RUTHFULLY YOURS

An explosive story by Sean Davis at The Federalist reveals that President Obama’s PAC, Obama for America, paid nearly $1 million in 2016 to the law firm that retained Fusion GPS, the consulting group responsible for the infamous Trump “dossier.” According to Davis, Federal Election Commission records show the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Obama’s PAC paid Perkins Coie more than $12 million last year alone. https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/31/obamas-shady-trump-russia-spinmeister/

The article also notes that Neil King, Jr.—the husband of Shailagh Murray, one of Obama’s former senior advisors—went on to work for Fusion GPS shortly after the election. King was a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter who, while at the Journal, was also a colleague of Glenn Simpson, one of Fusion GPS’s founders. These links were never divulged in any of King’s election coverage for the Journal. These ties could explain the Obama White House’s almost daily attention to the Trump-Russia collusion plotline, fueled largely by Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary.

From the White House press podium, Earnest played a critical role in tossing Trump-Russia conspiracy chum to an eager White House press pool. He conferred White House credibility to a politically connected cybersecurity firm that claimed Russian hackers hit the DNC server; wove a tale of Trump campaign collusion after the election in a shameful attempt to discredit the president-elect; and, just days before Trump’s inauguration, childishly compared Trump’s obligation to defend himself against the dossier to Obama’s need to defend against “birther” allegations.

In retrospect, knowing what we know now, particularly that the spouse of one of Earnest’s colleagues was close to and subsequently hired by the same outfit digging up dirt on Obama’s biggest political foe, Earnest’s conduct calls into question the integrity of Obama’s communications shop both before and after the election.

Earnest first floated the Russia-hacked-the-election meme during his press briefing on July 25, 2016. It was the same day the FBI announced it would investigate “cyber intrusion involving the DNC” related to the hacking of that organization’s email server earlier in the year. But while the FBI’s statement did not mention Russia, Earnest—with the help of some willing reporters—fueled the unsubstantiated but politically explosive plot line that the Russians hacked the DNC, even suggesting it was an attempt to help Donald Trump.

Here is an exchange on July 25, 2016, between Associated Press reporter Josh Lederman and Earnest at the beginning of the daily briefing, one day after the emails exposed via the DNC hack led to chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s ouster at the Philadelphia convention:

Lederman: Turning to the investigation into this hack that the FBI is now leading . . . are you prepared to say anything about whether Russia was involved in this hack and whether it may have been an attempt by a foreign state to try and sway the election towards Donald Trump?

Earnest: I know that there’s been a lot of public reporting about this particular matter and I know that there are some private sector entities that have conducted their own investigations and even released their own reports on these investigations. So the FBI has put out a statement indicating that they are investigating this situation . . . we know that there are a variety of actors who are looking for vulnerabilities in the cybersecurity of the United States, and that includes Russia.

*record scratch* Wait, what? The DNC server is hacked, no one knows who did it, but it’s automatically presumed to be helping Trump?

Further, the “entity” Earnest refers to is Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack. (We now know Perkins Coie also hired Crowdstrike on behalf of the DNC to look into the breach. To date, the DNC refuses to surrender its server to the FBI for a forensic analysis.) In June 2016, Crowdstrike posted a blog article identifying “two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network” and concluded, “attacks against electoral candidates and the parties they represent are likely to continue up until the election.” Trump’s name was never mentioned, and early news articles reported the hackers did it to gain “opposition research on Donald Trump.” So, how could anyone conclude that the DNC hack was intended to help Trump?

The driver who plowed into a group of people on Tuesday, killing 8, left behind handwritten notes pledging loyalty to ISIS along with an image of an ISIS flag inside his vehicle.

Sayfullo Saipov, 29, had the notes written in Arabic inside his Home Depot rental truck along with a picture of the ISIS flag, according to law enforcement sources.

The handwritten notes indicated that he had pledged allegiance to the terror group, the sources said.

Investigators discovered the materials inside his truck after the rampage in lower Manhattan.

The New York Times reported Tuesday night that Saipov had previously been on the radar of law enforcement as a result of an unrelated investigation.

It wasn’t clear if Saipov was the main target of that probe or just an associate of another figure being investigated, according to the report, which cited unnamed sources.

Shazam! The crack legal team of Herr Robert Mueller have pounced on a real crime (they say), and all the loudest voices in today’s politics have agreed on this farce, just as if it were the real thing. Liberals around the country are getting chills up their spines as the official Master Sleuths close in on…whom, exactly? And why, exactly? And in obedience to what principle in the Constitution, or in common law, or in common sense, for that matter?

The answer is that there is no legal, moral, or sane principle to be seen. None whatsoever. This is pure, emotional mob scapegoating under color of law – but not any law that adheres to the U.S. Constitution. The American Founders were steeped in the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century, and they would chew up and spit out all the rationalizations of all the liberal witch hunts since Watergate. This is all made up legal fiction, in direct violation of the very basis of civilized legality.

There is actually no sane or rational basis for the special prosecutor. Special prosecutors are really “special” – they are magicked into being from some extra-constitutional fringe of the law, whenever the Democrats and the Monsters of the Deep feel threatened, as happened during the Stalin years (when the State Department featured Stalin agents); during the George W. years (when the Democrats first voted for the Iraq War, and then, when American troops were in the field, stabbed them in the back); and in last year’s election, when Ms. Hillary was downed by a fiendish Electoral College, which (according to the Democrats) isn’t even in the U.S. Constitution.

(Actually, the electors are in there, but you have to look for them. DNC Chief Perez apparently lost his Cliff’s Notes to the U.S. Constitution, because he can’t find the electors – Article I, Section 2, Clause 1-3, etc.)

What do you expect from our lousy education system?

So Mr. Mueller has indicted his ham sandwich, responding to the fierce outcry of The American Public (as shown in the New York Times op-ed pages and the WaPo). He is giving us a couple of victims to hang. There, that should make everybody happy.

This is pure and simple mob justice, of the kind practiced throughout ancient history under the heading of scapegoating.

Remember, in the Book of Leviticus, the scapegoat was an actual goat – quite innocent of any crime – that was driven off to its death in ancient Israel, to carry with it all the sins of the people.

The act of scapegoating is not limited to Scripture. It is a human universal, and it belongs in the ancient gallery of emotional defenses against guilt and anxiety. Scapegoating was a favorite practice of European mobs in Poland and Russia, and in Germany and France, and anywhere else where an evil Other could be found. Africans practiced mob scapegoating in Rwanda, and Muslims have been doing it in Sudan for the last thirty years.

In Europe, the Jews were convenient scapegoats much of the time, and Russian Orthodox priests scapegoated Polish Catholic priests and vice versa. Catholics did it to Lutherans, and Lutherans did it to Catholics.

In Obama’s childhood home of Jakarta, the Indonesian Army scapegoated the Communist Party and the Muslims, but then everybody scapegoated the Overseas Chinese, who were easy to recognize as an ethnic group, and they were rumored to be rich, besides.

The Klan is the most notorious example of mob scapegoating and yes, murder, in recent American history. The late Robert Byrd could tell you all about that.

Politicians reflexively attack perceived gender bias in private companies. But it’s important to ask how those politicians are doing with their own hiring.

Do government payrolls reflect a “gender hiring gap?”

Our OpenTheBooks.com Oversight Report – Federal & State Government’s Gender Hiring Gap analyzed government payrolls:

25 largest federal agencies: the 500 most highly compensated employees from each of the largest 25 federal agencies
Congress: the 1,000 top-paid staffers – including payroll analysis of republican and democratic leadership in U.S. House & Senate
White House staff
Five largest states: the 1,000 most highly compensated public employees within each of the five most populous states: California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.

We found that top-paid men outnumbered women two to one at the federal level. Across the states, just two in 10 top-earners were women.

Politicians talk about a “war on women” in an effort to score political points. Many of those same politicians have striking gaps between male and female wages and employment on their own payrolls.

That’s pure hypocrisy.

Here are a few examples of what you’ll uncover:

We analyzed the 500 most highly compensated employees at the 25 largest federal agencies. Among 12,500 key employees, we found 7,869 men collectively earned $1.5 billion in compensation and 4,631 women collectively earned $817 million.

Female Congressional employees fared even worse. Among the 1,000 top-paid Congressional staffers, male employees who earn up to $172,500 outnumbered female employees who earn the same 2-to-1. Men, collectively, made $105.4 million, while females earned $58.6 million.

At the state level, we analyzed the 1,000 most highly compensated public employees in each of the five most populous states. In the states, collectively, the men earned $1.6 billion versus $386 million for the women. Across the five states, just seven women were employed in the top 100 highest-earning positions.

At every level of government, the number of women employed in the top-paid positions lags the number of men by an enormous
margin.

Download a PDF copy of our report, click here.

Read our press release, click here.

Eight people were killed and at least a dozen injured on Tuesday when a truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists on a lower Manhattan bike path in what officials said was a “cowardly act of terror,” the deadliest attack in New York City since Sept. 11, 2001.

The driver shouted “God is great” in Arabic when he got out of his truck and was confronted by police, a law-enforcement official said.

He was identified by officials as Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old from Tampa, Fla., who came to the U.S. in 2010 and is originally from Uzbekistan. He is in custody at a local hospital after he was shot in the abdomen by an officer, police said.

A law-enforcement official said police found handwritten notes near the truck saying that the suspect carried out the attack in the name of ISIS.

The terror unfolded shortly after 3 p.m., when the suspect drove a flatbed pickup truck rented from Home Depot for nearly a mile along a picturesque stretch of a bike path along the Hudson River, leaving behind mangled bikes and bodies.

The carnage ended at an intersection in Tribeca near the World Trade Center, where the truck smashed into a small school bus. Then the suspect exited his truck, brandishing a paintball gun and pellet gun before being shot by a New York Police Department officer.

From Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes:

Mostly she was mad – mad that she’d lost and that the country would have to endure a Trump presidency… Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. ‘She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,’ this person said.

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

“Mook” is campaign manager Robby of that ilk, and “Podesta” is John, her campaign chairman and, with his brother Tony Podesta, one of the two Podestas who founded the Podesta Group, now under investigation for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Notice Mr Allen and Miss Parnes’ choice of words: Whether or not the election in reality “wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up”, Messrs Mook and Podesta and the rest of the Clinton team decided to “engineer the case” that it wasn’t.

And engineering-wise they did a pretty impressive job, as you’ll know if you’re one of the impressionable rubes who gets his news from ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN. If the campaign team had worked its precision engineering half as well on the actual campaign, they would have won the election “on the up-and-up” and saved themselves the need for a post-election campaign.

By “Russian hacking” of the election, they mean that some Internet trolls from halfway round the world bought a few fake Facebook ads, half of which weren’t seen until after election day. For purposes of comparison, the one hundred grand these trolls spent to “interfere” in the US election works out at less than two per cent of what Hillary paid a high-ranking spy of a foreign power to interfere in the US election …and post-election.

It started in April 2016, when it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination. The Hillary campaign and the DNC gave millions of dollars to Marc Elias, a Clinton lawyer, who in turn hired Fusion GPS, who in turn hired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Why use Mr Elias as a cutout? Because Hillary and the DNC could then itemize the expense as “legal services” rather than list payments to Mr Steele, which would be in breach of federal law.

Mr Steele used to be head of “the Russia house”, to go all John le Carré on you. So he asked his contacts in Moscow to come up with some stuff on Trump, and they responded with some pretty thinnish material that Steele managed to stretch out to a total of about 33 pages. I can tell you, after six years in the fetid craphole of the District of Columbia Superior Court for the Mann vs Steyn case, that the most routine procedural motion therein runs at least three times the length. The most “salacious” (in James Comey’s word) assertion of the dossier is that Trump likes getting urinated on by Russian hookers. Having met him, I regard this as most unlikely: He is a germaphobe who resents having to do all the unhygienic gladhanding required in American politics. I find it easier to imagine almost any other Republican bigshot enjoying the erotic frisson of micturition, if only from Chuck Schumer. But judge for yourself: You can read the dossier here.

At which point things took a strange and disturbing turn. Steele’s dossier was passed along to the FBI. It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an “FI” (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump’s associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier was created and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.

In October 2016, things took a stranger and more disturbing turn. Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the Bureau to pay him to continue his work”. In other words, the permanent bureaucracy and the ruling party were collaborating to get the goods on their political opponent, by illegally paying a foreign spy to interfere with the election. Why would the most lavishly funded investigative agency on the planet need the services of a British subject and his modest consulting firm? Not just for plausible deniability but also for plausible reliability: Hey, investigating Trump would never have occurred to us, but the former head of the Russia desk at MI6 thought we ought to know about this… Which, in case you haven’t noticed, is the precise equivalent of Bush crediting British intelligence as the unimpeachable source for his belief that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire yellowcake from Niger.

A month later, Trump did the impossible and won the election. And within twenty-four hours Mook and Podesta had begun “engineering the case” that the election “wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up”. On November 18th, Andrew Wood, formerly British Ambassador in Moscow, and John McCain, the Senator from Arizona and fierce Never Trumper, met at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. Sir Andrew told Senator McCain about the dossier and said he’d known Steele when they were both on Her Majesty’s service in Russia and that he was a splendid chap, very sound and awfully decent.

[UPDATE! Steve McIntyre, slayer of hockey sticks, notes that Andrew Wood is not merely a former ambassador but an Associate of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd (Steele’s company).]

One month after the election, on December 9th, McCain met with FBI Director Comey and handed over the dossier. It is not known if Comey replied, “Oh, this old thing? As a matter of fact, we used it as a pretext to get surveillance warrants on Trump. Do you know what it’s like to sit through hours of phone transcripts about how ‘The Apprentice”s ratings have tanked since they hired that loser Schwarzenegger?”