Is Denmark Socialist?
Socialism has failed across the world – from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to China, Vietnam, North Korea and, most recently, Venezuela. So now the left references countries like Denmark as “proof” that socialism works. Otto Brons-Petersen explains why they’re wrong: Denmark is just as capitalist as the United States.
And:
https://www.foxnews.com/
Democrats will probably fail in their attempt to impeach Trump but will continue to harass and investigate him as long as they can in the hope they will find something to hang their hat on and Mueller gave them a dangling political participle as a hook.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Trump committed no collusion, he did not pursue obstruction after he told members of his staff to do so and they did not and he let it drop so he failed to obstruct a law he did not break.
The act of impeachment is a political one and, no doubt, Pocahontas would love to scalp him
Now the tornado Obama, Hillary and The DNC launched is about to rip through their tents.(See 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d and 1e below.)
http://amp.washingtontimes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Salena and her associate Todd are out with a new book. (See 2 below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Stop and think about this. Trump spouts out, his staff says no and he does not push forward and Democrats still want to accuse him of obstructing a collusion that never occurred.
Now contrast that with 20 Democrat candidates who are constantly floating out new campaign ideas, retracting none of them and getting others to believe they are not radical. Abortion at birth, tax the wealthy so student loans can be extinguished, adopt socialism and replace it for capitalism, sanctuary cities and the list of inanities is endless.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1)
Mueller's report means impeachment won't happen
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
THE CLOSEST THING to a bombshell in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report is an Oval Office curse word. Nearly 80 pages into its exhaustive account of incidents that raised potential obstruction-of-justice concerns, the report recounts President Trump's reaction on the day he learned that a special counsel would be appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election:
"The President slumped back in his chair and said, 'Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm f***ed.' The President became angry and lambasted the [then-]Attorney General [Jeff Sessions] for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, 'How could you let this happen, Jeff?'" Mueller writes that Trump then told Sessions to resign, began to argue that Mueller was compromised by conflicts of interest (including a six-year-old dispute over membership fees at a Trump golf course), and ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to direct Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to remove Mueller.
Pulled into a headline, Trump's F-word outburst conjures up the bitter fury of a president with something to hide, and a seething determination to shut down the investigation. But the bombshell is a dud. As Mueller relates, Trump eventually returned Sessions' resignation letter with the notation "Not accepted," his advisers told him the conflict-of-interest accusations were "ridiculous," and McGahn flatly refused to seek the special counsel's ouster.
That was typical of Trump's attempts to obstruct justice: They went nowhere. The president repeatedly lashed out at the Mueller investigation, repeatedly sought to curtail or weaken it — and was repeatedly talked down from the ledge by staffers who didn't let him have his way. The report makes clear that Trump regarded the investigation with unfiltered and reckless hostility. But it also makes clear that he ultimately did nothing to block Mueller's probe. The president, it seems, would have been only too glad to impede what he bitterly called "the single greatest witch hunt in American political history." But he was too much of a bumbling blowhard to do so.
The special counsel's most significant finding, of course, was that neither Trump nor anyone in his campaign ever "conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." But there were plenty of links between Trump confidants and the Russians, Mueller writes, and the campaign expected to "benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts." Donald Trump, Jr. in particular was almost giddy in his eagerness to exploit material leaked by the Kremlin's hackers. There may not have been collusion, in other words, but there was sleaze aplenty.
Neither the administration nor its bitterest foes come out of this looking good. The special counsel's report confirms that Trump and many in his circle are brazen grifters, and that he is a president devoid of honor or integrity. At the same time, the media wing of the anti-Trump "resistance," which spent two years promoting the false narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to steal an election, has wrecked whatever remained of its reputation for objectivity.
It is abundantly clear that Mueller looked, and looked hard, for the "corrupt intent" that would justify a finding of criminality. It is just as clear that he couldn't find it. Donald Trump's future will not be decided by the Justice Department. The Mueller report's bottom line — that while it "does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him" — is another way of saying that the president's fate lies in the realm of politics, not prosecutors.
And "politics" means — what?
"Going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer after the Mueller report was released.
|
For some in the anti-Trump camp, the Mueller findings are a signpost pointing to impeachment. On CNN Thursday, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin read the report as "all but an explicit invitation to Congress to impeach the president." Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced that she is signing on to a resolution to commence impeachment proceedings. To Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, "the Mueller report reads like an impeachment referral."
Don't count on it. Savvy Democrats are not going to repeat the blunder Republicans made when they impeached Bill Clinton in 1998 and were punished by voters. "Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgment," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said on Thursday. Anti-Trump hotheads may yearn to "impeach the mother-[expletive]," in the crude phrasingof one newly elected member of Congress, but Hoyer and the party's other top leaders know that isn't going to happen — not now, not after the long-awaited Mueller report has let Trump off the hook.
The special counsel tried to find proof that Trump committed a crime. In the end he proved only that the president elected in 2016 is an obnoxious loudmouth. That isn't grounds for impeachment. The Mueller report means that Trump's presidency is safe through 2020. What happens after that is in the voters' hands.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe)
1a)
Russian ‘Collusion’s’ Greatest Hits By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted By Ruth King
From late 2015 until April 2019, the media, the Left, and the Obama administrative state hierarchy warned us nonstop that candidate, president-elect, and inaugurated President Trump “colluded” with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton, to assemble a suspect cabinet, and to rule in treasonous fashion in the interests of Vladimir Putin. The former head of the CIA and the director of national intelligence were birthed as permanent analysts at MSNBC and CNN to sermonize—with wink-and-nod assurances that their past billets and security clearances substantiated their authority—that the treasonous Trump would likely be impeached, indicted, or quit.
A mostly progressive team of lawyers, with an unlimited budget, no restrictions on time, and with enormous legal powers found all of that to be a lie.
Unable to find Trump likely guilty of either collusion or obstruction of investigating the non-crime of collusion, they instead salted their report with innuendo and rumor of what the enraged Trump was supposedly thinking about, raging about, and talking about among his closest confidants, including the insurrectionary statement of his press secretary who allegedly sinned by exaggerating the extent of FBI rank and file unhappiness over the firing of James Comey.
All that was a long, slow distraction over real culpability on the part of a number of our supposed best and brightest. And here are some of their most absurd moments from the Orwellian hunt for collusion.
Claptrap
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper swore under the oath to the House Intelligence Committee that he did not leak the contents of the Steele dossier to the media or disclose to them an intelligence briefing to the newly elected president of the dossier’s contents. When such news accounts were nevertheless reported in the media, a shocked-in-Casablanca
Later Clapper admitted that he himself had been one of the sources—what James Comey called a “news hook”—of the very “extremely corrosive and damaging” leaks that he had so damned, through passing on information to CNN’s Jake Tapper, et al., Clapper mysteriously was later hired by CNN as a national security analyst.
Fox in the Henhouse
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein replaced Attorney General Jeff Sessions on all oversight of matters relating to “Russian collusion” on the theory that, unlike Sessions, the Obama-era Justice Department official was nonpartisan, not conflicted, and thus could decide whether to appoint a special counsel, and, if so, whom.
Yet Rosenstein himself had himself signed one of the FISA warrant extensions that continued surveillance of former Trump campaign Carter Page, a fact of some importance to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s subsequent investigation. Rosenstein, in fact, appointed Mueller, who was a longtime associate who had worked with him on prior investigations. Rosenstein had also drafted the memo justifying Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, which directly led to Mueller’s appointment.
Rosenstein would then meet with Comey’s replacement, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, allegedly, to discuss the possibility of removing the elected President Trump on grounds under the 25th Amendment that he was mentally unfit. Rosenstein’s angst, apparently, arose because Trump had taken Rosenstein’s own advice to fire Comey, which had in turn prompted McCabe to launch new investigations, which Rosenstein, again apparently, then sort of joined—in theory then to investigate in circular fashion himself?
A Higher Ego
Fired FBI Director James Comey wrote a book called A Higher Loyalty, with the theme that Comey had always put allegiance to “the Truth” over all careerist and partisan concerns.
Yet Comey signed off on a FISA warrant request without apprising the court that the chief evidence for such a writ was paid for by losing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Comey’s own sworn testimony about the dossier to a Senate Judiciary Committee was not consistent with the actual evidence in the dossier presented to the court. Comey also claimed he needed to brief Trump on the dossier because the media was going to publish its contents, when, in fact, it was only Comey’s staged meeting with Trump about the dossier that offered enough official sanction for the dossier to convince Buzzfeed finally to release it.
Yet Comey on FBI time and machines wrote memos memorializing his confidential meetings with President Trump, and then leaked seven of them to the media in order to create enough fury to lead to the appointment of a special counsel.
Despite Comey’s denials, four of the seven memos may well have contained some classified information and thus were probably illegally leaked by Comey, who succeeded in prompting the appointment of a special counsel—his longtime friend Robert Mueller. Yet Comey in his December 2018 congressional testimony, admitted under oath over 200 times that he did not know the answer to the questions asked or did not remember.
Yet Comey’s testimony cannot be reconciled with sworn statements of his own deputy Andrew McCabe. Comey’s real message is not about a higher loyalty, but rather that when one does not tell the truth, one must apparently continue not to tell the truth—at least until the edifice of the aggregate untruth collapses by its own weight.
Collusion Delusion
Robert Mueller investigated a supposed crime of Trump-Russian collusion that early on in his investigation was discovered to hinge on the Christopher Steele dossier, which to this day has had none of its contents verified but lots of its assertions proved impossible or inaccurate.
The mandate of the Mueller investigation was to discover which foreign nationals tried to interfere with the 2016 election, with the help of the Trump campaign, in order to warp its outcome. While the contents of the dossier that prompted his investigation were never substantiated (no sane person believes that Alexander Downer’s happenstance meeting with campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos prompted the entire collusion hoax), its author and sources were very much authenticated: foreign national and British subject Christopher Steele, and Russian anonymous sources whom Steele contacted and may have paid for the information that wound up in the dossier.
In other words, the Mueller investigation failed to find any Trump foreign collusion, but knew that its birth was initiated by the efforts of a foreign agent to work with other foreign sources to alter the 2016 election: real collusion created the Mueller investigation that looked in vain for false collusion. If that seems surreal, then perhaps the real purpose of the investigation soon was to sweep up enough innuendo and dirt on the president and to publish such extraneous allegations as some sort of justification for finding no collusion.
The No Stars
Robert Mueller had to assemble an independent and unbiased special counsel’s legal team, ostensibly to avoid the partisanship of an all-Republican Department of Justice hierarchy investigating the Republican Trump. But Mueller, a Republican, appointed almost all non-Republican lawyers; among them many donors to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign; among them lawyers of the former Obama Justice Department who had been briefed by Bruce Ohr on the contents of the Steele dossier at a time when Fusion GPS and members of Obama Administration were doing their best to seed the gossip mill among the media; and among them a few lawyers who variously had either represented the Clinton Foundation or former Clinton aides or former Obama Administration officials; and among them Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who earlier had sent each other hundreds of text messages, many of them expressing not just loathing of the object of their investigation, but also vows to ensure that Trump would not become president.
In the end, the “dream team” and “all stars” spent $34 million and 22 months, and wrote over 400 pages to confirm what was self-evident from the outset of this ill-starred inquest: Donald Trump did not “collude” with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton; Trump did not impede the nonsensical investigation of absurd charges; and the horde of lawyers who found no crimes were frustrated to the point of including anything in their report they could to embarrass Trump—except the proof of collusion for which they were tasked to find.
Legacies
The Mueller fiasco likely will end any talk of any special counsel investigation for a generation. Eventually, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe, along with others, will feel what it is like to have a federal prosecutor leveraging them, but this time about real, not made-up, crimes.
The liberal television media and their administrative state partisan “experts” likely will not gain back their former audiences, who were duped with two years of fabrications dressed up as “the walls are closing in” psychodramatic news. The hard Left, “Impeach Trump!” Democratic presidential field will no longer have an excuse to avoid explaining to the American people their weird agenda: a fundamental transformation of the country antithetical to the visions of the American Founders and likely on every issue opposed by a majority of Americans. And we the people will learn yet again that our best and brightest just may be among our worst and dumbest.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@
1b)U.S. INTELLIGENCE INSTITUTIONALLY POLITICIZED TOWARD DEMOCRATS FORMER CIA ANALYST SAYS AGENCIES DOMINATED BY LIBERALS
BY: Bill Gertz
The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have become bastions of political liberals and the pro-Democratic Party views of intelligence personnel have increased under President Donald Trump, according to a journal article by a former CIA analyst. John Gentry, who spent 12 years as a CIA analyst, criticized former senior intelligence leaders, including CIA Director John Brenan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former deputy CIA director Michael Morell, along with former analyst Paul Pillar, for breaking decades-long prohibitions of publicly airing their liberal political views in attacking Trump. The institutional bias outlined in a lengthy article in the quarterly International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence risks undermining the role of intelligence in support of government leaders charged with making policy decisions. Gentry stopped short of saying the widespread liberal bias of intelligence officials has influenced intelligence reports and products. However, he concludes that "bias may have crept into CIA analyses." "A considerable body of evidence, much of it fragmentary, indicates that many CIA people have left-leaning political preferences, but less evidence shows that political bias influences CIA analyses," Gentry concludes. In the past, intelligence politicization was defined as either skewing intelligence to fit biases or manipulating intelligence by those outside the intelligence community. "But in 2016 observers of U.S. intelligence began to wonder if the CIA's once-firm prohibition on partisan politics had changed, and to ponder whether a new kind of politicization had arisen: namely, institutionally embedded, partisan bias," Gentry wrote.
Gentry points to the activities of senior retired intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign that "universally" criticized then-candidate Trump and supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. "The attacks on Trump were unprecedented for intelligence officers in their substance, tone, and volume," he stated. "Critics went far beyond trying to correct Trump's misstatements about U.S. intelligence; they attacked him as a human being." Gentry, currently a professor at Georgetown and Columbia Universities, provides a detailed analysis of whether the 16-agency U.S. intelligence community and the CIA in particular have become institutional partisans supporting the Democratic Party. He reached no definitive conclusion on whether intelligence reports and activities were politicized and found no proof "intelligence products have been politicized to mislead or to avoid helping President Trump." CIA spokesmen did not return emails seeking comment. The article was written before the conclusions of the investigative report on Russian collusion by special counsel Robert Mueller were made public by Attorney General William Barr, who told Congress the Trump campaign was spied on by the U.S. government. The Justice Department is investigating whether the FBI and senior officials acted properly in launching a counterintelligence investigation of ties between President Trump and Russia based on information contained in a Democratic Party-funded dossier. Gentry said in an interview that he has not seen any movement within the intelligence community to address the institutional politicization. "My guess is the issue is not going to go away," he said.
UNPRECEDENTED PARTISAN ATTACKS
Recent books by Clapper and Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA director, appeared to justify political attacks on Trump based on both former officials' claims that the president has adopted a different world view. "For senior former intelligence officials to make such blatantly partisan statements is unprecedented," Gentry said. Gentry wrote that further investigation is needed into whether there is a liberal political institutional bias at CIA, because if such bias exists it would damage the agency's ability to carry out its primary missions of defending against threats and supporting senior leaders in making policy decisions. Unless the questions about bias are answered, Republicans may trust CIA less and give the agency a smaller role. For Democrats, the bias will lead to using the CIA as a tool to support its liberal agenda. Also, political bias creates new questions about whether CIA can provide objective intelligence analysis-a core institutional ethic. Regarding Morell, a career analyst who endorsed Clinton, Gentry criticized Morell's opinion article in the New York Times during the 2016 campaign that said his intelligence training had taught him that the nation would be safer with Clinton as president. "Morell's claim that his CIA career qualifies him to make political judgments about domestic issues is incorrect," Gentry said. "He was trained and authorized to 'make the call' about foreign intelligence issues within the classified, internal world of the U.S. government . He did not recommend policies, including voting choices." Intelligence officers, like many in the military, rely on former officials to express their views publicly. That has been the case with Clapper and Brennan, who have attacked Trump repeatedly. Other former intelligence officials, including former national intelligence officer Paul Pillar and former deputy director for intelligence John McLaughlin also appeared in left-leaning news media-New York Times, Washington Post, and MSNBC-to bash the president. Gentry said the criticism violated an unwritten rule for intelligence officials in the past to hide their opinions. "The CIA's ethic calls for intelligence professionals to work objectively for all agency heads and presidents, regardless of their political views," he said. Bias in analyses can be found in intelligence managers who control final assessments and reports that are the main products of intelligence agencies.
"Managers' biases camouflaged as organizational norms and biases in promotion decisions are hard to spot but are omnipresent," Gentry said. Gentry also notes that criticism of Trump by current and former officials contrasts sharply from intelligence officials' responses to criticism from Democratic presidents, such as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Former House Intelligence Committee chairman Pete Hoekstra was quoted as saying he was told by CIA station chiefs "every time I went anywhere" the Obama administration was "throwing them under the bus" regarding past harsh interrogation of terrorists. NSA officials also were "hung out to dry" by the Obama administration following the leaks by renegade contractor Edward Snowden.
Yet, unlike Trump, these intelligence officials did not speak out publicly or leak against Obama or Clinton to the extent that has been seen recently.
"In the past, intelligence officials usually bit their tongues when presidents criticized their work, recognizing that they sometimes make mistakes, that they work for presidents in an unequal relationship, that their job is to help all administrations succeed and even on occasion to be scapegoats for political leaders' failed policies," Gentry said. "That said, some intelligence officers have long leaked information to the press." Leaks have increased sharply in an apparent bid to undermine Trump, and Gentry said a long-held prohibition against discussing partisan politics in the office has been set aside. Anti-Trump
conversations are common in CIA analytical units, and anti-Trump analysts also express their political views on Facebook.
A POLITICIZED WORKFORCE
Politicization during the Obama administration also was evident at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, long criticized for its shortcomings in intelligence analysis and reporting on China's military. According to Gentry, under Obama, editors of the DIA's primary current intelligence report were notified to "avoid specifically identified terms that might trigger criticism of administration policy." "That clearly stated policy of politicization provoked no apparent reaction of any sort from analysts," Gentry said. "DIA analysts seemed comfortable with politicization by omission." Gentry challenged the claims of former senior intelligence analyst Thomas Fingar who asserted that annual surveys found very few cases of attempted politicization. "That's fine, but the survey data Fingar cited are a decade old and presumably report only overt cases of politicization, not those produced by organizational cultural norms, including politicization by omission," he stated. A chart produced by Gentry based on political contributions by known intelligence officials revealed that in 2016, 61.3 percent of all contributions were made to Democrats. Gentry speculates the politicized intelligence work force may have been the result of the large influx of young and inexperienced personnel after the September 11 terrorist attacks. "As is well documented, young people collectively are more left-leaning than other demographic groups," he said. "They have recently been in colleges and universities, some of which have become conspicuously illiberal through the strongly leftist outlooks of their faculty and administrators." Racial and other diversity programs also contributed to the politicization. This led to "demographic, not intellectual, diversity becoming a dominant focus of IC leaders." The so-called anti-Trump "resistance" by Democrats refusing to deal with Trump on any issue also contributed to the problem with intelligence officials joining the Deep State.
"This attitude is incompatible with a core principle of established democracies, the acceptance of a change in power after losing an election," Gentry said. "In the United States and elsewhere, liberals during the Cold War years often worried that unaccountable intelligence and security agencies were running amok. Now, 'progressives' welcome an ideologically center-left 'deep state,' built in part upon policies like Obama's as a check on Trump and conservatives are complaining." An example was former CIA director Brennan's announcement in July 2017-six months after leaving office-that CIA officers had an obligation to "refuse to carry out" Trump administration orders if Trump fired Mueller. Brennan further decried Trump as unstable.
Gentry urged intelligence agencies to conduct more research on the problem and take steps to correct it. "The U.S. government has traditionally and wisely declined to ask its job applicants and civil service employees about their political affiliations but President Obama, especially, got around the policy by mandating hiring from demographic groups known to be generally pro-Democratic," he said. "'Affirmative action' programs may therefore merit reconsideration. Another avenue for exploration is the attempt by some major technology firms that have developed leftist, intolerant corporate cultures to re-introduce intellectual diversity. Thus, the challenge at the CIA, too, may be to reform how analysts think, not just how they act."
Several former intelligence and executive branch officials agreed with Gentry. Kenneth deGraffenreid, former White House National Security Council intelligence director in the Reagan administration, said Gentry provided an excellent summary of CIA politicization that "confirms what those of us who have been working for intelligence reform have observed on a daily basis." "Politicization of intelligence begins when the work of the massive intelligence bureaucracy deviates from the focused definition of intelligence-the gathering and interpretation of foreign secrets," deGraffenreid said. "Today the IC and especially the CIA jealously envision themselves as the purveyors of all foreign policy wisdom. In this role it does not welcome other opinions and believes that U.S. officials should limit their reading and thinking to the CIA-provided intelligence analysis." The proper role of intelligence is perverted further when some in the intelligence bureaucracy believe their role is to provide a check on the actions of elected leaders and see their job as figuratively "poking a finger in the policymaker's eye," he said. "It will not be easy to fix this corruption of intelligence but it can begin by restricting the IC to the gathering and interpretation of foreign secrets," deGraffenreid said.
A THREAT TO THE REPUBLIC
Charles "Sam" Faddis, a former CIA operations officer, said countering politicization is a critical question. "A secret service that involves itself in partisan politics is a threat to the republic," Faddis said. "Do I think CIA officers as a whole are guilty of taking sides or slanting analysis? No. Do I think we have seen senior CIA officers guilty of using their positions to favor the Democratic Party? Beyond a doubt, and I'm not sure they're all former officers," he added. Another former CIA operations officer, Brad Johnson, said just as the State Department has been prone to liberal political bias "the same goes for the CIA in this day and age." "From Trump's election to this date, a common topic of conversation in the hallways of CIA headquarters at Langley is how best to 'resist' with no fear of backlash and no recognition of just how wrong it is," said Johnson, head of the group Americans for Intelligence Reform. "It even appears more likely with each passing day that a former CIA director was directly involved in a plot to overturn a legally elected U.S. president, which certainly seems to define treason. I am greatly saddened to say that while reforms to the intelligence sector are desperately needed, I don't think it can be fixed anymore with who is there." Former Pentagon policymaker Michael Pillsbury, author of the book on China The Hundred Year Marathon, said the conclusion of his book implies that the President Intelligence Advisory Board should conduct a review of significant intelligence failures on China even if none have yet been reported to congressional oversight committees. Pillsbury says there are "at least eight of these significant failures." "If the cause has been systematic bias based on politicization, that is all the more reason for the review to be conducted by the White House itself, not retirees from the intelligence community," he said. William C. Triplett, a former CIA officer, said one of the more egregious examples of politicization were comments in 2016 by Hayden, who on MSNBC stated Trump if elected would start World War III. "About ten days later he organized one of the more vicious 'Never Trump' letters" of former officials opposed to Trump.
1c) Targeting Bill Barr
Unlike Loretta Lynch, the AG does his duty on ‘prosecutorial judgment.’
Pivoting from their failed Russia-Trump collusion narrative, Democrats and the press corps have discovered a new political villain: William Barr. They claim the Attorney General is misleading the public, but their real goal is to warn Mr. Barr from following through on his promise to investigate abuses by the FBI and Obama Administration officials.
Mr. Barr was trying to satisfy the Democratic demand to see the report as soon as possible while he vetted the details for material that had to be redacted for sound legal and intelligence reasons. His four-page summary fairly characterized its conclusions on collusion and obstruction of justice while promising the full report soon. He even quoted Mr. Mueller’s line that the report “does not exonerate” Mr. Trump. A summary couldn’t contain the details that Mr. Mueller took 448 pages to describe, and now those details are public warts and all.
Democrats also want Mr. Barr to take a vow of silence so they’re the only people who can explain what the Mueller report means. But Mr. Mueller works for Mr. Barr, who had no legal obligation to release any of the report to Congress. He made a prudent judgment in the public interest to do so, as he promised during his Senate confirmation hearing.
Especially since Mr. Mueller abdicated on making any “prosecutorial judgment” about obstruction, Mr. Barr also had a duty to provide his own judgment on the law. Democrats may not like his conclusion, but at least Mr. Barr didn’t run for the tall grass like Obama-era AG Loretta Lynch did on the Hillary Clinton emails. She deferred, disastrously as later became clear, to FBI director James Comey’s inappropriate prosecutorial pre-emption. Mr. Barr stood up and took responsibility like a real Attorney General.
Mr. Barr is also being attacked for making redactions, and House Democrats said Friday they’ll subpoena the unredacted version and all background material. Yet Mr. Barr says senior Members of Congress will be able to see all redacted material except for what is legally protected by grand-jury secrecy. Mr. Barr would have to petition the judge who supervised the grand jury to release such testimony, which is secret under the law to ensure people speak honestly and to protect the innocent.
If Mr. Barr resists the subpoenas, Congress is likely to lose the legal fight. Congress has an interest in the report as part of its oversight duties, but the executive branch also has an interest in protecting the integrity of judicial proceedings. Congress will be able to see everything in the report except grand-jury material. Under the Supreme Court’s balancing test in the Nixon tapes case (U.S. v. Nixon), Mr. Barr is on strong legal ground.
The larger Democratic concern is that Mr. Barr is serious about looking into the origins of the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016. That could mean turning over such rocks as the FBI-Clinton-media collaboration over the discredited Steele dossier, or whether officials misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in seeking a warrant to eavesdrop on Trump adviser Carter Page. The Mueller report barely mentions the Steele dossier, which suggests the special counsel could not corroborate its allegations.
The Justice Department Inspector General is expected to issue a report on much of this in the coming months, and criminal referrals can’t be ruled out. Several criminal referrals have already come from Congress. Any prosecutions would no doubt require Mr. Barr’s assent, and Democrats are sending a message that he’ll pay a political price if he doesn’t call the whole thing off.
As he’s learning in this second turn as AG, Mr. Barr will be hammered no matter what he decides. The good news is that the country finally appears to have an Attorney General who can take the heat.
1d) A Reckoning Is in Store for Democrats
The collusion smear lies in ruins amid a throng of lackluster candidates
By CONRAD BLACK
The crisis of the Democrats is becoming more evident each week. Those of us who have been loudly predicting for years that the Russian-collusion argument would be exposed as a defamatory farce, and that the authors of it would eventually pay for it, are bemused at the fallback position of the Trump-haters: that the distinguished attorney general has whitewashed the president in his summary and his decision that there was no obstruction of justice.
One of the most entertaining moments of news-watching in many years came last week, when former national intelligence director James Clapper said it was “scary” and former FBI director Comey said it was “bizarre” to hear Attorney General William Barr say that the Trump campaign had been spied on. It has been obvious for a long time that both these men and former CIA director John Brennan lied under oath on a number of occasions, and Comey’s complaint last week that “court-ordered surveillance” wasn’t spying is going to get a full assessment when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) warrants that were the court authorization in this case, and were obtained on the basis of false campaign smears assembled and paid for by the Clinton campaign, are judicially considered.
Given the proportions of the scam that has been perpetrated, the principal actors, including those just named, deserve commendation for the imperishability of their unctuousness. These people seem still to be oblivious to the fact that lying under oath and producing false FISA applications are serious offenses. And some of the congressional Democrats, such as Congressmen Nadler, Swallwill, and Schiff (the new-millennium version of “Martin, Barton, and Fish,” made infamous by FDR in 1940), seem to think they have a perfect constitutional right to keep the president in the pillory of their spurious investigations indefinitely. The whole edifice of the Trump moral crisis is coming down in shards around the ears of the Clinton and Obama Democrats.
The numberless candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination will presumably go to hilarious extremes to sidestep the whole Trump-impeachment debacle, but the credibility of the Democratic party, given the total immersion the Clinton-Obama era is about to receive in the Trump-collusion perfidy, will not be unscathed.
After the brave launches of the candidacies, almost all of them have floundered. Kirsten Gillibrand, who has done and said absolutely nothing to merit consideration as president, has launched and sunk down the slipways and beneath the waves — her candidacy has attracted zero support. Most of the other candidates are equally unprepossessing. Cory Booker, perhaps the most compulsively verbose candidate since Hubert Humphrey (who was a good deal more thoughtful and entertaining), is apparently full of goodwill, but very inadequate. Kamala Harris seems to have the makings of a good candidate, but she is already tangled up in the runaway leftward nonsense of open borders, socialized medicine, high taxes, and the Green terror. Beto O’Rourke, as foreseen, after a brief flurry, has skateboarded off the dock and been abandoned by the media as an arm-flapping airhead. Elizabeth Warren is everyone’s nightmare of a severe, humorless kindergarten teacher, and she will not recover from her masquerade as a native Indian. Amy Klobuchar is sensible and seems likeable but has no pizzazz and hasn’t made inroads so far with radical normalcy, though its time could come.
The sensible majority of Democrats note that their party, on the heels of the Russian-collusion disaster, has completely bungled the border-and-migration issue and has gone down in flames with the claim that it is a crisis manufactured by the president. They have watched in silent horror as their party has been stampeded to the left, and the search is already under way for a moderate candidate. This will require breaking the bipartisan tradition of elevating the runner-up from the previous campaign. Bernie Sanders would expect to follow Hillary Clinton, as Mrs. Clinton lost to and succeeded Barack Obama, and Bob Dole did the same with George H. W. Bush, and John McCain with George W. Bush. But Bernie Sanders will be 79 on the next Inauguration Day, and he was too far left for the Democrats four years ago, when they lost to Trump, and he is still moving left. They are starting to put up a Sanders alternative every two weeks, as the Republicans did against Mitt Romney in 2012 — Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum — and Romney was a centrist. Each rival arose, mounted a serious challenge, and then imploded for different reasons.
The Democrats’ main Stop Sanders candidate has been Joe Biden, but he has been sandbagged by the now customary, if not obligatory, flood of disrespected women from previous years and decades. That seems to be surmountable, as Biden was only tactile, not intrusive, but the simmering concerns about his financial relations with Ukraine and controversies in his family seem to be delaying his decision. He is not, at the best of times, an exciting candidate, but he might at least prevent a McGovern-level seismic electoral landslide, which is what awaits any Democratic candidate festooned with the cornucopia of this campaign’s far-left nostrums.
Beto was the first try at a new face, and he bombed. Mayor Pete Buttigieg seems to be the next. He is an interesting candidate and had a good launch. The fact that he is only 37, gay, and the mayor of a rather small city gives him plenty of novelty, and he is the most articulate of the candidates. His approach to the gay issue is also imaginative. He is unapologetic about being gay and asserts that he would much rather be straight, but that God made him as he is, and therefore this should not be held against him: “Your complaint is with my creator.” It is not belligerent gay-pride-in-your-face self-defense. There are presumably an appreciable number of people, most of them quite tolerant, who would rather not have a gay president, and their problem, in that regard, is with the candidate, not with God, who created tens of millions of people they would not, for many other reasons, wish to be president. Good try, but no sale. Mayor Pete deserves to hang in for a while, but he is a bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing ideologically, and being mayor of South Bend is a training school for Congress or being governor, but not president in one leap.
1e)
Mueller’s Report Speaks Volumes
What’s in the special counsel’s findings is almost as revealing as what’s left out.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
By the fall of 2017, it was clear that special counsel Robert Mueller, as a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was too conflicted to take a detached look at a Russia-collusion story that had become more about FBI malfeasance than about Donald Trump. The evidence of that bias now stares at us through 448 pages of his report.
President Trump has every right to feel liberated. What the report shows is that he endured a special-counsel probe that was relentlessly, at times farcically, obsessed with taking him out. What stands out is just how diligently and creatively the special counsel’s legal minds worked to implicate someone in Trump World on something Russia- or obstruction-of-justice-
Volume I of the Mueller report, which deals with collusion, spends tens of thousands of words describing trivial interactions between Trump officials and various Russians. While it doubtless wasn’t Mr. Mueller’s intention, the sheer quantity and banality of details highlights the degree to which these contacts were random, haphazard and peripheral. By the end of Volume I, the notion that the Trump campaign engaged in some grand plot with Russia is a joke.
Yet jump to the section where the Mueller team lists its “prosecution and declination” decisions with regards the Russia question. And try not to picture Mueller “pit bull” prosecutor Andrew Weissmann collapsed under mountains of federal statutes after his two-year hunt to find one that applied.
Mr. Mueller’s team mulled bringing charges “for the crime of conspiracy—either under statutes that have their own conspiracy language,” or “under the general conspiracy statute.” It debated going after them for the “defraud clause,” which “criminalizes participating in an agreement to obstruct a lawful function of the U.S. government.” It considered the crime of acting as an “agent of a foreign government”—helpfully noting that this crime does not require “willfulness.”
Up to now, the assumption was that Mr. Mueller had resurrected long-ago violations of the rarely enforced Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 purely to apply pressure on folks like Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn. Now we find out that it was resurrected in hopes of applying it to campaign-period actions of minor figures such as Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
Mueller’s team even considered charging Trump associates who participated with campaign-finance violations for the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Was that meeting “a conspiracy to violate the foreign contributions ban”? Was it “the solicitation of an illegal foreign source contribution”? Was it the receipt of “an express or implied promise to make a [foreign source] contribution”? The team considered that the law didn’t apply only to money—it could apply to a “thing of value.” Until investigators realized it might be hard to prove the “promised documents” exceeded the “$2,000 threshold for a criminal violation.” The Mueller team even credited Democrats’ talking point that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions had committed perjury during his confirmation hearings—and devoted a section in the report to it.
As for obstruction—Volume II—Attorney General Bill Barr noted Thursday that he disagreed with “some of the special counsel’s legal theories.” Maybe he had in mind Mr. Mueller’s proposition that he was entitled to pursue obstruction questions, even though that was not part of his initial mandate from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Or maybe it was Mr. Mueller’s long description of what a prosecution of the sitting president might look like—even though he acknowledged its legal impossibility. Or it could be Mr. Mueller’s theory that while “fairness” dictates that someone accused of crimes get a “speedy and public trial” to “clear his name,” Mr. Trump deserves no such courtesy with regard to the 200 pages of accusations Mr. Mueller lodges against him.
That was Mr. Mueller’s James Comey moment. Remember the July 2016 press conference in which the FBI director berated Hillary Clinton even as he didn’t bring charges? It was a firing offense. Here’s Mr. Mueller engaging in the same practice—only on a more inappropriate scale. At least this time the attorney general tried to clean up the mess by declaring he would not bring obstruction charges. Mr. Barr noted Thursday that we do not engage in grand-jury proceedings and probes with the purpose of generating innuendo.
Mr. Mueller may not care. His report suggests the actual goal of the obstruction volume is impeachment: “We concluded that Congress has the authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority.”
Note as well what isn’t in the report. It makes only passing, bland references to the genesis of so many of the accusations Mr. Mueller probed: the infamous dossier produced by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. How do you exonerate Mr. Page without delving into the scandalous Moscow deeds of which he was falsely accused? How do you narrate an entire section on the July 2016 Trump Tower meeting without noting that Ms. Veselnitskaya was working alongside Fusion? How do you detail every aspect of the Papadopoulos accusations while avoiding any detail of the curious and suspect ways that those accusations came back to the FBI via Australia’s Alexander Downer?
The report instead mostly reads as a lengthy defense of the FBI—of its shaky claims about how its investigation began, of its far-fetched theories, of its procedures, even of its leadership. One of the more telling sections concerns Mr. Comey’s firing. Mr. Mueller’s team finds it generally beyond the realm of possibility that the FBI director was canned for incompetence or insubordination. It treats everything the FBI or Mr. Comey did as legitimate, even as it treats everything the president did as suspect.
Mr. Mueller is an institutionalist, and many on his team were the same Justice Department attorneys who first fanned the partisan collusion claims. He was the wrong man to provide an honest assessment of the 2016 collusion dirty trick. And we’ve got a report to prove it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) After Mueller, nobody has changed their views on Trump
Nothing has changed.
Just about no one has moved away from where they stood on Nov. 9, 2016, when they woke up trying to comprehend that Donald J. Trump had overcome the odds, the press, and his own shortcomings to win that presidential election.
If you voted for him, you are still thrilled and optimistic about the future. I outlined in the book I co-authored with Brad Todd, The Great Revolt, that election was never quite about Trump. Many of his voters saw with eyes wide open the man’s flaws and were voting heavily on concern for their communities and not necessary for themselves.
Many who did not vote for Trump loathe him with the intensity of a white-hot rod poker prodding at their souls. Their hair is still on fire, and nothing in the world can extinguish it until he is out of the White House, preferably in handcuffs.
If you are a reporter who lives and works within the counties that surround DC, New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, it’s been a tough go. You don’t work with anyone in your newsroom who would have voted for Trump, you don’t socialize with anyone who voted for Trump, and likely you don’t know anyone at your children’s school who voted for Trump.
Many reporters, though not all, often view these voters monolithically rather than the complex coalition they have formed, painting them with a broad brush. They see the Trump voters as foolish or fooled at best, bigots, unintelligent, and backward at worst.
Reporters marvel at these voters’ unwillingness to give up on a struggling town to move to a larger city or region, never understanding that these voters often happily trade a higher paying salary or a career with bonuses in another city to stay in a community where they have deep roots.
Since the day after Trump won, reports on his win focused heavily on his loss of the popular vote. Then there were the overhyped stories about a Wisconsin recount. Then the story developed that he only won because of Russia and that he probably helped Russia “hack the election.”
This simply reinforced Trump-backers’ support for the man. Haters will hate.
Which brings us back to this: Nothing has changed since Election Day 2016, because everything had changed for the C-suite influencers that control our culture, politics, entertainment, big tech, and news consumption. They chose to ignore the signs — or, in their arrogance, just missed what was in plain sight for decades.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
.
No comments:
Post a Comment