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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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Pierced
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His probe has yet to uncover evidence of actual criminal acts by the president. The revelations of the last few days are, though disguised, the crash in ignominy of the Robert Mueller putsch. But they are far from the end of the story. While the sire of the Mueller hit-squad assault, former FBI director James Comey, declared 245 times at last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing that he did not recall events that occurred in the last several years, the president’s official enemies confessed that the best they could do to show collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign was that lawyer Michael Cohen, who had almost nothing to do with the campaign, had received a message in 2015 from someone promising “synergy” between Russia and a Trump presidency. Cohen did not respond to the message. There is no evidence of such collusion, as chief FBI bloodhound Peter Strzok acknowledged to his intimate colleague Lisa Page in 2016, and collusion is not a statutory offense anyway, unless it is for an illegal purpose. Despite 29 months of mighty investigative effort, not a shred of evidence of such wrongful collusion has been adduced.
Collusion to rig the presidential election was cited by Hillary Clinton, along with being “shivved three times by Jim Comey,” as the reasons for her election loss, in her post-electoral memoir, What Happened. The first didn’t occur, and of the three administrations of the shiv, two were dubious exonerations about which the former FBI director now, under oath, has suffered a merciless attack of amnesia. An optimist could at least celebrate the end of this malignant idiocy of impeaching Trump for collusion with Russia, but there is something about the Trump phenomenon that is only now becoming clear: His support is irreducible and his enemies are inexhaustible, so, in the worst imaginable application of the tired phrase, the show must go on. His enemies hate him so fanatically, they cannot accept the absence of evidence against him. Carl Bernstein, who predicted almost two years ago that the Steele dossier would bring Trump down, and announced almost a year ago that the president qualified under the 25th Amendment as mentally incompetent to serve, was nodded to approvingly by CNN’s always mechanically anti-Trump Brian Stelter when Bernstein asseverated that Mueller was causing the world to “tremble” by the gravity of his revelations. Poor Anderson Cooper, television’s saddest person, thought the “synergy” message, which Cohen did not respond to, “could stick.” Stick to what? He and his fellow commentators, adhering to CNN’s rigorous policy of 100 percent partisan hatred of the president, thought the whole business seemed “collusiony.” I submit that this sort of mindless, biased drivel is an assault on reasonable standards of public information and thus in some measure constitutes a form of animosity to the people. This lends a color of right to Trump’s references to his more perfervid media critics as “enemies of the people.” Sane and serious commentators such as Andy McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney (and a friend), and law professor Jonathan Turley are more concerned about the finding by the U.S. attorney in Manhattan that the president, before his election, ordered Cohen to violate election-financing statutes, in paying off the aggrieved claimants to long-past alleged sexual relationships with Mr. Trump: Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Since this is so far out of Mueller’s field of investigation, he handed it off to the U.S. attorney in New York’s Southern District. One of the president’s senior counsel, Rudolph Giuliani, said or implied months ago that the threats of the two women (rather refreshing personalities, from what the public has seen of them) and the settlements, both in response to blackmail attempts that were breaches of contract, were paid by Cohen and repaid by Trump in the normal course of paying unitemized legal billings from Cohen. What makes the Southern District’s U.S. attorney leap to (all of) his feet, snarling and snapping and with dreams of publicity and political sugar plums dancing in his head in the manner of many American prosecutors, is that as part of his plea bargain, Cohen claimed that the payments to the two women were illegal campaign contributions, as they were made to spare candidate Trump embarrassment in the last phase of the 2016 election, and that Trump knew about them. This has invited and created the inference in the Trump-hating media that the president is an unindicted co-conspirator. That he may be so in the mind of an American prosecutor carries no more weight than did the opinions of a few flaky West Coast federal judges last year that Trump had no right to exercise his constitutional prerogative of controlling entry by foreigners into the United States. It’s an opinion and a headline. But the U.S. attorney catechized Cohen into the claim that it was a campaign contribution when, in fact, Trump paid Cohen’s bills and a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. It will likely be found, if necessary, that a prosecutor cannot indict an incumbent president, and has to send anything regarded as incriminating evidence to the House Judiciary Committee for possible action. Even the incoming chairman of that committee, Jerrold Nadler, whose every fifth word since the last presidential election has been “impeachment,” will have difficulty imagining that this tawdry and comical business has legs as an impeachment case. Cohen is charged, inter alia, with lying to Congress, and if every such episode in the pre-presidential lives of U.S. presidents were judged as retroactively impeachable, at least ten previous presidents would be dragged from their honored immortality and besmirched. It is obvious that both Mueller (with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort) and the federal prosecutors in New York (with Michael Cohen) are negotiating sentences in exchange for the confection of more damaging evidence against the president. In any serious foreign jurisdiction, the prosecutors would be disbarred, though this perverted plea-bargain system is the core of American criminal justice and its North Korean levels of conviction. It is all nonsense; it has always been nonsense, but it is ineluctable. Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claims that the president may be imprisoned after the end of his term. As long as the Democrats continue to pretend that they have a legal reason to destroy the president, the president’s supporters will pursue the Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton, James Comey, his deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, former intelligence directors James Clapper and John Brennan, and former attorney general Loretta Lynch, for what clearly seems to be lying to federal officials or Congress, and involvement in a fraudulent FISA surveillance warrant or renewal. The heaviest and fiercest phase of this struggle may be about to begin.
Collusion to rig the presidential election was cited by Hillary Clinton, along with being “shivved three times by Jim Comey,” as the reasons for her election loss, in her post-electoral memoir, What Happened. The first didn’t occur, and of the three administrations of the shiv, two were dubious exonerations about which the former FBI director now, under oath, has suffered a merciless attack of amnesia. An optimist could at least celebrate the end of this malignant idiocy of impeaching Trump for collusion with Russia, but there is something about the Trump phenomenon that is only now becoming clear: His support is irreducible and his enemies are inexhaustible, so, in the worst imaginable application of the tired phrase, the show must go on. His enemies hate him so fanatically, they cannot accept the absence of evidence against him. Carl Bernstein, who predicted almost two years ago that the Steele dossier would bring Trump down, and announced almost a year ago that the president qualified under the 25th Amendment as mentally incompetent to serve, was nodded to approvingly by CNN’s always mechanically anti-Trump Brian Stelter when Bernstein asseverated that Mueller was causing the world to “tremble” by the gravity of his revelations. Poor Anderson Cooper, television’s saddest person, thought the “synergy” message, which Cohen did not respond to, “could stick.” Stick to what? He and his fellow commentators, adhering to CNN’s rigorous policy of 100 percent partisan hatred of the president, thought the whole business seemed “collusiony.” I submit that this sort of mindless, biased drivel is an assault on reasonable standards of public information and thus in some measure constitutes a form of animosity to the people. This lends a color of right to Trump’s references to his more perfervid media critics as “enemies of the people.” Sane and serious commentators such as Andy McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney (and a friend), and law professor Jonathan Turley are more concerned about the finding by the U.S. attorney in Manhattan that the president, before his election, ordered Cohen to violate election-financing statutes, in paying off the aggrieved claimants to long-past alleged sexual relationships with Mr. Trump: Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Since this is so far out of Mueller’s field of investigation, he handed it off to the U.S. attorney in New York’s Southern District. One of the president’s senior counsel, Rudolph Giuliani, said or implied months ago that the threats of the two women (rather refreshing personalities, from what the public has seen of them) and the settlements, both in response to blackmail attempts that were breaches of contract, were paid by Cohen and repaid by Trump in the normal course of paying unitemized legal billings from Cohen. What makes the Southern District’s U.S. attorney leap to (all of) his feet, snarling and snapping and with dreams of publicity and political sugar plums dancing in his head in the manner of many American prosecutors, is that as part of his plea bargain, Cohen claimed that the payments to the two women were illegal campaign contributions, as they were made to spare candidate Trump embarrassment in the last phase of the 2016 election, and that Trump knew about them. This has invited and created the inference in the Trump-hating media that the president is an unindicted co-conspirator. That he may be so in the mind of an American prosecutor carries no more weight than did the opinions of a few flaky West Coast federal judges last year that Trump had no right to exercise his constitutional prerogative of controlling entry by foreigners into the United States. It’s an opinion and a headline. But the U.S. attorney catechized Cohen into the claim that it was a campaign contribution when, in fact, Trump paid Cohen’s bills and a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. It will likely be found, if necessary, that a prosecutor cannot indict an incumbent president, and has to send anything regarded as incriminating evidence to the House Judiciary Committee for possible action. Even the incoming chairman of that committee, Jerrold Nadler, whose every fifth word since the last presidential election has been “impeachment,” will have difficulty imagining that this tawdry and comical business has legs as an impeachment case. Cohen is charged, inter alia, with lying to Congress, and if every such episode in the pre-presidential lives of U.S. presidents were judged as retroactively impeachable, at least ten previous presidents would be dragged from their honored immortality and besmirched. It is obvious that both Mueller (with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort) and the federal prosecutors in New York (with Michael Cohen) are negotiating sentences in exchange for the confection of more damaging evidence against the president. In any serious foreign jurisdiction, the prosecutors would be disbarred, though this perverted plea-bargain system is the core of American criminal justice and its North Korean levels of conviction. It is all nonsense; it has always been nonsense, but it is ineluctable. Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claims that the president may be imprisoned after the end of his term. As long as the Democrats continue to pretend that they have a legal reason to destroy the president, the president’s supporters will pursue the Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton, James Comey, his deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, former intelligence directors James Clapper and John Brennan, and former attorney general Loretta Lynch, for what clearly seems to be lying to federal officials or Congress, and involvement in a fraudulent FISA surveillance warrant or renewal. The heaviest and fiercest phase of this struggle may be about to begin.
Pierced
Member
Mueller report PSA: Prepare for disappointment
President Donald Trump's critics have spent the past 17 months anticipating what some expect will be among the most thrilling events of their lives: special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on Russian 2016 election interference. They may be in for a disappointment.
That’s the word POLITICO got from defense lawyers working on the Russia probe and more than 15 former government officials with investigation experience spanning Watergate to the 2016 election case. The public, they say, shouldn’t expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump — not to mention an explanation of the myriad subplots that have bedeviled lawmakers, journalists and amateur Mueller sleuths. Perhaps most unsatisfying: Mueller’s findings may never even see the light of day. “That’s just the way this works,” said John Q. Barrett, a former associate counsel who worked under independent counsel Lawrence Walsh during the Reagan-era investigation into secret U.S. arms sales to Iran. “Mueller is a criminal investigator. He’s not government oversight, and he’s not a historian.” All of this may sound like a buzzkill after two years of intense news coverage depicting a potential conspiracy between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign, plus the scores of tweets from the White House condemning the Mueller probe as a “witch hunt.”
President Donald Trump's critics have spent the past 17 months anticipating what some expect will be among the most thrilling events of their lives: special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on Russian 2016 election interference. They may be in for a disappointment.
That’s the word POLITICO got from defense lawyers working on the Russia probe and more than 15 former government officials with investigation experience spanning Watergate to the 2016 election case. The public, they say, shouldn’t expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump — not to mention an explanation of the myriad subplots that have bedeviled lawmakers, journalists and amateur Mueller sleuths. Perhaps most unsatisfying: Mueller’s findings may never even see the light of day. “That’s just the way this works,” said John Q. Barrett, a former associate counsel who worked under independent counsel Lawrence Walsh during the Reagan-era investigation into secret U.S. arms sales to Iran. “Mueller is a criminal investigator. He’s not government oversight, and he’s not a historian.” All of this may sound like a buzzkill after two years of intense news coverage depicting a potential conspiracy between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign, plus the scores of tweets from the White House condemning the Mueller probe as a “witch hunt.”
Pierced
Member
Mark Penn: The Mueller investigation has come up empty on Russia -- You won’t believe what's coming next
The pattern and purpose of Mueller’s investigation and the endgame is becoming clear, and yes, it’s clearly get the president at all costs. The team Mueller hired really foretold the story — Andrew Weissmann as the stop-at-nothing pit bull and a group of Democratic-leaning lawyers, including some who have represented the Clintons, had the obstruction of justice charge ready to go on day one. Trump’s first team of lawyers with their “don’t worry and cooperate” strategy set the president back, and let the whole thing spiral out of control. The investigation, I believe, has come up truly empty on its central charge related to the president — collusion with the Russian government. They are now trying to find someone, anyone who had any contact with Julian Assange with the aim of calling that collusion-lite. But mostly what Mueller’s team is doing is bludgeoning witnesses on unrelated charges to piece together a case against the president. They are shaping that case through the indictments -- and threats of indictments -- that are being used to get guilty pleas to make the president seem like an obstructor or co-conspirator. They are literally creating the crimes. Let’s review what Mueller and his team are doing:
Michael Flynn — They discovered unreported lobbying by Trump's former National Security Adviser and leveraged that to get him to plead guilty to lying to the FBI. Why? So that they can claim Trump’s comment to James Comey about letting him go was obstruction of justice. Yet no other prosecutor would ever have brought this charge. Michael Cohen — They got Trump’s former lawyer on all sorts of financial crimes related to his businesses and loans. But he pled guilty to campaign finance violations for payments that in the past would have been ruled on as personal expenses. Now they’ve also gotten him to cop to lying about when he killed the perfectly legal Russia tower project, only it appears that Trump’s lawyers ducked that perjury trap in the written questions. George Papadopoulos— The former member of Trump’s foreign policy advisory panel was forced to plead to lying about the timing of his contacts. The goal was to legitimize the start of the investigation around him when all he did was pass on a surmise or a tip he received. Was the time and expense worth a 14-day sentence? Of course not. They had all the records they needed to figure out who he contacted when. Jerome Corsi – The best-selling author was threatened with pleading to lying about his contacts with his friend and former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone. There was nothing illegal about his comments or actions, and he is a journalist, though obviously, the general rules of journalism don’t apply to conservatives like him. Roger Stone -- The former Trump campaign adviser sent out a tweet suggesting Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta was next, and an email to Corsi asking him to get the rest of the emails. He was obviously trying to find out what was going on with these emails, and that’s not illegal in any way. Paul Manafort – The former Trump presidential campaign chairman’s old tax and reporting cases going far back were dusted off to get him under the thumb of the prosecutor. It was revealed that he continued a joint defense agreement with the president and suddenly the prosecutor is saying he lied about his business dealings. It’s all about vengeance on him for failing to give them what they want and to make Trump look bad. Sure, there are some anonymous Russians who will never be tried to add on top of this record. But it’s clear now Mueller is no longer looking for crimes in the presidential race of 2016. He is simply creating a narrative to delegitimize the president and to string together his words to Comey with the Flynn indictment, Cohen with Stormy Daniels payment, Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi with ties to Julian Assange, and now Cohen with underplaying Russia connections. And let’s not forget the Trump Tower meeting with the attorney who was also conveniently working with Fusion GPS. There’s no doubt that the outline of Mueller’s report was written a long time ago and is being filled in. For those who thought Mueller would deliver a balanced and thoughtful report, these latest actions suggest that instead, we are seeing an all-out attack on the president and the presidency the likes of which we have never seen. Get ready for the fight of the century coming soon and it will be about everything except collusion with the Russian government.
The pattern and purpose of Mueller’s investigation and the endgame is becoming clear, and yes, it’s clearly get the president at all costs. The team Mueller hired really foretold the story — Andrew Weissmann as the stop-at-nothing pit bull and a group of Democratic-leaning lawyers, including some who have represented the Clintons, had the obstruction of justice charge ready to go on day one. Trump’s first team of lawyers with their “don’t worry and cooperate” strategy set the president back, and let the whole thing spiral out of control. The investigation, I believe, has come up truly empty on its central charge related to the president — collusion with the Russian government. They are now trying to find someone, anyone who had any contact with Julian Assange with the aim of calling that collusion-lite. But mostly what Mueller’s team is doing is bludgeoning witnesses on unrelated charges to piece together a case against the president. They are shaping that case through the indictments -- and threats of indictments -- that are being used to get guilty pleas to make the president seem like an obstructor or co-conspirator. They are literally creating the crimes. Let’s review what Mueller and his team are doing:
Michael Flynn — They discovered unreported lobbying by Trump's former National Security Adviser and leveraged that to get him to plead guilty to lying to the FBI. Why? So that they can claim Trump’s comment to James Comey about letting him go was obstruction of justice. Yet no other prosecutor would ever have brought this charge. Michael Cohen — They got Trump’s former lawyer on all sorts of financial crimes related to his businesses and loans. But he pled guilty to campaign finance violations for payments that in the past would have been ruled on as personal expenses. Now they’ve also gotten him to cop to lying about when he killed the perfectly legal Russia tower project, only it appears that Trump’s lawyers ducked that perjury trap in the written questions. George Papadopoulos— The former member of Trump’s foreign policy advisory panel was forced to plead to lying about the timing of his contacts. The goal was to legitimize the start of the investigation around him when all he did was pass on a surmise or a tip he received. Was the time and expense worth a 14-day sentence? Of course not. They had all the records they needed to figure out who he contacted when. Jerome Corsi – The best-selling author was threatened with pleading to lying about his contacts with his friend and former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone. There was nothing illegal about his comments or actions, and he is a journalist, though obviously, the general rules of journalism don’t apply to conservatives like him. Roger Stone -- The former Trump campaign adviser sent out a tweet suggesting Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta was next, and an email to Corsi asking him to get the rest of the emails. He was obviously trying to find out what was going on with these emails, and that’s not illegal in any way. Paul Manafort – The former Trump presidential campaign chairman’s old tax and reporting cases going far back were dusted off to get him under the thumb of the prosecutor. It was revealed that he continued a joint defense agreement with the president and suddenly the prosecutor is saying he lied about his business dealings. It’s all about vengeance on him for failing to give them what they want and to make Trump look bad. Sure, there are some anonymous Russians who will never be tried to add on top of this record. But it’s clear now Mueller is no longer looking for crimes in the presidential race of 2016. He is simply creating a narrative to delegitimize the president and to string together his words to Comey with the Flynn indictment, Cohen with Stormy Daniels payment, Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi with ties to Julian Assange, and now Cohen with underplaying Russia connections. And let’s not forget the Trump Tower meeting with the attorney who was also conveniently working with Fusion GPS. There’s no doubt that the outline of Mueller’s report was written a long time ago and is being filled in. For those who thought Mueller would deliver a balanced and thoughtful report, these latest actions suggest that instead, we are seeing an all-out attack on the president and the presidency the likes of which we have never seen. Get ready for the fight of the century coming soon and it will be about everything except collusion with the Russian government.
It’s that the report shifts back and forth between “conspiracy” and “collusion.”
The story promises to talk about conspiracy, but then ends up talking about “collusion,” going so far as quoting Burr saying you need to draw your own conclusion about what you think the definition of “collusion” is.
That’s an important distinction, especially in a report that talks about Paul Manafort, not least because Manafort has already pled guilty to conspiring with Konstantin Kilimnik, albeit for covering up crimes in 2018 rather than committing them in 2016.
And while Burr complains we can’t know his or any of the other flunkies’ motives, Andrew Weissmann made it clear that Manafort told the grand jury he didn’t have just one motive when he handed highly detailed, recent polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik to be handed over to his Ukrainian and Russian paymasters.
This August 2, 2016 data hand-off occurred in the specific context of Manafort trying to get whole on his $20 million debt to Oleg Deripaska. The data was also going to some Ukrainian oligarchs that Manafort expected to pay him $2.4 million in November 2016. And all that’s aside from whether Manafort expected the Russians to do anything with the data that might help Trump.
He was badly underwater, and — according to his grand jury testimony, at least as described by Weissmann — he clandestinely handed off recent detailed polling data to a guy connected to the agency that was still hacking Hillary Clinton, to be shared with a bunch of oligarchs who could help him reverse his financial fortunes.
It seems there’s a conspiracy there one way another. Either Manafort effectively stole Trump’s campaign data and traded it to foreigners for monetary gain. And/or Manafort handed over that data expecting that the campaign would get a thing of value from the foreigners he was sharing it with.
Richard Burr would seem to argue that’s not “collusion” unless Trump knew about it (whether he did is one of the questions Mueller posed to Trump).
But it is a conspiracy, an agreement with Konstantin Kilimnik to commit one or more crimes, right there in the middle of the election season. Whether Mueller will charge it or do something else with it remains to be seen. But it is fairly clearly a conspiracy, down to the clandestine arrivals and departures from the dark cigar lounge.
Ultimately, Burr’s retreat to that word “collusion” is a tell. Because, given the public facts in this case, Republicans should be outraged that Trump’s campaign manager was so disloyal he shared highly sensitive data with potentially malign actors. Republicans should be outraged that Trump’s campaign manager was putting his own financial imperatives ahead of sound campaign practice.
But they’re not. For some reason, Republicans are not squawking about the explanation for this data hand-off that would suggest the campaign didn’t expect to benefit.
A prominent activist with close ties to Donald Trump urged British conservatives to abandon Twitter and embrace a new social media app dominated by right-wing political views and used by several far-right figures who are banned from Twitter.
Candace Owens — a rising star on the American right who attracted controversy last week because of comments about Adolf Hitler first reported by BuzzFeed News — told an audience in London that the new platform, Parler News, would be a conservatives haven away from the perceived left-wing bias of Silicon Valley and mainstream publishers such as the Guardian and New York Times.
Several leading figures in Trump’s circle, including his 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, joined the service, however Parler does not so far seem to have justified claims by its advocates that it can be a serious rival to Twitter. After a brief flurry of activity at the end of last year, some of the app’s most prominent members have gone weeks without posting.
Pierced
Member
Russian Collusion: It Was Hillary Clinton All Along
Russia Investigation: It's beginning to look as if claims of monstrous collusion between Russian officials and U.S. political operatives were true. But it wasn't Donald Trump who was guilty of Russian collusion. It was Hillary Clinton and U.S. intelligence officials who worked with Russians and others to entrap Trump.
of a RealClear Investigations report by Lee Smith, who looked in-depth at the controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between officials of then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign staff and a Russian lawyer known to have ties with high-level officials in Vladimir Putin's government. The media have spun a tale of Trump selling his soul to the Russians for campaign dirt to use against Hillary, beginning with the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting. But "a growing body of evidence ... indicates that the meeting may have been a setup — part of a broad effort to tarnish the Trump campaigninvolving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures and Department of Justice officials," wrote Smith. Smith painstakingly weaves together the evidence that's already out there but has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which have become so seized with Trump-hatred that their reporting even on routine matters can no longer be trusted. But he adds in more evidence that the Justice Department only recently handed over to Congress. And It's damning. Memos, emails and texts now in Congress' possession show that the Justice Department and the FBI worked together both before and after the election with Fusion GPS and their main link to the scandal, former British spy and longtime FBI informant Chris Steele. As a former British spook in Moscow, Steele had extensive ties to Russia. That's why he was picked as the primary researcher to compile the "unverified and salacious" Trump dossier, as former FBI Director James Comey once described it. Steele's dossier, for which Fusion reportedly received $1 million, was largely based on interviews with Russian officials. And who paid that $1 million? As we and others have reported, it was Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee, then under Hillary's control. The media knew all this, of course, but largely ignored it. The great irony here is that, after more than two years of investigating, the only real evidence of collusion with Russians at all points to Hillary Clinton. It was she who hired Steele to dig up dirt on Trump using Russian sources. But now, it turns out, it goes even deeper than that. Events surrounding that now-famous June 2016 Trump meeting suggest it, too, was a concoction of Hillary Clinton and her deep-state allies. And that meeting was the basis for much of the later Russian collusion "investigation," if it can even be called that. Bruce Ohr, the No. 4-ranking official at the Justice Department, "coordinated before, during and after the election" with both Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson and with Steele, notes Smith. This shouldn't come as a surprise, given that Ohr's wife Nellie, a sometime employee of the CIA, was also working for Fusion GPS. The FBI fired Steele in October 2016 after it discovered that he leaked information to the press. But that meant nothing. Bruce Ohr merely continued as the conduit from Fusion GPS for information related to Steele's bogus Trump dossier. The FBI and Justice used information from that 35-page document as the pretense for the FISA wiretap on Trump aide Carter Page. Far from being limited in scope, those wiretaps in essence provided a backdoor key to the entire Trump campaign — and the basis for the Russian investigation. So far so good. But an earlier investigation by RealClearPolitics showed that as early as March 2016, the FBI, other Western intelligence sources and Clinton campaign operatives contacted the Trump campaign about potentially damaging information about Clinton. They were in effect live-trolling the campaign. This is significant. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Putin-connected lawyer who contacted the Trump campaign about having dirt on Hillary Clinton, was a client of Fusion GPS when she met with Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump campaign. And she was accompanied by a former Soviet military counterintelligence official, now working as a lobbyist, named Rinat Akhmetshin. Let that sink in for a moment. What's especially curious is that GPS' Glenn Simpson admits he had dinner with Veselnitskaya both the night before and the night after the Trump Tower meeting. Any possibility there was no discussion of the meeting between the two? Seems highly unlikely. Veselnitskaya herself subsequently claimed that the talking points for her meeting with the Trump people were provided to her by Simpson. Once in the meeting, she quickly dropped the promises of having dirt on Hillary Clinton and instead brought up Russia's long-standing desire to get rid of the Magnitsky Act, under which the U.S. imposed sanctions on a number of Russian moguls and government officials. In short, they were baiting a trap for the Trump campaign to make it appear as if they were colluding with Russian officials. Given the nonstop media coverage following leaks by the FBI and Justice, it seems the meeting served its purpose: It sowed the seeds of suspicion about the Trump campaign's supposed Russian collusion. The evidence goes even deeper than what we have summarized here. We suggest you read Smith's piece, linked above. Congress, using the documents it pried out of the Justice Department after repeated requests, is busy getting at what might turn out to be the scandal of the century. And Congress is now doing the work the Justice Department and FBI won't. "So here you have information flowing from the Clinton campaign from the Russians," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes told Fox News on Sunday. Was Hillary The Real Colluder? Nunes, who heads Congress' investigation into the matter, said it was likely that information "was handed directly from Russian propaganda arms to the Clinton campaign, fed into the top levels of the FBI and Department of Justice to open up a counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign that has now colluded (with) nearly every top official at the DOJ and FBI over the course of the last couple years. Absolutely amazing." We have to agree. If all that is true, it is absolutely amazing. After all, these are serious felonies, using the federal agencies to spy on a political opponent in league with a hostile foreign power. As we said, the only real collusion appears to be on the part of the Clinton campaign — aided by the Obama administration, CIA chief John Brennan and a handful of high-level officials at the Department of Justice and FBI. President Trump is losing patience. In comments made in a raucous rally in Indiana on Friday, just before the long holiday weekend, Trump inveighed against the Mueller investigation's failure to look into Hillary Clinton: "You can have the biggest story about Hillary Clinton — I mean look at what she's getting away with, and let's see if she gets away with it." What's next? It's possible the collusion investigation soon will turn from Trump to Clinton. If so, it could lead to more resignations and possibly jail time for those involved. That includes perhaps even Hillary Clinton, who sits at the political epicenter of all this illegality.
Russia Investigation: It's beginning to look as if claims of monstrous collusion between Russian officials and U.S. political operatives were true. But it wasn't Donald Trump who was guilty of Russian collusion. It was Hillary Clinton and U.S. intelligence officials who worked with Russians and others to entrap Trump.
of a RealClear Investigations report by Lee Smith, who looked in-depth at the controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between officials of then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign staff and a Russian lawyer known to have ties with high-level officials in Vladimir Putin's government. The media have spun a tale of Trump selling his soul to the Russians for campaign dirt to use against Hillary, beginning with the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting. But "a growing body of evidence ... indicates that the meeting may have been a setup — part of a broad effort to tarnish the Trump campaigninvolving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures and Department of Justice officials," wrote Smith. Smith painstakingly weaves together the evidence that's already out there but has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which have become so seized with Trump-hatred that their reporting even on routine matters can no longer be trusted. But he adds in more evidence that the Justice Department only recently handed over to Congress. And It's damning. Memos, emails and texts now in Congress' possession show that the Justice Department and the FBI worked together both before and after the election with Fusion GPS and their main link to the scandal, former British spy and longtime FBI informant Chris Steele. As a former British spook in Moscow, Steele had extensive ties to Russia. That's why he was picked as the primary researcher to compile the "unverified and salacious" Trump dossier, as former FBI Director James Comey once described it. Steele's dossier, for which Fusion reportedly received $1 million, was largely based on interviews with Russian officials. And who paid that $1 million? As we and others have reported, it was Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee, then under Hillary's control. The media knew all this, of course, but largely ignored it. The great irony here is that, after more than two years of investigating, the only real evidence of collusion with Russians at all points to Hillary Clinton. It was she who hired Steele to dig up dirt on Trump using Russian sources. But now, it turns out, it goes even deeper than that. Events surrounding that now-famous June 2016 Trump meeting suggest it, too, was a concoction of Hillary Clinton and her deep-state allies. And that meeting was the basis for much of the later Russian collusion "investigation," if it can even be called that. Bruce Ohr, the No. 4-ranking official at the Justice Department, "coordinated before, during and after the election" with both Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson and with Steele, notes Smith. This shouldn't come as a surprise, given that Ohr's wife Nellie, a sometime employee of the CIA, was also working for Fusion GPS. The FBI fired Steele in October 2016 after it discovered that he leaked information to the press. But that meant nothing. Bruce Ohr merely continued as the conduit from Fusion GPS for information related to Steele's bogus Trump dossier. The FBI and Justice used information from that 35-page document as the pretense for the FISA wiretap on Trump aide Carter Page. Far from being limited in scope, those wiretaps in essence provided a backdoor key to the entire Trump campaign — and the basis for the Russian investigation. So far so good. But an earlier investigation by RealClearPolitics showed that as early as March 2016, the FBI, other Western intelligence sources and Clinton campaign operatives contacted the Trump campaign about potentially damaging information about Clinton. They were in effect live-trolling the campaign. This is significant. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Putin-connected lawyer who contacted the Trump campaign about having dirt on Hillary Clinton, was a client of Fusion GPS when she met with Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump campaign. And she was accompanied by a former Soviet military counterintelligence official, now working as a lobbyist, named Rinat Akhmetshin. Let that sink in for a moment. What's especially curious is that GPS' Glenn Simpson admits he had dinner with Veselnitskaya both the night before and the night after the Trump Tower meeting. Any possibility there was no discussion of the meeting between the two? Seems highly unlikely. Veselnitskaya herself subsequently claimed that the talking points for her meeting with the Trump people were provided to her by Simpson. Once in the meeting, she quickly dropped the promises of having dirt on Hillary Clinton and instead brought up Russia's long-standing desire to get rid of the Magnitsky Act, under which the U.S. imposed sanctions on a number of Russian moguls and government officials. In short, they were baiting a trap for the Trump campaign to make it appear as if they were colluding with Russian officials. Given the nonstop media coverage following leaks by the FBI and Justice, it seems the meeting served its purpose: It sowed the seeds of suspicion about the Trump campaign's supposed Russian collusion. The evidence goes even deeper than what we have summarized here. We suggest you read Smith's piece, linked above. Congress, using the documents it pried out of the Justice Department after repeated requests, is busy getting at what might turn out to be the scandal of the century. And Congress is now doing the work the Justice Department and FBI won't. "So here you have information flowing from the Clinton campaign from the Russians," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes told Fox News on Sunday. Was Hillary The Real Colluder? Nunes, who heads Congress' investigation into the matter, said it was likely that information "was handed directly from Russian propaganda arms to the Clinton campaign, fed into the top levels of the FBI and Department of Justice to open up a counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign that has now colluded (with) nearly every top official at the DOJ and FBI over the course of the last couple years. Absolutely amazing." We have to agree. If all that is true, it is absolutely amazing. After all, these are serious felonies, using the federal agencies to spy on a political opponent in league with a hostile foreign power. As we said, the only real collusion appears to be on the part of the Clinton campaign — aided by the Obama administration, CIA chief John Brennan and a handful of high-level officials at the Department of Justice and FBI. President Trump is losing patience. In comments made in a raucous rally in Indiana on Friday, just before the long holiday weekend, Trump inveighed against the Mueller investigation's failure to look into Hillary Clinton: "You can have the biggest story about Hillary Clinton — I mean look at what she's getting away with, and let's see if she gets away with it." What's next? It's possible the collusion investigation soon will turn from Trump to Clinton. If so, it could lead to more resignations and possibly jail time for those involved. That includes perhaps even Hillary Clinton, who sits at the political epicenter of all this illegality.
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Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is mulling entering the Democratic presidential primary, panned Trump's call to bail out the plant.
"As any business leader knows, the top consideration at @TVAnews is cost. Phasing out that coal plant will save Kentuckians money (not to mention their air & water)," Bloomberg tweeted.
TVA retired two other coal-burning units at the Paradise, Ky., site in 2017 because of pollution limits imposed by the Obama administration's Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. The Trump administration is revisiting the underlying justification for the rule and has asked for input on whether to go further. While EPA insists it will not weaken or eliminate the mercury standard itself, environmentalists say the administration is inviting legal challenges that eventually could upend the regulation. TVA replaced the retired coal with new, cleaner gas-burning generation.
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America is a kidnapper.
It became one in late 2017 and early 2018, when the government began quietly separating families — asylum seekers and migrants who entered the country illegally — at our southern border, a test run for a soon-to-be-open policy of taking children from their parents.
Our country became a kidnapper in plain sight last April, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy at the border, breaking up families at such a pace that children pulled from the arms of their mothers and fathers were dispersed to refugee sites across the country with no consistent tracking process in place.
And America remains a kidnapper today, because children are still being separated at the border for specious reasons and, according to a federal report and recent testimony before Congress, there may be thousands of additional children we didn’t know were separated, children the government says it now lacks the resources to find.
Ann Maxwell, assistant inspector general at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, testified last week before a U.S. House subcommittee on oversight and investigations: “In conclusion, the total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by U.S. immigration authorities and transferred to HHS for care is not known.”
She said it is “likely thousands more.”
Consider that for a moment: The total number of children, possibly thousands, that our government willfully took from their parents as part of a cruel and clumsy experiment in deterrence is not known.
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