RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON – Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said Facebook’s 20,000 content reviewers bring their political “bias to work” and have blocked content that’s not related to issues such as terrorism.

Blackburn mentioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Silicon Valley an “extremely left-leaning place” during his recent Senate hearing under questioning from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

“We don’t ask people their political affiliation when they are hired,” Zuckerberg said at the hearing.

Blackburn said Congress should examine “guardrails” that could be put in place to prevent content that might offend certain people for political reasons from being blocked.

“He has 15-20,000 content reviewers and managers. So one of the things we have to realize is they bring that bias to work and then, as they develop an algorithm, how are they manipulating that algorithm?” Blackburn said during a Family Research Council discussion last Tuesday, “Losing Our Voices: Who Owns Free Speech on the Internet?”

The Russians say he did, and while some might say, well, these are the same Russians who helped put together the Steele dossier filled with “salacious and unverified” material, and may once again be playing with us, there is evidence that Brennan, the man who voted for communist Gus Hall for president, did make the trip in March 2016 for purposes unknown:

“It’s no secret that Brennan was here,” claimed Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov. “But he didn’t visit the Foreign Ministry. I know for sure that he met with the Federal Security Service (the successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and someone else.”

No further remarks clarify what Brennan was allegedly doing in Moscow or what he discussed with the FSB. Syromolotov insists it had nothing to do with Russia’s withdrawal from Syria.

Sputnik News, a Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlet, quotes CIA Director of Public Affairs Dean Boyd as affirming that Brennan did, in fact, discuss Syria during the visit. “Director Brennan,” he allegedly said, “reiterated the US government’s consistent support for a genuine political transition in Syria, and the need for [President Bashar] Assad’s departure in order to facilitate a transition that reflects the will of the Syrian people.”

The website GlobalSecurity.Org goes into somewhat more detail about Brennan’s Moscow trip without clearing up confusion about what the purpose of the trip might have been:

The Russians say he did, and while some might say, well, these are the same Russians who helped put together the Steele dossier filled with “salacious and unverified” material, and may once again be playing with us, there is evidence that Brennan, the man who voted for communist Gus Hall for president, did make the trip in March 2016 for purposes unknown:

“It’s no secret that Brennan was here,” claimed Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov. “But he didn’t visit the Foreign Ministry. I know for sure that he met with the Federal Security Service (the successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and someone else.”

No further remarks clarify what Brennan was allegedly doing in Moscow or what he discussed with the FSB. Syromolotov insists it had nothing to do with Russia’s withdrawal from Syria.

A key, if under-covered, aspect of the “Pakistani mystery man” story is that Imran Awan, the Pakistani-born IT aide of former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, took a laptop with username RepDWS after he was banned from the House computer network for “unauthorized access to data,” and then left it in a phone booth with a letter to prosecutors.

On Friday, President Donald Trump tweeted: “Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails.”

Trump appears to have accurately identified a key issue with the “Pakistani mystery man” that comes straight from court documents.

Lawyers for Pakistani-born Imran Awan currently have a copy of the contents of a laptop with the username RepDWS
Wasserman Schultz wanted to block prosecutors from seeing what was on it
Imran’s lawyers have attempted to set up a situation where it is up to Imran whether prosecutors can see the laptop, claiming “attorney client privilege”
Other analysts say the laptop should be fair game for review

Each twist has increased the intrigue:

On Feb. 2, 2017, Imran was banned from the House computer network for making “unauthorized access” to congressional data, according to the House inspector general
This happened not long after Wasserman Schultz was fired from the DNC after a cyber breach, yet she refused to fire Imran or even put him on paid leave, claiming that an IT aide didn’t need to access the internet to do his job
Wasserman Schultz’s refusal to fire him meant he had continued physical access to the congressional office buildings, even though all of his other part-time employers fired him and he knew there was an ongoing criminal investigation
On April 5, 2017, despite not being allowed to connect to the House network, he was in possession of a laptop with the username RepDWS and left it in a phone booth, where it was picked up by police who confiscated it because they recognized that it was left there by a criminal suspect

Washington’s self-righteous establishmentarians talk of professionalism when they act unprofessionally. They refer at length to their intellectual and professional pedigrees when they prove incompetent. And they cite their morality and ethics when they possess neither.

And then, adding insult to injury, when the public expresses abhorrence at their behavior, they accuse critics of unprofessionalism, a lack of patriotism, or reckless demagoguery.

A James Clapper can lie to Congress under oath about intelligence surveillance of U.S. citizens; a John Brennan can lie about CIA monitoring of U.S. Senate computers, or mislead Congress about the absence of any collateral damage in the use of drones. Yet we are supposed to give both further credence based on their emeriti titles or to believe their current Captain Renault-like outrage over President Trump’s lack of presidential decorum? But what in their past has earned them the moral high ground? Claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely “secular,” or redefining jihad as “a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam”?

Are we supposed to believe that Robert Mueller did not overreach by spinning off an investigation of Trump consigliere and lawyer Michael Cohen?

Why? Because we are also told that a regional federal prosecutor would have to have had good cause to order raids on Cohen? Because a federal judge would have had to have seen such credible evidence before anyone dared enter Cohen’s office and residence? Because another federal justice believes it is in the national interest that we know Michael Cohen knows Sean Hannity?

Once Bitten, Twice Shy
Trust in the Obama-era directorships of the Justice Department, FBI, and, indeed, the federal courts themselves are now horses that have long ago left the proverbial judicial barn. Should the public also believe that no sober and judicious FISA court judge would ever have approved surveillance of American citizens without asking where the evidence came from, who compiled it, who, if any, paid for it, or had a vested interest in seeing it used for a warrant? Should the public believe that its FBI director, and various deputy attorney generals, would never have dared keep from a FISA court information about their own submitted evidence?

The news reports have all focused on the FBI’s second-in-command leaking information to the Wall Street Journal – or authorizing subordinates to do so — and then lying to investigators about it. This is big news, provided that account is borne out by a subsequent criminal indictment and successful prosecution.

The news will be even bigger if Andrew McCabe pursues a scorched-earth policy against his FBI superior, James Comey, who started the investigation of his deputy. Even a prosecutor fresh out of law school ought to be able to flip McCabe, who is facing serious jail time and thinks he has been betrayed. Such men are dangerous.

McCabe’s testimony is the best way to learn why the FBI and Department of Justice seemingly mishandled everything related to Hillary Clinton and how the intelligence agencies routinely funneled classified material on Donald Trump to friendly news agencies. If there was a high-level conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Clinton investigation or to use the so-called “Deep State” to smear Trump, McCabe would know a lot about it.

He could also respond to the stunning allegation recently leveled by Rep. Devin Nunes, the California Republican who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. On Sunday, Nunes told Fox News anchorwoman Maria Bartiromo, “We now know that there was no official intelligence that was used to start this investigation” of Trump’s aides. Nunes has read the classified materials, and he is making a deeply troubling allegation: An official investigation was mounted against an American presidential campaign with no official information to support it. If so, then U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were weaponized for partisan purposes. McCabe would know about that, too, or know if it is untrue.