RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/12/check-incompetent-pr-response-expose-womens-marchs-anti-semitism/

Tablet Magazine published a massive expose Monday detailing the anti-Semitic origins of the Women’s March and its shady financial practices. Two days later, many of the reporters who shared the Tablet article on Twitter received an e-mail from Inarú Meléndez of Megaphone Strategies, a nonprofit social justice media firm that lists the Women’s March as a client on its website.

According to sources whose accounts were published in the aforementioned article, Women’s March co-chairs Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory made anti-Semitic remarks at one of the organization’s initial meetings back in 2016. The story also reported that the organization had never picked a Jewish woman to sit on its board and that it excluded anti-Semitism from its unity principles. Tablet also detailed problems with the organization’s financial practices, which have also been reported by The Daily Beast.

In an e-mail sent to The Federalist’s Sean Davis and numerous others, Meléndez claims that “Tablet is in the process or making several corrections to the story,” and offered to share a list of these supposed “fact checks” — but only if Davis would agree to meet a set of demands.

“Before we share the fact-check: Can you confirm that what I am sending you is off the record, and will not be published?” Meléndez writes. “If you are interested in publishing any parts of the fact-checks below that you will contact us first to secure our agreement? You will let us know if you intend to delete your tweet pushing an article that includes sources/allegations, which were not vetted properly and in line with journalistic ethics? Once I receive your reply, I’ll send over the corrections. Please note that we are sending this to a number of reporters who shared this article.”

An identical e-mail was sent to a number of other reporters who also shared the story.

Asking a reporter from a different news outlet to agree to a list of demands before sharing a supposed fact check is bizarre. If Tablet Magazine actually got some facts wrong in its story, Megaphone should take that up with the magazine itself and ask that a correction be issued at the top of the original story. Asking that these fact checks be kept off-the-record also makes no sense. If there truly are factual errors in the story, wouldn’t Megaphone Strategies want this to be made known far and wide? Why the secrecy?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-visits-the-resistance-factory-11544645372?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=7&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Some conservative readers may quarrel with today’s headline on the grounds that Google is the resistance factory, given its left-leaning workforce and concerns about potential bias in the Alphabet unit’s search results. But this column is referring to the House Judiciary Committee in the 116th Congress, which is expected to be chaired by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.)

Mr. Nadler is now the lead Democrat on Judiciary after mounting a successful campaign to persuade his liberal colleagues that he’s the most qualified pol to manage an impeachment. Immediately after November’s elections, Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist reported overhearing Mr. Nadler on a train discussing potential impeachments of both President Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Voters might hope that a reasonable and responsible elected official would not proceed to impeachment discussions without first laying out specific allegations of high crimes and misdemeanors and supporting evidence. Americans are still waiting for such evidence when it comes to Democratic claims of Trump collusion with Russians, but Mr. Nadler claims to see a broad conspiracy.

The strategy for politicians like Mr. Nadler is to try to persuade the public that the Russian government’s attempts to meddle in our democratic process—which unfortunately the Kremlin has been doing for most of our lives—were so powerful in 2016 and so focused on helping Mr. Trump that they actually swayed the election. Part of the strategy involves convincing people that the Russians ran a significant disinformation campaign via American digital media companies.

But a Tuesday meeting of the House Judiciary committee may not have gone exactly as Mr. Nadler had planned. The witness was Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Here’s a partial transcript:

NADLER: Does Google now know the full extent to which its online platforms were exploited by Russian actors in the election two years ago?

PICHAI: We have — you know we undertook a very thorough investigation, and in 2016, we — we now know that there were two main ad accounts linked to Russia, which — which you know, advertised on Google for about $4,700 in advertising.

We also found other limited…

NADLER: Total of $4,700?

PICHAI: That’s right, which was, you know — no amount is OK here, but we found limited activity, improper activity. We learned a lot from that and we have, you know, dramatically increased the protections we have around our election offerings.

Leading up to the current elections, we did — we again found limited activity, both from the Internet Research Agency in Russia, as well as accounts linked to Iran. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/gen_flynn_was_setup_by_fbi_told_no_lawyer_needed_when_they_sprang_their_perjury_trap.html

The sentencing memo submitted by lawyers for General Michael Flynn contains details that ought to outrage anyone not consumed with hatred and desire for vengeance against anyone who worked for President Trump, however briefly. Simply put, he was misled and bamboozled into a trap, based on the FBI’s own documents.

Byron York presents a superb account of the disgraceful entrapment of a distinguished general, which I urge you to read in its entirety.

He begins with a general summary:

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who arranged the bureau’s interview with then-national security adviser Michael Flynn at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017 – the interview that ultimately led to Flynn’s guilty plea on one count of making false statements – suggested Flynn not have a lawyer present at the session, according to newly-filed court documents. In addition, FBI officials, along with the two agents who interviewed Flynn, decided specifically not to warn him that there would be penalties for making false statements because the agents wanted to ensure that Flynn was “relaxed” during the session.

The new information, drawn from McCabe’s account of events plus the FBI agents’ writeup of the interview – the so-called 302 report – is contained in a sentencing memo filed Tuesday by Flynn’s defense team.

The practice of the FBI not recording interviews but rather relying on agents’ notes ought to have ended a generation or more ago. The potential for abuse is obvious. At the end of the article, York notes:

In one striking detail, footnotes in the Flynn memo say the 302 report cited was dated Aug. 22, 2017 – nearly seven months after the Flynn interview. It is not clear why the report would be written so long after the interview itself.

I suspect the requirement of Miranda notifications of right to counsel probably does not apply here, as Flynn was not under arrest. But with most television viewers able to recite from memory the mandatory Miranda notice that begins, “You have the right to remain silent…,”the widespread impression that Flynn was treated unfairly is inevitable, at least if this gets any coverage in media they read. I know, it’s a slim hope…