Group ready to eat dinner at the cabin in August 2009. Lesley cleaning up a spill. She may have had too many adult beverages!

Kim Strassel:

“…The country has watched the FBI treat one presidential campaign with kid gloves, the other with informants, warrants and eavesdropping. They’ve seen the Justice Department resist all efforts at accountability, even as it fails to hold its own accountable. And don’t get them started on the one-sided media.

And they are now witnessing unequal treatment in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Yes, the former FBI director deserves credit for smoking out the Russian trolls who interfered in 2016. And one can argue he is obliged to pursue any evidence of criminal acts, even those unrelated to Russia. But what cannot be justified is the one-sided nature of his probe.

Consider Mr. Cohen, the former Trump lawyer who this week pleaded guilty to eight felony charges. Six related to his personal business dealings; the other two involved campaign-finance violations arising from payments to women claiming affairs with Donald Trump. The criminal prosecution of campaign-finance offenses is exceptionally rare (most charges are civil), but let’s take Mr. Khuzami’s word for it when he says Mr. Cohen’s crimes are “particularly significant” because he’s a lawyer who should know better, and also because the payments were for the purpose of “influencing an election” and undermining its “integrity.”

If there is only “one set of rules,” where is Mr. Mueller’s referral of a case against Hillary for America? Federal law requires campaigns to disclose the recipient and purpose of any payments. The Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to compile a dossier against Mr. Trump, a document that became the basis of the Russia narrative Mr. Mueller now investigates. But the campaign funneled the money to law firm Perkins Coie, which in turn paid Fusion. The campaign falsely described the money as payment for “legal services.” The Democratic National Committee did the same. A Perkins Coie spokesperson has claimed that neither the Clinton campaign nor the DNC was aware that Fusion GPS had been hired to conduct the research, and maybe so. But a lot of lawyers here seemed to have been ignoring a clear statute, presumably with the intent of influencing an election.

Prosecutions under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) are also exceptionally rare, though Mr. Mueller is getting media kudos for hammering the likes of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates for failing to register as lobbyists for foreign entities. The law is the law.

But under this standard, where are the charges against the principals of Fusion GPS, who Sen. Chuck Grassley has said look to have been lobbying on behalf of powerful Russians against a U.S. sanctions law, with its payment again funneled through a law firm? This was a sideline to its dossier work, but Mr. Mueller usually has no issue with sideline charges…”

Original here

This is a terrible situation. I am not Catholic or even religious, but I respect the church. This is not the church that has failed, it is the clergy. What a disgrace.  

The former apostolic nuncio has claimed that Pope Francis knew about sanctions imposed on McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI but chose to repeal them.

Full story here

Another great piece by Andrew McCarthy. It does no good to post a snippet here. If you are interested in a real analysis of the laws relating to campaign money and the president and Cohen go read Mr. McCarthy’s article. News you get in the MSM is worthless.

Go here

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the third quarter of 2018 is 4.6 percent on August 24, up from 4.3 percent on August 16. After yesterday’s releases on new-home sales and costs from the U.S. Census Bureau, the nowcast of third-quarter real residential investment growth increased from -4.5 percent to -1.1 percent. After this morning’s advance durable manufacturing report from the Census Bureau, the nowcast of third-quarter real nonresidential equipment investment growth increased from 6.4 percent to 7.5 percent and the nowcast of the contribution of inventory investment to third-quarter real GDP growth increased from 1.92 percentage points to 2.03 percentage points.

nhttps://www.streetinsider.com/Fed/Atlanta+Fed+Raises+GDP+Forecast+to+4.6%25/14546182.html

Related

Trump demands Fed help on economy, complains about interest rate rises

Borrowed Victimhood Is Not Heroism

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…”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/08/next-stop-the-trump-organization.php?utm_campaign=Roost&utm_source=Roost&utm_medium=push

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Crime and Punishment

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…”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/23/crime-and-punishment-2/

At what point does this become an unreported campaign contribution to democrats?

Facebook Temporarily Censors Tennessee Star Articles Critical of Phil Bredesen

Facebook censored my column — and I still can’t find out why

They censored an AP news source on me today, re-listed it much later.

Facebook Censors Articles From Salena Zito, Jenna Lynn Ellis, Saying They ‘Look Like Spam’

Facebook apparently identifying posts with conservative content as spam

Related

Tech Companies Are Gathering For A Secret Meeting To Prepare A 2018 Election Strategy

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

San Francisco “Poop Patrollers” Make $185,000

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-22/san-francisco-poop-patrollers-make-185000