Durham's Shoe Will Eventually Fall. Salena Makes The WSJ. Pendulums. Balanced Thinking.

 

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Well documented investigations and the law grind slowly but very fine.  Other Durham shoes are yet to drop but will. (See 1 below.)

And:

Probably will not happen but I would love for Durham to investigate and report on Weissmann's  influence on Mueller. (See 1a below.)
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Salena Zito's op ed makes the WSJ. (See 2 below.)

And:

Other meaningful op ed's:
CAIR Pennsylvania Poster Girl Resigns in Shame Leonard GetzPennsylvania's first female Muslim elected official crashes and burns.  More

Impeachment: Tactics vs. Strategy Ted NoelThe speaker of the House is playing tactics, while the majority leader in the Senate is playing strategy.  More

Corrupt Democrats Pushing America toward the Abyss Fletch DanielsWhen un-elected liberal bureaucrats believe they have the right to remove an elected president, anger continues to boil. MoreFinally:
3 other articles of interest from Israel:

1. Observation: Are Bennett and Shaked rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic

Thursday, December 19, 2019

1. Weekly Commentary: No Lacunas For AG Mandelblit

Friday, December 13, 2019

1. Is Benny Gantz A Clueless Mr. Clean +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pendulums swing and often too far and then they retrace but generally never go back to where they began.
That said I see some trends forming that have favorable potential:
a) Trump has told universities and colleges if they cannot control their campuses and quit ducking the Antisemitism issue they are susceptible losing government funding.
b) The Horowitz Report may form the basis of radically changing FISA Courts and Trump's Impeachment may have gone so badly that this vehicle may be buried and not likely to be resurrected.
c) Trump's impact on how a president should  function in the Oval Office may result in future presidents being more effective because they will be held to keener scrutiny should they fail implementing  their campaign pledges.
d) PC'ism is going to also be under more scrutiny which could lead to a reversal of its destructive effect.
e) If the 2020 election swings heavily in favor of Trump and he is re-elected decisively radicals in the Democrat Party could have their wings clipped and their nutty ideas about socialism and a give-away-government might receive a deserved funeral.
f) Though highly unlikely,  there is always the possibility mass media dolts will try becoming responsible adults. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++How about some balanced thinking? (See 3 below.)++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++DORIS

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1)

U.S. Attorney Durham Is Focusing in on John Brennan

By Katy Pavlich

U.S Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a criminal investigation into the origins the Russia probe and FISA abuse, is focusing in on former CIA Director John Brennan. 

During an interview with Fox News Thursday night, Attorney General Bill Barr broadly discussed Durham's efforts and his pursuit of information outside of the Department of Justice. 

"I know in a general sense what they're looking at," Barr said about Durham's investigation. "He's not just looking at the FBI, he's looking at other agencies, departments and also private actors. It's a much broader investigation. And also, he's not just looking at the FISA aspect of it, he's looking at all the conduct, both before and after the election...it would include agencies that could have been involved. We're getting a lot of cooperation on this."

The federal prosecutor scrutinizing the Russia investigation has begun examining the role of the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan in how the intelligence community assessed Russia’s 2016 election interference, according to three people briefed on the inquiry.

John H. Durham, the United States attorney leading the investigation, has requested Mr. Brennan’s emails, call logs and other documents from the C.I.A., according to a person briefed on his inquiry. He wants to learn what Mr. Brennan told other officials, including the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, about his and the C.I.A.’s views of a notorious dossier of assertions about Russia and Trump associates. …

Mr. Durham is also examining whether Mr. Brennan privately contradicted his public comments, including May 2017 testimony to Congress, about both the dossier and about any debate among the intelligence agencies over their conclusions on Russia’s interference, the people said.

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded a lengthy investigation into FISA abuse and released his report last week, but his investigation was limited to DOJ and the FBI. Durham has the authority and the legal ability to pursue leads wherever they may take investigators.

 For years, Brennan repeatedly peddled the false Russia collusion narrative on MSNBC before he was thoroughly debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Durham is pulling the curtain back on Brennan's behavior behind the scenes, which includes his involvement with the Clinton funded, foreign dossier. 

1a)

Robert Mueller’s Dossier Dodge

Why did the special counsel not tell America that Christopher Steele’s information was false?

The Editorial Board

In her public order Tuesday, Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court didn’t mention Robert Mueller. But her stinging rebuke of the FBI for abusing the FISA process to obtain a warrant to spy on Carter Page invites the question: How could the special counsel have ignored the Steele dossier?

Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirms the FBI sought to verify the claims former British spy Christopher Steele made in his dossier. Yet during an appearance before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, when Mr. Comey was asked directly if the bureau was investigating them, Mr. Comey answered: “I’m not gonna comment on that.”

He had good reason to dodge. By that time, the Horowitz report makes clear, the FBI knew that most of the Steele dossier’s claims were unreliable. Yet rather than take a hard look at it, Team Mueller made a deliberate choice to tiptoe around it. In his opening statement to Congress when he testified this July, Mr. Mueller declared he would not address “matters related to the so-called Steele dossier,” which he said were out of his purview.

This makes no sense. The Steele dossier was central to obtaining the Page warrant, and the leaks about the dossier fanned two years of media theories about Russian collusion that was one reason Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel. Mr. Mueller owed the public an explanation of how much of the dossier could be confirmed or repudiated.

Instead he abdicated, and the mystery is why. Perhaps as a former FBI director, Mr. Mueller wanted to protect the bureau’s reputation. But the best way to do that was to lay out the truth and explain any mistakes. A less generous explanation is that Mr. Mueller was more a figurehead as special counsel, and that the investigation was really run by his deputy Andrew Weissmann.

Remember that Justice official Bruce Ohr —who served as a conduit between Mr. Steele and the FBI—says Mr. Weissmann was among those at Justice he briefed that Mr. Steele hated Mr. Trump and that the dossier was opposition research. Before Mr. Mueller made him deputy, Mr. Weissmann also praised then Acting Attorney General Sally Yates in an email for refusing to implement a Trump executive order. This November he appeared on MSNBC to suggest that Mr. Trump had broken the law and that he didn’t have faith in Attorney General William Barr to honestly handle the work of career prosecutors.

Mr. Mueller’s dodge on the Steele dossier—and Mr. Weissmann’s partisanship—vindicates our view from 2017 that Mr. Mueller was the wrong man to be special counsel. On the evidence in the Horowitz report, the special counsel team had to know the truth about the Steele dossier and false FBI claims to the FISA court, but they chose to look the other way

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2) Daniel Cameron Overcame Racism to Make History in Kentucky

LEXINGTON-“It was a hard-fought campaign. Daniel Cameron endured racist attacks, including from the Lexington Herald Leader, which ran an editorial cartoon depicting a smiling Cameron carrying the coattails of a white Ku Klux Klan robe worn by President Trump. My latest for the Wall Street Journal

“As a black Republican you sort of find yourself in unique territory. There’s not a lot of black Republicans that are willing to openly identify,”

Click here for the full story.

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3)Presidential Misconduct: Some Historical Perspective

By David Harsanyi

The National Review

If you think Trump’s behavior is the worst in American history, you might be insane.

This week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee trotted out a trio of dispassionate legal experts to explain why the impeachment of Donald Trump was justified. They were there to bring a veneer of gravitas and erudition to what’s been, until now, a highly partisan affair.

But however smart people such as Michael Gerhardt, distinguished professor of constitutional law at University of North Carolina, might be, they aren’t immune from peddling partisan absurdities. Once Gerhardt argued that Trump’s conduct was “worse than the misconduct of any prior president,” we no longer had any intellectual obligation to take him seriously on the topic.

Because while I’m certainly not a distinguished professor, I am very confident that history began before 2016. Which means that, even if I concede Gerhardt’s framing of Trump’s actions — bribery, extortion, etc. — I can rattle off at least a dozen instances of presidential misconduct that are both morally and constitutionally “worse” than Trump’s blundering attempt to launch a self-serving Ukrainian investigation into his rival’s shady son.

Let’s ignore for a moment that American presidents have owned their fellow human beings, and focus instead on the fact that in 1942, the president of the United States signed an executive order that allowed him to unilaterally intern around 120,000 Americans citizens of Japanese descent. Not only was the policy deliberately racist, it amounted to a full-bore attack on about half the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold. Such an attack was a specialty of FDR’s, despite the all the hagiographies written about his imperial presidency.

Woodrow Wilson — who regularly said things like, “a Negro’s place is in the corn field” — didn’t merely re-segregate the civil service, personally firing more than a dozen supervisors for the sin of being black; he first pushed for, and then oversaw the enactment of, the Sedition Act. Wilson threw dissenters and political adversaries into prison, instructed the postmaster to refuse delivery of literature he deemed unpatriotic, and a created an unconstitutional civilian police force that targeted Americans for political dissent.

So, all of what Wilson did was “worse.”

Sorry to say, but despite their great achievements, both John Adams and Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the latter without any congressional approval. Surely, deep down, even those who act as if Russian social-media ads can topple the republic believe that denying citizens their fundamental rights of due process is a more serious offense than President Trump’s rhetoric and actions?

We can go on and on. Andrew Jackson ignored courts and laws and used his power to ethnically cleanse lands that he also sometimes happened to have a financial interest in. Teddy Roosevelt threatened American citizens with military intervention and abused his power in one way or another every day of his presidency. A reckless John Kennedy probably shared a mistress with a leading Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, whom he met in the White House, setting himself up for blackmail or worse.

Nixon may have lost his job after obstructing an investigation into freelance GOP spying on his political opponents, but Lyndon Johnson skipped any pretense, and just asked the FBI and CIA to spy for him. CIA officials, illegally operating inside the United States, spied on the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and brought Johnson information he used to undermine his opponents at every turn. That’s “worse.”

Johnson also lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, escalating the Vietnam War, and then kept lying about the war until he left office. I won’t even bother to catalogue the instance of other presidents misleading the public — either though lies of commission or lies of omission — in their efforts to precipitate or extend military conflicts, costing thousands of American lives. All of this misconduct is in every conceivable way “worse” than Trump’s actions.

Bill Clinton couldn’t go a month without some shady and humiliating scandal.

Now, maybe, Gerhardt doesn’t view incidents that weren’t investigated, prosecuted, or contemporaneously illegal as “misconduct.” That would be unfortunate. But even if so, referring to Trump’s actions as “worse than the misconduct of any prior president” would be terminally ahistorical.

Another Democratic expert, Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, actually drew applause for a canned line about the Constitution’s prohibition on titles of nobility: “While the President can name his son Barron,” she said, “he can’t make him a baron.”

Karlan’s line might have induced only some eye-rolling from me, if I hadn’t known that she was also a Barack Obama donor.

Barack Obama. The same president who ignored Congress and created laws by fiat. The man who ignored laws when they were inconvenient, and then ignored courts that told him to stop doing it. The man who ignored congressional subpoenas after his administration put 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of at least one American. More than once, Obama spied on the press. He ordered law enforcement to back off a terrorist organization that was engaged in criminal behavior in the United States, so that he could make a deal with Iran and bolster his political agenda. More than any modern president, Obama was rebuked by the Supreme Court, often 9–0. To watch a supporter of the previous president — a president who abused his executive power in unprecedented ways — playacting as a Madisonian purist was intolerable.

Of course, to argue, “sure, he’s bad, but, hey, there were worse presidents than Donald Trump!” is a terrible defense. Indeed, it is no defense at all. Impeachment should be decided on the facts of the case, and nothing else besides. But this isn’t a case in favor of Trump; it’s a plea for people to resist the compulsion to say insane things because they dislike this president. There is plenty to criticize without embracing hyperbole or losing all sense of historical perspective.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer for National Review and the author of First Freedom: A Ride through America’s Enduring History with the Gun.  @davidharsanyi 

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