RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

The new year brings many a revisiting of the Hillary Clinton email server case, including one at the hands of the Justice Department inspector general (that’s where all those FBI text messages are coming from), though his inquiry likely defines the matter too narrowly to get at the really important issues.

We should also stress that some kind of a revisiting would bedevil a Clinton administration now if Hillary Clinton had been elected instead of Donald Trump.

Way back in 2014, had Mrs. Clinton returned her “personal” emails and devices to the State Department instead of destroying them, it would have closed matters for most Americans.

After all, the Obama administration knew of and condoned her private server, amounting to an implicit endorsement of her unorthodox handling of classified materials.

But she didn’t, and the administration was not about to prosecute its heir apparent, especially after she became the sole alternative to Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump.

President Obama’s public statements on the case could not have been clearer. He essentially directed his Justice Department that Mrs. Clinton did nothing wrong, as arguably a president is entitled to do.

The part that never made sense was why FBI Director James Comey intervened to do the president’s bidding so the Justice Department wouldn’t have to.

It was unnecessary and improper. Whatever its wisdom, no serious person of either party believes the outcome was anything but predetermined. Mr. Comey simply intruded himself as a more plausible vehicle to carry out the administration’s will on the “matter” than Attorney General Loretta Lynch would have been. That much is clear by applying even the minimalist interpretation to the text messages of his lead investigator on the case, Peter Strozk, as well as other evidence surfaced by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Mr. Comey gave different reasons in public and private for his action. In closed congressional session, he pointed to intercepted Russian intelligence that he said could be used to discredit the Justice Department. That is, he relied on information from one or more U.S. intelligence agencies. It doesn’t tax the imagination to suppose Mr. Comey and fellow intelligence officials were operating on a shared premise that a Clinton presidency was inevitable and needed to be protected from email-related risks.

Since then, Obama intelligence officials have leaked intelligence and planted scurrilous innuendo about Mr. Trump, apparently aimed at giving credibility to the “collusion” narrative and discrediting his victory. But what Mr. Comey did was worse. Again, I’m not saying it was realistic or desirable that Mrs. Clinton be prosecuted, but the choice not to prosecute was a political decision that the Obama administration and Obama Justice Department had a duty to make and to own. CONTINUE AT SITE

The “secular stagnation” thesis is having a bad year. Readers will recall that this idea, popularized by former Obama White House economist Larry Summers, held that America is fated to endure slow economic growth. This conveniently justified the Obama era’s historic slow growth as an inevitable deus ex machina, and Mr. Summers’s policy advice was for government to borrow more money to spend on public works.

A year after the Obama economists left town, stagnation may be following them back to Harvard. The Commerce Department announced Friday that the U.S. economy grew 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2017, below what most economists expected but the third straight quarter of solid growth.

The details of the GDP report were stronger than the top line that was reduced by the volatile categories of trade and inventories. A fall in inventories accounted for most of the decline in growth from the third quarter, but inventories ebb and flow and the measure will rebound in future quarters. Exports rose more slowly (6.9%) than imports (13.9%), which reduced the trade contribution to GDP.

Consumer spending rose a healthy 3.8% in the quarter, while business nonresidential investment climbed 6.8%. The latter continues the trend during 2017 of rising capital spending, which underperformed across the Obama years. It’s not too much to say that capital was on strike as CEOs and small-business owners tried to avoid becoming a target of new taxes or Obama regulators.

The three-day government shutdown last Saturday has sharpened the debate about which party has the advantage going into the midterm elections in November, and which will profit from another possible shut-down if the February 8 deadline for coming up with a solution for the expiring DACA program isn’t met. More interesting than these analyses and prognostications is what they say about the pundits’ estimation of the American people’s ability to sort out the style “sizzle” from the policy-success “steak” come November.

The Democrat instigators of the current shutdown are for now paying a political price for bluffing and then caving to the Republicans, even though Republicans usually are blamed by the media and voters who have tarred them as the mean and greedy party of small government that always wants to starve the big-government Leviathan. Before the shutdown this received wisdom got support from A Washington Post poll that reported 48% of those polled would blame Republicans, 20 points more than those who’d blame the Dems. In fact, a later poll put 58% of voters blaming the Democrats.

Despite this seeming victory for Republicans, however, many still see the outlook for November as dim. Trump’s approval ratings, which are around 40%, 15 points behind his disapproval numbers, are at a historical low. The generic ballot poll asking people which party they prefer in November has the Dems ahead by 8 points. Democrats have been winning special elections lately, including a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama that had been Republican for 30 years, and most recently a the 10th State Senate district in Wisconsin, one held by Republicans for 17 years. The general consensus of Trumpophobes (e.g. here) from both parties is that the president’s abrasive and vulgar Tweets and comments, and his callous, if not racist, dismissal of immigrants during negotiations with Democrats in Congress, are undermining the party and threatening its success in November.

September 2009.

Obama hadn’t even been in office for a whole year when he gave in to Moscow’s biggest demand by dropping the missile defense shield for Poland and the Czech Republic. During his campaign, he had enthusiastically backed the defensive program, declaring, “We have to send a clear signal that Poland and other countries in that region are not going to be subject to intimidation and aggression.”

Like all of his campaign promises that were based on political triangulation, law enforcement, counterterrorism, Jerusalem and gay marriage, it was a campaign lie to be thrown out after the election.

Putin praised Obama’s sellout of our allies as a “brave decision.” In his first year, President Trump touted the sale of Patriot missiles to Poland. That was a truly brave decision.

After the Russian invasion, Obama refused to provide Ukraine with military assistance. While he had handed out weapons to Islamist terrorists in Syria and Libya, the Ukrainians were only offered MREs. The same administration that covertly shipped a fortune in foreign currency on unmarked cargo planes to Russia’s Iranian allies took months to meet Ukrainian requests for boots and spare tires.

The Trump administrated unapologetically approved the sale of sniper rifles to the Ukrainians.

“I’m aware of not only the extraordinary work that you’ve done on behalf of the Russian people,” Obama had gushed during his meeting with Putin. There were no protests from the same media that has since then repeatedly suggested that Trump’s praise for Putin indicated a soft spot for dictators.

Looking back at Obama’s first year and Trump’s first year, it’s easy to assess who was giving Moscow more. It wasn’t just missile defense. In the spring of ’09, Hillary was in Moscow toting a misspelled Reset Button swiped from a swimming pool. But it was Obama who had first urged a “reset or reboot”. That was the month he sent a secret hand-delivered letter to Russia offering to kill the missile shield. The Russians turned down his proposed deal, but he went through with the appeasement anyway.

Trashing missile defense was just one step in a larger effort to revive Jimmy Carter’s defense policies. In his first year, Obama began the push to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. CTBT would have allowed the Russians (and everyone else) to build up their nuclear arsenals while crippling our own. The new START treaty was drafted in ’09 and signed next year. And Russian violations of it were ignored.

Here’s the solution.https://spectator.org/what-trump-can-and-must-do-about-mueller/

No, don’t fire him. That way is boobytrapped. Instead, use your power as President to exercise control over him, in accordance with the rule of law.

Where there is smoke, there is fire. Somewhere, right now in Washington, there is a fire raging, just out of sight, but entirely out of control.

The fire is the unimaginable. Everything that is publicly known in and about Washington, and trumpeted by the so-called “mainstream” media, is actually the opposite of the truth.

Instead of Trump being guilty of obstruction of justice, and about to be bounced out of office through impeachment, it is actually the FBI, and President Obama’s Justice Department, that are guilty of obstruction of justice, with top figures about to be bounced into prison, or worse.

Instead of Trump being guilty of collusion “with the Russians” for help in defeating Hillary, it is Hillary Clinton who colluded with the Russians to try to defeat Trump. Hillary actually financed the Fusion GPS “dossier,” which served as the foundation for the FISA warrant authorizing espionage by the Obama Administration against the opposition party’s candidate for President.

Instead of Trump committing crimes that warrant impeachment and sending him to prison, it is Hillary Clinton who committed crimes that warrant sending her to prison. She is the one who sold out control over 20% of America’s uranium supply to Putin’s cronies, for $150 million in payoffs to the Clinton Foundation, in broad daylight as Obama’s sitting Secretary of State, in the biggest and most brazen corruption scandal in American history, by far.

That was in addition to revealing America’s top intelligence secrets by conducting her official business as Secretary of State on an unprotected email server that she should have known was subject to open access by foreign spies, which is a criminal violation of America’s intelligence laws.

Rep. Adam Schiff has many talents, though few compare to his ability to function as a human barometer of Democratic panic. The greater the level of Schiff hot, pressured air, the more trouble the party knows it’s in.

Mr. Schiff’s millibars have been popping ever since the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on which he is ranking Democrat, last week voted to make a classified GOP memo about FBI election year abuses available to every House member. Mr. Schiff has spit and spun and apoplectically accused his Republican colleagues of everything short of treason. The memo, he insists, is “profoundly misleading,” not to mention “distorted” and “political,” and an attack on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He initially tried to block his colleagues from reading it. Having failed, he’s now arguing Americans can know the full story only if they see the underlying classified documents.

This is highly convenient, given the Justice Department retains those documents and is as eager to make them public as a fox is to abandon the henhouse. Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had to threaten a contempt citation simply to get permission for his committee to gain access, and even then investigators had to leave Capitol Hill to view them, and were allowed only to take notes. Mr. Nunes has no authority to declassify them. The best he can do in his continuing transparency efforts is to summarize their contents. Only in Schiff land is sunshine suddenly a pollutant.

The Schiff pressure gauge is outmatched only by the Justice Department and the FBI, which are now mobilizing their big guns to squelch the truth. That included a Wednesday Justice Department letter to Mr. Nunes—written by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, designed as a memo to the media, copied to its allies in Washington, and immediately leaked to the public. And the department wonders why anyone doubts the integrity of all its hardworking professionals.

Mr. Boyd gets in his cheap shots, for instance slamming Mr. Nunes for moving to release a memo based on documents that Mr. Nunes hasn’t even “seen.” He apparently thinks Rep. Trey Gowdy —the experienced former federal prosecutor Mr. Nunes asked to conduct the review of those docs—isn’t qualified to judge questions of national security. He hyperventilates that it would be “reckless” for the committee to make its memo public without first letting the Justice Department review it and “advise [the committee] of the risk of harm to national security.” Put another way, it is Mr. Boyd’s position that the Justice Department gets to provide oversight of Congress. The Constitution has it the other way around.

The bigger, swampier game here is to rally media pressure, and to mau-mau Mr. Nunes into giving the department a veto over the memo’s release. Ask Sen. Chuck Grassley how that goes. Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently sent a referral to the department for a criminal probe into dossier author Christopher Steele. He then in good faith asked the department its views on an unclassified portion of that referral that he wants to make public. The department invented a classified reason to block public release, and has refused to budge for weeks.

The Boyd letter is also a first step toward a bigger prize: President Trump. Under House rules, a majority of the Intelligence Committee can vote to declassify the memo. Mr. Trump then has up to five days to object to its release. If he doesn’t object, the memo goes public. If he does, a majority of the House would have to vote to override him. CONTINUE AT SITE