To Find Leakers, Jeff Sessions Wants To Put Entire National Security Council Through Lie Detector Test: Axios

Having warned previously that the DOJ would crack down brutally on any current and future leakers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions appears ready to follow through with this threat, and according to Axios, he has told co-workers he is seeking to put the entire National Security Council staff through a lie detector test "to root out leakers."

While it is unclear if Sessions will follow through, the AG reportedly floated the idea to multiple people, as recently as last month.

As Axios details the upcoming crackdown, Sessions" idea is to do a one-time, one-issue, polygraph test of everyone on the NSC staff. Interrogators would sit down with every single NSC staffer (there"s more than 100 of them), and ask them, individually, what they know about the leaks of transcripts of the president"s phone calls with foreign leaders. Sessions suspects those leaks came from within the NSC, and thinks that a polygraph test — at the very least — would scare them out of leaking again.

Sessions has told associates he likes the idea of targeting the foreign leader phone calls because there"s a small enough universe of people who would have had access to these transcripts. Also, the idea that the President of the United States can"t have private conversations with foreign leaders was a bridge too far, even for Democrats.

Perhaps more than anything, such a dramatic turn of events by the DOJ, would demonstrate how frustrated he"s become about the rampant leaking of classified information. Then again, as Axios observes, Sessions seems to understand that it"s extremely tough to successfully prosecute leakers, especially when they are career intelligence professionals who are skilled at covering their digital tracks.

The Fed's Dependence On The Consumer Will Backfire

Via C.Jay Engel of The Mises Institute,

The story is that it is consumers that are going "to push the economy to grow more than 2 percent this year." That"s Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan"s recently expressed view. It"s the old fallacy of spending — rather than saving — our way into growth.

It"s remarkable that no one talks about the fact that the economy since 2008 was built on little but cheap debt, and therefore depends on the continued flow of such debt.

To raise interest rates in that environment, will lead to the very conditions that the Fed fears the most. Of course, Austrians would praise such a blessed blow to the artificial boom. However, since the Fed, operating through a Keynesian lens, sees no inherent instability in such an economic environment. They don"t see how much this would severely undermine the alleged stability they think they"ve achieved.

Kaplan and the rest of them are depending on indebted consumers, exhausted by their credit levels, to push the economy all the way up to 2 percent growth. That it"s come down to this speaks volumes about the Fed"s alleged success over the years. Aside from the terrible labor participation rate is the fact that we are now supposed to be impressed by a GDP growth print above 2 percent. And even worse, the economy is so bad that in order to hit this 2 percent mark, we have to rely on the consumer. 

Beyond this, we just got the 2016 fourth quarter GDP numbers and guess what: it came in at a seriously lousy 1.9 percent. The "expectations" were in the 2.1 percent range. It gets even better: this low number was in spite of a 3 percent increase in consumer spending. This of course means that the spending isn"t helping. And without it, where would economic growth be then?

If the Fed raises rates, where will the "recovery" go? Or more accurately, where will the facade of a recovery go?