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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Papadopoulos Hints Conversation That Launched Trump-Russia Probe Was FBI Setup These new revelations raise fresh concerns that, with the approval of the FBI, foreign governments were meddling in the 2016 election.Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/01/papadopoulos-hints-conversation-launched-trump-russia-probe-fbi-setup/

The recently released transcript of George Papadopoulos’s congressional testimony reveals a significant fact: Papadopoulos’s introduction to Joseph Mifsud—the source of the “Russia has Hillary’s emails” tip that purportedly prompted the FBI to launch an investigation into the Trump campaign—was arranged mere days after Papadopoulos announced he was joining the Trump campaign.

Saturday evening, Papadopoulos rocked Twitter with claims that “a woman in London, who was the FBI’s legal attaché in the U.K.” encouraged him “to meet Joseph Mifsud in Rome in March 2016.” These new revelations raise fresh concerns that, with the approval of the FBI, foreign governments were meddling in the 2016 election.

The Tables Turn in Russian Collusion Hunt By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/31/the-tables-turn-in-russian-collusion-hunt/

The irony of the entire Russian collusion hoax is that accusers who cried the loudest about leaking, collusion, lying, and obstruction are themselves soon very likely to be accused of just those crimes.

Now that Robert Mueller’s 674-day, $30 million investigation is over and has failed to find the original goal of its mandate—evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government to sway the 2016 election—and now that thousands of once-sealed government documents will likely be released in unredacted form, those who eagerly assumed the role of the hunters may become the hunted, due to their own zealous violation of the nation’s trust and its laws.

Take Lying
Former FBI Director James Comey’s testimonies cannot be reconciled with those of his own deputy director Andrew McCabe. He falsely testified that the Steele dossier was not the main basis for obtaining FISA court warrants. On at least 245 occasions, Comey swore under oath that he either did not know, or could not remember, when asked direct questions about his conduct at the FBI. He likely lied when he testified that he did not conclude his assessment of the Clinton illegal email use before he had even interviewed Clinton, an assertion contradicted by his own written report. I guess his credo and modus operandi are reflected in the subtitle of his recent autobiography A Higher Loyalty: “Truth, Lies, and Leadership.”

Andrew McCabe currently is under criminal referral for lying to federal investigators about leaking to the media. He and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein each have accused each other of not telling the whole truth about their shared caper of trying to force President Trump out of office by invoking the 25th Amendment.

DEEP STATE DUMPSTER DUMP: MARK STEYN

https://www.steynonline.com/9255/deep-state-dumpster-fire

For two years, the prefatory “Russia” has been intended to give the word “investigation” more heft, to make it seem as if there was something more than let’s-get-Trump-on-anything. But even the unlimited resources of a wretchedly corrupt federal justice system couldn’t keep that going without something more than Michael Cohen’s taxi medallions (only in America) and a few Russian troll farms, one of whom has amusingly decided to push back in court against Mueller and his showboating cronies.

Other than that, there are, as I said almost two years ago, no Russians in the Russia investigation – and what foreign “interference” with the 2016 election there was from Russia seems to have been amateur and minimal, unless you count MI6 spook Christopher Steele working his Moscow Rolodex on behalf of Hillary Clinton and her Deep State allies. There was, however, extensive domestic interference with the election, in that at the behest of the sitting administration the most powerful figures in the permanent bureaucracy set to work on a sophisticated surveillance operation against its political opposition: “Republics” in the Americas have been invariably prefaced by the qualifier “banana”; it just took Washington a little longer to sign up.

The Hate Crimes of Jussie Smollett COMMENTARY . By Carl M. Cannon

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/31/the_hate_crimes_of_jussie_smollett_139915.htmlBy Carl M. Cannon – RCP Staff
March 31, 2019

Let’s be clear: A hate crime did take place in Chicago. It’s an ongoing crime, too.

Yes, a hoax occurred — more like two or three hoaxes — but deliberately stoked racial animosity can’t be washed away with the forfeiture of a $10,000 bond, a few hours of dubious “community service,” or the sealing of public records in a criminal case. If history has taught us anything, it’s that hate tends to fester, especially when aided by fraud and abetted by government.

The latest chapter in America’s dispiriting culture wars began Jan. 22, when television actor Jussie Smollett reported receiving a letter with homophobic and racial invective, accompanied by a nasty threat: “You will die, black fag.” The letter also included a stick figure hanging from a tree and a white powdery substance. As its author knew, ever since the 2001 deadly anthrax letter attacks, sending such powder through the mail to a famous and politically active person would result in first-responders in hazmat suits, which is what happened.

Yet this reaction wasn’t enough to satisfy Jussie Smollett. When the white powder turned out not to be anthrax spores but crushed acetaminophen tablets, the incident attracted little attention, even in Chicago. This apparently irked Smollett.

Mueller and the Obama Accounting The former President now owes the country an explanation for the historic abuse of government surveillance powers.By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-and-the-obama-accounting-11553534271

The Mueller report confirms that the Obama administration, without evidence, turned the surveillance powers of the federal government against the presidential campaign of the party out of power. This historic abuse of executive authority was either approved by President Barack Obama or it was not. It’s time for Mr. Obama, who oddly receives few mentions in stories about his government’s spying on associates of the 2016 Trump campaign, to say what he knew and did not know about the targeting of his party’s opponents.

If he was briefed, for example, on plans by the Justice Department to seek wiretaps on Trump campaign associates, it’s hard to believe Mr. Obama would not have been highly interested in the matter. Going all the way back to his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, Mr. Obama had aggressively advocated for preventing federal abuse of surveillance powers.

When Prosecutorial Discretion Is Woke Throwing out charges against Jussie Smollett is consistent with the social-justice narrative that a hate hoax can be true in a deeper sense.Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/jussie-smollet-indictment-dismissal

The expunging of the 16-count felony indictment against actor Jussie Smollett for faking a hate crime against himself is being treated as a manifestation of Chicago-machine politics, whereby the politically well-connected enjoy a different standard of justice than everyone else. Feminist attorney Tina Tchen, the former chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, had contacted Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx about the case on behalf of a member of Smollett’s family. But the dismissal of a seemingly watertight case, based on the sworn confessions of Smollett’s two co-conspirators and reams of physical evidence, represents more than celebrity justice. It is rather the latest example of the incursion of academic identity politics into the workings of government.

Had Smollett been a straight white male who had staged his own attack by fake Antifa Trump antagonists, he would most certainly still be facing a trial and the prospect of prison time. But Foxx is a leading figure in the recent national wave of progressive local prosecutors who came to power by playing race politics. She campaigned on the Critical Race Theory credo that the criminal-justice system is endemically biased. She inveighed against the so-called school-to-prison pipeline and promised to reduce racial disparities in prosecutions. Last month, she dismissed aggravated battery charges against a 16-year-old student who had attacked two Chicago police officers; the Chicago police union argued that her dismissal of the charges fit a pattern of favoring offenders over police officers. Foxx operates in a cultural milieu that holds that the fact that a hate crime is a hoax is less important than the fact that it could have been true. Prosecuting Smollett could have sent another black man to prison. Is there a race-based system of justice here?

How Mueller Protects the Deep State Diana West

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-mueller-protects-the-deep-state_2855984.html

Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has published a shocking op-ed, explaining why he suspects that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has known for the past 18 months, since fall of 2017, that there was no Trump-Russia “collusion.”

Personally, I suspect Mueller knew earlier still, and certainly no later than the day he became Special Counsel, his very appointment resulting from leaking chicanery by his longtime “law enforcement twin,” James Comey. (Muller and Comey both were thought of as “rising stars mentored and guided by Eric Holder in the 1990s,” according to the Washingtonian)

McCarthy has laid out a logical argument based on dates and FISA warrants to make his case, which rather makes me wonder how long McCarthy has suspected Mueller has known there was no Trump-Russia “collusion.”

Eric Holder: America Never Great A God complex on full display. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273320/eric-holder-america-never-great-matthew-vadum

America has never been “great” and those who embrace the Trump campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” or MAGA, are racists, sexists, and homophobes, disgraced former Attorney General Eric Holder told his ideological comrades at MSNBC in an interview this week.

Since leaving office Holder has been spending his time plotting to turn the U.S. into a one-party state. He recently said the next Democrat president should pack the Supreme Court with leftists to combat what he called Republicans’ “power-grabbing antics.” Holder is now chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a political action committee that claims “the political system is rigged,” and “the fight to fix it is now.”

But what is particularly disturbing is that Holder, cited with contempt by Congress and nearly impeached and who spent his time in office stirring up racial animosity for political advantage –he infamously called America “a nation of cowards” on issues involving race— is not an outlier on the Left with his ugly, anti-American views. His sentiments are largely embraced by the Democratic Party’s base across the country, the mainstream media, Hollywood, academia, and more or less by all those now running for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination.

The Next Shoes to Drop After the Mueller Report . By Charles Lipson –

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/26/the_next_shoes_to_drop_after_the_mueller_report_139856.html

Footwear aplenty will fall as more details from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report are disclosed. The reckoning will come in several baskets and will fall on Democrats and Republicans alike, with major ramifications for 2020.

Basket No. 1: More information about the Mueller Report and the basis for its conclusions.The public wants that information and deserves it. Democrats will cry “coverup” if they don’t get everything. While Republicans emphasize “no collusion,” Democrats will concentrate their attention on Mueller’s indecision regarding President Trump’s possible obstruction of justice. Democrats will press Attorney General William Barr about the special counsel’s ambiguous conclusion—and Barr’s own definitive one–about the obstruction issue. Other Trump critics, who heretofore have described Bob Mueller as a modern-day Eliot Ness, will start crying, “Whitewash!”

Collusion Clingers and Their Flat-Earth Forebears By Deroy Murdock

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/collusion-clingers-and-their-flat-earth-forebears/

Democrats just won’t take ‘no collusion’ for an answer.

Even after Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to the New World and back, some naysayers surely clung to their shattered superstitions like life preservers after a shipwreck. “Who cares what Columbus says?” they likely whined. “The Earth IS flat. Columbus must have turned around and come home before he fell over the edge.”

Today’s Democrats resemble those 15th-century bitter-enders. No matter what, many insist that Donald Trump and Russia colluded to win the White House. Even after special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation finally repudiated their destructive myth, they still scream: “Collusion!”

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) is the spiritual leader of the Congressional Collusion Caucus. He told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday: “I did say that there is ample evidence, and indeed there is, of collusion of people in the Trump campaign with the Russians.” Schiff told the Washington Post, “Undoubtedly there is collusion.” He added: “We will continue to investigate the counterintelligence issues. That is, is the president, or people around him, compromised in any way by a hostile foreign power?”

Rather than extract proof of these grave charges this week, my three phone calls and three e-mails to Schiff’s office and communications director Patrick Boland yielded silence.