Dirty Russians: We know they interfere in the 2016 elections. No collusion on the Republican side, but it appears there was some cooperation between the Democrats and “Russian agents” that created much of the division our nation has been through.
The Russian desire to divide our country, stoke hatred and manipulate our media has worked. All sides have taken the bait, and America is worse off for it.
Democrat’s Partisan Impeachment: The Constitution of the United States in Article 2, Section 4 specifies specific reasons for the impeachment of a Presiden. Treason, Bribery, High Crimes and Misdemeanors. But by the Democrats own admission they are impeaching him for the abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
To be clear, the Democrat’s attack on the President fall into one of three categories:
- Hearsay
- Conjecture
- Substantive policy disagreements
If we continue down this political road of partisan gamesmanship, reflexive impeachment will be the new normal and it will be a terrible thing for our country.
They exonerate Hillary because they think she didn’t intend to do what she did.
They can’t find that Trump did anything, but they think he intended to do what he didn’t do, and so we need to impeach him.
I hope when Republicans win back Congress they will NOT act like the Democrats have.
IG Report Summed Up: Basically the country was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by the liberal mainstream media for partisan political reasons.
The FBI mislead the FISA court and the FBI ignored problems with the Steel Dossier.
Think about the damage done. The Steele dossier, the collusion allegations, the congressional probes undermined national unity and trust in Congress, let alone government as a whole.
I agree with the Attorney General Barr who said the “greatest danger to our free system” is the Obama Administration’s use of “the law enforcement agencies, both to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election”.
Media Bias: After giving uninterrupted coverage to Democrats’ Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff’s opening statements for weeks, CNN did not air a second of Lindsey Graham’s opening statement regarding the FBI’s massive FISA abuse and spying into President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
This is what media bias looks like.
So for CNN viewers, here’s what you missed:
Sen. Graham: FISA Lawyer Had Bias Against Trump, IG Report Shows “Bad Stuff”
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Weekly News Video Summary:
Biden signals to aides that he would serve only a single term
Advisers weigh the merits of a one-term pledge by the 77-year-old former vice president.
Key House and Senate health leaders reach deal to stop surprise medical bills
There are still obstacles, though as Congressional leadership has not yet signed on to the deal.
Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax math doesn’t add up, nonpartisan analysis says
A study concludes that Elizabeth Warren’s proposed “wealth tax” would bring in $1 trillion less than thought.
Watch our Weekly News Summary Video Here
-Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
IG Report Facts Prove The Anti-Trump Spy Probe Was Tainted By Bias
The facts detailed in the inspector general’s report on federal spying abuses make it clear that the entire anti-Trump investigation was tainted by partisan political bias.
When Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his report this week, the damning litany of civil rights abuses committed by the FBI in the report sent Trump opponents scrambling to find a silver lining. After years of defending the FBI’s conduct and integrity, that position was no longer tenable. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted, “I don’t think there’s anything to celebrate” in the report, but seized on the idea that Horowitz’s report didn’t establish any political motivation for the FBI’s egregious behavior. “It seems useful to have a thorough factual record of the fact that Barack Obama did not direct a rogue deep state operation to take down the Trump campaign, which has been the contention,” he added.
Some version of this narrative quickly became widespread. “The report is nothing to celebrate, the concerns it raises are real, and it should not be reduced to a soundbite,” said CNN legal analyst Renato Mariotti. “That said, it debunks many conspiracy theories and unfounded allegations made by Trump and his allies. It appears that they do not accept its conclusions.”
Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, in an otherwise reasonable series of thoughts on FISA abuse, says, “First, the report confirms that neither the investigation generally nor the FISA applications in particular were motivated by political bias. No big surprise there; despite what Trump would have us believe, the FBI isn’t actually a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals.” Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum adopted a more reasonable-sounding summation of the report — “OIG Report Says FBI Is Incompetent, But Harbors No Anti-Trump Bias” — that reflected a lot of the nonpartisan, mainstream journalistic analysis of the report.
Line by Line, A Complete Debunking of the Democrats’ Articles of Impeachment
Democrats released their two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Tuesday, and they are a complete joke.
Not only did the Democrats back away from charging Trump with bribery, obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation, campaign finance violations, treason, or any of the other wild claims they floated, but the two articles themselves are fraudulent, based on blatantly false claims of law and fact.
Line by line, here they are:
The IG Report Is a Huge Blow to the FBI’s Credibility. Why Is It Being Treated Like Vindication?
The government’s surveillance of Carter Page might not have been improperly motivated, but it was still seriously flawed.
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released its highly anticipated report on the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s Russia connection on Monday.
Make no mistake: The report chronicles serious wrongdoing with respect to the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, and is ultimately a damning indictment of the the nation’s top law enforcement agency. All Americans should have serious concerns about the FBI’s respect for constitutional principles, ability to carefully evaluate conflicting information, and its competency in general.
Many in the media have focused on the fact that the IG report failed to turn up any evidence that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia was politically motivated. The Washington Post’s key takeaway was that the report amounted to a “triple rebuke” of the president and his allies. CNN’s article led with “conspiracy theories debunked” and called the Russia probe “legal and unbiased,” before conceding “serious mistakes” that the network predominantly attributed to a “low level FBI lawyer.” In general, the Trump-critical mainstream media has treated the faltering of the most fervent pro-Trump partisans’ conspiracy theory about a deep state coup as some kind of full acquittal of the FBI. It’s not. The IG report is a chronicle of massive government wrongdoing.
As Scott Shackford explained in his post on this subject, the report by Michael Horowitz found 17 “serious performance failures” relating to warrants obtained by the FBI through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment (FISA) courts for the purposes of monitoring Page. The FISA warrant, which was reauthorized three times, contained false and misleading information about Page. It omitted that he had previously disclosed his Russian contacts to a government agency; it overstated the government’s confidence in the Christopher Steele dossier and ignored Steele’s own doubts about one of his sources; it declined to mention that Page had said he and Paul Manafort had “literally never met”; and in general it ignored information that rendered unlikely the theory that Page was a Russian asset.
IG Report Confirms Schiff FISA Memo Media Praised Was Riddled With Lies
Nearly two years later, the inspector general’s report vindicates the Nunes memo while showing that the Schiff memo was riddled with lies and false statements.
The new inspector general report on FISA abuse settles the debate between Republicans and Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Both groups put out memos about the Department of Justice’s efforts to secure a warrant to wiretap Carter Page.
At the time of their release, the media praised Democrat Adam Schiff and his memo and vilified Republican Devin Nunes and his memo. Nearly two years later, the inspector general’s report vindicates the Nunes memo while showing that the Schiff memo was riddled with lies and false statements.
IG Report Shows Comey Lied To Congress About FBI Investigation Of Trump Campaign
Soon after Monday’s release of the 476-page inspector general’s report on the Carter Page FISA applications and aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, former FBI Director James Comey took to Twitter to promote his op-ed in the Washington Post.
“So it was all lies. No treason. No spying on the campaign. No tapping Trumps [sic] wires. It was just good people trying to protect America,” Comey tweeted, with a link to his opinion article that demanded “those who attacked the FBI for two years should admit they were wrong.”
Comey’s spin is laughable. And there will be time in the days and weeks ahead to highlight the many failures of the DOJ and FBI revealed in the minutia of IG Michael Horowitz’s report. For now, though, let’s focus on a different detail exposed by Horowitz’s investigation into Crossfire Hurricane—that Comey falsely testified that the FBI had not launched an investigation into the Trump campaign.
Comey made that claim just more than a year ago, when he testified before the House Judiciary and Government Reform and Oversight committees. During that December 2018 hearing, Rep. Trey Gowdy posed this question to Comey: “Late July of 2016, the FBI did, in fact, open a counterintelligence investigation into, is it fair to say the Trump campaign or Donald Trump himself?”
“It’s not fair to say either of those things, in my recollection,” Comey retorted. “We opened investigations on four Americans to see if there was any connection between those four Americans and the Russian interference efforts. And those four Americans did not include the candidate.”
Brennan Lied About Not Including Steele Dossier In Intelligence Community Assessment On 2016 Russian Election Interference
The new report from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed former CIA Director John Brennan lied to Congress about whether the dossier authored by Christopher Steele was used in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
The ICA, a report conducted by intelligence officials in 2016 on Russian election interference, was used to brief President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump in January 2017. According to the IG report, there was significant discussion by top intelligence officials as to whether the unverified Steele dossier should be included in the main body of the ICA report, summarized in an appendix, or even included at all.
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said that “he felt strongly that the Steele election reporting belonged in the body of the ICA, because he feared that placing it in an appendix was ‘tacking it on’ in a way that would ‘minimiz[e]’ the information and prevent it from being properly considered.”
Ultimately, the ICA included a short summary and assessment of the dossier, which was incorporated in an appendix. “In the appendix, the intelligence agencies explained that there was ‘only limited corroboration of the source’s reporting’ and that Steele’s election reports were not used ‘to reach analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment,’” the IG report states.
IG Report Shows That Devin Nunes’s 2018 Memo Was 100% Accurate and Way Too Kind to the FBI
If we go back in time a bit, to January 2018, when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was actually exercising oversight of intelligence functions in the executive branch rather than trying to engineer an impeachment of the president based on the flimsiest possible pretexts, one of the things he did was personally review the Carter Page FISA applications and release a memo detailing the flaws.
…If anything, Nunes understated the issues with the FISA warrants. The FBI knew that Steele had not collected any of the information but relied upon a single paid intermediary who was responsible for gathering the information.
‘Corroboration Zero’: An Inspector General’s Report Reveals the Steele Dossier Was Always a Joke
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.
Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.
Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.
Russia probe witness charged with funneling millions to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign
A businessman who helped broker a meeting between an ally of President Donald Trump and an official of the Russian government has been indicted for allegedly funneling millions in illegal campaign contributions to support Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
George Nader, who was charged in another case earlier this year with child trafficking and transporting child pornography, was one of seven people named in an indictment unsealed in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday night involving the campaign payments.
Nader, 60, is charged with funneling money to Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja, 48, of Los Angeles in order to circumvent federal election laws that restrict the amount of donations from a specific individual and where that money is actually coming from, prosecutors say.
Trump impeachment effort is about more than just protecting Obama and Clinton
Surf the conservative websites, and you’ll find endless articles and comments asking, “Why do the Democrats hate Trump so much? Why are they so hell-bent on impeaching him?” Until the past year, there really wasn’t any explanation out there, but with what we’ve learned since 2018 from FBI texts, tapes, and emails, as well as other disclosures, a wide, sweeping campaign to undermine a Trump presidency was in the works well before he was even elected. Why is that?
To answer that, we need to consider what it was about Hillary Clinton winning in 2016 that was so crucial to Democrats that the Obama administration’s CIA and FBI would conduct an illegal, clandestine operation to ensure that it happened. The obvious answer is that under a Hillary administration, there would be no investigations into the many questionable dealings of the Obama administration or of Hillary, herself, and the massive growth in her Clinton Foundation “charity” and her personal wealth while serving as secretary of state.
Democrats have embraced the exact surveillance tactics they used to warn about
For years, Democrats have been warning Americans about the dangers of law enforcement metadata collections. They cautioned that communication giants were working in cahoots with law enforcement to undermine our privacy. They said that metadata snooping might one day be used to smear other politicians.
That was then. Today, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff not only employs the power of the surveillance state to smear his colleagues and press his political agenda, he has set a number of dangerous precedents by “unmasking” his political rivals in an effort to smear them with innuendo.
With the release of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment report this week, we learned that Rudolph Giuliani and his corrupt Ukrainian pal Lev Parnas, whose metadata Schiff had legally subpoenaed, were also exchanging calls with former The Hill columnist John Solomon, ranking Intelligence Republican Devin Nunes and the president’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow.
House passes bill to fight voter ID laws across the United States
The House of Representatives passed a bill to undermine state voter ID laws on Friday by a mostly party-line vote of 228-187.
H.R. 4 — also called the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019 — is an effort by House Democrats to restore preclearance provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were thrown out by the Supreme Court in the 2013 ruling on Shelby County v. Holder. It seeks to do this by updating the preclearance formula that the high court rejected.
Only one Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, Penn., voted with Democrats in favor of the measure. The House’s lone independent, Justin Amash, Mich., voted against the bill.
“Action is urgently needed to combat the brazen voter suppression campaign that is spreading across America,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said said at a press conference ahead of the vote. “We must, we must restore the strength of the voting rights act.”
But what kind of “voter suppression” does the bill go after? House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., put it plainly when he called the legislation “a good step to right the wrongs that’ve dismantled the fundamental right to vote through Voter ID laws, purging voter rolls & closing majority-minority polling places.”
Progressive group putting $45M behind battleground turnout effort
The liberal Progressive Turnout Project (PTP) is putting $45 million behind an effort to turn out voters who did not cast ballots in 2016 in more than a dozen key battleground states.
PTP, which has raised tens of millions of dollars since its inception in 2015, plans to have canvassers knock on more than 7 million doors in the key presidential battlegrounds of Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The group will also put money into get-out-the-vote efforts in states with competitive Senate races, such as Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Maine and North Carolina.
The aim is to encourage left-leaning and independent voters who did not cast ballots in 2016 to turn out for the Democratic ticket in 2020.
Solar-Powered Plant in Kenya Gives Drinking Water to 35,000 People a Day
You might not think twice as you reach for a glass and pour some drinkable water out of your kitchen tap into it. Unfortunately, 2.2 billion people around the globe still struggle to reach and consume safe, drinkable water.
However, let’s not delve into a conversation about how unfair this situation is, as an NGO may have found a positive solution. The NGO, GivePower, installed and still runs a solar-powered desalination plant in Kenya since August 2018. It transforms salt water into drinkable water.
35,000 people a day can now benefit from this fresh and clean water, dramatically improving the lives of many.
Say ‘goodbye’ to robocalls: The TRACED Act passes through U.S. House
There may soon be an end to those pesky robocalls. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill making it harder for the calls to get through to you.
The Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence, or TRACED Act would push carriers to implement a caller authentification system and require companies to block the calls for free.
The vote passed in the House of Representatives with a nearly unanimous vote, 417-3. “The robocall issue is one issue, maybe the one issue, that’s united everybody, Republicans, and Democrats,” said Rep. David Kustoff, R-TN.
Russia’s Northern Fleet to build Arctic air defense ‘dome’ with S-400
Moscow plans to equip all battalions of the Russian Northern Fleet with the S-400 air defense system within several years in a bid to create an air defense “dome” over the Russian Arctic, a naval commander says.
“This year, S-400 systems will enter service with the air defense missile regiment stationed on Novaya Zemlya,” said Fleet Commander Vice-Admiral Alexander Moiseyev said in an interview with the Defense Ministry’s Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper on Monday.
“There are plans to arm all our Arctic battalions with these systems in coming years and thus create an air defense dome over the Russian Arctic,” the state-run TASS news agency further quoted the fleet commander as saying in the interview.
The file photo, taken on August 22, 2017, shows Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missile launching system at the exposition field in Kubinka Patriot Park outside Moscow during the first day of the International Military-Technical Forum Army-2017. (By AFP)
The S-400 entered service with the Russian army in 2007 and is considered Russia’s most advanced long-range anti-aircraft missile system.
Capable of engaging targets at a distance of 400 kilometers and at an altitude of up to 30 kilometers, the missile system can destroy aircraft as well as cruise and ballistic missiles. It can also be used against land-based targets.
U.S. officials failed to devise a clear strategy for the war in Afghanistan, confidential documents show
In the beginning, the rationale for invading Afghanistan was clear: to destroy al-Qaeda, topple the Taliban and prevent a repeat of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Within six months, the United States had largely accomplished what it set out to do. The leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban were dead, captured or in hiding.
But then the U.S. government committed a fundamental mistake it would repeat again and again over the next 17 years, according to a cache of government documents obtained by The It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records.
More stories A visual timeline of the war Interviewees respond Share your story about the war
In hundreds of confidential interviews that constitute a secret history of the war, U.S. and allied officials admitted they veered off in directions that had little to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11. By expanding the original mission, they said they adopted fatally flawed warfighting strategies based on misguided assumptions about a country they did not understand.
The result: an unwinnable conflict with no easy way out.
