RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/the-russia-probe-has-nothing-to-do-with-russia/

America is at war with itself and the Russia probe is the leading, but far from the only, front in that war.

Bad as Vladimir Putin is, the investigation has little or nothing to do with Russia–which has been what it is since the days of the tsars–and everything to do with us.

From the Okhrana (the tsars’ secret police that authored the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and specialized in agents provocateurs) to the Cheka to the NKVD to the KGB to the FSB, it has always been the same. The Russians — Soviet or not — have always engaged in disinformation. Their recent Facebook and Twitter offerings were nothing more than the tip of an iceberg that’s been sailing for years.

In other words words, there’s nothing new here. The indictments of the Russian hackers by Mueller and Company were no more than a face-saving charade. They will never be arrested and no one will care. No one remembers who they were even now, less than a year later, except that they vastly expand the number of those indicted for breathless press reports.

U.S. leaders have been trying, and largely failing, to cope with Russia in all its guises since Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was gulled by New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, the progenitor of “fake news” and probably its worst practitioner, into thinking Stalin wasn’t so evil after all and that Dzhugashvili didn’t really starve over a million Ukrainians. And what little he did had to be done. After all, as Duranty put it, you had to break some eggs to make an omelet.
Exposing Joseph Stalin’s Media Apologist

Roosevelt went on to cede Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta, setting up decades of misery. When Reagan came along and tried to reverse the situation, building the military and confronting Moscow, many of our Democrat friends — the same ones attacking Trump for being soft on Russia — cried foul and went viciously after Reagan as a war monger.

The hypocrisy is beyond comprehension. Do these people think we’ve had a lobotomy and can’t remember anything? Maybe they have.

Nevertheless, after the Wall fell, things only got better for a brief time because Russia remained Russia and our leaders remained ineffectual or worse in their ability to deal with it. George W. Bush naively looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his “soul.” Obama was sleazier. He colluded with the Russian dictator, being caught on video whispering to Putin’s lackey Medvedev to tell Vladimir that he, Barack, would be freer to make concessions after the election. (If Trump had been caught doing such a thing, CNN would be playing it fifty times a day for the next fifty years.) And then he literally gave Syria to the Russian dictator, walking back on his red line on chemical weapons. (Again, if Trump had done that, CNN would have had a mega-orgasm. We need a new word for extreme hypocrisy.)

But now we’re in the era of Trump and that intramural blood sport the Russia probe is in full blast, threatening never to end, people being arrested right and left for process crimes or for engaging in the kind of corruption that has pervaded Washington, D.C., in both political parties since any of us were alive.

The latest is that we learn Donald, a businessman, was trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. As news, that’s right up there with the sky is blue and the sun rises in the East. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

November was the “mean” month, or, rather, another “mean” month. Tweets, inanities, recriminations and a general sense of unpleasantness, swept the nation and Europe: In the U.S., ballots disappeared, others became water-damaged and some arrived without signatures. In Europe, France’s Emmanuel Macron, already on the ropes for the economy, called for a European military force: “We must protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States.”This was said with President Trump, leader of the country that pays over 70% of the continent’s defense through NATO, standing nearby. This nastiness occurred despite the month hosting the great American holiday of Thanksgiving. Instead of giving thanks for living in this great land, the media and political elites went out of their way to find fault with anyone or anything that got in the way of their ideology, especially Donald J. Trump – witness the election results in Florida and Georgia and blame for the California wildfires. The crevasse created by identity politics, Mr. Trump’s Tweets and Trump haters grows wider and deeper. Bridging it grows more difficult and less likely.

Consider Jamal Khashoggi – not an admirable character, and not just because he was a columnist for The Washington Post, but because he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a right-wing, religiopolitical organization. Nevertheless, his murder was despicable and undoubtedly leaders in Saudi Arabia had fore-knowledge of the killing. But, spare me the hypocrisy – that does not make angels of those crying foul. Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other nation according to PBS. Iran is a hotbed of exporting terrorism. Yemen is ground zero in the battle between Shias and Sunnis, with Iran supporting the Houthi rebels who have infiltrated the country against the Saudi-supported government. Mr. Trump does himself a disservice in the crudity of his response, but had he singled out MBS (Mohammad bin Salman) for blame, the media and the left would have found fault for his cozying up to the Turkish dictator. As well, they would blame him for a spike in oil prices, which undoubtedly would have followed an abandonment of our decades-old relationship with the Kingdom. What Mr. Trump should do, with MBS in the spotlight, is pull concessions from the Saudis. He has already told the Saudis to end the bloodshed in Yemen, but he should do more. He should push them to restore ties with Qatar and to ensure the Gulf Cooperation Council remains effective. He should pressure the Saudis to recognize Israel. Keep in mind, the Saudis remained our ally after 9/11, despite fifteen of the nineteen hijackers being Saudi citizens. And it was President Obama who, in September 2016, vetoed a bill that held Saudi Arabia legally accountable for 9/11. Fortunately, Congress overrode his veto. Just remember, there are no clear consciences when a democratic nation’s interests require allying with a dictator.

Elections in the United States were much as expected, though counting extended into the middle of the month, and one Senate race – Mississippi – not decided until November 27. (Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith won by eight points.) Some results were not accepted by those that lost, reminding one of Anthony Trollope’s 1858 novel, Dr. Thorne: “…no political delinquency is abominable in the eyes of British politicians, but no delinquency is so abominable as that of venality at elections.” The bottom line: Democrats took over the House, while Republicans increased their lead in the Senate.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/trump_hints_at_the_scandal_about_to_blow.html

There is big news ahead, and President Trump teased it yesterday from Argentina via Twitter. Politics has become a game of narratives, something well understood by both President Trump and his enemies in the media-Democrat establishment. For more than two years, the professionals of the cultural and media establishment have worked assiduously to create an objectively false narrative, with no evidence whatsoever, that Vladimir Putin actually changed the count of votes to hand Trump the presidency, making his victory illegitimate. Most Democrats actually believe this now and have in earlier polls as well.

But as I keep reminding our readers, President Trump was the most successful reality television producer in the history of the medium, and he understands a story arc well, as events that can be programmed unfold. That must be kept in mind in understanding this enigmatic tweet that came from the president half a world away, in Argentina for meetings with the leaders of the 20 biggest economies in the world.

Watch @seanhannity on @FoxNews NOW. Enjoy!

Here is the short (barely over a minute) segment on Hannity last night to which the president referred:

John Solomon has a smile on his face as he reveals that two prosecutors working for John Huber, the Salt Lake City U.S. attorney tasked by then-A.G. Sessions with investigating corruption beyond what the Mueller team is handling, “reached out” to a whistleblower from the Clinton Foundation.

The Clinton Foundation scandal is, as President Trump would say, yuuuuge. I am told by a knowledgeable source that the official that John Solomon cites “knows where the bodies are buried.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/419193-trump-russia-and-lessons-from-the-mob-did-godfathers-steer-collusion

Back in the mafia’s heyday, FBI and IRS agents had a set of surveillance rules.

If one mobster showed up in town, pay notice. If two arrived, be suspicious. If three or four were in the same vicinity, something was going down.

And if five or more headed to the same neck of the woods, a meeting of consiglieri or La Cosa Nostra’s council was likely happening. (This, because there were always five families in New York and some adjunct families elsewhere that made up the council’s leadership.)

There also was another rule of thumb: Mobsters would always have the same calling card, or excuse, to be in town. Attending a funeral (the mid-1980s mob meeting in Chicago) or a vacation in the sticks (the infamous 1957 gathering in upstate New York) were some of the more memorable ones.

Early in my reporting that unraveled the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion probe, tying it to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and possible Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses, I started to see patterns just as in the old mob meetings: FBI or intelligence-connected figures kept showing up in Trump Town USA during the 2016 campaign with a common calling card.

The question now is, who sent them and why?

Interviews with more than 50 witnesses in the Trump case and reviews of hundreds of pages of court filings confirm the following:

At least six people with long-established ties to the FBI or to U.S. and Western intelligence made entrees to key figures in the Trump business organization or his presidential campaign between March and October 2016;

Campaign figures were contacted by at least two Russian figures whose justification for being in the United States were rare law enforcement parole visas controlled by the U.S. Justice Department;

Intelligence or diplomatic figures connected to two of America’s closest allies, Britain and Australia, gathered intelligence or instigated contacts with Trump campaign figures during that same period;

Some of the conversations and contacts that were monitored occurred on foreign soil and resulted in the creation of transcripts;

Nearly all of the contacts involved the same overture — a discussion about possible political dirt or stolen emails harmful to Hillary Clinton, or unsolicited business in London or Moscow;

Several of the contacts occurred before the FBI formally launched a legally authorized probe into the Trump campaign and possible collusion on July 31, 2016.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/robert-mueller-plan-trump-russia-investigation-report-not-case/
Special Counsel Mueller is building a report, not a case.

R ight after Special Counsel Robert Mueller racked up yet another guilty plea to a false-statements charge on Thursday, a friend asked me, “Doesn’t this destroy Michael Cohen’s credibility as a witness?”

Easier to destroy Satan’s conscience, I thought. Cohen would have to have some credibility before it could be destroyed, and how much could reside in a self-described “fixer” who openly compared himself to Tom Hagen, the lawyer-gangster in The Godfather. (I’ll stipulate that he has a law degree, but Cohen has always struck me as the Fredo of Trump World.)

Nevertheless, the flaw in my friend’s question was not the assumption that Cohen had some smidgeon of value as a witness until it was extirpated by his plea of guilty to lying to Congress (after he had already, in August, pled guilty lying to a financial institution, among other fraudulence). The real flaw was the assumption that Special Counsel Mueller is lining up witnesses and building a criminal case, like prosecutors do.

He is not.

No prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it. What prosecutor says, “Here’s our witness line-up: Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex van der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. And what is it that they have in common, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Bingo! They’re all convicted liars.”?

For a prosecutor, like any trial lawyer, what the jury thinks is at least as important as what the law says. If the most memorable thing the jury takes into the deliberation room is that no one should believe a word your witnesses say, you are not going to convict the lowliest grifter, much less the president of the United States of America.

As a prosecutor, you build a case by having your cooperating accomplice witnesses plead guilty to the big scheme you are trying to pin on the main culprit. After all, what makes these witnesses accomplices, literally, is that they were participants in the main culprit’s crime. That’s the scheme you’re trying to prove. So, on guilty-plea day, the cooperator comes into court and admits guilt to the same conspiracy on which you are trying to nail the lead defendant.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-and-racial-division-1543621887

Democrats are taking racial politics to new heights—and no wonder, since the tactic has again succeeded. This week Republican Senator Tim Scott said he will oppose the nomination of Thomas Farr, tapped for a federal judgeship in North Carolina. Senator Jeff Flake is voting no to showcase his opposition to Donald Trump, and the two GOP defections are enough to torpedo Mr. Farr’s appointment this year.

Mr. Scott cited legal work that Mr. Farr performed decades ago for North Carolina’s then-Senator Jesse Helms. After the 1990 election, the Justice Department accused Helms of trying to intimidate black voters by sending a postcard claiming that people who recently moved were ineligible to cast ballots. Mr. Farr defended Helms in the matter. But he told the Senate last year that he wasn’t consulted on the postcard’s content and didn’t know it had been sent until Justice sent a letter to the campaign.

A 1991 internal Justice memo, published this week, says that Mr. Farr, who also had coordinated “ballot security” for Helms in the 1984 election, discussed the idea of sending some kind of postcard in 1990, but that he counseled against it. Nonetheless, Mr. Scott said Thursday that the memo “shed new light on Mr. Farr’s activities” and “created more concerns.”

There’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mr. Scott, the Senate’s only black Republican. But Democrats will see Mr. Farr’s defeat as a vindication of their most underhanded and inflammatory racial tactics.
***

Consider a second complaint against Mr. Farr: that the North Carolina Legislature retained him to defend its 2013 voter-ID law. “This is a man who stands for disenfranchisement of voters, particularly minority voters,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said this week. In a letter last year, four members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote that in Mr. Farr the White House could hardly have found a nominee “with a more hostile record on African-American voting rights.”William Barber II, a former leader of the North Carolina NAACP, called Mr. Farr “a product of the modern white supremacist machine.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13363/robert-mueller-modus-operandi

Even if Mueller could prove that members of the Trump team had colluded with Julian Assange to use material that Assange had unlawfully obtained, that, too, would not be a crime.

Merely using the product of an already committed theft of information is not a crime. If you don’t believe me, ask the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and other newspapers that used material illegally obtained by Assange with full knowledge that it was illegally obtained.

In the end, Mueller should be judged by how successful he has been in satisfying his central mission. Judged by that standard and based on what we now know, he seems to be an abysmal failure.

The recent guilty plea of Michael Cohen of lying represents the dominant trend in Mueller’s approach to prosecution. The vast majority of indictments and guilty pleas obtained against Americans by Mueller have not been for substantive crimes relating to his mandate: namely, to uncover crimes involving illegal contacts with Russia. They have involved indictments and guilty pleas either for lying, or for financial crimes by individuals unrelated to the Russia probe. If this remains true after the filing of the Mueller report, it would represent a significant failure on Mueller’s part.

Mueller was appointed Special Counsel not to provoke individuals into committing new crimes, but rather to uncover past crimes specifically involving alleged illegal coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian agents. No one doubted that Russia attempted to influence the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton. But Mueller’s mandate was not to prosecute Russians or to point the finger at Vladimir Putin. His mandate was to uncover crimes committed by the Trump campaign with regard to Russia’s attempts to influence the election.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-michael-cohen-show-1543534091

Special counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday gave cable TV countless more hours of programming with a new plea deal with Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen. In a criminal information in federal court, Cohen now says he lied to Congress about his contact with Mr. Trump about his negotiations in 2016 for a possible Trump Organization hotel deal in Moscow.

If you believe the heavy media breathing, Mr. Trump is now, or once again, a goner. At last here is a clear 2016 link between candidate Trump and Russia. Cohen must know more, and it’s only a matter of time before we learn that Mr. Trump was conspiring with Vladimir Putin in return for who knows what.

The reality: Who knows? The Steele dossier was supposed to be the smoking gun, but that turned out to be a fraud. Then the famous 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian functionaries was supposed to be proof of collusion, but nothing more has come of that.

On its face, the Cohen court filing is hardly a crime or impeachable evidence. The filing says Cohen explored a hotel deal in Moscow for about six months in 2016, and that Russians with ties to the Kremlin wanted to get Mr. Trump to visit Russia and meet Mr. Putin.

But the deal fell through for reasons that aren’t explained, and Mr. Trump never made the trip. On Thursday President Trump called Cohen a “liar,” which is demonstrably true. Mr. Trump also said there was “nothing wrong” in considering a private business deal when he wasn’t President, which is true in a criminal sense though it was dumb for a presidential candidate.

As usual, the best posture is to avoid hyperventilating and size up the evidence as it emerges. There is still no public evidence proving a Trump-Russia campaign conspiracy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/michael-cohen-guilty-plea-false-statements-trump-tower-meeting/

Still no criminal ‘collusion,’ but there’s potential for more embarrassing revelations

Michael Cohen, a former lawyer for President Trump, pled guilty in Manhattan federal court this morning to making false statements to Congress regarding his involvement in efforts to build a Trump Tower complex in Moscow (the “Moscow project”).

As our Jack Crowe has noted, Cohen’s guilty plea is in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and pertains to testimony Cohen gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Cohen pled guilty to a one-count criminal information.

In a nutshell, Cohen gave testimony to the committee that minimized the extent and duration of efforts made by the Trump organization on the Moscow project. In order to downplay Donald Trump’s connections to Russia, Cohen told the committee that the project had ended in January 2016 (i.e., before the Iowa caucuses), and that Trump’s personal involvement had been scant — limited to three conversations with Cohen.

In reality, Cohen now says efforts on the project continued well into 2016. Moreover, both Donald Trump and members of his family were extensively briefed on it. The efforts involved communications with Russian-government officials, as well as discussions of possible trips to Russia by Cohen and Trump, and possible meetings with Russian president Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev.

For those who’ve been predicting an imminent end of the Mueller investigation, my sense is that this is not a “tying up the loose ends” guilty plea. There is a strategy here of proving collusion . . . even if Mueller cannot prove a collusion crime. (As we’ve frequently noted, collusion is a hopelessly vague term, referring to concerted activity that could be legal or illegal; it must be distinguished from conspiracy, which is an agreement to commit a crime — along with the activity in furtherance of that agreement.)

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/29/the-incorrigible

As I wrote last week, the Republican Congress largely has failed to hold accountable the masterminds behind the biggest political scandal in U.S. history: The unprecedented weaponization of our law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to spy on a presidential campaign and sabotage an incoming administration.

The man primarily responsible for executing the scheme, former FBI Director James Comey, exited the Trump Administration as a martyr and a hero. Republican lawmakers blasted the president for his (totally justified) firing of the deceptive FBI director in May 2017, lauding his public service and reputation even as the disturbing details of the way his agency spied on the Trump campaign and hid the probe from Congress were coming into view.

After successfully escaping any accountability for his actions, it’s no surprise that Comey now is threatening to thwart Congress once again. On Thanksgiving morning, Comey responded on Twitter to a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee: “Got a subpoena from House Republicans. I’m still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a ‘closed door’ thing because I’ve seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion. Let’s have a hearing and invite everyone to see.”

Now, it would take way too much space to mock the irony of Comey’s concerns about leaking and distortion. We know Comey’s top deputies were illegally leaking information to the press right up until the time he was fired. He also arranged for a friend to leak personal memos he wrote about his private interactions with the president to the press.

But here is the most galling part of Comey’s response: The man who once led the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world is threatening to defy a legally issued congressional subpoena unless the interview is conducted on his terms.

And the reason isn’t that Comey has nothing to hide—it’s that he has plenty to hide and he knows a public setting would provide him precisely the cover he needs.

He “Can’t Answer in an Open Setting”
During open testimony on Capitol Hill last year, Comey repeatedly invoked the defense, “it’s classified” as a way to avoid publicly disclosing crucial information about his agency’s conduct in 2016 and 2017. He dodged questions about the infamous Steele dossier, a thoroughly discredited political document produced by an opposition research firm that had been hired by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to dig up Russia-related dirt on Trump. Comey cited the dossier as key evidence on his October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.