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I maintain we ought to send all illegal aliens to California and New York and then wall those two states off from the rest of the country. (See 1 below.)
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In defense of Barr. (See 2 below.)
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Democrats love taxing citizens to raise money for policies which seldom work as intended. Perhaps they have other motives. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Is this the real Beto? If it is,he would be well suited to become president since Democrats think so little of the office. (See 4 below.)
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Apparently spying did happen. Question now is was it legal? Hard to see how it was.
Furthermore, I have no doubt Hillary was involved, Obama was smart enough not to have his finger prints on anything but had to be aware of Bill's clandestine meeting with the then Attorney General and Obama had to be aware of what was going on between Hillary, Comey, Clapper and Brennan etc.
Time will tell because the wheels of justice grind slow but fine. (See 5 below.)
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Every week brings it's own surprises.
This past week it became evident why Rob Rosenstein was called upon to remain in his position at The Justice Department util the Mueller Report was complete so he could help Attorney General Barr. Rosenstein was in charge of Mueller and was intimate with his investigation.
Like him or not, Rosenstein is a lawyer who goes by the book and his support of Barr is compelling because he is not looking for a job within government. He supports the rule of law concept and stands opposed to what Democrats want on firm constitutional ground.
Netanyahu's victory and the fact that Israeli millennial's rejected socialism proves interesting. I do not believe it gives insight into how American millennial's will react because there is no comparison between a 23 year old Israeli and a comparable American. By the time an Israeli reaches 23 they have served in the military, have traveled and gone to and graduated from both a fine university and been exposed to a solid education.
The one tragic area where they are the same is both have indulged by trying some form of narcotics.
A third happening this week is the foundation for embracing and defending anti-Semitic outbursts by Democrat Representatives and the continuing lack of support of Israel by The Democrat Party was reinforced.
The fourth interesting event was the exposure Maxine Waters received when she chaired an important House Committee and made a fool of herself if that is possible. Tenure cuts two ways.
Finally, the attacks on Trump, for everything under the sun, continue unabated and the more they do the better he will be because American's are being turned off by the likes of Pelosi et al.
Democrats have tarred themselves by their contempt for Trump and their inability to believe he beat their Queen. Consequently, they are prone to accept anything about him and when the facts undercut their misguided beliefs they resort to attacking others. This week the victim du jour was Barr.
Democrats told us to trust Mueller and allow him to investigate Trump. Mueller did so and the Democrats could not swallow/are choking on his conclusions.
As Democrats keep up their lunacy it will eventually bite them in the ass as it did in 2016. Bless their souls!
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Dick
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1)In an attempt to retaliate against Democrats, President Trump and White House officials reportedly plotted to release detained immigrants into sanctuary cities.
The Trump administration tried at least twice in the past six months to convince immigration authorities to target various Democratic-led cities, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco, where they expected the immigrants would cause problems, according to emails obtained by the Washington Post and several whistle blowers from the Department of Homeland Security.
“The extent of this administration’s cynicism and cruelty cannot be overstated,” Pelosi spokeswoman Ashley Etienne told the paper. “Using human beings — including little children — as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable.”
Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who has seemingly taken over immigration policy recently, led the discussion with ICE, according to the Post.
ICE officials, including acting deputy director Matthew Albence, reportedly shot down the proposition.
“It was basically an idea that Miller wanted that nobody else wanted to carry out,” a congressional investigator who has spoken to one of the whistleblowers told the Post.
“What happened here is that Stephen Miller called people at ICE, said if they’re going to cut funding you’ve got to make sure you’re releasing people in Pelosi’s district and other congressional districts.”
Trump went directly to former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who resigned earlier this week, but she and the DHS legal team struck down the idea, CNN reported Thursday.
The president has long railed against sanctuary cities, even proposing in 2016 that the federal government cut off all funding to those jurisdictions. A federal appeals court ruled in February that he could not do that in Philadelphia, specifically.
The news of the failed plan comes amid Trump’s intentions to double down in ICE after rescinding acting director Ronald Vitiello’s nomination to lead the department, instead saying he needed someone “tougher.”
— Kate Feldman New York Daily News
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2)The Day of Reckoning Is at
Hand
By George Parry
This week before the Senate Appropriations Committee Attorney General William Barr gave testimony that is guaranteed to induce panic throughout the D.C. swamp. Regarding spying on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he testified as follows:
ATTORNEY GENERAL BARR: As I said in my confirmation hearing, I am going to be reviewing both the genesis and the conduct of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign during 2016. And a lot of this has already been investigated, and a substantial portion of it has been investigated and is being investigated by the office of the Inspector General, but one of the things I want to do is pull everything together from the various investigations that have gone on, including on the Hill and in the [Justice] Department, and see if there are any remaining questions to be addressed.
SEN. JEANNE SHAHEEN (D., NH): And can you share with us why you feel a need to do that?
BARR: Well, you know, for the same reason we’re worried about foreign influence in elections, we want to make sure that during elections — I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal. It’s a big deal.
The generation I grew up in, which is the Vietnam War period, people were all concerned about spying on anti-war people and so forth by the government, and there were a lot of rules put in place to make sure that there’s an adequate basis before our law enforcement agencies get involved in political surveillance. I’m not suggesting that those rules were violated but I think it’s important to look at that. and I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily, but intelligence agencies more broadly.
SHAHEEN: So you’re not suggesting, though, that spying occurred?
BARR: Well, I guess — I think spying did occur, yes. I think spying did occur.
SHAHEEN: Well —
BARR: The question was whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting it wasn’t adequately predicated. I need to explore that. I think it’s my obligation. Congress is usually very concerned about intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies staying in their proper lane. I want to make sure that happened. We have a lot of rules about that.
I want to say that I’ve said I’m reviewing this. I haven’t set up a team yet, but I have in mind having some colleagues help me pull all this information together and letting me know whether there are some areas that should be looked at. I also want to make clear. I also want to make clear, this is not launching an investigation of the FBI. Frankly, to the extent there were any issues at the FBI, I do not view it as a problem that’s endemic to the FBI.
I think there was probably a failure among a group of leaders there, at the upper echelon. So I don’t like to hear attacks about the FBI because I think the FBI is an outstanding organization and I think Chris Wray is a great partner for me. I’m very pleased he’s there as the director. If it becomes necessary to look over some former officials’ activities, I expect I’ll be relying heavily on Chris and work closely with him in looking at that information. But that’s what I’m doing. I feel I have an obligation to make sure that government power is not abused. I think that’s one of the principal roles of the Attorney General.
Coming from Barr, a most measured and serious man, this explosive testimony portends a bleak future for all those FBI, Department of Justice, and intelligence community operatives who used their official positions and enormous — bordering on limitless — governmental powers to undermine the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and, failing that, to undo the results of the 2016 election. So it is that Barr’s description of the possibility of such political surveillance as a “big deal” is understatement of the first order. As “big deals” go, the stakes couldn’t be any higher.
On cue, the Democrats and their wholly owned mainstream media subsidiary have tried to dull the impact of Barr’s testimony. One bedraggled party flak claimed on network television that, since Barr merely thought spying had occurred, he had not confirmed that it had really, truly and actually happened. And, resorting to the left’s default position on all things Trump, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has called for Barr’s impeachment. These unhinged responses to Barr’s testimony are similar to the type of desperate, fantasy-based gibberish you might expect from a barricaded man facing imminent death at the hands of a SWAT team. Clearly the left knows that, with Barr running the show, trouble is on the way.
Although Barr tried to avoid making any definitive statements about the ultimate outcome of the current and future investigations, he did let slip certain tidbits that should cause many sleepless nights throughout what we in the Justice Department used to call the Seat of Government. In that regard, Barr effectively stated that the investigation would be to determine whether the Obama administration had engaged in electronic surveillance of the opposing political party’s presidential campaign and candidate without a proper legal basis.
When Barr questioned whether the spying on the Trump campaign was “adequately predicated,” he was obviously talking about the unverified and salacious Steele dossier that was used to obtain FISA warrants to intercept the communications of Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Such an investigation will necessarily encompass the genesis of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign’s bought-and-paid-for opposition research that constitutes the basis of the dossier, and its knowing, dishonest, and illegal use by James Comey’s FBI and Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice to deceive the FISA court into authorizing the electronic surveillance of Page and by extension all of the persons in or out of the Trump campaign with whom he communicated.
As we now know, in sworn testimony given in the United Kingdom, not even Christopher Steele would vouch for the dossier’s accuracy. And equally damaging, in testimony before Congress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page stated that, contrary to standard FBI procedure in counterintelligence operations, the Trump campaign, purportedly the target of Russian infiltration, had not been warned of the Kremlin’s nefarious efforts because the FBI did not deem the Steele dossier reliable enough to compel such a warning.
Page’s testimony sets up an irresistible line of inquiry. If the dossier was not reliable enough to justify a warning to Trump’s campaign about the Kremlin’s plot, how could it even remotely serve as the basis for obtaining FISA warrants to spy on the campaign? By her benighted testimony, Page has framed the issue nicely and invited a full vetting of who, what, where, when, why, and how the dossier was used to dupe the FISA court.
Barr also made clear that, beyond the FBI and Justice Department, the investigation will also be looking at “intelligence agencies.” This makes sense given that low level Trump campaign associates such as George Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis were approached by foreign operatives with CIA ties in an effort to plant the seeds of the Trump-Russia collusion illusion. As for the FBI, Barr made clear that, while he does not think that there is an “endemic” problem at that agency, he thinks that “there was probably a failure among a group of leaders there, at the upper echelon.”
No kidding.
And, of course, any investigation into the spying must logically and inexorably lead to the clandestine state-sponsored plot to unwind the 2016 election and remove President Trump from office. In short, the subject matter of any proper investigation will necessarily encompass the first attempted coup d’état in our nation’s history.
So here we are. After suffering through Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ comatose stewardship of the Justice Department, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s underhanded machinations, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s protracted rear guard action to protect the anti-Trump deep state conspirators, the day of reckoning is at hand. Attorney General Barr’s testimony portends a long overdue cleansing of the government temple the likes of which has never before happened in this country. This will be history in the making.
In ancient times, when nations reached such dramatic inflection points, there were poets, authors, artists, and philosophers who formulated, explained, and preserved for posterity the meaning of events and their impact upon their societies. As I listened to Barr’s astounding testimony, I realized that America was at such an historic milestone.
Who, I mused, will step forward to explicate and place these momentous events into their proper context? Does America have a Homer or a Cicero to properly express the gratitude and exaltation of our fellow citizens at the approach of long desired and overdue justice? And then the answer suddenly came to me as my shrinking brain flashed back to the immortal words of that long ago anthem of righteous adolescent retribution, My Boyfriend’s Back, to wit:
My boyfriend’s back and you’re gonna be in trouble
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend’s back)
You see him comin’ better cut out on the double
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend’s back)
Here’s a link to The Angels’ singing My Boyfriend’s Back on the Ed Sullivan Show. Their performance is at once entertaining and seemingly prescient. As you watch them sing, imagine that they are making eye contact with James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, John Brennan, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Sally Yates, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, and all the rest of the conspirators. It’s pretty amusing.
To a remarkable degree, the lyrics are apt and convey the mood of all of us who have had a belly full of the deep state.
As for all of those swamp dwellers who have corrupted and degraded our government to this historical low point, let me paraphrase the best line in the song: If I were [them], I’d take a permanent vacation.
Where at? Club Fed?
If Barr means what he says, you can count on it.
George Parry is a former federal and state prosecutor who practices law in Philadelphia. He is a regular contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer and blogs at knowledgeisgood.net. He may be reached by email atkignet1@gmail.com.
2a)
Rod Rosenstein Defends Justice Department Handling of Mueller Report
Deputy attorney general rebuts Democrats’ suggestions that William Barr is trying to mislead
By Sadie Gurman
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein defended the Justice Department’s handling of the special counsel’s still-secret report, saying Attorney General William Barr is “being as forthcoming as he can” about his process for redacting and releasing the roughly 400-page document.
In his first interview since the conclusion of the special counsel’s investigation, Mr. Rosenstein beat back suggestions that Mr. Barr is trying to mislead the public by releasing only a four-page summary of Robert Mueller’s investigation. The attorney general in that letter said the Mueller probe found President Trump and his campaign didn’t conspire with Russian interference in the 2016 election but reached no conclusion about whether the president obstructed justice. With the absence of a recommendation, Mr. Barr and Mr. Rosenstein determined Mr. Trump’s actions weren’t criminal.
Democrats have demanded access to the full report, which Mr. Barr said he would release, likely next week, after blacking out portions for sensitive information.
“He’s being as forthcoming as he can, and so this notion that he’s trying to mislead people, I think is just completely bizarre,” Mr. Rosenstein said.
Mr. Barr is under intense pressure to quickly produce the edited report amid concerns from Democrats that the attorney general, a longtime advocate of executive-branch authority, is seeking to protect the president from politically damaging information the report may contain. Their worries were heightened after reports that some investigators on Mr. Mueller’s team had told associates in recent days that they believe the report is more critical of Mr. Trump on the obstruction issue than Mr. Barr indicated in his summary. Mr. Rosenstein wouldn’t say why Mr. Mueller rendered no conclusion on that critical question.
“It would be one thing if you put out a letter and said, ‘I’m not going to give you the report,’ ” Mr. Rosenstein said. “What he said is, ‘Look, it’s going to take a while to process the report. In the meantime, people really want to know what’s in it. I’m going to give you the top-line conclusions.’ That’s all he was trying to do.”
Mr. Rosenstein, Mr. Barr, their top advisers and a member of Mr. Mueller’s team have been involved in reviewing the report for material related to intelligence sources, continuing investigations, grand-jury matters and the privacy of individuals not charged with crimes. Mr. Rosenstein wouldn’t say how it was going, only that the public should have “tremendous confidence” in Mr. Barr.
The rare interview in Mr. Rosenstein’s fourth-floor office at the Justice Department came in his waning days on the job, with the special counsel investigation he oversaw now complete and Mr. Trump’s nominee to replace him, Deputy Transportation Secretary Jeffrey Rosen,awaiting confirmation by the Senate. After nearly 30 years in the department, Mr. Rosenstein, 54 years old, said he doesn’t know what he will do next, only that he hopes to start a new job at the end of the summer.
His remarks came one day after Mr. Barr said he would form a team to examine the origins of a 2016 counterintelligence investigation that conducted what he termed as “spying” on people associated with the Trump campaign, a characterization Democrats and some former Justice Department officials, including fired Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, found disturbing.
Speaking at a conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Mr. Comey said, “When I hear that kind of language used, it’s concerning, because the FBI and Department of Justice conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance. I have never thought of that as spying.”
It isn’t known whether Mr. Barr’s review will examine any of Mr. Rosenstein’s actions, namely that he approved an application to ask a court to grant continued surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had long been on the radar of U.S. counterintelligence for his communications with Russians.
Mr. Rosenstein wouldn’t comment on Mr. Barr’s inquiry of that counterintelligence probe, but he said generally that he is open to objective scrutiny and stands by his approval of the renewal.
Mr. Rosenstein has been under an unusually intense spotlight as the No. 2 Justice Department official, largely because of his decision to appoint Mr. Mueller early in his tenure, which drew repeated swipes from Mr. Trump and concerns among some of the president’s advisers that he would move to fire the deputy attorney general. Mr. Rosenstein said he has stayed on the job at Mr. Barr’s request, adding, “for me, it’s a real privilege.”
Early on, at Mr. Trump’s request, Mr. Rosenstein wrote a memo that the White House initially cited as grounds for firing Mr. Comey. On Thursday, he said he stands by the memo and has few regrets about his time in office.
“If you put something in writing, put your name on it and be prepared to stand behind it,” he said. “That’s been a theme of my career.”
—Dion Nissenbaum contributed to this article.
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3)
Ron Wyden’s Plan to Drain Investors
By The Editorial Board
A new Democratic idea to grab revenue: Tax unrealized capital gains.
The Democratic competition to bleed the rich has become fierce. If progressives aren’t satisfied with Elizabeth Warren’s proposed “wealth tax” of 3% a year, AOC’s 70% income tax, Bernie Sanders’s 77% estate tax, or Rep. John Larson’s uncapped payroll-tax increase of 2.4 percentage points, they now have a fifth option. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden wants to tax capital gains as regular income, meaning rates up to 37%. He would also tax unrealizedgains, perhaps decades before the investor sells.
Mr. Wyden hasn’t released a formal plan, so the details are sketchy. Under current law, long-term capital gains are taxed at rates up to 20%—plus a 3.8% ObamaCare surcharge on investment income—only after the asset is sold.
Mr. Wyden calls this a loophole. “There are two tax codes in America,” he said recently. “The first is for nurses, police officers and factory workers—those who earn wages and pay taxes with every paycheck. The second is for millionaires and billionaires.” But there are good reasons to tax capital gains at preferential rates, which is why the U.S. has done it for decades under Democrats and Republicans.
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The lower rate encourages investment and productive risk-taking. It reduces the harm from double taxation after corporations already pay income taxes. It also assists the mobility of capital by reducing the “lock-in effect” from investors holding assets to avoid taxes.
In a December working paper for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, two economists looked at what happened in South Korea when a 24% capital-gains tax on certain large firms was switched to a 10% rate. Compared with unaffected companies, “the affected firms increased investment by 36 percent and capital stock by 9 percent within three years.”
A lower tax rate is also a matter of fairness. If investors have capital losses, they aren’t allowed to deduct more than $3,000 a year. There’s no inflation adjustment either: If $100 of stock bought in 1999 is sold for $150 today, the difference is taxed even though much of it is an illusory gain caused by dollar erosion. Many people who have capital gains are “rich” for a year, after a lifetime of letting an investment build value before they sell.
Capital gains aren’t taxed like salaries, in other words, because they’re different from salaries. Mr. Wyden’s plan would treat capital gains as ordinary income and deliver a gut-punch to investors and the economy. Mr. Wyden also proposes an annual “mark to market” scheme, which would spread the tax over the lifetime of the investment. As an asset rises in value, its owners would pay tax each year on the incremental gain.
When future progressives are scrounging for yet more tax revenue, they will inevitably lower Mr. Wyden’s threshold. Nearly a third of U.S. households—roughly 40 million—have some kind of taxable investment account, according to survey data from the Finra Investor Education Foundation. If Mr. Wyden creates another way to wring taxes out of people, it’s hard to imagine Congress restraining itself.
A deeper problem is Mr. Wyden’s plan would tax gains that exist merely on paper. Imagine a doctor investing in stocks in a taxable brokerage account. In good times he’ll have to divert money to pay the annual tax, since the unrealized gain isn’t in his bank account. Then what if the market crashes as he retires, erasing the gain—or turning it into a sudden loss? Could the doctor call the IRS to get a refund for years of taxes?
And what about illiquid investments, such as private companies or real estate? As with Ms. Warren’s suggested wealth tax, no one knows how Mr. Wyden would go about valuing them. Politico reported, citing the Senator’s spokeswoman, that his plan “would have exemptions for personal residences and retirement accounts while applying broadly to other tradeable and non-tradeable assets.”
This raises a host of questions: What about a family whose little lake cabin, purchased decades ago, is now surrounded by mansions? Taxing years of appreciation on the land could force them to sell the place. Would the owner of an apartment building be asked to revalue it every year? Will an art investor be told to mark that Picasso to market? Good luck.
Academic papers suggest that maybe the IRS could tax some “expected return” each year. Or perhaps the tax would be collected only when the asset is sold, but calculated as if it had been applied annually, with the rate of appreciation drawn as a straight line. Mr. Wyden’s detailed thinking isn’t known, but however he tries to skin the fat cat, it will add unhelpful complexity to the revenue code.
Mr. Wyden’s plan has zero chance of passing a Republican Senate, but he intends to inject it into the 2020 campaign. Given that the Democratic strategy is to attack wealth creation, Mr. Wyden’s idea is impossible to count out. Another day, another window on what Democrats would do if they regain power.
3a) California Has Become America’s Cannibal State
For over six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax.
The state legislature sold that confiscatory tax rate on the idea that it was a temporary fix and would eventually be phased out. No one believed that. California voters, about 40 percent of whom pay no state income taxes, naturally approved the extension of the high rate by an overwhelming margin.
California recently raised gas taxes by 40 percent and now has the second-highest gas taxes in the United States.
California has the ninth-highest combined state and local sales taxes in the country, but its state sales tax of 7.3 percent is America’s highest. As of April 1, California is now applying that high state sales tax to goods that residents buy online from out-of-state sellers.
In late 2017, the federal government capped state and local tax deductions at $10,000. For high earners in California, the change effectively almost doubled their state and local taxes.
Such high taxes, often targeting a small percentage of the population, may have brought California a budget surplus of more than $20 million. Yet California is never satiated with high new tax rates that bring in additional revenue. It’s always hungry for more.
Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco, has introduced a bill that would create a new California estate tax. Wiener outlined a death tax of 40 percent on estates worth more than $3.5 million for single Californians or more than $7 million for married couples.
Given the soaring valuations of California properties, a new estate tax could force children to sell homes or family farms they inherited just to pay the tax bills.
Soon, even more of the Californian taxpayers who chip in to pay half of the state income taxes will flee in droves for low-tax or no-tax states.
What really irks California taxpayers are the shoddy public services that they receive in exchange for such burdensome taxes. California can be found near the bottom of state rankings for schools and infrastructure.
San Francisco ranks first among America’s largest cities in property crimes per capita. The massive concrete ruins of the state’s quarter-built and now either canceled or postponed multibillion-dollar high-speed rail system are already collecting graffiti.
Roughly a quarter of the nation’s homeless live in California. So do about one-third of all Americans on public assistance. Approximately one-fifth of the state’s population lives below the poverty line. About one-third of Californians are enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s health care program for low-income residents.
California’s social programs are magnets that draw in the indigent from all over the world, who arrive in search of generous health, education, legal, nutritional and housing subsidies. Some 27 percent of the state’s residents were not born in the United States.
Last month alone, nearly 100,000 foreign nationals were stopped at the southern border, according to officials. Huge numbers of migrants are able to make it across without being caught, and many end up in California.
A lot of upper-middle-class taxpayers feel that not only does California fail to appreciate their contributions, but that the state often blames them for not paying even more—as if paying about half of their incomes to local, state and federal governments somehow reveals their greed.
The hyper-wealthy liberal denizens of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the coastal enclaves often seem exempt from the consequences of the high taxes they so often advocate for others. The super-rich either have the clout to hire experts to help them avoid such taxes, or they simply have so much money that they are not much affected by even California’s high taxes.
What is the ideology behind such destructive state policies?
Venezuela, which is driving out its middle class, is apparently California’s model. Venezuelan leaders believed in providing vast subsidies for the poor. The country’s super-rich are often crony capitalists who can avoid high taxes.
Similarly, California is waging an outright war on the upper-middle class, which lacks the numbers of the poor and the clout of the rich.
Those who administer California’s plagued department of motor vehicles and high-speed rail authority may often be inept and dysfunctional, but the state’s tax collectors are the most obsessive bureaucrats in the nation.
What is Sacramento’s message to those who combine to pay half the state’s income taxes and have not yet left California?
“Be gone or we will eat you!”
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4)THE REAL BETO O’ROURKE THAT EL PASO KNOWS
by Alva Baker
I lived in El Paso from 1991 until 2009. I went to El Paso on a
three-month contract as a consultant for a Mexican newspaper in
January 1991 and stayed for 18 years.
Working in El Paso, Ciudad Juarez and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. I knew many “media people” in print, radio, TV and the advertising agencies. Beto O’Rourke’s father-in-law Bill Sanders was a partner in one of the largest ad agencies in El Paso. One of my good friends was the senior creative director at that agency. I knew Beto, and I knew his wife Amy Sanders.
The political climate in El Paso and El Paso County was filled with
underhanded deals, corruption, blatant dishonesty and sleazy
officials. In July 2001, Beto’s father, County Judge Patrick O’Rourke
was run over on Artcraft Road early on morning while riding his
recumbent bicycle. Months prior to that, El Paso County Sheriff
Deputies found cocaine hidden in the dashboard of Judge O’Rourke’s automobile. No charges were ever filed.
Beto’s mother Melissa owned Charlotte’s Furniture. While I was in El
Paso, she was caught issuing fake invoices on merchandise sold to
people from Mexico to avoid paying sales tax. She was later forced by the Internal Revenue Service to close her business.
Because of several altercations with the local police department when he was a teenager, Beto was sent away to an all-male boarding school in Virginia. He graduated in 1991 from Woodberry Forest School in Madison County, VA. In 1995, he was arrested for burglary in El Paso, after jumping a fence at the University of Texas at El Paso. No charges were filed. In 1998, Beto was arrested for DWI and fleeing the scene of an accident. Charges were dropped after he completed a court-recommended DWI program.
Beto won his first political office in mid-2005. He ran for city
council against corrupt incumbent Anthony Cobos, who later served four years in a federal prison in Colorado for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and “deprivation of honest services.”
In 2012 Beto unseated U.S. Representative Silvestre Reyes in the
Democratic primary. Reyes had served with the U.S. Border Patrol for 26 years, retiring in 1995, before entering politics. Appointed to the House Intelligence Committee by Nancy Pelosi, Reyes became the laughing stock of Washington by not knowing the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite when questioned about al-Qaeda by the Congressional Quarterly in December 2006.
For Silvestre Reyes to chair the House Intelligence Committee was a
gross contradiction of terms. He was an embarrassment to the Democrat Party. Reyes and his brother Chuy are as corrupt as they come.
Two of my closest friends while in El Paso were
1) the editor of the El Paso Times, and
2) the general manager of the PBS TV-affiliate. Between the two of
them and my staff of investigative reporters at El Diario, I was
pretty much in touch with the political affairs and dealings in El
Paso.
Last Friday I received a call from the friend who had been the general manager at KCOS-TV. He talked about Beto O’Rourke, and how the people in El Paso who know him are frustrated and exasperated that he has made this much of an impact on the U. S. Senate election. They know the 38.1 million dollars he “raised” came from Hungarian George Soros and the Democrat Party.
My friend told me that he ran into a guy he knows who sold drugs to
Beto. My friend told him, “Henry, you would be doing the county a huge favor by telling people you were the drug pusher to Beto O’Rourke.” He said Henry looked at him and said, “Man, I would not live through the night if I did that.” Some people know the real Beto.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++5) Worse than Watergate
For most of my lifetime, “Watergate” has been used as the measuring stick for political corruption. What exactly was the Watergate scandal?
On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for burglarizing the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D. C. It was never alleged that President Richard M. Nixon knew about the burglary prior to the attempt, but that he tried to use the power of the presidency to obstruct justice in order to protect members of his administration and his reelection committee from facing criminal charges. Ultimately, Nixon was forced to resign in order to avoid congressional impeachment and a trial in the Senate.
The great irony is that Nixon was going to crush McGovern in the general election without any illegal help. Nothing that could have been stolen from the Democrats could have helped the Republican Party win any bigger in 1972 -- Nixon claimed 520 electoral votes and carried 49 states. The break-in was stupid and unnecessary.
And most importantly, it was illegal. Sure, the people initially apprehended were only a couple of Cuban refugees and a pair of former CIA spooks, but James W. McCord was with them -- a security coordinator for the Republican National Committee and Committee for the Re-election of the President. Investigators were eventually able to connect those five to G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, and those seven men were indicted by a grand jury on September 15, 1972. Over the course of the Watergate scandal, 69 people were eventually indicted, and 48 were found guilty. Nixon was pardoned by President Gerald Ford on September 8, 1974, officially putting an end to the whole sordid matter.
Since that fateful turn of events, political scandals are typically compared to Watergate and inevitably judged to have fallen short. Subsequent scandals have often been labeled as such by merely appending “gate” as a suffix: thus we’ve had “Climategate” for the global warming email scandal, as one example. In fact, there’s a whole Wikipedia page devoted to organizing and listing all the scandals that have been designated as such simply by slapping the word “gate” at the end of it.
In a delicious irony, this week Attorney General William Barr implied that a new bar might have been set (pun intended) during the 2016 election cycle when he announced that he believes President Trump’s political campaign was spied upon by the federal government.
Just let that sink in for a moment and noodle around in your brain.
In 1972, Republicans were caught using former CIA operatives to spy on their political rivals. In 2016, Democrats have now been caught using active FBI and senior Department of Justice employees to spy on President Trump. It is no longer debatable whether or not it happened, because A. G. Barr just told us it happened. The only question that remains is whether or not they had any sort of justifiable reason for doing so, except that question seems to have already been resolved by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, because his report found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. In fact, the opposite appears to be true -- it looks as if federal agencies conspired with foreign governments to entrap peripheral members of the Trump campaign.
Heads need to roll. Maybe even literally. This appears to the crime of sedition, the act of conspiring to incite rebellion against the authority of our government. If it could be proved that a foreign government had been involved in the conspiracy, the crimes involved might even rise to the level of treason. Sedition is bad enough.
At the heart of the Watergate scandal was a bungled burglary. No one got hurt. If Nixon hadn’t tried to obstruct justice, his presidency might have survived the scandal. Watergate is about to become ancient history because it pales in comparison to what the Obama administration just did. Innocent American citizens have had their lives destroyed in a criminal attempt to topple the Trump administration. Let’s recap how it happened.
To the surprise of pretty much everyone except Donald Trump, he rose to the top of the field and became the Republican nominee. Despite Bernie Sanders appearing to win most of the primaries and having the enthusiasm of most liberals behind him, Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee because the fix was in before the votes were cast. While working for the Democratic National Committee and campaign of Hillary Clinton, Marc Elias (from the law firm Perkins-Coie) hired Fusion GPS to create opposition research now commonly known as the “Steele dossier,” a collection of memos full of salacious unsubstantiated rumors and ridiculous claims that only a gullible maverick like Senator John McCain would believe. Fortunately for the conspirators, McCain passed the dossier over to James Comey at the FBI, giving the Obama administration an excuse to open a counterintelligence investigation into Trump even though they knew the “information” originated from the Clinton campaign and was unverified.
How did they know? Bruce Ohr told them. And how did Bruce know? His wife, Nellie, works for Fusion GPS. Meanwhile, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and others working within the FBI and Obama’s Department of Justice conspired to exonerate Hillary Clinton of serious crimes while charging her opponent with egregiously false, manufactured accusations of colluding with Russia.
How can this not be a plot to overthrow our government?
To make matters worse, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, James Clapper, and Sally Yates were all guilty of improperly “unmasking” innocent American citizens for nefarious political reasons, which led to General Michael Flynn’s unfair prosecution by Mueller after FBI officials had concluded he wasn’t lying to them during their unfair interview. How can this happen?
Where does the buck stop?
Although President Obama frequently claimed he never knew about anything until after he’d seen it in the news, he might not be able get away with pleading ignorance this time. According to texts sent between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, President Obama wanted to know everything they were doing. In contrast, Nixon didn’t find out about the Watergate break-in until after it had already happened.
Barack Obama has a big problem. He’s apparently involved in this effort to overturn the results of a presidential election up to those oversized ears of his. Somebody will probably start singing to get a reduced sentence pretty soon, and if they can corroborate their testimony with evidence, Obama can stop worrying about his legacy and start worrying about his imminent future. The penalty for sedition calls for up to twenty years in prison, and it is unlikely that President Trump would consider a pardon of Obama under the circumstances, because he was the target of this conspiracy. Dan Bongino calls it “Spygate”, but some people confuse that with a different scandal involving the New England Patriots and New York Jets.
Perhaps we should call this ugly blemish on American history “Obamagate?”
No matter what we eventually label this ugly episode in our nation’s history, the odds are strong that the word “gate” will be appended to the end of the phrase.
Will there be a patriot in the Democratic Party with the courage to paraphrase the same question Howard Baker posed about Watergate in 1972: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”
John Leonard writes novels, books, articles for American Thinker, and may be contacted via his website at southernprose.com.
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