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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Richard Grenell: An American Hero Under Attack No figure in the Trump administration has been a greater champion of equality for gay people. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/richard-grenell-american-hero-under-attack-daniel-greenfield/

President Trump’s new appointee to be the Acting Director of National Intelligence is under vicious attack from the left and from the LGBT Left in particular – a telling fact since no figure in the Trump administration has been a greater champion of equality for gay people.

After the attacks of September 11, the position of the Director of National Intelligence was created to coordinate all of our intelligence agencies against the external terror threat. As the Spygate scandal continues to undermine trust in the intelligence community, the position is more important than ever.

President Trump’s appointment of Richard Grenell as Acting Director has infuriated the Obama veterans and holdovers responsible for Spygate, as well as the LGBT Left.

As Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Grenell successfully led tariff negotiations with German automakers, helped gain subsidies for American energy shipments to Germany, convinced most major German companies to pull out of Iran, closed German airspace to an Iranian airline, stopped $300 million euros in gold and currency from going to Iran, and got Germany to ban Hezbollah.

Coming off this successful winning streak, Grenell is already under vicious attack because his track record shows that he can get things done, and get them done for America. And that’s the last thing that the anti-American Left wants.

Making Sense of the Harvey Weinstein Verdict By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/harvey-weinstein-verdict-long-prison-sentence-likely/

The former Hollywood power-player is likely to face a long prison sentence despite being acquitted of the most serious charges he faced.

Though a New York State jury convicted Harvey Weinstein on two felony sexual-assault charges Monday, it acquitted him of three allegations of aggravated sexual assault, including the two most serious charges he faced. Still, the counts of conviction are likely to result in a severe prison sentence for the 67-year-old former Hollywood producer.

Weinstein was charged with five offenses, all arising out of two coercive sexual encounters: a 2013 rape of then-aspiring actress Jessica Mann, and forcibly performing oral sex on former production assistant Miriam Haley (professionally known as Mimi Haleyi) in 2006. Before we describe the five counts with more specificity, let’s turn to the two controversial elements of the case, which will make the charges easier to understand:

1. Predatory-sexual-assault charges
Annabella Sciorra, the most famous actress involved in the case, testified that Weinstein raped her about 27 years ago. State prosecutors could not base charges solely on this accusation because it is time-barred under the statute of limitations. Yet they used the Sciorra incident to exacerbate the Mann and Haley encounters into charges of predatory sexual assault (PSA).

Claims of Russian Election Meddling Are Still a Scam By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/russian-election-meddling-claims-still-a-scam/If you can’t handle some memes or misleading ads, you probably shouldn’t be voting.

The fearmongering over Russian election “interference” might be the most destructive moral panic in American political life since the Red Scare. Then again, to be fair, those who prosecuted the post-war hunt for Communists had the decency to uncover a handful of infiltrators. We’ve yet to meet a single American who’s been brainwashed or had their vote snatched away by an SVR Twitterbot. Probably because no such person exists.

Nevertheless, millions of Americans believe that a handful of terrible memes — and I mean the most amateurish and puerile efforts imaginable — on social media were enough to overturn a presidential election in the most powerful nation on earth. Or, more likely, most pretend to believe it. As Donald Trump’s fortunes have turned somewhat in recent weeks, and socialist Bernie Sanders looks poised to take the Democratic Party nomination, the Russians are once again coming to snatch your vote.

There were lots of “wows” from journalists on Twitter last week when the New York Times reported that members of the House Intelligence Committee were warned by an aide to Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire that Russia would be meddling in the 2020 campaign in order to get President Trump reelected. When Trump found out, the Times reported, he was furious that briefers had given Adam Schiff ammunition for political attacks.

NEVER SANDERS? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/23/neversanders/

In 2020 if Sanders is the Democratic nominee, the NeverSanders movement will be far larger, far wealthier, far more influential—even as it is likely far quieter—than were the vociferous but anemic NeverTrumpers of 2016.

Almost everything the Democratic Left said about Donald Trump causing a Republican Party implosion proved untrue—and yet is proving true this year of the Democrats.

Trump’s agenda, for the most part, was Reaganesque, with a few important exceptions—closing the border and enforcing immigration law, getting tough with China’s unfair trade policies, restoring assembly and manufacturing jobs to the hollowed-out interior, avoiding optional wars abroad, and trying to drain the proverbial federal swamp of its careerist bureaucrats and revolving-door apparatchiks.

Those wrinkles from the Republican agenda, in fact, were consistent with traditional conservative values, and thus even among establishment and mainstream Republicans still polled well enough. That reality later was empowered by Trump’s effort to keep his campaign promises, by an economy at near-record employment, and by foreign policy recalibrations that are starting to win grudging, if unspoken, bipartisan support on China, given news coverage of the Hong Kong crackdown, the reeducation camps, the coronavirus debacle, and the Orwellian surveillance state apparat.

Even before Trump’s governance, the NeverTrump Right was emasculated, largely because its pundits and politicians could offer no alternative party agenda superior to Trump’s. Moreover, they had spent much of their lives advocating most of the very policies Trump was advancing, and increasingly was getting results. Nor before or after the election could they ever convince Republicans that Trump’s crassness and uncouth tweets were quite unlike the White House crudity of past presidents (e.g., Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton) rather than in part attributable to the Internet/social media age and the new tabloid media.

Philip Haney: Whistleblower and Happy Warrior A tragic loss. Col. Joe Martin

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/philip-haney-whistleblower-and-happy-warrior-frontpagemagcom/

Joe Martin is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel, a graduate of the National Defense University, and served with 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and as a Military Congressional Fellow to the United States Senate Majority Leader. His operational experience includes deployments to Afghanistan, Qatar, Kuwait, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela.

We met at a conference here in Washington DC several years ago, and I knew him from his reputation based on the national reporting after he had been a whistleblower to Congress about malfeasance in the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama Administration. He struck an appearance like Dr. Emmett Brown and his delivery was not unlike Ben Stein’s economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. His appearance, delivery, dry sense of humor and gaiety were disarming, making it deceptively easy to underestimate him. ­­­

An etymologist and self-proclaimed nerd, Phil was relentless in his pursuit of those who were infesting our country and attacking our way of life. Among the enemies this quirky bug hunter pursued were Osama Bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation and their offspring – the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) as well as the subversive operatives in the Obama administration… many of whom are still working for the Department of Homeland Security.

 The leaders of those [Muslim Brotherhood] organizations were deliberately and intentionally brought into the [Obama] Administration to help promote and create both domestic and foreign policy and this status continues to this very day.

Lawyers Cast a Stone at William Barr Former officials urge current officials to defy their supervisors. That’s an affront to the rule of law. By Edwin Meese III and Michael B. Mukasey

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawyers-cast-a-stone-at-william-barr-11582477289?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Whatever the outcome of a case, then-Attorney General Robert H. Jackson observed in 1940, “the government . . . has really won if justice has been done.” It’s worth keeping that truth in mind as we consider the dispute over Attorney General William Barr and Roger Stone.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson last week sentenced Mr. Stone to 40 months in prison—a term within the range Mr. Barr had suggested when he overruled prosecutors who recommended a term of seven to nine years. The attorney general’s move generated accusations that he was doing President Trump’s bidding by showing leniency to Mr. Trump’s friend and former political adviser. It even prompted a petition, signed by more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees, demanding Mr. Barr’s resignation.

Before we address these attacks directly, we think it useful to consider a few data points in Mr. Barr’s recent tenure. Notwithstanding his own skepticism about aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, he allowed that probe to run its course. Mr. Barr supported the decision not to prosecute Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and frequent critic of Mr. Trump, despite overwhelming evidence that Mr. McCabe not only lied when he denied leaking information about an investigation but also berated others for the leak to deflect suspicion from himself.

Mr. Barr has said publicly that he believes Mr. Stone’s prosecution was warranted, and that, given his conviction, so is a prison sentence. And the attorney general has pointedly criticized the president—rightly, in our view—for commenting publicly about cases pending in court and before the Justice Department. That is not the behavior of someone doing the president’s bidding.

The case for repealing FISA and reforming the FBI and CIA by Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/fixing-the-fbi-and-cia

Like most of what ails us today, the seeds of the current crisis in republican governance — the severance of Washington’s omnipotent law enforcement and intelligence apparatus from democratic accountability — were sown in the 1960s and ’70s. That was when we began to erase the salient distinction between law and politics. Under the guise of “national security,” we insulated governmental actions and policies from the reckoning of our citizens, whose safety and self-determination hang in the balance.

Fast forward to 2020. The FBI, in its bungling partisanship, very likely swung the 2016 presidential election away from its preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton. The sprawling “community” of intelligence agencies (led by the FBI and CIA) covertly used dubious foreign sources to justify monitoring an American political campaign and, later, a U.S. presidential administration. To do so, it invoked daunting foreign-counterintelligence surveillance powers, based on a fever dream that its bête noire, Donald Trump, was an agent of the Kremlin. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently chastised the FBI for feeding it false and unverified information — the secret court apparently calculating that this extraordinary public expression of wrath will divert attention from its own shoddy performance in approving highly intrusive spy warrants based on sensational, blatantly uncorroborated rumor and innuendo.

As usual, Washington is reacting with high-decibel inertia. In an era of hyperpartisanship, Democrats defend the politicization of the law enforcement and intelligence that resulted in the Trump-Russia investigation. Republicans, meanwhile, wail about being victimized — even as the victim-in-chief ham-handedly dabbles in his own mini-version of the abuse: the Ukraine kerfuffle, in which the president sought, however futilely, to leverage the investigative and foreign affairs powers of the executive branch for domestic political advantage.

Stunning: A Delusional Socialist Just Blew Away the Democrat Competition in Nevada. Now What? By Paula Bolyard

https://pjmedia.com/blog/stunning-a-delusional-socialist-just-blew-away-the-democrat-competition-in-nevada-now-what/

If you think that headline sounds like something from the Babylon Bee, you’re not alone. It defies logic, reason, and incredible odds, but as of publishing time, it appears that Bernie Sanders—a democratic socialist who is not even a member of the Democratic Party—is going to blow away the competition in the Nevada caucuses. At present, with just over 23% reporting, Bolshie Bernie has nearly 40% of the vote, topping second-place Biden by 17 points.

While Sanders caucuses with Democrats in the Senate, he has held elected office since 1981 as an independent and self-identifies as a democratic socialist (a less-scary-sounding way of saying “I know best, so gimme all your money and say goodbye to your freedom”). He’s also identified himself on multiple occasions as a plain old “socialist.”

The Monstrous Lie Behind CrowdStrike by Michael Thau *****

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/22/the-monstrous-lie-behind-crowdstrike/

There’s a simple explanation for the Democratic National Committee’s unwillingness to let outsiders have a peek at evidence its servers were infiltrated by the Russians in 2016: There isn’t any. The Russian hacking that’s caused so much division and turmoil at home and abroad never really happened. It was all a ruse.

Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 presidential election was predicated largely on the claim Russian intelligence had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers ahead of the November election. Russia’s guilt is such an article of faith among our political class that a Republican-controlled Congress imposed sanctions on Russia and President Trump signed on, substantially worsening relations with an important and potentially dangerous nation. 

Since those sanctions were imposed, Mueller’s team confirmed the Russian espionage those sanctions were meant to punish. Since its publication last year, the Washington establishment has treated the Mueller report almost as a sacred document.

Outside the Acela Corridor, however, one finds more skepticism.

A lot of ordinary folks just can’t stop wondering why the DNC wouldn’t let any federal investigators examine their servers. Only CrowdStrike, an independent contractor on the DNC’s payroll, was allowed to do so. CrowdStrike executive Robert Johnson appeared on “60 Minutes” to address concerns that his firm hadn’t been completely forthcoming with its findings. But he only succeeded in raising more questions by claiming that the “FBI got what it needed and what it wanted.”

Even if the self-proclaimed “hard-hitting” investigators at “60 Minutes” couldn’t be bothered to spend 30 minutes researching such an important story, Johnson himself had to know he wasn’t telling the truth.

On no less than three occasions before President Trump fired him, FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress about the DNC’s strange unwillingness to let his agency examine their servers in a case they were simultaneously hyping as akin to “an act of war.” Comey testified that the DNC rejected the FBI’s “[m]ultiple requests at different levels” to collect forensic evidence. 

A week before Comey testified in January 2017, the DNC had already tried palming off Johnson’s lie and were sternly contradicted the very next day. A senior FBI official told The Hill that his agency “repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise.” According to The Hill’s source, far from getting everything the bureau wanted, “the FBI [had] no choice but to rely upon” CrowdStrike.

SPEECH: THE DEPTH OF THE SWAMP- VIDEO

His talk, entitled “The Depth Of The Swamp”, discussed Ivy League Inc., farm subsidies in urban areas, the VA, Rahm Emanuel, poop in San Francisco, and more. 

Andrzejewski describes the target-rich environment to expose government waste and corruption within federal grants, the $1.4 trillion in improper and mistaken payments, and the $100 billion spent on year-end use-it-or-lose-it spending sprees.

Adam didn’t hold back. His hard-hitting stories and crackdown on corruption moved the audience of 900 to a standing ovation.  

This speech is a can’t miss!