RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two years before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States, he met with the leader of a hate group who had praised Hitler and declared that the Jews, “can’t say ‘Never Again’ to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you’re there forever.”

The previous year, Obama had launched his national profile with a DNC speech proclaiming, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” And there he was, smiling alongside Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, the largest black separatist organization in the country, whose theology claimed that white people were genetically engineered devils who were due to be destroyed by flying saucers.

Also posing with Farrakhan and Obama were Mustapha Farrakhan, Joshua Farrakhan and Leonard Farrakhan Muhammad, his security chief and son, his other son, and his chief of staff and son-in-law.

Also there was Willie F. Wilson, a Farrakhan ally, who had led a protest against an Asian business by a mob shouting, “F___ the Chinks”.

“We forgave Mr. Chan,” he told reporters after that incident. “If we didn’t forgive him, we would have cut his head off and rolled it down the street.”

Hope and change.

Blumenthal is a documented liar . When he ran for Senate he told veterans he served in Vietnam….never did. It was a shameless fabrication. Read https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265462/remembering-rich-blumenthals-vietnam-deception-lloyd-billingsley.

WASHINGTON – Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Democrats should “reveal and shame” President Trump’s judicial nominees since they do not have the power to filibuster them.

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently approved 17 of Trump’s judicial nominees. The Trump administration released a list of 12 new judicial nominees last week.

Blumenthal argued that the Trump administration is “seeking to radically reshape our judiciary,” which poses a threat to the protection of “individual rights and liberties including reproductive rights, LGBT rights, voting rights, workers’ rights, environmental protection and much more.”

He cited the confirmation of Judge John Bush for the 6th Circuit last summer.

“He has spent a decade posting online under a pseudonym using crude vulgar language to demean gay people, reproductive rights; he likened abortion to slavery and politicians who he may have disagreed with. He’s just one example,” Blumenthal said during a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. “Mark Norris, he was confirmed last week by the Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote – he has made a career out of hyper-partisanship. In 2001-2009, he fought for a change in the Tennessee constitution to severely restrict reproductive rights.”

Blumenthal continued, “They have in mind a clear and cruel agenda to dismantle essential elements that protect rights and liberties fundamental to our Constitution and to American values.”

When the “Steele dossier” was first published a year ago, it looked like a bombshell. The document, drawn up by the British ex-spy Christopher Steele, contained salacious allegations against President Trump and suggested that Russia had helped him win the 2016 election. No one has been able to corroborate its charges, but Democrats continue to see the dossier as a road map for impeaching Mr. Trump. Republicans, on the other hand, point out that it was created as opposition research, leading them to see it as an elaborate partisan ploy.

There is a third possibility, namely that the dossier was part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot targeting both parties and America’s political process. This is what seems most likely to me, having spent much of my 30-year government career, including with the CIA, observing Soviet and then Russian intelligence operations. If there is one thing I have learned, it’s that Vladimir Putin continues in the Soviet tradition of using disinformation and espionage as foreign-policy tools.

There are three reasons the Kremlin would have detected Mr. Steele’s information gathering and seen an opportunity to intervene. First, Mr. Steele did not travel to Russia to acquire his information and instead relied on intermediaries. That is a weak link, since Russia’s internal police service, the FSB, devotes significant technical and human resources to blanket surveillance of Western private citizens and government officials, with a particular focus on uncovering their Russian contacts.

Second, Mr. Steele was an especially likely target for such surveillance given that he had retired from MI-6, the British spy agency, after serving in Moscow. Russians are fond of saying that there is no such thing as a “former” intelligence officer. The FSB would have had its eye on him.

Third, the Kremlin successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee. Emails there could have tipped it off that the Clinton campaign was collecting information on Mr. Trump’s dealings in Russia.

If the FSB did discover that Mr. Steele was poking around for information, it hardly could have resisted using the gravitas of a retired MI-6 agent to plant false information. After hacking the DNC and senior Democratic officials, Russian intelligence chose to pass the information to WikiLeaks, most likely to capitalize on that group’s “self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” according to a 2017 report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Simultaneously the Kremlin was conducting influence operations on Facebook and other social-media sites. CONTINUE AT SITE

Media defenders of Fusion GPS and the FBI are criticizing as friends of the Kremlin anyone who dares raise questions about their behavior during the 2016 campaign. You almost have to admire their loyalty to sources, if not to readers. We’ll wait for the evidence, thanks, including the memo that the House Intelligence Committee understandably wants to make public.

Meantime, regarding Russia, the recent Congressional testimony by Fusion founder Glenn Simpson deserves more attention—specifically for what it reveals about Fusion’s campaign against Bill Browder, the human-rights and anti-Kremlin activist.

Mr. Browder hired Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to investigate a 2007 Russian raid on Mr. Browder’s investment company. Magnitsky ultimately exposed a financial fraud perpetrated by corrupt officials and the mafia. Russia responded by arresting Magnitsky and keeping him in pre-trial detention for 358 days, where he was tortured and denied vital medical care. He was found dead on a cell floor in 2009.

Magnitsky and his lawyers meticulously documented his abuse while in prison. His evidence was affirmed by multiple governments and outside organizations, including U.S. prosecutors. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, Congress in 2012 passed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned individuals involved in Magnitsky’s death and other Russian rights abusers.

Let’s cut to the chase: Donald Trump should not agree to be interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller — and President Trump should not even be asked.

See, there are two Trumps to consider here. There is the very eccentric and volatile man who is the subject of Mueller’s amorphous investigation. And there is the president of the United States, who has responsibilities to that vital public office. Here, the interests of both happen to align.

We’ll first examine Trump the man. No long history lesson is required here; let’s just take the last couple of weeks. Trump told a room full of lawmakers that he’d sign whatever immigration legislation they brought him —everything was negotiable. When senior legislators from both parties brought him the familiar Washington plan of amnesty now, security maybe someday, he said no way, no wall, no deal.

The eight-dimensional-chess explanation is that Trump realizes his supporters will never hold him to his commitments, so he makes bad ones in order to expose his opponents’ extremism. My preferred explanation is that Trump didn’t care what he said to lawmakers in the first meeting; his purpose was to refute Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury depiction of a demented doofus by appearing engaged and in command. Either way, the point is that Trump says stuff. And then he says other stuff. Quite often, the other stuff doesn’t match up with the first stuff.

Take this week’s sensational non-story: In June, Trump ordered his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which McGahn refused to do . . . so Trump dropped the idea and took no action.

There is no reason to doubt the veracity of the story produced by two veteran New York Times reporters, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman. They have four sources who, though anonymous, appear well-placed (likely drawn from current and former White House staff, lawyers representing such witnesses, and Mueller’s investigators). And their account has the ring of truth: Trump, like all of us, longs to do things within his power that it would please him to do, but that would be really stupid to do, and so in the end he refrains from doing them. More idiosyncratically, Trump is torn between his brash persona (“You’re fired!”) and his real self (though wont to browbeat, he shrinks from personally delivering the pink slip, having subordinates do that dirty work).

More importantly, the Times report is harmless in its substance.

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life:

Hillary Clinton is sending a message of thanks to “activist bitches supporting bitches.” The former secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee made the comments in a video posted to Twitter on Friday by Huffington Post commentator Alex Mohajer.

“Hey everyone, I just wanted to say thanks,” Clinton says in the video. “Thanks for your feminism, for your activism, and all I can hope is you keep up the really important, good work.” Off-screen, someone can be heard saying, “activist bitches supporting bitches,” which Clinton then repeats, laughing.

“And let me just say, this is directed to the activist bitches supporting bitches, so let’s go,” she says.

And the Left complains about Trump… Meanwhile, this little flapola seems to have some legs:

While most of her supporters can’t think of anyone who’s a bigger and better champion for women than Clinton, here comes the bucket of salt to pour in that 2016 wound that never really healed. According to the New York Times, Clinton shielded one of her advisers, Burns Strider, from being fired for repeatedly sexually harassing a younger staffer during her 2008 presidential campaign.

Surely, this is just a mistake, and Clinton had no say in the matter, her base might add. “Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager at the time recommended that she fire the adviser, Burns Strider. But Mrs. Clinton did not. Instead, Mr. Strider was docked several weeks of pay and ordered to undergo counseling, and the young woman was moved to a new job,” reads the New York Times. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Justice Department has given Congress less than 15 percent of the texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page – and that is all Congress is likely to get, at least until department experts finish an effort to recover an unknown number of previously lost texts that were sent and received during a key five-month period during the Trump-Russia investigation.

There is much confusion over some basic facts of the Strzok-Page texts. How many are there? How many relate to the two most politically-charged investigations in years, the Trump-Russia probe and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? How many have been turned over to Congress? And how many are left to be turned over to Congress?

The answers are complicated, but here is what I have been able to figure out from conversations with the Justice Department and Capitol Hill investigators.

The Justice Department has identified about 50,000 Strzok-Page texts. But that is apart from the texts between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017 that were declared missing a week ago but are now being recovered. So, the total is apparently 50,000 plus the currently unknown number of formerly missing texts.

But that number refers only to the Strzok-Page texts that were sent and received on FBI-issued Samsung phones. There are a number of instances in the texts in which the two officials say that they should switch the conversation to iMessage, suggesting they continued to talk about FBI matters on personal Apple phones. For investigators, those are particularly intriguing texts – what was so sensitive that they couldn’t discuss on their work phones? – but the number of those texts is unknown. And of course, they have not been turned over to Congress.

GOP Congressional investigators have written six letters to individuals or entities involved or thought to be involved in the funding, creation or distribution of the salacious and unverified “Trump-Russia dossier” believed to have been inappropriately used by the FBI, DOJ and Obama Administration in an effort to undermine Donald Trump as both a candidate and President of the United States.

Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SCS) wrote six Judiciary Committee letters requesting information from: John Podesta, Donna Brazille, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Robbie Mook, the DNC, and Hillary For America Chief Strategist Joel Benenson.

A brief refresher of facts and allegations:

The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s PAC was revealed by The Washington Post to have paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS for the creation of a dossier that would be harmful to then-candidate Donald Trump.
Fusion commissioned former UK spy Christopher Steele to assemble the dossier – which is comprised of a series of memos relying largely on Russian government sources to make allegations against Donald Trump and his associates.
According to court filings, Fusion also worked with disgraced DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and hired his CIA-linked wife, Nellie Ohr, to assist in the smear campaign against Trump. Bruce Ohr was demoted from his senior DOJ position after it was revealed that he met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson as well as Christopher Steele – then tried to cover it up.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, denied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he knew about the dossier’s funding, while Clinton’s former spokesman, Brian Fallon, told CNN that Hillary likely had no idea who paid for it either.
Current and past leaders of the DNC, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) also denied knowledge of the document’s funding.

A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign was kept on the campaign team at Clinton’s request after he was accused of sexually harassing a young aide.
Burns Strider was Clinton’s faith adviser and was later fired from his position at Correct the Record, an independent pro-Clinton group, for alleged harassment.

A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign was kept on the campaign team at Clinton’s request after he was accused of sexually harassing a young aide, The New York Times reported Friday.

Four sources with knowledge of the situation told The Times that Clinton’s campaign manager recommended that the adviser, Burns Strider, be removed from the campaign, but Strider instead underwent counseling and received reduced pay for several weeks. The young woman was moved to a different position.

Strider was Clinton’s faith adviser, a co-founder of the American Values Network, and personally sent Clinton daily scriptures for several months during her first presidential bid. Five years after the campaign, he was selected to lead Correct the Record, an independent pro-Clinton group, and was fired after allegations that he sexually harassed a young female staffer there.

Clinton’s legal representatives did not deny the harassment allegations or reporting that Clinton rejected the advice of her campaign manager in their statement to The Times.