RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/immunity-agreements-for-american-media-executives-shore-up-cohen-case/

There is almost certainly much less here than meets the eye.

There is always a lag between when things happen and when we learn about them through media reports. That is important to bear in mind when there are breathless news accounts of the kind that broke on Thursday: the revelation that federal prosecutors in New York granted immunity from prosecution to David J. Pecker, the chairman and CEO of American Media Inc. (AMI) and longtime friend of Donald Trump.

American Media controls the National Enquirer, which was deeply involved in the hush-money payments to two women who allege that they had extramarital liaisons with Donald Trump a dozen years ago and whose silence was purchased when they sought to sell their stories prior to the 2016 election. Naturally, coming on the heels of Tuesday’s guilty plea by Michael Cohen to campaign-finance offenses arising out of those two transactions, there was frenzied speculation that the investigation is heating up, with the noose tightening around the president

In reality, there is almost certainly much less here than meets the eye. In short, while we are just now learning that Pecker and his subordinate, Dylan Howard, were granted immunity, this appears to have happened many weeks ago — to be precise, shortly after search warrants were executed in April on the office and residences of Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer. Back then, prosecutors did not know whether Cohen would fight them or plead guilty. They needed Pecker and Howard in order to tighten up the case against Cohen, not necessarily to make a case on the president.

Perusing the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Vanity Fair reports (here, here, and here), we find something important is missing: They don’t tell us when Pecker and Howard got immunity. But we get a hint. The Times tells us: “In spring 2018, prosecutors subpoenaed communications between Mr. Pecker and Mr. Howard.” We also know that information from Pecker and Howard is reflected in the eight-count criminal information filed against Cohen, which refers to them, respectively, as “Chairman-1” and “Executive-1.” (AMI is “Corporation-1” and the Enquirer is “Magazine-1.”)

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/23/crime-a

One of the reasons so many people are confused by the operations of our self-appointed fourth branch of government—I mean in this instance the unending, Kafkaesque investigations conducted by Robert Mueller and his crack team of anti-Trump shock troops—is that while we have seen plenty of punishment meted out, crimes have been rather less populous on the ground.

Yes, I understand that Paul Manafort has been nabbed for tax evasion and bank fraud, and that he now faces additional charges in yet another court. One of the nice things about our modern prosecutors is their handy multiplication machine that takes what is essentially one crime and gins it up into dozens or even hundreds of counts. Presto! You’re facing 18 counts, peasant—try beating that!

The point is, when you have carte-blanche to torment someone, why stop when you’ve got him locked up for life? Like a cat toying with an injured mouse, the modern major prosecutor keeps batting his prey about till he stops moving altogether. What might have been justice for a serial killer is gleefully applied to someone who fudged his tax returns or tripped over himself answering an FBI agent. Then we have sadism, not justice.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271121/well-find-out-about-brennan-lloyd-billingsley

John Brennan became head of the Central Intelligence agency in 2013 and after leaving in 2017 he retained his security clearance, which President Trump recently revoked. Brennan is threatening a lawsuit, a prospect that delights the president’s lead lawyer.

“I’d volunteer to do that case for the president,” Rudy Giuliani told Fox News. “I’d love to have Brennan under oath for I don’t know how many days, two or three days? We’ll find out about Brennan.” As the former New York mayor is doubtless aware, there is plenty to find out. Consider, for example, Brennan’s role in the famous passport case.

Back in 2008, State Department contractors “unnecessarily reviewed” the passport file of Illinois Senator Barack Obama. The breach came without the knowledge of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who called the senator to apologize. “I myself would be very disturbed if I learned somebody had looked into my passport file,” Rice told reporters.

According to the State Department, two of the contract employees were fired for the security breach and a third was disciplined but remained on the job. The department did not reveal the identities of the employees nor what they might have been looking for in the presidential candidate’s passport file. On the other hand, some information did emerge.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/war-of-attrition-against-president-trump/

Precisely how does Bill Clinton’s main legal fixer turn up as Michael Cohen’s attorney in a plea bargain with a special prosecutor?

If you put that kind of plot line in a political thriller, the public would laugh you off the newsstand book racks. Nonetheless, we now have Lanny Davis, special counsel to the president for Bill Clinton during 1996-1998, declaring to CNN: “It’s my observation that Mr. Cohen has knowledge that would be of interest to the special counsel about the issue of whether Donald Trump, ahead of time, knew about the hacking of emails, which is a computer crime.” On Tuesday Davis told MSNBC that Cohen knew about “the possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election.”

There you have it, boys and girls: None of this has anything to do with paying off floozies who claimed to have done the dirty with a presidential candidate. No one cares about that. It’s about using the legal system to extract “confessions” from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen that will keep the Black Legend alive of a Russian hack of the 2016 elections. Cohen has no more knowledge of this, I am ready to wager, than he does of space aliens colonizing Chicago. Nonetheless, the swamp and their pet jackals in the media will spin new allegations until the public gets dizzy.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/23/there-is-nothing-illegitimate-about-the-brett-kavanaugh-nomination/

Perhaps one day a court will find that Donald Trump had conspired with his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to pay non-disclosure agreements meant to silence his mistresses. Perhaps one day the House will impeach Trump for breaking those campaign finance laws, and then, maybe the Senate will also remove him from office.

Those are the mechanisms that have been provided by the Constitution to thwart a president from nominating justices to the Supreme Court. I’m afraid there’s no clause in the document that empowers angst-y liberal pundits and politicians to question the legitimacy of duly confirmed justices.

But much like their ideal Supreme Court, Democrats have set about fabricating brand new extra-constitutional standards that happen to always align with their partisan aims. Their latest concocted stipulation states that anyone nominated by a president under suspicion of criminality becomes “illegitimate.”

Democratic Sens. Mazie Hirono and Ed Markey canceled meetings this week with prospective Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Markey said the nominee was “illegitimate” because the president was “all but named as a co-conspirator.” A similar sentiment was repeated by many Democrats and liberal pundits. The Supreme Court itself, contends The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, would become “fundamentally illegitimate.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/09/10/the-last-victim/

On January 23, 2014, the Florida Parole Commission sent Frank Fuster a letter informing him that, owing to a recent policy change, it had determined that his initial interview was scheduled for March 2134. No, that isn’t a misprint. His first parole hearing is scheduled in 120 years. And this for a crime that, by any fair reading of the evidence, not only did Fuster not commit but never even happened.

Thirty-three years ago, Fuster, along with his young wife, Ileana, was convicted of sexually abusing children at his suburban Florida home, where Ileana provided day care. He is the last person charged in the mass sex-abuse-in-day-care scares that made headlines from the 1980s to the mid ’90s to remain in prison. Part of a broader obsession with child sex abuse — therapist-induced repressed “memories” of incest destroyed thousands of families — the day-care cases were a modern version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, down to allegations of Satanic rituals by caregivers. They stand as a warning to those who look condescendingly at our Salem ancestors, incredulous that judges and public alike would believe girls writhing and shrieking that they were at that moment being pinched by the accused sitting far away in the dock. As a young attorney, Robert Rosenthal cut his teeth on the day-care cases, winning reversals on appeal in a number of them.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/08/22/dershowitz_candidate_entitled_to_pay_hush_money_committed_no_election_crime.html

Alan Dershowitz said the only campaign violation that could have happened is if former Trump attorney Michael Cohen did break a campaign finance law on his own volution and called the situation a “Catch-22” on MSNBC this afternoon.

MSNBC HOST: Can I ask about a couple things, Alan? .. You said last night, ‘All Cohen has to do is say the president directed me to do it. That’s the kind of embellishment people put on a story when they want to avoid dying in prison.’ Are you suggesting Cohen lied under oath?

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Well, we don’t know. All we know is what Judge Ellis said.

Judge Ellis said is when you put pressure on somebody like Cohen, there is an incentive to embellish the story and make it better because he’s now facing 4 years. So if he comes up with strong evidence against the president that will be reduced to 2 years, 3 years, or 1 year. …

I have no idea whether Cohen is telling the truth or not, but the interesting thing is, if Cohen is telling the truth it’s a catch-22 for the prosecution. Let me lay this out for 60 seconds…

Here’s the issue: The president is entitled to pay hush money to anyone he wants during a campaign. There are no restrictions on what a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. So if, in fact, the president directed Cohen to do it as his lawyer and was going to compensate him for it, the president committed no crime. if Cohen did it on his own —

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/despite-comey-assurances-vast-bulk-of-weiner-laptop-emails-were-never-examined/

When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had “reviewed all of the communications” discovered on a personal laptop used by Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.

At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the “hundreds of thousands” of emails residing on the machine, which had been a focus of a sex-crimes investigation of Weiner, a former Congressman.

Comey later told Congress that “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as “duplicates” of emails they’d previously seen. Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked “night after night after night” to scrutinize the remaining material.

But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.

In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.