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This Tuesday of Easter Week is St George’s Day — April 23, 2019.
It is time the English reclaimed their patron saint’s feast day. Other countries are proud to celebrate this special day. How wonderful, therefore, to see a trend for St George’s Day on Twitter, which includes these delightful tweets:
On a contemplative note, the following are by two Catholics from the Archdiocese of Southwark in London:
Returning to Easter, conservative commentator Chuck Woolery’s witness for the faith gives pause for thought, as does the video in the first reply he received:
I also liked this reply to America’s First Lady’s Easter greetings (click on image link to see it in full):
On Easter Sunday, the Trumps attended a morning service at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach. The Daily Caller has photos, especially of First Lady Melania Trump.
While the Trumps posed for photo ops outside the church, back in Washington, things went less well for Robert Mueller, who was accosted by a reporter outside of St John’s Episcopal Church in Washington DC after worship.
I’m hardly a Mueller fan, but this is just plain wrong:
On Easter Monday, the Trumps hosted the traditional Easter Egg Roll at the White House:
This video shows the First Couple returning to the White House from Palm Beach on Sunday. The Easter Egg Roll event begins at 12:50:
Mrs Trump read to the children (fashion notes here) …
… as did Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, mother of four:
As ever, the day was packed with activities. On April 19, the White House announced:
First Lady Melania Trump and President Donald J. Trump invite this year’s Easter Egg Roll attendees to enjoy a variety of activities, including the time-honored Egg Roll and the Trump Administration’s Cards for Troops station. New to the Egg Roll this year: musical eggs and Be Best hopscotch. In recognition of the First Lady’s Be Best campaign, children will also have the opportunity to spread kindness by mailing postcards to anyone they choose – friends, family, members of the military – directly through a United States Postal Service mailbox that will be on the South grounds.
Over 30,000 attendees are expected to walk the historic south grounds of the White House, experiencing all the tradition and fun that comes with the White House Easter Egg Roll.
There were also egg hunts, egg and cookie decorating stations, the military bands, tennis court activities, and a chance for the children to meet costumed characters, such as the Easter Bunny:
Reading stations have been a big part of the Trump Easter Egg Rolls, with members of the president’s advisory team as well as the Cabinet. Imagine hearing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, General Joseph Keith Kellogg, Jr. or Surgeon General Jerome Adams reading a book to a group of children. If past readers of previous years are anything to go by, they no doubt did exceptionally well.
Mrs Trump was delighted with the event and her many guests:
I am so pleased this went well and without incident.
Tomorrow’s post concerns a very sad subject: the attacks on Sri Lankan churches at Easter.
Well, well, well, on Tuesday, February 12, 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded there is ‘no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia’.
NBC News intelligence and national security correspondent Reporter Ken Dilanian broke the story in his article, ‘Senate has uncovered no direct evidence of conspiracy between Trump campaign and Russia’.
This is a bipartisan finding, by the way.
Later, MSNBC interviewed Dilanian:
NBC has a summary on Twitter:
This finding comes after the Senate Intelligence Committee spent two years on an investigation involving 200 interviews and 300,000 documents.
Their investigation has not yet concluded, but its end is nigh, according to Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), the chairman. Dilanian’s article tells us:
“We know we’re getting to the bottom of the barrel because there’re not new questions that we’re searching for answers to,” Burr said.
On Tuesday, Burr doubled down, telling NBC News, “There is no factual evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
It could take the committee several more months to produce a written report of their findings, which, even with this news, could be inconclusive:
The final Senate report may not reach a conclusion on whether the contacts added up to collusion or coordination with Russia, Burr said.
Democrats told NBC News that’s a distinct possibility.
“What I’m telling you is that I’m going to present, as best we can, the facts to you and to the American people,” Burr told CBS. “And you’ll have to draw your own conclusion as to whether you think that, by whatever definition, that’s collusion.”
The Senate investigation is separate from the Mueller probe, which trundles along.
Also, the House of Representatives, now Democrat-controlled, is planning to conduct a separate investigation:
that will go beyond the 2016 election to examine whether any foreign government has undue financial influence on Trump or his family. And New York federal prosecutors are pursuing their own criminal inquiry related to hush-money payments to women. The investigations into Donald Trump, therefore, are far from over.
Nonetheless, the Senate news puts a dent in Big Media’s anti-Trump narrative.
ZeroHedge reports that when Dilanian appeared on MSNBC (see video above, bold emphases in the original, those in purple mine):
MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson and her guest panelists’ faces looked visibly confused and uncomfortable as they learned the Senate report is going in the opposite direction of everything MSNBC and other mainstream outlets have been breathlessly reporting on a near 24/7 basis.
More importantly, if this is a precursor of what the Mueller report concludes in a few weeks/months, the TV station that built its current reputation on the premise of Russian collusion, may have no option but to go on indefinite hiatus.
Watch the segment … with host Hallie Jackson appearing to grow exasperated by the 2:20 mark:“If and when the president, as he may inevitably do, points to these conclusions and says look, the Senate intelligence committee found I am not guilty of conspiracy… he would be correct in saying that?”
Dilanian noted that while the Republican chair of the committee made what he characterized as “partisan” comments the week prior, it turned out be unanimous fact. “What I found,” he said, “is that Democrats don’t dispute that characterization.”
But perhaps sensing how “contrary” to the network’s own hysterical ‘Russiagate’ coverage his reporting was, he tried to soften the blow, saying, “But, again, no direct proof of a conspiracy. As one democratic aide said to me, ‘we never thought we were going to find a Democrat between Trump and Vladimir Putin saying let’s collude, but the question is how do we interpret all these various contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.’”
Hallie Jackson followed with further probing: “Not to put too fine a point on it, but I want to make sure I’m understanding this…” and asked “If and when the president, as he may inevitably do, points to these conclusions and says look, the Senate intelligence committee found I’m not guilty of conspiracy… he would be correct in saying that?”
Her face looking rather incredulous at this point, Dilanian responded by invoking the Meuller investigation, reassuring her his inquiry is not complete and likely could uncover more information. But then the bottom line: “That said, Trump will claim vindication through this, and he’ll be partially right,” he said.
President Trump tweeted his thanks:
Some readers might be sceptical.
However, an investigative journalist who has no ties to Trump and is not a supporter — Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept — agrees with him:
Greenwald’s readers were not happy.
On another tweet, Greenwald still had to repeat himself:
More angry readers tweeted here.
Let’s remind ourselves of what Big Media have been foisting on us since 2017: ‘bombshell’, ‘tipping point’, ‘beginning of the end’, ‘Trump will resign’:
Big Media’s narrative is ‘too big to fail’:
Trump supporters, understandably, are sick and tired of it all, because the Democrats started this narrative shortly before the 2016 election:
This chap meant ‘wielded’, but his point still stands. I hope he is correct:
Here are a few suggestions for President Trump on how to wield that hammer:
As for Robert Mueller and his team, the same day NBC’s Ken Dilanian filed his report, President Trump’s former attorney John Dowd gave an interview to ABC News (full transcript).
John Dowd does not believe the report of Mueller’s findings will be released to the public. He thinks there will simply be an announcement that the two-year investigation has ended.
Dowd says that Mueller had all the information he needed nearly a year ago (emphases mine):
In my opinion, on March 5th, we were done. He had everything. He said he had everything. He told me that no one had lied. He told me they had every document we asked for. He told me that it was nothing more. He told me that the president was not a target. That is, he did not have any exposure, that he was a witness subject, which is perfectly normal for someone’s conduct you’re looking at, but they don’t have exposure.
Dowd later said the same thing and says Mueller should have admitted that he was being pressured to find something by a ‘cabal in the FBI’:
There’s no exposure. It’s been a terrible waste of time. What’s worse is let’s get on the other side of this, how it all happened. This is one of the greatest frauds this country’s ever seen. And I’m just shocked that Bob Mueller didn’t call it that way and say, “I’m being used.” I would’ve done that. If I were in his shoes in this thing, I’d have gone to the– I’d have gone to Sessions and Rosenstein and said, “Look. This is nonsense. We are being used by a cabal in the F.B.I. to get even.”
President Trump has co-operated with Mueller, responding to requests that no other president has never had to endure (source):
Note the third paragraph in that last tweet. Had Trump agreed to an interview with Mueller:
it would set a precedent that would open the current president and future presidents to this kind of interview.
Given the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings, it will be interesting to see how much longer the Mueller probe lasts.
For my readers who do not live in the United States, Alan Dershowitz is a famous lawyer, author and the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School.
He has given countless interviews and made just as many television appearances over the past few decades and, although he is probably a Democrat deep down, he looks at legal cases from an impartial viewpoint.
Dershowitz recently wrote an article for Gatestone Institute, ‘Provoking New Crimes Rather than Uncovering Past Crimes: Mueller’s Modus Operandi’, which is well worth reading in full.
These are Dershowitz’s headlines (emphases mine):
- Even if Mueller could prove that members of the Trump team had colluded with Julian Assange to use material that Assange had unlawfully obtained, that, too, would not be a crime.
- Merely using the product of an already committed theft of information is not a crime. If you don’t believe me, ask the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and other newspapers that used material illegally obtained by Assange with full knowledge that it was illegally obtained.
- In the end, Mueller should be judged by how successful he has been in satisfying his central mission. Judged by that standard and based on what we now know, he seems to be an abysmal failure.
Dershowitz reminds us of the objective of the Mueller probe: to find evidence of Russian collaboration, not collusion, by the 2016 Trump campaign:
It was always an uphill struggle for Mueller, since collusion itself is not a crime. In other words, even if he could show that individuals in the Trump campaign had colluded with Russian agents to help elect Trump, that would be a serious political sin, but not a federal crime. Even if Mueller could prove that members of the Trump team had colluded with Julian Assange to use material that Assange had unlawfully obtained, that, too, would not be a crime. What would be a crime is something that no one claims happened: namely, that members of the Trump campaign told Assange to hack the Democratic National Committee before Assange did so. Merely using the product of an already committed theft of information is not a crime. If you don’t believe me, ask the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and other newspapers that used material illegally obtained by Assange with full knowledge that it was illegally obtained. Not only did they use information from Assange, but also from Chelsea Manning and from the stolen Pentagon Papers. The First Amendment protects publication by the media of stolen information. It also protects use of such information by a political campaign, since political campaigns are also covered by the First Amendment.
Instead, it appears as if Mueller is trying to create new crimes. Why would he do that? To cover up his own sins over the past 20+ years, including his involvement in Uranium One while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
The new crimes Mueller is trying to create are what are known as ‘process crimes’, which could trigger counts of perjury. Here is an example:
Q: Where were you at 3:15 p.m. on January 21st 2018?
A: I was walking my dog.
Q: No, you were at your Aunt Sally’s house at that time.
A: Well, I went to see Aunt Sally after I walked my dog.
Q: Sorry, you’ve already said — under oath — that you were walking your dog. You realise, don’t you, that you could be charged with perjury.
That’s a simple example of a process crime.
Back to Dershowitz:
It is important to note that Special Counsel Robert Mueller does not have a roving commission to ferret out political sin, to provoke new crimes, or to publish non-criminal conclusions that may be embarrassing to the President. His mandate, like that of every other prosecutor, is to uncover past crimes. In Mueller’s case those crimes must relate to Russia. He also has the authority to prosecute crimes growing out of the Russia probe, but that is collateral to his central mission. In the end, Mueller should be judged by how successful he has been in satisfying his central mission. Judged by that standard and based on what we now know, he seems to be an abysmal failure.
Precisely.
Last year, just before Christmas, pundits and others supposedly ‘in the know’ said that the Mueller investigation would end early in 2018.
A year later, we are still waiting.
Just before leaving for the G20 in Buenos Aires, President Trump tweeted:
$40,000,000!
And where’s the new sheriff in town, Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker? He could do something about it:
It would be wonderful if someone or something could put an end to this. Don’t forget: American taxpayers are footing the bill for Mueller and his lawyers.
Last week, Jeff Sessions resigned as attorney general.
He left the Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday, November 7, 2018.
Asking Sessions to resign was President Trump’s first action after the mid-terms on November 6.
Finally!
Now, maybe, justice can be done!
The acting attorney general (AG) was formerly Sessions’s chief of staff. His name is Matt Whitaker.
Trump was clever and did not promote Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general, to the post. Because Sessions had recused himself, Rosey had been overseeing the Mueller probe. Now that Whitaker has been given the responsibility of overseeing Mueller, the Left — Democrats and the media — have said that the United States is experiencing a ‘constitutional crisis’.
Fox News’s Howard Kurtz explains why (emphases mine):
Whitaker is a former prosecutor, as well as a conservative activist, but he is obscure. He is a Trump loyalist, once described as the president’s “eyes and ears” at DOJ.
What’s more, as a CNN contributor and at other times, he has trashed the Mueller investigation that he will now be overseeing. He’s suggesting that Justice could curtail the special counsel’s probe by cutting his funding.
“The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign,” Whitaker once said. As for the left, “the last thing they want right now is for the truth to come out, and for the fact that there’s not a single piece of evidence that demonstrates that the Trump campaign had any illegal or any improper relationships with the Russians. It’s that simple.”
So Whitaker has, to put it mildly, a rather dim view of the investigation. And his associates are telling reporters he has no intention of recusing himself. Of course not — that’s why Trump wants him.
So it’s a big deal that oversight of the Russia probe is moving from Rosenstein, who likes the job Mueller is doing, to a man who’s been so critical of the investigation. And criticism from House Democrats who’ll soon be in a position to scrutinize these matters is fueling the story.
Rumour has it that Robert Mueller might be wrapping up his investigation soon, possibly next week. If true, whether that is related to Sessions’s resignation is unclear.
As acting AG, Whitaker can stay in that position for up to 210 days. Whitaker was appointed to his former chief of staff role in 2017, therefore, he requires no Senate confirmation.
Whitaker quickly protected his Twitter account, which was all about sports, although you can see a photo of him lifting weights. He’s no pencil-necked geek. He’s a big man with a shaved head (similar to Mr Clean). One of Whitaker’s tweets featured a similar photo with the caption:
What I do in my free time. #powerclean #CrossFit…
VA Online News has an interesting article about Whitaker and how he got the AAG job. The article purports that White House aides thought Rod Rosenstein’s resignation was imminent, so they went about finding a replacement:
Convinced that the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, was ready to resign after the revelation that he suggested President Trump was unfit for the job, senior White House aides got to work last weekend installing a replacement.
Whitaker received a phone call on Saturday, November 3:
Matthew G. Whitaker, the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would become the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department, his White House counterpart, John F. Kelly, told him over the phone on Saturday morning, according to two people briefed on the call. To the White House, he was an obvious choice: a confident former college football player and United States attorney whom Mr. Kelly has privately described as the West Wing’s “eyes and ears” in a department the president has long considered at war with him.
By Monday, Rosenstein had decided to stay at the DoJ for the time being, therefore, Whitaker could not be moved into his slot.
Interestingly, had Whitaker become DAG, replacing Rosenstein, he would not have been able to supervise the Mueller probe:
thanks to complex department rules, Mr. Whitaker would not assume control of the inquiry if he ever replaces Mr. Rosenstein.
Some think that Whitaker could become the permanent AG if he performs well as AAG. Even if he doesn’t, there are other roles open to him:
Administration officials have also mentioned Mr. Whitaker as a possible successor to Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel who plans to leave in the fall.
Justice Department and White House spokespeople declined to comment. The back-and-forth between the White House and Justice Department were described by more than a half-dozen administration officials and others briefed on the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
President Trump is said to have an easy rapport with Whitaker, who disapproves of Mueller potentially probing the Trump family finances.
In 2016, he was critical of Hillary Clinton’s server situation:
A reasonable prosecutor may ask, if on numerous occasions, an unknown State Department employee had taken top secret information from a secured system, emailed that information on a Gmail account, and stored the information on a personal server for years, would that individual be prosecuted? I believe they would.
Eighteen US AGs have demanded that Whitaker recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller probe. On Friday, November 9, Fox News reported:
More than a dozen U.S. state attorneys general signed a document Thursday calling for Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, a role he assumed following his temporary appointment following the resignation of Jeff Sessions …
As part of Whitaker’s new role as the head official at the Justice Department, he will oversee the Russia probe and the agency’s other federal investigations, including the New York prosecutors’ look into the finances of Trump and his former aides.
In an op-ed Whitaker wrote last year, he argued that “any investigation into President Trump’s finances or the finances of his family would require Mueller to return to Rod Rosenstein for additional authority under Mueller’s appointment as special counsel.”
“It is time for Rosenstein … to order Mueller to limit the scope of his investigation to the four corners of the order appointing him special counsel,” Whitaker wrote. “If he doesn’t, then Mueller’s investigation will eventually start to look like a political fishing expedition. This would not only be out of character for a respected figure like Mueller, but also could be damaging to the President of the United States and his family — and by extension, to the country.”
And separately, in July 2017, Whitaker told CNN, “I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment, and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.”
Whitaker is adamant about refusing to recuse.
The Left — Democrats and the media — are in a right tizz at the moment.
Whitaker’s DoJ could look at all types of left-wing scandals from the past several years.
He could get a lot done in 210 days, especially as he has the little-known but brilliant Ezra Cohen-Watnick, 32, working at the DoJ. Cohen-Watnick formerly worked for HR McMaster, who fired him from the National Security Council. Trump fired McMaster earlier this year.
Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner think highly of Cohen-Watnick, who has an intelligence background. In April 2018, Trump personally told the DoJ he wanted Cohen-Watnick to work with Jeff Sessions. That did not sit well with the Left, either, because it was rumoured he had shown Rep. Devin Nunes classified documents relating to Nunes’s FISA investigation of the 2016 election.
With Whitaker and Cohen-Watnick working together, who knows what the near future might hold? We could well see some sunlight disinfecting the Swamp.
Election day is nearing and the Dems continue to pump out more untruths.
Before we get to those, rumour has it that Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion probe could end up being a damp squib:
Politico is left-of-centre, ergo not a Trump-supporting news site. Excerpts from their article follow, emphases mine:
That’s the word POLITICO got from defense lawyers working on the Russia probe and more than 15 former government officials with investigation experience spanning Watergate to the 2016 election case. The public, they say, shouldn’t expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump — not to mention an explanation of the myriad subplots that have bedeviled lawmakers, journalists and amateur Mueller sleuths.
Perhaps most unsatisfying: Mueller’s findings may never even see the light of day.
“That’s just the way this works,” said John Q. Barrett, a former associate counsel who worked under independent counsel Lawrence Walsh during the Reagan-era investigation into secret U.S. arms sales to Iran. “Mueller is a criminal investigator. He’s not government oversight, and he’s not a historian” …
For starters, Mueller isn’t operating under the same ground rules as past high-profile government probes, including the Reagan-era investigation into Iranian arms sale and whether President Bill Clinton lied during a deposition about his extramarital affair with a White House intern. Those examinations worked under the guidelines of a post-Watergate law that expired in 1999 that required investigators to submit findings to Congress if they found impeachable offenses, a mandate that led to Starr’s salacious report that upended Clinton’s second term.
Mueller’s reporting mandate is much different. He must notify his Justice Department supervisor — currently Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — on his budgeting needs and all “significant events” made by his office, including indictments, guilty pleas and subpoenas.
When Mueller is finished, he must turn in a “confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions” — essentially why he chose to bring charges against some people but not others. His reasoning, according to veterans of such investigations, could be as simple as “there wasn’t enough evidence” to support a winning court case.
Then, it will be up to DOJ leaders to make the politically turbo-charged decision of whether to make Mueller’s report public.
Government officials will first get a chance to scrub the special counsel’s findings for classified details, though, involving everything from foreign intelligence sources to information gleaned during grand jury testimony that the law forbids the government from disclosing.
They’ll also have to weigh the input from a number of powerful outside forces …
Now on to the Democrats.
Not a lot of people know that Trump is more popular now than Obama was at this point in 2010, the year of his first mid-term:
Why do Democrats vote against middle class interests?
Why do they keep saying Trump is racist?
Why do they lie about Republican plans for health insurance?
Excerpts from Dr McCaughey’s New York Post article follow:
Across the country, Democratic ads are telling voters a big lie. Dems claim they’re protecting people with preexisting medical conditions but Republicans would take that protection away. The idea is that ObamaCare is the only way to safeguard people with preexisting conditions. That’s false, and the outcome of the midterm elections could turn on this falsehood.
A super PAC allied with Sen. Chuck Schumer is behind many of these ads, including one targeting Republican Josh Hawley, who’s in a tight race with Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill. If he’s elected, the ad claims, millions of Missourians could lose their protections. In another ad, McCaskill tells the camera “Two years ago, I beat breast cancer,” then says her opponent would do away with protections for preexisting conditions like cancer.
These ads blatantly mislead voters. Hawley’s on the record insisting that health-reform legislation must include these protections.
So is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has called on his state lawmakers to enact protections. But never mind the truth. The Democratic Governors Association is funding an ad with a breast-cancer patient saying she won’t be able to afford lifesaving treatments if Walker is reelected.
She says that Republicans in general are partly to blame for not explaining their position properly.
Here is the problem with Obamacare. I mention this specifically for my overseas readers who think it operates like the NHS. It doesn’t:
ObamaCare isn’t the only way to protect people with preexisting conditions. Just the most unfair way. It compels insurers to charge the healthy and the sick the same price. That’s the major reason ObamaCare premiums for 2019 are triple what they were in 2013 …
Right now, the middle class, who are ineligible for a subsidy, are getting priced out of ObamaCare. They’re hoping to enroll in so-called short-term plans that offer fewer benefits (no inpatient mental-health care, for example) and low prices. The Trump administration recently relaxed insurance regulations to help sticker-shocked consumers buy these plans.
Yet last Friday seven advocacy groups, such as the American Psychiatric Association, sued to stop these plans and slam closed this escape hatch from ObamaCare. The litigants said the plans would “draw low-risk people out of” ObamaCare. That’s exactly the point. People want choices and lower premiums.
She says a federal insurance-fallback program would address the issue. In the meantime, the Dems are perpetrating untruths:
Let voters choose based on real issues, not a phony one.
And, finally, there are the human ‘caravans’ coming in from Latin America via Mexico. The Left is organising these, just as they organised the one in June:
On that topic:
Mexico’s efforts during the week of October 15 looked good to begin with, but were ineffectual. Trump was understandably unhappy — especially with the Democrats:
So …
The Mexican president had addressed the country two days before, announcing that the government’s response would continue to be strong (possibly thanks to the American secretary of state Mike Pompeo):
Spanish-speakers might be interested in reading the supportive replies he received from his fellow Mexicans. They do not want these human caravans, either.
Regardless of what Dems and the media say — ‘Think of the children!’ — this is manufactured chaos involving a lot of clean, well-fed young men …
… who hate not only President Trump but also the United States:
The left-wing media are peddling false sob stories. They’re only on foot for photo ops:
This is the truth of the matter:
A reporter from the LA Times is in Mexico. She saw first hand that these people don’t care about law or order …
… or borders (‘We are humans’, ‘No one is illegal’):
And, who else could be among them?
I hope this Leftist — Democrat — chaos fails dismally, especially at the ballot box on November 6.
Texas
Robert O’Rourke — ‘Beto’ (pron. ‘Bay-toh’) — is running against incumbent Ted Cruz for the US Senate.
James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas was able to penetrate his campaign office and obtain jaw-dropping information. This is brand new, made around Halloween and posted online on November 1:
This is 23 minutes well spent:
The Project Veritas report says, in part:
Project Veritas Action Fund has released undercover video from current Congressman and US Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s campaign. The video exposes how his campaign staff appear to be illegally using campaign resources to buy supplies and help transport Honduran aliens. This is the eighth undercover video report Project Veritas has released in a series revealing secrets and lies from political campaigns in 2018.
Said James O’Keefe, founder and president of Project Veritas Action:
“Charity and helping your fellow man are things we applaud at Project Veritas Action. The problem is, you can’t break the law when you do it.”
…
A Project Veritas Action attorney reviewed the footage and assessed:
“The material Project Veritas Action Fund captured shows campaign workers covering up the true nature of spending of campaign funds and intentionally misreporting them. This violates the FEC’s rules against personal use and misreporting. It also violates Section 1001, making a false statement to the federal government. The FEC violations impose civil penalties, including fines of up to $10,000 or 200 percent of the funds involved. Violations of Section 1001 are criminal and include imprisonment of up to five years.”
The campaign found out that a group of Honduran illegals are already in the US and are stopping on their way to Missouri to be sheltered by a church. Sean Hannity has more dialogue from the video (emphases mine):
“You know that migrant caravan? A few of them got here already and they’re dropping them off like really close,” said a campaign field manager. “I’m going to get some food right now and some stuff to drop off.”
“Don’t ever repeat this stuff but like, if we just say we’re buying some food for an event, like Halloween events,” suggested another staffer.
“That’s not a horrible idea, but I didn’t hear anything,” said the manager. “I think we can use that with [prepaid campaign debit cards] to buy some food, all that sh*t can be totally masked.”
But, didn’t Dems say they weren’t going to help the illegals?
James O’Keefe followed up with Beto’s campaign manager and posted the following video on November 2:
Earlier that day Beto got an endorsement from Obama’s CIA director. Hmm:
O’Keefe has alerted the local newspaper:
Other media outlets have ignored the story, too:
I hope that any readers in Texas will circulate these videos this weekend. Apparently, this Sunday — the final before mid-terms — is when a lot of churchgoers vote.
Thank you in advance.
Bob Woodward, who, with his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, exposed Watergate in the 1970s, recently completed a book on the Trump presidency.
The book is called Fear. Some of its content is dubious.
However, on Friday, September 14, 2018, Woodward gave an interview to Hugh Hewitt in which he said he spent two years looking for Trump-Russia collusion — and came up empty handed.
Real Clear Politics has the transcript of Woodward’s exchange with Hewitt about President Trump’s former White House attorney John Dowd, who, for better or worse, played it straight with special counsel Robert Mueller and his team (emphases mine):
HUGH HEWITT, HOST: Yeah, but I just think people who have been critical of you in the public, all they have to do is say hey, release my tapes, Bob, and we’ll find out whether Gary Cohn said what he said, and John Dowd said what he said, and Rob Porter said what they said. Now let’s get to the substance. I believe that if the president had actually read this book, and their team had read this book, they would not have attacked the book. They would have spun it differently, because there’s a lot complimentary in this book, the most important of which is John Dowd firmly believes, the president’s former lawyer, that the special counsel, Bob Mueller, has nothing. There’s no collusion, there’s nothing. It’s all a play to get an 18 USC 1001 perjury trap, and that POTUS should never sit down. Is that a fair assessment of what John Dowd believes?
BOB WOODWARD, ‘FEAR’ AUTHOR: Oh, well, yeah, until we end. And finally, it, the point where Dowd resigns because he is convinced the president should not testify, Dowd concludes that Mueller had played him for a sucker, got all of the cooperation of 37 witnesses, a million pages-plus of campaign documents, 20,000 pages of White House documents. So in the end, as he says to the president, he said you were right. We can’t trust Mueller.
HH: And I tell you, Bob Woodward, I read this book as a lawyer. I’m not a defense lawyer, although I was at Justice. Dowd got played badly. Do you agree?
BW: Well, but he is the one who decided on the strategy – total cooperation. We’re going to let you, we’re opening the door completely. And some of the most sensitive material was given to Mueller. He was delighted to have it. It is quite true that Dowd concluded from his own work, remember, he spent eight months on this intensely, time with Mueller, time with the White House people, time with Trump. And he didn’t see anything there until the end.
HH: So let’s set aside the Comey firing, which as a Constitutional law professor, no one will ever persuade me can be obstruction. And Rod Rosenstein has laid out reasons why even if those weren’t the president’s reasons. Set aside the Comey firing. Did you, Bob Woodward, hear anything in your research in your interviews that sounded like espionage or collusion?
BW: I did not, and of course, I looked for it, looked for it hard. And so you know, there we are. We’re going to see what Mueller has, and Dowd may be right. He has something that Dowd and the president don’t know about, a secret witness or somebody who has changed their testimony. As you know, that often happens, and that can break open or turn a case.
HH: But you’ve seen no collusion?
BW: I have not.
There’s a coup going on.
Mueller will have to find something to pin on President Trump to justify his waste of taxpayers’ money, which is probably by now into the double digits of millions of dollars right now. By last November, it was rumoured to have cost $5m already.
Mueller is all about saving his own reputation and destroying others’, which he has done throughout his career. But, that’s another topic for another day.
This week has seen more online political bloggers say that America’s attorney general Jeff Sessions must go.
President Trump has been weighing in over the past week or so with decidedly pointed tweets. Sessions supporters say that Trump really hasn’t meant what he’s tweeted, but, now, even they have had to re-examine those opinions.
Unfortunately, personal time restrictions do not permit me to fully examine Trump’s most recent tweets. Here, Trump quoted Gregg Jarrett who was discussing DOJ employee Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, both of whom have been linked with the Russian dossier designed to bring down the American president:
The Trumpet, which has been saying for months that Sessions must go, repeated that call on August 16 (emphases mine below):
“…because the DOJ is run by BLANK Jeff Sessions.” Jeff Sessions should have stopped this at least a year ago. Jeff Sessions must resign …
What is that landscape we painted a long time ago? Back during the primary campaigns for president in 2015-2016 we wrote that American voters found themselves in a snake pit and would take any stick offered to them to fight off the vipers. That stick was candidate Donald J. Trump. Trump was a man who never before held or ran for any elective office nor was he an Eisenhower type who served in the military as a five star General. Trump was Trump, told it like it is, and he won the election.
As candidate Trump grew in strength a vast conspiracy emerged from the intelligence agencies here and abroad to prevent candidate Trump from becoming President Trump. The intelligence agencies, law enforcement departments, Big Media, the totalitarian left of Obama Dimocrats alongside Republican Party bureaucrats and officials who lost power, scoundrels from every corner of filth conspired to destroy President Donald J. Trump and his voters and vision. After the election of Trump the conspiracy against President Trump persisted in trying to remove him from office and negate the will of the American voter.
That’s the landscape we painted a long time ago. The details, shocking and disgusting as they are, are details. We now have emails and documents. We now have names of miscreants and criminals. But they are mere details.
The details don’t matter if actions is not taken to behead the conspirators.
The details don’t matter if Jeff Sessions remains Attorney General. Jeff Sessions must be forced to resign.
Jeff Sessions might appear to the naive as if he is doing something useful, but, when one compares actions to words, one is left with words.
Take the recent sentencing for Imran Awan who, for several years, managed the computer system for various Democrat legislators, principally Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida). Author Frank Miniter, who is writing a book about the Awan case, which could well have national security implications, wrote about the sentencing for Fox News on August 21:
Tuesday was a lucky day for Imran Awan, the former IT administrator for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. A federal judge sentenced him to three months of supervised release and no fine for one count of bank fraud – sparing him any jail time.
Awan could have faced much more serious charges and a long prison sentence if he had been tried and convicted on accusations that he ran a spy ring inside Congress and stole congressional computer equipment.
Yet stunningly, Awan was not charged with those crimes. Instead, federal prosecutors ignored their own compelling evidence implicating him in the spy ring and exonerated him.
This is what happens when the establishment and the mainstream media collude to cover up a Democratic scandal.
Awan, who pleaded guilty last month to a single charge of making a false statement to obtain a home equity loan, could have been sentenced to up to six months in jail on that plea at his sentencing Tuesday.
Just read the FBI affidavit used to indict Awan and you’ll plainly see that even a prosecutor working on his or her first case wouldn’t have had any trouble getting a conviction for bank fraud against him.
However, the Justice Department opted to plea the charges against Awan down to one count of making a false statement on a home equity loan application – a crime that that allowed Awan to wire $283,000 to Pakistan.
In return for that sweetheart plea deal, the Justice Department got a cover-up.
Where was Jeff Sessions?
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, August 21, Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen and his former campaign manager Paul Manafort have been in court for tenuous reasons. With regard to Cohen and the Southern District of New York (SDNY), The Conservative Treehouse tells us:
The Michael Cohen plea agreement (full pdf here) is a total of eight counts claimed by the SDNY as unlawful activity. However, one count is entirely political and not supported by the Federal Election Commission. Guess which one the media focus on?
Yeah, let’s review.
Within the plea agreement the first five charges relate to tax avoidance, or tax evasion. Each count relates to a specific tax year: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016. The sixth charge, a bank fraud charge, relates to lying on a credit application. These six charges appear valid, documented and agreed in the plea. The seventh charge, relates to structuring financial transactions through the use of a corporation. This charge is tenuous, but arguable.
However, the eighth charge is the one the media are focused on. The charge of an illegal campaign contribution …
This Count Eight transaction surrounds a payment to Stephanie Clifford (Stormy Daniels) of $130,000 for a nuisance claim. Who says it is a campaign contribution? The SDNY does, no-one else. Not even the FEC considers this a campaign contribution.
Count eight is a political charge/plea specifically included for the purpose of pulling Donald Trump into the SDNY Cohen case. There is no FEC violation here. *Note it is not the Federal Election Commission making the claim, only the SDNY prosecutors.
Where was Jeff Sessions?
As Sundance of The Conservative Treehouse tweeted:
Also on that day, Paul Manafort’s jury in Virginia delivered a guilty verdict on eight out of 18 charges, none of which concern President Trump’s presidential campaign. These charges were brought by Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion team. From The Conservative Treehouse:
According to breaking news in the Manafort Trial, after four days of deliberations the jury has informed Judge Ellis they can only reach a verdict on eight out of eighteen counts.
The jury cannot come to a consensus on 10 counts.
A guilty verdict on five counts of fraudulent tax filings. One count for each tax filing year: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014.
Three guilty verdicts on bank fraud charges: ¹False information on a $3.4 million dollar loan application in March 2016 from Citizens Bank, Rhode Island. ²False information on a $5.5 million loan application for a building in Brooklyn. ³Hiding foreign bank accounts.
Judge Ellis declared a mistrial on the remaining 10 charges.
Now it’s up to Mueller’s team to decide what to do about said remaining 10 charges.
Where was Jeff Sessions?
To my overseas readers, the following tweet is a joke but summarises the reality of the situation:
Going back to the Cohen case:
Conclusion:
Ultimately:
I pray that Sessions, a God-fearing man, asks for divine guidance in the days and weeks to come.
I hope that he takes the right decision and resigns, as he has not served the United States well during the past year and a half.
Just time for a quick post today.
I do not know where this hoarding (billboard) is, but please note and remember the last three lines (image courtesy of 8chan):
If the Democrats hate America, chances are they hate you, too.
Even if you’ve voted for them all your life.
The US Constitution has been gradually eroded over the past century.
It’s getting worse, up to the point where the decisions of the American voters and the Electoral College are being undermined (origin of graphic unknown):
An article posted today at FrontPageMagazine explains it all.
Bruce Thornton’s ‘Dangerous Times for the Constitution and Freedom’ is well worth reading in full. Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine:
While We the People distract ourselves with porn stars and royal weddings, the cracks in our Constitutional order continue to multiply and widen.
Evidence continues to mount that a sitting president, Barack Obama, colluded in using the nation’s security and surveillance apparatus to subvert the campaign and then presidency of a legitimately elected candidate and president. This effort consisted of numerous illegalities: a mole planted in Donald Trump’s campaign; a FISA warrant granted on the basis of false opposition research paid for by his rival; the outgoing president’s expansion of the number of people allowed to unmask the identity of Americans mentioned in passing during surveillance; a rogue FBI director, James Comey, who illegally usurped prosecutorial powers to exonerate a felonious Hillary Clinton; and other FBI agents colluding in the plot to damage Trump. And don’t forget a Deputy Attorney General appointing the close friend of the fired and disgraced Comey as a special counsel to investigate the non-crime of “collusion,” an investigation that has gone on for a year with nothing to show but a handful of indictments resulting from dubious perjury traps.
To quote Bob Dole, “Where’s the outrage” at these attacks on the Constitution?
Outrage is surely warranted. These assaults on the rule of law and accountability to the people are akin to the catalogue of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” published in the Declaration of Independence. Yet our “watch-dog” media in the main have become the publicists for this attack on the foundations of our freedom, as they flack for the political party that long has resented the limitation of power enshrined in the Constitution. Only a few Cassandras, notably FOX News’ Sean Hannity, are trying to alert the citizenry to the coming conflagration that if unchecked could leave the architecture of our freedom in smoking ruins.
In fact, what we are witnessing in the deep-state Democrats’ undermining of divided government, check and balances, and government accountability, is the culmination of a process begun over a century ago …
For a century, progressives have been undermining the Constitution as they seek to expand and concentrate government power at the cost of freedom …
… If we allow those guilty of abusing the power of the state for partisan gain to get away with it, we will embolden even more enemies of freedom to do the same as soon as they get the opportunity. It is up to we the people to demand that Mueller’s inquisition come to an end, and that the true miscreants who have abused their power be investigated, indicted, tried, and punished. Only then will the fabric of the Constitution begin to be restored, and our freedom rearmored.
The article explains how various government programmes and policies dating from the First World War era have gradually made Americans a less free people living in a less free society. Even a vote is no longer sacrosanct.
It’s time Americans reclaimed their Constitution.
Please send letters or postcards to your public servants — representatives and senators — about specific issues, urging them to vote on them in a way that restores the Great Republic.
The future of the United States — and the world — depends on it.
