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Kim discusses whistle blower's relationship with deep state players. (See 1 below.)
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Project Veritas to dump on CNN? Stay tuned. (See 2 below.)
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I find it interesting many of my liberal friends dump on/criticize Trump for spending so much time fighting off and/or responding to his detractors/attackers/haters/impeachers.
Since they are always attacking him and he is a street fighting counter puncher, I guess it does take a lot of time fighting them. I am not sure Trump needs to always respond and in the manner he often does. Nor am I sure it helps him outside his loyal base but that is his personality so he will not change and I suspect his detractors and those who hate him go overboard as well.
Specific to the impeachment of Trump by The House, I believe Pelosi wishes to do so through the press in the hope he will twist in the win and drive public desire to have him impeached upward. By not bringing impeachment through a vote, Pelosi's efforts to do so, in secret, will eventually fly back in hr face.
So far nothing by way of public information indicates he should be impeached and if The House has nothing more, he will definitely win in The Senate.
With respect to the Kurds, here I am reluctantly opposed to what Trump has done.I do not like the way he acted, by, allegedly, not informing his staff etc. I also question the morality of what he has done. Finally, he should have known he could not trust Erdogan and any loyalty the Turks displayed was under a different regime.
Trump allowed Erdogan to show him up and sends a dangerous message of weakness to Iran, China, N Korea and Russia and an even worse message to our allies that Trump is no more than a blowhard and can be shoved around by a pipsqueak. In essence, Erdogan called Trump's bluff. Bad decision no matter how you slice it.
The real tragedy impacting our nation is that politicians on both sides of the aisle are more engaged in strategizing how to win/score without regard to what is being done constitutionally and thus, to the nation.
As a conservative I find what Democrats and their radical friends, including the press, is without precedence and far more dangerous than what the Republicans are about. It is time for both to pull back and rethink but they are hell bent and will not.
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Are the Clinton's flesh eaters? You decide. Patricia McCarthy already has. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Whistleblowers and the Real Deep State
By Kimberley Strassel
Civil servants too often forget they work for the people and seek to impose their own policy agendas.
House Democrats are plowing ahead with an impeachment effort inspired by accusations from an anonymous “whistleblower.” The lawmakers may allow the witness to testify anonymously, sources who themselves remained anonymous told the Washington Post this week. It’s as if the whole effort is designed to confirm President Trump’s complaint that the “deep state” is determined to sabotage his presidency.
By “deep state,” Mr. Trump seems to mean any current or former federal employee who works to undermine him. I find that definition too broad, and it misses an important distinction. Officials like James Comey and John Brennan, respectively former directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, were appointed by politicians and are subject to some public scrutiny and political accountability.
The “deep state”—if we are to use the term—is better defined as consisting of career civil servants, who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows. As government grows, so do the challenges of supervising a bureaucracy swelling in both size and power. Emboldened by employment rules that make it all but impossible to fire career employees, this internal civil “resistance” has proved willing to take ever more outrageous actions against the president and his policies, using the tools of both traditional and social media.
Government-employed resisters received a call to action within weeks of the new administration. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates became acting attorney general on Mr. Trump’s inauguration and Loretta Lynch’s resignation. A week later, the president signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Middle Eastern and African countries. Ms. Yates instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the order in court on the grounds that she was not convinced it was “consistent” with the department’s “responsibilities” or even “lawful.” She decreed: “For as long as I am Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order.”
Mr. Trump fired her that day, but he shouldn’t have had to. Her obligation was to defend the executive order, or to resign if she felt she couldn’t. Nobody elected Sally Yates.
The Yates memo was the first official act of the internal resistance—not only a precedent but a rallying cry. Subordinates fawningly praised her in emails obtained by Judicial Watch. “You are my new hero,” wrote one federal prosecutor. Another department colleague emailed: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law.” Andrew Weissmann—a career department lawyer, then head of the Criminal Fraud Division and later on the staff of special counsel Robert Mueller—wrote: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.” Ms. Yates set an example to rebels throughout the government: If she can defy the president, why can’t I?
That mentality fed the stream of leaks that has flowed ever since. The office of Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, made a study of Mr. Trump’s first 18 weeks in office. It found the administration had “faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day—containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama. ” Nearly 80% focused on the Russia probe, and many revealed “closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.” Unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a felony.
Employees also started using social media to “resist.” A National Parks Service employee had already used an official Twitter account to troll Mr. Trump, passing along a post that showed side-by-side comparison of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration and the larger one at Mr. Obama’s. Around the time of the Yates firing, someone in the Pentagon set up the Twitter account @Rogue_DOD, on which was posted a damaging opinion piece about Trump and internal documents about climate change. A former employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up @viralCDC, with the description: “The unofficial ‘Resistance’ page of the CDC.” Its pinned tweet read: “If they choose to make facts controversial, the purveyors of facts must step into the controversy. #ScienceMarch #resist.”
These details come from a Jan. 31, 2017, Washington Post story, which reported that “180 federal employees have signed up for a workshop next weekend, where experts will offer advice on workers’ rights and how they can express civil disobedience.” The report added that some federal employees were in “regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees” about how to oppose the administration, while others were planning to “slow” their work if asked to focus on anything other than their policy “mission” as they understood it.At the State Department, resisters organized a “cable” protesting Mr. Trump’s travel ban. It worked its way through dozens of U.S. embassies and ultimately had at least 1,000 signatures. The cable was part of a “dissent channel” that Foggy Bottom maintains to allow officials to disagree with policy, and it is meant to be confidential. The resisters made the letter public, bragging about the numbers of signers and anonymously slamming Mr. Trump. The Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed State Department official: “There is overwhelming disgust and shock at this executive order.”
A former Obama assistant secretary of state, Tom Malinowski, acknowledged sarcastically that such a protest was unprecedented. “Is it unusual?” he said to the Post. “There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.” (Mr. Malinowski is now a congressman from New Jersey.)
Many Obama holdovers have openly worked to cause mayhem in the new administration. Consider Walter Shaub, whom Mr. Obama appointed in 2013 to run the Office of Government Ethics. That office isn’t a watchdog. It doesn’t adjudicate, investigate or prosecute ethics violations or complaints. It was set up in 1978 to help the White House; its webpage notes it is there to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions.
Mr. Trump came to office with more such questions than most, and the Office of Government Ethics should have been a valuable resource. Instead, within weeks of the election, Mr. Shaub was mimicking the president-elect from an official Twitter account: “@realDonaldTrump OGE is delighted that you’ve decided to divest your businesses. Right decision!” “@realDonaldTrump Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, very good for America!” When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance.
At one point Mr. Shaub sent one of his critical missives to hundreds of government ethics officials, every inspector general, and the chairmen and ranking members of numerous congressional committees. When administration officials began to call him out on his behavior, he loudly resigned and immediately landed a job at the liberal Campaign Legal Center.
Bureaucrats also began filing official internal complaints, demanding to get to define their own policies and programs. In July 2017, an Interior Department employee named Joel Clement published a Washington Post op-ed titled “I’m a Scientist. I’m Blowing the Whistle on the Trump Administration.” He began his piece: “I am not a member of the deep state.”
He explained that he had just filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a federal body that regulates and protects civil servants. For seven years Mr. Clement had worked at Interior, helping “endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate.” Now he, along with more than two dozen other senior career Interior employees, had been reassigned to working in fossil fuels. He claimed this reassignment was retaliation “for speaking out publicly about the danger that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.” He called himself a “whistleblower.” At least he put his name on the article.
Although the law protects civil servants from being fired, departments have broad authority to reassign them. Setting policy priorities wasn’t Mr. Clement’s job. Yet his complaint inspired eight Senate Democrats to demand an Interior inspector general investigation. Notably, that 2018 report did not find evidence of Mr. Clement’s charges of retaliation. As then-Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt noted, the department’s actions were entirely “lawful.” Mr. Clement in the fall of 2017 resigned with a much-publicized letter to then-Secretary Ryan Zinke: “Your agenda profoundly undermines the DOI mission and betrays the American people.” Mr. Clement is now a senior fellow at the left-wing Union of Concerned Scientists.
In December 2017, such acts of defiance led the Atlantic to celebrate the “Year of the Civil Servant.” The article hailed the bureaucracy for toiling through “the president’s chaotic first year in office.” It saluted those who had fought against an administration that had made it “nearly impossible” for them to “do their jobs.”
But the job of civil servants is to implement, not undermine, the policies established by elected officials. A government paycheck doesn’t entitle them to call the shots. The bureaucratic resistance has used its power to delay and undermine Trump proposals, leak government information, gin up controversies to run Trump cabinet heads out of Washington—and now provide an excuse for impeachment. Many call themselves whistleblowers, but that’s a bastardization of an honorable word. Whistleblowers expose government fraud; resisters sabotage policy and attempt to undermine an elected government’s legitimacy.
Government workers are a vital part of society. Yet voters have become deeply suspicious—and rightly so—of the federal bureaucracy. That’s damaging the country. Democrats insist they must remove Mr. Trump from office to save America’s institutions and restore its norms. Who’s doing the real damage to institutions and norms? The resistance should look in the mirror.
Ms. Strassel is the Journal’s Potomac Watch columnist. This article is adapted from her book, “Resistance (at All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America,” to be published Oct. 15
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2) Project Veritas announces major undercover exposé of CNN next week
Project Veritas, the activist conservative group credited with taking down ACORN and dealing significant blows to other leftist groups, thanks to its undercover videos, is promising to release its next exposé and it looks like it will be a blockbuster. At the end of his speech to the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C.on Oct. 12, James O’Keefe, Project Veritas’s founder, announced what “may be the biggest story Project Veritas has ever broke.” An insider at CNN has come forward, O’Keefe said, having covertly recorded videos for months that promise to reveal what CNN has really been doing to – essentially – spin and fake the news. The revelations are scheduled to see the light of day next week.
In an article at Project Veritas’s Web site posted the same day, O’Keefe goes into more detail:
This week, a CNN insider will blow the whistle and through Project Veritas will release dozens of recordings made of officials at the highest levels of CNN, revealing a political agenda, bias and misconduct hidden from public view.This series of tapes — which we think will be the biggest story of the year for Project Veritas — blends two extraordinary series of events; a brave insider secretly recording at work. This is a hard-hitting piece of hidden camera muckraking into one of the supposed “most trusted names in news.”
After reviewing several recent whistleblowers’s actions that shed disturbing light on the questionable actions of social media giants like Google and Pinterest, O’Keefe added this:
It was destiny that the CNN wayfarer met me in the Spring by a happenstance, inspired by the actions of the others who came before him, I received a simple answer as to why: “I started at CNN with a dream to work in media, but my dream had become a nightmare.” With that, a hidden camera began to record…well…everything.
O’Keefe’s announcement of things to come is a clarion call that cites the work of several courageous real journalists and includes a quote from Samuel Adams. O’Keefe concludes with:
In a country governed by public opinion, and where public opinion is largely governed by the press, isn’t it critical to understand what governs the press?And this is why Project Veritas will be exposing CNN this week.
The mainstream media landscape – in particular, the three major cable television news channels – is in a state of flux. Last Friday, Shepard Smith, one of the Fox News channel’s most prominent news hosts for 23 years, abruptly left the channel after a high profile on-air dispute with opinion host Tucker Carlson last month. Ronan Farrow’s new book Catch and Kill, to be published next Tuesday, promises a significant deconstruct of questionable practices at NBC News (and by extension cable news channel MSNBC which shares the same management) including spiking Farrow’s story about Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement. And now, it looks like CNN will soon be in the metaphorical crosshairs of real investigative journalism, too.
Things are looking very interesting. Stay tuned for developments.
Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications. Peter's website is http://peter.media. Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++3)The Clintons: Flesh-eating disease of the American body politic
If we reflect on the current crises that afflict our nation, look no further than the poison injected into our national bloodstream by the Clintons.
There is no need to go back to the numerous scandals that bedeviled Bill Clinton's days in office, as governor of Arkansas, and as president. Hillary was behind them all: Whitewater, bimbo eruptions, foreign money (remember Charlie Trie?).
Bill Clinton was a walking, talking, serial philanderer scandal. He was rightfully impeached for lying under oath. The man was and remains a cad. But when it comes to criminality, Bill can't hold a candle to Hillary. Machiavelli would be proud: "Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception."
Hillary's entire life in politics has been about deception in the certain belief that she is smarter than everyone else, when in fact she is as transparent as a piece of glass. Those of us who have had to endure her presence in our public life for decades saw her for who and what she was long ago, a greedy, power-hungry pol with delusions of grandeur.
Consider though that it is the Clintons who have polluted our national politics since 1992. Sure, JFK was an adulterer, LBJ was a creep on many levels, but Hillary really does take the cake. She still thinks she won the 2016 election! She is the Stacey Abrams of national politics, fantastically deluded. And yet it is the Clintons who have led us to the present moment, the ridiculous attempt by the Democrats to impeach a successful president based on calculated lies and treachery that began with the "dossier" that Hillary commissioned Fusion GPS to produce.
All that has followed can be traced back to Hillary's campaign to be president and to insure her victory by deceit. But she was an expert at subterfuge long before she ran for president. She used her stint as Secretary of State to enrich herself with her pay-to-play scheme with the Clinton Foundation as her front. She sucked up millions into her faux charity and she saw to it that the payees got what they wanted - 20% of our uranium for example, sold to Russia.
Hillary was an equal-opportunity greed machine. She sold access to America's largesse to the highest bidder. She did not distinguish between good and evil and most of those from whom she took vast sums of money were not our allies. When she lost the election, all that payola dried up for obvious reasons.
Hillary Clinton is responsible for the devastation that has been visited upon Libya. That was her baby. It was Hillary who refused to send help to our guys stranded in Benghazi when our embassy was under attack. She let Ambassador Christopher Stevens be killed.
She was behind the scheme to run American guns from Libya to Syria. She proved her callous lack of foreign policy judgment with that fateful disaster. She should never again be even remotely close to having to make such decisions.
Had her husband Bill had the courage, he would have taken out Osama bin Laden when he had the several chances and the horrific crime of 9/11 might have been prevented. Had Bill Clinton's Deputy AG Jamie Gorelick not built her "wall" preventing communication between intel agencies about their independent investigations of potential terrorists, 9/11 might well have been prevented.
In short, the Clintons and their henchmen have done incalculable damage to this country. They are responsible for countless deaths, here and abroad. And yet this hopelessly narcissistic woman decries her loss in 2016 and still claims she won!
The three-year investigation that was in fact a cover-up operation can be traced directly to Hillary Clinton. Her coterie of fellow schemers who were dedicated to insuring her victory spent millions, lied, cheated and deceived the American people with the certainty she would win. It is a miracle that despite all their cheating, their underhanded attempt to destroy Trump, he still won.
It is as though the hand of providence stepped in to save the nation. Blinded by their loathing of Trump the interloper, they've lost their minds. Their attempt to remove him from office will fail and in the process they will have revealed to all how patently perverse they are.
The Democrats driving this impeachment inquiry -- Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Nadler, et. al, should be driven from office with the contempt they deserve. But we can thank the Clintons for bringing us to this crossroads. They are the bacteria that brought this national flesh-eating disease to the American psyche. They have long been a scourge on our body politic and it must end. We are where we are because of them, along with their conviction that they are superior beings entitled to rule.
Each of the Democrat candidates for the presidency are following Hillary's lead - remake America into something it was never meant to be.
What is the cure for the disease? Pelosi, Schiff, Nadler and their partners in crime, all those fake whistleblowers, need to be rebuked and called out for what they are - fascists masquerading as Americans.
May the Horowitz, Barr and Durham reports bring them to their knees and expose them for the anti-constitutionalists, anti-Americans that they are. Trump is the ultimate anti-biotic, elected to cure the Clinton disease
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