Sidney keeps re-appearing as Hillary's bag man always ready to do odd jobs for money. (See 1,1a, 1b and 1c below.)
And:
Why Schumer is such a slime: www.youtube.com/watch?time_
And:
https://youtu.be/o1IMUIbdspQ
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The market was beginning to stabilize and then our Whorish Congress busted the budget. More downside to adjust for higher rates and more inflation.
Spending earnings of others is what Congress is all about and when the reckoning day comes,, as it surely will, they will have retired on cushy pensions. (See 2 below.)
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Democrat antipathy towards the military, by reason of their unwillingness to fund it unless tied to some other pet program, is evidence they do not understand the single most important role of government - protect and defend the nation versus fund the desire to make citizens dependent.
Democrats know the power of welfare increases not only dependency but also those who vote for them because of their willingness to dispense largess.
Democrats are bleeders. They love dispensing your blood in order to "help" underdogs and their programs increase the number of underdogs and the entire charade has grown out of control and will end in disaster. If you think Venezuela's socialism is the answer move there and try it out for a week and take Bernie and Pocahontas and most of today's crop of fascist students with you.
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Dick
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1)
More Doubts About Mr. Steele (Steal?)
Including an appearance by none other than Sidney Blumenthal.
By The Editorial Board
The case of the FBI and Christopher Steele gets curiouser and curiouser. In the latest news, GOP Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham late Tuesday released a less redacted version of their criminal referral letter to the Justice Department concerning Mr. Steele, who wrote the now famous dossier alleging Russian collusion with Donald Trump. The letter supports the recent House Intelligence Committee claims of surveillance abuse and offers new evidence that the Clinton campaign may have been more involved than previously known.
Democrats claim the House Intel memo distorts the FBI’s actions in obtaining in October 2016 an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor former Trump aide Carter Page. But the Grassley-Graham referral makes public for the first time actual text from the FBI’s FISA application, as well as classified testimony the FBI gave the Senate Judiciary Committee about the dossier and FISA application.
In particular, the referral rebuts the Democratic claim that the FBI told the FISA court about the partisan nature of the Steele dossier. “The FBI noted to a vaguely limited extent the political origins of the dossier,” says the letter. And “the FBI stated that the dossier information was compiled pursuant to the direction of a law firm who had hired an ‘identified U.S. person’—now known as Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS,” the firm that hired Mr. Steele.
But, adds the referral letter, “the application failed to disclose that the identities of Mr. Simpson’s ultimate clients were the Clinton campaign and the DNC [Democratic National Committee].” That’s not being honest with the judges who sign off on an eavesdrop order.
The referral also confirms the House memo’s finding that the FBI “relied heavily” on Mr. Steele’s dossier claims, as well as on a Yahoo News article for which Mr. Steele was the main source. And the letter notes that “the application appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page.”
James Comey, who was running the FBI at the time of the FISA fiasco, told the Senate Judiciary Committee as much in March 2017. According to the referral, when Mr. Comey was asked “why the FBI relied on the dossier in the FISA applications absent meaningful corroboration,” he said this was “because Mr. Steele himself was considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau.”
In other words, the FBI rested its wiretap application on the credibility of a source who was working at the direction of the Clinton campaign. The FBI also seems to have closed its eyes to evidence that Mr. Steele wasn’t honest. The FBI acknowledges that it told Mr. Steele not to speak to the media about the dossier. Yet in September 2016 the ex-British spy briefed reporters about the FBI’s investigation and the dossier, which resulted in the Yahoo News article. The Clinton campaign cited that article on TV and social media to attack the Trump campaign. This was about a month prior to the FBI filing its first FISA application.
Yet the FBI’s October application told the FISA court that, “The FBI does not believe that [Steele] directly provided this information to the press.” Whether Mr. Steele lied to the FBI, or the FBI was too incompetent to verify that he was the source of the Yahoo News story, the result is the same: The FISA court issued a surveillance order on the basis of false information about the credibility of the FBI’s main source.
Even after Mr. Steele said under oath in court filings in London that he had briefed Yahoo News, and this fact was reported by U.S. media in April 2017, the FBI didn’t tell the FISA court in any subsequent wiretap application.
The Grassley-Graham referral also drops the stunning news that Mr. Steele received at least some of the information for his dossier from the Obama State Department. The letter redacts the names involved. But the press is now reporting, and our sources confirm, that one of the generators of this information was none other than Sidney Blumenthal. GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy, who has seen the documents, told Fox News “that would be really warm” when asked if Mr. Blumenthal is one of the redacted names.
Mr. Blumenthal has declined comment to several media outlets. But our readers will recall that he is a long-time Hillary Clinton operative whom President Obama barred from an official role at State but was later discovered to have sent her policy and political advice via her private email server. This revelation raises questions about the degree to which the Clinton team was involved in the Steele-Fusion effort from the beginning.
Some of our media friends are so invested in the Steele dossier, or in protecting their Fusion pals, or in Donald Trump’s perfidy, that they want to ignore all this. But journalists ought to tell the complete story.
The best way to learn what’s true and false in the Russian influence story is radical transparency, and the Trump Administration should declassify all four FISA applications on Mr. Page and all of the documents behind them. Meanwhile, thanks to the two Senators for helping get closer to the truth.
1a) The Trump Panic
By Daniel Henninger
Historians will record that the Trump Panic gripped all Democrats, some Republicans, scores of intellectuals (such as those who signed documents declaring their refusal to work in the Trump foreign-policy agencies), foreign leaders, journalists, and members of U.S. security agencies.
1a) The Trump Panic
It was the belief that the elected president was unacceptable and had to be stopped
By Daniel Henninger
It is a historic spectacle. Washington is transfixed by dueling “memos” between Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee over an FBI application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Carter Page of the Trump presidential campaign.
The application included a 35-page “dossier” on Donald Trump prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele.
The Washington press corps has kept the Trump-Russia collusion story before the American public for a year, and the president himself, speaking through his Twitteraccount, says he is the victim of a “witch hunt.”
How did this spectacle happen? Two salient and related events occurred on Nov. 8, 2016. Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the U.S. presidency. Within hours, the Trump Panic went viral.
The Trump Panic of 2016-17 was the belief that the U.S. presidency had fallen into the hands of an unacceptable person—who had to be stopped, or resisted by any means.
On election day, two FBI officials— Peter Strzok of the bureau’s counterintelligence division and Lisa Page —exchanged text messages.
Page: “OMG THIS IS F***ING TERRIFYING.” Strzok: “Omg, I am so depressed.”
Recall how routine it was then to hear or read that the new U.S. president resembled Hitler or Mussolini. Democracy was “at risk”—even as such non-Hitlerian pillars as Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn joined the government.
Let us stipulate it is not beyond imagining that individuals at the FBI’s Washington headquarters or at the Justice Department are Democrats. This is Washington, and the sky is blue. Historically, though, it has been possible to believe a functional distinction existed in these sensitive bureaucracies between political impulse and professional responsibility.
Because of the Trump Panic, professional discipline eroded. Exhibit A will always be the Steele dossier. Spend 15 minutes reading it, and you will recognize a textbook example of the Russian Cold War art form of assembling published facts, half-truths, untruths and conspiracies into an eye-popping narrative that would embarrass Frederick Forsyth.
From page 33: “Referring back to the (surprise) sacking of Sergei IVANOV as Head of PA in August 2016, his replacement by Anton VAINO and the appointment of former Russian premier Sergei KIRIYENKO to another senior position in the PA, the Kremlin insider repeated that this had been directly connected to the TRUMP support operation and the need to cover up now that it was being exposed by the USG and in the western media.”
The Steele dossier is factoids on steroids. In normal times, the FBI would not include it in a submission to the FISA court. The Trump Panic wasn’t normal times. Decisions outside normal boundaries were considered justified.
Recall Sally Yates. After President Trump’s legally vulnerable travel-ban order, acting Attorney General Yates wrote, “For as long as I am the acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of th[is] executive order.” You won’t what?
By comparison, it is well known that during Barack Obama’s presidency, much of the U.S. military leadership abhorred his policies and directives. It is inconceivable that any of them would have refused to execute a similar order from Mr. Obama.
But this was the Trump Panic, and Ms. Yates’s act of professional insubordination elicited approval in an email from Andrew Weissman, head of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.”
This doesn’t mean the FBI is off the rails. It means a handful of people in Director James Comey’s orbit at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue—products of an insular, inbred Beltway village—lost their professional bearings and succumbed to the zeitgeist of panic over the Trump presidency. Righting that ship is crucial.
We wrote at the outset that this is a spectacle. Which brings us, necessarily, to one of its ringmasters— Donald J. Trump.
Controversies come and go for any presidency. Some, such as Watergate and Whitewater, kept going because it was possible to report events that truly advanced the story. The Russian collusion story went moribund months ago, with Rep. Adam Schiff reduced this week to waving the Steele dossier as if it were the second coming of the Pumpkin Papers, which revealed Alger Hiss as a Russian dupe.
Anyone else in politics would have let the fires under the collusion issue burn down. Is it a potential legal problem? Sure. Should it be a destructive daily bonfire? No.
Mr. Trump is combative not for political reasons but because he’s been combative all his life. In the Washington Swamp he has found the ultimate Trumpian arena. The Swamp is his sparring partner. Don’t let the raging tweets fool you. He loves it.
1b)
1b)
FISA-gate Is Scarier than Watergate The press used to uncover government wrongdoing. Today’s press is defending it. By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted By Ruth King
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.
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.
As a result of various controversies, the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, has resigned. Two FBI officials who had been working on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in the so-called Russia collusion probe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, have been reassigned for having an improper relationship and for displaying overt political biases in text messages to each other.
The new FBI director, Christopher Wray, has also reassigned the FBI’s top lawyer, James Baker, who purportedly leaked the Steele dossier to a sympathetic journalist.
How does FISA-gate compare to Watergate and Iran-Contra?
Once again, an administration is being accused of politicizing government agencies to further agendas, this time apparently to gain an advantage for Hillary Clinton in the run-up to an election.
There is also the same sort of government resistance to releasing documents under the pretext of “national security.”
There is a similar pattern of slandering congressional investigators and whistleblowers as disloyal and even treasonous.
There is the rationale that just as the Watergate break-in was a two-bit affair, Carter Page was a nobody.
But there is one huge (and ironic) difference. In the current FISA-gate scandal, most of the media and liberal civil libertarians are now opposing the disclosure of public documents. They are siding with those in the government who disingenuously sought surveillance to facilitate the efforts of a political campaign.
This time around, the press is not after a hated Nixon administration. Civil libertarians are not demanding accountability from a conservative Reagan team. Instead, the roles are reversed.
Barack Obama was a progressive constitutional lawyer who expressed distrust of the secretive “Deep State.” Yet his administration weaponized the IRS and surveilled Associated Press communications and a Fox News journalist for reporting unfavorable news based on supposed leaks.
Obama did not fit the past stereotypes of right-wing authoritarians subverting the Department of Justice and its agencies. Perhaps that is why there was little pushback against his administration’s efforts to assist the campaign of his likely replacement, fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Progressives are not supposed to destroy requested emails, “acid wash” hard drives, spread unverified and paid-for opposition research among government agencies, or use the DOJ and FBI to obtain warrants to snoop on the communications of American citizens.
FISA-gate may become a more worrisome scandal than either Watergate or Iran-Contra. Why? Because our defense against government wrongdoing — the press — is defending such actions, not uncovering them. Liberal and progressive voices are excusing, not airing, the excesses of the DOJ and FBI.
Apparently, weaponizing government agencies to stop a detested Donald Trump by any means necessary is not really considered a crime.
– Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com. © 2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
1c)
BOMBSHELL: FBI Informant In Uranium One Scandal Testifies Against Obama. Here's What He Said.
"I was frustrated watching the U.S. government make numerous decisions benefiting Rosatom and Tenex while those entities were engaged in serious criminal conduct on U.S. soil."
The FBI’s informant in the Uranium One scandal involving the Obama administration gave written testimony to three congressional committees this week in which he accused the Obama administration of making decisions that directly benefited the Russian government and their goals of gaining geopolitical advantages over the United States.
The informant, Douglas Campbell, told congressional investigators on Wednesday that Moscow sent millions of dollars to the U.S. with the expectation that it would benefit the Clintons, while Hillary Clinton "quarterbacked a 'reset' in US-Russian relations" in her role as Secretary of State during the Obama administration, The Hill reported.
- Campbell participated in closed-door interviews with the Senate Judiciary, House Intelligence and House Oversight and Government Reform committees.
- Campbell said that Russian nuclear officials told him that Moscow hired an American lobbying firm, APCO Worldwide, because it was in a unique position to influence the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton in particular.
- Democrats are aggressively trying to discredit him but are having little success as "the FBI found Campbell’s undercover work valuable enough to reward him with a $50,000 check in 2016."
- Campbell says that the FBI told him that his work was "briefed to President Obama as part of his daily presidential briefing," which would mean that Obama was aware of the crimes committed by the Russian officials.
- The FBI forced him to pay $500,000 of his own money to Russian officials as bribes to facilitate his cover, and the bureau never reimbursed him despite their praise of his work and the fact that the ordeal was so stressful that he developed serious, life-threatening illnesses.
- Initially, reports indicated that Campbell was threatened by the Obama administration in an attempt to silence him before the 2016 election as they did not want this case hurting Hillary Clinton after then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch's Justice Department learned that he filed a lawsuit in a Maryland federal court. It was not immediately clear what the lawsuit was about, however Sara Carter reports: "Campbell filed a lawsuit in Maryland federal court against the Russian nuclear entities asking for the return of the money he had to launder out of his own paychecks."
- "Russian and American executives implicated in the Tenex bribery scheme specifically asked him to try to help get the Uranium One deal approved by the Obama administration," The Hill noted.
- He provided documentation of the corruption and crimes taking place to help Russia to the Obama administration months before they made a series of decisions that directly benefited Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
- He provided documentation to the Obama administration that showed that the Russian government was actively involved in trying to help Iran develop their nuclear capabilities years before the Obama administration implemented the now-infamous Iran deal.
- He said that he was told by the FBI that the politics of the Obama administration overruled justice from taking place against the criminal activity that was happening.
“I was frustrated watching the U.S. government make numerous decisions benefiting Rosatom and Tenex while those entities were engaged in serious criminal conduct on U.S. soil,” Campbell said in his testimony, as reported by The Hill's John Solomon. “Tenex and Rosatom were raking in billions of U.S. dollars by signing contracts with American nuclear utility clients at the same time they were indulging in extortion by using threats to get bribes and kickbacks, with a portion going to Russia for high ranking officials.”
II remember one response I got from an agent when I asked how it was possible CFIUS would approve the Uranium One sale when the FBI could prove Rosatom was engaged in criminal conduct," Campbell continued. "His answer: ‘Ask your politics.'"
t wasn’t until years later in 2015 that American businessman Daren Condrey, whose company Transportation Logistics International, plead guilty to conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and conspiring to commit wire fraud, according to the DOJ.
Russian national Vadim Mikerin, who was a top official of the Russian nuclear arms subsidiary Tenex and would later become president of Tenam the American subsidiary of Rosatom, was also sentenced in December 2015. Mikerin, who only plead guilty to money laundering, was arrested for a racketeering scheme that dated back to 2004. He was sentenced to 48 months in prison.
Boris Rubizhevsky, another Russian national from New Jersey, who was president of the security firm NEXGEN Security, was also involved in the conspiracy and plead guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering in 2015. He served as a consultant to Tenam and to Mikerin. Rubizhevsky was sentenced to prison last year along with three years of supervised release and a $26,500 fine, according to a recent Reuters report.
And Mark Lambert, 54, a co-owner of Transportation Logistics International, was charged this month on an “11-count indictment with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and to commit wire fraud, seven counts of violating the FCPA, two counts of wire fraud and one count of international promotion money laundering,” as stated in the DOJ press release. Lambert’s charges stem from an alleged scheme to bribe Mikerin in order to secure contracts with TENEX, according to the DOJ release.
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2)The Guns and Butter Budget
Democrats exact a high price for agreeing to boost the military.
First, the good news: The budget outline would lift defense spending by $80 billion
in fiscal 2018 and $85 billion in 2019, honoring a central GOP campaign promise.
This busts the “sequester caps” that forced useful restraint on domestic accounts for
a few years but damaged the military and did nothing on entitlements.
Military leaders have all but invaded Capitol Hill to say that unreliable and lower funding has eroded readiness in every area from aircraft to munitions. Some of this is not a matter of fixing old equipment: Training delayed by shutdowns or other shortfalls leads to personnel who miss opportunities to build proficiency and skill, which Defense Secretary Jim Mattis explained to reporters at the White House Wednesday. Training accidents and deaths have increased in recent years well above the normal risks of service.
This renovation is sorely needed, though it comes at a high price. Democrats backed up the truck for funding on everything from community health centers to billions on child-care grants to $20 billion for infrastructure. The tally comes to $131 billion more in discretionary spending over the next two years. Democrats wanted dollar for dollar parity with defense spending. So in the silver-lining department the GOP at least managed to get more for the Pentagon, where cuts have been harsher.
On the long list of the Democratic haul: An additional four-year extension for the children’s health insurance program, or CHIP, which was recently extended for six years. That means 10 more years of a separate health program for children, though many Democrats said that ObamaCare would provide affordable coverage that would make the CHIP program unnecessary. Now we get both for the long run.
Speaker Paul Ryan noted in a press-release pitch that the GOP steered some of the funding toward Republican priorities, including maintenance backlogs at veterans hospitals. Also $2 billion for research at the National Institutes of Health, and a better flu vaccine is looking like a good idea this month. Add to this about $90 billion in disaster relief. That money to rebuild Texas, Florida and other areas would have been whooped through Congress sooner or later, even if plenty of it is sure to be wasted.
The deal also includes $6 billion for the opioid crisis, though it’s hardly clear that communities or the health-care system are prepared to absorb more cash. Congress allocated $1 billion for state grants in a 2016 law, and little is understood about what this funding has accomplished. For now this spending is a bipartisan hall pass for not having to think about tougher problems like why so many Americans are declining treatment and overdosing multiple times.
One good development is that Republicans managed to include the repeal of ObamaCare’s Independent Advisory Payment Board, known as IPAB. The Obama central planners created this panel of bureaucrats to impose price controls on Medicare and it represents everything Americans hate about the Affordable Care Act: political rationing over individual choice.
IPAB was designed so its decisions would be nearly impossible for Congress to overrule. Repeal gives Republicans another health-care achievement to tout in the 2018 midterms, in addition to zeroing out the law’s penalty for declining to buy insurance as part of tax reform. Oh, and the deal raises the debt limit into 2019, which avoids another useless melodrama.
The politics of passing this deal could nonetheless get ugly. The Freedom Caucus is already squawking, and they have a point. The id of their membership is less spending, whether on defense or food stamps makes little difference. The problem is that their opposition hands leverage to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is trying to blow it up because it doesn’t include an immigration deal over the young adult “Dreamers” brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
The larger fiscal reality is the continuing failure to reform entitlements, which absorb an ever-rising share of GDP and federal budget and present the true threat to national defense. President Obama blocked reform, and then the GOP missed the best chance in a generation to fix Medicaid by replacing the Affordable Care Act. The politics of reforming that entitlement is easy compared with Medicare and Social Security.
The annual budget deficit is cruising toward a cool $1 trillion, yet some Republicans are flirting with adding another new entitlement called paid family leave. The GOP’s best hope is that tax reform can deliver at least 3% growth and delay the fiscal reckoning. Republicans have to handle the urgent task of rebuilding the military in a dangerous world, but one certainty: Entitlement reform must happen, or we’ll be defending ourselves against Kim Jong Un’s nuclear missiles with Medicare checks.
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