Who were Mueller’s ‘contractors’? and other commentary

Investigator: Who Were Mueller’s ‘Contractors’?

“Special counsel Robert Mueller spent more than $732,000 on outside contractors,” writes Paul Sperry at RealClearInvestigations, “but his office refuses to say who they were.” That stonewalling has led some on Capitol Hill to wonder if Mueller’s contractors included the shady British spook Christopher Steele, author of the discredited “dossier” on President Trump. The special counsel dispatched staff to London, Sperry notes, and his final report “recycles the general allegations leveled in the dossier.” Speculative as this so far is, if Mueller did draw on Steele information, it should raise serious concerns, given that such reliance would have “occurred long after FBI Director James Comey described the dossier as ‘salacious and unverified.’ ”

From the right: Get Real About the Dem Field

As in a bad TV show, already most of the Democratic 2020 primary drama is “filler,” quips Eric Lendrum in American Greatness. The number of candidates, 22, is “comical and now borders on the downright surreal.” Fact is, available polling data has already revealed who the top five candidates are, those who “truly have what it takes to remain there” — namely, former Vice President Joe Bider and Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Liz Warren and Cory Booker. Biden has the immense name recognition, hence his first-place status, while the other senators have managed to build national profiles while serving in the upper chamber. Lendrum urges: “Do not be fooled by the media’s fickle flirtations with whomever they deem the ‘hot new candidate’ ” and attempts to “generate excitement where none exists.”

Missouri senator: Big Tech Menaces Democracy

Is Silicon Valley’s vast technological prowess good for America? Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley recently took up that question in address to Stanford’s Hoover Institution (published at First Things), and he concluded that “there is something deeply troubling, maybe even deeply wrong, with the entire social-media economy.” Social-media platforms, he suggested, are consuming ever more of our attention and replacing “the various activities we did perfectly well without social media, for the entire known history of the human race.” The result: “dulled” attention spans, quickened tempers and profound alienation, all associated with activities that provide “little or no productive value to the United States economy,” said Hawley, and “an economy that does not value the things that matter produces a society shaped in its own image.”

Libertarian: PC Insanity Peaks at Seton Hall

A Seton Hall University history professor, Williamjames Hoffer, is under fire from a left-wing activist group demanding his firing. So far, so typical, says Robby Soave at Reason. What makes the Hoffer case remarkable is the speed with which the administration conceded, notes Soave. “The administration has placed Hoffer on leave pending an investigation, ostensibly ‘to ensure a safe environment is maintained on campus.’ ” What kind of “threat” did the scholar pose? “In a since-deleted post on his blog” published in 2018, Hoffer accused the activist group of “using rhetoric reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan.” As Soave notes, “this might be unfair” to the student activists, “but it is not a threat. It does not make them unsafe. It’s just speech, and any university that values academic freedom should allow professors to express sentiments that students find displeasing.”

French thinker: Europe’s Socialists Should Learn From GOP

In a City Journal review of Oren Cass’ book “The Once and Future Worker,” French intellectual Emmanuel Todd notes how elites on both sides of the Atlantic “express in elegant and apparently moderate terms absurd ideas,” while populist figures like President Trump utter “obscenities that are, in fact, much more reasonable and moderate in their economic, ­social and demographic implications.” Thus Cass, whom Todd characterizes as a “polite Trumpist,” is willing to cast a cold light on elite-favored policies like relentless globalization and automation that displace workers and harm the common good of families. Writes Todd: “It is troubling to find oneself in a world where it is now American Republicans, such as Cass, who worry about workers. How is it that he proves to be infinitely more humane than a contemporary French socialist?”

— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari

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