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Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS:
“…Federal employee Henry Kyle Frese was arrested today for allegedly leaking national security secrets to reporters at CNBC and NBC. One of the reporters was his girlfriend. Read the indictment here.
Frese was a federal employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency. It comes as no surprise that Frese — like so many other federal employees in Washington, D.C. — is full of hatred toward Donald Trump and willing to use his personal power and government job to attack the president and conservatives. Let’s peruse his Twitter feed before it disappears…”
You can’t make this stuff up!
Brent Bozell and Tim Graham:
“…Politico posted a curious headline by senior media reporter Michael Calderone the other day: “News anchors fight back against GOP senators’ refusal to condemn Trump.” At this point, is it really news that “news anchors” are fighting the GOP?…”
JOHN KASS:
“…Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the Democrat campaigning for president, has had two amazing creation myths to choose from.
One had her as a Native American, and the other as a young teacher forced out of her job because she was pregnant.
Many epic heroines, or heroes, have only one creation myth, as anyone who has who read Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” can tell you.
Warren has just the one face. But each of her stories cast her as a victim.
Yet when it comes to creation myths, Sen. Two Tales has none…
…The Democratic Party is ruled by identity politics, and victim status wins points and protection. Warren’s story gave her room to shape-shift, from the Native American who wasn’t to young mom victimized by the patriarchy…”
ROGER L. SIMON:
“…But most of the public doesn’t know the full story or anything close. The truth rarely emerges quickly. In Churchill’s words, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Eventually, however, it does. And when it does, in this case, if the Democrats have already impeached a president–if it turns out there was a coup plot or something close involving the CIA, the previous administration and others–there will be hell to pay in this country like we haven’t seen since the 1860s, maybe worse…”
Byron York:
“…In an Aug. 26 letter, the Intelligence Community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, wrote that the anonymous whistleblower who set off the Trump-Ukraine impeachment fight showed “some indicia of an arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate.”
A few weeks later, news reports said the whistleblower’s possible bias was that he is a registered Democrat. That was all. Incredulous commentary suggested that Republicans who were pushing the bias talking point were so blinded by their own partisanship that they saw simple registration with the Democratic Party as evidence of wrongdoing…
…Now, however, there is word of more evidence of possible bias on the whistleblower’s part. Under questioning from Republicans during last Friday’s impeachment inquiry interview with Atkinson, the inspector general revealed that the whistleblower’s possible bias was not that he was simply a registered Democrat. It was that he had a significant tie to one of the Democratic presidential candidates currently vying to challenge President Trump in next year’s election…”
Democrats should be worried. The impeachment circus is a spoiling attack to deflect attention from the ongoing investigations. Democrats know the investigations could blow up the 2020 elections for them.
I have mixed views on President Trump’s decision to pull out. I could go through the perceived pluses and minuses, but I will cut to the chase.
Nothing we have tried in Syria or the broader Middle East in general has worked very well. Will pulling out of Syria change that, I don’t think so. Will pulling out make things worse, I don’t think so, at least not for us.
I think we have plenty of intelligence capacity in the area without a presence in Syria.
I am willing to try something new and see how it goes.
“…So, the Ukraine narrative has collapsed worse than Adam Schiff’s credibility because it was obvious that the alleged whistleblower (i.e. leaker) didn’t have first-hand knowledge of what he reported. In fact, the rules were changed in August, suspiciously close to the time he came forward, to allow second-hand knowledge to be used in whistleblower complaints. This is such an obviously phoney-baloney set-up that only someone as credulous as, well, pretty much anyone in the national media believe it.
So it became general knowledge that not having any first-hand knowledge does not make for a credible whistleblower complaint.
Guess what happened next?
You’re right, a *second* whistleblower has allegedly come forward. And, wouldn’t you know it, the lawyer is claiming that this whistleblower does have first-hand knowledge. Wow! What a fantastic coincidence! Just when the whistleblower criteria is settled in the public mind, Trump’s enemies pull one out of their ass that that precisely meets the now-known requirements.
If the rules were that whistleblowers had to be left-handed Lithuanian midgets who enjoyed eating pickles while wearing pink frilly dresses, you can be sure that somewhere, somehow, the Democrats would be able to dig one up. This is basically the same play they ran with Kavanaugh. When it became obvious that Christine Doctor Ford was pretty much lying her ass off, suddenly, a number of other “credible” witnesses suddenly materialized out of thin air, each one with a kinky Kavanagh story more unbelievably bizarre than the previous one, until finally they had Kavanaugh as the captain of a pirate ship doing rape runs up and down the eastern seaboard in between celebratory keggers…”
William A. Jacobson:
“…Circulating claims of Trump-Russian collusion prior to the 2016 election didn’t work.
Using foreign-supplied fake intelligence, from a British spy who utilized Russian sources, to obtain surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition team didn’t work.
Intimidating Electoral College Electors to change their votes after the election didn’t work.
Having the Director of the FBI lie to, set up and try to entrap the president didn’t work.
Having that same FBI Director leak memos to the media to manufacture grounds for a Special Counsel didn’t work.
Trying to invoke the 25th Amendment to declare the president unable to perform the job didn’t work.
Two years of the Mueller Investigation didn’t work.
Three years of a permanent crisis news cycle meant to paralyze the administration didn’t work.
After all these failures to unwind the 2016 election, Democrats and the mainstream media are trying a new tactic: Create a Star Chamber “impeachment” process fueled by anonymous whistleblowers and selective leaks that is not so much designed to remove the president, though they would if they could, but to manipulate the 2020 election.
The first intelligence community whistleblower is not so much a whistleblower as a politically biased operative (according to the Inspector General) who gathered information from various sources, went to Adam Schiff’s office for guidance, then filed a so-called Whistleblower Complaint that almost certainly was drafted by a team of lawyers. WhistleBlower No. 1, because he or she filed the claim as a whistleblower, is entitled to anonymity, there will not be the type of cross-examination and investigation of the whistleblower’s background and information that was so critical when Democrats rolled out a series of accusers against Brett Kavanaugh.
With Whistleblower No. 1 failing to fulfill the mission, there was a leak to the NY Times of a potential Whistleblower No. 2. That’s how this is going to work, there will be leaks to the media to frame the public narrative just like regarding supposed Russian-collusion.
That potential Whistleblower No. 2 is not actually a whistleblower, he or she is reportedly a witness already interviewed as part of the first Whistleblower Complaint. Whistleblower No. 2 is not blowing the whistle on anything.
But that witness now has invoked whistleblower anonymity and protection via the same lawyer representing Whistleblower No. 1…”
Editorial of The New York Sun:
“…Talk about Democracy dying in darkness. It’s looking more and more as if the Democrats really are going to try to overturn the 2016 election based on testimony from an unnamed individual they won’t let the Americans see. That’s what we take from a bombshell report that House Democrats are considering masking the whistleblower when he testifies before the impeachment caucus.
The scoop is in the Washington Post, which has made the business about democracy dying in darkness its very slogan. It describes the steps House Democrats are weighing as “extraordinary.” We agree. The idea that some schlepper from the CIA could be brought before Congress with a mask over his head to testify in an effort to bring down a sitting president is gobsmacking.
The idea, according to the Post, is to “prevent President Trump’s congressional allies from exposing the individual.” It attributes that to “three officials familiar with the deliberations,” but the Post won’t disclose their names either. Under consideration, it quotes the three officials as saying, is “having the whistleblower testify from a remote location and obscuring the individual’s appearance and voice.”
“Kafka couldn’t make this up,” we noted when we first touched on the possibility of impeaching a president based on the tidings of an anonymous accuser. That editorial was headlined “Who Is the Whistleblower?” We recognize, we said, that the Sixth Amendment right of confrontation applies only to criminal prosecutions, not politics. Even so, the Sixth is a marker of fairness and due process…”
Clarice Feldman:
“…This week in a closed hearing Schiff called U.S. diplomat Kurt Volker, the recently resigned special envoy to Ukraine. Prior to the hearing media stenographers of hot Democrat tips bruited that Volker was going to be the final nail in Trump’s coffin. Schiff has refused to release the transcript of that hearing in which, to Schiff’s certain embarrassment, Volker confirmed what present Ukrainian officials had already said. “The Ukrainians were not pressured, they never raised any issue of quid pro quo, they did not view the President’s call to Zelensky to be inappropriate in any way.”
The Schiff show is such a flop that even Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who along with her squad forced Pelosi into calling for this ridiculous “impeachment inquiry” said, “I think the whole thing is boring. He should have been impeached a long time ago, I’m over it, and so that’s how I feel because we’ve got work to do.”
Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who changed the rules governing “whistleblowing” to accommodate this hearsay gossip, will rue the day he did this. He said he was unaware that the “whistleblower,” reportedly a CIA functionary assigned to the White House years ago where he worked with anti-Trump Ukrainians to stop Trump and who has not worked there for two or three years, had first talked to congressional staff. He was unaware of it, perhaps because the whistleblower complaint form asks if he had previously told anyone, including congressional staff, about this and lied about that, subjecting himself to possible felony charges. Moreover, allowing in such unsubstantiated gossip by a liar who had no firsthand knowledge of the substance of the complaint will only unleash a flood of these baseless charges, tying up more government resources on nonsense.
That the first complaint fell apart is clear from the leak to the New York Times that a second intelligence official is “thinking” about filing a similar complaint.
Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection notes:
Got that? Someone is thinking about filing a whistleblower complaint but has not done so, and may not need to do so since he or she already has been interviewed.
Such a person would not, under any circumstances, be a real whistleblower — the person is not revealing anything new and is merely a witness to someone else’s complaint. It’s a media hoax to assign the term “whistleblower” to such a person, but it creates a new news cycle.
Yet within minutes of the 8:38 p.m. publication of the report by the NY Times tonight, this supposed second whistleblower was being hailed as the end of Trump.
Not only did this ill-conceived hearing based on a fake predicate fail to advance their goal, it has seriously harmed the party’s frontrunner, Joe Biden. Voters might get bleary-eyed trying to remember the names of Ukrainian officials then and now, but graft they understand especially such blatant graft. (I predict a great deal more of Democrat graft with the former corrupt Ukraine officials will be forthcoming.) Biden’s fundraising and poll standings are sinking while Trump’s are rising.
And Obama is not likely to be in the clear any more than Hillary Clinton is. (The largest contributions to the Clinton Foundation, while she was Secretary of State vacuuming up foreign dollars, for example, came from wealthy Ukrainians.)
Here’s a detailed, well-documented article by John Solomon on how the Obama White House engaged Ukraine to promote the fake Russian Collusion story. Read it all. Here’s a short summary.
1. January 2016 Obama summons Ukraine’s top prosecutors and investigators to meet with members of his National Security Council, FBI, Departments of State and Justice.
2. At the meeting the U.S. attendees focused on getting dirt on Paul Manafort
3. Ukrainian officials soon after began meddling in the election, releasing a document damaging to Manafort. (Nellie Ohr reported in May 2016 to her husband Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr and federal prosecutors this release)
4. The Americans were not interested in similar evidence against others like former white House Counsel Gregory Craig.
5. U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer they drop the probe of Burisma (the Ukrainian energy company on which board Hunter Biden sat and was richly rewarded).
6. On September 2016 the FBI “asked a Russian “oligarch” Oleg Deripaska “if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia,” a notion Deripaska “laughed off as preposterous.”
As I say, there will be likely much more to come beyond this credible account of Obama pressure on Ukraine to help build the Russian collusion fantasy to stop Trump from beating Hillary….
…For years the Democrats have manipulated voters into thinking they were working for them. Instead they were in significant measure working for themselves, in search of graft and power. Like the opponents of the mythical Mr. Smith, the Democratic efforts, baseless as they are, to keep Trump from disrupting their sweet deal, only result in self-exposing their corruption and disdain for due process.
Excuse me now, please, I heard some gossip on the subway this morning from someone who heard something from someone about Elizabeth Warren and I need to beat a path to Mr. Atkinson’s office before he changes the rules back to require firsthand knowledge of the charges made…”
You can’t make this stuff up!