Iconoclast: Unanswered Russiagate Questions
“Key questions” remain “unanswered” in the wake of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the origins of the Russiagate probe, contends Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. Among them: former CIA boss John Brennan’s 2017 testimony before Congress that he had intel “about contacts between Russian officials and US persons” that “served as the basis for the FBI investigation.” Horowitz flatly contradicted that, which means either Brennan was lying to Congress or that “senior FBI officials were not truthful with Horowitz.” Similarly, ex-AG Loretta Lynch told Horowitz that FBI chief Jim Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, tipped her off about concerns centering on Trump aide Carter Page in the spring of 2016 — long before the investigation supposedly began. Add Brennan’s 2017 testimony, and you have “three different stories, still, from officials at the CIA, FBI, and Justice Department.”
Libertarian: Democrats’ Tax Cut for the Rich
“Democrats seem confused right now,” sighs Eric Boehm at Reason. Even their “centrist” presidential candidates want to pay for dramatic new spending by soaking the rich, yet House Democrats will “vote this week to restore a huge tax break that primarily benefits wealthy Americans.” The 2017 federal tax reform capped the state and local tax deduction at $10,000, but Dems want to double the cap this year, then repeal it entirely. The big beneficiaries would be high-earners in high-tax states. In New York in 2016, for example, the average deduction in wealthy Westchester was almost $16,000 but just $2,000 in much poorer St. Lawrence County. Why would Dems shift “the federal tax burden onto middle- and lower-income earners”? Well, “19 of the top 20 districts, ranked by the percentage of households claiming a SALT deduction,” are Democratic. In short, “Democrats know perfectly well that their own constituents like paying less in taxes, regardless of the campaign rhetoric.”
Impeachment watch: Dems May Pay Big-Time
Despite the conventional wisdom that impeachment will be “long forgotten” by Election Day 2020, freshman Democrats who “won on GOP-friendly turf to take back the House” aren’t so confident, notes National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar — and they’re right. For one thing, most of the “31 House Democrats who represent districts that Trump carried in 2016” promised to work with the president, but they can’t vote against impeachment, because “the backlash from their base would be severe.” Yes, it’s still “awfully hard” to see Republicans winning the House next year. But since these Democrats can’t keep their seats without winning over “a critical mass of Trump voters in addition to their base,” impeachment will boost the GOP’s chances.
From the left: Beware the Biden Disaster
Despite all the “hue and cry over Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders,” worries The Week’s Ryan Cooper, the Democratic front-runner is still Joe Biden, meaning the party is “sleepwalking into a disaster.” Biden’s campaign has been “lackluster at best,” and his fundraising, too. He ignores the way his relative moderation makes him ill-suited “to lead a party whose base is rapidly moving leftward.” And he hasn’t “even bothered to come up with a persuasive answer to his son Hunter’s involvement with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.” If Biden’s the nominee, “Trump is going to repeat the formula that made Hillary Clinton’s emails the dominant story of 2016” and successfully tag Biden as corrupt. Democrats need to act now to prevent “the potential disaster of a Biden nomination.”
Conservative: Bernie’s Anti-Semitism Problem
National Review’s David Harsanyi has news for the “mob of liberal blue checkmarks” that had “a collective meltdown” over Noah Rothman’s Commentary piece suggesting that Bernie Sanders, though Jewish, has anti-Semitic sympathies: Socialism “tends to corrode all other religious and cultural affiliations,” which is why Bernie Sanders “honeymooned in Moscow” when the Soviet regime was persecuting Jews. Fact is, “oppressed Russian Jews” aren’t Bernie’s concern — British socialist Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semites Linda Sarsour and Ilhan Omar are “his kind of people,” and for them, it’s “Judaism that’s the problem.” The fact that Bernie is a Jew “doesn’t mitigate that fact” — it “only makes it more appalling.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board