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Gail Heriot:
“…I can’t help it. Yesterday morning when I ran across the shutdown notice on the web site of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (of which I am a member), I smiled so much I spilled my coffee. So far, I am enjoying the break from writing dissents.
If you’d like to get a sense of how the Commission works, check out my dissent on immigration detention centers or on environmental justice. My guess is that after reading them you won’t shed any tears over the Commission’s failure to issue reports over the last few weeks.
While I am waiting for things to start up again maybe I’ll have some time to tend to my cactus garden. Dealing with prickly plants is good practice for Commission work…”
KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL:
“…Everybody knew. Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department understood fully in the middle of 2016—as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump—that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That’s the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven’t been released, but parts were confirmed for me by congressional sources.
Mr. Ohr testified that he sat down with dossier author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016, and received salacious information the opposition researcher had compiled on Mr. Trump. Mr. Ohr immediately took that to the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andy McCabe and lawyer Lisa Page. In August he took it to Peter Strzok, the bureau’s lead investigator. In the same month, Mr. Ohr believes, he briefed senior personnel in the Justice Department’s criminal division: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz, lawyer Zainab Ahmad and fraud unit head Andrew Weissman. The last two now work for special counsel Robert Mueller.
More important, Mr. Ohr told this team the information came from the Clinton camp and warned that it was likely biased, certainly unproven. “When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information,” he testified. “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware.”
He said he told them that Mr. Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected,” and that his own wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier. He confirmed sounding all these warnings before the FBI filed its October application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page. We broke some of this in August, though the transcript provides new detail.
The FBI and Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to muddy these details, with cover from Democrats and friendly journalists. A January 2017 memo from Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, flatly (and incorrectly) insisted “the FBI’s closely-held investigative team only received Steele’s reporting in mid-September.” A May 2018 New York Times report repeated that claim, saying Mr. Steele’s reports didn’t reach the “Crossfire Hurricane team,” which ran the counterintelligence investigation, until “mid-September.”
This line was essential for upholding the claim that the dossier played no role in the unprecedented July 31, 2016, decision to investigate a presidential campaign. Former officials have insisted they rushed to take this dramatic step on the basis of a conversation involving a low-level campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, which took place in May, before the dossier officially came into the picture. And maybe that is the case. Yet now Mr. Ohr has testified that top personnel had dossier details around the time they opened the probe.
The Ohr testimony is also further evidence that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in its Page warrant application. We already knew the bureau failed to inform the court it knew the dossier had come from a rival campaign. But the FISA application additionally claimed the FBI was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to Mr. Steele, that he was “reliable,” that his “reporting” in this case was “credible.” and that the FBI only “speculates” that Mr. Steele’s bosses “likely” wanted to “discredit” Mr. Trump.
Speculates? Likely? Mr. Ohr makes clear FBI and Justice officials knew from the earliest days that Mr. Steele was working for the Clinton campaign, which had an obvious desire to discredit Mr. Trump. And Mr. Ohr specifically told investigators that they had every reason to worry Mr. Steele’s work product was tainted.
This testimony has two other implications. First, it further demonstrates the accuracy of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans’ memo of 2018—which noted Mr. Ohr’s role and pointed out that the FBI had not been honest about its knowledge of the dossier and failed to inform the court of Mrs. Ohr’s employment at Fusion GPS. The testimony also destroys any remaining credibility of the Democratic response, in which Mr. Schiff and his colleagues claimed Mr. Ohr hadn’t met with the FBI or told them anything about his wife or about Mr. Steele’s bias until after the election.
Second, the testimony raises new concerns about Mr. Mueller’s team. Critics have noted Mr. Weissman’s donations to Mrs. Clinton and his unseemly support of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s obstruction of Trump orders. It now turns out that senior Mueller players were central to the dossier scandal. The conflicts of interest boggle the mind.
The Ohr testimony is evidence the FBI itself knows how seriously it erred. The FBI has been hiding and twisting facts from the start…”
Max Eden:
“…Last week, the first randomized control trial study of “restorative justice” in a major urban district, Pittsburgh Public Schools, was published by the RAND Corporation.
The results were curiously mixed. Suspensions went down in elementary but not middle schools. Teachers reported improved school safety, professional environment, and classroom management ability. But students disagreed. They thought their teachers’ classroom management deteriorated, and that students in class were less respectful and supportive of each other; at a lower confidence interval, they reported bullying and more instructional time lost to disruption. And although restorative justice is billed as a way to fight the “school-to-prison pipeline,” it had no impact on student arrests.
The most troubling thing: There were significant and substantial negative effects on math achievement for middle school students, black students, and students in schools that are predominantly black.
What are we to make of these results? For education journalists like U.S. News and World Report’s Lauren Camera, there’s an easy solution: Don’t report the negative findings and write an article titled “Study Contradicts Betsy DeVos’ Reason for Eliminating School Discipline Guidance.”
When asked why she left her readers in the dark regarding the negative effects on black student achievement, Camera said that it “wasn’t intentional,” explaining that “it wasn’t meant to be a deep dive into the study. And we linked to it, so readers who wanted to follow up could.”
Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum is somewhat unique among education journalists for his practice of reading academic studies in full before writing about them. Barnum commented, “Well, I will say that the researchers didn’t do any favors in framing the results for reporters. The negative test for effect for black kids is buried on like page eighty with no mention (that I saw) until then…. [T]he research itself is excellent; their choice in framing is…notable.”
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the education policy community will not read this study in sufficient depth to share their disappointment in RAND’s unmistakably slanted editorial emphases. They will read of mostly positive results, and of negative results framed by the RAND researchers as likely attributable to bad implementation of good policy.
It is very sad that the so-called “evidence-based policymaking” community has rendered itself immune to the intellectual breakthrough that enabled the scientific revolution: accepting the falsification of a hypothesis. When it comes to studies of ideologically-preferred policies like restorative justice, the logic all too often is: “Heads, I win. Tails, I would have won if it were implemented correctly.”…”
Kurt Schlichter:
“…Don’t be fooled by the “toxic” qualifier – all masculinity is toxic to these human weebles. What they call “toxic” is really the essence of freedom. It’s toxic all right, but to their goals, not ours. Masculinity means freedom from them and the puffy, non-binary utopia they dreamed up because that’s the only world in which such losers could be anything more than a sorry punchline.
It’s a War on Testosterone, and we’re culturally surrounded. But that’s awesome. As Toxic Male Icon and Army hero, General Anthony McAuliffe of the 101st Airborne put it at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, “Men, we are surrounded by the enemy. We have the greatest opportunity ever presented an army. We can attack in any direction.” And Marine legend and Toxic Male “Chesty” Puller said something similar: “We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them.” . . .
The answer to the attack on toxic masculinity is to recommit to what they label “toxicity,” because what they call “toxic masculinity” is not about criminality or being a jerk. It’s about the basic premise of being a man, the role of builder and destroyer, engineer and warrior. They want to take what makes you special from you, so all you have are the scraps they choose to give you. And then they will own you.
Do you want to be owned?
Cue the SJWs liars to hop in to say that praising masculinity means celebrating rape and abuse and mindless criminality and mayhem. But everything leftists say is a lie, and so is this. The answer to rape and abuse and mindless criminality and mayhem is, of course, more masculinity – the confrontation of evil, and its destruction, by righteous force. And righteous force is a masculine notion…”
Professor Gary Lawson:
“…The Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission’s rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission’s findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission’s complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. This Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. If the Commission ultimately finds a violation, then, and only then, the affected private party can appeal to an Article III court. But the agency decision, even before the bona fide Article III tribunal, possesses a very strong presumption of correctness on matters both of fact and of law…”
“…On the issue of Huawei, China realizes that the United States has enlisted its allies to collectively encircle the Chinese high-tech company. This sets a precedent for the United States to gather allies to suppress China in other areas in the future.
The Chinese official media Global Times published a particularly stern editorial entitled “Let the country that is invading China’s interests pay the price” on December 16, 2018. saying that “for countries which do not care about China’s interests and have extraordinary behavior, China should resolutely fight back, let it pay the price, and even suffer huge losses.” Doing so, to article reasoned, “also allows other countries to understand that China is principled”:
There is a high risk in following the U.S. to harm China’s interests. This time Canada helped the United States to detain a Huawei executive, which broke the bottom line. China needs to clearly express our attitude that we do not accept Canada’s doing so. If Canada finally extradites Meng Wanzhou to the United States, Canada will certainly pay the price of the retrogression of Canada-China relations. China needs to use practical actions to show the world the consequences of Canada’s doing so.
The commentary added, “We need to select counter-targets and make those countries be beaten very painfully. We argue that in this complex game, China should focus on the Five Eye alliance countries, especially Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. They follow the United States to harm China’s interests, especially in a step-by-step manner. Their performance is radical, and they are some of the targets that China should first hit.”…”
Andrew Moran:
“…Let’s begin with the makeup of the school district: It boasts a $7.52 billion budget and more than 60,000 employees, including about 26,000 teachers, with the average annual salary being $73,000. While employment has gone up 16% since 2004, enrollment has dropped 10% in the same period.
According to the latest available data, California school funding surged by nearly 10% from 2015 to 2016. If you examine a five-year period (2011 to 2016), school funding in the state is up a whopping 26%. Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has further proposed the “largest ever investment” in the LAUSD.
Plus, the district already offered LAUSD educators a pay raise of 3% this year and another 3% in 2020. It was rejected.
But the school district can’t afford another pay hike. Next year, LAUSD will have a $422 million budget deficit, mainly because employee pension and health care costs represent a great portion of the budget – they will account for more than half within 10 years. Overall, it has $5.1 billion more in liabilities than in assets and another $15 billion in unfunded health care benefit liabilities for retirees and current workers…”
Gail Heriot:
“…THE 1969 GUNFIGHT AT UCLA: Fifty years ago today, rival gangs, made up in part of “High Potential Program” students, fought it out on campus, leaving two dead.
The tiny “High Potential Program” was UCLA’s early, experimental form of affirmative action. Unlike today’s affirmative action programs, which primarily benefit middle- and upper-middle-class students, this was a real effort to benefit young people born on the wrong side of the tracks. As one might expect, UCLA relaxed the academic qualifications for this project. One of the founders of the program put it this way: “A high school diploma was not a requisite. We recruited people who were active in their community and who had the ability to lead.”
Here’s the crazy part: In practice, the leadership requirement meant that UCLA wanted—and actively recruited–leaders of street gangs, especially those involved in black nationalism. A history of violence was no barrier to admission.
Not a lot of learning went on in the special classes conducted for the program. Linda Chavez, a UCLA grad student at the time, wrote about her experiences in teaching classes for Chicano High Potential students in An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal. I won’t spoil her story here. Suffice it to say it wasn’t pretty.
Among the students recruited for the program was Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. Carter was the former leader of the Slauson gang, a mega-gang in South Central Los Angeles, and was known as “Mayor of the Ghetto.” Shortly before registering at UCLA he had spent four years in Soledad prison for armed robbery, where he had become a disciple of Malcolm X. In 1967, after meeting Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton, he formed the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party, mostly out of members of the Slauson gang.
John Jerome Huggins was Carter’s right-hand man; it was only natural that they would attend UCLA together. Huggins’ apartment was a meeting place for Black Panthers. A cache of weapons, including rifles, shotguns, handguns and homemade bombs, was kept there.
Carter and Huggins never made it thorough their freshman year. They were gunned down in UCLA’s Campbell Hall in the course of a feud between the Panthers and a rival Black Nationalist group, the US Organization (also known as United Slaves), several of whose members were also UCLA High Potential Program students. These broad daylight murders sent shock waves through colleges and universities across the country.
The US Organization bore some similarity to the Black Panthers in that its membership was derived in large part from ordinary L.A. street gangs of the early 1960s. And like the Panthers, its veneer of Black Nationalism was thin. But the two groups despised each other (as rival gangs tend to do).
UCLA administrators never understood what hit them. They thought they were introducing young street toughs to a whole new world. And, of course, they were right. But the reverse was also true. Just as UCLA wanted to turn gang members into college students, gang members wanted to turn UCLA into a part of their protection racket.
Shortly before the gun battle, student activists pressured UCLA Chancellor Charles Young to create a Center for African American Studies—complete with an executive director and staff, office space and a generous budget. The Panthers and US were simply vying to control those resources, knowing that whoever controlled the executive director’s position would control the center. The Panthers backed one candidate for director and US another. The situation got out of hand. Two brothers, George and Larry Stiner, members of US, were convicted of murder.
The High Potential Program experiment was quietly terminated (though it is still celebrated in some quarters). After that, affirmative action programs took more conventional forms…”
“…The 2019 Women’s March doesn’t kick off until Saturday, but what was once the left’s favorite anti-Trump fest is already stumbling.
The Democratic National Committee delivered a devastating blow Tuesday by dropping its affiliation with the third annual Women’s March on Washington, D.C., joining a growing list of liberal groups that have severed ties with the organization amid allegations of anti-Semitism, which the leaders deny.
The fall has been dramatic. In 2017, more than 560 progressive advocacy groups were listed on the Women’s March website as partners. As of Tuesday, there were fewer than 200.
The DNC released a statement saying that it “stands in solidarity with all those fighting for women’s rights,” but offered no explanation for the decision. Nor did Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who are not planning to attend this year’s march, according to BuzzFeed.
Mercy Morganfield, who headed the Women’s March D.C. organization for two years before leaving in December in part over conflicts with the national leadership, had a theory for the departures: self-preservation.
“I’m glad to see that they’re saying, ‘This is not something we want to associate with,’ not necessarily because they have some sort of moral ground, although I’m hoping they do,” said Ms. Morganfield, whose chapter folded when she left. “I think people are starting to jump ship because they want to protect themselves.”…”
Marc Sheppard:
“…Chuck Todd opened last year’s final Meet the Press show, which focused its entire hour on climate change, with a pompous, long-winded speech blaming human activity for a disastrously overheating Planet Earth. The NBC News host made news himself by declaring that “climate deniers” aren’t welcome to the discussion because “the science is settled.”
It was an awful show, even by NBC standards – a Sunday news and discussion program that not only deliberately invited only one point of view to the table, but proudly proclaimed as much in its opening statement. As promised, what followed was as one-sided and alarmist-biased a presentation on the subject as you’re likely to see anywhere. And yet, even in the absence of opposition opinion, Todd somehow seemed to lose the debate.
One member of the silenced opposition, Dr. Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, was quick to point out Todd’s mistake. Addressing the “settled science” canard from his excellent blog:
The belief in human-caused warming exceeding a level that what would be relatively benign, and maybe even beneficial, is just that – a belief. It is not based upon known, established, and quantified scientific principles. It is based upon the assumption that natural climate change does not exist.
Having attended numerous lectures by Richard Lindzen, the American atmospheric physicist Lord Monckton referred to as “the greatest climatologist of his age,” I couldn’t help hearing his words in my mind’s ear:
Virtually by definition, nothing in science is ‘incontrovertible’ – especially in a primitive and complex field as climate. ‘Incontrovertibility’ belongs to religion where it is referred to as dogma.
And remembering Prof. Robert M. Carter:
As to “the science is settled”; or, there is a “consensus” on the issue. … [S]cience is about facts, experiments and testing hypotheses, not consensus; and science is never “settled.” Indeed, Einstein’s relativity theories are still being tested; e.g.”Lorentz invariance.”
Incidentally – of course no science is ever settled, nor would we want it to be. Suppose computer science had been “settled” back in 1946, when the IBM 603 was developed. Can you imagine cramming all those big, bulky vacuum tubes and relays into a smartphone?
Fortunately, just as are the sciences of semiconductors, sensors, mobile processors, and image capture tools (to name just a few), climate science is in a constant state of flux, as is the climate itself, and neither will likely ever be “settled.”…”
“…After years of unsuccessful talks and handshake deals with Beijing, the United States should change course and begin cutting some of its economic ties with China. Such a separation would stop intellectual property theft, cut off an important source of support to the People’s Liberation Army and hold companies that are involved in Chinese human rights abuses accountable.
This will be no easy task. Some industries will have problems finding new suppliers or buyers, and there are entrenched constituencies that support doing business with China. They argue that any pullback could threaten economic growth. But even if American exports to China fell by half, it would be the equivalent of less than one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product. The cost of reducing Chinese imports is harder to assess, but there are multiple countries that can substitute for China-based production, none of them strategic rivals and trade predators.
The United States economy and its national security have been harmed by China’s rampant theft of intellectual property and the requirement that American companies that want to do business in the country hand over their technology. These actions threaten America’s comparative advantage in innovation and its military edge…”
MATTHEW WALTHER:
“…I mention these anecdotes not because I think the present record-setting shutdown is good or sane policy but because I am trying to illustrate why I and other Americans have a hard time caring much about it. In the popular imagination — and sometimes in dozens of little-read memos from the inspectors general of various departments — the average federal employee appears to be lazy, incompetent, performing meaningless tasks for too much pay, with an enviable array of benefits and other amenities (I still roll my eyes in disgust whenever I am reminded that there exist special credit unions for federal employees, whose pay and job security would be the envy of a hundred million other Americans). Government employees, at both the state and federal level, are among the only workers in the United States who continue to be represented by powerful unions, despite the fact that by definition they’re not bargaining against capital but against their fellow citizens.
This is to say nothing of the vast assortment of contractors, consultants, and hangers-on whose “work” has been temporarily interrupted by the shutdown. Their grotesque salaries have blighted the landscape with McMansions and driven housing prices in Maryland and northern Virginia to a level beyond what most families with children will ever be able to afford. So the people whose job it is to bid up the price of useless airplanes or dream up rival marketing schemes for some “cloud” project while our nation’s capital lacks a functional public transit system are going to have .05 percent fewer billable hours for the year? Boo hoo…”
“…The communists in the USSR and Cuba tried to invent a “new man,” a “socialist man” who would give up his individuality in order to advance the interests of “the people.” But the population never bought it, and oppressive security agencies were imposed to coerce people to live according to socialist ideals. That is why the “beneficiaries” of communism were delighted when their totalitarian societies fell.
Today, with the freeing of females from traditional role constraints, it is still primarily men who do the dangerous and dirty jobs, who make up most of the first responders and the military who defend us, and who, as scientists and engineers, continue to address the natural world for understanding and to serve our needs. These are some of the ways that the characteristics and qualities of men benefit society. And it is the job of socialization to direct the traits of men into constructive channels, a more realistic and productive strategy than trying to turn males into females.
Yes, being a man is not stress-free, and sometimes we have inner struggles. But do women not also have inner struggles, and is that not in our nature as human beings? Feminists who simplistically argue that women’s psychological and other problems are all and always the fault of “toxic” men, are doing a very human thing: blaming others for their problems. That such sad naivete has been adopted by our governments, scientific organizations, and schools and universities does not reflect a very sound understanding of people or the world. Even more so for psychologists, who should know better…”
ROGER KIMBALL:
“…For almost three years now, the intelligence services and police apparatus of the deep state have worked tirelessly to undermine Donald Trump. Beginning sometime in the late winter of 2016, when Trump’s presidential campaign was showing unexpected signs of strength, John Brennan—the Communist-voting apparatchik turned media mouthpiece whom it pleased Barack Obama to appoint as director of the CIA—began ringing alarm bells about Trump’s possible relations with the Kremlin. His concern was based on two things. One was a report, spurious as it turned out, about “contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians.” The other was that brittle sense of entitlement, fired by paranoia, that membership in the higher echelons of the deep state’s nomenklatura breeds.
Brennan convened a “working group” at CIA headquarters that included Peter Strzok, the disgraced FBI agent who was head of counter-intelligence, and James Clapper, then director of national intelligence (now, like Brennan, another mouthpiece for the left-wing media), in order to stymie Trump’s campaign. It was Brennan, too, who first alerted James Comey, the disgraced former director of the F.B.I., to the fantasy of possible “collusion” between the Trump Campaign and “the Russians.”
Then came the infamous “Steele Dossier,” the agglomeration of malicious gossip about Trump that was surreptitiously commissioned by and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. This fantastical piece of “opposition research” was essentially the sole warrant for opening secret FISA investigations against Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign advisor, and others.
All this provided sensational pabulum for the anti-Trump press, who spent countless hours peeling back the complex, hypertrophied onion that the CIA, the FBI, and various figures within the Obama administration had built up to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump without quite seeming to target Trump himself.
Mirabile ditctu, it didn’t work. Still, it was impossible that Trump could actually win the election. Nancy Pelosi told us that we could “take it to the bank” that Donald Trump was not going to be president. Many other politicians and talking heads made fools of themselves emitting similar pseudo-certainties right up to the afternoon and early evening of election day.
But win he did, and that changed everything. Now it was not a candidate who had to be stopped but a duly elected president of the United States who had to be kept from knowing exactly what lengths the government—soon to be his government—had gone to destroy him. From November 9, 2016, to January 20, 2017, the reins of government were still in the hands of Barack Obama. The apparatus to stop Trump the candidate was already in place. Now it would be deployed against Trump the president-elect and, later, Trump the president.
Over the last few days, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other anti-Trump outlets have revealed, and reveled in, something that many observers suspected for a long time. That the investigation into various figures associated with the Trump campaign—not only Carter Page, but also George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen—was just a pretext. The main target all along was Trump himself. As Andy McCarthy observed, “following the firing of FBI director James Comey on May 9, 2017, the bureau formally opened an investigation of President Trump.”…”
‘…It’s now beyond any reasonable doubt that Obama administration minions launched an all-out effort to destroy, first, President Trump’s presidential campaign and, when that failed, his presidency. The only question is, knowing the truth, will the Justice Department charge these people with crimes?
The whole concern over “Russian interference” with the 2016 election was little more than a smokescreen for a much wider effort to go after Donald Trump. And that’s not us talking, but the New York Times.
A Times report titled “F.B.I. Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia” shows that the investigation into Donald Trump for the non-crime of “collusion” with Russia’s government began before the election. The inquiry aimed at stopping Trump — and not, really, at determining whether Russians interfered in our presidential election.
The actual investigation by the Justice Department and FBI began during the election campaign. Using half-baked and “unverifiable” intelligence about Trump’s purported links to Russia, officials used the so-called Steele Dossier four separate times for FISA court approval to spy on the Trump campaign.
The Bogus Steele Dossier
The only problem is, the Steele Dossier didn’t come from the FBI or Justice Department. It came from Fusion GPS, an opposition research group linked to the Democrats. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for it.
“Ostensibly, the surveillance application targeted Carter Page,” wrote Andrew McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and himself a former federal prosecutor. “But Page was just a side issue. The dossier was principally about Trump – not Page, not Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, or other Trump associates referred to by Steele. The dossier’s main allegation was that Trump was in an espionage conspiracy with Russia to swing the election to Trump, after which Trump would do Putin’s bidding from the White House.”
So for all intents and purposes, the Deep State holdovers from the Obama administration were serving as an adjunct to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Early on in the investigation, CIA chief John Brennan convened multi-agency meetings about Trump. They included Peter Strzok, the head of the FBI’s counter-intelligence, and James Clapper, national intelligence director under Obama, among others.
The premise of the meetings, again, was that Trump possibly colluded with the Russians to hack our election and might even be an agent of Russia.
Where’s The Evidence?
Yet, as the Times itself admitted, virtually “no evidence” existed for such a charge.
Such actions are illegal, an attempt by supposedly nonpartisan government employees to subvert the 2016 presidential election. Bureaucrats attempting to veto the legitimate will of the people.
Ironically, these extra-legal machinations posed a far greater direct threat to our democracy than anything Trump allegedly did. And yet the perpetrators still walk free. They make hundreds of thousands of dollars on the lecture circuit and as talking heads on TV.
As the Times points out, even as he deepened his investigation into Trump on behalf of the Democratic Party, former FBI Director James Comey lied repeatedly to Trump about whether he was under investigation. He also leaked the contents of a private meeting with Trump in the White House to the media.
The idea: Create doubts about Trump and sow the seeds of broader action by the Deep State against his presidency. For anyone still harboring any doubts: This was no vindictive political act. Trump had no real choice but to fire Comey.
Firing Comey
But as we know now, firing Comey didn’t end Trump’s problems. It multiplied them.
Within days of Comey’s firing in early May 2017, acting FBI Director Rod Rosenstein named Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the charges that Trump was, in essence, a Russian agent. Still worse, they did it not because they had actual evidence — the Clinton-financed Steele Dossier, remember, has never been verified — but because they didn’t like Trump’s foreign policy views, in particular on Russia and Vladimir Putin.
Some of those taking part in this conspiracy actually discussed invoking the 25th Amendment. It allows for removal of a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office.”
They had no basis for this, of course. But it was a weapon they could use. It begins to look like a silent coup, not an investigation.
We find ourselves in complete agreement with The Federalist’s Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway. She wrote: “Using the completely lawful and constitutional firing of the bumbling Comey as pretext for opening a criminal investigation into the president is a grand abuse of power by the FBI. Attempting to overtake the authority to determine U.S. foreign policy from the lawfully determined president of the United States is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.”
Crimes Of The Deep State
Yes, these are crimes. And not minor ones. The real collusion, it turns out, was by the FBI, the Justice Department, the CIA and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Not Trump and the Russians.
For many reasons, they all wanted Trump to lose the election. When he didn’t oblige, they tried to remove him from office. It’s still going on. The Democratic Party openly seeks to impeach Trump. Meanwhile, the Mueller investigation trundles on, with nothing so far to show for its efforts.
This was, as others have said before without exaggeration, a kind of silent coup. Top officials at the Justice Department, FBI and CIA, in cahoots with the Clinton campaign, used the extraordinary powers of the U.S. justice and intelligence agencies for purely political ends: to end the Trump presidency.
By the way, our own IBD/TIPP Poll this month shows Americans mostly believe that to be true. In the poll, 51% agreed the Mueller investigation is an attempt to delegitimize the 2016 election. And they’re right about that.
With the House now in the hands of far-left Democrats, we can expect no calls for investigations of this egregious behavior. Justice should investigate these crimes and those who committed them. And start prosecuting…”