RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unbelievable-james-comey-1544478713?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Can the story former FBI Director James Comey told Congress on Friday possibly be true? In a joint executive session of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, Mr. Comey presented himself as unaware and incurious regarding one of the most consequential investigations the FBI has ever conducted. After describing how little he knew about the federal government’s use of its surveillance powers against associates of the presidential campaign of the party out of power in 2016, Mr. Comey then assured lawmakers that the launching of the investigation was proper and free of political bias.

On Saturday a transcript of the Comey testimony was released by the congressional committees. President Donald Trumptweeted without subtlety on Sunday:

On 245 occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn’t know, didn’t recall, or couldn’t remember things when asked. Opened investigations on 4 Americans (not 2) – didn’t know who signed off and didn’t know Christopher Steele. All lies!

This is perhaps an overstatement. But some skepticism is clearly in order on the part of the President and every other American who wants free and fair elections. Lawmakers were interested in finding out who exactly initiated the investigation and when. Here’s a portion of the transcript in which the Obama administration FBI boss was questioned by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.):

Mr. Gowdy. Do you recall who drafted the FBI’s initiation document for that late July 2016 Russia investigation?

Mr. Comey. I do not.

Mr. Gowdy. Would you disagree that it was Peter Strzok?

Mr. Comey. I don’t know one way or the other.

Mr. Gowdy. Do you know who approved that draft of an initial plan for the Russia investigation in late July 2016?

Mr. Comey. I don’t.

This was not just any investigation. On the other hand the FBI is a big place and perhaps the director would not recall which of the staff had worked on a particular document. Under further questioning from Mr. Gowdy, Mr. Comey added that he didn’t remember ever even seeing the document. Again, one might hope that consequential cases going to the heart of our democratic process would be closely supervised by the most senior officials, but any case generates some volume of documents and an FBI director may be able to learn enough from staff briefings to make sensible decisions. The next part of the transcript is harder to swallow: CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.city-journal.org/mentally-ill-ada

As the death of George H. W. Bush brought admiring attention to the Americans with Disability Act, which he had signed into law, the New York Times detailed how mental health advocates have weaponized the ADA to force hospitals and adult homes to discharge mentally ill patients still in need of significant care. The result of these discharges has been increased degradation, death, homelessness, and incarceration among the mentally ill whom the advocates purport to represent.

The Times told the story of Abraham Clemente, a schizophrenia sufferer formerly housed in an adult home—a residence where mentally ill can get intensive care, in environments less restrictive than psychiatric hospitals—who was discharged in 2017 as a result of an ADA consent decree that New York State signed under pressure from civil-liberties advocates. The agreement, as the Times described it, “is meant to be a national model for the rights of the mentally ill to live independently.” Frontline’s cameras were rolling this year, when police found the 69-year-old Clemente living in his apartment with “maggot-infested scrambled eggs . . . strewn across the floor”; a cantaloupe “so spoiled, it seemed to be melting,” and feces “ground into the carpet.”

After being hospitalized, Clemente was readmitted to an adult home, and says he doesn’t want to leave. The Times detailed another mentally ill victim, a 34-year-old former adult-home resident also moved to independent living after the ADA consent decree. She “stopped taking her antipsychotic drug and began trying to solicit sex from passing drivers and swap alcohol for drugs with neighborhood children. . . . Eventually, facing eviction, she became homeless.”

Civil liberties and mental health advocates believe that institutional living is axiomatically bad, and independent living is definitively good, regardless of the severity of the mental illness and the limitations it imposes on the person suffering from it. In its 1999 Olmstead v. L. C. decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the ADA requires states to place people with mental disabilities in the “least restrictive settings . . . appropriate to the individual . . . taking into account the resources available.” (Emphasis in original.)

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/10/6-key-takeaways-from-the-comey-deposition-transcript/

Two House committees quizzed former FBI director James Comey on Friday concerning his knowledge of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a homebrew server when she was secretary of state, and the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.

The judiciary and oversight committees released a transcript of the hours-long deposition on Saturday. Here are six important takeaways.
1. We didn’t learn much — but that was significant.

Comey repeatedly responded to questions about the Trump campaign investigation by pleading ignorance, establishing he did not know of many of the facts underlying both the launch of Crossfire Hurricane and the continuing investigation. That’s concerning.

For instance, in response to Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy’s characterization of Crossfire Hurricane as a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, Comey claimed that the FBI was not investigating Trump or the Trump campaign, but had instead “opened investigations on four Americans to see if there was any connection between those four Americans and the Russian interference effort. And those four Americans did not include the candidate.” Yet Comey had never seen the “FBI’s initiation document,” which Gowdy indicated referenced the “Trump campaign.”

Further questioning revealed that Comey had no knowledge concerning the agent responsible for drafting the FBI’s late-July 2016 initiation document for Crossfire Hurricane, did not know who approved the draft of the “initial plan for the Russian investigation,” and never read or saw the initiation document. In fact, Comey said he didn’t even know how the FBI launches counterintelligence investigations, who has the authority to launch a counterintelligence investigation into a major political campaign, or whether such an investigation would need to be approved by the FBI Director. Comey did note that “there’s documentation in criminal investigations and in counterintelligence investigations to explain the predication for the opening of a file, that is, the basis for the opening of a file.”

These exchanges raise three concerning points: First, that FBI agents — including the biased, “We’ll stop Trump from becoming president” duo of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — had the ability, without Comey’s involvement, to launch an investigation into the Trump campaign. Second, Comey’s testimony shows that he may not have known the official basis for, and scope of, the probe because he never saw the “initiation document.”

And third, the same agents who launched the investigation craft the documentation to explain “the basis for the opening of a file.” So, if the agents wanted to pin the launch of Crossfire Hurricane on George Papadopoulos’ supposed foreknowledge of the WikiLeak hack into DNC emails, they would merely need to list that as the predicate for opening the investigation.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/muellers-investigation-is-missing-one-thing-a-crime/

A baby born when Robert Mueller started his investigation would be talking by now. But would she have anything to say?

We last looked at what Mueller had publicly—and what he didn’t have—some 10 months ago, and I remained skeptical that the Trump campaign had in any way colluded with Russia. It’s worth another look now, but first let’s give away the ending (spoiler alert!): there is still no real evidence of, well, much of anything significant about Russiagate. One thing that is clear is that the investigation seems to be ending. Mueller’s office has reportedly even told various defense lawyers that it is “tying up loose ends.” The moment to wrap things up is politically right as well: the Democrats will soon take control of the House; time to hand this all off to them.

Ten months ago the big news was Paul Manafort flipped; that seems to have turned out to be mostly a bust, as we know now he lied like a rug to the Feds and cooperated with the Trump defense team as some sort of mole inside Mueller’s investigation (a heavily-redacted memo about Manafort’s lies, released by Mueller on Friday, adds no significant new details to the Russiagate narrative.)

George Papadopoulos has already been in and out of jail—all of two weeks— for his sideshow role. Michael Avenatti is now a woman beater who is just figuring out he’s washed up. Stormy Daniels owes Trump over $300,000 in fees after losing to him in court. There still is no pee tape. And if you don’t recall how unimportant Carter Page and Richard Gates turned out to be (or even who they are), well, there is your assessment of all the hysterical commentary that accompanied them a few headlines ago.

The big reveal of the Michael Flynn sentencing memo on Tuesday was that he will likely do no prison time. Everything of substance in the memo was redacted, so there is little insight available. If you insist on speculation, try this: it’s hard to believe that something really big and bad happened such that Flynn knew about it but still wasn’t worth punishing for it, and now, a year after he started cooperating with the government, still nobody has heard anything about whatever the big deal is. So chances are the redactions focus on foreign lobbying in the U.S.

https://itk.thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/420523-cohens-pleas-concocted-by-prosecutors-to-snare-trump

I’m experiencing 1998 déjà vu as prosecutors once again work overtime to turn extramarital affairs and the efforts to keep them secret into impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors. Unable to get the witnesses to compose the stories they want, today’s prosecutors are discovering they can simply compose the crimes by manipulating the pleas of men desperate to protect their families.

The Michael Cohen sentencing memo took aim directly at both Cohen and President Donald Trump. It was used, unethically, to cast the president as directing a criminal conspiracy to make “secret and illegal” payments. Sentencing memos are not supposed to use secret grand jury info to point fingers at those who are not being sentenced, but that’s exactly what these did.

One can say today that these New York prosecutors, acolytes of fired U.S. District Attorney Preet Bharra, have learned that the “plea’s the thing wherein to catch the king.” First, they went after the man, not the crime, and turned up millions in unpaid taxes and some bank-loan misrepresentations by Cohen. At that point, they convinced him to cave for the sake of his family; the trick was to get him to plead guilty to supposedly two campaign finance “felonies,” and then vaguely implicate the president as directing them (which Trump denies).

Despite promises to the contrary from prosecutors, they threw their star witness off the bus anyway, making him the biggest chump in this drama after he hired attorney Lanny Davis and burned all his bridges with his former client. Once they had the guilty pleas in hand, the prosecutors no longer needed Cohen; they trashed him as a greedy liar and called for substantial jail time.

The reason these two guilty pleas were so valuable is that these prosecutors could not, in my opinion, have gotten them in court. The first payment was not even made by Cohen but by American Media Inc., a bona fide media company with First Amendment protections; it could have decided to use the story that it bought, hold the story, or just prevent some competitor from using the story.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/09/will-the-leakers-in-the-flynn

Two years ago this month, the set-up of Lt. General Michael Flynn began. And now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has recommended the lightest sentence possible for Flynn’s crime of lying to the FBI in 2017, Americans are reminded that the real criminals—top officials at our nation’s most trusted agencies—have yet to be charged for illegally leaking classified information about Flynn to the news media in an effort to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidency.

Flynn was toward the top of Barack Obama’s enemies list. Forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 by Obama loyalist James Clapper, Flynn joined the Trump campaign and became an outspoken critic of Obama and Hillary Clinton. Famously, he led the “lock her up” chants at the Republican National Convention. Ten days later, James Comey’s FBI opened up a counterintelligence probe into possible election collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Flynn was one of four campaign associates targeted by the agency for his “suspected Russian ties.” (It’s unclear whether Comey also obtained a FISA order on Flynn, as he had on Carter Page.)

Obama warned Trump not to hire Flynn during their post-election meeting in the Oval Office on November 10. When Trump defied that advice, Team Obama made him pay.

In December 2016, Flynn held several conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Trump’s incoming national security advisor legally and appropriately spoke with Kislyak about a number of topics, including a scheduled call between the nation’s two leaders after the inauguration.

Logan Act Hype
What Flynn may not have known at the time is that his conversations—and perhaps all of his communications—with the Russian diplomat were being monitored by James Comey’s FBI. Someone in the Obama Administration illegally leaked details about Flynn’s call to Washington Post reporter David Ignatius.