++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hillary, Biden and Obama have decided to win back Congress by attacking Trump. Democrats have no policies and the ones they have tried are the reason Trump is president. Now they have to resort to what they are best at, character assassination and division.
Some of the calumny to be heaped on Trump he brought on himself but never forget Biden tried it on Obama with his comment about being light brown and speaking well and then he talked about Republicans enslaving blacks.
These three"despicables" are not nice people and if Republicans cannot rally round their president, for whatever reason, they deserve to lose.
I will not argue that Trump, having made this election about himself and not his successful policies, made a mistake. Most of what he has done has worked and what has not he at least tried but did not have the votes.
If Republican voters are willing to allow Trump to become a punching bag for the "despicables" then shame on them. (See 1 below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Kavanaugh commentary. I never knew Anita Hill had a sister. Only Democrats could find her. (See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Mueller is operating as if his investigation has no ramifications on the health of our nation. (See 3 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Bolton remains a fulcrum in the Trump Administration. (See 4 below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Bibi asserts Israel will not repeat the "73 mistake. (See 5 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1)Dirtiest Trick In U.S. History Comes Into Focus
By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the SunThe almost unnoticed fact in the latest Democratic assault on the Trump administration is that it is based entirely on charges of confusion, the circus, incoherence, and nastiness. These themes never have to be hammered very long before the faithful take up the incantation about impeachment, but these aren’t impeachable, even if the charges were true.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++The Resistance has abandoned the accusation of impeachable offenses. The press barely noticed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s acceptance of written answers to questions about collusion, or Rudolph Giuliani’s assertion that there would be no discussion of obstruction of justice, that there has been no obstruction, and that if Mr. Mueller thinks he has evidence of any, he should present it.Everyone now knows that the entire Trump-Russian collusion argument was a complete fabrication on the basis of the Steele dossier, which was a pack of lies from A to Z, and, of course, was commissioned and financed by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, through a law firm and Fusion GPS. In terms of ingenious political treachery, Mrs. Clinton and her entourage scored an immense success in subverting high levels of the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department and FBI to pursue this canard with the zeal they did.On what has emerged to date, fanatically anti-Trump figures in Justice and the FBI swallowed Mr. Steele’s story and invested in it so heavily they severely compromised the institutions that employed them. Once Mr. Trump was elected, instead of letting the ruse die quietly, they swallowed harder and set out to claim that the election result was fraudulent because of the illegal Trump-Russian collusion.Former national intelligence director James Clapper announced just two months ago that he believed the Russians had determined the election result, contradicting James Comey’s view. Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, proclaimed 18 months ago that a thousand Russian canvassers had swung Wisconsin to Trump. The apparently thoroughly Trump-deranged John Brennan, former CIA director, has been routinely accusing the president of treason for almost two years.The 2016 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, mused about whether the president’s son, son-in-law, and former campaign manager were guilty of treason because they met with a Russian lawyer who wanted to talk about the Magnitsky Act (nothing to do with the election).Hillary Clinton must have been serenely confident that the source, quality, and funding of the Steele dossier would never see the light of day. In her memoir of the election, “What Happened” (not a question), she directly blames former FBI director James Comey for “shivving” her three times (two of the occasions were exonerations of her questionable appropriateness), and Donald Trump’s semi-treasonable collaboration with the Russian government, and she quoted Mr. Steele in support of this.When the fact came to light that her campaign had funded this nonsense for about $9 million, she breezily said that it was “campaign information” but accurate anyway. (Treason applies only when collaboration is with a country with which the betrayed country is at war.)It was the dirtiest political trick in American history, but, in fairness to Mrs. Clinton, I doubt if she intended to do more than throw muck at her opponent in the last days of the election, since the Billy Bush tape had not, as had been expected, knock him out. When she lost, as Mr. Steele himself was still, with the aid of some officials, padding around the less reputable media pushing his dossier, Mrs. Clinton seized on it to explain her inexplicable defeat and threw in poor old Comey, who had bent his giraffe-like frame over backwards to exonerate her on the emails debacle, where she almost surely lied to a federal official, Mr. Comey in particular.Martha Stewart was sent to prison for less, and Hillary seems to have violated serious statutes. This was when Peter Strzok had finished whitewashing Mrs. Clinton for Mr. Comey and jumped to trying to inculpate Mr. Trump. He wrote, early on to his girlfriend and workmate, Lisa Page, of the collusion argument, that there was “probably no there there.” Yet this purposeless beast of an investigation of something that everyone who knew anything about it knew did not happen is still continuing.In their desperation to keep the president on his back foot until the midterm elections, the Democrats joined the Never Trump chorus in the McCain obsequies, and the habitually discredited political gossip Bob Woodward, reinforced by anonymous informants recruited or invented by the New York Times, wrote that the Trump White House was in chaos (irrelevant if the Constitution is not being violated and the policies work).Paid plants heckled at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings where Democratic senators reenacted a fictitious movie about a first-century slave revolt to protest the confidentiality of documents that had already been released, and Barack Obama hit the trail to rewrite the history of his broadly unsuccessful presidency.Even sensible and moderate commentators who don’t like Mr. Trump went back on autocue to announce that this was “the darkest hour” of Mr. Trump’s administration, as they have, every six weeks or so since the executive order about travelers from terrorism-plagued or -sponsoring countries in February 2017: Charlottesville, Helsinki, Manafort and Cohen, etc. Mr. Trump is about to declassify what congressional committees have been seeking, and the anti-Trump press will have real problems maintaining their implacable righteousness. By then, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe may have been indicted, and the charges won’t stop with him.I recommend clemency. I don’t believe in a deep state, just an arrogant, smothering, bipartisan mindset that easily construed self-defense as service of the national interest, even when it involved criminal conduct. In this respect it does bear some comparison with the conduct of Nixon underlings in the Watergate era.The mystery is why Robert Mueller, for all his experience and vaunted probity, chose a gang of rabid Trump-haters to conduct this operation, and why, when he must have realized it was a wild goose chase, he didn’t fold it up or turn it into an investigation of the sleazy conduct of Mr. Trump’s enemies, which, given the Russian connection, would have been within his mandate.There is now evidence that Mr. Steele, even after he was fired by the FBI for leaking material, via senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr “and his lovely wife,” as Mr. Trump calls Mrs. Ohr (who worked at Fusion with Mr. Steele), moved straight to Mr. Mueller’s special-counsel team. Mr. Mueller may have mishandled this so badly, he ensnares himself in the misconduct of those who commissioned him.Mr. Mueller has prolonged this false cloud over the administration while using his authoritarian office to try to terrorize Paul Manafort into a false inculpation of the president, has mouse-trapped a couple of lesser figures (14 days in jail for George Papadopoulos), and purported to indict a number of Russians who will never appear in an American court and whose names could have been taken from the Moscow telephone directory.The outcome of the midterm elections may depend on how quickly the administration can counter-attack on the legal front. When the Mr. Mueller charade is finally out of the way, everyone involved in the false applications for a FISA surveillance warrant against junior Trump campaign helper Carter Page will face the music, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and very prominent members of the Obama administration.Whatever happens in November, all this will unravel. The combination of the jungle ruthlessness of high American politics with the idealism of the Constitution occasionally creates bizarre and sordid dramas. Eventually, just when the pious claptrap about no one being above the law becomes almost insufferable, the puritanical conscience of America rises like a cobra and strikes the wrongdoers. The twist here is that the hunted president, who has broken no laws, will make the kill. It’s reality politics, wending toward a surprising climax.
2)
The #MeToo Kavanaugh Ambush
A story this old and unprovable can’t be allowed to delay a Supreme Court confirmation vote.
By
The woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of a drunken assault when both were teenagers has now come forward publicly, but that should not deter Republicans from proceeding with their current confirmation-vote schedule. There is no way to confirm her story after 35 years, and to let it stop Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would ratify what has all the earmarks of a calculated political ambush.
This is not to say Christine Blasey Ford isn’t sincere in what she remembers. In an interview published in the Washington Post on Sunday, Ms. Ford offered a few more details of the story she told anonymously starting in July. She says she was 15 when Mr. Kavanaugh, who would have been 17, and a male friend pushed her into a bedroom at a drinking party, held her down, and pawed her until the male friend jumped on them both and she escaped to a bathroom until the two boys left the room.
Mr. Kavanaugh denies all this “categorically and unequivocally,” and there is simply no way to prove it. The only witness to the event is Mr. Kavanaugh’s high school male friend, Mark Judge, who also says he recalls no such event. Ms. Ford concedes she told no one about it—not even a high school girl friend or family member—until 2012 when she told the story as part of couples therapy with her husband.
The vagaries of memory are well known, all the more so when they emerge in the cauldron of a therapy session to rescue a marriage. Experts know that human beings can come to believe firmly over the years that something happened when it never did or is based on partial truth. The Post reports that the therapist’s notes from 2012 say there were four male assailants, but Ms. Ford says that was a mistake. Ms. Ford also can’t recall in whose home the alleged assault took place, how she got there, or how she got home that evening.
This is simply too distant and uncorroborated a story to warrant a new hearing or to delay a vote. We’ve heard from all three principals, and there are no other witnesses to call. The only purpose of another public hearing would be a political spectacle in which Democrats could wax indignant for the cameras while Mr. Kavanaugh repeated his denials.
The timing and details of how Ms. Ford came forward, and how her name was coaxed into public view, should also raise red flags about the partisan motives at play. The Post says Ms. Ford contacted the paper via a tip line in July but wanted to remain anonymous. She then brought her story to a Democratic official while still hoping to stay anonymous.
Yet she also then retained a lawyer, Debra Katz, who has a history of Democratic activism and spoke in public defense of Bill Clinton against the accusations by Paula Jones. Ms. Katz urged Ms. Ford to take a polygraph test. The Post says she passed the polygraph, though a polygraph merely shows that she believes the story she is telling.
The more relevant question is why go to such lengths if Ms. Ford really wanted her name to stay a secret? Even this weekend she could have chosen to remain anonymous. These are the actions of someone who was prepared to go public from the beginning if she had to.
The role of Senator Dianne Feinstein is also highly irregular and transparently political. The ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee knew about Ms. Ford’s accusations in late July or early August yet kept quiet. If she took it seriously, she had multiple opportunities to ask Judge Kavanaugh or have committee staff interview the principals. But in that event, the details would have been vetted and Senators would have had time to assess their credibility.
Instead Ms. Feinstein waited until the day before a committee markup on the nomination to release a statement that she had “information” about the accusation and had sent it to the FBI. Her statement was a political stunt.
She was seeking to insulate herself from liberal charges that she sat on the letter. Or—and this seems increasingly likely given the course of events—Senator Feinstein was holding the story to spring at the last minute in the hope that events would play out as they have. Surely she knew that once word of the accusation was public, the press would pursue the story and Ms. Ford would be identified by name one way or another.
Democrats waited until Ms. Ford went public to make public statements. But clearly some were feeding the names of Ms. Ford and her lawyer to the press, and now they are piling on what they hope will be an election-eve #MeToo conflagration.
“Senator [and Judiciary Chairman] Grassley must postpone the vote until, at a very minimum, these serious and credible allegations are thoroughly investigated,” declared Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday. “For too long, when women have made serious allegations of abuse, they have been ignored. That cannot happen in this case.”
His obvious political goal is to delay the confirmation vote past the election, fan the #MeToo political furies until then, and hope that at least two GOP Senators wilt under political pressure. Already Senators Jeff Flake andBob Corker are playing into Mr. Schumer’s hands by calling for a delay.
GOP Senators should understand that the political cost of defeating Mr. Kavanaugh will likely include the loss of the Senate. Democrats are already motivated to vote against Donald Trump, and if Republicans panic now their own voters will rightly be furious. They would be letting Democrats get away with the same dirty trick they tried and failed to pull off against Clarence Thomas.
It would also be a serious injustice to a man who has by all accounts other than Ms. Ford’s led a life of respect for women and the law. Every #MeToo miscreant is a repeat offender. The accusation against Mr. Kavanaugh is behavior manifested nowhere else in his life.
No one, including Donald Trump, needs to attack Ms. Ford. She believes what she believes. This is not he said-she said. This is a case of an alleged teenage encounter, partially recalled 30 years later without corroboration, and brought forward to ruin Mr. Kavanaugh’s reputation for partisan purposes.
Letting an accusation that is this old, this unsubstantiated and this procedurally irregular defeat Mr. Kavanaugh would also mean weaponizing every sexual assault allegation no matter the evidence. It will tarnish the #MeToo cause with the smear of partisanship, and it will unleash even greater polarizing furies.
2a) Democrats Want Their Pound of Kavanaugh Flesh
They want to make sure that, if confirmed, he’s damaged goods in the public eye.
The 27-year-old “Anita Hill” strategy of digging for dirt on a Supreme Court nominee didn’t work with Clarence Thomas back in 1991. But desperate times for liberals call for desperate measures.
Just as with Anita Hill, no doubt it took a concentrated effort of importuning by a host of liberal Senate staffers and interest-group partisans to wrest from another college professor a last-minute allegation of sexual misbehavior designed to sink a Supreme Court appointment at the eleventh hour.
Christine Blasey Ford, a 51-year-old professor at Palo Alto University in California, has confirmed to the Washington Post her account that when she and Brett Kavanaugh were in high school in the 1980s, he pinned her to a bed. Ford told the Post that Kavanaugh “groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it.”
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford said. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.” Nonetheless, she was able to free herself and leave the house unmolested. At the time, Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, the friend she alleges was with him, were both students at Georgetown Preparatory School.
Judge told The Weekly Standard last week that the allegation against Kavanaugh is “just absolutely nuts.” A total of 65 women who knew the judge in high school sent a letter to the Senate last Friday stating, “He has always treated women with decency and respect.”
As Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley pointed out, “Judge Kavanaugh’s background has been thoroughly vetted by the FBI on six different occasions throughout his decades of public service, and no such allegation ever surfaced.” Perhaps also of note is that Ford seems to have airbrushed all politics out of her online profile, including her professional bio on LinkedIn, though according to public records she has made small contributions to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Friends of Bernie Sanders.
For her part, Ford says she hasn’t spoken with Kavanaugh about any such incident or mentioned it to anyone until 2012; it came up then when the 45-year-old was having relationship therapy. The notes of Ford’s therapist include mention of an incident with students who became “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington,” but no names were given.
Regardless of the validity of the accusation, the timing on it is straight out of Anita Hill. The woman is said to have approached Senate Democrats in July, but two months later, in the public hearing, Kavanaugh was never asked about the incident, nor did it come up in the 1,278 written follow-up questions he has since answered.
The New Yorker magazine implies that the reason for the delay in bringing up the incident is that Dianne Feinstein, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is now suddenly worried that she will be blamed for “going easy” on Judge Kavanaugh. Senator Feinstein faces a left-wing Democrat in the November election, whom she currently leads in the polls by 40 points. Similar claims were made against Joe Biden, when he was the ranking member of Senate Judiciary Committee and apparently didn’t move in for the kill against Clarence Thomas with enough vigor. Those claims never seemed to hurt Joe Biden’s career.
All of this will strike some as a Hail Mary pass by Senate Democrats who want to delay any confirmation vote and spare their colleagues running in states Trump won from having to cast a vote on Kavanaugh. In the #MeToo atmosphere of today, there’s no telling what a roll of accusatory dice might bring.
I fear we are about to relive at least part of the national psychodrama over Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. That ideological maelstrom transfixed the country and divided it into bitter warring camps of Thomas supporters and Hill sympathizers. And that was when there was just one 24-hour cable news channel and no Internet or social media.
As we enter what’s likely to be another sad episode in the borking of Supreme Court nominees, we’d do well to remember that after the American people heard both sides in the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill slugfest, they believed Thomas by a two-to-one margin. Something similar may happen again, but if liberals fail to derail Kavanaugh, they will still try for a consolation prize.
After Clarence Thomas was confirmed by a vote of 52 to 48 in 1991, we had a drumbeat of books, articles, and conferences all dedicated to rewriting the history of the incident. Two years later, a Newsweek poll showed that most of those surveyed believed Hill, even though no new evidence had been uncovered.
So even if Brett Kavanaugh takes his seat on the Supreme Court, liberals will have extracted a pound of flesh. Just as with the Florida recount of 2000 and the Trump election of 2016, any confirmation will be branded as suspect and accomplished only through brutish tactics and the wholesale disregard for the truth. The effort to sink Kavanaugh is not just a naked attempt to change a confirmation vote but to forever brand him as illegitimate
2b)
Last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) threw a last-minute Hail Mary attempt to stop the ascension of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court: an anonymous letter accusing Kavanaugh of sexual impropriety. The accuser was anonymous; the charge was unclear. On Sunday, Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual assault accuser came forward in the pages of The Washington Post. Christine Blasey Ford, a professor in California, apparently first contacted the Post in July after Kavanaugh began being discussed as a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy, but she didn’t talk with the paper on the record until now. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation,” she stated.
According to Ford, when she was 15 and Kavanaugh was 17, they were at a pool party where both got drunk. Her story continues in her letter:
Brett Kavanaugh physically and sexually assaulted me during high school in the early 1980's… The assault occurred in a suburban Maryland area home at a gathering that included me and four others. Kavanaugh physically pushed me into a bedroom as I was headed for a bathroom up a short stairwell from the living room. They locked the door and played loud music precluding any successful attempt to yell for help. Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with [Mark Judge], who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state. With Kavanaugh's hand over my mouth I feared he may inadvertently kill me. From across the room a very drunken [Judge] said mixed words to Kavanaugh ranging from "go for it" to "stop."
2b)
6 Questions About The Sexual Assault Allegations Against Judge Brett Kavanaugh
By Ben ShapiroLast week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) threw a last-minute Hail Mary attempt to stop the ascension of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court: an anonymous letter accusing Kavanaugh of sexual impropriety. The accuser was anonymous; the charge was unclear. On Sunday, Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual assault accuser came forward in the pages of The Washington Post. Christine Blasey Ford, a professor in California, apparently first contacted the Post in July after Kavanaugh began being discussed as a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy, but she didn’t talk with the paper on the record until now. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation,” she stated.
According to Ford, when she was 15 and Kavanaugh was 17, they were at a pool party where both got drunk. Her story continues in her letter:
Brett Kavanaugh physically and sexually assaulted me during high school in the early 1980's… The assault occurred in a suburban Maryland area home at a gathering that included me and four others. Kavanaugh physically pushed me into a bedroom as I was headed for a bathroom up a short stairwell from the living room. They locked the door and played loud music precluding any successful attempt to yell for help. Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with [Mark Judge], who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state. With Kavanaugh's hand over my mouth I feared he may inadvertently kill me. From across the room a very drunken [Judge] said mixed words to Kavanaugh ranging from "go for it" to "stop."
At one point when [Judge] jumped onto the bed the weight on me was substantial. The pile toppled, and the two scrapped with each other. After a few attempts to get away, I was able to take this opportune moment to get up and run across to a hallway bathroom. I locked the bathroom door behind me. Both loudly stumbled down the stair well at which point other persons at the house were talking with them. I exited the bathroom, ran outside of the house and went home…. I have received medical treatment regarding the assault.
Originally, Ford contacted Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), who sent Ford’s letter on to Feinstein.
Kavanaugh has said this never happened. “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time,” he said. Judge says the same. Judge told The Weekly Standard, “I can recall a lot of rough-housing with guys. It was an all-boys school, we would rough-house with each other. I don’t remember any of that stuff going on with girls.” He strongly denied witnessing an attempted assault.
On its face, the allegations aren’t non-credible. Ford has come forward, and she’s told a story with specifics. But serious questions remain. Here are six:
1. Why Didn’t Feinstein Come Forward Earlier? Feinstein had every opportunity to ask Kavanaugh about the allegations. She didn’t. She didn’t even share the letter, which she had for weeks, with her Democratic colleagues. Instead, she waited until days before the vote to dump the allegations publicly, and did so without revealing the name, choosing to release this absurd statement:"I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” she wrote. “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities."
Furthermore, she referred the matter to the FBI only at that point. All of this looks heavily political – in the interests of justice, she should have come forward earlier.
2. Why Isn’t The FBI Investigating? Feinstein passed along the charges to the FBI. The FBI immediately passed the charges on to the White House instead of investigating. Why? Perhaps it's because the charges are four decades old, non-specific, and impossible to verify.
3. Why Didn’t Ford Tell Anybody About This Incident Until 2012? In many cases of accused sexual assault (see Moore, Roy), accusers told their friends, family, or medical workers about the accusations at the time. This at least time-stamps the accusations. That didn’t happen here: the accuser says she first told no one for three decades. That makes it questionable as to when this even happened, and difficult to track down.
4. Why Do Her Therapist’s Notes Conflict With Her Account? Ford showed her therapist’s notes to The Washington Post. Those notes conflict with her account. The notes don’t include names, instead stating that the alleged perpetrators were “from an elitist boys’ school,” and had since become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” The notes also state that four boys were involved, not two; she says her therapist got it wrong, and that there were four boys at the party but only two boys involved. Another therapy session the following year includes the charge that Ford underwent a “rape attempt” in “her late teens,” but she was allegedly 15 – not late teens – when this incident occurred. Her husband, who was present for the first therapy session, said Kavanaugh’s name was raised, but the Post account doesn’t say that Kavanaugh was called the alleged perpetrator.
5. She Doesn’t Remember Key Details. According to the Post, she doesn’t remember key details:
She said she believes it occurred in the summer of 1982, when she was 15, around the end of her sophomore year at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda. Kavanaugh would have been 17 at the end of his junior year at Georgetown Prep….Ford said she does not remember how the gathering came together the night of the incident. She said she often spent time in the summer at the Columbia Country Club pool in Chevy Chase, where in those pre-cellphone days, teenagers learned about gatherings via word of mouth. She also doesn’t recall who owned the house or how she got there. Ford said she remembers that it was in Montgomery County, not far from the country club, and that no parents were home at the time. Ford named two other teenagers who she said were at the party. Those individuals did not respond to messages on Sunday morning.
6. Why Aren’t Any Other Women Coming Forward? In other cases, many women come forward. In fact, it’s difficult to think of another high-profile #MeToo case without multiple accusers. In this case, it’s one woman making an unsubstantiated three-decade-old allegation – the ultimate he-said, she-said. In this case, of course, it’s actually a he-said-he-said-she-said, since there were two men accused of involvement.
You don't have to believe that Ford is lying to believe that these allegations require more substantiation. Thirty-year-old events are difficult to reconstruct; memories change over time. Witness testimony is notoriously unreliable in many cases. And she could be telling the absolute objective truth, of course.
With all of that said, it’s not out-of-bounds for Republicans to call Ford to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee – we need to know more about these allegations. It’s also not inappropriate to delay the vote on Kavanaugh until after such a hearing, or at least until Ford has turned down such an invite. Kavanaugh has already offered to come back and testify on this matter. But allegations alone, without further supporting evidence – even contemporaneous accounts, witness accounts, or corroborating details – should not destroy someone’s life. Kavanaugh deserves more, and so does the appointments process.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3) Why the Russia hoax is a constitutional crisis
Mark Wauck, retired FBI agent and AT contributor, has written an important essay on the true dimensions of the Russia hoax, on his blog Meaning in History. Building on Andrew McCarthy’s close analysis of the redacted FISA warrants two days ago. I will take the liberty of quoting his argument, but urge those interested to read the whole thing:
McCarthy gets to the heart of the matter--the first of many important points he makes--right up front:Now here's what I want to make clear. The original FISA order, when the target is a US Person (USPER) such as Carter Page, lasts for 90 days. A FISA order can be renewed, but the renewal is NOTgranted on an "if at first you don't succeed, try try again" basis. To get an extension on a FISA--and let me say here that I completely agree with McCarthy that the initial FISA was pure BS--the FBI has to either:
Page has never been charged with any crime, much less with espionage. That is a salient fact because to get a FISA warrant on an American citizen, the FBI is required to show that the citizen’s activities on behalf of a foreign power violate federal criminal law. The FBI and Justice Department went to the FISA court four times over nine months, from October 2016 through June 2017, claiming to have grounds that Page was involved in heinous clandestine activity. Why isn’t he in handcuffs?
I believe it is because they never had a case. All they appear to have had were the 2013 attempt by Russian spies to recruit Page as an asset, and the Steele dossier.
1) make a reasonable showing that it is making progress in its investigation as a result of its use of FISA, i.e., it is moving forward with additional evidence gained through FISA that tends to confirm the presentation of the case that was made in the initial application, or
2) in the absence of such progress, the FBI must make a reasonable showing that the extension is likely to produce progress.
No extension should be granted unless one or the other condition is met; if not, the FISA should be shut down. Yet in this case three extensions were granted--despite the fact, as McCarthy convincingly shows, that there is absolutely no reason to suppose that either condition was ever met. We'll know for sure if/when President Trump finally declassifies these documents, but any fair reader of the redacted versions will be forced to McCarthy's conclusion: The FBI never had a case.
Prescinding from the corruption involved in the initial application, the fact that there were three extensions requested and granted is astounding--it should truly shock any normally aware citizen. That the top levels of both the FBI and DoJ should approve the extension requests, having nothing to show for their previous supposed investigative efforts, and that four separate Federal judges should approve such threadbare--not to say facially deficient and therefore bad faith--applications in a case that is so consequential for our Constitutional order strains credulity. And yet that, barring truly shocking new revelations that contradict all that we've learn thus far, is exactly what happened.
In light of this I would go beyond [Scott] Johnson's characterization [in Powerline here] of this as "scandal"--the only suitable word, not to be lightly used, is "crisis." And it's a continuing crisis. The reaction of both Democrats as well as Never Trump Republicans in the House and Senate has been bad enough, but the lackadaisical, dilatory, response of DoJ in the face of such scandal has simply been shameful.
Consider what we have learned to this point. All the evidence points to a conspiracy to prevent the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. Failing this, the continuing conspiracy sought to terminate his presidency, presumably through the impeachment process, or failing that, to hamstring it through innuendo and outright slander. It's a scandal, and it's a scandal built on an outright hoax--the Russia Hoax. This conspiracy that I've referred to was a conspiracy involved the core institutions of the Executive Branch of government: the Department of Justice--including the FBI--the "Intelligence Community" generally, including the CIA and DNI, and the Department of State. But if all this weren't appalling enough, this conspiracy against the integrity of our fundamental institutions and our courts--even our electoral processes--extended to enlisting the cooperation of the intelligence agencies of a foreign power--Great Britain (GCHQ and MI6), not Russia!--against our own government.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Trump administration is taking stock of agreements and treaties that do not serve American interests first.
By Rebeccah Heinrichs
National Security Advisor John Bolton delivered a blockbuster speech at an event hosted by the Federalist Society last Monday, about how monumentally dumb and dangerous the International Criminal Court is for America.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
5) Netanyahu: Israel will never again fail to preempt attacks
By Herb Keinon
On the eve of the 45th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet Sunday that Israel will never repeat the mistake it made in 1973 by not preempting an enemy attack.
5) Netanyahu: Israel will never again fail to preempt attacks
By Herb Keinon
On the eve of the 45th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet Sunday that Israel will never repeat the mistake it made in 1973 by not preempting an enemy attack.
No comments:
Post a Comment