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Conrad Black:
“…Only the final descent of the Trump assassination squads to the supreme self-humiliation of the Michael Cohen-Stormy Daniels nothingburger could drag me from my sublime writing holiday to inflict myself on whatever readers there may be in August. Amid the hydrogen bomb of decrials of moral turpitude and perceived high crimes, there is no one else audible who sees the Cohen rollover as the supreme victory for the president that it is.
The Mueller investigation that started out with such a trumpet-blast of portentous Wagnerian prophecy of impending revelations of treason, has fallen to the asininity of getting a sleazy lawyer who has pleaded guilty to a smorgasbord of criminal frauds to declare that candidate Trump told him to pay hush money to a woman he had allegedly had a sexual encounter with 10 years before the election, and that this was an illegal campaign contribution and attempt corruptly to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
There had never been any hint of impropriety by Trump in the matter—no coercion, no payment on the night, and the best that could be done for titillation was when Stormy, a generally engaging and peppy businesswoman, though she found nothing exceptionable in the future president’s conduct, or in “his junk,” claimed to have lightly spanked him with a copy of Time that had his picture on the cover. As S&M goes, this is pretty thin gruel…”
https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/24/trump-has-already-won-on-impeachment/
Scott Johnson:
“…My point, and I did have one, in placing the Michael Cohen plea agreement and related charges before readers here yesterday morning, was to note “the trouble down the road for others,” as I put it. First and foremost of “the others” I had in mind was the Trump Organization. Now the New York Times reports that the Manhattan district attorney’s office is mulling over charges against the Trump Organization and two senior company officials in connection with Cohen’s hush money payment to “an adult film actress,” as the Times now refers to Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford).
The supposed counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election now has more spinoffs than Happy Days. Just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean this shouldn’t be said or reiterated. Every day it becomes clearer that the true object of the investigation taken over by Robert Mueller is the removal of President Trump from office…”
Roger Kimball:
“…One of the reasons so many people are confused by the operations of our self-appointed fourth branch of government—I mean in this instance the unending, Kafkaesque investigations conducted by Robert Mueller and his crack team of anti-Trump shock troops—is that while we have seen plenty of punishment meted out, crimes have been rather less populous on the ground.
Yes, I understand that Paul Manafort has been nabbed for tax evasion and bank fraud, and that he now faces additional charges in yet another court. One of the nice things about our modern prosecutors is their handy multiplication machine that takes what is essentially one crime and gins it up into dozens or even hundreds of counts. Presto! You’re facing 18 counts, peasant—try beating that!
The point is, when you have carte-blanche to torment someone, why stop when you’ve got him locked up for life? Like a cat toying with an injured mouse, the modern major prosecutor keeps batting his prey about till he stops moving altogether. What might have been justice for a serial killer is gleefully applied to someone who fudged his tax returns or tripped over himself answering an FBI agent. Then we have sadism, not justice.
When it comes to our legal system, they say that the process is the punishment. But that leaves out the other side of the equation: that for the system, for wretched power-drunk commissars like Robert Mueller, the process, because of the punishment, is all the fun. They enjoy tormenting people.
But the thing that makes this long-running entertainment so confusing for most of us is that none of the crimes we’ve seen so far have anything to do with the title of the show.
Remember: we crowded into the theater to see “The Great Russian Collusion Drama.” But all of the skits we’ve seen so far—from Manafort’s and Michael Cohen’s tax evasions all the way down to whatever it is that Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos are supposed to have done—are like warm-up acts. Russian dressing might be slathered over the salad—everyone knows that in this election, as in previous U.S. elections, the Russians meddled and endeavored to sow discord. (And of course, we do the same thing: just ask the Brits or the Israelis.)…”
and
“…The crime at the center of this deep-state initiative is the election of Donald Trump. The tort? He was elected without the permission of the ruling class, its jesters and its scribes and moralists. Pete Wehner does not approve of Donald Trump. Bill Kristol thinks he is infra-dig. Psychiatrists are still trying to figure out what Mad Max Boot and Jabbering John Brennan think.
But this, Ladies and Gentlemen (and unlike the MTA and the London Tube, we still use the phrase “Ladies and Gentlemen” here), this is the crime: Donald Trump was elected. That’s it. That’s the crime. It’s not in the statute books, but a little thing like that never stopped a diligent bureaucrat, especially one armed with a phalanx of partisan prosecutors and an unlimited budget…”
At what point does this become an unreported campaign contribution to democrats?
Contrast the FBI/DOJ treatment of Clinton in 2016 with the treatment of Trump. Our federal law enforcement agencies are politicized and corrupt. It is a disgusting disgrace.
Scott Johnson:
“…RealClearPolitics has just posted Paul Sperry’s 7,000-word investigation into the FBI’s misrepresentations and nonfeasance in the matter of the Weiner laptop and the Clinton emails. Sperry’s column runs under the headline “Despite Comey Assurances, FBI Failed to Examine Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails.”
Sperry reports that the FBI examined only a tiny fraction of hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton emails discovered on the Weiner laptop six weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Sperry disputes then-FBI Director James Comey’s assurance to Congress that the FBI had “reviewed all of the communications” found on the Weiner laptop in justifying a hasty second exoneration of Clinton in the email affair just days before the 2016 election. With a little help from the RCP email summary noting the piece this morning, I should add that Sperry also reveals:
• After claiming they could not possibly review the 675,000 potentially relevant emails in the two weeks before the Nov. 8 election, FBI officials suddenly claimed they had made a great technological breakthrough that allowed them to eliminate the vast majority of emails as duplicates. But that technology didn’t work.
• The highly restrictive warrant issued to search the Weiner laptop‘s contents prevented investigators from capturing any “smoking-gun” emails outside the time frame of Clinton’s official tenure as Secretary of State, ones that might show intent to evade security requirements in setting up her private server, or efforts to cover up culpability afterward.
• Ultimately, the FBI manually reviewed only about one percent of the emails – a total of 6,827. FBI lawyers deemed more than half of these personal or outside the scope of the investigation, so that ultimately, only 3,077 emails were reviewed for potential classified material. This review was performed by three agents in one 12-hour session.
• Attorney General Loretta Lynch tried to limit public leaks about the existence of the emails. Once their existence was exposed, she pushed the FBI to review them as quickly as possible.
• As he was leading the review of these emails, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump bias contributed to his recent firing, exchanged a series of text messages about the Weiner laptop with another opponent of Trump, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. He assured her, “We’re going to make sure the right thing is done,” and, “It’s gonna be ok.”
• The FBI was drafting a statement about the emails before it had reviewed them.
• The FBI did not interview either Weiner or Huma Abedine before closing the case again.
• The FBI did not refer the Weiner laptop matter to the intelligence agencies to determine if national security were compromised, as required under a federally mandated “damage assessment” directive.
• The emails that were searched revealed new material, classified and unclassified, not seen by the FBI in its prior investigation of Clinton. At least five new classified emails were on the laptop, including highly sensitive information dealing with close Israel and the terrorist group Hamas…”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/08/the-weiner-laptop-revisited-2.php
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-22/san-francisco-poop-patrollers-make-185000
Liz Sheld:
“…Yesterday, the media was LIT UP talking about their favorite thing: Trump’s impeachment. If you get your information from the legacy media, you would think that Cohen put the nail in Trump’s coffin with his guilty plea, “admitting” that the President directed him to pay off some [alleged] blackmailing trollops with campaign money. The #resistance is all worked up now because they think this is actually going to happen. When it doesn’t happen, they are going to be angry and, as we have seen, violent. The media does this over and over again: they get some idiot partisans to present fantasy logic and reasoning that Trump is finally going down and when it doesn’t happen, they go nuts. The media is destroying the country.
All day long yesterday, a parade of morons were on cable news and the internet quacking about how Cohen’s guilty plea will destroy Trump. Here’s a Politico story with a tag team of “insiders” talking about how Trump is “unraveling” and “terrified.”
But it’s also been so brutally, consistently one-sided, and the Cohen flip brings to the fore the fragility of Trump’s transactional brand of loyalty and potentially its ultimate incompatibility with the presidency. This is not some tabloid or Twitter tit-for-tat. The stakes are of course incomparably higher. And Trump’s long span of quiet about Cohen was so out of character it suggested even he understands the reality of his legal jeopardy. For the first time, it appeared, a once biddable lapdog had turned around and bitten the boss—hard.
On the other hand, Lanny Davis who was panhandling on cable news for Cohen’s legal fund, undermined a central #resistance lie: that Trump “authorized” the famous Trump Tower meeting. Not so much, writes Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller.
“So Michael Cohen does not have information that President Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians beforehand or even after?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Davis.
“No, he does not,” replied Davis, a longtime Clinton insider who started representing Cohen earlier this summer.
Davis’s bombshell statement severely undercuts a July 27 CNN report that Cohen was willing to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that he was in a meeting when Donald Trump Jr. told his father about an offer to meet with a group of Russians who wanted to provide dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
According to CNN’s anonymous sources, Trump approved the meeting, which took place on June 9, 2016. Democrats seized on the CNN report as evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
“Well, I think the reporting of the story got mixed up in the course of a criminal investigation. We were not the source of the story. And the question of a criminal investigation, the advice we were given, those of us dealing with the media is that we could not do anything other than stay silent,” Davis told Cooper.
Womp, womp. This story will probably drag out for a few more days. Consider yourself warned…”
https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/live-blog-62/entry-238135/
Rush Limbaugh:
“…The one thing that hasn’t changed here, the one thing that all of this is about is forcing Donald Trump out of office because the Democrats lost an election. There are no crimes that have occurred here that involve the president of the United States starting with Russian collusion, moving on to obstruction of justice, and even this stuff now with the porn star, Stormy Daniels, Kara McDougal, and the stuff with Paul Manafort, none of it, none of it is going to result in criminal charges against Donald Trump. None of is gonna result in high crimes and misdemeanors.
What it’s all gonna lead to is the forthcoming blistering report from the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who remains blind to the actual crimes that have taken place in this entire sordid story. There is clearly now a double standard, a dual system of justice at the highest levels of our Department of Justice. You can see it in the way the DOJ and the FBI exonerated the Democrat presidential candidate when real crimes were taking place for years and years right under their noses, crimes they perhaps even participated in.
Those crimes, because they involved the Democrat nominee, were exonerated. The Democrat nominee herself was exonerated. You go to the Trump campaign, the Republican, the opponent, where there aren’t any crimes, there wasn’t any collusion with Russia, there hasn’t been any obstruction of justice, and yet this is where the allegation of crimes is occurring? And it’s occurring with people who are peripheral to the original charge of all this — Russian collusion, stealing the election?
What is actually happening now is the losers of the election attempting to steal it back. And that’s what all of this yesterday means, it’s why it all happened, and it is what it continues to add up to. The people who lost the election simply can’t accept it and are doing everything they can to overturn that election result…”
https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2018/08/22/the-2016-losers-seek-to-void-trumps-victory/
This is a good article. Worth reading the whole thing.
Alan Dershowitz:
“…As the record now stands, Donald Trump appears to be guilty of political sins, but not federal felonies or impeachable offenses. You wouldn’t know that if you just watched those cable-television stations that are determined to find crimes and impeachable offenses against President Trump without regard to the law, the facts or consideration of civil liberties. If one applies a single standard without regard to politics, what I call “the shoe on the other foot test,” there are still large gaps between Michael Cohen’s plea of guilty, on the one hand, and crimes or impeachable offenses against Donald Trump on the other. Until and unless those gaps are filled with credible evidence of criminal behavior by the president, his enemies should be cautious about tolling the death knell for this presidency…”
http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/403072-did-president-trump-violate-campaign-finance-laws
Salena Zito:
“…In the aftermath of Tuesday’s news that both former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen were found on the wrong side of the law in separate court cases, the question asked most frequently by the press, Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans is, “Where do Trump voters go now?” The answer is the same that it has always been since they first started asking it Nov. 9, 2016: With Trump.
This new conservative populist coalition is not the fluke the political class hoped it was. Donald Trump did not cause it, he is just the result of it, so no matter what he does, it continues. It is predicated on them, not him.
The coalition is a strike at not just tone deafness in both Congress and the White House but also high levels of incompetence, negligence and shoddy performance at agencies, as well as inept social services, a bloated and incompetent bureaucracy, endless wars and multinational agreements and treaties that don’t benefit average people.
These voters knew who Trump was going in, they knew he was a thrice-married, Playmate dating, Howard Stern regular who had the morals of an alley cat. They were willing to look past all of that because of how institutions had failed their communities for three consecutive presidencies.
Right now the value of Trump to the Trump voter is he is all that stands between them and handing the keys to Washington back over to the people inside Washington. That’s it. He’s their only option. You’ve got to pick the insiders or him.
So the question becomes: Can the Democrats pick someone who is Trump? Someone who just says, “I don’t trust anybody in Washington either. They all suck. The Democrats sucks, the Republicans suck and Trump’s a crook.”
If they could pick a Trump for their side, then Trump could have a problem. But as it stands we only really only have two parties; the party of the governing elite and the party of Trump.
That is why they stick with him…”
https://nypost.com/2018/08/22/why-trumps-supporters-wont-care-about-cohen-and-manaforts-convictions/
Michael Barone:
“…When you lose a game, particularly a game you had good reason to expect you’d win, do you try to figure out how to play better? Or is your first reaction to demand changes in the rules?
In the case of the Democratic Party, it’s the latter. Perhaps that comes naturally to a party that takes some pride in having advocated changes in rules that everyone today sees as unfair (even those, like racial segregation laws, that they enacted themselves). But sometimes it’s wiser to change the way you play than to denounce long-established rules.
The Democrats argue that they’ve been winning more votes but don’t control the federal government. They’ve won a plurality of the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but have elected presidents in only four of them. That darned Electoral College— “land,” as one liberal commentator puts it — gave the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.
Of course, the Gore and Clinton campaigns knew that the winner is determined by electoral votes, not popular votes. But that hasn’t stopped many Democrats from calling for changing the rules to election by popular vote.
Or from complaining about the composition of the Senate. A majority of senators, writes ace election analyst David Wasserman, represent only 18 percent of the nation’s population. That’s because under the Constitution, each state elects two senators, and a majority of Americans today live in just nine states.
It’s suggested that the framers didn’t expect population to be so heavily concentrated in a few states. Actually, it was similarly concentrated in big states 50, 100, 150 and 200 years ago. And when the framers met in 1787, small states demanded equal Senate representation precisely from fear that the big states would dominate them. . . .
It’s true that the Electoral College works against a party whose voters are geographically and demographically clustered. For the Framers, that was a feature, not a bug. They feared domination by a concentrated bloc of voters with no broad support across the country.
A party which wants to win more elections might take note of that and look to broaden its support base, rather than plead for impossible constitutional changes and fiddle with fixes that might produce unanticipated negative consequences…”
Watch Lanny Davis on television talking about Michael Cohen’s plea deal. It is pure politics, but it was a criminal prosecution. A political prosecution now being used by Davis for political purposes. This is the state of our corrupt Department of Justice and FBI and MSM. It is a disgusting disgrace. The president should use this fiasco in every media opportunity, every rally, every time he speaks to the nation. The corrupt government bureaucracy will do everything in their power in an attempt to remove Trump from office and the democrat media will go along.
Mark Penn:
“…Here we go, from Russia with love to campaign finance with love.
Why was Michael Cohen investigated? Because the “Steele dossier” had him making secret trips to meet with Russians that never happened, so his business dealings got a thorough scrubbing and, in the process, he fell into the special counsel’s Manafort bin — the bin reserved for squeezing until the juice comes out. And now we are back to 1998 all over again, with presidents and presidential candidates covering up their alleged marital misdeeds and prosecutors trying to turn legal acts into illegal ones by inventing new crimes.
The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini-crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals of Trump meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment. That was clear the minute he hired attorney Lanny Davis, who doesn’t try cases and did past work for Hillary Clinton. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold information about Trump (while acting as his lawyer) to corporations for millions of dollars, and didn’t pay taxes on millions…”
Trump Derangement Syndrome in full effect!
Toure on Trump:
“We don’t need to hear him say the ‘n’ word to know he’s racist. He has one of the longest resumes of racist behavior and rhetoric of anyone in this entire country.”
He then added:
“This is the king of birtherism. This is the man who’s attacking the NFL constantly. This is a man that stands on black people’s necks so that he can appear taller to white people. White nationalism and white entitlement were at the basis of his campaign. We don’t need anymore evidence — the jury is in.”
And a bit later, as he reacted to Stewart downplaying the issue of racism as a societal problem, Toure said:
“In Corey’s presentation, part of what I hear is part of why black people are not dealing with the GOP at this point. He is talking about that we are obsessed with race, right? And he has this color blind approach that everybody will rise. And that’s not the case, right?
“We know that this is a white supremacist country, and we have to deal with that every day in how we relate to the police, in how we relate to jobs, in how we relate to the criminal justice system and everything.”
Rich Noyes, the research director the Media Research Center explains our weekly pick: “Even as polls from sources as varied as Rasmussen Reports and the NAACP show Donald Trump’s approval rating has significantly increased among African Americans since the 2016 election, MSNBC is not only slamming the president as a ‘racist,’ but condemning the entire United States as a ‘white supremacist country.’ But it was only a few years ago that MSNBC celebrated the historic racial progress signified by the election, and re-election, of an African American president — hardly the act of a ‘white supremacist’ country. Trashing the United States as a nest of racists is untrue on its face, and the mark of a radical blame-America-first leftist.”
This masterful tweet from the president is sure to have the media crowd boiling over with Trump Derangement Syndrome!
“…Just watched former Intelligence Official Phillip Mudd become totally unglued and weird while debating wonderful @PARISDENNARD over Brennan’s Security Clearance. Dennard destroyed him but Mudd is in no mental condition to have such a Clearance. Should be REVOKED? @seanhannity7:06 PM – Aug 20, 2018…”
Stephen Moore:
“…Take a wild guess what country is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? No, no, no, no, no and no.
The answer to that question is the U.S. of A. Wow! How can that be? This must be a misprint. Fake news. America never ratified the Kyoto Treaty some two decades ago. We never enacted a carbon tax. We don’t have a cap-and-trade carbon emission program. That environmental villain Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accord that was signed by almost the entire rest of the civilized world.
Yet the latest world climate report from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy finds that in 2017, America reduced its carbon emissions by 0.5 percent, the most of all major countries. That’s especially impressive given that our economy grew by nearly 3 percent — so we had more growth and less pollution — the best of all worlds. The major reason for the reduced pollution levels is the shale oil and gas revolution that is transitioning the world to cheap and clean natural gas for electric power generation…”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/08/21/whos_the_cleanest_of_them_all_137850.html