AAA-O

Anything, Anywhere, Anytime bar Nothing. At 56 Col. Paddy Flint was too old for a front-line infantry command. Flint joined the 39th Infantry Regiment in Sicily, and developed the 39th into an exemplary combat formation.

During the Normandy invasion, while advancing on the Saint-Lô-Périers road, Paddy’s outfit was held up by heavy mortar fire. Leading from his customary place on the front, the Colonel and a rifle patrol soon found the trouble. Colonel Flint reported by radio over the walkie-talkie: “Have spotted pillbox. Will start them cooking.”

He called for a tank, and rode atop it in a rain of fire as it sprayed the hedgerows. During the attack, the tank driver was wounded, stopping it, whereupon Paddy crawled down, and went forward on foot with his men. As he led the patrol into the shelter of a farmhouse he was hit by a sniper’s bullet. Aid men soon came up, loaded the Colonel on a stretcher, and as they started for the rear, one of men told him: “Remember, Paddy, you can’t kill an Irishman—you can only make him mad.” Colonel Flint smiled. On the next day, 24 July 1944, he died of his wounds.

Colonel Flint is buried at Section 2, Site 310 at the Arlington National Cemetery.

---

 

Woke government. Democrats in control.

LAUREN FRUEN:

• • A decision to not cap property that homeless people can keep on Skid Row was announced last Wednesday
  • It sparked fury among some who say it will ‘only perpetuate the public health crisis that already exists’ there
  • Images from the downtown area show trash piling up as workers struggle to keep the area sanitized
  • Rows and rows of tents line the sidewalks of Skid Row in the sprawling 50-block area, home to around 4,200
  • On Thursday it was revealed a Los Angeles police detective has been diagnosed with typhoid fever
  • At least five other officers are also showing symptoms and their division polices downtown LA
  • Dustin DeRollo, a union spokesman, said cops who patrol Skid Row ‘walk through the feces, urine and trash’
  • In an op ed for The LA Times reporter Steve Lopez called it ‘the collapse of a city that’s lost control’

Original

Having Achieved World Peace, UN Turns Its Attention to Alexa and Siri—Symbols of the Patriarchy

JED BABBIN:

“…Crossfire Hurricane” — the melodramatic code name for the FBI/CIA spy operation on candidate Trump and his early presidency — was run for the FBI by then-FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, Special Agent Peter Strzok, and a few others.

Then-CIA director John Brennan ran it for the CIA. Brennan had to have help, but who was it? A lot of evidence points to the CIA’s then-chief of station in London in 2016-2017, and now the Director of Central Intelligence, Gina Haspel.

President Trump claimed that the FBI and CIA’s spying on his campaign and early presidency was treason. Attorney General William Barr said that, legally, it wasn’t.

Barr is correct. But note well that he didn’t say that crimes other than treason weren’t committed. On Friday, Barr said that since he became attorney general he had been asking why the counter-intelligence investigation was begun and hasn’t yet gotten a satisfactory answer.

The criminal investigation being conducted for Barr by U.S. Attorney John Durham is aimed at the intelligence community. As I wrote last week Trump’s recent executive order, which requires the intelligence agencies to cooperate with Barr and gives Barr the power to declassify anything he chooses, was probably necessitated by the stonewalling by the CIA and the NSA that Durham had already encountered.

There is every reason for the CIA to stonewall. Its current director, Gina Haspel, must have played a major role in conducting the CIA/FBI spy op on Trump.

One result of last week’s column was that one of my intelligence sources — a longtime veteran of the U.S. intelligence community — reappeared after about a year of silence. This person reminded me that he/she tried — unsuccessfully — to warn the White House against Haspel’s nomination to be DCI because of her longstanding close ties to Obama’s CIA chief, John Brennan.

Many people who objected to Haspel’s confirmation, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), based their objections on the fact that Haspel had run a CIA site in Thailand in which terrorist suspects were reportedly waterboarded. The waterboarding charge was sufficient to get the Senate — and apparently the White House — to overlook the real problem with her: the fact that, as Paul once implied in a tweet, Haspel is Brennan’s acolyte and protégé.

Brennan was — and still is — a hyper-partisan anti-Trumper. He was a relentless promoter of the Steele dossier allegations against Trump. Either he or James Comey (the two are disputing which) insisted on including information from the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017, which said that the intelligence community had agreed that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. We know that Brennan has lied to Congress on a host of topics, including events surrounding the spy op on Trump’s campaign and presidency.

Haspel’s longstanding loyalty to Brennan ranks her among the two or three worst personnel choices made by President Trump.

Her loyalty to Brennan is more than a little relevant to Durham’s investigation because, as noted above, Haspel was the CIA’s Chief of Station (COS) in London from 2014-2017. It was during the latter two years of her tenure there when all of the FBI/CIA spying operation on Trump and his campaign occurred.

I’m told that the most-coveted job in all of the CIA (second only to the directorship) is the COS-London job. Before her tenure there in 2014-2017, Haspel had already had that job from 2008 to 2011. It’s very unusual for anyone to have it twice. Brennan probably gave Haspel her second stint there as a reward for her loyalty.

COS-London sits in on weekly meetings of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) for the purpose of exchanging top-secret intelligence information. The JIC is made up of the heads of all the UK intelligence agencies ranging from MI6 to GCHQ, the UK’s equivalent of our National Security Agency.

During her 2008-2011 stint, Haspel would have made many close friends among the UK intelligence community. Those ties would have been renewed during her 2014-2017 time in the COS-London job.

During Haspel’s later time as COS-London, much of the action on CIA/FBI spy op on Trump took place in London.

The New York Times reported on May 16, 2018 that within hours of opening the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia, two FBI agents were dispatched to London to interview Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer about his meeting with Trump advisor George Papadopoulos. One of those agents was Peter Strzok, the anti-Trump FBI agent who led the “Crossfire Hurricane” team.

As the CIA’s chief of station (COS), Haspel would not only have known about Strzok’s mission to London, but would had to have been briefed on it and approved it.

And that’s not the half of it. Haspel, as Brennan’s COS in London, must have run the UK end of the spy op on Trump for Brennan.

In addition to the Downer meeting, much of the Crossfire Hurricane action took place in London. Among the UK meetings that were part of the spy op in London were meetings between Stefan Halper, the Cambridge professor, and Carter Page, another minor Trump advisor. (Page also met with one of Halper’s employees who was operating undercover for the FBI.) Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic, also met with Carter Page in London and cooperated with the FBI’s investigation.

All of these meetings were parts of the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. They had to have been overseen by the CIA’s London Chief of Station: Gina Haspel.

We don’t know — yet — what went on between Brennan, Haspel, or any of their agents and Christopher Steele, author of the dossier that was later seized upon as the basis for their “investigation.” Durham will have to investigate all of the London events and every aspect of Haspel’s and Brennan’s involvement.

Remember Hillary’s “Clintonmail.com” email system on which she communicated with Obama himself? Did Haspel, Brennan, and Comey — like many Obama officials — have non-government email accounts through which they communicated among themselves and with the Obama White House?

Durham will face the most determined stonewalling by the CIA on all of this. Both Haspel and Brennan have a lot to lose, so she will be fighting tooth and nail against any of Durham’s requests for documents and testimony. Durham, and Barr, will have to force the issue.

There are too many other inquiries Durham will have to make to recount here. But it’s worthwhile to mention two others.

The “original EC” is the much-discussed and never revealed electronic communication that Brennan sent to Comey that supposedly kicked off the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. We don’t know the date, but the investigation — we are told by the FBI — began on or about July 31, 2016. The original EC must have been dated days or weeks before that date.

House investigators Reps. Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy were allowed to view a heavily redacted version of the original EC only after threatening to begin impeachment proceedings against FBI Director Christopher Wray and then-deputy AG Rod Rosenstein. It is still classified and unavailable to Congress and the public. Durham will be able to get it in unredacted form and Barr, if he so chooses, can release it publicly. He should.

We don’t know what, if any, of Christopher Steele’s input is contained in the original EC. It’s important to find out because Steele’s dossier begins with a memorandum dated 20 September 2016, two months after the likely date of the original EC.

That’s important because — despite the date of his first memo in the dossier — we don’t know when Steele began to spread his rumors about Trump to the FBI or CIA. It is entirely possible — even likely — that Steele (a trusted FBI source at the time) successfully peddled his unverified, anonymously sourced products to the FBI and CIA long before September 2016.

Barr and Durham have an enormous — and enormously important — task before them. They should not hesitate to go to the president whenever they are stonewalled by the CIA or FBI. His executive order is just the beginning of his necessary involvement in their investigation.

The faster Barr and Durham can complete their investigation, the sooner the public will learn about the abuses of power that occurred in the FBI/CIA spy op on Trump, his campaign, and his early presidency…”

Original

Not a story our woke and biased MSM is interested in. I wonder if male teachers get the same breaks described below?

Amanda Garrett:

“…Some have downplayed or even laughed off the seriousness of female educators having sex with teenage students, playing into the trope of hormone-driven boys lusting after the women at the front of the class.

But many prosecutors and people who work with the abused say female teachers having sex with male students are doing just as much harm as their male counterparts who prey on girls…”

and

“…In Stark County, Eichler pleaded guilty last year to three felony counts of sexual battery.

Prosecutors asked a judge to sentence her to four years in prison, but the judge thought Eichler — who surrendered her teaching license and will forever have to register with authorities as a sex offender — had largely suffered enough.

He sentenced her to 30 days in jail and another 30 days in what Stark County calls “half-jail,” a sort of day detention room for adults…”

Original

Why are Democrat-run cities such hellholes of infectious disease and humanitarian catastrophe?!!

And don’t even get me going about San Francisco, where the current California Governor Gavin Newsome left behind a legacy of human feces, heroin junkies shooting up on the sidewalks, and progressive NIMBY losers turning away with indifference.

California really is a lost cause.

At the New American, ““Sky High” Piles of Trash Making Downtown Los Angeles Unlivable.”

And the Los Angeles Times, “Rats and other vermin infest LAPD downtown station, sparking anger among officers.”

Original

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…A veritable mini-industry of celebrity calls for Trump’s violent death or assassination is now old and boring—and getting dangerous. As if on cue, actors, singers, comedians, and banal entertainers compete with each other to hope for the most gruesome manner of killing the president—and thereby insidiously lowering the bar for unhinged minds of what could be conceivable or even acceptable to big screen icons and popular culture’s cool crowd…”

Original

Thoughts from Glenn Reynolds:

“…Republicans are charged with “incitement” if they criticize Democrats’ policy views, but when Democrats do this it’s okay with our tastemakers — not because it isn’t much-more-obvious incitement, but because they approve of the sentiments, and hope they come true…”

JONATHAN TURLEY:

“…Yet, as I noted previously, Mueller’s position on the investigation has become increasingly conflicted and, at points, unintelligible. As someone who defended Mueller’s motivations against the unrelenting attacks of Trump, I found his press conference to be baffling, and it raised serious concerns over whether some key decisions are easier to reconcile on a political rather than a legal basis. Three decisions stand out that are hard to square with Mueller’s image as an apolitical icon. If he ever deigns to answer questions, his legacy may depend on his explanations.

Refusal to identify grand jury material

One of the most surprising disclosures made by Attorney General William Barr was that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein expressly told Mueller to submit his report with grand jury material clearly marked to facilitate the release of a public version. The Justice Department cannot release grand jury material without a court order. Mueller knew that. He also knew his people had to mark the material because they were in the grand jury proceedings.

Thus, Barr and Rosenstein reportedly were dumbfounded to receive a report that did not contain these markings. It meant the public report would be delayed by weeks as the Justice Department waited for Mueller to perform this basic task. Mueller knew it would cause such a delay as many commentators were predicting Barr would postpone the release of the report or even bury it. It left Barr and the Justice Department in the worst possible position and created the false impression of a coverup.

Why would a special counsel directly disobey his superiors on such a demand? There is no legal or logical explanation. What is even more galling is that Mueller said in his press conference that he believed Barr acted in “good faith” in wanting to release the full report. Barr ultimately did so, releasing 98 percent of the report to select members of Congress and 92 percent to the public. However, then came the letter from Mueller.

Surprise letter sent to the attorney general

Five days after submitting his report, Mueller sent a letter objecting that Barr’s summary letter to Congress “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the work and conclusions reached by his team. He complained that “there is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”

The letter surprised Barr for good reasons. First, Barr had offered to allow Mueller to read the summary before submitting it. Mueller declined but then sent this letter calling for the release of sections of his report, even though they had not been cleared by Justice Department staff. Second, Barr has known Mueller for decades. Yet, Mueller did not simply pick up the phone to discuss his concerns and possible resolutions or to ask for a meeting. Instead, he undermined Barr with a letter clearly meant to insinuate something improper without actually making such an accusation.

Mueller’s letter also requested something he knew Barr could not do, which is to release uncleared portions of the report, including material later redacted by Justice Department staff. Mueller’s letter is notable in what it did not include, which is an acknowledgment that he was responsible for the need for the summary, as well as much of the delay in the release of the report.

In an earlier meeting, Barr explained that he wanted to quickly release the report and allow the work of the special counsel to speak for itself. To do so, however, Mueller and his people needed to identify material that should be redacted under federal law, which they did not do. While Barr has described Mueller’s letter as “snitty,” it was in fact a sucker punch.

Refusal to reach an obstruction conclusion

The most curious and significant decision by Mueller was refusing to reach a conclusion on presidential obstruction. While entirely ignored by the media, Mueller contradicted himself in first saying that he would have cleared Trump if he could have, but then later saying that he decided not to reach a conclusion on any crime.

I have already addressed why Mueller’s interpretation of memos from the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel is unprecedented and illogical. He concluded that, in barring the indictment and prosecution of a sitting president, those memos meant prosecutors can investigate but not reach conclusions on possible criminal acts.

It is not just his legal interpretation that is incomprehensible. Mueller was appointed almost two years before he released his report. He was fully aware that Congress, the Justice Department, the media, and the public expected him to reach conclusions on criminal conduct, a basic function of the special counsel. He also was told he should do so by the attorney general and deputy attorney general. Yet, he relied on two highly controversial opinions written by a small office in the Justice Department.

Over those two years, Mueller could have asked his superiors for a decision on this alleged policy barring any conclusions on criminal conduct. More importantly, he could have requested an opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel. That is what the Office of Legal Counsel does, particularly when its own opinions are the cause of confusion. One would think you would be even more motivated to do so, if you intended to ignore the view of the attorney general and his deputy that there is no such policy.

Mueller, however, is an experienced litigator who knows not to ask a question when you do not know the answer or when you know the answer and do not want to hear it. His position is even more curious, given his lack of action after Barr and Rosenstein did precisely what he said could not be done under Justice Department policies. If Mueller believed such conclusions are impermissible, why did he not submit the matter to the Justice Department inspector general?

His press conference captured his report perfectly. It was an effort to allude to possible crimes without, in fairness to the accused, clearly and specifically stating those crimes. Mueller knew that was incrimination by omission. By emphasizing he could not clear Trump of criminality, Mueller knew the press would interpret that as a virtual indictment.

What is concerning is not that each of his three decisions clearly would undermine Trump or Barr but that his decisions ran against the grain for a special counsel. The law favored the other path in each instance. Thus, to use Mueller’s own construction, if we could rule out a political motive, we would have done so. This is why Mueller must testify and must do so publicly…”

Original

Clarice Feldman:

In common parlance, a made man is someone whose path to success was greased by circumstances. It also refers to someone formally inducted as a full member of a criminal outfit — the Mafia.  In the political atmosphere in which Robert Mueller was born, he, like John Kerry, was virtually assured of a prestigious place in society: He was a tall white man with a hatchet jaw who (like his classmate Kerry) went to an expensive private school – St. Paul’s — and came from a well-connected and well-off family.

His wife, Ann Cabell Standish Mueller, is related to Charles Cabell, once deputy director of the CIA.  Richard Bissell, formerly the CIA’s director of plans, is his cousin. Both men were fired by President Kennedy for their roles in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

His own public service career includes a number of spectacular failures as well:

He kept four innocent men in jail for years (one for 35 years) to protect the vicious criminal Whitey Bulger, who had at times been an FBI informant.

Ripping FBI special counsel Robert Mueller as a political “zealot,” Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz reminded staunch Mueller supporters about the former FBI director’s role in protecting “notorious mass murderer” Whitey Bulger as an FBI informant.

“I think Mueller is a zealot,” Dershowitz told “The Cats Roundtable” on 970 AM-N.Y. “…I don’t think he cares whether he hurts Democrats or Republicans, but he’s a partisan and zealot.

“He’s the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an FBI informer. Those of us in Boston don’t have such a high regard for Mueller because we remember this story. The government had to pay out tens of millions of dollars because Whitey Bulger, a notorious mass murderer, became a government informer against the mafia…

“And that’s regarded in Boston of one of the great scandals of modern judicial history. And Mueller was right at the center of it. So, he is not without criticism by people who know him in Boston.”

He bungled the anthrax case (along with James Comey) so that one man — whom it is far from certain was responsible — killed himself and a clearly innocent man, Steven Hatfill, underwent incredible harassment and career destruction based on the flimsiest of evidence and the government (that is the taxpayers) again was forced to pay him millions in recompense.

Under his watch at the FBI, that agency and the Department of Justice’s criminal division framed Senator Ted Stevens and failed to stop the Boston bombing even though the Russians had warned them of the perpetrators in advance.

There’s more, of course, but is there any doubt in your mind that only a made man could have such a history of flops and still be considered for further high public office?

In the past weeks he tried to outsmart Attorney General William Barr. He’d earlier tried to sandbag Barr into not revealing the gist of his very flawed report. He delayed redacting the grand jury testimony in the belief that he would get the first public statement on the report. Barr outfoxed him by releasing a summary after first offering it to Mueller, an offer he refused.

This fiasco should be the last of his blundering career.

Clearly unhappy that Barr had exposed the 2½ year investigation as an expensive, partisan sham when he released early his summary of it, Mueller called a no-questions-allowed presser in which he unethically tried to muddy the waters again on obstruction, tarring the president with tales of suspicious (in his mind) behavior instead of evidence of wrongdoing. He was nervous, never departed from a written text, which he stumbled over reading. It appeared he was unfamiliar with its contents and at times appeared to be a hostage of some outside forces. He did all but blink an SOS.

The gist of his halting presentation was the implication that but for the DoJ policy that a president cannot be indicted, he had ample evidence of obstruction.

Barr batted that back.

If you read nothing else this week read this transcript of the interview by CBS’ Jan Crawford of the attorney general:

Two exchanges in particular are noteworthy. In this one he sweeps away the suggestion that the department’s rules precluded Mueller from concluding the president obstructed justice:

JAN CRAWFORD: Was there anything that would’ve stopped him in the regulations or in those… that opinion itself, he could’ve — in your view he could’ve reached a conclusion?

WILLIAM BARR: Right, he could’ve reached a conclusion. The opinion says you cannot indict a president while he is in office but he could’ve reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity but he had his reasons for not doing it, which he explained and I am not going to, you know, argue about those reasons but when he didn’t make a decision, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I felt it was necessary for us as the heads of the Department to reach that decision. That is what the Department of Justice does, that is why we have the compulsory powers like a grand jury to force people to give us evidence so that we can determine whether a crime has committed and in order to legitimate the process we felt we had to reach a decision.

JAN CRAWFORD: Well, I mean, he seemed to suggest yesterday that there was another venue for this and that was Congress.

WILLIAM BARR: Well, I am not sure what he was suggesting but, you know, the Department of Justice doesn’t use our powers of investigating crimes as an adjunct to Congress. Congress is a separate branch of government and they can, you know, they have processes, we have our processes. Ours are related to the criminal justice process we are not an extension of Congress’s investigative powers.

In the second quote, he was being generous to both Mueller and Comey:

Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good. They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have. They start viewing themselves as the guardians of the people that are more informed and insensitive than everybody else. They can — in their own mind, they can have those kinds of motives. And sometimes they can look at evidence and facts through a biased prism that they themselves don’t realize.

I say generous because I think a better characterization would be that these people regularly have masked self-interest and partisanship as “higher interest.”

In any event, a number of people quickly concluded that there was a conflict between Mueller’s recitation of how the department policy tied his hands and Barr’s  claim that it clearly did not. Nonetheless, Mueller had repeatedly conceded — and there were witnesses to that concession — that the Office of Legal Counsel’s longstanding policy of not indicting a president  had never precluded him from determining the president had criminally obstructed justice.

Shortly after the Barr interview, Mueller and Barr released a joint statement in which Mueller clearly backtracked from the calumny in his presser:

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a joint statement with Attorney General William Barr Wednesday evening; raising even more questions over his unusual press conference that fueled Democrats’ calls for impeaching President Trump.

“The Attorney General has previously stated that the Special Counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice. The Special Counsel’s report and his statement today made clear that the office concluded it would not reach a determination -one way or the other- about whether the President committed a crime. There is no conflict between these statements,” said a joint press release from Barr and Mueller’s offices.

Nothing in the memos even remotely bars a special counsel from reaching conclusions on the basis of possible criminal charges. Indeed, the memos accept that the Justice Department needs to establish such evidence to preserve a record for possible later charges. That is why Mueller was told by his superiors that there was no policy barring him from finding criminal conduct, only the policy against indicting while the president is in office. Even if you twist the memos to suggest some prohibition to reaching conclusions on criminal conduct, that debate should have ended when his two superiors, the attorney general and deputy attorney general, told him there was no such policy and asked him to reach a conclusion.

So it is clear that the song and dance in his presser was intended only to leave a cloud of suspicion over the White House. If he’d had any evidence of wrongdoing he was free to — in fact, encouraged — to so state that.

The editors of the NY Sun observed that the Mueller “swan song illustrates nothing so much as the constitutional illogic of having a special prosecutor set up to investigate the president in the first place.” The editors continue with an argument with which I fully agree:

It is not a partisan thing with us. We have been arguing since the days of Nixon against anything that smacks of independence from the president of any prosecutor. It was our view when Judge Walsh was sicced on Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, during Judge Starr’s long pursuit of President Clinton, and Mr. Mueller’s mission against President Trump.

All these probes or prosecutions were crosswise with the logic of the Constitution. Only the president is authorized and required to take care that our laws be faithfully executed. To ensure he is able to do that, only the president is given the power to commission the officers of the United States. It is why there is a grant of authority to the Representatives House to investigate a president and forward to the Senate articles of impeachment.

It is also why the Framers established that “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.” Yet it’s why they also established that if a president is removed from office through impeachment, his immunities end and he “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

And here we get to the nub of it — the Democrats hoped that they could use the Special Counsel and his biased staff to do the work for them in their drive to impeach a president whose only failing was beating their candidate.

In another article I strongly urge you to read in its entirety, David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley explain that Congress cannot outsource impeachment and use Mueller’s probe to do their job:

Yet if there is a constitutional crisis, its source is the Democrats. They are abusing the powers of investigation and impeachment in an illegitimate effort to unseat a president they despise.

Congressional Democrats claim they have the power to investigate the president to conduct “oversight” and hold him “accountable.” That elides an important constitutional distinction. As the Supreme Court said in Watkins v. U.S. (1957), Congress may “inquire into and publicize corruption, maladministration or inefficiency in agencies of the Government.” Executive departments and agencies are created by Congress and therefore accountable to it. The president, by contrast is not a creature of lawmakers. He is Congress’s coequal, accountable to Congress only via impeachment.

To commence impeachment, the House has a constitutional obligation to articulate clear evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” A two-year Justice Department investigation did not find that Mr. Trump had committed crimes. [snip]

House Democrats claim they’re entitled to see Mr. Mueller’s underlying materials. But Congress may not use its subpoena power for a prosecutorial do-over… Turnover of prosecutorial materials would allow Congress to hide behind the fact-finding and legal determinations of the other branches, thereby diminishing its own political accountability. Because the nation’s law-enforcement officials have concluded Mr. Trump has not committed any crimes, Democratic representatives cannot legitimately draft articles of impeachment accusing him of criminal conduct involving the same offenses of which he was cleared by the Mueller investigation.

I can see where they’d figure this was okay: They’ve outsourced much of their legislative responsibilities to partisan judges and the administrative bureaucracy and figure collecting campaign donations and reading statements drafted by their staffs to complaisant reporters is the limit of their responsibilities — that is, when they aren’t trying to run the White House from the bowels of the DNC. In truth, they hoped Mueller would throw enough mud on the president that they could continue to hamstring him and vote to impeach without any evidence to warrant it. Mueller failed them and covered himself, not the president, in slime.

Original

Sgt Jake McNiece of the 101st Airborne Division, ready to drop into Normandy, June 1944.

 

RICHARD FERNANDEZ:

“…But the men of D-Day closed off these alternative futures; they won and by winning shut out an infinity of possibilities and set us on the path we are on today. And what a long way it has been. Three generations ago the French and British empires still existed. The USSR was an ally. Churchill had not yet coined the term “Iron Curtain.” On the Los Alamos plateau, physicists still wondered whether an atom bomb would work. The only electronic computer in the world was at Bletchley Park, a guarded secret. Space travel was as yet a fantastic dream.

Seventy-five years later, most universities teach those empires were things of horror. The USSR is no more. “A fifth of British teenagers believe Sir Winston Churchill was a fictional character, while many think Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur and Eleanor Rigby were real.” The atom bomb waxed, waned and waxed again. Nearly everyone carries a computer in his pocket orders of magnitude more powerful than Bletchley’s Colossus. Man landed on the moon 50 years ago.

And what of D-Day? Like the fading black and white chemical film on which its images were captured, modern culture has lost the detail, emotional tone and context once provided by living memory. What still remains is posterized, compressed and pixellated to the point where, to paraphrase Tennyson, “they are become a name.” The Longest Day grows less distinct with each passing year…”

Original

That first headline, you can’t make that up!

The next one is for Sis Law