If the stock market is worried about the President Trump getting impeached it has a funny way of showing it: The Dow, the S&P and Nasdaq set new records Monday, buoyed by strong corporate earnings, a possible trade deal and the wide-spread belief among sophisticated investors that the US economy will continue to chug along handsomely.
Despite what you hear from doomsayers like the newly minted Dem front-runner Elizabeth Warren, the rising Trump economy is raising all boats, not just the fat cats on Wall Street. At least that’s what the people who have money in the game are saying, and their word counts a lot more than any leftist politician.
Of course, even in the best of times — and according to the data we are pretty close to them now with unemployment hovering at a 50-year-low of 3.6 percent — there are things to worry about. Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping may not reach their long-coveted trade deal. Sluggish business investment (which declined in the last quarter by an annualized rate of 3 percent after a 1 percent decline) could get even more sluggish, sending the modest economic growth of 1.9 percent in the past quarter into the red.
Wages are growing better than the dog-days of the Obama presidency, but growth has tapered off recently (to 3 percent in October) suggesting employers aren’t that worried about a tightening labor market and they’re slowing the pace of new hires. Meanwhile, the impeachment hearings could batter and bruise Trump so much that even an economic arsonist like Elizabeth Warren could slip through the electoral cracks and become president despite her fantastical utopian ideas of handing free stuff to everyone except wealth creators, who of course, she will tax so much they will stop creating any wealth.
More likely is that the current economy — which is strong and with a little luck likely to get stronger — will make Trump formidable in 2020.
The US economy grew nearly 2 percent last quarter, powered largely by continued strength of consumer spending, which grew solidly by 2.9 percent. People don’t generally spend money unless they’re feeling pretty good about their economic future, and you need more than the top 1 percent feeling good to accrue consumer spending growth like we now have.
In other words, the rich may be getting richer in the Trump economy, but so are most others.
Again, look at the numbers. I can’t wait for Warren & Co., to explain black unemployment, which has remained at record lows for the past three months. Yes, more needs to be done; black unemployment rate is at 5.4 percent compared to the overall 3.6 percent rate, but only a fool would argue that these numbers (possibly the biggest economic achievement of the Trump presidency) aren’t heading in the right direction, which is why for all of Warren’s class-warfare posturing, she has steered clear of them.
Keep in mind all this progress on the economy has been taking place in the face of prolonged business uncertainly as Trump fights his trade war with China. The president maintains he has good reasons to take on China’s abusive trade practices — from the theft of intellectual property to the uneven playing field faced by US companies doing business in the mainland — and he might have a point.
But there was an economic consequence to the tit-for-tat tariffs China and the US has been imposing on each other. As Trump and Xi move closer to ending the hostilities, the headache of uncertainty will be at the minimum removed. If they reach a decent deal allowing the likes of Chinese telecom company Huawei to have access to US markets, while US companies can have the same access to Chinese consumers, the economic benefits from both countries will be enormous.
I don’t know about you, but to me, a trade deal seems a lot more important for the markets, the economy and Trump’s re-election chances than some impeachment vote. And the best minds on Wall Street appear to agree.
I don’t know why this is hard for the news media. But if you don’t want to be hated by the American people, maybe stop being so damn terrible. Why in Lucifer’s reach is that such an insurmountable obstacle to these people?
Over the weekend, nine Mormons – all family members — were butchered by the narco-terrorists who pretty much control Northern Mexico.
You’d think the significant part of the story would be that Mexican drug cartels slaughtered nine women and children. Or maybe the fact that Northern Mexico is basically a rogue state run by narco-terrorists. Not to mention that this slaughter occurred just over our Southern border which could lead one to believe that narco-terrorists are a national security threat.
And if thought that was the significant part of the story, you would be wrong.
No, the real story according to those Brave Guardians of Truth, Justice, Freedom and Stuff isn’t the bloody narco-terrorist threat just south of our border, but those damn Mormons who got themselves killed.
Because apparently those Mormons had it coming!
I thought blaming the victim was wrong.
But then again, I’m not a Brave Guardian of Truth, Justice, Freedom and Stuff.
Five of the victims were children for crap’s sake!
This is just conjecture on my part, but I doubt that those five children have a “long history of violence.”
You know what I find infinitely more newsworthy?
The fact that one of the suspects in this brutal massacre was just apprehended in the town of Agua Prieta which is on the border with Arizona.
Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if we could use any and all means possible to secure our Southern Border to ensure that narco-terrorists who butcher women and children can’t threaten the American people?
But let’s not talk about that. Nosiree! Let’s talk about those weird Mormons and their “long history of violence.”
Listen up, garbage media. Unless those Mormons had a long history of beheadings, burying people in mass graves and butchering whole families, I think I’d rather focus on the long history of violence associated with Mexican drug cartels – especially since they effectively run the part of Mexico that borders the United States of America.
Is that really so hard to do?
Actually, for our garbage media, it is.
Because having to report on a clear and present threat to our homeland that exists just south of our border might confirm what President Trump has been saying all along – we have a crisis at our Southern border and it is, in fact, a national security threat.
Dr. Jack Devere Minzey, born 6 October 1928, died 8 April 2018, was the Dept. Head of Education at Eastern Michigan University as well as a prolific author of numerous books, (Editor's note) This was the last of his works:
Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can't settle the question through elections because they don't even agree that elections are how you decide who's in charge. That's the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.
The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it's not the first time they've done this. The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn't really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There's a pattern here.
What do sure odds of the Democrats rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don't accept the results of any election that they don't win.It means they don't believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections. That's a civil war.
There's no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.
This isn't dissent. It's not disagreement You can hate the other party. You can think they're the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don't win, what you want is a dictatorship.
Your very own dictatorship.
The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to Democrats, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it's inherently illegitimate. The Democrats lost Congress. They lost the White House So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats. Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can't scratch his own back without his say so, that's the civil war.
Our system of government is based on the constitution, but that's not the system that runs this country. The Democrat's system is that any part of government that it runs gets total and unlimited power over the country.
If the Democrats are in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. He can use the IRS as his own police force and imprison citizens who speak against him. He can provide guns and money (Fast and Furious) (Iran nuclear deal) to other countries to support his own agenda, and watch while one of America's Ambassador's is dragged through the streets and murdered doing nothing to aid our citizens. His power is unlimited. He's a dictator. But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the President can't do anything. He isn't even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty that his predecessor illegally invented. A Democrat in the White House has 'discretion' to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn't even have the 'discretion' to reverse him. That's how the game is played. That's how our country is run. Sad but true, although the left hasn't yet won that particular fight.
When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren't even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws. Under Obama, a state wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying that California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries. The Constitution has something to say about that. Whether it's Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land. This is what I call a moving dictatorship
Donald Trump has caused the Shadow Government to come out of hiding: Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can't serve in if you're not a member. If you haven't been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren't in the club. And Trump isn't in the club. He brought in a bunch of people who aren't in the club with him.
Now we're seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.
That's not a free country.
It's not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary take out an 'insurance policy' against Trump winning the election. It's not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition. It's not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media. It's not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn't supposed to win did.
Have no doubt, we're in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and a leftist Democrat professional government.
WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT – Prosecutor Brandon Van Grack sends a letter to Flynn’s defense team today containing a stunning, almost impossible to comprehend, admission of a mistake central to the claims of the prosecution. In March 2018 the FBI presented notes taken by agents Pientka and Strzok, now they say they made a ‘mistake’.
For almost two years the DOJ misidentified, misattributed, and never corrected that the authors of the Flynn interview notes were actually reversed. All of the notes attributed to FBI Agent Peter Strzok actually were taken by FBI Agent Joseph Pientka, and vice-versa:
What kind of fuckery is this? The DOJ never confirmed the authorship of the FBI notes that are central to the FD-302, upon which the entire prosecution claim of Flynn lying to investigators is based? …Seriously?
The entire FBI case against Flynn; meaning the central element that he lied to FBI investigators (he didn’t); is predicated on the FD-302 interview reports generated by the two FBI agents; later discovered to have been edited, shaped and approved by Andrew McCabe…. And for almost two years the entire outline of their documented evidence has been misattributed?
C’mon man. This is sketchy as heck.
Obviously what triggered this re-review of the notes was a smart sur-surreply from the defense that highlighted how Peter Strzoks notes were far too neat, organized and well constructed to have been written during an actual interview. [SEE HERE]
For the prosecution to now reverse course and say the agent attribution was transposed, is either the biggest screw-up in a high profile case…. OR, the prosecution now needs to reverse the note-takers due to the exact, and common sense, reasons highlighted by the defense.
This is so far beyond sketchy the light from where sketchy emanates won’t reach this sketchy location for a year.
This ain’t no ordinary ‘whoops, my bad‘…. move along, move along folks.
So the prosecution didn’t change authorship of the individual FD-302 reports, but now changes authorship of the agent notes that underwrite the FD-302 reports?
Sorry, I ain’t buying what they’re selling.
Hopefully, at the very least, Judge Sullivan requests Agent Strzok and Agent Pientka to appear in his court and asks them to swear to the authorship. This is nuts.
Michael Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, appears on Fox Late Night to discuss the stunning letter from the DOJ that for the past two years they have attributed the wrong notes to the wrong FBI agent. What a mess.
I was going to write Part II of why California is burning. But that takes a back seat to impeachment and the latest economic news.
So, I’ll shorten “Why California is burning” story. California is burning and blacked out because of insane liberal policies. First and foremost, as I pointed out in my last column, hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted over the past 20 years paying for illegal immigration, instead of upgrading and modernizing the California electric grid. The chickens have come home to roost.
The secondary cause for California’s nightmare is environmental policies that won’t allow brush clearing, controlled burns, or cutting down dead trees.
The third cause is climate change mandates that force utility companies to waste billions of dollars annually on green energy (wind and solar).
So, California consumers get the highest energy bills in the nation, the highest taxes in the nation, and blackouts when the wind blows. Congratulations, you just won the one-in-a-billion lottery!
I could solve California’s problems quickly. Clean out the forest and redirect all those billions of dollars to upgrading and modernizing your electrical grid. Simple. Problem solved.
Now, onto the two most important stories in America today.
Both play right into President Trump’s hands. Impeachment and the economy. They are linked together like Yin and Yang. Both storylines will lead to a Trump re-election electoral landslide.
First, impeachment. The game is on. The House voted along hyper-partisan lines to open the impeachment inquiry. And the Democrat Party marched in lock-step like sheep off a cliff.
How bad is impeachment for Democrats? A New York Times-Siena College battlegrounds poll released this week found that majorities of voters in every important swing state oppose impeachment. Worse news for Democrats, even larger majorities of independent voters in those same states oppose impeachment.
No big deal, unless Democrats have any interest in winning Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona.
If not, don’t sweat it.
I’ve seen a half dozen other polls- all with the same results. Trust me, this impeachment witch-hunt is the biggest mistake ever made by Democrats.
Now to the economy. More great news late last week. Actually, amazing news.
The Trump economy added 128,000 jobs in October. That number blew away the economists’ estimate of 75,000. This was despite a massive General Motors strike. Take that away and the number would have been in the neighborhood of 200,000 new jobs.
More importantly, the August and September jobs reports were revised dramatically higher- which means the economy is much stronger than initially reported. September was revised up by 44,000 jobs. August was revised up by 51,000 jobs. That brought the three month average up to 176,000 new jobs per month.
The overall unemployment rate of 3.6% remained at or near historic lows. The total amount of Americans employed jumped to 158.5 million, a new all-time high.
And average hourly wages went up too- a year-over-year gain of 3%. Everyone is working and everyone’s salary is going up.
Black unemployment dropped to the lowest ever. Yes, Trump is some “racist.” With racists like this, who needs friends?
To date, Trump has added over 6.5 million new jobs. At the exact same time in his presidency, Obama had lost 2.3 million jobs. That means Trump has beaten Obama by almost 9 million jobs.
That’s why impeachment is linked to Trump’s economy. They are Yin and Yang. Because what can Democrats say in the face of these great economic numbers? They’ve got nothing. If I was a Democrat leader, I’d talk impeachment too. It’s their only card to play.
So, anyone want to play poker? I’ll put the Trump economy up against the Democrat impeachment inquiry all day long.
Good luck to Democrats. You’re gonna need it. I’ll take the Trump economy and raise you 350 electoral votes. If I was you, I’d fold quickly, before you get hurt.
The possibility of adding Rep. Jim Jordan to the HPSCI was raised. Jordan has been an effective questioner and communicator for the republicans in the House, and moving him to HPSCI would allow him to participate in the public impeachment hearing controlled by Adam Schiff.
Jordan responded to that possibility yesterday on Fox News.
Pres Trump salutes as he boards Air Force One at JFK Airport, Dec 2, 2017. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters) The president bets that a booming economy, a beefed-up military, and U.S. energy dominance will deter enemies without the need for preemptive invasions.
Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought to overturn 75 years of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, especially as it applied to the Middle East.
From 1946 to 1989, the Cold War logic was to use both surrogates and U.S. expeditionary forces to stop the spread of Communist insurrections and coups — without confronting the nuclear-armed USSR directly unless it became a matter of perceived Western survival, as it did with the Berlin airlift and the Cuban missile crises.
That logic led to major conflicts like Vietnam and Korea, limited wars in the Middle East and Balkans, interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and occasional nation-building in conquered lands. Tens of thousands of Americans died, trillions of dollars were spent, and the Soviet Union and most of its satellites vanished. “We won the Cold War” was more or less true.
Such preemptory American interventions still continued over the next 30 years of the post–Cold War “new world order.” Now the threat was not Russian nukes but confronting new enemies such as radical Islam and a rogue’s gallery of petty but troublesome nuts, freaks, and dictators — Granada’s Hudson Austin, an unhinged Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, Hezbollah’s terrorists in Lebanon, Nicaraguan Communist Daniel Ortega, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, the gang leader Mohamed Aidid of Somalia, the former Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, arch terrorist Osama bin Laden, the macabre al-Qaeda and ISIS, and on and on.
These put-downs, some successful and some not so much, were apparently viewed by the post–Cold War establishment as our versions of the late Roman Republic and Empire policies of mowing the lawn, with an occasional weeding out of regional nationalists and insurrectionists like Jugurtha, Mithridates, Vercingetorix, Ariovistus, Boudicca, and the like. The theory was that occasionally knocking flat a charismatic brute discouraged all others like him from trying to emulate his revolt and upend the international order. Having one or two legions always on the move often meant that most others could stay in their barracks. And it kept the peace, or so the U.S., like Rome, more or less believed.
But the problem with American policy after the Cold War and the end of the Soviet nuclear threat was that the U.S. was not really comfortable as an imperial global watchdog, we no longer had a near monopoly on the world economy that subsidized these expensive interventions, and many of these thugs did not necessarily pose a direct threat to American interests — perhaps ISIS, an oil-rich Middle East dictator, and radical Islamists excepted. What started as a quick, successful take-out of a monster sometimes ended up as a long-drawn out “occupation” in which all U.S. assets of firepower, mobility, and air support were nullified in the dismal street fighting of a Fallujah or a Mogadishu.
The bad guys were bothersome and even on occasion genocidal, and their removal sometimes improved the lot of those of the ground — but not always. When things got messy — such as in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia — it was not clear whether the American use of force resulted in tactical success leading to strategic advantage. Often preemptive insertion of troops either did not further U.S. deterrence or actually undermined it — as in the case of the “Arab Spring” bombing in Libya.
At home, in a consistent pattern, the most vociferous advocates of preemptory war usually claimed prescient brilliance, as when the American military rapidly dislodged the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. But then came the occupation and post-war anarchy. As American dead mounted, the mission mysteriously creeped into nation-building. Sometimes, in the post-invasion chaos, the once noble liberated victims became the opportunistic victimizers. Depressed, some of the original architects of preemption blamed those who had listened to them. The establishment’s calling card became, “My weeks-long brilliant theoretical preemption was ruined by your actual botched decade-long occupation.” In extremis, few kept their support; most abandoned it.
Into this dilemma charged Donald Trump, who tried to square the old circle by boasting that he would “bomb the s*** out of ISIS” (and he mostly did that). Yet he also pledged to avoid optional wars in the Middle East — given that they did not pencil out to the Manhattan developer as a cost-benefit profit for America. We had become the world’s largest large oil producer anyway without worrying very much about how many barrels of oil a post-Qaddafi Libya or the Iranian theocrats pumped each day, and our rivals, like China and Russia, would soon find out that their involvement in the Middle East would likely not pencil out.
Trump started well enough. He backed down the provocative North Koreans and Iranians with tougher sanctions, while refusing to use kinetic force to reply to their rather pathetic provocations. He bombed ISIS but yanked American “trip wire” troops out of the Kurdish-Turkish battle zones in Syria, and he green-lighted the military’s killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He ratcheted up sanctions against Russia and armed Putin’s enemies without committing to defend any of the old republics of the Soviet Union. He increased the defense budget and boomed the economy but did not use such newly acquired power other than against ISIS.
Rarely has such an empowered military relied so much on economic sanctions. And rarely have leftist pacifist advocates of using sanctions and boycotts so damned Trump’s reluctance to launch missiles and drop bombs — the only common denominator being that whatever the orange man is for, they are against.
Trump’s apparent theory is that time is on his side. The Palestinians are cut off from U.S. funds; their U.N. surrogates are orphaned from the U.S. The U.S. Embassy is in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights are not going back to Syria. It is up to the West Bank and Gaza to change the Middle East dynamic, since their Gulf paymasters could care less about them, given the Palestinians’ romance with an Iran that is slowly going broke.
North Korea is squeezed by toughed-up sanctions. They can conduct missile tests, threaten, and cajole, but ultimately their people will be eating grass if they don’t wish to deal. And if they do launch a missile toward the U.S., they are convinced that Trump will launch a lot more against them.
Iran wants a confrontation before the election to undermine the Trump Electoral College base of support. So Trump is apparently willing to overlook such petty slights as the downing of the American drone by Iranian forces. But the Iranians must know that if they start targeting U.S. ships, or attacking NATO allied vessels and planes, Trump will likely restore deterrence by one-off, disproportionate air and missile attacks against Iranian naval and air bases — without intervening on the ground and without worrying that Iranian oil will go off the market entirely.
So there is a sort of Trump doctrine that grew in part out of Trump’s campaign promises and in part from the strategic assessment in 2016-17 by then national-security adviser H.R. McMaster, outlining a new “principled realism.” The net result is not to nation-build, preempt, or worry much about changing fetid countries to look like us, but to disproportionately respond when attacked or threatened, and in a manner that causes real damage, without the insertion of U.S. ground troops, in the fashion of the past 75 years.
Balance in achieving deterrence is the key. If Trump’s protestations that he does not wish to take enemy lives or conduct endless wars for no profit encourage enemy adventurism, then he will have to respond forcefully when American forces are attacked — but in a way that is not open-ended. And that usually means not through the use of ground troops that involve wars that, in Trump’s mind, create bad optics and poor ratings back home.
There are three ways of losing deterrence. One is to bluster, boast, and threaten and then do little — as with Barack Obama’s bombast about red lines in Syria.
A second is to reach out and appease a thug who has no intention of seeing outreach as anything other than laxity to be exploited. The Obama administration’s Russian reset combined the worst elements of this strategy: alternately courting and lecturing Putin, while doing nothing as he invaded former republics and returned to the Middle East. With Recep Erdogan, Trump is in danger of following the disastrous Obama model. More than most dictators, Erdogan views magnanimity with contempt and as a sign of weakness, rather than a gesture to be reciprocated in kind.
A third way of losing deterrence is to get bogged down in a quagmire that encourages other would-be terrorists, revolutionaries, and psychopaths to try instigating more of the same. Afghanistan and the Iraq, from 2003 to 2006, are good examples of gridlock. The Libya project of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton is a perfect case of hasty bombing followed by embarrassed indifference to the resulting chaos, and then withdrawal after the loss of four Americans. When Ronald Reagan inserted Marines into Lebanon, saw them blown up, and then yanked them, almost everyone concluded that Hezbollah and Iran had a free hand to do whatever they wanted. And they mostly did.
There is one final paradox related to the dilemma of maintaining deterrence without invading hostile countries. Trump apparently believes that a booming economy, a well-funded muscular military, and plenty of U.S.-produced oil and gas give America enormous power and a range of choices that recent presidents lacked.
The result would be that when forced to respond to an attack on an American asset or ally, the U.S. could do so disproportionately, destructively, and without any red line, promise, or virtue-signaling about what it might do next — given its unique ability to hit abroad without being hit at home, and with a well-oiled economy that has no need to beg the Saudis to be nice, or to urge the Iranians to pump more, or to get the Venezuelans back into the exporting business.
Add up all these paradoxes, and I suppose we could call the Trump administration’s idea of deterrence without preemptive intervention as either “Live and let live” — or, more macabrely, “Live — and let die.” Either way, the paradox is to maintain critical deterrence against American enemies to prevent a war, but without Pavlovian interventions, and without being baited into optional military action that is antithetical to the national mood that got Trump elected.
When former FBI ‘small group’ members Andrew McCabe, James Baker, Mike Kortan, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were working on their political operation to protect Hillary Clinton and remove Donald Trump they had three specific journalists (narrative engineers) atop their speed dials.
Texts, emails, and documents released over the past three years showed that whenever the small group wanted to leak they preferred: Devlin Barrett, Robert Costa and Matt Zapotosky at the Washington Post. [Example – source, pg 5]
So when we see Barrett, Costa and Zapotosky getting the gang back together to write about the upcoming IG report, it is worth reviewing their carefully engineered narrative. [All emphasis mine]
(Via Washington Post) Justice Department officials are trying to releasein the coming weeks a potentially explosive inspector general report about the FBI’s investigation into President Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to multiple people familiar with the effort.
Interesting start to the expository: “trying to release“; the implication here is somewhat of an internal struggle between two opposing forces. Those who are defending the deep state, and by extension the small group, and those attempting sunlight.
Of course the customary anonymous disclaimer “people familiar with the effort”, relates to those inside the FBI/DOJ who are still working earnestly to carry on the corrupt endeavor. Unfortunately it is not a surprise that FBI Director Chris Wray and AG Bill Barr have no removed the career resistance operatives inside the institutions.
[…] One person involved in the discussions said the target date for the report’s release has been Nov. 20, but another indicated that the Justice Department is unlikely to deliver it by then and that it is more likely to come after Thanksgiving because of the complicated and contentiousmix of legal, classification and political issues at play.
Where “complicated and contentious” is again representative of the internal dynamic between those who are hell bent on covering-up the corruption, and those who are less inclined. Those who want the full disinfecting distribution want a faster release; those who want the diluted version, prefer delay.
[…] The report’s findings will mark a major public test of Attorney General William P. Barr’s credibility, given his past suggestions of significant problems with the investigative decisions made by former FBI leaders involved in the case.
Whereby if AG Bill Barr allows the toxic scale of the group’s activity to be diluted, then he will be “credible” to the institution. However, if Barr supports an aggressive report, which outlines the full scale of corruption, then he is “less credible” to those who cherish the institutions. All of the sources for this WaPo expository are, as you would expect, career members of the institutional preservation effort.
[…] The findings by Inspector General Michael Horowitz also will set the stage for the separate but related investigation led by U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is investigating how U.S. intelligence agencies pursued allegations that Russian agents might have conspired with Trump associates during the 2016 campaign. Officials have recently said that investigation is pursuing potential crimes.
Despite the Mueller report stating conclusively that no Americans participated with any Russian interest to actively influence the 2016 election, the Washington Post must keep the resistance narrative. Hence: “might have conspired”.. Apparently the conduct being criminal in scope remains a concern for the usurping agents.
[…] Barr has spent weeks working on the declassification decisions, as Horowitz scrutinized large volumes of classified information to assess how the FBI launched and pursued the investigation and related cases, people familiar with the matter said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report is not yet public.
Again, anonymous leakers inside the current DOJ and FBI apparatus. This ongoing process of members of the intelligence community leaking to the media should simply be recognition that Barr and Wray have changed little within the environment. If there was concern, there would be no leaking. There is no concern.
But a number of key figures in the probe have yet to receive draft sections of the inspector general’s findings, suggesting that the public release is still at least a week away, according to people familiar with the matter. It is possible, too, that as draft language of the report is shared with different people, the entire process could become bogged down by disputes about the accuracy of certain passages.
This paragraph is interesting. Aside from our previous predictions of how the internal battle would evidence by how the ‘executive summary’ is written; the small group members have not yet received their “Principal Review” segments.
This is specifically Comey, McCabe, Baker, Strzok, Page, Yates, Rosenstein and McCord speaking to the Washington Post. Those officials would likely be recipients of the report specific to their conduct. Apparently the principal review has not taken place.
[…] Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, plans to meet Wednesday with Barr to talk about the report’s planned rollout, according to people familiar with the matter. The inspector general’s work is independent of the attorney general, but in this case, the two must work closely on the release because the inspector general does not have the authority to declassify information. Barr does. Horowitz is not expected to attend the meeting with Graham, these people said.
Interesting projection here from within the small group in that they view any discussions between Bill Barr and politicians as a “planned rollout”. The rolling out of a specific narrative is exactly the process the small group used when they engaged with their media co-conspirators for the Russia Collusion narrative.
[…] Current and former law enforcement officials have said the Russia investigation began in late July 2016 with an examination of George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser whose statements and behavior raised suspicions among diplomats and intelligence officials. After Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017, the Russia investigation was handed over to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who filed a lengthy two-volume report of his conclusions earlier this year, deciding there was no proof of a conspiracy between Trump associates and the Kremlin, and declining to reach a conclusion about whether the president obstructed justice. Barr examined Mueller’s evidence and concluded he had not.
The small group is sticking to their origination date of July 31st for “Crossfire Hurricane” and they are informing all fellow participants to stick to that date.
[…] The current and former officials insist the investigation was handled correctly and carefully, and argue it would have been a dereliction of duty on their part not to investigate alarming allegations that members of a presidential campaign were conspiring with a foreign power. (read full article)
The engineers almost said by the book, but realized it might not be a good catch-phrase all things considered. Again, it’s interesting to pause and consider who was defining the crazy investigative predicate as “alarming allegations”?… when you consider they affirm all of the predicate surrounds George Papadopoulos (here’s where the Mifsud aspect is so key).
If Mifsud is a western intelligence asset, everything about the origination of crossfire hurricane is an extinction level event for the claims of the CIA, FBI and DOJ participants.
Keep in mind, a few days AFTER the Mueller team used the Papadopoulos mistake of wrongfully remembering the date of first contact with Mifsud to charge him with a 1001 violation of lying to investigators; and therein specifically identifying Mifsud as a Russian operative attempting to influence Papadopoulos; the same Joseph Mifsud is pictured (October 21st, 2017) hanging out with Boris Johnson & other officials in London.
If Mifsud, the Russian operative, was such a danger, why was he innocuously hanging out with western politicians without a care in the world? ….
Joseph Mifsud (left), Boris Johnson (center), Prasenjit Kumar (right)
OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 7:00 AM PT — Wednesday, November 6, 2019
President Trump is gearing up for the latest stop in his 2020
reelection bid. He will visit Monroe, Louisiana Wednesday night, where
he is expected to deliver remarks to a crowd of supporters at a ‘Keep
America Great’ rally.
During his visit, the president is set to stump for businessman Eddie
Rispone who is facing off against Democrat John Bel Edwards in the
state’s gubernatorial elections next week. The president has praised
Rispone, saying he will stand with him to create jobs and protect the
Second Amendment.
The visit will mark the first time a sitting U.S. president has made
an official visit to Monroe since Ronald Reagan back in 1983. One
America News will have full coverage of President Trump’s campaign rally
starting at 8PM EST and 5PM PST.
While the mainstream media refuses to carry President Trump’s speeches, One America News and KlowdTV will now stream them worldwide to anyone with an internet connection. The service will be absolutely free!
Impeachment is going so poorly for the media and other Democrats that “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd was forced to broadcast false information to support it.
A graphic was posted on Sunday’s show that purported to identify how many people in the president’s party voted in support of an impeachment inquiry in the cases of Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. It accurately noted that 31 Democrats voted in favor of impeachment proceedings for Clinton. But it inaccurately claimed that a single Republican had voted in favor of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment rules last week.
There are multiple problems with this graphic. For one thing, zero Republicans voted with House Democrats last week. Zero point zero. Zilch. Nada. None. For another, Todd’s team is hiding the bipartisan nature of the opposition to the vote last week. Not only did not a single Republican vote with Democrats, two Democrats voted with Republicans in opposition.
Todd knows that no Republicans voted for impeachment, despite the graphic he put up on national television. In fact, he said during the show, “I have one with an asterisk here. I don’t know what you do with Justin Amash. It’s not a zero. At the same time, he’s not a Republican anymore.”
I know what you do with that, Chuck. You don’t lie and call him a Republican. Todd himself gave Amash national media attention for leaving the Republican Party in dramatic fashion, interviewing him two weeks prior. In the first six seconds of the interview, he noted twice that Amash was not a Republican.
The impeachment inquiry, such as it is, has tremendous struggles. It’s been conducted in secret, with heavy control from Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the man who falsely claimed for years he had evidence of Trump’s treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The inquiry is being handled by him because the more appropriate committee chair, Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., made a mess of the previous impeachment efforts by mismanaging his hearings with Robert Mueller, John Dean, and Corey Lewandowski. In fact, the Mueller hearing was such a disaster for impeachment efforts that it more or less killed a multi-year effort put in place by Resistance bureaucrats and their supporters.
Schiff has told witnesses not to answer questions when those questions would help Trump, and has badgered witnesses who were deemed insufficiently supportive of his efforts to undo the 2016 election. He and the whistleblower both lied about their coordination prior to the complaint being filed. And while he originally demanded the whistleblower’s testimony, after that coordination was revealed, he has attempted to prevent the testimony during which difficult questions would be asked.
Worse, the witnesses thus far can not point to a single crime, much less a high crime, for which to impeach the president. Instead, the witnesses either broadly support the president’s handling of foreign policy or are livid with rage over his disagreement with their foreign policy views.
While the losing faction in 2016 has great trouble with Trump’s less interventionist foreign policy, it is not actually grounds for impeachment. Even if one were to take issue with that foreign policy, nobody has been able to point to a single crime that took place in any interaction with Ukraine, much less one committed by the president, which is a serious barrier for an impeachment inquiry.
Also, unlike the Russia collusion hoax, Republican politicians aren’t falling for it at all. For impeachment to have even a scintilla of legitimacy, it must be broadly bipartisan. That’s not my opinion, it was the standard Democrats held until moments ago.
In March, Pelosi told the Washington Post, “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.” A year earlier she said, “Impeachment is a very serious matter. If it happens, it has to be a bipartisan initiative.”
Years prior, Nadler himself said, “There must never be a narrowly voted impeachment or an impeachment substantially supported by one of our major political parties and largely opposed by the other. Such an impeachment would lack legitimacy, would produce divisiveness and bitterness in our politics for years to come. And will call into question the very legitimacy of our political institutions.”
The only Republican to be broadly supportive of the latest anti-Trump effort is Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, a man whose opposition to Trump is seen as more ego-based than principled. In fact, a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll of Americans showed that only 2 percent of Americans view Romney “very favorably,” and only 18 percent view him favorably at all.
Polls that were working very hard to show growing support for impeachment have seen decreased support as Americans learn more about the probe, settling into a proxy for questions of Trump’s approval or favorability. National Review editor Rich Lowry noted in that “Meet the Press” panel that even in a poll that showed a slight majority of Americans favoring impeachment, a larger majority opposed removal in favor of waiting to see election results in 2020.
Polls also show that impeachment is disfavored in critical battleground states. And according to the latest Fox News poll, only 38 percent of independents favored impeachment. With Republicans and Democrats mirror images of each other on the issue, that’s a huge problem for Democrats and the media.
Inside of newsrooms, broadcast studios, and Twitter, impeachment is going according to plan. Outside of those bubbles, it’s not. Republicans are handling efforts to unseat Trump much in the way that Democrats would handle efforts to unseat Barack Obama or Republicans would handle efforts to unseat George W. Bush. They’re not finding them remotely compelling. And until they do, even the more feckless Republican politicians aren’t going to fall for impeachment unless they’re heavily incentivized to do so by outside interests.
