Understanding the Impeachment Charade

By Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel
https://townhall.com/columnists/tuckercarlsonandneilpatel/2019/09/27/understanding-the-impeachment-charade-n2553796
September 27, 2019



Washington scandals are moving at a record pace. It was only a week ago that The New York Times launched its unfair hit piece on Brett Kavanaugh. This is the Trump-era news cycle. Scandals that used to go on for months now seem to end in hours. Nothing illustrates this better than the bizarre Ukraine story we're all living through. A week ago, no one had even heard of it. Then we were on the brink of impeachment because of it, and now it seems it may be over already.

The same angry news anchors who brought you Stormy Daniels and the Russia hoax now want you to know Big Orange's days in the White House are over. Why? Because Donald Trump, they say, threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine did something bad to Joe Biden and his family. Supposedly, Trump was finished.

Once again, the mob turned out to be wrong. The administration released a transcript of the president's phone call with the Ukrainian head of state, and it says none of the things the news anchors claimed it would. Read it for yourself. It's online. Try to find the extortion in there. There isn't any. Trump never even mentions military aid. There's certainly something unseemly about a president asking a foreign government to investigate an American citizen, but it's not illegal, and it's not all that different from three Democratic senators' writing a letter to Ukraine just last year demanding investigations into Trump.

Now that the call turns out to be nothing like what the media told us it would be, some on the left have started a conspiracy theory that the transcript can't be real; it must be doctored. These conspiracies aren't confined to weird corners of the internet. Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff have already questioned the trustworthiness of the transcript, despite the fact that there's no evidence of wrongdoing. Numerous career national security officials -- many not fans of our president -- have access to the original call and would have to be in on any conspiracy.

What's driving all this insanity? Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, has been more honest about it than most. Green admitted it straight up: "I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get reelected."

Lots of Democrats, including many of today's party leaders, stood up when Bill Clinton was impeached to give impassioned speeches about the perils of taking away the American people's choice. Here's today's impeachment ringleader, Rep. Jerry Nadler, in 1998:

"The impeachment of a president is an undoing of a national election. And one of the reasons we all feel so angry about what they are doing is that they are ripping asunder our votes. They are telling us that our votes don't count."

And here's Nancy Pelosi in 1998 on the hatred behind the Clinton impeachment push:

"Today, the Republican majority is not judging the president with fairness but impeaching him with a vengeance ... We are here today because the Republicans in the House are paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton. And until the Republicans free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer."

Sadly, Nadler and Pelosi were right in 1998. Republicans should not have impeached Clinton, and they paid the price. Democrats today hate Trump. It's not about justice or truth. What they care about is winning the 2020 presidential election. Democratic leaders have decided that impeaching Trump is essential if they're going to win next year. So they're staking everything on this bizarre, flimsy scandal that the rest of us can barely understand.

Personal attacks on Trump have proven ineffective. If calling him a racist or a traitor actually worked, Hillary Clinton would be running for reelection right about now. That's not going to work. If you want to beat Trump, make a case on the issues. He won on the issues. So make a countercase. But the geniuses can't figure that out.

In the end, the loser in this impeachment nonsense is likely to be Biden, who, you will recall, is the apparent front-runner. He's supposed to be the safe choice, the guy who's going to reenergize the Obama coalition and win back the White House. Yet Democrats have now in effect demanded that we spend the next six months talking about Biden and his son's alleged corruption. That's what's at the core of this Ukraine story.

The issues aren't really complicated. Why in the world would a Ukrainian company pay Hunter Biden $50,000 a month? We still haven't heard an answer. If we're talking about Ukraine and impeachment, we're talking about Biden's alleged corruption. That can't help his campaign for president. In fact, it's likely to tank it. It looks like sabotage, really. They must have gamed this up. Or maybe Democrats have just become so obsessed with destroying Trump that they're accidentally destroying themselves.

A Detailed Account of America’s Greatest Political Scandal

By Julie Kelly
https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/24/a-detailed-account-of-americas-greatest-political-scandal/
September 24, 2019

In early 2017, as the shocking story of how the Obama Administration weaponized the world’s most powerful agencies against Donald Trump began to unfold, very few journalists were willing to confront that scandal amid the cacophony of Trump-Russia collusion. Andrew McCarthy was one of them.

From the pages of National Review to the set of Fox News, McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, explained complex legal procedures in layman’s terms. Americans unfamiliar with FBI counterintelligence probes or the workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or Special Counsel rules were educated by McCarthy in a way that made it easy for the non-lawyer to grasp. McCarthy, a humble, humorous, and gracious man by nature, offered his expertise without the self-gratifying puffery ingrained in so many prosecutors. (Think James Comey.)

His new book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, includes and expands on this crucial work. In careful detail, McCarthy deconstructs the Trump-Russia collusion ruse; the wind-up of Crossfire Hurricane, the unprecedented investigation into a U.S. presidential campaign; and the ramifications of one of the biggest political scandals in American history. In addition to his knowledge and insight, McCarthy knows many of the players involved personally, including former FBI Director James Comey, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney.

Further, McCarthy is no fawning booster of the president so his coverage of the scandal was not in the service of protecting Trump, his family, or his presidency. In fact, McCarthy contributed to the infamous “Against Trump” issue published by National Review in February 2016. “The threat against us has metastasized in our eighth year under a president who quite consciously appeases the enemy,” McCarthy wrote. “But the remedy is not a president oblivious of the enemy.”

The ball of collusion, as McCarthy describes at the end of his 456-page book, is “counterintelligence as a pretext for criminal investigation in search of a crime; a criminal investigation as a pretext for impeachment without an impeachable offense; an impeachment inquiry as a pretext for barring Donald Trump from reelection; and all of it designed as a straightjacket around his presidency.” (Don’t let the number of pages scare you out of reading it; the author’s writing takes up about 350 pages.)

The book’s 18 chapters cover a range of central and corollary subjects. The biggest takeaway is how this entire scandal fused the competing interests of the nation’s biggest egos—some of whom clearly suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. This list includes the president, former president Obama, Comey, Mueller, former CIA director John Brennan, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, and the collective Messiah complex of the Washington bureaucratic establishment and the national news media. McCarthy exposes the “small world” of partisan operatives, sycophants, apparatchiks, and deep pockets that populate the Acela Corridor and fuel the day-to-day turbulence of the American political climate.

Clinton Connections

For the last three years, Americans have been tormented by a dangerous power struggle waged by this claque of political actors who will use any means necessary in order to prevail. It is a black mark in history that will fascinate future historians; those historians undoubtedly will draw heavily from McCarthy’s book as a comprehensive account of what happened between 2016 and 2019, when Robert Mueller finally had to admit there was no evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to influence the stunning outcome of the 2016 presidential election. As someone who has covered this scandal closely, I learned important new information from McCarthy about the timeline and the culprits involved.

McCarthy offers crucial background about the financial and political ties between Russia and the Clintons—yet somehow Hillary Clinton’s troubling past related to Russia did not provoke any FBI investigation. “Candidate Clinton and her husband had disturbing Russia ties, too,” McCarthy explained in the book’s introduction. “The Clinton campaign had not just Russia contacts; it had Bill Clinton meeting with Putin and taking a huge payment while Russia had important business before the State Department run by his wife,” McCarthy outlines in chapter 10. “It had Russian money pouring into the Clinton Foundation; its chairman, John Podesta, sat on the board of . . . a company into which Putin’s venture capital firm invested $35 million.”

But Carter Page gave a speech in Moscow.

A Multi-Pronged Plot

McCarthy provides an in-depth analysis of Washington’s unsettling relationship with Russia and Ukraine. Chapter four is a must-read: McCarthy explains how the Obama Administration manipulated intelligence for political purposes—yet another egregious example of how the Obama White House got away with bad behavior while their lapdogs in the media either ignored it or covered it up.

“No administration in American history was more practiced in the dark arts of politicizing intelligence than President Obama’s,” McCarthy writes. “Examples are legion.” This unchecked malfeasance led to the creation of the fabricated collusion ruse and the empowerment of ego-maniacs such as Brennan and Comey.

The next several chapters delve into the multi-pronged plot to sabotage the Trump campaign and derail Trump’s presidency. McCarthy confirms that—contrary to dubious claims by the New York Times and faithfully regurgitated by Trump foes—the FBI investigation was not initiated by an alleged drunken conversation between Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos and an Australian diplomat in the spring of 2016.

That ruse—which McCarthy calls an “unlikely story”—was an attempt to camouflage the way the dossier compiled by British political operative Christopher Steele, who was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, supplied the probable cause to launch Crossfire Hurricane, the official name of the counterintelligence probe into four Trump associates, three of whom are named in the dossier. (A document filled with still-unproven accusations.)

“Steele’s project was not intelligence-gathering,” McCarthy explains. “It was the crafting of a campaign narrative about a traitorous Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy. That’s why Steele and [Fusion GPS chief Glenn] Simpson peddled the information to the media at the same time Steele was feeding it to the FBI and the Justice Department. The Clinton campaign’s Steele dossier was the sheer political spinning of rank rumor.”

“This Should Never Happen”

McCarthy profiles the various spies deployed to infiltrate and monitor the Trump campaign, easily debunking another faux media narrative that the Obama Administration didn’t spy on Trump.

“The indignant anger over questions about the Crossfire Hurricane undercover operations . . . is misplaced,” he writes in Chapter 12.

The book’s chapter on the FISA warrant against Carter Page offers a crucial primer in advance of the anticipated report by Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s Inspector General, on how Comey’s FBI manipulated the secret court to get an order to spy on Page for a year. McCarthy admits his own miscalculation about how FISA might be abused after procedures were loosened following the 9/11 terror attacks.

“Back then, it seemed ridiculous to believe the FBI and the Justice Department would resort to FISA pretextually,” he concedes. “I was wrong. What I didn’t factor in was the possibility that, for political reasons, the upper ranks of the FBI and the Justice Department might decide to do an investigation by themselves. This should never happen.”

But in Trump’s case, of course, it did.

Comey’s “weasel moves” (that he insists he didn’t make but did repeatedly make when it came to Donald Trump) led to his ouster in May 2017. McCarthy is critical of the president’s handling of Comey’s firing, an assessment which is up for dispute. I strongly disagree that Comey was undeserving of his humiliating public dismissal because he “had served the United States well in many capacities over many years.” Comey will be—and should be—remembered for how he defiled the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency to gratify Barack Obama’s contempt for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The inspector general recommended three criminal charges against Comey in his latest report; it’s very likely Comey will be implicated in more abuses as investigations into his conduct continue. But McCarthy does give an otherwise fair description of one of the most bitter president-FBI director relationships of all time.

The final chapter pores over the stretch of time between Comey’s firing and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which Comey successfully prompted by leaking one of his memos documenting a private conversation with Trump to the New York Times.

“The collusion narrative had served its purpose,” McCarthy concludes. “The collusion narrative, seeded by the Obama administration, tilted by intelligence leaks and tended by constant media care accomplished its objectives. A special counsel . . . was imposed, despite the absence of criminal predicate, to monitor the Trump presidency.”

The Scandal Is Far from Over

If there is any criticism of McCarthy’s book, it is that he gives short shrift to the insidious role played by the anti-Trump news media. While McCarthy offers some examples of how news organizations such as the Times, CNN and the Washington Post eagerly reported classified information to fuel the collusion plotline, the destructive conduct of the media—including reporters, columnists, editors, cable news hosts, and various contributors on both sides of the Trump-hating political aisle—warranted more coverage. For example, MSNBC, which served as a nonstop organ of the collusion deception, only received three mentions in the book.

To his credit, however, McCarthy generously commends other journalists such as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, Tablet Magazine’s Lee Smith, the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross, and the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel for their invaluable reporting on the scandal.

Even though the Mueller investigation is complete, this scandal is far from over. The public impatiently awaits the results of pending inspector general reports; criminal inquiries into McCabe and former FBI General Counsel James Baker; and an expansive investigation launched by Attorney General William Barr into what the Obama Administration did in 2016 and 2017 to try to destroy Donald Trump.

My guess is that McCarthy will have a chance to write a follow-up to this exceptional book.

Hating Kavanaugh, Killing Journalism

The New York Times took its best shot at Justice Kavanaugh -- and destroyed itself.

By Daniel Greenfield
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/hating-kavanaugh-killing-journalism-daniel-greenfield/
September 18, 2019

Robin Pogrebin, a culture reporter for The New York Times, and Kate Kelly, a Wall Street reporter for the same paper, got together to write The Education of Brett Kavanaugh despite being curiously unqualified.

In sharp contrast to Carrie Severino, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and chief counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network, who co-authored Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation, neither Pogrebin nor Kelly are especially familiar with the world they’re writing about.

And it shows.

Why send a business journalist and a culture reporter to write a book about a legal battle in Washington D.C.? There are two answers. The Education of Brett Kavanaugh is being published by Penguin Random House. Pogrebin is the daughter of leftist feminist author Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Pogrebin’s books, including her last major book Deborah, Golda and Me (Pogrebin has turned on Israel, allying with anti-Israel groups and endorsing boycotts of parts of Israel) have tended to be published by Penguin.

That’s the less cynical answer. The more cynical answer is that nobody actually cared.

The only kind of Kavanaugh book that there would be a market for in the environs of the New York Times would be a sore loser text providing ammunition for impeaching and removing Kavanaugh. It’s no coincidence that shortly after Pogrebin and Kelly debuted an article promoting their book with another freshman year sexual allegation against Kavanaugh, three 2020 Democrats called for his impeachment.

That’s not good timing. It’s a campaign.

Just to drive the point home, Kelly retweeted a reply from a media figure declaring, “He can be impeached by the house.”

Pogrebin and Kelly’s New York Times piece neglected to inform readers that the allegation had been brushed away by their supposed victim and that their source, Max Stier, had been Bill Clinton’s lawyer. Kavanaugh had worked for Ken Starr on impeachment while Stier had worked to defend Clinton against impeachment. Reporting that the accusation isn’t new, that it was not backed up by the victim and that the accuser had once fought on the opposite side of Kavanaugh in one of the country’s biggest legal battles were pieces of information that The Times thought readers shouldn’t be distracted by.

Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/hating-kavanaugh-killing-journalism-daniel-greenfield/

Hillary Clinton's Russia collusion IOU: The answers she owes America

By John Solomon
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/446736-hillary-clintons-russia-collusion-iou-the-answers-she-owes-america
June 3, 2019


(Getty Images)

During the combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before America’s most powerful political woman.

The pattern of political IOUs paid to the Clinton Foundation was so pernicious that the State Department even tried to execute a special agreement with the charity to avoid the overt appearance of “pay-to-play” policy.

Still, the money continued to flow by the millions of dollars, from foreigners and Americans alike who were perceived to be indebted to the Clinton machine or in need of its help.

It’s time for the American public to call in their own IOU on political transparency.

The reason? Never before — until 2016 — had the apparatus of a U.S. presidential candidate managed to sic the weight of the FBI and U.S. intelligence community on a rival nominee during an election, and by using a foreign-fed, uncorroborated political opposition research document.

But Clinton’s campaign, in concert with the Democratic Party and through their shared law firm, funded Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier which, it turns out, falsely portrayed Republican Donald Trump as a treasonous asset colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin to hijack the U.S. election.

Steele went to the FBI to get an investigation started and then leaked the existence of the investigation, with the hope of sinking Trump’s presidential aspirations.

On its face, it is arguably the most devious political dirty trick in American history and one of the most overt intrusions of a foreigner into a U.S. election.

It appears the Clinton machine knew that what it was doing was controversial. That’s why it did backflips to disguise the operation from Congress and the public, and in its Federal Election Commission (FEC) spending reports.

Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) used the law firm of Perkins Coie to hire Glenn Simpson’s research firm, Fusion GPS, which then hired Steele — several layers that obfuscated transparency, kept the operation off the campaign’s public FEC reports and gave the Clintons plausible deniability.

But Steele’s first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI’s imagination. So the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr — whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion — to push his Trump dirt to the top of the FBI.

Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele’s dossier to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the FBI, too.

Then Steele and, separately, longtime Clinton protégé Cody Shearer went to the State Department to get the story out, increasing pressure on the FBI.

In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure — and bad intel — until an investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

To finish the mission, Simpson and Steele leaked the existence of the FBI investigation to the news media to ensure it would hurt Trump politically. Simpson even called the leaks a “hail Mary” that failed.

Trump won, however. And now, thanks to special counsel Robert Mueller, we know the Russia-collusion allegations relentlessly peddled by Team Clinton were bogus. But not before the FBI used the Clinton-funded, foreign-created research to get a total of four warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, transition and presidency from October 2016 through the following autumn.

The Clinton team’s dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit job on Trump.

After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, it’s time for the house to call in its IOU.

Hillary Clinton owes us answers — lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while doing many high-profile media interviews.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said Friday night on Fox News that it’s time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew it.

Here are 10 essential questions:

1. In January 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a formal investigative request for documents and written answers from your campaign. Do you plan to comply?
2. Please identify each person in your campaign who was involved with, or aware of, hiring Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele.
   
3. Please identify each person in your campaign, including Perkins Coie lawyers, who were aware that Steele provided information to the FBI or State Department, and when they learned it.
   
4. Describe any information you and your campaign staff received, or were briefed on, before Election Day that was derived from the work of Simpson, Steele, Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr or Perkins Coie and that tried to connect Trump, his campaign or his business empire with Russia.
   
5. Please describe all contacts your campaign had before Election Day with or about the following individuals: Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, former foreign policy scholar Stefan Halper and Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud
6. Did you or any senior members of your campaign, including lawyers such as Michael Sussmann, have any contact with the CIA, its former Director John Brennan, current Director Gina Haspel, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe?
   
7. Describe all contacts your campaign had with Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal concerning Trump, Russia and Ukraine.
   
8. Describe all contacts you and your campaign had with DNC contractor Alexander Chalupa, the Ukraine government, the Ukraine Embassy in the United States or the U.S. Embassy in Kiev concerning Trump, Russia or former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
   
9. Why did your campaign and the Democratic Party make a concerted effort to portray Trump as a Russian asset?
   
10. Given that investigations by a House committee, a Senate committee and a special prosecutor all have concluded there isn’t evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, do you regret the actions by your campaign and by Steele, Simpson and Sussmann to inject these unfounded allegations into the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and the news media?

Hillary Clinton owes us answers to each of these questions. She should skip the lawyer-speak and answer them with the candor worthy of an elder American stateswoman.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.

Let’s Call the Russian Collusion ‘Hoax’ What it Really Is

By Roger Kimball
https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/25/lets-call-the-russian-collusion-hoax-what-it-really-is/
May 25, 2019


Robert Mueller, James Comey, James Clapper, Christopher Steele and John Brennan (Clockwise from top left)

During the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai in 1932, the Austrian essayist Karl Kraus was anguishing over the placement of commas in a column. It might seem futile at such a moment, he told a friend, but “if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.”

Hyperbolic? Perhaps. But the general point holds: words matter, as do the their appurtenances, punctuation. (After all, “Let’s eat Grandma” means something quite different from “Let’s eat, Grandma.”)

George Orwell made a kindred observation about the importance of having the courage to call things by their real names. Euphemism, the counterfeit of good manners, is the enemy of truth, which is the only ally worth having.

I have been thinking about this constellation of ideas recently as the news has been full of talk about the “Russian collusion hoax.” Use of the term “hoax” got a big boost in the aftermath of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the question of whether there was actionable cooperation, coordination, or collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Two years, $34 million, and a wide swath of debilitating rumor, innuendo, and unrelated indictments and prosecutions later and we know that the answer to that question is “No, there was no cooperation, coordination, or collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.”

Anyway, we know that if we haven’t locked ourselves in the bunker bulwark, closed our eyes, put our fingers in our ears, and chanted continually the NeverTrump mantras.

I myself have deployed the term “hoax” to describe what happened to Donald Trump and his colleagues—and to the American people—during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. But a couple of friends have pointed out how inadequate the term “hoax” is for what just happened and—to at least some extent—is still happening in the machinery of our government.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, a hoax is “1. an act intended to deceive or trick” or “2. Something that has been established or accepted by fraudulent means.”

The spectacle of round-the-clock hostile media coverage of the Trump-Russia fantasy certainly was intended to “deceive or trick.” And certainly we learn almost every day a little more about how the various investigations were started on the basis of “fraudulent means” (here’s looking at you Christopher Steele).

But thinking about it, I conclude that the term “hoax” is wholly inadequate to describe the enormity of the political scandal that was perpetrated against Donald Trump, against the office of the president, and ultimately against the American people.

For one thing, the word “hoax” implies something jocular or prankish. The joke might be malicious, but it is still intended to be humorous. There was nothing at all humorous about what just happened in our political life, though the hysteria of the anti-Trump chorus—the pussy-behatted females complaining about how “crude” Trump was, the “comedian” who paraded about with a bloody doll’s head representing the president, the tears and imprecations and jeremiads disgorged by the press and by Trump’s political enemies: all that did have a sort of ghastly if pathetic humor about it.

But when we step back and consider what actually happened over the past three years—and, more, what almost happened—it is clear that the word “hoax” does not begin to cover the reality of what I have been calling for many months the greatest political scandal in the history of the American republic.

Does that, too, sound hyperbolic, like worrying about commas when Shanghai is burning? Some people think so. I’ve have several times said why I think they are wrong.

Perhaps the best way of summarizing my disagreement is by suggesting an alternative to the word “hoax.” It’s not a novel suggestion.

On the contrary, it’s often been used in concert with or as a synonym for “hoax.” But I think it is a better word in this context because it expresses the malign intention behind the multifarious activities directed against candidate Trump and then President Trump. The word I have in mind is “coup.”

Again, I know that that is a dramatic, maybe a melodramatic, word. But I think it accurately expresses the deliberate effort by actors in the Obama Administration, including by President Obama himself, to assure Hillary Clinton’s victory by destroying the reputation of Donald Trump. “Most Presidents leave office,” the commentator L. J. Keith recently wrote, “and essentially step back from public life. Not Barack Obama. Shellshocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and Clinton set in motion a series of events that will forever tar his presidency, and decimate the concept of a peaceful transition of power.”

There have been scores if not hundreds or even thousands of columns written about every aspect of this complex story. We all know by now about the deployment of shadowy characters like Alexander Downer, the former Australian Ambassador to the UK and Hillary Clinton supporter (Downer engineered a $25 million contribution from the Australian government to the Clinton Foundation). Downer had drinks with George Papadopoulos, a minor Trump campaign aide, and thereby helped get the ball rolling on the Russia investigation. For a nanosecond, the New York Times said that was where it all started.

But Downer was just the tip—or maybe just a tip—of the iceberg. One of the remarkable things about this story is how many people it has involved and how long it has taken to get a full headcount of the anti-Trump team. Remember when Joseph Mifsud’s name first surfaced? Or Stefan Halper’s? Remember when we learned about Peter Strzok and his alleged paramour, Lisa Page? Then there was Bruce Ohr, former associate deputy attorney general: he had his part to play in the drama, too. But wait! It turned out that his wife is Nellie Ohr and that she worked for Fusion GPS, the company that hired Christopher Steele. Gosh. And what about Steele himself? When we were first introduced to him, he was a former British spy, a “highly respected” operative, who had got the goods on Donald Trump.

Remember how long it took before we learned that Steele had been paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary campaign, and that his dossier was not just “unverified” and “salacious,” as James Comey put it, but was in fact nothing but a scurrilous piece of opposition research made up out of “random” scraps of gossip that Steele had assembled from highly dubious sources? Nevertheless, it was the dossier, and nothing but the dossier, that provided the unverified “evidence” for the supposedly “verified” FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page, an American citizen, and hence to spy on the campaign and then the administration of Donald Trump.

And on and on this kaleidoscopic onion has gone, as one layer after the next has been peeled back only reveal another layer and additional personalities.

Finally, however, I believe we are nearing the hollow center of the onion. The dogged Attorney General William Barr is proceeding methodically, inexorably to lay bare the origins of the spurious Russia investigation.

There are still many details we do not know. Some we may never know. And dogged though Barr may be, many of the principal actors in this attempted coup will probably never be held to account. Will Hillary Clinton? Will Barack Obama? I doubt it.

In fact, it was not so long ago that I was resigned to the eventuality that no one would be held to account, not John Brennan or James Comey, not Peter Strzok or Lisa Page, not James Clapper or Sally Yates or Samantha Power.

Barr’s arrival on the scene has made me rethink my resignation. But whatever happens to those individuals, it now seems clear that Barr’s investigation will reveal for all to see that what began in 2016 or even 2015 and continued until and beyond the day that Robert Mueller deposited his nearly 500-page report clearing the president of “collusion” was not a hoax at all. It was an attempted coup.

We should face up to that unpleasant fact and call things by their real names. The actions taken by the Obama Administration threatened not just Donald Trump and his presidency but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States. As L.J. Keith observed, “Even in the most contentious elections and after disputed results, there was never been this sort of dangerous, systematic, deliberate rejection of the will of the people. The abrogation of the constitution to use extrajudicial methods to destroy the incoming president. It is the very definition of a coup.”

Indeed. So let’s call it what it is. A coup.

Clinton Projection Syndrome

By Victor Davis Hanson
https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/01/clinton-projection-syndrome/
May 1, 2019


Hillary Clinton speaks during the Time 100 Summit event on April 23, 2019 in New York.(Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

Hillary Clinton recently editorialized about the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller’s massive report. She concluded of the report’s assorted testimonies and inside White House gossip concerning President Trump’s words and actions that “any other person engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted.”

Psychologists might call her claims “projection.” That is the well-known psychological malady of attributing bad behavior to others as a means of exonerating one’s own similar, if not often even worse, sins.

After 22 months of investigation and $34 million spent, the Mueller report concluded that there was no Trump-Russia collusion—the main focus of the investigation—even though that unfounded allegation dominated print and televised media’s speculative headlines for the last two years.

While Mueller’s report addressed various allegations of Trump’s other roguery, the special counsel did not recommend that the president be indicted for obstruction of justice in what Mueller had just concluded was not a crime of collusion.

What Mueller strangely did do—and what most federal prosecutors do not do—was cite all the allegedly questionable behavior of a target who has just been de facto exonerated by not being indicted.

What Mueller did not do was explain that much of the evidence he found useful was clearly a product of unethical and illegal behavior. In the case of the false charge of “collusion,” the irony was rich.

Russians likely fed salacious but untrue allegations about Trump to ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who was being paid in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to find dirt on Trump.

The Russians rightly assumed that Steele would lap up their fantasies, seed them among Trump-hating officials in the Barack Obama administration and thereby cause hysteria during the election, the transition and, eventually, the Trump presidency.

Russia succeeded in sowing such chaos, thanks ultimately to Clinton, who likely had broken federal laws by using a British national and, by extension, Russian sources to warp an election. Without the fallacious Steele dossier, the entire Russian collusion hoax never would have taken off.

Without Steele’s skullduggery, there likely would have been no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court-approved surveillance of Trump aide Carter Page. There might have been no FBI plants inserted into the Trump campaign. There might have been no subsequent leaking to the press of classified documents to prompt a Trump collusion investigation.

Given the Steele travesty and other past scandals, it is inexplicable that Clinton has not been indicted.

Her lawlessness first made headlines 25 years ago, when she admitted that her cattle futures broker had defied odds of one in 31 trillion by investing $1,000 from her trading account and returning a profit of nearly $100,000. Clinton failed to report about $6,500 in profits to the IRS. She initially lied about her investment windfall by claiming she made the wagers herself. She even fantastically alleged that she mastered cattle futures trading by reading financial newspapers.

To paraphrase Clinton herself, anyone else would have been indicted for far less.

The reason that foreign oligarchs are no longer donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and that Bill Clinton is not being offered $500,000 for speaking appearances in Moscow, is simply because Hillary Clinton is not secretary of state. She is no longer in a public position to hector her colleagues into approving pro-Russian commercial deals, such as the one that gave Russian interests access to North American uranium.

As secretary of state, Clinton also sidestepped the law by setting up a home-brewed email server. She transmitted classified documents over this insecure route and lied about it. And she destroyed some 30,000 emails that were in effect under subpoena. Anyone else would have been indicted for far less.

In truth, Clinton was at the heart of the entire Russian collusion hoax. Even after the election, she kept fueling it to blame Russia-Trump conspiracies for her stunning defeat in 2016. Unable to acknowledge her own culpability as a weak and uninspiring candidate, Clinton formally joined the post-election “resistance” and began whining about collusion. That excuse seemed preferable to explaining why she blew a huge lead and lost despite favorable media coverage and superior funding.

For much of her professional life, Hillary Clinton had acted above and beyond the law on the assumption that as the wife of a governor, as first lady of the United States, as a senator from New York, as secretary of state and as a two-time candidate for the presidency, she could ignore the law without worry over the consequences.

For Clinton now to project that the president should be indicted suggests she is worried about her own potential indictment. And she is rightly concerned that for the first time in 40 years, neither she nor her husband is serving in government or running for some office, and therefore could be held accountable.

Release of Mueller report finally sets Trump — and America — free

By Michael Goodwin

https://nypost.com/2019/04/18/release-of-mueller-report-finally-sets-trump-and-america-free/

April 18, 2019

Good God, free at last, free at last.

Donald Trump is now free to be president without the cloud that hovered over him since his election. No president ever faced, let alone survived, a probe as fierce and determined as this one.

Cleared of false charges that threatened to end his presidency, Trump can be forgiven for gloating and rubbing a little salt into the wounds of his tormentors with a jab about serving another “10 to 14 years.”

Naturally, the hysterics are hysterical over that one. They can’t even take a joke.

Yet Trump’s great victory is not his alone. The release of the special counsel report marks a day of freedom for all of America and sends shock waves around the world.

As Attorney General William Barr said, the finding by special counsel Robert Mueller that nobody in the United States knowingly helped Russia interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign “is something that all Americans can and should be grateful to have confirmed.”

Take that, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. Deal with it, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler. You should be celebrating the outcome, not denouncing it.

The reality was that, while Russia dangled the bait, no one from the Trump campaign or anyone else took it. Those findings stand as a refreshing testament to the character of our people and the sanctity of the election.

So hide your head in shame, Hillary Clinton. You started the false charge of collusion because you couldn’t accept defeat, and now your name will be synonymous with the most destructive hoax in American history.

But reaching this uplifting conclusion took 23 months and held the entire nation hostage for half a presidential term over the possibility that the president had conspired with a foreign power to steal the election, then illegally sought to hide the evidence.

The unprecedented accusations carried the horrifying possibility that the president was a traitor, a finding that would have been catastrophic for our country and its standing in the world.

Had any of the charges been true, the president would have been impeached, convicted and removed from office. He likely then would have faced criminal charges as a private citizen. There would be no pardon to a man of historic venality.

Such a traumatic experience could have driven a stake through the heart of American exceptionalism and killed the image of a shining city on a hill. The beacon to the world would have been seen as just another corrupt country, a laughingstock worthy of contempt.

On many days, fears of that outcome dominated the headlines, as when the media reported this or that development suggesting Trump’s goose was cooked. We now know those reports, nearly all based on anonymous sources, were wrong either in their facts or import.

Take that, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC.

By abandoning their standards, Big Media got the biggest story wrong and misled their readers and viewers — yet refuse to admit it. They are the true dead-enders, still searching for a thread to justify their jihad against Trump.

There were other ramifications, too. Members of Congress of both parties surely calculated the odds of Trump’s survival in deciding how to vote on tax cuts, the border and other matters.

Perhaps last year’s midterm election would have turned out differently if voters knew then what they know now.

Think how much of the stark polarization we see every day is ­owing to the lingering possibility that Trump might be an illegitimate president. Think how families and friendships have been torn asunder, how many heated arguments took place in offices and factory floors and classrooms over the prospect that a puppet of Vladimir Putin sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

To this day, many people who despise Trump can’t articulate why, other than that they believe the election was somehow tainted. They were 100 percent wrong.

The decent, fair-minded people among them will now concede their error.

And what of international affairs? There can be little doubt that both friends and adversaries gave consideration to the investigation when determining their relationship with the United States. They would be fools not to.

Did the probe affect China’s position on trade, or North Korea’s on nukes? You can be sure that Iran is not happy that Trump has been cleared. That tells us something.

We can’t know all the possible ramifications, but we don’t need to know them. The bottom line is ­settled.

The Mueller report, like the investigation itself, is exhaustive in chasing down every possibility that somebody, anybody, linked to the Trump campaign sold out America.

The probers put the screws, often unfairly, to tangential players on the chance that they would give up the president in exchange for leniency.

None did because they had nothing to give up.

Certainly Michael Cohen tried. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer made it his mission to bring down the man he had sworn to take a bullet for. Cohen, in a bid to save himself, switched sides and fired all his bullets at Trump, to no great effect.

Even Thursday he was still trying to sell his soul, but there were no takers. He begins his prison sentence next month.

In fairness, Trump does not escape the Mueller report unscathed. He apparently did lie to the press about whether he helped draft a statement on behalf of Donald Trump Jr., and media reports were correct that he wanted to fire Mueller and searched for ways to make it happen.

Yet the president who is notorious for churning through staff was lucky that some aides were brave enough to ignore disastrous orders. Former White House counsel Don McGahn refused to fire Mueller, and Trump was unsuccessful in getting others to do it, too.

Lucky for him. Had he gotten his way, Trump might be facing an ­obstruction charge.

Yet it must also be noted that not only was Trump innocent of collusion, and so had no corrupt reason to obstruct justice, but also fully cooperated with Mueller.

Not once did he assert executive privilege or try to stop anyone from testifying. Indeed, McGahn spent a remarkable 30 hours with Mueller’s team, with Trump’s approval. Clearly, the president believed he had done nothing wrong and had nothing to hide.

This is not the end of Russia, Russia, Russia. Democrats in Congress can’t let go because they have put all their eggs in the rotten basket. They will do all they can to delay the inevitable, but eventually must get back to governing instead of fetishizing impeachment — or they will find themselves in the ­political wilderness.

More important is the hope that the other side of the story will be investigated with the same intense scrutiny. America needs to know whether law enforcement and intelligence agencies under Barack Obama tried to tip the election to Clinton, then undermine Trump’s presidency.

Get a good lawyer, Jim Comey. You, too, John Brennan and James Clapper.

Much evidence already gathered says they are guilty, but we are far from a certain conclusion. Thankfully, Barr has pledged himself to the painstaking task of investigating the investigators.

So it matters not whether we are at the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end. All that matters is that, sooner or later, somehow or another, America gets the full, unbiased truth of what happened in 2016.

In this season of holidays, pray for that.