RUTHFULLY YOURS

Now we have it ostensibly from then-FBI Director James Comey as well as former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe that there might have been no surveillance of Carter Page without the Steele dossier. If so, that’s probably because the dossier provided the one thing the FBI lacked and was unlikely to find (because it didn’t exist): a reason to believe Mr. Page was important.

In the dossier accumulated by former British spy Christopher Steele, Mr. Page is a player. He meets secretly with Vladimir Putin’s No. 1 capo, Igor Sechin. Dangled in front of him is a gobsmacking bribe—a brokerage fee on the forthcoming privatization of a 19.5% stake in the giant Russian state oil firm Rosneft. All he has to do is arrange the lifting of U.S. sanctions, as if this were in the power of the elfin Mr. Page to deliver.

The story is implausible. Mr. Page has denied it under oath. Nothing has emerged to suggest the FBI confirmed it. Only Luke Harding, a British journalist who has written a book alleging Trump -Russia collusion, finds it inherently self-crediting. Why? Because Mr. Steele’s Russian “mole” apparently correctly anticipated the Rosneft deal that would finally be consummated in the closing hours of 2016. Even the Russian cabinet and Rosneft’s own board, Mr. Harding wrote last week at Politico.com, “only discovered the deal on December 7, hours after Sechin had already recorded his TV meeting with Putin revealing it.”

This nonsense actually points to why somebody might pluck out of the pending Rosneft deal and attach Mr. Page’s name to it. The partial sale, aimed at reducing the Russian government’s stake to 50% plus one share, had actually been conspicuously on the agenda for years. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree in 2014, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov started touting the expected proceeds in 2015, and Mr. Putin formally included them in the state budget in February 2016. CONTINUE AT SITE

On Thursday, February 8, 2018, Tucker Carlson featured Sonia Ossorio, president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). The portion begins here at 20:30. The interview occurred because Macy’s has decided to unveil Muslim garb – i.e., the hijab. The brainchild of Muslim convert Lisa Vogl, the items are part of Macy’s development program, The Workshop, which “helps nurture businesses owned by minorities and women.”

In the 1999 film titled Shackled: Women, Shiren Samieh explains that “the hijab comes from the Arabic word meaning ‘curtain,'” and as such, it is intended to be “a limitation” so that women are restricted in movement, thinking, and freedom. In fact, Islamic religious leaders maintain that a woman who is not covered will excite men, and women who are uncovered lead themselves to being raped.

In fact, “Islamic law ([s]haria) requires women to cover themselves. The head covering is interpreted as a symbol of male domination by most critics – and many Muslim women, who fight for the right to dress as they please. In 1994, a 21-year-old named Katia Bengana became the first casualty of the renewed Islamist terror campaign in Algeria after refusing to cover her hair. She defended her choice even as the gun was pointed at her head.

Some apologists insist that the veil is not mandated by the religion, although they do not have anything within the sacred texts to counter the passages in which Muhammad instructed its use. In fact, verse 24:60 says that the veil is optional only for unmarried women too old to have children.

Calling a coin toss “racist” is stretching things. So here come the race charlatans

When everything is about race, nothing is about race. The left plays the race card as often as it plays the Nazi or gender card, its hackneyed alternative to any substantive discussion about issues and policy. It’s much like those pull-string dolls: pull the string of a liberal and hear about race, gender, skin color, or immigration status. And not much else.

Race became the National Football League theme this year, as a bunch of privileged young athletes, being paid millions of dollars for playing a game, supported by an organization worth $75 billion, found it necessary to take a knee against the National Anthem. There they were, protesting the very country leaving them on the winning end of such income inequality.

The NFL season, thankfully, is in our rearview mirror for the next six months. Ahead is the Winter Olympics. Will the Olympic motto of “Faster, Higher, Stronger” be replaced by “Skin color and gender – darker and more confused”?

Rick Moran, on these pages, pointed out how the diversity police have infected the Olympic games, with unnecessary commentary on the skin color and sex orientation of athletes. Hopefully, the fastest and strongest athletes are at the games, regardless of identity factors, but we shall see if the virtue-signaling NBC commentators can resist the siren song of identity politics – much as the NFL has done.

Forty-six years ago, a group of hamfisted burglars bungled the task of bugging the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate building in Washington D.C. Two years later, Richard Nixon resigned as president a result of the failed cover-up that ensued. Although Barack Obama is no longer president, the abuses that occurred within the FBI and Justice Department under his watch already have the potential to eclipse the Watergate scandal in their historic significance and damage done to American government.

​A Beltway adage ​has it that “it’s always the cover-up that’ll get you, not the original transgression.” Often, this proves to be true, especially in the case of Nixon, but even more recently, given the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, which were over perjury and obstruction of justice, not actual abuse of power with a 22-year-old intern.
However, with the recent declassification of the Nunes and Grassley memos from the House and Senate, in this case the putative crimes are far more serious than a failed attempt to bug the private office of a political party. These crimes have the potential to shake American confidence in otherwise prestigious institutions like the FBI, and the sanctity of our constitutional rights as citizens, especially those afforded by the Fourth Amendment, specifically protection “against unreasonable searches and seizures” or warrants being issued without “probable cause.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Just a year ago all of the smart people were mocking Donald Trump for being insane enough to suggest the Obama administration had surveilled or as he put it wiretapped his campaign. What a paranoid lunatic they said, ‘Get off Twitter!’ Yeah. Now we know what actually happened.

The question at this point is how many Trump’s people weren’t spied on by the FBI. Trump advisor Carter Page was placed under government surveillance in the fall of 2016 after the feds used uncorroborated claims from the Trump dossier to justify a FISA warrant.

We know from Congressional testimony that Page spoke to Trump advisor, Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon while he was being spied on, meaning Bannon was likely spied on too.

Tonight, based on our own reporting, we can tell you that Carter Page also sent email messages to members of the Trump campaign during that same period. Presumably, the FBI intercepted those as well.

Suddenly it looks like the Obama administration may have spied on a significant portion of the Trump campaign team. Just how many people were surveilled and to what extent? How much did President Obama know about that? We still don’t have the answers to those questions, though we definitely have the right to them. Oh, no we don’t, say Democrats. Asking questions is a sign of disloyalty to this country.