian perfidy don’t fit the narrative, so they get scant attention, if any attention at all.

Fortunately, unlike the bad old days, the internet makes it possible to keep tabs on developments from a distance and circumvent the media’s gatekeepers. Thus, when fallen-silent Fairfax Media correspondent Paul McGeough reports that Trump’s election unleashed a wave of horrific hate crimes, you can use Google to check the veracity of his story’s headline, “Make America hate again: how Donald Trump’s victory has emboldened bigotry “. Were you to cross-reference the litany of alleged assaults against this site, which tracks bogus “hate crimes”, you’ll find all but one or two incidents have been refuted by police. What you won’t find on the web or anywhere else is an Age, SMH or Canberra Times renunciation of the original reporting — an omission that brings me to the point I’d like to make about the current situation in the US, as understood by an interested layman.

As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president — much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either prior political office or military service. As unintended proof of his accomplishments, Trump’s many liberal opponents have gone from initially declaring him an incompetent to warning that he has become effective — insanely so — in overturning the Obama progressive agenda.

Never Trump Republicans acknowledge that Trump has realized much of what they once only dreamed of — from tax reform and deregulation to a government about-face on climate change, the ending of the Obamacare individual mandate, and expansion of energy production.

Trump so far has not enacted the Never Trump nightmare agenda. The U.S. is not leaving NATO. It is not colluding with Vladimir Putin, but maintaining sanctions against Russia and arming Ukrainians. It is not starting a tariff war with China. The administration is not appointing either liberals or incompetents to the federal courts.

A politicized FBI, DOJ, and IRS was Obama’s legacy, not Trump’s doing, as some of the Never Trump circle predicted. Indeed, the Never Trump movement is now mostly calcified, as even some of its formerly staunch adherents concede. It was done in by the Trump record and the monotony of having to redefine a once-welcomed conservative agenda as suddenly unpalatable due to Trump’s crude fingerprints on it.

On the short side, Trump has still not started to build his much-promised border wall, to insist on free but far fairer trade with Asia and Europe, or to enact an infrastructure-rebuilding program. Nonetheless, Trump’s multitude of critics is unable to argue that his record is shoddy and must instead insist that his list of achievements is due mostly to the Republican Congress. Or they claim he is beholden to the legacy of the Obama administration. Or they insist that credit belongs with his own impressive economic and national-security cabinet-level appointments. Or that whatever good came of Trump’s first year is nullified by Trump’s persistent personal odiousness.

At the conclusion of Trump’s first year, the stock market and small-business confidence are at record highs, and consumer confidence has not been higher in 17 years. Trump’s loud campaign promises to lure back capital and industry to the heartland no longer look quixotic, given new tax and deregulatory incentives and far cheaper energy costs than in most of Europe and Japan.

The new year brings many a revisiting of the Hillary Clinton email server case, including one at the hands of the Justice Department inspector general (that’s where all those FBI text messages are coming from), though his inquiry likely defines the matter too narrowly to get at the really important issues.

We should also stress that some kind of a revisiting would bedevil a Clinton administration now if Hillary Clinton had been elected instead of Donald Trump.

Way back in 2014, had Mrs. Clinton returned her “personal” emails and devices to the State Department instead of destroying them, it would have closed matters for most Americans.

After all, the Obama administration knew of and condoned her private server, amounting to an implicit endorsement of her unorthodox handling of classified materials.

But she didn’t, and the administration was not about to prosecute its heir apparent, especially after she became the sole alternative to Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump.

President Obama’s public statements on the case could not have been clearer. He essentially directed his Justice Department that Mrs. Clinton did nothing wrong, as arguably a president is entitled to do.

The part that never made sense was why FBI Director James Comey intervened to do the president’s bidding so the Justice Department wouldn’t have to.

It was unnecessary and improper. Whatever its wisdom, no serious person of either party believes the outcome was anything but predetermined. Mr. Comey simply intruded himself as a more plausible vehicle to carry out the administration’s will on the “matter” than Attorney General Loretta Lynch would have been. That much is clear by applying even the minimalist interpretation to the text messages of his lead investigator on the case, Peter Strozk, as well as other evidence surfaced by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Mr. Comey gave different reasons in public and private for his action. In closed congressional session, he pointed to intercepted Russian intelligence that he said could be used to discredit the Justice Department. That is, he relied on information from one or more U.S. intelligence agencies. It doesn’t tax the imagination to suppose Mr. Comey and fellow intelligence officials were operating on a shared premise that a Clinton presidency was inevitable and needed to be protected from email-related risks.

Since then, Obama intelligence officials have leaked intelligence and planted scurrilous innuendo about Mr. Trump, apparently aimed at giving credibility to the “collusion” narrative and discrediting his victory. But what Mr. Comey did was worse. Again, I’m not saying it was realistic or desirable that Mrs. Clinton be prosecuted, but the choice not to prosecute was a political decision that the Obama administration and Obama Justice Department had a duty to make and to own. CONTINUE AT SITE

Over in the department of futile and stupid gestures, the Senate on Monday voted 81-18 to end the government shutdown that Democrats had insisted on late last week. The politics apparently didn’t turn out to be the winner the Democrats anticipated, so they bailed out and called retreat a victory.

The Senate and House passed a resolution to fund the government through Feb. 8. Both parties will continue to negotiate a deal on the status of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the law-abiding young adults who came to the U.S. as children. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would bring some immigration measure to the floor, and Democrats are calling this a shutdown triumph. But the negotiations were already underway, and President Trump has said he wants a deal to legalize the Dreamers. The shutdown needlessly roiled immigration politics.

Some 15 Democrats plus Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) voted to keep the shutdown going. They include several of the multitude of Democratic presidential aspirants in addition to Mr. Sanders : Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. This crew wants to tout their credentials as fighters for the Dreamers, and they’d rather have a wedge issue than a solution.

Also voting against opening the government were Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah. This is a reminder that the 51-seat GOP majority is really a 49-seat minority given that those two might stage a protest vote at any moment for no useful purpose.