Hillary’s ‘Sure’ Victory Explains Most Everything
by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON January 30, 2018
The Page-Strzok text exchanges might offer a few answers. Or, as Lisa Page warned her paramour as early as February 2016, at the beginning of the campaign and well before the respective party nominees were even selected: One more thing: she [Hillary Clinton] might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi? The traditional way of looking at the developing scandals at the FBI and among holdover Obama appointees in the DOJ is that the bizarre atmospherics from candidate and President Trump have simply polarized everyone in Washington, and no one quite knows what is going on.
Another, more helpful, exegesis, however, is to understand that if we’d seen a Hillary Clinton victory in November 2016, which was supposed to be a sure thing, there would now be no scandals at all. That is, the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity.
On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1 percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails. Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of the United States?
learn more Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation” in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation. How could Lynch in the middle of an election have been so silly as to allow even the appearance of impropriety? Answer: There would have been no impropriety had Hillary won — an assumption reflected in the Page-Strzok text trove when Page texted, about Lynch, “She knows no charges will be brought.” In fact, after a Clinton victory, Lynch’s obsequiousness in devising such a clandestine meeting with Bill Clinton may well have been rewarded: Clinton allies leaked to the New York Times that Clinton was considering keeping Lynch on as the attorney general.
How could former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe assume an oversight role in the FBI probe of the Clinton email scandal when just months earlier his spouse had run for state office in Virginia and had received a huge $450,000 cash donation from Common Good VA, the political-action committee of long-time Clinton-intimate Terry McAuliffe? Most elite bureaucrats understood the Clinton way of doing business, in which loyalty, not legality, is what earned career advancement. Again, the answer was clear. McCabe assumed that Clinton would easily win the election. Far from being a scandal, McCabe’s not “loaded for bear” oversight of the investigation, in the world of beltway maneuvering, would have been a good argument for a promotion in the new Clinton administration.
Most elite bureaucrats understood the Clinton way of doing business, in which loyalty, not legality, is what earned career advancement. Some have wondered why the recently demoted deputy DOJ official Bruce Ohr (who met with the architects of the Fusion GPS file after the election) would have been so stupid as to allow his spouse to work for Fusion — a de facto Clinton-funded purveyor of what turned out to be Russian fantasies, fibs, and obscenities? Again, those are absolutely the wrong questions. Rather, why wouldn’t a successful member of the Obama administrative aparat make the necessary ethical adjustments to further his career in another two-term progressive regnum? In other words, Ohr rightly assumed that empowering the Clinton-funded dossier would pay career dividends for such a power couple once Hillary was elected. Or, in desperation, the dossier would at least derail Trump after her defeat. Like other members of his byzantine caste, Ohr did everything right except that he bet on the wrong horse.
What about the recently reassigned FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI top investigator Peter Strzok? Their reported 50,000-plus text messages (do the math per hour at work, and it is hard to believe that either had to time to do much of anything else) are providing a Procopian court history of the entire Fusion-Mueller investigation miasma. So why did Strzok and Page believe that they could conduct without disclosure a romantic affair on FBI-government-owned cellphones? Why would they have been emboldened enough to cite a meeting with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, in which they apparently discussed the dire consequences of an improbable Trump victory? I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s [probably Andrew McCabe, then deputy director of the FBI] office that there’s no way Trump gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40. And why would the two believe that they could so candidly express their contempt for a presidential candidate supposedly then under a secret FBI investigation? Once more, those are the wrong interrogatories.
If we consider the mentality of government elite careerists, we see that the election-cycle machinations and later indiscretions of Strzok and Page were not liabilities at all. They were good investments. They signaled their loyalty to the incoming administration and that they were worthy of commendation and reward. Hillary Clinton’s sure victory certainly also explains the likely warping of the FISA courts by FBI careerists seeking to use a suspect dossier to surveille Trump associates — and the apparent requests by Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and others to read surveilled transcripts of Trump associates, unmask names, and leak them to pet reporters. Again, all these insiders were playing the careerist odds. What we view as reprehensible behavior, they at the time considered wise investments that would earn rewards with an ascendant President Hillary Clinton. Did Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, or Debbie Wasserman Shultz worry about their fabrications, unethical behavior, and various conspiratorial efforts to ensure that Hillary Clinton would be exempt from criminal liability in her email shenanigans, and that she would win the Democratic nomination and general election? Not when their equally unethical and conspiratorial boss would appreciate her subordinate soul mates. For a deep-state careerist without ethical bearings, one of the advantages of a Clinton sure-thing presidency would be that the Clintons are known to reward loyalty more highly than morality.
Then we arrive at the tragic farce of former FBI director James Comey. It is now easy to deplore Comey’s unethical and unprofessional behavior: In all likelihood, he wrote an exoneration of Hillary Clinton before he even interviewed her and her top aides; then he lied about just that sequence while he was under oath and virtue-signaling before Congress; he feigned concern about Clinton’s felonious behavior but used linguistic gymnastics in his report to ensure his condemnation would be merely rhetorical and without legal consequences. Had Hillary won, as she was supposed to, Comey would probably have been mildly chastised for his herky-jerky press conferences, but ultimately praised for making sure the email scandal didn’t derail her. Comey’s later implosion, recall, occurred only after the improbable election of Donald Trump, as he desperately reversed course a fourth time and tried to ingratiate himself with Trump while hedging his bets by winking and nodding at the ongoing, unraveling fantasy of the Steele dossier.
And Barack Obama? We now know that he himself used an alias to communicate at least 20 times with Hillary on her private, non-secure gmail account. But Obama lied on national TV, saying he learned of Hillary’s illegal server only when the rest of the nation did, by reading the news. Would he have dared to lie so publicly if he’d assumed that Trump’s presidency was imminent? Would he ever have allowed his subordinates to use the dossier to obtain FISA warrants and pass around and unmask the resulting surveillance transcripts if he’d seen Trump as the likely winner and a potentially angered president with powers to reinvestigate all these illegal acts? We sometimes forget that Barack Obama, not candidate Hillary Clinton, was president when the FBI conducted the lax investigation of the email scandal, when Loretta Lynch outsourced her prosecutorial prerogatives to James Comey, when the FBI trafficked with the Clinton-funded Fusion GPS dossier, when various DOJ and FBI lawyers requested FISA-approved surveillance largely on the basis of a fraudulent document, and when administration officials unmasked and leaked the names of American citizens. Had Hillary Clinton polled ten points behind Donald Trump in early 2016, we’d have none of these scandals — not because those involved were moral actors (none were), but because Hillary would have been considered yesterday’s damaged goods and not worth any extra-legal exposure taken on her behalf.
Similarly, if the clear front-runner Hillary Clinton had won the election, we’d now have no scandals.
Again, the reason is not that she and her careerist enablers did not engage in scandalous behavior, but that such foul play would have been recalibrated as rewardable fealty and absorbed into the folds of the progressive deep state. The only mystery in these sordid scandals is how a president Hillary Clinton would have rewarded her various appendages. In short, how would a President Clinton have calibrated the many rewards for any-means-necessary help? Would Lynch’s tarmac idea have trumped Comey’s phony investigation? Would Glen Simpson now be White House press secretary, James Comey Clinton’s CIA director; would Andrew McCabe be Comey’s replacement at the FBI? What now appears clearly unethical and probably illegal would have passed as normal in a likely 16-year Obama-Clinton progressive continuum. In reductionist terms, every single scandal that has so far surfaced at the FBI and DOJ share a common catalyst. What now appears clearly unethical and probably illegal would have passed as normal in a likely 16-year Obama-Clinton progressive continuum.
A final paradox: Why did so many federal officials and officeholders act so unethically and likely illegally when they were convinced of a Clinton landslide? Why the overkill? The answer to that paradox lies in human nature and can be explored through the hubris and nemesis of Greek tragedy — or the 1972 petty burgling of a Watergate complex apartment when Richard Nixon really was on his way to a landslide victory. Needlessly weaponizing the Obama FBI and the DOJ was akin to Hillary Clinton’s insanely campaigning in the last days of the 2016 campaign in red-state Arizona, the supposed “cherry atop a pleasing electoral map.” I
In short, such hubris was not just what Peter Strzok in August 2016 termed an “insurance policy” against an unlikely Trump victory. Instead, the Clinton and Obama officials believed that it was within the administrative state’s grasp and their perceived political interest not just to beat but to destroy and humiliate Donald Trump — and by extension all the distasteful deplorables and irredeemables he supposedly had galvanized.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455885/expected-clinton-victory-explains-federal-employee-wrongdoing
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Monday, January 29, 2018
Democrats Are the New Palestinians on Immigration
Democrats Are the New Palestinians on Immigration
CHAT 375 COMMENTS
Just as the Palestinians twenty-five years and four significant offers after Oslo have demonstrated they really don't want a two-state solution with the Israelis, Democrats have now revealed they don't want to solve the U.S. immigration problem.
As with the Palestinians, it's all a shell game.
Donald Trump just offered the Dems an agreement on DACA that gives two million "Dreamers" a pathway to full citizenship after 10-12 years -- something not even done by Barack Obama! -- and the Dems didn't even want to discuss the proposal. All that happened was their increasingly unhinged minority leader screamed Trump was "making America safe for white people!"
Wonder if the rabid press dogs who all but rolled on the floor begging that Navy doctor to say Trump was somehow unfit or senile after scoring 100% on a cognitive test would demand the same thirty questions be put to Ms. Pelosi?
Never mind. The point is that Pelosi revealed herself to be a repellent racist... or racialist (someone who plays the race card no matter what). More importantly, the Democratic Party unmasked themselves as not all that interested in the "Dreamers" as people. They just want to make the Republicans look, well, racist and lose elections. Otherwise they would be jumping up and down for this proposal.
Call this "projection politics." Play it long enough and you turn into the very thing you claim the other is. Of course, the Democrats have been playing this so long they really could have been called the Race Party years ago. Other than racial and sexual name calling, they appear to have no policies whatsoever, except opposition to the current administration, no matter what that administration proposes. (If the administration proposed socialized medicine, they'd probably be against that too.)
In this case, they are opposing Trump's desire to exchange full citizenship for the "Dreamers" for a more rational immigration system that accepts immigrants largely on the basis of skills they offer society. (This is what "wildly conservative" Canada does, as do others.) He wants to put an end to the ridiculous visa diversity lottery, which is a kind of admission ticket for terrorists, and chain migration. He also, of course, wants 25 billion for a border wall and other forms of border security
These proposals will no doubt be on offer during the State of the Union on Tuesday. I'm not particularly happy with full citizenship for the "Dreamers." I'd prefer what Obama originally recommended, a form of renewable work and study permits. Call me old fashioned, but I believe the vote (that's what full citizenship means) should only go to those who played by the rules and waited in line in the first place, like most of our families, no matter where they came from.
But I'm willing to compromise, as are people who clearly have more say in the issue, Senators Purdue and Cotton. The question is whether the Democrats are willing to. If they're not, they are in deep trouble because the Trump administration is completely in synch with a public that in all recent polling seeks more restrictive legal immigration by a vast majority.
By playing identity politics, the Dems have won (a little) in the short run but, even though demographics seem to be running in their favor, will lose big time in the end. And not just because identity politics is immoral and discriminatory. That's obvious. It's because it won't work at all if the economy continues to boom. Blacks, Hispanics and women are going to work as never before and beginning to see through how they've been exploited. Change is happening. The Democrats are in the reactionary position of having to wish for or engineer an American economic failure to make their even more reactionary policies succeed. Pathetic, no?
But all is not lost for them. All they need is a little new leadership. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas would be willing to immigrate and come work for them. There's no one better at obstructionist policies. Of course, he'd have to stand in line.
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Anatomy of a Farce
Anatomy of a Farce
by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY January 13, 2018
Fusion GPS founder’s testimony shows how we got the collusion narrative . . . and why it won’t go away. Someone with fourth-hand knowledge that the bank was robbed claims that Smith conspired — er, I mean, colluded — with the local organized-crime family to rob the bank. Jones figures it must be true because he heard it from a trusted friend, a former cop — and you know those guys have great sources. Yet, Jones has no concrete evidence that it’s true. In fact, he can’t even prove that the mobsters had anything to do with the robbery, much less that Smith did. But Jones is an industrious investigative journalist. Long before the bank was robbed, he conducted months of in-depth research and came to a single, unalterable, unassailable conclusion: Smith is a really crappy guy.
He is a grade-A louche with mafia business partners and a decades-long record of financial shenanigans that walk the razor’s edge of actionable fraud. Born into wealth, he puts on the airs of the self-made man. When he’s in town, hide the women away. If he says he’ll pay you for a job, get it in writing . . . and make sure he still needs you when it’s time to pay up. Better have a good lawyer on retainer, too, just in case. Smith’s books are undoubtedly cooked, but they’re better hidden than Jimmy Hoffa — and yeah, you can bet he knows something about that, too. Here’s what totally infuriates Jones, though: Smith seems to skate from debacle to debacle not only unscathed but ever more audacious. If you knew what Jones knows, rather than what the public thinks it knows, you wouldn’t trust Smith to run a 7-Eleven — yet, Smith sees himself as White House material! Do you feel the frustration, the indignation that Jones feels in our hypothetical? If you do, then you know what it’s like to be Glenn Simpson.
The former Wall Street Journal reporter is a superb investigative journalist. More notoriously these days, he is the founder of Fusion GPS. It was he, in cahoots with his friend and collaborator, former British spy Christopher Steele, who orchestrated the compilation and dissemination of the so-called Steele dossier — the fons et origo of the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. We now know the dossier was covertly commissioned by the Clinton campaign, which dealt with Fusion through a layer of lawyers. Yet, we were not aware of that nearly five months ago. That was when Simpson gave nine hours of articulate but dodgy testimony to Senate Judiciary Committee investigators. The 312-page transcript of the session was released this week by the committee’s senior Democrat, Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.). Significantly, Simpson’s dodges included for whom and with whom he was working. Simpson has explained, unwittingly I think, both why there is a collusion narrative and why Trump has refrained from ordering his subordinates to cooperate with Congress’s probes. We’ll get to that. It is of greater moment to observe that Simpson’s testimony is the most enlightening information we have seen in over a year of collusion craze.
To cut to the chase: Simpson has explained, unwittingly I think, both why there is a collusion narrative and why President Trump, who could blow up the narrative by declassifying intelligence records, has refrained from ordering his subordinates to cooperate with Congress’s probes. –– learn more See, Simpson’s got nothing. Even if we had not learned that the dossier is a partisan opposition-research screed, the Trump–Russia narrative it spouts is a house of cards. But here’s the thing: Good investigative journalists who dabble in partisan politics can be great at making nothing look like something. I know this from my former life. All trial lawyers must be versed in this dark art — hopefully more to guard against than practice it. It is a particular danger with prosecutors. That is why the law builds in due-process safeguards like reasonable doubt, the presumption of innocence, and the right to counsel. The ability to make nothing look like something sinister is why it is famously observed that a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich in the grand jury, where these safeguards do not apply. You know where else those safeguards have no application? In the black hole we call “counterintelligence investigations” — such as Trump–Russia.
And in investigative journalism. How do you make someone look guilty of something he hasn’t done? You erect a formidable circumstantial case around the big hole in the middle — the hole that, in a normal case, would be filled by evidence that the suspect actually committed the crime. You don’t so much cover the hole as create distractions from it. The biggest distraction is bad character: You must establish that your suspect is a five-alarm rogue. This is the fun part, the part you can feel righteous about. By the time you’re done, people will want to believe the scoundrel has done whatever he’s charged with. Indeed, if you’re the maestro, you’ve probably even convinced yourself that this sort of morality play is, shall we say, a well-meaning “insurance policy” against the ruinous harm the accused would surely do unless we convicted him of . . . something. The rest is smoke and mirrors: Unable to demonstrate the actual commission of the offense, you compensate by showing, in dizzying detail, that all the conditions are in place for the crime to have happened just the way you claim it did. This doesn’t actually prove that that our suspect did anything wrong, just that he could have — or as you will call it: Corroboration!
To complete the web of suspicion, we sprinkle in the expert investigator. He has sources. We can’t say who they are, of course — that would be a security breach. But look, this guy is a pro. Not only are his snitches telling him our suspect is guilty; it seems that the sources’ stories get better every time a new detail about our suspect leaks out in the press. Funny how that happens. Selective Outrage Glenn Simpson made a number of mistakes, but the main one is a habit of smart people: He ignored the wisdom he urged on others. Never “predetermine the result that you’re looking for,” he told the committee. Follow the trail wherever it leads. Check your biases. In the investigations business, he opined, one should resist hiring ideological people. They come at the puzzle with their minds made up about what the completed picture must look like. They force the mismatched pieces together and fill in the blanks with their prejudices rather than remembering that there are no substitutes for fact. Glenn Simpson ignored the wisdom he urged on others.
Never ‘predetermine the result that you’re looking for,’ he told the committee. Follow the trail wherever it leads. Check your biases. Simpson decided Trump was a terrible, compromised guy. That made it easy to decide the Russians had compromised him. While Simpson poses as the gold standard of objectivity, his actions tell the story of a fellow powerfully swayed by whoever happens to be paying him. He is outraged by debauched character, but it is selective outrage. In his testimony, he made it his mission to abominate William Browder (of Magnitsky Act fame). Browder, you see, was the prime mover behind the case against Simpson’s client, Prevezon Holdings, a business he helped defend from a Justice Department forfeiture action. That civil lawsuit was relevant to the committee hearing because Prevezon has deep Kremlin connections. Not the least of these is the shady Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was meeting with Simpson throughout the same June 2016 trip to America during which she met with top Trump-campaign officials (Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort). Veselnitskaya even shared some of Simpson’s Browder research with Team Trump — according to her convoluted theory, the information might damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign by dirtying up some Clinton donors. In Simpson’s just-the-facts-ma’am telling, Browder is a charlatan. But what about Prevezon and the Katsyv family — i.e., the Putin cronies behind Prevezon? Gee, all Simpson could say was he met the client through the highly respected law firm of BakerHostetler. Suddenly passive, he figured law firms are supposed to vet their clients, so they must be legit, right? And what about Veselnitskaya? Well, she seemed to Simpson like a smart, ambitious lawyer. Wait, what about her Putin-regime ties? Our meticulous investigative journalist has somehow resisted any urge to dig into that. Turns out that, on Prevezon’s behalf, Veselnitskaya was paying BakerHostetler, which was paying Simpson and Fusion GPS.
But wait, Glenn, you had dinner with her right before and right after her Trump Tower confab. Surely she must have said something? Funny thing about that: When Simpson wants to tell you about things Russian, he is encyclopedic, right down to the roster of “the Solntsevo Brotherhood,” Moscow’s most feared mafia clan. But ask him about Natalia Veselnitskaya and, well, he’s sorry he can’t help you — see, she’s not fluent in English and, shucks, he doesn’t speak Russian, so who knows what she was jabbering about? Unfit Simpson’s Trump research project had two phases. In the first, during the Republican primaries when he was being paid by conservative-leaning clients, Simpson did the kind of research he excels at: scrubbing public records, piecing together the financial paper trail of Trump’s global business enterprises.
By early 2016, he’d made up his mind: Donald Trump was a dangerously creepy fraud who should not get anywhere near the presidency. It is not a conclusion he came to lightly. Simpson determined that Trump was closely associated with a Russian organized crime figure, Felix Sater — a business partner whom Trump had falsely claimed he wouldn’t know if he ran into him. According to published reports, Sater is suspected in the theft of billions of dollars from the Kazakh government. Simpson figured out that some of the Trump organization’s money flowed in from Kazakhstan. He further learned that Sater and Trump were involved together in a company that built the Trump SoHo project in New York. Simpson, moreover, tracked down scattered Trump financial information from required public filings. He studied the testimony of the litigious Trump in various cases. The journalist concluded that the magnate overstated his wealth for public consumption and understated it for tax purposes. Simpson dug deeply into the riddle of how someone could purportedly retain a billion dollars in personal assets despite repeatedly driving businesses into bankruptcy. Digesting it all, Simpson testified, “I reached an opinion about Donald Trump and his suitability to be president of the United States.” Trump, he concluded, was unfit, for reasons “of character and competence.” Simpson conveys this judgment with great persuasive force.
There are just two problems. what Simpson was able to prove might establish that Trump was unfit to be president, but it does not establish that Trump colluded with Russia. First, we do not conduct elections by having informed statesmen vet the candidates one at a time. Ours is a messy democratic process, which comes down to a choice between two nominees. This brings us back to Simpson’s blind spot: Trump’s opponent was the Democrat who was paying for Simpson’s second round of research: The May–November 2016 Trump–Russia project. That is a fact Simpson chose to conceal in his testimony. No wonder: Hillary Clinton matched Trump sleaze for sleaze. That doesn’t make Simpson’s concerns about Trump any less real, but it does sap much of their dispositive force. Second, what Simpson was able to prove might establish that Trump was unfit to be president, but it does not establish that Trump colluded with Russia.
The voters, not Simpson, get to decide who becomes president. Thus, the only pending question on which Simpson matters is whether there is a Trump–Russia conspiracy. On that question, Simpson’s showing cannot bear close scrutiny. Smoke and Mirrors That is true even on Simpson’s own terms. He concedes that the second phase of his investigation — i.e., the Clinton-sponsored Trump–Russia phase — is based not on a remorseless documentary record, the kind of evidence that is Simpson’s bread and butter. It is based on human intelligence in all its frailties. Simpson admits that, in his fact-based research business, human intelligence is not very helpful because “the question of whether something is accurate isn’t really asked. The question is whether it’s credible.” If you don’t know the human sources, if you can’t independently verify them, then you can’t judge their credibility. What human intelligence tells you is often intriguing, but it’s just as often wrong. If it can’t be corroborated, it rarely proves anything. So, what did Simpson do? Just as he trusted the respected law firm of BakerHostetler to vouch for its upstanding Kremlin-connected client in the Prevezon case, so too did he trust the respected former intelligence agent Christopher Steele to vouch for Steele’s anonymous Russian sources. But how do we know Steele’s good reputation is justified? We don’t. Simpson and the FBI are keen on him, but of course they’re invested here. As for the rest of us, we note that Steele’s profession is intelligence, not law enforcement. He has no track record of arrests and convictions, we can’t evaluate him on the basis of how his investigative work has stacked up when courts and defense lawyers start poking and prodding. As Simpson put it, “human intelligence isn’t good for . . . filing lawsuits.” A lot of it is highly attenuated hearsay, a telephone game remote from admissible evidence. Steele may have had a good career, but our snapshot of his work is not flattering. In the dossier, some of the work is dated, some not, and at least one key date is wrong. Once his work was publicized, people he implicated vigorously denied his allegations and sued for libel. Far from refuting their protestations, Steele’s reaction has been to say his reports were “raw” and “unverified.” In truth, the dossier was never meant to see the light of day. He is not claiming that its allegations are true; rather, they were passed along to him by sources of varying levels of reliability.
It is Simpson who vouches for Steele, not Steele himself. The latter says his rumor-ridden reports need to be run down by trained investigators. Except the FBI has been running them down for a year and a half now and, according to what former director James Comey said in Senate testimony last June, the bureau still has not corroborated Steele’s key allegations. One thing we do know is that the most critical detail in Simpson’s testimony about the dossier was wildly wrong. Repeatedly, Simpson claimed that Steele told him the FBI had a source inside the Trump campaign whose information matched up with what Steele was telling the bureau — that’s why Steele thought the FBI believed him. Except it turned out there was no inside source. Simpson was probably referring to an Australian diplomat who had a boozy conversation with George Papadopoulos (a young campaign aide) about the Russians claiming to have Hillary Clinton’s emails. Either Steele got this crucial detail hopelessly wrong or he conveyed it to Simpson in a manner that was woefully confused. Either way, it does not commend their work. And just how did they work? Steele has a network of unidentified Russian informants who knew he was beating the bushes for unsavory information about Trump — of which there is no shortage. The press reported on nauseatingly ingratiating remarks Trump made about Putin, speculating that maybe there’s something corrupt afoot. As night follows day, Steele started hearing about a corruption scheme. Trump hired Paul Manafort to run his campaign; next thing you know, Steele’s sources were saying they heard Manafort, with longstanding ties to a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian party, was managing the big Trump–Russia conspiracy. Carter Page, a tangential Trump adviser, went to Russia to make a speech. Steele’s crack informant network suddenly had Page in the middle of the scheme, meeting with top Putin operatives as Manafort’s emissary. Steele couldn’t prove that the meetings actually happened, or that Page even knows Manafort (which he apparently doesn’t). No matter: Fusion did some digging and found that if there were a scheme, these are the operatives who’d be in on it; and if there were a corrupt quid pro quo, these are the operatives who would be in a position to negotiate it. Corroboration! Meanwhile, Simpson and Steele decided that America was at risk, so Steele went to his friends at the FBI. Like Simpson, the FBI had already concluded that Trump was dangerously unfit and that Steele (who helped them on their FIFA soccer investigation) was an impeccable investigator. Interestingly, Simpson insisted to the committee that going to the FBI was Steele’s idea — that Simpson and Fusion absolutely did not contact the bureau.
What Simpson conveniently left out was that Nellie Ohr, one of the Fusion staffers he refused to identify, was a Russia expert who worked on Steele’s project and just happened to be married to top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr. We now know that Ohr had personal meetings with Steele and Simpson. In their FISA-court application, the Justice Department and FBI had a strong incentive to load it up with anything they thought they had on Trump. As the FBI and the Justice Department got the FISA wheels spinning, intelligence officials briefed Congress on Steele’s allegations. Naturally, Democratic leaders demanded that Trump’s ties to Putin be probed. At the same time, in the campaign stretch run, Simpson and Steele went to the media to tell them not only about Steele’s findings of Trump–Russia corruption but also that Steele was working with the FBI. Translation: This must be credible, because it is being investigated. And that’s exactly how it was reported. It is the anatomy of a farce. The frantic churning of hearsay and innuendo about bad guys who, being bad guys, must have been doing bad things. But at the core, there is no concrete, admissible evidence of an espionage or corruption conspiracy; no solid identified sources, no verifiable wrongdoing. A circle of relentless suspicion with a hole in the middle where the crime is supposed to be. Blackmail and Blackout That being the case, why doesn’t President Trump just expose it? Why doesn’t he tell the intelligence agencies to declassify the relevant data? If the Justice Department and FBI abused their intelligence-collection authority by seeking a FISA-court warrant based on unverified information, if they in any way gulled a federal judge into believing that Steele’s rumor-mongering was refined U.S. intelligence reporting, why not disclose that misconduct and put the collusion chatter to rest? Because, while Steele’s allegations may have been part of the Justice Department’s application for spying authority, perhaps even an essential part, you can bet the house that it is not the only information in the application. Remember what we said: If you don’t have evidence of an offense, you must compensate with evidence of bad character. Here, the Justice Department and the FBI are in the same posture as Glenn Simpson: They may not have had a collusion case on Donald Trump, but they surely had lots of intelligence tying him to bad people and unsavory activity. Repeatedly in his testimony, Simpson said he and Steele were most alarmed that the Putin regime had blackmail material on Trump — information so egregious that it could enable the Kremlin to control the president of the United States. That, they insisted, is why it had to be investigated.
Now, there is always a chance that this is not true. Maybe Simpson overstated what the documentary record says about Trump. Maybe the FBI doesn’t have extensive evidence of organized-crime contacts and shady dealing. But let’s be real: Even people who supported Donald Trump, or at least the many who grudgingly voted for him because the alternative was Hillary Clinton, are under no illusions. And just as Steele figured the public would never see his dossier, the Justice Department and FBI must have figured the public would never see their classified FISA-court application, especially after President Hillary Clinton took office. Thus, they had a strong incentive to load it up with anything they thought they had on Trump. If, echoing Simpson and Steele, the Justice Department and FBI told the court that an investigation was necessary because Trump was vulnerable to blackmail by Putin, what kind of information do you suppose must be in the FISA application?
Even if that information doesn’t prove collusion, and even if some or all of it is suspect, would you want such an application disclosed if you were the president? .
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455426/steele-dossier-fusion-gps-glenn-simpson-trump-russia-investigation
by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY January 13, 2018
Fusion GPS founder’s testimony shows how we got the collusion narrative . . . and why it won’t go away. Someone with fourth-hand knowledge that the bank was robbed claims that Smith conspired — er, I mean, colluded — with the local organized-crime family to rob the bank. Jones figures it must be true because he heard it from a trusted friend, a former cop — and you know those guys have great sources. Yet, Jones has no concrete evidence that it’s true. In fact, he can’t even prove that the mobsters had anything to do with the robbery, much less that Smith did. But Jones is an industrious investigative journalist. Long before the bank was robbed, he conducted months of in-depth research and came to a single, unalterable, unassailable conclusion: Smith is a really crappy guy.
He is a grade-A louche with mafia business partners and a decades-long record of financial shenanigans that walk the razor’s edge of actionable fraud. Born into wealth, he puts on the airs of the self-made man. When he’s in town, hide the women away. If he says he’ll pay you for a job, get it in writing . . . and make sure he still needs you when it’s time to pay up. Better have a good lawyer on retainer, too, just in case. Smith’s books are undoubtedly cooked, but they’re better hidden than Jimmy Hoffa — and yeah, you can bet he knows something about that, too. Here’s what totally infuriates Jones, though: Smith seems to skate from debacle to debacle not only unscathed but ever more audacious. If you knew what Jones knows, rather than what the public thinks it knows, you wouldn’t trust Smith to run a 7-Eleven — yet, Smith sees himself as White House material! Do you feel the frustration, the indignation that Jones feels in our hypothetical? If you do, then you know what it’s like to be Glenn Simpson.
The former Wall Street Journal reporter is a superb investigative journalist. More notoriously these days, he is the founder of Fusion GPS. It was he, in cahoots with his friend and collaborator, former British spy Christopher Steele, who orchestrated the compilation and dissemination of the so-called Steele dossier — the fons et origo of the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. We now know the dossier was covertly commissioned by the Clinton campaign, which dealt with Fusion through a layer of lawyers. Yet, we were not aware of that nearly five months ago. That was when Simpson gave nine hours of articulate but dodgy testimony to Senate Judiciary Committee investigators. The 312-page transcript of the session was released this week by the committee’s senior Democrat, Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.). Significantly, Simpson’s dodges included for whom and with whom he was working. Simpson has explained, unwittingly I think, both why there is a collusion narrative and why Trump has refrained from ordering his subordinates to cooperate with Congress’s probes. We’ll get to that. It is of greater moment to observe that Simpson’s testimony is the most enlightening information we have seen in over a year of collusion craze.
To cut to the chase: Simpson has explained, unwittingly I think, both why there is a collusion narrative and why President Trump, who could blow up the narrative by declassifying intelligence records, has refrained from ordering his subordinates to cooperate with Congress’s probes. –– learn more See, Simpson’s got nothing. Even if we had not learned that the dossier is a partisan opposition-research screed, the Trump–Russia narrative it spouts is a house of cards. But here’s the thing: Good investigative journalists who dabble in partisan politics can be great at making nothing look like something. I know this from my former life. All trial lawyers must be versed in this dark art — hopefully more to guard against than practice it. It is a particular danger with prosecutors. That is why the law builds in due-process safeguards like reasonable doubt, the presumption of innocence, and the right to counsel. The ability to make nothing look like something sinister is why it is famously observed that a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich in the grand jury, where these safeguards do not apply. You know where else those safeguards have no application? In the black hole we call “counterintelligence investigations” — such as Trump–Russia.
And in investigative journalism. How do you make someone look guilty of something he hasn’t done? You erect a formidable circumstantial case around the big hole in the middle — the hole that, in a normal case, would be filled by evidence that the suspect actually committed the crime. You don’t so much cover the hole as create distractions from it. The biggest distraction is bad character: You must establish that your suspect is a five-alarm rogue. This is the fun part, the part you can feel righteous about. By the time you’re done, people will want to believe the scoundrel has done whatever he’s charged with. Indeed, if you’re the maestro, you’ve probably even convinced yourself that this sort of morality play is, shall we say, a well-meaning “insurance policy” against the ruinous harm the accused would surely do unless we convicted him of . . . something. The rest is smoke and mirrors: Unable to demonstrate the actual commission of the offense, you compensate by showing, in dizzying detail, that all the conditions are in place for the crime to have happened just the way you claim it did. This doesn’t actually prove that that our suspect did anything wrong, just that he could have — or as you will call it: Corroboration!
To complete the web of suspicion, we sprinkle in the expert investigator. He has sources. We can’t say who they are, of course — that would be a security breach. But look, this guy is a pro. Not only are his snitches telling him our suspect is guilty; it seems that the sources’ stories get better every time a new detail about our suspect leaks out in the press. Funny how that happens. Selective Outrage Glenn Simpson made a number of mistakes, but the main one is a habit of smart people: He ignored the wisdom he urged on others. Never “predetermine the result that you’re looking for,” he told the committee. Follow the trail wherever it leads. Check your biases. In the investigations business, he opined, one should resist hiring ideological people. They come at the puzzle with their minds made up about what the completed picture must look like. They force the mismatched pieces together and fill in the blanks with their prejudices rather than remembering that there are no substitutes for fact. Glenn Simpson ignored the wisdom he urged on others.
Never ‘predetermine the result that you’re looking for,’ he told the committee. Follow the trail wherever it leads. Check your biases. Simpson decided Trump was a terrible, compromised guy. That made it easy to decide the Russians had compromised him. While Simpson poses as the gold standard of objectivity, his actions tell the story of a fellow powerfully swayed by whoever happens to be paying him. He is outraged by debauched character, but it is selective outrage. In his testimony, he made it his mission to abominate William Browder (of Magnitsky Act fame). Browder, you see, was the prime mover behind the case against Simpson’s client, Prevezon Holdings, a business he helped defend from a Justice Department forfeiture action. That civil lawsuit was relevant to the committee hearing because Prevezon has deep Kremlin connections. Not the least of these is the shady Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was meeting with Simpson throughout the same June 2016 trip to America during which she met with top Trump-campaign officials (Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort). Veselnitskaya even shared some of Simpson’s Browder research with Team Trump — according to her convoluted theory, the information might damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign by dirtying up some Clinton donors. In Simpson’s just-the-facts-ma’am telling, Browder is a charlatan. But what about Prevezon and the Katsyv family — i.e., the Putin cronies behind Prevezon? Gee, all Simpson could say was he met the client through the highly respected law firm of BakerHostetler. Suddenly passive, he figured law firms are supposed to vet their clients, so they must be legit, right? And what about Veselnitskaya? Well, she seemed to Simpson like a smart, ambitious lawyer. Wait, what about her Putin-regime ties? Our meticulous investigative journalist has somehow resisted any urge to dig into that. Turns out that, on Prevezon’s behalf, Veselnitskaya was paying BakerHostetler, which was paying Simpson and Fusion GPS.
But wait, Glenn, you had dinner with her right before and right after her Trump Tower confab. Surely she must have said something? Funny thing about that: When Simpson wants to tell you about things Russian, he is encyclopedic, right down to the roster of “the Solntsevo Brotherhood,” Moscow’s most feared mafia clan. But ask him about Natalia Veselnitskaya and, well, he’s sorry he can’t help you — see, she’s not fluent in English and, shucks, he doesn’t speak Russian, so who knows what she was jabbering about? Unfit Simpson’s Trump research project had two phases. In the first, during the Republican primaries when he was being paid by conservative-leaning clients, Simpson did the kind of research he excels at: scrubbing public records, piecing together the financial paper trail of Trump’s global business enterprises.
By early 2016, he’d made up his mind: Donald Trump was a dangerously creepy fraud who should not get anywhere near the presidency. It is not a conclusion he came to lightly. Simpson determined that Trump was closely associated with a Russian organized crime figure, Felix Sater — a business partner whom Trump had falsely claimed he wouldn’t know if he ran into him. According to published reports, Sater is suspected in the theft of billions of dollars from the Kazakh government. Simpson figured out that some of the Trump organization’s money flowed in from Kazakhstan. He further learned that Sater and Trump were involved together in a company that built the Trump SoHo project in New York. Simpson, moreover, tracked down scattered Trump financial information from required public filings. He studied the testimony of the litigious Trump in various cases. The journalist concluded that the magnate overstated his wealth for public consumption and understated it for tax purposes. Simpson dug deeply into the riddle of how someone could purportedly retain a billion dollars in personal assets despite repeatedly driving businesses into bankruptcy. Digesting it all, Simpson testified, “I reached an opinion about Donald Trump and his suitability to be president of the United States.” Trump, he concluded, was unfit, for reasons “of character and competence.” Simpson conveys this judgment with great persuasive force.
There are just two problems. what Simpson was able to prove might establish that Trump was unfit to be president, but it does not establish that Trump colluded with Russia. First, we do not conduct elections by having informed statesmen vet the candidates one at a time. Ours is a messy democratic process, which comes down to a choice between two nominees. This brings us back to Simpson’s blind spot: Trump’s opponent was the Democrat who was paying for Simpson’s second round of research: The May–November 2016 Trump–Russia project. That is a fact Simpson chose to conceal in his testimony. No wonder: Hillary Clinton matched Trump sleaze for sleaze. That doesn’t make Simpson’s concerns about Trump any less real, but it does sap much of their dispositive force. Second, what Simpson was able to prove might establish that Trump was unfit to be president, but it does not establish that Trump colluded with Russia.
The voters, not Simpson, get to decide who becomes president. Thus, the only pending question on which Simpson matters is whether there is a Trump–Russia conspiracy. On that question, Simpson’s showing cannot bear close scrutiny. Smoke and Mirrors That is true even on Simpson’s own terms. He concedes that the second phase of his investigation — i.e., the Clinton-sponsored Trump–Russia phase — is based not on a remorseless documentary record, the kind of evidence that is Simpson’s bread and butter. It is based on human intelligence in all its frailties. Simpson admits that, in his fact-based research business, human intelligence is not very helpful because “the question of whether something is accurate isn’t really asked. The question is whether it’s credible.” If you don’t know the human sources, if you can’t independently verify them, then you can’t judge their credibility. What human intelligence tells you is often intriguing, but it’s just as often wrong. If it can’t be corroborated, it rarely proves anything. So, what did Simpson do? Just as he trusted the respected law firm of BakerHostetler to vouch for its upstanding Kremlin-connected client in the Prevezon case, so too did he trust the respected former intelligence agent Christopher Steele to vouch for Steele’s anonymous Russian sources. But how do we know Steele’s good reputation is justified? We don’t. Simpson and the FBI are keen on him, but of course they’re invested here. As for the rest of us, we note that Steele’s profession is intelligence, not law enforcement. He has no track record of arrests and convictions, we can’t evaluate him on the basis of how his investigative work has stacked up when courts and defense lawyers start poking and prodding. As Simpson put it, “human intelligence isn’t good for . . . filing lawsuits.” A lot of it is highly attenuated hearsay, a telephone game remote from admissible evidence. Steele may have had a good career, but our snapshot of his work is not flattering. In the dossier, some of the work is dated, some not, and at least one key date is wrong. Once his work was publicized, people he implicated vigorously denied his allegations and sued for libel. Far from refuting their protestations, Steele’s reaction has been to say his reports were “raw” and “unverified.” In truth, the dossier was never meant to see the light of day. He is not claiming that its allegations are true; rather, they were passed along to him by sources of varying levels of reliability.
It is Simpson who vouches for Steele, not Steele himself. The latter says his rumor-ridden reports need to be run down by trained investigators. Except the FBI has been running them down for a year and a half now and, according to what former director James Comey said in Senate testimony last June, the bureau still has not corroborated Steele’s key allegations. One thing we do know is that the most critical detail in Simpson’s testimony about the dossier was wildly wrong. Repeatedly, Simpson claimed that Steele told him the FBI had a source inside the Trump campaign whose information matched up with what Steele was telling the bureau — that’s why Steele thought the FBI believed him. Except it turned out there was no inside source. Simpson was probably referring to an Australian diplomat who had a boozy conversation with George Papadopoulos (a young campaign aide) about the Russians claiming to have Hillary Clinton’s emails. Either Steele got this crucial detail hopelessly wrong or he conveyed it to Simpson in a manner that was woefully confused. Either way, it does not commend their work. And just how did they work? Steele has a network of unidentified Russian informants who knew he was beating the bushes for unsavory information about Trump — of which there is no shortage. The press reported on nauseatingly ingratiating remarks Trump made about Putin, speculating that maybe there’s something corrupt afoot. As night follows day, Steele started hearing about a corruption scheme. Trump hired Paul Manafort to run his campaign; next thing you know, Steele’s sources were saying they heard Manafort, with longstanding ties to a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian party, was managing the big Trump–Russia conspiracy. Carter Page, a tangential Trump adviser, went to Russia to make a speech. Steele’s crack informant network suddenly had Page in the middle of the scheme, meeting with top Putin operatives as Manafort’s emissary. Steele couldn’t prove that the meetings actually happened, or that Page even knows Manafort (which he apparently doesn’t). No matter: Fusion did some digging and found that if there were a scheme, these are the operatives who’d be in on it; and if there were a corrupt quid pro quo, these are the operatives who would be in a position to negotiate it. Corroboration! Meanwhile, Simpson and Steele decided that America was at risk, so Steele went to his friends at the FBI. Like Simpson, the FBI had already concluded that Trump was dangerously unfit and that Steele (who helped them on their FIFA soccer investigation) was an impeccable investigator. Interestingly, Simpson insisted to the committee that going to the FBI was Steele’s idea — that Simpson and Fusion absolutely did not contact the bureau.
What Simpson conveniently left out was that Nellie Ohr, one of the Fusion staffers he refused to identify, was a Russia expert who worked on Steele’s project and just happened to be married to top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr. We now know that Ohr had personal meetings with Steele and Simpson. In their FISA-court application, the Justice Department and FBI had a strong incentive to load it up with anything they thought they had on Trump. As the FBI and the Justice Department got the FISA wheels spinning, intelligence officials briefed Congress on Steele’s allegations. Naturally, Democratic leaders demanded that Trump’s ties to Putin be probed. At the same time, in the campaign stretch run, Simpson and Steele went to the media to tell them not only about Steele’s findings of Trump–Russia corruption but also that Steele was working with the FBI. Translation: This must be credible, because it is being investigated. And that’s exactly how it was reported. It is the anatomy of a farce. The frantic churning of hearsay and innuendo about bad guys who, being bad guys, must have been doing bad things. But at the core, there is no concrete, admissible evidence of an espionage or corruption conspiracy; no solid identified sources, no verifiable wrongdoing. A circle of relentless suspicion with a hole in the middle where the crime is supposed to be. Blackmail and Blackout That being the case, why doesn’t President Trump just expose it? Why doesn’t he tell the intelligence agencies to declassify the relevant data? If the Justice Department and FBI abused their intelligence-collection authority by seeking a FISA-court warrant based on unverified information, if they in any way gulled a federal judge into believing that Steele’s rumor-mongering was refined U.S. intelligence reporting, why not disclose that misconduct and put the collusion chatter to rest? Because, while Steele’s allegations may have been part of the Justice Department’s application for spying authority, perhaps even an essential part, you can bet the house that it is not the only information in the application. Remember what we said: If you don’t have evidence of an offense, you must compensate with evidence of bad character. Here, the Justice Department and the FBI are in the same posture as Glenn Simpson: They may not have had a collusion case on Donald Trump, but they surely had lots of intelligence tying him to bad people and unsavory activity. Repeatedly in his testimony, Simpson said he and Steele were most alarmed that the Putin regime had blackmail material on Trump — information so egregious that it could enable the Kremlin to control the president of the United States. That, they insisted, is why it had to be investigated.
Now, there is always a chance that this is not true. Maybe Simpson overstated what the documentary record says about Trump. Maybe the FBI doesn’t have extensive evidence of organized-crime contacts and shady dealing. But let’s be real: Even people who supported Donald Trump, or at least the many who grudgingly voted for him because the alternative was Hillary Clinton, are under no illusions. And just as Steele figured the public would never see his dossier, the Justice Department and FBI must have figured the public would never see their classified FISA-court application, especially after President Hillary Clinton took office. Thus, they had a strong incentive to load it up with anything they thought they had on Trump. If, echoing Simpson and Steele, the Justice Department and FBI told the court that an investigation was necessary because Trump was vulnerable to blackmail by Putin, what kind of information do you suppose must be in the FISA application?
Even if that information doesn’t prove collusion, and even if some or all of it is suspect, would you want such an application disclosed if you were the president? .
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455426/steele-dossier-fusion-gps-glenn-simpson-trump-russia-investigation
Can America Survive as a Post-Christian Nation?
Can America Survive as a Post-Christian Nation?
by DAVID FRENCH December 27, 2017 3:27 PM @DAVIDAFRENCH
We’re giving man back to his human nature. If I had to pick one of the most under-appreciated and under-reported stories of 2017, it would be that a post-Christian America is a more vicious America, and that the triumph of secularists is rendering America more polarized, not less. Remove from the public square biblical admonitions such as “love your enemies” and the hatred has more room to grow. When the fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control — wither, then the culture is far more coarse. Not everyone’s missing the story, of course. Both Ross Douthat and The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart have written powerfully on the topic, with Beinart noting how the rise of a post-Christian Left has mirrored the rise of a post-Christian Right. Beinart’s conclusion is correct:
For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse. In spite of these alarms, much of the elite media celebrates religious decline without seriously and realistically grappling with the consequences. There is so much underlying ignorance of and hostility toward orthodox Christianity in elite media circles that I fear they’re still trapped in the false belief that less Christianity means a better America. Much of this ignorance and hostility is rooted in the idea that Christianity itself is the source of contemporary cultural conflict.
In reality, a propensity toward division and conflict is deeply embedded in human nature. Tribalism reigns in the human heart. Religious differences can of course be a source of conflict, but a common Judeo-Christian culture also serves the invaluable purpose of providing rules and norms for controlling that conflict and creating the conditions for reconciliation. Flannery O’Connor once wrote that the South wasn’t “Christ-centered,” it was “Christ-haunted.” “The Southerner . . . is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.” Ghosts, she said, “can be very fierce and instructive.” While the South may be the most Christ-haunted American region, I’d argue that our entire nation has been so Christ-haunted that it has provided our common moral language, a moral language that has time and again proven “fierce and instructive” in political and cultural debate.
For example, as Beinart notes, the civil-rights movement was not only firmly located within the Christian church, it consistently (constantly, even) made explicitly Christian appeals to the larger American culture — appeals to moral norms that Americans were supposed to share. The great civil-rights leaders weren’t inventing a new morality; they were calling Americans to live by the moral norms they were already supposed to uphold. Younger Millennial activists — such as the leaders of Black Lives Matter — are much less likely to make explicit religious appeals and increasingly operate outside the church. Part of this is the natural byproduct of the fact that today’s young Americans attend church far less frequently than their parents or grandparents did. In addition, explicitly religious appeals have less purchase in a society that increasingly lacks a common set of religious views.
As countless commenters have noted, modern politicians often focus more on mobilization than on persuasion. While divisive, this approach represents the path of least resistance. It’s far easier to energize people who share your worldview than it is to persuade men and women who often don’t share your starting presumptions, don’t believe your faith, and construct their personal morality in substantially different ways. Some would argue that American Christian culture is being replaced by a separate, feel-good faith called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — a vague belief that while God exists, he’s not particularly involved in human affairs and mainly wants people to be nice and happy.
It’s a common moral code that applies to the conduct of one’s personal affairs; it is utterly inadequate, however, when it comes to addressing real human conflict and substantial cultural clashes. It provides no systematic moral worldview, and it ultimately leaves judgment of right and wrong to the individual conscience. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Millennial culture is that the failure to be “nice” is often met with the most brutal of reprisals. It’s okay — mandatory, even — to be cruel to the cruel and intolerant of the intolerant. In fact, it’s becoming plain that even some of our churches are becoming less “Christ-haunted,” to say nothing of “Christ-centered.” It’s a simple fact that our pews have long been filled with non-believers. Christ himself noted that the wheat and tares grow up together, and the non-believers in the pews are a reflection of a secularizing culture. Thus the rise of “ends justifies the means” political combat and the stunning lack of faith that motivated so many self-described Evangelicals’ belief that the church itself faced mortal danger in the 2016 presidential election.
When a nation lacks a common moral language and common religious culture, it frequently devolves into tribalism. When a nation lacks a common moral language and common religious culture, it frequently devolves into tribalism. Secular progressives have long seemed to assume that as Christianity receded, their own worldview would advance: Post-Christian America would look like post-Christian Europe, where it seemed that a particular worldview had largely prevailed. Yet America has always been different from Europe, and post-Christian America will evolve in its own distinct way, with Right and Left, urban and rural filling the moral and spiritual vacuum, often in ways that their cultural competitors view with loathing and contempt. Moreover, Europe hardly represents the secular ideal that many progressives imagine. It faces a strong challenge from Islam, and it’s seeing the reemergence of separatist forces that were once thought long vanquished. The Brexit vote captured the international imagination, but it’s easy to forget that less than two years before, Britain faced a referendum that threatened to divide a union older than our own. In short,
America is in the process of replacing a general worldview that prioritized love, hope, and truth with an individualized moral buffet that prioritizes personal satisfaction. We’re giving man back to his human nature — a nature beset by original sin and prone to tribalism. No one should assume that America can survive the change.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454971/post-christian-america-can-polarized-america-survive
by DAVID FRENCH December 27, 2017 3:27 PM @DAVIDAFRENCH
We’re giving man back to his human nature. If I had to pick one of the most under-appreciated and under-reported stories of 2017, it would be that a post-Christian America is a more vicious America, and that the triumph of secularists is rendering America more polarized, not less. Remove from the public square biblical admonitions such as “love your enemies” and the hatred has more room to grow. When the fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control — wither, then the culture is far more coarse. Not everyone’s missing the story, of course. Both Ross Douthat and The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart have written powerfully on the topic, with Beinart noting how the rise of a post-Christian Left has mirrored the rise of a post-Christian Right. Beinart’s conclusion is correct:
For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse. In spite of these alarms, much of the elite media celebrates religious decline without seriously and realistically grappling with the consequences. There is so much underlying ignorance of and hostility toward orthodox Christianity in elite media circles that I fear they’re still trapped in the false belief that less Christianity means a better America. Much of this ignorance and hostility is rooted in the idea that Christianity itself is the source of contemporary cultural conflict.
In reality, a propensity toward division and conflict is deeply embedded in human nature. Tribalism reigns in the human heart. Religious differences can of course be a source of conflict, but a common Judeo-Christian culture also serves the invaluable purpose of providing rules and norms for controlling that conflict and creating the conditions for reconciliation. Flannery O’Connor once wrote that the South wasn’t “Christ-centered,” it was “Christ-haunted.” “The Southerner . . . is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.” Ghosts, she said, “can be very fierce and instructive.” While the South may be the most Christ-haunted American region, I’d argue that our entire nation has been so Christ-haunted that it has provided our common moral language, a moral language that has time and again proven “fierce and instructive” in political and cultural debate.
For example, as Beinart notes, the civil-rights movement was not only firmly located within the Christian church, it consistently (constantly, even) made explicitly Christian appeals to the larger American culture — appeals to moral norms that Americans were supposed to share. The great civil-rights leaders weren’t inventing a new morality; they were calling Americans to live by the moral norms they were already supposed to uphold. Younger Millennial activists — such as the leaders of Black Lives Matter — are much less likely to make explicit religious appeals and increasingly operate outside the church. Part of this is the natural byproduct of the fact that today’s young Americans attend church far less frequently than their parents or grandparents did. In addition, explicitly religious appeals have less purchase in a society that increasingly lacks a common set of religious views.
As countless commenters have noted, modern politicians often focus more on mobilization than on persuasion. While divisive, this approach represents the path of least resistance. It’s far easier to energize people who share your worldview than it is to persuade men and women who often don’t share your starting presumptions, don’t believe your faith, and construct their personal morality in substantially different ways. Some would argue that American Christian culture is being replaced by a separate, feel-good faith called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — a vague belief that while God exists, he’s not particularly involved in human affairs and mainly wants people to be nice and happy.
It’s a common moral code that applies to the conduct of one’s personal affairs; it is utterly inadequate, however, when it comes to addressing real human conflict and substantial cultural clashes. It provides no systematic moral worldview, and it ultimately leaves judgment of right and wrong to the individual conscience. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Millennial culture is that the failure to be “nice” is often met with the most brutal of reprisals. It’s okay — mandatory, even — to be cruel to the cruel and intolerant of the intolerant. In fact, it’s becoming plain that even some of our churches are becoming less “Christ-haunted,” to say nothing of “Christ-centered.” It’s a simple fact that our pews have long been filled with non-believers. Christ himself noted that the wheat and tares grow up together, and the non-believers in the pews are a reflection of a secularizing culture. Thus the rise of “ends justifies the means” political combat and the stunning lack of faith that motivated so many self-described Evangelicals’ belief that the church itself faced mortal danger in the 2016 presidential election.
When a nation lacks a common moral language and common religious culture, it frequently devolves into tribalism. When a nation lacks a common moral language and common religious culture, it frequently devolves into tribalism. Secular progressives have long seemed to assume that as Christianity receded, their own worldview would advance: Post-Christian America would look like post-Christian Europe, where it seemed that a particular worldview had largely prevailed. Yet America has always been different from Europe, and post-Christian America will evolve in its own distinct way, with Right and Left, urban and rural filling the moral and spiritual vacuum, often in ways that their cultural competitors view with loathing and contempt. Moreover, Europe hardly represents the secular ideal that many progressives imagine. It faces a strong challenge from Islam, and it’s seeing the reemergence of separatist forces that were once thought long vanquished. The Brexit vote captured the international imagination, but it’s easy to forget that less than two years before, Britain faced a referendum that threatened to divide a union older than our own. In short,
America is in the process of replacing a general worldview that prioritized love, hope, and truth with an individualized moral buffet that prioritizes personal satisfaction. We’re giving man back to his human nature — a nature beset by original sin and prone to tribalism. No one should assume that America can survive the change.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454971/post-christian-america-can-polarized-america-survive
Friday, January 26, 2018
THE SAD DECLINE OF THE FBI: YOU READ IT HERE FIRST
THE SAD DECLINE OF THE FBI: YOU READ IT HERE FIRST [UPDATED]
The FBI scandals continue to unravel. Scott has chronicled the saga of the missing Strzok/Page text messages, now apparently on the road to recovery. The FBI has continued to stonewall Congressional investigations, to the point where Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley says the FBI is playing “a bureaucratic game of hide the ball.”
And House Republicans have prepared a four-page memo that apparently summarizes the FBI’s malfeasance in connection with the fake Trump dossier. Some who have read it say it may lead to criminal prosecutions within the Department of Justice. DOJ is demanding a look at the memo, but so far House Republicans won’t turn it over. Why? Because they know what Justice bureaucrats will do with it. They will leak it to their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post so they can preemptively attack the memo before the public gets to see it.
These scandals have been going on for quite a while, but people are finally beginning to notice. Howie Carr says it is time to abolish the FBI. Is that going too far? Maybe, but the Bureau has been coasting on its reputation for a long, long time. At a minimum, I would say that those who can be fired within the Bureau’s leadership, should be. Starting with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Rasmussen finds that a remarkable number of voters support appointment of another special counsel to investigate the FBI:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 49% of Likely U.S. Voters believe a special prosecutor should be named to investigate whether senior FBI officials handled the investigation of Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump in a legal and unbiased fashion. Thirty-one percent (31%) disagree, but a sizable 19% are not sure.
To say that the FBI has lost the confidence of the American people is an understatement. But it isn’t just the FBI; Barack Obama corrupted the Department of Justice from the top down. Those who were paying attention have known this for a long time. We started writing about the DOJ scandals early in Obama’s administration. I haven’t done a thorough search, and this may not be the first such instance, but on September 7, 2010, a year and a half into Obama’s first term, I wrote:
One of the real scandals these days is the way in which Barack Obama and Eric Holder have politicized the Department of Justice. The Democrats criticized the Bush administration for politicizing DOJ, but that was sheer fabrication. It didn’t happen. Immediately upon taking office, however, Obama and Holder embarked on a program of partisan law enforcement the likes of which this country may never have seen before.
A few months later, on January 28, 2011, I wrote:
The corruption of the Department of Justice under Barack Obama and Eric Holder is one of the saddest of many sad stories that have emerged from the Obama administration. Under Obama, the Department has been politicized to a degree this country has never experienced; certainly not in its modern history.
In the years that have gone by since then, Obama’s corruption of the Department of Justice, including but not limited to the FBI, has been a recurrent theme on this site. If “mainstream” reporters had joined us in blowing the whistle on DOJ’s rather obvious corruption under the Obama/Holder/Lynch regime, would we ever have gotten to the point where Loretta Lynch was meeting with Bill Clinton, apparently to assure him that Hillary was safe from prosecution, regardless of the evidence, while senior FBI officials huddled to discuss how they could prevent the outsider, Donald Trump, from assuming the presidency?
Perhaps not.
UPDATE: At the Hill, Sharyl Attkisson weighs in: “As walls close in on FBI, the bureau lashes out at its antagonists.”
Democrats and many in the media are taking the side of the intelligence community, calling the Republican efforts partisan. House Democrats are said to be writing a counter-memo.“We need to produce our own memo that lays out the actual facts and shows how the majority memo distorts the work of the FBI and the Department of Justice,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Which is consistent, obviously, with the fact that what we are dealing with here is the unprecedented politicization of the Department of Justice by Barack Obama and his minions.
Meantime, the Department of Justice has officially warned the House Intelligence Committee not to release its memo. It’s like the possible defendant in a criminal trial threatening prosecutors for having the audacity to reveal alleged evidence to the judge and jury.
More evidence of how far gone in Democratic Party partisanship the Department of Justice is. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a conservative Attorney General? Someone like Jeff Sessions?
This is the first time I can recall open government groups and many reporters joining in the argument to keep the information secret. They are strangely uncurious about alleged improprieties with implications of the worst kind: Stasi-like tactics used against Americans.
Actually, I don’t think it is surprising at all. “Jim Treacher” diagnosed this journalistic disease long ago:
Michael Ramirez gets the last word. Click to enlarge:
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Clinton Corruption Update: It’s All One Scandal
Clinton Corruption Update: It’s All One Scandal
Got slammed by the holidays, so this Clinton Corruption update is both extra late and extra huge. Unless I just start throwing stuff down wherever it even remotely fits, I’ll never finish this update. So let’s jump in!
(But first, take a look at Was Fusion GPS Allowed to Run Unsupervised FISA-702 Queries? if you haven’t already.)
Several Clinton scandals, and revelations from the ill-conceived Russia investigation, have been converging into a single scandal for months. With the Peter Strzok/Fusion GPS revelations, there’s no longer any gap between the various Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration unmasking scandals: it’s all one, big swampy scandal, with some of the same players showing up again and again, and Hillary Clinton is involved up to her chin.
Strzok, in case you hadn’t heard, is the FBI agent dismissed from Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. His text messages reveal that he’s a dedicated Trump hater:
He was also the one who sent a text to Lisa Page, the FBI lawyer he was having an affair with, stating how he was working on an “insurance policy” in case Trump became President.
More on Peter Strzok:
Now on to other Clinton Corruption news:
Need more information? This timeline of FBI/Clinton malfeasance may help.
Here’s a “state of play” piece Conservative Treehouse put up before their Fusion GPS/FISA-702 bombshell:
Mueller needs to release all the documents congress has requested. Also:
Remember how Hillary Clinton swore up and down she had no classified information on her illegal homebrew server? Well guess what: There were classified documents from that sever Huma Abedin had forwarded to her own account and stashed on husband Anthony Weiner’s computer.
And speaking of EmailGate:
“Christopher Wray Refuses to Say if Steele Dossier Was Used to Procure FISA Warrant.” That would be the current FBI director.
If you’re still confused as to just how deeply Fusion GPS (in the pay of the Clinton campaign, the DNC and Russian nationals) infiltrated America’s press corp, read this:
Lefty legal legend Alan Dershowitz says that Strzok should be punished:
Hillary gonna Hillary:
“The Anatomy Of Hillary Clinton’s $84 Million Money-Laundering Scheme.”
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton personally lifted the U.S. travel ban on terrorist-supporting accused rapist Tariq Ramadan. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Hey, Remember the Uranium One scandal, Hillary Clinton’s other other scandal? Well guess what? Indictments have been issued:
More thoughts on same.
“Obama State Department Let Clinton And Huma Make Off With Boxes Of ‘Muslim Engagement’ Docs.”
Could a Trump executive order lead to a crackdown and seizure of Clinton assets?
“A joint investigation by the Washington Examiner and the nonprofit watchdog group Judicial Watch found that former President Clinton gave 215 speeches and earned $48 million while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy, raising questions about whether the Clintons fulfilled ethics agreements related to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton‘s tenure as secretary of state.” Nice work if you can get it…
How Clinton cronies pay to manufacture fake news:
Why Democrats finally turnd on Bill Clinton:
Democrats are shocked, shocked to find out that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator. Remember all those Democrats who looked into allegations against Clinton when he was President? Me neither.
Despite all the “we’re free to call Bill Clinton a sexual predator now that Hillary will never run again” talk, don’t count on it. “Hillary Clinton never does anything spontaneously. Until further notice, we should assume she’s running to get back that which is *rightfully* hers.” And remember that the DNC recently purged all the non-Clinton DNC staffers.
Dolly Kyle, the women who claims to be Bill Clinton’s longtime mistress, claims that Bill Clinton has had over 2,00 sex partners and that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian. I would approach her claims with several pounds of salt.
Hillary Clinton said America was totally unprepared for the advent of artificial intelligence, then excused herself and asked directions to Sarah Conners’ house.
The New York Times ever-changing Trump Russia narrative:
Reminder: Chelsea Clinton used Clinton Foundation resources for her wedding. So say Wikileaks documents. Just in case you had forgotten…
Tags: Adam Entous, Alan Dershowitz, Andrew McCabe, Andrew Weissman, Anthony Weiner, Bill Clinton, Bruce Ohr, Carol Lee, Charles McCullough III, Chelsea Clinton, Christopher Wray, Dianne Feinstein, Dolly Kyle, EmailGate, FBI, FISA, Foreign Policy, Fusion GPS, George Papadopoulos, Glenn Simpson, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Huma Abedin, James Quarles, Jared Kushner, Jeannie Rhee, Ken Dilanian, Lisa Page, Marc Elias, Mark Lambert, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Neil King, Nellie Ohr, Obama Scandals, Paul Manafort, Perkins Coie LLP, Peter Fritsch, Peter Strzok, rape, Robert Mueller, Sally Yates, Tariq Ramadan, Thomas Catan, unmasking, Vadim Mikerin, William Browder
(But first, take a look at Was Fusion GPS Allowed to Run Unsupervised FISA-702 Queries? if you haven’t already.)
Several Clinton scandals, and revelations from the ill-conceived Russia investigation, have been converging into a single scandal for months. With the Peter Strzok/Fusion GPS revelations, there’s no longer any gap between the various Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration unmasking scandals: it’s all one, big swampy scandal, with some of the same players showing up again and again, and Hillary Clinton is involved up to her chin.
Strzok, in case you hadn’t heard, is the FBI agent dismissed from Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. His text messages reveal that he’s a dedicated Trump hater:
Text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in 2016 that were obtained by Fox News on Tuesday refer to then-candidate Donald Trump as a “loathsome human” and “an idiot.”Fine and dandy, but what does this have to do with Hillary Clinton?
More than 10,000 texts between Strzok and Page were being reviewed by the Justice Department after Strzok was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe after it was revealed that some of them contained anti-Trump content.
The messages were sent during the 2016 campaign and contain discussions about various candidates. On March 2, Strzok texted Page that someone “asked me who I’d vote for, guessed [Ohio Gov. John] Kasich.”
Strzok, who was an FBI counterintelligence agent, was reassigned to the FBI’s human resources division after the discovery of the exchanges with Page, with whom he was having an affair. Page was briefly on Mueller’s team, but has since returned to the FBI.More than that, Strzok is the one who changed language in Comey’s draft report on Emailgate from “Grossly Negligent” to “Extremely Careless,” essentially letting her off the hook.
House Intelligence Committee investigators have long regarded Strzok as a key figure in the chain of events that began when the bureau, in 2016, received the infamous anti-Trump “dossier” and launched a counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the election that ultimately came to encompass FISA surveillance of a Trump campaign associate.
Strzok briefed the committee on Dec. 5, 2016, sources said. But within months of that session House Intelligence Committee investigators were contacted by an informant suggesting that there was “documentary evidence” that Strzok was purportedly obstructing the House probe into the dossier.
Strzok also oversaw the bureau’s interviews with ousted National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – who pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators in the Russia probe.
He also was present during the FBI’s July 2016 interview with Hillary Clinton at the close of the email investigation, shortly before then-FBI director James Comey called her actions “extremely careless” without recommending criminal charges.
He was also the one who sent a text to Lisa Page, the FBI lawyer he was having an affair with, stating how he was working on an “insurance policy” in case Trump became President.
More on Peter Strzok:
A supervisory special agent who is now under scrutiny after being removed from Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office for alleged bias against President Trump also oversaw the bureau’s interviews of embattled former National Security advisor Michael Flynn, this reporter has learned. Flynn recently pled guilty to one-count of lying to the FBI last week.(Hat tip: Aceof Spades HQ.)
FBI agent was one of two FBI agents who interviewed Flynn, which took place on Jan. 24, at the White House, said several sources. The other FBI special agent, who interviewed Flynn, is described by sources as a field supervisor in the “Russian Squad, at the FBI’s Washington Field Office,” according to a former intelligence official, with knowledge of the interview.
Strzok was removed from his role in the Special Counsel’s Office after it was discovered he had made disparaging comments about President Trump in text messages between him and his alleged lover FBI attorney Lisa Page, according to the New York Times and Washington Post, which first reported the stories. Strzok is also under investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General for his role in Hillary Clinton’s email server and the ongoing investigation into Russia’s election meddling. On Saturday, the House Intelligence Committee’s Chairman Devin Nunes chided the Justice Department and the FBI for not disclosing why Strzok had been removed from the Special Counsel three months ago, according to a statement given by the Chairman.
The former U.S. intelligence official told this reporter, “with the recent revelation that Strzok was removed from the Special Counsel investigation for making anti-Trump text messages it seems likely that the accuracy and veracity of the 302 of Flynn’s interview as a whole should be reviewed and called into question.”
“The most logical thing to happen would be to call the other FBI Special Agent present during Flynn’s interview before the Grand Jury to recount his version,” the former intelligence official added.
The former official also said that “Strzok’s allegiance to (Deputy Director Andrew) McCabe was unwavering and very well known.”
Now on to other Clinton Corruption news:
As the Inspector General investigation continues:
All of these FBI personnel moves are a preliminary outcomes of the still ongoing Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation. All of this has been reported. None of these moves are speculative. All of these geese are cooked. However, this is just one side of the 2016 political “Trump operation”, the FBI investigative Counterintelligence Division side.
- FBI Agent Peter Strzok has been reassigned to the HR department.
- FBI Lawyer Lisa Page, personal legal aide to FBI Asst. Director, Andrew “Andy” McCabe, has been returned to the DOJ side.
- FBI Chief Legal Counsel James Baker has been relieved of his duties by FBI Director Christopher Wray.
- FBI Asst Director Andrew McCabe has announced his intent to retire in March.
The other side, the legal side of the Trump operation, stems from the National Security Division of the DOJ. A FISA application is submitted from the DOJ-NSD for use by the FBI Counterintelligence team. Sunlight upon this side of the collaboration is the reason for all of the current distraction narratives.
While both sides of the corrupt political apparatus participated in the illegal unmasking and leaking, the documentation and activity behind the origin of the FISA application is the current ‘hot potato’ no-one wants any association with.
The FISA application(s) and the subsequent wiretapping and surveillance collection, along with the unmasking that followed, is the focus of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.
Sometime this month, after the initial Inspector General Michael Horowitz release, House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte and Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley will likely call for a Special Counsel to investigate the upper-level management of the FBI and DOJ.
We should support that approach. The SC can quickly put a Grand Jury together and start presenting the IG investigative evidence, as well as enforceable subpoenas for witnesses.
There’s a lot of different down-stream legal issues:
- The unlawful exoneration of Hillary Clinton by political operatives in the DOJ/FBI.
- The unlawful destruction of evidence; and the manipulation of investigative protocols to gain a specific and pre-planned political outcome. (Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe)
- The unlawful use of the FISA court for political spy operations by the DOJ/FBI.
- The unlawful use of the Dept of Justice National Security Division. For weaponized political benefit. (Sally Yates, Loretta Lynch, Bruce Ohr)
- The unlawful use of the FBI Counterintelligence Division. For weaponized political benefit. (James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, James Baker)
- The unlawful use of a Special Counsel (Mueller) investigation to hide the conspiracy; (James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Andrew Weissman, Jeannie Rhee, Aaron Zebley)
Voters also have an interest in knowing who else on Mueller’s legal team is biased. Not a stretch, as we already know many key players have donated heavily to Democrat politicians, including Clinton. Here’s just a few:(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
- James Quarles donated $33,000 over the years to the Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, Obama and Clinton campaigns, according to CNN.
- Jeannie Rhee has given more than $16,000 to Democrats since 2008. She also maxed out donations both in 2015 and 2016 to Clinton’s presidential campaign. Rhee also represented Clinton in a legal case involving access to her private emails and defended the Clinton Foundation in a former racketeering suit.
- Andrew Weissman gave $2,300 to former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, and $2,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 2006, according to CNN.
Republicans on key congressional committees say they have uncovered new irregularities and contradictions inside the FBI’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s email server.
For the first time, investigators say they have secured written evidence that the FBI believed there was evidence that some laws were broken when the former secretary of State and her top aides transmitted classified information through her insecure private email server, lawmakers and investigators told The Hill.
That evidence includes passages in FBI documents stating the “sheer volume” of classified information that flowed through Clinton’s insecure emails was proof of criminality as well as an admission of false statements by one key witness in the case, the investigators said.
The name of the witness is redacted from the FBI documents but lawmakers said he was an employee of a computer firm that helped maintain her personal server after she left office as America’s top diplomat and who belatedly admitted he had permanently erased an archive of her messages in 2015 after they had been subpoenaed by Congress.
The investigators also confirmed that the FBI began drafting a statement exonerating Clinton of any crimes while evidence responsive to subpoenas was still outstanding and before agents had interviewed more than a dozen key witnesses.
Fusion GPS’s principals—Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, Thomas Catan, and [Neil] King—are all [Wall Street] Journal alumni. Moreover, several other former Journal hands employed throughout the Washington DC press corps to cover the Russiagate beat have teamed with the Fusion four. Because Journal alums played a key role not only in creating the Great Kremlin Conspiracy but also in disseminating it, it is natural that the Journal would find itself in the middle of the story. It appears its newsroom is still influenced by the former staffers driving the Russiagate story.(Hat tip: Aceof Spades HQ.)
William Browder, the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, told me recently about his experience with the Journal’s newsroom and its relationship with the firm four former WSJ reporters have founded. “When I was trying to get journalists interested in a story about the role Fusion GPS was playing in trying to undo the Magnitsky Act,” said Browder, “I found that the Wall Street Journal was one of the places where Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS were deeply entrenched in the newsroom.” Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker did not reply to a request for comment on Browder’s assertions.
The Fusion GPS story doesn’t end with the Wall Street Journal. It only started there. Recently The Daily Caller reported onCNN reporter Evan Perez’s ties to Fusion GPS, showing photographs of Perez with Fritsch and King, with whom he shared bylines at the Wall Street Journal before they went to Fusion GPS and he moved to CNN. Perez had the lead byline on CNN’s January 10, 2017 story that broke how four U.S. intelligence chiefs briefed incoming president Trump and outgoing President Obama on the Steele dossier. The CNN story made no mention of Perez’s friends and former colleagues who produced and distributed the dossier that was the subject of the story.
Former WSJ reporter Adam Entous, recently hired by the New Yorker, had the lead byline on the Washington Post article breaking the news that Marc Elias, a lawyer from the DC law firm Perkins Coie, hired Fusion GPS to compile an opposition research file on Trump for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign. After the story broke, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Ken Vogel expressed their professional frustration on Twitter. They were after the story, and someone else nailed it.
“Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year,” tweeted Haberman. “When I tried to report this story,” wrote Vogel, “Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’”
So how did the Post get the Clinton campaign, DNC, or Elias to confirm the story? There’s no evidence they did. A former Clinton spokesman told the paper he wasn’t aware Fusion GPS was hired. A DNC spokesperson said the new leadership was not part of the decision-making. “Elias and Fusion GPS,” according to the Post report, “declined to comment on the arrangement.”
That leaves the firm’s principals as Entous’ most likely sources. Why? Because Fusion GPS and its principals had an interest in dumping information to deter the House Permanent Select Committee in Intelligence from successfully subpoenaing the company’s bank records for evidence that Fusion GPS paid journalists. “Entous,” said one veteran journalist familiar with the national security beat, “is tight with Fusion GPS.”
Carol Lee of NBC News is another WSJ alum. At her new job she has worked on Russiagate stories with Ken Dilanian, a reporter Browder believes to be a regular and reliable purveyor of Fusion GPS-manufactured talking points. In September, for instance, Lee and Dilanian broke a story about the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, which also included Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort.
The network of journalists who take dossiers from Fusion GPS is rich and deep.
Lee and Dilanian reported, “Two sources tell NBC News that Manafort’s smartphone notes from the meeting included the words ‘donations’ in close proximity to the reference to the Republican National Committee.” NBC News was eventually forced to walk back the story when it turned out the word on Manafort’s phone was “donors,” not “donations,” a difference that nullified the thrust of the story, which was to suggest that Russia was funneling money directly to the Trump campaign.
But who fed Lee and Dilanian their story? It seems likely from the list of people at the meeting that their sources included Veselnitskaya herself and another Russian at the meeting, Rinat Akhmetshin—who both had partnered with Fusion GPS to try to undo the Magnitsky Act on behalf of pro-Putin elements. Indeed, Simpson met with Veselnitskaya before and after her meeting with Trump Jr.—a meeting Simpson says he didn’t know about until it was later reported.
The network of journalists who take dossiers from Fusion GPS is rich and deep, which is how the company manages to seed so many stories around the media and make its money. Others whose tenure at the Wall Street Journal intersected with those of Fusion GPS principals and who have filed numerous stories on the Trump-Russia narrative that originated with Fusion GPS’s “Steele” dossier include, among others, Devlin Barrett and Tom Hamburger of the Washington Post, and Matthew Rosenberg of the New York Times.
The FBI agent who altered former FBI Director James Comey’s assessment of Hillary Clinton’s private email server should be “severely punished,” said Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard University law professor.Derschowitz also poo-poos the whole “obstruction of justice” angle as regards President Trump:
FBI agent Peter Strzok changed the wording in Comey’s assessment from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless,” a key change in legal terms that softened the case against Clinton.
In order to be charged with obstruction of justice, you have to go beyond simply exercising a presidential prerogative under Article II of the Constitution,” said Dershowitz on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Monday. “If you bribe or take a bribe, if you destroy evidence and do what Nixon did, which is pay hush money or tell your subordinates to lie, of course you can be charged with obstruction of justice.”Further:
Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were both charged with obstruction of justice, Dershowitz pointed out.
“But you cannot be and should not be charged with obstruction of justice if you merely pardon people,” he added. “You merely fire people even if the prosecution believes your intentions are not good. That’s what George H.W. Bush did. He pardoned Caspar Weinberger and five other people. The special prosecutor said the intent was to stop the investigation of Iran-Contra. It succeeded. And nobody suggested that President Bush be charged.”
“He can’t be charged with obstruction merely for exercising his constitutional prerogatives,” said Dershowitz. “That’s an important distinction. No president in history has ever been charged for any crime or anything because he exercised his constitutional prerogative. They impeached President Andrew Johnson for doing that. And the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that that was absolutely wrong. The president had the authority to fire the secretary of the Army. He was impeached for that and wrongly impeached.”(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
A former government watchdog says Hillary Clinton’s campaign threatened retribution against him and his loved ones when he raised concerns about classified info on Clinton’s private email server while it was being investigated in 2016.He also got it from congressional Democrats for having the unmitigated gall to tell the truth about Clinton’s emails:
“There was personal blowback. Personal blowback to me, to my family, to my office,” former Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III told Fox News’ Catherine Herridge on Monday.
He said the Clinton campaign even put out word that it planned to fire him if Clinton won the 2016 election. Democrats in Congress also mounted what he thought looked like a coordinated campaign to intimidate him.
McCullough, an Obama appointee, became inspector general after “more than two decades at the FBI, Treasury and intelligence community,” Fox News reported. He explained how the probe was quickly politicized and his office marginalized by Democrats in Congress.
The intimidation campaign intensified in January 2016, after McCullough notified senior intelligence and foreign relations committee leaders that “several dozen emails containing classified information” were determined to be “at the CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, AND TOP SECRET/SAP levels.”
A government source involved with the review told Fox News at the time that seven of those emails had been deemed by the intelligence community to be so sensitive and so potentially damaging to national security that they could never be released under any circumstances.
“All of a sudden I became a shill of the right,” McCullough recalled. “And I was told by members of Congress, ‘Be careful. You’re losing your credibility. You need to be careful. There are people out to get you.’”
In March 2016, seven senior Democrats entered the fray, sending a letter to McCullough and his State Department counterpart expressing their reservations about the impartiality of the Clinton email review.(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
McCullough, of course, wasn’t the one making the decisions regarding the classification of Clinton’s emails, he was just, as Herridge notes, “passing along the findings of the individual agencies” that had the final say on classification.
The watchdog said he thought there was “a coordinated strategy” targeting him based on the evidence he saw.
Six weeks before the election, McCullough said Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office tried to pressure him to respond to the letter – which Feinstein had co-signed.
“I thought that any response to that letter would just hyper-politicize the situation,” McCullough said. “I recall even offering to resign, to the staff director. I said, ‘Tell [Feinstein] I’ll resign tonight. I’d be happy to go. I’m not going to respond to that letter. It’s just that simple.”
The pressure intensified as Election Day approached and McCullough and another senior government investigator on the email case were threatened.
“I was told in no uncertain terms, by a source directly from the campaign, that we would be the first two to be fired — with [Clinton’s] administration. That that was definitely going to happen,” he said.
The Committee to Defend the President has filed an FEC complaint against Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Democratic National Committee (DNC), Democratic state parties and Democratic mega-donors.
As Fox News reported, we documented the Democratic establishment “us[ing] state chapters as straw men to circumvent campaign donation limits and launder(ing) the money back to her campaign.” The 101-page complaint focused on the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) — the $500 million joint fundraising committee between the Clinton campaign, DNC, and dozens of state parties — which did exactly that the Supreme Court declared would still be illegal.
HVF solicited six-figure donations from major donors, including Calvin Klein and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane, and routed them through state parties en route to the Clinton campaign. Roughly $84 million may have been laundered in what might be the single largest campaign finance scandal in U.S. history.
Here’s what we know. Campaign finance law is incredibly complex and infamous for its lack of clarity. As I’ve explained before, its complexity is a feature, not a bug. Major political players with the resources to hire the very few attorneys who practice campaign finance law benefit from the complexity that keeps others out. Perhaps HVF’s architects thought so too, and assumed that if no one understands what’s happening, no one would complain.
Here’s what you can do, legally. Per election, an individual donor can contribute $2,700 to any candidate, $10,000 to any state party committee, and (during the 2016 cycle) $33,400 to a national party’s main account. These groups can all get together and take a single check from a donor for the sum of those contribution limits — it’s legal because the donor cannot exceed the base limit for any one recipient. And state parties can make unlimited transfers to their national party.
Here’s what you can’t do, which the Clinton machine appeared to do anyway. As the Supreme Court made clear in McCutcheon v. FEC, the JFC may not solicit or accept contributions to circumvent base limits, through “earmarks” and “straw men” that are ultimately excessive — there are five separate prohibitions here.
On top of that, six-figure donations either never actually passed through state party accounts or were never actually under state party control, which adds false FEC reporting by HVF, state parties, and the DNC to the laundry list.
Finally, as Donna Brazile and others admitted, the DNC placed the funds under the Clinton campaign’s direct control, a massive breach of campaign finance law that ties the conspiracy together.
Democratic donors, knowing the funds would end up with Clinton’s campaign, wrote six-figure checks to influence the election — 100 times larger than allowed.
HVF bundled these megagifts and, on a single day, reported transferring money to all participating state parties, some of which would then show up on FEC reports filed by the DNC as transferring the exact same dollar amount on the exact same day to the DNC. Yet not all the state parties reported either receiving or transferring those sums.
Did any of these transfers actually happen? Or were they just paper entries to mask direct transfers to the DNC?
For perspective, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza was prosecuted and convicted in 2012 for giving a handful of associates money they then contributed to a candidate of his preference — in other words, straw man contributions. He was sentenced to eight months in a community confinement center and five years of probation. How much money was involved? Only $20,000. HVF weighs in at $84 million — more than 4,000 times larger!
The Department of Justice unsealed an 11-count indictment on Friday to a former DoD intelligence analyst-turned uranium transportation executive who stands accused of a bribery and money laundering scheme involving a Russian nuclear official connected to the Uranium One deal.(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The indictment corroborates a November report by The Hill that an FBI mole deeply embedded in the Russian uranium industry had gathered extensive evidence of the scheme.
Mark Lambert, 54, of Mount Airy, Maryland, was charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and to commit wire fraud, seven counts of violating the FCPA, two counts of wire fraud and one count of international promotion money laundering.
The charges stem from an alleged scheme to bribe Vadim Mikerin, a Russian official at JSC Techsnabexport (TENEX), a subsidiary of Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation and the sole supplier and exporter of Russian Federation uranium and uranium enrichment services to nuclear power companies worldwide, in order to secure contracts with TENEX.
According to the indictment, beginning at least as early as 2009 and continuing until October 2014, Lambert conspired with others at “Transportation Corporation A” to make corrupt and fraudulent bribery and kickback payments to offshore bank accounts associated with shell companies, at the direction of, and for the benefit of, a Russian official, Vadim Mikerin, in order to secure improper business advantages and obtain and retain business with TENEX. -DOJWhile the indictment lists Lambert’s company as “Transportation Corporation A,” a simple search reveals that Lambert is the co-President of DAHER-TLI, “the leading front end freight forwarding company dedicated to Nuclear Cargo,” according to its website.
The Trump Administration quietly issued an Executive Order (EO) last Thursday which allows for the freezing of US-housed assets belonging to foreign individuals or entities deemed “serious human rights abusers,” along with government officials and executives of foreign corporations (current or former) found to have engaged in corruption – which includes the misappropriation of state assets, the expropriation of private assets for personal gain, and corruption related to government contracts or the extraction of natural resources.Snip.
Now consider that if reports from The Hill are accurate – an FBI mole deep within the Russian uranium industry uncovered evidence that “Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow (the Uranium One approval)” – a deal which would eventually grant the Kremlin control over 20 percent of America’s uranium supply right around the time Bill Clinton also collected $500,000 for a Moscow speech, as detailed by author Peter Schweitzer’s book Clinton Cash and the New York Times in 2015.
“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions,” a person who worked on the case told The Hill, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by U.S. or Russian officials. –The Hill
The same FBI informant claims to have video evidence showing Russian agents with briefcases full of bribe money related to the controversial Uranium One deal.
A wealthy Hillary Clinton supporter dropped half a million dollars in the run up to the 2016 election to fund a number of alleged victims willing to accuse President Donald Trump of sexual misconduct.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that Susie Tompkins Buell, a major Clinton donor for years, gave $500,000 to celebrity attorney Lisa Bloom in support of a stable of women willing to come forward – if the price was right.
The media doesn’t suddenly “believe Juanita”. Or rather it always knew that Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones and the other women were telling the truth. It didn’t silence them because it thought they were lying. It silenced them because they were telling the truth about its guy.Snip.
Now Bill Clinton isn’t the media’s guy anymore. He’s a problem.
And what the media does “believe” is that the Clintons will continue to be a liability that might cost them victories in 2018 and 2020. The DNC badly needs money. The Clintons are once again posing a threat to the DNC’s financial viability. And the Dems have become less willing to lose House and Senate seats to sate the insatiable greed of the grifters from Hope.
Then there’s 2020. The Dems don’t want to risk their nominee facing passive aggressive attacks by Hillary Clinton. Nor do they even want to see Hillary Clinton on the air for the entire election.
They’re purging the Clintons for the same reason that they covered up for them.
They’re calling out Bill Clinton for his sexual assaults for the same reason that they covered them up.
They did it out of political self-interest then. And they’re doing it out of political self-interest now. There’s nothing clean or honest about what they’re doing. There’s no moral reckoning here. Only a political reckoning. It’s not about the women Bill abused. It’s about DNC cash and the 2020 election.
Slowly but surely, it has emerged that the Justice Department and FBI very likely targeted Page because of the Steele dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed disguised as intelligence reporting. Increasingly, it appears that the Bureau failed to verify Steele’s allegations before the DOJ used some of them to bolster an application for a spying warrant from the FISA court (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).
Thanks to the persistence of the House Intelligence Committee led by Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the dossier story won’t go away. Thus, Democrats and their media friends have been moving the goal posts in an effort to save their collusion narrative. First, we were led to believe the dossier was no big deal because the FBI would surely have corroborated any information before the DOJ fed it to a federal judge in a warrant application. Then, when the Clinton campaign’s role in commissioning the dossier came to light, we were told it was impertinent to ask about what the FBI did, if anything, to corroborate it since this could imperil intelligence methods and sources — and, besides, such questions were just a distraction from the all-important Mueller investigation (which the dossier had a hand in instigating and which, to date, has turned up no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy).
Lately, the story has morphed into this: Well, even if the dossier was used, it was only used a little — there simply must have been lots of other evidence that Trump was in cahoots with Putin. But that’s not going to fly: Putting aside the dearth of collusion evidence after well over a year of aggressive investigation, the dossier is partisan propaganda. If it was not adequately corroborated by the FBI, and if the Justice Department, without disclosing its provenance to the court, nevertheless relied on any part of it in a FISA application, that is a major problem.
So now, a new strategy to prop up the collusion tale: Never mind Page — lookee over here at [George] Papadopoulos!
But that’s not what they were saying in April, when the collusion narrative and Democratic calls for a special prosecutor were in full bloom.
Back then, no fewer than six of the Times’ top reporters, along with a researcher, worked their anonymous “current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials” in order to generate the Page blockbuster. With these leaks, the paper confidently reported: “From the Russia trip of the once-obscure Mr. Page grew a wide-ranging investigation, now accompanied by two congressional inquiries, that has cast a shadow over the early months of the Trump administration” [emphasis added].
Oh sure, the Times acknowledged that there might have been a couple of other factors involved. “Paul Manafort, then [i.e., during Page’s trip] Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, was already under criminal investigation in connection with payments from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.” And “WikiLeaks and two websites later identified as Russian intelligence fronts had begun releasing emails obtained when Democratic Party servers were hacked.”
But the trigger for the investigation — the “catalyst” — was Page.
Somehow, despite all that journalistic leg-work and all those insider sources, the name George Papadopoulos does not appear in the Times’ story.
Now, however, we’re supposed to forget about Page. According to the new bombshell dropped on New Year’s Eve by six Times reporters, it was “the hacking” coupled with “the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign” — Papadopoulos — “may have had inside information about it” that were “driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.”
It seems like only yesterday — or, to be more precise, only late October, when he pled guilty to a count of lying to the FBI in the Mueller probe — that Mr. Papadopoulos was even more obscure than the “once-obscure Mr. Page.” Now, though, he has been elevated to “the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration.” But hey, if you’re willing to hang in there through the first 36 paragraphs of the Times’ nearly 3,000-word Papadopoulos report, you’ll find the fleeting observation that “A trip to Moscow by another adviser, Carter Page, also raised concerns at the F.B.I.”
You don’t say!
Again, until this weekend, Page was the eye of the collusion storm. And as I outlined in a column last weekend, a significant part of what got the FBI and the Obama Justice Department stirred up about Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow was the Steele dossier — the anti-Trump reports compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. Alas, six months after the Times’ planted its feet on Page as the linchpin of the Trump-Russia investigation, we learned that the dossier was actually an opposition-research project paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. We further learned that at Fusion GPS, the research firm that retained Steele for the project, Steele collaborated on it with Nellie Ohr, the wife of top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr — and that Bruce Ohr had personally been briefed on the project by Steele and a Fusion GPS executive.
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