‘I would say that out-of-state money that wants to control the outcome of a local election is disturbing…’
George Soros/photo by Niccolò Caranti (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Two progressive county prosecutors defending their seats in the exurbs of Washington, D.C., have found themselves the unwitting victims of a George Soros-driven dark-money campaign to replace them with even more radical left-wing law-enforcers.
The Soros-backed Virginia Justice and Public Safety PAC gave substantial contributions to primary challengers in the commonwealth’s attorney races in Northern Virginia’s Arlington and Fairfax counties, reported The Washington Post.
In Arlington, candidate Parisa Tafti received $139,000 from the PAC; in Fairfax, candidate Steve Descano received $146,000.
The in-kind contributions—used for polling, mailings and other campaign services—well eclipsed the total amounts raised by the current incumbents, said the Post.
Commonwealth’s attorneys Theo Stamos and Raymond F. Morrogh denounced their primary opponents for taking money from a political interest outside Virginia.
“I would say that out-of-state money that wants to control the outcome of a local election is disturbing,” Stamos told the Post.
“This is a community that values local civic engagement and local experience. No amount of special interest money will make up for those deficiencies.”
As the increasingly extremist Democratic Party pushes fringe positions on everything from open-borders to gerrymandering and Census counts to felon voting rights and lowering the voting age to abolishing the Electoral College, there are two common themes:
The first is that each involves a blatant ploy to entrench leftist political dominance and ensure permanent Democratic majorities while undermining many of the traditional processes and institutions that sustain the democracy.
The second is that it does not take scratching the surface very deeply to see the hand of Hungarian-born billionaire investor Soros guiding many of those initiatives.
Even so, some of Soros’s most nefarious operations remain shrouded in the shadows—among them, his efforts to influence local prosecutor races in cities nationwide.
The Post said that Soros-aligned PACs had contributed to “reformist” prosecutor candidates in major cities including Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston.
The impact of just how much weight prosecutorial discretion can have was brought to light recently in the highly controversial decision by Chicago’s Kim Foxx to drop charges against actor Jussie Smollett after his racially-charged hate-crime hoax cost the city millions to investigate.
Jussie Smollett/IMAGE: ABC News via YouTube
Foxx, who had claimed to recuse herself from the case, dismissed Smollett’s 16 felony counts following the intervention of Tina Tchen, the former chief of staff for Michelle Obama.
Likewise, the two Northern Virginia candidates are markedly farther to the Left than the veteran incumbents, said the Post.
Their professed positions include pledges to end prosecutions for marijuana possession, and to compensate for racial disparities in other low-level drug and driving offenses. They also have said they would forgo death penalty prosecutions.
“I have the support of virtually every grassroots activist organization that supports reform in our community in addition to the support of a wide array of individuals who understand the need for change in our local criminal justice system,” Tafti said in a statement to the Post. “I welcome the support of any organization that believes in my campaign.”
In addition to the Soros support, Tafti and Descano also got help from the political efforts of the NFL‘s radical Players Coalition, which has made criminal justice and racial issues some of its major focuses.
Although the football group does not plan to endorse or contribute to any of the candidates in the race, the two challengers benefited from exposure at a Fairfax town hall hosted by Philadelphia Eagles player Chris Long.
‘Dixie does represent the Southern states that fought to hold on to slavery…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Over the past two years, partisan radicals in North Carolina have aggressively attacked the state’s Civil War monuments and prominently felled several historic statues.
Under pressure from a group of local activists, the city of Winston–Salem announced Wednesday that it would be initiating the process to change the name of a popular annual fair that uses the “D-word.”
We have started a process to change the name of the Dixie Classic Fair, but it includes multiple avenues of collecting public input. Details will be released shortly. @JournalNow@myfox8@WXII
According to the Winston–Salem Journal, less than a month after the forced removal of a Confederate statue in the city’s downtown area—a popular tourist destination, known for its historical emphasis—activists led by Sir Walter Mack Jr., pastor of the Union Baptist Church, swarmed a city council meeting to demand the region’s 137-year-old fair change its name.
“Dixie does represent the Southern states that fought to hold on to slavery,” said Mack, who claimed to have researched the word in 1988 and to have boycotted the fair for the past two decades.
The activist group said it is connected with a local ecclesiastical-based organization, Love Out Loud, which has ties to prominent companies including Wells Fargo and Northwestern Mutual.
Although past partnerships have involved many noble and charitable undertakings, the 11-year-old nonprofit now appears to have been ensnared in politically motivated virtue-signaling of the worst kind.
The radical call for the name change at the April 9 meeting received little resistance from council members, though the city officials emphasized the need for additional public comment. They are currently accepting suggestions for the new name via an online survey.
Councilor John Larson called it “a fascinating opportunity to rebrand ourselves,” reported the Journal.
“We do need to have a thorough understanding of the history,” Larson said. “We have a fair committee involved in branding and marketing. Maybe they should bring a recommendation back to this board.”
However, some of those connected with the fair’s planning committee expressed shock over the unorthodox resolution being directed by the city, which normally would have required a committee vote.
The fair’s public relations manager, Rachel Lough, lamented that political forces had devised a solution in search of a problem, according to local NBC affiliate WXII.
The Dixie Classic Fair in Winston–Salem, NC / IMAGE: eMarketWiz via Youtube
“The Dixie Classic Fair is really all about bringing the community together … [W]e’re all about getting everyone together and being happy and celebrating how great we are,” Lough said.
“People have their own opinions on everything, but to us ‘Dixie’ came from over 50 years ago … [I]t just celebrates how great of an agricultural community we have here,” she added.
The Journal said that the Dixie Classic Fair has been the name of the festival since 1956, when it was changed from the Forsyth County Fair in order to emphasize a broader reach beyond the local region. The annual event began in the 1880s as the Wheat and Cattle Fair.
Five years ago, the city officially changed the name of its fairgrounds from the Dixie Classic Fairgrounds to the Winston–Salem Fairgrounds, though one local man launched a petition to change them back, the Journal said.
Although accounts vary, the etymology of the word “Dixie” is commonly attributed to the printing of 10-dollar bank notes in New Orleans prior to the Civil War. The currency used the French word dix, leading to Louisiana being referred to as “Dixie Land.”
The word “Dixie” later became associated more broadly with the Confederate states, most prominently in the eponymous song written by Ohio-born Daniel Decatur Emmett. The song—said to be a favorite of Abraham Lincoln’s—was later used by minstrel shows that relied on racist tropes like blackface to depict negative stereotypes.
The now-controversial fair will run from Oct. 4-13 assuming no further protests. The name change, currently under debate, would take effect next year, according to a press release issued by the city.
‘Their active participation in our refugee program is a threat to our sovereignty, an obfuscation in our screening process, and a serious detriment to our refugee program…’
IMAGE: The Daily Mail via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) An immigration watchdog organization says the United Nations High Commission for Refugees is increasingly inserting itself into Central American migration issues—and the United States is letting it.
The research from the Immigration Reform Law Institute follows closely on the heels of an NBC News report that corrupt UNHCR officials had sold resettlement recommendations to the highest bidder in five African and Middle Eastern countries.
IRLI said the U.N. agency has dispatched more than 45 staffers to Mexico in an effort to force the United States to comply with its globalist resettlement agenda under the guise of humanitarian relief.
It is demanding that the U.S. accept asylum-seekers’ claims for reasons such as drug and gang violence, corruption, poverty and exclusion—even though none are considered a valid basis for asylum under U.S. law.
According to a press release from IRLI, UNHCR spokesman Charlie Yaxley called President Donald Trump’s threat to close off the southern border unacceptable.
“We wish to reiterate and underline that any individuals within that group that are fleeing persecution and violence, they need to be given access to the territory,” Yaxley said, “and they need to be allowed to exercise their fundamental rights to seek asylum and have access to refugee status determination procedures.”
Current U.N. Secretary–General António Guterres has openly stated his objective to expand the definition of asylum to include not only those being actively persecuted, but also “victims” of war and other types of violence, as well as natural disasters, and even climate-change.
Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI said the idea that the Trump administration would yield its sovereignty by capitulating to the U.N.’s agenda was a troubling prospect.
“Think about this, the United States is paying the UNHCR to screen and refer migrants for resettlement in the United States, who don’t meet the U.S. legal definition of a refugee, and then try to mandate how many migrants we should allow into our country,” Wilcox said.
Although turmoil has surrounded the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to evaluate the flood of claims given limited resources, the UNHCR’s supposed help would likely make things worse, he added.
“There are no legal requirements nor any advantages to allow the UNHCR to continue to make refugee status determinations or play any role in processing and screening applicants desiring to resettle in the United States,” Wilcox said.
“Their active participation in our refugee program is a threat to our sovereignty, an obfuscation in our screening process, and a serious detriment to our refugee program.”
‘We are subsidizing something that already happened absent the subsidy…’
Photo by UnitedSoybeanBoard (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A report released by a tax-reform advocacy group said the federal government propped up the dubiously efficient biodiesel fuel industry with $12 billion in subsidies over the past decade.
Taxpayers for Common Sense noted in the report, titled “Biodiesel Bonanza,” that the biggest offender, the biodiesel tax credit, has since expired but that some lawmakers were trying to resurrect it and even apply it retroactively.
Corn, soy, palm and and other crops cultivated as renewable energy sources may also pose potential environmental and health consequences, said a statement accompanying the report’s release.
Among the issues they create are greater land-use demands that result in habitat loss, water pollution, water treatment costs and a detrimental effect on public health.
“With more than half of US biodiesel sourced from virgin soy this massive tax credit not only negatively impacts taxpayers, it also harms food production and the environment,” said TCS president Ryan Alexander.
“At the end of the day, biodiesel subsidies distort energy markets, raise fuel prices and waste taxpayer dollars, and do little to promote long-term sustainable energy policy,” she said.
Nonetheless, following an extensive lobbying campaign by biodiesel backers, the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committees may take up a proposal to renew the subsidy when Congress reconvenes from its spring recess, TCS said.
“It is no surprise lawmakers are pushing expensive plans to extend the biodiesel tax credit backwards and forwards,” it said. “Industry boosters have been heavily lobbying for months.”
One proposal, TCS said, would cost taxpayers $19 billion by extending the credit retroactively for 2018 and continuing it for the next five years.
Alexander said such a retroactive extension for an agricultural enterprise defied logic since there is no way to retroactively change last year’s crop production.
“[W]e are subsidizing something that already happened absent the subsidy,” she said.
TCS also accused the biodiesel producers of playing political games with their past production numbers, drastically boosting their crop in three years when they knew they would benefit from the subsidy, then leveling off in subsequent years.
“[A]fter more than ten years of lavish taxpayer support, it’s time for the biodiesel industry to stand on its own two feet,” Alexander said.
2018 midterm election spending increased by $300M over 2016 general election….
Photo by K. Kendall
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In spite of—or perhaps because of—a landmark Supreme Court ruling that cut into their involuntary base of dues-paying members, labor unions doubled down during the 2017-18 election cycle, spending more than $2 billion, according to an analysis of government records.
The National Institute for Labor Relations Research compared filings from the Labor Department, Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service to determine that Big Labor had bet heavily on the 2018 midterms—even after the devastating legal decision.
Last June, the high court’s landmark Janus v. AFSCME decision determined that public-sector employees could not be forced to pay dues to unions whose political activities they opposed.
The ruling threatened to purge possibly millions of members from their ranks—and even more from their coffers. However, many cases have arisen of unions actively resisting the law by setting narrow withdrawal windows or simply refusing to comply.
The NILRR determined that of the $2 billion invested in lobbying and electioneering activities during the most recent election cycle, more than $1.3 billion came directly from general treasury funds that were paid by union-member dues, often forcibly imposed on non-members.
But the group said that its spending figure was likely a conservative estimate.
“On balance, then, the aggregate $2 billion in political and lobbying expenditures by labor union[s] since the 2018 election cycle reported here is likely an understatement because NILRR chose to mostly ignore the $500 million of union contributions, gifts, and grants that are heavily misclassified,” it said in a release.
Shockingly, the $2 billion reflected an increase of at least $300 million over the 2016 presidential race, when the union rolls were not in jeopardy. However, the amount of general treasury funding did not increase between the two election cycles.
Union contributions historically have gone almost exclusively to Democrats, and the most recent cycle was no exception, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The top 20 recipients of 2018 campaign donations from unions were all Democrats.
Unfortunately for the unions, several of their biggest “investments” in the U.S. Senate were for naught.
‘Which came first, President Trump or the degradation of our political system…?’
Andrew Cuomo (screen shot: CNBC/Youtube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has spent the bulk of his career raising more questions than providing answers or solutions.
He’s been known to point fingers and cast glances more often at Washington, D.C., than Albany.
Like rats on a sinking ship, many are now fleeing the tax-onerous Empire State, and others appear to be poised to do the same as the once-vaunted Democratic Party finds itself splintering into pieces.
In a Washington Postop-ed posted Thursday Cuomo addressed those worries by asking an additional 35 questions.
Although he previously ‘ruled out’ having any designs on the 2020 presidential race, the article seemed to clearly signal otherwise.
Intending to target opponents such as President Donald Trump with the rhetorical barrage, however, his questions seemed equally effective in highlighting Cuomo’s own deficiencies and myopic, far-left perspectives.
Political Degradation
In his leadoff question, Cuomo asked: “Which came first, President Trump or the degradation of our political system: Which was the cause, and which was the effect?”
He either was in denial about the answer, or at least had a very short memory—and hoped his audience did also.
The word “degrade” was, in fact, used often in the context of President Barack Obama—notably over his brazen insertion of partisan politics in areas where other presidents had sought to unify the country and build national consensus.
Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan issued a blistering attack against Obama following his 2016 State of the Union address for pettily turning it into a campaign stump-speech even though he wasn’t running.
As New York’s governor, Cuomo likewise has done his share of dividing, such as lighting up the World Trade Center—a symbol of national unity and resilience—in pink to celebrate his state’s passage of a late-term abortion bill in January.
Of course, one could argue that President Bill Clinton with his Oval Office conquests was the ultimate degrader of the Office of the Presidency—at least in the modern era.
Barack Obama/IMAGE: theleeoverstreet via Youtube
But the rancor that Obama brought to his eight years—after the relentless political attacks on quintessentially moderate GOP leaders like President George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain and Gov. Mitt Romney—led Republicans to draw a red line in 2016.
One of the most effective qualities Trump has embraced as a political figure is his willingness to return fire when the Left “goes low” and to answer them in kind with an offense taken directly from their political playbook.
In the series of questions that follows Cuomo took aim at the president’s use of social media, evidently forgetting again how scores of obsequious reporters and all-around Obama fanboys dubbed Trump’s predecessor “the social media president.”
Scholarly-looking books were churned out that fawned over this bold new way for Obama to take his message directly to the people, a modern-day equivalent of FDR’s fireside chats.
Naturally, the advantage lay with Democrats as social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google were openly rooting for Team Obama.
But of course, whenever Democrats’ own weapons are used against them, they quickly become anathema, eliciting on the Left a derisive bitterness for the same qualities that once made them magical.
Fake News
The governor directed his next set of questions at the media—specifically the cable-news media, bemoaning the fact that it has become partisan and click-based, as well as unreliable.
Chris Cuomo/IMAGE: YouTube
Question No. 6: When did we stop believing what we read in the press?
Perhaps his brother, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, would be in the best position to instruct him on the inner workings of fake news.
The left-wing media has only itself to blame for its exponential decline in credibility—there is not, nor should there be, a political solution to the First Amendment dilemma.
But politicians like Gov. Cuomo are complicit in the mainstream media’s downfall for tacitly abiding such irresponsible journalism when they benefited from it, torquing up the debate with hyperbolic exaggerations and making an entire cottage industry out of spinning the press—often with debunked or discredited talking points.
Competitive Advantage
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez / IMAGE: The View via Youtube
Cuomo next pivoted from Trump-bashing to an underhanded slap at some of his Democratic colleagues.
As he desperately attempted to carve out his own centrist path, ignoring his record of radical leftism and corruption, Cuomo asked obliviously why unions that operate as partisan political machines had become an enemy of the middle class.
But there seemed to be no connection between the stifling regulations and demands that liberal big-government imposes on private enterprise and the decline in competitive innovation and visionary undertakings.
Ironically, Cuomo also puzzled over the fact that America has lost “our competitive advantage” in efforts to build bridges and skyscrapers—a day after New York City officials voted to ban many of the city’s skycrapers if they failed to become environmentally compliant with Green New Deal demands over the next few years.
The governor himself even followed up his article in short succession with a press release touting his goal of 70-percent renewable energy in keeping with the Green New Deal.
Cuomo was at odds not long ago with GND’s champion, the socialist-spouting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, over the catastrophic withdrawal of Amazon from its New York headquarters plans.
Perhaps an unequivocal condemnation of the radical anti-capitalist movement would be much more effective than asking, “Gee whiz, how did that happen?”
Identity Politics
Cuomo seemed genuinely confused by the divisiveness that has overtaken the Democratic Party as its own interest groups find their agendas at odds with one another.
Antifa/ IMAGE: Stumptown Matters via Youtube
He asked: When did the political left become an enemy of the political left and the Democratic Party become a circular firing squad?
Cuomo bemoaned the infighting between the radical Left and the even more radical Left—which has manifested itself in conflicts over Islamophobia versus anti-Semitism; trans-rights versus feminism; unemployment versus immigration; and an elitist power-structure of moneyed, dynastic career politicians like the Cuomos against the populist, anti-establishment uprising.
Such is the natural and inevitable conclusion of building one’s platform around divisions instead of unity, promising to make the majority assimilate to meet the demands of the fringes rather than the other way around.
And yet, for all his puzzling over divisiveness, Cuomo couldn’t help but deploy some of the loaded hate-think that is woven into the very fabric of leftist dogma.
His article invoked the perennial boogeyman–canard of white supremacy, while making no mention of parallel violence from radical leftist hate groups like Antifa.
When did white supremacists become so emboldened that when they rally in our streets they no longer feel the need to cover their faces with hoods?
Theater of the Absurd
Cuomo’s last volley of questions veered into more cerebral and abstract territory, pondering when we, as a country, lost our sense of humor, our respect for history, our political courage, and when Democrats began to abandon many of their self-declared virtues.
But once again, the man doing the complaining—implying that he is somehow the antidote to it all—has spent eight years in an executive state-level office pandering to political acrimony and inviting it.
Cuomo’s first step to solving the country’s problems would be to practice what he preaches by stepping down from the New York governorship, giving all his family money to charity and disappearing into obscurity.
His series of questions ultimately raised one more: Is he that oblivious, or purely hypocritical?
‘Refusing to review the report you demanded as soon as possible amounts to dereliction of duty….’
Rep. Jerrold Nadler/IMAGE: PBS NewsHour via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, repeated inaccurate talking points about the Mueller Report, ranking minority member Doug Collins, R-Ga., seemed to wonder if Nadler actually read—and fully understood—it.
The nearly 450-page, two-volume tome—the result of almost two years of investigating—was submitted to the Attorney General’s Office in March and publicly released in redacted form last Thursday.
After much ballyhooing from House Democrats over the fact that Attorney General William Barr was taking too long with redactions—and calls from partisans such as Nadler to provide a full, unredacted report to Congress—the Justice Department took pains to meet as many of the demands as were legally permissible.
Both Collins and Nadler received offers to view the unredacted version, though Nadler allegedly refused.
Still, the Judiciary chairman—who decisively declared before the investigation was over that his committee would continue to investigate, regardless of the findings— seemed more intent on rehashing false, pre-ordained conclusions than addressing the report’s substance.
“You claim the Report states the Special Counsel wanted Congress to decide whether the President committed obstruction of justice,” wrote Collins in a letter to Nadler on Monday.
“However, a plain reading of the Report does not at all indicate—let alone make ‘very clear,’ as you claim—the Special Counsel intended for Congress to decide whether President Trump obstructed justice,” Collins said. “In fact, it is the exact opposite.”
Nadler’s assertions that Mueller was calling on Congress to pursue charges of obstruction of justice were roundly repeated throughout the mainstream media echo chamber.
“I trust by now you have thoroughly read the entire Report from the Special Counsel’s 22-month investigation,” Collins prodded the New York liberal.
Referring to a lengthy legal discussion at the start of the report’s second volume—which partisan Democrats pointed to as a justification for the probes they already had committed to, even hiring full-time investigative staffs—Collins said the “passages are not, in fact, an invitation for Congress to pick up where the Report left off.”
He noted that the constitutional division of powers authorizes Congress to write the laws, not to enforce or evaluate them.
Doug Collins/IMAGE: C-SPAN via YouTube
“This simple maxim from Civics 101 has become a casualty of false claims Special Counsel Mueller asked Congress to decide whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice,” he said.
“The Special Counsel did not say that—and would not say that—because Congress is neither a prosecutorial nor judicial body.”
Mueller’s report declined to say whether Trump had obstructed justice in his May 2017 firing of FBI Director James Comey.
Democrats have claimed that Trump’s May 2017 firing of Comey constituted obstruction since the FBI was investigating the president at the time—under what were later proven to be false pretenses.
But others contend that Comey’s firing fell well within the new president’s executive purview.
The fact that there was no actual collusion underlying the investigation also makes matters more complicated. It is difficult to prove an attempted cover-up of a crime was intended if the actual crime did not occur.
Collins said that the Mueller Report had concluded that Congress would be permitted to pass a future law prohibiting the president from firing the FBI director under such circumstances—not that it had the power to re-investigate a matter already settled by the proper legal authorities.
“This isn’t a matter of legal interpretation; it’s reading comprehension,” Collins said.
Undeterred, Nadler and other Democratic leaders have pressed forward, seeking perhaps to exact revenge for the impeachment of Hillary Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice two decades ago.
Although Congress does have the power to impeach the president, Collins added that was an entirely different matter from appropriating the role of prosecutor simply because the political outcome of the original investigation did not favor them.
“Your deliberate misrepresentations to the American public threaten the fundamental separation-of-powers doctrine, are dangerous, and need to stop,” Collins told Nadler.
He noting that the current rules for DOJ-led special-counsel investigations were written by Democrats in the aftermath of the Clinton impeachment and criticized the baseless political attacks on the attorney general’s credibility.
“Moving forward, I urge you to be accurate in your claims before the American public and encourage you to take the Attorney General up on his offer to read the full report,” Collins said. “Given the stakes, dismissing this offer and refusing to review the report you demanded as soon as possible amounts to dereliction of duty.”
‘This is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The sleazy, partisan lawyer commissioned by President Bill Clinton to rewrite the rules for independent investigations whined Thursday about how unfair those rules were after the Mueller Report exonerated President Donald Trump.
“There’s a couple things that we didn’t anticipate, you know, we thought about corrupt attorneys general and nefarious ones, but Barr’s actually more nefarious in some ways than anything we anticipated.”
Katyal, who briefly became the Obama administration’s acting solicitor general after Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court, said nothing during the interview about Eric Holder, the abjectly crooked DOJ chief he had served under.
Although the post-Starr Report rules that Katyal drafted in 1999 effectively gave more influence to the attorney general over Congress in independent investigations, he claimed the opposite on Thursday.
“The special counsel regulations were written to deal with the central problem that our constitution creates, which is, the president and his attorney general control prosecution entirely,” Katyal said. “So if you have a corrupt attorney general, there isn’t a way to stop him from doing the president’s bidding.”
Attacks on the current attorney general were an oft-repeated talking point in the liberal media following the Mueller Report’s release, despite clear indications that both Barr and Trump took unprecedented measures to provide transparency and access.
While both Clinton and Obama claimed “executive privilege” to block investigations into their dubious conduct, Trump declined to use it and asked for no redactions beyond what were legally mandated.
Prior to Barr’s becoming attorney general for the second time (he also filled the role under President George H. W. Bush), he had penned a legal analysis pointing to constitutional guidelines that prevent a sitting president from indictment.
Katyal and Colbert claimed Thursday that, contrary to being a reflection of fact-based judicial interpretation, this was his “audition” for the Trump AG spot.
“You can read this Mueller Report as, like, a 400-page, epic subtweet of the Barr memo saying the president can’t obstruct justice,” griped Katyal.
Even while saying that the report “parroted” Barr’s views, though, Katyal also claimed that the attorney general had completely misread and misinterpreted the conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“I kind of feel like with Barr if he tells you, ‘Don’t see this movie,’ you probably should see it because he saw a different movie than the one that actually exists,” he said.
William Barr/IMAGE: YouTube
Katyal desperately clung to footnote 1,091 of the Mueller Report, asserting that Mueller may have been secretly begging Congress to investigate further—and possibly to indict Trump after his presidency had ended.
“I’m feeling pretty good tonight because, basically, I feel that this is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end,” Katyal said.
Although the rules he wrote were ostensibly intended to diminish the influence of partisan politics on investigations, Katyal said the ball is now in the court of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her legion of left-wing radicals in Congress to keep the witch hunt alive “at least until the president is no longer president.”
Shockingly, Katyal did acknowledge that he had been wrong about one prognostication in the lead-up to the report’s release.
Mueller found that the Trump campaign had resisted overtures from Russia to conduct election interference on its behalf—at least some of which actually stemmed from coordination between the Kremlin and the Clinton campaign through the Fusion GPS firm.
The report’s conclusion proved a far cry what Katyal had suggested the outcome would be in a February hit piece for The New York Times.
Under the false auspices of his legal expertise, he made a wildly off-the-mark prediction that members of the Trump inner-circle, including the president’s own son, would be arrested for collusion.
But rather than recognize that his assumptions were not evidence-based, Katyal used his supposed mea culpa instead to snipe at both Trumps.
“I plead guilty—I got this wrong,” he said. “Basically, there’s two variables here: Who has a greater proclivity to lie, and who has less respect for the rule of law—and between Trump and Trump Jr., Senior trumps Junior.”
Perhaps Katyal should consider including himself in that equation.
The Committee for Justice, a pro-Constitutionalist policy think-tank, said in a statement Thursday that, when put into perspective, the efforts by Russia’s Internet Research Agency to spread misinformation online actually seemed downright paltry.
Mueller’s findings concluded that the IRA had the capacity to reach millions of U.S. social-media users by the end of the presidential campaign.
This “gives the mistaken impression that the Russian operation had a substantial impact on the 2016 election,” said CFJ. “But while the operation is alarming, it was actually quite modest in its scale and sweep.”
The CFJ said it previously noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last August that the Russians reportedly spent a mere $46,000 on Facebook ads during the 2016 race. The official Clinton and Trump campaigns spent $81 million on Facebook ads by comparison.
“For every 25,000 items the typical Facebook user saw in his news feed, only one came from the Russians,” said the op-ed.
Vladimir Putin / IMAGE: Al Jazeera English via Youtube
Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai, while testifying at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, said that what committee chair Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, claimed was “a massive disinformation campaign to influence the 2016 election” in fact amounted to a couple thousand dollars.
Meanwhile, it has long been reported that Clinton campaign surrogates Robbie Mook and John Podesta took active measures to concoct the fraudulent Russian narrative as a scapegoat for the campaign’s failures and to deflect against its own scandals.
Clinton’s own Russia collusion included working with sources in the Kremlin to devise the now-debunked Steele Dossier—which in turn was elevated by the Obama administration’s partisan intelligence community, then used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, leaked to the media and promoted by Trump opponents to form the basis of the nearly two-year Mueller investigation.
Attorney General William Barr said last week that he intends to investigate the spying that occurred and the circumstances surrounding the origins of the Russia-collusion probe.
Now facing the likelihood of investigation—possibly criminal—into their own actions, several of the key players in those efforts have pointed to the Russian interference confirmed by the Mueller Report as providing justification and vindication for their misconduct.
In a speech last week to technocrats in Sausalito, Calif., just across the bay from San Francisco, former FBI Director James Comey—who has openly encouraged followers to vote for Democrats—attacked Trump by saying his disregard for Russian interference may cause it to happen again in 2020.
It was only in relation to the hoax against Trump that the Obama-led agencies appeared to make any effort to follow through on concerns about Russia prior to Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
But Comey claimed, contrary to the actual evidence of what Russia did, that the FBI had drastically underestimated the threat on his watch. “I failed to push us to the decision point of how do we want to deploy against this threat effectively,” he said.
As for Barr’s charges of spying, Comey coyly pleaded ignorance: “I have no idea what he’s talking about, so it’s hard for me to comment.”
While assessing the release of the Mueller Report on Thursday, CNN correspondent James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, agreed that the conclusions about Russian interference were “devastating.”
However, Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government-accountability and transparency advocate, recently submitted requests under the Freedom of Information Act seeking records that may implicate Clapper and disgraced former CIA Director John Brennan in leaking the phony Russia narrative to left-friendly media outlets.
“Clapper and Brennan were key proponents of the big lie, exposed by the Mueller report, that President Trump colluded with the Russians,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “… FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic.”
‘I think that will be a big plus sign for President Trump and the integrity of the campaign…’
Ken Starr / IMAGE: Face the Nation via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Unlike President Donald Trump—who never asserted executive privilege even as members of his campaign inner-circle faced jail time—the administration of impeached President Bill Clinton actually took his investigator, Special Counsel Kenneth Starr, to court.
Clinton sued Starr repeatedly in order to block access to witnesses like the shady communications adviser Sidney Blumenthal, as well as to overturn criminal convictions of White House associates, according to a May 1998 article from The Washington Post.
“While Starr has been criticized by the White House for spending four years and more than $30 million on his investigation, yesterday’s ruling underlines how much of his resources have been absorbed fighting various court challenges,” wrote The Post.
Even though Clinton’s effort largely failed in the courtroom, The Post‘s coverage—like much of the media’s coverage at the time—never once raised the specter of a possibility that challenging the special prosecutor would itself warrant accusations of obstruction or arouse suspicion of guilt.
Rather, the coverage characterized Starr’s probe as something like a footrace in which hurdles randomly sprung up—or perhaps as an equal clash of forces in which justice happened casually to fall with the prosecutor appointed to investigate the president.
“The executive privilege dispute has been one of many legal hurdles erected in Starr’s path as he investigates whether Clinton lied under oath about having a sexual relationship with [White House intern Monica] Lewinsky and asked her to do so as well,” The Post wrote.
“But Starr has won a string of victories in recent weeks,” the two-decades-old report continued. “[Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway] Johnson has also sided with Starr by ordering Lewinsky’s first attorney to comply with a subpoena and by rejecting the former White House intern’s claim of a binding immunity agreement with prosecutors.”
The newly released Mueller Report delivered the goods some in the current partisan press had hoped for, recounting moments in which Trump put up a strong resistance to the Russian collusion witch hunt. The President used choice profanities to rail out former Attorney General Jeff Sessions over his recusal, and he also attempted to get White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller due to his conflicts of interest.
However, both might have seemed reasonable measures to the one person who was acutely aware from the start that no Russian collusion had occurred and that deep-state political forces were, in fact, making an active effort to undermine his presidency.
In light of that, the more surprising revelation is the degree to which Trump lent support to the probe, despite his public spectacle of almost daily denunciations.
Starr, whose investigation into Clinton resulted in his impeachment by the House of Representatives for obstruction of justice and perjury, said in a recent Fox News appearance that Trump’s cooperation stood in stark contrast.
“For the White House counsel to spend 30 hours answering questions of Bob Mueller and his staff is extraordinary, talk about unprecedented,” Starr said. “That’s an unprecedented level of cooperation with a special counsel investigation.”
During his Fox News segment, Starr went on to observe that not only did Trump not seek to collude with Russia, but he actively resisted Russian overtures to do so.
“I think that will be a big plus sign for President Trump and the integrity of the campaign,” he said.
Robert Mueller, James Comey and Barack Obama / IMAGE: The Obama White House via Youtube
On the contrary, some have noted that Russians were working, to a degree, with Fusion GPS, the company hired by the Clinton campaign to compile the notorious, since-debunked Steele Dossier.
Both the Attorney General’s Office and the Senate Judiciary Committee have signaled their intention to investigate the circumstances under which FBI spying on the Trump campaign occurred.
The fraudulent and unvetted information in the dossier, likely from sources within the Kremlin itself, was promoted by deep-state partisans to the upper ranks of the intelligence community and then leaked to the media.
As to whether any of the revelations in the Mueller Report deserved additional scrutiny following the nearly two-year probe, Starr said the petty, partisan snipes would only continue to weigh in Trump’s favor after his having endured it all and come through unscathed.
“Here is a key that no one should lose sight of—Bill Clinton committed crimes. Richard Nixon committed crimes,” Starr said.
“Whatever this report shows, the bottom line is no crimes are being charged by those who are charged with making that decision—that’s the Justice Department.”
