MADDOG10's Blog

The economy grew at a faster pace than expected in the first quarter and posted its best growth to start a year in four years.

"We're knocking it out of the park," President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.

First-quarter GDP expanded by 3.2 percent in the first quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said in its initial read of the economy for that period. Economists polled by Dow Jones expected an increase of 2.5 percent in the first quarter.

It was the first time since 2015 that first-quarter GDP topped 3 percent. !!!

Everybody knew. Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department understood fully in the middle of 2016—as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump—that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That’s the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven’t been released, but parts were confirmed for me by congressional sources.

Mr. Ohr testified...

Justice Department official Bruce Ohr arrives for a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., Aug. 28, 2018.Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

Everybody knew. Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department understood fully in the middle of 2016—as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump—that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That’s the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven’t been released, but parts were confirmed for me by congressional sources.

Mr. Ohr testified that he sat down with dossier author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016, and received salacious information the opposition researcher had compiled on Mr. Trump. Mr. Ohr immediately took that to the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andy McCabe and lawyer Lisa Page. In August he took it to Peter Strzok, the bureau’s lead investigator. In the same month, Mr. Ohr believes, he briefed senior personnel in the Justice Department’s criminal division: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz, lawyer Zainab Ahmad and fraud unit head Andrew Weissman. The last two now work for special counsel Robert Mueller.

More important, Mr. Ohr told this team the information came from the Clinton camp and warned that it was likely biased, certainly unproven. “When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information,” he testified. “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware.”

He said he told them that Mr. Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected,” and that his own wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier. He confirmed sounding all these warnings before the FBI filed its October application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page. We broke some of this in August, though the transcript provides new detail.

The FBI and Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to muddy these details, with cover from Democrats and friendly journalists. A January 2017 memo from Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, flatly (and incorrectly) insisted “the FBI’s closely-held investigative team only received Steele’s reporting in mid-September.” A May 2018 New York Times report repeated that claim, saying Mr. Steele’s reports didn’t reach the “Crossfire Hurricane team,” which ran the counterintelligence investigation, until “mid-September.”

This line was essential for upholding the claim that the dossier played no role in the unprecedented July 31, 2016, decision to investigate a presidential campaign. Former officials have insisted they rushed to take this dramatic step on the basis of a conversation involving a low-level campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, which took place in May, before the dossier officially came into the picture. And maybe that is the case. Yet now Mr. Ohr has testified that top personnel had dossier details around the time they opened the probe.

The Ohr testimony is also further evidence that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in its Page warrant application. We already knew the bureau failed to inform the court it knew the dossier had come from a rival campaign. But the FISA application additionally claimed the FBI was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to Mr. Steele, that he was “reliable,” that his “reporting” in this case was “credible.” and that the FBI only “speculates” that Mr. Steele’s bosses “likely” wanted to “discredit” Mr. Trump.

Speculates? Likely? Mr. Ohr makes clear FBI and Justice officials knew from the earliest days that Mr. Steele was working for the Clinton campaign, which had an obvious desire to discredit Mr. Trump. And Mr. Ohr specifically told investigators that they had every reason to worry Mr. Steele’s work product was tainted.

This testimony has two other implications. First, it further demonstrates the accuracy of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans’ memo of 2018—which noted Mr. Ohr’s role and pointed out that the FBI had not been honest about its knowledge of the dossier and failed to inform the court of Mrs. Ohr’s employment at Fusion GPS. The testimony also destroys any remaining credibility of the Democratic response, in which Mr. Schiff and his colleagues claimed Mr. Ohr hadn’t met with the FBI or told them anything about his wife or about Mr. Steele’s bias until after the election.

Second, the testimony raises new concerns about Mr. Mueller’s team. Critics have noted Mr. Weissman’s donations to Mrs. Clinton and his unseemly support of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s obstruction of Trump orders. It now turns out that senior Mueller players were central to the dossier scandal. The conflicts of interest boggle the mind.

The Ohr testimony is evidence the FBI itself knows how seriously it erred. The FBI has been hiding and twisting facts from the start.

Write to kim@wsj.com.

How could you forget?

The funeral lasted longer than the first season of Cop Rock — something like nine episodes.

McCain died on a Saturday, and his funeral services did not come to an end until the following Sunday, but only after it had toured three different cities. George H.W. Bush died on Friday and his services will end on Thursday. Both men were legitimate war heroes, but only one was a U.S. president.

Although illuminating, that is the least of it.

President Bush’s funeral has been lovely, classy, unifying, and loving. There have been no cheap snubs, no axe grinding from the grave.

The Bush family’s simple and decent act of burying the hatchet with President Trump, their patriotic act of making the president (and by extension his supporters) feel welcome and honored at these services, that is true patriotism, and that is what American democracy is supposed to be about.

What’s more, because of this, as sad as it all is, the funeral has been a healthy and uplifting national event, a rare time in these bitter days when all Americans have come together, an important reminder that, despite our differences, we do share a common culture and decency.

And it is also, by way of comparison, another reminder that the McCain funeral was something closer to an obscenity.

By far, the worst part of McCain’s going-away grudgefest was the clown show of audacious hypocrisy, the slathering sanctimony found in a theme that begged for us to go back to the good old days when people were civil with one another — and yet, all of this tripe about “civility” was coming from those who used a war hero’s funeral to snub and bash everyone who is not a member of their elitist establishment club — including, unforgivably, the president of the United States.

The catty, childish snubbing of the president is unforgivable, not because Donald Trump was snubbed, but because the office of the presidency was snubbed. That office represents We the People, and no matter who occupies that office, be it Barack Obama or Trump, when you <snip> on the president you <snip> on the people, and that is just how awful the McCain family is.

And then there were the so-called eulogies, most of which were reprehensible acts of narcissistic exploitation. On one hand, you had eulogies being used as score-settling tirades against Trump and his supporters, and on the other you had those like Meghan McCain — the deceased’s own child, for God’s sake — using her eulogy to up her media profile, to create a YouTube moment, to reassure the same hideous media that personally destroyed her father during his 2008 presidential run, that she is one of them.

“The America of John McCain does not need to be made great again, because it is already great,” the hideous Meghan said. I mean, she really said that — at a funeral — her father’s funeral.

Everything about McCain’s funeral proved just what a shallow, grasping, insecure, and small family this is. Among other things…

Publicly snubbing the American president.

Publicly snubbing Sarah Palin, his ever-loyal 2008 running mate.

Choosing pallbearers to take a jab at Trump.

Eulogies full of cheap-shot applause lines.

Funeral attendees applauding the mean-spirited partisanship as though they were at a rally.

John McCain’s funeral was twisted into something bitter and un-American, something disgraceful and petty. The New Yorker aptly described it as “the biggest resistance meeting yet.”‘

“Two ex-Presidents and one eloquent daughter teamed up to rebuke the pointedly uninvited Donald Trump, the New Yorker wrote, adding, “The funeral service for John Sidney McCain III, at the Washington National Cathedral …was all about a rebuke to the pointedly uninvited current President of the United States, which was exactly how McCain had planned it.”

What a disgrace, and every decent person knew at the time it was a disgrace. But through their act of common courtesy, humanity, dignity, and modesty, the Bush family once again reminded us of who they really are and who the McCains really are.

Too soon? Is it too soon to tell the truth about the McCains? You know what, I don’t care if it is too soon. I am sick and tired of being told what I can and cannot say, and I am really sick and tired of being emotionally blackmailed into not telling the truth. So there it is … and you all know I’m right.

May God bless and keep President George H.W. Bush and his family.

And may God forgive John McCain and his.