RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Steele dossier has already become a thing of John le Carré-like intrigue—British spies, Kremlin agents, legal cutouts, hidden bank accounts. What all this obscures is the more immediate point: The dossier amounts to one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history. It was perpetrated by Team Clinton and yielded a vast payoff for Hillary’s campaign.

The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion in turn hired former U.K. spook Christopher Steele to assemble the (now largely discredited) dossier. That full dossier of allegations wasn’t made public until after the election, in January 2017. And the media and Democrats continue to peddle the line that it played no role during the election itself.

“Details from the dossier were not reported before Election Day,” ran a recent CNN story. Hillary Clinton herself stressed the point in a recent “Daily Show” appearance. The dossier, she said, is “part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated.”

This is utterly untrue. In British court documents Mr. Steele has acknowledged he briefed U.S. reporters about the dossier in September 2016. Those briefed included journalists from the New York Times , the Washington Post, Yahoo News and others. Mr. Steele, by his own admission (in an interview with Mother Jones), also gave his dossier in July 2016 to the FBI.

Among the dossier’s contents were allegations that in early July 2016 Carter Page, sometimes described as a foreign-policy adviser to Candidate Trump, held a “secret” meeting with two high-ranking Russians connected to President Vladimir Putin. It even claimed these Russians offered to give Mr. Page a 19% share in Russia’s state oil company in return for a future President Trump lifting U.S. sanctions. This dossier allegation is ludicrous on its face. Mr. Page was at most a minor figure in the campaign and has testified under oath that he never met the two men in question or had such a conversation.

Yet the press ran with it. On Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff published a bombshell story under the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Mr. Isikoff said “U.S. officials” had “received intelligence” about Mr. Page and Russians, and then went on to recite verbatim all the unfounded dossier allegations. He attributed all this to a “well-placed Western intelligence source,” making it sound as if this info had come from someone in government rather than from an ex-spy-for-hire.

The Clinton campaign jumped all over it, spinning its own oppo research as a government investigation into Mr. Trump. Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director, the next day took to television to tout the Isikoff story and cite “U.S. intelligence officials” in the same breath as Mr. Page. Other Clinton surrogates fanned out on TV and Twitter to spread the allegations.

The Isikoff piece publicly launched the Trump-Russia collusion narrative—only 1½ months from the election—and the whole dossier operation counts as one of the greatest political stitch-ups of all time. Most campaigns content themselves with planting oppo research with media sources. The Clinton campaign commissioned a foreign ex-spy to gin up rumors, which made it to U.S. intelligence agencies, and then got reporters to cite it as government-sourced. Mrs. Clinton now dismisses the dossier as routine oppo research, ignoring that her operation specifically engineered the contents to be referred to throughout the campaign as “intelligence” or a “government investigation.”

Making matters worse, there may be a grain of truth to that last claim. If the Washington Post’s reporting is correct, it was in the summer of 2016 that Jim Comey’s FBI obtained a wiretap warrant on Mr. Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If it was the dossier that provoked that warrant, then the wrongs here are grave. Mr. Page is suing Yahoo News over that Isikoff story, but he may have a better case against the Clinton campaign and the federal government if they jointly spun

Former FBI Director James Comey’s explanation for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton was always improbable. Now it seems impossible.

The Espionage Act makes it a crime to mishandle classified documents “through gross negligence” (18 USC 793-f). Punishment upon conviction carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

With 110 emails on Clinton’s private server that were classified at the time they were sent or received, the Democratic nominee for president could have been prosecuted on 110 separate felony counts. Yet Comey scuttled the case.

But a story in The Hill this week by John Solomon says a newly discovered document shows that then-FBI Director Comey authored a draft statement accusing Clinton of mishandling classified documents and being “grossly negligent.”

The document was confirmed by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was written a full two months before Clinton was ever interviewed by the FBI.

However, sometime later the words “gross negligence” were edited out with red lines. The words “extremely careless” were substituted. This would appear to show that Comey knew Clinton violated the law but subsequently resolved to conjure a way to exonerate her by altering the language.

Comey didn’t do a very good job. The two terms are largely synonymous under the law.

Both before and after a shady, Kremlin-tied lawyer met with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign officials in June 2016, she consulted with a top official of Fusion GPS, the firm now known to have been commissioned by the Clinton campaign to produce the infamous Trump dossier.

A report by Fox News suggests there may thus have been coordination regarding the dossier between the Fusion principal, Glenn Simpson, and the Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya. That possibility cannot be discounted. After all, we don’t know what their discussions entailed, even though Simpson has met behind closed doors with congressional investigators.

But there’s a more plausible explanation. Their consultations were almost surely dominated by — if perhaps not exclusively taken up with — the civil forfeiture federal prosecutors were then pursuing against Prevezon Holdings, a Kremlin-crony company for which both Fusion and Veselnitskaya were working. To understand why, recall what was going on in the case at the time.

There has been a great deal of news in recent weeks about Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and that retained Fusion — which, in turn, hired former British spy Christopher Steele to compile the dossier. Less attention has been paid to Baker Hostetler, the law firm that represented Prevezon, and that retained Fusion to do research in connection with the forfeiture case.

Prevezon is controlled by the Katsyv family — specifically Denis Katsyv, the son of Pyotr Katsyv, a high-ranking Russian transportation official and close confederate of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Veselnitskaya is a lawyer for the Katsyvs in Moscow, a big part of what makes her a trusted Kremlin operative.

A couple of thoughts on the passing parade:

~Political memoirs are almost always boring, self-serving, committee-written and unreadable – Hillary’s What Happened being merely an especially bloated example. So Donna Brazile, hitherto one of the Clintons’ loyalest acolytes, might have been expected to turn in a more or less typical insider account of a flop campaign, worth neither your time nor money. Instead, she has confirmed what some of us charged at the time – that the Democrat establishment succeeded in doing to Bernie what the GOP establishment tried but failed to do to Trump: steal the nomination away from the insurgent.

Sanders vs Trump would have made it a much tougher race, and I suspect Bernie could have held a couple of those rust-belt states. But that match-up never happened, because, while the Republicans’ institutional corruption is ineffectual, the Democrats’ is lethal and all too effective. Ms Brazile’s publisher should have made a last-minute title-change and called the book What Really Happened. As is customary with the Clinto Nostra, Donna is now being accused of being a squealer and a turncoat: As the union heavies say in On the Waterfront, you’re supposed to stay D’n’D – deaf and dumb. Ms Brazile, of course, was previously head of the DNC, which is dumb’n’complicit.

I heard, I believe, Jessica Tarlov talking about this the other day, and regretting that the Brazile fracas had reopened the party divisions between the Sanders progressive wing and the Clinton moderate faction. But that’s not really what the divide is, is it? The party split is between Sanders social-justice warriors and the Clintons’ dynastic kleptocracy. And if the latter is what “moderation” and “centrism” look like, why be surprised that Dem foot-soldiers are lurching lefter? Kleptocrat centrism appeals only to wannabes – whether Clinton bagmen like Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who’d like to get a piece of the sleazy deals with Kazakh oligarchs; or media suck-ups who wish they were getting Clinton-sized six-figure sums from Goldman Sachs for speeches nobody wants to listen to.

Beyond that, kleptocrat centrism has no takers: In leftie parties around the world, it requires some effort to wean youthful idealists off their starry-eyed utopianism, and corrupt, entitled, pay-for-play Clintonism isn’t going to cut it. I made this point at the dawn of the 2016 presidential cycle in early 2015:

Leaving the studio, I ran into [Democrat pollster Doug Schoen] emerging from makeup and he upbraided me for my hostility to Hillary – which I felt bad about, because I’ve always gotten on well with him, and we have a shared interest in demography and whatnot. Twenty months later, Doug has caught up to my view.

But few other centrist Dems have. Yet the question underpinning Donna Brazile’s book is pretty basic: What do genuinely moderate Democrats have to show for mortgaging their brand to the Clinton Foundation? Me again:

Hillary got rich, Bill got laid, republican virtue got screwed. Like the sickly leaders of late-Soviet politburos, both appear older and feebler than their years: once the star performer of the double-act, Bill staggers around like the Blowjob of Dorian Gray; the life has all but literally been sucked out of him. His straight-woman, once the reliably stolid, stone-faced Margaret Dumont of his cigar-waggling routine, now has to be propped up on street bollards and fed lines by her medical staff. When she shuts down and she’s out cold, who’s driving the pantsuit? Huma? Cheryl? Podesta? Bill and Hillary have been consumed by their urges. America would be electing the Walking Dead, insatiable and fatal to the touch, but utterly hollow.

As long as “centrism” is cornered by the Clintocracy, the Democrats will continue to drift left and lefter. Clean house, or go full antifa.

In May, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson dismissed a lawsuit by the families of the victims of Benghazi against Hillary Clinton. Judge Jackson decided that the families couldn’t sue Hillary either for wrongful death or for defamation. That isn’t too surprising as Jackson is a former Clinton donor who had been appointed by Obama. And a Clinton donor should never have been ruling on a Clinton case.

But now Judge Jackson will be presiding over the Paul Manafort case.

Presiding over Manafort’s indictment is Judge Deborah A. Robinson. Judge Robinson’s most prominent previous case was the Berger trial. Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s former National Security Adviser, stole classified documents about the terror failures of the Clinton administration, hid documents under a construction trailer, lied about taking them and destroyed some of them.

People have gone to jail for doing a whole lot less with classified documents. But not Clinton associates.

Sandy Berger was sentenced to two years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a fine.

Judge Robinson had presided over the “Scooter” Libby indictment. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in jail. Robinson may have had little to do with that final outcome. And may have had limited control over the eagerness of some in the DOJ to give Sandy Berger a pass. If nothing else, Robinson did end up raising the fine that Berger had to pay. But Berger still got a slap on the wrist and Libby didn’t.

FBI Director Christopher Wray had announced the slap on the wrist for Berger in his former capacity as Assistant Attorney General. And had declined to discuss the investigation while in progress. President Bush had wanted action, but the FBI had cheerfully dismissed the seriousness of the investigation.

And that’s just the way that it seems to go for Democrats and the way that it is for Republicans.

It’s not hard to see why. Take Judge Beryl Howell.

Howell is an Obama appointee and a former Leahy adviser. Beryl and her husband are both Dem donors. She’s also a pal of Obama’s former DOJ boss, Lorretta Lynch. And of Andrew Weissmann.

Weissmann, an Obama donor, is a key member of Mueller’s team.

And Judge Howell gave Mueller his grand jury and decided that Manafort wasn’t entitled to attorney-client privilege. It was an extraordinary and troubling decision. And its legitimacy can’t help but be questioned when it comes from a partisan Dem figure.

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s EPA administrator, is the top target of the anti-Trump lynch mob. He’s enduring daily attack pieces in the media and threats of violence against him and his family. It’s hard to think of any cabinet member — current or former — who has been subjected to more vitriol and vilification than Pruitt, and he’s been on the job for less than a year. Suddenly, everything from overlooked Superfund sites to the Flint water crisis to “toxic” pesticides are Pruitt’s fault, which of course means he is poisoning children and destroying the planet.

According to the EPA inspector general’s office, Pruitt has received “four to five times the number of threats” that his predecessor, Gina McCarthy, did. The level of concern for Pruitt’s safety is so deep that agents are being added to his round-the-clock security detail. In a recent Bloomberg News interview, Pruitt said, “The quantity and the volume — as well as the type — of threats are different. What’s really disappointing to me as it’s not just me — it’s family.”

Why are Pruitt and his family in the crosshairs? “What is different is that the Democrats have whipped up their base into a frenzy against him,” Steve Milloy, a longtime EPA critic, told me. “It’s not surprising that he’s getting even more threats than usual.”

And it isn’t just left-wing environmental extremists who are inciting or excusing calls to assassinate a key cabinet member. Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey and EPA chief under President George W. Bush, told CNN that “if he has had enough serious death threats, then he shouldn’t have proposed the deep cuts to the EPA budget.”

So, to borrow a line from the musical Chicago, he had it comin’, or so sings the chorus of swamp creatures threatened by Pruitt’s systematic disassembling of one of the federal government’s most notoriously rogue and punitive agencies. In a column for SFGATE, a sister site for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Morford suggested the death threats might be from “environmental advocates, or teachers, or peace activists, or lovers of life and humanity and nature, or distraught mothers, worried that Pruitt’s actions will endanger the lives of their children.” Morford concludes that “when you send death threats to the world and all who live on her, the world will, quite naturally, send them right back.”

Some Hollywood celebrities are also riding the Pruitt Hate Train; actor Mark Ruffalo routinely posts threatening tweets about the EPA chief. As Hurricane Irma took aim at the Florida coast in September, Ruffalo suggested that hurricane victims “direct some of your rage and loss” at “climate deniers like Scott Pruitt.” This week, Ruffalo said this about extreme weather events:

The country is shocked, shocked that the DNC colluded with the Hillary campaign to anoint her as their nominee. In her 2015 caper, Clinton made a backroom deal with the DNC. But in 2008, Barack Obama combined muscular Chicago-style clout with community organizing acumen to steal the nomination directly from the voters.

Obama’s illegal shenanigans in the 2008 Democrat primaries were far worse than Clinton’s – and will never be widely reported. Obama used outright election fraud and thuggery, the tried and true Chicago methods. When he got far enough, the DNC pressured Hillary’s pledged superdelegates to violate their voters’ wishes and award Obama an unearned victory.

It’s an odd experience to dig this information out of the memory hole. No one in the Democratic Party, their media, or their base cares – not about rule of law, not about fair elections. Their primaries reveal how their will to power trumps every other value. What these corrupt Democrat primaries show is that progressives want permanent power, not a functioning republic. They don’t want fair and free elections – witness their dirty attempts to overturn the last one and deprive Trump voters of their victory.

As Hillary might say, Democrat corruption, like Hollywood corruption, takes a village.

Like the revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s abuses, one big dog gets punished, while the even bigger dog (Bill Clinton for sexual abuse, Barack Obama for political abuse) remains untouchable.

A documentary by Hillary supporters on Obama’s cheating and abuse was reported on Fox & Friends only in 2010; at the time of the election, no one would cover their complaints. Read about it here.

In one documentary interview, civil rights activist Helene Latimer recounts seeing an elderly woman being intimidated at the polls. “As she approached the entrance way to go into the building, one of the young men said to her, ‘If you’re not voting for Obama, go home because you’re not voting here today.'”

“It’s our right as Americans to be able to vote and everybody was alerted, we went to press, we went to Fox, we went to CNN, nobody wanted to hear the story (in 2008),” Gaston told Fox’s Alisyn Camerota. “Nobody wants to deal with this.”

From “How Obama Used an Army of Thugs to Steal the 2008 Democratic Party Nomination”:

… the Obama Campaign… encouraged and created an army to steal caucus packets, falsify documents, change results, allow unregistered people to vote, scare and intimidate Hillary supporters, stalk them, threaten them, lock them out of their polling places, silence their voices and stop their right to vote.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Party are trying to torpedo the biggest tax cut since 1986. Schumer accuses GOP tax cutters of “messing up the good economy the president inherited from President Obama and hurting the middle class.” The senator must think we’re stupid. The Obama economy wasn’t “good.” It was lousy, sputtering along at a pathetic 2.1 percent, far below the 3.8 percent norm for this nation. Who got clobbered? The middle class, who had to settle for almost no increase in wages and disappointing job prospects.

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act, unveiled by House Republicans on Thursday, is designed to ignite the nation’s economy, producing higher wages and more job opportunities for workers. America taxes corporations at the highest rate of any industrialized country. That drives companies overseas, sabotaging our workforce. The GOP tax cut lowers the corporate from 35 to 20 percent, to make the U.S. competitive again.

As for the middle class, they’ll benefit in two ways — from a faster growing economy and from tax breaks for individual filers. The GOP plan nearly doubles the standard deduction to $12,200 for single filers and $24,400 for married couples, and lowers most rates. It pays for those changes by eliminating certain deductions.

The impact on your wallet will depend on the deductions you’re used to taking. But a typical family earning $73,000 a year would save about $1,600 the first year.

The media began to paint Muslims as the victims of Saipov’s attack — not the dead and the wounded victims of the terrorist.

“As a Muslim committed to fighting Islamism, I appeal to you: The need for strong surveillance of Muslim communities in the West has never been greater…. Counterterrorism experts and politicians must know that far from being Islamophobic, the scrutiny is supported by Islam…. Nations seasoned in combating Islamism — most recently, Egypt…. have identified mosques as critical nerve centers for Islamism. Mosques in Egypt, for example, are monitored by the state….Islam itself demands no less.” — Dr. Qanta Ahmed, Muslim physician, Newsday.

New York has adopted, in its entirety, the European response to Islamic terrorism: Appeasement and genuflection to Islam. Historically, such behavior was required by non-Muslim citizens of Islamic states, known as dhimmis, in exchange for “protection”. The question is why American citizens, who live in the United States and not in an Islamic state, feel obliged to submit to Islam?

On October 31, Sayfullo Saipov, a Muslim immigrant from Uzbekistan, shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” (“Allah is the greatest!”) as he rammed his rented truck into 20 people in downtown Manhattan, killing eight and wounding twelve more. The truck-ramming attack, a terrorist tactic popularized by jihadists in Israel, then Europe, was the deadliest terror attack in New York since September 11, 2001. The response to Saipov’s attack from New York City officials, as well as the US media, displays the extent to which officials have submitted to Islamic terrorism since then, and how unquestioningly the mainstream media backs this capitulation. Americans should be extremely worried.

NY Deputy Police Commissioner John Miller said after the attack:

“This is not about Islam, this is not about the mosque he attends, there are hundreds of thousands of law abiding Muslims in New York City, who are adversely affected by things like this. It is probably a good time to say that we have seen in the aftermath of incidents like these, bias incidents, hate crimes, assaults… and anybody behind those will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”.

In fact, this attack had everything to do with Islam. Saipov was a devout Muslim, who left a note at the site of the attack making clear that he had committed the atrocity on behalf of ISIS, an organization that is, as studies have shown, nothing if not Islamic. The mosque Saipov allegedly attended had actually been under surveillance since 2005; and mosques are among the most popular places for Muslim outreach, dawa. Although the internet also plays a role in the radicalization process, a recent study showed that face-to-face encounters are even more important.

Instead of threatening New Yorkers — who have a constitutionally protected right to voice their objections to being murdered by Muslim terrorists, even if the deputy police commissioner thinks it might be “biased” to be against your own demise — with prosecution, the police deputy commissioner should have admonished them, “If you see something, say something”. Instead, he not only lied about the Islamic nature of the terrorist attack, but, through his grossly negligent remarks, enabled future attacks. Possibly, now, if people witness something suspicious, they will be afraid to speak out for fear of being labelled an “Islamophobe”, or, as in Europe, prosecuted.