Socialist Ditsy “Eliza” Warren Not a Socialist…..Just Ditsy?

No, No, No. Elizabeth Warren Is Not a Socialist

Joe Nocera at  YAHOO  –   Bloomberg:

(Bloomberg Opinion) — A press release from Elizabeth Warren landed in my inbox last Friday morning. It came not from her presidential campaign but from her Senate office, and it concerned a subject that doesn’t often claim the attention of U.S. senators, much less leading contenders in a presidential race.

The subject was bond ratings.

“Senator Warren to SEC,” read the headline. “Do Your Job. Crack Down on Dangerous Inflated Bond Ratings.” The press release was sparked by recent “troubling reports of inflated bond ratings and the perverse incentives within the bond rating industry.” It pointed out that poorly-rated mortgage-backed securities caused “millions of Americans to lose their jobs, homes and savings” during the financial crisis — yet a decade later “ratings agencies are continuing to rubber stamp risky products.”

The press release linked to the letter Warren had sent to Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it was a doozy. Three and a half single-spaced pages, heavily footnoted, it offered a detailed analysis of the damage those triple A-rated subprime securities had done to the economy in 2008. And it reminded Clayton that the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law had established an Office of Credit Ratings within the SEC that was charged with promoting accurate bond ratings. What, Warren asked Clayton, was the SEC doing about this growing problem?

As it happens, the day before Warren issued her press release, CNBC ran a story saying that big-money Democrats on Wall Street – that is, the people Democratic presidential nominees rely on every four years — were threatening to either sit out the 2020 race, or support Donald Trump, if Warren were the nominee.  (Hillary Clinton received more than $64 million from the financial services industry in 2016.)

One anonymous Wall Street executive (shocker: nobody was willing to speak on the record to CNBC) said that he and his fellow Wall Street Democrats “will not support her. It would be like shutting down their industry.” CNBC linked to a video of Jim Cramer, one of its in-house stars, saying bluntly: “She has to be stopped.”

And early last week, a strategist with AGF Investments put out a note to clients saying that “investors should be more concerned” about the prospect of a Warren presidency than about any “fallout” from Trump’s phone call to the president of the Ukraine. After all, the strategist, Greg Valliere, told Bloomberg News, the Robert Mueller investigation hadn’t affected markets, so the impeachment inquiry probably wouldn’t either.

Ah, but Elizabeth Warren — she’d be a disaster for stocks!  After all, she wants to force private equity firms to take more responsibility for the workers whose companies they take over; to cancel student debt that is putting college graduates behind the eight-ball; to recreate the Glass-Steagall Act and once again separate investment and commercial banking; and to eliminate the “tricks and traps” that the financial services industry often uses to stick consumers with excessive fees. Oh, and let’s not forget: Warren wants to impose a 2% tax on any household with a net worth over $50 million and a 3% tax on households worth over $1 billion. That’s gotta be a stock market killer. Right?

I understand that markets are central to Wall Street, but it’s a bit much when it tends to view everything through the prism of stocks and bonds. If World War III were to break out, you half expect Wall Street strategists to react with notes asking “What does it mean for the market?” (Which they would, of course; that’s a fundamental part of their job. I’m simply asking that they take other forces into account as well.)In this case, what the anti-Warren Democrats are really saying is that they would prefer a president who has divided and destabilized the country — and whose phone call to Ukraine’s president was so far outside the bounds that he is likely to be impeached — than a president who would prevent them from gouging customers and taxing some of their wealth. That’s a pretty sorry commentary.

Wall Street often lumps Warren together with Senator Bernie Sanders as a “socialist.” She is nothing of the sort. As she consistently says, “I believe in markets.” She just wants them to work better. Her stance towards Wall Street reminds me of Franklin Roosevelt’s, who came into office in 1933, with banks failing and the country struggling through the Depression. By the time he died in 1945, bank customers had federal deposit insurance, commercial banks and investment banks had been separated, and the Securities and Exchange Commission had been created to regulate the markets. These three measures did a great deal to restore Americans’ faith in the nation’s financial system. But of course Wall Street hated Roosevelt too.

(Warren’s reaction to her Wall Street critics also echoes Roosevelt’s. In a speech he made in 1936, referring to his critics in the financial industry, Roosevelt said, “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” After Cramer made his “She’s gotta be stopped” comment, Warren treated it like a campaign ad, posting the video on Twitter and writing, “I’m Elizabeth Warren and I approve this message.”)

Big corporate tax cuts notwithstanding, Trump has been no friend to business. Think about it: He has placed pointless tariffs on goods from countries we’ve had good trading relationships with for decades. He has started a counterproductive trade war with China. His anti-immigration policy hurts everything from tech companies to poultry farms. He has consistently issued threats against Amazon.com because its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post. He has turned the Justice Department’s antitrust division into a weapon that rewards his friends and attacks his enemies. Even his deregulatory efforts can be harmful. Oil companies don’t want looser methane rules, and car companies don’t want lower gas emissions regulations — both of which the Trump administration has proposed.

According to Bloomberg News, Jeffrey Gundlach, the billionaire bond guru, predicts the chances of a recession in 2020 have risen to 75%. Suppose there is a recession next year. Do you trust Trump and his economic team to take the right steps to soften the economic blow it will deal the country? I certainly don’t.

But Elizabeth Warren? Does anyone doubt that she will be surrounded with economists who know what they are doing, as opposed to, say, Peter Navarro, who has helped the White House bungle its trade policy with China. Yes, they will be “progressive” economists in the Joe Stiglitz mold, but that also means they will care more about the effects of a recession on the middle class than on Wall Street bankers.

It’s true that many of the proposals Warren has put forward, if passed into law, would restrict what bankers can do to generate profits. They would also make them a little less rich. But those same proposals could well restore Americans faith in the financial industry — faith that has been largely absent since the financial crisis. And a 3% billionaire’s tax would allow people to see that someone in government is finally doing something to mitigate income inequality.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan Chase & Co., once said of Warren, “I don’t know that she fully understands the global banking system.” He got it exactly backwards. The reason Wall Street fears her is that she understands it all too well.

That may not offer much comfort for Wall Street executives — including those Democrats who say they prefer Trump. But it ought to be great comfort to the rest of us.

 

https://news.yahoo.com/no-no-no-elizabeth-warren-163017757.html

Long Time New York Dem, “Fats” Nadler, Leads Impeachment Action!

Nadler’s House committee holds a faux hearing in search of a false crime

BY ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR

The House Judiciary Committee’s faux impeachment hearing on Tuesday was an exercise in legal obfuscation about obstruction. 

It is a curious exercise, because the House does not need a criminal obstruction offense in order to impeach the president. But it is a telling exercise, too: Democrats are pretending they have an actual crime, just as they are pretending to engage in an actual impeachment inquiry. Acknowledging the absence of a crime would demonstrate that Chairman Jerry Nadler’s hearings are nakedly political.

As their first witness since Nadler (D-N.Y.) outlined his impeachment investigation without a House vote endorsing one, committee Democrats called Corey Lewandowski, the president’s confidant and one-time campaign manager. The purpose was not to plumb new ground. Congressional Democrats and the White House are arguing over executive privilege; the committee was on notice that Lewandowski — who already had cooperated with the special counsel and testified before Congress three times — would not answer questions about his communications with the president beyond what is laid out in the Mueller report.

Consequently, the purpose of the hearing was to read, again and again, a portion of that report that Democrats deem terribly damaging. To wit, in June-July 2017, Trump instructed Lewandowski — who was not formally on the White House staff — to urge then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit his recusal from the Russia investigation, so that Sessions then could narrow the scope of Mueller’s investigation. The idea was that Mueller would be permitted to continue investigating in order to prevent Russian interference in future elections, but drop the investigation of whether Trump’s campaign interfered in the 2016 election.

Lewandowski never carried out the president’s directive. Yet, by the Democrats’ lights, Trump’s actions amount to felony obstruction of justice. On these facts, however, there can be no such crime.

Insofar as Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign is concerned, Mueller, by order of then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, inherited the investigation described in March 2017 by the FBI’s then-director, James Comey, in House Intelligence Committee testimony. Comey explicitly said that the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s election meddling, which would include examination of any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

A counterintelligence investigation is not a criminal investigation. This is a critical distinction.

Federal obstruction law relates to corrupt interference with the due administration of law in an official proceeding. The crime is called obstruction of justice for a reason. Under federal law, an FBI investigation is not a proceeding that can be obstructed. It is neither a judicial process nor a proceeding (such as a congressional or agency hearing) of the type that the obstruction laws reach.

That is not the end of the matter. The law also says a proceeding can be obstructed even if it is not pending at the time the obstruction takes place. For example, if a person corruptly destroys incriminating evidence or tampers with witnesses out of concern over the possibility that he could be prosecuted in the future, that can amount to obstruction. Naturally, if that kind of corrupt behavior occurs in the context of an FBI investigation, an obstruction crime can occur — but only because the conduct affects the contemplated future proceeding (e.g., the eventual criminal trial), not the FBI investigation itself.

Democrats keep saying Trump obstructed the investigation. He did not, but even if he had, a counterintelligence investigation is not a proceeding that can be obstructed.

Regarding Donald Trump (as candidate, president-elect, and president), the FBI director told him, on multiple occasions, that he was not under investigation.

Now, I happen to believe that was misleading. As I outline in my book, “Ball of Collusion,” I believe the Obama Justice Department and the FBI pretextually used counterintelligence powers against Trump and his campaign — such as surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA — in the hope of finding a crime, or some impeachable offense, even though they lacked a factual basis to believe he had committed a crime. Regardless of whether I am right about that, though, the fact remains that Trump was led to believe there was no criminal investigation.

To summarize, then, on the matter of Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, the FBI and, later, Mueller, were not conducting a criminal investigation, and Trump was told he was not a criminal suspect. The FBI and, later, Mueller, were conducting a counterintelligence investigation. Counterintelligence is not a proceeding for purposes of the obstruction laws. Unlike a criminal investigation, counterintelligence does not even contemplate an eventual proceeding; its aim is to gather information about the activities and intentions of foreign powers in order to protect the nation, not to build courtroom prosecutions.

Notice the difference. Criminal investigations are done in order to vindicate the rule of law — i.e., to enforce in judicial proceedings the criminal statutes enacted by Congress. Consequently, we do not want political interference in it — we don’t want partisanship deciding who gets investigated and indicted; we don’t want politics dictating who gets punished and how severely.

By contrast, counterintelligence is unrelated to judicial proceedings. It has nothing to do with the rule of law. It is conducted solely to support the president’s constitutional duty to protect the United States from foreign threats. Consequently, it is completely within the president’s discretion. It is the president, elected by the people whose lives are at stake, who gets to decide what intelligence the country needs — it is not the FBI’s call, much less a determination to be made by a prosecutor dubiously appointed to run a counterintelligence investigation. (The special counsel regulations do not authorize the appointment of a special counsel for counterintelligence purposes. And the Justice Department norm is that counterintelligence cases are not assigned to prosecutors because, to repeat, the objective is not to build a legal case.)

It is certainly true that a president can obstruct justice by corruptly tampering with evidence or witnesses. But a president cannot obstruct justice by shutting down a counterintelligence investigation, or by threatening to shut it down, or by redirecting counterintelligence resources to focus on some threats rather than others. We elect a president to make such judgments, which do involve judicial proceedings that can be obstructed.

Would the lack of an obstruction crime mean Congress lacks legitimate power to consider impeachment? Not at all.

As I observed at the start, Congress does not need a penal crime to impeach a president. If lawmakers believed that the president had irresponsibly endangered the nation by directing the FBI not to collect intelligence on a profound security threat posed by a foreign power, the House would be completely within its legitimate power to file articles of impeachment.

But notice the difference: Under those circumstances, the House would not be impeaching the president over a purported felony obstruction of justice offense. It would be impeaching over abuse of power — what Hamilton described as a political offense, in the sense that it would be a betrayal of the president’s duty to protect the nation.

Of course, even House Democrats would have a hard time leveling that charge against President Trump.

Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign was thoroughly investigated. The Obama administration knew it was happening in real time, and the intelligence agencies compiled a report about it in January 2017. By the time President Trump spoke with Corey Lewandowski about the Mueller investigation in summer 2017, Russia’s meddling had been under scrutiny by U.S. intelligence agencies for more than two years. Trump never took any action to limit the inquiry into Russia’s activities. Moreover, he expressly stated that he had no problem with a probe of Russia’s potential to threaten future elections, which naturally would have required an understanding of what they’d done in 2016.

The only thing Trump wanted was public clarification that he was not suspected of wrongdoing in connection with Russia’s 2016 espionage activities. Under the circumstances, that was entirely reasonable, even if the president went about it ham-handedly. The FBI repeatedly told him he was not a suspect; the then-FBI director nevertheless made public statements in March 2017 that led to media and public speculation that the president was a suspect — and Mueller has now concluded that there was no Trump-Russia conspiracy.

Even for the Democrats’ faux impeachment gambit, that record is a non-starter. So, they will continue talking about obstruction of justice — even though what they are talking about is not obstruction of justice.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, a contributing editor at National Review, and a Fox News contributor. His latest bestselling book is “Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.” Follow him on Twitter @AndrewCMcCarthy.

 

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/461914-nadlers-house-committee-holds-a-faux-hearing-in-search-of-a-false-crime

King of American Creeps, ex FBI Man Comey, to Escape Jail Where He Belongs?

DOJ INSPECTOR GENERAL’S REPORT BLASTS JAMES COMEY

by John Hinderaker   at PowerLine:

The Inspector General for the Department of Justice released his report on his investigation of former FBI Director James Comey’s handling of FBI documents this morning. You can read the full report here. The report addresses the seven memos that Comey wrote on his meetings and conversations with President-Elect and President Trump, some of which he kept copies of in his home safe and gave to his personal lawyers. In one instance, he arranged for the contents of his memo to be reported by the New York Times. By his own acknowledgement, this was for the purpose of bringing about the appointment of a special counsel to investigate President Trump.

First, some excerpts from the report; then a few comments on my impressions of the report.

As described in this report, we conclude that Comey’s retention, handling, and dissemination of certain Memos violated Department and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement.

***

Comey told the OIG he created Memo 2 because he viewed Trump as “fundamentally dishonest” and was “worried very much that [Trump] would say I had said things at this dinner that were not true; that I had promised him something; that I had given him assurances about something.” Comey said he saw that possibility as “dangerous,…to me, but also to the FBI.” Comey told the OIG that during the dinner, the President asked for his loyalty, and that in that moment, Trump was not

…asking me for my loyalty because I’m a Government employee. He want[ed] my loyalty, personally. And if President Trump were sitting here, I think he would consider that a personal conversation [—][“]I want you lashed to me.[“]

***

Comey told the OIG that, when he was removed as FBI Director, he had four memos—Memo 2, Memo 4, Memo 6, and Memo 7—in his personal safe at home. He stated that he did not notify anyone at the FBI that he had retained these documents. He told the OIG that he had “had them there for quite a while,” and that because he viewed them as personal documents, like his will or his passport, it “never would’ve occurred to [him]” to give those back to the FBI. He also stated that he did not seek permission of the FBI to retain these Memos, because he did not consider them to be FBI records.

***

Comey told the OIG that on Tuesday, May 16, 2017, he “w[o]ke up at 2 o’clock in the morning, like, struck by a lightning bolt.” He said he suddenly realized that if, as the President had said in his May 12, 2017 tweet, there were “tapes,” then Comey’s version of his one-on-one conversations with Trump could be corroborated. In particular, Comey told us he thought that the President “would be heard on that tape asking [Comey] to let Flynn go” as Comey had documented in Memo 4. Comey said he also realized that “Trump will eventually figure out he shouldn’t have said that. And he may well destroy the tapes,” so somebody needed to preserve them. Comey said he was

…lying there, playing this in my mind. And I thought, you know what, I can actually do something. That if I put out into the public square that encounter, that will force DOJ, likely to appoint a Special Counsel to go get the tapes. Or even if they won’t do that, it will force them to go get the tapes.

Comey told the OIG he lay awake thinking the tapes could be preserved, “[b]ut only if I spur [the appointment of a Special Counsel] by putting this out.”

***

Comey’s characterization of the Memos as personal records finds no support in the law and is wholly incompatible with the plain language of the statutes, regulations, and policies defining Federal records, and the terms of Comey’s FBI Employment Agreement. By definition, Federal records include “all recorded information, regardless of form or characteristics, made or received by a Federal agency…in connection with the transaction of public business.”80 This definition expressly covers any “act of creating and recording information by agency personnel in the course of their official duties, regardless of the method(s) or the medium involved.”81 Comey’s FBI Employment Agreement likewise acknowledged that “[a]ll information acquired by [Comey] in connection with [his] official duties with the FBI…remain[s] the property of the United States of America.”
Comey’s drafting of the Memos can only be viewed as the “act of creating and recording information by agency personnel in the course of their official duties.” …

Further, much of the content of the Memos was directly tied to FBI investigative activities.

***

As Comey well knew, classified information is never considered personal property; rather, it is the property of the U.S. government

***

Comey’s actions with respect to the Memos violated Department and FBI policies concerning the retention, handling, and dissemination of FBI records and information, and violated the requirements of Comey’s FBI Employment Agreement.

Comey violated Department and FBI policies, and the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement, by retaining copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 after he was removed as Director, regardless of each Memo’s classification level. As a departing FBI employee, Comey was required to relinquish any official documents in his possession and to seek specific authorization from the FBI in order to personally retain any FBI documents. Comey failed to comply with these requirements.

In view of the clarity of relevant provisions of law, policies, and Comey’s Employment Agreement, the assertion that the Memos were personal records was not reasonable. …

Comey violated FBI policies and the requirements of his FBI Employment Agreement when he sent a copy of Memo 4 to Richman with instructions to provide the contents to a reporter, and when he transmitted copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and a redacted version of 7 to his three attorneys.

***

Comey said his view at the time was that “if the world knew there might be tapes of Donald Trump asking me to drop an investigation, there would be tremendous pressure for [the Deputy Attorney General] to hand it to an independent prosecutor.” Comey also said he believed that this was something he was “uniquely situated to do” as a private citizen, but that he chose to do this through an intermediary because he did not want to respond to questions from reporters.

Comey violated FBI policy and the requirements of his FBI Employment Agreement when he chose this path. By disclosing the contents of Memo 4, through Richman, to The New York Times, Comey made public sensitive investigative information related to an ongoing FBI investigation, information he had properly declined to disclose while still FBI Director during his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony. Comey was not authorized to disclose the statements he attributed to President Trump in Memo 4, which Comey viewed as evidence of an alleged attempt to obstruct the Flynn investigation and which were relevant to the ongoing Flynn investigation. Comey clearly considered the contents of Memo 4 highly sensitive—in fact, as he stated in his June 8, 2017 congressional testimony, Comey and other senior leaders of the FBI had decided not to report the President’s statements to the Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General, and to keep the President’s statements “very closely held,” so that the FBI leadership could “figure out what to do with it down the road as our investigation progressed.” Comey placed in the public domain evidence relevant to the investigation of Flynn, and what he clearly viewed as evidence of an attempt to obstruct justice by President Trump. Rather than continuing to safeguard such evidence, Comey unilaterally and without authorization disclosed it to all. By his own admission, Comey disclosed the contents of Memo 4 in an attempt to force the Department to take official investigative actions—to appoint a Special Counsel and preserve any tapes as evidence.

***

Members of Comey’s senior leadership team used the adjectives “surprised,” “stunned,” “shocked,” and “disappointment” to describe their reactions to learning that Comey acted on his own to provide the contents of Memo 4, through Richman, to a reporter. The unauthorized disclosure of this information—information that Comey knew only by virtue of his position as FBI Director—violated the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement and the FBI’s Prepublication Review Policy.

***

Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility. By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees—who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information. Comey said he was compelled to take these actions “if I love this country…and I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI.” However, were current or former FBI employees to follow the former Director’s example and disclose sensitive information in service of their own strongly held personal convictions, the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly, as Comey himself noted in his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony. Comey expressed a similar concern to President Trump, according to Memo 4, in discussing leaks of FBI information, telling Trump that the FBI’s ability to conduct its work is compromised “if people run around telling the press what we do.” This is no doubt part of the reason why Comey’s closest advisors used the words “surprised,” “stunned,” “shocked,” and “disappointment” to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.

We have previously faulted Comey for acting unilaterally and inconsistent with Department policy. Comey’s unauthorized disclosure of sensitive law enforcement information about the Flynn investigation merits similar criticism. In a country built on the rule of law, it is of utmost importance that all FBI employees adhere to Department and FBI policies, particularly when confronted by what appear to be extraordinary circumstances or compelling personal convictions. Comey had several other lawful options available to him to advocate for the appointment of a Special Counsel, which he told us was his goal in making the disclosure. What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.

The IG’s report is being described in some news accounts as “scathing.” As these excerpts show, that is a fair characterization. Additional thoughts:

1) On Twitter this morning, Comey took a victory lap, as though the IG’s report somehow vindicated him. While it is true that the Attorney General exercised his discretion in favor of not charging Comey criminally, any suggestion that the IG report in any way exonerates Comey is absurd.

2) It appears that Comey testified falsely before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He told the committee that he had shared one of his memos, but failed to disclose that he had also distributed several others outside the FBI. Comey told the IG it was because the Senators didn’t ask the proper question. However, that isn’t correct, as the transcript shows:

COLLINS: And finally, did you show copies of your memos [Emphasis added.] to anyone outside the Department of Justice?

COMEY: Yes.

COLLINS: And to whom did you show copies?

COMEY: I asked—the president tweeted on Friday [May 12], after I got fired, that I better hope there’s not tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape.

And my judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself, for a variety of reasons. But I asked him to, because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a friend of mine to do it.

COLLINS: And was that Mr. Wittes?

COMEY: No, no.

COLLINS: Who was that?

COMEY: A good friend of mine who’s a professor at Columbia Law School.

COLLINS: Thank you. ….

Comey told the OIG that he did not tell Senator Collins about sharing four of the Memos with his three attorneys because Comey was “trying to answer the question that [he] was asked, and not reveal confidential communications with my lawyers.”

3) The overriding impression one gets from the IG’s report is that James Comey was a swamp creature who was dedicated to destroying President Trump. Comey regards it as a scandal that the president asked Comey to be loyal to him. In fact, Comey was disloyal. He was scheming against the president he was supposed to be serving. That is the real scandal.

4) On May 16, 2017, the New York Times broke a story about one of Comey’s meetings with Trump. The paper claimed its story was based on information from two sources:

The sources for the May 16, 2017 article were described as “a memo…Comey wrote shortly after the meeting,” and “two people who read the memo.” The May 16 article further stated that “The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of…Comey’s associates read parts of it to a Times reporter.” The May 16 article also reported that two people had confirmed that “Comey created similar memos—including some that are classified—about every phone call and meeting he had with the [P]resident….”

One of the sources, of course, was Richman. But who was the second? No one could answer that question. One possibility is that the Times lied. Perhaps the story was too good to wait for a second source, who probably never would have surfaced.

 

DOJ Inspector General’s Report Blasts James Comey

Corrupt New York Times Replaces False Russia Collusion with False Racism Fraud to Defeat Trump in 2020!

NYT Editor Sets New Narrative In Staff Meeting: The Trump Story Is Shifting From Russia To Race

ALLAHPUNDITPosted at 2:01 pm on August 16, 2019

.

A nice catch by Byron York from this transcript of audio from a Times staff meeting that was leaked to Slate — a meeting that was held to address concerns from the left about the Times’s Trump coverage, of course, not the right. The paper recently sustained a double whammy among the progressive activist class, first for the Bad Headline it published on the day Trump spoke in the White House about the El Paso and Dayton shootings and second for some Bad Tweets that its Washington editor posted about Ilhan Omar and other minority women pols. I wrote about both; you can catch up here and here. The headline was the greater offense — “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism,” it read, an accurate summary of his remarks about the El Paso shooting but one which glossed over his emerging campaign strategy of picking fights with minority pols like the Squad, Elijah Cummings, and Al Sharpton to try to galvanize the white working class.

The story that accompanied the Times headline did provide that context, but that wasn’t enough. For a paper with the Times’s outsized influence, at a moment when the Resistance is preparing for battle to oust Trump next year, even a headline can be guilty of treason against the cause.

So executive editor Dean Baquet called a meeting. The staff would huddle and consider ways to address the plague of Problematicness that had recently befallen them. Nothing will tune you into the tone of what followed better than this single quote, from a question posed by a Times staffer:

Elliot Kaufman@ElliotSKaufman

The moment at the NYT’s townhall meeting when Dean Baquet realized the inmates now run the asylum. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-times-meeting-transcript.html …

The Times should consider appending that to every story it publishes, as a sort of standing disclaimer: “Racism is in everything.”

Read the transcript and you’ll see that much of the meeting involved Times staffers pressuring Baquet to let them frankly describe Trump or the things he says as “racist.” Baquet was ambivalent about that, encouraging staffers to use concrete examples of things Trump has said that might qualify rather than inject their own verdict. Who, what, when, where, why, and how — just give the readers the facts and let them come to their own conclusions. “I think that a bizarre sort of litmus test has been created,” he complained to staffers. “If you don’t use the word racist, you’re not quite capturing what the president said.” That’s exactly what his staff and their activist cohort are suggesting, and it’s of a piece with their objection to the Bad Headline. It’s not enough for the Times to note, say, that Trump’s Telepromptered call for unity after a mass shooting sounds like it came from a different person than the one who invited the Squad on Twitter to go back where they came from. They want the Times to be as aggressive as possible in expressing their moral objections to Trump. Are they on the team or not?

But then, towards the end of the meeting, Baquet seemed to reassure his staffers that he wasn’t insisting on a pure “just the facts” approach to Trump, with the Times content to let the day’s news cycle carry it along to destinations unknown. There will be a narrative frame to the next 18 months:

Baquet: OK. I mean, let me go back a little bit for one second to just repeat what I said in my in my short preamble about coverage. Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice?That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.

The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?

I think that we’ve got to change. I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.

This is no longer a story where the Washington bureau every week nails some giant story by [Washington correspondent] Mike Schmidt that says that Donald Trump or Don McGahn did this. That will remain part of the story, but this is a different story now. This is a story that’s going to call on different muscles for us. The next few weeks, we’re gonna have to figure out what those muscles are.

What’s revealing about that is how explicit Baquet is in framing the recent coverage of Trump and white nationalism as part of a grand anti-Trump narrative comparable to Russiagate, a new “chapter” in how Trump’s presidency will be organized by historians. He could have presented the paper’s coverage lately as a matter of simply following where the news leads. There was a terrorist attack by a racist in El Paso; Trump has in fact been sparring with a series of minority pols, the Squad foremost among them; therefore the paper needed to devote resources to both stories and whether they converge. Instead Baquet is explicitly focused on what the paper’s anti-Trump readership wants to see as a means to the end of ousting him. They craved Russiagate material because they thought it would lead to him being indicted and eventually removed from office. With that having failed, they’re craving material on Trump The Racist, doubtless with an eye to galvanizing suburban voters against him next fall. There’s no reason *right now* to think that Trump The Racist is how voters will organically think of the next 18 months; if I had to bet on a single narrative to define the rest of his presidency at this moment in time, it’d be “Trump the trade warrior copes with the economic and electoral fallout of his protectionism.” But Baquet doesn’t have that luxury. He’s writing for a readership that leans a certain way and which includes a noisy activist class that leans further and so their narratives to some extent need to be the Times’s narratives. He might not let his reporters call Trump a “racist” overtly but he’s making clear here, it seems, that they’re free to make that the moral of their news stories about him. Encouraged, even.

 

NYT editor sets new narrative in staff meeting: The Trump story is shifting from Russia to race

The Magnificent Ditsy Dem, Kristen Gillibrand!

Two plus two don’t necessarily make four among today’s  American  Leftist Feminist crowd.   These “women” are superior to truth and reality!   After all, they  are magnificently ditsy,  governed  by FEELINGS!!

Get to know Kristen Gillibrand better!

Kristen Gillibrand’s Tangled Web

by Christopher Skeet   at  American Thinker:

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During the second Democratic debate, New York senator and political weathervane Kristen Gillibrand bragged that she could explain to white suburban women who voted for Trump “what white privilege actually is.”  No doubt.  When you presume to lecture Joe Biden about being a single father, anything is possible.  Still, I question the strategy of scything a path to the White House by arrogantly condescending to a voting bloc whose overriding motive for their previous presidential vote was a stern disavowal of arrogant condescension.

But Gillibrand wasn’t finished.  “When their son is walking down the street with a bag of M&Ms in his pocket, wearing a hoodie,” she scolded, “his whiteness is what protects him from not being shot.”  From not being shot?  Gillibrand is a lawyer, presumably schooled in the art of courtroom rhetoric, but I’m not sure I would trust her to defend me against shoplifting at Wal-Mart, much less to defend America as president.  Mr. Skeet, isn’t it true that you didn’t not steal that inflatable Judy doll?  Please keep in mind that you aren’t not under oath.

But the point that Gillibrand was clumsily trying to make was entwined in a rehash of the Trayvon Martin shooting.  According to accepted mythology, Trayvon was walking down the street, having recently purchased candy and iced tea from a nearby 7-11.  Having been spotted and followed by the local Grand Wizard and ethnically pretzeled “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman, the black Trayvon found himself running from, brawling with, and tragically being shot by the Afro-Peruvian Klansman.

For the umpteenth time, the facts of this case belie the myth.  Trayvon was not shot for wearing a hoodie, or for carrying candy, or for being black.  He was shot because he was on top of Zimmerman, pummeling his head off the pavement with MMA-style punches.  Attorney General Eric Holder, who haughtily fancied himself John Shaft of the DoJ, left no stone thrice unturned in its investigation.  If there was even a shred of a legal case against Zimmerman, you can bet Holder would have pounced on it.

But Gillibrand takes the myth an extra step.  In her scenario, the hypothetical white son is walking down the street with a bag of M&Ms.  But Trayvon wasn’t carrying a bag of M&Ms.  He was carrying a bag of Skittles and an Arizona brand beverage.  OK, so what’s the big deal? you might ask.  She made an honest mistake with the brand of candy. 

But she didn’t make a mistake.  She deliberately substituted M&Ms for Skittles.  Anyone following the case knew that the nationwide pro-Trayvon demonstrations in the aftermath of the shooting featured Skittles as a central tenet.  Protestors carried Skittles packages, attached them to signs, and taped them over their mouths.  The Guardian ran a storyabout how Skittles symbolized Trayvon’s alleged innocence.

But as the case unfolded, it emerged that Trayvon’s Arizona Iced Tea wasn’t iced tea, but in fact was Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail.  Again, what’s the big deal?  The big deal is that M&Ms and Arizona Iced Tea are what a normal American teenager, black or white, might be expected to be carrying on any given evening.  On the other hand, Skittles and Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail are what an experienced drug abuser might be expected to be carrying on any given evening (during his third school suspension of the year for vandalism and illegal drugs).

Popular in hip hop culture is a drug called Lean (a.k.a. Purple Drank, Sizzurp, Dirty Sprite, etc.).  Lean is made by mixing cough syrup, Skittles, and Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail.  The result is a codeine-based concoction, one effect of which causes its abuser to lean (hence the name).  Trayvon chatted extensively on Facebook about his abuse of codeine, among other drugs, as well as about the ingredients needed to make lean.

The evening Zimmerman spotted him, Trayvon was carrying two of these three ingredients.  In Zimmerman’s 911 call, he stated that Trayvon appeared to be “on drugs”.  Is it possible that a sober Trayvon, pondering his dreams of being a brain surgeon, just happened to be in the mood for Skittles and juice that day?  Yes, it’s possible.  And it’s possible that the local moonshiner just bought some yeast, sugar, and a large vat because he wants to bake hot cross buns for the new congregants at his church.

One of many long-term effects of codeine abuse is liver damage.  Trayvon’s autopsy revealed a patchy yellow discoloration of the liver, due to mild fatty metamorphosis.  Such fatty buildup is one early indication of drug abuse, though it admittedly could also be the result of a number of other perfectly legitimate medical factors.  What it is most definitely not indicative of is M&M overdoses.

Notice what Gillibrand did not say.  She did not say that Trayvon was carrying M&Ms.  She only used M&Ms in her hypothetical “white son” scenario.  So she technically never lied, and she left herself wiggle room in case the CNN debate “moderators” called her out on it (no laughing, please).  Her very lawyerly intention was to lie by false equivalence and, by doing so, score a notch for the white privilege polemic.

If white privilege was so axiomatic, one would think its opponents would have stockpiles of evidentiary ammunition with which to batter down the ramparts of American society.  As it stands, their most flaunted example of such institutionalized bigotry was built on deliberate falsehoods from its inception.  It has long since been exposed as such, yet it continues to be exploited by ambulance chasers like Gillibrand.

My intention here is not to change anyone’s mind about the Trayvon shooting, race relations, or stand-your-ground laws.  My intention is to reiterate an important fact underpinning a controversial incident.  In the larger picture, this fact may seem irrelevant.  But this fact was intentionally distorted by Gillibrand to alter the narrative of the Trayvon shooting, which in turn has been touted as evidence of systemic racism in America, which in turn is being used to peddle untenable theories of white privilege, which in turn is being used to cultivate support for reparations.  The attempted implementation of reparations would be nothing short of catastrophic, and would leave in its wake an unbridgeable schism between black and white Americans.

I don’t imagine Gillibrand gave much thought, and even less concern, about the accuracy or effects of her words.  As evident from her shameless flip-flopping over every conceivable issue, her ambition is the presidency at whatever cost.  In the grand scheme of things, her ambiguous M&M duplicity is small fry compared to the If you like your health care plan whoppers.  But if we concede the singular facts on which these individual incidents are grounded, we eventually concede the overall narrative.  The facts of these incidents are on our side, and we have no reason to surrender them.

We’ve locked horns with the Left for almost a decade over the Trayvon shooting and its underlying causes, and after struggling for so long, it’s tempting to throw our hands up in exasperation and say Ah screw it, let them have this one.  But there is too much at stake to succumb to battle fatigue.  Call the Left out on every single lie, no matter how insignificant it may seem.  The small lies are constructed into guard towers from which the big lies are imposed.  Fight for every inch and don’t back down a centimeter, because that’s what the socialists who very well might take power in 2020 are doing.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/kristen_gillibrands_tangled_web.html

Will Dems Reach Their 44 Years in a Row of Owning Minnesota’s Presidential Electoral Vote in 2020?

Once A Democratic Bastion, Minnesota Trends Red Heading Into 2020

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When it comes to elections, swing states are always crucial, but in 2020, this blue state could be turning red for Trump.

by Stewart Lawrence  at  the Federalist

Let’s say Donald Trump fails to sweep the Rust Belt states in 2020. His chances of winning Ohio, where he swamped Hillary Clinton by 9 points in 2016, are still great. But without Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where Trump won by smaller margins four years ago, the president might well lose reelection.

In 2016, Trump had a 68 electoral-vote margin over Clinton — 304 to 236. Take away the combined 44 electoral votes from those three states, and Trump falls short of the needed 270 votes by 10.

With Trump trailing most of the Democratic candidates in the Rust Belt by double digits in recent polling, liberals seem gleeful about their chances of victory in 2020. But this optimism assumes Trump cannot expand the electoral map elsewhere.

Minnesota Isn’t Feeling Blue

In fact, he can. Thanks to the success of Trump’s policies and other fortuitous developments, several other blue-trending states are certain to be in play in 2020.

Of these, none is more important than Minnesota. Its 10 electoral votes alone could offset a possible Rust Belt loss. The mainstream media has barely covered Trump’s remarkable gains in Minnesota, a state that historically is the bluest of the blue.

How blue? Even during the Reagan landslide victories of 1980 and 1984, the Gopher State remained a bastion of New Deal liberalism and economic populism. In fact, the last time the GOP captured Minnesota was during Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972, nearly a half-century ago.

Yet Trump, with his own brand of populism, nearly captured the state in 2016. He carried 78 of the state’s 87 counties, double the number carried by President Barack Obama in 2012. Overall, the margin between Trump and Hillary Clinton was a mere 1.5 percent — just 44,000 votes — the weakest Democratic tilt in decades.

In fact, Trump might well have won Minnesota in 2016 had he made the state more of a priority. On the advice of the GOP mainstream, which had watched Mitt Romney make a foolhardy play for Minnesota in 2012, Trump didn’t visit the state until the waning days of the campaign, a decision he came to regret. “One more big rally, and we would have won,” he lamented later.

Trump’s taking no chances this time. Since October of last year, he’s held three major rallies in Duluth and Rochester, two urban Democratic bastions with pockets of working-class voters attracted to his anti-trade, “America First” message. Each time, the crowds have grown larger. Just last week, Trump weighed in heavily during the burgeoning Pledge of Allegiance controversy in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, saying the state was “under siege.”

The President’s Policies Are Working

Why are Trump’s chances in Minnesota so good? The booming economy is one big factor. In addition to favorable job trends — the state’s unemployment rate is 3.3 percent, one of the lowest in the nation — Trump has undertaken special initiatives to bolster the state’s economy, drawing a sharp contrast between his administration’s policies and those of his predecessor.

For example, last month, Trump moved to expand a major copper and nickel mining operation, one of the largest remaining reserves in the world, that Barack Obama had refused to renew in his final weeks in office. Obama’s backpedaling on approving new mining leases was widely unpopular. While liberal environmental groups are still vocally protesting Trump’s decision, polls show that Minnesotans, especially in the five counties surrounding the project, strongly approve.

Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has also found increasing favor. Minnesota is a major resettlement state for Muslim refugees, many of them from terror-prone Syria and Somalia. Some Somalis have also left Minnesota to join the Islamic State in east Africa. A November 2016 attack by a Somali American, who stabbed eight people in a shopping mall, has fueled support for Trump’s Muslim travel ban.

Minnesota’s up for grabs for another reason: Massive fallout from the resignation of Sen. Al Franken, a prominent liberal Democrat, over sexual assault allegations that have damaged the party’s standing with voters across the board. Add to this the growing controversy over newly elected in-state Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is widely viewed as anti-Semitic and extremist, and the Democrats are confronting a major crisis of credibility with Minnesota’s electorate.

Trump’s growing popularity with Minnesotans was apparent in 2018 when the two candidates he endorsed and campaigned for easily won their races. They included Pete Stauber, who captured the 8th District, which had voted Democratic for years. The fact that these victories occurred at a time when Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives reflect the deep GOP undercurrent that could allow Trump to flip Minnesota in 2020.

More Blue States May Be Up For Grabs

Trump could conceivably expand the 2020 map in two other states in the Southwest: Nevada, with 6 electoral votes, and Colorado, with 9. While both states have tilted Democratic since 2004, Trump’s growing popularity with Hispanics, who constitute a sizable share of each state’s electorate, is giving him a fresh opening. Still, both states remain an uphill climb.

Some analysts have argued that Pennsylvania is the bellwether contest in 2020. Trump won by slightly less than 1 percent there in 2016. But if Joe Biden, a Scranton native, is his opponent, that advantage likely evaporates.

Trump is certainly not out of the running in the Rust Belt, but with a major Democratic investment expected there (in contrast to 2016), the Gopher State will loom unusually large in 2020. Assuming the rest of the electoral map stays frozen in place, it could even be the state that puts Trump over the top.

Seeing Minnesota fall would be the bitterest of ironies for the Democrats and an unmistakable sign of just how much the mood of the country has shifted since Trump captured the White House.

Stewart J. Lawrence is a Washington, D.C.-based public policy analyst who writes frequently on national issues.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/24/democratic-bastion-minnesota-trends-red-heading-2020/

(Just a note to remind the American public:   Honesty in counting votes in Minnesota is no longer a Dem value in our state.   Don’t bet on today’s metropolitan Minnesota Dems  losing their  count in the  Presidential election this coming AD2020.  They own the schools, television news, St. Paul,  and the Mpls StarTribune for starters!) ghr

How Cold Was Duluth, MN 12,000 Years Ago?

THE FAKE SCIENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING

by John Hinderaker  at PowerLine:

Francis Menton sticks it to the global warming lobby, good and hard:

If you follow closely the subject of hypothesized human-caused global warming, you probably regularly experience, as I do, a strong sense of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, you read dozens of pieces from seemingly authoritative media sources, as well as from important political officeholders, declaring that the causal relationship between human CO2 emissions and rapidly rising global temperatures is definitive….

On the other hand, you studied the scientific method back in high school, and you can’t help asking yourself the basic questions that that method entails:

* What is the falsifiable hypothesis that is claimed to have been empirically validated? You can’t find it!

* What was the null hypothesis, and what about the data caused the null hypothesis to be rejected? You can’t find that either!

* Where can you get access to the methodology (computer code) and the full data set that was used in the hypothesis validation process; and are those sufficient to fully replicate the results? You can’t find these things either!

* You learn that there have been major after-the-fact adjustments to the principal data sets that are used to claim rapidly warming global temperatures and to justify press releases claiming that a given year or month was the “hottest ever.” You look to see if you can find details supporting the data alterations, and you learn that such details are not available, as if they are some kind of top secret from the Soviet Union.

This is not science, obviously. There is much more at the link, but I will close with this:

Since about 2007, there has been a notable counter-theory to the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. The counter-theory is that fluctuations in world temperatures over the past several decades have been caused more by fluctuations in the cloud cover of the earth than by increases in greenhouse gases like CO2. This counter-theory is often called the “Svensmark hypothesis,” after Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who proposed it.
***
I have no position on whether this hypothesis is “right.” However, prior to the collection of data, it is a plausible hypothesis — equally as plausible as the hypothesis that increasing temperatures are mainly caused by human-emitted greenhouse gases. Accepting the human-caused warming hypothesis as proved requires rejecting the alternative Svensmark hypothesis (as well as all other plausible null hypotheses; but let’s stick with Svensmark for now).

Which brings us to the Povrovsky and Kauppinen, et al., papers. Povrovsky did something that somebody should have long since done by now, which is to collect month-by-month satellite cloud-cover data for the earth for the period 1983-2009, and plot it on a graph, and then compare that graph to the month-by-month temperature graphs. What is the correlation of the two?

It turns out to be exceptionally close:

This is from the article by Povlovsky and Kauppinen:

The IPCC climate sensitivity is about one order of magnitude too high, because a strong negative feedback of the clouds is missing in climate models. If we pay attention to the fact that only a small part of the increased CO2 concentration is anthropogenic, we have to recognize that the anthropogenic climate change does not exist in practice. The major part of the extra CO2 is emitted from oceans [6], according to Henry‘s law. The low clouds practically control the global average temperature. During the last hundred years the temperature is increased about 0.1°C because of CO2. The human contribution was about 0.01°C. We have proven that the GCM-models used in IPCC report AR5 cannot compute correctly the natural component included in the observed global temperature.

The debate over global temperature trends rages on numerous levels, and the alarmists are getting the worst of it pretty much everywhere. Actual science is winning over “climate science.”

 

The Fake Science of Global Warming

Comment:  Ignorance…..that is, the lack of truthful knowledge, is a serious disease in America these days.   Feminists of all sexes, shapes, and sizes rule the schools.  “Feelings” replace the classical male drive to solve problems.

The best human solving of problems, after all, arises from seeking knowledge to discover Truth better.

The female of the human animal used to produce and care for human offspring.   The human male animal used to build, provide shelter, substance, and protection.   He was born to be curious…..to invent…..to wonder.

Today’s America including our Minnesota, has to survive Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Adam Schiff, Jerold Nadler, the SQUAD,  and countless other today’s  fascistic Democrats who have NO TIME OR INTEREST TO SEEK, DISCOVER, OR EMPLOY TRUTH.

THEY PREFER  TO FEEL GOOD,  FOR GOOD OR EVIL…THE POWER TO FEEL GOOD!

I was taught to be a traditional Godfearing  male American primarily by Church, country, and  old maid public school teachers between 1939 and  1952.    We were taught to seek knowledge and Truth then.

Today’s America is becoming  programmed by fascistics,   countless professors, Democrats, and allies at universities and the press to believe white man has caused much sin, especially Global Warming through his politics and inventions.   More and more people are killed annually  by our weather warmed by too many Western white male inventions.

Fascists have never had any  interest in knowledge and Truth.

Our Earth has endured Global Warming in its past…..If it weren’t for Global Warming,  Minnesota would’t exist!

Mark Twain visited Duluth, Minnesota once…..and remarked later in life:  “THE COLDEST WINTER I EVER SPENT WAS SUMMER IN DULUTH!”  But that wasn’t twelve thousand years ago….

What was  Duluth, Minnesota’s  vegetative environment environment  twelve thousand years ago?   Feminazis don’t care about Truth.   They care about feelings!  They won’t look it up…..WILL YOU?

The Minnesota That Produced Omar

THE WASHINGTON POST DOES IT AGAIN

by Paul Mirengoff   at PowerLine

How much mileage did the Democrats get out of President Trump’s unpresidential tweet suggesting that four ultra-radical, America-bashing congresswomen leave the country? I’m not sure, but I know they didn’t get as much as they wanted.

Now, however, the Democrats and their media backers have a new card to play. At a Trump rally in North Carolina, some in the crowd responded to the president’s reference to the rads by chanting “send them home.”

Trump didn’t say this. He never has. Indeed, he has said he was uncomfortable with the chant.

No matter. The chanting gives a new lease on life to those who unfairly use Trump’s tweet against him.

Naturally, the Washington Post is at the forefront of this effort. Today’s edition features two front page stories about the North Carolina chanting, plus two more on page 6. There’s more in the op-ed section from the usual suspects.

In this post, I want to focus on just one of the news stories — an article by Felicia Sonmez, Rachel Bade, and Seung Min Kim called (in the paper edition) “N.C. Republicans split in response to ‘send her back’ chant at Trump rally.”

The article is dishonest at multiple levels. Its most glaring lack of respect for the truth is the claim that the crowd’s chant of “send her back” is “almost identical to [Trump’s] tweet Sunday telling the women to ‘go back’ [to the places they came from].”

This single, brief passage in the Post contains two instances of dishonesty. First, Trump didn’t tell the four rads to go back. He asked “why don’t they go back?” In quoting from Trump’s tweet, the Post omits the words that are inconsistent with its argument. He didn’t tell them to do anything. The Post is just making it up.

Second, any half-way intelligent person knows the difference between telling people to go back (which Trump didn’t do) and sending them back. To send the four rads back would involve forcibly deporting them. Telling them to go back would leave them free to go back or not. Suggesting that they go back (which is what Trump did) is more innocuous still.

Sommez, Bade and Seung Min Kim know the difference. Yet, they pretend there is virtually none. They are lying.

These three also take issue with Trump’s claim that the four rads hate America. They state: “None of the women has said they hate the United States.”

That’s right, and Trump has never said he’s a racist or that he hates any racial or ethnic group. Yet, pursuant to an editorial decision, the Post writes article after article claiming (sometimes in the headline) that Trump is a racist.

One can easily infer that the four rads hate America from the contempt they display towards the U.S. in their statements. Any half-way intelligent person knows that one can hate something or someone without using the word “hate.”

Even the premise of the Post’s article — its jumping off point for the attack on Trump — is fallacious. The supposed “split” among North Carolina Republicans the Post cites is between Sen. Thom Tillis and Rep. Mark Walker. But there is none.

According to the Post, Tillis said that Trump had no control over what some in the crowd chanted. Walker said the chanting was offensive and needs to stop before it defines the Republican Party.

There no inconsistency here. Both statements can be true.

Tillis’ statement is indisputable. The first part of Walker’s — that the chanting was offensive — is true as well, in my opinion.

The second part — that the chanting will define the GOP if it doesn’t stop — may be too alarmist. However, it will be true if the Washington Post has its way.

 

The Washington Post does it again

Comment from ghr… Actually, the fascistic left Washington Post and New York Times news prints are the major daily reporting sources offered by  the daily  lefty   news standards of Minnesota’s biggest  fascistic information  source, the StarTribune.

Honest folks in Minnesota still carrying some degree of truthful knowledge are quite aware fascistic leftism has generally  ruled the state since Dem Paul Wellstone’s  tenure “making America forever socialist”.

Yet, if he were alive, I don’t think he would ever be swimming in the same fascist pool as this creepy foreigner Omar and  the folks at today’s  StarTribune!

Getting to Know “Minnesota” Omar Better

DAVID STEINBERG: TYING UP LOOSE THREADS IN THE CURIOUS CASE

by Scott Johnson  at PowerLine:

In four intensely reported investigative columns — here (August 13, 2018), here (October 23, 2018), here (October 30, 2018), and here (November 5, 2018), — David Steinberg has explored the evidence suggesting that Ilhan Omar entered into a sham marriage with her brother in 2009. This is his fifth. He titles it “Meet Leila Elmi: The Missing Link Showing Ilhan Omar Married Her Brother.” Drawing on his research, interviews, and social media evidence he makes the case that Omar has engaged in a variety of fraudulent activities and willful misrepresentations related to her marital arrangements. He writes:

On October 22, 2008, the U.S. State Department stopped accepting applications for the Priority 3/Refugee Family Reunification program — the process by which refugees can apply for asylum if one family member is already a legal U.S. resident. State halted the program because DNA testing — primarily of Somalis — had concluded that perhaps 87 percent of applicants were fraudulently claiming family relationships.

Despite continuing war, Somalia of 2008 was not comparable to the open hell of the early 1990s, when an eight-year-old Ilhan and her family fled to Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps. She lived there from 1991 until 1995, aged eight to 12. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services then helped Ilhan, her sister Sahra, and their father Nur Said receive asylum in the United States along with thousands of other Somalis.

The complicated moral question of fraud, let alone fault, among this 1990s wave of refugees escaping civil war will never be answered with accurate statistics. We will have to settle for adjectives like “widespread” and “rampant.” Yet the negative outcomes cannot be ignored. Even refugees with strong desire to assimilate with Western civic order are hampered by the possible discovery of conflicting documents. And compromising information becomes leverage in a community already difficult to police.

Twelve-year-old Ilhan had no say on the manner in which she arrived in the United States.

However, U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (D-MN) is now under scrutiny for acts she took beginning in 2009 — not 1995. In 2009, Omar was a 26-year-old U.S. citizen. She had been a U.S. citizen for nearly nine years.

Additionally, the foreign national Omar apparently helped commit fraud was not fleeing hell in 2009, either. Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was a long-time citizen of the United Kingdom. He even possessed a high school diploma from the United States: Elmi attended a St. Paul, Minnesota high school for his senior year of 2002-2003, and graduated before returning to London.

We look to 1995 not to incriminate a kid, but to answer questions about what Omar did 14 years later as an adult U.S. citizen.

Please read the verified evidence below — and read it alongside the three years of verified evidence published by Scott Johnson, Preya Samsundar, and myself (our work is linked here). The answers to those questions about 2009 appear to give probable cause to investigate Omar for eight instances of perjury, immigration fraud, marriage fraud, up to eight years of state and federal tax fraud, two years of federal student loan fraud, and even bigamy.

To be clear: The facts describe perhaps the most extensive spree of illegal misconduct committed by a House member in American history.

———————-

The preceding information was given to me by multiple sources within the Minneapolis Somali community. The verifiable evidence corroborating their information follows below:

In 1995, Ilhan entered the United States as a fraudulent member of the “Omar” family.

That is not her family. The Omar family is a second, unrelated family which was being granted asylum by the United States. The Omars allowed Ilhan, her genetic sister Sahra, and her genetic father Nur Said to use false names to apply for asylum as members of the Omar family.

Ilhan’s genetic family split up at this time. The above three received asylum in the United States, while Ilhan’s three other siblings — using their real names — managed to get asylum in the United Kingdom.

Ilhan Abdullahi Omar’s name, before applying for asylum, was Ilhan Nur Said Elmi.

Her father’s name before applying for asylum was Nur Said Elmi Mohamed. Her sister Sahra Noor’s name before applying for asylum was Sahra Nur Said Elmi. Her three siblings who were granted asylum by the United Kingdom are Leila Nur Said Elmi, Mohamed Nur Said Elmi, and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.

Ilhan and Ahmed married in 2009, presumably to benefit in some way from a fraudulent marriage. They did not divorce until 2017.

Above: This chart summarizes how multiple sources in the Minneapolis Somali community describe key events in the life of MN Representative Ilhan Abdullahi Omar — whom these sources state was born as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi.”

———————-

Confirming some of the above information, as it might appear on their 1995 U.S. immigration papers, is not difficult. A basic background search shows that “Nur Omar Mohamed,” “Ilhan Abdullahi Omar,” and “Sahra Noor” all received SSNs in 1995 or 1996 in Virginia. Verified address records show adult members of the Omars living at three addresses in Arlington, Virginia at that time: 1223 South Thomas Street, 1226 South Thomas Street, and 1107 South Thomas Street.

The United Kingdom records of the relevant individuals are similarly easy to find. Try with a simple Ancestry.com account and similar online tools: There appears to be only one “Leila Nur Said Elmi,” only one “Mohamed Nur Said Elmi,” and only one “Ahmed Nur Said Elmi” in the UK.

The remaining evidence below verifies a sibling relationship between Ilhan and Ahmed.

————————

Sahra Noor is the only person Ilhan Omar has ever publicly identified as her sister. Ilhan and Sahra have also, publicly and often, referred to the same man as their father. And, per Preya Samsundar’s 2016 investigation, they both identified this man as “Nur Said”:

The above image, a screenshot of Sahra Noor’s confirmed Facebook account, was first published by Preya Samsundar in 2016.

He also identifies himself as “Nur Said”.

See below — this is a screenshot of his current Facebook account. As of this article’s publication, it is active and searchable by anyone online. (I have archived his page with archive.is):

Note this thumbnail of “Leyla Cilmi,” listed as a friend of Nur Said.

In 2018, as I published a series of articles investigating Ilhan’s past, this account name changed from “Leila Elmi” to “Leyla Cilmi.”

However, the URL did not change. It still refers to “leila.elmi”:

Below, see the 1997 marriage certificate for the only Leila Nur Said Elmi listed in the United Kingdom.

I retrieved this certified copy from a government records center in London in February of this year; note the date in the document’s lower right corner. This is a public record. Anyone can retrieve this document to verify its authenticity.

See that Leila attests to her father’s name being “Nur Said Elmi”:

So far, we have verifiable evidence that Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, Sahra Noor, and Leila Nur Said Elmi referring to their respective fathers as “Nur Said” or “Nur Said Elmi.”

Next, we have verifiable evidence showing the three are sisters, and are all referring to the same man.
——————–

See below: These two posts appeared on Ilhan Omar’s confirmed Instagram account in 2013 and 2015, respectively. (Instagram user “hameey” became the blue-checked “IlhanMN” account at some point in 2016. A cursory search through older posts on the “IlhanMN” account still reveals many instances of commenters addressing “IlhanMN” as “hameey.”)

In August 2016 — after Scott Johnson and Preya Samsundar originally broke the story about Ilhan’s curious marriage — the below post disappeared from Ilhan Omar’s Instagram account.

However, a source within the Minneapolis Somali community had downloaded much of Omar’s Instagram account before posts were deleted.

The source recently reviewed these two deleted posts, recognized their significance, and sent them to me via email. I made these emails available to Power Line to confirm how I received these posts, and to confirm that this particular source had provided several other pieces of information that had proven authentic and verifiable:

You are looking at what appears to be Leila Elmi, Nur Said, and Ilhan Omar — together. According to Ilhan, they are pictured on an August 2011 trip to East Africa.

Now, see below: You are looking at what appears to be Leila Elmi in white, Ilhan in black, and Ilhan’s amazing caption in red:

Further, the above post, with the #londontrip hashtag, depicts Ilhan Omar’s infamous 2015 trip to the UK. This is the same trip on which Ilhan was photographed with Ahmed Nur Said Elmi himself:

Below, see one more piece of evidence establishing Leila Elmi as Ilhan’s sister. This post is currently live, and I have archived it.

In December 2016, Ilhan reported that she was harassed by a cab driver while in Washington, D.C. attending meetings. She claimed that the cab driver called her “ISIS” and threatened to remove her hijab. A few days later, Ilhan filed a report with the D.C. Department of For-Hire Vehicles and the D.C. Office of Human Rights.

Ilhan initially stated that she was accompanied in the cab by her “sister.” A Star Tribune reporter in 2016 claimed to have a copy of her complaint, and that it stated she had been in the cab with her sister.

I few months ago, I received a copy of Ilhan’s report via FOIA request. The description of the person Ilhan had been in the cab with was redacted.

Suleiman Axoow, per his profile, is a frequent host of social events for the Washington, D.C. Somali-American community. On December 9, 2016, Suleiman Axoow stated that he was with Ilhan soon after the cab incident:

On Wednesday night I had an opportunity to have dinner with State Representative-Elect Ilhan Omar & her lovely sis Leila Elmi …

Check the “Edit History” on Suleiman’s Axoow’s post. He even initially included a link to the Leila Elmi/Leyla Cilmi account:

It is not plausible to believe that Axoow simply made a mistake.

One would have to believe that Axoow:

1. Had dinner with Ilhan and a second woman;
2. that the woman was introduced to him as any other person alive;
3. and that a couple days later he made the 1-in-7-billion mistake of misremembering this woman as Ilhan Omar’s “lovely sis Leila Elmi.” A random name of a woman from England he has no clear reason to know.

Ilhan has steadfastly refused to give media the names of any of her siblings besides Sahra Noor. The only rational explanation: Leila Elmi was in the United States to visit Ilhan Omar, attended this dinner with her, and Ilhan (carelessly?) introduced her as Axoow describes.

We now have verifiable evidence that Ilhan Omar, Sahra Noor, and Leila Elmi are siblings with a father named Nur Said Elmi.

All that remains is to verify our sources’ claims that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is indeed Leila Nur Said Elmi’s brother.

————————-

We have a great, easy start: Leila and Ahmed already appear to be two of the only three “Nur Said Elmis” in the United Kingdom.

Next, view the marriage certificate again: It attests that Leila Nur Said Elmi lived in Camden, a borough of London, in 1997, and that she was 24 years old at the time.

Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was 12 in 1997. Per his own admission, he attended a school in Camden for students aged 11 to 18: Haverstock School. (See its address here; “Camden” is in the school’s URL: https://www.haverstock.camden.sch.uk/.)

This link on Ahmed’s confirmed Facebook account is currently live, and I have archived the page:

(Note that he lists his current location as “Nairobi, Kenya.” See here for definitive evidencethat Ahmed has recently been working in Nairobi with — of all people — Sahra Noor.)

Back in August 2016, Preya Samsundar posted two finds now worth revisiting:

1. Ahmed Nur Said Elmi’s Instagram post calling two young twin girls with a backpack from a primary school in Camden his “nieces.” Ilhan’s Instagram account “loved” the post.
2. Ilhan’s Instagram post picturing herself with the same twin girls. Ilhan marked her location as “Camden Lock Village.” Ilhan also calls the girls “her nieces.” The post is yet another that is tagged #londontrip from 2015.

The twin girls are, indeed, the daughters of Leila Nur Said Elmi. This can be confirmed by anyone through posts that are currently active on Mohamed Nur Said Elmi’s Facebook account.

We now have verifiable evidence that:

1. Sahra Noor, Ilhan Omar, and Leila Elmi are siblings with a father named Nur Said Elmi.
2. Leila Elmi and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi both lived in the same neighborhood of London, and know each other.
3. Both Ilhan Omar and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi call Leila Elmi’s children “nieces.”

——————–

Earlier this year, a source gave me one more piece of information that would inform UK law enforcement — if granted a warrant — where to locate conclusive proof that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi married his sister Ilhan Omar.

Ahmed Nur Said Elmi apparently arrived in the United Kingdom in 1995 or 1996, only 10 or 11 years old, without a parent. Who looked after him until he arrived in the United States in 2002?

According to my sources, it was Leila.

There is no adoption record (which can be public in the UK); it would have been a “Kinship Care” or “Family and Friends Carer” arrangement. I am advised that Haverstock School would have records of student Ahmed Nur Said Elmi living at the same address as Leila Elmi with her listed as his guardian.

However, these two very recent posts — currently active on Instagram and archived — already put a nice bow on everything. Here are Leila and Ahmed calling each other “mum” and “son”:

—————-

On August 10, 2017, Ilhan swore under penalty of perjury — literally, she signed a half-inch or so under “penalty of perjury” — that she’d had zero contact with Ahmed Nur Said Elmi after June 2011.

Further, Ilhan swore that she did not know where to find him, and that she did not know a single person who was likely to know his whereabouts. She did this to apply for a default divorce from Ahmed — a divorce where one spouse cannot be located and served.

Now, a tremendous amount of evidence — from this article and our prior articles — shows that Ilhan perhaps perjured herself eight times with her nine answers. Minnesota’s perjury statute allows for a sentence of up to five years — for each instance:

Yet this may be the least worrisome of her current legal exposures.

Consider the disturbingly inadequate evidence used to obtain FISA warrants on members of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Consider that Democratic representatives have demanded that Attorney General William Barr release grand jury testimony — itself an illegal act.

Yet here we have:

• Verifiable UK and U.S. marriage records
• Verifiable address records
• Time-stamped, traceable, archived online communications (Convictions and settlements based upon social media evidence are commonplace, Anthony Weiner being a notable example)
• Background check confirmations of SSNs and birthdates
• Archived court documents signed under penalty of perjury
• Photos which can be examined to rule out digital manipulation
• The 2019 Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board investigation, which found Omar filed illegal joint tax returns with a man who was not her husband in at least 2014 and 2015
• Three years’ of evidence published across many articles — none of which has been shown to be incorrect, or have even been challenged with contradictory evidence from Rep. Omar or any other source
• Perjury evidence that stands on its own — regardless of whom she married:
  • Long after June 2011, she was clearly in contact with the only man in either the U.S. or the UK with the same name and birthdate as the man she married. She was clearly in contact with several people who were in contact with him.
  • Further, Preya Samsundar did contact him, published how she managed to contact him, and published his email admitting to being photographed with Omar in London in 2015. To be clear: Omar was legally married to an “Ahmed Nur Said Elmi” at the time she was photographed next to a man who admits his name is Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, and that he is in the photo.
  • Samsundar published all of this information on how to contact Ahmed Nur Said Elmi a few months before Omar swore to that nine-question court document.
• Rep. Omar has refused all inquiries from her constituents, elected officials, and media outlets to provide any specific evidence contradicting even a single allegation suggested by three years of now-public information.
• In fact, Omar has responded by making information less available:
  • In August 2016, after Scott Johnson and Preya Samsundar posted the allegations, Omar’s verified social media accounts were taken offline.
  • Ahmed Nur Said Elmi’s social media accounts were also taken offline.
  • When the accounts returned, a large amount of potentially incriminating evidence had verifiably been deleted.
  • I found and published at least ten additional “before and after” instances of evidence still being deleted in 2018.
• Omar has released carefully worded, Clintonian statements that denigrate those seeking answers from her as racists. Yet she has repeatedly refused to answer questions or issue anything other than public relations statements.
• I have a large amount of information that we have not published for reasons including the protection of sources.
  • Sources have expressed fear regarding published video and photo evidence confirming threats from Omar’s campaign team. These sources have shared other evidence of threats. I have contacted the federal authorities to share this and other unpublished information. Providing knowingly false information to the DOJ is a serious crime.

I believe Scott Johnson, Preya Samsundar, and me, with our three years of articles, columns and posts, have provided more than enough evidence to give law enforcement authorities probable cause to open an investigation. Now would be the chance for law enforcement, and especially for Rep. Ilhan Omar’s House colleagues, to make a sincere stand against corruption and for the uniform application of the law.

David Steinberg was New York City Editor at PJMedia from 2009-2019, primarily handling coverage of Israel, homeland security, and political corruption. His investigation of Eric Cantor’s 2014 primary campaign is credited (ask Dave Brat!) with tipping the historic loss, perhaps the beginning of the “Trump Era.” As noted above, since 2018 Steinberg has published several articles of exclusive evidence covering Rep. Ilhan Omar’s past; they can be accessed here: https://bit.ly/2FJq529.

Follow David Steinberg on Twitter: https://twitter.com/realDSteinberg

 

David Steinberg: Tying up loose threads in the curious case

The Fascist Left Already Owns Our American Communications System!!!

EXACTLY WHAT WERE THE REAL WORDS PRESIDENT TRUMP SPOKE WHICH STIRRED  AMERICA’S FASCISTS  TO SHOUT “RACIST’?

WILL THE FOLLOWING FACSISTIC  GURUS SELLING ‘NEWS’ IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ALLOW READERS, ANYONE,  TO KNOW?   OR DO YOU JUST TAKE THEIR FASCIST WORDS FOR TRUTH?   Please seek below for President Trump’s actual words which in anyway match  with the fascist interpretations at the New York Times and Washington Post, CNN, and ABC NEWS, and the Guardian below!!

WHY AREN’T THE FOUR SQUAD STARS THE REAL RACISTS!!???   WHO, IN FACT, IS STIRRING ‘HATE’????  (one expects colored racist  leftism at the bbc)

After Trump Accuses Four Democratic Congresswomen of Hating U.S. …

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/us/politics/trump-go-back-tweet-racism.html

2 days ago – President Trump amplified his attacks against the lawmakers, and they … amplified his attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color on Monday, … all of whom are women of color,” said Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of … he stood behind them, saying it was Ms. Pelosi who was the real racist.

House Condemns Trump’s Attack on Four Congresswomen as Racist …

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/politics/trump-tweet-house-vote.html

19 hours ago – The House voted on Tuesday to condemn President Trump’s attacks against four congresswomen of color as racist. … no room for racism,” said Representative John Lewis, Democratof Georgia, an icon of the civil rights movement. … Mr. Trump on Tuesday denied that his tweets wereracist and implored …

A divided House votes for resolution condemning Trump’s racist remarks

https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/trump…prepares…condemn…/bca3afa4-a7b3-11e9-…

19 hours ago – A divided House voted Tuesday to condemn President Trump’s racist … stark: A diverse Democratic caucus cast the president’s words as an affront to … legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color. … but in none did the four women say they hate America, as the president has asserted.

Live updates: Backlash after Trump’s racist tweets – CNNPolitics

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-racist-tweet…july-2019/index.html

18 hours ago – The House plans to vote on a resolution condemning President Trump’s racist tweets about four Democratic congresswomen. … The House votes: The House of Representativesapproved a resolution denouncing President … “Not only to this President that his behavior and his words are not acceptable.”.

House condemns Trump’s Twitter attacks against congresswomen …

https://abcnews.go.com/…democrats-prepare-condemn-trumps…congresswomen/story?i…

18 hours ago – The House voted on a measure criticizing President Trump’s attacks against four Democratic congresswomen of color. … The House of Representatives voted largely along party lines Tuesday to formally condemn … @realDonaldTrump’s tweets from this weekend were racist and he should apologize.

House passes resolution officially condemning Trump’s racist attack …

https://www.theguardian.com/…/trump-news-today-live-racist-attack-alexandria-ocasio-c…

18 hours ago – White House adviser tries to deny Trump’s tweets were racist, while … Donald Trump’sracist tweets telling congresswomen of color to “go … Trump campaign tapped the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump to spearhead a Women for … about four newly elected Democraticlawmakers – Representatives …

Trump to congresswomen of colour: Leave the US – BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48982172

3 days ago – The US president is accused of racism for tweets directed towards … the women “originally came from countries whose governments are a … of four congresswomen of colour; three were born and raised in the … Democratic representative Don Beyer – who was born in Italy and is … Apollo 11: The real Neil.

Missing: words ‎| Must include: words

AOC, Omar, Pressley, Tlaib: Who are ‘the squad’ of congresswomen …

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48994931

2 days ago – Who are the four US congresswomen who President Trump told to “go back” to … with tweets calling on several Democratic congresswomen of colour to “go home”. … Mr Trump did not explicitly name the women, but the context and … in to the US House of Representatives, Ms Ocasio-Cortez said there is …

Trump tells Dem congresswomen: Go back where you came from …

https://www.politico.com/…/trump-congress-go-back-where-they-came-from-141569…

3 days ago – Later in the day, the president doubles down on his attacks. … called out progressive congresswomen in xenophobic terms on Sunday, saying, … targeting some of the caucus’s best-known freshman women of color: Reps. …. 4 House Democrat, said the comments were “a racist tweet from a racist president.

Trump’s racist tweets: House votes to condemn president with GOP …

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/…/president-trump…/1743579001/

1 day ago – The House formally condemned President Donald Trump’s Twitter posts as … the president’s attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color that … The Squad: Four femalefreshman congresswomen upsetting the status quo …. and saying Trump’s “words were racist,” according to an aide in the room.