A perfect example of Euro-Global-Weenie analysis and thinking.
Why the President Doesn’t Trust FBI/DOJ/Intel – Two Tweets of the Day from Law Prof Randy Barnett with Commentary
John Hinderaker:
“…The application relies to an astonishing degree on anti-Trump news stories published in the Democratic Party press. Does the FBI really get surveillance warrants on the basis of partisan press accounts? Apparently so. . . . Amazingly, the FISA application relies on ‘speculation in U.S. media’ for the proposition that Russia was behind the phishing of DNC emails…”
Glenn Reynolds:
“…That multiple warrants could be issued against an American citizen on such shaky evidence calls into question the entire FISA process…”
The FISA Documents Used To Wiretap Carter Page Just Dropped or Why the President Doesn’t Trust FBI/DOJ/Intel
“…If you’ve tried to follow the ever-changing Trump-Russia collusion narrative, you’ll know that back in 2016, the FBI obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to wiretap former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Until now, both Democrats and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have sent out memos trying to characterize the Page warrant in their respective favors, but now The New York Times and other news outlets have obtained the warrant applications through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
It turns out the dossier created by Christopher Steele and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign really was a significant source for the FBI’s warrant. Steele appears to be “Source #1” in the document, who claimed that Page met with two sanctioned Kremlin insiders while in Moscow. Page adamantly denies the claims…”
Saturday night document dump or Malfeasance by FBI/DOJ at the FISA Court regarding Trump/Russia Collusion
Scott Johnson:
“…We are familiar with the Friday afternoon document dump. It’s a standard tool of political scandal management. What are we to make of the Saturday night document dump by which the Department of Justice delivered the heavily redacted documents comprising the Carter Page FISA warrant application to the New York Times and other news organizations that had sought them under the Freedom of Information Act? Charlie Savage’s New York Times article draws no inferences from the timing. I say the Saturday night document dump resets best scandal management practices. These documents were not released on Saturday night because the FBI and the Department of Justice are proud of themselves for what they reveal.
Andrew McCarthy commented this morning on FOX News: “I’m really embarrassed because I told people for months that this could never happen….It’s astonishing. It’s as if they took the dossier and slapped a caption on [the Steele Dossier] to give it to the judge. They ought to be looking at the judges who signed this stuff.”…”
Half Dome and Clouds Rest From Olmstead Point
Lefty Russia Insanity, Except Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald:
“…First NPR (above), now @BrookingsInst, with the key, undeniable fact that cable news and Twitter hysteria about Trump/Russia will never mention: Trump’s actual policies affecting Russia have become *more* belligerent, confrontational & adverse than Obama’s…”
Merced River
One FBI text message in Russia probe that should alarm every American
Why the president doesn’t trust the FBI
John Solomon:
“…Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the reported FBI lovebirds, are the poster children for the next “Don’t Text and Investigate” public service ads airing soon at an FBI office near you.
Their extraordinary texting affair on their government phones has given the FBI a black eye, laying bare a raw political bias brought into the workplace that agents are supposed to check at the door when they strap on their guns and badges.
It is no longer in dispute that they held animus for Donald Trump, who was a subject of their Russia probe, or that they openly discussed using the powers of their office to “stop” Trumpfrom becoming president. The only question is whether any official acts they took in the Russia collusion probe were driven by those sentiments.
The Justice Department’s inspector general is endeavoring to answer that question.
For any American who wants an answer sooner, there are just five words, among the thousands of suggestive texts Page and Strzok exchanged, that you should read.
That passage was transmitted on May 19, 2017. “There’s no big there there,” Strzok texted.
The date of the text long has intrigued investigators: It is two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee an investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and the Russia campaign.
Since the text was turned over to Congress, investigators wondered whether it referred to the evidence against the Trump campaign.
This month, they finally got the chance to ask. Strzok declined to say — but Page, during a closed-door interview with lawmakers, confirmed in the most pained and contorted way that the message in fact referred to the quality of the Russia case, according to multiple eyewitnesses.
The admission is deeply consequential. It means Rosenstein unleashed the most awesome powers of a special counsel to investigate an allegation that the key FBI officials, driving the investigation for 10 months beforehand, did not think was “there.”
By the time of the text and Mueller’s appointment, the FBI’s best counterintelligence agents had had plenty of time to dig. They knowingly used a dossier funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — which contained uncorroborated allegations — to persuade the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to issue a warrant to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page).
They sat on Carter Page’s phones and emails for nearly six months without getting evidence that would warrant prosecuting him. The evidence they had gathered was deemed so weak that their boss, then-FBI Director James Comey, was forced to admit to Congress after being fired by Trump that the core allegation remained substantially uncorroborated.
In other words, they had a big nothing burger. And, based on that empty-calorie dish, Rosenstein authorized the buffet menu of a special prosecutor that has cost America millions of dollars and months of political strife…”
Poop is beginning to be a big problem at Burning Man, authorities say
Not the 21st century I was expecting!
OUR COUNTRY IS INSANE
I don’t have trouble maintaining a positive attitude, but this post strikes a chord.
Quote of the day from John Hinderaker:
“I am by nature an optimist, but it is hard to maintain a positive attitude in the face of the rampant insanity that has seized control over our national life.”
Coming War Against the Constitution
Highlighting by me.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS:
“…To Brett Kavanaugh’s foes, the Constitution stands in the way of grand designs they have for the federal government and your lives.
They want to control things in your lives – your healthcare, your lightbulbs, your land, your neighborhood, your dishwasher, your electric bill, your employer. That’s why a wartime coalition of leftist interest groups have mobilized to battle over the future of the Constitution.
Kavanaugh’s foes want the Constitution to mean whatever suits their transformative agenda. Kavanaugh believes the Constitution means what it said when it was written. That it was written in 1787 doesn’t trouble him at all. . . .
The Cons believe the President is in charge of the executive branch, not unelected bureaucrats.
The Progs also believe in federal control over state elections. They don’t care that the Constitution of 1787 recognized that decentralized control over elections helps preserve individual liberty. When no single entity is in control of elections, no despot or malevolent faction can tamper with the system. The Progs hate election integrity rules like citizenship verification of voters or voter ID. They want federal bureaucrats to have the power to invalidate those state laws…”
Time to junk racial quotas in higher education
Michael Barone:
“…It’s time for enlightened America to hit reset on affirmative action once and for all,” writes Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter in The American Interest. By affirmative action, of course, he means the racial quotas and preferences that most selective colleges’ and universities’ admissions departments employ.
“The reason America can never truly come together in understanding racial preferences is not benighted racism rearing its ugly head as always,” he goes on, “It’s because the rationales simply no longer make any damned sense.” Forty years ago, they were arguably needed to reverse anti-black discrimination. Today, beneficiaries tend to come from upscale households or from among new immigrant families never subject to discrimination here.
The weakness of the case in favor of racial quotas and preferences—which are, literally, racial discrimination, otherwise banned by the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act—is illustrated by a Washington Post column by the thoughtful liberal Charles Lane, subtitled “Why restart the war?”
Lane doesn’t bother to defend this form of racial discrimination as a good thing. He just says that President Trump doesn’t oppose it and that most of his voters don’t particularly care about it. On this issue, unlike many others, he’s ready to accept Trump’s and his followers’ priorities.
His equally thoughtful colleague Megan McArdle, assuming that ending quotas would reduce black and Hispanic numbers at selective schools, adds a curious defense of the status quo: “Elite institutions that systematically and markedly differ from the general population create a gaping social wound that never heals.” Really?
Our four most recent presidents, like eight of their predecessors, earned degrees at Harvard or Yale (both for former President George W. Bush). Our history has been far less blighted than Asia’s or Europe’s by resentment at or persecution of what Yale Law professor Amy Chua calls “market-dominated minorities.” Americans don’t much mind when people of various ethnicity earn success by merit, whether in business, in the National Basketball Association, or in Nobel Prizes.
But the increasingly glaring contrast between elite institutional practice and constitutional principle is driving the case against racial quotas and preferences. “Governmental use of race must have a logical end point,” Justice Sandra O’Connor wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger, allowing racial preferences at Michigan Law School. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
That was in 2003. Ten years left to go.
Except it may come sooner. Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s Education and Justice Department withdrew six possibly illegal guidance letters issued to colleges and universities by their Obama administration predecessors, each one encouraging racial discrimination in admissions…”
Why the President Doesn’t Trust His Intelligence Agencies
Kinberley Strassel:
“…But the man who deserves a belated bit of scrutiny is former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan. He’s accused President Trump of “venality, moral turpitude and political corruption,” and berated GOP investigations of the FBI. This week he claimed on Twitter that Mr. Trump’s press conference in Helsinki was “nothing short of treasonous.” This is rough stuff, even for an Obama partisan.
That’s what Mr. Brennan is—a partisan—and it is why his role in the 2016 scandal is in some ways more concerning than the FBI’s. Mr. Comey stands accused of flouting the rules, breaking the chain of command, abusing investigatory powers. Yet it seems far likelier that the FBI’s Trump investigation was a function of arrogance and overconfidence than some partisan plot. No such case can be made for Mr. Brennan. Before his nomination as CIA director, he served as a close Obama adviser. And the record shows he went on to use his position—as head of the most powerful spy agency in the world—to assist Hillary Clinton’s campaign (and keep his job).
Mr. Brennan has taken credit for launching the Trump investigation. At a House Intelligence Committee hearing in May 2017, he explained that he became “aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons.” The CIA can’t investigate U.S. citizens, but he made sure that “every information and bit of intelligence” was “shared with the bureau,” meaning the FBI. This information, he said, “served as the basis for the FBI investigation.” My sources suggest Mr. Brennan was overstating his initial role, but either way, by his own testimony, he as an Obama-Clinton partisan was pushing information to the FBI and pressuring it to act.
More notable, Mr. Brennan then took the lead on shaping the narrative that Russia was interfering in the election specifically to help Mr. Trump—which quickly evolved into the Trump-collusion narrative. Team Clinton was eager to make the claim, especially in light of the Democratic National Committee server hack. Numerous reports show Mr. Brennan aggressively pushing the same line internally. Their problem was that as of July 2016 even then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t buy it. He publicly refused to say who was responsible for the hack, or ascribe motivation. Mr. Brennan also couldn’t get the FBI to sign on to the view; the bureau continued to believe Russian cyberattacks were aimed at disrupting the U.S. political system generally, not aiding Mr. Trump.
The CIA director couldn’t himself go public with his Clinton spin—he lacked the support of the intelligence community and had to be careful not to be seen interfering in U.S. politics. So what to do? He called Harry Reid. In a late August briefing, he told the Senate minority leader that Russia was trying to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that Trump advisers might be colluding with Russia. (Two years later, no public evidence has emerged to support such a claim.)
But the truth was irrelevant. On cue, within a few days of the briefing, Mr. Reid wrote a letter to Mr. Comey, which of course immediately became public. “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” wrote Mr. Reid, going on to float Team Clinton’s Russians-are-helping-Trump theory. Mr. Reid publicly divulged at least one of the allegations contained in the infamous Steele dossier, insisting that the FBI use “every resource available to investigate this matter.”
The Reid letter marked the first official blast of the Brennan-Clinton collusion narrative into the open. Clinton opposition-research firm Fusion GPS followed up by briefing its media allies about the dossier it had dropped off at the FBI. On Sept. 23, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff ran the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Voilà. Not only was the collusion narrative out there, but so was evidence that the FBI was investigating.
In their recent book “Russian Roulette,” Mr. Isikoff and David Corn say even Mr. Reid believed Mr. Brennan had an “ulterior motive” with the briefing, and “concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russia operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign.” (Brennan allies have denied his aim was to leak damaging information.)
Clinton supporters have a plausible case that Mr. Comey’s late-October announcement that the FBI had reopened its investigation into the candidate affected the election. But Trump supporters have a claim that the public outing of the collusion narrative and FBI investigation took a toll on their candidate. Politics was at the center of that outing, and Mr. Brennan was a ringmaster. Remember that when reading his next “treason” tweet…”
Brennan Exposes the Rot
Scott Johnson:
“…Following former Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan on Twitter, we see his animus nakedly on display. He is demented by hatred. Is this really the public role a former Director of the CIA is to be playing?…”
Rand Paul Smacks Brennan
Rand Paul:
“John Brennan started out his adulthood by voting for the communist party presidential candidate. He is now ending his career by showing himself to be the most biased, bigoted, over the top, hyperbolic, and unhinged Director of the CIA we have ever had.”
Everyone Is Smart Except Trump
Politics and media explained!
Dov Fischer:
“…It really is quite simple. Everyone is smart except Donald J. Trump. That’s why they all are billionaires and all got elected President. Only Trump does not know what he is doing. Only Trump does not know how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. Anderson Cooper knows how to stand up to Putin. The whole crowd at MSNBC does. All the journalists do.
They could not stand up to Matt Lauer at NBC. They could not stand up to Charlie Rose at CBS. They could not stand up to Mark Halperin at NBC. Nor up to Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic, nor Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, nor Michael Oreskes at NPR, at the New York Times, or at the Associated Press. But — oh, wow! — can they ever stand up to Putin! Only Trump is incapable of negotiating with the Russian tyrant…”
Non-citizens legally register to vote in San Francisco school elections
A certain portion of our society have completely lost their minds.
“…San Francisco began registering non-citizens, including undocumented immigrants, to register to vote Monday in the November election for the city school board, reported The San Francisco Chronicle.
The move follows passage of a 2016 ballot measure by San Francisco voters opening school elections to non-citizens who are over the age of 18, city residents and have children under age 19, reported the publication…”
Get a Better Class of People in Charge of Institutions Where the Rot is Worst
Glenn Reynolds:
“…So I don’t know if Trump knows what he’s doing. (As proof that his remarks were dumb, he’s already walked them back.) American presidents have historically done badly in their first meetings with Russian leaders, from Kennedy at Vienna to George W. staring into Putin’s soul. And as a general rule, Presidents don’t criticize their own intelligence agencies while at meetings with foreign adversaries. But then, as a general rule, U.S. intelligence agencies aren’t supposed to be involved in domestic politics up to their elbows, as has clearly been the case here. And don’t get me started on John Brennan’s disgraceful comments, which Rand Paul correctly calls “completely unhinged.” Brennan, like his colleagues Comey and Clapper, has made clear the rot at the top of important intelligence agencies, and people like Peter Strzok suggest that the rot extends some ways down from the head. So maybe the general rules don’t apply any more, and Trump is more a symptom than a cause of that.
So maybe his approach to Putin is disastrous, maybe it’s smart. But the most important thing Trump can do is get a better class of people in charge of the institutions where the rot is worst. I don’t know if he can do that at all…”
Intel Chair: FBI, DOJ Obstructing Trump Probe in Hope of Dem Takeover in Congress
“…The chair of the House Intelligence Committee accused the FBI and Department of Justice of stonewalling a sprawling investigation into claims the Trump campaign colluded with Russia with the hope of running out the clock until the November elections, when they anticipate Democrats will regain control of the House and dissolve an ongoing probe that has uncovered evidence U.S. officials sought to cripple Trump’s campaign.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), in a wide-ranging audio interview with his House colleague Rep. Sean Duffy (R., Wis.), accused top officials at the FBI and DOJ of “putting all their chips on the Republicans losing the House” so that their Democratic allies can “shut down” the longstanding Intelligence Committee probe, which has unearthed information disputing claims of collusion in recent months.
Rep. Duffy interviewed Rep. Nunes for an upcoming episode of Duffy’s podcast, “Plaidcast.”
Nunes also lashed out at the U.S. media, accusing “90 percent” of reporters covering the Russia probe of being “essentially an arm of the Democratic party,” according to an advance copy of the interview shared with the Washington Free Beacon…”
Funny piece, worth reading the original.
Kurt Schlichter:
“…Donald Trump goes to Europe, scandalizes the Euroweenies, libs, and cruise-shilling grifters of Never Trump, and comes back victorious. He’s about to get his second SCOTUS justice confirmed – all they have on Brett Kavanaugh is that he likes beer and is named “Brett.” In Congress, the Democrats decided to go all in on abolishing ICE because Americans love open borders and welcome MS-13 or something. In the Mueller farce, the Dems decided that the smart play was to publicly run interference for creepy weirdo Peter Strzok when he went on national TV doing his impression of Lotion Boy from Silence of the Lambs.
Hey Pete, what do those Trump voters smell like? Smells like a red wave to me, you insipid weirdo.
How did Trump luck out by getting such hopeless geebos for opponents? It can’t just be chance. At every turn, these dummies choose to lock themselves into the most implausible and indefensible positions imaginable, then push all their chips into the center of the table. It’s almost supernatural – maybe Trump won the intervention of some ancient demon by heading over to the offices of the Weekly Standard and snatching away one of its Never Trump scribblers to use as a virgin sacrifice…”