Anyhow, I had the Vet come and have a look at him. He said the bull was very healthy, but possibly just a little young, so he gave me some pills to feed him once per day. The bull started to service the cows within two days, all my cows! He even broke through the fence and bred with all of my neighbor's cows! He's like a machine! I don't know what was in the pills the Vet gave him ............ but they kind of taste like peppermint.
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One day Black Americans may wake up and see how they have been trapped into believing Democrats/liberals care about them.(See 1 and 1a below.)++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
We now know we were had and soon we will find out why. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Though I have not read this book there is much to commend it's thesis based on this review. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) African-American Candidates Polling at 1 Percent in Iowa
One day, black Democrats will wake up and say, "We've been had." For a half century, African Americans have been giving Democrats a huge majority of their votes in national elections--91 percent for Hillary in 2016, 90 percent in the 2018 Congressional contests--and in return Democratic kingmakers have not seen fit to take a single presidential candidate of African American heritage seriously.
Yes, there was Barack Obama. He looked the part, and sometimes he even tried to sound it, but as Obama's part-black Hawaiian friend Keith Kakugawa said of pal Barry, “He wasn’t African American, at least not with the connotation that term has taken on: a meaning that includes a heritage of slavery.” Added Kakugawa, “The only Black influence he had in his life was television."
From the beginning, Democratic power brokers knew the rootless internationalist was in a class apart. They never confused Obama with homegrown activists like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. In 2007, then Senator Joe Biden made this point altogether clear, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American presidential candidate who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Despite a comment that could have killed a Republican career, that same Joe Biden is leading the Democratic pack in early Iowa polling at 24 percent. The leading African American candidate, the once promising Sen. Cory Booker, is polling at 1 percent. Improbably, Booker is the only African American candidate in a field of 23.
Hispanic candidates, the presumed future of the Democratic Party, are doing no better. The sole Hispanic candidate, Julian Castro, is polling at 1 percent of the vote. By contrast, in 2016, the two Republican Hispanic candidates, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, got 50 percent of the actual Iowa Caucus vote between them. The leading black Republican candidate in Iowa, Ben Carson, got 9 percent of the vote. In 2016, not one of the six announced Democratic candidates was black or Hispanic.
The Democratic Party is fully dependent on non-white votes. No Democratic presidential candidate has captured the majority of white votes since LBJ in 1964. Since 1976, Democratic presidential candidates have averaged only 40 percent of the white vote, and that number has been diminishing. Hillary Clinton lost the white female votes in 2016 and the white male vote by very nearly a 2-1 margin.
Despite the Democratic Party's dependence on black votes, no black candidate with roots in the American slave experience has won so much as a Democratic primary since Jackson in 1984, and his five primary victories did not earn Jesse a vice-presidential nod. Incredibly, given the obvious debt the Party owes black voters, the Democrats have never chosen an African American to be a vice presidential candidate or even seriously considered one.
“Intersectionality” may be all the rage on the left, but for African Americans intersectionality means subordinating their interests to those of the left's trendier cohorts. In Iowa, for instance, the very gay Pete Buttigieg has gathered more support from the Democratic rank and file than all the candidates "of color" combined.
The leading such candidate at 7 percent, Kamala Harris, is the child of immigrants. Her mother was born in India, her father in Jamaica. Both are successful academics. Beyond Harris, there is Booker, the son of two IBM executives, Castro, the Mexican-American son of a math teacher father and political activist mother, and Andrew Yang, the son of two successful Taiwanese academics.
What the four candidates of color know about struggling minorities they have gleaned from the outside looking in. Castro and Booker both went to Stanford, Castro after turning down a tennis scholarship to a lesser university. Yang and Harris both have law degrees, Yang from Columbia, Harris from the University of California. Harris learned much of what she knows on the job. "Yes, we dated," admitted former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. At the time, Brown was married and more than 30 years Harris's senior. Brown also admitted to jump starting Harris's career. As they say in France, the pillow is the best teacher.
Democrat activists and the media would have made a "racist" out of whichever Republican candidate reached the White House. His or her "rhetoric" would have sparked the inevitable wave of hate crimes, real or imagined, especially in election years.
In 2016, Donald Trump got the bullseye painted on his back. The Democrats need him. He is to their minority base what Israel is to the Arab world, the tie that binds, the cause that makes all the disparate elements, especially African Americans, forget how shabbily they have been served by their political masters.
If leftists were truly staunch advocates of racial equality and harmony, they should be moved to address the fact that the face of abortion has a color.
The left thrives on recklessly leveraging race. They inflame and foment racial differences until their voters are hysterical over the idea that slavery is returning to our country at the hands of the pro-life movement. The left’s frenzied panic and outlandish claims compel me to respond to the insidious lie that “the right doesn’t actually care about black and brown babies.”
I am black. I am pro-life. And I do care. I think I can speak for all pro-lifers when I say we care about all pre-born babies—babies so early in development that they don’t even have a skin color yet. Regrettably, it is the left that has a race problem at its core, and this problem is as old as the institution of slavery.
It is the left, in fact, that worships an organization that was birthed out of the racist ideas of its founder, Margaret Sanger. She was a staunch proponent of the contemptible, progressive, eugenics movement—the discredited philosophical concept that “undesirable” people should be eliminated from the gene pool of the human race. “Undesirables” like the poor, illiterate, disabled, and the dark-skinned.
Unfortunately, Sanger’s degenerate beliefs led her to work very closely and intentionally with the black community, “assuring” them that her goal was not to “exterminate the Negro population.” America’s intricate strategy to dovetail racist policies and eugenics was so effective that it was studied by one Adolf Hitler, and the horrors of the eugenics movement were fully realized in the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust.
Fast-forward to today, and Sanger’s early organization, the American Birth Control League, has become today’s Planned Parenthood, and the intentional targeting of America’s minorities continues. It appears that 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are within walking distance of black and brown neighborhoods. Indeed, more than 19 million black babies have been aborted since the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, effectively reducing the size of today’s black community by 40 to 50 percent!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 36 percent of all abortions in the United States are performed on blackwomen, despite the fact that they represent just 13 percent of the population. Hispanic babies are also aborted at 1.5 times the rate of white babies, making up 18 percent of all aborted babies. Essentially, more members of the black community are killed by abortion each year in the United States than by all other causes combined.
Despite the intentional targeting of poor and minority communities that has persisted across the decades, Sanger’s strategy to ensure that blacks remain unaware of their extermination has worked perfectly, with both pro-choice blacks and their allies insisting on their right to choose.
More than 100 years ago, the “pro-choice” party of today insisted that the institution of slavery was also a choice to which every state was entitled. Their platform was that each state should have the right to choose whether slavery was a morally acceptable option for its own citizens. In addition, states were not allowed to impose their moral beliefs about slavery on others because slavery was a constitutionally protected right.
If leftists were truly staunch advocates of racial equality and harmony, they should be moved to address the fact that the face of abortion has a color. They should be compelled to address the fact their pro-choice platform of a century past has resulted in tens of millions of lives lost, a great many of them black. Pro-lifers understand that a law that is ruled to be “constitutional” can still be morally reprehensible.
So the next time you hear someone on the left claiming that the right doesn’t care about brown and black babies, know that it’s a lie designed to cover up their own shameful past and present. The truth is this: Regardless of political philosophy, no one is doing more to protect brown and black babies than the pro-life movement.
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2) Steele’s Shoddy Dossier
Its claims were absurd, its evidence unconvincing — why did government officials ignore so many red flags?
Could former Obama-administration intelligence chiefs run any faster from the Steele dossier? “Pseudo-intelligence,” scoffs former national intelligence director James Clapper in his new memoir — after having arranged for the dossier to be included in a briefing of then-president-elect Trump, ensuring it would be published by the media. John Brennan, the former CIA director, belittles the dossier as uncorroborated reporting never refined into an authentic intelligence-agency product — and hopes we don’t notice his behind-the-scenes stoking of the dossier’s explosive allegations during the 2016 campaign. “Salacious and unverified,” sniffs former FBI director James Comey — after his bureau repeatedly relied on the dossier to obtain surveillance warrants from a federal court.
Even the principal author himself, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, no longer stands behind his work. He touted it plenty ahead of the election he told colleagues he desperately wanted Trump to lose. Later, though, when he was sued for libel in Britain and had to answer questions under oath, the dossier disintegrated into “unverified” bits of “raw intelligence” that he had passed along because they “warranted further investigation” — not because they were, you know, true.
By any objective measure, Steele’s dossier is a shoddy piece of work. Its stories are preposterous — the “pee tape,” the grandiose Trump–Russia espionage conspiracy, the closely coordinating Trump emissaries who turn out not even to know each other, the trips and meetings that never happened, the hub of conspiratorial activity that did not actually exist. Steele gets basic facts wrong. There are undated and misdated reports. The putative Russia expert repeatedly misspells the name of Alfa Bank (“Alpha”), which is among the country’s most important financial institutions. In the antithesis of good spycraft, Steele tried (unsuccessfully) to corroborate his sensational claims by using dodgy information pulled off the Internet, including posts by “random individuals” who were as unknown to Steele as most of Steele’s vaunted sources are unknown to everyone else. No wonder Steele’s former MI6 superior, Sir John Scarlett, scathingly assessed the dossier as falling woefully short of professional intelligence standards: The reports were “visibly” part of a “commercial” venture, unlikely ever to be corroborated, and patently suspect due to questions about who commissioned them and why they were generated.
Yet the Obama administration made the dossier the centerpiece of its Russia investigation.
The FBI eventually tried to corroborate Steele’s claims. The effort was ramped up only after the Obama administration — through the Justice Department and the bureau — peddled the dossier to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal established by Congress in the wake of the 1970s spy scandals to give Americans a modicum of due-process protection against national-security monitoring. Months after the FISA warrants were issued, enabling the bureau to monitor former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page, then-director Comey sheepishly conceded to Judiciary Committee senators that investigators had not verified the allegations; they had relied on them because they had believed Steele. This despite the fact that Steele had not even pretended to be the actual source of the allegations. Essentially, he was an aggregator, a collector of rank rumor.
Proceeding in this manner flouted an elementary principle. All warrants require the government to make a probable-cause showing about the target. In criminal law, it must illustrate that a crime has been committed; in counterintelligence law, that the proposed surveillance target is acting as an agent of a foreign power. Regardless of what must be proved, though, the showing must be based on information from the sources who made the relevant observations, whom the judge is given reasons to credit. The credibility of the person who assembles the source information (usually, the case agent) is largely beside the point.
Nevertheless, it’s worth asking: Just how reliable was Christopher Steele?
Steele was a virulently anti-Trump partisan. The media-Democrat encomia therefore hail him as a meticulous former British intelligence officer with a formidable record. So highly regarded was he that MI6 put him in charge of the investigation of the Putin regime’s brazen murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian-intelligence operative who had defected to Britain. Less often mentioned is that Steele had been Litvinenko’s handler when he was poisoned in 2006. Steele, we’re further told, was so well connected that he was chosen to run MI6’s all-important Russia desk. Well, yes . . . but he ran it from London. In the late Nineties, through no fault of his own, his cover in Moscow, along with that of scores of other spies, had been blown. When he was retained to pen the dossier reports, he hadn’t been to Russia in nearly 20 years. His recruiter and collaborator was the self-professed “journalist for rent” Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter. Simpson had co-founded a so-called intelligence firm, Fusion GPS, which had been contracted to do anti-Trump research for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee by Perkins Coie, their law firm.
By that point in the spring of 2016, Steele was a sleuth for hire who had done the bidding of such fine, upstanding clients as Oleg Deripaska, known as “Putin’s oligarch,” who had cornered the Russian aluminum market during the post-Soviet era of “gangster capitalism” and labors under U.S. sanctions imposed due to the regime’s malign policies. And why shouldn’t Steele work for Deripaska? Simpson, who was just as rabidly anti-Trump, had Fusion GPS doing lucrative litigation-support work for Denis Katsyv — son of Putin crony and transportation minister Pyotr Katsyv. On that project, Simpson’s main job was to savage the reputation of Bill Browder, the longtime Kremlin antagonist who spurred passage of the Magnitsky Act — Congress’s response to the Putin regime’s imprisonment, torture, and murder of Sergei Magnitsky, the investigator Browder hired to uncover the massive financial fraud carried out by the regime.
The client lists of Steele and Simpson would have put any competent FBI agent on alert to the possibility that these political operatives were being fed disinformation by the Kremlin, which may have coopted them through well-paying service contracts. Ironically, such fears had informed Simpson’s own work years earlier, when he wrote a series of Wall Street Journal reports examining the corrupt interplay between the Kremlin, the oligarchs, Russian organized crime, and American political consultants — most of them Republicans, such as Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager who had cut his political teeth in the 1976 Ford campaign. In fact, had the bureau done its job, it would have detected that the dossier was an updated partisan narrative derived from Simpson’s Bush 43–era investigative journalism, with the same theme of corrupt interplay between Putin’s regime and American politics.
In the media coverage of Russiagate, Steele’s intelligence-officer background has been a deceptive distraction. In drafting the dossier, he was not a detached intelligence agent whose training in the separation of fact from fiction was critical to his country’s security and prosperity. That was the Steele of years ago. Arguably it was the Steele of 2010, fresh out of MI6, who had worked with the Obama Justice Department on the heralded FIFA soccer-corruption investigation. The Steele of 2016, however, was a private eye, marshaling (or inflating) information in the light most favorable to his clients. During the Trump–Clinton contest, he was a well-paid and quite willing political hack.
Both the FBI and the Justice Department were well aware of that. Another Fusion GPS collaborator on the dossier was Nellie Ohr, a former CIA open-source researcher married to Bruce Ohr, a high-ranking Justice Department official. Nearly three months before the Obama administration used the dossier in court, Bruce Ohr told top bureau officials — including his longtime colleagues, deputy director Andrew McCabe and McCabe’s counselor, Lisa Page — that Steele was working with Nellie Ohr on anti-Trump research that was connected to the Clinton campaign. Steele told Bruce Ohr he was desperate that Trump not get elected. Ten days before the court issued FISA warrants based on the dossier, Steele told State Department official Kathleen Kavalec that he hoped his dirt on Trump would become public before Election Day and that he was cultivating relationships with various major press outlets. Kavalec passed this information along to the bureau.
Yet the Justice Department and the FBI withheld from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court the dossier’s connection to the Clinton campaign, as well as Steele’s avowed commitment to defeat Trump. The FISA-warrant application not only concealed indications that Steele was leaking his unverified allegations to the media; the FBI told the court that Steele was not the “direct” source for a press story (written by Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News) for which Steele appeared to be the obvious source, and for which he was, in fact, the source. Again, this is something the FBI could have figured out with minimal effort — such as by pointedly interviewing Steele. For reasons that are still unclear, he had become a paid FBI informant in February 2016, months before his anti-Trump work started. He was obliged to answer the bureau’s questions. There is no reason to believe Steele would have held back: The FBI has never accused Steele of lying about media contacts; there were so many such contacts that it would have been foolish of Steele to deny them; Steele freely discussed them with the State Department’s Kavalec, and Justice’s Bruce Ohr knew that Fusion GPS was trying to push anti-Trump information into the press.
Steele began generating his reports in mid June. There are 17 in all, cumulating to 35 pages, most crafted before the election. The dossier spells out the essential collusion narrative that has been mass-marketed by Trump detractors since the 2016 election.
The first report, dated June 20, is what grabbed the attention of the FBI and the State Department. It is entitled “U.S. Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin.” Steele claimed that Putin’s regime had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump” for five years, providing the candidate “and his inner circle” with “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” According to Steele’s star witness, described as a “former top Russian intelligence officer,” the Kremlin was able to control the New York real-estate tycoon because it possessed kompromat — blackmail material involving “perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB” (successor to the KGB). This was said to include the so-called pee tape, a 2013 video of Trump in a luxury suite at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, cavorting with prostitutes as they performed a “golden showers (urination) show” on a bed in which President Obama and his wife, Michelle, were said to have slept.
Steele was confident in the lurid story because of his sources. Most important was a “close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow” and who had been heard to say “this Russian intelligence had been ‘very helpful.’” This source, with whom Steele was not in direct contact (i.e., it’s double-hearsay), was said to have been overheard claiming on-scene knowledge of Trump’s lewd romp — though Steele’s rambling, imprecise writing style makes it unclear whether the source had supposedly placed himself in the room or merely at the hotel.
One is left to wonder: Did it not occur to the FBI that Trump had not made any “recent trips to Moscow”? There is no record of his having been in Moscow after a brief weekend trip for a beauty pageant in 2013. Trump is a very public person, so that should not have been difficult to figure out. In 2018, the Washington Post’s Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger pulled together and published a comprehensive account of Trump’s travel to and business dealings in Russia, going back over 30 years. Why not the world’s premier investigative agency, which had, by mid 2016, been scrutinizing Trump–Russia contacts for months, in conjunction with the rest of the government’s $50 billion–per–annum “community” of intelligence agencies? What “recent trips to Moscow” and “very helpful” Russian intelligence could Steele have been talking about?
Steele’s work is slapdash: His source for the pee tape is referred to as “Source D” in the first report but becomes “Source E” in later ones. Upon request, Steele would have been obliged to disclose his sources to the bureau (and he is known to have identified at least some of them). Regardless, these were supposedly Trump associates with Russian backgrounds; for the FBI, finding them should have been a layup. (Indeed, it is publicly rumored, though unconfirmed, that Steele’s sources included Russian-born Felix Sater, a fraudster and longtime FBI informant who was a close friend and high-school classmate of Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen and who partnered with Trump in real-estate ventures, including the mogul’s failed efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.)
Both the Wall Street Journal and ABC News identified Steele’s main pee-tape source as Sergei Millian. At the time, he was a 38-year-old native of Belarus who had immigrated to America in his early twenties. To be blunt, you would not trust him as far as you could throw him. Upon arriving, he worked as a translator and used the (apparently true) name “Siarhei Kukuts.” In 2006, to raise his profile, he started an outfit called “the Russian–American Chamber of Commerce.” Sounds impressive, but it was basically a Potemkin platform with little in the way of assets or activities — just the sort of entity Russian intelligence would typically use as a front for recruitment operations, which is how the FBI is said to have suspected that Millian’s “chamber” was occasionally used.
Even Simpson confided to friends that he worried Millian was an unreliable “big talker.” No wonder. Millian has claimed in Russian and American media appearances to have a close relationship with Trump and to have marketed Trump Organization properties as a real-estate broker. In reality, he barely knows Trump and cannot keep straight the story of when they met. Originally, he said it was in 2007 in Moscow. When it was suggested to him that Trump had not been in Russia that year, he revised the tale, claiming to have met the mogul in Florida at a 2008 marketing meeting.
According to Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, there was just one meeting, a photo op of the kind Trump, a global celebrity, had done thousands of times. Cohen denied Millian’s claims of a personal and professional relationship with Trump as well as a working relationship with him. (Cohen says he never met Millian but did email him warnings to stop exaggerating his ties to the Trump Organization.) No, Cohen is not the world’s most reliable source, convicted as he is of fraud and false statements. But he was right to contend that no publicly known evidence supports Millian’s claims of close Trump ties. Further, Millian’s representations have been contradictory. When challenged on his purported work as a Trump real-estate agent, he admitted to never actually having represented Trump. Significantly, Millian acknowledges that he was not with Trump during the 2013 Moscow trip. And upon being exposed as an indirect Steele source, Millian dismissed the dossier as “fake news (created by sick minds).”
So Millian denies the pee-tape story, and it seems evident that he was not a “close associate” of Trump’s. No investigator who had interviewed Millian, or who had even questioned Steele in any depth about him, would have dared to rely on information Steele had sourced to him. And the night-and-day difference between Steele’s description of Millian’s connection to Trump and the reality of it would have induced any qualified FBI agent to pause until all of Steele’s allegations — not just the ones about Millian — could be carefully investigated. But it gets worse — much worse. Millian was not just a key source on the pee tape. He appears to be the source of Steele’s core claim:
There was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [Trump] and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate’s manager, Paul Manafort, who was using foreign policy advisor Carter Page and others as intermediaries.
Mind you, it’s not just that Steele was not in direct contact with Millian, or that Millian lacked the kind of relationship with Trump that would have enabled him to know of such a conspiratorial arrangement. Both Manafort and Page were available for interview by the FBI. In fact, they had both been interviewed on a number of occasions — Manafort in connection with his work for a Ukrainian political party; Page when he cooperated with the government’s prosecution of Russian spies (and while Manafort has now been convicted of fraud, the FBI has never accused Page of lying). Upon questioning them, an agent could easily have learned that they say they do not know each other, and that there was no evidence to the contrary. They were both on Trump’s campaign, but their roles did not intersect: Manafort, the chairman, focused on GOP convention delegates; Page was a tangential, low-level foreign-policy adviser.
But even that is not the half of it. The dossier attributes to the source identified as Millian the claim that the “Trump campaign/Kremlin co-operation” against Hillary Clinton entailed the exchange of intelligence and money at key hubs, including the Russian consulate in Miami. Except there is no Russian consulate in Miami. When Steele told this part of his story to the State Department’s Kavalec, she was able in nothing flat to confirm that it could not be true. And she immediately forwarded that information to the FBI, which was then working on the first FISA surveillance application. Yet the Obama Justice Department and the bureau represented to the court that they were aware of no derogatory information regarding Steele — in addition to concealing the dossier’s connection to the Clinton campaign, as well as Steele’s bias and media contacts.
The dossier allegation that catalyzed the surveillance of Page involved the claim that, in his purported role as Trump-campaign intermediary to the Putin regime, Page had met with two operatives close to Putin during a July 2016 trip to Moscow: Igor Sechin, head of the Kremlin-controlled energy conglomerate Rosneft; and Igor Diveykin, an influential member of Putin’s presidential administration. Sechin, under U.S. economic sanctions due to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, is claimed to have said that, if Trump were elected president and lifted the sanctions, Russia would pay Page and Trump the brokerage fee from the sale of a 19 percent stake in Rosneft — a bribe that would have amounted to tens of millions of dollars. Diveykin also supposedly told Page that Russia had a kompromat file on Mrs. Clinton that it might be willing to share with the Trump campaign — while warning that there was also a file on Trump, which the tycoon should bear in mind when dealing with Russia. And the dossier had Trump lawyer Cohen in a role similar to Page’s — dispatched by Trump on a secret trip to Prague to meet with Putin’s operatives for dark discussions about (a) damage control after public revelations of Manafort and Page ties to Russia and (b) “deniable cash payments” for “hackers in Europe who had worked under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign.”
Two things are especially worth noting about these claims, which have been convincingly denied by Page and Cohen. First, Steele’s vaunted sources never predicted clandestine treachery. Rather, Steele and Simpson fashioned a narrative framework of Trump–Russia collusion and then folded into the story each new publicly reported development — Page’s well-publicized trip to Russia, the hacked DNC emails, and so on. Indeed, Steele’s reports (including one written just three days before WikiLeaks began publishing the DNC emails on July 22) never said a word about the emails, even though WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had begun speaking publicly about a coming release of Clinton-related material over a month earlier. When Steele finally wrote about the emails, he echoed what the Clinton campaign was already saying publicly.
Second, there is the matter of the Kremlin sources to whom Steele attributed his information. As mentioned earlier, Steele maintained that a “former top Russian intelligence officer” was one of his principal sources — in particular, for the allegation that Russia had amassed enough kompromat on Trump to blackmail him at a time of Putin’s choosing. Steele also purported to derive insider intelligence from what were variously described as a “senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” a “senior Kremlin official,” an official close to the head of Putin’s presidential administration, and/or “two well-placed and established Kremlin sources.” Information was said to be forwarded to Steele through an unidentified person sometimes described as the “trusted compatriot” of these sources. And for all we know, there may have been yet more intermediaries in the telephone game between the sources, the “compatriot,” and Steele.
When he was interviewed by the State Department’s Kathleen Kavalec in October 2016, Steele claimed his sources included Vyacheslav Trubnikov and Vladislov Surkov. A regime eminence, Trubnikov ran Russia’s SVR (the external intelligence service, analogous to our CIA) before Putin came to power. Thereafter, he served in other key posts: first deputy for foreign affairs, ambassador to India, and omnipresent counselor. Surkov, who has been Russia’s deputy prime minister, may now be Putin’s top adviser — referred to as the “Kremlin demiurge” and “Putin’s Rasputin.”
Really? We’re supposed to believe that when Steele was not slumming with the wannabe likes of Sergei Millian, he was plugged in to the crème de la Kremlin? Count me skeptical. As Daniel Hoffman, the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow, told the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross, trusted figures in Russia’s national-security bureaucracy “never stop” working for the Kremlin. In Trubnikov’s case, “there’s no such thing as a former intelligence officer.” And Surkov might as well be Putin’s right hand. If these characters were Steele’s sources, they were not spying on the Kremlin but getting the West believe what the Kremlin wanted to West to believe.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report found no conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. What remain to be investigated are the neon-flashing indications that we’ve been had.
2a)Justice Dept.: Review of
Russia Probe 'Broad in
Scope'
By Eric Tucker
Attorney General William Barr said last month that he had directed John Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut and a veteran prosecutor, to determine if law enforcement and intelligence authorities engaged in improper surveillance as they investigated potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election.
“It is now well-established that, in 2016, the U.S. government and others undertook certain intelligence-gathering and investigative steps directed at persons associated with the Trump campaign,” said the letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, the department’s top liaison to Congress.
“As the Attorney General has stated publicly at congressional hearings and elsewhere, there remain open questions relating to the origins of this counter-intelligence investigation and the U.S. and foreign intelligence activities that took place prior to and during that investigation,” the letter said.
The point of the review, Boyd added, “is to more fully understand the efficacy and propriety of those steps” and to answer open questions for the attorney general.
Barr has repeatedly said he believes there was “spying” on the Trump campaign, language President Donald Trump has seized on to support his claims that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was a “witch hunt.” Barr has said he doesn’t yet know if the “spying” was improper, but he has been unsatisfied with the answers he has received.
He has not elaborated on what specific surveillance he is troubled by. The FBI did obtain a secret warrant in 2016 from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the communications of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. That application was renewed several times.
Durham and his team will be working primarily out of Washington, with the Justice Department making existing office space available for the work, Boyd wrote to Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
The team has already asked that certain intelligence agencies preserve records, make witnesses available and identify materials that may be relevant for the review.
Though the White House has granted Barr the authority to declassify documents, the Justice Department sought to assuage concerns that he would abuse that power, with Boyd saying the attorney general would prevent from disclosure information that could expose sources and methods or harm U.S. national security interests.
Mueller’s investigation identified questionable contacts between Trump associates and Russians but found insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and the Kremlin. Mueller did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice, though Barr said he determined that the special counsel’s evidence was not enough to support an obstruction allegation.
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3) Michael Gerson: Civility makes our system noble
By Michael Gerson
IN HIS influential 1984 book, "The Naked Public Square," Richard John Neuhaus recalled attending an event featuring the late Jerry Falwell Sr., who delivered an angry excoriation of liberals and other supposed enemies of freedom. Seated next to Neuhaus was a clean-cut, nicely dressed, well-spoken young man. Following the speech, the young man said of Falwell: "He's a very great man, and often he's very vulgar. I would be more hopeful about America if we had more vulgarity like his."
In Neuhaus' account, the young man went on to paraphrase (with a smile) a quote attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels — "When I hear the word civility I reach for my gun" — and to argue: "Their way of doing things means they continue to be in control. We mean to take over — nicely, if possible, but if that's not possible, well, civility is not the highest of the virtues."
This argument is evergreen on the left and right, because it is less of an argument than a temptation — the temptation to see politics only as a matter of achieving certain policy outcomes, rather than the expression of certain underlying moral commitments.
The debate on these questions has been recently renewed by a group of bright, articulate and morally adolescent social conservatives who have adopted their own version of being "woke." Politics, they seem to have discovered during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, is war. And war is hell. Which makes civility a form of disarmament. The objective of politics, in this view, is not the building of coalitions around the common good.
This viewpoint may be perennial, but it is also perfectly suited to the Trump era: Persuasion, compromise and politeness are for losers. Do unto others as they have done unto you. And worse.
Those disturbed by this attitude but not entirely sure why should read Peter Wehner's new book, "The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump." Wehner makes a strong case for civility as an indispensable democratic virtue.
First, according to Wehner, "civility is central to citizenship." It is the strong force that makes civic cohesion possible. "When civility is stripped away," he argues, "everything in life becomes a battlefield, an arena for conflict, an excuse for invective. Families, communities, our conversations and our institutions break apart when basic civility is absent."
Second, a commitment to civility is an expression of our respect for other human beings. "Undergirding this belief for many of us is the conviction that we're all image-bearers of God — 'a work of divine art' in the words of theologian Richard Mouw — which demands that we respect human dignity."
Third, civility allows us to discover the elements of truth that may reside in someone else's version of it. We should not assume, says Wehner, that "those who hold different views than we do have nothing to teach us." Civility is one expression of an appropriate epistemological humility.
None of this, in Wehner's argument, means that people should lack conviction or passion. "One can be a vigorous and forceful advocate for justice without being uncivil," he argues. Wehner cites Martin Luther King Jr. as an example and quotes Yale professor Stephen L. Carter: "The true genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. was not his ability to articulate the pain of an oppressed people — many other preachers did so, with as much passion and as much power — but in his ability to inspire those very people to be loving and civil in their dissent."
Those who see politics only as a method to defeat enemies and advance favored aims have lost sight of something important. We should honor democratic values such as civility, not only because they make our system function, but because they make our system noble. We should treat our fellow citizens with respect because we share a role in, and responsibility for, an experiment in self-government that remains the last, best hope of earth.
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