Writing on Twitter, President Donald Trump wonders whether one of the results of the damning Inspector General’s report should be that all of the “phony” cases have to be overturned or dismissed. Is he talking about George Papadopoulos and, more importantly, General Mike Flynn?The Federalist reports that
Judge Emmet Sullivan had two choices: He could ignore the growing evidence of government misconduct and wind up the two-year saga that has been the sentencing phase of the Michael Flynn criminal case, or he could say “not on my watch.” Yesterday, in a methodical and seemingly tempered opinion, the long-time federal judge opted for the former tack when he denied in full the comprehensive motion to compel Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell filed several months ago. Judge Sullivan then set Flynn’s sentencing for January 28, 2020.
This was a remarkable decision because Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the FBI overstepped its authority several times during the Russia collusion investigation. General Flynn was, of course, targeted as part of this investigation. Talk about a “poisoned well…”
Although the judge in the case disagrees, there’s one person with significant power who seems to share my view: President Donald J. Trump. On Twitter, Trump wrote:
So, if Comey & the top people in the FBI were dirty cops and cheated on the FISA Court, wouldn’t all of these phony cases have to be overturned or dismissed? They went after me with the Fake Dossier, paid for by Crooked Hillary & the DNC, which they illegally presented to FISA…
“They want to Impeach me (I’m not worried!),” he went on to say in a follow-up tweet, “and yet they were all breaking the law in so many ways. How can they do that and yet impeach a very successful (Economy Plus) President of the United States, who has done nothing wrong? These people are Crazy!”
The case against Gen. Flynn has always been extremely flimsy. The FBI was so determined to bring him down that they were willing to settle for anything that accomplished that goal, undoubtedly with the end-goal in mind of getting to President Trump himself. That failed eventually, but hey, at least they successfully took out a powerful critic of the (military) intelligence community… who also had the audacity to support Trump. To these dirty FBI agents, that was enough of a win.
So, they set him up and all but forced him into pleading guilty after he was financially ruined — the man lost his house, is bankrupt and will — even if he serves little to no jail time — have a difficult time finding a new job when he returns to society.
Back in April of this year, PJ Media’s own David P. Goldman called on President Trump to pardon Gen. Flynn and…
…and summon him back to Washington. Mueller forced Flynn to plead guilty to an invented charge of lying to FBI agents, even though the FBI agents who interviewed him about Russian contacts said that they thought he was telling the truth. Now that the Mueller investigation has come up with nothing, the frame-up of Gen. Flynn appears all the more heinous. The Deep State feared Mike Flynn, with good reason. Trump should reappoint him to a top job, and really terrify his opponents.
We can now add to this that, with the IG’s report proving serious and serial FBI misconduct in the Russia collusion investigation, the well has been poisoned to such a degree that the case against Gen. Flynn has to be dismissed — if not by Judge Sullivan, then by President Trump. who has all the authority he needs to pardon Flynn and bring the general back into his administration.
Trump is right: “All of these phony cases have to be overturned or dismissed.” But since the judges in those cases aren’t willing to take responsibility for it, it’s time for him to step up to the plate and help the man who meant so much to him early in his presidential campaign.
Category: Corruption
The FISA Court Wants Answers About the Problems with FBI’s Carter Page Warrants
Judge demands to know what the agency will do prevent future “omissions” in the applications.
Last week, the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Justice found that the FBI omitted relevant information and made a number of mistakes on its warrants submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to wiretap a former aide to Donald Trump. Now the judges of the court are demanding some answers.
In an order filed today and signed by FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, the court lays out a brief explanation about why it’s so bad that the FBI left important details out of its warrant request as it sought a wiretap to get more information about Page’s communications with Russian officials to determine whether Trump’s presidential campaign had been somehow been compromised. In short, there are many rules to get permission to use FISC warrants to secretly snoop on Americans on American soil, and each of the 17 problems Inspector General Michael Horowitz found with the warrants represents a breakdown in the system at several points.
“When it is the FBI that seeks to conduct … surveillance, the Federal officer who makes the application is an FBI agent, who swears to the facts in the application,” the report notes. “The FISC judge makes the required probably cause determination ‘on the basis of the facts submitted by the applicant.'”
In short, the FISC has to trust that the FBI is including all relevant information in its warrant request and is not leaving out any important details that might factor into the decision. That’s because FISC essentially serves as the only form of oversight over the FBI when it comes to secretly snooping on Americans. Its role is to make sure that the targeted Americans’ rights are protected and that wiretaps aren’t based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment (this is partly why the court was made) and to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of targets. The court depends on the “candor” (a term used several times in the order) of FBI officials in deciding whether to permit surveillance of Americans.
In Page’s case, the report says, “The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the OIG report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above.”
The court is therefore ordering the federal government, by January 10, to provide a sworn written submission of what it has done and what it plans to do to make sure FBI warrant applications to FISC “accurately and completely reflects information possessed by the FBI that is material to any issue presented by the application.”
The court is also ordering a declassification review of an order FISC put out on December 5 demanding more information about the FBI attorney who is accused of altering a document to conceal that Page had a previous relationship as a source with another federal agency regarding contacts with Russian officials. This would be very relevant to the court when considering a request to wiretap him over conversations with these very Russians.
Read the orders for yourself here.
Judicial Watch: ‘The FBI Needs to be Shut Down,’ Transferred to U.S. Marshals Service.
From 2018? Kinda ‘prophetical’ wasn’t it?
Noting some of the major blunders of the FBI, such as failing to follow protocols with the Florida school shooter and failing to follow leads on the Boston Marathon bombers, Judicial Watch’s Director of Investigations Chris Farrell said FBI Director Christopher Wray should be replaced and that the entire FBI should be restructured as a “new investigative arm of the U.S. Marshals Service.”
“People do need to go,” said Farrell on the Feb. 16 edition of Lou Dobbs Tonight. “You can start with Director [Christopher] Wray.”
“Frankly, I would go back 200 years to the U.S. Marshals Service,” said Farrell, a former Military Intelligence officer and counterintelligence expert. “I would create a new division for investigations, and in about six to eight months I would shut the FBI down. Agents would be allowed to apply for, or laterally transfer to a new investigative arm of the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI would cease to exist. That’s my idea.”
When guest host Trish Regan expressed reservations about completely revamping the FBI, Farrell said, “There’s a systemic, institutional problem. We can walk it back to the Tsarnaev brothers [Boston Marathon bombing] where they missed the leads, multiple leads on them. You can go back to Whitey Bulger for that matter. You can go back to existing corruption in El Paso, Texas. There’s all sorts of problems.”
“At this point, you’ve got a 200-and-some-odd record of the U.S. Marshals Service performing honorable work,” he said. “So let’s create an investigative branch or division within the U.S. Marshals Service. Let the very fine agents, at the rank and file level who are trying to do their jobs, let them apply for, be screened, and then be admitted to this new investigative division. Then let’s take what’s left over of an obvious, deeply flawed organization, certainly at the headquarters, and shake it out.”
Farrell continued, “Let’s start over. We don’t want to lose good people and we don’t have to. We can simply put them in a new investigative arm of the U.S. Marshals Service, an organization that has served honorably for more than 200 years.”
Trish Regan then started to talk about holding certain FBI officials accountable and Farrell said, “Here’s the problem: If nothing changes, nothing changes. There has to be a radical, penetrating, severe examination. You have to turn over the furniture here.”
“We have to reset the thinking,” said Farrell. “It’s an institutional, cultural question. The entity itself has become poisoned.”
As for the FBI’s undeniable failure in the Florida school shooting case, Reuters reported, “A person described as someone close to accused gunman Nikolas Cruz, 19, called an FBI tip line on Jan. 5, weeks before the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, to report concerns about him, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement.
“’The caller provided information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting,’” it said.
“That information should have been forwarded to the FBI’s Miami field office for further investigation, but ‘we have determined that these protocols were not followed,’ the agency said.”
Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, has called on FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign.
Voters Favor Jail, Firing for Rogue Officials Who Targeted Trump
Rasmussen polls
Monday, December 16, 2019
Voters are ready to jail or fire senior law enforcement officials who illegally targeted President Trump, but most think they are unlikely to be punished.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone and online survey finds that 52% of Likely U.S. Voters consider it likely that senior federal law enforcement officials broke the law in an effort to prevent Trump from winning the presidency. Thirty-nine percent (39%) say that’s unlikely. This includes 36% who say it’s Very Likely they broke the law to get Trump and 24% who say it’s Not At All Likely. These findings are virtually unchanged in surveying since February of last year. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
A plurality (43%) thinks these officials should be jailed if they are found guilty of breaking the law to prevent a Trump presidency, up dramatically from 25% early this year, while another 22% say they should just be fired. Fifteen percent (15%) favor a formal reprimand. Just 11% say no disciplinary action should be taken.
But only 34% of voters believe the officials in question are likely to face criminal charges for their anti-Trump activity, with just 16% who say it’s Very Likely. Fifty-five percent (55%) see criminal prosecution of these rogue officials as unlikely, including 24% who feel it’s Not At All Likely. These attitudes are essentially unchanged from two months ago despite the recent release of a Justice Department inspector general’s report detailing wrongdoing by senior law enforcement officials.
>Eighty percent (80%) of voters who Strongly Approve of the job Trump is doing think it’s Very Likely that senior federal law enforcement officials attempted illegally to deny him the presidency. Among voters who Strongly Disapprove of the president’s job performance, only nine percent (9%) agree.
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted December 12 and 15, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
The U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general has concluded that James Comey improperly leaked information to the news media while he was serving as head of the FBI, and voters by a 47% to 35% margin think he should be criminally prosecuted.
Seventy-seven percent (77%) say they have been closely following news reports about the inspector general’s investigation of the FBI, with 41% who have been following Very Closely. Among those following the news Very Closely, 55% think it’s Very Likely that senior law enforcement officials broke the law in an effort to get Trump.
The older the voter, the closer they have been following the news about the Justice Department IG report.
Republicans (71%) are a lot more likely than Democrats (39%) and unaffiliated voters (46%) to suspect federal law enforcement officials of trying to prevent the Trump presidency. GOP voters are also the most likely to think they’ll be criminally charged.
Fifty-six percent (56%) of Republicans think convicted offenders should be jailed, a view shared by 35% of Democrats and 38% of unaffiliateds. Fifteen percent (15%) of Democrats say there should be no disciplinary action, compared to five percent (5%) of Republicans and 13% of unaffiliated voters.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of all voters said in April that it is likely President Obama or his top aides were aware that U.S. intelligence agencies were spying on the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team.
Law enforcement officials were investigating alleged contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, but earlier this year Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation concluded that no such collusion took place. Sixty-seven percent (67%) of Democrats don’t agree with Mueller’s conclusions, but 76% of Republicans and 50% of unaffiliated voters do.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and its archives were opened, certain Cold War controversies became susceptible of definitive resolution. Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis titled his 1997 book on the subject We Now Know. By the same token, publication of the Department of Justice Inspector General report on FISA abuse and related issues should similarly bring closure to the Russia hoax touted by the Democrats and their media adjunct over the past three years. As to the status of the Steele Dossier and the invalidity of the FISA warrants taken out on Carter Page to spy on the Trump campaign, we now know.
Having joined up with the intelligence and law enforcement authorities who perpetrated the unbelievable abuses involved here, the luminaries of the mainstream media are not inclined to apologize or engage in introspection of any kind. On the contrary, they have chosen sides and carry on the battle without looking back.
If there is to be a reckoning with the deceit and dishonesty that have pervaded our public discourse on matters related to the hoax, we are on our own. That is what I mean to do in this series. What we have here is by far the biggest scandal in American political history and the bigwigs of the mainstream media served as accomplices of the perpetrators.
Following up on “After Horowitz,” I want to highlight the overview provided by Senator Josh Hawley at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Horowitz this past Wednesday (video below).
Quotable quote: “The DNC pays for the Steele dossier, solicits the Steele dossier, and then gets the Federal Bureau of Investigation to go get FISA warrants, surveil an American citizen, surveil a presidential campaign, all on the basis of this manufactured garbage that they paid for. I mean that’s extraordinary. That has got to be a first time in history. In fact, let me just ask you, Mr. Horowitz, are you aware ever of another presidential campaign being targeted by the FBI during the campaign like the Trump campaign was?” (Answer: No.)
It’s Not a Coup. It’s a Civil War.
Lately, it’s been convenient — and self-serving to some — to call what is going on with the Trump administration a coup. It’s a “soft coup” or a “silent coup” or a wish-it-were-a-coup.
Let’s take a look at what that means. According to all definitions I can find, a coup is a sudden, often violent overthrow of a government. Every time I look up the definition of a coup, I get something like this from Merriam-Webster: “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics.” But there is nothing sudden about this.
Have you ever thought, “What would a modern civil war look like?” Tanks rolling down the streets of Washington, D.C.? Missiles targeting the Congress? Armed forces storming the White House or Capitol Building? None of these would accomplish anything. So what would a modern-day civil war look like?
At least since the 1960s, a faction of people have been looking for a chance to make our government conform to what they think it should be. This faction has identified itself in many ways, and its members always embrace Marxist ideals with a top-down government run by a few. A “law-based” government, on the other hand, would have a constitution to protect the rights of the minority from the “tyranny” of the majority. That is what the United States of America is: a law-based government founded on the belief that those working in government are employees of the people, and not that the people are subservient to them. And all decisions are to be based on our agreement to form such a government — that is, as spelled out in our Constitution.
When a group, no matter how large or small, decides it wants to step beyond the constitutional means for changing the government and change it to fit their own ideals of government, and superimpose those ideals on everybody else, we have a true conflict. If that conflict cannot be resolved to their satisfaction through the instrumentalities of the provisions to do so, and so they decide to overthrow it and replace it with their own views or ideas, we have a war. We have those circumstances playing out before our eyes (and ears)………….
We Just Got a Rare Look at National Security Surveillance. It Was Ugly.
A high-profile inspector general report has served as fodder for arguments about President Trump. But its findings about surveillance are important beyond partisan politics.
“IF THE FBI WAS WILLING TO BE THIS SHADY WHILE INVESTIGATING THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, WHAT DOES IT GET AWAY WITH IN LOWER-PROFILE CASES?”
When you’ve even lost the proggies at the NY Times…….
WASHINGTON — When a long-awaited inspector general report about the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation became public this week, partisans across the political spectrum mined it to argue about whether President Trump falsely smeared the F.B.I. or was its victim. But the report was also important for reasons that had nothing to do with Mr. Trump.
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. And what the report showed was not pretty.
The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.
“The litany of problems with the Carter Page surveillance applications demonstrates how the secrecy shrouding the government’s one-sided FISA approval process breeds abuse,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “The concerns the inspector general identifies apply to intrusive investigations of others, including especially Muslims, and far better safeguards against abuse are necessary.”
Congress enacted FISA in 1978 to regulate domestic surveillance for national-security investigations — monitoring suspected spies and terrorists, as opposed to ordinary criminals. Investigators must persuade a judge on a special court that a target is probably an agent of a foreign power. In 2018, there were 1,833 targets of such orders, including 232 Americans.
Most of those targets never learn that their privacy has been invaded, but some are sent to prison on the basis of evidence derived from the surveillance. And unlike in ordinary criminal wiretap cases, defendants are not permitted to see what investigators told the court about them to obtain permission to eavesdrop on their calls and emails.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Mr. Horowitz’s report on Wednesday, both Republicans and Democrats suggested that legislation tightening restrictions on FISA surveillance may be coming, and the A.C.L.U. submitted ideas to the committee.
Civil libertarians for years have called the surveillance court a rubber stamp because it only rarely rejects wiretap applications. Out of 1,080 requests by the government in 2018, for example, government records showed that the court fully denied only one.
Defenders of the system have argued that the low rejection rate stems in part from how well the Justice Department self-polices and avoids presenting the court with requests that fall short of the legal standard. They have also stressed that officials obey a heightened duty to be candid and provide any mitigating evidence that might undercut their request.
But the inspector general found major errors, material omissions and unsupported statements about Mr. Page in the materials that went to the court. F.B.I. agents cherry-picked the evidence, telling the Justice Department information that made Mr. Page look suspicious and omitting material that cut the other way, and the department passed that misleading portrait onto the court.
Ever since this dog-and-pony show culminating in today’s articles of impeachment got started, something has been on my mind.
It’s clear the FBI is corrupt at the upper most levels. Chief Weasel Jim Comey, and the dishonor roll of his underlings: McCabe, Strzok, Page, and lots more are all partisan hacks. We know this. We know they used the absolutely bogus Steele dossier to justify the need to monitor American citizens to the FISA courts (overview). Borepatch started the day with post that it’s time to Disband the FBI. Count me on board with that. While, from all I know, the majority of the agents and lower level staff are still honorable, there’s a saying in management classes (I originally heard it was taken from the mafia) that goes, “the fish rots from the head down.” If there are systemic problems in an organization, the problem lies in the top management’s offices.
What I’ve been saying since this whole mess started is “what about the FISA courts?” In my mind, if they were honest and honorable, they’d bust the FBI like 13 year olds pretending to be college students at spring break in south Florida.* I’d very publicly and loudly tell the FBI, “you’ve proven you’re not trustworthy. Because of that, from now on there will be no warrants issued to you unless you bring 10 times the amount of justification we used to require, and you’d better have far more than one source. You will be questioned about it relentlessly, and you’d better damned well have every last detail documented.” Or something similar. Let everybody know the FBI is getting their chops busted for their partisan politics.
The fact that this hasn’t happened doesn’t mean the FISA courts didn’t slap down the FBI in some classified meetings that we’re not allowed to know about. The fact that it wasn’t public, though, implies that the FISA court is just as rotten as the heads of the FBI fish. They could have dressed them down in secret but made a public statement about how shocked – shocked! I tell you – and how appalled the court is at having been lied to by the FBI. The fact that didn’t happen tells you the FISA court needs to be disbanded, just like the FBI. The whole Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act needs to be torn up and started again from blank paper.
The Danger of Making Ruthlessness Seem Reasonable
I use a lot of dangerous drugs. Well, not me personally, but on my patients. Of course, I use dangerous drugs only when the disease I’m treating is more dangerous than the drug.
In diseases that are not life-threatening, naturally I avoid dangerous drugs and try to stick with safer therapies. Chemotherapy drugs can save your life, but they can also have significant side effects. Side effects that you would not tolerate if you were treating a sinus infection. But if you have cancer, and you’re trying to avoid dying, it may make sense to take a chance on side effects – even very serious side effects. In truly desperate circumstances, there are few actions one would not consider, no matter how drastic.
That’s what always bothered me about the great leftist / progressive / socialist leaders of the 20th century: Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, and so on. They saw a problem and took drastic measures to fix it.
When I consider the horrifyingly drastic measures they took, I wonder, “What possible problem did they see that warranted such drastic actions? Who on earth could have possibly thought that was a good idea?” Even for those who lack sympathy for others, killing millions of people is no small thing. They claimed that they were trying to save or improve their countries for their citizens. Which some considered to be an adequate reason. Think about that. And then, think about Greta Thunberg.
There are many facets of the global warming fraud that I find concerning, but what bothers me the most about it is that its adherents claim to on a mission to save the world. Ok, so what would you not do to save the world? At that point, any action could be considered, right? Even horrible side effects are worthwhile in this case because the patient is dying and we’re desperate. So no action, no matter how drastic, is off the table.
It’s easy to chuckle when a self-important 16-year-old girl explains that the world is ending. It’s ridiculous.
Well, it may be ridiculous, but it’s not funny.
These people are dangerous. Their polarizing extremism encourages ruthless actions that would otherwise be unthinkable. Just ask a dead German Jew from 1943.
A few days ago, at a town hall on CNN, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi explained her concern about President Trump with the following statement: “Civilization as we know it today is at stake in the next election, and certainly, our planet. The damage that this administration has done to America, America’s a great country. We can sustain. Two terms, I don’t know.”
Not that long ago, Mrs. Pelosi would have said no such thing. She might have said, “I have serious disagreements with Mr. Trump’s policy proposals, and I don’t like where he is taking this country. I hope my fellow American citizens will choose to vote Democrat in the next election. Let me explain why I think that would be a good decision.” And she would then outline her specific disagreements with Mr. Trump, and how she would propose to do better for the American people than he would.
This is how the Republicans won the House in 1994. The “Contract with America” explained what they saw as problems, and how they intended to fix those problems. It worked – they won.
I’m not sure that approach would work now. As I often say, I hope I’m wrong about this. But American politics has changed. And more importantly, American society seems to have changed.
There are those who think that the Democrats’ repeated impeachment attempts against Mr. Trump and other extremist tactics are due to their particular dislike for Mr. Trump. I disagree. If Mitt Romney or Scott Walker were president, I suspect the Democrats would be using similarly ruthless tactics. This shift in tactics occurred before, and independent of, the inauguration of Mr. Trump.
President Trump may be a response to this new approach to American politics, but he is not the cause of it.
It seems strange that such extremism and such vicious approaches to politics occur now, in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, here in modern America. American politics were vicious and nasty in the mid-1800s, but slavery and other issues were on the verge of tearing our country apart. One can understand how such serious disagreements about such serious issues would lead to divisive politics.
But we’re not arguing about slavery and basic human rights anymore. We’re not even arguing about foreign wars or Prohibition. We’re arguing about transsexual bathrooms. It’s hard to understand such vicious political tactics in times of peaceful prosperity like these.
I’m not sure of the cause, but I suspect it started with the extremist environmental movement. Silent Spring was published in 1962. The Population Bomb was published in 1968. The cold winters of the 1970s led many to believe that we were all about to die in the next ice age.
All of those predictions turned out to be wrong, but the potential power of such messages was hard for some politicians to ignore. Particularly politicians who had no other compelling reasons for anyone to vote for them. Al Gore is an extreme example of this phenomenon, but many others on the left are using this technique now. And when one considers the success rate of leftist policies, one can understand why they use this approach.
A leftist politician no longer has to explain why socialism has never worked anywhere else, and how exactly it will work here. That’s a tough sell. All he/she has to do is convince voters that Republicans are evil capitalists who want to get rich by destroying the world, like a James Bond villain. And then convince those voters that global catastrophe is certain unless they vote for the leftist, who cares for the environment. Skip the details, just paint the picture.
At that point, no actions, no matter how drastic or ruthless, are off the table. Confronting and shaming people in public. Scaring the families of prominent conservatives. Arresting elderly nobodies like Roger Stone in SWAT raids in the middle of the night, with CNN along to broadcast it worldwide. It seems vicious, but hey, we’re trying to save the world here, so it’s ok. Really. Are you with us, or against us? Are you evil, or nice?
These people are dangerous.
So when I hear Nancy Pelosi say, “Civilization as we know it today is at stake in the next election, and certainly, our planet,” I don’t laugh. When I hear Greta Thunberg say, “For way too long, the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything to fight the climate crisis, but we will make sure that they will not get away with it any longer,” I don’t just roll my eyes. When I hear AOC say, “There’s no debate as to whether we should continue producing fossil fuels. There’s no debate,” I don’t wonder what she’s been smoking.
These people are dangerous. They make ruthlessness seem reasonable.
In the past, people have agreed to drastic actions simply to save their country, as they saw it. People actually voted for Adolf Hitler for little more reason than that. What if they thought they were saving the whole world? What would they not do?
Saul Alinsky.
The impeachment charade is not a joke. Neither are climate protests, or boycotting businesses suspected of being insufficiently leftist, or economic sanctions against businesses in states that don’t enact your preferred policies regarding transsexual bathrooms. It may seem ridiculous, but it’s not funny.
This is scary stuff. And I don’t see a solution. This is just the way the left does politics now. It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton who learned a lot from Saul Alinsky. The Democrat party has decided that such ruthless tactics are reasonable. I suspect that things will get much worse before they get better.I really hope I’m wrong about all this…
Inspector General report on FBI’s FISA abuse tells us one thing: We need radical reform.
BLUF:
“Ironically, the FISA court was created in 1978 to prevent Nixon-style political spying.”
As my section CWO often said when a plan went over like a lead balloon:
“It briefed well.”
Yesterday’s IG report was only the latest in a long series of revelations about FBI misconduct at the FISA court:
*In 2002, the FISA court revealed that FBI agents had false or misleading claims in 75 cases and a top FBI counterterrorism official was prohibited from ever appearing before the court again.
*In 2005, FISA chief judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented; that never happened because it could have “slowed such investigations drastically,” the Washington Post reported. So FBI agents continued to have a license to exploit FISA secrecy to lie to the judges.
*In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”
* In October, a secret FISA court ruling was released documenting the FBI’s illegal conducted warrantless searches of vast numbers of Americans’ emails despite congressional legislation seeking to curb FBI data roundups.
FBI machinations at the FISA court are especially perilous to American democracy because that court is extremely docile to federal agencies. The FISA court “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” the New York Times reported in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked court decisions. FISA decisions have “quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court…regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny.” The court’s servility can boggle the imagination, such as its rubber-stamping FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans were “relevant” to a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling N.S.A. data seizures later denounced by a federal judge as “almost Orwellian.”
Ironically, the FISA court was created in 1978 to prevent Nixon-style political spying.
Trump on IG Report: ‘This Was an Attempted Overthrow… We Caught ‘em Red-Handed.’
He’s not wrong.
And a lot of people were in on it and they got caught. They got caught red-handed. And I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future. He’s got his own information, which is this information plus, plus, plus. It’s an incredible thing that happened and we’re lucky we caught them.
The IG **Admits** DOJ/FBI Attempted A Putsch
The IG report, after reading through a good part of it, states that seventeen “errors” were made by the FBI. May I remind you of an indisputable fact: Errors are randomly distributed.
That is, let’s assume you intend to drive at 40mph. If you make an error you will operate your car some of the time at 38mph, and some of the time at 42mph. The errors, if they are actual errors, will be randomly distributed around the correct action. Some of the errors will place you inside the correct action and some of them will be place you outside of the correct action. Approximately an equal number of errors will fall on each side of the correct action; some will help you, some hurt, but given enough errors there should be an approximately equal number in each direction.
If your speed, as measured at 1 minute intervals, is 40, 42, 45, 43, 41, 40, 46, 50, 42 and 45 mph that is not “error.” You are instead driving with a floor of 40mph; your intent is to drive at no slower than 40mph.
The probability of an error is 50% in each direction. Therefore half the errors should have been to Trump’s benefit.
However, exactly zero of them were to Trump’s benefit.
The odds of this being random chance can be computed.
The probability of the first error being to Trump’s detriment is 0.5 (50%.)
Each successive “error” is also equally probable to be of either benefit or detriment. So when the second error occurs for them to both be to Trump’s detriment by random chance — that is, if it’s an actual error without motivation or bias, is 0.50 * 0.50, or 1 in 4.
For seventeen “errors” to be all in the same direction is 0.5 ^ 17, or exactly 1 in 131,072.
This is not quite as bad of odds as winning the Powerball but it clowns the claim that such were errors and not intentional acts that evince a predetermined goal or desire.
Indeed in a criminal trial should odds of 1 in 131,072 be established that is almost certainly enough for you to be convicted and sent to prison. Remember that the standard in a criminal trial is not “beyond question” or “with absolute proof” — it is beyond a reasonable doubt.
1 in 131,072 does not admit reasonable doubt.
The FBI and Department of Justice did, beyond reasonable doubt, intentionally target Donald Trump and his associates as a candidate and as President for surveillance and did, with corrupt intent beyond said reasonable doubt, intend to harm both him and his associates.
This did not occur due to error. The manifest weight of the evidence as proved by fundamental, middle-school mathematics, is that this campaign was intentional, it was malicious, and given that it involved knowingly false statements to a court by means of omission it was criminal.
To refuse to prosecute everyone so-involved is for the United States Department of Justice and FBI to declare themselves above the law and to declare the Constitution of the United States, as a contract between the citizens and its government, null and void due to the intentional refusal to enforce same for political reasons.
It does not matter whether or not the scheme ultimately did or does in the future (e.g. impeachment) succeed.
The IG report establishes that the FBI and DOJ attempted to conduct a putsch in the United States to overthrow a democratically-elected President, along with imprisoning his associates and staff members by concocting knowingly-false pretense for surveillance and entrapment.
The IG report, in an attempt to claim that there was no “wrongdoing” but simple mistakes has mathematically proved that in fact the campaign to overthrow the President of the United States was intentional with a sufficient level of probability to secure convictions under criminal law for virtually any crime in the US.
It is important to note that the prosecutions and convictions obtained since the beginning with this process have been for obstructing an illegally-initiated investigation, as is, I note, the currently pending prosecution of Stone. That people in this nation believe that citizens have an obligation to comply and cooperate with an unlawfully-initiated investigation is exactly the sort of premise that the Politburo of Russia used to present, or the Communist Chinese Party presents today.
You decide what your response to this outright admission of wrongdoing by the IG shall be America.
You did pass middle-school math, right?
New Inspector General Report Reveals Scandalous Lying by Obama Administration About Afghanistan War
Some of the servicemembers killed in Afghanistan during that time period were people I didn’t just know, but worked with. What I think of Obammy isn’t fit to print.
California CEO and Seven Others Charged in Multi-Million Dollar Conduit Campaign Contribution Case
On Friday, AG Bill Barr indicted eight individuals for illegally funneling foreign money to a major demoncrap PAC. One, George Nader (no relation to Ralph), was one of Mueller’s witnesses and is a top donor, so it should be easy to figure out which “…candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 election.” is being referred to.
And, of course, not one peep was heard about this in the MSM.
Earlier today, an indictment was unsealed against the CEO of an online payment processing company, and seven others, charging them with conspiring to make and conceal conduit and excessive campaign contributions, and related offenses, during the U.S. presidential election in 2016 and thereafter.
Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and Assistant Director in Charge Timothy R. Slater of the FBI’s Washington Field Office made the announcement.
A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia indicted Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja, 48, of Los Angeles, California, on Nov. 7, 2019, along with George Nader, Roy Boulos, Rudy Dekermenjian, Mohammad “Moe” Diab, Rani El-Saadi, Stevan Hill and Thayne Whipple. The 53 count indictment charges Khawaja with two counts of conspiracy, three counts of making conduit contributions, three counts of causing excessive contributions, 13 counts of making false statements, 13 counts of causing false records to be filed, and one count of obstruction of a federal grand jury investigation. Nader is charged with conspiring with Khawaja to make conduit campaign contributions, and related offenses. Boulos, Dekermenjian, Diab, El-Saadi, Hill, and Whipple are charged with conspiring with Khawaja and each other to make conduit campaign contributions and conceal excessive contributions, and related offenses.
According to the indictment, from March 2016 through January 2017, Khawaja conspired with Nader to conceal the source of more than $3.5 million in campaign contributions, directed to political committees associated with a candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 election. By design, these contributions appeared to be in the names of Khawaja, his wife, and his company. In reality, they allegedly were funded by Nader. Khawaja and Nader allegedly made these contributions in an effort to gain influence with high-level political figures, including the candidate. As Khawaja and Nader arranged these payments, Nader allegedly reported to an official from a foreign government about his efforts to gain influence.
The indictment also alleges that, from March 2016 through 2018, Khawaja conspired with Boulos, Dekermenjian, Diab, El-Saadi, Hill, and Whipple to conceal Khawaja’s excessive contributions, which totaled more than $1.8 million, to various political committees. Among other things, these contributions allegedly allowed Khawaja to host a private fundraiser for a presidential candidate in 2016 and a private fundraising dinner for an elected official in 2018.
The indictment further alleges that, from June 2019 through July 2019, Khawaja obstructed a grand jury investigation of this matter in the District of Columbia. Knowing that a witness had been called to testify before the grand jury, Khawaja allegedly provided that witness with false information about Nader and his connection to Khawaja’s company. Boulos, Diab, Hill, and Whipple also are charged with obstructing the grand jury’s investigation by lying to the FBI.
Currently, Nader is in federal custody on other charges.
An indictment is not a finding of guilt. It merely alleges that crimes have been committed. A defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The FBI’s Washington Field Office is investigating the case and Deputy Chief John D. Keller and Trial Attorneys James C. Mann and Michael J. Romano of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section are prosecuting the case.
The last time the Democratic Party blew up in a presidential election year was 1860. It had evolved from Jefferson’s 1800 bloc of yeoman farmers to Andrew Jackson’s rowdy caucus of frontier populists in the 1830s, and settled into a slough of pro-slavery apologists by the 1850s, including two do-nothing Democratic presidents, Pierce and Buchanan. The party held a nominating convention in the spring of 1860 and couldn’t come up with a candidate when a claque of southern “fire-eaters” walked out. They tried again a few months later and cracked up into three separate parties with three nominees — and of course Mr. Lincoln won the election. The result was the bloodiest war in US history.
That’s one way to drain a swamp. Historical obfuscators might say the Civil War was a lofty, legalistic quarrel over “state’s rights,” but of course it was really about the intolerable depravity of slavery. A hundred years later, the mysterious inversions of history converted the old slaver’s party into the Civil Rights party. That had a good fifty-year run. It included a hearty side-dish of anti-war sentiment, and a general disposition against the Big Brother treatment of citizens, including especially the overreach of the CIA and the FBI.
What is the Democratic Party today? Well, it’s the cheerleading squad for “seventeen” government agencies that add up to the craftily-labeled “intel community,” a warm-and-fuzzy coalition of snoops, false witnesses, rogue lawfare cadres, seditionists, and bad-faith artists working sedulously to hide their previous misdeeds with ever-fresh ones. They’re the party against free speech, the party against due process of law, the party determined to provoke war with Russia. They’re the party of sexual confusion, sexual hysteria, and sexual conflict, the party of kangaroo courts, cancel culture, erasing boundaries (including national borders), and of making up rules for all that as they go along — like the Nazis and Soviets used to do. The ideas and policies they advocate are so comprehensively crazy that their old support of slavery looks quaintly straightforward in comparison.
It’s taken a while for the full efflorescence of these political pathologies to present. But now they are finally on display for all to see in what is supposed to be a climactic impeachment melodrama. The impeachment process itself has revealed the party’s genius for inventing new debaucheries of law and government misconduct — the latest being Rep Adam Schiff’s blatantly illegal cadging of his opponents’ phone logs. And now, after three years of unchallenged wickedness, they literally face the moment of truth.
That is, when all the many players in this grand game of Gotcha have to face the consequences of what they have done.
Zimbabwe Begs White Farmers To Return As Nation Teeters On Brink Of ‘Manmade Starvation’
I have a pretty good notion what the answer from the majority of those who left will be, and it isn’t fit to post here. For the ones who are stupid enough to consider returning to that selfmade $#!+hole, one question:
Are you really that stupid?
Crisis-torn Zimbabwe is on the brink of “manmade starvation” with most households unable to obtain enough food to meet basic standards, a UN envoy has said.
This comes 17 years after Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwean government seized large swathes of land from white farmers in the country, triggering a rapid downturn in the country’s economy.
“The people of Zimbabwe are slowly getting to a point of suffering a manmade starvation,” said Hilal Elver, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.
“More than 60% of the population of a country once seen as the breadbasket of Africa is now considered food insecure, with most households unable to obtain enough food to meet basic needs due to hyperinflation,” said Elver.
How did the “breadbasket of Africa” reach the point of “manmade starvation“?
News24 reports that Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party launched the controversial land reforms in 2000, forcibly seizing white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks. Mugabe said the reforms were meant to correct colonial land ownership imbalances.At least 4,000 white commercial farmers were evicted from their farms.
The land seizures were often violent, claiming the lives of several white farmers during clashes with veterans of Zimbabwe’s 1970s liberation struggle.
Critics of the reforms have blamed the programme for low production on the farms as the majority of the beneficiaries lacked the means and skills to work the land.
The Zimbabwean government’s message to exiled white farmers is now clear. Come back to Zimbabwe and save us.
The nation is offering land leases to white commercial farmers in an effort to re-start the nation’s agricultural industry.
Basil Nyabadza from Zimbabwe’s Agricultural and Rural and Development Authority says Zimbabwean farmers exiled in foreign lands should return to “home” soil.
The Government is now offering 99-year leases to white farmers, a deal previously reserved for black Zimbabweans.
The resignation of president Robert Mugabe last November and the swearing in of his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa has delivered significant change.
Government officials now admit the campaign of farm invasions that began in 2000 was a mistake.
“Clearly, the formulas deployed then, left a lot of bad feeling. And more importantly, the intellectual property, left our borders,” Mr Nyabadza said.
Without its professional, experienced farmers, Zimbabwe went from being an agricultural export powerhouse to having to rely on handouts from the United Nations’ World Food Programme.
Hyperinflation and a multi-decade depression followed.
History repeats
The news comes as South Africa threatens to follow in Zimbabwe’s doomed footsteps in seizing white farmers land and exiling them from the country.South Africa is teetering on the brink of a race war after President Cyril Ramaphosa called on parliament to pass a law allowing white-owned land to be “confiscated” by blacks without any form of compensation.
Ramaphosa called white land ownership the “original sin”, and stated that he wants to see “the return of the land to the people from whom it was taken… to heal the divisions of the past.”
How does he plan on doing that?
Forcible confiscation. Specifically– confiscation without compensation.“The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans.”
Ramaphosa did not mince his words. He’s talking about seizing land from white farmers and giving it to black South Africans — just like in neighboring Zimbabwe.
Astonishingly, Ramaphosa followed up that statement by saying, “We will handle it in a way that is not going to damage our economy. . .”If South Africa refuses to learn the lessons of history, it is doomed to repeat them
Just another inept, corrupt moslem masquerading as a public servant. She didn’t even last a whole year in office.
Johnson-Harrell was elected in a special election in March to replace Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown (D-Philadelphia). Rep. Brown resigned from office in December 2018 after being sentenced for bribery and other charges. The Attorney General’s Office says Johnson-Harrell will be pleading guilty and will resign from office effective December 13th.