RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’m posting the link to my May 15, 2019 Red Thread radio interview with Sean Hannity and Gregg Jarrett (with thanks to Vlad Tepes) because I suddenly realized that this 10-plus minute segment from the beginning of the summer makes a nice bookend to a short passage I find in Andy McCarthy’s late-summer release, Ball of Collusion.

As some may recall, my three-way conversation with Hannity and Jarrett demonstrated what I have found to be a perplexing dynamic in Trump-Russia narratives: namely, an ever-present force field against the notion, even the evidence (as laid out in The Red Thread) that the intellectual history of the anti-Trump conspirators, from Comey to Ohr, from Brennan to Steele, and on and on, reveals open affinities for Marxist ideology, clear connections to communist movements and activities, which bind them all together in a skein of “red threads.”  

The preferred consensus — ideology-free — is succinctly expressed in the Hannity interview by Jarrett, who, in answer to the question that guided my research (what motivated these top Washington officials to risk all in their lawless efforts to stop Trump?), stated that their motivation was personal, visceral, job-related. Had I one more soundbyte, I think I would have replied that none of these assuredly plausible motivations cuts the conspirators’ troubling ties with what old Soviet agit prop called “the socialist camp.”

I plan to read the McCarthy book. We are writing about the same events but it seems that we regard them with very different eyes. What I unravel in The Red Thread as an ideologically motivated conspiracy by subverters (if not “occupiers”) of our constiutional republic against a strongly (yea, vsicerally) anti-communist president, Andy McCarthy defines as a more conventional if “scandalous abuse of power” by the Obama administration.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/18/lewandowskis-contempt-for-a-contemptible-congress/

Shortly after being sworn-in in January, freshman U.S. Representative  Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) promised to “impeach the motherfucker” during an inauguration celebration. The “motherfucker” to whom she was referring, of course, was President Donald Trump.

Tlaib’s outburst ushered in the profane, malevolent, and contemptible 115th Congress of the United States.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is under fire for his defiant performance during the House Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment hearing on Tuesday. Lawmakers and pundits are howling about Lewandowski’s refusal to answer questions and his mockery of the process. (Lewandowksi testified for more than 20 hours before the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and Robert Mueller’s office.)

Yet Jerold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the committee’s chairman, is reportedly considering whether to charge Lewandowski, who never actually worked for the Trump Administration, with contempt of Congress.

It is Nadler and his Democratic colleagues, however, who are defiling the halls of Congress.

Since taking control of the people’s house more than eight months ago, Democrats—individually and collectively—have acted contemptuously toward the president, his associates, his family, and his supporters. After failing to take down the president by means of fabricated Trump-Russia collusion, Democrats are leading dozens more investigations into Trump World.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/461914-nadlers-house-committee-holds-a-faux-hearing-in-search-of-a-false-crime

The House Judiciary Committee’s faux impeachment hearing on Tuesday was an exercise in legal obfuscation about obstruction. 

It is a curious exercise, because the House does not need a criminal obstruction offense in order to impeach the president. But it is a telling exercise, too: Democrats are pretending they have an actual crime, just as they are pretending to engage in an actual impeachment inquiry. Acknowledging the absence of a crime would demonstrate that Chairman Jerry Nadler’s hearings are nakedly political. 

As their first witness since Nadler (D-N.Y.) outlined his impeachment investigation without a House vote endorsing one, committee Democrats called Corey Lewandowski, the president’s confidant and one-time campaign manager. The purpose was not to plumb new ground. Congressional Democrats and the White House are arguing over executive privilege; the committee was on notice that Lewandowski — who already had cooperated with the special counsel and testified before Congress three times — would not answer questions about his communications with the president beyond what is laid out in the Mueller report. 

Consequently, the purpose of the hearing was to read, again and again, a portion of that report that Democrats deem terribly damaging. To wit, in June-July 2017, Trump instructed Lewandowski — who was not formally on the White House staff — to urge then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit his recusal from the Russia investigation, so that Sessions then could narrow the scope of Mueller’s investigation. The idea was that Mueller would be permitted to continue investigating in order to prevent Russian interference in future elections, but drop the investigation of whether Trump’s campaign interfered in the 2016 election.

Lewandowski never carried out the president’s directive. Yet, by the Democrats’ lights, Trump’s actions amount to felony obstruction of justice. On these facts, however, there can be no such crime. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/democrats-impeachment-theater-corey-lew

How you come out on the question about the scope of obstruction should determine how you come out on the question of executive privilege.

President Trump’s former campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski is scheduled to testify this afternoon before the House Judiciary Committee. The White House is not objecting to his appearance but has reportedly instructed him not to answer questions about his communications with the president. (See the letter of White House counsel Pat Cipollone to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler.) This raises an interesting question: May the president assert executive privilege to shield disclosure of his communications with people who are not part of the White House staff and the broader executive branch?

Lewandowski was not a government official in June and July 2017, when, according the Mueller Report, the president instructed him to convey a directive to then–attorney general Jeff Sessions. The directive was for Sessions to narrow his recusal from the Russia investigation so that he could limit then–special counsel Robert Mueller’s jurisdiction — such that Mueller could investigate only to prevent Russian meddling in future elections. That is, Mueller would end his probe of Kremlin interference in the 2016 campaign, on the rationale that Trump had done nothing wrong. Sessions was to add that he had been with Trump for nine months on the campaign and therefore knew that “there were no Russians involved with him.”

The last claim was an overstatement. We now know that the Trump organization was involved in negotiations for Trump Tower Moscow throughout the 2016 campaign. Moreover, while there is no evidence that candidate Trump himself was informed about the matter, his top campaign officials (his son Don Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his then–campaign manager Paul Manafort) met in June 2016 with a lawyer they understood to be a Kremlin emissary (Natalia Veselnitskaya, with an entourage of Russians in tow) in the expectation (unfulfilled) of receiving campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. (Ironically, as I further detail in Ball of Collusion, Veselnitskaya obtained the materials she presented from Fusion GPS, the same outfit that was working for Clinton to scrounge up campaign dirt on Donald Trump from Russian sources.)

My purpose here, though, is to focus not on questions about the president’s credibility, which congressional Democrats have every right to highlight. Let’s stick with executive privilege.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/09/new-womens-march-board-member-listens-farrakhan-daniel-greenfield/

Easy come, easy go.

The Women’s March is replacing three inaugural board members who have been dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism, infighting and financial mismanagement — controversies some say have slowed the organization’s progress and diminished its impact.

Co-Chairs Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour stepped down from the board July 15, though the organization has been slow to announce their departures. The Women’s March website continued to host their photos and titles as co-chairs through this week, when the group announced the board turnover.

A diverse cast of 16 new board members that includes three Jewish women, a transgender woman, a former legislator, two religious leaders and a member of the Oglala tribe of the Lakota nation will inherit an organization recovering from a failed attempt to trademark the Women’s March name and fractured relationships with local activist groups and the Jewish community.

Notice the vagueness. The organization does things. No people actually mentioned by name.

Mallory, Sarsour and Bland left in July, but we’re only being told this in September.

It goes without saying that the Women’s March has replaced anti-Israel and anti-Semitic figures with more of the same.

 Samia Assed, a Palestinian American activist from New Mexico who serves on the board of the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice and leads the organization’s New Mexico chapter.

Zahra Billoo, a civil rights attorney and executive director of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Ginna Green, who runs the strategy arm of liberal Jewish group Bend the Arc and was among a group of Jewish women to lead the 2019 Women’s March on Washington.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-assault-on-the-supreme-court-11568674522

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will apparently receive continuing education in the politics of personal destruction, and this weekend came another round of rumor-mill accusations over his conduct in college. It’s important to understand that this assault on the Justice is part of the left’s larger campaign against the legitimacy of the current Supreme Court and an independent judiciary.

By now readers have seen Democrats running for President calling for Justice Kavanaugh to be impeached, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke. These Democrats know there is zero chance of a Republican Senate voting to remove Mr. Kavanaugh from office.

The attacks on Justice Kavanaugh are an attempt at intimidation to influence his opinions. But if Democrats fail in that, they want to portray conservative opinions of the current Court as illegitimate. Even Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota now says the Judiciary confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh was “a sham.” She knows better but so much for her self-styling as a “moderate.”

***

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14741/us-politics-britain

My friends assured me there were terrible, terrible things that would become apparent in the ensuing months.

Even in the extended echo-chamber of social media, there appeared to be a seemingly pathological fear of anything even remotely resembling a balanced view.

The only thing that has not changed is the Democrats’ make-believe view that President Trump and the Russians were somehow trying to rig the election, when it was, in fact, they themselves who were doing that.

Before the advent of online news, residents of the UK had to rely on the British press to report on the minutiae of the American political system — something that didn’t happen all that often. In politics what went on in the USA, stayed in the USA, most of it at least. Beyond a major political upheaval, or the swearing in of a new president, news reportage was more concerned with the cut and thrust of our own routine domestic politics.

Only the bickering between the Democrats and Republicans rang a familiar note, mirroring as it did, our British Punch and Judy stereotype, with the stuffy old Tories on one side, and the loony-left Labour on the other.

By 2008, along with the advent of social media, and a growing awareness of international affairs, it became increasingly impossible not to notice the apparently out of proportion intensity driving the Democrat-Republican voter divide. Heralded in by the arrival of the US’s first president “of colour”, Barack Obama, and coinciding with the rising usage of Twitter and Facebook, the “Left” seemed to jump at the chance of embracing the one-dimensional limitations of an “echo chamber”. The “echo-chamber” served not only to widen the chasm between left and right, but — even to the outsider — noticeably amplified the animosity between the two sides. Compared to the almost polite political rivalry between voters and parties in Britain, the political division in the US began looking distinctly engineered.

My American friends, in an effort to help me try and understand their conclusions, sent a raft of articles from the US mainstream media, which, in their bias, displayed the same lack of integrity as my friends’. Even in the extended echo-chamber of social media, there appeared to be a seemingly pathological fear of anything even remotely resembling a balanced view.