In Ca., Justice Has Been Replaced With Newsom’s Feelings

This trend has been building for some time in Europe and the political left in this country. Our media is biased and corrupt and will not report on it.

Caren Besner:

“…Albert Einstein observed, “If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world.  Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”  His words are relevant today because anti-Semitism, briefly dormant, is alive again — in Europe and around the world.  This “new form” of anti-Semitism claims to be different from the traditional racial and religious images.  Its adherents say they are anti-Zionist, not anti-Semites.  But their accusations mirror The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Only recently, a Belgian parade featured a float of grotesquely distorted Orthodox Jews in religious garb, perched on bags of money, à la the art of Nazi Julius Streicher. What makes this sickening display even more alarming is the official sanction given to it by the Mayor of Aalst, Christoph D’Haese, who stated, “It’s not up to the mayor to forbid such displays” and that the carnival participants had “no sinister intentions.” No sinister intentions? Adolf Eichmann also had no sinister intentions when he organized transportation to the death camps. After all, he himself had no part in the actual killing process; they just did their jobs.

We have our own anti-Semitic scandal with newly elected congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D), a Somalian hijab-wearing Muslim who tweets anti-Semitic tropes “without sinister intentions” or retractions. Democrat leadership won’t condemn, censure, or remove her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, leftist Jews have defended her, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi excused her inadvertent offense. Yes, Congress passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and anti–everything else, without singling out Omar and the Jews. Thus, the Democratic Party is falling farther left toward Islamic ideology. . . .

American Jewry is at a crossroads. The vast majority of American Jews will continue to cling to their familiar ancestral belief system; it’s all they know. To change now would be to deny everything their family members and they, themselves, have lived for. But before they bury their heads in the sand once again, they should at least hear these simple truths. When our enemies came for us during the Holocaust, they did not ask if we were Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or secular Jews. Neither were they interested in any past service we rendered for the state. We were Jews. That was all that mattered. If history repeats itself, when our enemies come for us once again, they will not ask if we are Israelis or Zionists. They will not care if we marched in Selma, Alabama; protested against apartheid in South Africa; supported equal rights for women; advocated for the LBGTQ community; and campaigned for Hillary or Bernie. It will matter that we are Jews.

Today’s anti-Semitism, unleashed by the Left and Islamists, is so visceral, virulent, vile, vicious, and vitriolic that it can no longer be justified under the guise of anti-Zionism. In form, content, and message, it is exactly what was seen and heard during the heyday of the Third Reich. It is what made the Holocaust possible. What begins with a parade float in Belgium inevitably ends in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. This is the fate our enemies want for us. This is why Tehran’s Ayatollah Khamenei rejoices that more Jews are moving to Israel — for one grand target…”

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Worth clicking over for the whole thing.

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.

So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed. There are many elements to what in time likely will become recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history, marking the first occasion in which U.S. government bureaucrats sought to overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S. president.

Preparing the Battlefield
No palace coup can take place without the perception of popular anger at a president.

The deep state is by nature cowardly. It does not move unless it feels it can disguise its subterranean efforts or that, if revealed, those efforts will be seen as popular and necessary—as expressed in tell-all book titles such as fired FBI Directors James Comey’s Higher Loyalty or in disgraced Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s psychodramatic The Threat.

In candidate and President Trump’s case that prepping of the battlefield translated into a coordinated effort among the media, political progressives and celebrities to so demonize Trump that his imminent removal likely would appear a relief to the people. Anything was justified that led to that end.

All through the 2016 campaign and during the first two years of the Trump presidency the media’s treatment, according to liberal adjudicators of press coverage, ran about 90 percent negative toward Trump—a landmark bias that continues today.

Journalists themselves consulted with the Clinton campaign to coordinate attacks. From the Wikileaks trove, journalistic grandees such as John Harwood, Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank, and Glenn Thrush often communicated (and even post factum were unapologetic about doing so) with John Podesta’s staff to construct various anti-Trump themes and have the Clinton campaign review or even audit them in advance.

Some contract “journalists” apparently were paid directly by Fusion GPS—created by former reporters Glen Simpson of the Wall Street Journal and Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post—to spread lurid stories from the dossier. Others more refined like Christiane Amanpour and James Rutenberg had argued for a new journalistic ethos that partisan coverage was certainly justified in the age of Trump, given his assumed existential threat to The Truth. Or as Rutenberg put it in 2016: “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable. But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”

I suppose Rutenberg never considered that half the country might have considered the Hillary Clinton presidency “potentially dangerous,” and yet did not expect the evening news, in 90 percent of its coverage, to reflect such suspicions.

The Democratic National Committee’s appendages often helped to massage CNN news coverage—such as Donna Brazile’s primary debate tip-off to the Clinton campaign or CNN’s consultation with the DNC about forming talking points for a scheduled Trump interview.

So-called “bombshell,” “watershed,” “turning-point,” and “walls closing in” fake news aired in 24-hour news bulletin cycles. The media went from fabrications about Trump’s supposed removal of the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office, to the mythologies in the Steele dossier, to lies about the Trump Tower meeting, to assurances that Michael Cohen would testify to Trump’s suborning perjury, and on and on.

CNN soon proved that it is no longer a news organization at all—as reporters like Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Eric Lichtblau, Manu Raju, Brian Rokus, Jake Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, and Lex Harris all trafficked in false rumors and unproven gossip detrimental to Trump, while hosts and guest hosts such as Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, and Anderson Cooper stooped to obscenity and grossness to attack Trump.

Both politicos and celebrities tried to drive Trump’s numbers down to facilitate some sort of popular ratification for his removal. Hollywood and the coastal corridor punditry exhausted public expressions of assassinating or injuring the president, as the likes of Jim Carrey, Johnny Depp, Robert de Niro, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffin, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, and a host of others vied rhetorically to slice apart, shoot, beat up, cage, behead, and blow up the president.

Left wing social media and mainstream journalism spread sensational lies about supposed maniacal Trump supporters in MAGA hats. They constructed fantasies that veritable white racists were now liberated to run amuck insulting and beating up people of color as they taunted the poor and victimized minorities with vicious Trump sloganeering—even as the Covington farce and now the even more embarrassing Jussie Smollett charade evaporated without apologies from the media and progressive merchants of such hate.

At the same time, liberal attorneys, foundations, Democratic politicians, and progressive activists variously sued to overturn the election on false charges of rigged voting machines. They sought to subvert the Electoral College. They introduced articles of impeachment. They sued to remove Trump under the Emoluments Clause. They attempted to invoke the 25th Amendment. And they even resurrected the ossified Logan Act—before focusing on the appointment of a special counsel to discredit the Trump presidency. Waiting for the 2020 election was seen as too quaint…”

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JOHN HINDERAKER:

“…When freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar came out with smears whose anti-Semitic nature couldn’t be denied, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer responded rapidly, with unequivocal denunciation. But when Pelosi tried to steer a resolution condemning anti-Semitism through the House, her party’s young radicals, who rightly view themselves as representative of the Democrats’ base, rebelled. Omar and her fellow “progressives” won the day, and Pelosi replaced her anti-Semitism resolution with one so anodyne that Omar happily voted for it.

Yesterday, the arch-leftist group MoveOn denounced the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has until now enjoyed broad bipartisan support, and urged Democratic presidential candidates to boycott AIPAC’s upcoming conference. Ilya Sheyman, Executive Director of MoveOn.org Political Action, tweeted:

“You cannot be a progressive and support AIPAC because of the policies that they’ve supported.”

Democratic presidential candidates see which way their party is going. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, and Julián Castro have all announced that they are boycotting AIPAC. So far, no prominent Democratic contender has said he intends to attend. The AIPAC boycott is obviously related to Ilhan Omar’s claim that American support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins,” followed by “AIPAC!” It’s Omar’s party now.

Just a few years ago, the idea of the Democrats turning anti-Israel en masse would have been unthinkable. It would have been especially unthinkable if the phenomenon bore the taint of anti-Semitism that it has been lent by Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and others. Meanwhile, President Trump tweeted today that the U.S. should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights:

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!

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JOHN SOLOMON:

“…After nearly three years and millions of tax dollars, the Trump-Russia collusion probe is about to be resolved. Emerging in its place is newly unearthed evidence suggesting another foreign effort to influence the 2016 election — this time, in favor of the Democrats.

Ukraine’s top prosecutor divulged in an interview aired Wednesday on Hill.TV that he has opened an investigation into whether his country’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton. . . .

In our interview, Lutsenko accused the Obama-era U.S. Embassy in 2016 of interfering in his ability to prosecute corruption cases, saying the U.S. ambassador gave him a list of defendants that he would not be allowed to pursue and then refused to cooperate in an early investigation into the alleged misappropriation of U.S. aid in Ukraine…”

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RONALD L. TROWBRIDGE:

“…A constant refrain we now hear is that President Trump’s order to finance the wall is “unconstitutional” and “violates the separation of powers.” That is not the case. Richard H. Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, wrote on March 14 the clarifying article, “How the Supreme Court Weakened Congress on Emergency Declarations.”

Here are his salient points:

Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build the wall derives from that singular authority in the National Emergencies Act (NEA), passed by Congress in l976. Since then, presidents have resorted to the NEA 58 times. In each case, the president — Democrat and Republican — spent funds not appropriated by Congress and the Supreme Court did not overturn the action. Pildes notes, “Courts are uncomfortable when asked to second-guess presidential judgments in areas such as national security, foreign affairs and emergencies.” The courts are not experts on these matters.

Pildes cites the key Supreme Court decision, Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, which declared, he says, that “legislative vetoes are unconstitutional”— including vetoes of actions under the National Emergencies Act, the basis on which Trump acted.

Pildes adds, “Congress cannot act through a legislative veto but can act only by passing a new law.” But the horse was out of the barn for Trump: he acted on the authority of the NEA. Chadha, says Pildes, “must give Trump the chance to veto Congress’s disapproval” of his unilateral action. He issued a veto, for which, Pildes further explains, a “two-thirds majority in each chamber [is required] to override….” This override is not likely to happen: in the Senate, 59 members voted against Trump’s declaration of a national emergency; a two-thirds supermajority would require 67 votes. In the House, 242 voted against Trump’s action, a two-thirds supermajority requiring 290 votes.

Pildes says the NEA “does not define what constitutes an emergency.” A non-definition goes to the president’s advantage. Trump neither violated the Constitution nor violated the separation of powers. His unilateral action was a constitutional power ceded to him by an act of Congress (the NEA) in l976 and used by presidents on both sides of the political aisle 58 times. President Obama, for example, used the act to transfer funds without congressional authority to his health care act.

The final resolution now will go to the courts, surely ending up in the Supreme Court. Now here’s the rub: we know that members of the Supreme Court often make political rather than legal decisions. The Court is now composed of four liberals and five conservatives. Jeffrey Toobin, legal analyst at CNN, was on the mark when he observed, “When it comes to the core of the Court’s work … it is ideology, not craft or skill, that controls the outcome of cases.” Similarly, Richard A. Posner, the great conservative judge and law professor, has written, “It is rarely possible to say with a straight face of a Supreme Court decision that it was decided correctly or incorrectly.” Constitutional cases, he added, “can be decided only on the basis of a political judgment, and a political judgment cannot be called right or wrong by reference to legal norms.”

If the Supreme Court acts legally rather than politically in following the Chadha precedent, the vote could be 9-0 in support of Trump’s unilateral authority to declare an emergency and transfer funds to defray costs. Why do I feel somehow that the vote will be 5 to 4?…”

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RICHARD FERNANDEZ:

“…But changing the rules is tacit admission Plan A has failed. Nobody’s talking about a ‘rules based international system’ any more because changing the rules is Plan B. The progressives are already creating their own world order to replace the old world order. The system Hillary hoped to lead is gone. . . . In this context the spate of proposals to change the rules — lower the voting age, abolish the electoral college, expand the Supreme Court and spend trillions on a Green New Deal — should come as no surprise. They are the domestic equivalent of building a brand new America. Although they come at a destabilizing price it is one ideologues are willing to pay since their vision is imperative enough. After all, to paraphrase Recep Erdogan ‘the rules are like a tram ride: when you reach your stop, you get off.’…”

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“…If one were to predict between comity and authoritarianism in the coming years the odds would favor authoritarianism. Never has so much naked ambition disguised itself as virtue and the more loudly political factions proclaim they’re out to save the world the more ruthless they are likely to be. Liberty will come under assault from the banner of tolerance, fascism will advance in the guise of grievance…”

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“…Senator Elizabeth Warren has joined a growing chorus within the Democratic party in calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. Speaking at a forum in Mississippi on Monday night, Warren said that she hoped to ensure that “every vote matters” and proposed that “the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”

Warren’s lofty rhetoric notwithstanding, a large portion of the Democratic party’s present animosity toward the Electoral College is rooted in rank partisanship. Since they watched their supposed “blue wall” evaporate in the small hours of the 2016 presidential election, many Democrats have felt sufficient anger with the system to seek to remake it. This habit has by no means been limited to the Electoral College. Indeed, no sooner has the Democratic party lost control of an institution that it had assumed it would retain in perpetuity than that institution has been denounced as retrograde and unfair. In the past year alone, this impulse has led to calls for the abolition or reinvention of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and more.

Insofar as there does exist a serious argument against the Electoral College, it is increasingly indistinguishable from the broader argument against the role that the states play within the American constitutional order, and thus from the argument against federalism itself. President Reagan liked to remind Americans that, far from serving as regional administrative areas of the nation-state, the states are the essential building blocks of America’s political, legal, and civic life.

In our era of viciously divisive politics, the states are arguably more necessary than they have ever been. Critics of the Electoral College bristle at the insistence that it prevents New York and California from imposing their will on the rest of the country. But the Electoral College guarantees that candidates who seek the only nationally elected office in America must attempt to appeal to as broad a geographic constituency as possible — large states and small, populous and rural — rather than retreating to their preferred pockets and running up the score. The alternative to this arrangement is not less political contention or a reduction in anger; it is more of both.

In addition to protecting the political diversity for which the United States is famous, the Electoral College brings with it a number of practical advantages that are crucial to good government. Under the current system, the result of presidential elections tends to be clear almost immediately — there is no need, for example, to wait three weeks for California to process its ballots; it is nigh-on impossible for voters to return a tie or disputed outcome; and, because presidential elections are, in effect, fifty-one separate elections, accusations of voting fraud and abuse hold less purchase than they would if all franchisees were melted into a single, homogenous blob. The freak occurrence that was Bush v. Gore is often raised as an objection against the status quo. Less attention is paid to the obvious question: What if that recount had been national?

Impressively, Elizabeth Warren’s plan for straight abolition is not the worst reform being touted at the moment. Impatient at the lack of progress that the #Resistance has made in pulling the wiring out of America’s constitutional engine, a handful of states have adopted the “National Popular Vote” plan, which binds their electors to cast their ballots for the candidate who wins a majority of votes nationwide. Until enough states have signed on to tip the balance past 270 — and, indeed, until the inevitable litigation has been concluded — adoption of the NPV will remain purely symbolic. Should it be put into action, however, it would achieve the remarkable feat of removing all of the benefits that the Electoral College provides while preventing the electors of each state from voting for the presidential candidate whom a majority in that state had picked. Who knew that the outsourcing craze would extend to democracy?

The U.S. Constitution is a complex document that, as Whitman might have put it, contains multitudes. At once, it boasts guarantees of democracy and protections against it; hosts an outline for national action, and a blueprint for localism; and serves as a vehicle for the majority, while including guarantees that the most significant decisions must be broadly agreed upon. The Electoral College is one of the many finely tuned institutions within the charter that have ensured stability and continuity in America for more than two centuries. To destroy it in a hail of platitudes, civic ignorance, and old-fashioned political pique would be a disastrous mistake…”

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Conrad Black:

“…If, as I wrote last week here, Joe Biden may save the Democratic party from a horrible debacle at the polls next year, Beto O’Rourke may be doing the whole process a good turn now. Biden, despite his efforts to masquerade as the vanguard of what is now called progressivism, is politically sane and, if nominated, might hold his shaggy legions back from holus-bolus embrace of the many suicide potions being offered to the Democratic contestants. To date, the most lethal intoxicants that have been extolled by some of the candidates are legalized infanticide, open borders, reparations to African and other minority Americans, nationalized health care, a fascistic and Luddite green policy, and top personal-tax rates above 70 per cent. So far, this cocktail, which is such an assault on the sanity of an electorate that it could reduce the Democrats to splinters, has scared off Michael Bloomberg, Sherrod Brown, and Hillary Clinton (though she is probably contemplating her legal future with some well-founded consternation too).

But another candidate-benefactor is also in sight, and so hyperactive and in his way irresistible that it is hard to get him out of your sight. Beto O’Rourke is stoking up one the great bonfires of modern political history; he is a phenomenon of these strange times so unique that no one could have imagined him. Even the Trump-hating media, desperate to find a Democrat who can win, in despair at the collapse of the impeachment bubble, demoralized and hung over from pelagic overconsumption of sour Kool Aid, are taking a break from their sacred mission to destroy Trump. They are not turning their swords into ploughshares, but some sort of quasi-Biblical grace of change is occurring.

All of the Democratic candidates and the entire political process are being taken over and occupied by the invasion of the whole public space by Robert Francis O’Rourke. No one has ever heard or seen anything like this candidate: a hyperactive limb-flailing imbecile, babbling compulsively in a torrent of extremist nonsense barely couched in comprehensible syntax. No idea is too stupid to be endorsed in terms of absolute finality: “If we do not abolish all fossil fuels within twelve years, everything on the planet will be dead. The scientists are 100 percent united on this. Just as Americans of the past had to fight at Normandy, we have to fight this now, and save our planet.”

It does not require an immensely sophisticated political scientist to see that there are a few problems with that sequence, as there are with all Beto’s sentences, and with his much more numerous and even more idiotic non-sentences…”

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“…The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals again Tuesday in an immigration case that turned on a clear-cut question of statutory interpretation. While the 5-4 conservative majority read the law as it was written, the Court’s liberals would have overruled Congress.

Federal immigration law generally authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to detain “deportable” immigrants with the discretion to release them on bond or parole if they don’t endanger the public. Congress in 1996 limited executive discretion and required the government to detain immigrants who have committed certain crimes or have links to terrorism “when [they are] released” from prison or jail.

In Nielsen v. Preap, plaintiffs argued that if the government does not detain the criminal immigrants immediately upon their release—that is, the day they leave jail—they are entitled to a bond or parole hearing. Immigration officials didn’t detain the lead plaintiff until 2013, seven years after being released from criminal custody. The case is especially ripe since sanctuary cities often don’t inform federal authorities when they release criminal immigrants.

Siding with the plaintiffs, the Ninth Circuit twisted itself into knots to rule against the Trump Administration. But as Justice Samuel Alito observed in the majority decision, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling “misreads the structure” of the law and would result in all kinds of legal absurdities.

“It would be ridiculous to read paragraph (1) as saying: ‘The Secretary must arrest, upon their release from jail, a particular subset of criminal aliens. Which ones? Only those who are arrested upon their release from jail,’” Justice Alito noted, adding that “The mandatory-detention scheme [favored by the Ninth Circuit] would be gentler on terrorists than it is on garden-variety offenders.”

Or as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained in his pithy concurrence: “It would be odd, in my view, if the Act (1) mandated detention of particular noncitizens because the noncitizens posed such a serious risk of danger or flight that they must be detained during their removal proceedings, but (2) nonetheless allowed the noncitizens to remain free during their removal proceedings if the Executive Branch failed to immediately detain them upon their release from criminal custody.”

Although the case involved a narrow statutory question, the Court’s four liberals quibbled about the law’s policy implications on the nation’s “values.” For instance, what if immigrants were detained years after being released from police custody and have “established families and put down roots in a community”? The Court’s job isn’t to substitute its policy judgments for those of Congress…”

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Related:

The Only Option They Had as Pseudo-Conservatives

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…Something in this country went radically wrong in the 1980s and 1990s. We created an entire subversive ideology according to which loud allegiance to “progressivism” — decrying class, race, and gender “inequality” —  excused an institution or industry from bias, exempted it from following the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution, and made competency in its mission of educating youth irrelevant. And worse still, so-called progressive egalitarians transformed the idea of an elite college degree from a reflection of wide reading, inductive thinking, and scientific and mathematical literacy into a mere cattle brand, a showy trademark that advertised social-justice virtue and provided entrée into the well-paying capitalist rat race.

Yet once politics serves as such a blanket exemption for institutions, then it’s no surprise that the institutions ignore or even normalize fraud, racial and class discrimination, and consumer misinformation.

The rationale of contemporary higher education is that such progressive angels surely cannot be self-interested devils…”

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Socks the cat peers over the podium in the White House briefing room Saturday, March 19, 1994. A White House groundskeeper was walking Socks when he stopped and lifted Socks to the podium.

Don’t believe the White Supremacy nonsense coming from the media and the left. They never stop attacking Trump and actual facts mean nothing.

Worth clicking over to read the whole thing. The media loved McCain, now we see why.

Julie Kelly:

“…After receiving a subpoena to appear before the House Intelligence Committee last year,  David Kramer, a close associate of the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The committee had additional questions to ask Kramer about his handling of the infamous Steele dossier, which he helped circulate on Capitol Hill and in the news media after the 2016 presidential election.

Now, we may know why.

Kramer’s recently unsealed court deposition in a lawsuit related to the dossier contains bombshell revelations that not only directly contradict media reporting about how McCain came into possession of the dossier, but Kramer’s December 2017 testimony also undercut claims made by McCain himself in his 2018 book. This might explain why Kramer refused to appear before the committee for a second time.

It’s important to revisit the history of the dossier. While the term is meant to confer seriousness (it sounds more official than “file”), the dossier is nothing more than unverified political opposition research produced by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who now runs a consulting firm in London. Steele was hired in mid-2016 by Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, also a political consulting firm, to dig up Russia-related dirt on then-candidate Trump. Simpson, in turn, was being paid by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

(Steele and Simpson have collaborated since 2009 on behalf of “oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs,” according to a 2017 article in The Guardian.)

Steele confessed that he never traveled to Russia, and instead relied on distant sources and hearsay for the dossier, which is a poorly formatted and in some places, ridiculous, collection of allegations about Trump and some associates. It’s nothing close to hard evidence—but that did not stop former FBI Director James Comey from presenting the dossier to a secret court in order to obtain a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign volunteer.

The dossier was used before the election for a number of nefarious purposes by political schemers at the highest levels of government. But McCain’s engagement occurred after the election. This is even more troubling because the shady dossier was legitimized arguably by Trump’s most powerful enemy on Capitol Hill in a campaign to sabotage the duly elected president of the United States.

Shortly after the election, McCain and Kramer attended a conference in Nova Scotia. Kramer, who worked for the McCain Institute at the time, hosted a panel with Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia. At the November 19, 2016 event, McCain, Kramer, and a staffer for the Senate armed services committee briefly met with Wood.

According to Kramer, Wood mentioned “the possibility of a video that might have shown the president-elect in a compromising situation. He mentioned that it was, if it existed, from a hotel in Moscow before he was president-elect, and . . . [it] was of a sexual nature.” (Wood was referring to the infamous “pee pee” tape that has yet to surface.)

In his final book, The Restless Wave, McCain described the somber climate of the meeting despite its farcical topic.

“Our impromptu meeting felt charged with a strange intensity,” McCain wrote. “We spoke in lowered voices. The room was dimly lit, and the atmosphere was eerie.” Both Kramer and McCain admit that Wood did not present to them any material, including the dossier. At that point, it was gossip. But McCain “was taken aback. They were shocking allegations.” (Wood, it turns out, is an advisor to Steele’s consulting firm.)

What happened afterwards appears to be in dispute. McCain wrote, “Kramer offered to go to London to meet with Steele, confirm his credibility, and report back to me. I agreed to the idea.”

But Kramer had a different, and far more consequential, version of the story. In his deposition, Kramer testified that McCain directed him to meet with Steele. “[Wood] said that the person who gathered this was in London and would be willing to meet. And so the Senator turned to me and asked me if I would go to London to meet with what turned out to be Steele.”

This is a distinction with a major difference; if Kramer indeed offered to go of his own accord, that’s far different than a sitting U.S. senator directing an associate to travel overseas to track down information from an unknown British consultant that would humiliate the incoming U.S. president. In his own June 2018 court deposition, Steele testified that “McCain nominated [Kramer] as the intermediary” between the hired gun and the senator.

There is another significant fact Kramer revealed that contradicts news reports as well as McCain’s suggestion in his book about who furnished the dossier to him. The public has been led to believe that Steele gave Kramer a top-secret copy of the dossier during their November 28, 2016 meeting in London; Kramer, in turn, gave it to McCain upon his arrival home. “Kramer flew back to Washington that same night, guarding his hard-won prize with his life,” wrote Howard Blum in a 2017 puff piece about Steele for Vanity Fair.

McCain also intimated that Steele was his source for the dossier. “When David returned and shared his impression that the former spy was . . . a respected professional . . . I agreed to receive a copy of what is now referred to as ‘the dossier.’ I reviewed its contents. The allegations were disturbing.”

In fact, Steele refused to give Kramer the dossier in London; instead he arranged for Kramer to meet Glenn Simpson in Washington the very next day. It was Simpson, a DNC-Hillary Clinton hired gun, who was responsible for furnishing two versions of the dossier to Kramer and ultimately to McCain.

“Both [Simpson] and Steele knew that I was going to give this to Senator McCain,” Kramer testified. “[Simpson] indicated to me that it was a very sensitive document and needed to be handled very carefully. That it covered material that was politically sensitive and in terms of the allegations in here, so it was not something to be bandied about.” Kramer also acknowledged he became aware that Fusion had a “relationship” with Steele at that point.

Even more troubling, Kramer claimed McCain did not carefully vet the 35-page dossier…”

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