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Monday, August 5, 2019

Good Reads Today

One thing--VDH seems never to have heard of Emmett Flood.


Barr Has Far Bigger Things To Prosecute James Comey For Than Leaking Memos

A deeper look provides a clue that the memo-leaking investigation may have been abandoned because it’s insignificant compared to the real reason James Comey needs to be held to account.

by Adam Mill

As I previously reported, even before the Russia collusion hoax, Comey signed his name on sweeping surveillance violations. Pursuing Comey on the memo-leaking offense would be like charging Comey for jaywalking after he crossed the street to fire a close-range kill shot at our Constitution.

There have been increasingly serious scandals regarding U.S. intelligence agencies spying on Americans. In 2013, for example, the National Security Agency found its employees had used the most powerful spying tools to monitor their spouses and lovers.

In 2014, The New York Times reported that the Central Intelligence Agency had hacked emails of Senate investigators. This is an extremely serious assault on Congress’s oversight powers under Article I of the Constitution, and a violation of the CIA’s charter. Yet the Department of Justice declined to prosecute, and the CIA got away with it.

...

Comey presided over an assembly line of constitutional violations. As I noted, “The FISC court did not provide numbers but it’s reasonable to infer that the term ‘widespread’ in reference to ongoing violations by multiple officials could mean thousands of felonies under the cover of the Comey and Brennan affidavits that apparently remain uncorrected, in spite of having been found false by a published court opinion.”

...


Mueller's 'Dream Team' Loses to the Nobodies

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness August 5, 2019

When figurehead Robert Mueller likely allowed Andrew Weissman to form his special counsel team to investigate so-called charges of Russian collusion involving Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin, Washington elites became bouncy. The high-profile legal “powerhouse” lineup immediately looked like a sure-thing—an elite slaughter of the yokels.

As they perused the résumés of the New York and Washington prosecutors, and the Wilmer-Hale veterans, reporters were ecstatic that the supposedly straight-shooting Republican Mueller had turned his investigation into what the media soon boasted was a progressive “dream team” of “all-stars,” a veritable “hunter-killer team” of get-Trump professionals. One would have thought mere names and credentials win indictments, regardless of the evidence.

The subtext was that Trump had all but met his Waterloo. Indictments for conspiracy, obstruction, and worse yet inevitably would follow, until Trump either resigned in disgrace or was impeached. ...

...

A Vox headline on August 2, 2017 summed up the progressive giddiness of the time: “Meet the all-star legal team who may take down Trump.” The subtitle offered more snark: “Special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team is full of pros. Trump’s team makes typos.” Get it? Young-gun pros against the so-sos.

So, whom exactly did Trump enlist against the all-stars?

...

10 comments:

  1. "A Vox headline on August 2, 2017 summed up the progressive giddiness of the time..."

    I despise Vox and their ilk. Not so much for their politics (with which I do in fact totally disagree but respect their right to their beliefs) but for their arrogance and lust for power.

    It is the power-seeking arrogance of the elites which will be their ultimate downfall.

    A candidate for our highest office labelled one-half the electorate deplorable...and, no question, she meant it.

    One day, perhaps in the not too distant future, we will see in grand technicolor what it has meant to dismantle a faith-based, family-oriented, rule-abiding, work-ethic driven national melting pot organized under the greatest constitution devised by man with an IQ-based so-called meritocracy which undermines faith, family and work and replaces it with a hollowed out system of 'affirmative action' and manipulated credentials and class-creating entitlement...and over-weening arrogance of the elites annointed by that system.

    It is true that I (for one) am not prepared to bestow any medals (yet) on William Barr, but I do pray for him and for the successful completion of his work. It will be no small feat if Comey and his friends are held accountable for their actions and some measure of justice is done.

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    1. I suspect that in the mass killings we are seeing some of the results of social dislocation that the dismantling of our national culture has wrought. The response of the "elite" shows that they regard their Americans not so much as fellow citizens but simply as subjects to be ruled.

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    2. Bingo! Twice.

      Social dislocation resulted from offshoring middle class jobs for the sake of globalization--effectively transferring the US industrial and intellectual base to China for the benefit of the elite--Wall St. bankers and lawyers. And of course the obverse side of the globalization coin is the cheap labor lobby urging open borders turning the US into a third world country.

      Unintended consequences will be the result of transformational dislocation

      People do desperate things when the fear factor of "fight or flight" is triggered--especially when there is nowhere to flee to...

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    3. To your point, I present an ex-Vice President of Goldman Sachs, Steve Bannon:

      “The Party of Davos. That's what the World Economic Forum is.
      It's a combination of the consultant class, the bankers, the private equity firms, the hedge funds and these global corporations.
      Their central function in life is higher margins and higher stock prices.
      The way they do that, the principal way they do that is lower wages. They are always on the search for lower wages. And what you’re seeing in places like Europe and the U.S is a rejection of that model. What comes after that we don’t know. But I’ve got to tell you if we don’t work together to essentially save capitalism were going to get socialism.
      Right now we’re on the losing side of the culture wars. We do have an education system that turns out people in a certain way. If you continue to lose the economic argument you’re going to lose the country.”

      https://www.prageru.com/video/the-candace-owens-show-steve-bannon/ (minute 55:00)

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    4. And Trump seems to understand that.

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  2. The error is not the decision to defer a low level prosecution over leaking in favor of pursuing a bigger and more meaningful prosecution. The error was in allowing this decision to become public. A better choice would have been to defer to decision (or if necessary to make it now, then ask a judge to seal it pending other investigative developments). Nothing was gained by the public disclosure of the no prosecution determination at this time, and arguably a lot of harm has been wrought by it's revelation.

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    1. I doubt that much, if any, lasting harm was done, but agree that the timing was puzzling and served no particular purpose that I'm aware of.

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    2. Better to get the bad news out first (decline to prosecute) followed by the good news of the entire (un-redacted??) IG report?

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    3. Maybe it is just turning up the heat. "We could nail you for this, Jim, but I've got a bigger hammer in my tool box, let me go get it." Jim sweats some more and others in the gang start to wonder when, not if, he'll crack, if he hasn't already, and should they be playing 'Let's Make a Deal'. Or, "I know the pan is hot Jim, but your not done yet. When I stick a fork in you you'll know it's time." As Mark Steyn sez, "In American jurisprudence the Process is the Punishment."
      I'm surprised Rosenstein isn't under suicide watch.
      Tom S.

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  3. Presumably some declassification may occur soon, and if so, the house of cards may begin to crumble. As such, this could be a critical tipping point or, more likely, the start of the final campaign by the Deep State to stave off defeat. Hold on to your seats, it could be a bumpy ride.

    Here in the US, we are focused solely on SpyGate and RussiaGate as the preeminent "crime of the century", but there is a much larger story yet to be told. By now, most people know about the role that MI6 has played in these operations. But the Brits are nothing if not big thinkers. There is much, much more dirty laundry in that basket. It wasn't just Trump that had become an object of their shenanigans. Soon it will come to light that this same motif has been in play throughout Europe. And the one thing that all these OPs have in common is that they were largely FUBARed. "Oh what a tangled web we weave . . ."

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