Tag Archive for: hillary clinton

POLICE STATE: Staunch Republican Douglas Mackey Sentenced To Prison For Posting Memes Mocking Hillary Clinton

We no longer have a country when a highly partisan, corrupt judicial system sends people to prison for posting jokes.

Freedom of speech is worth fighting for, worth dying for. Our once-great nation was founded on it, and it’s the hill we must die on.

Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society. Without it, a tyrant can wreak havoc unopposed, while his opponents are silenced.

Putting up with being offended is essential in a pluralistic society in which people differ on basic truths. If a group will not bear being offended without resorting to violence, that group will rule unopposed while everyone else lives in fear, while other groups curtail their activities to appease the violent group. This results in the violent group being able to tyrannize the others.

Social Media Influencer Sentenced for Election Interference in 2016 Presidential Race

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Office of Public Affairs

Defendant Attempted to Trick Voters into Believing They Could Vote by Text Message

A social media influencer was sentenced today to seven months in prison and fined $15,000 for his role in a conspiracy to interfere with potential voters’ right to vote in the 2016 presidential election.

According to court documents, by 2016, Douglass Mackey, aka Ricky Vaughn, had established an audience on Twitter with approximately 58,000 followers. A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as one of the most significant influencers of the then-upcoming presidential election. Between September 2016 and November 2016, Mackey conspired with other influential Twitter users and with members of private online groups to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages that encouraged supporters of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to “vote” via text message or social media, which was legally invalid.

For example, on Nov. 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” Mackey tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.” The tweet included the typed hashtag “#ImWithHer,” a slogan frequently used by then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images that Mackey and his co-conspirators tweeted.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLE: RINOS WIN: Jim Jordan Withdraws, Won’t Seek Third Vote

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Durham Report: FBI Had No ‘Actual Evidence,’ Trump-Russia ‘Collusion’ Probe Was a Hoax

Special prosecutor John Durham concluded that “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

“FBI records prepared by [Peter] Strzok in February and March 2017 show that at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials.”

According to the 306-page Durham report, the Obama FBI tried and failed to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on George Papadopoulos.

Durham concluded the Steele dossier was a complete joke and that the FBI failed to corroborate any of its key claims: “Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting.”

Obama knew. Clinton knew. Biden knew. Comey knew. Brennan knew. McCabe knew. Strzok knew. Clapper knew. Schiff knew. FBI knew. DOJ knew. They all knew.

It was way more than a hoax, it was a coup. When do heads roll?

CIA Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her…

FBI, DOJ’s Trump-Russia ‘collusion’ probe was ‘seriously flawed,’ no basis in evidence when opened: Durham

By Samuel Chamberlain and Steven Nelson, NY Post, May 15, 2023:

The FBI investigation of former President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia in 2016 was “seriously flawed” and had no basis in evidence, special counsel John Durham said in a report released Monday.

Durham concluded his four-year review with a scathing indictment of official bias in the probe, which fueled Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Trump’s theorized conspiracy with the Kremlin to win the White House.

“It is the Office’s assessment that the FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” Durham wrote.

“Similarly, the FBI Inspection Division Report says that the investigators ‘repeatedly ignore[d] or explain[ed] away evidence contrary to the theory the Trump campaign… had conspired with Russia… It appeared that … there was a pattern of assuming nefarious intent,’” he added.

“An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for [the investigation], but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.”

Durham, the former Connecticut US attorney who was tapped to lead the review in 2019 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, dug deep into the origins of Operation Crossfire Hurricane, but his final report didn’t urge new criminal prosecutions.

The FBI’s leak-ridden investigation began in summer 2016 and ultimately dragged on under special counsel Robert Mueller through more than half of Trump’s term in office — with a granular stream of leaks to the media creating the impression of damning evidence mounting against Trump.

Read more.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLES:

‘FBI True’ Series – What’s the Other Half of it?

Weaponized FBI’s ‘Abuse of Power’: Three Whistleblowers Expose How Bureau Inflated Domestic Extremism’ Stats and Prioritized January 6 Defendants Over Child Predators in Bombshell Hearing

FBI Admits Durham Report Is Right

RELATED VIDEO: CNN’S Jake Tapper Calls Durham Report “Devastating To The FBI”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Foundations Destroying American Public Education: The Hydra

Summary: The world of K–12 education policy has long been dominated by philanthropic foundations. Much of the education “reform” sweeping across America has been financed and pushed by elite, well-heeled foundations. They have used the billions from their endowments to create various associations and activist groups to promote these changes. The Ford, Kellogg, and MacArthur Foundations commanded assets of nearly $27 billion and, between them, doled out more than one billion dollars in 2015. For example, it is philanthropic foundations who have injected critical race theory into society. The Ford Foundation spent $665 million on “racial equity” between 2011 and 2020.


Pierce Delahunt is a trust-fund baby with an inheritance in the millions, generated from a chain of successful outlet malls. By thirty-two, Delahunt took “nongendered pronouns” like “their,” was a self-styled anarchist and communist, and was directing the inheritance to nonprofit groups that advanced those causes. Their parents were socially liberal and Delahunt often heard things like “be kind to all, and mindful of those less fortunate.” But after learning “social justice throughout high school,” Delahunt realized that was not equity. They expressed distaste for concepts like “NeoLiberalism (an intentionally repackaged Capitalism), ‘Classical Liberalism’ (similarly repackaged Conservatism), Liberalism itself (as opposed to Leftism) . . . and other liberation-washed practices of oppression.”[1]

With time and money at their disposal, Delahunt “put a lot of energy into critiquing this country. I enjoy problematizing in general.” Though outlet malls provide name-brand goods at deeply discounted prices, allowing lower-income earners to enjoy the same luxuries as the rich, Delahunt was ashamed of the source of their wealth, saying, “When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression.” They decided to donate their inheritance to anticapitalist groups that “tackle the externalities of discount shopping.”[2]

Delahunt now has a master’s degree in education and gives speeches to children, such as one geared toward middle and high schoolers called “Vegan Praxis in a Political Context of White Supremacy.” As a professional biography says: “Their research was a study of activist-education programs throughout the country. They grew up in occupied Lenape territories of New York and New Jersey, and . . . teach social emotional learning, activism, social justice, and Leftist eco nomics.”[3]

Key to Delahunt’s activities was a group called Resource Generation, a group funded by the Ford Foundation and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to coax guilt-ridden young scions of millionaires into steering their families’ funds to activist groups that oppose capitalism. Delahunt is one of a thousand or so dues-paying members of Resource Generation, a network that stands to influence a combined $22 billion in inheritance. The group held “workshops on family dynamics” to train young inheritors how to siphon off their parents’ money on the premise that capitalism is based on “stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen lives.”[4]

This is typical of how philanthropic foundations like Ford and Kellogg work. Elite, well-heeled foundation executives use the billions from their endowments—amassed through capitalism—to create various associations and activist groups. Those nonprofits radicalize youth by associating racism with America, and America with capitalism. The foundation money serves as seed money that is eventually leveraged by another source. The foundations have created their own mouthpieces, and gotten others to pay for it.

There are hundreds of such activist groups, local and national, pushing complaints about “systemic racism,” equity, and the evils of capitalism to public schools and children. It is a veritable industry, breathtaking in its volume and complexity.

But like the Hydra of Greek mythology—the immortal, multi-headed snake monster that, if someone cut off a head, would grow two more in its place—these activist groups are all parts of one machine. Pick any one of them, and its funding is likely to tie back to the foundations, primarily Ford; Gates; W. K. Kellogg; Annie E. Casey; MacArthur; and Surdna. There is also the New Venture Fund, a group that pools money from all of these foundations and then distributes it.

The Ford Foundation spent $665 million on “racial equity” between 2011 and 2020. But foundations do not simply subsidize existing, independent nonprofits. They decide what they want to allocate their focus and money to, then a crowd of activist groups lines up with grant proposals promising to do just that, even if it means diverting from what those groups would have otherwise done. In October 2020, Ford announced $180 million in new funding for racial equity, with a focus on litigation—perhaps suing over racism and fighting for the likes of racial quotas in the courts. In making this decision, Darren Walker, the gay black former securities trader who leads the foundation, was like a coach calling the play, sending his players out into position, and setting the course of American activism.[5]

Equity grantee groups are professional outfits, but many operate in largely esoteric areas such as school board policy making and curriculum development, where the “other team” is simply regular parents, who rarely have the time or know-how to resist, or even notice these efforts. The obscurity of their work makes them harder to challenge.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton spent more than half a billion dollars on her presidential campaign. By comparison, the Ford, Kellogg, and MacArthur foundations alone commanded assets of nearly $27 billion and, between them, doled out more than one billion dollars in 2015.[6] Imagine having the resources of two presidential political campaigns without having to worry about expensive advertising, because the arena they were influencing was, to the average citizen, so small and arcane.

Then imagine that in this presidential campaign, there was no opposing candidate—essentially no organized faction presenting a competing choice.

Then imagine that the views being pushed by this campaign were far more extreme than a mainstream candidate like Clinton—ideas that, if Americans had been paying attention, most would oppose, regardless of political party.

Now imagine that the people behind this campaign were among the wealthiest, most powerful people in America, working in close coordination, and that their arena was the nation’s K–12 schools. This is how this game is actually being played.

In this framework, the foundations seek to transform America in ways few Americans would want, and to do it, they seek to transform your children, by influencing the largest and most intimate thing government does: operating America’s public schools. For some reason, this is viewed as an obscure policy arena by most people, who spend more time paying attention to things like presidential politics. But it shouldn’t be. And the philanthropic foundations should not be thought of as merely the rich families who paid for some art museums or public television programming. These rogue foundations are perhaps the most radical, powerful, and least understood force in American politics. And their aspirations go far beyond the outcome of an election.

In the next installment, learn which foundation are behind equity initiatives.

Foundations Destroying American Public Education (full series)
The Hydra | Equity Initiatives | Education | Youth Activism | Two Steps Ahead

AUTHOR

Luke Rosiak

Luke Rosiak is an investigative reporter with the Daily Wire who broke stories that put Loudoun County Public Schools on the national stage. He previously worked as a journalist at…+ MORE BY LUKE ROSIAK

RELATED ARTICLE: New Book For New York School Kids Praises Socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Notes

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/lifestyle/article/The-Rich-Kids-Who-Want-to-Tear-Down-Capitalism-15759903.php; https://medium.com/delapierced/how-i-became-a-patriotic-millionaire-8d3ba645b3e1; https://medium.com/delapierced/sel4sj-9ababbc6f5ab.

[2] https://medium.com/delapierced/how-i-became-a-patriotic-millionaire-8d3ba645b3e1; https://www.sfgate.com/lifestyle/article/The-Rich-Kids-Who-Want-to-Tear-Down-Capitalism-15759903.php.

[3] https://medium.com/delapierced/about-e1770f9f8577.

[4] https://www.sfgate.com/lifestyle/article/The-Rich-Kids-Who-Want-to-Tear-Down-Capitalism-15759903.php; https://resourcegeneration.org/who-we-are/history/; https://resourcegeneration.org/frequently-asked-questions/.

[5] https://www.fordfoundation.org/the-latest/news/ford-foundation-announces-180-million-in-new-funding-for-us-racial-justice-efforts/; https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/what-money-can-buy-profiles-larissa-macfarquhar.

[6] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00000019; http://data.foundationcenter.org/#/foundations/all/nationwide/top:giving/list/2015.

Will We Ever Know the Truth About the Clintons?

Christopher Sign is dead at age 45. Sign is the journalist that exposed the supposedly unplanned meeting between Bill Clinton and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016.

If you Google “Christopher Sign dead” you’ll get a page full of headlines and excerpts stating his death is “being investigated as a suicide.” But why would a healthy 45 year old with a young family do that? Sure, it’s possible, but it isn’t likely.

Sign, who received death threats after reporting the obvious – the ex President of the United States, husband to the Democratic candidate for president, does not randomly run across an airport runway to a plane that just happens to be parked next to his plane, in order to engage in a 20 minute discussion about the weather. Just days after the meeting, the FBI decided it would not recommend criminal charges against Hillary.

One of Google’s top search results has the helpful excerpt “Trolls spread ‘Clinton crime syndicate’ nonsense conspiracy after ABC anchor found dead.” The problem with these attempts to debunk the conspiratorial interpretation of Sign’s death is simple: We’ve realized our news is censored and we’ve realized our establishment institutions can’t be trusted.

When you watch every major corporation and political special interest in America line up to fund a year of vandalism and thuggery, justified by lies and distortions, while demonizing the law abiding majority as inadvertent if not overt White Supremacists, you don’t trust them any more.

When you watch the entire weight of the American corporate establishment spend four years spreading obviously dishonest propaganda calculated to demonize and destroy an elected president, you don’t trust them any more.

When you watch the American medical establishment, with the full complicity of every major political and corporate institution, suppress information about early stage treatments for COVID-19, and lie about its origins, you don’t trust them any more.

When things like this happen, conspiracy theories gain credence. And the conspiracy theory that holds forth on the “Clinton crime syndicate” is robust, despite that many of the investigative voices that mushroomed into the Q Collective have been largely silenced. It wasn’t the Q digital army’s supposed militancy that got them banished from every major online platform, nor their most outlandish theories about Satan worshipers running the democratic party. It was what you read between the lines: tens of thousands of people were diligently investigating countless examples of how corrupt special interests have spread like a cancer through America’s most trusted institutions.

The light of day was intolerable. The Q warriors were crushed. Now they barely survive, relegated to alternative platforms where only the initiated dare to tread. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions remain in the online corridors where approved algorithms deliver approved pysops, and they ride the dopamine drip into quiescence.

Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who if nothing else is a breath of fresh air in a dank DC swamp, tweeted what millions are thinking: “Why is it that so many who cross the Clinton Crime Syndicate end up dead?”

If you want to find out more about the so-called “Clinton Death Count,” there isn’t much to be found. Comprehensive lists that were easily found ten years ago have disappeared. One fairly comprehensive list can be found from Robert Horan, who maintains a website and a Twitter account. His list includes details about each alleged victim, but hasn’t been updated in over a year.

There are other sources, the anonymous “Clinton’s Blood Trail,” also not updated. A NewsBytes article from 2016, a Gateway Pundit article from January 2021. Or a “debunking” article published on an Ohio State University website in 2019 – be sure to read the comments, since often that’s where the most interesting information can be found.

We may never know what is really going on behind the scenes in the Clinton organization. We don’t know if the scores of deaths suffered by former associates of the Clintons are the result of foul play. What we do know, however, is that there is a coordinated attempt to suppress this material.

EDITORS NOTE: This Winston84 Project column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All of Hillary Clinton’s emails posted on U.S. State Department website

The U.S. State De­part­ment has re­leased more of Hil­lary Rod­ham Clin­ton’s email cor­res­pond­ence, re­viv­ing scru­tiny of her ser­vice in the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW HILLARY CLINTON’S EMAILS.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Analysis of the attack on Judge Jeanine: It’s Time to KISS

The familiar acronym KISS, “keep it simple stupid,” began as a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s according to Wikipedia. “The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

The current maelstrom created by Fox News suspending Judge Jeanine Pirro over a question she posed concerning the symbolism of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab can best be understood using the KISS principle.

Mohammed, the 7th century prophet and founder of Islam, believed himself to be the messenger of the one and only god Allah. Mohammed believed that all people should honor Allah and only Allah. This was and continues to be the foundational premise of Islamic expansionism and its desire to establish a worldwide caliphate to make the whole world Muslim – including the United States. Islam is a replacement theology.

Islam has been at war with competing ideologies since the time of Mohammed but war is expensive. The Islamic movement’s fortunes waxed and waned over the centuries until oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Saudi Arabia in 1938. A seismic shift in geopolitical power took place and the oil rich Muslim nations were able to pursue their expansionist dreams of an Islamic caliphate once again.

The Muslim Brotherhood was already 10 years old in Egypt. According to its founder Hassan Al-Banna, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law (Sharia) on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” There is no separation of church and state in Islam, all life is ordered by Islamic supremacist religious sharia law which does not recognize any other authority including the United States Constitution.

At that time in history Saudi Arabia supported the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia went into the oil business with the United States of America. The ambitious religious ideology of Islam met the ambitious material greed of the West. Western greed was easily exploited by Islamic expansionists using the rules of the game established by Al-Banna and documented in the 1991 Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum which outlines its strategic goals for North America. Here are some highlights:

“Enablement of Islam in North America, meaning: establishing an effective and a stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims’ causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at unifying and directing Muslims’ efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global Islamic State wherever it is.” (p.4)

The movement must plan and struggle to obtain ‘the keys’ and the tools of this process in carry out this grand mission as a ‘Civilization Jihadist’ responsibility. (p.5)

The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikwan (Muslim Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and ’sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers.” (p.7)

The Explanatory Memorandum lists its organizations and chief among them are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Brotherhood’s propaganda arm the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The Explanatory Memorandum was discovered in the home of Ismael Elbarasse, a founder of the Dar Al-Hijra mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. Elbarasse was a member of the Palestine Committee, which the Muslim Brotherhood created to support Hamas in the United States.

The war on America being waged by the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots including ISNA and CAIR is being facilitated by American greed and by the most anti-American pro-Muslim president in American history – Barack Hussein Obama. For eight years Obama facilitated the Memorandum’s seditious goals by seeding the American government with Muslim Brotherhood operatives and by embracing CAIR as its voice.

A stunning 12/22/17 article by Mark Hewitt, “Stopping the Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Plan to Infiltrate America” lists many pro-Muslim Brotherhood policies of Barack Obama including:

  • Preferential hiring of Arab Muslims over Arab Christians for top jobs.
  • Development and implementation of Muslim Outreach programs throughout the administration including NASA.
  • Federally funded Muslim outreach program taught in K-12 to educate children about Islam and Muslim beliefs.
  • CIA recruitment in Arab and Muslim communities.
  • Obama’s Cairo “A New Beginnings Speech” that welcomed the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • Support and protection of legacy candidate Hillary Clinton and her Muslim Brotherhood connected aide Huma Abedin who took five boxes of physical files out of the State Department that included records marked “Muslim Engagement Documents.”
  • Appointed Muslim convert John Brennan as CIA Director.
  • Support for overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and full support for his Muslim Brotherhood replacement Mohammad Morsi in Egypt.
  • Reversed President Bush’s policy and removed the FBI from conducting surveillance on mosques.
  • Open door policy for immigration of Muslims.
There are many more not specifically mentioned in Hewitt’s article including:
  • Obama called for Israel to return to its indefensible 1967 borders.
  • Refused to name Islamic terror attacks as religiously motivated jihad.
  • Purged homeland security and the military of documents and manuals that would teach our security forces about the motivational goals and threat of Islamic jihad.
  • Obama’s FBI director Robert Mueller purged the Bureau of all anti-terrorism training materials deemed “offensive” to Muslims after secret meetings with Islamic organizations including ISNA and CAIR – both named by the U.S. government as unindicted co-conspirators in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing case.

Judge Jeanine Pirro was entirely justified in her 3.11.19 opening statement to say about Ilhan Omar:

“Think about this, she’s (Omar) not getting this anti-Israel sentiment doctrine from the Democrat Party, so if it’s not rooted in the party, where is she getting it from? Think about it. Omar wears a hijab which according to the Quran 33:59 tells women to cover so they won’t get molested. Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”

Ilhan Omar’s district is the #1 terrorist recruitment area of the United States. Omar is a sharia compliant Muslim who represents the hostile norms and antisemitism of her sharia compliant district. Sharia law is completely incompatible with the cultural norms and freedoms of the United States and our Constitution.

Instead, Judge Jeanine was suspended by Fox News and lost several sponsors. Political correctness has silenced the crucial debate about sharia law in America that would expose how sharia compliance is a threat to the safety and stability of the United States.

The winds of change are blowing against free speech in America. Obama invited the Muslim Brotherhood into America and now the Muslim Brotherhood and its anti-American goals are in Congress.

With the suspension of Judge Jeanine Pirro, Fox News has taken one giant leap toward dhimmitude and embraced creeping religious sharia law that prohibits criticism of Islam or even questioning its tenets. The judge’s reputation and career are being destroyed because her question exposed an inconvenient truth about the antisemitism inherent in hijab wearing sharia compliant Ilhan Omar.

The corrupt Democrats refuse to condemn Omar’s antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood statements. It appears that CAIR is running Congress and that Obama has finally achieved the change he hoped for. CAIR is now demanding that Judge Jeanine Pirro be permanently removed.

It is time for pro-America Americans to apply the KISS principle to Washington politics. Islamic supremacist sharia law cannot be allowed to have the last word in Congress.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its seditious member organizations must be declared terrorist organizations.

The current Muslim Brotherhood effort to make America Muslim is a religious war started in the 7th century and reignited in the 20th century. Islam is not a religion like any other – it is a replacement religion that must be defeated in America in the 21st century.

EDITORS NOTE: This Goudsmit Pundicity column is republished with permission.

Should Governor Andrew Cuomo be Excommunicated?

George J. Marlin raises a question very much on the minds of many Catholics. Surely, some rebuke from New York’s bishops is necessary. 

In March 1970, the New York State Legislature repealed the anti-abortion law that had been on the books since 1830. The bill narrowly passed, due to support from several legislators from heavily Catholic districts who were subsequently defeated for their apostasy in the November elections.

Back in those days, the Catholic Church in New York possessed moral authority; and the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Terrence Cooke, was not afraid to use that power in the public square.

Cardinal Cooke led the charge to repeal the law that permitted unrestricted abortions up to 24 weeks. And in May 1972, the State Legislature did just that and reinstated the 1830 statute.

Sadly, Governor Nelson Rockefeller vetoed the repeal of the liberalized abortion law shortly thereafter.

The New York abortion issue became moot, however, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973.

Fast forward forty years and abortion has once again made headlines in New York thanks to Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo, a baptized Catholic and graduate of Archbishop Molly High School in Queens and Fordham University in the Bronx, has abandoned some major moral tenets of his faith.

In 2011, his first year in office, he engineered the passage of same-sex marriage legislation. “Marriage equality,” he declared, “is a question of principle and the state shouldn’t discriminate against same-sex couples who wish to get married.”

Then on January 16, 2014, Cuomo announced, on a radio show, that Catholics and others with traditional moral views were unfit citizens who were no longer welcome in New York:

Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right to life, pro-assault weapons, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

It gets worse.

Cuomo has been off the rails on the subject of abortion. In his 2013 State of the State Address, he cast his lot with the radical pro-abortion lobby, screaming four times, “It’s her body; it’s her choice!”

Cuomo introduced legislation that would repeal the 1970 abortion law, and would codify abortion as a “fundamental right of privacy,” a classification even the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected.

Cuomo’s proposal was bottled up in the Republican-Conservative-controlled State Senate for four years. But last November, the GOP lost control of that legislative chamber.

A jubilant Cuomo boasted that his so-called Reproductive Health Act would be the first order of business before the newly organized Legislature in January 2019.

And so it was.

On January 22, the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Legislature passed the bill, to thundering applause and wild laughter. Minutes later, to a standing ovation, Cuomo signed it into law.


Standing (right to left in the photo), during the visit of Pope Francis to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York (September 23, 2015), are the author, Mayor Bill DeBlasio, Sandra Lee (Andrew Cuomo’s domestic partner), and the governor.

This law goes far beyond Roe v. Wade. It removes abortion clauses from the penal code and “creates a right to the procedure under the public health law.”

Although abortions are restricted to the first twenty-four weeks of pregnancy, exceptions are so broad (i.e., economic, social, or emotional distress) that anyone will be able to procure an abortion up to minutes before giving birth. In other words, the lives of unborn children who have viability outside the womb can now be terminated by doctors and non-doctors.

Governor Andrew Cuomo is very different than his father, Governor Mario Cuomo. The elder Cuomo tried to be St. Thomas More and Machiavelli at one and the same time.

In his famous 1984 Notre Dame speech on “Religious Belief and Public Morality,” the More-Cuomo said “The Catholic Church is my spiritual home. My head is there and my hope. . . .[and] I accept the Church’s teaching on abortion.” But the Machiavelli-Cuomo gave himself an “out” by claiming that as a public official, he could not impose his private religious views on the rest of society.

Mario Cuomo demonstrated the absurdity of his position every time he vetoed death penalty legislation that was approved overwhelmingly by the Legislature and was supported by over 60 percent of New Yorkers. Cuomo imposed his personal moral objections even though there was public opinion against him.

Andrew Cuomo is vastly different from his father. There is no duality; he prefers to be a Machiavellian and he promotes whatever works to advance his political ambitions.

In fact, it has been reported that when he was Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, one of his first acts “was to distribute the book by Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, to his key aides. . .telling them: ‘This is my leadership philosophy.’”

Cuomo uses or spurns the Church when it suits his political ends. While he discarded Church teaching on abortion, he embraced and praised Pope Francis’s message concerning the needy and the marginalized. And when the pope visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral on September 24, 2015, Cuomo made sure he was in a front pew. It was great political theater for the governor.

Since Andrew Cuomo has dismissed the fundamental Church teaching that all persons have the right to life because they are made in the image of God, maybe it’s time the Church dismissed him.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly states that “Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encouraged.”

So, at the very least, the bishops of New York should announce publicly that because Cuomo has caused public scandal, he must be denied Communion.

Or the bishops, if they have the mettle, might call Cuomo in and point out the canonical penalties they are prepared to impose if he does not renounce his heresy. Whether or not that includes excommunication is a matter for canon lawyers.

But something really must be done, lest New York’s bishops confirm the growing perception that the Catholic Church is a compromised paper tiger.

COLUMN BY

George J. Marlin

George J. Marlin

George J. Marlin, Chairman of the Board of Aid to the Church in Need USA, is the author of The American Catholic VoterNarcissist Nation: Reflections of a Blue-State Conservative, and Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy. . His new book, Sons of St. Patrick, written with Brad Miner, was published on St. Patrick’s Day 2017.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column with images is republished with permission. © 2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. The featured image of
Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) is from his Facebook page.

The Plot Thickens: Grassley-Graham Letter Sheds New Light on Steele Dossier, Nunes Memo

While politicians, pundits, and the people continue to react to (and spin) the contents of the Nunes memo that was released last Friday, and await the release of the Democrats’ rebuttal, a new document has been released that contains tidbits of illuminating information.

On Jan. 4, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime and terrorism, submitted a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Chris Wray requesting that they consider investigating Christopher Steele for lying to the FBI, which is a federal crime.

Steele is the former British spy who was hired and paid $160,000 by Fusion GPS, a research company working on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to do opposition research on Donald Trump. Steele is also the individual who produced a dossier that was used to support an application for a warrant to engage in electronic surveillance of Carter Page, a suspected foreign agent (wittingly or unwittingly) of the Russian government who was also working as an unpaid foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign.

And it is Steele’s credibility, as well as allegations of political bias at senior levels of the FBI, that are the center of this dispute.

Grassley-Graham Memo Informs Our Understanding of Nunes Memo

Attached to that referral letter was an eight-page classified memorandum (“Grassley/Graham memo”) setting forth the basis for the referral. Wray, very much to his credit, has declassified much (but not all) of the information in that memorandum, which has now been released.

The initial application (which was subsequently renewed three times) was filed on October 21, 2016, pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and was signed by a judge on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

As I wrote in a previous article, Former FBI Director James Comey has testified that the information in the Steele dossier was “unverified” at the time the initial FISA application was submitted, and, according to the Nunes memo, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe testified before the House intelligence committee that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] with the Steele dossier information,” suggesting the FBI did not believe probable cause existed based on the information it gathered on its own.

Several Democrats have charged that the Nunes memo mischaracterized McCabe’s testimony and have implied that there was more than enough information in the FISA application to support issuing the warrant without information from the Steele dossier.

In their referral memorandum, Grassley and Graham, who have reviewed all four FISA applications in their entirety, “as well as numerous other FBI documents relating to Steele,” make statements which, assuming they are true, tend to support what is contained in the Nunes memo.

Specifically, the Grassley/Graham memo states that the Steele dossier “formed a significant portion of the FBI’s warrant application,” that the application “relied more heavily on Steele’s credibility than on any independent verification or corroboration for his claims,” and that the basis for the warrant “rests largely” on Steele’s credibility.

The Steele dossier contains explosive allegations that the Russian government, acting under orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin, was carrying out an operation to tilt the election in Trump’s favor and that the Russian government had compromising information of a financial and sexual nature against Trump that could be used to blackmail him at some point in the future.

Why the FBI Trusted Steele

The FBI, it seems, trusted Steele and relied on this information because of his background as a spy and because he had provided the bureau with reliable information on several occasions in the past.

According to the Grassley/Graham memo, the FBI stated in its initial FISA application that, “based on [Steele’s] previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby [Steele] provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes [Steele’s] reporting to be credible.”

While that may have been so in the past, there was plenty of reason to distrust Steele in this case.

In addition to the fact that he was working on behalf of the DNC and Trump’s opponent in the presidential election, Steele detested Trump. A month before the government filed its first FISA application, Steele told Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department official whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, that he was “desperate” to see that Trump not win the election.

Moreover, the Steele dossier itself is replete with statement allegedly provided to Steele by various unnamed sources whom Steele claims are or were senior Russian officials or people who were close to them. In other words, the validity of the dossier depended not only on the credibility of the man preparing the dossier (whose credibility was subject to doubt in this case), but also his assessment of the credibility of other unidentified sources who were feeding him information.

Did Clinton Sources Contribute to Steele Dossier?

As disturbing as that is, another revelation in the Grassley/Graham memo is even more concerning.

The memo suggests that some of the information being fed to Steele and included in his dossier did not come from highly-placed Russian sources, but from people associated with the Clintons.

There has been some speculation that this individual may have been Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and employee of the Clinton Foundation and a long-time close confidant of Hillary Clinton.

As the memo states, “[i]t is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility.”

Steele’s Relationship With FBI

The nature of the lies that Steele may have told the FBI are also significant.

Given the fact that the information in the Steele dossier was “unverified” and was central to the FISA application, the FBI was looking for some, any, information that might be deemed corroborative. According to the Grassley/Graham memo, at the time of the initial FISA application, Steele had told the FBI that he had not disclosed the contents of his dossier to anyone other than the bureau and Fusion GPS.

Roughly one month beforehand, Yahoo News, presumably doing its own investigative work, published an article that, as the FISA application stated, “generally match[ed] the information about [Carter] Page that [Steele] discovered doing [his] own research … .”

According to the Grassley/Graham memo, the FBI affirmatively stated in the FISA application that it did not believe Steele was the source of the information that appeared in the Yahoo News article, which attributed the source of its information to “a well-placed Western intelligence source … .”

If the Yahoo News source was indeed an independent source, this would be significant, but it wasn’t. Contrary to what he told the FBI, Steele had, in fact, provided information in his dossier to others. The source of the information in the Yahoo News article was Steele himself.

Steele, no doubt anxious to get his revelations into the public domain before the election, was leaking like a sieve. In addition to speaking to Yahoo News, Steele provided background briefings to CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and possibly other media outlets.

Shortly after the initial FISA warrant was obtained, Mother Jones published its own article in which Steele outed himself as an FBI confidential source, which prompted the FBI to formally terminate Steele’s designation as a trusted source.

Friends of Steele’s have stated that Steele was deeply troubled by what he learned during his investigation of Trump and that he felt like he was “sitting on a nuclear weapon.” Perhaps that was so.

But given the explosive nature of charges, the relationship of the target (Page) to the Trump campaign in the heat of a close election battle, the fact that Steele was paid by (and possibly given unsourced information by) the Clinton campaign, it was incumbent on the FBI to verify as much of this information as it could or, at the very least, to reveal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court every bit of information it had that might cast doubt on Steele’s credibility.

In summary, the initial FISA application and, most likely, the renewal applications, relied extensively on the credibility of Steele. Yet in addition to the fact that it failed to disclose the full extent of Steele’s known or potential bias in the initial application, when the FBI learned that Steele had not been truthful during the process, it did not, it seems, tell that to the FISA court.

As Graham has stated: “You can be an FBI informant. You can be a political operative. But you can’t be both, particularly at the same time.”

All attorneys before a court have a duty of candor, which means they must disclose “all material facts known to the lawyer that will enable the tribunal to make an informed decision, whether or not the facts are adverse.” Would the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge have signed the warrant if this information had been disclosed? We will never know.

This is, of course, a developing story, and more information will likely be revealed once the memo from Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is disclosed, assuming that it is disclosed.

Speaking of the Schiff memo, some Democrats have expressed the fear that the president, who must approve the memo’s release, will make “political redactions” to the memo to prevent the disclosure of information that will be unfavorable to him.  And some Republican sources have expressed the fear that the Democrats may have intentionally included highly sensitive information in their memo so that, if redacted by Trump, it would enable them to argue that the president is hiding something.

Let’s hope neither of these is true.

It is, of course, vital that the president protect against the disclosure of sensitive “sources and methods” that could imperil the integrity of current or future national security investigations. That having been said, it is also important that the public get to the bottom of what happened here. As I have previously stated, this “matter should be thoroughly and dispassionately (to the extent that is possible in Washington, D.C.) investigated. The matter is too important to do otherwise.”

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of John G. Malcolm

John G. Malcolm oversees The Heritage Foundation’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law as director of the think tank’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Read his research. Twitter: .

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Huma Abedin Emails Show Clinton Donors Receiving Special Treatment

New Clinton/Abedin Emails Revealed!

Our understanding of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton’s State Department continues to expand as more of her illicit server’s emails are revealed.

This week we released 448 pages of documents from the U.S. Department of State revealing new incidents of Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, providing special State Department treatment to major donors to the Clinton Foundation and political campaigns.

The heavily redacted documents from Abedin’s non-government account include an email from Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, to Abedin revealing that he acted as a go between for a Clinton Foundation donor, Richard Park. And they reveal Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band instructing Abedin to “show love” to Clinton donor Andrew Liveris.

The documents included six Clinton email exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to at least 439 emails that were not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department, and further contradicting a statement by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails had been turned over to the State Department.

The documents are in response to a court order from a May 5, 2015, lawsuit filed against the State Department (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)) for: “All emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-‘state.gov’ email address.”

A number of emails show the free flow of information and requests for favors between Clinton’s State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

In July 2009, in reference to the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, Clinton Global Initiative head Doug Band told Abedin that she “Need[s] to show love” to Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow Chemical. Band also asked for Liveris to be introduced to Hillary, “and have her mention both me and wjc”.  Dow gave between  $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.  Band also pushes for Clinton to do a favor for Karlheinz Koegel, a major Clinton Foundation contributor, who wanted Hillary Clinton to give the “honor speech” for his media prize to “Merkel.”

The emails reveal that on June 19, 2009, Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, passed a long a letter for Hillary Clinton for Clinton donor Richard Park.  Park donated $100,000 to Bill Clinton as far back as 1993 and is listed by the Clinton Foundation as a $100,000 to $250,000 donor.

The Washington Examiner reported:

In March 2012, Bill Clinton received an invitation to speak at the Kaesong Industrial Complex in North Korea…. Richard Park’s friendship with Tony Rodham earned him a direct line to Hillary Clinton while she served as secretary of state. In January 2013, the Korean businessman sent Rodham an email and asked him to “forward this to your sister.”

On November 14, 2009, Clinton donor Ben Ringel, who has appeared in numerous prior emails asking for favors, emailed Abedin to get help in getting an Iranian woman a visa to come to the United States. He writes: “We need to get her clearance even only temporary to be with her granddaughter.” Abedin forwarded the request to Lauren Jiloty, asking her “Can U help Monday with consular affairs?” Jiloty replies, “Sure. Will look into it.”  Ringel donated between $10,000 and $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation.  In May, Band, working through Abedin, attempts to help Canadian concert promoter and Foundationdonor Michael Cohl with the processing of a visa. Abedin passes the request to Monica Hanley, Clinton’s “confidential assistant.”

The emails show that the Clinton Foundation operative Band was involved in personnel matters at the Clinton State Department.  In a May 2009 email exchange between Band and Abedin, a “career post” to East Timor for someone is discussed. Abedin explains to Band that Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s then-chief of staff, was working on the situation “under the radar.”

In August 2009, Band tells Abedin of someone who wants to be the ambassador to Barbados. Abedin replies: “I know, he’s emailed a few times. But she wants to give to someone else.”

The emails also show that Abedin received advice from her mother, Saleha Abedin (a controversialIslamist activist), on whom the Obama administration should appoint as the US Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.   She notes that she has obtained a recommendation from “Hassan” (NFI), and that she’d reached out to “Ishanoglu”. This is presumably Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, a Turkish academic and the former Secretary-General of the OIC. Ihsanoglu famously called on the West to enact anti-Islamic blasphemy laws.

On Monday, June 8, Clinton emails her aide Lona Valmoro and Abedin asking to attend a cabinet meeting: “I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are you sending?” Valmoro answers: “It is actually not a full cabinet meeting today – those agencies that received recovery money were invited to attend/participate. We were welcome to send a representative though, not sure if we have anyone going.”

Other emails found in Abedin’s unsecure email account appear to show additional instances of the Clinton State Department’s lax approach to protecting national security.

On July 4, 2009, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Jonathan “Scott” Gration sent Abedin an email that the State Department has classified in part and redacted because the information deals with “foreign governments” and “national defense or foreign policy.” Abedin forwarded Gration’s email to her personal, unsecure email account.  In his email, Gration related his meeting with Libyan president Muammar Qadafi, saying: “I conveyed our appreciation for Libya’s role to improve relations between Chad and Sudan … Leader al-Qadafi promised to continue his nation’s close collaboration with the United States … and is eager to meet you and President Obama.…” Gration would later be fired for, among other things, using personal email accounts to send government information.

A document titled “HRC PRIVATE LINE BLOCK” gives the planned whereabouts for President Obama for Thursday, June 4, 2009: “Attend POTUS Foreign Policy Speech at Cairo University.” In another example of lax concern for security, Valmoro forwarded Clinton’s detailed daily schedule for July 15, 2009, to officers of the Clinton Foundation, including Doug Band and Justin Cooper. Again, on July 26 Valmoro forwarded Hillary’s detailed, sensitive daily schedule to numerous Clinton Foundation officials.

In other examples of lax concern for security, on June 11, there is a reference to testing the “Federal preparedness and response for an international terrorist threat to the United States. [Principal-Level Exercise] will be a scenario-driven discussion for Cabinet Secretaries, agency Directors and Administrators, senior officials in the Executive Office of the President, or their approved representatives.” A document in Abedin’s unsecure email account dated May 2009 is titled “The Secretary’s Phone Call with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang” is marked sensitive but unclassified and fully redacted, as is a document titled “The Secretary’s Phone Call with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov.”

I’m not sure how much more evidence of pay for play, classified information mishandling, and influence peddling from Clinton’s email server one would need to show for a serious criminal investigation is required.

More emails to come soon, so stay tuned….

RELATED ARTICLE: A New Clinton Email Emerges In Which Clinton Camp Brags About Killing An Unflattering Story On Uranium One

Trump/Obama Travel Numbers Released

As we continue to monitor the cost to taxpayers of presidential perks, we have received new numbers on President Trump’s travel.

We have obtained records from the U.S. Department of the Air Force in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and a lawsuit for Trump administration travel records.

The new records show new expenses totaling $2,301,527.02. As a result of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, the following records were produced:

  • Melania Trump flew to Mar-a-Lago between February 3-6 on a C-37B military jet at an operating cost of $10,075 per hour for six hours. The total comes to $60,450.
  • Vice President Pence flew Air Force Two 5.58 hours to Houston for the Super Bowl between February 3-6 at an operating cost of $15,994 per hour, for a total of $89,246.52.
  • Melania Trump flew from New York to Washington DC on February 10 to join her husband on Air Force One for the trip to Mar-a-Lago. She departed on February 12 for New York on a C-37A jet for a weekend total of 7.09 hours at $10,075 per hour, bringing the cost to $71,431.75.
  • President Trump flew Air Force One 5.7 hours to Mar-a-Lago between February 17-21 at an operating cost of $142,380 per hour, for a total of $811,566.
  • Melania Trump flew from New York to Mar-a-Lago between February 17-21. One leg she flew 5.63 hours on a C-37B military jet at an operating cost of $10,075 per hour for a total of $56,722.25 and on the other leg she flew 5.57 hours on a C-40B jet at $5,450 per hour for a total of $30,356.50. The grand total is $87,078.75.
  • President Trump flew 4.1 hours on Air Force One to Mar-a-Lago between March 17-19 at $142,380 per hour, for a total of $583,758.

In response to a Judicial Watch FOIA request, the Air Force produced the following record:

  • President Trump entertained Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago between February 10-13 where they played a round of golf. They flew Air Force One 4.2 hours at $142,380 per hour for a total of $597,996.

We previously released documents showing travel expenses of $1,281,420.

We also closely tracked Obama family travel costs throughout his presidency.  In response to a June 19, 2014, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Judicial Watch recently received documents from the Secret Service related to Michelle Obama’s March 2014 trip to China. The total Secret Service expenses adds up to $389,931.71:

$288,662.07 in hotels
$72,701.14 in car rentals
$5,020.52 in cell phone charges
$4,282.65 in rental reproduction equipment
$393.52 in printers and toners
$1,010.63 in cell phone rentals
$199.17 in supplies
$11,266.38 in overtime/per diem pay
$1,265.13 in miscellaneous services by another government agency
$5,130.50 in Air/Rail

Added to the previously released flight costs from the Air Force ($362,523.53) and the total for the trip comes to $752,455.24. Obama family travel cost taxpayers at least $100,104,459.53 during his two terms.

Presidential travel is racking up millions of dollars in expenses paid by taxpayers. The liberal media did not much care about our reporting on President Obama’s abusive travel but now are keenly interested in President Trump’s trips.

The Trump administration should do what the Obama administration did not do – move reforms through to get these expenses under control for this and future presidents.  In the meantime, the bureaucracies should release the travel numbers rather than requiring us to go to court to get accountability for taxpayers.

Media Ignores Virginia Governor’s Role in Green Car Scandal

When we last looked in on Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe he was trying to influence the 2016 presidential election in Hillary Clinton’s favor by abusing his office to restore voting rights for 206,000 convicted felons. As an aside, it’s interesting to note that he assumed criminals would choose to vote for Clinton.

Now we find the Teflon governor looking over his shoulder as some of his shady dealings pursue him. The media has apparently been too busy criticizing Ivanka Trump’s dress to cover this story fully. But our Corruption Chronicles blog has the details.

An electric car company that folded after taking millions of taxpayer dollars was founded by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, but the mainstream media is ignoring this pertinent fact.

The Mississippi-based company, GreenTech, shut down in January but is back in the spotlight because this week the state’s auditor demanded the firm repay $6.4 million in public funds. Only a small Richmond, Virginia, newspaper prominently reported McAuliffe’s ties to the scandal, stating in the headline that, “Mississippi auditor demands $6.4M repayment from McAuliffe’s former electric car company.

Most mainstream news outlets ignored the story altogether and a few kept McAuliffe’s name out the minimal coverage. Washington D.C.’s mainstream newspaper went with a lengthy wire service story that matter-of-factly mentions McAuliffe in the very last sentence. “Among former insiders is Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe,” the end of the article states. “He resigned as the firm’s chairman in December 2012 and said he divested his interest.” How convenient! The article omits that, as GreenTech founder, McAuliffe brokered the deal in which the company got millions in public funds by promising to invest $60 million locally and creating hundreds of new full-time jobs. That never happened and instead taxpayers got fleeced. Now Mississippi State Auditor Stacey Pickering is ordering that the money be repaid with interest and investigative costs. The exact figure is $6,360,019.60.

McAuliffe is a renowned Democratic fundraiser who made a fortune with shady investments in a telecommunications giant that went bankrupt. He started his fundraising career in Jimmy Carter’s 1979 reelection campaign and has raised big bucks for Democrats over the years, but not without controversy. McAuliffe was investigated for campaign-finance abuses during the 1996 presidential election and was deposed by the Senate committee investigating the matter. 

In 2002 the Virginia governor was investigated for his role in an unprecedented case of political profiteering for turning a $100,000 investment in telecommunications giant Global Crossings into an $18 million profit. The company later made the fourth-largest bankruptcy filing in history and McAuliffe insisted he only did “political work” for the company’s founder who, incidentally, donated $1 million to Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library.

In 2013, McAuliffe appeared on Judicial Watch’s most corrupt politicians list, and last year Judicial Watch sued the governor on behalf of Virginia voters for signing an executive order to restore voting rights to about 206,000 convicted felons. In court proceedings, Judicial Watch argued that the blanket restoration of rights to felons violates “provisions of the Virginia Constitution mandating that voting rights may only be restored on an individual basis, following a particular, individualized review and a finding of sufficient grounds for restoring such rights.” Plaintiffs alleged that their votes and the lawful votes of other Virginians will be cancelled out or diminished by felons who are not eligible to vote under Virginia’s laws and constitution.

Though his pals in the mainstream media are keeping his name out of the GreenTech scandal, McAuliffe could still be in serious trouble. The Virginia paper that reported his key role in the bankrupt electric car company points this out: “McAuliffe’s office has said the governor has had no involvement with the company since stepping down as its chairman and divesting his financial stake. But the escalating standoff in Mississippi raises the likelihood that the business deal McAuliffe brokered could be headed toward a bitter end in court. Ending his four-year term as governor with a higher national profile and record as an exuberant pitchman for Virginia, GreenTech’s unraveling could dog McAuliffe amid speculation about a 2020 presidential bid.”

It’s Democrats who have embraced the policy of death and thousands of people are dying!

As Republicans in the U.S. Congress are debating the pluses and minuses of their repeal and replacement legislation for Obamacare, the Democrats are accusing their colleagues of  wanting “thousands of people to die.”

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

It was The Agenda Project Action Fund that in 2011 released the video of a “Republican” pushing an old woman in a wheel chair off of a cliff. The Agenda Project Action Fund in 2016 endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for President of the United States. The “thousands of people to die” rhetoric has been repeated on major news channels most recently by Senator Sanders and other Democrats, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

The scheme is to paint Republicans as murderers. It’s the “big lie.”

Master propagandist of the Nazi regime and dictator of its cultural life for twelve years, Joseph Goebbels wrote,

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Watch the below video to understand how a variety of Democrats, and media pundits, are repeating the “big lie” that “thousands will die”:

TRUTH: It’s Democrats who have embraced the policy of death and thousands of people are dying.

Here are a few examples of policies and legislation supported by Democrats that are causing people to die:

In an LA Times article titled “111 terminally ill patients took their own lives in first 6 months of California right-to-die law”, Soumya Karlamangla reports:

A total of 111 people in California took their own lives using lethal prescriptions during the first six months of a law that allows terminally ill people to request life-ending drugs from their doctors, according to data released Tuesday.

A snapshot of the patients who took advantage of the law mirrors what’s been seen in Oregon, which was the first state to legalize the practice nearly two decades ago. Though California is far more diverse than Oregon, the majority of those who have died under aid-in-dying laws in both states were white, college-educated cancer patients older than 60.

The End of Life Option Act made California the fifth state in the nation to allow patients with less than six months to live to request end-of-life drugs from their doctors.

Five states and Washington, D.C., have “Death with Dignity” statutes:

  • California (End of Life Option Act; 2016)
  • Colorado (End of Life Options Act; 2016)
  • District of Columbia (Death with Dignity Act; 2017)
  • Oregon (Oregon Death with Dignity Act; 1994/1997)
  • Vermont (Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life Act; 2013)
  • Washington (Washington Death with Dignity Act; 2008)

These five states and the District of Columbia are controlled by Democrats.

Illinois is in a fiscal meltdown, the state is bankrupt. In 2016 the Illinois Obamacare co-op became 16th to collapse. Americans for Tax Reform reported:

Sixteen Obamacare co-ops have now failed. Illinois announced that Land of Lincoln Health, a taxpayer funded Obamacare co-op, would close its doors, leaving 49,000 without insurance. The co-op now joins a list of 15 other Obamacare co-ops that have collapsed since Obamacare has been implemented.  Failed co-ops have now cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion in funds that may never be recovered.

Co-ops were hyped as not-for-profit alternatives to traditional insurance companies created under Obamacare. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) financed co-ops with startup and solvency loans, totaling more than $2.4 billion in taxpayer dollars. They have failed to become sustainable with many collapsing amid the failure of Obamacare exchanges.

Since September, 13 Obamacare co-ops have collapsed, with only seven of the original 23 co-ops remaining.  Illinois’ Land of Lincoln co-op faced losses of $90 million last year and is suing the federal government for the deficit caused by Obamacare.  Co-ops across the country have struggled to operate in Obamacare exchanges, losing millions despite receiving enormous government subsidies.

Tens of thousands of people in the Land of Lincoln are without healthcare. Illinois is ruled by Democrats.

In an article titled “Break the Baby’s Neck if Born Alive” Debra Braun reports:

St. Paul, MN, June 27, 2017 – Planned Parenthood abortionists in St. Paul, Minn. would “break the baby’s neck” if the child was born alive, according to a new video just released by Pro-Life Action Ministries. This would be a violation of both federal and Minnesota law.

Braun notes:

In the video, a former Planned Parenthood client says that when she went to Planned Parenthood earlier this year for a late-term abortion (at 22 weeks, 1 day), she asked the two abortionists, “If you guys were to take him out right now while he’s still, his heart rate is still, you know, going, what would you guys do?” According to the woman, one of the abortionists looked at the other one, then looked back at the client, “and she told me that we don’t tell women this, and a lot of women don’t even ask this question, but if we was to proceed with the abortion and the baby was to come out still alive and active, most likely we would break the baby’s neck.”

Read more.

Democrats fully support Planned Parenthood aborting the unborn, and now killing the born.

So who supports a culture of death? Who wants thousands of people to die? You be the judge.

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Acting FBI Director McCabe needs to go because of his wife Jill

The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and CNN all reported that the acting FBI Director Andrew G. McCabe contradicted the White House’s assertion that James B. Comey had lost the support of rank-and-file FBI agents. So why are these news organizations highlighting McCabe? Perhaps it is because of his wife Dr. Jill McCabe, who ran for the Virginia state Senate as a Democrat?

What these news outlets fail to tell you about his wife Dr. Jill McCabe is her connection to long time Hillary Clinton supporter and governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe.

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe campaigning with his wife Jill.

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe campaigning with his wife Jill.

In The Daily Signal article Here Are 12 Possible Comey Replacements at FBI Fred Lucas reports:

Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director who was the deputy director under Comey, testified on Capitol Hill Thursday. He is also reportedly a contender for the job, but could be challenged due to potential conflicts.

McCabe served as an FBI special agent since 1996, and was elevated to the No. 2 spot in 2016. However, while he was moving up in the FBI during the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, his wife Dr. Jill McCabe ran for the Virginia state Senate in 2015, with a financial boost of almost $500,000 from Common Good VA. The political action committee is controlled by longtime Clinton ally Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

In a statement to The Wall Street Journal last year, the FBI said, “Months after the completion of [his wife’s] campaign, then-Associate Deputy Director McCabe was promoted to deputy, where, in that position, he assumed for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails.”

“It needs to be somebody independent,” said Ron Hosko, the FBI’s former assistant director of the criminal investigative division and now president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. “With McCabe, this day and age, even the appearance of impropriety is a problem … An appearance can be fatal—maybe not to a career—but to advancement.”

Hillary Clinton campaigning with long time ally Terry McAuliffe, governor of Virginia.

Hillary Clinton campaigning with long time ally Terry McAuliffe, governor of Virginia.

The Daily Beast reports:

The news [of Dr. Jill McCabe’s McAuliffe connection] drew calls for McCabe to publicly recuse himself from anything involving the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s email scandal. But he didn’t do that, and conservatives haven’t forgotten.

“He should be removed as acting director and then either fired or demoted,” Mark Corallo, spokesperson for John Ashcroft when he was Attorney General, told The Daily Beast. “When he did not recuse himself from the investigation despite knowing his wife received major campaign contributions from Terry McAuliffe, he broke the ethics rules and tainted the investigation. Time for him to go.”

It appears the reason McCabe is defending Comey and wants the Russian investigation to move forward may be because he is complicit in the failure by the FBI to indict Hillary Clinton and those implicated in creating, maintaining and scrubbing the email server, which contained classified information.

Mr. McCabe needs to go.

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COUNTDOWN: The Top 5 Lies of the Left

American political liberaldom relies heavily on empty canards, name-calling and scare tactics to stay alive and shut down opposition.

There are few if any deep and penetrating debates on major topics that drive the politics of the left. They simply will not allow it. So they create fictitious arguments (the nice way of saying lies.)

With that in mind, here are a few major shibboleths of at least the activist left which verge on the incredulous, but which are used regularly and magnified by the sympathetic media megaphone.

No. 5 Lie: Border security is racist

If you believe that America should act like most every other country in the world and protect its borders, you’re a racist.

If you believe that America should have the authority to let in who it wants to and keep out who it wants to like most every other country, you’re a racist.

If you believe America should know who is here and who is coming and going like most every other country, you’re a racist.

This stems from candidate Donald Trump running on a campaign to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border to stop the millions of illegal aliens (that is the actual, legal term) from crossing back and forth like it was a state border.

This quasi-open border is the result of an unholy alliance between businesses that want cheap labor and Democrat political interests that see future Democratic voters and a play to current Hispanic voters. And it is the issue that Trump claimed in order to peel away blue-collar Democratic voters.

The left rarely tries to argue the merits of open borders, because most Americans oppose that. So they devolve to the thought-free name-calling of racism because, you know, Mexicans are brown and therefore opposing them, or anyone else, breaking into our country illegally is racist.

No. 4 Lie: Asking questions is science denying

Speaking of science and politics, the inquisitive, independent thinkers among us are now considered anti-science — if they are asking questions about the degree and causes of climate change today.

Yes, while it is obviously the antithesis of actual science, which involves continually asking questions, forming hypotheses, testing, re-testing based on results and so on, this tactic now is employed to shut up any opposition to the climate change political agenda.

The data seems to suggest modest warming since the mid 1800s and there seems to be a connection between carbon in the atmosphere, trapped greenhouse gases, and global warming.

But if you question the data because of a series of scandals revealing how leading climatologists have conspired to alter older data creating cooler temperatures to suggest more rapid warming now, you are a denier.

If you question the degree to which human activity is impacting climate change by pointing out a nearly two-decade pause while carbon emissions continued to increase, you are a denier.

But these and many others are reasonable questions. That we are not allowed to ask them without being labeled flat-earthers suggests this is a lot more about politics than about science.

No. 3 Lie: Men can be women can be men, or whatever

One of the most mind-boggling absurdities foisted on us by the modern liberal is that a person’s sex is dependent on what they think it is. Any “assignment at birth” is an arbitrary constraint to who that person really is.

So, if a person has one Y chromosome and one X chromosome and they have the full package of penis and scrotum, it is not arbitrary to call them male. That person is a man. That is actual science.

But the left — in true full science denial — says those physical realities can be trumped by a person’s feeling. If that person feels like a woman, then they are a woman trapped in a man’s body and they should be allowed and encouraged to dress like a woman or have full-blown surgery to become a woman. And they should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms, locker rooms and showers — even though they are a man.

Until just the past few years this was considered a psychological condition that should be treated. But now, the left celebrates children as young as four years old being encouraged to be the sex they are not.

One could reasonably call that child abuse.

No. 2 Lie: Hate speech is not free speech

No less a luminary than former Vermont governor, DNC chairman and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean tweeted out this past week that “Hate speech is not protected by the first amendment.”

dean tweet hate speech

The internet blew up over such a ridiculous statement. Even PolitiFact and media organs called him to task. But the thing is, his tweet got 700 retweets and 1,400 likes. Dean actually doesn’t have that big a Twitter following, meaning the tweet got strong traction among those following him.

Too many on the left, most particularly those on college campuses, view hate speech practically as any speech with which they disagree. Of course, many of these same campuses actually have speech codes and “free speech zones” with the overt meaning that outside the zone is not for free speech.

The unfortunate truth is that many college liberals, trained by professorial liberals, think that they should be able to shut down speech they do not appreciate or agree with. They have safe spaces and mainstream American views can be shouted down and pushed out with threats and actions.

These people leave the campuses today and in a generation will be leaders in the nation. It matters. The radicals running campuses know this.

No. 1 Lie: It’s not about innocent life, but reproductive freedom

And coming in at number one in our countdown is the oldie but definitely not goodie, the abortion non-debate.

Increasingly, science (which worldview seems to be anti-science here?) is showing that by every objective definition the baby in the womb is indeed a human, with the inherent rights of a human, within a few weeks of conception. From brainwaves to heartbeats to pain reaction, a person. Science continually pushes this obvious definition earlier and earlier.

But the left forces the debate to revolve around women’s rights. Not the 50 percent of female babies aborted — not those would-be women — but adult women who should have the right to kill their unborn baby at any point in a pregnancy for any reason they deem. Period. This is the classic Planned Parenthood position on choice.

Because abortion is conflated with birth control, it is called a reproductive “right” on the order of getting a contraceptive device or even pap smears and mammograms — anything except actually talking about whether we should condone the often wanton taking of an innocent human life. Any restrictions on abortion therefore are restrictions on a woman’s access to healthcare. See how much you can get away with when you refuse to call something what it is.

Oh and coat hangers. Don’t forget coat hangers.

But there is an encouraging side to this falderal. All of this avoidance on major issues means that conservatives actually have the stronger cases. Otherwise, liberals would not avoid the debate. We just need to be courageous enough to make those cases over and over and over.

RELATED ARTICLE: Conservatives Fight for Free Speech at a Far-Left College

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Revolutionary Act. Click here to subscribe to the Revolutionary Act’s YouTube channel!

Hillary’s ‘Libyan legacy’ still responsible for invasion of Europe as Italy panics

Invasion of Europe news….

I’m not going to let you all forget that it was Hillary and her girls who were responsible for the overthrow of Libyan strongman Muammar Ghaddafi that resulted in the opening of the flood gates from Africa to Europe for tens of thousands of mostly economic migrants from the heart of Africa to countries like Italy geographically on the frontline of the invasion.

Left to right – Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power

Even Obama didn’t have the stomach for the slaughter of Ghaddafi.  I followed the whole sorry tale from its earliest days here at RRW.

Of course the Europeans made that fatal mistake in the earliest days of the invasion by not turning back (using safe methods) the first boats that were launched from the Libyan coast. Now they rescue each one sending a signal to people smugglers to keep ’em coming!

Susan Rice, Hillary and Samantha Power. Hillary admitted that in 2011 Obama was reluctant to follow Europe’s lead and get involved in Libya, but that she marshaled the forces (including Susan Rice and Samantha Power) to persuade Obama to help overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Ultimately, she said, it was the President’s decision thereby tossing blame back on Obama when the results of her actions have proven so disastrous.

Here is the latest news from Middle East Monitor:

hillary-clinton-benghazi-phone-transcripts-696x364Italy panics as North Africa migrants surge

Italy will host a meeting between European and North African countries next week in a bid to strengthen support for an agreement it struck with Libya to fight people smuggling as migrant arrivals surge.

The prime minister of the UN-backed government in Tripoli, Fayez Al-Seraj, will meet with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni and interior ministers from eight European countries including Germany and France on Monday.

Last month, Italy pledged money, training and equipment to help Libya fight people smugglers, a deal that was endorsed by European Union member states.

But Libya is still far from stable. Two governments are vying for power – in Tobruk to the east and Tripoli to the west – and the country remains mired in factional fighting and lawlessness.

The authorities in eastern Libya have rejected the deal struck between Rome and Tripoli.

“I’m not so naive as to not understand the situation there,” Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti told reporters. “But we cannot remain immobile and wait for the country to stabilise.”

He said the Libya agreement and next week’s meeting were not just “talk”, but strategic steps toward managing mass migration to Europe.

So far this year more than 16,000 migrants – a 36 per cent increase on the same period last year – have been rescued at sea and brought to Italy after Libya-based people smugglers piled them onto flimsy boats.

Don’t miss Hillary cackling about her success in killing Gaddafi. She looks like an absolute loon here:

Another version of Hillary’s looney laugh, is here. Don’t you think it might be too early for her to come out of the woods!

Our archives on the ‘Invasion of Europe’ are here.

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‘Trust Me’ Doesn’t Cut It on Russian Hacking: This one-sided report smells like a political hatchet job

Here’s the real problem with the joint intelligence report on alleged Russian hacking: without the classified details, we ordinary citizens are supposed to take the breathless allegations, presented as “high confidence” intelligence judgments, on faith.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan are crossing their fingers and saying, “Trust us.”

Since both are political appointees – Brennan in particular came directly out of the Obama White House, where he is believed to have orchestrated secret arms smuggling through Libya to Syrian rebels that led directly to the Benghazi disaster – excuse me if I remain skeptical.

Has Russia been engaged in sophisticated disinformation operations in the United States? Well, duh. That’s been going on for decades. During the Cold War, as General Clapper reminded the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, we had a separate United States Information Agency (USIA) at the State Department to combat Soviet intelligence desinformatziya and, to a lesser degree, maskirovka.

The USIA regularly issued bulletins on Soviet deception operations, and traced how they were laundered through predominantly Third World media (India was a big favorite in the 1980s) until they made it into the United States, generally as part of left-wing conspiracy outlets.

A few examples were fabricated stories that the CIA had invented AIDS, or that Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was shot down by Soviet fighters in 1983, had been flying a covert U.S. intelligence mission. The KGB also planted forged documents to smear American politicians and then “leaked” them to (usually) unwitting journalists.

But that’s not what happened here. If we are to believe the unclassified Russian hacking report, released on Friday, Russian intelligence agents hacked into the DNC and into the Hillary Clinton campaign servers and then turned over emails it exfiltrated to DCleaks.com and to Wikileaks.

“Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self- proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries,” the report stated.

Note that statement: the Russians didn’t spread obvious falsehoods or sophisticated disinformation. They disseminated the truth – stolen documents, yes. But true.

That is one reason why many Americans are having a hard time getting steamed at the Russians for exploiting the stupidity of John Podesta, who responded to a spearphishing attack by emailing his password, which was the word “password.”

Dumber than that, you die… of ridicule.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus told FoxNews that the RNC reported similar attempts to penetrate its email to the FBI, and was never successfully penetrated. Why? Because they already had common sense security protocols in place.

Nations spy on each other. Democrat operatives need to get over it – or perhaps, just set aside the roach and revive their collective memories. After all, it was just two years ago that President Obama sent his 2012 campaign field director, Jeremy Bird, and four other political operatives to Israel, with orders to help defeat Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in his March 2015 re-election effort.

That was direct, overt, U.S. government interference in the election of a U.S. ally. But because it was Obama and Netanyahu, Democrats just didn’t get steamed.

By the way, if the Russians could penetrate the Clinton campaign server, what’s to say they didn’t also penetrate the private email server Mrs. Clinton set up to mask her “private” dealings while she was Secretary of State? And yet, the U.S. hacking report never alleges that this happened, nor does it allege that the Russians disclosed classified U.S. documents.

Perhaps that was a red line the Russians didn’t want to cross? Leaking unclassified emails that revealed the hypocrisy of the Clinton team and the Democrat party could arguably be construed as doing the work the U.S. news media failed to do. Leaking classified documents is another matter entirely.

Fully half of the unclassified U.S. report details the activities of RT television, formerly known as Russia Today.

It’s hard to believe that anyone watching RT is not aware of its strong Russia connection. The U.S. report accurately describes how RT unsurprisingly coordinated its propaganda with the Russian state.

What about MSNBC and CNN coordinating their propaganda with a political party, the DNC?

The U.S. report criticizes Russia because “RT coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative.” Somehow I missed the report’s criticism of MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post for their “consistently negative” coverage of Donald Trump.

But I get it: that’s because RT is controlled by a foreign state, and those U.S. media organizations are privately owned.

So why doesn’t the U.S. intelligence report criticize other foreign state-owned media organizations, such as the BBC, or TF1 and France 2 in France, that not only broadcast coverage of Donald Trump that was “consistently negative,” but portrayed him as “emotionally unbalanced,” “unhinged,” “incompetent,” “unqualified to be President,” “racist,” “misogynist,” etc.?

The U.S. report announces on page 1 that it “covers the motivation and scope of Moscow’s intentions regarding US elections and Moscow’s use of cyber tools and media campaigns to influence US public opinion.” Perhaps it’s just me, but I find it odd that U.S. intelligence analysts would put their analysis of Russian motivation before the facts. But that’s the way it reads throughout.

One curious omission: the report contains no assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. While the report claims this is because it’s not the job of the intelligence community to “analyze US political processes or US public opinion,” I can guarantee you that if they had detected a clear impact of the Russian hacking, they would have spread it like butter on toast.

Michael Moore may have influenced more voters in a YouTube clip from his one-man show in Michigan, than RT did in all of its election coverage. The five-minute segment went viral when it was first released; many people thought they were actually watching left-wing ideologue Moore endorse Donald Trump.

Moore of course had no intention of endorsing Trump, but wanted to show his audience that he “understood” the motivation of Trump voters, and that they were “good” people. From the astonished look on the faces of people in the audience, it’s easy to imagine many of these Michigan voters suddenly realizing it was “okay” for them to vote for Trump, even if they traditionally had identified with Democrats.

The omission of any context in the unclassified version of this report, coupled to the breathless tone of its “high-confidence” conclusions and total lack of factual evidence in the public version, makes it appear like a political hatchet job. That in itself does a disservice to the honest, hard-working intelligence gatherers and analysts of the U.S. intelligence community.

EDITORS NOTE: This column first appeared on FrontPage Magazine.

MediaMatters exposes who really influenced the election — hint, its not the Russians

As political scientist Bernard Cohen put it, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about.”

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy analyzed news coverage during the 2016 general election from January 1st to November 8th, 2016. The study  titled “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters” flies in the face of the narrative that the Russians gave the election to Trump. Even MediaMatters for America agrees with the Harvard study and goes further to blame the “Fakestream Media” for Hillary Clinton’s loss.

In a MediaMatters column titled “Post-Mortem: How 2016 Broke Political Journalism” Matt Gertz writes:

The [2016 Presidential] campaign broke political journalism. Despite the vast differences between the two candidates, the message media consumers heard from journalists was that to an equal extent, both candidates were flawed.

In fact, according to Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, which reviewed an analysis of news reports in major newspapers and cable and broadcast networks from January 1, 2015, through November 7, 2016, the conventional candidate actually received a higher proportion of negative coverage over the course of the campaign.

general-election-media-bias

Chart courtesy of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.

Gertz goes on to point out:

In a prescient July 2015 essay, reporter and Clinton biographer Jonathan Allen explained that over the course of her career, “coverage of Hillary Clinton differs from coverage of other candidates for the presidency,” and warned that the “difference encourages distortions that will ultimately affect the presidential race.” He pointed out the reason public perception of Clinton is distorted: because “the media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith unless there’s hard evidence otherwise” and outlets are willing to serve as a vector for unhinged, unfair, or false attacks on her character.

Here, according to MediaMatters, is the real reason for Hillary Clinton’s loss in one graphic:

mediamatters-headlines_emails

It was media coverage of Hillary’s email servers, stupid, not the Russians.

Gertz concludes:

Overall, however, editors and executives at major media outlets failed in their responsibility to present to their audience the full picture of the election in proper context, instead providing disproportionate scrutiny to relatively minor Clinton “scandals” in a way that ultimately resulted in a skewed picture of the election.

And that’s because the political press was unable to adapt its methods and practices to a dramatically different election season. In typical elections, news outlets often treat both major presidential candidates as relatively similar — comparing their flaws, scrutinizing their respective scandals, and framing the vote as a choice between two comparable options.

But this was not a normal election between two comparable choices. That sort of equivalency could not hope to provide viewers and readers with an accurate picture of this unusual race. And on balance, the press did not rise to this unique challenge. 

Even after 16 months on the campaign trail, political journalists never figured out how to accurately depict the unprecedented nature of Trump’s candidacy…

[Emphasis added]

So, even MediaMatters says it was the Fakestream Media who did in Hillary Clinton.

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