Thursday, September 26, 2019

Snopes Rolls Out New Opinion Check Feature

Babylon Bee 🐝 

U.S.—Snopes has rolled out a helpful new feature: an opinion checker. 

Alongside the site's helpful fact checks of satirical articles and debunking of urban legends, there will now be a section of the site dedicated to checking out opinions and letting you know which ones are acceptable to hold.

"Just checking facts wasn't enough anymore---now, people are looking to Snopes to be the moral arbiter of which opinions are OK and which ones are  not," said a spokesperson for the website. "This has been a long time coming. We've pretty much been doing this all along, but disguising it as a 'fact check.' So now we can just be much more upfront with people about what our intentions are."

As soon as the feature went live, Snopes had opinion-checked dozens of opinions, including the following:
  • President Trump isn't as bad as Hitler
  • White men aren't all bad
  • Abortion is wrong
  • Pineapple does not belong on pizza
  • Hillary Clinton is not a good person
  • The Last Jedi is trash
  • It's OK to laugh at a joke on the internet
All of these earned a "Wrong" opinion rating. Any post expressing these opinions on social media will automatically be tagged with a "Wrong" rating from Snopes. 



at

BREAKING: Whistleblower is CIA Officer ‘Detailed to Work at White House’ – And Has Since Returned to the CIA

The Deep State whistleblower is a CIA officer who was detailed to work at the White House, according to a new report by the New York Times.
Little is known about this ‘whistleblower’ but the Times reported that he has since returned to the CIA.
WASHINGTON — The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity.
The man has since returned to the C.I.A., the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public Thursday suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.
The whistle-blower’s expertise will likely add to lawmakers’ confidence about the merits of his complaint, and tamp down allegations that he might have misunderstood what he learned about Mr. Trump. He did not listen directly to a July call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that is at the center of the political firestorm over the president’s mixing of diplomacy with personal political gain.
Lawyers for the whistle-blower refused to confirm that he worked for the C.I.A. and said that publishing information about him was dangerous.
“Any decision to report any perceived identifying information of the whistle-blower is deeply concerning and reckless, as it can place the individual in harm’s way,” said Andrew Bakaj, his lead counsel. “The whistle-blower has a right to anonymity.”

at

It’s the “Very fine people” hoax all over again

Just as they did after Charlottesville, the media is rewriting what President Trump said in that phone call, hoping their audience is too dumb to know it.



You all know the “Very fine people” hoax the media created after Charlottesville.  In a press conference at Trump Tower shortly after the riot, President Trump condemned the Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Antifa radicals for the violence.  But he also pointed out that among those protesting the removal of the Confederate statues were very fine people who just didn’t want these statues taken down.
The news media wasted no time refashioning what Trump said in order to claim that “Trump called Nazis and white supremacists very fine people.”
No. He didn’t.  And anyone who actually heard what the President said knew he didn’t.
But the media depends on the stupidity of its audience.
So certain were they that their audience wouldn’t bother actually watching video of the press conference, the media told the “Very fine people” lie knowing it would be taken as the gospel truth.
Then they kept repeating it as if it was undisputed fact.
In no time, politicians echoed it uncritically.
And the “Very fine People” hoax narrative was born.
Joe Biden even launched his 2020 campaign based on it.
So ingrained in the national narrative is this lie that when many exposed it as a lie, they were dismissed as cranks and “conspiracy theorists.”
This is how the so-called “free and independent press” operates in the Age of Trump. Repeat a lie often enough that it’s believed as truth to the point where the actual truth sounds like a lie.
Well, with the release of the now infamous phone transcript between President Trump and President Zelensky, the media is creating yet another hoax narrative.
So confident are they that their audience won’t bother reading the damn transcript for themselves, the media – and now Democrats in Congress – are claiming that President Trump said to Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor … investigate my 2020 rival Joe Biden.”
Yeah. He said nothing like that.
But here we are again. The Ukraine transcript is the “Very fine people” hoax all over again. Or at least the media and Democrats hope it is.
This is exactly why I told you yesterday not to listen to the cable news people but read the transcript for yourself.
What was the “favor” President Trump asked for?
Well, here is the context in full:
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
But that’s not how the media and dinks like Adam Schiff are portraying that “I would like you to do us a favor,” is it?
Nope.  They skip past everything the President said about election interference and Crowdstrike.  Then they skip past President Zelensky’s response. And they go down to the part where President Trump mentions the prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden who was fired after Biden threatened to withhold US aid.
But of course they do.
Because the favor President Trump is asking for is assistance in investigating Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election interference and the RussiaGate debacle.
The media is well aware that this phone conversation doesn’t say what they told us it would say.  So they’re trying to turn chicken shit into chicken salad by fudging the facts and omitting pertinent information in order to create a false narrative that every single one of their ResistanceLOL audience members will then uncritically believe.
Naturally Democrats in Congress will happily play along because it helps advance their impeachment fantasy.
But they’re all lying.  Just like they have for two years with that “Very fine people” hoax.
Yes, President Trump brings up Biden bragging about getting that prosecutor who was investigating his son fired.
And why shouldn’t he?
Should Joe Biden get a pass for influence peddling and strong-arming a foreign country by holding US aid hostage in order to protect his son?
That’s corruption.
In fact, Joe Biden actually did what the media and Congressional Democrats accuse President Trump of doing (and, as we can see from the transcript, clearly did not do).
The news media is trying to do several things here.
First, as has been the case since 2009, they are seeking to shield the Obama Administration.  But not just Obama.  They are also trying to bury the fact that the DNC and the Hillary campaign enlisted Ukraine’s help in defeating Donald Trump in 2016.  Ukraine cooperating with an investigation into foreign influence for the benefit of the Democrats must be hidden at all costs.
So what do they do? They accuse President Trump of the very thing Team Clinton and the DNC actually did in 2016.
If I had to guess, I’d say the media is concerned over the DOJ’s investigation into the genesis of the Russia hoax.  Who can blame them?  They were complicit in it.  Learning that President Trump personally asked Ukraine’s president to cooperate with the DOJ in this investigation must have been a chilling discovery.
And that leads me to the second thing. The media is trying to protect itself. The truth of what happened in 2016 and the subsequent RussiaGate witch hunt will hurt the news media. It will expose their complicity in the effort to undermine the 2016 election.
Third, the media is trying to protect Joe Biden.
What Biden did – what he even bragged about doing – is straight-up corruption.  To use US aid as leverage to protect his son from prosecution?  Come on.  This is a serious matter.  If Joe Biden was using his Vice Presidency as a way to financially enrich his family while protecting them from legal scrutiny, that is the height of corruption. It’s Clinton-level corruption.
In fact, if you changed the names from Joe Biden and Hunter Biden to Donald Trump and Don Junior, the media would be apoplectic with rage over what Biden did.
But it’s Joe Biden – a Democrat in good standing, the 2020 frontrunner, and former Vice President of their God-King Barack.  The media does not want his malfeasance seen in the cool, clear light of day.
And finally, the media is desperate to get Trump impeached.
I mentioned yesterday that the radical fringe of the Democrat Congress is the one controlling Nancy Pelosi.
But I’m thinking that may be only partially correct.
I think the real influence behind the Democrat Congress is the corporate news media. They’re the ones who actually calling the shots. The Democrats follow the media’s lead.
Both the Democrats and the media know that the American people overwhelmingly disagree with impeachment.  Vulnerable House Democrats certainly know that.  And they don’t want to risk their seats by hopping aboard the SS Titanic Impeachment.
Enter the news media.  They still believe that they are the major influencer of public opinion.  So what do they do?  They howl about this transcript, pretend it says something it doesn’t, invite on guest after guest to clutch pearls and bemoan the “existential threat to our national security” that this phone call reveals.  All in hopes that they can change the public’s mind on impeachment.
That’s why when the transcript didn’t reveal what they said it would and all the wild claims fell apart, the media decided to use the same tactic they used with the “Very fine people” hoax — just lie about what Trump said.
And keep lying until it becomes accepted Truth.
The question is, are Americans naïve enough to believe that this time, THIS TIME, the media is telling them the truth?
I’m doubtful.
First of all, alternative media sources are much more savvy to what these hacks are doing. And this time they’re prepared to immediately fight back against the lie.
It also doesn’t help that trust in the mainstream news media at an all-time low. Americans have been played and lied to far too many times over the last three years. And as a result, we are much more skeptical of the crap the media peddles. 
As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
And, other than the Trump Deranged ResistanceLOL who fall for everything, I don’t think many voters will be fooled this time around. 
at

DOJ: Bureaucrat’s Trump Complaint Was Neither Urgent Nor Needing Congressional Referral



The Department of Justice’s criminal division reviewed a bureaucrat’s complaint about President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and found it neither urgent nor requiring referral to congressional committees. All relevant components of the department agreed with the legal conclusion, and the matter was concluded, a DOJ spokesman announced.

The complaint was leaked to the media and other Democratic officials who have used it to call for the immediate impeachment of President Trump. A transcript of the call was released to the public. In the wide-ranging phone call, the transcript shows the two leaders discussing Ukraine’s meddling on behalf of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, which the Justice Department today confirmed is now being investigated by a team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham.

The Ukrainian president asked that former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani, who is the president’s attorney, come to Ukraine. “We are hoping very much that Mr. Guiliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine,” Zelensky said.

The legal opinion rests mostly on the idea of whether the foreign policy role of the president of the United States is subject to unelected bureaucrats’ complaints. It is not, they found.
A complaint from an intelligence-community employee about statements made by the President during a telephone call with a foreign leader does not involve an “urgent concern,” as defined in 50 U.S.C. § 3033(k)(5)(G), because the alleged conduct does not relate to “the funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence activity” under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence. As a result, the statute does not require the Director to transmit the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees.
The investigation also found that the complainant had political bias in favor of an election opponent of President Trump, though that had no bearing on the DOJ decision. 

at

GOP Politicians Aren’t Falling For Ukraine Hysteria Like They Did Russia



Unlike how they handled the Russia collusion conspiracy theory, Republican politicians have shown themselves less likely to fall for the Ukraine story being peddled through leaks to the same sympathetic reporters from anonymous partisan sources.
On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper amplified a tweet from Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, with some additional commentary:

In recent days, Resistance figures have run an operation similar to the Russia collusion conspiracy that gripped the country for years. That since-debunked conspiracy theory, supported by daily drips of “bombshell” “news” reports from media employees including Tapper, was that Trump had seditiously colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Even the partisan probe ostensibly led by the ailing Robert Mueller was unable to find a single American, much less the president of the United States, had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The hysteria about Russia caused real harm to the country’s foreign policy and administration of government. No one has yet been held accountable for perpetrating the hoax. And many media are helping the co-conspirators in the hoax avoid that accountability.

Now similar figures are alleging, based on an anonymous source without firsthand knowledge, that Trump should be impeached because of a phone call he had with Ukraine in which corruption involving Hunter Biden was discussed. Biden is the son of former Vice President Joe Biden. He is famously troubled, but also acquired a great deal of wealth thanks to his father’s connections, including in Ukraine and China. The anonymously sourced reports are changing, depending on the media outlet. First it was a whistleblower, then it turned out to be a hearsayer — someone without firsthand information. Supposedly a quid pro quo was demanded, then it turned out there was no quid pro quo. President Trump, for his part, is adamant that the phone call was nothing as described, even as that description is ever-changing.

Trump released the transcript of the phone call, which showed that the media and other Resistance figures’ early reports of the call mischaracterized it. Last week, it might be noted, Democrats were demanding the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh due to a false report in the New York Times of dubious provenance to begin with.

What Tapper highlighted is worth highlighting, though. While during the Russia hoax, nearly all prominent Republicans expressed concern about collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election, rushed to microphones to condemn the president for what turned out to be a false smear of sedition, and went out of their way to protect the relentless investigation of him based on lies secretly funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, this time, it’s mostly just Mitt Romney.

The standard of evidence required from Resistance figures in and out of the media to perpetrate yet another Russiagate is so high that it might be impossible to meet. But at the very least, it’s higher than what’s offered now. Yes, Democrats have wanted to impeach Donald Trump for the crime of winning the 2016 election, and they very well might do that no matter what they pretend the underlying reason is. But Republican politicians, Romney and those like him excepted, are either smart enough not to fall for this particular Resistance effort, or they’re simply savvy enough to realize there is no appetite for Republican politicians to assist Democrats in undermining a duly elected Republican president based on questionable hearsay, a complicated narrative that doesn’t even add up, and a desperate desire to undo 2016.
at

Deluded Democrats Privately Panic Following Transcript Unveiling and Impeachment Fallout



For those of you like myself who are relative newcomers to politics (I tolerated political discussion, but never sought it out, and considered it a bit of a necessary evil rather than something in which I would actively participate), I occasionally drop in a brief definition of terms to help newcomers who are like myself and need to understand what is being discussed.

In this case, the term is “quid pro quo.” I looked it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and the definition is quite simple. It means something given or received for something else. Also: a deal arranging a quid pro quo. 

So, all this talk about what went on during the discussion between President Trump and Ukraine’s president had nothing in it in which any deals were struck whereby either country would receive concessions in exchange for something reciprocated. There was no quid pro quo. Nothing was given or received for something else.

Of course, now that the transcript of the discussion is public, Democrats are still howling at the tops of their lungs that there was wrongdoing and that they MUST impeach this president — in public — but reports are coming in that in private, they’re not quite so cocky, and are more likely doing their best to hide their fears that they’ve just been “had” by a president who is smarter than the average Democrat.
Democrats and Republicans demonstrated starkly different reactions following the release of the unredacted transcript of President Trump’s conversation with the president of Ukraine.
Many congressional Democrats publicly declared it the “smoking gun,” while Republicans dismissed their cries by noting the absence of quid pro quo or generally lawless behavior.
However, Democrats are striking a drastically different tone privately, as several reports indicate.
The far-left flank of the Democrat caucus forced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to concede and announce a formal impeachment inquiry against the president on Tuesday. She made the announcement prior to the release of the transcript, which detailed the phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
As Republican lawmakers explicitly noted, the conversation contained “zero” grounds for a legitimate impeachment inquiry. The president’s request for a “favor,” Republicans added, was immediately followed by a reference to Crowdstrike and questions revolving around election meddling and hacking efforts. Joe Biden’s (D) son, Hunter Biden, was not mentioned until later in the conversation.
“President Trump asked about Ukraine investigating ‘Crowdstrike’ (an investigation unrelated to Biden). It was Ukraine President Zelensky, not President Trump, who first brought up investigations beyond ‘Crowdstrike,’” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said in a statement, noting that Biden’s “possible illegal interference in a Ukraine prosecutor’s investigation of Biden’s son” was not mentioned until after the fact.
“Just read transcript of POTUS’ call w/Ukraine Pres. Absolutely ZERO grounds for impeachment and I agree w/ the President that US-Ukraine should investigate,” Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) wrote. “This is absurd how Congressional Dems & many in media are trying to spin this all!”
“Wow. Impeachment over this?” Rep Lindsey Graham (R-SC) expressed. “What a nothing (non-quid pro quo) burger.”
However, the public calls are overshadowed by reports of internal freakouts among Democrats, who believe this is a losing battle. As Breitbart News reported, several aides to top Democrats on Capitol Hill expressed hesitation and concern over the party’s decision to pull the trigger on impeachment. One senior Democrat congressional aide called the impeachment effort “a joke” and “all bullshit.”
Privately, several aides to top Democrats on Capitol Hill expressed concerns about the lack of a focus on the impeachment move; without a clear outcome in mind, Democrats fear that whatever happens will further energize Trump ahead of the 2020 election while failing to remove him.
“If you’re going to take a shot at the king, you best not miss,” one House Democrat leadership aide told Breitbart News. “And we do not have a pathway to win without 20 GOP votes in the Senate. We are nowhere near that, not even close.”
Another senior Democrat congressional aide added regarding the move to attempt to impeach Trump: “It’s a joke. It’s all bullshit.”
Over on the Senate side, most Republicans are in line with Trump. While Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) said that he considers the transcript’s contents “troubling,” he declined to discuss “impeachment” at this time.
This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The report details MUCH more of the private hysteria going on behind closed doors in the Democrat ranks. They may find that by jumping on the impeachment bandwagon, they have sealed their party’s fate for the foreseeable future as nothing more than a political afterthought.

at

CNN Just Yadda-Yadda-Yadda’d 540 Words To Frame Trump For ‘Favor’ He Never Requested



In the media’s efforts to tie President Donald Trump with its latest conspiracy theory, CNN skipped an entire section of the released and unredacted transcript of a phone call to charge Trump with requesting a favor he never asked for.

Below is text from the transcript of the July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the center of the latest media outrage cycle.
I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… the server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you and your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you said yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.
The transcript that CNN read on air, however, connects the word “favor” in this section with Trump 540 words later asking the Ukrainian leader to look into former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s questionable business dealings with a Ukrainian energy company. Hunter sat on the board of the company for $50,000 a month while, as Joe Biden bragged in 2018 on camera, his dad put pressure on the Ukrainian government to end a corruption probe into the company.

CNN just skipped right over it on air earlier this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/1cirnrMglW
— Andrew Clark (@AndrewHClark) September 25, 2019
Here’s the transcript has reported by CNN: “I would like you to do us a favor… There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”

MSNBC’s Katy Tur made the same omission.
MSNBC's @KatyTurNBC did it too.
Absolutely despicable. pic.twitter.com/EFlCO9lz7m
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) September 25, 2019
“Will you do me a favor and investigate Vice President Biden’s son? Will you do me a favor and get involved in the 2020 election? Vice President Biden is my chief political opponent,” Tur said.

National Public Radio (NPR) also skipped over more than 500 words of the transcript to tie “favor” to the later part of the conversation mentioning Biden, all to suggest Trump demanded foreign meddling in the U.S. election.


The highlighted ellipsis in this NPR story represents 526 words https://t.co/8nPQT2gfuA pic.twitter.com/PX2f1Opz16
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) September 25, 2019
The stunning omissions come as Democrats are jumping on an uncorroborated complaint from an anonymous “whistleblower” alleging Trump urged the Ukrainian president to investigate American political opponents. The White House released the fully unredacted version of the July phone call in question today. It contradicted the complaint, revealing no quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government as the hearsay accusations claimed.

The intelligence inspector general had rated the hearsay complaint “credible” and “urgent,” but other agencies refused to move them up the legal food chain due to lack of supporting evidence.



at

Further Evidence Intelligence Community Inspector General is Part of Lawfare Alliance



Details are beginning to surface about the deep state Whistleblower complaint.  It is possible in the next few days the 6-page complaint, which utilized media reports to construct the supportive evidence for the phone call accusation against President Trump, will be made public.

That said, within a heavy propaganda report from the New York Times there are details about the Intelligence Community Inspector General that show the tell-tale fingerprints of the ICIG supportive intent (emphasis mine): 
[…] Mr. Atkinson, a Trump appointee, nevertheless concluded that the allegations appeared to be credible and identified two layers of concern.
The first involved a possible violation of criminal law. Mr. Trump’s comments to Mr. Zelensky “could be viewed as soliciting a foreign campaign contribution in violation of the campaign-finance laws,” Mr. Atkinson wrote, according to the Justice Department memo. (read more)
Does the “foreign campaign contribution” angle sound familiar?  It should, because that argument was used in the narrative around the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian Lobbyist Natalia Veselnitskaya.  More specifically, just like FARA violations the overused “campaign contribution” narrative belongs to a specific network of characters, Lawfare.

The center of the Lawfare Alliance influence was/is the Department of Justice National Security Division, DOJ-NSD.  It was the DOJ-NSD running the Main Justice side of the 2016 operations to support Operation Crossfire Hurricane and FBI agent Peter Strzok.  It  was also the DOJ-NSD where the sketchy legal theories around FARA violations (Sec. 901) originated.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) is Michael K Atkinson.  ICIG Atkinson is the official who accepted the ridiculous premise of a hearsay ‘whistle-blower‘ complaint; an intelligence whistleblower who was “blowing-the-whistle” based on second hand information of a phone call without any direct personal knowledge, ie ‘hearsay‘.

 Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in  2016. That makes Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who  were the former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway.


[Irony Reminder: The DOJ-NSD was purposefully under no IG oversight. In 2015 the OIG requested oversight and it was Sally Yates who responded with a lengthy 58 page legal explanation saying, essentially, ‘nope – not allowed.’ (PDF HERE) All of the DOJ is subject to oversight, except the NSD.]

Put another way, Michael Atkinson was the lawyer for the same DOJ-NSD players who:  (1) lied to the FISA court (Judge Rosemary Collyer) about the 80% non compliant NSA database abuse using FBI contractors; (2) filed the FISA application against Carter Page; and (3) used FARA violations as tools for political surveillance and political targeting.

Yes, that means Michael Atkinson was Senior Counsel for the DOJ-NSD, at the very epicenter of the political weaponization and FISA abuse.

Immediately after the Carter Page FISA warrant is approved, in the period where DOJ-NSD head John Carlin has given his notice of intent to leave but not yet left, inside those specific two weeks, the National Security Division of the DOJ tells the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) they have been breaking the law. The NSD specifically inform the court they are aware of contractors who have been using FISA 702(16)(17) database search queries to extract information on political candidates.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has looked into the FISA application used against U.S. Person Carter Page. Additionally, U.S. Attorney John Durham is said to be looking at the intelligence communities’ use of systems for spying and surveillance.

If the DOJ-NSD exploitation of the NSA database, and/or DOJ-NSD FISA abuse, and/or DOJ-NSD FARA corruption were ever to reach sunlight, current ICIG Atkinson -as the lawyer for the process- would be under a lot of scrutiny for his involvement.

Yes, that gives current ICIG Michael Atkinson a strong and corrupt motive to participate with the Schiff/Lawfare impeachment objective. 

Atkinson’s conflict-of-self-interest, and/or possible blackmail upon him by deep state actors who most certainly know his compromise, likely influenced his approach to this whistleblower complaint.   That would explain why the Dept. of Justice Office of Legal  Counsel so strongly rebuked Atkinson’s interpretation of his responsibility with the complaint.

In the Justice Department’s OLC opinion, they point out that Atkinson’s internal justification for accepting the whistleblower complaint was poor legal judgement.
[See Here]

I would say Atkinson’s decision is directly related to his own risk exposure:
.
Advertisements

at

The Agonies of the Patriotic Democrat


 Article by John Eidson in "The American Thinker":

My California cousin is a hair-on-fire liberal Democrat. That fact notwithstanding, he admirably belongs to the rapidly shrinking number of patriots in the party he’s supported all his adult life.  According to a 2018 Gallup survey,  patriotism is cratering in the modern Democratic Party, with less than a third of today’s Democrats extremely proud of their country.  Less than a third, and trending sharply downward. 

That should be troubling to my cousin.

When he started his career in the 1960s, patriotism ran so deep in both parties that I doubt it even occurred to Gallup to do a survey on love of country back then.  According to CNN, Gallup’s first survey on patriotic fervor wasn’t done until 2001.  But attitudes in political parties can change dramatically over time.

A sharp turn toward the hardest edge of the hard left
In addition to Gallup’s finding that love of country is dropping like a rock among Democrats, there are other clues that the party once led by genuine American patriots -- Democrat icons such Adlai Stevenson, JFK, and Hubert Humphrey -- has soured on the country those great men loved with all their heart.

From rank and file Democrats siding with NFL anthem kneelers to the San Francisco School Board voting to conceal a Depression-era mural depicting George Washington, indications abound that today’s Democrats see their country as an irreparably unfair and oppressive place.  And no wonder, because the modern Democratic Party has also given up on the two-party capitalist system that created the most free and prosperous nation the world has ever known.  According to another 2018 Gallup survey, an astounding 57% of today’s Democrats are infatuated with socialism.  A more recent poll, by Public Opinion Strategies, reported an even more mind-boggling finding: that 77% of Democrats are advocates of socialism, the principles  of which are outlined in The Communist Manifesto.

My cousin once told me that during trips he’d taken to socialist countries in connection with his job, he’d witnessed the glaring failures of socialism many times.  I don’t remember what got him started, but he began venting about the wretched conditions he observed in every socialist country he ever visited, all of them.  Obviously grateful that he was born in capitalist America -- he lives in a million-dollar home and owns a private plane -- he ended his anti-Marxist speech with this unambiguous declaration: “I want nothing to do with socialism.”

My cousin is a patriotic Democrat and a strident anti-socialist.  He loves his country and hates socialism, yet is totally blind to the profoundly un-American direction the party he supports has taken.  When I present him with credible information in that regard, such as the respected surveys cited above, he reflexively reaches deep into his tiny bag of rational rebuttals and then, upon finding it empty, responds with the kind of sarcastic, non-serious political comment that pollutes the web.

Birds of a feather
From the time Barack Obama announced for the presidency, my cousin was among his most enthusiastic supporters.  Having grown up in an era when black people were still being lynched, he saw the prospect of a black president as cause for hope that America would continue on the noble path of moving ever farther away from its deplorable history of slavery and segregation.  One of our aunts told me that the night Obama was elected, my cousin called her literally crying tears of joy.

My cousin still believes that Obama is the messianic figure he was portrayed as by a fawning media: a flawless American leader in love with his country and its two-party capitalist system.  Assuming my cousin is a patriot who sees socialism for the lie it is, he had to be taken aback to learn that Obama has associated all his life with a long line of influential mentors with deep contempt for America and its capitalist system.  The list of those Marxist birds of a feather includes:

Barack Obama, Sr., a Harvard-educated Kenyan Marxist whose political views inspired his son to write Dreams From My Father, the memoir in which the younger Obama revealed his “affinity for Marxist professors and radical student groups.”

Frank Marshall Davis, a pro-Soviet, card-carrying member of Communist Party USA mentioned by Obama in reverent terms 22 times in Dreams.

William Ayers, a self-declared communist revolutionary in whose living room Obama chose to launch his political career.

Saul Alinsky, the socialist community organizer so admired by Obama that he (Obama) taught Alinsky’s ends justify the means tactics to students at the University of Chicago.

Rev. Jeremiah “God d*mn America” Wright, whose sermons on Black Liberation Theology were regularly attended for twenty years by the Obamas.

Thanks to me, my cousin knows about those troubling associations with people who detest this country. (What he doesn’t know is there were many more such people in Obama’s past.)  He also learned from me that Obama vowed five days before his first election to fundamentally transform the United States of America. To fundamentally transform a nation means to bring about profound changes to its principles, values, and institutions. In the case of America, that means upending its economic and governing systems. America always needs improving, but is it such a sorry place that it must be fundamentally transformed?  Obama and the Democratic Party obviously think so, but I don’t think my cousin does, unless his views have undergone a fundamental transformation of their own.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that his views on socialism haven’t changed and that he is a patriot. If that’s the case, why won’t he acknowledge the devastating truth about the party he supports, a truth that’s staring him squarely in the face?

Here’s my theory.

No informed person can fail to recognize that the modern Democratic Party is attempting to fundamentally transform America into a single-party socialist nation. But because the human ego is loathe to admit it’s been duped, especially about politics, many Democrats who love their country will likely continue allowing themselves to be led like sheep into the closing noose of the hammer and sickle.

Like distracted grazers in lion country, patriotic Democrats like my cousin won’t realize what happened until it’s too late.
 
Image result for meme for pledge of allegiance
 

at