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Ruth King

Mueller Team Corruption Contaminates Justice by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16525/mueller-investigation-corruption

Are we truly supposed to believe that all of these phones just happened to erase themselves?

You will remember that these very same attorneys and investigators sought to imprison George Papadopoulos for 20 years simply for switching cell phones and deactivating his Facebook account. The government argued that Papadopoulos knowingly committed obstruction per 18 US Code section 1519, with the intent of impeding or otherwise influencing a federal investigation.

The flagrant, outrageous abuse of record-keeping and phone communications requirements by the Mueller team is a prime avenue for further criminal investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham. Attorney General Barr recently said there will be more indictments. Let’s hope so…. The only remedy is the rigorous prosecution of the offenders.

We now know the Mueller Special Counsel Investigation of the Trump-Russia “collusion” claims was a politically motivated hoax. The investigation dragged on for months. Despite increasingly hysterical Leftist speculation of criminal conspiracies and treason — not a single claim was ever made against the President. In the end, Robert Mueller appeared before Congress and seemed befuddled throughout his testimony — “Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

Consequently, it appears necessary that Mueller and his team need to be the subjects of a criminal investigation. Last week, responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, the Justice Department released heavily redacted documents showing that several dozen phones belonging to members of Mueller’s team were “wiped” or disabled before they could be examined by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz during his office’s review of the special counsel’s investigation.

U.S. Economy Continues Steady Recovery in September, Business Surveys Show

https://www.wsj.com/articles/faltering-service-sector-weighs-on-global-recovery-as-infections-rise-11600853490

The U.S. economy in September continued its steady recovery from the sharp declines in the second quarter as demand and output strengthened, according to new business surveys. But the pace faltered in Europe and Asia, where new infections have led to new restrictions on activity.

U.S. service-sector and manufacturing companies reported solid growth in September, a positive signal for overall economic growth in the third quarter.

Data firm IHS Markit said Wednesday its composite Purchasing Managers Index for the U.S.—a measure of activity in the private sector—was 54.4 in September, down slightly from 54.6 in August. A reading above 50.0 indicates that activity is increasing, while a reading below points to a decline in activity.

Growth in the services sector slowed slightly to 54.6 in September from 55 in August, while in the manufacturing sector it accelerated to 53.5 from 53.1.

The numbers suggest the U.S. economy continues its slow and steady climb from the deep declines seen in the spring due to lockdowns and other restrictions imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

A ‘Safe Space’ for Terrorists at San Francisco State Toxicity under the cover of free speech. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/safe-space-terrorists-san-francisco-state-richard-l-cravatts/

If any area of the United States can be identified as the epicenter of anti-Israelism on campus, California, the nation’s most populous state, can certainly be said to have earned that dubious distinction. In fact, observers of out of control anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic activity on campuses consider California’s universities to be the veritable ground zero of such vitriol, with particularly troubling and persistent problems of radical student groups, venom-spewing guest speakers, annual hate-fests targeting Israel and Jewish students, entire academic units in the thrall of Israel hatred and anti-Zionism, and a pervasive mood on campuses in which Jewish students and other pro-Israel faculty and students regularly experience visceral and real “harassment, intimidation and discrimination,” as a 2004 Zionist Organization of America’s complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights described the situation on one California campus.

A particularly execrable record for radical anti-Israel, anti-Semitic campus activism is to be found at San Francisco State University, and specifically in the pseudo-academic machinations of Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, director of the school’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) program. Abdulhadi, who, among other slurs, referred to Zionists as white nationalists during a 2019 UCLA lecture, is embroiled in controversy once again for the upcoming virtual speaking appearance, to be held on September 23rd, by Leila Khaled, a terrorist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose resume includes her role in the 1969 hijacking of an Israel-bound plane and her arrest the following year during a failed hijacking of an El Al flight. 

Promotional materials for the roundtable discussion with Khaled, entitled “Whose Narrative? Gender, Justice, & Resistance,” (and which included a photograph of Khaled proudly brandishing an AK-47, with which she no doubt intended to murder Jews), glowingly describe her as a “Palestinian feminist, militant, and leader,” someone who Abdulhadi has described as a “Palestinian feminist icon,” an “icon in liberations movements and . . . an icon for women’s liberation.”

BLM, Antifa and the Communist Strategy to Destroy the United States Today’s woke violence – yesterday’s red tactics. Joseph Hippolito

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/blm-antifa-and-communist-strategy-destroy-united-joseph-hippolito/

The unprecedented violence perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter embodies two of the Left’s biggest tactics in its quest to fundamentally transform the United States.

One is to force a race war by radicalizing African-Americans to a violent degree. The other involves making mayhem more intimidating by spreading police and firefighters as thinly as possible, thereby limiting their ability to respond quickly.

Manning Johnson, an African-American, spoke about the first tactic from personal experience. Describing himself as a “dedicated ‘comrade’ ” and a “professional revolutionist,” Johnson belonged to the Communist Party USA for 10 years. He served as a union organizer, director of agitation propaganda, and a member of the party’s national committee. Johnson even ran as the party’s candidate for a Congressional seat in New York.

But when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany concluded their non-aggression pact in 1939 — nine days before Germany invaded Poland and began World War II — Johnson left the party. Following the war, Johnson testified about Communist activities to various legislative committees. In 1958, one year before his death, Johnson wrote about his experiences in Color, Communism and Common Sense.

Why did Johnson become a Communist at 21?

“Like other Negroes, I experienced and saw many injustices and inequities around me based upon color, not ability,” he wrote. “I was told that ‘the decadent capitalist system is responsible,’ that ‘mass pressure’ could force concessions but ‘that just prolongs the life of capitalism;’ that I must unite and work with all those who more or less agree that capitalism must go. 

Judge Amy Coney Barrett for her intellect instead of Catholic faith By Jonathan Turley,

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/517756-judge-amy-coney-barrett-for-her-intellect-instead-of-catholic-faith

The image was striking and unsettling with a line of women in red hoods under a Newsweek headline that read, “How Charismatic Catholic Groups Like Amy Coney Barrett’s People of Praise Inspired The Handmaid’s Tale.” Writer Lauren Hough responded immediately by declaring that Barrett, a potential Supreme Court nominee, belongs to a “f—–g cult,” and others labeled Barrett as some type of judicial Serena Joy, a character on the show who imposes virtual slavery on fellow women.

Few Supreme Court nominees, let alone a still unnamed nominee, have been labeled as threatening to reduce all women to handmaiden birthing machines in a theocratic hellscape. Of course, the extraordinary career of Barrett should be a celebration of feminism. She graduated at the top of her law class, became a national thought leader, and ascended to one of the highest courts in the nation. She did that in her career while raising seven children, including two children adopted from Haiti.

The Newsweek story happens to be untrue. The outlet ran a correction that author Margaret Atwood “never specifically mentioned the group as being the inspiration for her work.” The only connection was that a clip that referenced the People of Praise was found in her home. Newsweek said it “regrets the error” but did not retract the story.

Imagine if Newsweek published a picture of the Taliban with that type of picture for a Muslim nominee. But Barrett is a devout Catholic, and some liberals have found a certain release in voicing raw intolerance for certain groups. Recently, many of us criticized statements attributed to Attorney General William Barr seeking out the use of sedition laws against rioters. However, instead of raising constitutional objections, Harvard professor Laurence Tribe raised the Catholic faith of Barr, writing, “It’s way beyond monarchical. It’s paranoid and dictatorial. Opus Dei, anyone?”

The lack of Breonna Taylor indictments triggered riots all over the place By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/the_lack_of_breonna_taylor_indictments_triggered_riots_all_over_the_place.html

By now, it’s not news anymore. If something happens that the Biden-voting mob doesn’t like, it hits the streets, lusting to destroy.

In June and July, it was still news (kind of) whenever we read that leftist mobs, inspired by anti-white racism and anti-American hatred, ran riot in the streets, screaming, destroying people’s businesses, and attacking anyone who got in their way, especially police officers. By now, it’s predictable and, while disturbing, it’s also dull. It’s become a dog bites man story.

It was to be expected that the mobs would start to riot in Louisville. Indeed, practically within minutes of Daniel Cameron announcing that none of the police involved in Breonna Taylor’s death would be charged for her death and that just one police officer would have to face a reckless endangerment charge for allegedly discharging his gun carelessly, the mob was on the move.

Note, please, that this was no random mob. This was a carefully organized and well-financed mob:

Well-stocked U-Haul vans, ready with all the supplies a mob needs to destroy a city, don’t come cheap. It is to be hoped that the FBI is already following the money and working with the DOJ to charge with sedition those funding the mobs. Sedition can be punished with up to twenty years in federal prison.

Hunter Biden’s Business A Senate report reveals Joe’s passivity amid his son’s influence-peddling.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunter-bidens-business-11600901745?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Joe Biden is running against Donald Trump’s character and supposed corruption, so a Senate report documenting the Biden family’s ethical swampiness certainly counts as news.

Senate committee Chairmen Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley on Wednesday released the findings of their year-long investigation into the problems that the business dealings of Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, presented to the Obama-Biden administration. The report makes clear Hunter was profiting off his father’s position—in Ukraine, and notably in China. Foreigners knew they were buying influence by association.

The Ukrainian gas company Burisma hired Hunter to “consult” on corporate governance in May 2014, only weeks after Vice President Biden took the U.S. lead in helping Ukraine fight corruption. Burisma was a top investigation target, and U.K. officials had seized the London bank accounts of Burisma’s owner. Hunter had no experience in Ukraine or natural gas. The report cites emails showing Hunter and his business associate, Devon Archer, requesting meetings with State Department officials after their Burisma appointments. A U.S. lobbying firm working for Burisma invoked Hunter’s name as it sought a State Department meeting.

Former State official George Kent wrote to superiors in 2016 that Hunter’s Burisma position made it “very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine.” He testified that officials had to worry about “opponents” saying “What about Hunter Biden?” State Department email chains show U.S. officials mulling how to handle the Hunter problem.

Before Reporting Became ‘Journalism’ Writers subdued their egos and encouraged readers to think. Nowadays it’s all about arousing emotion. By Lance Morrow

https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-reporting-became-journalism-11600879803?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

My father’s favorite word of dismissal was “phony.” As a young man, he worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For him and his fellow reporters, phony was the watchword—an instinct. That period—the late 1930s, going into the war—had the atmosphere of a movie by Frank Capra, who was big on newspaper reporters as everyman types. After the calamitous sucker-punch of the Great Depression, a guy didn’t want to be a sap.

That generation of reporters would rather have died, or moved permanently to Albany, N.Y., than call themselves “journalists.” The term itself was phony. When young Henry Luce, who went on to co-found the Time-Life empire, was just out of Yale, he showed up for his job at the Chicago Daily News (as a legman for the columnist Ben Hecht, who, with Charles MacArthur, would write “The Front Page”), he carried a walking stick and a briefcase. The editor looked him up and down and said, “Ah, Mr. Luce. A journalist, I see.”

The lesson I absorbed as a boy was that the work of reporting called for a disinfected mind that busied itself, with little-guy sympathies and self-effacing clarity, on available facts, collected conscientiously. The ideal was fairness: Let the reader decide. It would not have occurred to my father or his fellow reporters, or to me in my apprentice days at the Buffalo News or the Washington Star, to drape the facts in adjectives and adverbs and attitude. The eye of the city editor (the great Sid Epstein at the Star, for example) was vigilant and scathing: Who gives a damn what you think?

If a sensitive person, or, God forbid, one of us on the newspaper staff, had declared that something or other made him feel “uncomfortable” or “unsafe” or constituted a “microaggression,” the answer would have been an incredulous stare: “So what?” If it happened again: “You’re fired.”

Two Police Officers Shot in Louisville Riots after Breonna Taylor Grand-Jury Indictment By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/two-police-officers-shot-in-louisville-riots-after-breonna-taylor-grand-jury-indictment/

Two police officers have been shot in Louisville, Ky., amid riots following the announcement of an indictment in the shooting of Breonna Taylor.

Louisville chief of police Robert Schroeder confirmed that the officers were shot and were taken to a local hospital. Schroeder told reporters that one of the officers was undergoing surgery but in stable condition, while the other was alert and stable. Police have arrested one suspect in the shooting.

Demonstrations devolved into riots in the city on Wednesday night after a grand jury charged just one of the officers involved in the shooting of Taylor in a botched drug bust. Rioters clashed with police throughout Louisville, burning trash cans and calling to defund the city police department.Demonstrations and riots broke out in other cities including New York and Washington, D.C. New York saw large crowds chanting “no justice, no peace!” outside Barclays Center in Brooklyn, while black-clad demonstrators in Washington passed through the Dupont Circle area.

Rioters in Washington also overturned tables at restaurants providing for outdoor dining, as patrons looked on.

“Praying for the two police officers that were shot tonight in Louisville, Kentucky. The Federal Government stands behind you and is ready to help,” President Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night. “Spoke to [Governor] Andy Beshear and we are prepared to work together, immediately upon request!”

Justice Department Refuses to Testify before Nadler’s Judiciary Committee By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/justice-department-refuses-to-testify-before

The lasting damage from the Trump years will be the norm-busting by congressional Democrats.

The unintended consequences of the House Democrats’ anti-Trump derangement, in both infantilizing congressional oversight and foolishly pleading with the federal courts to meddle in it, are becoming manifest. On Monday, the Justice Department declined a request by House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) that it send top officials to testify at an oversight hearing — or at least what was portrayed by the House as an oversight hearing; it was depicted by DOJ as more election-year political theater.

DOJ’s position traces to two developments in July.

First, as I recounted here, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Mazars, which involved subpoenas issued by House committees for President Trump’s personal financial information. The dispute over this information pitted the Congress’s broad authority to seek information for legislative purposes versus the president’s legitimate interest in carrying out his weighty responsibilities free of both undue burdens and the pretextual exploitation of Congress’s oversight powers for partisan political advantage. That is, it was the type of legislative/executive tug-of-war that the political branches have worked out between themselves since a time out of memory — such that Chief Justice John Roberts was moved to observe that the case marked the first time in 233 years of American constitutional governance that the High Court had been asked to resolve such a controversy.