Tag: Trump

Maybe not, Babylon Bee

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I was chuckling over this Babylon Bee headline:
Democrats Say It’ll Take A Lot More Than Eyewitness Testimony, Bank Records, Audio, Video, Complete Confessions For Them To Believe Biden Did Anything Wrong

…when these popped into my email
In major escalation, Delaware federal prosecutor named special counsel to investigate Biden family
and
Prosecutors ask court to disregard Hunter Biden plea deal, raising legal jeopardy for first son

That special counsel, who is in charge of those prosecutors, is David Weiss. Appointed US attorney for the District of Delaware by Donald Trump. Trump said Weiss shared his vision for ‘Making America Safe Again.’

Weiss has been at least nominally in charge of the Hunter Biden investigation (admitted tax evasion, proven gun crimes, probable Foreign Agents Registration Act violations) since 2018. It’s logical for AG Merrick Garland to continue Weiss’ oversight of the investigation. Whether that serves Justice is a separate question.

In a March Senate committee hearing Merrick Garland insisted that he would not interfere with the investigation. Weiss, he said, had “full authority” to carry out the investigation and choose the jurisdiction if necessary. Weiss was “not to be denied anything that he needs.” Whether this turned out to be true is disputed.

Weiss is the same prosecutor who approved Hunter Biden’s plea deal – which constituted a gentle touch on the wrist (no slapping, absolutely no jail time) for crimes for which offspring not related to Joe Biden have received years long sentences. But, that’s only two of the three parts of the investigation for which Weiss was responsible.

His prosecutors tried to hide the FARA related parts (still under investigation, they say) of the plea agreement. The judge wasn’t fooled. When she challenged the buried and sweeping future immunity for FARA crimes (broadly, arranging favors for foreigners without registering as a lobbyist), Hunter’s lawyers withdrew from the plea deal. The Feds are now simply admitting the deal is kaput.

It must be getting serious if Garland is citing Departmental Rules. He’s a master of ignoring them. And the announcement wasn’t held for a Friday night information dump.

Joe is standing in front of an accelerating bus.

Then there’s THIS:
Judge sides with Trump on protective order, handing Jack Smith an early defeat

So, the odds on Biden being the nominee seem to be getting ready to jump off the cliff.

Update 4:58 PM, Aug 11, 2023.
Got a new email.

Above, I let the dates speak for themselves on the alacrity displayed by David Weiss in his investigation of Hunter Biden. It started in 2018. Hunter’s laptop revelations are nearing 3 years old.

Here’s a less charitable look:
Hunter’s new special counsel also needs investigating

Where is Kellyanne Conway when you need her?

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Maybe Donald Trump simply forgot the personnel management lessons he got in the 2016 campaign and the first year of his Presidency. Michael Cohen, Omarosa Newman, Anthony Scaramucci, Paul Manafort…

You might ask, “Where is Kellyanne Conway when you need her?”

Why? Well, he desperately needs a steadying influence.

You are probably already aware of Trump’s recent flurry of intemperate and foolish outbursts, soon to be a Prog campaign advertising buy. But JIC, at Powerline a précis: Donald Trump, RIP

My understanding is that Trump did not assemble the pictures himself, but that they were part of an article he appended to a Truth Social post. This is not an excuse. That he(!?) failed to notice himself(!?) threatening a black man with a baseball bat is not believable. If you do believe that… it’s even worse: A potential CiC did it unwittingly?

To make this sort of discernment error in your public communications is not, shall we say, indicative of sober reflection. To do it on the same day you warn against “potential death and destruction,” is beyond my comprehension. To do both when a quarter of the country already is wrongly convinced you incited an insurrection?

It was always too much to expect the tiniest forbearance from The Donald, and he has been mercilessly harassed for 7 years by those who would tear down the law to an extent that would make Mother Theresa swear. He accomplished many positive things as President.

But, grant causes for this stone deaf bullshit though I might, I cannot find any rational justification for it. This is his 2016 campaign on crack.

Reasonable, if less informed people could not be blamed for supposing the Jan/6 Committee had a point.

Trump supporters who do not recoil from this need to reflect. But they are the people who will defend him, again making the Jan/6 Committee seem reasonable.

He has already alienated those who consider DeSantis a credible alternative. He insists on sacrificing votes in the general election, should he be nominated.

His egomania is a progressive disease. I am convinced he will run third party should he fail at the GOP nomination. He seems quite willing to destroy any chance of keeping the Dems out of the White House in 2024.

Another Republican might lose even if there is no third party run. But imagine the effect of a Trump campaign of the sort he is already conducting. Cloward-Piven from the right.

Trump has a point. He is no longer capable of making it to anyone who is not a lemming.

Do I still prefer Donald Trump to Joe Biden? Yes. But I hope I am not forced to make that choice. I did vote Libertarian when he ran against Hillary.

Deranged?

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That’s Presidential Historian and Progressive darling Michael Beschloss hyperventilating because of the current justification from our Federal explainers for the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago: Trump had “nuclear documents” squirreled away.

Really? A former President proven to NOT be a Russian collaborator by the Democrat’s hand picked special prosecutor despite the lies of the FBI? The same President the Prog’s should acknowledge wouldn’t give nuclear secrets to China because they know he’s a racist? The President whose Iran and North Korea policies were anathema?

He’s just like the Rosenbergs and should face the death penalty.

If only he’d cut the papers up and smuggled them out of the White House stuffed in his pants according to Sandy Berger’s example, we could string him from a lamp post without bothering the judiciary.

Jim Treacher: Emphasis mine:

“What?

Nuclear documents? What, like launch codes? Schematics? Locations? What are we talking about here?

What did they think the guy was going to do with this stuff? Is any of it even current? Don’t they change the launch codes every day? And nobody missed these documents for 18 months? What’s the danger here?”

The danger is Trump might be re-elected in 2024. My guess is that the Swamp dwellers have just increased that possibility.

It’s not like the FBI and DOJ haven’t publicly and dishonorably acquitted themselves for a decade now.

Smooth

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Democrats are complaining that the “transition” to the putative Biden administration is being obstructed. They claim the transition from Obama to Trump was free of such drama. It was “smooth.”

This is a myth. But, never mind the petty obstructionism from the Obama administration: It’s at about this stage of the Obama/Trump transition that the Russiagate plot got well and truly underway, though preparation had begun long before the election.

In Oct 2016, then FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe presented the Steele report (to be totally discredited almost 4 years later) to the FISA court for the first time – as verified intelligence. McCabe was investigating election interference under operation “Crossfire Hurricane,” which began in July of 2016. McCabe has admitted leaking the document and lying TO HIS OWN agency about it.

That plot was pretty smooth, we haven’t yet got to the bottom of it.

Mindate

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Until Friday the word “mandate” meant a clear and convincing, if not resounding, message from an electorate. It meant full-throated approval of a candidate’s policies by a significant majority. Biden claims his “mandate” includes “action on COVID, the economy, climate change, and systemic racism.”

With Joe Biden’s assertion that he has a mandate – though not a single state has yet certified a result and margins in key states are fractions of a percent; though his party experienced dismal results in the House contests; though control of the Senate won’t be decided until Georgia’s runoff election in December; though not a single state legislature changed hands – we are being treated to yet another Orwellian attempt to shift the meaning of a word 180 degrees.

Despite a years long investigation intended to prove Donald Trump is a Russian agent, despite an impeachment predicated on Trump asking a foreign government to investigate corruption involving prominent American politicians, for which compelling evidence was suppressed by the same media which waged unrelenting war on the President for four years, despite the Democrats’ refusal to ever accept the results of the 2016 election, despite corporate censorship by Big Tech, despite a politicized pandemic and associated massive unregulated vote by mail: Donald Trump received the second highest total popular vote in history, and increased the proportion of minority voters for the GOP.

Biden calls this narrow result a mandate. Despite, in addition to all the above, the highest number of suspect ballots in history, and secretive, irregular vote counting in solid blue Democrat cities with a long history of electoral fraud. Tammany Hall springs to mind.

Can it be proven that the fraud this year was sufficient to swing the election? Probably not.

Still, mailed ballots were discarded, and there are several witnesses claiming ballots which would have been ineligible were backdated. GOP poll watchers were prevented from observing ballot counting, even so far as blocking windows so the process couldn’t be observed at all.

We have the Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar’s tweet, “Using the title ‘President’ before the word ‘Trump’ really demeans the office of the presidency…” And the fact that “Election officials in Pennsylvania allegedly told Democrat operatives the names and contact information of voters whose ballots were rejected before the end of Election Day, which Republicans say violates state election laws.” They did that so Democrat ballots with errors could be ‘fixed.’

Then there’s the Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s thumb on the scale advice, “Need help with your mail in ballot, finding out where to vote, or something else?” Shapiro wrote on social media. “Call the @PADems Voter Assistance Hotline.” He also said, “If all the votes are added up in PA, @realDonaldTrump is going to lose..”

He would have been well advised, as the chief law enforcement officer, to have inserted the word “legal” before the word “vote,” because the non-obvious part of that statement is the definition of “a vote.”

If there is a mandate from this election, it is to raise the integrity of our voting process at least to the level of Iraq in 2005.

As I say, the evidence is probably not sufficient across half a dozen or more states to prevent a Biden Presidency, but the damage done to confidence in the integrity of our political system is immense – and it’s Democrats who did it. They abandoned the appearance of propriety. And after their relentless, hysterical, false vilification of President Trump, who believes they wouldn’t cheat?

For the far left of that Party, chaos was the objective. Destroying the foundations of the Republic is the announced goal.

If Joe Biden does not forcefully make correcting this mess his number one priority, we will have a full answer about how he will govern.

Update: I forgot to add that this is why Trump’s suit(s) should go forward, to drag this walled section of the swamp into the sunlight. Yes, these will suits be further disruptive, but absent a correction we will be absent a Republic.

Guise and Thralls

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If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
-James Madison

Andrew McCarthy is, IMO, the best single analyst writing about the Obama administration’s Russia-centered conspiracy to depose Donald Trump. Here, he proposes a novel theory about one part of it.
Unmasking? The Real Story Is When Flynn Was Not Masked in the First Place

This is not just about unmasking. It is about how pervasively the Obama administration was monitoring the Trump campaign.

He does not mention other #Obamagate Hydra heads – hidden Congressional testimony providing zero evidence of “Russian collusion,” secret plea agreements not disclosed to Judge Sullivan’s court, absence of evidence that Russia hacked DNC emails, CIA (Brennan) suppression of evidence indicating Russian support for a Hillary Clinton presidency, nor even the FBI’s use of the DNC funded Steele Dossier to mislead the FISA court.

Michael Flynn was not a FISA surveillance target, but connections may be found:
How The IG FISA Abuse Report Affects Michael Flynn’s Case
Note, in that link, that this is not the first time Judge Sullivan is in the middle of hearing about politically motivated prosecutorial malfeasance in a burgeoning surveillance state.

In her 2014 book Licensed to Lie Sidney Powell, Sullivan’s current nemesis in the Flynn case, praised him:

The judicial hero of my book, Emmet Sullivan held federal prosecutors in contempt for failing to disclose evidence, dismissed the corrupted prosecution of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the Department of Justice.

This makes Sullivan’s animus toward General Flynn hard to comprehend.

You might think that what Judge Sullivan knows about Flynn (remember Sullivan called Flynn out for treason, and then retracted it), is so serious that Sullivan’s attempt to charge him with perjury for pleading guilty under compulsion is justified. Or, you might conclude that what’s different is that Trump is now President, and Sullivan is running a Soviet style show-trial to damage Trump.

The Flynn/Kislyak phone call was NSA/CIA tapping Kislyak’s phone. This does not require a FISA application, since Kislyak is not an American citizen. That’s where Flynn’s identity was supposed to be protected and required the “unmasking” requests, which took place at the discretion of a surprising number of bureaucrats closely associated with dirty cops, rogue prosecutors, and slimy politicians.

What McCarthy is saying in the National Review article is that the surveillance of Trump (and thus Flynn) strongly appears to have preceded any unmaskings of Flynn. It probably started the day Trump announced his candidacy.

Here’s another article worth reading on this with a broader overview of the whole plot, and why it is “the biggest political scandal in our nation’s history.”
John Brennan and the Plot to Subvert an American Election

This quote from that link summarizes McCarthy’s National Review speculation:

[T]he most significant thing about these unmaskings may be the dog that didn’t bark—there was no unmasking request for December 29, 2016, the date that Flynn, then on holiday in the Dominican Republic, made his famous call to Sergei Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States. McCarthy speculates that the call was intercepted by “an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service.”

Seems like there might be more Brady material there. What did the CIA, or MI6, tell the FBI and when did they tell it?

Let’s extend the dot connecting to the more general case for Progressive lawlessness. Here’s Liberal Matt Taibbi:
Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties

If they’ll do all that to a Lt. General to get to Trump, of course they’ll tell you you can’t leave your house, buy seeds, or get a haircut in order to damage the economy. Because Orange man bad:

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them.

The deplorables in fly-over country need to be taught their place. To paraphrase Commandante Witmer, “Protests must stop, or I’ll extend the house arrest edict.”

Masks are coming off.

Withdrawal pains

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“There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free.”
-Barack Obama, on the withdrawal of the case against Michael Flynn

So much to unpack in a short sentence.

Of course there are many precedents for getting off (we’ll get to “scot-free” later) from being charged for perjury. Anybody can easily find them. For example, like Bill Clinton, you’re found innocent of the charge. He didn’t get off scot-free, though. He was disbarred and paid a $25K fine over Monica Lewinski, plus a $90K fine for false testimony and $850K in settlement in the Paula Jones case.

As to perjury, that wasn’t the charge laid on General Flynn. He was charged with lying to the FBI. This is simple enough that we can depend on Wikipedia:

“Perjury is the intentional act of swearing a false oath or falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to an official proceeding.”

Flynn was not only not under oath, he was led to believe the meeting engineered by the FBI was happenstance. An oath, in itself, would have provided notification that one was under investigation. Flynn received no such notification and was deliberately led to believe he was just having a chat. Bushwhacked is an appropriate term.

Perjury, if it were at issue, requires materiality. As does the actual charge against Flynn. Emphasis mine:

“Under federal law, a false statement made to investigators is actionable only if it is material to the matter under investigation. If there was no basis to believe Flynn had committed a crime, his counsel could have argued that any false statements allegedly made by Flynn when he was questioned in January 2017 were immaterial. Ergo, Ms. Powell contends that the withholding of this information violated the government’s duty to disclose exculpatory evidence.”

And don’t forget, the answer over which he was charged with lying regarded a telephone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn knew such conversations are routinely recorded by NSA, and that the FBI had almost certainly listened to the recording. You have to believe Lt. General Flynn to be extraordinarily stupid to believe that he lied about it.

The FBI interviewers didn’t believe it, even though newly released emails show an internal FBI debate about the purpose of the ambush:

“The documents turned over by the Justice Department late Wednesday include handwritten notes in which FBI officials openly indicated that their “goal” was “to get him [Flynn] to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired””

That was the basis of the ‘crime.’

“Getting off scot-free” is another curiosity of Mr. Obama’s thinking. Flynn’s reputation was destroyed, he was psychologically tortured, he’s been financially wrecked, and his family has been threatened. The prosecutors covered that last extortion up in collusion with Flynn’s first set of lawyers. An agreement not to prosecute his son was illegally excluded from the description of the plea deal supplied to the court. “[T]he government [is required] to disclose to the defense any promises made or benefits given in exchange for the testimony of a witness called by the prosecution.”

Not satisfied with misstating the crime, insulting due process, excusing prosecutorial misconduct and FBI framing, and minimizing the burden imposed on General Flynn, our former organizer-in-chief went on to lament, “That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.”

Well, yes, but not in the way he thinks.

More to come, I think, since we also just found out Mr. Obama was aware of this charade at the time.

Hmmm.

Flynn’s current lawyer, Sidney Powell, is another Dagny Taggart Award nominee.

Update, May 11, 1:20PM:


…and, while we’re at it:
Attorney General Barr’s Office Shreds NBC’s Chuck Todd For ‘Deceptive Editing’ Of Barr’s Comments Add a little collusion from the Maim Scream Media™.

Note, too, that the soon-to-be-infamous January 5th Oval Office meeting where Obama surprised Sally Yates with his knowledge of the Kislyak phone call preceded the bushwacking meeting (Jan 24th) with General Flynn by several weeks. Obama had been briefed on the call by James Clapper (according to Comey, during Congressional testimony), but Yates, at the DOJ, had not been briefed.

Also attending that meeting were James Comey, Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Susan Rice. Rice was later to write a CYA email to herself:

“President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia,”

The very next day, Comey briefed incoming President Donald Trump on the Steele dossier, i.e., Russian disinformation paid for by the Clinton campaign, and already used to obtain a FISA warrant against Carter Page. Comey only discussed the salacious parts of the dossier, and neglected to tell Trump about the Kislyak phone call and Flynn. Comey lied by omission.