RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not all conspiracy theorists are unhinged paranoids—even when they insist there was a loosely organized if not sometimes incoherent effort to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy beyond the bounds of “normal” politics and later a renewed and unprecedented endeavor to abort his presidency.

After all, did anyone believe that in the year 2017 the losing side in an American election would immediately dub itself the “Resistance”—channeling the World War II nomenclature of the guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupation of France? Or that the defeated candidate Hillary Clinton would formally embrace the imagery of liberationist patriots fighting a Nazi-like Trump’s occupation of the United States?

One ingredient for removing a president would entail a nonstop effort by the opposition to use the courts, the legislative branch, the investigatory agencies, and the administrative state to discredit, undermine, and remove an elected government. In modern terms, that might entail opponents suing to challenge the legitimacy of the election, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,” voting machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were null and void.

The effort might embrace trying to subvert the Constitution by pressuring state electors not to honor their constitutionally defined responsibilities to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce articles of impeachment in the House.

A resistance might sue under the 25th Amendment to find the president non compos mentis, accompanied by a popular campaign to clinically diagnose the president as mentally unfit or physically decrepit. Or a resistance might use the courts to seek the removal of an elected president on grounds he was a rank profiteer and had violated the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution—or to file suits with cherry-picked liberal judges to delay and stop the president’s executive orders. On the petty side, an organized effort to discredit a president would range from boycotting the Inauguration to deliberately holding up and delaying confirmation of his appointees.

Two years before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States, he met with the leader of a hate group who had praised Hitler and declared that the Jews, “can’t say ‘Never Again’ to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you’re there forever.”

The previous year, Obama had launched his national profile with a DNC speech proclaiming, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” And there he was, smiling alongside Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, the largest black separatist organization in the country, whose theology claimed that white people were genetically engineered devils who were due to be destroyed by flying saucers.

Also posing with Farrakhan and Obama were Mustapha Farrakhan, Joshua Farrakhan and Leonard Farrakhan Muhammad, his security chief and son, his other son, and his chief of staff and son-in-law.

Also there was Willie F. Wilson, a Farrakhan ally, who had led a protest against an Asian business by a mob shouting, “F___ the Chinks”.

“We forgave Mr. Chan,” he told reporters after that incident. “If we didn’t forgive him, we would have cut his head off and rolled it down the street.”

Hope and change.

Blumenthal is a documented liar . When he ran for Senate he told veterans he served in Vietnam….never did. It was a shameless fabrication. Read https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265462/remembering-rich-blumenthals-vietnam-deception-lloyd-billingsley.

WASHINGTON – Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Democrats should “reveal and shame” President Trump’s judicial nominees since they do not have the power to filibuster them.

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently approved 17 of Trump’s judicial nominees. The Trump administration released a list of 12 new judicial nominees last week.

Blumenthal argued that the Trump administration is “seeking to radically reshape our judiciary,” which poses a threat to the protection of “individual rights and liberties including reproductive rights, LGBT rights, voting rights, workers’ rights, environmental protection and much more.”

He cited the confirmation of Judge John Bush for the 6th Circuit last summer.

“He has spent a decade posting online under a pseudonym using crude vulgar language to demean gay people, reproductive rights; he likened abortion to slavery and politicians who he may have disagreed with. He’s just one example,” Blumenthal said during a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. “Mark Norris, he was confirmed last week by the Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote – he has made a career out of hyper-partisanship. In 2001-2009, he fought for a change in the Tennessee constitution to severely restrict reproductive rights.”

Blumenthal continued, “They have in mind a clear and cruel agenda to dismantle essential elements that protect rights and liberties fundamental to our Constitution and to American values.”

When the “Steele dossier” was first published a year ago, it looked like a bombshell. The document, drawn up by the British ex-spy Christopher Steele, contained salacious allegations against President Trump and suggested that Russia had helped him win the 2016 election. No one has been able to corroborate its charges, but Democrats continue to see the dossier as a road map for impeaching Mr. Trump. Republicans, on the other hand, point out that it was created as opposition research, leading them to see it as an elaborate partisan ploy.

There is a third possibility, namely that the dossier was part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot targeting both parties and America’s political process. This is what seems most likely to me, having spent much of my 30-year government career, including with the CIA, observing Soviet and then Russian intelligence operations. If there is one thing I have learned, it’s that Vladimir Putin continues in the Soviet tradition of using disinformation and espionage as foreign-policy tools.

There are three reasons the Kremlin would have detected Mr. Steele’s information gathering and seen an opportunity to intervene. First, Mr. Steele did not travel to Russia to acquire his information and instead relied on intermediaries. That is a weak link, since Russia’s internal police service, the FSB, devotes significant technical and human resources to blanket surveillance of Western private citizens and government officials, with a particular focus on uncovering their Russian contacts.

Second, Mr. Steele was an especially likely target for such surveillance given that he had retired from MI-6, the British spy agency, after serving in Moscow. Russians are fond of saying that there is no such thing as a “former” intelligence officer. The FSB would have had its eye on him.

Third, the Kremlin successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee. Emails there could have tipped it off that the Clinton campaign was collecting information on Mr. Trump’s dealings in Russia.

If the FSB did discover that Mr. Steele was poking around for information, it hardly could have resisted using the gravitas of a retired MI-6 agent to plant false information. After hacking the DNC and senior Democratic officials, Russian intelligence chose to pass the information to WikiLeaks, most likely to capitalize on that group’s “self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” according to a 2017 report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Simultaneously the Kremlin was conducting influence operations on Facebook and other social-media sites. CONTINUE AT SITE