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POLITICS

New Data: Illegal Voters May Have Decided New Hampshire in 2016 By J. Christian Adams

Newly available data is casting doubt on the integrity of the presidential election in New Hampshire in 2016, which Hillary Clinton won by just over 2,700 votes.

Over 6,000 voters in New Hampshire had used same-day voter registration procedures to register and vote simultaneously for president. The current New Hampshire speaker of the House, Shawn Jasper, sought and obtained data about what happened to these 6,000 “new” New Hampshire voters who showed up on Election Day.

It seems the overwhelming majority of them can no longer be found in New Hampshire.

Of those 6,000, only 1,014 have ever obtained New Hampshire driver’s licenses. Of the 5,526 voters who never obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license, a mere three percent have registered a vehicle in New Hampshire.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation received information that 70 percent of the same-day registrants used out-of-state photo ID to vote in the 2016 presidential election in New Hampshire and to utilize same-day registration.

Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, also defeated incumbent U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte by only 1,017 votes.

These new data illustrate the problem with same-day registration laws: they prevent the ability to verify residency prior to the election — and in a close election, that can make a difference.

As John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky pointed out in their book Who’s Counting, same-day registration fraud won Al Franken his Senate seat, and that extra Democratic seat then gave the country Obamacare.

A New Obama? The Media Starts Selling Abdul El-Sayed By Bruce Bawer

On August 24, the Guardian ran an unusually long profile of one Abdul El-Sayed, a 32-year-old Muslim doctor and son of Egyptian immigrants who is already campaigning heavily for governor of Michigan, even though the election won’t take place until November of next year. The headline on Drew Philp’s article dubbed El-Sayed “the new Obama.”

It was the ultimate puff piece, shameless in its utter lack of objectivity and balance, and it began, as such pieces invariably do, with an anecdote calculated to win sympathy for the subject. When he was seven years old, writes Philp, El-Sayed “sat in the eye of Hurricane Andrew,” drinking juice “while swaddled under mattresses between his father and stepmother, who was holding El-Sayed’s newborn baby brother just home from the hospital.”

What does this story have to do with anything? For Philp, it is a metaphor: “At the moment,” he suggests, “American politics feels a bit like being in the eye a hurricane.” Donald Trump is ready to attack North Korea; neo-Nazis paraded in Charlottesville. “No one man can stop the hurricane,” admits Philp. “But in Michigan, a grown-up El-Sayed is now having a go, trying to keep the storm at bay.” El-Sayed, you see, seeks “not just to win, but also to change American politics itself” by becoming “the first Muslim governor in US history.”

Philp goes on to depict El-Sayed as a progressive hero who is struggling against an army of Yahoos. He follows El-Sayed to Adrian, Mich. (“Trump country, white and Christian,” and “the kind of place with lots and lots of American flags”), where the candidate is introduced to an audience by a transgender man (“a brave choice for a region still coming to terms with gay rights, let alone trans rights”). El-Sayed shares “his personal story” with the audience, then goes into some “soaring rhetoric” about “hope and commonality.”

When he takes questions, one “clearly agitated man” asks him about sharia law. El-Sayed replies by saying that he supports separation of church and state and that he wouldn’t take away anyone else’s right to pray and wouldn’t want that right to be taken from him either. (He has made it clear that he prays several times a day.) For this, the audience gives him “an enormous round of applause” – even though El-Sayed’s answer is a total dodge.

Repeatedly, El-Sayed has described himself as a devout Muslim: he prays several times a day; he has said that “his Islamic values are at the center of his work as a civil servant”; his father is an imam. If he’s a devout Muslim, that means he firmly supports sharia law. But how does he square this with his purported approval of secular government? Is he a devout Muslim or a devout believer in the separation of religion and state? You can’t be both.

Whether or not Philp recognizes this contradiction, he certainly doesn’t confront El-Sayed with it. Instead he approaches the religion issue this way: “The rumors surrounding El-Sayed’s faith are small but persistent, spread by a handful of far-right websites preying on the uninformed and fearful.”

He doesn’t spell out what kind of “rumors” he’s talking about, but his message is clear: only “the uninformed and fearful” (and Islamophobes) would be concerned about a having a Muslim governor. “It’s tempting to make any story about El-Sayed about his faith,” writes Philp. “But to reduce him to his faith would also be a disservice. His story is one of responsibility, courage and hope.”

Hope, hope, hope – that’s the mantra here. Never mind that America is still getting over feeling burned by Obama’s empty repetition of that word.

Then there’s El-Sayed’s staffers, with whom Philp is as impressed as he is with the candidate himself: they’re “young, fun and smart” and “hail from Harvard and other elite institutions” and are “incredibly diverse.” Philp tells us about a bathroom visit during which he sees one of El-Sayed’s staffers, a Muslim, “washing his feet in the sink before praying,” while another, “pierced and dyed and queer,” washes his hands in the next sink.

Oh good, another gay guy who thinks Muslims and gays are, as they say, “allies in oppression.”

There are a few details about El-Sayed that Philp doesn’t mention, obviously because they would damage the glowing picture he’s trying to paint of the guy. For one thing, El-Sayed is chummy with Linda Sarsour, the hijab-wearing Women’s March organizer who is a vocal proponent of jihad and sharia law (and who has enthusiastically endorsed his candidacy). At the University of Michigan, El-Sayed was vice-president of the Muslim Student Association, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood.

His wife wears hijab, a fact that seriously undermines the image he seeks to project, and her father is a former president and current board member of the Michigan chapter of the terrorist-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In 2012, when he was in med school, El-Sayed received a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship. Paul Soros, who died the next year, was George Soros’s brother; some sources maintain that the Soros empire is funding El-Sayed’s campaign and grooming him to eventually become president. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Excuse No. 1,756: Trump Stood Too Close to Me ‘He followed me closely, staring at me, making faces.’ By Kyle Smith

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 brand: Tough. Capable. Experienced. Ready. A fighter.

Who freaks out when a man stands behind her for a few seconds.

That last detail about Hillary’s personality didn’t emerge until the world was treated to excerpts from her forthcoming memoir What Happened, in which Clinton makes yet another effort to cast herself as the victim of structural sexism. She writes that when Donald Trump wandered up behind her during the second debate, in St. Louis, she thought, “This is not OK. . . . Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces.”

You can almost hear the theme from Halloween as Clinton continues with her unnerving tale: “It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, well, what would you do? Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up you creep, get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.’”

Wait — months later, that’s her big comeback, her esprit d’escalier? More like colère d’escalier.

Picking up this anecdote — treating a sliver of a wisp of a crumb as though it’s a boulder with which to crush feminism’s enemies — diehard Clinton defender Jill Filipovic wonders, ludicrously, in the New York Times whether the incident was the game-changer of 2016. She speculates that a “different split-second choice could have changed the course of world history,” suggesting that if either Clinton or the debate’s moderators had made a big fuss about Trump’s violation of her personal space, Hillary would have won the election.

That Clinton didn’t react simply neutralized the moment, though. If anything, it hurt Trump a bit by making him look a little weird. If Clinton had responded angrily, she would have looked unhinged and everything else about the evening would have been forgotten. On her better days, Mrs. Clinton has a Nurse Ratched streak, and she would hardly have done herself any favors by coming across as touchy and dyspeptic. As for the moderators, Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz, they declined to intervene on Clinton’s behalf not because they are secretly knights of the International Brotherhood of Sexism but because they thought moderators should remain neutral. Or because, less charitably, they didn’t want to make it too obvious that they were on Clinton’s side.

Clinton and Filipovic make a mistake familiar to anyone who tries to slog through feminist thinking. Both see no options except for a) lashing out angrily and b) cursing their feminine fate while suffering in silence. As political analysts, they have remarkably short memories: Neither seems to recall that the same issue arose in the very same building as the Trump–Clinton clash — the Field House at Washington University in St. Louis — in another presidential debate, on October 17, 2000.

Putrid Waters Maxine Waters, the most vicious racist and socialist in the U.S. Congress. John Perazzo

There are many worthless deceivers from both major parties in the U.S. Congress ⸺ individuals whose principal talent is to screw over the American public while enriching themselves and basking obscenely in the glow of the political limelight they crave even more than life itself. But no one better fits this description than Los Angeles-based Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who has been secreting her special brand of racist, anti-American bile into the House of Representatives for more than a quarter of a century.

In recent months, Waters has experienced something of a resurgence in her popularity among leftists. In honor of her 79th birthday this Tuesday, for instance, Elle magazine lauded Waters not only as “a beacon of hope” in “these dark times,” but also as “a pop culture icon” who is “telling it like it is to anyone who has sense enough to listen.” MSN.com crowed: “It’s Rep. Maxine Waters’ birthday and the whole Internet is celebrating.” And TheRoot.com ran a puff piece titled “The Making of Auntie Maxine,” stating that “we love her” because she “says what many black women are thinking,” she “will not bow down to anyone,” and “time and time again she has fought against racism, white supremacy, white mediocrity, and misogyny.”

What the Left particularly loves about Maxine Waters lately, are her relentless, seething, theatrical professions of hatred for President Trump. Indeed, destroying Donald Trump’s presidency and having him removed from office in disgrace is mostly what she lives for nowadays. When Waters boycotted Trump’s inauguration on January 21, 2017, she explained her reasoning as follows: “I don’t honor him, I don’t respect him, and I don’t want to be involved with him.” In an appearance on MSNBC the following month, Waters called President Trump and his associates “a bunch of scumbags.” At a large rally two months ago in Los Angeles, she called for Trump’s impeachment: “He is not my president. He is not your president…. I’m saying, impeach 45. Impeach 45!” (Trump is the 45th U.S. President.) And at the annual ESSENCE Festival in New Orleans in early July, Waters revisited this same theme: “I am taking off the gloves. I don’t honor him, I don’t respect him, and I am not going to tolerate him. I am going to do everything I can do to get him impeached.”

Then, very recently, in a discussion about the multiple felonious leaks that have surfaced in recent months about President Trump and his associates ⸺ including transcripts of Trump’s private phone conversations with other world leaders ⸺ Waters proudly affirmed that she is “so glad” that the leakers are “telling us what’s going on,” adding: “I welcome the leaks. I welcome the information. That keeps us focused on him [Trump] and talking about what is wrong with him.” And for good measure, Waters vowed that “when we finish with [the impeachment of] Trump, we have to go and get” Vice President Mike Pence as well. “He’s next.”

Fidel and the Many Other Communists in Maxine’s Life

In stark contrast to her undiluted contempt for President Trump, Waters had a remarkable affinity for the late Fidel Castro, the longtime Communist dictator, mass murderer, and overseer of the island gulag known as Cuba. That would be the same Fidel Castro who tried very hard to provoke an intercontinental nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; the same Fidel Castro who, according to Humberto Fontova, “jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror” and “murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six”; and the same Fidel Castro whose most infamous ally, Che Guevara, once boasted that if he and Castro would have had the opportunity, “we would have fired [nuclear missiles] against the very heart of the U.S., including New York,” because “the victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”

But none of these things ever bothered Maxine Waters nearly as much as Donald Trump’s character flaws and political agendas bother her today. How do we know this? Because on September 9, 2000, Waters was among the throng of starstruck leftists who greeted and honored Fidel Castro during his visit to Harlem’s Riverside Church. “Viva Fidel!” the congresswoman shouted jubilantly as the dictator soaked up the adoration. As Castro himself put it: “I came to Harlem because I knew it was here that I would find my best friends.” Best friends like Maxine Waters.

HOPE FOR THE DEMS? THE BLUE DOG COALITION SEE NOTE PLEASE

https://bluedogcaucus-costa.house.gov/members

The Blue Dog Coalition is an official caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives comprised of 18 fiscally-responsible Democrats, who are leading the way to find commonsense solutions. They represent the center of the political spectrum, appealing to the mainstream values of the American public. The Blue Dogs are dedicated to pursuing fiscally-responsible policies, ensuring a strong national defense for our country, and transcending party lines to get things done for the American people.
Rep. Adam Schiff California District 28th left the coalition which recommends it immediately….rsk

The Democrats’ “Rising Star” A look at the radical record of Kamala Harris. John Perazzo

As House and Senate Democrats press forward with their quest to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency by any means necessary, they are simultaneously focused on finding someone in their ranks who could be an effective presidential candidate for their own party in 2020. Fifty-three-year-old Kamala Harris, who served as the Attorney General of California from 2011-16 and then filled the vacant U.S. Senate seat that had been occupied for a quarter-century by Barbara Boxer, is someone whom they will undoubtedly look at very closely. To be sure, Harris possesses all the qualifications necessary to be a Democratic leader, insofar as she is a far leftist in the mold of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — but without the baggage of Obama’s extensive ties to domestic terrorists, anti-Semites, and America-hating Marxists, or of Hillary’s status as a money-grubbing thief who feloniously violated the Espionage Act more times than anyone can count.

Consider, for instance, Harris’s stance on immigration. In December 2012, during her tenure as California’s Attorney General, she issued a memo informing all the executives of law-enforcement agencies statewide that they could “make their own decisions about whether to fulfill” Immigration & Customs Enforcement detainers, which are temporary holds that federal immigration authorities place on municipal prisoners who are suspected of being eligible for deportation.

After an illegal alien named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez — a convicted felon who had been deported from the United States on five separate occasions — was released from prison in April 2015 and subsequently murdered a 32-year-old San Francisco woman named Kathryn Steinle, Harris backed up the city sheriff’s decision to release Lopez-Sanchez without first calling immigration authorities.

During Harris’s Senate run in 2016, her campaign website stated that “everyone should have access to public education, public health, and public safety regardless of their immigration status”; that Harris, if elected, would “fight for comprehensive immigration reform that creates a fair pathway to citizenship” for America’s “11 million undocumented immigrants”; that she would “protect President Obama’s immigration executive actions,” which shielded several million illegals from deportation; and that the U.S. had a duty to “responsibly resettle refugees” from Syria and other war-torn, terrorism-infested nations around the world.

But then again, America’s national security has never been high on Kamala Harris’s list of priorities. In September 2015, for instance, she spoke out in support of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration had negotiated with the government of Iran — an agreement that allowed the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and be guaranteed of having a near-zero breakout time to the development of a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. But by Harris’s reckoning, the accord represented “the best available option for blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons capability and to avoid potentially disastrous military conflict in the Middle East.”

In 2015 as well, Harris launched an investigation of journalist/anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who had recently made headlines by releasing undercover videos demonstrating that Planned Parenthood routinely violated federal law by collecting and selling fetal tissue and body parts. As National Review reports: “The basis for investigating Daleiden was his appearing to have used a fake California driver’s license to hide his identity from Planned Parenthood, and the suspicion that he violated Planned Parenthood’s privacy. Those trivial allegations were enough for Harris to have eleven police officers raid Daleiden’s house, confiscate his computers and hard drives, some private documents, and all the yet-unreleased Planned Parenthood footage Daleiden had shot over two years. When Daleiden called his lawyer, Harris’s raiders tried to confiscate his phone too.”

Schumer’s Criticism of Hillary Is Worse Than It Seems By Roger L Simon

Chuck Schumer has been much remarked upon, even praised in many quarters, for stating the obvious — that Hillary Clinton should stop blaming the sun, moon, and stars, and, of course, Russia for her demise and look to herself for her failure to win the presidency. She was a wretched candidate with no obvious reason for running. Indeed, the WikiLeaks from her campaign operatives are rife with emails searching for some justification for her candidacy other than gender.

The New York senator is clearly correct in his criticism but he has a larger unacknowledged problem that is ultimately far more serious: Hillary’s loss didn’t occur entirely due to her own ineptitude. She is not alone. Her party has no useful programs anymore. As Gertrude said of Oakland, there’s no there there. All they have is Trump bashing and, with the help of their media pals, that’s all they do — and the country knows it.

Yes, as we also all know, the Republicans have their issues, to put it mildly. For a party controlling practically everything, they are remarkably inept and self-destructive, but at least, beneath it all, they have the potential to come together and move forward. (Who knows if they will?) For the Democrats it is another matter. They are hamstrung on all sides.

On the left, they have the Bernie Sanders contingent. At first glance, these people are stuck in 1968, but in truth, they are stuck in (roughly) 1932 or is it 1867? (The publication of Das Kapital.) Bernie’s ideas are ye olde and moribund. He doesn’t even seem to understand (or admit) that the Europeans — whose version of socialism he continually touts — have been deserting that system right and left for years, going more free market than the USA currently is, particularly in the area of corporate taxes.

Bernie is Margaret Thatcher’s admonition about socialism eventually running out of other people’s money writ large. Sure, some young people are seduced by his seemingly idealistic palaver (actually it’s the reverse) but if he — or a younger clone — does run in 2020, one word will spell disaster for them: Venezuela. All socialist roads sooner or later point that way or to something even worse — the Soviet Union, China, etc. It doesn’t take a genius to point that out, nor to demonstrate the catastrophic deficits his proposals engender. (Hillary, scared of alienating his supporters, was terrible at this.) And the young people who vote — those concerned about jobs, not the sad Social Justice Warriors who have, unwittingly, already given up on life — will react accordingly.

Run, Kamala, Run George Neumayr

It would be fun to watch her get demolished by Trump in 2020.

Finding a pol as (or more) obnoxious than Barbara Boxer is no easy feat, but Golden State voters managed to perform it by selecting Kamala Harris as her replacement. Harris is a left-wing dingbat of singular rudeness. A deluded Boxer thought of herself as kittenish and charming; Harris conceives of herself as more of a clawing feline — the relentless prosecutor who is going to bring the conservative dogs of Washington to heel. Except she is too vapid and dim to pull the role off.

My favorite moment from her absurd harangue of General Kelly earlier this year came when she demanded to know why he was subjecting immigration officers and local officials to a “Hobbesian choice.” She meant Hobson’s choice. Kelly was too nice to point out her sub-literate gibbering, but he did object to her lack of basic manners. She interrupted him repeatedly and finally he told her to knock it off (as have even John McCain and Richard Burr). That, of course, has occasioned feminist whining from Harris about a culture of mansplaining and double standards.

Barack Obama once got on the wrong side of her feminist fan club after he noted her striking good looks. He duly apologized for the infraction. The press, hinting at this secret to her success, calls her a “fresh face” in prospective presidential politics, by which it means a pretty one. It is hard to imagine reporters listening with bated breath to her pronouncements about this or that “Hobbesian choice” if she possessed the looks of, say, Barbara Mikulski.

Were it not for her fanatical support for abortion and all things culturally degenerate, NOW and NARAL would see Harris as an annoying and unworthy rival to Elizabeth Warren. A nubile Harris, after all, slept her way to the middle of California politics after she had an affair with a pol thirty-some years her senior, Willie Brown. An open crook with a Cosbyesque marriage to a long-suffering wife, Brown had no problem arranging lucrative state jobs for Harris after they trysted. The legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen called Kamala Harris Brown’s “steady.”

These days Harris furrows her brows over Trump’s “public corruption.” But Willie Brown, to paraphrase Oscar Levant, knew her before she was a virgin. She got at least two public jobs after serving as his mistress, according to the California press. It is safe to say that MSNBC-style fretting over “emoluments” didn’t figure into their pillow talk.

The growing chatter among Dems about her as a potential 2020 candidate is yet another illustration of the party’s lack of seriousness. At a time when it should be downplaying its image as an out-of-touch bi-coastal party, it deepens that image by pushing one more San Francisco radical forward. Who knows, maybe Harris can run with Pelosi.

According to press reports, Harris wowed supporters of Hillary’s at a recent fundraiser in the Hamptons. What a compelling look for a defeated party — a San Francisco kook feted by routed East Coast plutocrats impressed by her stern questioning of General Mattis over the plight of transgender soldiers. That should work well in the Rust Belt and the South.

Even Mark Penn, Hillary’s former strategist, is wincing at the party’s direction. He recently wrote that the party can’t recover if it stays on this far-left course. He proposes that the party adopt a more measured, less intolerant liberalism. But his plea is falling on deaf ears. The party is in no mood for any Sister Souljah moments. It remains the party of MoveOn.org, evident in the gushing over Harris for having raised money for it off her classless antics against Sessions and company.

In 1984, Reagan crushed the “San Francisco Democrats,” as his foreign policy advisor Jeane Kirkpatrick called them. Trump, in his re-election bid, would do the same, should Harris somehow rise to the top in the primaries. He would probably find that even more fun than beating “Pocahontas.”

Organizing for Anarchy His party may be falling apart, but Obama’s community organizing group is going strong. Matthew Vadum

Former President Obama’s army of community organizing thugs shows no signs of slowing down efforts to protect Obama’s policy legacy and undermine the Trump administration.

Obama directs Organizing for Action, a huge, well-funded 501(c)(4) nonprofit with more than 30,000 volunteers nationwide that doesn’t have to disclose its donors and that is at the head of Obama’s network of left-wing nonprofit groups. OfA, which grew out of Obama’s electoral campaigns, has upwards of 250 offices across America. His other nonprofit, the Barack Obama Foundation, is building Obama’s $675 million presidential library in Chicago. The library is slated to be a hub of left-wing activism.

Obama now owns and lives in a $8.1 million, 8,200-square-foot, walled mansion in Washington’s Embassy Row that he is using to command his community organizing cadres in the war against President Trump. Obama’s alter ego, Valerie Jarrett, has moved into the house to help out. Jarrett also resided in the White House when Obama was president.

No ex-president has ever stuck around the nation’s capital to vex and undermine his successor. Of course, Obama is unlike any president the United States has ever had. Even failed, self-righteous presidents like Jimmy Carter, who has occasionally taken shots at his successors, didn’t stay behind in the nation’s capital to obstruct the policy-making of the new administration.

OfA, which functions as a kind of shadow government, has been on the front lines attacking President Trump in order to defend the Obama administration’s awful legacy. Both OfA and George Soros-funded MoveOn.org have been leading the way in packing town hall meetings with unruly protesters. Many protests OfA has been involved in have turned into riots.

In 2013, Michelle Obama appeared in a video introducing the group to the public. She said OfA was “the next phase of our movement for change,” and that it would help Obama supporters “finish what we started and truly make that change we believe in.” She congratulated supporters for having “already begun to change our politics,” and declared that “the mission of Organizing for Action” is to “change our country” in accordance with her husband’s vision of how to “bridge [the] divide” between “the world as it is and the world as it should be.”

In the early days of the Trump administration, Organizing for Action activists organized protests across the country. After President Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning visitors from seven terrorism-plagued Muslim countries, OfA organized “spontaneous” demonstrations at airports.

Clinton Donors Have Picked Their 2020 Democratic Presidential Nominee By Michael Sainato •

Since Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss to Donald Trump, her donors have strategized with Democratic leadership about how to revive the failing party. Billionaire George Soros held a closed door conference with wealthy donors in November 2016 that addressed how to “take back power” and was attended by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. On the weekend of Trump’s inauguration, David Brock hosted a retreat for the most prolific Democratic donors to figure out how to “kick Donald Trump’s a–.” On July 15, Page Six reported that Sen. Kamala Harris, a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, met with top Clinton donors in the Hamptons. Many figures in Clinton’s inner circle attended, including Clinton’s 2008 Campaign National Finance co-Chair Michael Kempner, donors Dennis Mehiel and Steven Gambrel, and Democratic National Committeeman Robert Zimmerman. Harris also attended a separate luncheon hosted by one of Clinton’s top lobbyist bundlers, Liz Robbins. http://observer.com/2017/07/donors-george-soros-steve-mnuchin-kamala-harris/

Harris’ meetings with Clinton’s donors signal that they are rallying behind her as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. Harris has emerged as a leading figure in the Trump Resistance; Politico reported that the hearings regarding Trump’s connections to Russia have enabled the Democratic Party to frame her as Trump’s most aggressive critic. In response to one of the hearings she was involved in, she launched the slogan “courage not courtesy.” However, despite this catchy slogan, Harris has historically lacked the courage to hold her donors accountable when they have broken the law.

The nomination of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin provoked criticisms over his tenure as CEO of OneWest Bank. In 2013, California prosecutors claimed to have discovered over 1,000 foreclosure law violations, but the California Attorney General’s office failed to file any action against the bank. At the time, Kamala Harris was California’s attorney general. Many questioned why Harris didn’t take any action given the evidence her office uncovered.

“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris told The Hill. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”

Harris’ vague defense is insufficient. The Democratic Party has branded her as a leader of the Trump Resistance without addressing why Harris avoided a criminal investigation that involved donors to her campaign.

In 2011, Mnuchin’s wife at the time, Heather Mnuchin, gave $8,750 to Harris’ 2011 campaign. OneWest Bank donated $6,500 to Harris’ 2011 election. Heather Mnuchin also donated $850 to Harris’ 2014 election for California attorney general.

In 2014, the Center for American Progress graded California’s campaign donor recusal laws a “C.” The state’s lax laws allowed Harris to decide not to recuse herself from deciding whether or not to prosecute OneWest Bank.

Mnuchin donated to multiple Republicans’ campaigns in 2016, but Harris was the only Democrat he donated to.

Harris also has ties to billionaire Democratic Party donor George Soros, who was one of the two owners of OneWest Bank at the time. Coincidentally, before Harris passed on the opportunity to file action against OneWest Bank, Soros was pouring money into California criminal policy initiatives that Harris was pushing.