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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

The Morning Briefing: The Delicious Stupidity of Liz Cheney’s Presidential Folly By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/08/24/the-morning-briefing-the-delicious-stupidity-of-liz-cheneys-presidential-folly-n1623691

It has been just over a week since the Republican voters of Wyoming let Liz Cheney know what they thought of her stabbing them in the back by joining the Democrats’ J6 House Soviet Select Committee on Daddy Issues.

The mental unwellness that Dick’s daughter began exhibiting that night hasn’t improved. Soon-to-be-former-Congresswoman Cheney is still harboring delusions about the viability of a presidential run in 2024. So much so, in fact, that she’s lining up some Koch money and some experienced Republican consultant firepower to help her, per Rick’s reporting.

I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to see her go through with this. I may have to rent a storage space for the extra schadenfreude I’ll have when this ego train wrecks.

Here is a snippet from a VIP column I wrote last week:

There is no great GOP silent majority just waiting for a milquetoast squish alternative to Trump. It’s absolutely ridiculous to think that if faced with AOC, Mayor Pete, or Kamala Harris on the ballot, millions of Republicans are going to think, “Hmmm… better that than mean tweets.”

We should also remember that the disgruntled GOPers who would get behind a Cheney run are the same ones who were behind the Great Evan McMullin Gambit of 2016.

In short, Cheney’s merry band of potential voters is made up of a handful of morally bankrupt Never Trump grifters and maybe one drunk Democrat named Chet.

A Dying, Desperate Establishment Is a Dangerous Beast : David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/08/23/a-dying-desperate-establishment-is-a-dangerous-beast-n1623454

The best piece of U.S. political analysis published in recent weeks is Michael Anton’s essay at Compact Magazine, “They Can’t Let Him Back In.” Writes Anton, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration: “Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three.” The brazenly partisan perversion of the justice system that was the Mar-a-Lago raid validates Anton’s warning in spades.

Trump threatens what the elites call the “rules-based international order,” which simply means an international order in which the elites make the rules.

Our elites are as incompetent as they are malicious. If anyone bears the blame for tearing down the post-war international order—the NATO alliance and the dollar-centered monetary system—it is the elites themselves, whose arrogance, overreach, and outright pigheadedness threaten to ruin the West. Long before the next U.S. president takes office in January 2025, the “rules-based” order and the institutions attached to it will be in ruins. The elites will be desperate.

The Ukraine war is a dealbreaker for the “rules-based order.” Despite the drumbeat of propaganda channeled through the echo chamber of international media, Russia is NOT losing—not militarily and not economically. China has doubled its imports of Russian oil and India has quadrupled its imports. The two countries alone pay Putin $150 billion a year.

The Trump Warrant Had No Legal Basis A former president’s rights under the Presidential Records Act trump the statutes the FBI cited to justify the Mar-a-Lago raid. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-warrant-had-no-legal-basis-mar-a-lago-affidavit-presidential-records-act-archivist-custody-classified-fbi-garland-11661170684

Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in searching Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago? The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled that he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit supporting it. But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no—the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.

The warrant authorized the FBI to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519” (emphasis added). These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national-security information, public records or material relevant to an investigation or other matters properly before a federal agency or the courts.

The materials to be seized included “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”—i.e., during Mr. Trump’s term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that “where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.” The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

Liz Cheney’s Agony By Richard McDonough

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/liz_cheneys_agony.html

EXCERPT

Liz Cheney, who sits on the Jan. 6th Committee, has made her political agenda clear from the beginning.  Although an “investigation” is supposed to be a search for the truth, Liz Cheney made agonizingly clear many times that she didn’t need to wait for the results of the investigation.  From the beginning her stated aim was “make sure that Trump never gets near the White House again.”  Permanent Washington also made their aim clear.  The Jan. 6th Committee “investigation” was for her, and many others, mere political theatre to achieve a predetermined political agenda.

Had Cheney been interested in the truth, she might have insisted that the committee seat the appropriate number and type of Republicans to cross-examine the prosecutorial witnesses.  She did not do so.  At every turn she interpreted any testimony in the worst way possible for Trump, e.g., she has recently stated that Trump “commanded” a “heavily armed mob” to try to stop the counting of electoral votes.  She and her Jan. 6th Committee have, however, given no evidence whatsoever that Trump “commanded” an armed mob to use violence to stop the counting of electoral votes.  Her very strong statement requires that she prove both causality and intent.  However, the committee has only demonstrated a degree (even that not clear) of correlation between Trump’s remarks and the riot, namely, that Trump made some remarks and some people went to the Capitol and rioted.  The committee has not proved that Trump’s remarks caused the mob to riot at the Capitol or that Trump intended that his remarks cause the mob to riot at the Capitol.  Demonstrating causality or intent is never easy in social situations: “Since intent is a mental state. it is one of the most difficult things to prove.” It is certainly not easy given the very murky events surrounding Jan. 6th, events that the committee in their “Star Chamber” has conspired to keep murky.  For Liz Cheney, however, everything about Jan. 6th is as clear to her as her seething hatred of Donald Trump.

Where Is Steven D’Antuono? The head of the FBI’s field office in Washington, D.C., has a lot of explaining to do. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/22/where-is-steven-dantuono/

A few days after the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021, a tough-talking FBI chief with a Boston accent promised the American people that the bureau would spare no resource in hunting down everyone and anyone involved in the four-hour disturbance that day. 

Steven M. D’Antuono, the newly appointed head of the Washington, D.C. FBI field office, gave the public a stern warning. “The FBI will leave no stone unturned. This is a 24/7, full bore, extensive operation,” D’Antuono explained during a January 12, 2021 press conference at the Department of Justice. “As Director Wray says, the FBI does not do easy.”

His agency, D’Antuono bragged, has a “long memory and a broad reach.” Agents from 56 FBI field offices across the country “will be knocking on your door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol.” He urged people to turn in their co-workers, neighbors, and relatives if they had information that could help the FBI in its dragnet.

Turns out, his comments weren’t just Beantown-style braggadocio. More than 850 Americans since then have been investigated, arrested, and charged for mostly nonviolent offenses related to the January 6 protest. Armed FBI agents have conducted early morning raids at homes across the country, using military style vehicles to batter in front doors while traumatizing families, children, and neighbors in the process. It is a crusade of fear and terror meant to reinforce D’Antuono’s threats that those who dared to demonstrate against the fraudulent election of Joe Biden that day will pay a hefty price. 

Nearly 20 months later, D’Antuono’s office continues to announce new arrests.

Fauci flees his office, fearing Republicans taking control in Congress and holding him to account By Thomas Lifson

Yesterday, in a statement posted on the website of the federal agency he runs, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced his retirement in December, one month before Republicans are expected to take control of the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate.

I am announcing today that I will be stepping down from the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as the position of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career.

As Sister Toldjah notes at RedState:

Apparently, the “next phase” of Fauci’s career will include collecting a sweet pension and possibly avoiding having to answer before Congress under oath as to what he knew about the origins of COVID-19 and U.S. gain of research funding:

Who Is Joe Pinion? He could be the candidate to topple Senator Schumer. Ira Stoll

He could be the candidate to topple Senator Schumer.

Who is Joe Pinion?

When a colleague called with that question last week, I was stumped. It turns out that he is the Republican Party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022 in New York, running against the Senate majority leader, Charles Schumer. 

The Schumer-Pinion race is a study in contrasts, and not only when it comes to name recognition. Mr. Schumer’s campaign has raised a lot more money: Federal Election Commission data through June 30, 2022, show that Mr. Schumer had raised $39 million to Mr. Pinion’s $254,397, and that Mr. Schumer had $37.9 million in cash on hand, while Mr. Pinion had $25,150. 

Mr. Schumer, 71, was elected to Congress in 1980 and to the New York State assembly in 1974; Mr. Pinion just turned 39 and has not yet been elected to political office.

Mr. Pinion himself says in a phone interview that people thought he was “crazy” to try to beat Mr. Schumer. He says, though, that he’s in a “great position” to take on the majority leader. Two polls taken in late July show Mr. Schumer with support at 53 percent or 56 percent, down from the 70 percent of the vote Mr. Schumer won when he was re-elected in 2016. A McLaughlin poll taken in August found 42 percent of New Yorkers would re-elect Mr. Schumer, while 48 percent want someone else.

Mike Pence Is Wrong. DOJ And FBI Rot Spreads Way Deeper Than Garland By: Jonathan S. Tobin

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/22/mike-pence-is-wrong-doj-and-fbi-rot-spreads-way-deeper-than-garland/

The former veep is still trying to sound reasonable by saying the GOP shouldn’t criticize the FBI — but the bureau is saturated with political bias that must be expunged.

When it comes to the way the deep state regime is at war with Republicans, former Vice President Mike Pence’s No. 1 priority is showing that his main concern is to keep playing the “good cop” to the “bad cop” of former President Donald Trump. 

Speaking in New Hampshire last week, Pence characteristically tried to have it both ways over this unprecedented attack on norms that the incident represented. After vaguely calling for transparency, Pence said:

I also want to remind my fellow Republicans that we can hold the Attorney General accountable for the decision that he made without attacking the rank and file law enforcement personnel at the FBI. The Republican Party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal, state, and local levels. These attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police. The truth of the matter is we need to get to the bottom of the matter and let the facts play out, but more than anything else, the American people need to be reassured of the integrity of our justice system.

Conservatives are justifiably venting outrage over the banana republic-style raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home by FBI agents acting on the orders of Attorney General Merrick Garland. But the soft-spoken Pence thinks the priority is to reassure the administrative state that Republicans won’t be unreasonable in their pushback against attempts to delegitimize opposition to the Biden administration. 

When the American Dream is a ‘dog whistle’Oliver Wiseman

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/american-dream-dog-whistle-dc-diary-08-22-22/?utm_source=

When the American Dream is a ‘dog whistle’

High on the list of reasons why American politics feels so bad-blooded, chaotic and dysfunctional is the determination of many members of the media to paint the normal and harmless as unprecedented and dangerous.

For the latest example of this pathology, look no further than the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, where prime real estate was afforded to an article explaining that “In US politics, even the phrase ‘The American Dream’ divides.”

The starting point for the story, by national politics reporter Jazmine Ulloa, is the large number of unorthodox Republican candidates for office this cycle, many of them Latinos and many of them, as the story puts it, with “powerful come-from-behind stories.”

As you might expect, the likes of Juan Ciscomani, a Republican running for Congress in Arizona who “washed cars to help his Mexican immigrant father pay the bills”, and Winsome Earle-Sears, the Jamaican-born former Marine who was elected lieutenant governor of Virginia last year, are fond of invoking the American Dream. An entirely benign development, you might think. Not according to the Times, which reports that “historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message.” The story then approvingly quotes a Fordham University professor’s claim that the American Dream is being used by Republicans as a “dog whistle.”

The real motivation for the FBI raid It wasn’t to collect classified documents Roger Kimball

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/real-motivation-fbi-raid-mar-a-lago/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=

I write  after the FBI, without warning, raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach. According to Trump, agents even broke into his safe and made off with who-knows-what documents. They also rifled through Melania Trump’s wardrobe. Maybe they were looking for classified lingerie. Who knows?

As many commentators pointed out immediately, this assault on a former president of the United States by what amounts to the Democratic Party’s secret police was unprecedented. Never before in our history has a former president been subject to the mafia-busting, terrorist-crushing might of state police power directed by the opposing party.

That’s just in our history, though. Elsewhere the story is not so cheery. In many countries, using the power of the state to persecute and harass one’s political opponents is business as usual. Trump got it right when he noted that such “weaponization of the Justice System” and “prosecutorial misconduct” had hitherto been the province of “broken, Third-World countries,” not America.