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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!
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…”
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?…”
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.’…”
And
“…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…”
“…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…”
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…”
“…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…”
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…”
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.
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…”
Paul Bedard:
“…The new numbers show that even among women the issue has plateaued.
Overall, 62 percent of adults believe sexual harassment is a “major problem.” That is down from 69 percent in 2017.
Among men, 53 percent see it as a major problem, down from 66 percent in October 2017.
For women, 70 percent call it a major problem, down from 73 percent in 2017.
While still in the minority, more also see that “people in the workplace are too sensitive” to the issue, said Gallup.
For men, 45 percent said people are “too sensitive,” while 46 percent said they aren’t “sensitive enough.” At the height of the movement, 54 percent said people were “not sensitive enough,” versus 33 percent who felt people were “too sensitive.”…”
Michael Corkery:
:…Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.
Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.
Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
“We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,” said Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, where recycling costs have increased in some cities.
Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. That stopped when Chinese officials determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions…”
Eric Kaufmann:
“…We find this pattern across numerous issues. And taken as a whole, it reveals something about the United States in the Trump era: The country is not divided by racial conflict, but by conflict over racial ideology. This is a crucial difference — and it is also grounds for optimism.
Race pertains to communities defined by ancestry and physical appearance. Racial ideology turns instead on race as a political idea. Questions like “Should Northam resign?” or “Is the wall racist?” divide voters today by ideology far more than race. “White” is a description of a person’s race, whereas feelings about whether whites are privileged or whether diversity makes the country stronger are part of a person’s racial ideology.
Liberal whites — not minorities — are setting the tone on these issues.
Since 2012, white liberals have moved considerably left on questions related to race, reflecting both a campus- and online-driven cultural awakening that has accelerated in response to Mr. Trump. On the American National Election Study’s scale measuring how respondents feel about a group — white liberals are warmer toward minorities than their own racial group. . . . For example, support for immigration among Democrats has broadly risen, but that rise is much more pronounced for white Democrats than for black Democrats. . . .
Yet Trump voters rate minorities relatively warmly. Racial ideology rather than race accounts for their differences with white Democrats: White Republicans reject affirmative action, the notion of white privilege and the idea that racial discrimination continues to hold minorities back.
Minorities again rank in between on many of these measures. When it comes to “microaggression” statements such as “America is a colorblind society” or “You are so articulate,” few blacks and Hispanics find these offensive while more liberal whites do…”
“…Members of the group, which calls itself Cult of the Dead Cow, protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise the former Texas Congressman’s political career. After more than a year of reporting, Menn persuaded O’Rourke to talk on the record. In an interview in late 2017, O’Rourke acknowledged that he was a member of the group, on the understanding that the information would not be made public until after his Senate race against Ted Cruz in November 2018.”…”
Rick Moran:
“…The dossier that launched several investigations into Donald Trump and his presidential campaign was based, in part, on posts from “random individuals” from a CNN website that allows the public to publish unverified information.
Christopher Steele made the admission in a deposition given in connection with a lawsuit against the dossier. The judge released portions of the deposition this week.
According to deposition transcripts released this week, Steele said last year he used a 2009 report he found on CNN’s iReport website and said he wasn’t aware that submissions to that site are posted by members of the public and are not checked for accuracy.
A web archive from July 29, 2009 shows that CNN described the site in this manner: “iReport.com is a user-generated site. That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked, or screened before they post.”
The FBI was able to obtain several FISA warrants based on the dossier. Was the FISA judge told that some of the information was from an internet crank?
He was pressed on this further: “Do you understand that CNN iReports are or were nothing more than any random individuals’ assertions on the Internet?” Steele replied: “No, I obviously presume that if it is on a CNN site that it may has [sic] some kind of CNN status. Albeit that it may be an independent person posting on the site.”
When asked about his methodology for searching for this information, Steele described it as “what we could call an open source search,” which he defined as “where you go into the Internet and you access material that is available on the Internet that is of relevance or reference to the issue at hand or the person under consideration.”
Steele said his dossier contained “raw intelligence” that he admitted could contain untrue or even “deliberately false information.”
When in doubt, Google it.
The FBI was aware of Steele’s “sources” but still used the dossier to convince a FISA judge to issue a warrant against Trump campaign aide Carter Page. That the FBI has, to this day, refused to verify the authenticity of the information in the dossier is not surprising. A document as flawed as this should never have been presented to a FISA court as justification for granting a warrant to spy on Carter Page. It makes the FBI look ridiculous.
Many on the left still take the dossier as gospel and refer to it as if it were relevant. It isn’t. It was a political smear job, paid for by Democrats, that Steele passed on to a former aide to GOP presidential candidate John McCain, who gave it to BuzzFeed, who then posted it.
The FBI has no interest in declaring most of the information in the dossier untrue. Look at the anti-Trump mileage they’re getting out of it. Someday, in some dusty history of our times, a small footnote will tell the story of how a political hit job was used to try to blow up a presidency…”
