‘I appreciate the work that the NRA does to protect gun owners rights and I look forward to working with you for many years in Congress…’
Kirsten Gillibrand/Photo by Phil Roeder (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Second-Amendment advocates are calling out the hypocrisy of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, after a 2008 letter resurfaced undermining her recent attacks on the National Rifle Association.
In fact, her turn to the Left has been so hard that Gillibrand even declared her own positions only a decade ago were “racist” on issues such as opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants.
So it comes as no surprise that her extreme rhetoric on gun control during Sunday’s Fox News town hall event belied a past history to which most Tea Party patriots would have given a 21-gun salute.
Gillibrand unloaded on the NRA at the town hall, calling it the “worst organization in this country” and scapegoating it for the country’s epidemic of violence.
She claimed that the U.S. was being “ripped apart again and again [because the NRA cares] more about profits than the American people.”
In response, the NRA published a fawning letter Gillibrand wrote to then-Executive Director Chris Cox in September 2008, while she was still a member of the House of Representatives. (She would replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate that year when the latter was appointed secretary of State.)
Representing the 20th congressional district—a gerrymandered stretch of the state’s eastern border that wrapped around Albany and regularly alternated between blue and red—Gillibrand appeared to embrace every gun-rights position imaginable—and then some.
“I want to be very clear that I always have and always will believe that the correct interpretation of the 2nd amendment is that it applies to an individual’s right to carry guns,” she said.
Gillibrand closed the letter by saying, “I appreciate the work that the NRA does to protect gun owners rights and I look forward to working with you for many years in Congress.”
Gillibrand’s about-face led Fox News’s Brit Hume to quip that Gillibrand was one of “the most flexible politicians” he’s ever seen.
On Tuesday, the Poynter Institute-based (read: Soros-funded) fact-checking operation debunked a torqued-up bit of anti-gun-rights rhetoric from Obama from a recent summit in Brazil.
The erstwhile community organizer claimed that, in the U.S., “Anybody can buy any weapon, any time without much, if any, regulation.”
PolitiFact added Obama’s two subsequent statements to its fact check: that guns can be purchased over the internet, and that it was legally possible to buy machine guns.
The catalyst for the fact-check, it noted, was the outraged reaction from conservative media outlets such as Townhall and The Blaze, even eliciting a response from National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch via Twitter:
While PolitiFact’s prestidigitators were able to work their magic to soften the blow on Obama’s gun claim, qualifying it as merely “mostly false” instead of an outright mistruth, they did pick apart several nuances.
“The assertion that anybody can buy a weapon flies in the face of the many types of people, from felons to drug abusers to spouse abusers, who may not buy weapons,” it said.
Although it noted that online sales were legal, as Obama said—allowing them to give him points for a partial truth—“they take place under the same rules that govern other gun sales,” said the PolitiFact analysis.
“As for machine guns, they are strictly illegal, with the exception under legal controls of models from 1986 and earlier,” it added.
In its article criticizing the claim, The Blaze observed that the middle part of Obama’s claim, regarding online sales, also was brazenly misleading in context since he was speaking specifically about his experiences following the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.
“[T]he Sandy Hook shooter actually was prevented from purchasing a weapon, by our laws and regulations in this country,” wrote The Blaze’s Caleb Howe.
“In fact, that evil murderer had to steal a weapon to commit his heinous acts,” Howe said. “Stole them from his own mother, whom he murdered first.”
Rather than let their own fact-checking stand on its merits, PolitiFact later allowed an Obama official to continue to spin the comments with an addendum at the bottom of their analysis, somewhat defeating the purpose of an ‘impartial’ and ‘independent’ fact-check.
“Initially, we did not hear from Obama’s office, but after publication, Obama spokesman Eric Schultz sent us links to articles, including one from PolitiFact, that described how people circumvent gun laws,” the site posted in an update.
“But a plain reading of Obama’s words, by us and the firearms legal specialists we reached, is that he was describing current laws, not whether people were breaking them,” it said, deciding to maintain its “mostly false” rating.
PolitiFact was founded in 2007, meaning it was around for the entirety of Obama’s White House tenure, and it won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on his 2008 race against the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Of the 600 times it had fact-checked Obama as of June 2019, only 151, or 25 percent, were deemed below the halfway mark on truthfulness. Only 1 percent (9 claims) received its lowest rating of “Pants on Fire.”
By comparison, with President Donald Trump’s first term slightly past its halfway point, the site already has launched 679 fact-checking queries against him, of which it deemed 479 (70 percent) below the median mark of truthfulness.
It designated 15 percent of Trump’s statements as “Pants on Fire” and only 5 percent of its fact-checks against him as entirely truthful statements (Obama’s fully truthful rating was 20 percent).
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Fans of “The Simpsons” may delight in recalling a classic episode (itself a “Music Man” parody) in which a con-artist whips the fictional town of Springfield into a frenzy with promises of a monorail.
Now, the long-running cartoon, which famously anticipated the election of President Donald Trump, may once again prove prescient.
Democratic front-runner Joe Biden unveiled a recent proposal on his website that he said broadly addressed his climate policy, with its centerpiece being an end-to-end high-speed-rail system funded by repealing Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Among the plans Biden specifically outlined were halving the travel time between New York and Washington—a boon for liberal coastal elites who have a regular need for commuting between the two.
Biden also promised to “make progress” toward completing California’s high-speed-rail boondoggle, a plan that Trump recently threatened to defund after Gov. Gavin Newsom backpedaled on the scope and deadlines of the project that was slated originally to connect San Francisco with Los Angeles.
While many Southerners already feel, at best, ambivalent about the encroachment of the northeast corridor expanding upon their “fast growing” region, Biden promised to do more of precisely that.
And “[a]cross the Midwest and the Great West, he will begin the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts, unlocking new, affordable access for every American,” said the plan, which also outlined additional spending for green-friendly freight rail.
In an op-ed for The Hill, Adam Sabes, a communications associate at Americans for Tax Reform, noted that the lofty spending promises may seem like a good idea now, but they ultimately would not win over the majority of Americans who prefer to keep their money in their pockets.
“Running on a repeal of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may be convenient for Biden during a Democratic primary where he can gain a lot of support for the idea,” Sabes said. “But this is not a winning strategy in the general election and he could more than likely attempt to backtrack. Voters will see through it.”
Noting the tremendous damage that the Biden plan would have on the booming economy, Sabes likened the former Obama vice president to Walter Mondale, the Jimmy Carter administration veep who attempted unsuccessfully to oust the incumbent Ronald Reagan in 1984.
“Joe Biden opened his much hyped 2020 presidential campaign last month by proclaiming the ‘first thing’ he would do if elected is to repeal the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That means the middle class would see a tax increase,” Sabes said.
“Does that sound eerily familiar?,” he continued. “It is because Walter Mondale made a similar promise when he ran for president against Ronald Reagan.”
The group also compiled a video of Biden’s calls to repeal the Trump tax cuts in order to underscore its centrality to his message.
Like the conman in “The Simpsons,” Biden has misleadingly attempted to miscast himself as an empathic everyman with a deep concern for the needs of blue-collar middle America.
But as his policies reveal, he remains a swindler at heart.
‘There is no Donald Trump without News Corp, I firmly believe that…’
Bill de Blasio/Photo by Todd Crusham (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A mere 10 months ago, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio stood astride his soapbox on CNN‘s “Reliable Sources” and accused Fox News of single-handedly ushering in the decline of America through racism and hate.
“They put race front and center, and they try and stir the most negative impulses in this country,” he told host Brian Stelter on the Aug. 12, 2018 broadcast.
“Today you have one outlet and one outlet only that is constantly sowing division,” he said, while absurdly claiming CNN harbored no such political agenda.
But now, the struggling 2020 hopeful, who consistently finds himself near the bottom of most people’s lists of Democratic primary prospects, is begging the top-rated Fox News to bail him out.
The New York Post reported that de Blasio had approached the right-leaning cable network for a town hall, following in the footsteps of five other prospective Trump-challenging Democrats.
“We want to talk to all voters about why the mayor is the best candidate for working people—regardless of what news channel they watch,” his campaign spokeswoman, Olivia Lapeyrolerie, told The Post.
Ironically, de Blasio’s previous remarks also targeted The Post and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which is parent company to both media outlets.
“There is no Donald Trump without News Corp, I firmly believe that,” he told Stelter.
Some candidates, however, like Klobuchar and Buttigieg have sought to pitch themselves (albeit dubiously) as moderate liberals whose ideas might appeal to the network’s normal conservative viewers should they become disaffected enough by the Trump presidency.
De Blasio has hinted in his past rhetoric that he would attempt to win Trump voters, but he would have much to answer for in his liberal track record—notably his recent proposal to provide free healthcare for all New Yorkers, including illegal immigrants.
And de Blasio’s biggest shot at a conservative-friendly accomplishment—his pro-business bid to bring Amazon‘s headquarters to the city with a sweeping tax incentives deal—failed miserably, instead prompting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, to court other New York tech and financial companies to leave the tax- and regulation-oppressive state.
According to The Post, which cited a Quinnipiac University poll taken in early May, de Blasio had the highest negative ratings among every candidate in the Democratic field.
According to the poll, only 8 percent of voters liked de Blasio while 45 percent had an active dislike of him.
“He’s been hammered by the late-night talk shows and I don’t think you can underestimate those shows as far as the impact they have on the how people feel about politicians,” Quinnipiac analyst Tim Malloy told The Post.
That article noted that by polling above 1 percent de Blasio had met the primary threshold for participating in the first Democratic debate, which will air on NBC over two days at the end of June.
However, he was still concerned over a second threshold—donations from at least 65,000 individuals—in case too many other candidates are eligible for the first threshold.
‘This is the opposite of what federal bank regulators are doing with capital…’
National Credit Union Association / NCUAchannel via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Banks and other credit unions are crying foul over federal regulators’ questionable decision to greenlight a capital campaign for a financially teetering Big Labor credit union—while at the same time blocking similar requests by its better managed and capitalized competitors.
By rubber-stamping a request by Orange, Calif.-based Union Yes Federal Credit Union to raise $4 million in subordinated debt, at fixed and variable rates of 4 to 4.5 percent interest over five- to seven-year terms, the National Credit Union Administration gave the financial institution an unfair edge over competitors, say critics.
An industry insider told Liberty Headlines that the union-boss-run credit union has turned in financial performance numbers that would normally prompt a federal shutdown mandate, not new approvals.
The recent capital issuance approval—which would more than double the credit union’s current capital and raise debt totaling 6 percent of its current asset holdings ($63.4 million)—also means that the tax subsidy granted to Union Yes as a member-operated collective would theoretically benefit its investors instead of its members, said blogger Keith Leggett, a retired economist with the American Banker’s Association, on his Credit Union Watch.
Leggett told the subscription-based trade publication American Banker that agencies overseeing the non-subsidized banking industry, such as the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, would never allow such a sweetheart deal to fly with so much of an organization’s capital coming from short-term, temporary sources.
“This is the opposite of what federal bank regulators are doing with capital,” he said.
The NCUA contends that Union Yes FCU’s low-income designation allows it to bend the rules imposed on other, larger institutions.
But viewed from another angle, it seems more like a case of political cronyism at its worst.
According to the Union Yes website, the credit union’s mission since 1981 has been “to serve only union workers and their families” in Southern California.
Meanwhile, some comparable rural credit unions that have been denied approval for capital issuance have raised questions with the NCUA’s ombudsman, Joy Lee, regarding the arbitrary standards applied.
They note that in the agency’s own 2016 “Secondary Capital Best Practices Guide” (which were abruptly removed in recent days from the NCUA’s official website, under “poor practices,” it lists several standards that all would seem to apply, on some level to Union Yes FCU:
Poor due diligence, inaccurate cost benefit analysis and weak strategic planning in connection programs funded by secondary capital
Premature and excessively ambitious concentrations of uninsured secondary capital to support unproven or poorly performing programs
Failure to realistically assess and timely curtail programs that, in the face of mounting losses, are not meeting expectations
Use of secondary capital solely to delay Prompt Corrective Action
Insufficient liquidity to repay secondary capital at maturity
A look at the bank’s records indicates that the capital campaign may even be an effort to skirt the imposition of corrective action over recent negative returns—creating a potentially toxic brew for investors who hope to get their money back in a timely fashion.
So indefensible was the NCUA’s approval of the near-failing credit union’s capital raise that one insider floated the possibility of corrupt motives by the NCUA bureaucrats involved in the decision.
Union Yes CEO William Byerly, however, painted a rosier picture in the credit union’s March 13 prospectus.
“Over the past few years,” he said, the credit union “has been experiencing extraordinary growth and needs to raise additional capital to fund new membership growth.”
Union Yes says its goal is to become a $100 million financial institution.
‘The Department’s declination to prosecute leaks only serves to embolden leakers to continue their reckless actions over time…’
Peter Strzok/IMAGE: YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., said disgraced former FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok was the likely subject of a recently closed investigation that found evidence of illegal leaking but declined to prosecute.
“As you are aware, the dissemination of material filed under seal with a federal court is a serious offense especially when the person engaging in the unauthorized dissemination is a law enforcement official,” Collins wrote in his letter to Barr.
“It undermines a fundamental underpinning of our justice system and can put lives in jeopardy,” he said.
The summary said that an unnamed subject, identified only as a former deputy assistant director (DAD), had leaked information to the media in violation of federal contempt of court statutes and FBI policy—and had committed further misconduct by accepting a ticket of $225 value to a media-sponsored dinner.
Although the summary quietly announced the closure of the investigation, with a referral to the FBI for any further action, it said the matter would not be prosecuted.
The release, whether intentionally or not, was eclipsed in the news cycle by a press conference from former special counsel Robert Mueller on his investigation into the Russian collusion hoax and allegations of obstruction of justice.
Collins, in his letter to Barr, criticized the decision not to pursue charges, calling the leaks “a dangerous, illegal action.”
“The Department’s declination to prosecute leaks only serves to embolden leakers to continue their reckless actions over time,” he said.
Doug Collins/IMAGE: C-SPAN via YouTube
Collins said all indications pointed to the unnamed DAD leaker being Strzok, who was fired from the FBI last August after having been reassigned when anti-Trump text messages between him and his mistress, FBI counsel Lisa Page, emerged during a Congressional investigation.
An earlier Liberty Headlines report, since retracted, indicated the individual under investigation was former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
McCabe also stood accused in Congressional testimony of leaking classified information—for which President Donald Trump ultimately fired him in March 2018.
Wednesday’s investigative summary referenced a section of an inspector general’s report from June 2018 that immediately preceded an examination of McCabe’s likely misconduct in an unrelated matter, regarding his wife’s financial ties to Hillary Clinton surrogates while McCabe was actively overseeing the investigation of Clinton’s private email server.
However, in an e-mail to Liberty Headlines, John Lavinsky, senior counsel to the inspector general, noted that in the section of the report concerning the culture of leaks at the FBI, “the analysis specifically focuses on ‘numerous FBI employees,’ ‘large numbers of FBI employees,’ and ‘dozens of FBI employees,’ without referencing any specific individuals by name or title.”
Although it is plausible that any leaking McCabe was investigated for would have begun prior to his February 2016 appointment as deputy director, when he held a position similar to DAD, Lavinsky also noted the discrepancy in titles to dismiss the possibility that McCabe was the subject of that particular investigation.
As well as seeking confirmation that Strzok was the individual in question, in his letters to Barr and Horowitz, Collins sought to find out more about the status of investigations into McCabe and former FBI Director James Comey.
It is unclear whether the recent closure of the inspector general’s investigation and decision not to prosecute may be tied with Barr’s appointment of U.S. Attorney John Durham as special prosecutor to broadly investigate the origins of the Russia hoax and the use of the debunked Steele Dossier to engage in eavesdropping on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Inspector General Horowitz is said to have been working closely with Durham and other DOJ officials in their efforts.
Trump recently declassified many of the documents surrounding the investigations, much to the chagrin of partisan Democrats and process-minded FBI bureaucrats.
Liberty Headlines reached out to Lavinsky in the IG’s office for additional comment or confirmation regarding Collins’s letters and will update with any replies.
‘When all the investigations are over and Trump is gone, there will be one organization that will have suffered the most in terms of reputation—the FBI…’
Barack Obama and James Comey / IMAGE: The Guardian via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A former Soviet counterintelligence agent with the FBI, speaking to a group of California Republicans, said the scandals wrought by former Director James Comey and other corrupt members of the agency’s top brass may have done irreparable harm.
“When all the investigations are over and Trump is gone, there will be one organization that will have suffered the most in terms of reputation—the FBI,” special agent Rick Smith told the Piedmont Area Republican Women Federated at a luncheon in Oakland, according to the East Bay Times.
Smith described Comey as a “villain” who had repeatedly ignored the efforts of field offices to communicate with him regarding the probe into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.
Of the roughly 30,000 emails on Clinton’s personal server, Smith said 110 were classified and 22 top secret.
“Comey ignored the head of the Washington field office, who called seven times about the emails,” he said.
Although he named many of the other “bad actors” whose names, familiar to many as the subject of investigations—including the one currently underway in the Justice Department headed by special prosecutor John Durham—Smith said he thought the “conspiracy” ended at the top and that rank-and-file agents continued to do their work in good faith without partisan motives.
While some, including current FBI Director Christopher Wray, have cautioned against Trump’s recent declassification of materials allowing Attorney General William Barr and his team the access needed to investigate, Smith applauded the efforts at transparency, which could be the FBI’s only road to redemption.
“We need to find out what happened from the very beginning in order to re-establish the public’s confidence in the FBI,”he said.
‘We cannot run this country based on political strategy…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) While a series of videos making the rounds on social media last week mocked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for seeming confused and jumbled, one of Pelosi’s biggest inter-party rivals, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., has once again outdone her.
In a rambling appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball” Thursday, Tlaib dismissed the notion that Democrats needed to move forward with a strategic plan before diving into politically risky and divisive impeachment proceedings.
“We cannot run this country based on political strategy,” Tlaib said. “… We can’t do our job when the man that is in charge in the Oval Office is endangering our, our, you kn—our country and our democracy.”
Tlaib, whose district is in a safely liberal section of Detroit, has been one of the staunchest advocates for impeachment, capturing headlines on the very day that she was administered her oath in the House of Representatives by saying that she intended to “impeach the motherf***er” during a reception with the far-left group MoveOn.
That group, and several others associated with leftist extremism, claimed in early May to have delivered a petition with 10 million names to Tlaib calling for Trump’s impeachment. However, an online petition referenced by the groups appeared to have just under 298,000 names.
A similar online petition via Change.org calling for Tlaib’s impeachment had more than 326,000 signatories.
Asked by host Chris Matthews whether she was prepared for the political battle that lay ahead should Democrats press forward against Trump, Tlaib struck a defiant and confrontational tone.
“I tell the president, ‘bring it,’ because 10 million people signed a petition to impeach this president,” she said. “They want us to hold them accountable—and I bet you I can get 10 million more people from organizations that have been talking to people at home.”
Her fuzzy math on the petition signatories was not the only statement that needed fact-checking.
Tlaib also seemed to imply, falsely, that President Richard Nixon was impeached.
Although Nixon resigned in 1974 facing imminent impeachment in the Watergate scandal, the only president actually to have been impeached since the 20th century began was President Bill Clinton.
“Just like the Watergate class, when it came in, they didn’t run away from their responsibility and their duty,” Tlaib said. “They may not have run or campaigned on impeaching the president, but in the end they did what was right for the country and they put the people first before they chose any kind of political stance.”
If viewers needed a further preview of what Tlaib’s vision of a strategy-less America, led only by her personal intuition, might look like, her discursive diatribe on “Hardball” might have offered a good glimpse.
She jumped from one platitude to the next, insisting voters in the 2018 midterm elections had given her and her radical colleagues a “mandate” to remove Trump.
“It was very clear that many people came out because they wanted to elect a jury that would impeach this president,” Tlaib said.
Clear indeed.
“They are very clear: No one should be above the law,” she continued. “No one should sit there and become a king-like president. It endangers our well-being, our future. What a precedent do we set when we don’t do anything. Inaction is basically action in saying that what he’s doing in acting above the law and not upholding on to his oath as the president of the United States—I say to people, please understand that this is not about this president—who’s a me me me president. This is about people, about government, which is supposed to be about people, and about upholding the most brilliant, awesome document that we have in this country, which is the United States Constitution. That is my responsibility—and I know many of my colleagues agree.”
Matthews then cut her off by thanking her, saying he liked clarity.
‘She’s interested in rational debate and discussion to make progress. … She’s not an ideologue…’
Abigail Spanberger / IMAGE: PBS NewsHour
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As the Trump White House seeks to drain the swamp and the Barr Justice Department increases its scrutiny of intelligence-agency corruption from the Obama era, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va. is a symbol of just how formidable an adversary the Democrats’ political machine is.
In a recent, fawning profile, the left-leaning Washington Postmisleadingly attempted to portray Spanberger as a “front-liner”—a blue-dog Democrat of the people whose dynamic charisma led a district that supported Trump by a 7-point margin to suddenly switch sides.
“She’s old-school Virginia,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., of the New Jersey native. “She’s interested in rational debate and discussion to make progress. … She’s not an ideologue.”
The Post article cast Spanberger as a tireless bridge-builder, swilling buy-one-get-one-free Coors Lights at NASCAR events while touting her love of shooting.
But, in fact, the former CIA agent—who was full-throatedly endorsed by disgraced ex-FBI Director James Comey during her 2018 run—is a loyal party foot-soldier, beholden to a litany of outside interests.
Spanberger defeated Dave Brat—a rising-star in the Freedom Caucus who, in turn, had upset longtime neo-conservative incumbent House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 primary. Cantor had been criticized as too soft on immigration.
Amid the inter-party wrangling, few Virginians noticed the chicanery from forces largely beyond the state that eyed the 7th District as a plum political prize—a strategic victory in their master plot to undermine longstanding democratic institutions nationwide.
Sue Till Blue
Terry McAuliffe/Photo by sharedferret (CC)
Following the forced partisan passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Democrats lost delegates and representatives en masse through the legitimate electoral process.
Their 2010 midterm “shellacking” saw then-President Barack Obama’s party lose unprecedented numbers in Congress and in statewide positions, just before districts were set to be redrawn.
Rather than accept the defeat as a mandate against their policy agenda, the Left took its fight to the unelected judicial branch.
The 7th District had long been a Republican stronghold in central Virginia, which remains largely conservative, with giant Confederate flags visibly waving from major thoroughfares, including Interstate 95—despite pockets of blue clustered around urban centers like Charlottesville, Richmond, Norfolk and the affluent exurbs of Washington, D.C.
But in 2016, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe—a Clinton stooge and New York native, whose own election to the office came under questionable circumstances—launched an initiative alongside then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and several other Democratic power-brokers to use the court systems to redraw districts in red states like the one McAuliffe represented.
Using a “sue till blue” strategy dubiously supported by crooked activist judges and prosecutors, Virginia Democrats successfully forced the redrawing of the district maps, making the 7th District more demographically favorable to them by clipping part of its southern boundary.
Dark Money
Photo by boellstiftung (CC)
In addition to getting help from the courts, it helped having well-heeled billionaire allies.
Spanberger’s campaign was able to out-raise Brat’s by a total of nearly $4 million, more than double his total—not even counting the considerable dark-money contributions through superPACs funneling resources into the race.
Many of the donations came through aggregators like ActBlue and Democracy Engine, which provide software and services deliberately designed to muddy the waters.
These fake “nonprofits” create a middle man, often so that mega-donors like George Soros can avoid scrutiny and skirt campaign finance restrictions, while the donations show up as having come from the organization instead of the actual contributor.
With many of her funds coming from these sources, Spanberger suspiciously raised nearly double what Brat did by September 2016, a fact that was not lost on her opponent.
“She raised $3 million in the last three months—which is unheard of—from Nancy Pelosi and ActBlue, which is a George Soros-backed group,” Brat told WRVA in October 2016.
“It’s her largest bundler which raises money, and that is the group that is behind the resistance movement across the United States,” Brat said.
While Soros-linked groups such as Democracy Alliance also use ActBlue—a widespread, go-to platform for radical leftist activism—Brat was not able to establish a direct link between the Hungarian plutocrat and his opponent’s campaign.
Even so, Spanberger’s donor list was hardly lined with the groundswell of 7th District ‘old-school Virginians’ clamoring for change that The Washington Post suggested she was fighting for.
Among her top donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, were: Alphabet (the parent company of Google), pro-abortion group Emily’s List, Palestinian advocacy group J Street, and the University of California.
‘Charging the president with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Former special counsel Robert Mueller upped the pressure on House Democrats who have hedged over whether to press forward with impeachment charges against President Donald Trump.
In his first and, likely, only public statement regarding the nearly two-year probe into Russian collusion, Mueller made clear that he thought Congress should act in order to give the president his day in court on claims of obstructing the investigation.
“The Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing,” he said. “… It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.”
Mueller clarified that, contrary to what many were led to believe, it was never within his scope of duties, as he saw it, to recommend filing charges against Trump.
“Under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office—that is unconstitutional,” Mueller said.
“Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that too is prohibited,” he said.
“The special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider.”
He was adamant, though, that his decision not to recommend obstruction charges, and rather to defer any further determinations to Attorney General William Barr, was far from an exoneration of Trump, in his own opinion.
“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
Although praised by many for his discretion during the politically charged spectacle, Mueller’s mincing of words has been met with some criticism for failing to reach the conclusive determinations his office was tasked with.
His speech, running under 10 minutes with no follow-up questions, attempted to defend those decisions—or lack thereof—and address the rampant speculation as many have attempted to read the subtext of his report.
Mueller said he hoped the press conference would be his only public statement on the matter—apart from the report itself.
The report “contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully, and the work speaks for itself,” he said.
“And the report is my testimony,” he added. “I would not provide information beyond that which is already public in any appearance before Congress.”
Mueller defended Barr’s decision to wait until redactions were finished and release the report in its entirety, despite asking Barr in a letter to provide more comprehensive summary versions.
“At one point in time, I requested that certain portions of the report be released,” he said. “The attorney general preferred to make the entire report public all at once, and we appreciate that the attorney general made the report largely public—and I certainly do not question the attorney general’s good faith in that decision.”
William Barr / IMAGE: Senate Judiciary Committee
Partisan Democrats subsequently attacked Barr’s credibility and, ultimately, laid a trap to hold him in contempt of Congress for refusing to break the law by releasing a fully unredacted version of the report.
Mueller’s statement did little to add new information to the discussion over impeachment, although its impact on public perception could prove significant.
While much of what he wrote in the report has been spun through the punditry on nightly news broadcasts, his direct comments, for better or worse, add another strong voice to the rising clamor for Congress to file obstruction charges against Trump.
Thus far, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has publicly resisted the call, seeing a losing hand in the politicized battle that closely mirrors that of President Bill Clinton in 1998.
Despite the recommendation of perjury and obstruction charges from special prosecutor Kenneth Starr over Clinton’s extramarital affairs and sexual misconduct, Clinton’s fellow Democrats were mobilized by the partisan effort and gained seats in that year’s midterm election.
But there is no love lost between Pelosi and the president, and should public opinion reach its tipping point—or should at least 20 Republican Senators turn on Trump, providing enough to remove him from office—the San Francisco congresswoman would be poised to strike.
If Mueller’s announcement creates a cascading demand for a trial, it would then be left to both Congress and the public to determine, prior to next year’s election—in what would surely dominate all other issues—whether Trump was right to resist an investigation that was levied against him under false pretenses from the start.
Even if Democrats do not seek to impeach, however, Mueller welcomed their current path of continuing to investigate, saying it was “important to preserve evidence while memories are still fresh and documents available.”
Moreover, he said it would provide accountability “if there are co-conspirators who could be charged now,” hinting that Trump could be charged after leaving office.
Still, he said he won’t be a party to any of the ongoing fishing expeditions House Democrats have launched, which have included appeals to the special counsel’s office to provide them with any of Trump’s financial records that he was able to gain access to.
Mueller closed his remarks by underscoring one crucial point, often lost in the political navel-gazing between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill—that the broader underlying issue at hand was not about Trump at all but Russia’s efforts to meddle in American democracy.
“There were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election,” Mueller said. “And that allegation deserves the attention of every American.”
