‘Future Pres’ Hillary — the Font of all the Scandals

By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/clinton-email-investigators-broke-rules-to-please-hillary/

June 19, 2018

James Comey, Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch

Review the Clinton email scandal, the Steele dossier, the insertion of at least one FBI informant into the Trump campaign, the misleading of the FISA court by FBI and DOJ officials intent on monitoring U.S. citizens, and, now, the inspector general’s report. There emerges a common denominator: the surety by all involved that Hillary Clinton would be president, and the need to prepare for that fact.

Examine the IG’s transcript of a random, pre-election series of electronic chitchat between high-ranking FBI employees:

15:07:41, Agent 1: “ . . . I’m done interviewing the President — then type the 302. 18 hour day . . . ”

15:13:32, FBI Employee: “you interviewed the president?”

15:17:09, Agent 1: “you know — HRC” [Hillary Rodham Clinton]

15:17:18, Agent 1: “future pres”

15:17:22, Agent 1: “Trump cant win”

“Trump can’t win” explains the salty language also of the Page-Strzok text trove, where the two paramours talk of Trump supporters that they “can smell” and an “insurance” plan to preclude Trump’s nearly nonexistent chances. (“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration . . . that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”)

Perhaps the most iconic example of deep-state bias was the following Page-Strzok exchange:

Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”

Strzok: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

When high-career FBI and DOJ officers go on to refer to American voters as smelly, “retarded,” ignorant, and feces (easily trumping Hillary’s own “deplorables” and “irredeemables” and Obama’s “clingers”), they do so because they assume their candor to each other will earn rewards rather than punishments. More generally, they count on their illegal and unethical behavior becoming known and thus résumé points rather than grounds for later firing and jail.

In such an incestuous Washington world, one presidential candidate, an abject outsider and sure loser, was a hopeless “idiot,” ”loathsome,” a ”menace” and a “disaster.” In contrast, as another (unnamed) FBI agent boasted to a female counterpart, “I’m . . . with her.” What he meant was not so much that he was obviously a Clinton partisan and a would-be born-again feminist, but rather that he was a partisan of someone who was going to shortly be president, and that he was an enemy of one who would pay a big price for his eccentric and uncouth bid.

So recalibrate the following questions:

Why would a seasoned careerist like Andrew McCabe allow his spouse to receive nearly $700,000 in campaign donations from Clinton-affiliated organizations, only later to become a chief investigator of the Clinton email scandal, or why would he so clumsily leak to the press and lie about it afterwards? Easy answer: He wisely played the odds and knew that his future FBI ascendency was assured, given that he had helped exonerate the soon-to-be president, Hillary Clinton. His only rub would be competing with other post-election sycophants who would all be vying for President Clinton’s patronage, each claiming that his own particular improper, illegal, or unethical behavior trumped that of the others.

Why would Loretta Lynch endanger her reputation with an adolescent stunt like agreeing to a weird jet-plane meeting on an Arizona tarmac with the old conniving schmoozer Bill Clinton? (What are the odds that two friends accidentally bump into each other in charter jets at the same time at one of the nation’s roughly 5,000 airports?) Answer? Such a concession was not entirely adolescent by Lynch’s savvy calculations. Not only was her improper behavior unlikely to become publicized; far more important, the Clintons, once Hillary was elected, would probably have either retained Lynch as AG or promoted her to the Supreme Court as a careerist reward for noble service rendered. We can imagine that Lynch would have reported to President Hillary that she had forced Comey to drop the word “investigation” and only with a wink and nod had “recused” herself from an investigation that she intended would lead to only one result.

Why would the last boy scout James Comey, in clumsy fashion, reinterpret a federal statute about handling classified communications so that it would suddenly include “intent” as a newly invented criterion for being found in violation of the law? Why, as investigator and prosecuting attorney, would he shut down, open up, and then shut down his investigation of Clinton at the height of the election season? Why would he for so long ignore the Wiener laptop evidence?

Comey later himself answered those questions by his admission that he assumed Clinton would be president. As he stated, he thought his (Potemkin) investigation would give her legitimacy after her exoneration.

A losing Hillary Clinton may now be mad at Comey, but that is only because the deep-state pollsters’ sure 90 percent odds of her winning proved laughable. Had she won, Hillary probably would at least have listened to Comey as he pleaded that his exoneration of her email impropriety and the way in which he had assigned partisans to her case were proof — along with her victory — that he deserved praise and rewards, not firing. Comey’s 2016 calculus was always that Clinton had likely done something wrong but would be president, while Trump probably had not broken the law but certainly would not be elected.

Why would Hillary, John Podesta and the DNC be so childish as to hire the likes of a reckless egotist Christopher Steele who would leave a paper trial with their fingerprints over his bought fantasies and fabrications? Again, a President Hillary would probably soon have appreciated such slavish service. And more significantly, as a sure winner, she would have thought such dirt would help subject the pathetic loser Trump to a legal morass in his post-election bitter isolation. Who knows, Hillary might have cackled to her gang that their neat oppo-research file reminded her of her own cattle-futures gambit or the mysterious vaporization and reincarnation of the Rose Law Firm files.

Why would professionals such as the omnipresent Rod Rosenstein and the proper Sally Yates sign on to juvenile FISA-court requests for surveillance that were obviously misleading, if not constituting some sort of felonious obstruction of justice by deluding the court about the nature of the Steele dossier? (The application failed to disclose that the dossier was unverified, that the FBI had fired Steele for improper leaking, that the dossier itself was the source of circular “corroborating” news stories, and that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.)

Answer? Again, Yates, Rosenstein, and Comey, along with other signatories of FISA requests, would now be rewarded with tenure and/or promotions for noble service to the cause. Bill might have guffawed that it all reminded him of the Marc Rich pardon caper or the minor inconvenience of being disbarred.

Why would supposed intelligence pros like Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper stoop to traffic in the Steele dossier, and in Comey’s case, even become a party to inserting at least one informant into an ongoing political campaign?

Lots of answers. One, Trump’s was not a political campaign, but rather a sure losing political campaign. Two, Trump himself would not just go down to defeat, but was likely to be ruined after the election as he experienced a Manafort-like fate of endless leaked negative stories in the media, a litany of made-up charges designed to have him plea-bargain to a felony or two, and millions in never-ending legal fees. Three, nothing in the past of either Brennan or Comey, both of whom had previously lied with impunity and while under oath to Congress, gave them any reason to fear any legal consequences for either unethical or illegal behavior. Again, in careerist terms, their behavior was logical; what was abjectly illogical was that Trump won.

Why would supposed progressive humanitarians and civil libertarians such as Susan Rice and Samantha Power request unmasking of hundreds of American citizens and somehow expect such unredacted names to reappear in dark contexts right before the 2016 election? Aside from the fact that neither Rice nor Power is a humanitarian or a civil libertarian, such behavior would springboard a rapprochement with the Clintons. Service beyond the call of duty, indeed, even risking criminal exposure through leaking unmasked but still classified names, could not be ignored even by a vindictive Hillary Clinton, who had prior reason to distrust both.

What then would be stupid in careerist terms? Had James Comey and the Obama DOJ run their investigation of Hillary Clinton the same way that Robert Mueller is currently conducting his hounding of Donald Trump, or had Robert Mueller conducted a post-election, Comey-like faux inquiry into Donald Trump, it would be the epitome of administrative-state stupidity.

It is tiring to hear sermons about the integrity of the FBI and DOJ, as if their elite leadership in Washington has no more influence over an organization than a general does over his army. Of course, the vast majority of employees in the field are both competent and just. But too many of their Washington leaders see themselves in grandiose terms, as subject to no law other than the demands of their own egos.

That same mindset of exemption explains why Mueller did not disclose to the public immediately why he removed Page and Strzok from his investigation, and why their staggered and initially clandestine departures were in fact related. And why, too, Andrew Weissmann, Jeannie Rhee, and Aaron Zebley were seen to have no possible conflict of interests even though one of them was not shy about his earlier disdain for Trump and his enthusiasm for Clinton, while the other two had either in the past defended a Clinton aide or the Clinton Foundation. Again, the way the orthodox state works is that the mere suggestion that such progressive attorneys have conflicts of interests is branded heresy and earns outrage — but never alters the fact that they do in fact have real ethical conflicts.

The problem with all the current scandals is that half the country, including the half that runs the media and the administrative state, thinks that any means are justified to achieve the ethical and noble end of aborting Donald’ Trump’s presidency. What one half of the country sees as unethical behavior is assumed by blue America to be noble service beyond the call of duty. When a Page or Strzok or Andrew McCabe broke protocols and likely the law, 50 percent of the population saw something like James Comey’s version of a “higher duty.”

For all the investigations and IG reports, for all the revelations of scandals and wrongdoing, there will probably in the end be little consequence, simply because to those who matter, such illegality is seen as nobility. Many at the highest echelons of the FBI and DOJ broke laws. But Trump broke a far higher and far more important unwritten law — one forbidding any presidential candidate and future president to be and act like Donald J. Trump.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. @vdhanson

Media Dishonesty on Immigration Contributes to Gridlock

By BEN SHAPIRO
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/immigration-debate-family-separation-media-coverage-misleading/
June 19, 2018

The illegal-immigration issue has always been one fraught with politicking. We always hear the same refrain from both sides: that people are suffering and living in the shadows; that we must find a solution for them as well as a way to solidify our border security. And yet nothing ever gets done.

The impression of some in the press seems to be that nothing gets done because of a lack of public pressure. If only they could somehow jar American sensibilities into solving this problem once and for all!

Certainly, that’s the motivation that lies behind the sudden media enthusiasm for covering the phenomenon of Immigration and Customs Enforcement separating children from their illegal-immigrant parents at the border. For the last week, the attention has been nearly wall-to-wall — and the moral preening has hit an all-time apex. MSNBC is now analyzing Biblical verses while asking, “What Would Jesus Do?” (Does this mean Trump has finally won the War on Christmas?) Chuck Todd of NBC News is accusing Republicans of holding kids “hostage.” Media members are breaking land-speed records to rush down to the border in order to shout their outrage over the holding pens in which the authorities are holding small children.

Presumably, all of this is designed to effectuate change.

Instead, it achieves precisely the opposite.

That’s because the media coverage of the illegal-immigration issue has always been shot through with emotionally manipulative falsehoods. In this case, that manipulation has been particularly extreme.

We’ve heard that the Trump administration has heartlessly sought to rip toddlers from the arms of their weeping mothers in order to punish illegal-immigrant parents who are merely seeking asylum. But the truth is more complex: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that even accompanied immigrant minors must be released from custody within 20 days. That means that if their parents do not arrive at a point of entry to claim asylum, and instead violate the law by crossing the border illegally, they will be arrested — and their children must then be separated from them by the working of the law. The only possible solution, without a change to the law itself, would involve releasing illegal-immigrant parents along with their children into the general population.

We’ve also heard about the terrible living conditions in the holding centers for these children. Likely, some of that is true — although the stories from various sources conflict. But those facilities were overburdened for years before Trump took office; in fact, the media covered these same facilities and pointed out the problems therein during the Obama administration. In other words, this isn’t a Trumpian attempt to dump kids in hellholes. It’s a longtime problem that has yet to be solved.

In reality, all of this could be solved with simple legislation. The House of Representatives is actually set to take up the issue of family separation in both versions of the immigration bill being presented in the House. But Democrats probably won’t sign on to either bill — and it’s unlikely they’d even sign onto an independent piece of legislation designed to allow children to stay with their illegal-immigrant parents until their cases can be adjudicated. That’s because thanks to biased media coverage — and, in some cases, outright falsehoods — Democrats are winning the public-relations war. The longer the Democrats prevent a solution from arising, the more they gain in the public-opinion polls. So they have little incentive to come to the table around an immigration solution — their better political option remains to wait Trump out and let the press inflict damage on him. There’s a reason every Republican attempt at immigration reform has stalled out over the past two decades — and there’s a reason Democrats have celebrated every time they have. There’s also a reason that Democrats with unified control of the presidency and Congress attempted no serious immigration reform. Better to let the problem fester for political gain than to attempt to solve it.

If the media truly wished to contribute to a solution, all they’d have to do is cover the issue honestly. Yes, Trump is enforcing the laws against crossing the border illegally more harshly than the Obama administration did. But he didn’t create the separation policy. Yes, Trump has spoken with great passion in favor of stronger border controls. But he’s also offered a bigger amnesty for so-called DREAMers than even Barack Obama did.

Instead of using truth as a guide, however, the press continue to suggest that base animus animates conservative feelings on immigration. This leads to a political prisoner’s dilemma in which everyone’s best option is stasis: Republicans are best off doing nothing, since they’ll earn nothing but scorn for any action they take from the press anyway, as well as the undying enmity of many in their base; Democrats are best off doing nothing, since they can count on the press to clock Republicans for any immigration failures. The only ones who lose out are the American people.

Mark Steyn on Hillary's flip-flop on illegal immigration

The Truth about Separating Kids

By Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/illegal-immigration-enforcement-separating-kids-at-border/

May 28, 2018

U.S. Border Patrol agents with illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border near McAllen, Texas, May 9, 2018. (Loren Elliott/Rueters)

The latest furor over Trump immigration policy involves the separation of children from parents at the border.

As usual, the outrage obscures more than it illuminates, so it’s worth walking through what’s happening here.

For the longest time, illegal immigration was driven by single males from Mexico. Over the last decade, the flow has shifted to women, children, and family units from Central America. This poses challenges we haven’t confronted before and has made what once were relatively minor wrinkles in the law loom very large.

The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.

It's the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)

When a migrant is prosecuted for illegal entry, he or she is taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. In no circumstance anywhere in the U.S. do the marshals care for the children of people they take into custody. The child is taken into the custody of HHS, who cares for them at temporary shelters.

The criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.

If the adult then wants to go home, in keeping with the expedited order of removal that is issued as a matter of course, it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.

Where it becomes much more of an issue is if the adult files an asylum claim. In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children.

That’s because of something called the Flores Consent Decree from 1997. It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.

The clock ticking on the time the government can hold a child will almost always run out before an asylum claim is settled. The migrant is allowed ten days to seek an attorney, and there may be continuances or other complications.

This creates the choice of either releasing the adults and children together into the country pending the ajudication of the asylum claim, or holding the adults and releasing the children. If the adult is held, HHS places the child with a responsible party in the U.S., ideally a relative (migrants are likely to have family and friends here).

Even if Flores didn’t exist, the government would be very constrained in how many family units it can accommodate. ICE has only about 3,000 family spaces in shelters. It is also limited in its overall space at the border, which is overwhelmed by the ongoing influx. This means that — whatever the Trump administration would prefer to do — many adults are still swiftly released.

Why try to hold adults at all? First of all, if an asylum-seeker is detained, it means that the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again once he or she is in the country are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.

A few points about all this:

1) Family units can go home quickly. The option that both honors our laws and keeps family units together is a swift return home after prosecution. But immigrant advocates hate it because they want the migrants to stay in the United States. How you view this question will depend a lot on how you view the motivation of the migrants (and how seriously you take our laws and our border).

2) There’s a better way to claim asylum. Every indication is that the migrant flow to the United States is discretionary. It nearly dried up at the beginning of the Trump administration when migrants believed that they had no chance of getting into the United States. Now, it is going in earnest again because the message got out that, despite the rhetoric, the policy at the border hasn’t changed. This strongly suggests that the flow overwhelmingly consists of economic migrants who would prefer to live in the United States, rather than victims of persecution in their home country who have no option but to get out.

Even if a migrant does have a credible fear of persecution, there is a legitimate way to pursue that claim, and it does not involve entering the United States illegally. First, such people should make their asylum claim in the first country where they feel safe, i.e., Mexico or some other country they are traversing to get here. Second, if for some reason they are threatened everywhere but the United States, they should show up at a port of entry and make their claim there rather than crossing the border illegally.

3) There is a significant moral cost to not enforcing the border. There is obviously a moral cost to separating a parent from a child and almost everyone would prefer not to do it. But, under current policy and with the current resources, the only practical alternative is letting family units who show up at the border live in the country for the duration. Not only does this make a mockery of our laws, it creates an incentive for people to keep bringing children with them.

Needless to say, children should not be making this journey that is fraught with peril. But there is now a premium on bringing children because of how we have handled these cases. They are considered chits.

In April, the New York Times reported:

Some migrants have admitted they brought their children not only to remove them from danger in such places as Central America and Africa, but because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner.

Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing.

According to azcentral.com, it is “common to have parents entrust their children to a smuggler as a favor or for profit.”

If someone is determined to come here illegally, the decent and safest thing would be to leave the child at home with a relative and send money back home. Because we favor family units over single adults, we are creating an incentive to do the opposite and use children to cut deals with smugglers.

4) Congress can fix this. Congress can change the rules so the Flores consent decree will no longer apply, and it can appropriate more money for family shelters at the border. This is an obvious thing to do that would eliminate the tension between enforcing our laws and keeping family units together. The Trump administration is throwing as many resources as it can at the border to expedite the process, and it desperately wants the Flores consent decree reversed. Despite some mixed messages, if the administration had its druthers, family units would be kept together and their cases settled quickly.

The missing piece here is Congress, but little outrage will be directed at it, and probably nothing will be done. And so our perverse system will remain in place and the crisis at the border will rumble on.

MORE IN IMMIGRATION

Progressives, Stop Comparing Immigrants to Gang Members, It’s Offensive

The Smear Campaign against Ronald Mortensen

The Anti-Trump Media’s ‘Missing Kids’ Myth

Anecdotes and Stereotypes Shouldn’t Dictate Our Immigration Policy

Crime and Punishment

By Conrad Black

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/17/crime-and-punishment/

June 17, 2018

James Comey, Barack Obama, Robert Mueller

The Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s unsecured personal email server laid bare a widespread pattern of conduct that “cast a cloud” over the FBI. The report incites the inference that the Bureau is a severely corrupted organization, tainted and warped by unconstitutional ambitions to meddle in electoral matters.

Although Inspector General Michael Horowitz asserted he lacked “documentary and testamentary evidence” to prove political bias ruled in making decisions of great political consequence, clearly he did not mean bias was not present. On what the report presented, it is almost certain that the FBI, at the deliberate direction of its leaders and senior Justice Department officials, intervened completely improperly in political matters. The inspector general led the country to the edge of the decision, and will presumably make a number of criminal referrals for possible indictments, as he did after his initial report.

Horowitz is not a prosecutor. But he recorded extreme anti-Trump bias in many people and on many occasions. The presence of Peter Strzok as head of the FBI Clinton whitewash operation, jumping at once to take over the effort to tie Trump to Russia so as to rig the presidential election (though he acknowledged “there is no there there”), and then on to lead Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of Trump, is scandalous. At mid-point in the circuit, Strzok assures his Justice Department paramour Lisa Page, “We will stop him” (Trump). This makes Horowitz’s pious attachment to inconclusiveness very tenuous.

Former FBI Director James Comey emerges as a psychopath incapable of telling fact from fiction, himself guilty of possible criminal misuse of emails, as well as likely obstruction of justice, untruthful answers to Congress under oath, theft of government property, illegal leaks, and in Horowitz’s words, “usurping” the authority of the attorney general and deputy attorney general, “serious improprieties and errors of judgment,” and severe breach of Bureau practices and policies for “unpersuasive” reasons. He is completely disgraced and is on the low road to indictment.

Comey and his counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, when he was a prosecutor, never accorded any mercy to those whom they gleefully prosecuted, (such as Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, and me), and it will be a fine divertissement to see how they do when their turn comes to face the lawless rogue monster of American criminal justice. Retaining proportionality, there will be some resemblance to the fate of Robespierre’s chief prosecutor under the Committee of Public Safety, Fouquier-Tinville, and Stalin’s police ministers, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria: all were executed when the political currents shifted.

Revelations About Obama

We also learn for the first time that that President Obama was not, as he has claimed, unaware of Secretary Clinton’s illegal email activity, which, Horowitz also confirms, gave “foreign actors” access to unknowable quantities of classified material—a major security breach. There is little doubt that President Obama and his attorney general, Loretta Lynch, and her deputy Sally Yates, were complicit in the harassment of the Trump campaign, including the implantation of informers within the campaign, the surveillance of the campaign through telephone intercepts and other means under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant requested from a court under a false pretext of treating the Steele dossier, a farrago of lies and defamations commissioned by the Clinton campaign, as an objective product of respectable impartial, professional intelligence gathering with no hint of its origins or methods or purpose.   

Comey inherited the FBI from Robert Mueller, who must have inculcated the initial ethos of omnipotence and infallibility. Horowitz reveals many instances of the tangible corruption of FBI agents by interested parties in investigations, and of contact between agents and the media so frequent that it is impossible to identify the principal suspects in the Niagara of illegal leaks the FBI’s agents have committed. Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who has already been referred for possible criminal indictment, got around to recusing himself on the Clinton “matter” a week before the 2016 election, after a Clinton ally had given McCabe’s wife’s Virginia state senate campaign almost $800,000 while McCabe was leading the soft-pointed investigation of Mrs. Clinton.

Somebody serious, meaning no one now in sight in the Justice Department, is going to have to come to grips with the role of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in all this. Obviously, Clinton lied to federal officers. It is inconceivable that Obama did not know a legally damaging amount about this appalling skullduggery. The country needs the truth.

Though Horowitz wasn’t looking at the intelligence agencies, the coordinated law-breaking and perjury of senior officials, almost certainly including the former directors of the FBI, CIA (John Brennan), and the Office of National Intelligence (James Clapper), has to be addressed, starting with their frequent lies to Congress, and apparent participation in a plan with Comey to mislead the president-elect about the Steele dossier. All of this is so far from passing a smell test, no person of normal olfactory sensibilities could inhale through their nostrils while being exposed to it.

We cannot wait for the Horowitz molasses to run for another 18 months—as it did to produce this report—to get to the bottom of the partisan Russian probe, the infamous Steele dossier and the apparent manipulation of the FISA court, a serious crime. The Democrats are trying to run out the clock, and the macabre farce noire of Mueller’s investigation, which returns every few months to launch another feeble assault on Paul Manafort for reasons having nothing to do with its ostensible purpose (Trump-Russian collusion), must not continue ad nauseam et infinitum.

The well-tried Democratic dirty tricks operation is doing its best, one last time, with a contemporaneous spurious civil lawsuit against the Trump Foundation, from the Spitzer-Cuomo-Schneiderman-Underwood legal sewer of the attorney general of New York. The wax-works official Democratic leadership—Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and their claque—are trying to spin the report as inconclusive and maintain that Comey was more helpful to Trump than to Clinton. The reaction of the new FBI director, Christopher Wray, promising to implement Horowitz’s recommendations and acknowledging errors “in hindsight,” was completely unacceptable. He should have been wearing short pants and a Yogi Bear hat as he promised to “teach” his 35,000 agents to avoid political bias.

The Washington Sleaze Factory Needs to be Upended

The old Washington sleaze factory is talking to itself. We are between the lightning and the thunder and the country cannot tolerate this level of sanctimonious, institutionalized corruption any longer.

It’s now or never for the pitiful, self-emasculated Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He must name a special counsel to get to the bottom of the origins and development of the Russian investigation, while Mueller is ordered to make an interim report, show cause why he should be allowed to continue at all, and if so, his staff must be purged of known political partisans. Its origins and functioning have been arrogantly unprofessional and they are not close to anything relevant to the non-existent Trump-Russia relationship. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is compromised by approving the renewal of an illegal FISA warrant, stonewalling Congress, and buckling to Comey in appointing Mueller right after Comey was fired (on Rosenstein’s recommendation).  

Nothing in any of these investigations raises the slightest questions about the probity of the conduct of Donald Trump, who has been the victim of Clintonian chicanery, Sessions’ impotence, and a historic media smear campaign. The president must require the public revelation of all relevant documentation, redacting only what an independent unquestionable source identifies as necessary to keep secret for reasons of the safety of an agent or human asset or national security. Then let the people judge in November.

If Sessions or Rosenstein won’t appoint a new special counsel with a proper mandate and impose reasonable guidelines on Mueller, they should be sacked and the solicitor general, Noel Francisco, should be ordered to do what his superiors have failed to do, pending senatorial approval of replacements.

If Clinton had won, as the leaders of the Justice Department assumed and passionately hoped and tried to assure, none of this would have come to light. If they had just allowed Donald Trump a decent honeymoon, as every other incoming president receives, he would not have overturned the rocks and it all would have slipped into the past. But in confecting and promoting the monstrous fraud of Trump-Russian collusion, they tried, first to subvert a presidential election and then to overturn the result of one. What occurred was a massive criminal assault on the Constitution. The tumor has been ripped open and now it must be excised.

Despite Horowitz’s partial disclaimer, he has almost certainly proved that political bias perverted the administration of justice. Those responsible and complicit must be indicted, convicted, and punished, with the same severity they have shown to their often guiltless victims.

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.

Loyalty to Self

The Horowitz report demonstrates that there are no limits to James Comey’s hypocrisy and self-regard.

By Judith Miller

https://www.city-journal.org/html/loyalty-self-15974.html

June 15, 2018

James Comey and Loretta Lynch

The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General’s long-awaited report found no explicit political agenda or motivation for former FBI director James Comey’s “extraordinary” violations of FBI and DOJ rules, regulations, policies, and procedures. Nor did the 568-page report challenge Comey’s decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email in handling secret information while serving as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. “We found no evidence that the conclusions by department prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations,” concluded Michael Horowitz, the independent-minded inspector general, after reviewing 1.2 million documents and interviewing more than 100 witnesses.

The report is silent on what motivated Comey’s stunning errors of judgment in breaking with longstanding policy by publicly discussing his investigation into Clinton’s handling of secret government information. But while the report does not address his personal motivation, it devastates the decisions and actions Comey has tried for months to defend—in congressional testimony, a bestselling book, and a much publicized book  tour in which he has accused President Donald Trump of violating the Constitution, American law, and being unfit for office.

“Insubordinate” is what the report calls Comey’s disregard of the FBI’s and the Justice Department’s “established procedures and norms” and his repeated preference for his “own subjective, ad hoc decision-making.” The inspector general’s verdict on that conduct affirms Trump’s decision to fire Comey, and is likely to haunt the former FBI director for the rest of his professional life. And it should.

The weighty report’s point-by-point criticism of Comey’s deviation from rules and procedures suggests a motivation. So, too, does the title of his own account of life in the law enforcement trenches—A Higher Loyalty. In his book, Comey emerges not so much as he portrays himself—a courageous defender of truth and embodiment of judicial virtue—but as a man consumed by self-righteousness. Department of Justice rules and policies may dictate that prosecutors who decline to bring an indictment against a target remain silent as to the reasons, but Comey decided that the American people were entitled to his opinion of Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business as “exceedingly reckless.” Never mind that the report discloses something he must have known while writing his self-serving non mea culpa—that Comey himself frequently used his own personal email and laptops to conduct official business.

Comey not only publicly discussed the politically explosive investigation’s conclusions in contravention of Justice Department norms; he also decided not to consult with senior Justice Department officials about his decision or tell his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, that he had decided to speak publicly about it. “We found that Comey largely based his decisions on what he believed was in the FBI’s institutional interests and would enable him to continue to effectively lead the FBI as its Director,” Horowitz wrote. Comey alone would decide what information about investigations the American people were entitled to know.

Comey made a regular practice of leaking classified information to the press through friends and associates, thus maintaining his own ostensible aloofness from the media fray. He oversaw an agency where top officials spoke of derailing Trump’s candidacy, and where FBI employees were feted by members of the press, who gave them tickets and treated them to golf outings. Comey was told by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch to refer to the Clinton email probe as a “matter,” thereby downplaying it, and he complied; the fact that his bizarre choices about announcing the various reopenings of the investigation may have redounded to Trump’s benefit does not detract from his willingness to follow in this case a seemingly politically motivated order.

Now more social-media savvy, Comey had a gracious, measured response to the inspector general’s attack on his conduct. While he disagreed with some of the inspector general’s “reasonable” conclusions, he tweeted, he respected the office and prayed that no FBI director would ever again face such an “unprecedented situation.” Comey clearly remains focused on his own image. The Horowitz report’s revelations, though, will surely undermine Comey’s standing as a credible witness for Robert Mueller, should the special prosecutor try to bring charges against President Trump or his senior campaign aides in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Comey is isolated: he will never be accepted by the Right, who largely back President Trump’s decision to fire him, nor by the Left, who will never forgive him for helping to sink Clinton’s campaign. Comey will go down as one of the worst examples of federal service in modern history.

Judith Miller is a City Journal contributing editor and author of The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.