He ‘is now thinking who is our best chance in this environment to win, and I think he believes, in his mind, it’s him…’
Terry McAuliffe/Photo by sharedferret (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Very few Democrats have been clamoring for another white, male candidate with close ties to the Clintons.
Very few centrists and conservatives have lamented the lack of demonstrably corrupt, deep-state partisans masquerading as moderates.
Nonetheless, Terry McAuliffe—the bundler known for renting the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom to Chinese donors during the Bill Clinton era, who went on to become chair of the Democratic National Committee and governor of Virginia—sees his return to Pennsylvania Avenue in the tea leaves.
CNN reported that McAuliffe has been telling political allies he planned to make a decision by late March and potentially announce a run in April.
“I get the sense that he is moving closer,” John Morgan, a longtime Democratic donor and McAuliffe friend, told CNN.
McAuliffe spokesperson Crystal Carson said he was “seriously considering” a run.
To McAuliffe’s credit, in the crowded field of Democrats packed with socialist-sympathizing radicals—among them, six senators who co-sponsored the recently defeated Green New Deal bill—he might, in fact, be one of the more moderate options.
Likewise, despite having played a central role in the trading of nuclear secrets to the Chinese for campaign funds—what some call the biggest scandal in modern history (ever to be completely ignored and forgotten by the liberal media)—McAuliffe’s uncanny ability to slime his way through unscathed makes him, technically speaking, one of the more “ethical” DNC chairs and Virginia Democrats in recent memory.
Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook
Both may be a testament to just how low the bar is on the Left.
Biden, who currently leads the pack of prospective candidates, has more name recognition and would be likely to overshadow McAuliffe by appealing to the same demographic for support.
But McAuliffe’s surrogates downplayed the similarities between the two.
“It is still going to be on his mind,” Morgan said, “but I got the impression that he has moved past that objection and is now thinking who is our best chance in this environment to win—and I think he believes, in his mind, it’s him, a pro-business Democrat.”
Like Biden, McAuliffe’s extensive public record as a career swamp-dweller may be a blessing and a curse.
Among the past business experiences he so highly touts was a failed auto-making endeavor with Hillary Clinton‘s brother, Tony Rodham.
The pair attempted to exploit Obama-era tax subsidies for green enterprises by launching the electric car company GreenTech.
However, the number of investigations into the company may well have eclipsed the number of cars it produced, with the group Watchdog.org leading the way.
Central among the charges was that GreenTech was a shell organization being used to grant permanent-residency visas to Chinese investors.
McAuliffe bailed on the company in late 2012 while gearing up for his gubernatorial run. GreenTech filed for bankruptcy last year, having already bilked its investors of millions of dollars.
McAuliffe also was instrumental in promoting voter fraud in Virginia—calling on precincts to refuse to allow watchdog groups to audit the voter rolls where suspected illegal immigrants were present.
He also defied the state legislature and supreme court to unilaterally restore voting rights to 200,000 felons in the state, and he was instrumental in establishing the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by Eric Holder, which has pushed courts to reverse red-state legislative maps and gerrymander in favor of Democrats.
‘It’s a young, diverse class, stocked with a bunch of my campaign and administration alums…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In merely three months, new Democratic members of Congress have made the dialogue on Capitol Hill more hostile, wedge-based and radical.
They have encouraged profanity and threatened removal of the president with no evidentiary basis.
They have taken identity politics to a new level, launching anti-Semitic attacks into the Twittersphere and then claiming those who criticize them are Islamophobic.
They have forced mainstream Democrats—many from vulnerable, conservative districts—to take a position on a vastly unrealistic, irresponsible and widely mocked proposal to spend $93 trillion on socialism-friendly environmental initiatives.
Now, their Papa Bear, former President Barack Obama, has acknowledged he couldn’t be happier.
Obama met with the more than 60 freshman Democrats on March 25 at an event organized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, reported Newsweek.
According to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.—whose outrageous conduct included her widely condemned vow to “impeach the motherf***er” in reference to President Donald Trump—Obama made a point of expressing his approval.
.@BarackObama met with us new members of Congress and we had a thoughtful discussion about serving our country. The best part was when he looked straight at me and said, “I’m proud of you.” pic.twitter.com/cPDOth0B5i
Meanwhile, Obama tweeted about the meetup: “It’s a young, diverse class, stocked with a bunch of my campaign and administration alums who’ve taken the torch. This group is going to be driving progress for a long time to come.”
But he also cautioned the rookie representatives about passing radical proposals like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All without a logistical support plan.
“He said we shouldn’t be afraid of big, bold ideas—but also need to think in the nitty-gritty about how those big, bold ideas will work and how you pay for them,” said an unnamed source who was present.
Obama’s own rollout of the massive Affordable Care Act, despite easy passage by the Democrat-led Congress in 2009, proved to be an unmitigated disaster, forcing him to violate the law itself through executive fiat by refusing to enforce many of the required deadlines.
It also proved politically costly as a red wave swept the 2010 midterms.
Campaigning on repeal of the radical policy, the GOP netted 63 new congressional seats—the biggest turnover in modern political history—giving them control of the House until Democrats retook it last year.
‘I’m all about protecting your privacy, but this is not about privacy…’
Nellie Ohr / IMAGE: Fox News via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The release of congressional testimony from former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr confirmed that she actively courted the company’s founder, Glenn Simpson, to hire her for work “analyzing”—and perhaps inventing—ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In admitting to Congress that she reached out to Simpson in late 2015, Ohr opened the door to speculation that Obama’s intelligence agencies at the very least sought secret access to biased opposition-research commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Some even suggest that the CIA, under disgraced ex-Director John Brennan, may have planted the phony Trump innuendo through Ohr and used Fusion to launder the information before spreading it to the FBI and national media outlets.
Whatever the case, the transcripts recently released by ranking House Judiciary member Doug Collins, R-Ga., reveal a need for deeper investigation and declassification to expose a network of corruption that exploited public trust in government and law-enforcement for political purposes, while leveraging the sacred institution of marriage to help conceal its crimes.
Both Ohr and her husband, Bruce—at the time a top Department of Justice official—ultimately became conduits in the smear effort to link Russia with President Donald Trump using the Fusion-compiled Steele Dossier.
The salacious, questionably-sourced information supplied by the dossier triggered several costly and protracted investigations of Trump, both in the lead-up to and aftermath of the November 2016 presidential election.
Disregarding the recent conclusions of the Mueller Report, powerful House Democrats even now have signaled that they intend to continue probing the debunked claims of collusion between the U.S. president and the Kremlin.
Conflicts of Interest
Together, the Ohrs ensured that the unvetted slander from British ex-spy Christopher Steele had a direct pipeline into the hands of anti-Trump operatives working in the highest reaches of the FBI.
Bruce Ohr, Fox News screen shot (YouTube)
The agency then used Steele’s dubious research to justify an investigation into the Trump campaign and as the basis for warrant applications to the secretive FISA court, which authorized it to wiretap and covertly monitor the Trump campaign.
The Ohrs—despite the obvious, and potentially illegal, conflicts of interest in their overlapping Russia work—were able to use their marriage as legal cover when testifying at separate congressional hearings last year.
In his congressional testimony, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr insinuated that it was the nature of the research—i.e. the shocking claims against Trump—that compelled the couple to breach protocol in delivering thumb drives of Fusion files to Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
However, Nellie Ohr’s testimony cast doubt on that and painted a different picture of the motives behind the exchange.
She claimed that she had reached out to Fusion around September 2015, likely touting her inside track to the Justice Department to secure the lucrative position. Both Simpson and Steele had previously worked with her husband in his capacity as a DOJ prosecutor.
“I read an article in the paper that mentioned Glenn Simpson. And I remembered because he had been a Wall Street Journal reporter working on things like Russian crime and corruption, so I recognized the name,” Nellie Ohr said. “I was underemployed at that time and I was looking for opportunities.”
Ohr said her Fusion projects involved working about 30 hours a week from home, using open online sources to compile her research. She was paid $55 an hour for her efforts—which if extended to a full 40-hour work week would have put her compensation in the six-figure range.
Unusual Ties
While Ohr confirmed her husband’s testimony that he was professionally acquainted with Simpson, and that Simpson was aware when she applied of her ties to the Justice Department, Ohr downplayed the prior relationship when directly asked by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
Glenn Simpson & Christopher Steele (screen shot: PBS NewsHour/Youtube)
She said she didn’t know if Simpson even made the connection initially.
“I had been at a conference that he was at,” Ohr said. “I don’t recall directly talking with him at that conference, and I don’t know whether he knew who, you know, who I was other than the fact that I attended that conference.”
If he didn’t realize who Nellie Ohr was, though, hiring her for her Russian expertise at the time would have been a strange investment.
Simpson already had been making ripples with Fusion GPS at the time of Ohr’s hiring—but not on matters remotely related to Russia.
A month earlier, his firm had led Planned Parenthood’s spin campaign to defuse damaging undercover sting videos by the conservative Center for Medical Progress, which allegedly showed abortionists conducting partial-birth abortions and attempting to sell aborted fetuses.
Even Simpson’s former newspaper, the Wall Street Journal viewed Fusion as more of a leftist lobbying and public-relations venture than as the “independent research firm” that some claimed.
Marital Privilege
Similar to her husband’s testimony and Simpson’s, Nellie Ohr’s account to Congress offered little clarity about the “off and on” collaborations between the Ohrs, Simpson and Steele prior to and during the 2016 campaign.
Jim Jordan & Mark Meadows/IMAGE: Fox News via YouTube
Nellie Ohr said under questioning she was unaware of her husband’s role in an intelligence investigation of Trump’s alleged Russia ties.
Bizarrely, she also claimed to have no curiosity in their overlapping efforts even once they became obvious.
At a breakfast meeting that both Ohrs attended with Steele and a British associate of his, whom Nellie claimed to know nothing about, she excused herself from the table for a lengthy period of time while Trump was being discussed.
She also said that after seeing an email from an account she and her husband shared, in which Glenn Simpson had asked one of the recipients to call him, she automatically assumed it was for her husband.
In response to grilling by Rep. Mark Meadows, Nellie Ohr refused to definitively answer how she would have known whom the email was for, claiming that her conversations with her husband were privileged.
“I’m all about protecting your privacy, but this is not about privacy,” Meadows replied. “This is about a relationship between Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson, and the knowledge that Ms. Ohr had of that when, indeed, there was a third party involved in that communication.”
An Inside Job?
But some have looked past her claims of willful ignorance to speculate that Nellie Ohr’s role in the operation may have been much greater.
Based on her having reached out to Simpson initially about the Fusion position, a recent piece posted on The Conservative Tree House mused that Nellie might have been working with the CIA to feed information to Fusion under the guise of her “open-source” research.
It then would be passed on to Steele and presented as part of his own dossier, which Simpson delivered to Bruce Ohr to give to the FBI.
“Our research has always indicated that Nellie’s work product was transmitted to Christopher Steele as part of an intelligence laundry process,” the site said.
“Chris Steele laundered Nellie’s information, provided second verification where possible, formatted into an official intelligence file, and returned that file—now named the Steele Dossier—to the FBI.”
John Brennan (screen shot MRC TV/MSNBC)
If classified documents were to link Nellie Ohr with the CIA, it said, “this revelation would imply that an inside government effort from the CIA was likely the origination of material that Nellie would ‘discover’ while working for Fusion. Under this possibility the laundry process would have two washes.”
The article notes Nellie Ohr’s use of a HAM radio, which coincided with the time period when the Clinton campaign contracted with Fusion for the Steele research.
In her congressional testimony, Nellie Ohr admitted to being a Hillary Clinton supporter but denied ever having communicated about her work with the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee or the law firm Perkins Coie, which commissioned the dossier.
The Conservative Tree House went on to say that Fusion, long believed to be the source of the phony research, may have been relegated to a bit role in the information-laundering scheme.
“Whether Glenn Simpson knew of Nellie’s intent, or was likely willfully blind, is another question,” wrote the author. “I tend to think it didn’t really matter. Simpson hired Nellie to get valuable oppo-research he could turn into a commodity.”
It also mattered little in the grand scheme of things whether the research came from the Brennan CIA, from the Kremlin or from Nellie Ohr’s own imagination.
More important was that the chain leading to the FBI—and ultimately the national media—lent it credibility enough to damage Trump, while the true conspiracy would be nearly impossible for investigators to unravel.
“Simpson wouldn’t necessarily care how Nellie found the information, and he knew her background in the intelligence research community,” said the article. “The commodity was always the Trump-research file; which was then sold to the Clinton campaign after the contract with the DNC was made through Perkins Coie.”
‘Judicial Watch FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic…’
John Brennan and James Clapper (screen shot: CNN/Youtube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) With the Mueller Report‘s debunked allegations of Russian collusion behind us, conservatives increasingly have sounded a drumbeat to hold accountable those responsible enough for the real misinformation campaign.
Once again, Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests from the transparency/accountability guardians at Judicial Watch may be the catalyst that helps set it in motion.
The salacious and since-discredited Steele Dossier lies at the center of a massive web of collusion, which likely enmeshed the Hillary Clinton campaign, intelligence community, White House, media outlets and the opposition research firm FusionGPS in a plot that itself may have been orchestrated by the Kremlin.
And yet, all were willing participants due to the partisan, anti-Trump elements who were willing to cash in all ethical scruples in service of a higher mission: undermining the GOP president while deflecting from Clinton’s potentially criminal conduct.
Judicial Watch announced a FOIA lawsuit on Wednesday seeking records of communication between the liberal CNN network and two Obama-era intelligence officials: former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan.
The two men, both of whom later became CNN analysts, are believed to have had a hand in leaking Steele Dossier to the network, it said in a press release.
“Judicial Watch is again in court trying to get the truth about the Obama gang illegal leaks and conspiracy targeting President Trump,” said its president, Tom Fitton.
The organization’s previous FOIA lawsuits on Clinton’s role in covering up the 2012 embassy attacks in Benghazi, Libya—just prior to President Barack Obama’s re-election—uncovered perhaps an even greater conspiracy with the revelation in early 2015 that Clinton had maintained a private email server to dodge transparency laws.
The hunt for the missing emails triggered a cursory FBI investigation that turned up little before being dismissed with no charges, but it also led Russian-backed agents to hack the servers of the Clinton campaign and DNC, where the published emails revealed a number of shady dealings.
To deflect, Clinton sought help from the FBI and other intelligence bureaus in disseminating to the press a phony narrative that Trump was working with the Russians. Some, such as FBI Director James Comey, may have seen an ongoing investigation as the leverage needed to hold their position in the new administration.
Others, like Clapper and Brennan, may have had more subversive, partisan motives.
“Clapper and Brennan were key proponents of the big lie, exposed by the Mueller report, that President Trump colluded with the Russians,” Fitton said. “Judicial Watch FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic.”
Brennan, whose attacks on Trump resulted last year in the revocation of his security clearance, is known to have lied previously to Congress about the collateral damage involved in drone warfare.
Although he claimed that the dossier had little bearing on investigations into Trump, subsequent reporting undercut his denials. Following the release of Mueller’s conclusions, he issued a mea culpa, declaring he must have been the recipient of bad intelligence.
Reporting by the National Review in June 2018 revealed that not only was he a conduit for spreading the fake news to the media, but he also likely urged others to use it in their intelligence assessments, even while knowing that it had originated with the Clinton campaign.
According to the National Review‘s Victor Davis Hanson, Brennan “almost certainly did not tell the truth to Congress when he testified in answer to Rep. Trey Gowdy’s questions that he neither knew who had commissioned the Steele dossier nor had the CIA relied on its contents for any action.”
During a lecture sponsored by Queens University, in Charlotte, NC, on Tuesday, Comey also hinted at the deeper motives of the intelligence heads when he recounted a story about an intelligence briefing with President Barack Obama shortly before the dossier rumors hit the press.
He said the discussion—at which Brennan was also present—included deliberations on whether to notify the new president–elect about the sexual innuendo contained in the dossier. Ultimately, Comey said, they decided to do so because “one of the ways you undermine an adversary is to tell them you know all about it.”
‘It’s a token of elite tribal identity—and endorsing it, a public act of piety for the chic and woke…’
Mike Lee / IMAGE: TheDC Shorts via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Amid concerns over whether the Democrat-supported Green New Deal could end commercial air flight as we know it, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, offered some bold replacements for travel: dinosaurs, tauntauns and giant seahorses.
The Senate voted by party line to defeat the Green New Deal measure, which was introduced in the upper chamber by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and cosponsored by about a dozen radical liberals—half of whom have announced presidential runs.
The House counterpart, introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY, was unlikely to come to a vote in the foreseeable future.
“There isn’t a single serious idea here—not one,” Lee said in his speech on the Senate floor Tuesday.
Referring to an iconic—but not historically accurate—portrait of former President Ronald Reagan toting a machine gun while riding a velociraptor, Lee said, “This image has as much to do with overcoming communism in the 20th century as the Green New Deal has to do with overcoming climate change in the 21st.”
Lee’s speech directly lampooned some of the more absurd suggestions that appeared in the GND’s initial framework, which Ocasio–Cortez later deleted, claiming it was a draft version.
Among the radical measures necessary for its goal of attaining net-zero carbon emissions within 10 years were some that would have drastically changed American lifestyles.
Regarding the notion of eliminating air travel, the Utah senator criticized the main sponsors and other Democrat supporters from the heavily liberal, historically elitist New England states for failing to recognize the needs of all constituents.
“This might seem merely ambitious for politicians who represent the densely populated northeastern United States,” Lee said, “but how’s it supposed to work for our fellow citizens who don’t live somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Boston?”
In what was at least the second recent example of the Star Wars universe intersecting with the realm of climate policy, Lee said tauntauns might offer a suitably viable solution.
“These hairy bipedal species of space lizards offer their own unique benefits,” he said. “Not only are tauntauns carbon-neutral, but according to a report a long time ago and issued far, far away, they may even be fully recyclable.”
The GND proposal also targeted “cow farts”—recognized to be one of the leading sources of methane released into the atmosphere—with the implication being that the socialist overhaul would remove beef from our diets, with bantha poodoo likely to follow in short succession.
But Lee warned, “If they think the cows smell bad, just wait till they get a whiff of the seahorses.”
Mike Lee / IMAGE: TheDC Shorts via Youtube
Barring air travel would leave the transport option favored by Aquaman of the kingdom of Atlantis as the best bet for Hawaiians trying to reach the mainland, he said.
However, even though Lee conceded that “a massive fleet of giant, highly-trained seahorses … would be really, really awesome,” he saw several red flags in the plan.
“The last thing we want is to ban all airplanes and only then find out that China or Russia may have already established strategic hippocampus programs,” Lee said.
Lee concluded his speech on a more serious note, taking Ocasio–Cortez to task for her efforts to backpedal on the proposals, which actually hurt its credibility even more.
“Supporters of the Green New Deal want Americans to trust them to reorganize our entire society … and they couldn’t even figure out how to send out the right press release,” he said.
Lee said the plan, with an estimated cost of $93 trillion if all of its demands were met, amounted to little more than an expensive ploy for the Left to virtue-signal and campaign on while distracting from real issues.
“The resolution is not an agenda of solutions,” he said. “It’s a token of elite tribal identity—and endorsing it, a public act of piety for the chic and woke.”
‘I have great faith in Bob Mueller, but I just cant tell from the letter, why didn’t he decide?’
Former FBI Director James Comey speaks in Charlotte, NC, Tuesday, March 27 at a talk hosted by Queens University. / PHOTO: Tricia Coyne (used with permission)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In one of his first opportunities to speak publicly since the conclusion of the Mueller report, former FBI Director James Comey said Tuesday that he was confused by Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s opting to defer to Attorney General William Barr on the decision to pursue obstruction of justice charges.
Mueller, according to the memo provided by the Justice Department, pointedly declined to say whether President Donald Trump’s May 2017 firing of Comey—as the FBI was in the midst of an investigation into Russian collusion—constituted obstruction.
Instead, Mueller wrote, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
During a talk hosted by Queens University in Charlotte, NC, which was scheduled prior to the release of the report, Comey expressed his puzzlement at the verdict of his close friend and colleague Mueller, who preceded Comey as FBI director.
“I have great faith in Bob Mueller,” Comey said, “but I just can’t tell from the letter, why didn’t he decide?”
Barr ultimately made the call, deciding that since the original pretext of collusion was debunked, there was not a strong enough case to be made for obstruction.
Echoing Comey’s own July 2016 decision not to pursue a case against Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, the attorney general said that it would be difficult for prosecutors to establish intent.
At Tuesday’s lecture, however, Comey second-guessed Barr’s assessment, saying that, in his experience, the notion that obstruction cases hinged on a person’s actual guilt was false.
“Obstruction crimes matter without regard… of the underlying crime,” he said.
While his own flip-flopping on the standard of intent may have been lost on him, Comey did find humor in the reversals of others, as partisan objectives quickly shifted with the political trade winds.
He said the current situation Congressional Democrats find themselves in—attempting to push for the full release of the special counsel’s report—is a stark departure from their demand to keep sensitive information classified during the Hillary Clinton investigation.
“I find it slightly ironic that the people who were beating on me then are all in favor of transparency,” Comey said.
‘Who Have They Spawned?’
Comey himself called for the full release of the Mueller report, saying it was “very important that the American people get transparency.”
Peter Strzok/IMAGE: Fox Business via Youtube
But that, too, came with a touch of irony since much of his own talk seemed largely scripted, relying only on a set of pre-approved questions from Queens University students that focused more on his book than on the controversies swirling around him.
Comey presented himself as disarmingly candid and self-effacing—joking about everything from his 6-foot-8 height to his “impostor complex” to his practice of reading a room to glean whatever information he could use to his advantage.
However, in true FBI form, his seemingly earnest anecdotes often fell short of revealing the full picture.
Comey made no mention of recent calls for a new special counsel investigation into collusion and election interference—this time centered around the FBI’s role in working with the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to launch and disseminate a smear campaign against its GOP political adversary.
And while Comey spent considerable time talking about the qualities of a great leader—including the importance of cultivating and nurturing talented subordinates and fostering an atmosphere of trust—he made no references to the partisan operatives who infiltrated the top levels of the FBI on his watch.
Underlings like Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, attorney Lisa Page and general counsel James Baker promoted a culture of overt political bias and misconduct, as critically noted in a report by the agency’s own inspector general.
“One measure of a leader is, who have they spawned?” Comey observed in one of the evening’s many glib aphorisms, inspired by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bob Dylan.
Best Boss Ever?
While reflecting on his own FBI leadership, Comey hinted at a bureau whose director was so preoccupied with being seen as an approachable everyman—going to the cafeteria every day to get a sandwich and mingle with the hoi poloi, even when he didn’t have time—that he often went out of his way to let others hold the reins.
Barack Obama and James Comey / IMAGE: The Guardian via Youtube
“The best bosses would rather not be standing center stage,” he said, drawing a contrast between his own management and that of his last boss, Donald Trump.
“The best person I’ve ever seen in a leadership role is Barack Obama,” Comey said.
He noted that the ex-president—who hired Comey as FBI director even though he had given money to Obama’s political opponents, John McCain and Mitt Romney—would always sit in a soft chair and spend the first five to 10 minutes of a meeting completely silent, allowing the presenter to speak.
Such “kind and tough,” “confident and humble” leadership, Comey said, was akin to a teacher who never had to yell at students but could communicate disappointment with a simple inflection, or use the mere raising of his eyebrows to convey humor.
“He got something much more important than loyalty,” Comey said of the hypothetical teacher. “… He got love.”
By contrast, Comey left no doubts about his lingering grudge against Trump.
“Insecure people cannot listen,” he said. “Just being silent as a boss is a threat to them.”
He said Trump always sat behind his desk and usually did all the talking. “There’s a block of wood on that steep hill,” Comey said. “… To tell him the truth … requires extreme courage and a willingness to interrupt the president.”
The Sting of Rejection
Comey neglected during his talk to mention Operation “Crossfire Hurricane,” through which the FBI had leaked to the media salacious hearsay and rumors drawn from unvetted sources within the Kremlin in a report originally commissioned as opposition research by the Hillary Clinton campaign for the express purpose of undermining Trump.
Christopher Steele/IMAGE: YouTube
Even though Comey’s organization used the Steele Dossier, under false pretenses, to launch an investigation into the Republican candidate and to eavesdrop on Trump staffers for months prior to the November 2016 election, Comey mocked Trump for seeking early reassurances of the FBI director’s loyalty, which he repeatedly rebuffed.
“It occurred to me right in that moment, this person doesn’t know anything about leadership,” Comey said.
Notwithstanding his refusal to pledge loyalty to Trump or “be part of his team,” and despite Trump’s public and private expressions of displeasure, Comey said the prospect of being fired “didn’t enter my mind.”
He seemed to acknowledge his own belief that the FBI’s investigation into Russian collusion would provide him with an insurance policy to keep his position in the new administration.
By the time of his firing in May 2017, “I knew the man did not like me,” Comey said, but it “never occurred to me that a president whose campaign was being investigated” might oust the lead investigator.
Comey described his humiliatingly public and unceremonious firing as one of the darkest moments of his life.
Comparing it with the “indescribable pain” of losing an infant son and with his experience consoling victims’ family members after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said it left him with a feeling of “numbness.”
Afterward, he spent the entire plane ride home drinking “pinot noir from a paper cup,” he said, “and I just stared out the window.”
A ‘Nightmare’ Scenario
Comey, a self-declared former Republican, said that in his book he compares Trump with a forest fire.
Anthony Weiner/IMAGE: Movieclips Indie via Youtube
“I believe he is doing tremendous damage to core American values [in] the relentless effort to portray [institutions like the FBI] as corrupt,” Comey said.
He also stood firmly by his many controversial actions during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“I will defend the way we made those decisions to my grave,” he said.
That included the decision to inject himself twice into the election: First, he publicly announced the closure of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server, in July 2016.
Then, he reopened the case in late October, shortly before the election, saying a trove of more Clinton emails had been discovered on an unsecured laptop.
“The Oct. 28 decision was a nightmare from which I can’t awaken,” he said.
He lamented being thrust into the role of referee following a scandalous tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who despite recusing herself continued to exert pressure on Comey’s decision.
“Each choice we had to make was a bad [option] and a worse one,” he said.
Comey spoke sheepishly to the largely anti-Trump audience of the dilemma he faced in the decision to publicly disclose the appearance of missing Clinton emails on the laptop of former-congressman-turned-convicted-pedophile-sex-offender Anthony Weiner, D-NY, who was at the time married to Clinton’s personal assistant.
However, Comey neglected to mention the FBI’s earlier efforts to suppress the emails, which they had knowledge of for weeks prior to the October revelation.
Modern-Day McCarthyism
Although Comey said the thought of harming Clinton’s election chances was “excruciating,” he seemed to see little wrong with the public servants both above and below him who routinely wove partisan attacks on Trump into their deliberations and decision-making.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (screen shot: CBS News/Youtube)
He noted that in a meeting to discuss the reopening the Clinton email case, Trisha Anderson—a deputy general counsel who was later implicated in the scandal over warrant applications to covertly eavesdrop on the Trump campaign—asked if the FBI should take into account that a criminal investigation into Clinton might help elect Trump.
“Not for a moment,” Comey replied, “because down that path lies the death of the FBI as an institution.”
All arguments for truth, justice, ethics and the rule of law aside, Comey knew reopening the investigation was the right thing because failure to do so might ultimately blow back on the FBI when it was revealed.
Comey also described a security briefing in which he, Obama and CIA Director John Brennan discussed whether to tell the newly-elected Trump about the unverified allegations of potentially compromising sexual innuendo contained in the Steele Dossier.
They agreed to do it, Comey said, because “one of the ways you undermine an adversary is to tell them you know all about it.” It was unclear whether the “adversary” being ambiguously referred to was Trump or Russia.
Although Comey said he saw an inevitable reckoning for Trump within the Republican Party, he remained optimistic about the long-term prospects for the country.
“These demagogue fevers break very quickly,” he said, ignoring the unparalleled peace and prosperity Trump has ushered in during the first two years of his term, even while subject to a politically motivated investigation and incessant calls for impeachment.
Comey likened Trump to Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. Ironically, like current House Democrats, McCarthy led Congressional hearings into whether members of the government and Hollywood establishment had been compromised by Soviet-era Russia.
“That guy disappeared overnight when the American people said ‘enough,’ Comey observed. “I expect that history will repeat itself.”
‘This isn’t just me: an angry bartender. This is a grieving black community…’
Andrew Woods / IMAGE: screenshot via WSOCTV.com
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A North Carolina pizza chain faced protests from both sides of the political spectrum after a fight between a conservative LGBT group and a former bartender alleged to be an Antifa activist.
“It’s like a little microcosm of where we are in this country,” Will Bigham, owner of Charlotte-based Pizza Peel, told The Charlotte Observer.
Bigham said his popular pizzeria, which has three locations in Charlotte, was caught in the middle of the political crossfire.
Andrew Woods, 34, was fired Thursday after an online feud with the Charlotte-based group Deplorable Pride turned into an off-hours physical confrontation near one of the restaurants.
Seizing on a post from Woods’ personal Facebook profile—where he called for “brutal harm” against all white Republicans who support President Donald Trump—Deplorable Pride flooded Pizza Peel with phone calls and negative online Yelp reviews.
The group said that Woods’ extremist rhetoric, far from being an isolated incident, was part of a pattern of alarmingly violent political activism, including an effort in October to attack GOP supporters waiting in line for a Trump rally.
The FBI was called to shut down Woods’ “Stump a Naz” operation, but “since then his violent acts have got progressively worse,” Deplorable Pride founder Brian Talbert told Liberty Headlines in an email. “Mr. Woods is no victim except from his own evil hatred.”
Talbert said he initially tried to reach Bigham through a private message but chose to go public after receiving no response from the owner.
Woods claimed he also received threats targeting him as an activist and a communist, and telling him to “dig himself a shallow grave.”
Two days later, Woods—who was asked by Pizza Peel to take two days off work—posted a Facebook Live video telling his audience to meet at a location two blocks from the restaurant in what may have been another effort to ambush Republicans.
Talbert said Deplorable Pride members had planned to be at the Client and Community Center on March 16 for the MeckGOP‘s annual county convention.
After the two groups clashed, the incident prompted Pizza Peel to dismiss Woods for inciting violence, Bigham said.
Despite the fact that his violent rhetoric initiated both the online and the physical conflicts with the LGBT group, Woods claimed he was a victim of injustice due to the restaurant’s response.
“If they will do it to me, they will do it to people more vulnerable than me,” he told the Observer.
But he said he doesn’t want his old job back or any severance money.
“I’ve been fired—I know how to take a firing—that’s not the problem,” Woods told WSOCTV. “The problem is the weaponization of police against me as a person of color.”
Woods said Pizza Peel used three police officers to intimidate him at the Thursday meeting when he was fired.
CMPD records show the restaurant requested officers about 15 minutes before Woods arrived to the pre-planned meeting.
On Monday evening, in response, Woods led several dozen supporters inside the restaurant, where they chanted “Black Lives Matter” and presented a list of four demands: donations to black youth programs and food for the homeless, mandatory training for staff conducted by black women, and the display of Black Lives Matter signs at all of the group’s restaurants.
Pizza Peel rejected the “offer.”
Now, Woods vows to return with more protestors.
“This isn’t just me: an angry bartender. This is a grieving black community,” he told the Observer.
Woods and his supporters in Charlotte’s black community said the pizza restaurant’s choice to call for police showed a lack of understanding and sensitivity.
Charlotte pastor and activist Ray McKinnon said it “flirts” with the line of racism to pre-emptively call law enforcement when meeting with an employee of color.
“In their firing of Andrew and the way they did it, they took a stand,” McKinnon said. “When white folks call the cops, the cops are there to help … But for some of us in our community, we don’t always feel safe when police are there.”
For his part, Bigham said the concern for violence—based on yet another online post—was what prompted the call to police.
But facing the pressure from the protests and negative media, he noted that his business group is already reviewing its decision and may change its policy on when to call the cops.
“I want to remain open, I want to listen,” Bigham told the Observer. “What we did was what we did, based on threats—but I say let’s review that policy. If it’s not safe for everyone, yeah, we’ll change it.”
Bigham said he supports Woods’ right to free speech and says he has supported many of the causes Woods fights for, such as raising money for the refugee community in Charlotte and hiring people of color from a range of backgrounds.
“Our mission is to intentionally spread the love—and that’s love for everyone,” Bigham told the Observer, referencing the motto of his restaurant group ownership Stomp, Chomp and Roll. “Hate against hate is never gonna win.”
One thing Bigham won’t have to worry about for now is any further protest from Deplorable Pride. “The firing was satisfactory and no we do not have anymore plans for action at this time,” Talbert told Liberty Headlines.
He added: “Mr. Woods only has himself to blame for his firing.”
Dispatches from The Charlotte Observer’s Anna Douglas and Teo Armus were used to compile this report.
‘When it comes to the FISA warrant, the Clinton campaign, the counterintelligence investigation, it’s pretty much been swept under the rug … Those days are over…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, invoked his bipartisan bona fides on Monday to reiterate the conclusiveness of the Mueller report while calling on a special counsel investigation into the other side.
His press conference invoked a firm demand for fairness and equal pursuit of justice that may have been reminiscent to some of his stand during the Brett Kavanaugh hearing last September.
As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham was one of the first to receive Attorney General William Barr‘s summary of the findings of the Mueller report.
On Sunday, he was returning from a golf outing with President Donald Trump when Barr formally announced that the report found no evidence of Russian collusion and insufficient evidence of obstruction of justice to pursue a case.
Graham said he hoped to have Barr appear before the committee in a public hearing to discuss the full Mueller report and his conclusions.
“The truth is, I want you to know as much as you possibly can know. This is a very big deal,” he said. “From my point of view, it was a great day for the president in terms of the underlying allegation, but now I’m hoping some of you will be interested in the other side of the story.”
Despite saying Trump had been deeply scrutinized more than any president since Nixon, Graham emphasized that he had been a vocal supporter of the Mueller probe from the beginning.
“Mr. Mueller has been given a chance to do his job: two years, 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents, 2800 subpoenas, 500 people interviewed, 230 orders for communications records, 13 requests to foreign governments, $25 million dollars or more—that is what happened to the Trump campaign, and I’ve been OK with that scrutiny from Day 1,” he said.
He said his support for the rule of law superseded any political considerations—and called on opponents across the aisle, including ranking Senate Judiciary Democrat Dianne Feinstein, to follow the same principles by looking into the “bizarre” and “at a minimum, disturbing” allegations that partisan influences directed the FBI claims of Russian collusion that ultimately triggered the Muller investigation.
“When it comes to the FISA warrant, the Clinton campaign, the counterintelligence investigation, it’s pretty much been swept under the rug except by a few Republicans in the House. Those days are over,” he said. “Going forward, hopefully in a bipartisan fashion, we will begin to unpack the other side of the story.”
Graham said he intended to ask Barr to appoint a special-counsel investigator similar to Mueller to investigate the lingering questions over whether the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee may have colluded with the Justice Department and FBI to interfere with the election.
He said several questions lingered about the false pretenses the FBI used in using the Clinton-commissioned Steele Dossier to justify to the secretive FISA court why it should be allowed to eavesdrop on Trump campaign staffer Carter Page.
He also said he wanted to know what influence the Clintons may have exerted over then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch that caused her to recuse herself from investigating Hillary Clinton, and whether partisan motives may have swayed the decision by then-FBI Director James Comey to drop the investigation into Clinton’s private server and missing emails.
“Am I right to be concerned?” Graham asked. “Seems pretty bad on its face, but [we need] somebody like a Mr. Mueller to look at that so that—if nobody else—those who believe that the FBI and the Department of Justice were playing politics, that they wanted Clinton to win and Trump to lose, that somebody can satisfy them that that was looked at.”
Other lingering questions surrounded the commissioning of the dossier itself, which relied upon information from ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who allegedly used sources close to the Kremlin to supply it, with little vetting from the American intelligence community.
“The salacious material generated [by the dossier]… is just a bunch of garbage,” Graham said, “I think generated by Russians who are trying to undercut our democracy.”
One clear conclusion from the Mueller investigation, though was that the Russians were involved in sowing discord all around.
“There’s things I can’t tell you—they were out to get us all,” Graham said. “… If you just think Russia just likes Trump and hate Clinton, you’re missing the point of what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to divide all of us against each other and done a pretty good job of it.”
Graham also said the Russians were continuing in those efforts, and he hoped that his deep dive into the 2016 campaign would help find ways to prevent future interference.
“Critical infrastructure before this debate was power companies, financial services. Now it’s gotta be the political system,” he said. “Parties need to realize that they’re subject to being attacked, that the vote-tallying process needs to be hardened, that the social-media outlets that we all rely upon and enrich our lives can be co-opted to spread lies, to pit one American against the other.”
Despite his support for the Trump, Graham called on the president to stay out of attempting to direct or interfere with the Senate inquiry.
Instead, said Trump should to use the political capital he received from Mueller’s exoneration to move forward his agenda rather than to settle personal scores with adversaries.
“I don’t need your advice about what I should do,” Graham said. “If I were you, Mr. President, I would focus on what’s next for the country.”
Graham took several questions from reporters during the press conference, with many of them conveying the Left’s refusal to let the investigation drop.
He encouraged Democrats to “learn from our mistakes” referencing Republican’s pursuit of impeachment against former President Bill Clinton, which, despite strong supporting evidence of perjury in a sexual harassment investigation, wound up backfiring politically against Republicans in the public eye.
Graham also dismissed the notion that Mueller and Barr had punted on fully investigating claims of obstruction of justice, which stemmed from Trump’s decision to fire Comey from his FBI post after the innuendo about Russian collusion had already led to partisan investigations of his associates, including short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Graham said the case for obstruction would be very difficult in light of the fact that the collusion never happened to begin with.
“It is important but not dispositive that the underlying crime did not exist,” he said. “You can actually obstruct justice even if there is not a crime, but the intent really does go to whether or not somebody is trying to protect themself—and if they did nothing wrong to being with, it’s pretty hard to prove.”
Putting it all into perspective, Graham said only those with partisan objectives were despairing over the outcome of the Mueller report.
“To those wanting an outcome of removing Trump, you’ve gotta be disappointed,” he said. “To those who wanted somebody to look at Trump without interference, you’ve gotta be pleased. To those that are happy that your president has been cleared of working with a foreign power, I think you’re a good American.”
On “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” Ocasio–Cortez made an articulated gesture that many in the leftist media have observed to be a symbol of white supremacy when previously used by President Donald Trump and his supporters.
While the theory that AOC may secretly be part of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas likewise remains unproven, the freshman congresswoman’s ubiquitous exposure and increasing name recognition have indeed transformed her from a so-called democratic socialist into more of a national socialist, known to vigorously defend her colleagues’ anti-Semitic stereotyping.
The obsequious Seth Meyers and compliant audience on Thursday allowed AOC to push several blatantly false narratives with nary a trace of incredulity.
For her part, Ocasio–Cortez’s blending of Stalinist rhetorical tactics with the presence and diction of a 15-year-old Valley girl were apt to leave non-indoctrinatees to the theology of ‘wokeness’ uncertain whether to laugh, cry or cower in fear.
Among the highlights (or lowlights) of the segment:
● She regaled the audience with an anecdote mocking a Republican colleague, whom AOC accused of being “unprepared,” while repeatedly using “like” and “um.”
“Especially with my Republican colleagues, they say things and I’m like ‘What does that have to do with what we’re talking about now.’ There’s this one member who famously every single Financial Services Committee hearing, he says ‘I ask everyone this: Are you a capitalist or a socialist?’ And like the person’s like in charge of National Flood Insurance Program, and they’re like ‘What?’”
● She falsely insinuated that the only reason many on Fox News and other media are preoccupied with her is an illicit sexual attraction, not that she has prescribed a $93 trillion spending plan over 10 years that also would drastically impact the everyday freedoms of all Americans.
“I mean, it’s weird, like why are so many grown men just like obsessed with this like 29-year-old?”
● Set up with a softball question (one of many) from Meyers about whether she was a “Manchurian candidate,” she denied and then deflected, bragging that tax-funded office staffers received no less than $52,000 in salary, far more than most entry-level wage-earners.
“I’m not a Manchurian Candidate, but I do have amazing staff and in no part [sic] thanks to the fact that we pay a living wage in our office—we don’t pay any less than $52,000 a year—which means so far two of my staffers have been able to quit their second jobs in restaurants and be fully present at work.”
● While literally on a TV show where she was promoting misinformation through selective omissions, lack of context and false premises—and receiving no pushback—she accused Fox News of duping Republicans by doing precisely that.
“It is funny because one of the side effects of kind of this Fox News lunacy is that, uh, is that other actual members of Congress, like, believe it and see it uncritically, and so I was on the floor once and this guy came up to me and he was like, ‘Is it true that you got $10 million from Netflix?’ and I was like ‘No?’ and it was like in the well, like we’re voting on like gun reform and I’m like ‘What else do you not know?'”
● She falsely framed criticism of the controversial Green New Deal, with help from Meyers, who claimed without evidence that opponents were primarily concerned with its position on methane emissions (i.e. “cow farts”) that would force people to give up ice cream.
“It’s always good to see how these narratives are manipulated because they’re trying to say that the Green New Deal is about what we have to give up—what we have to cut back on—when in fact the Green New Deal itself is a resolution to be more expansive. … The only reason I think anyone would have to cut back on ice cream I think is if their doctor advised them to.”
● She deceptively touted the fact that the GND was a nonbinding House resolution while omitting the fact that a companion Senate bill also exists with more than half of its Democratic co-sponsors also having declared presidential runs.
“One of the things that’s important that doesn’t get communicated is that our Green New Deal legislation is not a bill. It’s a resolution … it is a declaration—it is an intentional vision document. What it does is that it puts forward the large scope, the overall vision of what we’re trying to accomplish and to say, ‘Listen, if we’re going to make progress, we need to declare our north star…’”
● After costing New York City 25,000 jobs or more by criticizing a proposed Amazon deal, she sought to deprive Washington, D.C.’s homeless population of paid work opportunities by attacking lobbyists’ use of them to hold places in line in front of congressional offices. She also suggested that they had no right to be there because they were not “everyday people.”
“[Y]ou know, congressional hearings are not a Beyonce concert. You know, they’re two different things, and this is one way in which money in politics has really sunk so steep to the fact that everyday people can’t even see their own elected officials because a lobbyist has paid to get in there first.”
Shock doesn’t begin to cover it.
Today I left a hearing on homelessness & saw tons of people camped outside committee.
I turned to my staff and asked if it was a demonstration.
“No,” they said. “Lobbyists pay the homeless + others to hold their place so they can get in 1st.” pic.twitter.com/mXbgqkKp4P
● She allowed Meyers to refute valid, bipartisan criticisms about her fuzzy math on crucial economic matters by showing a picture of her standing next to a high-school science project.
“Science was my first passion, and I pursued the intel science competition—I studied microbiology and the impacts of antioxidants on model organism known as a C. C. Elegans…”
In an excellent takedown of the Left’s calumny, Rabbi Yaakov Menken wrote for the Center for American Greatness in January that Ocasio–Cortez was “projecting her own defect” in her frequent accusations of racist dog-whistles against Trump and other critics.
“The Bronx Democrat is the last person qualified to accuse someone else of dredging up hidden signals of racism, especially against a president who has, from the beginning, opposed racism and bigotry in all its forms,” Menken wrote.
1 Gram Gold Bullion Bars are offered from different brand name refiners at Money Metals.
The convergence of AOC and Seth Meyers—who routinely jockeys with Stephen Colbert to be the Joseph Goebbels of late-night television—made patently clear that racist views are not the only qualities Ocasio–Cortez and the new socialist Left are projecting onto opponents.
The question is not if but rather why she is purposely misleading and manipulating the public.
‘There is no legal strategy the Democrats won’t try in order to litigate their way into power…’
Scott Walker/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) One of the first casualties of Obama operatives’ bid to redistribute political power through court-forced redistricting, former Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wisc., now hopes to raise money to counter the Left’s expansive gerrymandering.
“Barack Obama and Eric Holder want to gerrymander Democrats into permanent control, so we are working to ensure that our side has the organization and resources to combat their efforts,” Walker said in a statement on the NRRT website. “Our reforms work, and if we have a fair chance to make our case, we win.”
Democrats—including then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—pitched their idea for a well-funded gerrymandering operation to donors at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, according to an October 2016 Politico article.
Their efforts reaped considerable success already in the 2018 midterm election, after using activist courtrooms to undo the legislative district maps and add Congressional seats for their party in states like Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which recently merged with Obama’s political campaign arm, Organizing for Action, currently has targeted 12 red states for gerrymandering in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
The goal is to substantially reverse the balance of power prior to the 2021 district maps being drawn—a duty that, in many cases, is delegated to state legislatures every 10 years, following the national Census.
“Governor Walker will be a tremendous asset to the NRRT as we prepare for the next round of redistricting,” said NRRT Executive Director Adam Kincaid. “There is no legal strategy the Democrats won’t try in order to litigate their way into power. To fight back we need Republicans like Governor Walker who believe in the future of our country and our party.”
Eric Holder & Barack Obama/PHOTO: WhiteHouse.gov
Holder has coyly rebuffed the charges that Democratic efforts are a power-play, including a recent denial at a stop in Walker’s home state, where the NDRC is investing heavily on behalf of a Democrat in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, despite the judicial candidate’s appeal to reject outside money.
“We’re not here to gerrymander for Democrats,” Holder said. “I just want to have a fair process—and I’m confident that if we have a fair process, Republicans, conservatives, will not do as well as progressives, as Democrats, in a fair fight.”
He also drew widespread criticism and condemnation prior to last year’s election for appearing to encourage left-wing activists to use violence in order to achieve their political ends.
“When they go low, we kick them,” Holder said. “That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.”
With Walker at the helm, the NRRT has said it hopes to raise at least $35 million prior to the 2020 election.
But the group’s best fundraising weapon may well be Holder’s and and other Democrats’ own extremist rhetoric.
