The Paradoxes of the Mueller Investigation

Victor Davis Hanson

Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for allegedly conspiring to sow confusion in the 2016 presidential election. The chance of extraditing any of the accused from Vladimir Putin’s Russia is zero.

Some of the Russians’ Keystone Cops efforts to disrupt the election favored Donald Trump (as well as Bernie Sanders). Yet Mueller’s team made it clear that the Russians neither colluded with any U.S. citizens nor had any material effect on the election’s outcome.

But from here on out, there will be ironies, paradoxes, and unintended consequences with just about everything Mueller does.

Is it now time to prosecute foreigners for attempting to interfere with a U.S. election? If so, then surely Christopher Steele, the author of the Fusion GPS dossier, is far more culpable and vulnerable than the 13 bumbling Russians.

Steele is not a U.S. citizen. Steele colluded with Russian interests in compiling his lurid dossier about Donald Trump. Steele did not register as a foreign agent. And Steele was paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to find dirt on political rival Trump and his campaign.

In other words, Steele’s position is far worse than that of the Russians for a variety of reasons. One, he is easily extraditable while the Russians are not. Two, his efforts really did affect the race, given that the dossier was systematically leaked to major media and served as a basis for the U.S. government to spy on American citizens. Three, unlike with the Russians, no one disputes that American citizens—Hillary Clinton, members of the Democratic National Committee, and anti-Trump partisan Glenn Simpson and his Fusion GPS team—colluded by paying for Steele’s work.

Mueller’s team has also leveraged a guilty plea from former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for making false statements to FBI investigators. If the Flynn case is now the Mueller standard, then we know that a number of high-ranking officials are vulnerable to such legal exposure.

Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr deliberately omitted on federal disclosure forms the fact that his wife, an expert on Russia, worked on the Fusion GPS dossier.

Steele himself probably lied to the FBI went he claimed he had not leaked the dossier’s contents to the media.

Hillary Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills likely lied to FBI investigator Peter Strzok (who had also interviewed Flynn) when they claimed they had no idea that Clinton was using a private and illegal email server until the story went public. In fact, Abedin and Mills had communicated with Clinton over the same server—as did then-President Barack Obama, who likewise denied that he knew about the improper server.

Former FBI Director James Comey likely lied to Congress when he claimed that his exoneration of Clinton came after he had interviewed her. We now know from documents that he drafted a statement about the conclusion of the investigation even before he met with her.

As far as obstruction charges go, Mueller has other possible targets. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch met secretly with Bill Clinton on a jet parked on a tarmac in Phoenix shortly before the Justice Department closed the probe of Hillary Clinton and chose not to pursue charges against her. Comey said Lynch asked him not to use the word “investigation” when discussing the Clinton email probe. Text messages between Strzok and fellow FBI official Lisa Page suggest that Lynch knew in advance about the conclusions Comey would reach in the investigation.

What is going on?

DRUDGE

NRA LaPierre warns of 'socialist state'...
States Mull Gun Seizures from People Deemed Dangerous... 
Church To Hold Blessing For AR-15s...
Texas to build police substation at school...
TRUMP: Maybe Video Games, Movies Too Violent...
CHINA TELLS USA: BE LIKE US, RESTRICT FIREARMS...
Russian trolls on TWITTER 'rile' Americans on gun violence... 

STUDENT: CNN TOLD ME TO STICK TO SCRIPT
NETWORK WROTE QUESTION
'IT WAS VERY SHOCKING'

This is CNN

FL Shooting Survivor Colton Haab: CNN Told Me I Needed To "Stick To The Script"; Entire Town Hall Scripted

FL Shooting Survivor Ariana Klein: Networks Don't Want Us To Give Our Real Opinions, "Want Us To Further Their Agendas"

Shooting Survivor: CNN Gave Me "Scripted Question" After Denying Question About Armed Guards

CNN is the Putin Network

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA

Yesterday on Bret Baier’s Special Report, his panel was discussing President Trump’s latest tweets about Russia. Charles Lane suggested that we reflect on how Trump has attacked Barack Obama over Russia and asserted the superiority of toughness towards Putin. “There was a time,” Lane said, when the very fact of such attacks and assertions by a president on his predecessor would widely have been considered outrageous.

Lane may be right. But note how carefully he chose his words. He said “there was a time,” not “until now.”

Lane had good reason to choose the words he did. As president, Obama did not hesitate to attack his predecessor, George W. Bush....

To be sure, Obama was never as nasty about Bush as Trump has been at times about Obama. Trump’s approach to his predecessor has been a full step less civil than Obama’s was.

But there’s another factor to consider. It’s now clear that the Obama administration, almost certainly with Obama’s knowledge, used dirty (and probably illegal) tactics to undermine Trump. To paraphrase Charles Lane, there was a time when the tactics used by Team Obama against Donald Trump would widely have been considered outrageous. They still would be if used against a Democrat.

Consider the Obama DOJ’s submission supporting its application to engage in electronic surveillance against Carter Page. From all that appears, it relied on unverified information in a dossier put together by an operative paid by the Clinton campaign.

Moreover, the target, Page, had been cooperating with the FBI for several years. In fact, it seems that he had helped catch Russian spies.

There was no national security reason to spy on Page. He was not the Trump campaign guy who bragged in London about the campaign having Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. That was George Papadopoulos who, as far as I know, never had his phone tapped.

The only logical reason I can think of for tapping Page’s lines was to obtain information about Trump and his campaign. And this was only the beginning of Team Obama’s effort to undermine and delegitimize Trump and his administration. Anyone who has been reading Power Line this year knows what followed in this regard,

To summarize, Trump succeeds a president who relentlessly blamed his predecessor for America’s woes and his own failures. He succeeds a president whose top officials — James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Sally Yates, et al — worked assiduously to put Trump and his presidency behind the eight ball and, indeed, quite possibly in legal jeopardy.

Does this explain why Trump has become so nasty towards Obama? I don’t know. Trump’s a nasty guy. He doesn’t require much provocation.

But no intelligent comparison between the present situation and how things were once upon a time in America can ignore Obama’s churlish approach to Bush and his administration’s subversive approach to Trump.

It's becoming abundantly clear that Obama went Richard Nixon's "Plumbers" one better and wiretapped the Trump campaign for nefarious political reasons.

Ann Coulter: Amazing New Breakthrough To Reduce Mass Shootings!

As fun as it is to ridicule the FBI for devoting massive resources to chasing down Hillary Clinton’s oppo research while blowing off repeated, specific warnings about school shooter Nikolas Cruz, we’ve put a lot on the agency’s plate....

First- and second-generation immigrants have committed more than 40 percent of all mass shootings since 2000. I know we’ve been admitting Third World immigrants at a breakneck pace, but I don’t think immigrants make up nearly half the population yet.

Once we exclude the immigrant mass shooters, a clearer pattern emerges. The typical American perpetrator is a young man with paranoid schizophrenia — or, as we’re now euphemistically calling it, “autism” — probably exacerbated by pot, a deadly combo platter.

An immigration moratorium and widespread deportations would not only cut mass shootings in half, but it would also free up the FBI’s time to focus on these delusional young men with the terrifying stare, who hear voices no one else hears.

Young men like Nikolas Cruz.

Kentucky Moves To Add Guns To Schools After School Shooting

It's the only thing that can stop the next shjooting.

CNN’s Tapper Sits Back as Student Equates Rubio to School Shooter

This is CNN. No objectivity. Just a naked ratings grab and gun ban push.

Hey, it's CNN, the Putin Network.  What do you expect?

Not A Single Lawyer Known To Work For Mueller Is A Republican

Shooting Survivor: CNN Gave Me "Scripted Question" After Denying Question About Armed Guards

But of course, it's CNN, the Putin Network..

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Colton Haab said he was approached by CNN to ask a question at Wednesday night's town hall but decided not to after the network gave him a "scripted question," quashing one he wrote himself. Haab, a member of the Junior ROTC shielded students while the school was under attack from the shooter, said he was going to ask about using veterans as armed security guards.

Mueller's Latest Indictments Reveal Russia's Real Goal … And Who's Been Helping Them

Scandal: For more than a year, Democrats have been pushing the story that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. But the evidence keeps piling up indicating that it was Democrats, wittingly or not, who've been helping Russia achieve its real meddling goals....

But if you read the indictments, look at the Facebook ads, the Trump "dossier" and other evidence, it becomes clear that the goal of this meddling wasn't to elect Trump, but to create anger, hostility, bitterness, and discord in the U.S....

So, to sum up: There's been no credible evidence presented so far — none — of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to sway the November election, despite more than a year-and-a-half of relentless FBI and media investigations.

But there is growing evidence that, as Facebook's Goldman put it:

"The main goal of the Russian propaganda and misinformation effort is to divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media, against us. It has stoked fear and hatred amongst Americans. It is working incredibly well. We are quite divided as a nation."

Indeed it has worked incredibly well.

The problem is that Democrats and the mainstream press will never admit any of this, because if they did, they'd also be admitting that they were co-conspirators in this nefarious Russian campaign to undermine America's democratic institutions.

During the Cold War, there was a label for Americans who unwittingly did Russia's bidding — "useful idiots."

Perhaps it's time to resurrect this label.

MSNBC Host Joy-Ann Reid Was Apparently Russian Trolls’ Favorite Pundit

No better way of fomenting hate than drawing attention to Joy-Ann Reid.

In fact, Joy-Ann Reid has made somewhat of a sport out of criticizing Sanders’ over the Russian issue in particular. Last year, she criticized Sanders and his supporters for repeating claims of Democratic National Committee fraud as little more than a Russian plot.

All in all, Reid was elevated by Russian trolls above Sanders by a ratio of roughly five-to-one.

Russia’s trolls were barely background static in the 2016 campaign

Jacob Sullum in the NY Post

The New York Times, which last year breathlessly claimed that “Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics,” reports that Donald Trump’s “admirers and detractors” both agree with him that “the Russians intended to sow chaos” and “have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.” A Times editorial assures skeptics that “the Russian subversion effort” was “sophisticated” and “breathtaking” in scope.

That analysis is at odds with the paper’s own reporting, which describes Russian trolls as “sloppy” and “amateurish” bumblers who sounded suspiciously like foreigners while posing as Americans, left a trail that made it easy to catch them, and produced crude propaganda that amounted to a drop in the raging river of online political speech. The only thing breathtaking about this influence campaign is the hyperventilation of the alarmists who talk as if we are just a few angry tweets from the abyss.

As I said here:

What’s totally missing from the indictment is the real reason that the 2016 election has divided the country more than any time since the Civil War. The Russians set off a few damp squibs. Meanwhile our very own Liberal media, with the apparent support of a politicized FBI, CIA and DOJ began lobbing nuclear bombs in the direction of Donald Trump, claiming that his election was illegitimate. The entire Liberal Establishment joined “The Resistance” as if they were French freedom fighters opposing the Nazis. It wasn’t the Russians calling Trump Hitler, Mussolini and worse. It wasn’t the Russians who claimed that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election. It wasn’t the Russians who called Trump insane. It wasn’t the Russians who went on late night TV to tell dirty jokes about Trump fellating Putin. And it wasn’t the Russians who were demanding the end of the Trump administration via impeachment, a White House coup or assassination. That was the hysterics in the Liberal Establishment (along with the #NeverTrump Right).

Sullum again:

Richard Salgado, Google’s senior counsel on law enforcement and information security, testified that the company found 18 YouTube channels offering about 1,100 videos with political content that were “uploaded by individuals who we suspect are associated with this [Russian] effort.” The videos, which totaled 43 hours on a platform where 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute and more than 1 billion hours are watched every day, “mostly had low view counts,” with less than 3 percent attracting more than 5,000 views.

Salgado nevertheless deemed the Russian content “a serious challenge to the integrity of our democracy.” If our democracy cannot survive another 43 hours of political videos on YouTube, it was already doomed.

The Russians didn’t do anything to us that we weren’t already doing to ourselves

What do you mean "We" Mr. Never Trumper?  Lowery has a point but misses the mark.

If only Joe McCarthy had lived to see this moment, when it’s suddenly in vogue to attribute large-scale events in American politics to the hand of Russia and to inveigh against domestic subversion.

Robert Mueller released an indictment of 13 Russians for crimes related to their social-media campaign to meddle in our internal affairs in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election.

Mueller obviously isn’t a McCarthyite, and can’t be held responsible for the hysteria — and hopeful expectations of an impeachment-level event — that has built up around his work. His indictment is, as far as anyone can tell, rigorously factual.

That’s probably the point of it — to create a record of an episode that we should want to know as much about as possible and prevent from ever happening again.

[No.  The point of the indictment is to be to generate publicity for the Anti-trumpists, because none of those indicted will voluntarily come to the US to face trial.]

 But the scale of the operation shouldn’t be exaggerated. In the context of a hugely expensive, obsessively covered, impossibly dramatic presidential election, the Russian contribution on social media was piddling and often laughable.

The Russians wanted to boost Trump [No, the Russians wanted to dirty up the candidate who everyone assumed - including the Russians - would win the election.  The Rusians also supported Sanders ans Jill Stein.] but as a Facebook executive noted, most of their spending on Facebook ads came after the election.  The larger goal was to sow discord, yet we had already primed ourselves for plenty of that.

...

If you read the Mueller indictment, you might think the Russians were everywhere, not only advertising on Facebook (“Trump is our only hope for a better future”; “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison”), but organizing rallies around the country.

But it’s not clear these rallies even came off.

The New York Post couldn’t find any evidence of planned pro-Trump and anti-Hillary rallies in New York — not exactly a swing state — in June and July of 2016. Pictures and videos that appear to be from Russian-initiated pro-Trump “flash mobs” in Florida show a handful of people in various cities. This at a time when Trump was routinely holding rallies with thousands of people that garnered lavish media coverage.

The biggest Russian rally success appears to have been an anti-Trump event in New York after the election drawing 10,000 people.  [And heavily covered by CNN/MSNBC and by attended by Michael Moore]

Bezos Eats Bugs

WAL-MART FACES CHALLENGING FUTURE

CNN and MSNBC Helped Russia Sow Discord by Promoting Fake Anti-Trump Rally

As I said HERE, the American media are actively aiding the Russians divide the country.

One of the revelations in Friday’s indictment handed down by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was that alleged Russian attempts to sow disunity in 2016 included the organization of both pro- and anti-Trump rallies in New York City on the Saturday after Election Day.

A check of their November 12 coverage showed both CNN and MSNBC gave enthusiastic coverage to the Russian-organized anti-Trump rally that day, with live reports every hour. Correspondents celebrated the idea that it was “a love rally,” and repeated the marchers’ anti-Trump mantras, such as: “We reject the President-elect.”

While the two liberal anti-Trump networks offered heavy coverage of the anti-Trump rally throughout the day, a check of coverage between noon and 5:00 p.m. Eastern found that the Fox News Channel offered only a short re-cap (66 seconds) at the start of their 4:00 p.m. Eastern hour.

Of course, none of the networks were aware of who was allegedly behind the march, but CNN and MSNBC reveled in the inflammatory messages of the march. At one point, MSNBC anchor Alex Witt credulously responded to the ridiculously alarmist rhetoric: “That woman, when she’s saying she’s concerned that black people will be shot in the street....Is that a legitimate concern for her? Because, that’s scary.”

Correspondent Morgan Radford cheerfully played along: “Alex, it’s not only a legitimate concern for her, it’s a legitimate concern for a lot of people I’ve spoken to....They’re wondering if this [Trump’s election] is almost a license to carry in terms of hate.”

If the goal of the secret Russian organizers was to inject nonsense like that into the American political dialogue, then their unwitting helpers on CNN and MSNBC certainly gave them plenty of assistance that day.

Both CNN and MSNBC talked about who they thought was organizing the rally. On MSNBC a few minutes before the march began, anchor Alex Witt asked Radford: “Hey, Morgan, can you tell who has organized this rally?...Is there someone in charge here?”

“Right now, this is lots of different groups of people who have come together,” Radford explained, “with no, necessarily, official leader, and that’s been some of the criticism.”

An hour later on CNN, correspondent Brynn Gingras said the rally had been organized by “a 20-year-old student from St. John’s University here in New York....We’ve seen him several times shaking hands with police officers....It is the most organized protest that I’ve seen here in New York City.”

A little after 3:00 p.m. Eastern, Gingras marveled at the crowd size, saying she had been “texting with the person, a 20-year-old college student here in New York City who organized this protest. I’ve been texting with him, and I asked, ‘Are you impressed with the size,’ and he says ‘It’s amazing what the collective voices can spread.’”

WHY SPECULATE? A talk by Michael Crichton

There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can. —Mark Twain

My topic for today is the prevalence of speculation in media. What does it mean? Why has it become so ubiquitous? Should we do something about it? If so, what? And why? Should we care at all? Isn’t speculation valuable? Isn’t it natural? And so on.

I will join this speculative trend and speculate about why there is so much speculation. In keeping with the trend, I will try to express my views without any factual support, simply providing you with a series of bald assertions.

This is not my natural style, and it’s going to be a challenge for me, but I will do my best. Some of you may see that I have written out my talk, which is already a contradiction of principle. To keep within the spirit of our time, it should really be off the top of my head.

Before we begin, I’d like to clarify a definition. By the media I mean movies, television, Internet, books, newspapers and magazines. Again, in keeping with the general trend of speculation, let’s not make too many fine distinctions.

First we might begin by asking, to what degree has the media turned to pure speculation? Someone could do a study of this and present facts, but nobody has. I certainly won’t. There’s no reason to bother. The requirement that you demonstrate a factual basis for your claim vanished long ago. It went out with the universal praise for Susan Faludi’s book Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 1991, and which presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false.

But that’s old news. I merely refer to it now to set standards.

The Media Stopped Reporting The Russia Collusion Story Because They Helped Create It

Pretty much nails it.

Read this in conjunction with Mueller Indicts MSM

Ann Coulter: ANATOMY OF A COUP

Every place you look in Robert Mueller's investigation, the same names keep popping up: FBI agent Peter Strzok and sleazy, foreign private eye -- or "British intelligence agent" -- Christopher Steele.

So it's rather important that they both are Trump-hating fanatics, and one was being paid by Trump's political opponent in a presidential campaign.

Steele is the author of the preposterous dossier that sparked the special counsel investigation, and Strzok is the FBI agent involved at every crucial turn of both the Trump and Hillary investigations.

As we found out from the House Intelligence memo, Steele told Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr that he "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president." (Ohr's wife worked for Fusion GPS, and, like Steele, was being paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.)

In the hands of Trump-obsessive Peter Strzok -- he of the estrogen-dripping texts to his Trump-hating FBI lawyer mistress -- the dossier was used to obtain a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against Trump's alleged "foreign policy adviser," Carter Page.

The FISA warrant against Page constitutes the last crumbling piece of the "Russia collusion" story.

Mueller Indicts MSM

Mueller Indicts MSM

The Mueller indictment states that the purpose of Russia’s efforts surrounding the last general election was to sow discord.  The indictment states that the Russians made use of “divisive U.S. political and social issues,” to set Americans against each other and “sow discord in the U.S. political system.”

The indictment goes on to say that:

Defendant ORGANIZATION had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Defendants posted derogatory information about a number of candidates, and by early to mid-2016, Defendants'' operations included supporting the presidential campaign of the -candidate Donald J. Trump ("Trump Campaign") and disparaging Hillary Clinton. Defendants made various expenditures to carry out those activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and grassroots entities and U.S. persons, and without revealing their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation, solicited and compensated real U.S. persons to promote or disparage candidates. Some Defendants, posing as U.S> persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.

If sowing discord was the object, any objective observer would conclude that the Russians were spectacularly successful.  For roughly half the country, Donald Trump is an illegitimate President, soon to be impeached, a Russian puppet manipulated by Putin, and the second coming of Hitler.

How did that happen if, as asserted by the Mueller indictment, most of the Russian effort was to disparage Hillary?  The indictment is a banal recitation of the use of social media, primarily Facebook and Twitter to call Hillary names and to promote “flash mobs” for Trump.  It is alleged that two of the thirteen people indicted actually came to the U.S.  There is literally nothing in the indictment that would lead anyone to conclude that the Russians had any effect on the election …. at all.  Because that was not the objective. 

In the face of a billion dollar Hillary Clinton campaign here are examples of what the Mueller alleges the Russians did:

a. In or around June through July 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators purchased advertisements on Facebook to promote the "March for Trump" and "Down with Hillary" rallies.

b. Defendants and their co-conspirators used false U.S. personas to send individualized messages to real U.S. persons to request that they participate in and help organize the rally. To assist their efforts, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through false U.S> personas, offered money to certain U.S. personas to cover rally expenses.

c. On or about June 5, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, while posing as a U.S. grassroots activist, used the account @March_for_Trump to contact a volunteer for the Trump Campaign in New York. The volunteer agreed to provide signs for the "March for Trump" rally.

There is no reference in the indictment to the number of real Americans who participated or who attended.  It’s doubtful that it persuaded anyone to change their vote and there is no assertion that it affected the election.

What’s totally missing from the indictment is the real reason that the 2016 election has divided the country more than any time since the Civil War.  The Russians set off a few damp squibs.  Meanwhile our very own Liberal media, with the apparent support of a politicized FBI, CIA and DOJ began lobbing nuclear bombs in the direction of Donald Trump, claiming that his election was illegitimate.  The entire Liberal Establishment joined “The Resistance” as if they were French freedom fighters opposing the Nazis.   It wasn’t the Russians calling Trump Hitler, Mussolini and worse.  It wasn’t the Russians who claimed that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election.  It wasn’t the Russians who called Trump insane.  It wasn’t the Russians who went on late night TV to tell dirty jokes about Trump fellating Putin.  And it wasn’t the Russians who were demanding the end of the Trump administration via impeachment, a White House coup or assassination.  That was the hysterics in the Liberal Establishment (along with the #NeverTrump Right). 

There may be more indictments to come.  The question needs to be asked: was there another group of unidentified Russian operatives working behind the scenes to influence American opinion makers?  What made the Democrat Party operatives, member of the media, and the entertainment industry refuse to acknowledge that they lost an election?  Posting on Facebook and Twitter, getting someone to hold up a sign, paying someone to dress up as Hillary in prison is all very well.  But the biggest weapons in a culture war are found in newsprint or over the airwaves. 

“Regular” people, as Kurt Schlichter calls them are really not the object of a sophisticated attack on a culture like ours.  If you want to really move the needle you influence the influencers: the press, the talking heads, the comedians … and the educators who will influence the young “skulls full of mush.”  If we really want to dive down and see what’s causing this country to rise up against itself, this is worth examining in detail.  And this is not what Robert Mueller and his merry men are interested in doing. 

CNN: North Korea Dept. of Propaganda

CNN;

Movie Critics Complain Eastwood Doesn't Show Sympathetic Terrorist

TruthRevolt friend Christian Toto over at HollywoodInToto.com has helpfully rounded up a sample of movie reviews of openly conservative director Clint Eastwood's new terrorism drama The 15:17 to Paris. The film is based on the true-life Islamist attack on a Paris-bound train in 2015 that was quickly thwarted by three American heroes who happened to be passengers on that train.

And:


 "A few critics hated how Eastwood didn’t give enough screen time to the terrorist in question, Ayoub El-Khazzani," wrote Toto, such as this reviewer from The National Post:

15:17 to Paris overly simplifies the attack and its aftermath. The terrorist (Ray Corasani) snarls and wears sneakers, but there’s little more to him.

The movie's not about him. The movie is about the three American heroes. And to the outrage of leftist reviewers, Eastwood apparently wasn't inclined to depict a sympathetic terrorist. This is a Clint Eastwood movie, not a Rolling Stone magazine cover.

What Do We Do about the Biased and Incompetent FBI?

Roger Simon:  

It's bad enough for a law enforcement agency to be biased. It's even worse for it to be biased and incompetent.

For the last few weeks we have been digesting the nauseating probability that the FBI used a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and ginned up by an assembly of creepy political hatchet men and women (Blumenthal, Shearer, Steele, two Ohrs, etc.) with input from various "friends of the Kremlin" in order to spy on an American citizen and, undoubtedly, Donald Trump, before and after he became president.

In other words, the FBI displayed the behavior of a Banana Republic in its bias (well, it's a lot more than that, sadly ) at the same time it demonstrated it's incompetence by doing so in a manner that would so easily—despite their myriad redactions—finally be uncovered. Many have stated they felt they could do this—play fast and loose—because Clinton's victory was assured, but even that was no guarantee. Documents exist. Did they think Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch would stop their FOIA requests? Eventually, the truth gets known. Whether anyone does anything about it is another matter.

This "biased incompetence" has not gone away. It showed up again Friday in the supposedly momentous announcement by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies have been indicted for monkeying with our 2016 election via social media. Two of them even came to the U.S. to do it. Aiming to wreak havoc with our system, they are alleged to have done everything from exploiting minority groups (in the grand Soviet tradition) to instigating pro and con Donald Trump demonstrations on the same day.

Disinformation, as most intelligence officials know, or should, has been a hallmark of Russian intelligence since the czars. (Remember The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?) These particular Russkies began their disinformation campaign back in 2014, two years before the election.

Wait... 2014?

Where was the FBI? Why did it take them so long to unmask a fairly paltry one million dollar Internet campaign using the most old-style Soviet front groups, although throwing them up online this time? Could it be because this all got started under Obama and he was the one who famously excoriated Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates for daring to point out that Russia was still a serious threat? Obama (busy cozying up to and ultimately enriching Iran) accused Mitt of being back in the eighties. The Cold War had been over for twenty years. No wonder the FBI wasn't paying much attention to Putin & Co.

Evidently it took the Trump-Russia gambit to get them off their duffs to discover this giant espionage ring—this even though Rosenstein admitted during his press conference it had no impact on the election and did not involve a single willing U.S. citizen. At certain levels, it seemed almost like a practical joke.

Why are the Comey memos secret?

Byron York is doing great investigative reporting.


Wouldn't you like to know?  Who benefits from keeping them secret?

Gowdy has read the memos.

On the House side, Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., among a few others, was allowed to read the memos under the same conditions: FBI minder, no copies, no notes.

What struck Gowdy was the general absence of classified information in the memos or any other reason they should remain secret. Out of a total of seven memos, the FBI had marked four as classified at the "secret" or "confidential" levels — not the highest level — but even with those memos, it appeared to Gowdy that they could be released publicly with only minimal blacking-out.

"What would need to be redacted would be incredibly small and really would not interfere with the substance of the memos," Gowdy told me in a phone conversation Wednesday. "I read them a long time ago, and I still don't know why they're not in the public domain. If they were really helpful for the Democrats, they would have been leaked a long time ago."...

"I have read the memos," Gowdy said on Fox News "Special Report" Monday. "They would be defense Exhibit A in an obstruction of justice case — not prosecution exhibit, defense Exhibit A. If Comey felt obstructed, he did a masterful job of keeping it out of the memos."

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It's Not Illegal

Andrew Weissman breaks the law and stomps on the broken pieces.

Dalhousie University Commits Not to Hire Most Competent Candidate for New VP

Dalhousie University restricts search for new VP to 'racially visible' and Indigenous candidates -> Dalhousie University Commits Not to Hire Most Competent Candidate for New VP

Dalhousie University says its search for a new senior administrator will be restricted to "racially visible" and Indigenous candidates, part of its efforts to increase underrepresented groups on the Halifax campus.

In a memo to the university community, provost and vice-president academic Carolyn Watters said the prerequisite is in line with the principles of Dalhousie's employment equity policy.

"We have embarked on the process of selecting a new vice-provost student affairs," she stated in the memo last month, adding that the search "will be restricted to racially visible persons and Aboriginal Peoples at this time."

This isn't the first time this has happened in Canada. One needs to look no further than what the University of Victoria did, with justification provided here.

FOX BUTTERFIELD, IS THAT YOU?

James Taranto has moved on from his daily online Best of the Web column and his recurring documentation of New York Timesthink under the catchphrase “Fox Butterfield, is that you?” Butterfield was the Times reporter endlessly befuddled by, or indignant over, high incarceration rates coupled with low crime rates. Invoking Butterfield, Taranto noted cases of reported contradiction where correlation was more like it.

CBS Minnesota affiliate WCCO introduces Pat Kessler’s story on gun ownership with this classic of the genre: “More people are carrying guns than ever before, but the crime rate remains relatively low.” Kessler himself reports: “Minnesota’s violent crime rate hit a 50-year low in 2016, according to the FBI. And in 2017, the state set a new record for firearms background checks.”

Rebekah Mercer Fights Back

This is the kind of thinking that the Democrats and the Press, - but I repeat myself - hates.

“I oppose politicized science,” she writes, “in which researchers cannot study certain subjects -- or even ask certain questions -- for fear of a career-ending backlash and persecution.” Noting that America “was founded on the principle of open discourse” and that “[i]ntellectual diversity and vigorous, reasoned debate have been fundamental to America’s success, making us the freest, most prosperous, and most innovative society in human history,” Rebekah Mercer warns that “we have lost our way” and that “America is now a society that threatens, pillories, and harms those who dare to question the status quo.”

The anti-science Nazis in the media march on.

General Flynn Should WITHDRAW His Guilty Plea. His New Judge Is A Government Misconduct Expert

Agreed.

The FBI Keeps Missing Mass Shooters Before It’s Too Late

When you're too busy trying to overturn the last election ....

CIA Argues The Public Can’t See Classified Information It Has Already Given To Favored Reporters

This is a good time to quote The Onion on another "...massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States."

Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the “Nunes Memo” could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. “Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale,” said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. “If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.

Scandal, Corruption, Lawbreaking — And So What?

Victor Davis Hanson

The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus. Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued.

Remember, in the FISA-gate scandal such likely widespread criminal behavior was predicated on two premises: 1) certainty of an easy Clinton victory, after which the miscreants would be not only excused but probably rewarded for their zeal; 2) progressive hubris in which our supposedly moral betters felt it their right, indeed their duty, to use unethical and even unlawful means for the “greater good” — to achieve their self-described moral ends of stopping the crude and reactionary Trump.

The wrongdoing probably includes attempting to warp a U.S. election, Russian collusion, repeatedly misleading and lying before the FISA courts, improperly surveilling American citizens, unmasking the names of citizens swept up in unlawful surveillance and then illegally leaking them to the press, disseminating and authenticating opposition smears during a political campaign, lying under oath to Congress, obstructing ongoing investigations, using federal funds to purchase ad hominem gossip against a presidential candidate, blatant conflicts of interests, weaponizing federal investigations, trafficking in and leaking classified information . . . The list goes on and on.

The State Department is now involved. Apparently anyone who was a former Clinton smear artist can pass fantasies to a sympathetic or known political appointee at State. And if the “dossier” fits the proper narrative and shared agenda, it gains credence enough to ensure that it is passed up to senior State officials and on to the FBI. Perhaps a private citizen with a grudge against a rival should try that as well. These scandals will grow even greater before various congressional investigations expire....

I think the Democratic fallback position will be to point to the career carnage at the FBI and DOJ as punishment enough.

Director Comey was fired. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forcibly retired. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was reassigned and demoted. FBI general counsel James Baker resigned. Senior agent Peter Strzok was reassigned and demoted. The former FBI director’s chief of staff, James Rybicki, resigned. Mike Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, took retirement. Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was reassigned and demoted. Justice Department’s counterintelligence head, David Laufman, resigned. A cadre of others “unexpectedly” have left, allegedly (or conveniently) for private-sector jobs. Such career implosions do not happen without cause.

Voters would only grow more cynical if some Americans were allowed to abuse constitutionally protected civil liberties, and to lie to the Congress, the FBI, and the courts, while the less connected others go to jail for much less. Without a judicial accounting, it will be impossible to clean up the hierarchies of the FBI and the DOJ.

Indeed, absent accountability and punishment, the new modus operandi would be for any lame- duck incumbent administration to use federal agencies to enhance the campaign of its own party’s nominee. It would be only logical to conclude that criminal acts used to help a successor would be forgotten or rewarded under the victor’s tenure.

...
We can't allow this to end with a standoff, where the people who committed crimes and tried to remove a freely elected President get away with it. It's not good for the country.

Attorney General Sessions must find muscular, ambitious, and combative prosecutors (preferably from outside Washington, D.C., and preferably existing federal attorneys), direct them to call a Grand Jury, and begin collating information from congressional investigations to get to the bottom of what is likely one of gravest scandals in post-war American history: the effort to use the federal government to thwart the candidacy of an unpopular presidential candidate and then to smear and ruin his early tenure as president.

Only another prosecutorial investigation, one way or another, will lead to resolution, take the entire mess out of the partisan arena, and keep the anemic Mueller investigation honest — with the full knowledge that if its own investigators have violated laws or used tainted evidence or in the past obstructed justice, then they too will be held to account.

Trump pitches plan to replace food stamps with food boxes

What a great idea!

WHY SUSAN RICE WROTE AN EMAIL TO HERSELF

Via Powerline:

Scott wrote this morning about the extraordinary email that National Security Advisor Susan Rice wrote to herself at 12:15 on January 20, 2017, within minutes of when President Trump was inaugurated. It must have been her last act, more or less, before she vacated the White House. So obviously the email was important to her. But why would it be important to send an email to herself (the only person copied was one of her aides)?

If you read the email, which Scott posted along with Senator Grassley’s letter to Rice, it is obvious that it is a CYA memo. But the question is, whose A is being C’d?

Jimmy Kimmel Targeted by Street Artist Over Sunset Boulevard Car Wreck

Sabo hung a phony street sign at the spot where the talk-show host crashed his BMW.

 

Time for someone else to #FundUNRWA

This is why the Trump administration is a new broom that sweeps away the old.

The Trump administration recently announced that it will “reassess” American aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). That’s the agency charged with overseeing Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 and, of equal importance, their descendants. The United States will now voluntarily contribute to the agency only $60 million rather than the expected contribution of $360 million, with all subsequent funding subject to further consideration...

And UNRWA is hardly the “relief” and “education” organization portrayed in Western and Arab media. During Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas, its hospitals and schools were commonly used to stockpile Hamas weapons and explosives. The agency “strongly condemned” the use of its hospitals and schools in this way, but these condemnations somehow didn’t stop the practice. In the past two years, moreover, illegally built tunnels have been found beneath UNRWA schools in Gaza. By propping up the UNRWA, the United States was helping to fund anti-Israel terrorism while at the same time helping to fund Israel’s defense against that terrorism.

The wife-beater, the witch and the White House: Why the hell did Trump ever tell Rob Porter and Omarosa ‘you’re hired’?

Piers Morgan answers the most important questions

'Shut the f**k up, a**hole,’ snarled Omarosa Manigault-Newman at me. ‘How are your kids going to feel when they wake up and discover their dad’s a f**king f*gg*t?’

Yes, this is the same Omarosa Manigault-Newman who just spent a year inside Donald Trump’s White House.

I’ve met a lot of vile human beings in my life, from dictators and terrorists to sex abusers and wicked conmen.

But I’ve never met anyone quite so relentlessly loathsome as Omarosa; a vicious, duplicitous, lying, conniving, backstabbing piece of work.

Omarosa sidled up to me at the New York Mercantile Exchange and said, quite seriously: 'Piers, do you want a showmance?' 'A what?' I replied. 'A showmance. You know, a romance on the show - we get it on together. Happens all the time on Apprentice. Everyone has sex together. Then we can make lots of money out of it.’ I stared at her grasping, ferociously ambitious little eyes, and laughed: 'You must be joking, you deluded woman.' She didn't take it well. 'What are you? Gay?'

From that moment, she turned on me like a viper.

NYT INVESTIGATES IF WHITE CHILDREN CAN WEAR BLACK PANTHER MASK

But would you want to child to wear one?

Byron York: Comey told Congress FBI agents didn't think Michael Flynn lied

Where's the truth?

... lawmakers wanted Comey to tell them what was up. And what they heard from the director did not match what they were hearing in the media.

According to two sources familiar with the meetings, Comey told lawmakers that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe that Flynn had lied to them, or that any inaccuracies in his answers were intentional. As a result, some of those in attendance came away with the impression that Flynn would not be charged with a crime pertaining to the Jan. 24 interview.

Nine months later, with Comey gone and special counsel Robert Mueller in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation, Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the FBI in that Jan. 24 questioning.

...

In any event, much happened after the FBI director's March briefings of Congress. In May, the president fired Comey. The Justice Department, under Trump-appointed deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, chose Robert Mueller to be the Trump-Russia special counsel. Mueller gathered a number of prosecutors known for tough, take-no-prisoners tactics. And on Dec. 1, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Yates went on to become a heroine of the Trump resistance (and at least one of Mueller's prosecutors) after she refused to enforce the president's travel ban executive order, and Trump summarily fired her. Her legacy lives on in United States v. Michael T. Flynn.

But to outside observers, mystery still surrounds the case. To some Republicans, it appears the Justice Department used a never-enforced law and a convoluted theory as a pretext to question Flynn — and then, when FBI questioners came away believing Flynn had not lied to them, forged ahead with a false-statements prosecution anyway. The Flynn matter is at the very heart of the Trump-Russia affair, and there is still a lot to learn about it.

The Ruling Class Hates You

The syrupy slogans promulgated by the ruling class, ruling class wannabes, and fellow travelers on the Left aren’t fooling anyone, not even, I would guess, the people who say, wear, and post them. Truth is, they really don’t like the rest of us. No problem, we have our own lives and families. But it’s only not a problem until such disdain is combined with a sense of political entitlement and the coercive power of government.

Which brings us to the political and cultural union of the Democratic Party and the permanent political class called the deep state, that forms the unelected, unaccountable fourth branch of government that wields so much power up to and including the police power of the FBI.

In private texts recently made public, FBI “super-agent” Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, were quite candid. Their open disdain for a wide variety for groups including Italians, Russians, Romanians, gypsies, Virginians, Texans, and pro-lifers should surprise no one. The leaders of their party have been saying the same thing in public for years....

The Rhetoric

Love trumps hate.

Hope and change.

“Hate is not a family value.”

Tolerance.

Diversity

Coexist

The Reality

Sleazy

Entitled

“Buttf*** Texas”

Hillbillies

Bitter clingers

Deplorables

Irredeemable

The sense of entitlement and open disdain of this country’s counterfeit elites is dangerous. Early in the Obama Administration, it led to weaponizing the IRS against political rivals. That manifest wrong was never punished and it emboldened ruling class Democrats in the FBI to lie to the FISA court so they could spy on the Trump campaign for the benefit of Hillary Clinton.

If a Republican president can’t address a Republican-controlled Congress without paying lip service to the idea of cutting spending, what good are Republicans?

Glenn Reynolds has a good answer. 

Okay, a few points, starting with the fact that I actually do care about the debt.

But the demise of the Tea Party movement showed that nobody much in DC cares, in either party. “Lip service” is the most we’ve ever gotten, and not even that when there was even a hint of danger that it might actually be taken seriously.

I think that we simply can’t address the debt, barring an immediate crisis too big to finagle our way out of it, under our current political arrangements. I think Trump may be helpful here not because he cares about the debt — he doesn’t, or, if he does, he realizes that there’s nothing that can be done under existing political arrangements — but because he offers some hope of disrupting current political arrangements. Until those arrangements are disrupted, or the bottom drops out of U.S finances, nothing much can be done.

Alternative take: In 2012 with Mitt Romney, America had a chance at a turnaround artist, and it passed. In 2016, we elected Trump. And his expertise is different.

First we have to change the culture in Washington.

I wanted Ted Cruz to be President, but Donald Trump is working

But I no longer think so.  

I'm incredibly pleased with Trump, including his tweeting.  

And I don't know of another professional politician who would have withstood the attacks from the Establishment the way Trump has.

Because they would have called any other Republican Hitler too.

Roger Kimball:

I was not always a fan. For most of the 2016 campaign, I supported Ted Cruz, a choice that many thought only marginally less bad than Mr Trump. But politics is the art of the possible and it turned out that the only two possibilities were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. For me, that meant that the only possibility was Donald Trump....

From Instapundit

TO BE FAIR, THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN PRETTY RACIALLY OBSESSED:

● Shot: The New York Times Is Now a Nazi Paper. Wait, What?

—Headline, Reason, January 29th.

● Chaser: Does the word “Caucasity” — used in the NYT today — express the idea of whiteness as a problem?

—Headline, Ann Althouse, today.

● Hangover: ‘Pinch’ Sulzberger, then publisher of the New York Times, told a crowd at the Metropolitan Museum in 1994 that “alienating older white male readers means ‘we’re doing something right.’”

—New York magazine, November, 1991.

As Rod Dreher warned last year, the elite left “needs to know [that] you aren’t going to be able to count on conservative people like me to help you oppose the alt-right, because you are their ‘respectable’ left-wing mirror image.”

THE FBI HAS “GRAVE CONCERNS”? SO DO I

John Hinderaker: 
I’m so old, I can remember when liberals were in favor of revealing corruption in institutions like the FBI. 

Most of us are eagerly awaiting the release of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo on abuse of the FBI by the Obama administration. It should happen in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, the Bureau is worried, as always, about its public image. The Associated Press headlines: “FBI clashes with Trump, has ‘grave concerns’ on Russia memo.” I’m so old, I can remember when liberals were in favor of revealing corruption in institutions like the FBI. Those days, of course, are long gone.

In a remarkably public clash of wills with the White House, the FBI declared Wednesday it has “grave concerns” about the accuracy of a classified memo on the Russia election investigation that President Donald Trump wants released.

Yeah, well, you know what? I have grave concerns about the politicization of the Department of Justice and the FBI under the Obama administration, which I have been writing about since 2010.

“As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the FBI said.

If there are “material omissions of fact,” the Democrats’ responsive memo no doubt will reveal them. Good: let’s lay the cards on the table. The relevant fact here is that the FBI is no longer claiming that there is a national security problem with releasing the memo, only that it will put the FBI in a bad light.

Trey Gowdy, soon to depart the House, gets the last word:

The Justice Department had said in a letter last week that it would be “extraordinarily reckless” to release the memo without first giving the FBI and the department the chance to review it.

After those complaints, Wray reviewed the memo over the weekend. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who was with him when he reviewed the memo, said the FBI director did not raise any national security concerns. Gowdy said the memo doesn’t reveal any intelligence methods but does reveal “one source.”

Heh. Christopher Steele, I presume. It’s time for some transparency. Let’s get to the bottom of the FBI’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The Bureau needs, at a minimum, to be reformed via a thorough housecleaning of senior bureaucrats.

I'm so old that I remember when the news media wanted to get the story out. 

Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.

TRUMP DIVIDES AMERICANS AND UN-AMERICANS

Daniel Greenfield:

There are two stories of America. One is the American story and the other the un-American story.

On one side there are pilgrims settling a new land and on the other colonists ethnically cleansing the native population. One side sees war heroes and the other sees killers. One sees brave police officers and the other genocidal bigots in uniform. One sees America. And the other hates it.

At the State of the Union, we saw those two halves divide up the House Chamber. We saw American elected officials stand for the flag, for the anthem, for veterans, for Jerusalem and for In God We Trust. And we saw the un-American officials selected by corrupt urban machine politics stay seated.

The leaders of America and un-America were there in one room while America’s story was told....


President Trump’s speech wasn’t divisive. But it did divide. It divided those in the House Chamber who love this country from those who don’t. It divided those who honor our troops, our anthem and our flag from those who take a knee. It divided those who want to make America great again from the left.

The State of the Union vision exposed the divisions between America and un-America.

Read the whole thing.  Americans are dreamers too.

Summary of Virginian Pilot Editorial page 2/1/2018

Editorial: Editors demand economic growth; clueless about how to get it.  [Sad, but that's what you get from the "brain trust" at the Virginian Pilot]

Op Ed:  Employers who don't want to hire the mentally ill are bad, and so are the tests that weed them out.

Letters to the editor:

Kimberle Rizzo:  Mentally ill woman wants Trump exiled to remote island in the Pacific.

Joe Duffy: believes people with jobs in the energy business are doing "dirty deeds."  Blames Trump.

Sebastian Kuhn: Republican deficits bad, Democrat deficits good. [Reflecting what he reads in the Virginian Pilot]

Holt M. Livesay: pretty good analogy about immigration [how did this get printed in the Virginian Pilot?]

Dihann Geier: some countries are Shit hole Countries; call them what they are.  [get ready for shrieks of outrage that are sure to get printed]

Don't thank me, I'm making the sacrifice of reading the Virginian Pilot  [motto:  "True to the Democratic Party in victory or defeat."]   so you won't have to.