(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In what was intended to be an update on state responses to the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump responded on Wednesday to the breaking developments that former Vice President Joe Biden and other top Obama administration officials requested to unmaskMichael Flynn during the transition of power.
During his summit with the governors of North Dakota and Colorado, Trump fielded a wide range of press questions, including one about the unmasking release.
He specifically called out Biden for claiming in an interview with Good Morning America on Tuesday that he knew nothing about the FBI’s Flynn investigation.
“How do you know nothing if you’re one of the unmaskers?” Trump asked.
“It’s one of the very big stories, and I suspect you’ll have—if it’s possible—even bigger stories coming out,” Trump added.
The declassification of several key documents in the Russia-gate conspiracy have added new fuel to the criminal probe being led by special prosecutor John Durham, which is expected to wrap sometime this summer with prosecutions likely.
‘Somebody cooked up this plot. Somebody gave an order. Somebody did the dirty work. … And the American taxpayer has footed the bill…’
Lindsey Graham / IMAGE: News 19 WLTX via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Acting Director of National Security Richard Grenell‘s release of a long awaited list of Obama administration officials who were allowed to unmask intelligence reports on Michael Flynn, then the national security advisor in waiting, “smell[ed] of politics,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said it was a “coup” in an appearance on Lou Dobb’s Fox News show.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., turned the lens on Flynn’s NSA predecessor, Susan Rice, calling her approval of the unmasking requests “negligent at best and criminal at worst.”
One thing that most conservative leaders and analysts seemed certain of, as former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker observed, was that the latest, much anticipated disclosures in Flynn’s legal battle were just the “tip of the iceberg.”
On Tuesday night, Blackburn told Fox’s Shannon Bream that it was Congress’s duty to get to the bottom of it.
“Somebody cooked up this plot,” she said. “Somebody gave an order. Somebody did the dirty work. Michael Flynn paid a price. The Trump administration paid a price. And the American taxpayer has footed the bill.”
Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, likewise promised to investigate it.
“In light of General Flynn’s unmasking by the Obama Administration, the job of Congress will be to perform oversight of these unmasking requests to ensure the process was used for legitimate national security concerns, not reprisals or political curiosity,” he said.
“I specifically want to know how many unmasking requests were made, if any, beyond General Flynn regarding members of the Trump campaign team, family, or associates,” he continued.
Flynn was one of the five members of the Trump campaign (likely including the president himself) who was investigated as part of special counsel Robert Mueller‘s two-year probe into Russian collusion, which stemmed from an FBI operation.
That was, in turn, predicated on Russian disinformation included in the Steele Dossier, which was largely underwritten by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The recent revelations that top FBI officials knew about the dossier’s credibility issues and planned out how to ensnare Flynn in a perjury trap have intensified the push to investigate the investigators, whose partisan misconduct already was established in a series of reports by the DOJ inspector general.
The conclusion of special prosecutor John Durham‘s wide-ranging criminal probe into the conspiracy’s origin is expected to arrive sometime this summer, with prosecutions likely.
Already, though, partisans on the Left have been launching their pre-emptive defense, with former Attorney General and Obama “wing man” Eric Holder among those seeking to de-legitimize the investigation.
Despite the sense of outrage felt on the Right over the Obama administration’s gross perversion of justice, Democrats continued to circle the wagons and deny even the slightest malfeasance in the dubious plot to spy on American citizens’ telephone conversations under the guise of national security, reveal their identities and then leak information to the media for the express purpose of doing political damage to the incoming rival administration.
“[U]nmasking is something that you are just looking to just seem more intelligent,” claimed Democratic National Committee spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa, according to Fox News.
“It is nothing that is scandalous in any way,” Hinojosa continued. “But frankly, this is going to backfire on Republicans because it just shows how serious Flynn was in his conversations with the Russians. So Republicans can try to use this to play political football. But in reality, this will backfire.”
‘McConnell has warned Democrats that he will not approve any ‘wish list’ items…’
Donald Trump / IMAGE: C-SPAN via Youtube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) House Democrats included a provision in their latest $3 trillion coronavirus relief proposal that would restrict President Trump’s authority and prevent him from removing inspectors general without notifying Congress.
The proposal, which was unveiled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week, specifically states that Trump would not be allowed to fire inspectors general without giving Congress a 30-day notice and a list of reasons why explaining the removal if it passes, according to The Hill.
Pelosi has not yet said why this provision was included in a coronavirus relief package, but it comes just a few weeks after Trump fired Glenn Fine, the acting Pentagon Inspector General; Christi Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services; and Michael Atkinson, the Intelligence Community Inspector General who was involved in the Democrats’ impeachment probe.
House Democrats slammed these removals as an “assault,” and proposed legislation in April that would have prevented further “retaliation.”
The legislation hasn’t gone anywhere, and it’s unclear how Senate Republicans will address this new provision.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already warned Democrats that he will not approve any “wish list” items in future coronavirus relief bills.
Trump’s decision to fire the three inspectors general received criticism from some Republicans, too.
In a letter to Trump last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and several other GOP lawmakers asked the president to provide a “detailed” written explanation for why he removed Atkinson.
Congress has a “responsibility to confirm that there are clear, substantial reasons for removal,” Grassley said in the letter.
Trump defended his decision to fire Atkinson, calling him a “total disgrace” for helping the Democrats launch an impeachment probe.
The president also explained in a letter to Congress that he was firing Atkinson because he no longer had confidence in Atkinson’s ability to adequately fulfill his position.
‘Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process…’
Joe Biden / IMAGE: MSNBC via YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Former national security adviser Michael Flynn‘s attorney, Sidney Powell, charged earlier this week that those who illicitly requested to “unmask” intelligence reports on Flynn had committed a felony.
According to the now-public list, released Wednesday by new acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, that includes current Democrat presidential contender Joe Biden.
“I was aware that there was—that they asked for an investigation,” Biden claimed. “But that’s all I know about it.”
Wednesday’s DNI release explains that Flynn had gone unnamed in generic NSA-generated intelligence reports.
“Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request,” said Grenell.
Presumably, the focus of the report in question was a Dec. 29, 2016 conversation Flynn had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak regarding the Obama administration’s expulsion of 35 Russian officials.
While it is unclear what details the intelligence report on Flynn contained, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in a press conference Wednesday that they may have included an audio recording of the conversation.
At the time, Susan Rice was the national security adviser overseeing the agency who would have had authority to rubber-stamp the approval.
Rice also participated in a Jan. 5 meeting in the Oval Office where President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates discussed a plan to entrap Flynn using the antiquated 1799 Logan Act.
Of the 16 authorized individuals who requested the unmasking during the specified time frame, Grenell noted that he “cannot confirm they saw the unmasked information.”
In addition to Biden and Comey, the list of individuals who requested access to Flynn’s intelligence report from Nov. 8, 2016—roughly a week after Trump election victory—to Jan. 31, 2017 also includes several other top Obama officials:
DNI James Clapper,
CIA Director John Brennan,
U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power,
Obama Chief-of-Staff Denis McDonough,
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and several of his subordinates
By the time Biden accessed the database, Jan. 12, 2017, the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius already was reporting on the fact that Flynn had spoken with Kislyak prior to Trump’s inauguration.
Ignatius subsequently reported on details of the conversation, suggesting that one of the officials had leaked not only Flynn’s identity but also a transcript of the intercepted signal intelligence contained in the NSA report.
That led to Flynn’s resignation and ultimately snowballed into the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Mueller concluded last year that there was no evidence to support the claims.
A few days after Trump’s Jan. 20, 2017, inauguration, FBI officials met with Flynn in his White House office, where they deceptively attempted to lure him into a perjury trap over whether he and Kislyak discussed the Obama-imposed sanctions.
Although the agents doing the interview initially reported that he had been candid in saying he did not recall conversation details, the documents were revised later to indicate that Flynn had lied.
Flynn struck a plea deal with Mueller’s attorneys after they indicted him for lying to the FBI, but following the recently declassified notes showing that the FBI had conspired to deceive him, he requested to withdraw his guilty plea.
Attorney General William Barr announced shortly thereafter that he was dropping the case.
Grenell’s recent release is the latest in a spate of damning declassifications that have revealed the scope of corrupt intelligence officials’ efforts to undermine the incoming Trump presidency and smear his advisers.
A Justice Department criminal probe, being led by special prosecutor John Durham, is expected to wrap sometime this summer.
‘Events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook…’
Mark Zuckerberg / IMAGE: Guardian News via Youtube
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Facebook officials have removed the “Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine” page, which had about 386,000 members, in their latest act of censoring Americans who dissent from coronavirus orthodoxy.
Garrett Soldano, who started the page, tweeted on May 12 that Facebook censored his group, Mid-Michigan Now reported.
Neither Soldano nor Facebook has provided an explanation for removing the group.
Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine served as a meeting place for those who opposed the state’s mandatory house arrest and business closures.
The group also was used to promote protests at the state capitol and other political activities.
A Facebook spokesperson said the platform will censor all posts that contradict the “government’s guidance.”
“Unless government prohibits the event during this time, we allow it to be organized on Facebook. For this same reason, events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,” the spokesperson said, Cleveland.com reported.
Facebook has effectively joined forces with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has sought to discredit those who protest her executive decrees.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in April that content moderators will remove posts, comments, pages, and groups that violate the platform’s “community standards.”
Violations of community standards can include spreading “misinformation” about the coronavirus.
Facebook officials have defined misinformation to include anything that goes against World Health Organization or government orders, even though they are often confusing and contradictory.
‘It’s all part of a plan to somehow make those institutions weaker…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The former Obama campaign-bundler who, as U.S. attorney general, brought unprecedented partisanship and corruption to the Justice Department, attacked his most recent successor, current Attorney General William Barr, for cleaning up the mess.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder claimed Barr’s efforts to hold corrupt intelligence officials accountable for a seditious plot to frame Trump advisers and undermine the current president were all part of a scheme to “delegitimize” the institutions he oversees.
“It’s all part of a plan to somehow make those institutions weaker so that he can do the kinds of inillic—implic—illicit things, um, that has been, uh, he’s been doing—and [Trump is] facilitated by this attorney general,” Holder told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
“This attorney general is actually complicit in this by weakening these institutions,” Holder continued. “This is an attorney general who’s supposed to stand up for the people who work for him, and in fact, he is doing all he can to weaken the very institutions that, uh, that he leads.”
Panic Mode
Leftists have been in panic mode while attempting to spin Barr’s decision to drop the charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn after a special prosecutorial review of the case highlighted FBI abuses.
The findings—revealed in since-declassified documents—indicated that the FBI had actively sought to lure Flynn into a perjury trap during a highly unorthodox White House meeting a few days after President Donald Trump was inaugurated.
When the effort to mislead Flynn into lying about his communications with a Russian diplomat failed, corrupt agent Peter Strzok solicited the help of his mistress, FBI attorney Lisa Page, to stealth-edit the interview documents and suggest that Flynn had lied.
Michael Flynn, the incoming national security adviser, poses with his Obama administration predecessor, Susan Rice, who may have been complicit in Flynn’s framing by the FBI. / IMAGE: Fox Business via YouTube
Flynn—following the bad advice of his then-legal counsel, who happened to be from the same law firm where Holder works—agreed to a plea bargain for the lying charge as part of the broader Mueller investigation into Russian collusion, which later found no evidence to support any of the FBI claims.
Among the other possible felonies in the pipeline are the unauthorized unmasking and systematic leaking of classified material to the left-wing media.
Additional evidence—including the account of a Jan. 5 Oval Office meeting with President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and then-national security adviser Susan Rice—indicates that several top executive officials were likely complicit in the plot to frame Flynn, and that Obama may have, in fact, directed it.
Others within the Justice Department—including then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bruce Ohr, an assistant deputy AG who answered to Yates—are also known to have been deeply involved in the conspiracy.
Policing the Police
William Barr / IMAGE: Senate Judiciary Committee
As Barr and his investigators work to unravel the web of brazen deceptions, felonious conduct and attempted cover-ups, the veteran lawman, who also served as attorney general for former President George H.W. Bush, has needed to play an active role in policing the police.
But Holder complained that Barr was “injecting” himself into cases.
“I think that what we have here, at least to date, has been a really, um, good effort on the part, by the attorney general to defend—shield, as you said—um, various interests, chief interests for him being the, um, being the president,” Holder told Hayes during the MSNBC interview.
Hayes called out Holder, noting that he, himself, had once boasted of being Obama’s “wingman” and often had acted accordingly.
Asked how Barr was any different, Holder deflected, glossing over his own actions to continue his attack on Barr instead.
Ironically, Holder—the first attorney general ever to be held in contempt of Congress over his refusal to cooperate in an investigation of the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal—attacked Barr for his unwillingness to acquiesce in the extraordinarily partisan “oversight” investigations being waged currently by House Democrats.
“Uh, he has supported the effort to keep documents away from, um, Congress,” Holder alleged.
Selective Prosecution
Likewise, Holder established a new low during his DOJ tenure for his overreach, using the threat of prosecution to bully into compliance institutions such as banks and universities if they resisted Obama’s raft of radical non-legislative executive actions.
Eric Holder & Barack Obama/PHOTO: WhiteHouse.gov
He also notoriously established his own new doctrine of selective enforcement, refusing to uphold the rule of law in cases where he disagreed for political reasons.
“Engaging in that process and making that determination is something that’s appropriate for an attorney general to do,” Holder said in a 2014 New York Times interview over his refusal to prosecute challenges to LGBT marriage.
Holder’s disregard for the word of law has now given way to the widespread practice of partisan civil disobedience in areas like immigration enforcement, where so-called sanctuary states have refused to cooperate and have pressed their cases before Obama-appointed judges to issue injunctive relief.
Yet, Democrats have since fumed as Barr turned the policy back on them, declining to defend liberal causes like Obama’s signature health care reform amid mounting legal challenges.
But either due to a lack of self-awareness—or, more likely, an arrogant disregard for American jurisprudence, deeming himself to be above the law—Holder accused Barr of threatening to do the very thing he has been actively engaged in by weaponizing the legal system.
“My concern is that we move from the defensive to the offensive: That they will use the power of the Justice Department, the power of the criminal justice system, to go after people who are perceived as enemies of this, uh, of this president,” Holder said, obviously a nod to the anticipated fallout from special prosecutor John Durham‘s investigation of the Obama-era corruption.
“That is something that I say reluctantly, but I think based on the record that we have seen, um, they are up to doing that, to using the system in that way, which will be unprecedented,” he continued, in a desperate, pre-emptive bid to delegitimize the DOJ’s findings.
Indeed, such an action—having to prosecute high-ranking former members of the intelligence community—may be unprecedented. But that is only because the need to do so has never before been warranted.
The blame for it falls squarely on the shoulders of Holder and Obama, who audaciously lowered the bar for ethical, nonpartisan standards within the nation’s once trusted law-enforcement institutions.
‘this is a Democrat grab bag special-interest giveaway to their base supporters…’
Nancy Pelosi / IMAGE: CBS News via Youtube
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is proposing an unprecedented $3 trillion rescue package that purports to shore-up the economy amid Wuhan virus-induced mass unemployment and government-mandated business closures.
But critics are warning the public not to take the bait.
Pelosi, a wealthy San Francisco Democrat, has jam-packed the spending omnibus with blue-state bailout money, special interest pork, carve-outs for Democratic donors and activists, and cash giveaways for illegal aliens—in addition to trillions in unaffordable new debt.
Stephen Moore, a member of President Trump’s economic recovery panel and co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, called the proposal a monumentally shameless cash-grab.
“The new draft of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s $3 trillion plan shows she wants to go on a hog-wild spending binge that is nothing more than a wish list of liberal initiatives,” said Moore.
“The Democrats in Congress are using this deadly virus emergency as a cynical excuse to pass 30 years of failed great society/welfare state programs,” he added.
The so-called “Heroes Act” centers on sending $1 trillion to city and state governments, despite the fact that government workers have been spared by the Wuhan virus economy, unlike private-sector workers and businesses.
Moore called the move “blue state budget bailouts.”
The bill also includes $150 million for union-friendly Department of Labor programs, $100 million for new OSHA regulations, and another $20 million for the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities—that’s on top of $150 million Pelosi extracted for the endowments from the recent $2 trillion CARES Act stimulus.
Perhaps the most cynical maneuver is an attempt to restore the ability of high-tax blue states like New York and California to allow wealthy residents to deduct their state and local taxes from their federal income tax liabilities.
The GOP-led “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017” stripped the carve-out and eliminated the low-tax, red-state subsidy for wealthy individuals in Democratic strongholds.
Reinstituting the deduction “would be the biggest tax cut in history for the top 1 percent in income,” said Moore.
Pelosi’s wish list almost obscures her actual proposed effort to help economically hurting Americans, which amounts to another CARES Act-like $1,200 in direct cash to individuals and $500 per child.
“We must think big, for the people, now,” Pelosi said on Tuesday from the speaker’s office at the U.S. Capitol.
“Not acting is the most expensive course,” she said.
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, said the bill was a non-starter for House Republicans.
In a Wednesday interview, Banks warned of “free cash” for illegal aliens, incentives for businesses to hire illegals over American workers, assurances that businesses will not be prosecuted, and a provision that illegals cannot be deported.
But that’s not all, he warned.
The bill provides funding for Planned Parenthood against existing restrictions, includes a $25 billion bailout for the U.S. Postal Service, $75 billion for Wuhan virus testing, and $3.6 billion to states for mail-in voting which is designed to help Democrats in the November general election.
“At the end of the day, this is a Democrat grab bag special-interest giveaway to their base supporters. Not a single Republican had any input at all into this massive spending deal,” said Banks.
The Democratic House majority is expected to pass the partisan spending package on Friday but is expected to face stiff resistance in the Senate.
Senate Republicans have given the $3 trillion blowout a cold shoulder, so far.
“Donald Trump and Republicans should reject this plan and get back to what works to stimulate the economy: a payroll tax holiday which will most benefit low-income workers, deregulation, and lawsuit shields for workers and employers,” said Moore.
‘Whatever Biden had to say in Kyiv, he knew he did not want it overheard by the many bureaucratic busybodies…’
Joe Biden / IMAGE: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The dual scandals involving Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden‘s corrupt family business affairs and the deep-state plot to smear President Donald Trump with claims of Russian collusion have cast new scrutiny over a trip the former vice president took to Ukraine in the final days of the Obama administration.
Biden made the unorthodox visit to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Jan. 17, 2017—a mere three days before Trump’s inauguration.
The looming question is why.
Officially, Biden undertook the last-minute jaunt to encourage further democratic reforms in the corruption-laden ex-Soviet satellite.
But that seems highly unlikely under the circumstances, wrote Joseph Duggan for the conservative website American Greatness.
“The cover story was that Biden was in Kyiv to give a speech exhorting Ukrainians to repent and renounce their centuries-old habit of public corruption,” Duggan wrote.
“Think about it: A man who in three days would have no power gave a public speech demanding that his corrupt hosts—people who only fear overwhelming power—give up their addiction to corruption,” he continued. “Preposterous.”
Duggan also wondered why such a message could not have been conveyed in a phone call.
“Whatever Biden had to say in Kyiv, he knew he did not want it overheard by the many bureaucratic busybodies … who manage to listen in or receive transcripts of these highly sensitive communications,” he wrote.
“Only by getting face to face in Kyiv with his Ukrainian contacts could Biden be certain of his ability to conduct such communications with them without anyone else, in our government or theirs, knowing about it,” Duggan speculated.
The recent impeachment proceedings—resulting from a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy—offered telling insight into the circumstances of Biden’s Ukraine involvement, but they raised more questions than they answered.
Trump solicited Zelenskiy’s help in investigating both Biden’s personal corruption and the rumors of a hacked Democrat server that was linked to the Russia-gate conspiracy.
Most of the focus was placed on Biden’s intervention in an anti-corruption investigation of Burisma, the energy company where his son Hunter was receiving a million-dollar-a-year stipend for “consulting.”
Duggan guessed that, in all likelihood, Biden’s last official state trip as vice president was meant to feather his nest further after leaving office, or possibly to ensure that his previous quid-pro-quo arrangement would not expire.
“He was creating an opportunity for himself to speak, unmonitored, with the bosses of a corrupt country whose natural gas company was paying his miscreant son,” Duggan wrote.
But other, even more sinister, possibilities exist.
The trip coincided with some of the most crucial days in the FBI conspiracy to link Trump with claims of Russian collusion.
If, in fact, the Democratic National Committee‘s server, after being “examined” forensically by CrowdStrike, made its way to Ukraine, the Obama administration’s point-man with the Petro Poroshenko administration might have needed to make some emergency cover-up plans.
Although Biden has denied knowledge of the FBI abuses, evidence suggests that Obama himself may have signed off in the efforts to frame top Trump advisers.
Moreover, the classified nature of many of the impeachment proceedings—ostensibly to protect whistleblowers—raises the possibility that the U.S. intelligence community may have been more deeply involved in Ukrainian nation-building than has been officially acknowledged.
Leading up to its 2014 revolution, the country had, for decades, been the staging ground of a proxy war—likely involving covert intelligence operations—for geopolitical and economic influence between Western and Soviet powers.
Thus, the purpose of the secrecy in Biden’s visit may have been to cover-up something else entirely unrelated to either Burisma or the 2016 election.
“The truth is that we will never know the identities of every person with whom Biden spoke when he was in Kyiv in January 2017,” wrote Duggan.
“No one apart from the direct interlocutors—not even the Vindman twins—will ever know everything that Biden and his Ukrainian friends had to say to one another 72 hours before the Trump inauguration,” he said.
But whatever the motives behind his trip, there can be little doubt that serving and representing the broader interests of the American people to provide for a stable transition of power was low on Biden’s list of priorities.
“The closer to inauguration day, the more important it becomes to handle sensitive details diligently,” Duggan noted. “This was a duty that Joe Biden decided was subordinate to his desire to travel abroad.”
‘Washington’s legislation was an obvious example of overreach … and could have ultimately driven their state refineries to foreign sources of crude oil…’
The law was spearheaded by Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee — whose presidential campaign based completely on climate change was a miserable failure — under the pretense of environmentalism and public safety.
The regulations effectively trapped landlocked oil-producing states that rely on Washington’s Pacific seaports.
“Washington’s legislation was an obvious example of overreach, not scientifically founded, and could have ultimately driven their state refineries to foreign sources of crude oil, further harming America’s energy dominance,” they said.
The Department of Transportation determined federal law preempts the Washington law, which hinged on the fig leaf of preventing volatile gases contained in Northern Plains oil from causing an accident.
Inslee claimed the law would boost safety for schools and homes from oil trains passing nearby. He cited a 2013 train explosion in Quebec, Canada, for media effect.
The problem, however, was that complying with the regulations wouldn’t have made a difference, except for making the transported oil economically unviable due to unmanageable compliance costs.
According to the Transportation Department’s analysis, the removal of volatile gases was not a “statistically significant factor” in the severity of oil train crashes.
“A state cannot use safety as a pretext for inhibiting market growth or instituting a de facto ban on crude oil by rail within its borders,” wrote Paul Roberti, chief counsel of the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
Northern oil-producing states’ attorneys general petitioned the Transportation Department for help in July 2019.
At the time, Montana Attorney General Tim Fox argued that “rigorous and uniform” regulations for the safe transport of oil were long-established, and that Gov. Inslee and the climate-change activist lobby simply decided they didn’t apply.
“Washington state politicians want to pretend those standards are insufficient as a pretext for their anti-oil agenda,” he said.
On Monday, Fox got the last laugh. He called the decision “a victory for Montanans and the citizens of other oil-rich states,” and slammed Inslee for illegally attempting to “dictate what commodities other states can transport to market.”
A spokesperson for Inslee said state officials were disappointed with the DOT’s 74-page decision.
“Washington’s law helps protect the public from the inherent risks of transporting oil by rail by decreasing explosion risk in the event of an oil train derailment,” said his communications director.
An attorney for the radical climate-change lawfare organization EarthJustice blamed President Donald Trump and his supporters.
“In Trump’s America, states are on their own to protect the health and safety of their citizens—until it bumps against the wishes of the oil industry,” said Jan Hasselman of EarthJustice.
But rather than play politics, the ruling relied on the finding that there was nothing scientifically unusual about the volatility of Northern Plains and Bakken crude oil.
“This is just one more decision verifying what we’ve known from Day 1,” said Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, which represents more than 500 companies and thousands of workers.
‘I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make a decision…’
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Tuesday criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “one-size-fits-all” approach to the Wuhan virus, saying his opinions should not be the “end-all.”
At a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on May 12, Paul questioned the decision of many states to defer to Fauci regarding if and when they should open for school and work.
“I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make a decision,” Paul said. “We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there’s not going to be a surge and that we can safely open the economy.”
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has advocated for a stranglehold on the American people since the outset of the coronavirus panic.
Even as his doom-and-gloom predictions fall flat, Fauci said “the consequences could be really serious” if the nation’s citizens reclaim their right to assemble at church, government, work, and school.
“There is no doubt, even under the best of circumstances, when you pull back on mitigation you will see some cases appear,” he said, arguing that “little spikes” could turn into “outbreaks.”
Many of those predictions have failed to materialize throughout the country.
“I don’t think any of us are certain when we do all these modelings,” Paul said. “There have been more people wrong with modeling than right.”
“We’re opening up a lot of economies around the US, and I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom and saying, ‘Oh we can’t do this, there’s going to be a surge,’ will admit that they were wrong if there isn’t a surge,” he continued. “Because I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
Fauci said children returning to school in the fall “would be a bit of a bridge too far,” despite evidence that children catch the coronavirus, spread it to adults, and die from the disease in lower rates than they do from the seasonal flu.
For example, the Journal of American Medical Associations Pediatrics study found that only 48 children were admitted to pediatric intensive care units in Canada and the United States throughout March.
40 of the 48 children admitted with the coronavirus had preexisting medical conditions.
Two children died.
During the 2018-2019 flu season, 136 children died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“At the present time, our data indicate that children are at far greater risk of critical illness from influenza than from COVID-19,” the study’s authors concluded, reflecting the findings of the CDC.
Paul worries that the impact of keeping schools closed through the fall will harm students.
“If we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s gonna happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that’s able to teach them at home are not gonna learn for a full year,” he said.
Instead of Fauci’s centralized, authoritarian response to the virus Paul suggested that the United States should “look at the Swedish model and we outta look at getting our kids back to school.”
“I think it’s a huge mistake if we don’t open the schools in the fall,” Paul said.
