Remember: OMB. Orange Man Bad.
A great video in which Representative Jim Jordan (R, OH, 4th) makes just a point or three.
Is it lawful or not? Bottom line.
Again I repeat, at the risk of enlisting the help of the Dept of Redundancy Department: it’s all about the OMB. Orange Man Bad.
BZ
In a nutshell: haters gonna hate. And ain’ters gonna ain’t.
Nothing short of a video showing President Trump fellating Vladimir Putin — which Leftists, Demorats and the American Media Maggots are fully convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt truly exists — it’s all one big cover-up.
No one will be much changed. The LDAMM are already shitting car parts over the “timing” of the release.
Nadler, Pelosi, other Dems blast DOJ ahead of Mueller report release
by Samuel Chamberlain
Democrats in Congress attacked Attorney General William Barr Wednesday evening ahead of the Justice Department’s planned release of a redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Barr is set to hold a 9:30 a.m. news conference Thursday accompanied by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the Mueller investigation after the special counsel’s appointment in May 2017. Neither Mueller nor other members of his team will attend, according to special counsel spokesman Peter Carr. Democrats have criticized the timing of the news conference, saying that Barr would get to present his interpretation of the Mueller report before Congress and the public see it.
But here’s the crux of the biscuit:
At a news conference Wednesday evening, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the panel was expected to receive a copy of the report between 11 a.m. and noon, “well after the attorney general’s 9:30 a.m. press conference. This is wrong.”
And therein lies the PSH factor. Demorats hate that the AG is going to release — to us terribly unwashed citizens — an amount of information prior to The Anointed Ones.
As a result there is a new Twitter hashtag trending — #BoycottBarr — in which “journalists” (and I wield that word quite loosely since there are only a handful of real living journalists extant) are advocating the boycott of the AG Barr release.
As if anyone gives the most remote fuckish semblance should “journalists” refuse to attend said press conference. Note to AMM: there will ALWAYS be one of you there to cut the knees off other “journalists.” Guaranteed. So piss on your flintlock.
This week’s continuing problem is now truly twofold: you’re dealing with a president who doesn’t really need the job, and an attorney general who doesn’t really need the job either. And neither one of them really quite care what the rest of the planet thinks of them. They’ve already done their bit. They couldn’t care less if you think they’re unimpressive.
They’re there to do a job.
Late Wednesday, Nadler and four other Democratic committee chairs released a joint statement calling on Barr to cancel the Thursday morning news conference, calling it “unnecessary and inappropriate.”
Uh, no. Bad Orange Man doesn’t care what you think. Neither does man who said this:
“Spying did occur. And I need to explore that.” Those subsequent few words instigated the explosion of hundreds of heads, more camshafts were thrown, and a future path was revealed. As in: “I’m going to backtrack a lot of this. Starting today.”
Footsteps. Certain personnel can hear footsteps. Because it would appear that, unlike the completely inadequate and milktoast Jeff Sessions, William Barr is an adult with a sense of history, America, law, justice and responsibility. With the authority to dive deep. Translated: he’s not recusing shit.
As Barr’s four page summary revealed:
In the report, the Special Counsel noted that, in completing his investigation, he employed 19 lawyers who were assisted by a team of approximately 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, and other professional staff. The Special Counsel issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses.
Meaning: Mueller utilized the tools provided to his best advantage.
As I worked for the FBI myself, let me define two things. “Pen registers” are captured phone numbers from either landlines or cellular, and Title III — included but not mentioned here — are actual wiretaps. Guaranteed those occurred. No matter what anyone tells you.
An interesting point is the recent article by John Solomon:
Ten post-Mueller questions that could turn the tables on Russia collusion investigators
Soon, the dust will settle from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and Americans will have a fuller understanding of why prosecutors concluded there wasn’t evidence to establish that Donald Trump and Russia colluded to hijack the 2016 election.
At that point, many voters exhausted by the fizzling of a two-year scandal, once billed as the next Watergate, will want to move on like a foodie from an empty-calorie shake.
But a very important second phase of this drama is about to begin, as Attorney General William Barr, Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) put the Russia collusion investigators under investigation.
Their work will be, and must be, far more than just a political boomerang.
Really? Do tell. And I hope John Solomon understands when I reproduce all of his salient questions here — with clear attribution: John Solomon.
1.) When did the FBI first learn that Steele’s dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party and written by a partisan who, by his own admission, was desperate to defeat Trump? Documents and testimony I reviewed show senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr first told his colleagues about Steele’s bias and connections to Clinton in late summer 2016. Likewise, sources tell me a string of FBI emails — some before the bureau secured its first surveillance warrant — raised concerns about Steele’s motive, employer and credibility.
2.) How much evidence of innocence did the FBI possess against two of its early targets, Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page? My sources tell me that agents secured evidence of the innocence of both men from informants, intercepts and other techniques that was never disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges in the case. I’m told learning exactly the sort of surveillance used on Page also may surprise some people.
3.) Why was the Steele dossier used as primary evidence in the FISA warrant against Page when it had not been corroborated? FBI testimony I reviewed shows agents had just begun checking out the dossier when its elements were used as supporting evidence, and that spreadsheets kept by the bureau during the verification process validated only small pieces of the dossier while concluding other parts were false or unprovable. And, of course, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page admitted that, after nine months of investigation, the dossier’s core allegation of Trump-Russia collusion could not be substantiated.
4.) Why were Steele’s biases and his ties to the Clinton campaign — as well as evidence of innocence and flaws in the FISA evidence — never disclosed to the FISA court, as required by law and court practice?
5.) Why did FBI and U.S. intelligence officials leak stories about evidence in the emerging Russia probe before they corroborated collusion, and were any of those leaks designed to “create” evidence that could be cited in the courts of law and public opinion to justify the continuation of a flawed investigation?
6.) Did Comey improperly handle classified information when he distributed memos of his private conversations with Trump to his lawyers and a friend and ordered a leak that he hoped would cause the appointment of a special counsel after his firing as FBI director?
7.) Did the CIA, FBI or Obama White House engage in activities — such as the activation of intelligence sources or electronic surveillance — before the opening of an official counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016?
8.) Did U.S. intelligence, the FBI or the Obama administration use or encourage friendly spy agencies in Great Britain, Australia, Ukraine, Italy or elsewhere to gather evidence on the Trump campaign, leak evidence, or get around U.S. restrictions on spying on Americans?
9.) Did the CIA or Obama intelligence apparatus try to lure or pressure the FBI into opening a Trump collusion probe or acknowledge its existence before the election? Text messages between alleged FBI lovebirds Strzok and Page raised concerns about “pressure” from the White House, the “Agency BS game,” DOJ leaks and the need for an FBI “insurance policy.” And, as Strzok texted at one point in August 2016, quoting a colleague: “The White House is running this.”
10.) Did any FBI agents, intelligence officials or other key players in the probe provide false testimony to Congress? McCabe already has been singled out by the inspector general for lying about a media leak to an internal DOJ probe, and evidence emerged this year that calls into question Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s testimony about his contacts with Ohr.
It’s time to start asking clear questions.
One guess:
Barack Hussein Obama.
A soft coup against America.
But wait; there’s more. This from the WashingtonPost.com:
Admit it: Fox News has been right all along
by Gary Abernathy
Throughout most of southern Ohio, residents who watch cable news are predominantly glued to one channel: Fox News.
People there don’t watch Fox News to know what to think; they already know what they think, and they avoid news channels that insult their intelligence and core beliefs. Yes, Fox News is an echo chamber for the right, but no more than CNN and MSNBC are for the left, as far as conservatives are concerned. To be fair, when a Democrat is in the White House, the networks switch places, with Fox News criticizing every move, and MSNBC and CNN defending the Oval Office fortress.
That was the setup. Now comes the truth.
But for now, while partisans on the left may quibble, the fact remains that on the subject of collusion with Russia by President Trump or his campaign, Fox News was right and the others were wrong.
Correct.
BZ
Fig. 1: Donald Trump kisses a terribly reprehensible and insidious green monster whilst he purposely avoids kissing an actual human baby, c. 2016.
That evil President Donald John Trump, the guy with the dead orange cat on his head — the temerity of him, for attempting to fool people by thinking he’s somehow benevolent for donating portions of his $400,000 annual salary to various charities and agencies. Don’t you see? It’s all a ruse, a trick, a ploy, smoke and mirrors, a shell game, a scam, a dodge, naked subterfuge in an attempt to. . .
Do what exactly? Subvert whom? Oh yeah. Maybe help a few people. But clearly, the wrong people, instead of, say, the MGCDTDA (Mis-Gendered Colorblind Dump Truck Drivers of America).
From the MilitaryTimes.com:
Trump donates salary for vet entrepreneurship
by Leo Shane III
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday donated his second quarter salary to a new Small Business Administration initiative to help veteran entrepreneurs, the second time this year he has given money to federal veterans initiatives, according to the White House.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced the donation at a White House briefing on Wednesday. Linda McMahon, head of the Small Business Administration, accepted the $100,000 check, saying the funds “would be put to good use.”
Agency officials plan to use the money to launch a new seven-month training program for transitioning troops looking at starting their own businesses. The program will be based on the existing Emerging Leaders Initiative, but tailored to veteran-specific needs.
Earlier this year, White House officials announced Trump’s first quarter salary for 2018 would be given to the Department of Veterans Affairs for caregiver support programs focused on “mental health, peer support, financial aid, education and research.”
Previous donations by Trump went to the Department of Transportation for infrastructure repair, the National Park Service for battlefield preservation, the Department of Education for support programs and the Department of Health and Human Services for opioid management programs.
That evil, evil, evil President Trump. Giving his salary to disgusting American veterans instead of the GMA (Gay Midgets for Antifa), the SPAC (Syphilitic Pustules for Anti-Cisgenderists) or the LRCOG (Lesion-Ridden Cishet Objectophilists for Genderqueers).
That evil, evil President Trump.
Think of all the good he could have done.
BZ
The full movie is here.
Things you never, ever saw on television.
The truth.
Now go out and #WalkAway from the Demorats.
Then go vote RED on November 6th.
Don’t let anyone talk you out of it.
BZ
Senior US Judge T.S. Ellis III, Eastern District of Virginia.
Has Robert Mueller reached his plateau?
Two rather surprising pieces of news emerged this past week regarding Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of Trump Fishing Expeditionists.
And, in case you failed to notice, Monday was the one year anniversary of the multi-million dollar special counsel appointment via the Mueller Fishing Company.
First, from FoxNews.com:
Federal judge accuses Mueller’s team of lying, trying to target Trump: ‘C’mon man!’
by Jake Gibson
A federal judge on Friday harshly rebuked Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team during a hearing for ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort – suggesting they lied about the scope of the investigation, are seeking “unfettered power” and are more interested in bringing down the president.
If you thought that was glorious, like BTO, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III told Mueller’s team. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever.”
Who is US District Judge Thomas Selby Ellis III? He happens to be a 78-year-old Senior US Judge assigned to the Eastern District of Virginia. A Reagan appointee in 1987, he was born in Bogota, Colombia and graduated from Princeton with a BA in Engineering. He subsequently served in the US Navy as an aviator and took his JD magna cum laude from Harvard in 1969.
Judge Ellis has presided over cases such as the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, espionage act cases, Khalid El-Masri, and now the Paul Manafort case. In three words, Ellis has “seen it all.”
Continuing:
Further, Ellis demanded to see the unredacted “scope memo,” a document outlining the scope of the special counsel’s Russia probe that congressional Republicans have also sought.
Which, by the way, Mueller’s team has roughly three more days to produce.
The hearing, where Manafort’s team fought to dismiss an 18-count indictment on tax and bank fraud-related charges, took a confrontational turn as it was revealed that at least some of the information in the investigation derived from an earlier Justice Department probe – in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Manafort’s attorneys argue the special counsel does not have the power to indict him on the charges they have brought – and seemed to find a sympathetic ear with Ellis.
Damn the judge for asking a particularly logical and pointed question.
The Reagan-appointed judge asked Mueller’s team where they got the authority to indict Manafort on alleged crimes dating as far back as 2005.
“We don’t want anyone with unfettered power,” he said.
He summed up the argument of the Special Counsel’s Office as, “We said this is what the investigation was about. But we’re not going to be bound by it, and we weren’t really telling the truth in that May 17 letter [appointing a special counsel].”
There is this article from TheFederalist.com about Robert Mueller.
Why Robert Mueller Is The Clown Prince Of Federal Law Enforcement
by John Dellaportas
As we enter the second year of Robert Mueller’s sprawling investigation, Hanlon’s Razor teaches us to ‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.’
Other than the president himself, perhaps no public figure is more debated and discussed these days than Special Counsel Robert Mueller. On the Right, former Speaker Newt Gingrich has called him “the tip of the deep state spear aimed at destroying or at a minimum undermining and crippling the Trump presidency.” On the Left, best-selling author J.K. Rowling has tweeted: “If someone, somewhere, isn’t rushing Robert Mueller Christmas angels into production right now, I will be bitterly disappointed.”
Could both sides be off-base? As we enter the second year of Mueller’s sprawling investigation, with no apparent end in sight, Hanlon’s Razor teaches us to “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” What if Mueller were not some sort of avenging angel, but rather just a bumbling bureaucrat? To put it somewhat differently, why assume that the same folks who brought us Amtrak, the U.S. Post Office, and Healthcare.gov somehow knocked it out of the park with the Office of Special Counsel?
OMG. I utterly failed to see that one coming.
Whatever else one might say about Washington DC, it has never been accused of being a meritocracy. Rather, it has always been a place where people trade on connections. Until President Obama came into town and shook things up a bit, for centuries our federal government was mostly overseen by a bipartisan old-guard of WASP privilege.
Hang on. The trip’s gonna get bouncy for a bit.
If anything, the story of Robert Swann Mueller III reads like a parody of that privilege. Born to a wealthy DuPont executive, Mueller was sent off to St. Paul’s, the elite New Hampshire boarding school (where he was John Kerry’s lacrosse captain), before matriculating at Princeton, New York University, and the University of Virginia. In 1966, he married Ann Cabell Standish, an alumnus of Miss Porter’s Finishing School in Farmington, Connecticut, and Sarah Lawrence College. (To his credit, Mueller did volunteer post-college with the Marines, and served bravely in Vietnam.)
Are you now wondering if there’s a proverbial time bomb in here somewhere? Wonder no more.
As Alan Dershowitz recalled on “The Cats Roundtable” podcast, Muller is “the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an FBI informer. … And that’s regarded in Boston of one of the great scandals of modern judicial history. And Mueller was right at the center of it.”
Anyone also remember that, during that time, FBI agent John Connolly was providing information to Whitey Bulger? Bueller?
Mueller not the idyllic beacon of goodness, light and truth? Heaven forbid. Anyone recall this?
One week after the 9/11 attacks, letters with anthrax were mailed to various media outlets and the offices of two U.S. senators, killing five and infecting 17 others. Coming as soon as it did after 9/11, hysteria naturally ensued. This was Mueller’s first true test as FBI director. The results were not pretty. As Mollie Hemingway noted, Mueller “completely botch[ed] the anthrax killer case, wasting more than $100 million in taxpayer dollars, destroying the lives of multiple suspects, and chasing bad leads using bad methods.”
Want the “dirty little lies, the dirty little truth?” You’re going to get it.
To appreciate why the FBI so inept at catching terrorists during these years, one has to understand the transformative changes Mueller inflicted on the Bureau. In law enforcement, experience is key. One would expect it to be encouraged. But Mueller took the opposite tack, instituting a policy that required all FBI employees in any type of supervisory position for five years to either move to Washington to sit at a desk, or else leave the FBI.
The policy drew a stinging rebuke from the FBI Agents Association, which said the program hobbled local field offices by forcing out seasoned agents. The numbers bear that out. In the first nine months of 2007 alone, according to NPR, some “576 agents found themselves in the five-and-out pool. Less than half of them – just 286 – opted to go to headquarters; 150 decided to take a pay cut and a lesser job to stay put; 135 retired; and five resigned outright.” Overall, Mueller’s “Five and Out Policy” devastated the FBI ranks.
For surrounding himself with an army of “yes men,” however, Mueller’s personnel practices were a smashing success. It was so much so that at the end of his stint, Mueller managed to talk his way into a two-year extension to his original ten-year term.
Ah, the beauty of office politics. But wait; I thought Leftists, Demorats and the American Media Maggots insisted and continue to insist that all of our beloved Alphabet Agencies are completely unbiased and apolitical? Notice how I failed to throw “competent” in there?
I’ll leave you with this final bit. And please read the rest of Dellaportas’s article.
That is how Mueller came to still be in charge on April 15, 2013, when two homemade bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three persons (one an eight-year old boy) were killed and hundreds were injured. More than a dozen runners lost limbs.
Once again, a subsequent congressional investigation uncovered that Mueller’s FBI had been notified but did not act in time. In March 2011, the Russian intelligence agency FSB cabled the FBI, warning that the man who would become the lead bomber, a Chechen immigrant named Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was known to have associated with militant Islamists. The FBI investigated but quickly cleared him.
The FSB in September 2011 sent a second cable, this time to the CIA. Again, the FBI did not act. In 2012, Tsarnaev traveled to and spent six months in Dagestan, a terror-filled Russia region next to Chechnya. The FBI was alerted to his travels, but decided neither to detain nor question him.
Once again, Mueller did not apologize. Rather, he told Congress the agent who handled the matter “did an excellent job in investigating, utilizing the tools that are available to him in that kind of investigation. … As a result of this, I would say, thorough investigation, based on the leads we got from the Russians, we found no ties to terrorism.”
“We found no ties to terrorism.” That wasn’t Comey’s cock-up. It was Mueller’s. It’s as convincing as the Paris police saying, regarding the May 12th knife attack, that the “suspect’s motives were unclear.” Because, after all, nothing indicates a lack of clarity like the phrase “Allahu Akbar.”
Then there was this little bit of frippery from Monday’s TheHill.com:
Mueller may have a conflict — and it leads directly to a Russian oligarch
by John Solomon
Special counsel Robert Mueller has withstood relentless political attacks, many distorting his record of distinguished government service.
But there’s one episode even Mueller’s former law enforcement comrades — and independent ethicists — acknowledge raises legitimate legal issues and a possible conflict of interest in his overseeing the Russia election probe.
In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.
Now hold up on that thar car wash, cowboy. Is it being said that — gulp — Mueller may have a Russian Collusion Connection instead of Donald John Trump, the guy with the dead orange cat on his head?
Yes, that’s the same Deripaska who has surfaced in Mueller’s current investigation and who was recently sanctioned by the Trump administration.
Helping him then, hurting him now? Just a wee bit of smegmatized Mark I Model I Conflict of Interest? Hell-ewww? But hang onto your girdle. It gets better.
One agent who helped court Deripaska was Andrew McCabe, the recently fired FBI deputy director who played a seminal role starting the Trump-Russia case, multiple sources confirmed.
So why should anyone care about Oleg Deripaska?
Two reasons.
First, as the FBI prepared to get authority to surveil figures on Trump’s campaign team, did it disclose to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that one of its past Russian sources waived them off the notion of Trump-Russia collusion?
Second, the U.S. government in April imposed sanctions on Deripaska, one of several prominent Russians targeted to punish Vladimir Putin — using the same sort of allegations that State used from 2006 to 2009. Yet, between those two episodes, Deripaska seemed good enough for the FBI to ask him to fund that multimillion-dollar rescue mission. And to seek his help on a sensitive political investigation. And to allow him into the country eight times.
As Scooby-Doo says: “Ruh-roh.”
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told me he believes Mueller has a conflict of interest because his FBI previously accepted financial help from a Russian that is, at the very least, a witness in the current probe.
“The real question becomes whether it was proper to leave [Deripaska] out of the Manafort indictment, and whether that omission was to avoid the kind of transparency that is really required by the law,” Dershowitz said.
Melanie Sloan, a former Clinton Justice Department lawyer and longtime ethics watchdog, told me a “far more significant issue” is whether the earlier FBI operation was even legal: “It’s possible the bureau’s arrangement with Mr. Deripaska violated the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the government from accepting voluntary services.”
Too “inside baseball” for you? I should care to remind: we are a nation of laws.
George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley agreed: “If the operation with Deripaska contravened federal law, this figure could be viewed as a potential embarrassment for Mueller. The question is whether he could implicate Mueller in an impropriety.”
Then, despite the best wishes of Leftists, Demorats and the American Media Maggots.
In the meantime, the episode highlights an oft-forgotten truism: The cat-and-mouse maneuvers between Moscow and Washington are often portrayed in black-and-white terms. But the truth is, the relationship is enveloped in many shades of gray.
Finally, again from TheHill.com:
How about a few questions for Robert Mueller?
by Mark Penn
Robert Mueller has plenty of questions for President Trump, and maybe he will get to ask them. Most of them seemed like perjury traps rather than real questions for the president and, surprisingly, they contain very little that wasn’t in the public domain though prior leaks. In other words, the president is not a target because they have nothing implicating him, and so they want to use the interview to create such material.
But the conduct of the investigation by the special counsel and his team has raised a lot of questions as to its foundation, conflicts of interest, fairness and methods. Most of the public, based on the last Harvard Caps-Harris Poll, supports Robert Mueller going forward with his investigation, but I wonder whether that would still be the case if he were required to answer a few questions himself.
Perjury trap? Oh yes. Every question aimed at Donald Trump will be a perjury trap. The Perjury Trap of perjury traps in modern history.
Just a few questions from Penn’s article.
You get my gist. You understand the thrust. There are many more questions.
Am I the only one that’s beginning to think this whole Special Council thingie kinda stinks?
BZ