If You Hate Israel, You're No Friend of the Jews | PragerU
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The Electoral College Is Essential! | PragerU
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Will Democrats wind up cutting their own throats and re-elect Trump? (See 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d and 1e below.)
Personal comments/observations:
a) That Comey and Schiff gave half-hearted mia culpas gives me some personal satisfaction but the key is will anyone who lied to FISA, The FBI and CIA and those who attacked decent citizens be tried, found guilty and spend some time in jail?
b) Schiff claims he learned about the "FISA and Dossier fraud later yet, he gave a balanced/provocative rejection of Nunes' claims, which proved 100% correct. Did Schiff create his "no facts" out of thin air? Did he base his false rebuttal on supposition? He remains an unmitigated liar in my opinion.
c) Will FISA Courts be abolished, as they should be, and replaced by another method of issuing warrants in intelligence investigation matters.
d) After being elected some Democrats called for Trump's immediate impeachment and the crescendo built from there despite solid and overwhelming evidence was lacking.
Now that Democrats and the mass media have been shown to be biased liars and have done more harm than Russian involvement in our election process are their continuing effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election simply more of the same? It would seem so.
e) Democrats should be punished for their deceptive tactics, wasting time and money in a senseless investigation they caused which was based on scurrilous information they sought and paid for because they refused to accept Trump's election. This is what elections are all about. Will they receive their due?
f) Will FBI Director Wray be able to rebuild public faith in this critical Agency?
g) Can the mass media ever regain the public's trust and return to balanced reporting? It is critical they do so but I am not convinced they will even make the effort.They no longer are reporting enterprises. They are entertainment factories and rating driven. I suspect the mass media midgets might even double down and become worse, ie. more distrusted
h) A thriving economy is not the basis for voting against Trump's impeachment. The reason to impeach should solely be based on overwhelming evidence Trump abused his office. The Democrat's failed to measure up to this standard. Their two charges fell outside the scope of the Impeachment Amendment. But that did not deter them because they were driven by hate and were on a zealous mission to overturn the decision of 63 million voters some 11 months before another election they fear will return President Trump to The Oval Office to Make America even greater than it currently seems to be.
Now Pious Pelosi is playing games with McConnell about whether she will even send the impeachment charges over to The Senate.
If no one is above the the law then Schiff and his Democrat partners are beneath hypocrisy.
i) Will Durham's report come out before the 2020 election and finally lay out the entire sordid story of how haters sought to take over this nation because their grip on power was slipping?
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Orthodox Jews are not stupid for embracing Trump and acting rational.
They obviously live in the real world, care not about The New York Times and the dreamy world of squishy feelings and misplaced nonsense. (See 2 below.)
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It is wrong to be unforgiving but in the case of Rep.. Schiff I do not believe he is capable of changing his spots. That said, here is an op ed that offer a chance for him to partially redeem himself. (See 3 below.)
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In a memo I sent yesterday morning I discuss my views of what made two different sets of women enter the work force and the consequences. Tonight I happened across an article which I could not find to copy on pp A7 under the "World News"" Section entitled "Babysitting Key To Push For Japan Working Mothers." It parallels my own thoughts.
Again I am always amazed to find articles on subjects I just discuss and again, I repeat, I am not clairvoyant. Perhaps topical at times.
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We just returned from Orlando where we went to see our 7 year old granddaughter, Dagny, in a play about The Addam's Family. She danced and sang and when the play ended she asked us: "Was it worth the drive." I told her we would have driven twice as far. Blake joined us in applauding his big sister.
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My number two daughter and her husband are coming tomorrow for a few days followed by their daughter and her husband for another few days and then we are off to Orlando again so, as I mentioned earlier, memos will be sporadic if not totally absent.
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DORIS
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1)
KLAVAN: Adam Schiff: The Unwitting Russian Asset
1a) The Democrats Could Re-Elect Trump in 2020
On the campaign trail he’ll say they’ve been out to get him from his first day in office. He won’t be wrong.
Rep. Adam Schiff, who prides himself on being one of President Trump’s leading Democratic tormentors, argued last week that the president must be impeached pronto so that he doesn’t “cheat in one more election.” I know Democrats are eager to expand the scope of impeachable behavior, but since when do we impeach presidents based on what they might do in the future?
Mr. Schiff ought to reacquaint himself with special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress earlier this year. Mr. Mueller stated that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” But Democrats who are panicking over the prospect of Mr. Trump’s winning a second term should be at least as concerned with the mainstream media’s behavior as they are with Russia’s.
Mr. Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 came as a surprise to so many people because journalists consistently played down his chances of winning. Thinking Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, many Democrats stayed home on Election Day. Much has been written about the millions of voters who switched from supporting Barack Obama to backing Mr. Trump in important battleground states like Iowa and Wisconsin. But Democratic nonvoters, who either couldn’t stomach pulling the lever for Mrs. Clinton or didn’t think she needed their support to prevail—were also a decisive factor. In Michigan, for example, Mrs. Clinton received 300,000 fewer votes than Mr. Obama did in 2012, and Mr. Trump won the state by just 11,000 votes.
The media continues to harp on Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, which is news but needs context and is hardly a reason for Democrats to be complacent. Despite low unemployment, rising wages and relatively strong economic growth, the president’s job-approval rating has remained in the 40s. This could be a problem for the incumbent next year, particularly if the economy goes into recession, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle. President Obama was also polling in the low to mid-40s in December 2011 and went on to be re-elected in 2012.
The press is also inadvertently helping Mr. Trump by giving the most favorable coverage to the most liberal Democratic candidates running to replace him. The president’s strategy has been to paint the other party as too extreme to trust with the White House. Joe Biden has led the Democratic nomination race in national polling from the moment he announced his candidacy. But he is not the preferred candidate of the Washington media elites, as their coverage of him thus far makes clear. Progressive proposals to end private health insurance and decriminalize illegal immigration get far more and far better press coverage than Mr. Biden’s alternatives. If the Democrats do go ahead and nominate a progressive who loses to Mr. Trump, the media can share the blame.
As Mr. Schiff’s remark suggests, many Democrats in Congress have never accepted Mr. Trump as a legitimate president. Speaker Nancy Pelosi understood that the case for impeachment was weak, overly partisan and doomed to fail in the Senate. She moved ahead anyway to placate the progressives in her caucus who share Mr. Schiff’s sentiment. And she now wants it over as soon as possible to placate more-moderate Democrats from districts Mr. Trump carried, who want to spend next year campaigning on other issues.
The irony for Democrats is that fallout from their overzealous get-Trump offensive could strengthen the president’s argument for a second term. He is a disrupter, if nothing else, and after the revelations contained in the Justice Department inspector general’s report, who can argue that some disruption wasn’t in order? “At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the government’s secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American soil,” wrote Charlie Savage in the New York Times. “And what the report showed was not pretty.”
What the report showed was that FBI officials deceived a court into obtaining warrants to wiretap Carter Page, a U.S. citizen and former Trump adviser, during the 2016 campaign. It also showed that a discredited “dossier” compiled at the request of Democratic operatives was “central and essential” to the FBI’s warrant application, something the anti-Trump media had long disputed. In a hapless effort to demonstrate that Mr. Page was working for the Russians, the agency manipulated documents and hid information that could have exonerated him.
Democrats are playing down these findings because, however badly the FBI behaved, it was in the service of taking down Mr. Trump. But voters might see things differently, and I don’t suspect that the president will stop talking about how his opponents in the government and the media have spent the past three years using lies and deception to portray him as a White House squatter.
1b) Halfway to the 2016 Truth
The Steele dossier was flimsy. What about the FBI’s secret info in the Clinton case?
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
It’s bracing to consider that Robert Mueller’s report and several important Horowitz reports are all about what didn’t happen in 2016: Trump-Russia collusion. The key Horowitz report that deals with what did happen—the Russian influence on Mr. Comey’s Clinton actions—remains classified and hidden from the public.
The mainstream press, while flogging the false collusion narrative, has ignored and even declined to mention to its readers the existence of the Horowitz so-called classified appendix. At best, this inverts the newsman’s traditional inverted pyramid, hiding what is important while promoting the false and trivial. At worst, the media is engaged in a cover up to protect the sources behind its faulty collusion reporting who happen to be the same FBI and CIA decision makers in the Hillary case.
In the latest Horowitz report, released last week, an FBI attorney is seen doctoring the Carter Page warrant to hide the fact that Mr. Page was actually reporting his Russian contacts to the CIA. This same FBI attorney was last seen in an earlier Horowitz report lamenting Donald Trump’s election in a text message to a colleague and adding, “It’s just hard not to feel like the FBI caused some of this.”
He means the FBI’s highly questionable actions may have accidentally sparked Mrs. Clinton’s defeat.
In a moment that rings of honesty, Mr. Comey himself allowed that he might not have committed his second intervention if not convinced Mrs. Clinton would win anyway—i.e., acknowledged that his actions in some sense were necessarily influenced by political calculation.
We also know for certain now that Mr. Comey and Obama intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper, as they took to the airwaves to spread false allegations about Mr. Trump, did so in deep consciousness that their own meddling was the only meddling that likely affected the 2016 outcome.
Who else knows the truth behind all this idiocy? Vladimir Putin does. To the extent that the story here is discrediting to the CIA and FBI, Mr. Putin will be in a position to hold it over our so-called intelligence community until the U.S. public knows too.
Attorney General William Barr has authority from President Trump to declassify the classified Horowitz report. He owes America a Christmas present. This is it.
It’s time for the American people to know the truth. How was the alleged Russian intelligence obtained? How high or widely was it circulated in the Russian leadership if at all?
The information, we learn from leaks, ostensibly revealed an alleged agreement between the Clinton campaign and the Obama attorney general to corral the email investigation. If this information was fake, with what intention did its presumably Russian author fake it?
Mr. Comey, in his memoir, refers portentously to a “development still unknown to the American public to this day.” Due to an oblique statement in an earlier Horowitz report, we know Mr. Comey’s own FBI colleagues considered the Russian intelligence underlying his actions in the Hillary matter to be “objectively false.” Some considered it a Russian plant.
Not all of the relevant detail will be found in Mr. Horowitz’s classified pages. Some will have to be pried out of the CIA. But if the information was really of Russian origin, then planting fake leads (as the Steele dossier also appears to have been) to make fools out of U.S. enforcement agencies was Russia’s real contribution to our politics.
So let us have the truth. I suspect we will be as unimpressed by Mr. Comey’s Russian intelligence as we have been by the Steele dossier. Its provenance will be nothing anyone should have respected—a flimsy basis for actions hugely consequential in our democracy.
The real fabricators will turn out to be the U.S. intelligence community agents who, as they did with the Steele dossier, fabricated a significance for an apocryphal document that it didn’t merit. They will have done so as an excuse for ill-conceived and improper acts that roiled our politics and undermined domestic harmony. The public campaign of Messrs. Comey, Brennan and Clapper, after Nov. 8, 2016, to paint Mr. Trump as a Russian agent will appear in a far more cynical and sinister light. And the disgrace of the U.S. mainstream media will be complete.
1c) Obama’s FBI and the Press
The media establishment congratulated itself for getting duped into supporting an abuse of power.
Thanks to a report from the Obama-appointed inspector general of the Justice Department, now everyone knows the truth about 2016. The Obama administration misled the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and wiretapped an American who supported the presidential campaign of the party out of power. One of the many sad lessons is that no American can count on even the most celebrated members of the establishment press to shine a light on such abuses.
By concealing exculpatory evidence, the Obama FBI, directed by James Comey, obtained a warrant from a court intended to counter foreign enemies and managed to turn the surveillance powers of the federal government against a U.S. citizen participating in our domestic politics, Carter Page.
Some of us have been concerned for a while about the abuses of the Obama FBI and their foundational challenge to free elections and a free society. Now it’s nice to see that even one of the New York Times columnists who enjoys tossing casual treason references at President Donald Trump is beginning to see the light.
“The inspector general’s report about the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation offered a hideous Dorian Gray portrait of the once-vaunted law enforcement agency,” admits Maureen Dowd in the 11th paragraph of her umpteenth column attacking Mr. Trump. She adds: “The F.B.I. run by Comey and [Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe ] was sloppy, deceitful and cherry-picking — relying on nonsense spread by Christopher Steele. ”
She’s referring to the British author of the now discredited “dossier” of smears paid for by Mr. Trump’s opponents. The FBI never told the court that Mr. Steele’s own sources debunked his report.
Beyond Ms. Dowd, will the Times newsroom and that of the Washington Post now consider how they got this story so wrong for so long?
In 2018, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger presented Pultizer Prizes in national reporting to the staffs of the Times and the Post. The prize citation reads:
For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.
After special counsel Robert Mueller concluded his nearly two-year investigation and reported in March that he found no evidence of Trump collusion with Russia, the prize citation seemed to be in need of a rewrite. Now Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report undercuts more details in the reporting.
Among the prize-winning submissions was a report published on Feb. 28, 2017. The Washington Post wrote:
While Trump has derided the dossier as “fake news” compiled by his political opponents, the FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that the bureau considered him credible and found his information, while unproved, to be worthy of further investigation... Steele was known for the quality of his past work and for the knowledge he had developed over nearly 20 years working on Russia-related issues for British intelligence.
Oops. The Post story elaborated that in 2016, “Steele became concerned that the U.S. government was not taking the information he had uncovered seriously enough, according to two people familiar with the situation.” According to anyone familiar with the Horowitz report, the government should not have taken his information seriously at all.
Another Post classic that helped win the prize was the report published on May 22, 2017 that said Mr. Trump had asked intelligence officials “to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.”
Of course everyone knows now that Mr. Trump was asking them to state the plain fact that there was no collusion evidence. But according to the Post at the time:
Current and former senior intelligence officials viewed Trump’s requests as an attempt by the president to tarnish the credibility of the agency leading the Russia investigation.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the FBI deserved to have its credibility tarnished. Continued the Post:
Senior intelligence officials also saw the March requests as a threat to the independence of U.S. spy agencies, which are supposed to remain insulated from partisan issues.
Is there anything more threatening than a powerful spy agency refusing to be accountable even to the duly-elected President of the United States? The Post saw things differently:
“The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,” a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats.
No, it’s now clear that there truly was a lack of collusion evidence. The false statements were being made by former senior intelligence officials.
Among the Times prize-winners was a report on April 22, 2017:
Days after Mr. Comey’s news conference, Carter Page, an American businessman, gave a speech in Moscow criticizing American foreign policy. Such a trip would typically be unremarkable, but Mr. Page had previously been under F.B.I. scrutiny years earlier, as he was believed to have been marked for recruitment by Russian spies. And he was now a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Page has not said whom he met during his July visit to Moscow, describing them as “mostly scholars.” But the F.B.I. took notice. Mr. Page later traveled to Moscow again, raising new concerns among counterintelligence agents. A former senior American intelligence official said that Mr. Page met with a suspected intelligence officer on one of those trips and there was information that the Russians were still very interested in recruiting him.
The FBI shared all of their alleged concerns about Mr. Page’s Russian connections with the FISA court but did not share key information—including the fact that Mr. Page was working with the CIA. Is there any chance a FISA judge would have approved the FBI’s surveillance request on Mr. Page if his assistance to another arm of the federal government had been fully disclosed?
The full details on the Obama-Comey FBI’s abuse of power in 2016 are taking years to come to light, and not just because too many prize-winning media outlets failed to recognize them.
Where were the whistleblowers when America really needed them?
Mr. Freeman is the co-author of “Borrowed Time,” now available from HarperBusiness.
1d) How Should the Senate Deal with an Unconstitutional Impeachment by the House?
By Alan Dershowitz
If the House of Representatives were to impeach President Trump on the two grounds now before it, the senate would be presented with a constitutional dilemma. These two grounds— abuse of power and obstruction of Congress— are not among the criteria specified for impeachment. Neither one is a high crime and misdemeanor. Neither is mentioned in the constitution. Both are the sort of vague, open-ended criteria rejected by the framers. They were rejected precisely to avoid the situation in which our nation currently finds itself. Abuse of power can be charged against virtually every controversial president by the opposing party. And obstruction of Congress — whatever else it may mean — cannot extend to a president invoking privileges and then leave it to the courts to referee conflicts between the legislative and executive branches.
By: Alan M. Dershowitz
Hamilton feared that vague criteria would allow a majority of the House to impeach a president from the opposing party just because they had more votes than the president’s party. He called that “the greatest danger.” Madison worried that open-ended criteria, such as “maladministration” would give Congress too much discretion and power, and turn our republic into a parliamentary democracy in which the chief executive serves at the will of the legislature. To prevent these dangers, the framers settled on criteria with well-established meanings: treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The House Democrats are simply ignoring these words and this history, because they have the votes to do so. They are following the absurd notion put forth by congresswoman Maxine Waters that when it comes to impeachment “there is no law,” and the criteria are anything a majority of the House wants it be, regardless of what the constitution mandates. This lawless view confuses what a majority of congress can get away with (absent judicial review) with what the constitution requires. It places Congress above the supreme law of the land, namely the constitution.
Were Congress to vote to impeach President Trump on the two proposed grounds, its action would be unconstitutional. According to Hamilton in Federalist 78, any act of Congress that does not comport with the Constitution is “void.” This view was confirmed by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison and is now the law of the land.
So, what options would the Senate have if the House voted to impeach on two unconstitutional grounds? Would it be required to conduct a trial based on “void” articles of impeachment? Could it simply refuse to consider unconstitutional articles? Could the president’s lawyer make a motion to the Chief Justice — who presides over the trial of an impeached president — to dismiss the articles of impeachment on constitutional grounds?
This is uncharted territory with little guidance from the Constitution or history. There are imperfect analogies that may be informative. If this were an ordinary criminal case, and a grand jury had indicted a defendant for a non-crime (say, having gay sex) or an unconstitutional crime, the trial judge would be obliged to dismiss the indictment and not subject the defendant to an unconstitutional trial. Impeachment, however, is not an ordinary criminal proceeding.
So, the analogy is not directly on point. But impeachment by the House is similar in many ways to indictment by a grand jury, and a removal trial by the Senate is similar to a criminal trial, including being presided over by a judge. It is entirely possible that the president’s lawyers may file a motion seeking dismissal of the impeachment as unconstitutional. It is impossible to predict whether such a motion would be entertained and if so, how it would be decided.
Another option would be for the president’s lawyer to seek judicial review of the House’s unconstitutional action. Despite the fact that the Constitution says that the House shall be the “sole” judge of impeachment, two former justices have opined that there might be a judicial role in extreme cases.
The most likely option for the president — and the one hinted at by White House sources — is for the Senate to conduct a scaled down trial focusing on the constitutional defects in the articles of impeachment. No fact witnesses would be called: that would turn the proceeding into a he said/she said conflict with no clear resolution. Only legal arguments — neater and quicker — would be presented before a vote was taken.
Whichever option is pursued, the ultimate outcome seems clear: the Senate will vote to acquit President Trump. Regardless of the outcome, the damage will have been done by the House majority that will have abused its power by weaponizing the House’s authority over impeachment for partisan purposes — exactly as Hamilton feared. (Gatestone Institute)
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and author of The Case Against the Democratic House Impeaching Trump, Skyhorse Publishing, 2019, and Guilt by Accusation, Skyhorse publishing, 2019.
1e)
The Incredibly Incurious Mr. Comey
The IG report shows investigators who didn’t investigate Steele.
By The Editorial Board
James Comey has finally admitted some “sloppiness” over the surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The former FBI director should re-read Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report because it lays out a record of willful incuriosity about Christopher Steele and his dossier that is hard to credit as mere incompetence.
The report quotes Bill Priestap, a key FBI player in the 2016 Crossfire Hurricane probe into the Trump campaign, that the FBI had “concerns” about Mr. Steele’s “reporting the day we got it . . . [S]ome of it was so sensational, that we just, we did not take it at face value.
But if the FBI was initially skeptical, it isn’t evident in the IG report. The report shows how the FBI avoided taking any action, or asking any question, that might have undermined its use of the dossier in its application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The Crossfire team obtained Mr. Steele’s dossier on Sept. 19, 2016. The FISA court didn’t grant its warrant on Mr. Page until Oct. 21, 2016, giving it weeks to explore Mr. Steele’s revelations. The former British spook had operated as a confidential FBI source since 2013, which meant he had his own “Delta” file, containing all information concerning sources.
Yet the IG says the FBI didn’t bother looking at Mr. Steele’s file prior to obtaining the first FISA warrant. Even Mr. Steele’s overseas handling agent was astonished at this, telling the IG that the Crossfire team should have “turned the file upside down” two months earlier, when first handling Mr. Steele’s information.
The FBI also waited until November to talk to anyone who had worked with Mr. Steele during his tenure at Britain’s MI6—after the FBI had fired him for talking to the press. Only then did it learn that former colleagues believed Mr. Steele was prone to “rash judgments” and had a “lack of self awareness.” It didn’t bother talking to his primary source until January 2017, when it discovered that much of the reporting Mr. Steele provided was gossip.
The IG confirms that the FBI also made no effort to “determine who was financing Steele’s election related research.” Mr. Steele told the IG he knew who his paymasters were by late July, and Justice official Bruce Ohr told Congress that he warned FBI officials in August that Mr. Steele was hired by somebody “related to the Clinton campaign.” A team of FBI officials interviewed Mr. Steele in early October. Nobody asked about his employer.
Nor did they ask if Mr. Steele had been the source of a Sept. 23, 2016 Yahoo News article that revealed the FBI was looking into Trump-Russia collusion. Various case agents at the time of publication expressed alarm that Mr. Steele was talking to the press (he was), and a draft version of the FISA application fingered him as the leaker. But the IG says nobody at the October meeting asked Mr. Steele if he talked to the press. The final FISA application incorrectly asserted to the court that Mr. Steele had not.
The Crossfire sleuths also went to great effort to deny information to Justice Department attorneys reviewing the FISA application. The IG “did not find any written communications indicating that anyone on the Crossfire Hurricane team advised [Justice] about the potential or suspected political connections to Steele’s reporting.” One Justice lawyer, Stuart Evans, asked the FBI team three times if Mr. Steele “is affiliated with either campaign and/or has contributed to either campaign.”
The Crossfire team answered only the second part of his question, saying that because Mr. Steele was a “foreign national” he was “unable to contribute to either campaign.” Mr. Evans told the IG that he remembered being “frustrated and annoyed” by the answer. The FBI ultimately acknowledged that Mr. Steele was working on “political opposition research,” but rolled past Mr. Evans’s concern that the application was not worth the “risk” of going after such a “politically sensitive” warrant.
Which brings us to Mr. Comey’s incredible incuriosity. Crossfire Hurricane was among the most politically fraught investigations in recent American history. Yet the IG says Mr. Comey recalls few details, says he was only periodically updated on the “status,” and didn’t make any “significant investigative decisions.” This is at odds with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s testimony to the IG that Mr. Comey in spring 2016 went out of his way to “[pull] her aside” to tell her the FBI believed the Russians intended to “use Page for information.”
Had the FBI done even basic due diligence on Mr. Steele, his financiers and sources, it would never have sought a FISA warrant. Mr. Comey and his investigators have more to answer for than sloppiness.
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22) The Real Reason Orthodox Jews Love Trump (Hint: It’s Not Israel)
A recent poll conducted by the Orthodox publication Ami Magazine found that support for President Trump in the Orthodox community has skyrocketed. Though just 54% of Orthodox Jews voted for Trump in 2016, Ami found that Trump has an 89% approval rating among the Orthodox. On fighting anti-Semitism, over 92 percent said Orthodox Jews trusted the president and Republicans over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“The Exclusive @Ami_Magazine Poll, What Orthodox Jews really think about President Trump” @JakeTurxhttps://t.co/bYaDIbKPAapic.twitter.com/ TRtFKA8bGj— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 11, 2019
These numbers might surprise you if you aren’t Orthodox. In fact, the polling of all American Jews shows almost the opposite: 76% of Jews recently polled by the American Jewish Committee had an unfavorable rating of the President, and 73% disapprove of how he is handling anti-Semitism.
What accounts for this huge gap?
It would be tempting to explain the erosion of support among Orthodox Jewish voters for the Democratic Party on the perceived receding support for Israel. After all, 80% of those polled by Ami Magazine saw in Trump the American president who had “accomplished the most for Israel,” which is a big priority for Orthodox Jews. While on its face this would explain some loss of the vote share in the community, it doesn’t explain its absolute obliteration. While people do consider U.S. policy on Israel when voting, American Jews are Americans first. Their political positions revolve around American issues, and for the most part are not single issue voters. Additionally, support for the Israeli government amongst Orthodox Jews is not as high as an outsider would expect it to be. If the loss of Jewish votes did in fact reflect a reaction to the lack of support for Israel by the Democrats, this dip would actually be more pronounced amongst liberal Jews.
In fact, support for Trump among the Orthodox is less about Trump and more about another trend: growing support for Republicans among the Orthodox. And that support is directly tied to issues of church and state. Specifically, Orthodox Jews are responding to attempts by a secular government to meddle in what they believe should be private, religious affairs.
Though woefully under-reported, one of the most controversial developments affecting parochial schools of all religions has been the unprecedented attempt by the State of New York to meddle with the curricula in private schools. The state has attempted to dictate mandatory quotas of time dedicated to secular studies in schools that receive any kind of public support. And as our community views it, the hours of secular study that are being demanded by state officials are so excessive that they would render the school’s ability to teach religious subjects basically impossible.
There are simply not enough hours in an average school day to satisfy the requirements of the religious students who would be impacted, as we see it, and so far, these efforts have fortunately been stymied. But the battle is still ongoing, and Orthodox and Haredi parents across New York State remain worried about what the future holds for their children.
This ongoing saga has naturally created a sense of suspicion in the community vis a vis the secular, Democratic administration and officials who seek to interfere in our children’s schooling. But this story is merely one example among many.
The New York State school saga is a microcosm of a gradual if significant attitudinal change towards religion and the right to practice it freely, which I believe accounts for a big part of the shift in the Orthodox vote.
Religious freedom has, for the most part, been a given in this country. The creed of “separation between church and state” has not just been an empty slogan; it has been understood by politicians and legislators on both sides of the political aisle as the backbone of our free society.
But in recent years, there have been an ever increasing number of instances where a public outcry against religious freedom shows how much it has been devalued. And court rulings that follow these incidents seem to indicate that this once unassailable right is on very shaky footing.
Take, for example, the Christian bakery owner asked to bake and decorate a cake for a gay wedding. Due to his religious beliefs, the baker felt he could not accommodate the gay couple’s request, but he was sued for discrimination, and a Colorado Supreme Court found in the couple’s favor.
It’s true that this man was a Christian and not an Orthodox Jew. It’s also true that the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the Colorado Supreme Court had violated the baker’s rights. But the spectacle of a secular court ruling against a religious person’s beliefs sent a chill through my community, especially given that the Supreme Court found the commission had shown “clear hostility” towards the baker, and implied religious beliefs “are less than fully welcome in Colorado’s business community”. These are hardly words that would alleviate the angst felt by people from all religions.
There have been other stories too, of Christians forced to comply with secular edicts that they view as contrary to their beliefs that the Orthodox community watched with growing unease. There was the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns sued by the Department of Justice because they declined to provide contraceptives. There are the doctors being sued for refusing to perform abortions, or gender reassignment surgeries.
Examples like these are the things that keep Orthodox Jews up at night. While Jewish law doesn’t prohibit serving gay couples, many interpretations of Jewish law in the Orthodox community believe it forbids showing approval for such acts, and catering a gay wedding would indeed fall into that category. If religious freedom goes by the wayside, Orthodox rabbis worry they may be forced to perform same sex weddings, and doctors will be forced to perform abortions even if those things conflict with their religion.
Combine the disdain for religious freedom and the increasingly zealous, almost religious, persecution of any disagreement on the left, and it would almost feel like self sabotage for Orthodox Jews not to vote Republican. After all, it’s the Republicans who are standing up for the right of religious people to practice their religions.
The GOP has their its major deficiencies, chief among them a disturbing affiliation with the Alt Right. And yet, to us, these simply do not impact our lives as much, or as deeply.
Jewish voters will always vote their principles and interests first, no matter how flawed the candidate or party. For Orthodox Jews, we will protect our right to practice our religion first and foremost. After 2,000 years of that being denied us, you have to admit, it makes a lot of sense.
Rabbi Eliezer Brand is a talmudic researcher and teacher. He resides in Brooklyn with his wife son and two daughters.
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3)
In other words, Ms. Hill is no Trump apologist. Which makes her Oct. 14 closed-door deposition to the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees all the more compelling. In this deposition, Ms. Hill said she worried that Mr. Steele may have been “played” by Russian disinformation.
“Their goal was to discredit the presidency,” she said. “Whoever was elected president, they wanted to weaken them. So, if Secretary Clinton had won, there would have been a cloud over her at this time if she was President Clinton. There’s been a cloud over President Trump since the beginning of his presidency, and I think that’s exactly what the Russians intended.”
In her public testimony a month later, she deemed Moscow’s effort a success. “The Russians’ interests, frankly, is to delegitimize our entire presidency. . . . And I think that what we are seeing here as a result of all these narratives is this is exactly what the Russian government was hoping for.”
3)
A Job for Adam Schiff
The chairman should look into how he was taken in by Russian disinformation.
In other words, Ms. Hill is no Trump apologist. Which makes her Oct. 14 closed-door deposition to the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees all the more compelling. In this deposition, Ms. Hill said she worried that Mr. Steele may have been “played” by Russian disinformation.
“Their goal was to discredit the presidency,” she said. “Whoever was elected president, they wanted to weaken them. So, if Secretary Clinton had won, there would have been a cloud over her at this time if she was President Clinton. There’s been a cloud over President Trump since the beginning of his presidency, and I think that’s exactly what the Russians intended.”
In her public testimony a month later, she deemed Moscow’s effort a success. “The Russians’ interests, frankly, is to delegitimize our entire presidency. . . . And I think that what we are seeing here as a result of all these narratives is this is exactly what the Russian government was hoping for.”
What Ms. Hill says is strikingly similar to what the House Intelligence Committee included in its “Report on Russian Active Measures” of March 2018, when the committee was still chaired by California Republican Devin Nunes:
“The Committee is concerned with the degree to which the Kremlin may have sought to influence information that was ultimately provided to Steele—through the potential provision of disinformation or otherwise—consistent with its ongoing efforts ‘to undermine public faith in the US democratic process.’ ”
Finally there is the Horowitz report. Whether the Steele dossier was Russian disinformation, the inspector general wrote, “wasn’t within the scope” of his review. But he did ask FBI officials whether they’d considered the possibility. Bill Priestap, assistant director of the counterintelligence division, told investigators he had, but added that if Russians were trying to funnel disinformation through Steele, “then I’m struggling with what the goal was.”
It isn’t such a struggle if Ms. Hill is right. She says the Russian goal was less to elect Mr. Trump than to undermine the legitimacy of whoever was elected. If she’s right, clearly the Russians succeeded beyond all their expectations.
Think about that. If the Steele dossier was the product of disinformation, it means the FBI used Russian disinformation to get warrants to spy on former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. It means FBI Director James Comey used Russian disinformation to brief the president. It means that presidential briefing, which became the news peg to publish the dossier, was itself used to disseminate Russian disinformation to the American people.
It means that the Russians succeeded in planting their disinformation in the 2017 intelligence community assessment of Russia’s role in recent U.S. elections. And it means that when Mr. Schiff read allegations from the Steele dossier into the congressional record during an open House Intelligence Committee hearing with Mr. Comey, he too was repeating Russian disinformation.
Mr. Schiff, who has been wrong about most things related to Russia, is nonetheless right when he says Moscow hasn’t given up on efforts to manipulate American elections. He’s also still chairman of the Intelligence Committee. So how about bringing Ms. Hill back before the committee to kick off an investigation into whether the Steele dossier was the product of a Russian disinformation campaign?
It would be a good way for Mr. Schiff to claw back some credibility, to keep the Russians from doing in 2020 what they did in 2016—and maybe even to get back at Mr. Putin for helping to make Mr. Schiff look like such a boob these past three years.
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