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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Schiff Threatens Press Freedom When the surveillance state exposes a journalist and his sources, there’s an instant chilling effect. By John Solomon

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiff-threatens-press-freedom-11575937690?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the bible for agents, has long recognized that journalists, the clergy and lawyers deserve special protections because of the constitutional implications of investigating their work. Penitents who confess to a priest, sources who provide confidential information to a reporter, and clients who seek advice from counsel are assumed to be protected by a high bar of privacy, which must be weighed against the state’s interests in investigating matters or subpoenaing records. Judges and members of Congress also fall into a special FBI category because of the Constitution’s separation of powers.

The FBI and Justice Department have therefore created specific rules governing agents’ actions involving special-circumstances professionals, which include high-level approval and review. There are also special rules for subpoenaing journalists.

If the executive branch, and by extension the courts that enforce these privacy protections, observe the need for such sensitivity, it seems reasonable that Congress should have similar guardrails ensuring that the powers of the state are equally and fairly applied.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff apparently doesn’t see things that way. His committee secretly authorized subpoenas to AT&T earlier this year for the phone records of President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and an associate. He then arbitrarily extracted information about certain private calls and made them public.

Many of the calls Mr. Schiff chose to publicize fell into the special-circumstances categories: a fellow member of Congress ( Rep. Devin Nunes, the Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican), two lawyers (Mr. Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow ) and a journalist (me).

More alarming, the released call records involve figures who have sometimes criticized or clashed with Mr. Schiff. I wrote a story raising questions about his contacts with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, a key figure in the Russia probe, that brought the California Democrat unwelcome scrutiny. Mr. Nunes has been one of Mr. Schiff’s main Republican antagonists, helping to prove that the exaggerated claims of Trump-Russia election collusion were unsubstantiated. Messrs. Sekulow and Giuliani represent Mr. Trump, who is Mr. Schiff’s impeachment target.

A Trail of FBI Abuse The Horowitz report confirms that the bureau deceived FISA judges with the Steele dossier.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-trail-of-fbi-abuse-11575938300?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The press corps is portraying Monday’s report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz as absolution for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but don’t believe it. The report relates a trail of terrible judgment and violations of process that should shock Americans who thought better of their premier law-enforcement agency.

Readers can look at the detailed executive summary and decide for themselves. But our own initial reading confirms the worst of what we feared about the bureau when it was run by James Comey. The FBI corrupted the secret court process for obtaining warrants to spy on former Trump aide Carter Page. And it did so by supplying the court with false information produced by Christopher Steele, an agent of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

***

How can anyone, most of all civil libertarians, pass this off as no big deal? The absolution is supposedly that Mr. Horowitz concludes that the FBI decision to open a counter-intelligence probe against the Trump campaign in July 2016 “was sufficient to predicate the investigation” under current FBI rules.

Yet Mr. Horowitz also notes that these rules amount to a “low threshold for predication.” John Durham, the U.S. Attorney investigating these matters for Attorney General William Barr, said Monday he disagrees with Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions on predication, albeit without elaboration for now.

Mr. Horowitz confirms what the FBI had already leaked to friendly reporters, which is that the bureau’s alarm in July 2016 was triggered by a conversation that former Trump aide George Papadopoulos had with Australian Alexander Downer. But we learn for the first time that the FBI immediately ramped up its counter-intelligence probe to include four Trump campaign officials: Messrs. Page and Papadopoulos, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn.

AG Bill Barr Just Issued a Translation of the DOJ IG Report & It’s a Red-Hot Rebuke of ‘Intrusive’ Spying on Trump By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/trending/agl-bill-barr-just-issued-a-translation-of-the-doj-ig-report-its-a-red-hot-rebuke-of-intrusive-trump-spying/

“I do not think it means what you think it means.” – Inigo Montoya

The Department of Justice Inspector General’s (IG) report into the FBI lying to the FISA Court to get warrants to spy on the Trump campaign is 433 pages. It took AG Bill Barr one paragraph to translate what all of it means in the real world. Oh, and don’t pick it up because you might burn yourself.

The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory. Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration. In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source. …[T]he malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.

Because the IG has no right to subpoena and can’t lock anyone up, he can only refer people for prosecution. Currently, most of the people who conducted the abuse have been fired and were out of the purview of the IG.

The IG report, however, found that officials lied and omitted helpful information to Trump campaign officials who were being spied on, but couldn’t determine if the malfeasance was politically motivated.

U.S. Attorney John Durham is looking into why the Trump spying case was hatched by people clearly pulling for Hillary Clinton to win the election.  CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump Declares American-Israeli Bond ‘Unbreakable,’ Blasts ‘Radical Lawmakers Who Support the BDS Movement’ by Benjamin Kerstein

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/08/trump-declares-american-israeli-bond-unbreakable-blasts-radical-lawmakers-who-support-the-bds-movement/President Donald Trump declared the American-Israeli alliance “unbreakable” and slammed anti-Israel Democratic lawmakers at a major conference of pro-Israel activists on Saturday night.

At the Israeli American Council’s national conference in Florida, Trump said of the alliance between Israel and the United States, “It’s unbreakable, unbreakable.”

“The Jewish state has never had a better friend in the White House than your president, Donald J. Trump,” he added.

Without mentioning their names, Trump also appeared to hit out at Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who support boycotting the Jewish state and have been accused of antisemitism.

“You’ve got to be very careful, make no mistake, radical lawmakers who support the BDS movement are advancing anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda,” Trump stated.

Why Is The Holocaust Museum Attacking JNF? By Moshe Phillips

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/why-is-the-holocaust-museum-attacking-jnf/2019/12/06/

The official journal of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has just published an article depicting the Jewish National Fund (JNF) as a colonialist exploiter of the Palestinian Arabs. The article was authored by Amy Weiss, a young Holocaust scholar from New Jersey. It appears in the latest issue (Fall 2019) of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the museum’s official journal, which is edited by Richard D. Breitman.

Weiss accuses the JNF of secretly plotting in the 1930s to plant more pine trees and fewer olive trees in its forests, thereby “alter[ing] a Palestinian landscape to resemble a European one more familiar to Jewish pioneers and Holocaust survivors.”

According to Weiss, the JNF continued this European-colonialist conspiracy after the 1948 war, too. “Erecting JNF forests where Palestinian villages and olive groves once stood promised to erase the connection to that land of the former residents who had fled or been expelled,” she writes.

The Legacy of Low-Bar Impeachment Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/08/the-legacy-of-low-bar-impeachment/

From now on, impeachment can be used against any first-term president with a record of success. It will be used solely as a political strategy by the opposition party that controls the House to weaken a president’s reelection chances. That’s the Democratic Party’s legacy and Democrats will live to rue it.

Since the embarrassing impeachment and failed conviction of President Andrew Johnson in 1868, Americans more or less had avoided that ultimate constitutional method of removing a chief executive from power. The Johnson impeachment had been so steeped in personal hatred, political rivalry, and post-war agendas that the failure by one vote in the Senate to remove the impeached Johnson more or less discredited the process for a century.

The 1974 Watergate impeachment inquiry saga was framed in opposition to the way Johnson had been impeached, inasmuch as anyone still remembered the particulars of that long-ago fiasco. That is, a special prosecutor, first Archibald Cox and then Leon Jaworski, was appointed to investigate the break-in and the so-called Watergate cover-up.

Democratic moderates like Representative Peter Rodino (D-N.J.) and Senator Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) gave the impeachment inquiries a patina of bipartisanship, both giving time for the targeted president’s defenders to produce witnesses and conduct cross-examinations. Neither released the phone records of their political counterparts on their respective committees. By the time a now-unpopular Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974 to avoid impeachment by an impending overwhelming vote, he had lost public support and gained bipartisan congressional opposition.

Bill Clinton, unlike Nixon, but like Johnson, was both impeached and acquitted in the Senate. Like Nixon, he had easily won a prior reelection (1996). But, unlike Nixon, Clinton was still reigning over a booming economy and enjoyed relatively high popularity—at least on poll questions other than character and morality. Independent counsel Ken Starr, like Leon Jaworski, found Clinton likely to have committed felonious acts. Indeed, he was impeached on grounds of obstructing justice and perjury by the full House on a mostly partisan vote, which nonetheless saw a handful of both Democrats and Republicans respectively cross party lines.

The Insanity of Progressivism Comes Right Out of Gulliver’s Travels By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-insanity-of-progressivism-comes-right-out-of-gullivers-travels/

Our intellectual classes today are utterly disconnected from reality. As Milo Yiannopoulos writes in a review of the film Joker, “We are reeling from a disaster still unfolding, the unmaking of reality at the hands of millennial progressivism.” Indeed, when it comes to unmaking reality, our cognitive elite may as well inhabit the parody world of Gulliver’s Travels. Proposing blueprints for radical social change and meddling in the complexities of domestic and economic policy, they have come to resemble Jonathan Swift’s pixilated “projectors” in the Academy of Lagado (Book 3, Chapter 5), a conclave of intellectuals and academics “full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region” of vacuous irrationality.

In its effort to save the nation, Swift’s Academy put forward various endeavors to advance the economy, improve education, and become energy-self-sufficient. For example, it proposed “extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.” This new technology “should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate.” There was an astronomical plan “to place a sun-dial upon the great weathercock on the town-house, by adjusting the annual and diurnal motions of the earth and sun, so as to answer and coincide with all accidental turnings of the wind.” Another project to improve land cultivation led to a Lysenko-like result, namely not a single ear of corn or blade of grass was to be seen. An ingenious “artist” set about employing spiders as weavers of silk, requiring an exhaustive effort grooming colored flies to feed the spiders, all to no purpose.

Nor should we forget the New Math of Swift’s imagining, in which “[t]he proposition, and demonstration, were fairly written on a thin wafer, with ink composed of a cephalic tincture. This, the student was to swallow upon a fasting stomach, and for three days following, eat nothing but bread and water.” The project was a failure since students regularly upchucked their educational diet. Another professor was “employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge,” so that “the most ignorant person,” by arbitrarily operating an “engine” made of bits of wood inscribed with letters, “might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” A prominent landowner was tasked with using “wind and air” to run a mill, a work which miscarried miserably. As for architecture, the Academicians set about building houses by “beginning at the roof and working downward to the foundations.” These new theories and practices had the predictable effect, leaving the country in a state of ruin.

Schiff’s Snooping Standard He says he can gather and release private metadata because only ‘the far right’ objects.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffs-snooping-standard-11575841853?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Kudos to Margaret Brennan of CBS for asking Adam Schiff on Sunday about his release of phone logs of his political opponents. Mr. Schiff dismissed any criticism, and his reason is revealing about the balance of power in Washington.

“The blowback has only come from the far right,” Mr. Schiff said. “But look, every investigator seeks phone records to corroborate, sometimes to contradict, a witness’s testimony.”

Yes, but executive-branch investigators who want to get data from private telecom companies typically must obtain some kind of judicial order. Mr. Schiff did it himself. Prosecutors are also supposed to limit the release of data on innocent bystanders like journalists for privacy reasons. The intelligence term of art is “minimization.” Mr. Schiff released the phone logs of journalist John Solomon and Rep. Devin Nunes —information irrelevant to his impeachment case against President Trump. The narrative of his report suggests he did it gratuitously to imply that Mr. Nunes is part of the Ukraine conspiracy, though the Republican has a right to call anyone he wants.

Mr. Schiff is right that he’s getting no criticism from the rest of the press corps. The same media that howled when the Bush Administration gathered metadata to hunt for terrorists is silent when Democrats gather and release it against a conservative journalist and Republicans. Keep this double standard in mind when you next hear media lectures about violating democratic and institutional “norms.”

Impeachment and the American Grain Presidential inquisitions might yet become routine in a country at war with itself. Lance Morrow

https://www.city-journal.org/trump-presidential-impeachment

More than a century passed between the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and the almost-impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974. Since then, the intervals have been getting shorter—a sort of Doppler effect. It was only 24 years after Nixon’s resignation that Bill Clinton’s case came before the House of Representatives, and only 21 years after that that the impeachment investigation of Donald Trump began.

It seems possible that in the manic accelerations of the twenty-first century, impeachment may soon become routine. The nation is at war with itself. If Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016, Republicans might have tried to impeach her. Indeed, if impeachment becomes a regular tactic of the opposition, America will have informally adopted a quasi-parliamentary system of governance. Impeachment will amount to a chronic, slow-motion vote of no confidence, staged now and then in intervals between the quadrennial elections that the Constitution intended.

No matter what the outcome of an impeachment, the process itself would, among other things, ensure that nothing much would get done in the way of the public’s business. That would, in fact, be the goal—to paralyze an enemy administration by putting the incumbent through the wringer. 

How would this serve the country? It would certainly be a quantum leap in partisan antagonism. In the past, Americans regarded impeachment as an extreme rarity, a sort of civic apocalypse. In the future, it might become merely another ritual of hardball politics.

I can think offhand of at least a half-dozen presidents who might have been impeached—but were not—for abuses of the public trust: I don’t mean that they necessarily should have been impeached, only that their enemies might have made a plausible case for it. Would Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus have been sufficient grounds? Could Woodrow Wilson have been impeached for ordering the racial segregation of workers in the Post Office and other federal departments? In the last months of his presidency, when he was incapacitated by a stroke, Wilson—or anyway, his wife Edith and his physician, Cary Grayson—concealed the facts of his grave medical condition from Congress and the American people. One way or another, he should have been removed from office. Franklin Roosevelt had a foxy way with the truth, and Republicans might have persuasively accused him of abuse of power in lying repeatedly—or anyway, in staging fancy misdirections—as he maneuvered America toward involvement in World War II.

Uh Oh: New Polling Shows Democrats’ Impeachment Nonsense Is Hurting Them in Key Swing States by Matt Vespa

I mean what were they thinking? Democrats thought their North Korean-style kangaroo court would…torpedo the Trump presidency? They thought they could change sway minds with this bit of Nonsense Theater. They thought they could get the vast majority of Americans to back them? Whatever these clowns are snorting, I want some. The feelings about Trump and this administration are entrenched. They’re not moving. Second, the impeachment push was forever tainted as a partisan witch-hunt as soon as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, decided to lay the foundations for this circus in secret. Testimonies were given behind closed doors, select excerpts were released that only supported the Democrats’ warped narrative, and once this quasi-coup was taken out of the basement—the whole thing fell apart.

The public hearings, like the ones for Russian collusion, revealed that this was another nothing burger. The president may have acted inappropriately in terms of decorum over a phone call with the Ukrainians. That’s not an impeachable offense. The allegation is that Trump threatened to withhold aid unless a corruption probe was opened into Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma, which he’s held since daddy Biden was VP. He was there to allegedly sell access to top U.S. officials. The quid pro quo allegation is the crux of the Democrat’s argument for impeachment and it’s shoddier than the Russian collusion myth.

Following this mayhem gives you whiplash, the whistleblower reports that unearthed this allegation was considered a smoking gun. Now, that we know all of this is grounded in hearsay, Democrats say they don’t need solid evidence. But let’s go back to this bet that the House Intelligence hearings could undo Trump (via NBC News) [emphasis mine]:

Democrats are betting the reality-TV presidency of Donald Trump will begin to short-circuit Wednesday when they start putting names and faces to the bureaucrats who collectively contend he placed his own gain above American national security interests.

Democrats are confident enough that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., upped the ante on the eve of his panel’s first publicly televised hearings by teasing the possibility that Trump will face impeachment on charges of bribery as well as high crimes and misdemeanors in an interview with NPR.

“I don’t think any decision has been made on the ultimate question about whether articles of impeachment should be brought,” Schiff told the public radio network. “But on the basis of what the witnesses have had to say so far, there are any number of potentially impeachable offenses, including bribery, including high crimes and misdemeanors.”