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Blood thirsty Nadler and Schiff, driven by their own hatred of Trump and supported by the "Four Snakes" and those assorted Democrats who are equally venomous, will now seek new avenues to slither down as they perpetuate their"witch hunt."
They used Mueller in the pitiful hope he would provide them sound bites to support section 2 of the report which established new principles of law never used before, to exonerate someone who was not found guilty of the alleged crime in section one.. Under our jurisprudence a prosecutor charges or closes the book.
Meanwhile, the radical Democrat Party offers three solutions to solve the myriad of issues America faces and they are, in order of their importance:
1) Impeach Trump
2) Spend beyond our means
3) Turn every want into an entitlement and then make it a free one.
It should now be evident to all, so called liberals will do anything to win, to gain power. How pathetic. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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The generally liberal New Yorker reviews Harris. (See 2 below.)
And:
Judge Napolitano unleashes on Trump. (See 2a below.)
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I watched an interview with our Secretary of State and he was asked about N Korea's recent missile launches and he said that Kim has agreed to another meeting between our two negotiating teams and this could be posturing.
Our State Department understands the importance of words and all the niceties but the keys are actions because they are lasting whereas, words are mostly fleeting.
My response to those who are constantly bringing up Trump's crudeness, boorishness and use of ill serving words is: Obama was deemed gifted and eloquent and his words spoke to many but his disastrous actions and policies are the legacy he left that Trump now must deal with because they are the reality.
When a boxer says he is going to knock you out you should pay attention but watch his hands.
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Tomorrow morning last memo for a while.
Have a great week. Stay well. Dick
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1) Beyond Mueller’s ‘Purview’
The Justice Department will have to examine the rest of the Russia story.
The Editorial Board
Having failed to prove collusion and obstruction of justice, the cheerleaders of the Robert Mueller investigation are now highlighting his claim this week that Russia is still trying to interfere in U.S. elections. No doubt the Russians are. Which makes it all the more important that the Justice Department finish the half of the Russian-meddling probe that Mr. Mueller didn’t.
Was Mr. Mueller familiar with Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that Democrats used to flog dirt about Donald Trump and Russia? “This is outside my purview,” he said.
Did he know that Fusion GPS was also representing a Russian-based company known as Prevezon while it was flogging that dirt? “It’s outside my purview,” Mr. Mueller said.
Did he know that Fusion GPS was working with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who figured so prominently in the meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 with Trump campaign officials? She wanted to repeal the Magnitsky Act that allows sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s cronies. “Outside my purview,” he said.
And what about the notorious Steele dossier, supposedly based on Russian sources, that formed the basis for a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign? “Well what I think is missing here is the fact that this is under investigation,” Mr. Mueller replied. “And consequently it’s not within my purview, the Department of Justice and FBI should be responsive to questions on this particular issue.”
None of this was under investigation as far as we know when Mr. Mueller began his probe in May 2017, so that isn’t a good excuse. How could Mr. Mueller think that the Steele dossier that drove the media clamor about Russia-Trump collusion for months wasn’t part of his purview? Mr. Mueller may never answer that question.
Which leaves finishing the job to the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr. In his public life Mr. Barr will never have a more important assignment. Americans need to know how and why a U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agency came to spy on a presidential campaign. They need to know the real story, not merely the one leaked to a sympathetic media by former FBI and Obama Administration officials.
So much doesn’t add up from the dribs and drabs we have already learned. If the fear of Russian influence was so great, why didn’t the FBI tell Donald Trump? If the threat was so great, why did the FBI send its operatives to entrap a pair of minor campaign advisers, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos? If they thought Mr. Trump was a Manchurian Candidate, then why not seek to engage someone with real authority who actually spoke with Mr. Trump?
The good news is that Mr. Barr does seem determined to find the truth. “The use of foreign-intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign to me is unprecedented and it’s a serious red line that’s been crossed,” Mr. Barr told CBS News in May.
There are several key areas to explore. The first that will become public is the investigation by Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz into the FISA warrants against Mr. Page and perhaps others. Were they legitimate and based on solid information? Or were the FISA judges deceived as part of a politically motivated campaign against Mr. Trump? Mr. Horowitz should report sometime this autumn.
Other areas include the private actors such as Fusion GPS, the Democratic law firm Perkins Coie that paid Fusion, the former British spy Christopher Steele and others. What actions did they take and how did they influence the FBI and FISA court?
Then there’s the FBI investigation, which was controlled by a small number of officials under former director James Comey. Their actions and motivations need to be examined closely for their legality but also for their communications across the government, especially with former CIA Director John Brennan and the Obama White House.
All of this is being investigated by U.S. Attorney John Durham at Mr. Barr’s request. His probe may not find illegal acts, but the documents and facts related to all of this should still be made public consistent with U.S. national security. Mr. Barr has pledged to declassify as much as he safely can, and we hope he leans to more disclosure than the insiders will want.
As Mr. Durham’s probe proceeds, look for the attacks on Messrs. Barr, Durham and Horowitz to escalate. We hope they bear up under the pressure, because the U.S. cannot tolerate intelligence and enforcement officials who abuse their power for political ends. If abuses occurred in 2016, they need to be exposed and punished so it never happens again
1a) What Mueller Was Trying to Hide
His investigation was about protecting the actual miscreants in the collusion hoax.
Special counsel Robert Mueller testified before two House committees Wednesday, and his performance requires us to look at his investigation and report in a new light. We’ve been told it was solely about Russian electoral interference and obstruction of justice. It’s now clear it was equally about protecting the actual miscreants behind the Russia-collusion hoax.
The most notable aspect of the Mueller report was always what it omitted: the origins of this mess. Christopher Steele’s dossier was central to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe, the basis of many of the claims of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Yet the Mueller authors studiously wrote around the dossier, mentioning it only in perfunctory terms. The report ignored Mr. Steele’s paymaster, Fusion GPS, and its own ties to Russians. It also ignored Fusion’s paymaster, the Clinton campaign, and the ugly politics behind the dossier hit job.
Mr. Mueller’s testimony this week put to rest any doubt that this sheltering was deliberate. In his opening statement he declared that he would not “address questions about the opening of the FBI’s Russia investigation, which occurred months before my appointment, or matters related to the so-called Steele Dossier.” The purpose of those omissions was obvious, as those two areas go to the heart of why the nation has been forced to endure years of collusion fantasy.
Mr. Mueller claimed he couldn’t answer questions about the dossier because it “predated” his tenure and is the subject of a Justice Department investigation. These excuses are disingenuous. Nearly everything Mr. Mueller investigated predated his tenure, and there’s no reason the Justice Department probe bars Mr. Mueller from providing a straightforward, factual account of his team’s handling of the dossier.
If anything, Mr. Mueller had an obligation to answer those questions, since they go to the central failing of his own probe. As Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz asked Mr. Mueller, how could a special-counsel investigation into “Russia’s interference” have any credibility if it failed to look into whether the Steele dossier was itself disinformation from Moscow? Mr. Steele acknowledges that senior Russian officials were the source of his dossier’s claims of an “extensive conspiracy.” Given that no such conspiracy actually existed, Mr. Gaetz asked: “Did Russians really tell that to Christopher Steele, or did he just make it up and was he lying to the FBI?”
Mr. Mueller surreally responded: “As I said earlier, with regard to Steele, that is beyond my purview.”
So it went throughout the whole long day. Republicans asked basic questions about the report’s conclusions or analysis, and Mr. Mueller dodged and weaved and refused to avoid answering questions about the FBI’s legwork, the dossier’s role and Fusion’s involvement. Ohio Rep. Steve Chabot asked how the report could have neglected to mention Fusion’s ties to a Russian company and lawyer. Mr. Mueller: “Outside my purview.” California Rep. Devin Nunes asked several questions about one of the men at the epicenter of the “collusion” conspiracy—academic Joseph Mifsud, whom former FBI Director Jim Comey has tried to paint as a Russian agent. Mr. Mueller: “I am not going to speak to the series of happenings as you articulated them.”
Then again, how could he? The Mueller team, rather than question the FBI’s actions, went out of its way to build on them. That’s how we ended up with tortured plea agreements for process crimes from figures like former Trump aide George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. They were peripheral figures in an overhyped drama, who nonetheless had to be scalped to legitimize the early actions of Mr. Comey & Co. Mr. Mueller inherited the taint, and his own efforts were further tarnished. That accounts for Mr. Mueller’s stonewalling.
The special counsel’s often befuddled testimony has predictably raised questions about how in control he was of the 22-month investigation or the writing of the report. Yet in some ways it matters little whether it was Mr. Mueller calling the shots, or “pit bull” Andrew Weissmann, or Mr. Mueller’s congressional minder, Aaron Zebley. All three spent years in the Justice Department-FBI hierarchy, as did many of the other prosecutors and agents on the probe. That institutional crew early on made the calculated decision to shelter the FBI, the Justice Department, outside private actors, and leading Democrats from any scrutiny of their own potential involvement with 2016 Russian election interference.
That’s been the story all along. Mr. Comey hid his actions from Congress; the Justice Department and FBI worked overtime to obstruct Republican-led congressional probes; and Mr. Mueller and his team are clearly playing their own important role in hiding the truth. The Mueller testimony only highlights how important it is that Attorney General William Barr is finally pursuing accountability.
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2) The New Yorker’s lengthy profile of Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) spends far more time discussing the influence of Willie Brown than her relationship with her husband, which is portrayed as impersonal and even politically motivated.
The profile, by Dana Goodyear, tells a positive story of Harris professionally—highlighting her well-received prosecutorial style as a senator and her rise in the polls after her use of it on the debate stage. But it's far more focused on the things Harris hates to talk about, like her relationship with Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, and how it shaped her as a politician.
Goodyear, after noting how "stories that mention Brown have always infuriated Harris," goes on to mention Brown about two dozen times. She attempted, unsuccessfully, to both interview Brown and get a comment on him from Harris's campaign.
"When I asked her campaign about him, a spokesperson testily referred me to statements that she made sixteen years ago," Goodyear writes.
In her piece, Goodyear argues Harris learned a lot from Brown: "His advice to black women seeking political office: get involved at a high level with cultural and charitable organizations, ‘like symphonies, museums, and hospitals,'" she writes. "In 1995, Harris joined the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she designed a mentorship program for public-school teens."
The piece also mentions the lucrative board positions Brown got Harris appointed to while they were dating.
While Goodyear treats Brown as a major influence on Harris, her husband, lawyer Doug Emhoff, is portrayed as a political prop and nuisance.
In the one interaction between Harris and Emhoff in the piece, Harris ignores a "cloying remark" from her husband. Goodyear also quotes a longtime donor to Harris who suggests she would have stayed single if it weren't for her presidential ambitions, saying, "When she married Doug, I knew she was running for President."
The full segment on Emhoff, a mere 291 words in a nearly 10,000-word piece, are below.
Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, stood to one side, holding her purse. He wore whitewall sneakers, jeans, and a blazer. A line of children and parents zagged through the shelves. Harris remained unflaggingly engaged, asking each child a question, paying a compliment, nodding exaggeratedly. "That’s her real personality," Emhoff said, shaking his head, starstruck, at his wife. "She smiles and laughs and has a good time. That came through on ‘Colbert.’"
For much of Harris’s life, she has been single, with no children, focussed on her work. She married Emhoff, a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, at a tiny ceremony in 2014, where Maya [Harris’s younger sister] officiated and guests were sworn to secrecy. When Harris is not on Capitol Hill, or on the campaign trail, she and Emhoff live together in Brentwood, with a freezer full of two-cup containers of Bolognese she makes ahead so that he can always have home-cooked food. (Emhoff enrolled in cooking classes before the wedding, to make himself a worthy sous-chef.) He has two children from a previous marriage: Cole, who works as an assistant at William Morris Endeavor, and Ella, a student at Parsons School of Design. Harris’s official Twitter account identifies her as "Momala," the name she says her stepchildren gave her. One longtime donor, noting the country’s expectations around the First Family, told me, "When she married Doug, I knew she was running for President."
After Harris finished signing books, she walked over to Emhoff. "How did you not die from maximum cuteness?" he asked her. Harris ignored the cloying remark and, noting the presence of reporters, turned sober: a policy point was coming. "Kids pay attention to everything," she said. "They remember it. That was an element in my school truancy initiative."
Emhoff's crucial role as "Instagram husband" was profiled this month by Politico Magazine.
2a) Judge Andrew Napolitano: Trump has unleashed a torrent of hatred
“Now hatred is by far the Longest pleasure;
“Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.”
-- George Gordon, Lord Byron
When I was an undergraduate at Princeton University during the height of the Vietnam War, surrounded by fellow students who condemned it and even some who later left our country to avoid fighting in it, the mantra used by supporters of the war was, "America, love it or leave it." In my misguided "Bomb Hanoi" youth, I uttered this phrase, which I now detest.
The phrase itself – with its command of the government's way or the highway – admits no dissenting opinions, suggests that all is well and proper here, and insinuates that moral norms and cultural values cannot be improved. The phrase itself is un-American.
That era also produced such hate-filled catchphrases as: "Hey, hey, LBJ; how many kids did you kill today?" Those post-JFK and pre-Watergate times were harsh and bitter, as the nation was deeply divided over a war we now all know was useless and based on deception and fraud.
We know from the publication of the Pentagon Papers that the incidents President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed justified the war never occurred, and the president and some of his generals regularly lied to the American public about the war.
The lies and deceptions – combined with the military draft and the deaths of 58,000 Americans – produced much hatred. The hatred was for people, rather than ideas. It was generational and ideological.
Youth hated age. Long hair hated short hair. Conservatives hated liberals. Many people hated LBJ personally. When President Gerald R. Ford declared the war had ended – though in a colossal defeat – the end produced a great national relief because the national hatred of people was over.
Now, that hatred is back.
The problem is that presidential hatred produces division among people and destroys peaceful dialogue.
The problem is that presidential hatred produces division among people and destroys peaceful dialogue.
I have known President Trump personally since 1986. The private Trump I have known is funny, charming and embracing. That is not the public Trump of today. When he loudly called for four members of Congress – women of color who oppose nearly all his initiatives and who have questioned his fitness for office – to go back to the places from which they came, he unleashed a torrent of hatred.
The "Go back" trope was used by white racists toward African-Americans for 100 years, from Reconstruction to the civil rights era, suggesting repulsively that they should go "back" to Africa; never mind their American births. It was uttered by the establishment at my grandfathers and many others who came here from southern Europe as children in the early days of the last century.
"Go back" is a rejection of the nation as a melting pot; a condemnation of one of America's founding values – E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one). It implicates a racial or nativist superiority: We were here before you; this is our land, not yours; get out. Nativist hatred is an implication of moral or even legal superiority that has no constitutional justification in American government.
All working in government in America have taken an oath to support the Constitution. The Constitution commands equal protection of the laws by government at all levels. No one is above the laws' obligations and no one is beneath the laws' protections. The Constitution not only commands of government both racial neutrality and color blindness, it generally prohibits government officials from making distinctions among people on the basis of immutable characteristics.
So, when the president defies these moral and constitutional norms and tells women of color to "Go back," he raises a terrifying specter.
The specter is hatred not for ideas he despises but for the people who embrace those ideas. The specter is also a dog whistle to groups around the country that hatred is back in fashion and is acceptable to articulate publicly.
Don't get me wrong. Even though hate speech – speech that expresses hatred for people, as opposed to hatred for ideas – stings and hurts, it is constitutionally protected. The remedy for hate speech is not to silence the hater but to shame him. And the most effective way to do that is with more speech.
But when the hate speech comes from a shameless president, we have a problem.
The problem is that presidential hatred produces division among people and destroys peaceful dialogue. When thousands of people at a Trump rally in North Carolina recently chanted, "Send her back" referring to a congresswoman born in Somalia – and Trump tweeted that the four congresswomen (including three born in the U.S.) should "Go back" to where they came from – the inescapable image was of a president trying to divide rather than unite.
At first, Trump seemed to welcome the chants. Then, two days later, he distanced himself from those who chanted. Then, three days after that, he praised the chanters.
When a Louisiana police officer tweeted that one of the congresswomen Trump targeted deserved a round – he was referring to a bullet – he and a supportive colleague were fired. And in New York City, hatred for cops has led to group assaults on them, along racial lines.
Hatred is so volatile and destructive that, once unleashed, it takes on a life of its own. It is cover for our deepest and darkest instincts. And it is a cousin to violence, as those Louisiana and Manhattan cops know.
It also captivates our attention. Could that be the president's wish – that we think about hatred of his targets rather than the testimony of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years investigating the president and testified before two House committees Wednesday?
This business of the hatred of people is so dangerous because to some, as Lord Byron wrote, hatred is perversely pleasing. It gives them shelter in a mob, it lets them hurl venom with anonymity, and it regenerates itself. It must be rejected loudly in all its forms – especially when it comes from the president.
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