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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Larry C. Johnson: The Malevolent Farce that is Mueller and the Russia Hoax

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/05/larry-c-johnson-the-malevolent-farce-that-is-mueller-and-the-russia-hoax/

The “Introduction” to the Mueller Report justifies the investigation of Donald Trump by claiming as undisputed fact that, “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” But, according to Mueller, this “sweeping and systematic” interference, consisted of:

A social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Russian military intelligence conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents.

You have got to be kidding me? The Mueller team present the the Russian social media campaign as some sort of propaganda behemoth and claims it was wildly influential. The Mueller folks cite, for instance, the IRA spending $100,000 on Facebook ads as evidence of this great influence. Nothing is said, however, about the billion dollars the Clinton Campaign spent on media to influence the American public. Apparently, $100,000 dollars from Russia carries more punch than $1,000,000,000 from Hillary.

The FBI’s Trump-Russia Investigation Was Formally Opened on False Pretenses By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/fbi-trump-russia-investigation-george-papadopoulos/

The State Department and an Australian diplomat grossly exaggerated Papadopoulos’s claims — which were probably false anyway.

Chicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely: The Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails related to Hillary Clinton. From there, through either intentional deception or incompetence, the foreign ministries of Australia and the United States erected a fraudulent story tying the Trump campaign’s purported knowledge to the publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails.

That is what we learn from the saga of George Papadopoulos, as fleshed out by the Mueller report.

The investigative theory on which the FBI formally opened the foreign-counterintelligence probe code-named “Crossfire Hurricane” on July 31, 2016, held that the Trump campaign knew about, and was potentially complicit in, Russia’s possession of hacked emails that would compromise Hillary Clinton; and that, in order to help Donald Trump, the Kremlin planned to disseminate these emails anonymously (through a third party) at a time maximally damaging to Clinton’s campaign.

The Fright of James Comey By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/05/the-fright-of-james-comey/

In a recent op-ed, fired FBI Director James Comey was back again preaching to the nation about the dangers of Donald Trump and his capacity to corrupt any top-ranking federal official of lower character than Comey’s own.

Comey seems to have become utterly unhinged by Donald Trump, especially when the president, in his thick Queens accent, scoffs in the vernacular—quite accurately, given the transgressions of the FBI hierarchy—about “crooked cops.” What an affront to Comey’s complexity, his subtlety, his sophistication, his feigned Hamlet-like self-doubt—at least as now expressed in his latest incarnation as Twitter’s Kahlil Gibran.

One can say a number of things about the timing of Comey’s latest sermon and his characteristic projection of his own sins on to others.

First, Comey’s unprofessionalism was home-grown and certainly did not need any help from President Trump. His schizophrenic behavior both as a prosecutor and investigator in the Hillary Clinton email matter was marked by exempting Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin from indictment, despite their lying to his own federal officials about their knowledge of a private Clinton email server. Comey wrote his summation of the Clinton email investigation before he had even interviewed the former secretary of state. He was hardly independent from a recused Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Clinton email investigation. As her rubbery courier he bent to her directives on all key decisions that led to de facto exoneration of likely next president Hillary Clinton.

None Dare Call It Spying (But It Was Obviously Spying) Derek Hunter

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2019/05/05/none-dare-call-it-spying-but-it-was-obviously-spying-n2545854

We used to be able to get along. We really did. We haven’t always been able to work together – it’s difficult to find common ground when you want the polar opposite of your opponent – but at the end of a long day of fighting, people were perfectly capable of eating a meal near or even with each other. Now we can’t even agree in the obvious definition of words.

Dictionary.com defines “spy” as:

1) a person employed by a government to obtain secret information or intelligence about another, usually hostile, country, especially with reference to military or naval affairs.

2) a person who keeps close and secret watch on the actions and words of another or others.

There is no possible interpretation of those definitions that does not cover what the Obama administration did to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016.

Check Out These Pathetic Prices For ‘An Evening With The Clintons’ By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/check-out-these-pathetic-prices-for-an-evening-with-the-clintons/

Tonight is the final night of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s speaking tour “An Evening with the Clintons” and as much as it might be amusing to see Bill and Hillary pretend to stand each other for the duration of the event, I can’t imagine spending my hard earned money to listen to them talk about current events, or to whine about Hillary’s defeat.

But, if you’re so inclined, their event tonight in Las Vegas is not yet sold out, and as Hot Air reported earlier today, you could get tickets for $15—though I’m now seeing tickets for as low as $10 at StubHub.

And guess what? That’s not the lowest they’ve gone for.

The Clinton’s show moved to California Saturday night and tickets went for as little as $2.00. Wow. Imagine that. Some California Democrats listened to Bill and Hillary, a former president and a former Secretary of State (and the leader of pantsuits nation) in person for a couple of bucks That makes the $15.00 tickets in Las Vegas look over-priced, doesn’t it?

I’d rather spend $2.00 on a cup of coffee than listen to them myself. Not all tickets were that low (some seats are a couple hundred bucks, and some were over thousand dollars) but sales were slow and were quickly discounted—though it hasn’t exactly succeeded in boosting attendance to the levels you’d expect for an event featuring a former U.S. president and Secretary of State.

Perhaps they should take it as a sign that they should just go away. The Clinton Era is long gone.

Weeding Out Dubious Marijuana Science Researchers find ways to minimize increases in crime and traffic deaths that followed legalization. By Alex Berenson

https://www.wsj.com/articles/weeding-out-dubious-marijuana-science-11557090088

Academics depict the peer-review process as the gold standard for intellectual honesty, ensuring published scholarly work is unbiased and accurate. But ideological conformity makes peer review a far thinner defense than advertised.

In January I published a book about the mental-health and violence risks of cannabis. Several dozen scholars signed a petition expressing in unison their objection to my work. Thus I’ve recently spent an inordinate amount of time reading papers seeking to prove that marijuana is a cure-all whose deleterious consequences are a figment of our collective imagination. The shoddiness of much of the work has shocked me.

Example: Driving deaths have risen more than 30% in Colorado and Washington, the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational use, since dispensaries opened there in 2014. That rise is more than double the national change. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported in October that the number of vehicle accidents overall were up faster in legalized states than the rest of the nation.

Bill Barr and the Law vs. The Lie Thomas McArdle

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/02/bill-barr-and-the-law-vs-the-lie/

Attorney General William Barr in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday was a living, breathing representation of the Constitution of the United States.

At one point during five hours that included a shower of insults from Senate Democrats, he put it all in a nutshell: special counsel Robert Mueller’s “work concluded when he sent his report to the attorney general,” Barr said, pointing out that as AG he “effectively overrode the regulations, used discretion, to lean as far forward as I could to make that public.”

As Barr added, “The job of the Justice Department is now over; that determines whether or not there’s a crime. The report is now in the hands of the American people. Everyone can decide for themselves. There’s an election in 18 months. That’s a very democratic process. But we’re out of it. And we have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.”

When Obama’s ego blew out of his earsBy Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/when_obamas_ego_blew_out_of_his_ears.html

We all saw the famous picture from the Obama administration on the day after President Trump was elected president in 2016. But now it’s coming out about just how bad it was at the top, according to a new book cited by Fox News.

Former President Obama took President Trump’s win and Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 as a personal insult, according to a newly updated book.

The former president was “shocked” by the election results and felt the American people had turned on him, The Washington Examiner reported, citing New York Times correspondent Peter Baker’s book “Obama: The Call of History.” It was originally published in 2017. He was also reportedly frustrated by Hillary Clinton’s “soulless” campaign after believing his legacy “was in safe hands.”

Personal insult? As if he didn’t start it (and keep at it), with his ‘clinging to guns and religion’ quote, one of his most famous? As if his chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, didn’t refer to Americans in less than coastal places as ‘deplorables’?

Pompeo: Omar’s Venezuela Comments ‘Ignorant’ and ‘Disgusting’ By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/mike-pompeo-ilhan-omars-venezuela-comments-ignorant-and-disgusting/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday evening that he finds Representative Ilhan Omar’s comments blaming the U.S. for the political crisis in Venezuela “disgusting.”

“The nicest thing I can say is, it is unbelievable ignorance. It’s just factually wrong,” Pompeo told Fox News. “The problems in Venezuela have been years in the making. It’s been a socialist regime, first with Chavez now with Maduro. And for a member of Congress, who, frankly — one who sits on an important national-security committee — to make a statement blaming America first in this way, it’s not only ignorant, it’s disgusting.”

Omar, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was asked Wednesday by PBS’s Democracy Now! about the “U.S.-supported coup attempt against President Maduro,” to which the Minnesota Democrat responded that America’s push for regime change in Venezuela does not help the country’s citizens.

“A lot of the policies that we have put in place has [sic] kind of helped lead [to] the devastation in Venezuela,” Omar said. “And we’ve sort of set the stage for where we’re arriving today.”

FBI Official’s Testimony Raises New Questions about Surveillance of Trump Campaign By Eric Felten

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/fbi-official-testimony-surveillance-trump-campaign/

Deputy assistant director Jonathan Moffa’s testimony, which has been obtained exclusively by National Review, suggests there was more going on than has yet been admitted.

The deputy assistant director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Jonathan Moffa, was involved with the Russia–Trump investigation from the start. He was asked, in a closed-door Capitol Hill interview on August 24, 2018, to describe his role: “I was the section chief over counterintelligence analysis during the period of the election,” Moffa told lawmakers and staff. “And as a result, I had analysts who reported to me who supported the full range of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigations and counterespionage investigations during that period. So in a sense, if there’s a Russian-election-related investigation underway in the division at that point, personnel reporting to me are a part of it.”

Moffa’s congressional interview was private, and no transcript has been released. But National Review has obtained a copy. The interview transcript reveals that the FBI’s use of Confidential Human Sources and other counterintelligence assets was far more extensive than has previously been acknowledged.

Much of the questioning of Moffa was done by Robert Parmiter, the chief counsel for the Republican staff on the Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee. He asked Moffa about August 2016 text messages between Moffa and FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was putting together a meeting to discuss the initial organization of the investigation. Even at that early date, Strzok specified that they needed to discuss the use of “CHS” and “liaison.”

Parmiter asked about the acronym CHS: “What does that stand for?”

Moffa replied: “Confidential human source.”