RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/michael-cohen-sentencing-campaign-finance-law/

The prosecutor is twisting campaign-finance law.

Donald Trump’s wayward counsel, Michael Cohen, was sentenced today as part of a plea bargain with the government. As part of that settlement, Cohen has admitted to criminal violations of federal campaign-finance law and has implicated President Trump in those violations. The press is ablaze with headlines trumpeting the president’s possible involvement in two felony campaign-finance violations. The source of these violations are Mr. Cohen’s arranging — allegedly at Trump’s direction — hush-money payments to women alleging long-ago affairs with the 2016 presidential candidate.

The Federal Election Campaign Act holds that an “expenditure” is any “purchase, payment, loan, advance, deposit or gift of money, or anything of value, for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.” According to Cohen and the U.S. Attorney, the hush-money payments were, it appears, made in the hopes of preventing information from becoming public before the election, and hence were “for the purpose of influencing” the election. This means that, at a minimum, they had to be reported to the Federal Election Commission; further, if they were authorized by Mr. Trump, they would become, in the law’s parlance, “coordinated expenditures,” subject to limits on the amounts that could be spent. Since the lawful contribution limit is much lower than the payments made, and the payments were not reported, this looks like an open and shut case, right?

Well, no. Or at least not in the way some might presume. To the contrary, the law — following our common sense — tells us that the hush-money payments outlined by the U.S. Attorney are clearly not campaign expenditures. There is no violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act.

To reach the opposite conclusion, the U.S. Attorney is placing all his chips on the language “for the purpose of influencing an election.” Intuitively, however, we all know that such language cannot be read literally — if it were, virtually every political candidate of the past 45 years has been in near-constant violation. The candidate who thinks “I need to brush my teeth, shower, and put on a nice suit today in order to campaign effectively” is surely not required to report as campaign expenditures his purchases of toothpaste, soap, and clothing. When he eats his Wheaties — breakfast of champions, and surely one cannot campaign on an empty stomach — his cereal and milk are not campaign expenses. When he drives to his office to start making phone calls to supporters, his gas is not a campaign expense.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-flynn-entrapment-11544658915

Of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s many targets, the most tragic may be former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The former three-star general pleaded guilty last year to a single count of lying to the FBI about conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Now we learn from Mr. Flynn’s court filing to the sentencing judge that senior bureau officials acted in a way to set him up for the fall.

Not a rich man after decades in uniform, Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to avoid bankruptcy and spare his son from becoming a legal target. Mr. Flynn’s filing doesn’t take issue with the description of his offense. But the “additional facts” the Flynn defense team flags for the court raise doubts about FBI conduct.

The Flynn filing describes government documents concerning the Jan. 24, 2017 meeting with two FBI agents when Mr. Flynn supposedly lied. It turns out the meeting was set up by then Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who personally called Mr. Flynn that day on other business—to discuss an FBI training session. By Mr. McCabe’s account, on that call he told Mr. Flynn he “felt that we needed to have two of our agents sit down” with him to talk about his Russia communications.

Mr. McCabe then urged Mr. Flynn to meet without a lawyer present. “I explained that I thought the quickest way to get this done was to have a conversation between [Mr. Flynn] and the agents only. I further stated that if LTG Flynn wished to include anyone else in the meeting, like the White House Counsel for instance, that I would need to involve the Department of Justice. [Mr. Flynn] stated that this would not be necessary and agreed to meet with the agents without any additional participants,” wrote Mr. McCabe in a memo viewed by the Flynn defense team.

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…

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/12/11/mueller_files_undercut_cohens_infamous_appointment_in_prague.html

It was one of the most incendiary allegations included in the Clinton-financed opposition research known as the Steele dossier – that Donald Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen met with “Kremlin officials” in Prague in 2016 to arrange payments to operatives hacking Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Despite strong denials from Cohen, the claim has shadowed the president, inspiring and coloring the Russia investigation ever since. McClatchy reported in April that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had obtained evidence of the Prague trip and likely confirmed the secret meeting.

But a flurry of court filings by Mueller last week suggests that this story is false, a damaging piece of disinformation that has roiled the nation for two years.

Officials familiar with the case said the proof is in the lack of evidence in the 25 pages of court papers Mueller has filed on Cohen over the past two weeks. The alleged Prague visit is not evident in the plea agreement, the criminal information statement or the sentencing memorandum, none of which contain redactions.

In fact, language in the filings strongly indicates prosecutors have not found evidence to authenticate the Prague rumor, according to people familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

They point to the sentencing memo filed Friday, for starters. On page 5, Mueller stated that Cohen “has provided relevant and truthful information” about “his own contacts with Russian interests during the campaign” to prosecutors in their investigation of Russian election interference. Though Mueller details contacts Cohen made with various Russians, he offers no evidence he contacted Kremlin officials in Prague, as described in the dossier. The Czech city, in fact, is not cited in any of his filings, though Moscow, St. Petersburg, Davos and other cities are.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272204/trump-haters-smell-blood-over-cohens-charges-joseph-klein

The chorus of Trump-haters rushing to brand President Trump a criminal has gotten considerably louder since last Friday. That was the day prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office separately filed their sentencing recommendations against ex-Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Cohen had pleaded guilty to a variety of charges, including of lying to Congress. The Mueller sentencing memo contained some teasers on the Russian collusion investigation. However, the teasers seem to have fallen flat, including the Moscow tower project promoted by Cohen, which never got off the ground, and a cryptic reference to “political synergy” offered by a Russian official as early as 2015 that Cohen apparently did not pursue. Instead, the Trump-haters have turned their attention to the portion of the New York prosecutors’ sentencing memorandum regarding Cohen’s admitted federal election campaign finance law violations, which the Trump-haters are counting on to spell trouble for the president.

The prosecutors in New York accepted as true in their sentencing memorandum Cohen’s claim that he had arranged for the payment of hush money to two past alleged Trump paramours in violation of federal election campaign finance laws, doing so “in coordination with and at the direction of” President Trump (referred to as “Individual #1” in their sentencing memo). That is all the Trump-haters had to hear before declaring that it was curtains for the president. Smelling blood in the water, they are looking beyond impeachment to possible jail time once the president leaves office.

On Sunday morning’s edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, for example, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, still living on his reputation from that decades-old scandal, said, “There’s something much more important than just impeachment going on, and that is the fact that Donald Trump for the first time in his life is cornered.”

The Obama administration’s former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal said on CNN: “Even if a sitting president can’t be indicted, he’s got to know his future looks like it’s behind bars unless he cuts some sort of deal with the prosecutors.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/11/muellers-co

The sudden death of the unutterable nonsense of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government, announced as it was in the hand-off to the Southern New York U.S. Attorney of the shabby fruit of Michael Cohen’s plea bargaining, has divided onlookers into three communities of opinion.

The true believers in the collusion canard are left slack-jawed, like the international Left after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: an immense fervor of faith is instantly destroyed; it is the stillness of a sudden and immense evaporation.

The professional Trump-haters, the Democratic Party assassination squads in the Congress and media, like disciplined soldiers, have swiveled with parade ground precision and resumed firing after a mere second to reload, at the equally fatuous nonsense about illegal campaign contributions. Disreputable, contemptible myth-makers and smear-jobbers though they are, they deserve credit for fanaticism, improvisation, and managing in unison to sound half plausible in the face of the crushing defeat they have suffered and the piffle and pottage they are left to moralize about.

Third, and slowest to respond, so sudden has been the change of the whole Trump-hate narrative, are those who never wavered from the requirement of real evidence of something before they would endorse the drastic act of impeaching and removing the nation’s leader. Some feel betrayed and some vindicated, but sensing no need for instant response, unlike the Trump-haters who are scrambling to try to cooper up some credibility for continuing their assault on the president, the third group is preparing with only deliberate speed to counter-attack the assassins-by-impeachment with their full and now overpowering armament of facts and law.

The Trump-haters can make a strong case that the president is an obnoxious public personality—that he is boastful, exaggerates constantly, sends out silly tweets with grade two typographical errors in them and gets into ill-tempered slanging matches with half the people with whom he comes into contact. To a great many, he is just refreshingly puncturing official self-importance.

But whatever anyone thinks of Trump, there are two points his enemies will have to face: he won the 2016 election and that can only be undone by the 2020 election, and high office-holders can only be impeached and removed from office by high crimes and misdemeanors as prescribed by the Constitution.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/11/james-and-the-giant-impeachment/
For those concerned that former FBI Director James Comey is suffering from early dementia, have no fear: His memory returned with a vengeance during a Sunday night interview with MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace.

On Friday, under questioning by House Judiciary Committee members, Comey answered, “I don’t know,” “I don’t recall,” or “I don’t remember” nearly 250 times during a six-hour closed-door hearing. His memory lapse included critical details like how the infamous Steele dossier reached his agency; who at the FBI drafted the initiation document to investigate the Trump campaign; who at the FBI had authority to open a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign; and his own comments about the tarmac meeting between his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and former president Bill Clinton. He said he didn’t know what the word “insidious” meant and couldn’t explain the difference between collusion and conspiracy.

But perhaps Comey loaded up on ginseng over the weekend because his vague and convenient memory miraculously returned when he was questioned by a fawning Wallace at a 92nd Street Y event just two days later. Tiny details about dates, locations, meeting participants and a funny moment during a briefing with President Obama in early January 2017 were recalled with ease. He knew enough about the recent Michael Cohen plea deal to suggest the president is an unindicted co-conspirator, and even recalled how Trump “lied” about the inauguration attendance. He claimed that it’s possible the Russians have tapes of Trump “engaged in unusual activities in Moscow.”

But perhaps his most explosive revelation was when Comey smugly revealed how he exploited the disarray during the Trump administration’s first weeks to corner National Security Advisor Michael Flynn about his monitored calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016. Flynn, who already was under investigation by the FBI for his alleged ties to the Kremlin, had denied to senior administration officials that he discussed recently-imposed sanctions with the Russian diplomat.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/report-womens-march-leaders-spread-anti-semitic-trope-during-inaugural-meeting/

Women’s March leaders Tamikah Mallory and Carmen Perez endorsed an infamous anti-Semitic trope during the group’s first meeting in November 2016, according to a wide-ranging report published by Tablet on Tuesday

Mallory and Perez “asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people — and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade,” the report says.

Mallory and Perez, who were invited to join the Women’s March soon after Trump’s election because the movement’s white founders felt they needed greater diversity among their leadership, deny discussing Jewish people in any capacity during the meeting in question.

As the report notes, the thoroughly debunked notion that Jewish people organized and profited from American chattel slavery was popularized by the Nation of Islam’s book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which casts Jews as a historic oppressor of black people.