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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Is the DOJ the US Department of Injustice? By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/is_the_doj_the_us_department_of_injustice.html

It is ironic that just as the Democrats are losing their cookies (for the umpteenth time in the past few weeks) over a Trump tweet regarding the absurd sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, the DOJ says it is dropping charges against Andrew McCabe, the proven liar, leaker, and hoax conspirator who was part of the coup cabal at the FBI along with Comey, Strzok, Page, et al.  It seems also that Lt. Col. Vindman will not be investigated by the military.

There is one form of justice for Democrats — no charges ever — and a harsh form for any Republican.  Roger Stone is mostly a figure of fun, a wannabe player who exaggerated his proximity to actual players.  He is guilty of virtually nothing that warrants nine years in prison, but because the prosecutors, all attached to the Mueller team, had to have something to show for the $32M spent on their Russia hoax, they want him sent away to die in jail.

Is letting McCabe off the hook for lying and leaking a ploy?  Are there more serious charges coming?  He sure doesn’t think so.  He’s so self-absorbed that he is complaining about what his family has been through for two years!  His family!  He and his cohorts have ruined numerous lives with their baseless witch hunts; the families of all of them have endured far more hardship than the weasel McCabe.  Some have lost everything.  It is doubtful that McCabe and his team of traitors have ever given a thought to what they have put the president and his family through except perhaps with glee.  This bunch that tried to take down a candidate, then a president they decided should not hold that office are arrogant beyond belief; they’re smug, elitist white-collar criminals all, and it’s beginning to seem as if they are all going to get away with their treasonous crimes.

BOMBSHELL: U.S. Atty. John Durham Is investigating Whether Obama Admin Hid Evidence of Russian Meddling By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bombshell-us-atty-john-durham-is-investigating-if-obama-admin-hid-or-manipulated-evidence-of-russian-meddling/

According to a bombshell report from the New York Times Friday morning, U.S. Attorney John Durham has been investigating whether Obama administration officials hid or perhaps manipulated intelligence about Russia’s meddling.

Of course, that’s not exactly how the New York Times wants you to see this story. From the very first paragraph, the NYT tries to spin the story as a partisan fishing expedition, not a legitimate investigation of Obama-era corruption. “Trump administration officials investigating the government’s response to Russia’s election interference in 2016 appear to be hunting for a basis to accuse Obama-era intelligence officials of hiding evidence or manipulating analysis about Moscow’s covert operation, according to people familiar with aspects of the inquiry.”

Mr. Durham appears to be pursuing a theory that the C.I.A., under its former director John O. Brennan, had a preconceived notion about Russia or was trying to get to a particular result — and was nefariously trying to keep other agencies from seeing the full picture lest they interfere with that goal, the people said.

The Agony of the Democrats Bernie Sanders is riding the intellectual currents that the party and its elites have nurtured.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/agony-of-the-democrats-11581723656?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Bernie Sanders’s victory in New Hampshire on top of his tie in Iowa makes him a favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. Hard to believe, but in a winnable race against President Trump the opposition may nominate a socialist who wants the government to control energy production and health care, who wants nationwide rent control, and who calls America a “racist society from top to bottom.” No wonder Democrats like James Carville are in agony.

The Vermont revolutionary’s victory portends a long primary battle, unless Democratic voters elevate a single mainstream candidate who can challenge him. Mr. Sanders will get his 25% to 30% primary after primary, racking up delegates on his way to the convention. If other candidates keep dividing the other votes, he will be hard to stop, as Mr. Trump was for Republicans in 2016. Even if a single alternative emerges, Mr. Sanders won’t go down without a ferocious intra-party fight.

***

How did this happen? How did Mr. Sanders move from the socialist fringe to the brink of controlling the Democratic Party? The Senator’s dogged persistence across decades and especially the last four years is part of the explanation.

Yet Mr. Sanders wouldn’t be this close to the White House if not for the complicity of Democrats and the liberals who dominate the academy and media. Rather than fighting the ideas that animate him and his millennial voters, they have indulged and promoted them. They created the political environment in which he could prosper.

NEW!! – – Judicial Watch Sues FBI For Seth Rich Documents After They Were Caught Lying to Courts Cristina Laila

www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/02/new-judicial-watch-sues-fbi-for-seth-rich-documents/?

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch on Thursday announced it filed a lawsuit against the FBI for Seth Rich documents.

Recall, Seth Rich was a DNC staffer who was murdered in the early morning hours of July 10, 2016.

Seth Rich’s murder has not been solved to this day.

After getting caught lying to the Courts and claiming there were no documents related to Seth Rich, emails between FBI lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were uncovered.

Now the FBI is claiming these emails are redacted to protect the investigation they claim never happened.

“There is significant public interest in the Seth Rich murder and the FBI’s game-playing on document production in this case is inexcusable,” JW boss Tom Fitton said.

“There’s references to Seth Rich” in these Lisa Page/Peter Strzok documents, Fitton said.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange never reveals his sources, however he previously hinted Seth Rich may have been murdered for transmitting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

Roger Stone’s sentence: How the judge will really decide to ‘lock him up’ Andrew McCarthy

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/483090-roger-stones-sentence-how-the-judge-will-really-decide-to-lock-him-up

Attorney General Bill Barr is undoubtedly right: The president’s ill-tempered tweets about pending criminal cases undermine the Justice Department’s mission. The rule of law depends not only on the reality but also the perception that prosecutorial decisions are driven by legal requirements and evidence, not political considerations.

For now, though, let’s table that and focus on what is actually at issue in the matter of Roger Stone’s sentencing.

The fact is, it was well within the legitimate power of the attorney general to countermand the Stone prosecutors’ submission to the court — i.e., to substitute a recommendation that the court impose a stiff but reasonable prison sentence on Stone, in place of the prosecutors’ suggestion of an excessive term.

More to the point, what we are witnessing in the media-Democrat commentariat is a manufactured controversy, reminiscent of their mau-mauing the president’s Ukraine indiscretion into an impeachable offense. Hence, the unhinged calls for Barr’s impeachment. The judge, not the Department of Justice (DOJ), will determine Stone’s sentence. The shrieking over DOJ’s Stone sentencing memos, topped by the theatrical resignation of the four prosecutors (who now want to be seen as stalwarts against politicized law enforcement after they conducted a patently politicized prosecution), is much ado about nothing.

Contrary to the misimpression so studiously peddled, Barr has not taken action that effectively slashes Stone’s potential sentence. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I have provided a broad overview of the controversy over the DOJ’s pre-sentencing submissions in the Stone case. Nevertheless, because the facts are a bit complicated and involve some legal esoterica, a simple point is being obscured: The only thing at issue in the two memoranda filed with the court by the DOJ is a non-binding recommendation about the sentence. It has no legal effect on the term that the judge will impose when Stone ultimately is sentenced, which currently is scheduled to happen on Feb. 20.

The Progressive Prosecutor Project How and why the nation’s crime busters are becoming criminal enablers By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-progressi

A newly minted district attorney for a major American city vows to establish an immigration unit. At first blush, that would seem entirely normal for a prosecutor’s office. Immigration laws require enforcement, and prosecutors are in the law-enforcement business.

But no—the new San Francisco DA actually has in mind an immigration defense unit. He wants to assign a staff of prosecutors to protect undocumented aliens—those who are either illegal and thus deportable to begin with, or for whom a criminal conviction could result in loss of lawful status and thus eventual deportation. The unit’s enforcement target would be not the law violators but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who enforce federal laws, along with any local police and corrections officials who have the temerity to assist ICE in that endeavor. The prosecutors’ mission, in the words of their new boss, would be to “stand up to Trump on immigration”—the president having made signature issues of border security and the stepped-up deportation of aliens who flout the laws.

That kind of immigration unit is not something you’d expect to find in a district attorney’s office. But of course, neither would you expect, upon this new DA’s election, a victory party marked by ear-splitting chants of “F*ck POA!” The POA is the Police Officers Association.

The Roots of Our Partisan Divide Christopher Caldwell

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/roots-partisan-divide/?utm_campaign=imprimis&amp%3Butm_source=housefile&

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 28, 2020, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation lecture series.
American society today is divided by party and by ideology in a way it has perhaps not been since the Civil War. I have just published a book that, among other things, suggests why this is. It is called The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald J. Trump. You can get a good idea of the drift of the narrative from its chapter titles: 1963, Race, Sex, War, Debt, Diversity, Winners, and Losers.
I can end part of the suspense right now—Democrats are the winners. Their party won the 1960s—they gained money, power, and prestige. The GOP is the party of the people who lost those things.
One of the strands of this story involves the Vietnam War. The antiquated way the Army was mustered in the 1960s wound up creating a class system. What I’m referring to here is the so-called student deferment. In the old days, university-level education was rare. At the start of the First World War, only one in 30 American men was in a college or university, so student deferments were not culturally significant. By the time of Vietnam, almost half of American men were in a college or university, and student deferment remained in effect until well into the war. So if you were rich enough to study art history, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were more privileged or—heaven forbid—less brave, but because they were more decent.
Another strand of the story involves women. Today, there are two cultures of American womanhood—the culture of married women and the culture of single women. If you poll them on political issues, they tend to differ diametrically. It was feminism that produced this rupture. For women during the Kennedy administration, by contrast, there was one culture of femininity, and it united women from cradle to grave: Ninety percent of married women and 87 percent of unmarried women believed there was such a thing as “women’s intuition.” Only 16 percent of married women and only 15 percent of unmarried women thought it was excusable in some circumstances to have an extramarital affair. Ninety-nine percent of women, when asked the ideal age for marriage, said it was sometime before age 27. None answered “never.”
But it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to our day, that is most important for explaining our partisan polarization. It concerns how the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. They did so by giving birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution, which would eventually cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures. This became obvious only over time. It happened so slowly that many people did not notice.

America’s Growing Approval Of Socialism Is A Rejection Of Freedom J. Frank Bullitt

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/14/americas-growing-approval-of-socialism-is-a-rejection-of-freedom/

In February 2009, just after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Newsweek declared on its cover “We Are All Socialists Now.” More than a decade later, socialism has taken over the Democratic Party, and has a strong hold on young Americans. It’s gone mainstream in a nation founded on principles opposite the tenets of socialism.

Seven in 10 millennials say they would vote for a socialist candidate, while 64% of Generation Z told pollsters last year it is “somewhat/extremely likely” they’d vote for a socialist, according to a YouGov-Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation poll taken last fall.

Among Democrats of all ages, socialism is held in high esteem. Seven in 10 (again) said last spring socialism is “a good thing,” marking a disturbing shift. The year before, only 57% of Democrats held the same opinion of socialism.

Cultural critic Camille Paglia has said that young Americans lean toward socialism because they are ignorant of history. So maybe they just don’t understand what socialism is. To them, it’s an avuncular white-haired guy yelling about concentrations of wealth, which they’ve been led to believe is an evil that must be broken by the state, and too many choices in deodorant; a frail but angry-for-some-reason woman promising to cancel the debt on their student loans who says she has a plan to fix all economic and societal ills; and a young, photogenic New York congresswoman with a tippy-top coolness factor who they think speaks for them.

Socialism, though, is coercion by the state, “a boot,” said George Orwell, “stamping on the human face forever.” It requires the exclusion of freedom, operates by command, requires reluctant participants to yield to its plans. Socialism “cannot co-exist with individual rights,” its solidarity “is enforced at gunpoint,” its notions of equality and fairness ensured by squads that will ultimately “show up with truncheons.”

Unindicted Co-Conspirator of ’93 WTC Bombing Coming to Speak in South Florida February 2020 ICNA banquet featuring Siraj Wahhaj and other Muslim radicals. Joe Kaufman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/unindicted-co-conspirator-93-wtc-bombing-coming-joe-kaufman/

On February 26, 1993, a truck bomb exploded under the North Tower of the World Trade Center killing six people and injuring over a thousand others. The bomb was meant to collapse the building and, if successful, would have taken the lives of thousands, as we later witnessed during 9/11. On February 22, 2020, just days shy of the 27th anniversary of the ’93 bombing, one of the named unindicted co-conspirators of the attack, Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, will be the main speaker at the South Florida annual banquet for ICNA Relief. Besides its sorrowful anniversary, this shameful event is a reminder, as well, that radical Islam is thriving in America and that Florida is a hotbed of Islamist activity.

Siraj Wahhaj is the imam of the At-Taqwa Mosque, located in Brooklyn, New York, and the President of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA). In 1995, along with Osama bin Laden and bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam, Wahhaj was named by the US government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” for a federal trial dealing with the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing. Wahhaj had been linked to the bomb-maker of the attack, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, and during the trial, he was a character witness for the spiritual leader of the attack, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, whom Wahhaj has openly praised.

Wahhaj recently made the news, when his son, two daughters, son-in-law and daughter-in-law were arrested on charges of abusing children at an alleged terrorist training compound in New Mexico. According to Reuters, “Eleven children ranging from 1 to 15 years of age were found ragged and starving.” Another child and grandson of Wahhaj, 3-year-old Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, was found dead at the compound, after his reported abduction by Wahhaj’s son, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, from the Atlanta, Georgia home of the child’s mother. According to prosecutors, the children were being trained at the compound to commit school shootings.

This month, Wahhaj will be the keynote speaker at the 2020 annual banquet for ICNA Relief, taking place at the Marriott Coral Springs Hotel and Convention Center. The location has become a go-to venue for radical Muslim events, as the Hamas-related Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) just held their annual banquet there, this past October.

The #MeToo movement ignored a Ninth Circuit judge guilty of terrible misconduct By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/the_metoo_movement_ignored_a_ninth_circuit_judge_guilty_of_terrible_misconduct.html

In December 2017, the #MeToo movement claimed Judge Alex Kozinski, widely recognized as one of the most brilliant judges on the Ninth Circuit. Kozinski was also a libertarian in an activist circuit. Ironically, it now turns out that his close friend, the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a judicial activist, was the real sexual harasser.

At the #MeToo movement’s height, around fifteen women claimed that Kozinski, a Romanian-born child of Holocaust survivors, had sexually harassed them. Their charges ranged from his showing female clerks pornography, to using trying to read a hidden label name tag as an excuse to touch the woman’s breast, to kissing both male and female lawyers on the cheeks.

An interesting aspect of Kozinski’s departure was that one of the main people to help push him out was Heidi Bond, who alleged that Kozinski showed her pornography on the office computer, asked inappropriate questions, and was generally abusive to her.

Bond was in the news again in December 2019 because of her alternative career as bestselling romance novelist Courtney Milan. The Romance Writers of America kick Bond out after she used social media to accuse other romance novelists of racism. Bond, who is half Chinese, wrote on Twitter that one novelist’s 1999 work was a “f**king racist mess.”

While conceding that she not read the book, Bond found offensive the way the novel described its Chinese heroine. It was a vicious attack against a book that tried to write with sympathy (whether successfully or not) about a different culture two decades before “cultural appropriation” was a thing. Bond’s role in two attacks from the left, one against a judge and the other against an author, doesn’t mean that her accusations were wrong. Still, her commitment to identity politics is noteworthy.

The real irony is that the truly vile judge on the Ninth Circuit wasn’t Kozinski, it was Judge Stephen Reinhardt, an activist judge and an icon of the left. Although Reinhardt died in 2018, a House Judiciary subcommittee heard testimony on Thursday about Reinhardt’s incredibly abusive, demeaning conduct towards Oliva Warren, a female clerk: