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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Newly-released Strzok-Page lovebird text messages: ‘potus wants to know everything we’re doing’ By Thomas Lifson

Tick, tick, tick… we’re getting closer and closer to the “What did the president know and when did he know it?” moment in the biggest political scandal in American history. What looks like a sitting president authorizing the use of the vast spy apparatus of the federal government on the opposing party candidate for president would, if proven, be far bigger than Watergate – a mere burglary intended to spy on the opposition. Pay attention because you may want to tell your children or grandchildren what it was like watching this all unfold in 2018.

Up until the present moment, Barack Obama has been missing in all the discussions of surveillance misbehavior. And most curiously, Obama has been almost invisible, staying quiet, and not using his expensive Washington, DC mansion (shared with Valeire Jarrett) as a base for leading the opposition to President Trump, as many of us expected him to do. He is the only president I can remember who didn’t get out of DC when his term in office expired, yet he has been as invisible as if he were Truman retired to Independence or Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg. He hasn’t even spoken out about the opposition to his presidential monument planned for public park land in Chicago, My optimistic guess is that he realizes his peril and is dummying up.

In a move calculated to infuriate the Democrats, the latest batch of text messages between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page was leaked to Fox News first, and there are some striking revelations. Officially embargoed until 6 AM Eastern Time today, FNC was ready with the first item to reach the nation, followed minutes later by an AP dispatch, which headlined that the lovebirds admired James Comey. The Washington Post and other outlets saw fit to go with the innocuous emphasis. No kidding!

Rod Rosenstein Should Not Be Fired, but Should He Be Recused? by Alan M. Dershowitz

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should not be fired. He is a distinguished public servant with a bipartisan reputation for fairness. But there is a real question whether he should be recused from participating in any investigation by the special counsel of alleged obstruction of justice by the president.

Five facts are indisputable. First, Rosenstein is currently supervising Robert Mueller, who he appointed to be special counsel to investigate the Russia matter and all ancillary issues. Second, these ancillary issues include any possible obstruction of justice growing out of the Russia investigation. Third, President Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey may be an important building block in any possible obstruction case against the president. Fourth, Rosenstein played a central role in that firing, having written the memorandum justifying the president’s action. Fifth, Rosenstein would be an important — perhaps the most important — witness in any investigation of the reasons behind the firing.

The question is whether a lawyer should both supervise an investigation and be an important witness in that very investigation. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself because he might have been a witness or subject of the Russia investigation. Rosenstein might be a more central witness in any obstruction of justice investigation by the prosecutor who he is supervising.

A Year of Achievement The case for the Trump presidency By Victor Davis Hanson

As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president — much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either prior political office or military service. As unintended proof of his accomplishments, Trump’s many liberal opponents have gone from initially declaring him an incompetent to warning that he has become effective — insanely so — in overturning the Obama progressive agenda.

Never Trump Republicans acknowledge that Trump has realized much of what they once only dreamed of — from tax reform and deregulation to a government about-face on climate change, the ending of the Obamacare individual mandate, and expansion of energy production.

Trump so far has not enacted the Never Trump nightmare agenda. The U.S. is not leaving NATO. It is not colluding with Vladimir Putin, but maintaining sanctions against Russia and arming Ukrainians. It is not starting a tariff war with China. The administration is not appointing either liberals or incompetents to the federal courts.

A politicized FBI, DOJ, and IRS was Obama’s legacy, not Trump’s doing, as some of the Never Trump circle predicted. Indeed, the Never Trump movement is now mostly calcified, as even some of its formerly staunch adherents concede. It was done in by the Trump record and the monotony of having to redefine a once-welcomed conservative agenda as suddenly unpalatable due to Trump’s crude fingerprints on it.

On the short side, Trump has still not started to build his much-promised border wall, to insist on free but far fairer trade with Asia and Europe, or to enact an infrastructure-rebuilding program. Nonetheless, Trump’s multitude of critics is unable to argue that his record is shoddy and must instead insist that his list of achievements is due mostly to the Republican Congress. Or they claim he is beholden to the legacy of the Obama administration. Or they insist that credit belongs with his own impressive economic and national-security cabinet-level appointments. Or that whatever good came of Trump’s first year is nullified by Trump’s persistent personal odiousness.

At the conclusion of Trump’s first year, the stock market and small-business confidence are at record highs, and consumer confidence has not been higher in 17 years. Trump’s loud campaign promises to lure back capital and industry to the heartland no longer look quixotic, given new tax and deregulatory incentives and far cheaper energy costs than in most of Europe and Japan.

The Clinton Dossier Exposing the collusion between the DOJ and the Clintons. Daniel Greenfield

There were many damning revelations in the Nunes memo released by a House Intelligence Committee vote. But the most damning of them all doesn’t raise questions about process, but about motive.

The memo told us that the FISA application would not have happened without the Steele dossier. The document known as the Steele dossier was a work product of the Clinton campaign. Not only was Christopher Steele, the former British intel agent who purportedly produced the document, working for an organization hired by the Clinton campaign, but he shared a memo with the FBI from Cody Shearer, a Clinton operative, listing some of the same allegations as the ones in his dossier. That memo has raised questions about whether Steele had been doing original research or just dressing up a smear by Shearer.

A redacted memo by Senate Judiciary Committee members Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham also states that there was a second Steele memo based on information that Steele had received from the State Department and which had been passed along by “a friend of the Clintons.” Victoria Nuland, a Clinton protégé and top State Department official who helped cover up the Benghazi attack, recently went on a media tour in which she revealed that Steele had passed along his material to State.

Shearer and Nuland are both Clinton associates. Under President Clinton, Nuland had been Strobe Talbott’s Chief of Staff. Shearer was Strobe Talbott’s brother-in-law and his connection to the Clintons.

Not only was the Steele dossier a work product of the Clinton campaign, but the State Department, which had been run by Hillary Clinton and staffed by many of her loyalists at the top, had been used to route information to Steele from the Clintons, and then route information back from Steele. Clintonworld had not only paid for the Steele dossier, but influenced its content and passed it around.

Hillary Clinton unconsciously satirizes herself in Georgetown speech By Thomas Lifson

The joke is on Hillary, perhaps the least self-aware person ever to be a major party presidential candidate (with the possible exception of John Kerry).

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton predicted Monday during a human rights event at Georgetown University that climate change will force women to “bear the brunt of looking for the food, looking for the firewood, looking for the place to migrate to …”

Such migration won’t be led by men, she maintained, but rather by women “when all of the grass is finally gone as the desertification moves south and you have to keep moving your livestock or your crops are no longer growing.”

For a former secretary of state, she is amazingly out of touch with the demographic makeup of the wave of refugees that has overwhelmed Europe: overwhelmingly males, most of military service age. But hey, she’s never let facts get in the way of her demagoguery before.

Obviously, she’s never heard the old joke about newspaper headlines on the day the world ends.

God decided He was finally fed up with the human race and decided to end it for good. He called up a reporter at the New York Times to tell him the news: The world would end the day after tomorrow.

The reporter tried to talk God out of it, but God was firm and wouldn’t be swayed. The reporter then asked if he had an exclusive. God said that He was going to call three other newspapers.

Headlines the next day:

The New York Times: “God says world to end tomorrow; story and analysis on page B11.”

The Wall Street Journal: “God says world to end tomorrow; market to close early”

USA Today: “IT’S OVER!”

The Washington Post: “God says world to end tomorrow; women and minorities hardest hit.”

But the biggest joke of all is the name of the ceremony at which she delivered her craziness:

…the annual Hillary Rodham Clinton awards ceremony hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in Washington, D.C.

The End of IRS Targeting? President Trump prepares to name a new chief tax collector. James Freeman

It can be hard to keep track of Obama-era targeting of the political opposition by federal administrative agencies. But this week brings fresh hope that such abuses will not be repeated.

The Journal reports:

President Donald Trump will nominate Charles Rettig, a California tax lawyer, to run the Internal Revenue Service, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Rettig will take one of the most thankless jobs in Washington.

Of course in recent years it has been thankless for especially good reason. During the Obama administration, the tax agency targeted conservative organizations for exceptional scrutiny and even harassment. Last year the IRS settled lawsuits brought by organizations that had been mistreated simply because they advocated for limited Constitutional government. The government shelled out millions of dollars to settle one suit involving 428 organizations, according to an October report in the New York Times. In a separate case brought by different organizations, an apology for the IRS’s egregious conduct was enough to resolve the litigation.

Reported the Times:

The settlements were the conclusion of two legal battles that have dogged the I.R.S. since the initial lawsuits were filed after a 2013 treasury inspector general’s audit that found groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names received more scrutiny over their applications for tax-exempt status. The revelations plunged the I.R.S. into a firestorm that ultimately led to the ouster of its acting commissioner and prompted accusations that the agency was being used as a political weapon by the Obama administration.

While Mr. Obama did force the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner in the wake of the scandal in 2013, he made no serious effort to reform the agency and proclaimed that the targeting had involved “not even a smidgen of corruption” long before his government had finished investigating.

Steele’s Credibility—and the FBI’s—Keeps Unraveling By Julie Kelly

Here is one more reason why the Nunes memo is consequential: Its release prompted the Justice Department and FBI to grant the Senate Judiciary Committee’s request to declassify portions of its criminal referral of dossier author Christopher Steele for making false statements to federal officials. The new information corroborates a key allegation in the Nunes memo that “Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI.”

Shortly after the president authorized the publication last Friday of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo, Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray asking them again to declassify parts of the referral.

“Much of the information in the declassified [House Intelligence] memorandum overlaps with the information in the criminal referral made by Senator Graham and me,” Grassley wrote. “That information has now been declassified and can no longer properly be deemed as classified in our criminal referral. Accordingly, I ask that you immediately review the classified referral in light of today’s declassification and provide a declassified version of it to the Committee.”

‘Hide the Ball’
Just as the FBI had attempted to halt the Nunes memo’s release, Bureau officials initially tried to block portions of Grassley’s January 4 referral from public view, insisting it contained classified information and warning that the Bureau was “deeply concerned that granting exceptions to this policy would send a troubling signal.” Grassley blasted the FBI’s excuse from the Senate floor on January 24, accusing FBI leadership of “falsely claiming that three of our unclassified paragraphs each contain the same or single classified fact,” because the sections in question are from “non-government sources and do not claim to repeat or confirm any information from any government document.”

Jail the Guilty, Repeal FISA By Angelo Codevilla

The House Intelligence Committee’s summary memo of highly classified FBI and Justice Department documents confirms what has been public knowledge for over a year: Some of America’s highest officials used U.S. intelligence’s most intrusive espionage tools to attempt to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and then to cripple Donald Trump politically. Being of one mind with the rest of the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, these officials acted symbiotically and seamlessly with them, regardless of any cooperation that may have existed.

The party-in-power’s use of government espionage to thwart the opposition violates the Fourth Amendment and sets a ruinous precedent. Having done so under color of law—specifically, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—makes it a lot worse.

Unfortunately, the summary memo—to say nothing of the Democrats’ and their kept media’s reaction to it—focuses largely on whether the FBI and Justice Department dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s as they obtained a warrant from the FISA court to do the spying. This misrepresents high crimes as merely technical violations. Worse, it risks leaving in place a law under which those in charge of the government may violate the basic tenets of American political life with reasonable hope of impunity.

The FISA-Gate Boomerangs Many questions remain, but Democrats, including Obama, are probably not going to look good when we get the answers. By Victor Davis Hanson

Some things still do not add up about the so-called Steele dossier, FISA warrants, the Nunes memo, and the hysterical Democratic reaction to it.

A Big Deal or a Nothing Deal?

1) Progressives and Democrats warned on the eve of the memo’s release that it would cause havoc throughout the intelligence agencies, by exposing classified means and processes.

When no serious intelligence expert claimed that the released memo had done such damage, the official response to the memo was suddenly recalibrated by progressives. It went from being radioactive to a “nothingburger.”

The obvious conclusion is cynical: Cry Armageddon to prevent its release, then, after the release, resort to yawns to downplay its significance. An even more cynical interpretation is that Rod Rosenstein, James Comey, and other officials stridently objected to the release of the memo because they are named in it. Comey incoherently mocked the memo’s purported unimportance even while listing all its deleterious effects and the crises that would ensue.

Congressional, DOJ, and FBI resistance to the release of most documents connected to FISA-gate apparently originates with fears that information will either reveal Obama-administration efforts to surveille Trump officials during a campaign or will suggest that the impetus for the Mueller investigation came as a result of illegal activities and a concocted dossier — or both.

2) Critics scream, “Carter Page is no big deal.” Aside from the easy retort that neither, initially, was a petty break-in at the Watergate complex, or rumors of supplying arms to distant guerillas in Central America, Page is a big deal for a variety of reasons.

Democrats allege that, given Carter Page’s familiarity with Russians, it was logical for the Obama administration to use the dossier’s references to him to substantiate FISA warrants.

But is not the opposite more likely true?

Don’t Call it the Steele Dossier, Call it the Clinton Dossier Daniel Greenfield

My research had previously suggested that the Steele Dossier may have really been the work of Cody Shearer, one of Bill’s plumbers. The Grassley memo doesn’t name Shearer but indicates that the dossier produced by Christopher Steele had been based on work from the Clinton campaign.

Clinton associates were “feeding” allegations to former British spy Christopher Steele at the same time he was compiling the controversial anti-Trump dossier paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign, according to an unclassified memo from senior Senate Republicans who recently made a criminal referral.

Those Republicans, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had asked the Justice Department in January to investigate Steele based on evidence they say suggests he lied to the FBI about his contacts with the media (a violation of 18 USC 1001) — or the FBI misrepresented Steele’s statements.