Kimberley Strassel: Insubordination and Bias at FBI
Posted: June 17, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, U.S. News | Tags: Bias, Bill Clinton, FBI, Hillary Clinton, Investigation, James Comey, Kimberley Strassel, Loretta Lynch, Michael Horowitz Leave a comment
The inspector general report is careful in its conclusions, but damning on the facts.
Kimberley A. Strassel Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 500-page report covers plenty, but it can be distilled to two words he uses to describe the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the 2016 election: insubordination and bias. Two terms that are chilling in connection with such a powerful agency.That won’t be the message from Democrats and most of the press, who will focus on a few episodes they will claim cost Hillary Clinton an election. Watch for them to blame former FBI Director James Comey, whom the report faults for “a serious error of judgment,” for having “concealed information” from superiors, and for “violation of or disregard for” departmental and bureau policies.
True, the report is damning about the man who lectures Americans on “higher loyalty.” It describes how an “insubordinate” Mr. Comey was, as early as April 2016, considering how to cut his Justice Department bosses from a public statement exonerating Hillary Clinton. He hid this scheme for fear “they would instruct him not to do it”—and therefore was able to “avoid supervision.” He then “violated long-standing Department practice and protocol” by using his July 5 press conference for “criticizing Clinton’s uncharged conduct.” In October, he made public that the FBI had reopened the investigation, even though the Justice Department recommended he not do so. Mr. Comey went rogue, and President Trump had plenty of justification in firing him in May 2017.
Yet it is the report’s findings on the wider culture of the FBI and Justice Department that are most alarming. The report depicts agencies that operate outside the rules to which they hold everybody else, and that showed extraordinary bias while investigating two presidential candidates.
There’s Loretta Lynch, who felt it perfectly fine to have a long catch-up with her friend Bill Clinton on a Phoenix tarmac and whom the inspector general slams for an “error in judgment.” Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] SCHADENBONER: HBO’s Footage of Ben Rhodes On Election Night: ‘I Can’t Even…’
Posted: May 31, 2018 Filed under: Foreign Policy, Politics, White House | Tags: 2016 Presidential Election, Ben Rhodes, Hillary Clinton, video Leave a comment
John Sexton writes: There’s a certain view of Ben Rhodes which arose in the aftermath of the Iran deal and specifically after the publication of that infamous NY Times profile in which Rhodes talked about creating an “echo chamber” of know-nothing journalists to push the deal. After that story, it was easy to see him as a kind of Machiavellian character manipulating people from behind the scenes.
Ben Rhodes, assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications at the White House, answers a question during the Reuters Washington Summit in Washington, October 24, 2013. REUTERS/Jim Bourg.
There a good reason Rhodes does his best work behind the scenes. He’s just a really bad actor. I mean ‘bad actor’ in the theatrical sense, i.e. someone who is playing a part in our national story with such overwrought pathos that it becomes unintentionally funny …
“I came outside just to process all this,” Rhodes says to the camera. “I can’t even….ah…uh…I can’t…I mean I, I, I, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t put it into words, I don’t know what the words are.”
… Rhodes has a book coming out about his experience in the White House. The NY Times profile of it suggests Obama’s reaction to Hillary’s loss wasn’t much better:
Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.
“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.
He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »
Cambridge Professor Stefan Halper Outed as FBI Informant Inside Trump Campaign
Posted: May 20, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Classified information, Democratic Party (United States), Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Donald Trump, Donald Trump presidential campaign, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Moscow 1 Comment
‘It’s Not Syping Spying, it’s Investigating Spying’.
The revelation, stemming from recent reports in which FBI sources admitted sending an agent to snoop on the Trump camp, heightens suspicions that the FBI was seeking to entrap Trump campaign aides. Papodopoulous has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, while Page was the subject of a federal surveillance warrant.
[Read the full text here, at nypost.com]
“If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal,” President Trump tweeted Saturday, calling for the FBI to release additional documents to Congress.
The Halper revelation also shows the Obama administration’s FBI began prying into the opposing party’s presidential nominee earlier than it previously admitted. Read the rest of this entry »
Did the Bureau Engage in Outright Spying Against the 2016 Trump Campaign?
Posted: May 11, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: 2016, Central Intelligence Agency, CNN, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Donald Trump presidential campaign, Government of Russia, Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller, The Washington Post, United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence 1 Comment
About That FBI ‘Source’
Kimberley A. Strassel writes: The Department of Justice lost its latest battle with Congress Thursday when it allowed House Intelligence Committee members to view classified documents about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.Among them is that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation outright hid critical information from a congressional investigation. In a Thursday press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan bluntly noted that Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s request for details on this secret source was “wholly appropriate,” “completely within the scope” of the committee’s long-running FBI investigation, and “something that probably should have been answered a while ago.” Translation: The department knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, but instead deliberately concealed it.
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
House investigators nonetheless sniffed out a name, and Mr. Nunes in recent weeks issued a letter and a subpoena demanding more details. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s response was to double down—accusing the House of “extortion” and delivering a speech in which he claimed that “declining to open the FBI’s files to review” is a constitutional “duty.” Justice asked the White House to back its stonewall. And it even began spinning that daddy of all superspook arguments—that revealing any detail about this particular asset could result in “loss of human lives.”
This is desperation, and it strongly suggests that whatever is in these files is going to prove very uncomfortable to the FBI.
The bureau already has some explaining to do. Thanks to the Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a “top secret intelligence source” of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe. When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign. Read the rest of this entry »
The press used to uncover government wrongdoing. Today’s press is defending it.
Posted: February 8, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, White House | Tags: ABC, Barack Obama, Bruce Ohr, Christopher Steele, Donald Trump, FBI, FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Hillary Clinton, media, MSNBC, NBC, New York Times, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, The Press, Victor Davis Hanson, Washington Post, Watergate 1 Comment
FISA Memo Is Scarier than Watergate.
Victor Davis Hanson write: The Watergate scandal of 1972–74 was uncovered largely because of outraged Democratic politicians and a bulldog media. They both claimed that they had saved American democracy from the Nixon administration’s attempt to warp the CIA and FBI to cover up an otherwise minor, though illegal, political break-in.
In the Iran-Contra affair of 1985–87, the media and liberal activists uncovered wrongdoing by some rogue members of the Reagan government. They warned of government overreach and of using the “Deep State” to subvert the law for political purposes.
We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.
But none of these government officials told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the warrant requests were based on an unverified dossier that had originated as a hit piece funded in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump during the current 2016 campaign.
[Read the full story here, at National Review]
Nor did these officials reveal that the author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, had already been dropped as a reliable source by the FBI for leaking to the press.
Nor did officials add that a Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, had met privately with Steele — or that Ohr’s wife, Nellie, had been hired to work on the dossier.
Unfortunately, such disclosures may be only the beginning of the FISA-gate scandal.
Members of the Obama administration’s national security team also may have requested the names of American citizens connected with the Trump campaign who had been swept up in other FISA surveillance. Those officials may have then improperly unmasked the names and leaked them to a compliant press — again, for apparent political purposes during a campaign.
Victor Davis Hanson: Counterfeit Elitism
Posted: February 6, 2018 Filed under: Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Administrative State, Barack Obama, Devin Nunes, Elise Jordan, Elite, Farmers, Harvard, Hillary Clinton, San Joaquin Valley, Victor Davis Hanson, Yale Leave a comment
“Elite” is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it.
Victor Davis Hanson writes: Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:
Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.
Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.
Elise Jordan
Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.
Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.
[Read the more here, at American Greatness]
“Elite” is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it.
The frustration with chronic elite incompetence was a theme in the 2016 election. “Expert” pollsters assured us of a Clinton landslide. The media could not follow undergraduate rules of decorum and truthfulness. “Brilliant” Ivy League trained pundits preached that the Trump administration’s first year would be disastrous and without accomplishment. Televised legal eagles insisted that Robert Mueller by now would have indicted Team Trump on charges of Russian collusion.
Half the country no longer believes these self-appointed authorities, largely because there is no visible connection between what the self-congratulatory say and do and any commensurate discernable accomplishment.
After a half-century of “whiz kids,” “the best and the brightest,” and “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Americans finally yawned and are moving on.
Deplorables, Clingers, and Those Not Worthy of Worry
One symptom of such a played-out elite is its blanket condemnation of the supposed blinkered middle-class—usually evident in their virtue-signaling outrage and in their inclination to contrast their own supposed enlightenment to the supposed ignorance of everyone else.
You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that… Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
So said Yale law graduate Hillary Clinton, in an incoherent, factually unsubstantiated, and politically disastrous rant that may have lost her the 2016 election.
Clinton all but wrote off 25 percent of America as “not America”—this from the 2008 primary challenger to Barack Obama who was blasted by progressives for pandering to just such a white gun-owning consistency.
[Read the full story here, at American Greatness]
Or as Barack Obama once said, Hillary Clinton is “talking like she’s Annie Oakley . . . Hillary Clinton is out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday. She’s packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better.”
Or as Clinton herself once put it, “[I’ve] found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me . . . There’s a pattern emerging here.”
It is hard to image the Yalie feminist Clinton having any sort of political career without attachment to president emeritus and spouse Bill Clinton, whose serial sexual harassment and assault she not only contextualized over four decades, but by serial defense fueled. Read the rest of this entry »
Biased FBI and DOJ Officials Broke The Law And Tried To Decide The Election: An Annotated Timeline
Posted: February 6, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Barack Obama, Devin Nunes, FBI, Hillary Clinton 1 Comment
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., returns to a secure area in the Capitol Jan. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Thomas Del Beccaro writes: There can be no question, at this point, that certain higher ups in the FBI and the DOJ did not want Hillary to be indicted and did not want Donald Trump to become President. Those efforts were not entirely independent of each other.
Below is a timeline of events – abbreviated though it is – that makes it rather plain that the FBI and DOJ were not investigating potential crimes objectively.
Indeed, they were committing crimes during the process in aid of their preferred outcomes.
1. 2007. Hillary Clinton wanted to be President. Hillary’s ambitions to be president started long ago. She ran for President in the 2008 cycle. In 2009, after losing to Obama, Hillary became Obama’s Secretary of State. She stayed in that post until 2013.
2. March 2015. The Hillary email scandal breaks. Hillary was using an unapproved/unsecured server and devices to communicate. She was using a private email account. Classified information was being sent through that email, server and devices – including when Hillary was abroad.
All of that is illegal. As 2015 unfolds, it becomes clear to the FBI and the DOJ that President Barack Obama was communicating with Hillary using her non-state department email. Obama was using an email and a name that masked who he was.
That had to be known to authorities long before March of 2015 given that it occurred prior to 2013.
As Andrew McCarthy points out in his recent article, there was no chance that the DOJ was going to indict Hillary because that would have required implicating President Obama. That was never going to happen. From thereafter, DOJ officials acted with that understanding, however illegal, in mind.
3. June 2015. Donald Trump announces his Presidential run.
4. March 2016. Trump has enough delegates to claim the nomination. Read the rest of this entry »
A Reckoning for the FBI
Posted: February 3, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Christopher Steele, DOJ, Donald Trump, Dossier, FBI, FISA, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Memo, Presidential Campaign 2016, Surveillance Leave a comment
The House memo reveals disturbing facts about the misuse of FISA.
Now we know why the FBI tried so hard to block release of the House Intelligence Committee memo. And why Democrats and the media want to change the subject to Republican motivations. The four-page memo released Friday reports disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath.
The White House declassified the memo Friday, and you don’t have to be a civil libertarian to be shocked by the details. The memo confirms that the FBI and Justice Department on Oct. 21, 2016 obtained a FISA order to surveil Carter Page, an American citizen who was a relatively minor volunteer adviser to the Trump presidential campaign.
The memo says an “essential” part of the FISA application was the “dossier” assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele and the research firm Fusion GPS that was hired by a law firm attached to the Clinton campaign. The memo adds that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told the committee in December 2017 that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
This is troubling enough, but the memo also discloses that the FBI failed to inform the FISA court that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier. The memo says the FBI supported its FISA application by “extensively” citing a September 2016 article in Yahoo News that contained allegations against Mr. Page. But the FBI failed to tell the court that Mr. Steele and Fusion were the main sources for that Yahoo article. In essence the FBI was citing Mr. Steele to corroborate Mr. Steele.
Unlike a normal court, FISA doesn’t have competing pleaders. The FBI and Justice appear ex parte as applicants, and thus the judges depend on candor from both. Yet the FBI never informed the court that Mr. Steele was in effect working for the Clinton campaign. The FBI retained Mr. Steele as a source, and in October 2016 he talked to Mother Jones magazine without authorization about the FBI investigation and his dossier alleging collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The FBI then fired Mr. Steele, but it never told the FISA judges about that either. Nor did it tell the court any of this as it sought three subsequent renewals of the order on Mr. Page. Read the rest of this entry »
‘FED UP: FBI Deputy Out in Clinton, Trump Probes Turmoil’: NY Post Cover for January 30, 2018
Posted: January 30, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Donald Trump, FBI, Hillary Clinton, journalism, media, New York, New York Post, news, NYC, Tabloid 1 Comment
Source: New York Post
2018 Grammy Ratings Sink From Recent Years
Posted: January 30, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Grammys, Hillary Clinton, Ratings, Television, The Pantsuit Report Leave a comment
It’s a demo low for the telecast, as it still skews young and the audience drops by 24 percent.
Michael O’Connell reports: Sunday’s Bruno Mars-loving Grammy Awards took a dramatic ratings spill, fetching the smallest demo audience in the show’s history.
The telecast, which ran a bloated three-and-a-half hours, was off by 24 percent from 2017 with adjusted numbers. With time zone adjustments taken into account, the telecast averaged 19.8 million viewers and a 5.9 rating among adults 18-49. The second stat marked a low for the show. Among total viewers, that number was down even more than overnight returns from Nielsen Media that it a 12.7 rating among households. It’s the biggest drop for the Grammys since the 2013, the year after the show swelled following the death of Whitney Houston.
The 2017 overnight ratings for the Grammy Awards didn’t paint the most accurate portrait of their year-over-year performance. The 16.0 rating among households, steady with 2016, ended up translating to a not-insignificant gain of 1 million viewers. Those Grammys were the best in two years, averaging just north of 26 million viewers and earning a 7.8 rating among adults 18-49. Read the rest of this entry »
NYT Only Finds the FBI Texts Newsworthy in that Republicans are ‘Seizing’ On Them
Posted: December 15, 2017 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: 2016 Presidential Campaign, Bias, Democrats, Department of Justice, DOJ, FBI, GOP Pounce Story, Hillary Clinton, media, New York Times, Peter Strzok Leave a comment
The New York Times has already moved on to the ‘Republicans pounce’ portion of the news cycle.
Becket Adams writes: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is facing a brewing scandal involving hyper-partisan texts written by his former team members, and the New York Times has already moved on to the “Republicans pounce” portion of the news cycle.
Because that’s often the modus operandi for these sorts of things.
Peter Strzok, who specializes in Russian counterintelligence, was removed from Mueller’s team this July. The decision to take Strzok off the Russia investigation came after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered he had sent and received dozens of anti-Trump texts between August 2015 and 2016 from Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer with whom Strzok was having an affair. Page was also on Mueller’s team, but only briefly. She returned to the FBI before the special counsel was made aware of the texts.
There’s really no getting around it: The texts are extremely partisan.
“I can not believe Donald Trump is likely to be an actual, serious candidate for president,” Page wrote in one note.
Strzok wrote in another note, “God Hillary should win. 100,000,000-0.”
“And maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace,” Page wrote in another text. “I can protect our country at many levels, not sure if that helps.” Read the rest of this entry »
Fusion DoJ: It’s Getting Hard to Tell Where the Clinton Campaign Ends and the Federal Law Enforcement Apparatus Begins
Posted: December 14, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice | Tags: CIA, DOJ, Fusion, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, James Comey, Justice Department 1 Comment
The Department of Justice headquarters building in Washington. Photo: J. David Ake/Associated Press
James Freeman reports: Is animus toward President Donald Trump a prerequisite for landing a job with special counsel Robert Mueller ? Recent revelations in Washington also raise again the question of what former President Barack Obama knew about the decisions of his FBI Director James Comey to exonerate Hillary Clinton and investigate Mr. Trump in 2016.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
A top FBI agent and an FBI lawyer, who were involved in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email arrangement and the probe into Russian electoral meddling, exchanged texts disparaging then-candidate Donald Trump, including calling him an “idiot” and a “menace,” according to copies of the messages the Justice Department provided Congress.
Peter Strzok, 47 years old, was one of the highest-ranking agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was removed from his post with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling this past summer after a Justice Department watchdog launched an inquiry into the texts.
The messages between Mr. Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page include one in which Ms. Page tells him in August 2016: “Maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace.”
The New York Times reports on another 2016 text:
On July 27, Ms. Page wrote, “She just has to win now. I’m not going to lie, I got a flash of nervousness yesterday about Trump.” That text message was sent after the Clinton investigation had been closed. Days later, the F.B.I. began investigating possible coordination between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.
Recently the Journal’s Kim Strassel noted the stone wall against congressional oversight that has been constructed by Mr. Mueller, his Department of Justice colleagues, and Mr. Mueller’s deputies, many of whom have demonstrated their political opposition to the President.
[Read the full text here, at WSJ]
Is there really no way to run a special counsel’s office or a federal law enforcement agency without appointing liberal political activists—or at least people with close ties to the President’s adversaries—to senior roles? Fox News reports:
A co-founder of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS acknowledged in a new court document that his company hired the wife of a senior Justice Department official to help investigate then-candidate Donald Trump last year.
[VIDEO] Fox News Reporting: The Tangled Clinton Web
Posted: October 21, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Bill Clinton, Bret Baier, Clintons, Enriched uranium, Fox News, Hillary Clinton, Uranium, video 1 Comment
New York Post: The White House has become the craziest reality show on TV
Posted: July 27, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: 2016, Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump, Donald Trump presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, President of the United States, Reince Priebus, West Wing, White House Leave a comment
In the latest episode of “White House Survivor,” the West Wing descended into chaos Thursday, as President Trump and his top aides turned on each other like vicious reality show divas … (read more)
Source: New York Post
[VIDEO] Millennials Love Love Love Socialism (But Can’t Define It)
Posted: July 18, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Americans, Bernie Sanders, CNN, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, Political action committee, Republican Party (United States), The Washington Post Leave a comment
Scott McClallen writes: Millennials rushed to the polls to vote for Bernie Sanders running as a Democratic socialist last election season. However, did they fall in love with socialism or just want free college and healthcare? A new video suggests they have no idea what socialism is.
Campus Reform interviewed George Washington University students and asked them two questions: Do you think socialism is good or bad?
“I think people throw that word around to try to scare you, but if helping other people is socialism, then I’m all for it,” one girl answered.
“It could really benefit our country in the future,” another said.
“Socialism as a concept, as a philosophy, is good,” a male student said. “I think it’s got a bad rep.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Resistance That Cried Wolf
Posted: July 17, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, Russia, War Room | Tags: Democratic Party, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Left Wing Activists, Progressives, Radical Left, Ted Kennedy, The Resistance, W. James Antle III, whataboutism Leave a comment
W. James Antle III writes: It’s impossible in some quarters to discuss Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a shady Russian lawyer without being quizzed about similar bad things politicians from the opposing party have done.
What about Ted Kennedy’s secret messages to the Soviets while Ronald Reagan was running for re-election? What about the Ukrainian government trying to help Hillary Clinton? And on and on it goes.
This bit of rhetorical judo has become so common in our politics that it even has a name: “whataboutism.” Naturally, its origins have been traced back to the Russians, if not even further back. The Economist‘s Edward Luce described it as an attempt to “match every Soviet crime with a real or imagined Western one.”
More recently, the tactic has been deployed by diehard supporters of President Trump, as well as by his more removed “anti-anti-Trumpist” backers.
And you know what? Trump’s supporters are not wrong to urge us all to truly examine historical precedents. Because all too often, Trump’s fiercest critics declare his every utterance and action unprecedented without bothering to thoughtfully consider the precedents.
Now, when “whataboutism” is used to defend the indefensible, it is obviously wrong. But not every historical comparison can be dismissed as simple “whataboutism.” And there are good reasons why “What about … ” questions have so frequently been raised under this president. The case against Trump is not simply that he does things that are wrong or bad, but that he is bad in ways that are unprecedented and represent a sharp break from important political norms.
If we are going to chastise Trump for norm violations, shouldn’t we first establish how normal or abnormal his actions in a given area really are? If we are going to say he is guilty of doing the unprecedented, shouldn’t we look to see if there are in fact any precedents? Read the rest of this entry »
Radical Opponents of Free Speech Can’t Tolerate Hearing Anything New
Posted: July 15, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Barack Obama, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Donald Trump presidential campaign, EUROPE, First Amendment, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of speech, Hillary Clinton, Israel, Peter Beinart, Radical Left, Steve Scalise, To the End of the Land, United States, Warsaw 1 Comment
Turn Left and Go Over the Top
Stefan Kanfer writes: Pity the poor members of the Resistance. They decried violence on the right—only to have GOP congressman Steve Scalise shot by rifle-wielding left-winger James T. Hodgkinson. Then, a group of theater professinals decried any attempt to quash a staging of Julius Caesar with the title character, caparisoned as Donald Trump, assassinated with shouts of revenge and gouts of blood. But soon afterward, yet another assemblage of theater professionals decided that censorship was a good thing after all.
The Lincoln Center Festival is staging a four-night production this month of To the End of the Land, a dramatization of the acclaimed novel by Israeli author David Grossman. The play is underwritten by a cultural-outreach arm of the Israeli government. The Jewish State is anathema to the radical Left, and angry members of an organization identifying itself as “Adalah-NY, the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel,” are demanding that the production be taken off the boards before the Center dares to raise its curtain. Signatories to the demand include playwrights Tracy Letts, Lynn Nottage, and Annie Baker, as well as director Sam Gold, rock star Roger Waters, indie-film darling Greta Gerwig, and reliably anti-Israel playwright/actor Wallace Shawn.
[Read the full story here, at City Journal]
Adalah-NY says that production of To the End of the Land will aid the Isralie government in its “Brand Israel” campaign, which aims to use arts and culture to beguile audiences into thinking that Israel is a modern, civilized nation—while the wicked Hebrews continue their “violent colonization, brutal military occupation and denial of basic rights to the Palestinian people.”
Never mind that the play is actually an antiwar document, that its Israeli writer lost a son to battle and is understandably reluctant to fan any fires, and that, in fact, it has a sympathetic Palestinian character. Never mind that Israel is surrounded by would-be assassins who have sworn to destroy the Jewish state and all who live there. Never mind that a quick glance at the state of human rights or rule of law among any of Israel’s neighbors provides the sharpest possible foil, and that not a peep has been heard from Adalah-NY about the lives of the citizen-victims of Egypt, Gaza, Syria, or Lebanon. Read the rest of this entry »
Peter W. Smith, GOP Operative Who Sought Clinton’s Emails from Russian Hackers, Committed Suicide, Records Show
Posted: July 13, 2017 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Donald Trump presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Republican Party (United States), RUSSIA, Twitter 1 CommentIn a room at a Rochester hotel used almost exclusively by Mayo Clinic patients and relatives, Peter W. Smith, 81, left a carefully prepared file of documents, which includes a statement police called a suicide note in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring.
Days earlier, the financier from suburban Lake Forest gave an interview to the Journal about his quest, and it published stories about his efforts beginning in late June. The Journal also reported it had seen emails written by Smith showing his team considered retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then a top adviser to Republican Donald Trump‘s campaign, as an ally. Flynn briefly was President Trump’s national security adviser and resigned after it was determined he had failed to disclose contacts with Russia.
At the time, the newspaper reported Smith’s May 14 death came about 10 days after he granted the interview. Mystery shrouded how and where he had died, but the lead reporter on the stories said on a podcast he had no reason to believe the death was the result of foul play and that Smith likely had died of natural causes.
However, the Chicago Tribune obtained a Minnesota state death record filed in Olmsted County that says Smith committed suicide in a hotel near the Mayo Clinic at 1:17 p.m. on Sunday, May 14. He was found with a bag over his head with a source of helium attached. A medical examiner’s report gives the same account, without specifying the time, and a report from Rochester police further details his suicide.
In the note recovered by police, Smith apologized to authorities and said that “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER” was involved in his death. He wrote that he was taking his own life because of a “RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017” and timing related “TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.”
“Tomorrow is my last day,” Smith told a man at the hotel while he worked on a computer in the business center, printing documents between 8 and 9 p.m. on May 13, according to the police reports.
One of Smith’s former employees told the Tribune he thought the elderly man had gone to the famed clinic to be treated for a heart condition. Mayo spokeswoman Ginger Plumbo said Thursday she could not confirm Smith had been a patient, citing medical privacy laws.
The Journal stories said it was on Labor Day weekend in 2016 that Smith had assembled a team to acquire emails the team theorized might have been stolen from the private server Clinton had used while secretary of state. Smith’s focus was the more than 30,000 emails Clinton said she deleted because they related to personal matters. A huge cache of other Clinton emails were made public. Read the rest of this entry »
Did CNN’s Russia Story Debacle Come at the Best Possible Time for the Network?
Posted: June 27, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, Russia, White House | Tags: Donald Trump, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, President of the United States, Robert Mueller, RUSSIA, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Twitter Leave a comment
When the flawed story broke, the investigations editor was out of town.
Paul Farhi reports: Lex Haris, CNN’s investigations editor, traveled to a journalism conference in Phoenix last week. In hindsight, his timing was terrible.
While Haris was away, his group published a story on CNN.com that reported — citing a single anonymous source — that Senate investigators were looking into a meeting between a member of President Trump’s transition team, Wall Street financier Anthony Scaramucci, and an executive of a Russian investment fund before Trump took office. The story seemed to advance the narrative of ties between Trump campaign officials and people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
One problem: When challenged on the particulars of the story, CNN acknowledged that it couldn’t stand by it. It retracted it and apologized to Scaramucci on Saturday. On Monday, Haris and the editor and reporter of the piece, Eric Lichtblau and Thomas Frank, resigned from CNN.
The sequence of events led Trump to take a kind of victory lap on Tuesday. He turned to Twitter to bash CNN and other media outlets (including The Washington Post) that have aggressively reported on his associates’ connections to Russian officials during the 2016 campaign and pre-inaugural period.
“Wow, CNN had to retract big story on “Russia,” with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!” Trump tweeted. He added later, “Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories. Ratings way down!”
In fact, CNN isn’t looking at “big management changes,” according to senior executives at the network. But Trump — long resistant to admitting his own falsehoods— is unlikely to correct his tweet anytime soon. He has also been silent about errors committed by other news organizations, such as Fox News, that he deems to be friendly. Read the rest of this entry »
Massive Ransomware Cyber Attack Spreads Across Europe
Posted: June 27, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Global, Mediasphere, Russia, Science & Technology, Terrorism | Tags: 2016, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Donald Trump presidential campaign, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Jeff Sessions, RUSSIA, The Washington Post, Twitter 1 Comment
Another widespread cyber attack is causing massive problems across Europe Tuesday.
Ukraine has been hit particularly hard as government and company officials have reported serious intrusions across the Ukrainian power grid, banks and government offices. The country’s prime minister says that the cyber attack affecting his country is “unprecedented,” but “vital systems haven’t been affected.”
Russia’s top oil producer Rosneft has said it has been hacked, as well as Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk and Britain’s WPP—the largest advertising company in the world.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko on Tuesday posted a picture of a darkened computer screen to Twitter, saying that the computer system at the government’s headquarters has been shut down.
There’s very little information about who might be behind the disruption, but technology experts who examined screenshots circulating on social media said it bears the hallmarks of ransomware, the name given to programs that hold data hostage by scrambling it until a payment is made.
“A massive ransomware campaign is currently unfolding worldwide,” said Romanian cybersecurity company Bitdefender. In a telephone interview, Bitdefender analyst Bogdan Botezatu said that he had examined samples of the program and that it appeared to be nearly identical to GoldenEye, one of a family of hostage-taking programs that has been circulating for months. Read the rest of this entry »
Kevin D. Williamson: It did not take very long to get from ‘Punch a Nazi!’ to ‘assassinate a congressman’
Posted: June 15, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, U.S. News | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Elections in the United Kingdom, Hillary Clinton, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party (UK), List of United Kingdom general elections, Nancy Pelosi, National Review, Political Violence, Radical Left, Republican Party (United States), Steve Scalise, The New York Times Leave a commentThe Alexandria shooting is the continuation of the riots in Berkeley and Middlebury.
This is why the standard liberal motto — that violence is never legitimate, even though it may sometimes be necessary to resort to it — is insufficient. From a radical emancipatory perspective, this formula should be reversed: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate (since their very status is the result of the violence they are exposed to), but never necessary (it will always be a matter of strategy whether or not use violence against the enemy).
Slavoj Žižek, On Violence and Democracy
Kevin D. Williamson writes: It did not take very long to get from “Punch a Nazi!” to “assassinate a congressman.”
” … the relevant question here is not violent rhetoric but violence itself. The violence at Berkeley and Middlebury did not lead to the shooting in Alexandria — they are part of the same phenomenon: The American Left has embraced political violence.”
A great deal of spittle has been deployed in the debate over whether or to what extent the Left’s recent indulgence of its penchant for violent rhetoric can be linked to the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise and other members of a Republican congressional baseball team by an angry Democratic activist and Bernie Sanders partisan. But the relevant question here is not violent rhetoric but violence itself. The violence at Berkeley and Middlebury did not lead to the shooting in Alexandria — they are part of the same phenomenon: The American Left has embraced political violence.
[Read the full story here, at National Review]
More precisely, the Left has embraced “anarcho-tyranny.” (Yes, I know what kind of man Sam Francis became; his phrase remains useful.) The anarcho part: Progressives including mainstream Democrats have embraced the sort of violence that has been directed against the likes of Charles Murray as an instrument of liberationist politics.
Representative Val Demings, a Democratic congressman from Florida, shared her view that the riots greeting Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley were “a beautiful sight.” After a physical attack on white nationalist Richard Spencer, Jeremy Binckes of Salon wrote: “Maybe the question shouldn’t be, ‘Is it okay to punch a Nazi?’ but, ‘If you don’t want to be punched in the face, maybe you shouldn’t preach Nazi values to the public?’” A lively debate about the ethics of using violence to suppress certain political views ensued. Short version: Free speech did not experience a runaway victory.
“A Middlebury professor had to be briefly hospitalized after being physically attacked for having invited Charles Murray to campus. That is not free speech. That is violence, and Democrats, judging by their non-response to these episodes, have more or less made their peace with it.”
Things are worse on campus. The editorial board of the Daily Californian defended blackshirt violence on the grounds that, without it, “neo-Nazis would be free to roam the streets of Berkeley.” Read the rest of this entry »
DO IT: Sarah Palin May Sue New York Times for Tying Her to Gabby Giffords Shooting
Posted: June 15, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Bernie Sanders, D.C., Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Libel, Republican Party (United States), Slander, The New York Times, United States, Washington Leave a comment
Sarah Palin indicated on Thursday that she might sue the New York Times over editorial that suggested she was in some way responsible for the 2011 shooting of then-Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords.
“Commonsense suggestion by a journalist, am talking to attorneys this [morning] and exploring options,” she said. “[By the way], wonder WHY someone would no longer be in public eye? Think constant libel & slander have anything to do with it?”
(1/2) @nytopinion – commonsense suggestion by a journalist, am talking to attorneys this AM and exploring options. BTW, wonder.. pic.twitter.com/jACvxwUBZH
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) June 15, 2017
(2/2) …WHY someone would no longer be in public eye? Think constant libel & slander have anything to do with it? 🤔
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) June 15, 2017
Attached to one of her tweets was an article that questioned whether Palin has “a libel case” against the Times.
The paper on Thursday corrected an editorial that claimed there was a “clear” link between the shooting of Giffords and Palin.
[Vintage MZHemingway – read more here, at thefederalist.com]
The original version of the Times editorial, which focused on the shooting Wednesday at a recreational congressional Republican baseball practice outside of Washington, D.C., said “the link to political incitement was clear” in the Giffords shooting … (read more)
Source: washingtonexaminer.com
Shame on the New York Times. Shame.
Its editorial about yesterday’s shooting doesn’t just twist the truth; it may be libelous.
David French writes: The New York Times published its editorial in response to yesterday’s vicious, violent, and explicitly political attack on Congressional Republicans — an attack that wounded four and left Representative Steve Scalise in critical condition in a Washington-area hospital — and it is abhorrent. It is extraordinarily cruel, vicious, and — above all — dishonest. The editorial doesn’t just twist the truth to advance the board’s preferred narratives; it may even be libelous, a term I choose carefully.
Yesterday’s shooter, James Hodgkinson, left little doubt as to his political leanings and his political motivations. He was a vocal Bernie Sanders supporter, belonged to Facebook groups with names such as “Terminate the Republican Party” and “The Road to Hell is paved with Republicans,” and he was constantly sharing angry anti-GOP messages and memes. Before opening fire, he reportedly asked whether the players on the baseball field were Democrats or Republicans. In other words, all available signs point to an act of lone-wolf progressive political terror. Read the rest of this entry »
‘Republicans are the Taliban of the USA’: Congressional Shooter was Bernie Sanders Supporter, Leaned Slightly Anti-Trump
Posted: June 14, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, James T. Hodgkinson, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Ralph Northam, Republican National Committee, Republican Party (United States) Leave a comment
(CNN) Jose Pagliery reports: James T. Hodgkinson, the man identified as shooting a Republican member of congress and four others on Wednesday morning, was a small business owner in Illinois who defined himself publicly by his firm support of Bernie Sanders‘ progressive politics — and his hatred of conservatives and President Donald Trump.
This is based on CNN’s review of Hodgkinson’s Facebook profile, public records, and three years of impassioned letters to his local newspaper.
“Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” he posted on his personal Facebook page on March 22.
“Republicans are the Taliban of the USA,” he posted in February.
Hodgkinson, 66, was married and lived in Belleville, Illinois. He started his own company, JTH Inspections, in 1994 and conducted home inspections and mold/air quality testing. But he quit that job on New Year’s Eve last year, according to his Facebook profile.
Federal law enforcement identified Hodgkinson as the shooter who attacked Rep. Steve Scalise, a congressional staffer and members of the congressional police force, Wednesday morning in Alexandria, Virginia. President Donald Trump said the gunman had been killed.
His online presence was largely defined by his politics. For example, his public Facebook posts date back to 2012 and are nearly all about his support for leftist politics. He was passionate about tax hikes on the rich and universal health care.
In the last year, most of his Facebook posts consisted of signed petitions on Change.org with titles like: “Bernie — please run no matter what;” “Hillary Rodham Clinton should concede the nomination to Bernie Sanders;” and “Healthcare for all Americans.” Read the rest of this entry »
Robert Mueller Stocks Staff with Democrat Donors
Posted: June 13, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: 2016, Donald Trump, Donald Trump presidential campaign, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort, Robert Mueller, RUSSIA, United States Department of Justice Leave a comment
Special counsel’s team includes former Clinton Foundation lawyer, contributors to Obama, Hillary, more.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sparked a mini-meltdown in the media Monday with a tweet challenging the fairness of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Gingrich, who also appeared on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” pointed to the early hires special counsel Robert Mueller has made.
“Republicans are delusional if they think the special counsel is going to be fair,” he tweeted. “Look who he is hiring.check fec [sic] reports. Time to rethink.”
He’s not wrong about the donations. Four top lawyers hired by Mueller have contributed tens of thousands of dollars over the years to the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates, including former President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.
One of the hires, Jeannie Rhee, also worked as a lawyer for the Clinton Foundation and helped persuade a federal judge to block a conservative activist’s attempts to force Bill and Hillary Clinton to answer questions under oath about operations of the family-run charity.
Campaign-finance reports show that Rhee gave Clinton the maximum contributions of $2,700 in 2015 and again last year to support her presidential campaign. She also donated $2,300 to Obama in 2008 and $2,500 in 2011. While still at the Justice Department, she gave $250 to the Democratic National Committee Services Corp. Read the rest of this entry »
Kurt Schlichter: From Russia With Stupidity
Posted: June 9, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Donald Trump, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Jeff Sessions, RUSSIA, United States Deputy Attorney General, United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Leave a comment
Kurt Schlichter writes: That towering doofus James Comey crushed the spirits of millions of democracy-hating geebos when, trapped by his own prior testimony, he was forced to admit the truth on national television. And that truth, as those of us not caught up in the whirlpool of Menschian insanity and liberal wishcasting all know, is that the whole Russia thing is a wheelbarrow of fresh Schumer squeezed out by Hillary and her minions in order to create a narrative – any narrative – that would hide the bitter truth. We rejected her, and now we’re rejecting the Russia idiocy too.
Poor Comey, having to contort his grossly-elongated body into something like a pose of victimhood in front of the unforgiving glare of the TV lights. And all the time watched by eager, credulous resisters, taking their day off from their usual routine of sponging and posing, and gathering at mid-day to view the proceedings from lame urban bars with dorky names like “The Peculiar Muskrat & Sons,” while clutching cucumber-infused IPAs and sipping twee mixed drinks specially-formulated so that their femboy imbibers don’t start crying because they taste actual alcohol.
Where were the TREASON BOMBSHELLS OF TREASON!!!!!!!!!!! they were promised? Probably somewhere near the jobs they were promised they’d get with their degrees in Intersectional Feminist Marketing or Gender Neutral Namibian Poetry that they took out $250,000 in loans to pay for.
Comey’s opinion of his own rectitude is formidable – he’s the only honest guy there is, you know – and he loves to be seen furrowing his brow under the crushing weight of his own goodness in a way Ben Sasse no doubt envies during those moments when Senator Sanctimony isn’t busy grinning like a moron at liberal media jerks’ racial epithets. However, similarly exaggerated is Comey’s opinion of himself as a cunning bureaucratic player. He thinks he’s the King of the DC Power Gamers; instead, he’s more like that feckless Games of Thrones prince who ends up losing his Harry Reid. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Now’s she’s blaming 39 problems, but a Hillary ain’t one
Posted: June 1, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Daily Caller, fake news, Hillary Clinton, Presidential Election 2016, Putin, video 1 Comment
She shook her head when asked if she was going to run again today, but unfortunately it looks like we’re still stuck with this sore loser Hillary blaming everything but her unlikeable self for her big-league loss to Trump.
[VIDEO] House of Clintons
Posted: May 29, 2017 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Bill Clinton, Clintons, Free Beacon, Hillary Clinton, House of Cards, media, satire, video 1 Comment
[VIDEO] Bombshell: Seth Rich, Slain DNC Staffer, Had Contact with WikiLeaks, say Multiple Sources
Posted: May 16, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Central Intelligence Agency, Chelsea Manning, Donald Trump, Embassy of Ecuador, Espionage Act of 1917, Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange, London, Smart TV, United States Department of Justice, WikiLeaks 2 CommentsAssange has not returned a series of recent emails from Fox News about Rich. MacFadyen, who was considered a mentor by Assange, died of lung cancer on Oct. 22 at age 76.
D.C. police have announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s killer. Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman has offered a separate $130,000 reward.
Rich had been at Lou’s City Bar a couple of miles from his home until about 1:15 a.m. He walked home, calling several people along the way. He called his father, Joel Rich, who he missed because he had gone to sleep. He talked with a fraternity brother and his girlfriend, Kelsey Mulka.
Around 4:17 a.m., Rich was about a block from his home when Mulka, still on the phone with him, heard voices in the background. Rich reassured her that he was steps away from being at his front door and hung up.
Two minutes later, Rich was shot twice. Police were on the scene within three minutes. Rich sustained bruising on his hands and face. He remained conscious, but died at a nearby hospital less than two hours later. Read the rest of this entry »
McCabe: FBI Agents Were ‘Vocal’ In Their Dissatisfaction Over Failure To Indict Clinton
Posted: May 11, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Politics | Tags: FBI, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, McCabe Leave a comment
The testimony of Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe on Thursday grabbed headlines in his direct contradiction of the White House claim that former FBI Director James Comey has lost the support of career agents. McCabe made clear that the rank and file were (and remain) entirely supportive of Comey. However, I thought the most interesting aspect of the hearing was a brief discussion of the 2016 decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton. McCabe, who is viewed by many Republicans as having problematic links to the Clinton camp (through his wife who ran for office with their financial support), said that the failure to indict Clinton produced “vocal” opposition from the agents investigating her conduct.
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OH YES HE DID: President Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey
Posted: May 9, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Democratic Party (United States), Dianne Feinstein, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Donald Trump, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, United States Congress, United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, WikiLeaks Leave a comment
Jonathan Karl,Meghan Kenally and Justin Fishel report: FBI Director James Comey has been fired, according to the White House.
“Today, President Donald J. Trump informed FBI Director James Comey that he has been terminated and removed from office,” the White House statement reads.
“President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions,” the statement said.
President Trump has previously been critical of Comey, suggesting that his actions helped Hillary Clinton during the campaign, while Clinton blamed Comey and his late announcement about the FBI’s investigation into her email server contributed to her electoral college loss. Read the rest of this entry »
The Clinton Factor: New York Times Study Suggests That It Was Not Voter Turnout That Determined Election
Posted: May 4, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Democratic Party, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, New York Times, Presidential Election 2016, Voter turnout 1 Comment
Hillary Clinton has been speaking publicly about her electoral defeat and offering a long list of reasons for the loss except one: Hillary Clinton herself. A new study by the New York Times however concludes that there was not a failure of Democratic turnout, as often suggested by Clinton supporters spinning the election. Rather, voters simply rejected Clinton herself. While Clinton has offered the perfunctory statement that she takes responsibility for the loss, she has been blaming everyone else except herself from the Russians to the FBI Director to self-hating women. Yesterday, she sat through an interview with Christaine Amanpour at the Women for Women event in New York and proclaimed that, if it weren’t for FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress, and “[i]f the election had been on October 27, I would be your president.” Update: President Donald Trump has fired back at Clinton saying that he…
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[VIDEO] OH YES SHE DID: Clinton Says That Putin Opposed Her Because ‘He’s Not Fond Of Strong Women’
Posted: April 8, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Russia | Tags: Donald Trump, Free Beacon, Hillary Clinton, media, news, Paul Manafort, RUSSIA, video, Vladimir Putin Leave a comment
[VIDEO] OH YES SHE DID: ‘Certainly Misogyny Played A Role’ In 2016 Election
Posted: April 7, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: 2016 Election, Hillary Clinton, Misogyny, video, Women of the World Summit Leave a commentHillary Clinton sat down for an interview at the Women of the World Summit in New York on Thursday. When she was asked to reflect on her loss with 53% of the white female vote, she responded by saying ‘certainly misogyny played a role’. No, Hillary, you were just a horrible candidate. It’s really that simple.
“Certainly, I mean, that just has to be admitted. And why and what the underlying reasons were is what I’m trying to parse out myself … It is fair to say…certainly misogyny played a role … I mean, that just has to be admitted.”
The interviewer brought up Donald Trump ‘bragging about sexual assault’ yet 53% of white women still voted for him…how could that be? Well of course misogyny is to blame…after all, Hillary has such a wonderful track record of treating women well!
Hillary Clinton: “Certainly, I mean, that just has to be admitted. And why and what the underlying reasons were is what I’m trying to parse out myself.” — “It is fair to say…certainly misogyny played a role” in the 2016 election. “I mean, that just has to be admitted.” Read the rest of this entry »
CORRECT TARGETING: Source: ICE Targeting ‘Sanctuary Cities’ with Raids
Posted: March 24, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Illegal immigration, Los Angeles, Muslim world, New York, New York City, Sanctuary city, U.S.Immigration and Customs Enforcement, United States Leave a comment
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been targeting so-called “sanctuary cities” with increased enforcement operations in an effort to pressure those jurisdictions to cooperate with federal immigration agents, a senior US immigration official with direct knowledge of ongoing ICE actions told CNN.
A sanctuary city is a broad term applied to states, cities and/or counties that have policies in place designed to limit cooperation or involvement in the enforcement of federal immigration operations. More than 100 US jurisdictions — among them New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — identify as such.
High-ranking ICE officials have discussed in internal meetings carrying out more raids on those locations, said the source.
This week, a federal judge in Texas seems to have confirmed that tactic. US Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin revealed during an immigration hearing Monday that a mid-February raid in the Austin metro area was done in retaliation for a local sheriff’s recent decision to limit her department’s cooperation with ICE.
“There’s been questions about whether Austin is being targeted. We had a briefing…. that we could expect a big operation, agents coming in from out of town. There was going to be a specific operation, and it was at least related to us in that meeting that it was a result of the sheriff’s new policy that this was going to happen,” Austin says in audio of the proceedings provided by the court.
The judge’s comments came as he questioned an ICE agent about a recent unrelated arrest.
Austin said that in a late January meeting, local ICE officials told him and another federal judge that an upcoming enforcement operation was being done in direct response to Sheriff Sally Hernandez’s adoption of a sanctuary policy in Travis County.
Earlier this year, Hernandez announced that beginning in February, her department would no longer honor ICE detainers unless the individual was arrested for murder, sexual assault or human trafficking, or a warrant had been issued. A detainer is a 48-hour hold request placed on suspected undocumented immigrants in local jails until federal agents can come in and take over the case.
A showdown in Travis County, Texas
It is a significant shift in the county’s immigration enforcement policy that has put the newly elected Democratic sheriff at odds with pro-enforcement local and state officials, including the Texas Senate, which recently passed a bill that withholds state dollars from sanctuary cities and Gov. Greg Abbott, who cut $1.5 million in funding to the county. Read the rest of this entry »
Preet Bharara proved Trump Right
Posted: March 13, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Think Tank, White House | Tags: Anthony Bourdain, Barack Obama, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Neil Gorsuch, White House 1 Comment
Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in New York on March 11, 2017. (Photo: Kathy Willens, AP)
The former U.S. attorney’s petty defiance shows why he needed to be shown the door.
Glenn Reynolds writes: In the excellent Paul Newman legal thriller, Absence of Malice, Wilford Brimley faced a misbehaving Justice Department prosecutor who refused to resign. He fired him. It was Brimley’s breakthrough role, as a no-nonsense older guy there to fix a mess. In a way it prefigured what’s going on with President Trump and former U.S attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. Bharara refused to resign, and Trump fired him.
There’s been a lot of faux outrage about this decision of Trump’s, but it’s all bogus. And Bharara’s refusal to resign was childish, an effort to score anti-Trump points with Democrats that, all by itself, demonstrated why Bharara was unfit for office and why Trump was right to let him go.
Here’s the thing to understand: United States attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president. The prosecution of crimes, including the decision of which crimes to prosecute and which crimes not to prosecute, is at the discretion of the executive branch, which ultimately means the discretion of the president. U.S. attorneys work for the president in that capacity. And if the president thinks someone else would be better, he’s free to fire them and replace them.
And there’s nothing whatsoever unusual or improper about doing so, something the press has no trouble remembering when the incoming administration is run by Democrats. When Barack Obama took office, he dismissed a bunch of U.S. attorneys. Attorney General Eric Holder explained that “Elections matter — it is our intention to have the U.S. attorneys that are selected by President Obama in place as quickly as they can.”
Likewise, when Hillary Clinton was running for the White House in 2007, she said that replacing U.S. attorneys is “a traditional prerogative of an incoming president.” And, of course, she was right, and there was no outrage from the press. (As journalist and former Democratic staffer David Sirota tweeted, presidents have been replacing U.S. attorneys for decades. Why is this now a scandal? Well, because it’s Trump, and for the press, everything Trump does is a scandal.)
It’s traditional for new administrations to request the resignation of holdovers from the previous administration. It’s considered more polite than outright firing people. But that’s all it is: politeness. Read the rest of this entry »
Shelby Steele: The Exhaustion of American Liberalism
Posted: March 8, 2017 Filed under: History, Politics, Reading Room, Think Tank | Tags: African Americans, African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–68), Barack Obama, Civil and political rights, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Identity Politics, Liberalism, Martin Luther King Jr, morality, Radical Left Leave a comment
White guilt gave us a mock politics based on the pretense of moral authority.
Shelby Steele writes: The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trumppresidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos.
Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic 
dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.
All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?
America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.
“When America became stigmatized in the ’60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently the American left reconstituted itself as the keeper of America’s moral legitimacy.”
White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual 
guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.
[Order Shelby Steele’s book “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country“ from Amazon.com]
White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.
“White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia.”
It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.
“To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having ‘no name in the street’ as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.”
When America became stigmatized in the ’60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently the American left reconstituted itself as the keeper of America’s moral legitimacy. (Conservatism, focused on freedom and wealth, had little moral clout.) From that followed today’s markers of white guilt—political correctness, identity politics, environmental orthodoxy, the diversity cult and so on.
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
This was the circumstance in which innocence of America’s bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of hardcore political power. Read the rest of this entry »
The Wikileaks CIA Stash May Prove Interesting, But Not Necessarily for the Hacks
Posted: March 8, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Science & Technology, War Room | Tags: Android (operating system), Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Central Intelligence Agency, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Hillary Clinton, National Security Agency, RUSSIA, United States, Whatsapp, White House, WikiLeaks Leave a comment
The software tools revealed by the leak are sinister, unsurprising—and potentially politically explosive.
Jamie Condliffe writes: Wikileaks has released a huge number of files that it claims to be the “largest ever publication of confidential documents” from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. It includes details of a number of hacking tools, though at first blush they don’t appear to be as incendiary as their potential political ramifications.
“To be sure, such hacks are sinister. But if we learned anything from Snowden’s disclosure of National Security Agency surveillance programs in 2013, it’s that government agencies feel it necessary to hack any technology the public chooses to use.”
The controversial organization published the first tranche of what it says will become a vast collection called Vault 7 on the morning of March 7. The first wave, called Year Zero, contains 8,761 documents and files from between 2013 and 2016.
At this point in time it’s impossible to have scoured the entire database. But Wikileaks claims that it contains descriptions of tools from the CIA’s hacking program. They are said to include malware that can turn Samsung TVs into covert listening posts, tools to remotely control vehicles, and a number of means to render encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal redundant.
[Read the full story here, at MIT Technology Review]
None of these approaches are particularly earth-shattering. Samsung had already admitted that its smart TVs could effectively spy on you. Security consultants showed that they could remotely control a Jeep Cherokee two years ago.
“None of these approaches are particularly earth-shattering. Samsung had already admitted that its smart TVs could effectively spy on you.”
And as Edward Snowden points out, the files don’t reveal a problem with encrypted messaging services themselves, though they do reveal that the CIA has a number of targeted exploits that allow them to gain partial remote access to iOS and Android. Read the rest of this entry »
pundit from another planet 