CNN And MSNBC Analysts Sign Petition Urging William Barr To Resign

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Trump Should Keep Shaming the Justice Department on Twitter

Adam Mill for American Greatness

The Justice Department has taken the blindfold off Lady Justice so it can protect its political allies and punish its enemies. Courts and Congress have been powerless to shame them. If a few tweets are causing mild discomfort inside the department, the president should keep tweeting about this as often as possible.

According to Andrew McCabe’s attorney, the former deputy director of the FBI should not be prosecuted for lying to agents because the Department of Justice has so many examples of unprosecuted lying within its ranks that it’s basically part of the culture.

“Additionally,” the New York Times reported on Friday, “people who are charged with lying to the F.B.I. are typically accused of committing the offense in the course of a criminal investigation, not an administrative inquiry . . . Mr. McCabe’s lawyers made the case to Mr. Rosen that other former officials were not prosecuted after they were caught lying to the inspector general’s investigators.” 

That must be frustrating reading for General Michael Flynn who, based in part on McCabe’s essential statement, stands convicted of lying to the FBI with no underlying crime. McCabe, as I reported here, is the only person who can testify that Flynn was placed on notice that his conversation with the FBI was part of an investigation. The Wall Street Journal has an account of just how dirty the entrapment really was. The government has to show that Flynn lied about a matter within its “jurisdiction.” McCabe’s testimony, if Flynn’s case went to trial, would be essential because the phone call between Flynn and the ambassador of Russia was not a crime and he’s never been charged for anything he said on that call. 

So, in sum, the Justice Department is relying on a confirmed liar to testify about the importance and seriousness of telling the truth to the FBI.

The Times article also reports that McCabe’s lawyers argued that he didn’t “lie,” he misremembered the facts. Didn’t the agents who interviewed Flynnsay exactly the same thing after interviewing Flynn—that his inaccuracies about his phone call with the Russian ambassador were not intentional misstatements? Don’t believe those agents? How about McCabe’s own testimony? 

As reported by the Daily Caller, McCabe has said the “conundrum that we faced on their return from the interview is that although [the agents] didn’t detect deception in the statements that he made in the interview . . . the statements were inconsistent with our understanding of the conversation that he had actually had with the ambassador.” McCabe recovered from the conundrum enough, however, to push successfully for Flynn’s prosecution. One wonders whether McCabe’s personal grudge against Flynn might have played a role in pushing forward with the prosecution.

The Times also suggests that the Justice Department’s refusal to prosecute McCabe, “also appears to be a sign that Attorney General William P. Barr wants to show that the Justice Department is independent from Mr. Trump: The notification came a day after Mr. Barr publicly challenged the president to stop attacking law enforcement officials on Twitter and said the criticisms were making his job more difficult.” 

Barr, you may remember, criticized the president’s tweet condemning federal prosecutors’ recommendation of a nine-year sentence to punish Roger Stone for lying during a congressional investigation.

Stone, like McCabe, supposedly lied when there was no underlying crime. Stone had no inside knowledge of Wikileaks or alleged Russian hacking. He made some wild (and wrong) guesses about when the documents would be released based on his interpretation of publicly-available news accounts. He was convicted of lying about having emails that contained this kind of idle speculation. If he had no contact with Russians or Wikileaks, why was he being investigated in the first place? You know the answer.

In other words, the defenses of “I misremembered” or “I wasn’t lying to cover-up an underlying crime,” are available only to figures people like Andrew McCabe inside the velvet rope of the upper tier of the “Just-Us” system. But if you’re on the lower tier, or worse, if you helped Trump get elected, those defenses are not available. Different rules for different levels of privilege.

You might hope the attorney general would forgive our elected president for criticizing a system that metes out punishment differently depending on how the Justice Department apparatchiks evaluate the politics of its target. The golden thread of control connecting the ballot box to the awesome power of the criminal prosecutor passes through the elected president. One might naïvely believe that Article II of the Constitution actually mandates that the president intercede when he sees such injustice.

No, says Bill Barr. Trump’s tweets make his job “impossible.” From inside the Justice Department, they don’t see the problem as one of unequal justice. They see the problem as the president using Twitter to tattle on the Justice Department to the public. 

To Barr’s credit, he has now tapped an outside prosecutor to “help” former Mueller team member Brandon Van Grack with the Flynn case. That’s something, but it’s not what’s called for in this instance. Van Grack appears to have been involved in some very questionable Justice Department behavior and should not be in a position to compound his many misdeeds.

Barr should spend a little more time addressing the obvious misconduct of many of the hoax figures and a little less time trying to stop his boss from informing the electorate of valid complaints about the Justice Department. 

For instance, there has never been anyone prosecuted for the many lies to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court about the government’s secret campaign of spying on Americans. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for the CIA’s hacking of Senate computers. Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS have not been prosecuted though they appear to have violated the Foreign Agent Registration Act repeatedly (including by representing Russian interests) and colluded with foreigners to directly interfere in the 2016 election. Simpson has never been prosecuted in spite of a criminal referral from Congress. 

The Justice Department is still obstructing reporter Sharyl Attkisson who had her computer illegally hacked by the government. I caught former FBI director James Comey red-handed lying to the FISA court here. He, of course, is still getting rich from the Russia-collusion hoax. Then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress to cover-up the government’s mass-surveillance program on Americans. 

The Justice Department has taken the blindfold off Lady Justice so it can protect its political allies and punish its enemies. Courts and Congress have been powerless to shame them. If a few tweets are causing mild discomfort inside the Justice Department, then I hope the president keeps tweeting about this as often as possible.

What Are Bureaucrats Really Good For?

I finished watching Deepwater Horizon a little while ago.

Exciting movie, but watching the final minutes reminded me of why we need to reign in the Bureaucracy.

Hollywood in their infinite wisdom lead anyone who watched the movie to believe BP was wholly responsible for that 87 day debacle in the Gulf of Mexico.

That well blew out in April 2010 and spewed oil until July 2010.

In 2010 my company was still operating and I contacted Transocean to see if they needed anything some of my Hydraulic experts could offer, we ended up sending two engineers to Houston to work with BP and Transocean analyzing what went wrong with the blowout preventer and look at why the casing shear ram failed.

What I learned from my engineers convinced me too much of this problem was caused by inept incompetent bureaucrats in Washington DC working in the Obama Administration.

Had the regulators in the Obama administration's Energy Department's not given BP one exemption after another for short cuts that led to the explosion, this disaster would not have happened.

Democrats in Congress enjoyed BP bashing in hearings, but what about the "regulators" who gave permission for BP's short cuts, etc.

What are their names?

Why did they issue the exemptions?

Are they still in their jobs?

The oil industry had been going to double casing ram shears a year before this disaster, yet the Obama regulators gave BP a waiver for this $15 million piece of equipment.

Remember how Obama exhibited shocking inability to marshall government forces to protect our Gulf is beyond a broken campaign promise, it was a typical betrayal of his oath to protect our country.

Like I said, a great movie and enjoyable to watch if you don't know some of the background.

Obama and his lackys cost 11 men their lives, BP over $20 billion, Transocean $5 billion, Halliburton $3 billion and untold pain and discomfort to people living along the Gulf simply because bureaucrats could not do their jobs.

Hell even the NYT's actually reported Obama and his lackys let America down, anyone remember Tide Pod Nancy Pelosi or Chuckles Schumer demanding he be impeached?

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/us/21blowout.html

How the Justice Department Avoids Becoming the ‘Injustice Department’

Roger Kimball for American Greatness

It was good news that the Justice Department announced Friday it had engaged an outside prosecutor to review the government’s case against Michael Flynn. But restoring the department’s credibility will be a long and arduous process.

The news Friday that the Department of Justice had decided not to charge former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe got me thinking once again about the legend chiseled into the façade of the Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.”

Is that what we have? Michael Horowitz, the Obama-appointed inspector general, concluded that McCabe had lied under oath. But as Andrew McCarthy noted last summer, “Government officials who leak while demonstrating their contempt for Donald Trump manage to land on their feet.” Like James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, McCabe left his government job to be a commentator on CNN.

Clapper, McCarthy pointed out,

is best known for lying to Congress about the government’s bulk collection of telephone metadata . . . and for discussing Steele dossier information with CNN shortly before the network published a report about it . . . CNN missed out on former Obama CIA director John Brennan, who falsely denied to the Senate that his agency spied on the chamber’s intelligence committee. Brennan, who said he was really sorry, was inked by MSNBC.

Contrast what happened with McCabe, Clapper, and Brennan with what happened to George Papadopoulos, who told the FBI he had met the international man of mystery Joseph Mifsud slightly before he had joined the Trump campaign when, in fact, it was slightly after he joined. Result: he is nabbed, disembarking from a plane at night, thrown into jail overnight, and was later sentenced to two weeks in jail.

Or contrast McCabe’s fate with that of Roger Stone, a former advisor to and pal of Donald Trump’s. Stone was subjected to one of Robert Mueller’s signature pre-dawn raids, hit with seven felony counts for allegedly obstructing Congress’s Russia investigation, lying, and threatening a witness (who later said he did not feel threatened). Prosecutors—including a couple who were on team Mueller—initially recommended a jail term of nine years—for a nonviolent first-offender.

A few days ago, news broke that the Justice Department had recommended a lighter sentence. The Left, true to form, went nuts.

“It’s only because Stone is a friend of Trump’s that he is getting special treatment,” etc, etc., as if three years in the slammer (which is what the revised recommendation amounted to) was something for Stone to celebrate.

But, as Kimberly Strassel noted in her Wall Street Journal column, the revised recommendation had nothing to do with Trump. “[T]he decision to reverse,” she wrote, “was made well before Mr. Trump tweeted, and with no communication with the White House.”

Enter Tomeka Hart, the foreman of the jury that convicted Stone. We never would have heard of her if she had not publicly slammed the Justice Department’s decision to seek a lighter sentence. “It pains me,” she said, “to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors.”

Google knows everything. It took only a few clicks to reveal that Hart is a left-wing activist and Trump hater. As The Hill reported, Hart referred to the president with a hashtag of “klanpresident,” spoke about “Trump and the white supremacist racists,” and shouted “Shame, shame, shame!” at a protest outside a Trump hotel.

Now what? On Friday, Stone’s attorney asked again for a new trial (the initial request, on Wednesday, was denied). Stay tuned.

In her Wall Street Journal column, Strassel went on to say that the Justice Department’s revised sentencing recommendation shows Attorney General Barr “getting rid of politics in justice—as he promised. In his confirmation hearing, the attorney general vowed an ‘even-handed application of the law’ rather than judgments based on politics or favoritism.”

It would be nice to restore some faith in that lofty-sounding ideal chiseled into the pediment of the Supreme Court. I do believe that William Barr is endeavoring to recover the impartiality without which any Justice Department mutates into an injustice department. It was good news, for example, that the Justice Department announced Friday that it had engaged an outside prosecutor to review the government’s case against former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn.

Flynn was set-up and ambushed by James Comey’s FBI at the direction of Robert Mueller. He lost his job, was bankrupted by the legal process-as-punishment attack, and pled guilty only because the FBI threatened to go after his son. To this day, we do not know who it was who leaked the transcript of Flynn’s call with Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States, to the Washington Post.

Flynn recently withdrew his guilty plea. It is anyone’s guess what Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney assigned with looking into Flynn’s case, will discover. I hope that he is exonerated and lavishly compensated.

Trump named Daytona 500 grand marshal, will give 'start your engines' command

President Trump is taking part in this year’s Daytona 500.

Not as a driver, but as grand marshal, which means he gets to give the “start your engines” command to the 43 entrants in the Great American Race.

 The only other time a sitting president attended the race as grand marshal was when George W. Bush came in 2004, the year Dale Earnhardt Jr. won his first 500.

 Trump was endorsed in 2016 by former NASCAR CEO Brian France Jr. and has hosted series champions Joey Logano and Martin Truex Jr. at the White House. Trump also gave NASCAR team owner Roger Penske the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year.

Joe Nemechek will be driving a Mike Harmon Racing car in the NASCAR Xfinity Series race on Saturday, sponsored by the Patriots PAC of America, that will have Trump/Pence 2020 logos on it.
Fox News Channel's John Roberts reported Friday that the White House is in discussions to have Trump take a lap of the track in the presidential limousine, known as the Beast, before the race.

https://www.foxnews.com/auto/trump-president-daytona-500-grand-marshal

Spygate: The Villains Aren’t the Victims

Thaddeus G. McCotter for American Greatness

Yet again, the Left ascribes its sins to its victims. And, yet again, the Left falsely portrays itself as the victim of the aggrieved people the Left has sinned against.

This political maxim remains and is made manifest in recent events: The Left ascribes its sins unto its victims.

The recent resignations of four Department of Justice prosecutors, because their wholly disproportionate, excessive, and—yes—political sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years in prison for nonviolent offender Roger Stone was countermanded by their superiors in the department, is a case in point.

While Stone was convicted of process crimes of making false statements and witness tampering (unrelated to any actual underlying crime), make no mistake, this near miscarriage of justice by some of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “dream teamers” wasn’t blind: the initial seven-to-nine year sentencing recommendation was precisely because of Roger Stone’s status as a confidant to President Trump.

And it served a larger purpose.

Deliberately filing such an excessive sentencing recommendation, defying their superiors to overrule it, and then resigning when justice was actually done, Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed, and Mike Marando cast themselves as the latest faux martyrs of “Orange Man Bad.” This also served to promote and perpetuate the latest disgraceful chapter in the Left’s implementation of the narrative that they are the victims of a vindictive Trump politicizing the Justice Department to punish his enemies and reward his friends.

Given that the swamp’s sole goal these days is to pretend it has any credibility left to save, on cue the collusion media have portrayed this incident as the latest norm-breaking constitutional crisis instigated by President Trump.

Further, the collusion media has used these conveniently timed resignations as yet another pretext to obfuscate, excuse, and ignore Spygate and instead pretend the Mueller report found evidence of Russian “collusion” with the Trump campaign. (“Collusion” being a swamp synonym for “bad” though not illegal.) Most importantly, for the collusion media and their fellow travelers, this incident further propagandized the Left’s big lie that “the villains are the real victims.”

The good news? Every day, fewer and fewer Americans are buying into the Left’s tired scam. 

But what else to expect from the collusion media—these stalwart practitioners of “accountability journalism” (a swamp term of art for “Democratic messaging”) who have long been according themselves the coveted status of victim, which they believe will shield them from being held accountable for their complicity in Spygate.

But not to worry, this Noah’s Ark of alleged victims is big enough to house all the collusion media hacks, Democratic operatives, Obama administration officials, and other character-challenged Lefties constituting Spy-gate’s gaggle of bad actors who engaged in a coup to prevent and then to destroy the Trump presidency.

For those who have eyes but refuse to see, let’s take a quick trip down Malfeasance Lane.

The Obama Administration and its leftist cohorts weaponized the police and intelligence powers of the federal government—including the unmasking and leaking of names to the media—against innocent American citizens. In other words, spying on them.

Then, to escape accountability, Obama alumni both in and out of government and their leftist cohorts continued to weaponize the federal government—including carrying on with a kangaroo court impeachment—to thwart and oust a duly elected president and his administration.

All the while, the collusion media aided, abetted, and blatantly pimped the Russia-gate lie; and now they spew the new “narrative” that it is Trump who has weaponized the government against his enemies.

Yet again, the Left ascribes its sins to its victims. And, yet again, the Left falsely portrays itself as the victim of the aggrieved people the Left has sinned against.

The good news? Every day, fewer and fewer Americans are buying into the Left’s tired scam. (This, of course, excludes Michael Bloomberg, who aims to buy everything—including this leftist scam and maybe even the entire Left.) President Trump’s poll numbers are up, because he is delivering on his promise to make and keep America great again.

And one of those core promises is to end the Obama era’s abuses of the federal government for political gain. The perpetrators of these abuses are well aware of this; and, these martyrs of nothing save their own malfeasance, will do anything to escape being held to account. As the Durham inquiry into the origins of Spygate proceeds apace, the culpable Left’s panic and, hence, its rhetoric will intensify. To no avail.

Those who knowingly, willfully, and deliberately abused the public’s trust to commit malfeasance are not victims, they are villains. And, through the blind, impartial administration of justice, and for the sake of our free republic, these villains will be held to account.

Andrew McCabe Gets a Reality Check After Whining That the DOJ Was Unfair to Him

Bonchie reporting for RedState

Andrew McCabe should be facing prison time right now, but alas, we don’t live in a country where justice is blind. So instead, he’s going on CNN — even after admitting he committed crimes — and whining about how unfair the DOJ was in their investigation of him. This is the same guy who helped trash Michael Flynn’s life over a supposed lie that neither Flynn nor the agents interviewing him thought was a lie.

Here’s McCabe on CNN clutching his pearls with faux indignation.

Andrew McCabe: “As glad as I am that the DoJ and the DC attorney’s office finally decided to do the right thing today, it’s an absolute disgrace that they took 2 years and put my family through this experience for two years before they finally drew the obvious conclusion." pic.twitter.com/T8x7drbukU

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 14, 2020

Yes, the investigation into McCabe was an absolute disgrace, but mostly because it ended with him not in handcuffs. Meanwhile, McCabe and his cohorts did far, far worse to others while proclaiming their righteousness. This is what having no shame looks like.

But instead of just ranting, I’ll let Undercover Huber lay it out in the most concise way possible.

McCabe isn’t an idiot. He knows exactly what he did and he knows exactly how hypocritical it is for him to now cry foul after he’s destroyed numerous lives in pursuit of the same crimes he committed himself. But like most bureaucrats, McCabe lacks the ability to feel shame and believes himself to be above accountability. Elections? Presidents? Laws? None of that applies to these people. They are a law unto themselves and continue to flaunt it in the faces of Americans who are wondering what the heck our justice system even stands for at this point.

The damage done to these institutions is likely irreversible. It’s not Donald Trump’s fault. It’s not Bill Barr’s fault. It’s McCabe, Comey, etc. who have absolutely destroyed the credibility of federal law enforcement and that will be their legacy. No amount of CNN hits is going to change that.

Stone Case Exposes the Arrogance of the Administrative State

Ned Ryun for American Greatness

This abuse of law enforcement and our legal system for political purposes is, in many ways, the ultimate end of the permanent bureaucracy.

With the latest news surrounding the Roger Stone case and the press to send him to jail for nine years, we can apparently now add the Fourth and Sixth Amendments to the growing list of our constitutional rights flying out the window.

Stone’s sentencing, the definition of cruel and unusual punishment for a first-time offender on a process crime, is the latest episode in an ongoing series where liberal fanatics use their power to punish political opponents, the rule of law be damned.

To be honest, I’ve never been the biggest fan of Roger Stone or Paul Manafort. I’ve even had my doubts about former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. But you can’t convince me that it is pure coincidence that only one side of the political aisle is routinely hauled into court on flimsy charges. Especially when we have Andrew McCabe, who the Justice Department has now decided to not prosecute, walking free despite doing the exact same thing Stone and Flynn have been charged with doing.

With reports now coming out that the lead juror in the Stone case was openly anti-Trump, and potentially perjured herself in denying knowledge of who Stone was and then tweeting about him, this has been a rigged process. Yet Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a Barack Obama appointee, did not see any reason to bar jurors with apparent bias. She has sworn to uphold the equal application of the law, but apparently, that oath only extends to those who share her political leanings.

But this issue of Roger Stone is about far more than the fate of one man. It is the principles instilled by the Founders that are at risk of collapse—the principles that state unequivocally one is guaranteed a fair trial, due process, an impartial jury, and legal protections under the law regardless of party affiliation—in short, the very principles denied to Stone.

Justice may be blind but you cannot turn a blind eye to the unfairness happening here.

Here’s the thing: The American people are not stupid. They are paying attention. Their common sense kicks in when they see the hijacking of our institutions. Many of us can plainly see there is no equal application of the law anymore.

It does make one wonder how many times were people trapped into perjury and a speedy conviction when no one was looking? Only the high-profile convicts are covered, but let’s face it: any one of us could get trapped into unintentionally lying to a federal agent if those federal agents were fully intent on trapping you.

Seriously: how many of you remember exactly what you said or did in a given moment several years ago?

This abuse of law enforcement and our legal system for political purposes is, in many ways, the ultimate end of the administrative state. This is a consolidation of immense power into the hands of unelected careerists that, in effect, gives them the ability to suspend the Bill of Rights when they so choose, as they so choose. Then, to add insult to injury, these same unelected careerists arrogantly hold in contempt the “deplorable” people who form and fund this republic.

As a case in point consider former Justice Department official Chuck Rosenberg (a Republican mind you—this isn’t always about party) who recently was quoted as saying, “We all understand that the leadership at the top the department is politically appointed and we make peace with that.” How about you make peace with the fact that most of the arrogant careerists in our federal government should be fired? The four career prosecutors who resigned over the Stone sentencing should never have been allowed the face-saving measure of resignation. They should have been fired. My disappointment over the entire episode is that it was only four. If it were 400, well then maybe we’re talking.

Let me spell it out to the administrative state careerists: there is a heck of a lot more to the Constitution and Bill of Rights than the First Amendment.

The various departments inside our leviathan of a bureaucracy, for which you work, were created by the Article I branch of our government —the Legislative Branch, elected by the people. That branch, comprised of those duly elected representatives of the people, are the stewards of power and various monies that are to be used to advance the people’s interests. By that legislation, you are made accountable to not only the Article I branch but also to the Article II branch, the executive. Those two branches are then accountable, via the process of elections, to us. In no way, in our republic, do you career bureaucrats rightfully get to decide anything. Power flows from the people, not you. You work for us.

In his second term, for the sake of the American Republic, Trump must declare war on the administrative state and its many usurpations of power. He must break it apart, dismantle it, fire people, devolve power out of Washington, D.C. Only by reducing our government and putting the federal government back into its proper role will America continue to be free and prosperous. To fail in this is to accept that someday every last American will work for and be a ward of the state.

Expert: China Has ‘Global Chokehold’ on Medicine, Can Shut Down Our Pharmacies, Hospitals in Months

 
 Article by Robert Kraychik in "Breitbart News":

 China could effectively shut down America’s healthcare system within months given the one-party state’s “global chokehold” on the manufacturing of medicines and medical supplies, explained Rosemary Gibson, author of China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine.

Mansour noted how the coronavirus outbreak in China has exposed America’s dangerous dependence on Chinese production of pharmaceutical and medical supplies, including an estimated 97 percent of all antibiotics and 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients needed for domestic drug production.

Gibson said, “If China shuts the door on exports of medicines and the ingredients to make them, within a couple of months our pharmacies would be empty. Our healthcare system would cease to function. That’s how dependent we are.”

Gibson added, “Say there’s a coronavirus outbreak in the United States, God forbid, and a lot of people end up in hospitals with severe cases. The medicines needed to care for them if they can’t breathe and are on a ventilator — fentanyl and propofol — [are made in China]. We depend on China for the raw materials. If they go into shock, the epinephrine and dopamine we need to care for them, we depend on China. If they have bacterial infections, we depend on China for the antibiotics.”

Many over-the-counter supplements sold in the U.S. are at least partly manufactured in China, Gisbon noted. “We can’t make [vitamin C] here anymore. That comes from China.”

America has lost much of its manufacturing apparatus for medicines to China via globalization, explained Gibson. “With our medicines, it’s not just the active ingredient [that is made in China]. It’s the raw chemicals, the molecules, the white powdery stuff, that we also depend on China for. That’s where China has the real global chokehold.”

Gibson explained how generic drugs manufacturers around the world are dependent on China for raw materials.

“Another shocking thing I discovered is that India and its huge generic [drug] industry — they’re the top generic producer in the world, although I think China’s going to overtake them in about five to ten years — even India depends on China,” Gibson stated.” [India’s] generic industry would shut down within weeks and months without those core components, and you see it in the Indian press, right now, that they’re already concerned about this because this coronavirus in China is really disrupting supply chains.”

China uses predatory mercantilist policies — including dumping — to undercut American and Western drug manufacturers, just as the communist state did with steel and other commodities, noted Mansour.

Gibson recalled, “I documented China’s penicillin cartel. There’s an incredible story of how we lost our penicillin manufacturing plants. These are huge industrial facilities, big fermentation plants, and China came in and knocked them out in the U.S. and even India by dumping it on the global market at really cheap prices — keeping it low for several years — and then the price goes back up again.”

Gibson went on, “So we can’t make penicillin, and this was the playbook for how we lost aspirin manufacturing, vitamin C, and so many other antibiotics that we rely on. We’re talking about last-resort antibiotics, medicines to treat sepsis, MRSA, [and] C. diff. These are the antibiotics you give to your kids for ear infections, or you take if you have a tooth infection of staph infection.”

Gibson warned, “We are so vulnerable. These are infectious diseases, and we depend on China to treat them.”

American politicians have been absent on the issue of domestic hemorrhaging of drug manufacturing capabilities to China, Gibson said.

“Nobody did anything about it,” lamented Gibson. “This has been going on for almost 20 years. In fact, no one wanted to even expose it. That’s why it took so long to figure this out and to put it out there, to reveal our dependence. It’s really quite remarkable. The American public’s been thrown under the bus.”

Mansour asked why American politicians allowed domestic manufacturing of medicines and medical supplies to be outsourced to China.

Gibson replied, “There was country-of-origin legislation introduced in Congress around 2008 that would require companies to state on their packages where their product is made, and it was killed immediately. So I asked someone in the industry, someone who worked there for more than 30 years, ‘So, what’s going on here?’ and this person said, ‘Well, the industry thought it probably wouldn’t be good for business if their customers knew where their medicines were coming from.'”

Gibson continued, “Our military is dependent on China. So the young men and women in the South China Sea on those aircraft carriers, they’re dependent on their adversary for their medicine.

Gibson reflected on the testimony of Larry Wortzel, a 32-year veteran and retired Army colonel, regarding contaminated blood pressure medicines made in China. Wortzel’s comments were made during a 2019 hearing of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

“It was spellbinding,” recalled Gibson, “for 90 seconds, he described how he got three different blood pressure medicines. They were made in India but the ingredients came from China, and it had rocket fuel compounds in it. … He said, ‘If I’m getting it, that means our active duty military are all getting it.’ This is how far down we have come in our standards with our medicine.”

“There are no short-term solutions,” Gibson stated of measures to restore America’s medical manufacturing capacity. “We have lost so much of our industrial base to make our own medicines, and you don’t create that overnight. … the FDA has proposed some measures, going forward, that drug manufacturers produce risk management plans and require them to identify alternate sources in case there are future disruptions.”

Gibson continued, “You know what the problem with that is? So many of these manufacturers [are now] Chinese domestic companies that are now ramping up from ingredients to making generic finished drugs. So now, 90 percent of the generic drugs sold in the United States [are linked to China]. They’re birth control pills, antidepressants, HIV/AIDS medicines, medicines for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, diabetes.”

“China’s on track to gain control of our generic drugs, and so the FDA has proposed that it’s going to ask manufacturers to tell us what their plan B is,” added Gibson. “So we’re going to be effectively relying on Chinese companies to help us out in a future emergency.”

Gibson noted, “China’s stated aim is to become the pharmacy to the world with its own companies. And what we’re seeing with Western generic drug companies, they’re collapsing because they can’t compete.”

Gibson said, “There’s a chapter in China Rx called “Made in China, Sue in America? Good Luck.” One of these reasons for the cheap price is that Chinese companies assume no liability for the quality of their product. When there was this huge recall of blood pressure medicines in the U.S. and around the world, it was because of a single company in China that made the active ingredient that had carcinogens in it — these rocket fuel compounds — and they knowingly sent product to the United States, knowingly knew that it didn’t meet U.S. standards, and it went on for four years before we picked it up.”

Gibson continued, “What we’re seeing is not just our supply coming from China, but the quality that is diminishing, and the FDA’s leverage to protect the public is just falling apart. Look, the FDA had to recall inspectors from China because of the coronavirus. It’s going to be months before [FDA] employees go back there, and they volunteer for those positions. The agency can’t [compel them]. Who’s going to want to go?”

Gibson added, “Just imagine you’re an FDA inspector over there and you’re in this big Chinese plant and you write a report, and you see some very serious violations, do you think the Chinese government will ever want you back in the country? Would you ever want to go back? Would you be afraid of retaliation?”

“I think we have to prepare for a future where the FDA will have virtually no leverage in China to really protect the American people,” assessed Gibson. “[The FDA] is already making trade-offs between substandard medicines and preventing shortages in medicines. It’s allowing stuff in that doesn’t meet standards, because we have no choice.”

Free market solutions can’t correct China’s mercantilist undercutting of Western drug and medical supply manufacturing.
“Some are saying, ‘Let the free market fix it,'” noted Gibson. “There is no free market. We wouldn’t allow this for our nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers to operate, because we’d be making them in China. We need to think of our medicines as a strategic asset. Not as something cheap that we outsource to a country that has a lot of problems.”

Gibson added, “It’s not a free market. They cheated [with] subsidies to these Chinese companies, so it’s very hard for any U.S. or Western company to compete, because you’re competing not with Chinese companies, you’re competing with the Chinese government.”

“We’re losing our manufacturing base,” warned Gisbon. “It’s just collapsing before our eyes. It’s the reason why we have really poor quality medicines now coming in.”

Gibson quoted a physician she spoke with, “We’re becoming like a developing country with our medicines.”

Gibson proposed federal industrial policy to renew domestic manufacturing of medicines and medical products.

“I would have our federal government invest in helping to rebuild our industrial base using advanced manufacturing technology that can produce our medicines much more cheaply, safely, with less environmental footprint, and fully, from soup to nuts from those core raw materials to finished drug in one location all here in the United States,” Gibson advised.

Gibson added, “There will be opponents who say, ‘No, we should let the market do it.’ The market will never do this. They’ll never make this investment. So we have to decide as a country, do we want to have some degree of self-sufficiency in our ability to make medicine? Do we want our military not to be dependent on China for pharmaceuticals to treat chemical and biological agents?”

“We’ll be depending on China to help us out when we run out of medicines,” warned Gibson. “The absurdity of it is extraordinary. We have to decide as a country, do we want to have some capacity to make our own medicines, or not?”

“Would you trust taking a last resort antibiotic for your child that was made in China?” asked Gisbon. “Would you trust it? Would you trust a chemotherapy if your child has leukemia? More than ten percent of the generics that have been tested in the U.S. don’t meet standards, by the way.”

Gibson went on “Most Americans don’t trust. They remember when thousands of dogs and cats died when a Chinese company contaminated pet food, and hundreds of humans died when the Chinese did a very insidious and sophisticated operation to contaminate a blood thinner widely used in hospitals.”

“A number of hospitals are having to test certain medicines because physicians see that there’s just something not working,” stated Gibson. “So we have this 18 percent of our GDP in our healthcare system, and we’re relying on these components from China that are essential for helping people recover, that make a difference between life or death. It’s insanity.”

“Food was used as a weapon of war” in World Wars I and II, said Gibson, warning of the political weaponization of medicines.

“Our medicines can be weaponized,” Gibson observed. “China can withhold them. China has threatened the United States with drug shortages in the past, it had nothing to do with the trade issue.Think of the leverage you give to a country when it controls your antibiotics.”

Eighty-five percent of the America’s strategic national stockpile of medicines and medical supplies depends on China, Gibson noted.

Gibson concluded, “We have to diversify away from China and bring some manufacturing of essential medicines back home to this country.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/14/expert-china-has-global-chokehold-on-medicine-can-shut-down-our-pharmacies-hospitals-in-months/ 

McCabe’s Leak Denials Cast Suspicion On His Loyal Aide, Lisa Page

 
Article by Chuck Ross in "The Daily Caller":

Andrew McCabe’s denials to his FBI colleagues that he was behind a media leak related to the Clinton Foundation investigation in October 2016 cast suspicion on his loyal aide, Lisa Page, former FBI Director James Comey said in an interview with the Justice Department’s inspector general.

In a Nov. 15, 2017, interview, Comey said McCabe denied to him that he was involved in a leak for an Oct. 30, 2016, story in The Wall Street Journal that disclosed the existence of an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

Because of McCabe’s denials, Comey’s chief of staff, James Rybicki, came to suspect that Page, McCabe’s general counsel, might have revealed the information for the story.

“I actually didn’t suspect Andy,” Comey said in the interview.

“After conversations with Rybicki my worry was is his aide doing it,” he added, referring to Page.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington obtained the transcript of Comey’s interview in January, but it has not been reported in the media.

The Justice Department on Friday closed an investigation of McCabe. Prosecutors in Washington, D.C., were weighing whether to charge McCabe with making false statements to FBI investigators and the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general regarding his role in authorizing Page to speak with a reporter from The WSJ.

The inspector general found that McCabe displayed a “lack of candor” four times by denying any role in the leak.

Page congratulated her former boss in a Twitter post on Friday after the Justice Department closed the case.

McCabe authorized Page to provide details of the investigation to Devlin Barrett, a reporter who worked for The WSJ. Days earlier, Barrett published a negative story about contributions that a Clinton ally gave to the state senatorial campaign for McCabe’s wife.

Barrett’s second story revealed the existence of an investigation of the Clinton Foundation. It also portrayed McCabe as battling with the Justice Department to try to keep the investigation going. The story revealed that McCabe had a heated conversation on Aug. 12, 2016, with Justice Department official Matthew Axelrod, who reportedly wanted the FBI to back off of the probe.

Prosecutors investigated whether McCabe made false statements to FBI and Justice Department officials regarding his authorization of a leak to The WSJ. 

Comey told the inspector general that he considered the story a problem because it would make the Justice Department “furious.” He also said Rybicki suspected that Page was the sole leaker.

“I think Rybicki came in or called me when this appeared and said this is really bad. DOJ is going to be furious,” Comey said.

“I’m really worried Lisa Page went off the reservation or something here,” Comey recalled Rybicki saying.

Comey also appeared to embrace the theory because of McCabe’s repeated denials that he was involved in the story.

“I don’t remember except that I have a strong impression that he conveyed to me, it wasn’t me boss,” Comey said of McCabe, who was fired from the FBI on March 16, 2018.

He paraphrased McCabe saying “I don’t know how this shit gets in the media,” and “why would people talk about this kind of thing?”

Besides an initial denial that he was involved in the leak, McCabe did not tell Comey of his involvement even after the FBI chief asked him to pull phone and email records for FBI employees in order to snuff out the leaker.

Comey said that when he discussed the issue with McCabe, the deputy mentioned there were a large number of contacts between FBI agents in New York and members of the press.

Comey said it “bugged” him that there were stories in the media about the Clinton Foundation probe.

“I want to find who is making disclosures and nail them to the wall and so see if we can do it internally,” Comey said.

He added: “I remember him telling me that we were finding a disturbing number of contacts between the FBI in New York executives and media figures, not that executives can’t talk to media figures, but a concerning number of contacts.”

Comey also suggested in his interview that Page was overly loyal to McCabe, even to the detriment of the FBI.

He described deliberations with McCabe about possible recusing himself from Clinton-related matters because of Devlin Barrett’s initial news story about contributions to his wife’s political campaign.

Comey said McCabe was “very unhappy” at the suggestion that he recuse himself from the investigation. Page was also opposed to the idea, so much so that she raised the issue with Rybicki.

Comey said he had a “strong reaction” when Rybicki told him Page disagreed with the decision to have McCabe removed from Clinton investigations.

“Lisa’s client is the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Our client is not Andy McCabe and she you know, you want me to do it or you do it, but someone’s got to make that clear to her that she’s not, should never be before me advocating for Andy McCabe,” Comey said.

“She should step back.”

https://dailycaller.com/2020/02/15/andrew-mccabe-leak-denial-lisa-page/