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Ruth King

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Resistance Inc. By Matthew Continetti

By on July 27th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/resistance-inc/Why impeachment isn’t going away.

Trump supporters are right to feel vindication after Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress. At times the special counsel seemed unfamiliar with the contents of his own report. He came across as aloof and confused and often unable to answer both Democratic and Republican questions to the lawmakers’ satisfaction. The same media figures that began the day saying Mueller’s appearance might be the game changer ended up calling it a flop. “Democrats now have one option to end Trump’s presidency,” read the headline of Dan Balz’s analysis in the Washington Post. “The 2020 election.” Trump, as always, put it more memorably: “truth is a force of nature!”

The real truth is Mueller’s testimony was never going to interrupt preexisting trends. Support for impeachment has been stable for a year at around 40 percent in the Fox News poll of registered voters. Fox asks, “Do you think President Trump should be impeached and removed from office, or not?” In June 2018, 39 percent of respondents answered yes. Last week, 42 percent said the same. Opposition to impeachment has hovered around 50 percent during all this time. When the most recent Fox News poll asked if Mueller’s testimony might cause voters to change how they felt about Trump, only 8 percent said there was a strong chance of that happening. Forty-nine percent said not at all.

Views of President Trump are cast iron. Mueller might have overturned this equilibrium by offering new evidence incriminating Trump or by saying definitively that Trump obstructed justice. He did neither. Nor was he going to. It was clear from his May press conference that Mueller did not want to appear before Congress and that he had said all he was willing to say in his report. The negotiations over his testimony that stretched into midsummer, the sudden delay of his testimony by a week, and the addition of his chief of staff as counsel further indicated his reluctance as well as his lack of assurance before the cameras. The presence on the committee of Republicans hostile to Mueller’s investigation and to his findings meant that the hearing would not be entirely favorable to Democrats. Sure enough, Mueller’s performance was a disappointment.

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The Mueller Report’s Fundamental Dodge By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on July 27th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-goes-nuclear-on-cummings-his-dist

It misinterprets the rule against indicting a sitting president.

Editor’s Note: This is the first article in a two-part series; the second will appear tomorrow.

Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony was such a bumbling fiasco that it was easy for a viewer to be confused — and stay that way — about the main bone of Democratic contention regarding his report: the “OLC guidance” that prevents the Justice Department from charging a president with crimes while he is in office. Specifically, how did it factor into the special counsel’s decision — or, rather, non-decision — on the main question he was appointed to answer: Did President Trump obstruct justice? How did the special counsel’s dubious reliance on it as a rationale for abdicating on this question affect the publication and ramifications of the Mueller report?

We’ve plowed this ground before, but it is worth revisiting. We will do that in this weekend’s two-part series. This is Part 1.

The OLC Guidance

The OLC is the Office of Legal Counsel, the lawyers’ lawyers in the Justice Department who formulate policies that guide federal prosecutors throughout the United States. The OLC guidance at issue in the Mueller investigation is the prohibition on indicting a sitting president. This rule is said to be derived from constitutional and prudential considerations.

I do not believe the guidance is sound. But that’s beside the point: The guidance is binding on Justice Department lawyers, period. That means it is also binding on special counsels. By regulation, they are firmly in the Justice Department chain of command.

Consequently, the OLC guidance applied to Mueller’s investigation of President Trump. In particular, it was relevant to the obstruction aspect of the probe, which was always a criminal investigation. (For reasons that need not divert us, the “collusion” part of the case was pretextually conducted as a counterintelligence investigation.)

Because (a) the president was the principal subject of the obstruction probe and (b) the objective of such a criminal investigation is to indict wrongdoers, the pertinence of the OLC guidance is obvious. The question is: What is the effect of its application?

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump Goes Nuclear on Cummings: ‘His District Is a Disgusting, Rat and Rodent Infested Mess’ By Michael van der Galien

By on July 27th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-goes-nuclear-on-cummings-his-district-disgusting-rat-and-rodent-infested-mess/

President Donald Trump has completely had it with Elijah Cummnings, the U.S. Representative for Maryland’s 7th congressional district and House Oversight Committee Chairman.

Earlier, Rep. Cummings made headlines after he called the treatment of illegal immigrant children “government-sponsored child abuse.”

“We have seen cases where the administration has deported parents without their children and still, to this day, have not reunited those families,” he said. “This is government-sponsored child abuse … on a grand scale.”

If Rep. Cummings thought President Trump would take this lying down, he’s sadly mistaken. The president responded this morning with an epic tweetstorm.

“Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border,” president Trump tweeted. “When actually,” he went on, “his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA…”

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Amazon Purges Reviews of Bestselling Anti-Obama Book By Matt Margolis

By on July 27th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/amazon-purges-reviews-of-bestselling-anti-obama-book/

Reports of Amazon purging reviews from conservatives books on their site have been made for some time now. PJ Media’s Megan Fox reported in March 2018 that many conservative authors noticed a mass deletion of reviews. Well, another purge has taken place. This one targeted my book, The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. This book was approaching 1,000 reviews until Amazon decided to clean house. On Tuesday, the book had 945 reviews. On Wednesday, the book had only 693 reviews. A whopping 252 reviews (approximately 27 percent) simply vanished. Worse yet, most of the purged reviews appear to have been positive ones, as the average rating went down from roughly 4.5+ to 4.2 stars.

I can prove this because I have screenshots:

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Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Marriage on the Rocks By Rick Moran

By on July 27th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/rep-ilhan-omars-marriage-on-the-rocks/

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)’s marriage to the father of her three children, Ahmed Hirsi, appears to be headed for divorce as the Daily Mail reports that she has moved out of their house in Minneapolis and moved into a swanky apartment while he has been absent from her side at several high-profile events.

Omar’s complex and secretive personal life has been the subject of much controversy. She first married Hirsi in an Islamic ceremony in 2002, although the state of Minnesota never recognized the union as legal. Six years later, they divorced “in their faith tradition” according to media accounts, and a year after that, she married British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi just two weeks after he entered the country. She divorced Elmi in 2011 “in their faith tradition” and two years later she moved in with Hirsi. She did not legally divorce Elmi until 2017 after which she married Hirsi in 2018.

Several investigations by media outlets, including an extensive and painstaking review of the records by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, failed to untangle the truth about Omar’s marriage to Elmi. It is widely thought that Elmi is Omar’s brother and that she married him so that he could legally enter the U.S. Omar refuses to talk about her personal life — or answer questions about her numerous legal troubles, including filing joint tax returns with Hirsi for several years despite not being married to him.

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Open Letter to The New Yorker Exposes False Allegations Alan Dershowitz

By on July 27th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14605/open-letter-to-the-new-yorker-exposes-false

As I have previously written, The New Yorker has commissioned a hit piece that seems calculated to silence my voice on President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel.

Here below is a letter I sent to the editor, the writer and the fact checkers. I have received only a formal response assuring me that the article will be fair. I replied that this will be up to the readers and the courts to judge.

Having been contacted by your “fact” checkers, I now understand the thrust of Connie Bruck’s hit piece: You must know there is no actual evidence that I engaged in sexual misconduct or even met my false accusers — because I did not. So, you appear determined to concoct a false narrative of my life, going back more than 40 years to my first marriage, that falsely suggests that I am the kind of person who “could” or “might” have engaged in such misconduct.

To support your false narrative, you began your negative “research” – as you acknowledged to my son — by sourcing a Holocaust denial site that circulates false stories about prominent Jews, including me. You then interviewed my enemies, my critics, dissenting students and especially anti-Israel and, in some cases anti-Semitic, zealots. The original reporting, which took place over many months, did not include interviews with longtime friends and associates who know me well and can present a more balanced perspective. You agreed to speak to a handful of such people only at the last minute, after I complained to the editor. But even then when some people called you, you told them the story was closed. Let’s see if you include the positive comments that contradict your story, that some of these people relayed to you.

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Boris Johnson Reviving Britain’s Standing on the World Stage by Con Coughlin

By on July 27th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14601/boris-johnson-world-stage

Mr Johnson’s determination to help Britain reclaim its status as a leading world power after the drift of the May years is reflected in the stature of his appointments, especially regarding Britain’s engagement with the outside world.

In one of Mrs May’s last acts as prime minister, Britain declined an offer of American military support to protect British shipping in the Gulf, resulting in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard hijacking a British-registered oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz and holding it captive in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

Thus, with politicians of this calibre occupying key positions in the new British government, Mr Johnson now has a golden opportunity to revive Britain’s standing on the world stage, one where the close relationship between Washington and London will be one of the pillars of Britain’s dynamic new approach.

The appointment of Boris Johnson as Britain’s new prime minister offers the serious prospect of a radical improvement in the bilateral ties between Washington and London following the froideur [chill] that came to define the transatlantic relationship under the outgoing prime minister, Theresa May.

While, in public, Mrs May offered loyal pledges of support to Donald Trump, and professed to enjoy a warm personal relationship with the American president, the reality was that the personal chemistry between the two leaders was often awkward, with Mrs May often failing to grasp Mr Trump’s radical approach to global affairs.

The differences between the two are best summed up by Mrs May’s failure to heed Mr Trump’s advice on handling the challenging Brexit negotiations with the European Union. Mr Trump suggested London needed to play hardball with Brussels, even suggesting at one point that the UK should sue the EU as part of its negotiating strategy to demonstrate that it meant business.

This advice was completely contrary to Mrs May’s mindset, as prevarication, obfuscation and a desperate desire to avoid confrontation at all costs were the characteristics that defined her premiership. Consequently, the negotiations resulted in the EU dictating the terms of the settlement. The subsequent withdrawal agreement was deemed so unacceptable that it failed to win the approval of the House of Commons, thereby ending Mrs May’s premiership.

Moreover, throughout this sorry saga, relations between London and Washington continued to deteriorate to the point where, in one of Mrs May’s last acts as prime minister, Britain declined an offer of American military support to protect British shipping in the Gulf, resulting in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard hijacking a British-registered oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz and holding it captive in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

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Donald & Boris Can Be The 21st Century’s Reagan & Thatcher Thomas McArdle

By on July 27th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/26/donald-boris-can-be-the-21st-centurys-ron-maggie/

Having taken the prime minister’s seat in Britain, Boris Johnson might not face Churchill’s existential crisis upon taking office in May 1940, but some instant Churchillian nerve is still called for. Whether he is up to the task of outplaying Iran after it seized the British-flagged oil tanker Stena Impero in a tit-for-tat move in the Strait of Hormuz will be known soon enough.

The U.S. will have Johnson’s back, but Britain is too major a power not to take care of its own business against the world’s worst terrorist state; so Boris is under the spotlight. At stake is freedom of passage for a vast amount of the world’s energy resources.

Passing that test, however, is but the prelude to more daunting challenges, and an opportunity for greatness in governing unseen since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher used the famed “special relationship” between the U.S. and Britain to upend economic orthodoxy and ultimately redraw the map of the world.

The Cold War, with its threat of mutual assured destruction, is won, thanks in no small part to Reagan and Thatcher resisting the unilateral nuclear disarmers. But the tasks that President Trump and Britain’s similarly sharp-elbowed new leader face are in some ways harder, and certainly more complex.

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FOREIGN POLICY, POLITICS Comments turned off

Kirsten Gillibrand Delivers the World’s Most Ignorant Foreign Policy Speech Daniel Greenfield

By on July 27th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274433/kirsten-gillibrand-delivers-worlds-most-ignorant-daniel-greenfield

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has only one admirable quality. Determination.

Sadly that determination isn’t yoked to anything except her ambition. Gillibrand has no notable skills. She’s managed to rub everyone the wrong way. But that hasn’t made her give up her senseless 2020 campaign. Senator Gillibrand may not know anything or be qualified for anything. But she won’t let that stop her. And so she delivered a speech on foreign policy to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. 

The only thing the speech lays out is that Gillibrand is barely qualified to work as a receptionist in an organization dealing with foreign policy.

Gillibrand starts off by boasting that she had traveled to Syria. When you’re from New York, visiting Syria is really impressive.

In Jordan, we met with Syrian refugee mothers. These are women who had to flee their home country because President Bashar al-Assad decimated entire neighborhoods and villages and tortured and killed tens of thousands of political prisoners.

After we spoke for a bit, these women looked me straight in the eye and one got straight to the point: “You are so afraid of Osama Bin Laden. When you turn a blind eye to people suffering here in Syria, you’re creating thousands of Bin Ladens every day.”

No example more powerfully demonstrates how our endless wars, our abandonment of diplomacy, and our lack of strategy have hurt our credibility abroad and made us less safe.

Osama bin Laden wasn’t a war refugee. And if anything, he used American intervention in the Gulf War to kickstart a Jihad against America. 

But Kirsten Gillibrand doesn’t actually know anything. And her speech somehow even gets dumber.

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The Weissmann Dossier Who really wrote the Mueller Report? Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on July 27th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274432/weissmann-dossier-kenneth-r-timmerman

Anyone who watched more than a few minutes of Wednesday’s painful hearings with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller discovered a sad truth the Democrats and many in the media continue to hide: Mueller neither wrote his report nor did he master the content of it.

Repeatedly during the day, the former FBI director stumbled over what we had been told were his findings. He slowly leafed through a binder, searching for passages that lawmakers were quoting to him, only to say “okay” or “true” when he finally found them.

In the morning’s hearing at the House Judiciary committee, Rep. Doug Collins asked Mueller if “conspiracy” – the criminal law term used in the first part of his report about Russia – and the vernacular term, “collusion” were the same thing. Mueller replied, “No.”

Taken aback, Collins asked if he was changing his earlier testimony – ie, the report – which stated on page 180 that collusion and conspiracy were the same. When Mueller finally found the passage, he withdrew his earlier testimony and stood by the report.

Rep. Collins – and frankly, every member of the two committees who questioned Mueller – had the elegance not to state the obvious: Mueller was non compus mentis.

During the afternoon hearing, Rep. Peter Welch, D, Va, again asked whether he had found collusion. This time, Mueller was so far gone, he couldn’t find his words.

“We don’t use the word collusion,” he said. “The word we usually use is-ah-not collusion-ah. But one of the other-ah-terms that-ah-ah-that fills in when collusion is not used. In any event, we decided not to use the word collusion in so much as it has no relevance to the criminal law arena.”

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