RUTHFULLY YOURS

Like most awards shows, the Grammy Awards exist to fill a narcissistic industry’s need for attention. And like most awards shows, it stopped making sense once most people began to stream shows, instead of being rooted to a television screen. And so the producers know quite well that aside from die hard fans and people who don’t have internet, most people will just see a few viral clips of their show.

And the highlight of the Grammy Awards is Hillary Clinton taking a shot at President Trump.

You know your awards show is terrible when…

1. Its highlight is Hillary Clinton

2. Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with your industry

3. The only thing anyone will remember from your autotune and lip sync party is a disposable comedy bit involving Hillary Clinton.

There. Now you don’t have to watch the Grammy Awards ever again.

Let’s say I’m an assistant United States attorney in, oh I don’t know, Montana. I get to work one morning and I say to myself, “Self, you know what would be really interesting? Why, to ask Barack Obama some questions.”

Sure, there are a lot of people who’d like to do that — Obama’s a very interesting guy. But see, I’m not just “a lot of people.” I’m a federal prosecutor, just like Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Thanks to this nifty federal grand jury we’ve empaneled here in Montana, I’ve got subpoena power, just like Mueller.

Let’s back up a bit. After my weekend column, it occurred to me that a hypothetical was in order, to demonstrate the sorts of things a self-absorbed, unrestrained prosecutor can do.

My column argued not only that President Trump should refuse to be questioned by Mueller’s alpha-prosecutors, but that it would be wrong for Mueller to seek to interview the president of the United States unless he can first show cause that (1) a serious crime implicating the president has been committed and (2) the president is possessed of testimony that is both essential to proving the crime and unobtainable by alternative means.

In response, some commentators who were sympathetic to this standard wondered how it would be enforced.

After all, what’s to stop Mueller from threatening to issue a subpoena compelling Trump’s appearance before the grand jury if he declines to submit to an interview? Even if Mueller should not do that, nothing says he could not do it. If he did, then Trump — despite the lack of just cause — would be put to an array of fraught choices — much to the delight, no doubt, of the Democratic partisans on Mueller’s staff. The president would have to (a) submit to questioning and risk that Mueller would decide his answers somehow incriminated him; (b) invoke executive privilege at the political cost of adversaries’ claiming he was concealing criminal misconduct or some kind of collusion with Russia; or (c) fire Mueller and risk comparisons to Watergate and calls for his impeachment — even though the Watergate special prosecutor had compelling evidence of President Nixon’s criminal culpability before demanding that the president submit to law-enforcement demands.

Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is drawing criticism from Donald Trump Jr. and US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley after participating in a pre-recorded reading of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury for the 60th Annual Grammy Awards on Sunday night, multiple outlets are reporting.

Hosted by James Corden, the comedian had multiple singers “audition” for an audio performance of Wolff’s book, ending on a surprise cameo from Clinton. Take a look at the responses from Haley — as well as the clip — below.
Nikki Haley
✔ @nikkihaley
I have always loved the Grammys but to have artists read the Fire and Fury book killed it. Don’t ruin great music with trash. Some of us love music without the politics thrown in it.
10:12 PM – Jan 28, 2018

Not all conspiracy theorists are unhinged paranoids—even when they insist there was a loosely organized if not sometimes incoherent effort to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy beyond the bounds of “normal” politics and later a renewed and unprecedented endeavor to abort his presidency.

After all, did anyone believe that in the year 2017 the losing side in an American election would immediately dub itself the “Resistance”—channeling the World War II nomenclature of the guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupation of France? Or that the defeated candidate Hillary Clinton would formally embrace the imagery of liberationist patriots fighting a Nazi-like Trump’s occupation of the United States?

One ingredient for removing a president would entail a nonstop effort by the opposition to use the courts, the legislative branch, the investigatory agencies, and the administrative state to discredit, undermine, and remove an elected government. In modern terms, that might entail opponents suing to challenge the legitimacy of the election, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,” voting machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were null and void.

The effort might embrace trying to subvert the Constitution by pressuring state electors not to honor their constitutionally defined responsibilities to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce articles of impeachment in the House.

A resistance might sue under the 25th Amendment to find the president non compos mentis, accompanied by a popular campaign to clinically diagnose the president as mentally unfit or physically decrepit. Or a resistance might use the courts to seek the removal of an elected president on grounds he was a rank profiteer and had violated the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution—or to file suits with cherry-picked liberal judges to delay and stop the president’s executive orders. On the petty side, an organized effort to discredit a president would range from boycotting the Inauguration to deliberately holding up and delaying confirmation of his appointees.

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.