Thursday, May 31, 2018
Yes, the FBI Was Investigating the Trump Campaign When It Spied
Trey Gowdy and Marco Rubio evidently paid little attention to testimony before their own committees on how Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
May 30, 2018
FBI Director James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan at a House hearing in February, 2016. (Joe Gromelski/Stars and Stripes)
Well, well, well. The bipartisan Beltway establishment has apparently had its fill of this “Trump colluded with Russia” narrative — the same narrative the same establishment has lustily peddled for nearly two years. The Obama administration recklessly chose to deploy the government’s awesome counterintelligence powers to investigate — and, more to the point, to smear — its political opposition as a Kremlin confederate. Now that that this ploy has blown up on the Justice Department and the FBI, these agencies — the ones that went out of their way, and outside their guidelines, to announce to the world that the Trump campaign was under investigation — want you to know the president and his campaign were not investigated at all, no siree.
What could possibly have made you imagine such a thing?
And so, to douse the controversy with cold water, dutifully stepping forward in fine bipartisan fettle are the Obama administration’s top intelligence official and two influential Capitol Hill Republicans who evidently pay little attention to major testimony before their own committees.
Former National Intelligence director James Clapper was first to the scene of the blaze. Clapper concedes that, well, yes, the FBI did run an informant — “spy” is such an icky word — at Trump campaign officials; but you must understand that this was merely to investigate Russia. Cross his heart, it had nothing to do with the Trump campaign. No, no, no. Indeed, they only used an informant because — bet you didn’t know this — doing so is the most benign, least intrusive mode of conducting an investigation.
Me? I’m thinking the tens of thousands of convicts serving lengthy sentences due to the penetration of their schemes by informants would beg to differ. (Mr. Gambino, I assure you, this was just for you own good . . .) In any event, I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine the Democrats’ response if, say, the Bush administration had run a covert intelligence operative against Obama 2008 campaign officials, including the campaign’s co-chairman. I’m sure David Axelrod, Chuck Schumer, the New York Times, and Rachel Maddow would chirp that “all is forgiven” once they heard Republicans punctiliously parse the nuances between investigating campaign officials versus the campaign proper; between “spies,” “informants,” and other government-directed covert operatives.
Sure!
Senator Rubio
Then there are Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), General Clapper’s fellow fire extinguishers.
Rubio is a member in good standing of that Washington pillar, the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has had about as much interest in scrutinizing the highly irregular actions of intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the Clinton and Russia probes as Gowdy’s Benghazi committee had in revisiting Republican ardor for Obama’s unprovoked war on Moammar Qaddafi. (That would be: roughly zero interest.)
Rubio told ABC News that he has seen “no evidence” that the FBI was gathering information about the Trump campaign. Rather, agents “were investigating individuals with a history of links to Russia that were concerning.” The senator elaborated that “when individuals like that are in the orbit of a major political campaign in America, the FBI, who is in charge of counterintelligence investigations, should look at people like that.”
Gee, senator, when you were carefully perusing the evidence of what the FBI was doing, did you ever sneak a peek at what the FBI said it was doing?
May I suggest, for example, the stunning public testimony by then-director James Comey on March 20, 2017, before the House Intelligence Committee — perhaps Representative Gowdy, who sits on that committee, could lend you the transcript, since he appears not to be using it. Just so we’re clear, this is not an obscure scrap of evidence buried within volumes of testimony. It is the testimony that launched the Mueller probe, and that sets (or, better, fails to set) the parameters of that probe — a flaw the nation has been discussing for a year.
Comey’s House testimony was breathtaking, not just because it confirmed the existence of a classified counterintelligence investigation, but because of what the bureau’s then-director said about the Trump campaign (my italics):
I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts. . . .
That is an unambiguous declaration that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign. That is why, for nearly two years, Washington has been entranced by the specter of “Trump collusion with Russia,” not “Papadopoulos collusion with Russia.” A campaign, of course, is an entity that acts through the individuals associated with it. But Comey went to extraordinary lengths to announce that the FBI was not merely zeroing in on individuals of varying ranks in the campaign; the main question was whether the Trump campaign itself — the entity — had “coordinated” in Russia’s espionage operation.
Representative Gowdy
Gowdy’s fire truck pulled into Fox News Tuesday night for an interview by Martha MacCallum. An able lawyer, the congressman is suddenly on a mission to protect the Justice Department and the FBI from further criticism. So, when Ms. MacCallum posed the question about the FBI spying on the Trump campaign, Gowdy deftly changed the subject: Rather than address the campaign, he repeatedly insisted that Donald Trump personally was never the “target” of the FBI’s investigation. The only “target,” Gowdy maintains, was Russia.
This is a dodge on at least two levels.
First, to repeat, the question raised by the FBI's use of an informant is whether the bureau was investigating the Trump campaign. We’ll come momentarily to the closely connected question of whether Trump can be airbrushed out of his own campaign — I suspect the impossibility of this feat is why Gowdy is resistant to discussing the Trump campaign at all.
It is a diversion for Gowdy to prattle on about how Trump himself was not a “target” of the Russia investigation. As we’ve repeatedly observed (and as Gowdy acknowledged in the interview), the Trump-Russia probe is a counterintelligence investigation. An accomplished prosecutor, Gowdy well knows that “target” is a term of art in criminal investigations, denoting a suspect who is likely to be indicted. The term is inapposite to counterintelligence investigations, which are not about building criminal cases but about divining and thwarting the provocative schemes of hostile foreign powers. In that sense, and in no other, the foreign power at issue — here, Russia — is always the “target” of a counterintelligence probe; but it is never a “target” in the technical criminal-investigation sense in which Gowdy used the term . . . unless you think we are going to indict a country.
Moreover, even if we stick to the criminal-investigation sense of “target,” Gowdy knows it is misleading to emphasize that Trump is not one. Just a few short weeks ago, Gowdy was heard pooh-poohing as “meaningless” media reporting that Trump had been advised he was not a “target” of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe (which is the current iteration of the Russia investigation). As the congressman quite correctly pointed out, if Trump is a subject of the investigation — another criminal-law term of art, denoting a person whose conduct is under scrutiny, but who may or may not be indicted — it should be of little comfort that he is not a “target”; depending on how the evidence shakes out, a subject can become a target in the blink of an eye.
So, apart from the fact that Gowdy is dodging the question about whether the Trump campaign was being investigated, his digression about “targets” is gibberish. Since the Obama administration was using its counterintelligence powers (FISA surveillance, national-security letters, unmasking identities in intelligence reporting, all bolstered by the use of at least one covert informant), the political-spying issue boils down to whether the Trump campaign was being monitored. Whether Trump himself was apt to be indicted, and whether threats posed by Russia were the FBI’s focus, are beside the point; in a counterintelligence case, an indictment is never the objective, and a foreign power is always the focus.
Withholding Information from Trump
Second, if Gowdy has been paying attention, he must know that, precisely because the Trump campaign was under investigation, top FBI officials had qualms of conscience over Comey’s plan to give Trump a misleading assurance that he personally was not under investigation. If this has slipped Gowdy mind, perhaps Rubio could lend him the transcript of Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee — in particular, a section Rubio seems not to remember, either.
A little background. On January 6, 2017, Comey, Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and NSA chief Michael Rogers visited President-elect Trump in New York to brief him on the Russia investigation. Just one day earlier, at the White House, Comey and then–acting attorney general Sally Yates had met with the political leadership of the Obama administration — President Obama, Vice President Biden, and national-security adviser Susan Rice — to discuss withholding information about the Russia investigation from the incoming Trump administration.
Ms. Rice put this sleight-of-hand a bit more delicately in her CYA memo-to-file about the Oval Office meeting (written two weeks after the fact, as Rice was leaving her office minutes after Trump’s inauguration):
President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia. [Emphasis added.]
It is easy to understand why Obama officials needed to discuss withholding information from Trump. They knew that the Trump campaign — not just some individuals tangentially connected to the campaign — was the subject of an ongoing FBI counterintelligence probe. Indeed, we now know that Obama’s Justice Department had already commenced FISA surveillance on Trump campaign figures, and that it was preparing to return to the FISA court to seek renewal of the surveillance warrants. We also know that at least one informant was still deployed. And we know that the FBI withheld information about the investigation from the congressional “Gang of Eight” during quarterly briefings from July 2106 through early March 2017. (See Comey testimony March 20, 2017, questioning by Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.).) Director Comey said Congress’s most trusted leaders were not apprised of the investigation because “it was a matter of such sensitivity.” Putting aside that the need to alert Congress to sensitive matters is exactly why there is a Gang of Eight, the palpable reason why the matter was deemed too “sensitive” for disclosure was that it involved the incumbent administration’s investigation of the opposition campaign.
Clearly, the Obama officials did not want Trump to know the full scope of their investigation of his campaign. But just as important, they wanted the investigation — an “insurance policy” that promised to hamstring Trump’s presidency — to continue.
So, how to accomplish these objectives? Plainly, the plan called for Comey to put the new president at ease by telling him he was not a suspect. This would not have been a credible assurance if Comey had informed Trump that his campaign had been under investigation for months, suspected of coordinating in Russia’s cyber-espionage operation. So, information would be withheld. The intelligence chiefs would tell Trump only about Russia’s espionage, not about the Trump campaign’s suspected “coordination” with the Kremlin. Then, Comey would apprise Trump about only a sliver of the Steele dossier — just the lurid story about peeing prostitutes, not the dossier’s principal allegations of a traitorous Trump-Russia conspiracy.
As I’ve previously recounted, this did not sit well with everyone at the FBI. Shortly before he met with Trump, Comey consulted his top FBI advisers about the plan to tell Trump he was not a suspect. There was an objection from one of Comey’s top advisers — we don’t know which one. Comey recounted this disagreement for the Senate Intelligence Committee (my italics):
One of the members of the leadership team had a view that, although it was technically true [that] we did not have a counterintelligence file case open on then-President-elect Trump[,] . . . because we’re looking at the potential . . . coordination between the campaign and Russia, because it was . . . President-elect Trump’s campaign, this person’s view was, inevitably, [Trump’s] behavior, [Trump’s] conduct will fall within the scope of that work.
Representative Gowdy and Senator Rubio might want to read that testimony over a few times.
They might note that Comey did not talk about “potential coordination between Carter Page or Paul Manafort and Russia.” The director was unambiguous: The FBI was investigating “potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.” With due respect to Gowdy, the FBI did not regard Russia as the “target”; to the contrary, Comey said the focus of the investigation was whether Donald Trump’s campaign had coordinated in Russia’s election interference. And perspicaciously, Comey’s unidentified adviser connected the dots: Because (a) the FBI’s investigation was about the campaign, and (b) the campaign was Trump’s campaign, it was necessarily true that (c) Trump’s own conduct was under FBI scrutiny.
Director Comey’s reliance on the trivial administrative fact that the FBI had not written Trump’s name on the investigative file did not change the reality that Trump, manifestly, was a subject of the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. If Trump were not a subject of the investigation, there would be no conceivable justification for Special Counsel Mueller to be pushing to interview the president of the United States. If Trump were not a subject of the investigation, Trump’s political opponents would not have spent the last 18 months accusing him of obstruction and demanding that Mueller be permitted to finish his work.
In the interview with Ms. MacCallum, Representative Gowdy further confused matters by stressing Trump’s observation, in a phone conversation with Comey on March 30, 2017, that it would be good to find out if underlings in his campaign had done anything wrong. This, according to Gowdy, means Trump should be pleased, rather than outraged, by what the FBI did: By steering an informant at three campaign officials, we’re to believe that the bureau was doing exactly what Trump suggested.
Such a specious argument. So disappointing to hear it from someone who clearly knows better.
First, the informant reportedly began approaching campaign officials in July 2016. It was nine months later, well after the election, when President Trump told Comey that if would be good if the FBI uncovered any wrongdoing by his “satellites.” Trump was not endorsing spying during the campaign; the campaign was long over. The president was saying that it would be worth continuing the FBI’s Russia investigation in order to root out any thus-far-undiscovered wrongdoing — but only if the FBI informed the public that Trump was not a suspect (an announcement Comey declined to make).
Second, Gowdy’s argument assumes something that is simply not true: namely, that the Trump campaign was not under investigation. As we’ve seen, Comey testified multiple times that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign for possible coordination with Russia. The bureau was not, as Gowdy suggests, merely investigating a few campaign officials for suspicious contacts with Russia unrelated to the campaign.
The Steele Dossier and FISA Surveillance
That brings us to a final point. In support of the neon-flashing fact that the Trump campaign was under investigation when the Obama administration ran an informant at it, there is much more than former Director Comey’s testimony.
Probes conducted by both the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee have established that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI used the Steele dossier to obtain FISA-court warrants against Carter Page. The dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research project (a fact withheld from the FISA court), was essential to the required probable-cause showing; the FBI’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, testified that without the dossier there would have been no warrant.
So . . . what did the dossier say? The lion’s share of it — the part Director Comey omitted from his briefing of Trump — alleged that the Trump campaign was conspiring with the Kremlin to corrupt the election, including by hacking and publicizing Democratic-party emails.
We also know, thanks to more testimony by Director Comey, that dossier information was presented to the FISA court because the Justice Department and the FBI found former British spy Christopher Steele to be reliable (even if they could not corroborate Steele’s unidentified Russian sources). That is, the FBI and Justice Department believed Steele’s claim that the Trump campaign was willfully complicit in Russia’s treachery.
It is a major investigative step to seek surveillance warrants from the FISA court. Unlike using an informant, for which no court authorization is necessary, applications for FISA surveillance require approvals at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI. After going through that elaborate process, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI presented to the court the dossier’s allegations that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to undermine the 2016 election.
If that was their position under oath before a secret United States court, why would anyone conceivably believe that it was not their position when they ran an informant at members of the campaign they were investigating?
To be sure, no sensible person argues that the FBI should refrain from investigating individuals suspected of acting as clandestine agents of a hostile foreign power. The question is: How should such an investigation proceed in a democratic republic whose norms forbid an incumbent administration, in the absence of strong evidence of egregious misconduct, from directing its counterintelligence and law-enforcement powers against its political opposition?
That norm was flouted by the Justice Department and the FBI, under the direction of the Obama administration’s senior political leadership. Representative Gowdy, Senator Rubio, and General Clapper maintain that the Justice Department and the FBI were just doing what we should expect them to do, and that we should applaud them. But this claim is based on the easily refuted fiction that the Justice Department and FBI were not investigating the Trump campaign. The claim also ignores the stubborn fact that, if all the Obama administration had been trying to do was check out a few bad apples with suspicious Russia ties, this could easily have been done by alerting the Trump campaign and asking for its help.
Instead, Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.
TOMMY ROBINSON, POLITICAL PRISONER
A corrupt British court system silences a righteous whistleblower.
May 31, 2018
[Editor' note: To help Tommy, visit his website, tommyrobinson.online, and also go to Rebel Media, which has nobly taken up his cause.]
One of Britain’s most prominent human rights activists is being held as a political prisoner for reporting on a brutal Muslim child-rape gang, one of many such “grooming” gang cases that country’s government has been downplaying or outright covering up in recent years.
Authorities in the United Kingdom are notorious for protecting Muslims who rape Britons and for covering up the crimes of Muslim rape rings. Some government officials and journalists suppress news of the sex crimes out of a perverse sense of political correctness; others because they are afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic.
From the 1980s to the 2010s, as many as 1,400 Britons, mostly white girls, were raped largely by Muslim men in Rotherham, England. In recent years Muslim rape gangs have been uncovered in Rochdale, Telford, Aylesbury, Banbury, and in many other British communities.
Not surprisingly, many Britons now longer trust their government to handle such grooming cases fairly.
Some like scrappy English Defence League co-founder Tommy Robinson, a married father of three who has been sounding the alarm about the Islamization of the United Kingdom for years, try to bring transparency to a distrusted legal process.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is an imperfect vehicle for reform. He has hadplenty of legal troubles unrelated to his activism – for example, a conviction for mortgage fraud, and at times he seems a bit too eager to use his fists. But he is doing his countrymen a great service by drawing their attention to tremendous evils in his society that go largely unchallenged.
Whatever misdeeds Robinson may have carried out, they are insignificant compared to the crime waves unleashed on the British public by violent, misogynistic Muslim men who refuse to assimilate and adapt to their new homeland.
Unfortunately, Robinson can’t look for relief to weakling Prime Minister Theresa May, who is an Islamist appeaser. Her Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, is a Muslim.
The deck is stacked against those skeptical of Islam. In the United Kingdom the police now monitor statements on social media and jail those who express frowned-upon sentiments. In the U.K., Big Brother is no longer just something from George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Not surprisingly, Muslim terrorism apologist and Second Amendment-hater Piers Morgan pulled out the usual canards about Islam while attacking Robinson during a recent TV interview.
Based on nothing in particular, Morgan called him a “bigoted lunatic stirring up hatred” as Robinson characterized the Koran as a “violent and cursed book,” adding, “this book is the reason we are in such a mess.”
Piers claimed, “We’re in this mess because people take Islam, they are terrorists and they abuse the nature of Islam and… perpetrate evil.”
Robinson shot back denying Islam is a religion. “Islam is an idea – a bad idea,” he said, echoing ex-Muslim and genital mutilation survivor Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has called Islam “a political theory of conquest that seeks domination by any means it can.”
It was last Friday, May 25, when Robinson was reporting outside Leeds Crown Court in England when he was taken into custody for his most recent act of unauthorized citizen journalism. A tanning salon owner, Robinson filmed on his smartphone the arrival of accused rapists on trial for acts allegedly committed while being part of a so-called Muslim grooming gang. The broadcast consisted of an hour-long Facebook Live stream that within hours had been viewed more than 250,000 times.
The arresting officers informed Robinson he was being taken into custody for suspicion of breaching the peace. Taking footage in a public place of people walking into a courthouse is not in itself a breach of the peace even in the United Kingdom.
But this arrest was for what constituted a second offense under contempt of court laws, and was therefore grounds for Robinson’s probation to be revoked and for a sentence that was previously suspended for the same so-called crime to be carried out. He is now serving a 13-month term in secure custody at Hull Prison.
Because the filming May 25 was of accused persons in an ongoing criminal trial where a publication ban preventing news from being reported had been imposed, the court that day imposed a separate publication ban specifically on reporting what happened to Robinson. As happens in police states, the court ordered the media not to report on Robinson’s case, ostensibly to avoid “a substantial risk of prejudice to the administration of justice in these proceedings" against the rape suspects.
As Leeds Live reported on the events of May 25 days after Robinson’s arrest:Eventually, the 35-year-old was arrested on suspicion of a breach of the peace and was held in the court cells before being taken up to the courtroom to face the trial judge.In a rare move, he was arrested, charged and sentenced within five hours. The video footage was played to Judge Geoffrey Marson QC as Robinson sat in the dock.Contempt of Court legislation largely applies to media publications - but as Tommy Robinson was broadcasting live on Facebook to the 778,280 people who like his page, and his 848,100 followers - he can be deemed a publisher in his own right.Judge Geoffrey Marson QC told him: “I respect everyone’s right to free speech. That’s one of the most important rights that we have.“With those rights come responsibilities. The responsibility to exercise that freedom of speech within the law.“I am not sure you appreciate the potential consequence of what you have done."
Judge Marson claimed that Robinson waving a single smartphone around outside the courthouse could somehow have led to a mistrial declaration in the prosecution of the accused rapists, a claim that seems laughable on its face.
It is more likely Marson does not appreciate the social value of what Robinson, whom he jailed for the same kind of citizen journalism that got the man in trouble in the first place, did outside his courtroom.
Marson, who almost certainly believes he did the right thing in sending Robinson to prison, is an instrument of a corrupt system defending itself.
The U.K. is a country without anything even remotely comparable to the First Amendment, which still has creepy, frightening blasphemy laws, and where truth is not necessarily a defense to a defamation lawsuit.
The American system, readers need to be reminded, is about liberty – the system in England is about order, which is one of the reasons why American patriots had to overthrow the yoke of English tyranny in 1776. Liberty is frightening to intellectually stunted legal bureaucrats obsessed with order, which helps to explain why the English legal system has treated a heroic figure like Robinson so harshly.
As for Robinson, he seems to have predicted his sudden disappearance from the public scene.
In March, Twitter banned Robinson for the Left’s favorite catch-all thought crime, so-called hate speech. He alsoposted an ominous video on YouTube on March 2 titled “I won’t be around for much longer.”
I'm not going to be around for much longer. Between the police, the mainstream media and social media giants in Silicon Valley there is a concerted effort to silence and discredit me. Soon enough they will remove me from social media completely.
So far that sinister plan seems to be working.
Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."
"Tommy this, an' Tommy that ...an' Tommy go away"
By Mark Steyn
https://www.steynonline.com/8675/tommy-this-an-tommy-that-an-tommy-go-away
May 28, 2018
Tommy Robinson being arrested in Leeds last Friday.
On Sunday morning I had the pleasure of appearing with Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron on their Sky Australia show, "Outsiders", to talk mainly about the Obama Administration's attempt to subvert the Trump campaign in the 2016 US election, and in particular the remarkable Anglo-Australian contribution to that effort. (You can view our exchange here - and/or listen to it here, starting about 17 minutes in).
But, just before I came on (about 15 minutes in), Rowan and Ross addressed recent events in the United Kingdom and in particular the fate of, er, someone whose name they weren't permitted to mention but who, um, had been gaoled for, er, something or other... This was somewhat astonishing to me, as I'd assumed empire-wide D-notices had lapsed with the passage of the Statute of Westminster. But mein hosts circled back, cautiously, to the topic toward the end of my interview - and I observed, as I have before, how in almost the entirety of the western world, whenever anyone draws attention to some of the more problematic aspects of Islam, the state cracks down not on the problematic aspects, but on the guy who draws attention thereto. In Britain and Europe, we are an incident or two away from literally "shooting the messenger".
Rowan, Ross and I all knew we were referring to a gentleman by the name of Tommy Robinson. I expect many of you know that, too. But I doubt most Australian viewers had much of a clue about it, and I'm pretty certain the overwhelming majority of his fellow Englishmen are unaware of his fate. As readers may recall, I have met Mr Robinson just once, at an event at the European Parliament in Brussels. He is an engaging, charismatic fellow, albeit a bit rough-hewn for the refined sensibilities of the metropolitan media - although I thought he had the better of a rather somnolent Jeremy Paxman in this BBC interview.
On Friday, Robinson was livestreaming (from his telephone) outside Leeds Crown Court where last week's Grooming Gang of the Week were on trial for "grooming" - the useless euphemism for industrial-scale child gang rape and sex slavery by large numbers of Muslim men with the active connivance (as I pointed out to the Sky guys) of every organ of the state: social workers, police, politicians. Oh, and also the media. Me last year, on my time in a certain municipality about thirty miles south of Leeds:
Tracking down the victims of Rotherham required a bit of elementary detective work on my part, but it's not that difficult. What struck me, as my time in town proceeded, was how few members of the British media had been sufficiently interested to make the effort: The young ladies were unstoppably garrulous in part because, with a few honorable exceptions, so few of their countrymen have ever sought them out to hear their stories.
You can say a lot of things about Tommy Robinson, but he's one of the embarrassingly small number of Britons who recognizes the horror inflicted on those young and vulnerable girls on the receiving end of "diversity" and seeks to do something about it.
So on Friday he was outside the Crown Court in Leeds. He was not demonstrating, or accosting or chanting, or even speaking. He was just pointing his mobile phone upon the scene from a distance. Within minutes, seven coppers showed up in whatever they use instead of a Black Maria these days, tossed him inside it and drove off. In other words, these were not "investigating officers" called to the scene: They showed up with the intent to take him away. Within hours, he was tried, convicted and gaoled - at HM Prison Hull, a Category B chokey, or one level below maximum security. The judge in the case, one Geoffrey Marson, spent all of four minutes on trying, convicting and sentencing Robinson. It is not clear whether that leisurely tribunal included his order expressly forbidding "any report on these proceedings" (the case is Regina vs Yaxley-Lennon because that's Robinson's real name).
Which is why, all the way over in Sydney, Messrs Dean and Cameron were being so vague and cautious. In Britain itself, early online reports at The Mirror, the Scottish Daily Record, The Birmingham Mail and elsewhere vanished instantly, and silence has been maintained, especially on radio and TV, ever since.
The justification for this is Robinson's previous conviction in a previous Grooming Gang of the Week case at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion, the judge sentenced him to three months' imprisonment suspended for eighteen months. That was almost exactly a year ago - so, suspension-wise, he came up six months short when the plods collared him on Friday. That doesn't explain why Judge Marson in Leeds added an additional ten months (ie, he quadrupled his sentence) and disregarded a point that Judge Norton last year took into account - that the British state insists on banging up Robinson in gaols full of Muslim blokes who violently assault him. In Canterbury, Her Honor was sympathetic - up to a point:
I accept what Mr. Kovalevsky [Robinson's barrister] tells me about the dangers that you might face were you to be sent into immediate custody. I have to say it is on a knife edge so far as I am concerned because a very large part of me thinks so what? you could be put into protective custody.
Given that Judge Marson devoted a full four minutes to his drive-thru trial on Friday, I seriously doubt whether 25 seconds of that was devoted to any consideration of "protective custody". Indeed, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the British state would quite like it if Robinson were to be offed in HMP Hull. Yesterday UKIP Euro-MP Gerard Batten Tweeted:
UKIP Peer Malcolm Lord Pearson has written to Home Secretary Sajid Javid today saying : if Tommy is murdered or injured in prison he and others will mount a private prosecution against Mr Javid as an accessory, or for misconduct in public office.
Two and a half years ago, when I appeared at the Danish Parliament to mark the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons, there was some brief discussion of Tommy Robinson. My friend Douglas Murray noted that in 2014 Robinson had been gaoled for ...go on, guess: Islamophobia? Hate crimes? Yanking off some Muslima's hijab on the streets of Luton?
No. The British state sentenced Mr Robinson to eighteen months in jail for misrepresentation on a mortgage application. At HMP Woodhill he was savagely attacked by the Muslim gangs who operate with impunity in many UK prisons. As Douglas remarked, many people make "misrepresentations" on mortgage applications, but the vigor with which the constabulary hunt down this particular mortgage-misrepresenter is unique. In one of the few mainstream publications to risk comment on Friday's events (read it while you can), Rod Liddle underlines the point:
I'm not remotely a fan of Robinson. But I do not like the idea that simply being Robinson is enough to get you arrested.
Just so. With respect to this particular citizen among sixty million, the police function as the Old Bill of attainder: Get Robinson - on anything.
Supposedly Judge Marson ordered a media blackout because news reports would "prejudice" the trial of the groomers. Surely the opposite is true - that widespread reporting of the arrest of Robinson would lead to fewer citizens attempting to "prejudice" the trials of groomers. At the very least, when a man loses his liberty and is gaoled immediately without due process on an instantly quadrupled sentence, it would be nice to think that a free press would be free enough to mull the pros and cons of such an action. But Geoffrey Marson seems to have been minded to teach a more basic lesson - that in England, as in Argentina under the junta, you can be disappeared by the state, and it won't even make the papers.
And the lesson is not lost on those few who question the cozy bipartisan multiculti consensus: Best to fall into line - or at least pipe down.
Rod Liddle notes another aspect - the contrast between the urgency of the flatfeet when it comes to Tommy Robinson and their utter lethargic indifference when it comes to the young women I spoke to in Rotherham and the thousands of others like them in Leeds, Telford, Oxford, [Your Town Here]... West Yorkshire Police in Leeds are not to be confused with South Yorkshire Police in Rotherham. The latter are institutionally corrupt and depraved. As I told Mark Steyn Club members last year of my meeting with the victims of Rotherham:
To Mad Ash and his fellow 'Asians', the likes of Jessica and Katie are 'white slags'. To Her Majesty's Constabulary, they're mere 'Paki-shaggers', and thus unworthy of valuable police resources. The girls recall the night Mad Ash's brother Bannaras was in his car having sex with a twelve-year-old. A 'jam sandwich' - a police cruiser - pulled up alongside, and the officer rolled down the window. 'She's just sucking my c**k, mate,' said Bannaras Hussain.
The cops drove away...
Jessica kept a detailed diary of what had happened to her. She took it to the cops. It 'disappeared'. There was one kindly officer, but the others told him to back off, and, when he didn't, he died in an accident. Katie puts the word 'accident' in air quotes. Rotherham is a land of coincidence. 'Some of these things can happen, but not all of them, not in one town.'
A couple of years after taking them her diary, Jessica went back to see the police. This time the detective told her none of the officers who'd witnessed her abuse would support her story because if they gave evidence at trial they'd wind up 'getting in the shit'. She left the room having taken the precaution of covertly recording the conversation. And thus the cover-up began to unravel...
It is striking to read Judge Norton's sentencing remarks from last year (Judge Marson's do not appear to be available: he rules in darkness). Her Honor huffs and puffs about Mr Robinson referring to "Muslim paedophiles" and "Muslim child rapists". I can appreciate that that might be vaguely annoying if one were a non-paedophile Muslim - although evidently not so annoying that spokespersons for the wider Muslim community ever rouse themselves to object to all the industrial-scale sex slavery. But it is a fact that in 21st-century England - in Yorkshire, in Shropshire, in Lancashire, in Oxfordshire, in the Home Counties - child-rape gangs are Muslim. It is a phenomenon, one that has never existed previously in the British Isles and one which will continue and metastasize until there is honest debate about it.
And, while Judge Norton is evidently outraged by Tommy Robinson's ill manners in referring to Muslims who rape children as "Muslim child rapists", one notices that neither she nor anybody else display any such outrage about the ruined lives of thousands of victims of men who get away with their evil for years ...because officialdom has chosen to prioritize "Islamophobia" over real crimes.
One more thought from my trip to Rotherham:
The cops drove away. It must have been an abiding image for Jessica, for Katie, for Bannaras Hussain's twelve-year-old, for the girl who would later testify that all three brothers pissed on her like 'a pack of animals', for a thousand and more 'Paki-shaggers' and 'white slags' all over Rotherham, year in year out, for decades: The police driving away ...and leaving them.
...and heading off to arrest one man with a cellphone, over and over and over.
~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with a Tales for Our Timesampler for those who've yet to hear any of our audio adventures, with yours truly introducing and reading Conan Doyle, H G Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and more. On Saturday morning we presented the results of our "Oh Happy Day" competition: It wasn't exactly a D-notice, but we were under considerable legal pressure from a vexatious litigant. Our Saturday movie date offered contrasting movie treatments of an ingenious stage thriller: Dial RM for Remake. And for Memorial Day we offered a song for the season, some thoughts onwar and sacrifice, and a word from the real talent in the family. If you were busy with your own Memorial Day observances, we hope you'll want to check out one or two of the foregoing as this brand new week begins. We shall have a Tales for Our Time birthday bonus to launch the start of our second year later this week.
In June I'll be back in my hometown of Toronto next month to celebrate the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and to accept the signal honour of the very firstGeorge Jonas Freedom Award. Hope to see you there.
Thank you so much for all the Mark Steyn Club subscription renewals this past month - and for all the new memberships, too. Tomorrow, Tuesday, we will be presenting another of our Clubland Q&As live around the planet at 4pm North American Eastern - and we may return to the subject of Tommy Robinson and related matters. For more information on the Steyn Club, see here - and don't forget our limited-time Gift Membership.
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