The Democratic Party and Clinton campaign’s attempt to smear the Trump campaign for collusion with Russia has badly backfired. It is now likely that the Trump dossier that Democrats and the Clinton campaign paid for — and got the FBI to swallow — was stuffed with smears provided by a Russian government disinformation unit (paywall). In effect, the FBI colluded with Russia to corrupt a U.S. presidential election.
This is an unprecedented scandal — that the nation’s top investigative body corrupted itself by secretly joining with one presidential candidate to bring down the other –and did so not only on the basis of partisan-motivated opposition research but that was likely salted with false information inserted by a hostile foreign government.
The FBI at the time was led by James Comey. He is a close friend of the previous FBI director Robert Mueller, who is now — astonishingly — the Special Counsel investigating Trump campaign collusion with Russia — a huge conflict of interest. Mueller, when himself FBI director, helped cover up a scandal involving former President Clinton and Secretary of State Clinton’s pay-for-play assistance to Russia in acquiring 20% ownership of strategic U.S. uranium mines.
Two other present Justice Department and FBI officials are implicated in the scandal to bring down Trump: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. It was Rosenstein who appointed Mueller as Special Counsel and gave Mueller his ill-defined, overly broad mandate to pursue Trump and his campaign officials. And it was Comey who appointed McCabe as Deputy Director of the FBI in 2016. Both then did their best to shield presidential candidate Hillary Clinton from an indictment for her illegal use of a home email server for State Department business, some of which was classified.
The FBI and Justice Department are stonewalling attempts by Congressional committees to now obtain information on these multiplying scandals.
Drain the swamp or wade into it?
This Louisiana cypress swamp is lovely. Not so Washington’s swamp that Trump promised to drain
President Trump has promised to drain the swamp — the corruption of legislators and regulators by special interest lobbies — and his dismantling of burdensome Obama-era regulations has been a notable fulfillment of that pledge. Yesterday Vice-President Pence added to the list by casting a tie-breaking vote that will allow companies to continue using arbitration clauses in contracts. Obama regulatory appointee Richard Cordray had sought to ban the clauses — with strong support from class-action lawyers, a powerful Washington lobby.
But the President has occasionally himself capitulated to the swamp he is supposed to be draining — witness his flip-flop on Eximbank (a.k.a. the “Bank of Boeing”) in April and now his capitulation to the ethanol lobby — a retreat that will cost motorists and truckers dearly.
Trump would do well to atone for these sins by working with Congress to curtail the out-of-control Americans with Disability Act (ADA). We wrote earlier of how the ADA has been forcing universities to shut down courses they had been offering for free on the internet. The ADA’s latest horror in the lead up to Halloween is described here.
Why politicians and the swamp hate tax cuts
There’s a reason why politicians and the swamp hate tax cuts. It’s explained very well in this article, which we strongly recommend that our readers look at in its entirety.
The dynamic it describes is a paradigmatic example why the late economist James Buchanan was awarded a Nobel Prize for developing public choice theory. It will also help readers understand why Founders Broadsheet yesterday strongly criticized the Trump-Republican tax plan’s failure to cut top income tax rates.
Forced into retirement
Facing primary defeat, Senator Flake joins Senator Corker in declining to run again
Senators Corker and Flake have now been forced into retirement for having taken on President Trump personally, even though they were reliable supporters in some of the key votes he favored. The withdrawal of incumbents who support most of a sitting president’s policies is not a very wise strategy, and both Trump and the Republicans will likely suffer dearly for this in the upcoming 2018 elections. The advantage incumbents have is not to be carelessly discarded.
The better policy for senators and congressmen, however irked they may be at the President’s style, is to focus on the issues, supporting the President when they are in policy agreement with him and criticizing not him but the erring policy when they aren’t.
Some think that both parties are cracking up and that at some point new parties will emerge, as the Republican Party itself did out of the wreckage of the Whig Party. That has also been the perspective of this publication.
More evidence of the Republican crack up? House Republicans are blocking House adoption of the 2018 budget until guaranteed SALT will remain on their Blue State banquet tables. SALT is the Capitol Hill acronym for the State And Local Tax deduction.
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