Glenn Reynolds;

THE UNENDING STREAM OF LEAKS FROM MUELLER’S OPERATION IS UNPROFESSIONAL AND — REMEMBER? — ILLEGAL.The DoJ should subpoena the journalists and demand they identify their sources. People within the prosecutor’s office who are committing felonies, and breaches of ethics should be prosecuted and fired. And that includes Mueller himself, if he’s doing the leaking.

Does Robert Mueller Want to Cause a Civil War?

These leaks have appeared only days after this supposedly-confidential investigation began. Where did they come from? Inside the FBI? If so, that organization (with five leakers!) is seriously corrupt and should be disbanded. Yes, you read that correctly.

Related: Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein cautions against anonymous sources in bizarre, strange, curious statement

The Federalist;

Not until after he was fired did Comey suddenly decide to inform the public of all these interactions that he said made him so uncomfortable. Comey’s similar refusal during his tenure to inform the public that the president was not being investigated is also clear evidence of the keep-my-job-at-all-costs game he was playing (if this game looks familiar, it’s the exact same one he played when he took the fall for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s refusal to prosecute Clinton in 2016). What better way to insure yourself against being fired than to give the impression that you are overseeing a grave investigation of potential wrongdoing by your boss?
The public impression that Trump was being criminally investigated, amplified by the president’s critics in the media, was effectively Comey’s get-out-of-jail-free card. The former FBI director likely assumed that no president would be crazy enough to fire a man whom the public believed to be investigating the president. Only a madman would fire that guy, right?

Oops.

Mr. Comey also confirms that on at least three occasions he told Mr. Trump that he was not a personal target of the Russia probe. But Mr. Comey wouldn’t make a public statement to the same effect, “most importantly because it would create a duty to correct” if Mr. Trump were implicated. This is odd because the real obligation is to keep quiet until an investigation is complete.
More interesting is that Mr. Trump’s frustration at Mr. Comey’s refusal raises the possibility that the source of Mr. Trump’s self-destructive behavior isn’t a coverup or a bid to obstruct the investigation. The source could simply be Mr. Trump’s wounded pride.
The most troubling part of Mr. Comey’s statement is his belief in what he calls “the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch,” which he invokes more than once. Independent? This is a false and dangerous view of law enforcement in the American system.

Any question as to what the face of the Deep State looks like? What is this guy doing in the U.S. embassy in London, and who put him there?

Breaking 911: — A criminal complaint was filed in the Southern District of Georgia today charging Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor from Augusta, Georgia, with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.

This Reality Leigh Winner? pic.twitter.com/MojC8StGs3

— LeftyBollocks (@LeftyBollocks) June 5, 2017

Gideon Rachman; (link updated)

One of the truly impressive things about modern Germany is that, more than any other country I can think of, it has thought hard about the lessons of history, and learnt them with thoroughness and humility. So it is baffling that a German leader could stand in a beer-tent in Bavaria and announce a separation from Britain and the US while bracketing those two countries with Russia. The historical resonances should be chilling.

She’s done a thorough job of wrecking Germany – why stop there?

What is Debbie Wasserman Schultz hiding? This smells bad.
Via, Instapundit.

This isn’t the first time James Comey placed himself at the center of a partisan attempt to oust a top Republican. He did the same thing in 2007. (Via)

“Having refused to admit his errors, the Director cannot be expected to implement the necessary corrective actions.” — Full text of the Memorandum for the Attorney General on the firing of James Comey.
Related…
More: “The surprise is it took so long”.

Republicans have never bought into the story line that Comey cost Clinton the election. And they fault him for not recommending criminal prosecution of Clinton for her alleged misdeeds. But their main complaint was that he gave the Russia story more weight than it deserved. In March, Comey revealed that there had been an active counterintelligence investigation on “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”
This was an unprecedented admission, and it might have been an attempt on Comey’s part to make it politically difficult to fire him. Clearly, not difficult enough. And while Comey said he had “no information that supports” the idea that President Trump had been “wiretapped,” the full nature of the surveillance that Trump’s campaign and administration have been subjected to has yet to be revealed.
The bottom line was that Comey repeatedly made himself the issue. His mandate was to enforce the law fairly and impartially. Instead, he appeared time and again to be gaming the system.

Weekly Standard;

Those who try to police the relentlessly transformational projects of constitutional progressives had much to dread from the Obama administration, an inveterate ally of the legal left that did what it could to graft the aspirations of progressives onto the Constitution. But Trump’s presidency may be even worse, because too many judges now feel called to “resist” Trump and all his works–no matter the cost to the law’s authority and to the integrity of the judicial role.

After a time, you’ll get used to it.

During his final year in office, President Obama’s team significantly expanded efforts to search National Security Agency intercepts for information about Americans, distributing thousands of intelligence reports across government with the unredacted names of U.S. residents during the midst of a divisive 2016 presidential election.
Among those whose names were unmasked in 2016 or early 2017 were campaign or transition associates of President Trump as well as members of Congress and their staffers, according to sources with direct knowledge.
[…]
In all, government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept metadata, which include telephone numbers and email addresses. The activity amounted to a 27.5 percent increase over the prior year and more than triple the 9,500 such searches that occurred in 2013, the first year such data was kept.
The government in 2016 also scoured the actual contents of NSA intercepted calls and emails for 5,288 Americans, an increase of 13 percent over the prior year and a massive spike from the 198 names searched in 2013.

OttRob