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Thursday, July 12, 2018
All Gave Some~Some Gave All
*****

President Trump Gives Germany a Tongue-Lashing at NATO for Being ‘70% Controlled by Russian Natural Gas’: We’re Protecting Germany from Russia and Germany’s Giving Russia Billions; Head of the Pipeline Company is Germany’s Former Chancellor; ‘INAPPROPRIATE!’(MUST WATCH VIDEO)

Congress Renews Push to Designate Muslim Brotherhood as Terror Group

THE LIBERTY DAILY

Longtime friend, Frank S. sent the following thoughts. He makes great sense and I concur with his position...

The Court will have to go a lot further back than Roe to return to it's limited confines. Since Marbury v Madison, the court has based ruling on their opinions rather than objective reasoning. Look at Dred Scott, Plessy v Ferguson, Buck v Bell. Just a few of the most notorious rulings.

The court has acquired their power slowly and subtly over 215 years. They have even made us believe that they are a distinct and equal branch of government. They are not. No more than an umpire gets a turn at bat, or gives a black player 4 strikes because of 400 years of oppression.

Walking the pooch...Good going guys...

Donald Trump Made This Supreme Court Pick And All Hell Is Breaking Loose

After days of speculation, President Trump finally revealed his selection to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

The President kept Washington in suspense by keeping his selection a secret until moments before it was announced in a prime-time address.

And all hell is breaking loose now that the nominee’s identity is known.

President Trump named D.C. Circuit Court of appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh as his pick for the Supreme Court.

If confirmed, Kavanaugh will be the fourth justice to join the nation’s highest court after serving on the D.C. Circuit.

Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg also sat on the D.C. Circuit bench which has earned a reputation as a “feeder system” for the Supreme Court.

President Trump explained why he chose Kavanaugh stating:

“JUDGE KAVANAUGH HAS IMPECCABLE CREDENTIALS, UNSURPASSED QUALIFICATIONS AND A PROVEN COMMITMENT TO EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW. A GRADUATE OF YALE COLLEGE AND YALE LAW SCHOOL, JUDGE CAVANAUGH CURRENTLY TEACHES AT HARVARD, YALE AND GEORGETOWN. THROUGHOUT LEGAL CIRCLES HE IS CONSIDERED A JUDGE’S JUDGE, A TRUE THOUGHT LEADER AMONG HIS PEERS.”

IN HIS REMARKS, KAVANAUGH EXPLAINED HOW ORIGINALISM WOULD GUIDE HIS JUDICIAL PHILOSOPHY STATING “”A JUDGE MUST BE INDEPENDENT AND MUST INTERPRET THE LAW…A JUDGE MUST INTERPRET STATUTES AS WRITTEN.  AND A JUDGE MUST INTERPRET THE CONSTITUTION AS WRITTEN, INFORMED BY HISTORY AND TRADITION AND PRECEDENT.”

The left reacted by losing their minds.

We need a time out from all political bickering

Joe Fitzgerald
Alan Dershowitz

Don’t you sometimes wish that, as in sports, we who call ourselves Americans could call for a timeout, just a bit of a breather to assess where we are, how we’re doing and what adjustments might be needed?

It’s a thought that came to mind here at a delightful holiday gathering where warm, frivolous conversations continued almost a whole day until Donald Trump’s name was inadvertently invoked, quickly polluting the rollicking camaraderie and replacing it with a tension felt by everyone in the room.

You know that feeling, don’t you?

Almost 18 months after he was duly elected by the American public, contentious portions of that same populace obstinately refuse to see his incumbency as legitimate.

Like those Japanese soldiers who kept coming out of hiding decades after World War II ended, they still refuse to accept defeat.

Perhaps the mindset of a soldier makes that remotely understandable.

But teachers? Entrepreneurs? Civic leaders? Reporters?

Too angry to be civil, they champ at every opportunity to lecture the rest of us on how wrong we are not to see things their way, revealing an arrogance that’s as appalling as the accompanying ignorance of how democracy is supposed to work.

Now comes word Alan Dershowitz sensed he was becoming persona non grata among the hifalutin swells whom he considered friends at tony Martha’s Vineyard. They’ve subsequently backed off, bombarding him with invitations to come and be adored again.

So what was it that temporarily got their noses out of joint? Dershowitz, as one of them put it, “defended and gave cover” to Trump by opposing the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the president’s ties with Russia.

In other words, in their pretentious minds, personalities should have mattered more than principles, which is patently indefensible.

Dershowitz has never been a favorite here, yet he’s greatly admired. Because he’s what used to be known as “a yellow dog Democrat,” his open-mindedness regarding Trump’s legal affairs is reminiscent of the ACLU defending the right of neo-Nazis to stage a demonstration in the heavily Jewish village of Skokie, just outside Chicago.

The statement it made was that principles have to matter even when they’re applied to reprobates.

So when did we lose sight of what it meant to disagree without becoming disagreeable?

And look at the price we’re now paying for abandoning that basic understanding.

The late Joan Rivers often began her repartee with audiences by asking, “Can we talk?”

Well, in these days of Donald Trump, can we?

If we can’t, we’re well on our way down a very rocky road.



Agenda for the Trump-Putin Summit
Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute

• Cold War
• Crimea
• Donald Trump
• Finland
• Georgia
• Helsinki
• NATO
• North Korea
• nuclear deterrence
• summit
• Syria
• Ukraine
• Vladimir Putin

President Donald Trump soon will meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland. President Trump long sought this summit and talking is better than silence. However, without a change in U.S. policy it isn’t clear what positives will result.

Much of Washington has fixated on the Russian. Democrats treat the White House as Russian-occupied territory. Republicans see Putin as a leader of the global resistance to American dominance.

The president should approach the summit with a realistic assessment of Moscow’s capabilities and intentions. Putin is no friend of Western-style liberalism, but then, many U.S. allies are no less authoritarian.

There is no evidence that he bears any ideological animus toward America or Europe. Although Putin regrets the geopolitical wreckage left by the U.S.S.R.’s collapse, he has done little to recreate the Evil Empire. Retaking Crimea and gaining influence in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the Donbass don’t count for much.

A globe-spanning empire is unrealistic and unnecessary. Instead, he insists on respect for his nation’s interests, expects secure borders, seeks to deter potential military threats, and desires to sit in global councils of power.

Nothing suggests plans for aggression against Europe (or America!). And the Europeans don’t believe so either: even the countries squealing for U.S. troops spend barely two percent of GDP on their militaries, ludicrous levels if they really fear attack.

Moscow no longer is a superpower, but remains capable of asserting itself, as evidenced by its confrontational policy toward Georgia and Ukraine.

Yet even there the Putin government’s ambitions were limited: seize control of select territories and freeze conflicts to prevent the two nations’ admission to NATO. In this Putin’s behavior has been ugly but effective, and no worse than that of such U.S. allies as Saudi Arabia, which is waging a brutal war against Yemen.

While many in the West deride Moscow’s security fears, that perspective is easier to maintain with America’s than Russia’s history. Add to that Washington’s widespread attempts at regime change, support for “color revolutions,” and calculated mendacity concerning NATO expansion: Russian skepticism of Western intentions is understandable.

Relations, though bad, have not yet turned into another Cold War. To improve bilateral ties the two leaders should start by comparing national objectives. There are no essential conflicts. Even where the two governments appear at odds, such as over Syria and North Korea, the differences are manageable.

Indeed, Syria demonstrates how U.S. policymakers meddle around the world even when doing so is not in America’s interest. A continuing Russian beachhead there does little to diminish Washington’s influence: after all, the U.S. is allied with Israel, the Gulf States, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and just about everyone else in the region.

Presidents Trump and Putin also should explore potential areas of cooperation. Terrorism is one area. President Trump reportedly is interested in using the upcoming summit to make a deal on Syria that would allow a U.S. exit, a worthy objective.

Even more important would be working together to constrain China. The U.S. has needlessly pushed Moscow toward Beijing, reversing President Richard Nixon’s geopolitical strategy. Moscow might prefer to look Westward, where its economic and territorial interests are less likely to be overwhelmed.

Washington and Moscow need to work through the issues which most sharply divide them. Since Putin is unlikely to admit to interfering with America’s election, the two presidents should agree to stay out of each other’s internal affairs. In fact, the U.S. is a more active meddler than Russia—Washington has intervened in at least 81 elections worldwide, including the 1996 Russian contest.

Any agreement should include a plan to fully staff the respective embassies. Even more necessary is resolving the stand-off over Ukraine. Russia won’t yield Crimea, so on this issue the two governments should agree to disagree. The U.S. and Europe could formally refuse to recognize the annexation while effectively dropping the issue.

As for Ukraine and Georgia, the Western allies should trade a commitment not to enlarge NATO with an end to Russian subversion of Ukraine. Georgia and Ukraine should remain militarily neutral while left free to go either way economically. Everyone would benefit from a modus vivendi that ended the shooting.

The president’s willingness to meet with nations at odds with America deserves praise. He need not befriend foreign leaders. However, he should communicate with them. If nothing else, the president needs to ensure that both Americans and Russians better understand each other and the issues which unite as well as divide us.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.

The “Bernie Sanders / SCOTUS” Tweet That Has Everyone Talking Today

By TFPP Writer

The “Bernie Sanders / SCOTUS” tweet below has everyone who sees it talking today, as it shows what buffoons most Democrats are.

Of course Bernie Sanders wins the prize for the most buffoonish of the Senators.

An 80 year old socialist trying to sell his “new ideas” which are nothing more than failed ideas of the past.

When it comes to the Supreme Court though the clownish behavior hits a whole new level.

Exactly!

How is nominating a justice who would interpret the law based on the Constitution a bad thing?

Unfortunately for Bernie and the rest of his far left crew President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick just took huge step toward confirmation with the tacit endorsement of the Senate’s two pro-choice Republican members.

Speaking to Politico, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins both think President Trump could have “done a lot worse” than Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

The two “centrist” senators wouldn’t say if they would vote “yes” or “no” on his appointment, but the pick of Kavanaugh seems designed to woo over the two senators more than a more conservative pick like 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett or another equally conservative nominee.

“Let’s put it this way: There were some who have been on the list that I would have had a very, very difficult time supporting, just based on what was already publicly known about them,” Murkowski (R-Alaska) said in an interview on Monday. “We’re not dealing with that.”

Collins (R-Maine) told reporters that while she wouldn’t directly compare Kavanaugh with Barrett, she touted Kavanaugh’s experience and sounded warm notes about him while insisting she has yet to decide.

“It will be very difficult for anyone to argue that he’s not qualified for the job. He clearly is qualified for the job,” Collins said.

“But there are other issues involving judicial temperament and his political, or rather, his judicial philosophy that also will play into my decision.”

To top it off, both senators voted for Kavanaugh’s nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court in 2006.

All Republicans need is a simple majority to confirm Kavanaugh.

While Arizona Sen. John McCain is out recovering from brain cancer, there are 50 Republican votes in the Senate. A “no” vote from either Murkowski or Collins would throw the nomination into doubt.

Conservative supporters of Kavanaugh are hoping that his confirmation could lead to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but Republican senators seemed comfortable that the two female, pro-choice lawmakers would back him anyway.

Instead of facing off against a judge they mighty view as too ideological, Collins and Murkowski and other centrists have a different problem:

Sorting through Kavanaugh’s 12-year record on the federal bench and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from his time in the George W. Bush administration and his work with independent counsel Kenneth Starr during the Bill Clinton presidency.

“That’s kind of a good news/bad news with him. Good news is that there is a lot to look at it,” Murkowski said. “Bad news is there is a lot to look at.”

Murkowski’s most important issues are over regulation, abortion rights and gun ownership rights.

Collins said she does not apply an “ideological test” to their views, but mentioned parts of Obamacare that she would like to retain.

Democrats have said that Kavanaugh’s appointment could mean another vote to throw out the Affordable Care Act.

What is Cultural Marxism?

By William S. Lind

In his columns on the next conservatism, Paul Weyrich has several times referred to “cultural Marxism.” He asked me, as Free Congress Foundation’s resident historian, to write this column explaining what cultural Marxism is and where it came from. In order to understand what something is, you have to know its history.

Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is commonly known as “multiculturalism” or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as “multiculturalism.”

Cultural Marxism began not in the 1960s but in 1919, immediately after World War I. Marxist theory had predicted that in the event of a big European war, the working class all over Europe would rise up to overthrow capitalism and create communism. But when war came in 1914, that did not happen. When it finally did happen in Russia in 1917, workers in other European countries did not support it. What had gone wrong?

Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interest that Communism was impossible in the West until both could be destroyed. In 1919, Lukacs asked, “Who will save us from Western civilization?” That same year, when he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, one of Lukacs’s first acts was to introduce sex education into Hungary’s public schools. He knew that if he could destroy the West’s traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture itself.

In 1923, inspired in part by Lukacs, a group of German Marxists established a think tank at Frankfurt University in Germany called the Institute for Social Research. This institute, soon known simply as the Frankfurt School, would become the creator of cultural Marxism.

To translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the members of the Frankfurt School - - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, to name the most important - - had to contradict Marx on several points. They argued that culture was not just part of what Marx had called society’s “superstructure,” but an independent and very important variable. They also said that the working class would not lead a Marxist revolution, because it was becoming part of the middle class, the hated bourgeoisie.

Who would? In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question: a coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals.

Fatefully for America, when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt School fled - - and re established itself in New York City. There, it shifted its focus from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to destroying it in the United States. To do so, it invented “Critical Theory.” What is the theory? To criticize every traditional institution, starting with the family, brutally and unremittingly, in order to bring them down. It wrote a series of “studies in prejudice,” which said that anyone who believes in traditional Western culture is prejudiced, a “racist” or “sexist” of “fascist” - - and is also mentally ill.

Most importantly, the Frankfurt School crossed Marx with Freud, taking from psychology the technique of psychological conditioning. Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like “normalize” homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically. They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School’s key people spent the war years in Hollywood).

After World War II ended, most members of the Frankfurt School went back to Germany. But Herbert Marcuse stayed in America. He took the highly abstract works of other Frankfurt School members and repackaged them in ways college students could read and understand. In his book “Eros and Civilization,” he argued that by freeing sex from any restraints, we could elevate the pleasure principle over the reality principle and create a society with no work, only play (Marcuse coined the phrase, “Make love, not war”). Marcuse also argued for what he called “liberating tolerance,” which he defined as tolerance for all ideas coming from the Left and intolerance for any ideas coming from the Right. In the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief “guru” of the New Left, and he injected the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now America’s state ideology.

The next conservatism should unmask multiculturalism and Political Correctness and tell the American people what they really are: cultural Marxism. Its goal remains what Lukacs and Gramsci set in 1919: destroying Western culture and the Christian religion. It has already made vast strides toward that goal. But if the average American found out that Political Correctness is a form of Marxism, different from the Marxism of the Soviet Union but Marxism nonetheless, it would be in trouble. The next conservatism needs to reveal the man behind the curtain - - old Karl Marx himself.

(The Free Congress Foundation’s website, www.freecongress.org, includes a short book on the history and nature of cultural Marxism, edited by William S. Lind. It is formatted so you can print it out as a book and share it with your family and friends.)

Berkeley yearbook photos catch Kamala Harris is one whopper of a lie
Frieda Powers

It appears Sen. Kamala Harris may be having a memory problem. Or a truth problem.

The California Democrat and potential 2020 presidential contender commented on the power wielded by Supreme Court justices in a tweet on Monday.

Image: Screenshot

But the ‘facts’ Harris shared in her tweet were questionable at best.

Kamala Harris ✔@KamalaHarris

Two decades after Brown v. Board, I was only the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools. Without that decision, I likely would not have become a lawyer and eventually be elected a Senator from California.

That’s the power a Supreme Court Justice holds.

7:02 PM - Jul 9, 2018

Harris’ parents, a professor and a researcher, attended graduate school in Berkeley where the family lived. But when they divorced, the then-seven-year-old Harris moved to Canada with her mother where she attended grade school and high school.

Harris, who was born in 1964, claimed she was in only the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools.

Photos from the 1963 Berkeley yearbook, however, appears to tell a different story.

Classrooms in Berkeley were already integrated in 1963, before Harris was born.

And the same could be seen in the Berkeley 1964 yearbook — the year Harris was born.

Seems the senator needed to get her dates and facts right before her tweet.

Harris, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been an outspoken critic of President Trump and his administration, making her a Democratic favorite as she reportedly thinks about a potential 2020 run for office.

“It’s about who can be radical, who can be a leader of the ‘resist’ movement, who can be the biggest hater of Donald Trump” Republican Congressman Sean Duffy told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on “The Angle” Tuesday, speaking of Harris’ appeal to the left.

Duffy argued that Democrats are fully engaged in opposing Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, because “if you can’t win at the ballot box, if you can’t win votes in Congress, you have to look to the courts to have activist judges who will implement your progressive, liberal, socialist policies for you.”

Harris fits both of those needs for the left, Duffy noted as she leads the resistance movement against Trump and, as a former prosecutor, takes on the legal issues.

We know first-hand that censorship against conservative news is real. Please share stories and encourage your friends to sign up for our daily email blast so they are not getting shut out of seeing conservative news.

Everybody Is Wrong About The Ali Watkins Scoops-For-Sex Scandal
All of the major players in this story -- Ali Watkins, James Wolfe, The New York Times, and the Department of Justice -- behaved in less than admirable fashion.

By Mollie Hemingway

Legendary New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal once fired a newly hired reporter when he learned she’d had an intimate relationship with one of the people she reported on at her previous newspaper. Michael Goodwin explains what happened next:

Word of the incident spread quickly through the newsroom, and several female reporters complained to Rosenthal. They argued that the woman was treated unfairly, at which point Abe raised his finger for silence and said something to this effect: ‘I don’t care if you f–k an elephant on your personal time, but then you can’t cover the circus for the paper.’

The Times faced a remarkably similar employee problem recently. One of its reporters was found to have been sleeping with someone she covered at her previous newspaper. The news went public when her ex-boyfriend was arrested for lying to the FBI about his voluminous contacts with reporters. To further complicate matters, her records had been seized by the Department of Justice during its investigation into the ex-boyfriend.

Journalists and their defenders get agitated when government officials impinge or threaten to impinge on the press freedoms protected in the First Amendment. Some observers, such as this journalism professor, thought that was the only issue of interest in this sordid tale:

Victoria M. Walker ✔@vikkie

The government overreach is the *actual* issue. Not a female reporter's sex life. But carry on.

Nick Short ✔

Ali Watkins matter exposes everything that is wrong with the American media. You can cheat, lie, break the company’s rules, embarrass an entire profession and you will still get to work at one of the nation’s top newspapers! Polish up those résumés, kids! https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/06/unaccountable-big-media-personified/ …

2:30 PM - Jul 7, 2018

Government overreach absolutely is an issue. But so are journalism ethics, the mishandling of classified information, and threats against congressional oversight.

Who Did What When?

The Department of Justice announced in June that it arrested a former Senate staffer and charged him with lying to the FBI about his voluminous contacts with reporters who broke stories based on leaks of classified and sensitive information he was privy to. James Wolfe, 57, spent nearly 30 years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence before leaving his director of security post, where he was responsible for receiving, maintaining, managing, and safeguarding the committee’s classified information.

The indictment detailed contacts with four of the reporters he claimed never to have dealt with, including one with whom he had a lengthy intimate relationship beginning while she was in college. The New York Times recently reported on that relationship between Ali Watkins, 26, one of their national security reporters, and Wolfe.

Watkins was nominated for a Pulitzer while a college intern at McClatchy for a story she co-wrote based on leaks regarding the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The Pulitzer Committee noted the nomination was for “timely coverage of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture, demonstrating initiative and perseverance in overcoming government efforts to hide the details.”

Watkins later reported on national security, including the work of the committee, for Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Politico, before being hired at the Times. The Department of Justice seized years’ worth of her phone and email records as part of their investigation of Wolfe. All of the major players in this story — Watkins, Wolfe, The New York Times, and the Department of Justice — behaved in less than admirable fashion. Let’s look at the problems with each.

Ali Watkins

Watkins had a three-year affair with Wolfe, a married Senate aide who served on that committee. Although she implausibly claims she didn’t use him as a source, she admits he shared information with her. He also sent her an email talking about how he liked to help her out in her career by sharing information. When Watkins and her lover broke up last year, she began dating another Senate staffer on the same committee.

It is wrong to have a romantic relationship with a married man you are not married to. In no world is it considered ethical to have an intimate relationship with someone you cover, because it doesn’t just make you appear to be biased, it makes you biased. It’s particularly wrong to have a relationship that is undisclosed to readers.

Honesty about the relationship to the source can harm the overall effect of the story. “This dude who’s cheating on his wife with me said…” just doesn’t have the same authority as “according to a senior intelligence official,” after all. Still, it should be disclosed. As one New York Times story about Watkins noted, an editor at one of her previous publications named Sam Stein was married to an Obama administration official, a fact he disclosed in his stories. In some cases, Watkins partially disclosed her relationship to her editors, a disclosure that should have been taken far more seriously than it was in every case.

Watkins’ stories based on anonymous leaks dealt with the Russia collusion narrative that has been rather uncritically pushed by the media. Sleeping with sources also reinforces negative stereotypes about reporters, a stereotype that particularly harms female journalists. Critics frequently suggest that anti-Trump media and anti-Trump members of the intelligence community are in bed together. It wasn’t meant to be taken literally.

James Wolfe

It is wrong to cheat on your wife. It is wrong to mishandle the trust the government places on you to handle classified information. Wolfe’s job was to receive, maintain, manage, and safeguard classified information for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. His job was not to talk about his work with reporters.

The indictment suggests the reporters Wolfe was in contact with wrote stories about information he was privy to regarding Carter Page, a Trump associate who was under electronic and human surveillance in recent years after being named in an opposition research document secretly bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. That document alleged Page was at the center of a treasonous plot to collude with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Despite the extraordinary surveillance, he has not been charged with any crime. Government officials have regularly leaked information about him. He disputes the allegations in the dossier. Leaking the fact that he was under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant is itself a crime.

The leak of the FISA wiretap against Page occurred in the very middle of the government’s surveillance of Page. It was a major story in the “treasonous collusion with Russia” narrative many in the media promulgated. Watkins’ story about previous FBI interaction with Page also helped support the Russia hysteria, even though the story’s spin was dubious.

“A Former Trump Adviser Met With A Russian Spy,” blared the headline to the story, which said he’d “met with and passed documents to a Russian intelligence operative” in 2013. The documents were only samples of lectures he gave to students. Despite the dramatic language from Watkins, Page was not charged with doing anything wrong with Russian agents, but his cooperation with federal officials helped bring the Russian spies to justice. Selective leaks from government officials with access to sensitive information crafted a false narrative that has objectively harmed Page.

Department of Justice

The Department of Justice has been leaking like a sieve in recent years. Fired FBI director James Comey routinely used friends to shape news stories, even when it meant sharing classified memos. His deputy Andrew McCabe was later fired for lying about leaks to the media. Stories that follow their style of “leaks to shape the narrative” continue to pop up, such as this one about DOJ acting deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein that was in The New York Times last week.

When the DOJ inspector general released a report about the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation, it included repeated condemnation of the FBI’s culture of leaking. “Although FBI policy strictly limits the employees who are authorized to speak to the media, we found that this policy appeared to be widely ignored during the period we reviewed,” the report said. “We identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters.”

A diagram attached to the report showed rampant leaking to the media in just a few time periods analyzed. And that’s not all:

In addition, we identified instances where FBI employees improperly received benefits from reporters, including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events. We will separately report on those investigations as they are concluded, consistent with the Inspector General Act, other applicable federal statutes, and OIG policy.

Instead of looking inward at the leak problem, the Department of Justice went hunting for leaks from those who perform their oversight. It’s not that they can’t do it, but given the problems that come from investigating one’s overseers it’s not an unalloyed good to see the DOJ seeking to blame outsiders in a separate branch of government for the rampant leak problem the agency faces. That’s particularly true when the other branch of government performs oversight that is designed to hold the Justice Department accountable.

The other issue is that the DOJ seized reporter records in order to nab the Senate aide. Although they reportedly didn’t get the content of Watkins’ emails and phone calls, the seizure of the metadata can still pose serious threats to constitutionally protected journalistic freedoms.

Reporters don’t have a First Amendment right to participate in crimes such as the felonious leaking of information, but a robust First Amendment culture has protected reporters from overreach by the government. While Wolfe was the clear target of the investigation, wrapping up journalists can also have a chilling effect on their ability to report on the government and hold it accountable.

The New York Times

The New York Times code of ethics says, “Even though this topic defies hard and fast rules, it is essential that we preserve a professional detachment, free of any whiff of bias. Staff members may see sources informally over a meal or drinks, but they must keep in mind the difference between legitimate business and personal friendship… Clearly, romantic involvement with a news source would foster an appearance of partiality.”

Clearly The New York Times doesn’t take these concerns as seriously as they did when Rosenthal was in charge. The publication messed up in multiple ways. It messed up by hiring someone they knew had slept with people she covered. Then it messed up by keeping her employed after the world learned about her unethical behavior.

Some have theorized that The New York Times had to keep Watkins after allowing reporter Glenn Thrush to keep his job. He was the target of an article alleging drunken and caddish behavior with female colleagues. The allegations were made in a reported piece written by one of the women who experienced this behavior. I’m truly no fan of Thrush’s partisanship or allegations of sexual improprieties, but the story was journalistically irresponsible. Still, perhaps the Times felt it couldn’t keep Thrush on the payroll but fire Watkins, despite the different nature of the claims made against them.

Others have theorized that the Times kept Watkins on simply because it couldn’t afford to give President Trump a victory in his battle with a biased media. Watkins uncritically received anti-Trump leaks and published them. Firing her for her unethical journalistic behavior, even if it is the only appropriate course of action, would be a gift to him.

Ethical standards exist for a reason, and when they break down in media, government, and law enforcement all at once, public trust becomes difficult to impossible. One can and should oppose the bad behavior on display from everyone, whether reporters and editors, law enforcement officials, or government officers charged with protecting the nation’s secrets.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway

Photo Janne Räkköläinen / Flickr

G’ day…Ciao…Helen and Moe Lauzier

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