RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/27/attack-

The Covington Lie offered the perfect occasion for the electronic mob to pounce—after temporarily licking its wounds following the BuzzFeed fake news hysteria. And it did so without shame or even much regret after the fact, as Jason Leopold, the BuzzFeed fabulist, ceded center stage to a kindred serial prevaricator, Nathan Phillips. The latter in his 15 minutes of fame did not make a major statement that was not contradicted by an earlier statement or by the facts.

The entire psychodrama boiled down not to what the facts on the ground showed, but rather who each party was perceived innately to be.

On the one side, the suspects were seen as rambunctious teenage kids (thus easy targets not especially schooled in the arts of rhetoric or repartee).

They were white (enough said) and smiling (indicative of their smirking privilege and lack of victim status).

They also were doctrinaire religious (the current upsurge in left-wing Catholic bigotry is our updated version of the “whore of Babylon” smear wave of the 19th century).

They were mostly male (toxic masculinity, Gillette just reminded, is the font et origio of our sins).

They were pro-life, and anti-abortion (insensitive to the reality that an ascendant Planned Parenthood just announced record annual income of $1.67 billion and its highest annual profit in history with $244.8 million).

Some were wearing red Trump MAGA hats (or as Joy Behar justified the lynch mob frenzy, “Because we’re desperate to get Trump out of office. That’s why.”)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/the-c-list-caper/

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone, rumored for months to be imminent, is more telling for what it omits than what it alleges.

Stone is charged with lying during congressional investigations of what happed in 2016 rather than for anything directly related to his laughably inept efforts to gather information on what WikiLeaks was about dump on Hillary Clinton during the campaign.

Allegedly, Stone testified falsely about his communications with two associates in 2016, Jerome Corsi, Stone’s confederate at the Infowars conspiracy-theory site, and Randy Credico, a left-wing comedian and talk-show host. Needless to say, this was a decidedly C-list caper. Stone is further charged with witness tampering and with falsely denying that he was in possession of emails and texts documenting communications about WikiLeaks.

The evidence of Stone’s corruptly influencing Credico to stonewall the committees seems, ahem, strong. Referring to the committee’s subpoena, he texted Credico, “Stonewall it. Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan . . . Richard Nixon.” Also: “If you testify you’re a fool.” Stone, who has long prided himself on his outlaw politics and may now have literally lived down to his self-image, also made a reference to mobster Frank Pentangeli’s sudden bout of amnesia during congressional testimony in The Godfather: Part II.

Most of the 23-page indictment weaves the tale of the longtime Trump associate’s desperation to find out what WikiLeaks had, and to press sources who had access to Julian Assange — particularly Credico, who interviewed him. The idea, clearly, was to urge WikiLeaks to publish damaging information in the weeks before Election Day. Stone, however, is mostly in the dark. His one request — through intermediary Credico, that Assange provide information about a specific incident (not described) during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state — is apparently rebuffed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-issue-is-not-roger-stones-lurid-personal-life-but-equality-under-the-law/

The issues of special Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone have nothing to do with his personal life. His sexual habits should be of no concern to anyone. And what is so funny about the Internet jokes about (a still presumed innocent) Stone enjoying rape once he’s in prison?

The issues are instead threefold: One, given that Stone has said so many contradictory things, were his public statements lies and his sworn statements true, vice versa, neither or both?

Two, why after 21 months, is the special counsel still hounding minor transitory Trump officials (Stone was fired from the Trump campaign way back in August 2015) in hopes of flipping them to find proof of almost anything against Trump? Stone, like all other Americans indicted by Mueller so far, is not charged with any crime close to “collusion.” We are now well past the descent of this investigation into “show me the man, and I’ll show the crime.”

Three, the Stone indictment raises real questions of equality under the law.

If Stone lied under oath to Congress as Mueller alleges, then by all means prosecute him to the fullest.

But what exactly are the federal criteria that adjudicate when and where lying under oath to Congress or to federal authorities is a prosecutable crime? Is it perceived useful only in Robert Muller’s hunt for incriminating evidence against Trump, as in the case of Michael Flynn?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13629/trump-third-year

Those who opposed the creation of the US as an independent nation claimed there was collusion between the Founding Fathers and the French, who wished to prevent the English from extending their empire to the whole of North America.

The second charge brought against Donald Trump by is arrogance. Have we forgotten Barack Obama, who claimed that the start of his presidency meant “oceans receding ” to end climate change? Or his boast that he would solve the Israel-Palestine problem in one year?

The claim that “foreign interests”, including European, Latin American, Arab and Iranian (during the Shah’s time) have tried to buy influence in the US by financing candidacies up to the presidency has been a routine part of the political war in America for decades.

Theoretically, we have another year before the next American presidential campaign gets underway. And yet those who follow US policies more closely know that the 2020 presidential campaign has already started. In a sense, at least as far as the two main political parties are concerned, the campaign started the day Donald Trump took the oath of office.

In his first two years in office, Trump has attended at least 30 rallies across the United States that could best be described as campaign sorties. Add to that more than two dozen media interviews, not to mention thousands of tweets designed to create the image of a successful president running for a second term. For their part, Trump’s Democrat rivals have campaigned against him in a guerrilla-style, hoping to kill his hope of a second term with a thousand cuts.

https://www.amgreatness.com/2019/01/26/reject

Now that the media, the Left, and their usual conservative allies have failed to destroy young Nick Sandmann and the other Covington Catholic High School boys who attended the March for Life last weekend, they seem to be falling back on the old “wrong on both sides” standby.

Activist Nathan Phillips, the 64-year-old Native-American “elder,” may have lied when he claimed the students surrounded him, blocked his way, and yelled “Build the Wall”—and lied for good measure about being a Vietnam veteran. (In fact, he marched, cameras in tow, into their group while they were waiting for their bus, beating a drum within inches of Sandmann’s face.) But, as the story now goes, the boys—or “many” of them, or maybe just a “few” of them—were “mocking” or “disrespectful.” There were even some “tomahawk chops,” like at sports events, and maybe a few of what may have been “war whoops” or at least mimicry of his chants in a less than adulatory tone.

Even commentators who have supported the students, such as Robby Soave in his otherwise excellent reportage at Reason, have criticized them for this behavior.

Two points need to be made about all this.

The first and less important one is about whether anyone was actually mocking or acting disrespectfully toward Phillips. As usual in these situations, the evidence is ambiguous. From everything I’ve watched and read, the predominant reaction of the boys seemed to be confusion amidst all the racket, with some even thinking at first that Phillips was on their side against the Black Hebrew Israelites who had been harassing them with obscenities. (On some of the videos, a few students can be heard saying things like “What’s going on here?”) There appeared to be some Tomahawk chopping, but also some kids who just seemed to be dancing to the beat and trying to join in the chants.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-offbeat-genius-of-a-great-american-spy-11548478837?mod=hp_lead_pos10

In 1976, the CIA’s Moscow station heard some excellent news. One of its most prized sources, a well-placed Soviet diplomat who’d turned on the regime, had been transferred back to Moscow.

The asset, code-named TRIGON, had already been supplied with the T-100, an experimental CIA camera concealed inside a pen, and was in a perfect position to copy scores of classified documents.

The only challenge was getting in touch with him.

Armed with a seemingly limitless budget, the KGB had put an estimated 50,000 spies on the streets of Moscow, wrapping the city in an impenetrable surveillance blanket. Any CIA officer who left the U.S. embassy would be followed by highly-trained teams of 20 or more.

So many CIA assets had been exposed and killed over the last decade that the station had all but stopped trying to arrange face-to-face meetings. Some spymasters in Washington viewed Moscow as a lost cause. The station chiefs had only one card left to play.

When he arrived in Moscow in 1976, Tony Mendez had spent 11 years at the CIA but had little experience in covert operations. He’d originally been recruited as an artist. Now he ran the agency’s disguise branch.

Mr. Mendez met with every field officer in Moscow. He logged their exact clothing and shoe sizes, collected hair samples and color-matched their skin tones. A few months later, he returned from his laboratory with some unusual cargo: enough masks, wigs, dental facades, prosthetics, makeup palettes and made-to-measure costumes to put on a magic show. If the CIA wanted to operate freely in Moscow, its agents had to disappear.

Mr. Mendez and his team trained operatives to apply disguises in layers and showed them how to radically alter their appearance on the street, changing from a man in a suit to an old woman in a shawl in less than 45 seconds. To help them bail out of moving cars undetected, CIA technologists invented the “Jack in the Box,” a briefcase containing a spring-loaded inflatable dummy that popped up in the empty seat.

As far-fetched as it sounds, this experiment in deception and illusion became the central pillar of a unique operational mindset known as “the Moscow Rules.” By learning to outfox the KGB, the Moscow station not only connected with TRIGON, it scored some the biggest espionage coups in American history.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/01/25/roger-stone-charges-indictment-richard-nixon-what-do-politician-column/2678017002/
Collusion isn’t one of the charges against Richard Nixon-loving political trickster Roger Stone.

The arrest of Roger Stone by Special Counsel Robert Mueller could not have been more dramatically presented. The pre-dawn raid of Stone’s house by a contingent of heavily armed, body-armored agents could easily have fit the arrest of El Chapo rather than an elderly crank with a Nixon fetish.

Despite the breathless media accounts, the actual indictment of Stone is most notable for what it does not include. This was supposed to be the long-rumored linchpin to Russian collusion: The Russians fed information to Wikileaks which fed the information to Stone who fed the information to the Trump campaign.

The raid on Stone’s home clearly made for great television, but the Stone indictment hardly makes for a great collusion case. Let’s be honest. After more than a year of investigation, Mueller nailed a gadfly on false statements, witness tampering and obstruction rather than illegal collusion with Russia.

That’s what has been happening all along. Mueller has almost exclusively charged non-Russian defendants with either false statements or other process crimes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/roger-stone-indictment-underscores-no-trump-russia-conspiracy/

Will the Justice Department ever correct the record?

R oger Stone is the shiny object. The obstruction charges in his long-anticipated indictment, made public on Friday, are not the matter of consequence for the United States.

Nor is the critical thing the indictment’s implicit confirmation that there was no criminal “collusion” conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

What matters is this: The indictment is just the latest blatant demonstration that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, the Department of Justice, and the FBI have known for many months that there was no such conspiracy. And yet, fully aware that the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI had assiduously crafted a public narrative that Trump may have been in cahoots with the Russian regime, they have allowed that cloud of suspicion to hover over the presidency — over the Trump administration’s efforts to govern — heedless of the damage to the country.

The rationale for the Trump-Russia investigation — namely, the notion that the Trump campaign had “coordinated” in the Kremlin’s cyber-espionage operation to meddle in the 2016 campaign — has been nothing more than a suspicion harbored by political, law-enforcement, and intelligence officials who loathed Donald Trump. That there may be a thousand good reasons to dislike Donald Trump is irrelevant, for we are talking about investigations, not politics. Investigative suspicions must be rooted in fact, not contempt.

Not only was the suggestion of a Trump-Russia conspiracy not founded on fact. The officials calling the shots had reason to know that the premise was factually false. In truth, there was no evidence of Trump-campaign complicity in Russian espionage — nothing but the Clinton-campaign generated, unverified Steele dossier. The months-in-the-making Stone indictment is just the latest proof of that.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/25/who-leaked-the

The Trump presidential campaign’s alleged ties to WikiLeaks have been a pivotal piece of the Trump-Russia “collusion” story since the beginning. In order to mitigate the damage to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy after WikiLeaks in July 2016 released damning emails swiped from the Democratic National Committee’s server, Clinton’s team skillfully changed the subject by claiming Russia was behind the hack and suggested the Trump campaign had a hand in it, too.

WikiLeaks is back in the news for two reasons. First is the arrest on Friday of former Trump associate Roger Stone, who Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges made false statements about his communications with the group.

Second, and far more interesting, is renewed allegations by Donald Trump, Jr. that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) leaked details about Don Jr.’s contact with WikiLeaks during the campaign—information that was erroneous and resulted in major correction by CNN, the news organization that first reported the bogus story.

In an interview with Fox News last week, Don Jr. said “there’s a 99.9 percent chance” that Schiff was “the guy that was leaking my testimony as I was testifying.”

“I came out of testimony at about 8 o’clock looking [at my phone] and CNN is running quotes from noon on about my testimony . . . I would bet a lot of money it was him.”

For more than a year, the people who leaked unauthorized information about Don Jr.’s closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on December 6, 2017, have not been officially identified, let alone punished. It is just one more frustrating example of how government insiders, in collaboration with their accomplices in the press, escape accountability for their role in perpetuating a seditious plot to take down a presidency.