RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/17/the_checkered_past_of_the_fbi_computer_contractor_who_spied_on_trump_816761.html

Long before FBI computer contractor and Clinton operative Rodney L. Joffe allegedly trolled Internet traffic for dirt on President Trump, he mined direct-marketing contact lists for the names and addresses of unwitting Americans to target in a promotional scam involving a grandfather clock.

Not just any clock, mind you, but a “world famous Bentley IX” model, according to postcards his companies mailed out to millions of people in the late 1980s claiming they’d won the clock in a contest they never entered. There was just one hitch: the lucky winners had to send $69.19 in shipping fees to redeem their supposedly five-foot mahogany prize.

Tens of thousands of folks forked over the fees, only to discover the grandfather clock that arrived was nothing as advertised. It was really just a table-top version made of particle board and plastic and worth less than $10. Some assembly was required.

The scheme generated thousands of complaints, sparking federal and state investigations. Joffe and his then-California partner, Linda M. Carella, were eyed by federal postal authorities and several state attorneys general for allegedly operating a multi-state mail-order scheme. Joffe settled several state lawsuits by agreeing to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars mainly to elderly victims, according to several published reports at the time.

Joffe and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. But in a phone interview, Carella told RealClearInvestigations that Joffe ran the operation. “I was just the secretary, the receptionist,” Carella, 76, said from her home in Florida, where she is now retired. She did say she picked up the returned postcards and checks from mailboxes.

Carella said she quit after the investigation: “I said I don’t want anything more to do with this … I have not seen Rodney since then.” But Joffe pressed on with his direct-mail marketing business before packing up for Arizona a few years later. Federal and state tax lien records reveal Joffe — who also sent out mailers for skin care and other beauty products — owed more than $110,000 in back taxes on his property in Los Angeles in 1995.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-are-those-techies-who-spied-on-trump-clinton-2016-election-durham-data-fusion-gps-joffe-11645139606?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

The usual suspects are already circling the wagons around the techie “experts” who spied on Donald Trump. If their defense feels tired, it’s because we’ve been through it before. It’s Christopher Steele all over again.

Special counsel John Durham destroyed the last shreds of Mr. Steele’s credibility last year, proving that the paid-for-hire spook had relied on fabrications for the infamous dossier the Federal Bureau of Investigation used in its Trump probe. The special counsel is now dismantling that other big claim of Trump-Russia “collusion”—the Alfa Bank narrative. The wonder is that the press and others are stepping up for another humiliation—when the disturbing actions of the creators of the Alfa narrative are already so easy to document, and in their own words.

The Alfa story came to life in October 2016, when Franklin Foer of Slate was gulled into writing that a largely anonymous “benevolent posse” of “computer scientists,” “spurred by a sense of shared idealism,” had discovered data showing secret communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. Cybersecurity professionals instantly ridiculed the data as nonsense, and the FBI dismissed it, but the liberal media kept it alive. In October 2018, the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins devoted a 7,600-word panegyric to the “self-appointed guardians of the Internet” who continued to flog the claims.

In recent court filings, Mr. Durham explains that these tech experts—including Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar, Inc.—were in cahoots with the same crew as Mr. Steele, using the same playbook. They worked with Democratic lawyers at Perkins Coie and opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, with the goal of dredging up “derogatory” information on Mr. Trump that would please “VIPs” in the Clinton campaign. The techies did so, the Durham indictment says, in part by mining protected internet data that had been supplied to a government contractor—allowing them to snoop on the White House as well as Trump Tower and Mr. Trump’s Manhattan apartment.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/02/16/hillary-finally-responds-to-durham-bombshell-calls-it-a-fake-scandal-n1559864

According to a motion filed Friday by Special Counsel John Durham, lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign allegedly paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers that belonged to Trump Tower and, later, the Trump White House “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

“Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it’s a day that ends in Y,” Hillary tweeted on Wednesday. “The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.” Hillary included a link to an article from popular culture and fashion magazine Vanity Fair, which she claims debunks the allegations because that’s the best she could come up with after five days.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/16/hillary-clintons-greatest-masterpiece/

Hillary Clinton’s never-ending shenanigans in 2015-2016 could be summarized as an attempted slow-motion coup. 

Four years of national hysteria, a divided nation, and dangerous new tensions with Russia were some of the wages of Clinton’s machinations.

Clinton hired a British national and ex-spy, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on her election opponent, Trump. She hid her likely illegal campaign payments to him through at least three paywalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. 

Partisans in the FBI helped her, by variously spying on minor officials affiliated with the Trump campaign, like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. To expedite its improper surveillance, a corrupt FBI hierarchy presented fraudulent documents to a FISA court that authorized the illicit surveillance. 

Clinton’s orbit of former subordinates and friends seeded the lies in the dossier throughout the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA. 

During the Trump transition, the FBI also tapped into the communications of national security advisor designate General Michael Flynn. The illegally leaked surveillance put an end to his service to the Trump Administration and ruined his life. 

The country went through 22 months and $40 million in legal expenses under special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Clinton-inspired Russian collusion hoax.

When it was all over, Mueller’s “dream team” found no such actionable Trump-Russian collusion. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/02/16/you-will-never-guess-whos-in-charge-of-the-60-million-in-black-lives-matter-assets-n1559825

Two weeks ago, PJ Media covered the growing scandal of the finances of Black Lives Matter. The group had raised $90 million and spent less than $30 million on “social justice” causes. The scandal is that no one appears to be in charge of that remaining $60 million.

The Black Lives Matter board members who were supposed to be running the foundation denied they had anything to do with it. CharityWatch Executive Director Laurie Styron said that BLM was like a “giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting in the night with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction.”

To the rescue comes the Bill and Hillary Clinton cavalry. The Washington Examiner reports that several Clinton associates have taken up key positions at BLM, including Democratic Party fixer Mark Elias. It was Elias who funneled money to fund Christopher Steele’s discredited anti-Trump dossier and served as Hillary’s 2016 campaign general counsel.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/16/its-time-for-americans-to-rescue-u-s-cities-from-greedy-leftists-crime-infested-drug-riddled-chokehold/

Urban areas need to use upcoming elections to force out the hypocritical politicians whose policies are ruining the nation.

If the last two years have taught us anything it’s that progressive policies are ruining U.S. megalopolises and it’s time for Americans to take back the nation’s cities.

Urban hubs once hailed as beacons for American innovation have morphed into drug-crazed, crime-filled, dirty, sad, and expensive cities run by woke politicians that are just getting worse. Thanks to progressive policies, criminals guilty of violent and dangerous crimes are back on the streets instead of behind bars, drug addicts are incentivized with smoking kits and designated shoot-up areas, children are regularly indoctrinated and still forcibly masked in schools, essential police are let go, and rent prices are rising.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-hypocrisy-of-the-lefts-attacks-on-the-ottawa-truckers/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Where were all these experts — and the journalists eager to quote them — when genuinely violent protest movements swept the country?

If you were to read the mainstream coverage of the Ottawa trucker convoy — or more specifically, to listen to the long line of researchers and academics who have been trotted out by the mainstream media to provide their expert insights — you’d think that the protests here are a hotbed of frothing-at-the-mouth right-wing extremism.

Here’s NPR: The Ottawa trucker protest is rooted in extremism, a national security expert says. Alternatively: Experts say online conversation around trucker convoy veering into dangerous territory, CTV News warns. “Canadians ought to be worried about whether crowdfunding websites could be used to finance hate groups and other extremist organizations, financial crime and security experts warn,” writes Canada’s Global News. A Politico headline informs readers that Ottawa truckers’ convoy galvanizes far-right worldwide, citing the influence of “American far-right influencers like Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro” — Ben Shapiro! — as contributing to the convoy’s momentum. “Experts raise concerns about far-right, racist views arising from protests against vaccine mandates for truck drivers,” Al Jazeera reports. A national-security expert tells the New York Times that “this was an extremist movement that got mainstream attention.” The Washington Post announces that Canada’s Trumpian trucker protests show the global radicalization of anti-vaxxers.

http://www.swtotd.b;ogspot.com

In 1863, on a cool, sunny November day in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln gave a four-minute address. In it he reminded the audience: “Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The freedom we experience in this 233-year-old experiment, which is the United States, is based upon the individual citizen being the ultimate source of power, expressed through their representatives in municipalities, states and Washington, D.C. Granted, in times of emergency, presidents and governors have assumed exceptional powers, as did Lincoln when he signed the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863. Nevertheless, fundamental to our democracy is a belief that the people have a greater understanding of their self-interests than do the politicians, bureaucrats and experts who operate the machinery of government. It is, collectively, the wisdom of the people that combine to produce the political strength of our communities, states and nation.

All elections are important and as usual we are being told that the current one is critical, because the two sides are so far apart in how they define individual freedom and in their visions for the future. Democrats, too often, believe that government bureaucrats and “experts” can better decide what people should do than individuals themselves: lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, what courses should be taught children in public schools, what forms of energy we should consume, and what opinions should be allowed on social media. Republicans, in general, believe that people make wise choices when offered alternatives: to mask or not; to take a vaccine or not; to have their children learn Critical Race Theory or not; to buy a hybrid, a gas-guzzler or an electric vehicle. They want options in school choice and be able to weigh alternatives.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/how-to-save-science-from-covid-politics?token=e

Scientific knowledge is supposed to accumulate. We know more than our ancestors; our descendants will know far more than us. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, that building process was severely disrupted.

Federal agencies and their officials have claimed to speak on behalf of science when trying to persuade the public about policies for which there is little or no scientific support. This ham-handedness—and especially the telling of “noble lies”—has gravely undermined public trust. So has the hypocrisy of our elites. Look no further than the Super Bowl, at which celebrities and politicians had fun mask-free, while the following day children in Los Angeles were forced to don masks for school.

The upshot is that science and public health have become political. We now face the very real danger that instead of a shared method to understand the world, science will split into branches of our political parties, each a cudgel of Team Red and Team Blue.

We cannot let that happen.

Thanks to protective vaccines, a huge number of Americans with natural immunity, and a less lethal strain of the disease, now is the time to talk about how to undo the grave damage that has been done. To avoid similar pitfalls when we are faced with the next public health emergency—and to rectify the mistakes that are still unfolding—here are ten crucial lessons:

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2022/02/16/john-durham-almost-the-m

No one can ever claim that the notion of Trump-Russia collusion and the Mueller investigation were downplayed or ignored by the press. It was the opposite. The story was enormous and incessant.

Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found that from Jan. 20, 2017, through July 20, 2019, the evening newscasts at ABC, CBS and NBC alone devoted an astounding 2,634 minutes to the Trump-Russia narrative.

On Feb. 12, the conservative media reported a “bombshell.” Well, the term “bombshell” is almost copyrighted as a journalism term for “Republican scandal deepener.”

Special counsel John Durham, tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s probe into Donald Trump and Russia, reported a client for Hillary Clinton’s law firm, Perkins Coie, was monitoring internet traffic at Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and the Executive Office of the President. They wanted information to sell a “narrative” of Trump-Russia collusion.

ABC, CBS and NBC coverage? None. Other networks and major newspapers balked. Then they tiptoed in to deny it meant anything.

From the beginning, liberal partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff have trashed Durham’s probe as “tainted” by Trump’s desires for an investigation. On ABC in 2019, Schiff denounced it as automatically “illegitimate” because “when you win an election, you don’t seek to just prosecute the losing side, but this is what Bill Barr is seeking to do.”