The Real “Russia Collusion” (1/11/18)

In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt chose to run for a precedent-setting third term as President of the United States of America.   The world was at war as France lay prostrate under the Nazi boot and Britain stood alone against Adolf Hitler, who had (temporarily) secured his “back door” for his War against the West, by entering into the astonishing Nazi-Soviet Pact with his absolute ideological opposite; Josef Stalin, to carve up Poland and the Baltic States.   The fact that America was only then starting to recover from the Great Depression was another reason that Mr. Roosevelt decided to break with 152 years of tradition to run for, and win, a third term for President.

Roosevelt’s Republican opponent for the 1940 election was industrialist and utilities magnate Wendell Wilkie, who was the first presidential candidate who had never had past experience either in politics or in the U.S. military.   (There would be a second in 2016).   Imagine the scenario that would have occurred if the Wilkie campaign and the Republican National Committee began to spread accusations or rumors during the 1940 presidential election campaign that Franklin D. Roosevelt was trashing constitutional tradition by running for a third term; that he was physically not up to the job as he suffered from polio and wore leg braces or utilized a wheelchair (a fact kept from the people in those pre-TV days by the Press); that his mental capabilities were slipping; that he had a mistress named Lucy Mercer, or that he was helped in his bid to win a third term by isolationists who wanted the keep the U.S. out of the War, that were secretly funded by the Axis Powers, and thus FDR was in-pay to foreign interests!    If this harangue by the Republicans and the defeated Weldell Wilkie continued after Roosevelt’s inauguration and throughout 1941 until Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, would not the constant assault upon Roosevelt weakened his credibility, as he was shown to have been “had” by the Axis Powers, and now was forced to ask America to send their sons to war?

A similar scenario may be faced by President Donald J. Trump and the United States in regard to the crisis with North Korea, due to the months and months of incessant and constant attacks on President Trump’s motives, character, competency, loyalty and capabilities by the Democratic Party; the holdovers of the Obama Administration and members of the Deep State; the defeated Hillary Clinton; the Mainstream Media and the Robert Mueller’s “Russia Probe!”   A toll has definitely been taken on President Trump’s credibility, as he faces the nuclear threat of North Korea’s maniacal Kim Jong-Un; the absolute leader of a nation that has been officially at war with the United States since 1950!   With Kim’s developing ability to deliver a thermonuclear device upon the U.S. mainland via North Korea’s rapidly advancing ICBM technology, would the country be united behind President Trump and trust his leadership should he be forced to confront an Armageddon-like threat of nuclear blackmail from Kim Jong-Un?   Or, has his credibility and stature been irreparably damaged by these never-ending assaults?

$8,000,000 into Robert Mueller’s probe into “Russia’s Assault Upon Our Democracy”, the Special Counsel’s hand-picked, crack team of Democratic partisan and patently biased anti-Trump prosecutors has yielded two indictments to date, and two guilty pleas for the “process crimes” of “Lying to the FBI”.   Yet, unless one reads articles about these charges in the New York Times or the Washington (Amazon) Post to the proverbial “Paragraph 18”, or divines what is not being reported within the cacophony of the latest claim of “collusion” spouting from the non-stop, breathless harangue of the talking heads of the Mainstream Media, one would never know that neither the indictments of Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates, nor the guilty pleas for lying to the FBI by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and George Papadopolos have ANYTHING to do with  the stated purpose of the Special Counsel’s probe – to investigate allegations that Donald Trump and his campaign colluded with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to (somehow) “steal” the 2016 election from the heiress-apparent, Hillary Rodham Clinton!

The indictment brought against Manafort and Gates related to their lobbying efforts from at least 2006, in acting as political consultants for a pro-Moscow Ukrainian political party, the Party of Regions, whose leader, Viktor Yanushkovych, was President of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014.   The indictment charged that Manafort and Gates generated tens of millions of dollars in income as the result of their Ukrainian lobbying work, conspired to launder the money through scores of American and foreign corporations, partnership and bank accounts to evade the payment of federal income taxes on the funds generated by their lobbying efforts and, acted as unregistered foreign agents in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (F.A.R.A.). NOTHING  in the indictment referred in any way to the 2016 presidential election or to any activity of the defendants’ to collude with the Russians to hack DNC emails, to conspire with Russian intelligence to propagate “fake news” against Mrs. Clinton, to tamper with the electoral process, to alter the vote count, etc.   On January 3, 2018, Manafort brought a civil suit against the Department of Justice, Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein seeking a Declaratory Judgment that the indictment against him by Mueller’s office should be quashed as being beyond the Special Counsel’s mandate to probe alleged interference of Russia in the election.

Yet the fanatic operatives of the Special Counsel’s office could not resist entitling Count I of the Indictment against Manafort and Gates – which described the alleged conspiracy of the defendants to launder income to avoid the payment of federal income taxes, as a “Conspiracy Against the United States.”   Lazy and/or corrupt members of the Mainstream Media breathlessly reported that the one-time campaign chairman of the Trump Campaign and his business partner were charged with “conspiracy against the United States” without further details, thus inferring that the indictment had something to do with the defendants conspiring with Moscow to “steal” the election, rather than describing a conspiracy to defraud the United States in the avoidance of the payment of income taxes!

Mueller’s zealots, headed by Assistant Deputy Attorney General Andrew Weissmann (who attended Hillary Clinton’s aborted victory party in Manhattan on election night), were further unable to curb their bias-fueled excesses, by staging a violent search of Paul Manafort’s home on July 26,2o17 pursuant to a search warrant, carried-out by FBI agents at 4:00 am, who violently broke down the door of the home and dragged the 68-year- old Manafort and his wife out of bed, as if he was Tony Montana from the movie Scarface!

Only on October 24, 2017 did news break that top Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, worked extensively with Paul Manafort as far back as 2011, to lobby on behalf of the same Ukrainian and Russian groups that are mentioned in Manafort’s indictment, and through his ties to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, may also have been instrumentally involved in the “Uranium One” transaction that netted the Clinton Foundation more than $100 million in donations;  these matters are now being investigated!   Both Tony and John Podesta are supposedly “central figures” in Mueller’s investigation, as well as for their potential liability for being unregistered foreign agents under F.A.R.A.   As the result of these news reports, on October 30, 2017 Tony Podesta stepped down as Chairman of the powerhouse Democratic lobbying firm, the Podesta Group.

The guilty plea for “Lying to the FBI” by 30-year old, self-styled, Eastern Mediterranean oil and gas expert George Papadopolos, by all accounts a low-level foreign policy volunteer to the Trump campaign, derived from an FBI interview in which Papadopolos apparently minimized the extent and significance of contacts he was making in London with a Russian “professor” and a “Female Russian National” who claimed to be  a “niece” of Vladimir Putin, (!) who claimed to have “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.   (An obvious post-KGB sting operation!).  Papadopolos further misstated to the FBI that he first made contact with the “professor” before becoming affiliated with the Trump campaign, rather than months afterward.   Lawyers for the President have denied that George Papadopolos was instructed to make these contacts and that he free-lanced this operation on his own.   No “dirt” ever was passed about HRC.   The New York Times has just reported that in 2016, George Papadopolos bragged to an Australian diplomat during a night of heavy drinking in a London bar that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton as contained in “thousands of emails.”   Allegedly, the diplomat subsequently reported Papadopolos’ claim to the FBI, which the Times’ claims may have been the genesis of the entire “Russia” Probe (as opposed to the now discredited Clinton campaign financed Steele dossier – see below!).  While Papadopolos’ alleged actions can be defined as attempted ”opposition research” at its worst, no evidence has been unearthed to date, that his free-lance attempts to elicit unfavorable information about Mrs. Clinton were ever realized or were sanctioned by the Trump campaign.

Finally, the guilty plea by Michael Flynn for “Lying to the FBI” also had nothing to do with a conspiracy to collude with the Russians to throw the election.   Flynn, who retired as a U. S. Army three-star general after a distinguished 30-year career; culminating as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Obama, became a fierce critic of Obama upon his retirement, in objection to the administration’s baseless optimistic reports on the war against Islamic militants and in defense of the Iran Nuclear Deal.   He became a leading foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign and with Donald Trump’s surprise election, was designated as the National Security Advisor to-be, to the incoming president.

The “Lying to the FBI” charge stemmed from an interview Flynn underwent with Assistant Deputy A.G. Weissmann four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, in which Flynn was not represented by counsel, concerning phone conversations Flynn had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in DECEMBER, 2016 in his role as the incoming National Security Advisor.   The phone conversation was six weeks AFTER Donald Trump was elected as the President of the United States.   (BULLETIN: to ABC’s Brian Ross!!!)   Flynn’s apparent misstatements to Weissmann had to do with the substance of the telephone calls with Ambassador Kislyak, namely: (1) whether a discussion was had concerning the new administration’s stance on recently-imposed sanctions that the Obama administration had placed on Russia for its alleged tampering with the election and, (2) whether Flynn requested that Russia abstain from voting on an upcoming U.N. Security Council vote condemning Israel’s building of settlements in the West Bank.   Obviously, the first conversation had nothing to do with Trump’s collusion with Moscow to “steal” the election as the election had already been decided, and the second had nothing to do with the 2016 vote whatsoever.

Flynn is reported to have subsequently misled Vice President Pence on the precise content of his telephone calls with Kislyak, which was the stated reason for his dismissal as National Security Advisor only 24 days into the new administration.   After his conversation with Flynn, Pence went on the various Sunday morning talk shows to repeat Flynn’s misstatements about the substance of the Kislyak phone calls.

While Michael Flynn’s conversations with Sergey Kiskyak could not have been part of a conspiracy to collude with the Russians to “steal” the election, why did Flynn not accurately (or completely) disclose the content of these conversations with Andrew Weissmann?   As the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn should have known that all phone conversations with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, were monitored pursuant to FISA warrants.    He should also have known that Weissmann was armed with the transcripts of these phone conversations.   So, why did Flynn fall into Weissmann’s “perjury trap”, sprung most famously on Martha Stewart on charges of insider-knowledge stock trading?   Or, did Flynn “cop-a-plea” based on some other crime, or supposed “crime”, that the feds. claimed they had on him?

Michael Flynn could theoretically face legal jeopardy for potential violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (F.A.R.A.), for being an unregistered agent of TURKEY (not Russia).   Reports have surfaced that have alleged  that Flynn engaged in non-disclosed lobbying efforts on behalf of the regime of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.   However, prosecution under F.A.R.A. requires proof that the nation that a defendant was surreptitiously representing was currently engaged in “hostilities” with the United States and further, that the violation of the statute was a willful act – the law is riddled with many exceptions.   Turkey, a NATO ally, does not meet the first criteria and furthermore, proof would have to be presented that Flynn knowingly violated the statute, which is rarely enforced.   Could this be the leverage that the Special Counsel has over him, to compel Flynn to plead to lying to the FBI?

The only evidence that has been surfaced about any links that Michael Flynn had to Russia were a banquet that Mr. Flynn attended back in 2015 in Moscow for the RT television network in which Vladimir Putin attended, in which Flynn received a fee of $50,000.00.   Additionally, some alleged emails have surfaced that have been leaked to the press, in which Flynn supposedly expressed satisfaction about some Russian energy holdings he had invested in; reports claimed that Flynn felt these investments would increase in value upon the onset of the Trump administration.   There’s not much to see here!

A more esoteric possibility is that Michael Flynn pled to the charge of Lying to the FBI, over threats of prosecution for violation of the obscure, Logan Act, passed by Congress in 1799.   This antiquated statute makes it a felony for a private citizen to “interfere” in international “disputes” between the United States and foreign governments.  After all, Michael Flynn was still a “private citizen” in December, 2016, when he engaged in the phone conversations with Sergey Kislyak! (?)   However, the potential prosecution of Michael Flynn for violating the Logan Act would immediately run into some serious challenges.   First, no one has ever been prosecuted for violation of the Logan Act, primarily because most legal scholars believe the statute to be unconstitutional as being in violation of the First Amendment.  Any indictment would immediately be challenged as being unconstitutional, as well as being attacked on due process grounds for lack of notice, on the theory that this never-enforced statute is suddenly now being utilized, for the first time, against Mr. Flynn.   Secondly, no “dispute” technically exists at the minute between the United States and Russia.   Finally, Michael Flynn was no ordinary “private” citizen in December, 2016; he was the incoming National Security Advisor, to take office within the month!    It was his duty to set the framework for the foreign policy of the new administration ever before it took power, as many incoming advisors have done in the past; he would have been negligent had he not been engaging in these contacts!

Yet, despite the lack of these necessary elements to charge Michael Flynn with a violation of the Logan Act and despite past precedent, Obama administration Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates testified before Congress in January, 2017 that her “concerns” that Flynn may have violated the Logan Act were the reason that Yates ordered the investigation of Michael Flynn, and triggered the FBI interview which ultimately led to his guilty plea!   Yates testified that she launched an investigation against Michael Flynn on the theory that he was subject to being blackmailed by the Russians, for his alleged violation of this antiquated, never-enforced and probably unconstitutional statute, as well as for his misstatements to Vice President Pence.   Was the potential prosecution of Michael Flynn for violation of the Logan Act the leverage that Robert Mueller has over him?

Have you noticed that neither the indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, nor the guilty pleas of George Papadopolos and Michael Flynn, had anything to do with a charge of “collusion” with Russia to “steal”, “tamper” or even influence last year’s presidential election – the stated purpose of the “Russia” Probe?   That is because “collusion” – whatever that means – with a person, entity or even a foreign power, to release unfavorable information about an opponent during an election campaign, IS NOT A CRIME!    No Federal statute exists that would criminalize ANY of these claimed, supposed acts of conduct of Donald Trump or any member of his campaign, as screamed incessantly by the Mainstream Media, even if facts were unearthed to support such a charge!!!!!   Further, the crime of Conspiracy would not be a viable criminal charge, as there must be an underlying crime, made illegal by an existing criminal statute, that the conspiracy was formed to violate!

That could be the reason that the narrative now seems to be shifting to trying to impeach Donald Trump on a bogus charge of Obstruction of Justice for his firing of FBI Director James Comey (which was totally within his constitutional powers and was for many good reasons, as seen below), or for the President “wishing” that prosecutors “go easy” on Michael Flynn as “he is a good guy” – both of these efforts are now being claimed to be an attempt by Trump to “obstruct” the prosecution of a non-existent crime!   Alternatively, New York Senator Kirstin Gillibrand is now spearheading an effort to impeach the President on allegations of past sexual harassment, as if that “issue” hadn’t already been fully litigated, and decided upon, in November, 2016!

If neither of those tactics succeed, listen to the increasing volume of the far-off drumbeats of the “top-flight” psychologists retained by the Mainstream Media (or schlock “journalists” like Michael Wolff!), as they now presume to “psychoanalyze” Mr. Trump from afar, (against the ethics code of the American Psychiatric Association prohibiting “psychoanalysis” of political candidates in the Press – the “Goldwater Rule”) and offer their “expert” opinions on Trump’s “lack of mental fitness and stability”, in an attempt to set the narrative to have the President removed from office pursuant to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment!   Perhaps the all-knowing Media Talking Heads should crack open the Constitution and read Section 4 of that Amendment, to learn what the terms actually are to remove a sitting president, pursuant to that Constitutional provision!!!

The “Russia Probe” is thus a sham, masquerading as a criminal investigation!   In reality, it is nothing more than a Democrat-fueled, extralegal, disinformation campaign to attempt to engineer a coup d’etat to topple this constitutionally elected president!   As Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief, once famously said: “show me the man and I will find you the crime.”   And as will be outlined below, it is the Democrats along with their allies in the Media and the Deep State,  that have “colluded” to topple Donald Trump with none other than RUSSIA, in an attempt to realize this outcome!!!!

On December 12th, the first of a series of damning emails authored by top leadership officials of the Justice Department and the FBI were made public, which demonstrated with naked clarity, that rank bias; a wishful suspension of disbelief of a dubious intelligence source that turned out to be a Clinton campaign-funded, piece of almost totally fictional opposition research against Donald Trump; a virulent hatred of Mr. Trump, and an overriding preference for Hillary Clinton that trashed all concepts of “equal justice under the law”, all fueled the launching of the FBI counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign, which has now morphed into “The Russia Probe!”

The most notorious email that has been released to date is the now infamous August 16, 2016 email of the FBI’s deputy counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok to his mistress, Justice Department lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.   The email referred to a meeting held in the office of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe by Strzok and other FBI counter-intelligence  officials who discussed the “frightening” possibility of a Trump presidency.   Strzok wrote of Trump’s candidacy that “there’s no way he gets elected”, but on the remote possibility that he was able to cobble together an electoral college victory, the FBI had  no choice but to carry out a plot to undermine Trump’s candidacy as the Bureau “can’t take that risk”.   “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”   What was the “insurance policy” that Strzok was referring to, that smacks so much like a KGB plot that FBI special agents like Strzok spent their careers battling?    As Andrew McCarthy so brilliantly analyzed in his National Review article of December 23rd, Strzok’s “insurance policy” against a Donald Trump presidency was most likely the now notorious, Hillary Clinton-funded, Russian-collaborated and Obama Administration-utilized, Christopher Steele Dossier!!!

As the revelations of the last few weeks have revealed, the first of a series of reports, collectively known as the “Steele Dossier”, was written for hire (see below!), by British former MI-6 spy Christopher Steele on June 20, 2016, in which Steele described a purported, conspiratorial relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, in which Putin’s regime had alleged to have been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years”, without providing any credible verification on how Putin had been allegedly supporting Trump, or on Donald Trump’s role or even knowledge of, such “assistance”.   What the Dossier did graphically detail were the totally debunked, tales of debauchery involving Mr. Trump that supposedly would subject him to blackmail by Russia, the most famous being the “golden showers” yarn about urinating prostitutes with Trump on a Moscow hotel bed that was formerly utilized by Barack and Michelle Obama, a tale that even the Mainstream Media had heard of for months and rejected, until the left-wing website Buzzfeed saw it as their duty to release it three days before Donald Trump’s inauguration!   CNN then breathlessly took up the cudgel!

The record reflects that the FBI and the Department of Justice had favorable past dealing with Christopher Steele, as information provided by him was credited toward successfully prosecuting the international bribery scandal involving top officials of FIFA – the world soccer federation.   The Bureau was thus favorably predisposed toward him.   However, what appeared to be the linchpin that convinced the FBI to credit the entire content of Christopher Steele’s Dossier against Donald Trump, was the Bureau’s confirmation of Steele’s claim that a tangential Trump foreign policy advisor named Carter Page had indeed traveled to Moscow on a three-day trip in July, 2016, as reported by Steele, where he delivered a commencement address at the New Economic School.   Page, like George Papadopolos, was another loosely-connected Trump advisor whose expertise was in the Eastern European oil and gas market.   The record shows that Mr. Page asked permission of the Trump campaign to make the trip which was first denied by the Campaign.   Page apparently then asked again and for his second effort, was granted permission to go to Russia, but only in his “private capacity”.   A top-ranking graduate of the US Naval Academy, Carter Page worked in investing after his naval career and for several years worked at the Merrill Lynch office in Moscow.   He has readily acknowledged being a Russophile and an apologist for the Putin regime; he has championed appeasement for the sake of better US-Russian relations.   Yet, the allegations of Christopher Steele as contained in his Dossier, accused Carter Page of engaging in activities of a treasonous nature, during his three-day Russian trip.

As reported by Andrew McCarthy in his National Review article, the Dossier of Christopher Steele claimed that on July 19th, Carter Page held secret meetings in Moscow with two senior functionaries of Vladimir Putin – Igor Sechin, the president of Russia’s energy conglomerate Rosneft, and Igor Diveykin of Putin’s “Internal Political Department”.   Mr. Steele claimed to have been informed “by an Russian source close to Sechin”, that Sechin floated to Page the possibility of US-Russia energy cooperation in exchange for the lifting of Western sanctions against Russia over Russian incursions into Ukraine.   Page was reported to have reacted “positively” by Steele, but in a manner that was “non-committal.”   Another source of Page’s alleged activities in Moscow that was claimed by Christopher Steele in the Dossier was “an official close to Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov who had confided to a compatriot” that Diveykin told Page that the Putin regime had a dossier of “kompromat” – compromising information on Hillary Clinton that it would consider releasing to Trump’s “campaign team”, but also hinted “more strongly” that the regime also had “kompromat” on Donald Trump himself, “which the latter should bear in mind in his dealings with them.”   (As McCarthy observed: “Note the dizzying multiple-hearsay basis for this information.”)   Steele’s report went on to state that in late July 2016, Steele claimed to have been told by “an ethnic Russian close associate of Trump” that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between Trump’s inner circle and the Russian leadership”, “managed on Trump’s side by Paul Manafort who was using foreign policy advisor Carter Page and others as intermediaries.”   (Note that Mueller’s indictment of Manafort speaks nothing of these accusations.)   Steele further claimed that the same source (or sources) informed him that “the Russian regime had been behind the leak of the DNC emails to the WikiLeaks platform with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team”, in return for which “Trump agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue” and further agreed “to raise the failure of NATO nations to meet their defense commitments as a distraction from Russian aggression in Ukraine.”  The hacked DNC emails were first released on July 22, 2016, shortly after Page’s return, before the start of the Democratic National Convention.

Carter Page has since testified on more than one occasion in close sessions before both the House and the Senate intelligence committees and has reportedly also testified before the Grand Jury in Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation.   Note that as of this date, no criminal charges have been brought against him.   He has denied all of the allegations against him as contained in the Steele Dossier, in several FBI interviews and in public statements.   He has further stated that he has never met Paul Manafort.   Mr. Page has filed a federal defamation lawsuit against the press outlets that he claims have defamed him, as the result of their publication of the Dossier.

Former FBI James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June, 2017, that the content of the Steele Dossier were “salacious and unverified.”    If the allegations of the Dossier were still unvetted as of June of 2017 as stated by the then-fired FBI Director, they certainly could not have been verified at the time the claims of Christopher Steele were apparently acted upon by the FBI months earlier, in August, 2016!!!!

The Steele Dossier reports had been trickling in to the FBI at the time of the meeting in Andrew McCabe’s office with Peter Strzok and other counterintelligence agents on August 16, 2016, when the Bureau determined that it was “imperative” to “aggressively investigate”, the “allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia” as alleged in the Dossier.   It was startlingly revealed only on October 25, 2017, that Christopher Steele was paid $12,000,000.00 for his Dossier against Donald Trump by the Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee as an effort of “OPPOSITION RESEARCH”, through the Democratic law firm Perkins Coie, which in April, 2016 retained the research firm Fusion GPS to serve as the conduit to Steele!!!   Without question, the FBI knew just from a cursory reading of the Dossier that Christopher Steele’s claimed sources were high ranking apparatchiks within the Putin regime!!!   However, did the FBI also know on August 16, 2016, that the “allegations of collusion” by the Trump campaign as alleged by Steele in his Dossier, were additionally a product of “opposition research”, funded by Donald Trump’s electoral opponent, Hillary Clinton???

The tight nexus of high ranking officials within the FBI and the Department of Justice who launched the “Russia Probe” against Donald Trump and his campaign, based on the “salacious and unverified” allegations of the Steele Dossier –  and who likely utilized the spurious claims of the Dossier to seek warrants from the FISA Court to “wiretap” the communications of Carter Page, other members of the Trump campaign and possibly the presidential candidate himself (!),  were the same functionaries that carried-out the “investigation” of Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of top-secret communications while Secretary of State, as routed through her unauthorized and unprotected, home-based internet server.   Of course, these two probes were being conducted concurrently while Clinton and Trump were vying to succeed Barack Obama as the next president!   The conflicts of interest of these same top law enforcement officials, as they simultaneously wore the two hats of the “Clinton” and the “Russia” probes, are utterly staggering!:

-GLENN SIMPSON, FUSION GPS, BRUCE OHR, NELLIE OHR and SALLY YATES:   Glenn Simpson is one of three former Wall Street Journal reporters that in 2011 founded the commercial research and strategic intelligence firm Fusion GPS, based in Washington, DC, which conducts open-source investigations and provides research and strategic advice for businesses, law firms and investors, as well as political inquiries, including opposition research.   Simpson and Fusion GPS had previously been investigated for operating as unregistered lobbyists in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (F.A.R.A.) for campaigning on behalf of RUSSIA, to influence and overturn the Magnitsky Act, which was passed by Congress as a sanction against certain Russian officials for human rights abuses in Russia in general, and for the 2009 death of activist Sergey Magnitsky in a Moscow prison, in particular.   As stated, in October, 2017, it was first revealed that in April, 2016, the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign utilized the Democratic law firm of Perkins Coie for the expressed purpose of retaining Fusion GPS, as a conduit for the hiring British ex-spy Christopher Steele; known for his Russian contacts, to compile an opposition research report on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, for a fee of $12,000,000.00.

On Friday, June 9, 2016, the now notorious meeting took place in Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and others, with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya and her retinue.   When the news first broke about the meeting, Donald Jr.’s original explanation for the purpose of the meeting; arranged by London impresario Rob Goldstone, a common acquaintance of the Trumps and a client of Veselnitskaya, was to discuss “adoption issues”, but was soon amended to admit that Trump Jr. agreed to meet Ms. Veselnitskaya because she claimed to have “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.   Trump Jr. claimed that the meeting did not even last twenty minutes; that Veselnitskaya had nothing on Hillary; that the conversation quickly shifted to repeal of the Magnitsky Act, and that Manafort and Kushner left the left the room not long after the beginning of this (treasonous?) meeting, when they determined it to be a waste of time.

Donald Jr. has since been called to Capitol Hill before closed sessions of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on more than one occasion to testify on his amateur attempts at opposition research.   But it wasn’t until November 7, 2017, that it was revealed that hours before Natalia Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Donald Trump Jr. on June 9, 2016, Ms. Veselnitskaya met with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS in a Manhattan Federal courtroom!!   Simpson is reported to have also met with Veselnitskaya after the meeting with the young Trump.!!   Can we all chant SET-UP in unison!!!

Five weeks later, on December 13, 2017, news broke that the Fusion GPS employee who collaborated with both Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele in realizing what has become known as the Steele Dossier was a Russian scholar named Nellie Ohr, who is none other than the wife of Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, the Obama Administration Justice Department’s point man for “Transnational Organized Crime and International Affairs!”   It has been further reported that Bruce Ohr himself personally met with both Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson as the Dossier was being formulated!   As the head of the international organized crime section of the D.O.J., Bruce Ohr reported to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who no doubt was monitoring his efforts to foster the Dossier.   Since the revelation of the involvement of both Nellie Ohr and himself in the Steele Dossier, Bruce Ohr has since been demoted in the Justice Department “for (allegedly) concealing his meetings with Fusion GPS!”

On January 9, 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.- Ca.), the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, unilaterally released the 312 page transcript of the closed-session testimony of Glenn Simpson before the Committee, in which Simpson had invoked the Fifth Amendment numerous times.  Feinstein’s motivation for releasing the transcript contrary to the majority vote of the Committee, was apparently Simpson’s contention that the allegations of Russian collusion in the Steele Dossier were corroborated by a “source” the FBI had “within” the Trump campaign!    However, “upon further review”, the realization quickly set in that the “source” that Simpson was referring to, that the FBI had “relied upon”, was none other than the drunken ramblings of George Papadopolos!!!!

Sally Yates, who was the holdover acting Attorney General during the opening days of the new administration, was famously was fired by President Trump on January 30, 2017 for her naked insubordination in refusing to follow the President’s order to enforce what popularly became known as the “Travel Ban”, which was ultimately held constitutional by the Supreme Court.   (Yates’ “resistance” prompted an email from Assistant Deputy A.G. Andrew Weissmann lauding Yates for her “courage.”)   However, the outsized role of Sally Yates as being at the center of the swirling events of 2016 cannot be questioned!   Sally Yates, as the Obama Administration’s Deputy Attorney General, monitored the day-to-day operations of the FBI pursuant to the chain of command of the Justice Department – James Comey reported to her!   Thus, Yates was not only overseeing Bruce Ohr’s efforts to coordinate the compilation of the Steele Dossier within Justice Department as discussed above, but was also the “managing director” of both the “Clinton” and the “Russia” probes in the Federal Bureau of Investigation!!

-PETER STRZOK, LISA PAGE, ANDREW McCABE and JAMES COMEY:   The emails first released on December 12, 2017 between Peter Strzok and his paramour, Justice Department attorney Lisa Page, exposed the virulent bias that these top law-enforcement officials had against Donald Trump and their equally fawning preference for Hillary Clinton, during the time they held critical positions of power in the investigation of both the “Clinton” and the “Russia” probes!   Strzok  told Page that “Trump was an idiot” and that “Hillary should win 100 million to 0”; Page responded that Trump “was a loathsome human”.   (In addition to the rank bias of these comments, notice the banality of the quotes of these top-flight “legal eagles”, written as if they were still in high school!)

Further, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, to whom Peter Strzok directly reported, was also compromised by bias and conflicts of interest during these investigations, as it has been reported that his wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, received $467,500.00 from very close Clinton-confidant and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee in 2015, to run as the Democratic candidate in a state senate race in Virginia, in which she was defeated.   Despite these obvious conflicts of interest, McCabe never felt that it was his duty to recuse himself from either the “Clinton” or the “Russia” probes!   After being grilled for two days in closed sessions before the House Intelligence Committee concerning all of the shenanigans reported above, McCabe has announced that he intends to take an early retirement in the next few weeks.

While it has now been revealed that Stzrok was one of the prime movers in insisting that it was “imperative” to “aggressively investigate” the “allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia” as alleged in the unverified Steele Dossier, during the meeting in Andrew McCabe’s office on August 16, 2016, reports have also now surfaced that it was none other than Peter Strzok, who was responsible for the re-editing of FBI Director James Comey’s July 5, 2016 Declaration in such a way, that exonerated Hillary Clinton for her mishandling of classified communications while Secretary of State!

The original draft of the memo written for James Comey back in May, 2016, stated that:

“there is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton and others, used the email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with the respect to the handling of classified information”  * * * and that “it was reasonably likely that Hillary Clinton’s private email server had been infiltrated by hostile foreign powers.”

However it was revealed only on December 14, 2017, that on June 10, 2016; well before the investigation of the email scandal had been concluded and before the FBI interviews of the key players were conducted (including Mrs. Clinton herself), that Peter Strzok  deliberately watered-down the original memo of May, 2016 by editing the text in such a way as to transform the memo into an “Exoneration Declaration” of Mrs. Clinton, by patently misstating the burden of proof required for prosecution under the relevant criminal statute, 18 U.S.C. Section 793(f).   Director Comey obviously acquiesced to Peter Strzok’s re-write of the Declaration.   The following was proclaimed by James Comey on July 5, 2016:

“although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of the classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information * * * and that “it was possible that hostile actors had gained access to Clinton’s server.”   * * * “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” (Why, because her name was Clinton?)

Section 793(f) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code makes it a felony for an individual who have been granted lawful access to highly classified materials, to act in a grossly negligent manner in the handling of such materials, by removing such materials from their proper place of custody, or by transmitting such materials or causing such materials to be transmitted to others not authorized to have access to such materials (Anthony Weiner?), in violation of the trust granted to such an individual through his/her federal security clearance.

In order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass in 2016, Strzok, Comey, McCabe & Company re-labeled Clinton’s conduct as “extremely careless” instead of the statutory requirement of “gross negligence” and further, they in affect “rewrote” the applicable statute by inserting an intent element that Congress did not require and consequently was not present within the text of Section 793(f)!   As Andrew McCarthy has also observed: “the point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing.   The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant.”

Peter Strzok, the former deputy chief of counterintelligence for the FBI, has now been demoted from his top position of authority within the Bureau, and is now serving as head of the Human Resources department for the FBI!   The current fate of Lisa Page is unknown.   New emails have just surfaced between Strzok and Page, which seem to indicate that they were prime sources of leaks to the Mainstream Media during both the “Clinton” and the “Russia” probes, in direct violation of their oaths as sworn officers of the Justice Department!   Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr and Nellie Ohr are all expected to be called to testify before Congressional committees in the coming weeks!

It is patently obviously that while Strzok, McCabe, Comey and others deliberately misstated the terms of the relevant law in order to exonerate Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information, they also ignored relevant facts that constituted evidence that Mrs. Clinton and her aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, Monica Hanley, Brian Pagliano and others, were potentially liable not only for their own violations of Section 793(f), but also could be liable for potential prosecution for Obstruction of Justice for their alleged roles in deleting 33,000 emails that had previously been demanded by Congressional subpoenas; for using the data-scrubbing product Bleachbit to forever eradicate the data on the hard drive of Clinton’s home-based server; for smashing the utilized Blackberry smart phones with mallets, etc.

It has been further reported that during their FBI interviews, both Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills testified that they had no knowledge that Mrs. Clinton was utilizing a home-based, unauthorized internet server while Secretary of State.   These statements were proven to be falsehoods which directly contradicted the emails of both Abedin and Mills which referred to Hillary’s home-based server!   Therefore, both Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills are could both have been charged for “Lying to the FBI”, as have Michael Flynn and George Papadopolos!   But no, each Clinton functionary was granted immunity by the FBI during the “Clinton” probe, as did Samuelson, Pagliano, State Department staffer John Bentel and I.T. aide Paul Combetta!!!    The FBI was giving out immunity like it was candy during the Clinton investigation!!   Normally, immunity is granted to a lower player in a conspiracy chain as an incentive to “rat out” someone higher in the conspiracy; but here, it is patently obvious that immunity was granted to protect the higher-ups!!!    After all, Hillary Clinton was the odds-on favorite to win the election and no one thereafter would ever be the wiser, right?????

The fact that the Obama Administration’s Justice Department and the FBI never sought to have a Grand Jury empaneled to look into Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information through her home-based email server, and the conspiracy that developed after the news broke of Clinton’s server (thank you, New York Times!); the fact that the applicable statute was re-written just for Hillary Clinton so she could be exonerated; the fact that when Hillary Clinton was finally interviewed by the FBI (by Peter Strzok, no less – his fingerprints are everywhere!), she was allowed to be accompanied by Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson as her “attorneys”, though both were witnesses in the investigation; the fact that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton, in what was supposed to be a secret meeting, on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport just days before James Comey’s Exoneration Declaration; the fact that discovery requests for documents and tangible items by the FBI were made on a “pretty please” basis rather than through compulsion by Grand Jury subpoenas (or via 4:00 am raids on the key players’ homes!); the fact that obvious acts of Obstruction of Justice by the conspirators were ignored; the fact that key individuals who lied in their FBI interviews were given a pass, and the fact that President Obama, who endorsed Hillary Clinton as his successor, made it clear in many previous public statements that he did not want Mrs. Clinton to be charged, all lead to the conclusion that key law-enforcement officials that were running the “Clinton” probe, may be guilty of Obstruction of Justice themselves!!!   They would prefer to label their decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton, based on the results of the “fruits” of their “investigation”, to be one of “Prosecutorial Discretion!!!

Reports have just come out that the the Clinton email investigation; inquiries into the “pay-to-play” allegations involving the Clinton Foundation, and the “Uranium One” transaction, will be reopened and/or explored.   Perhaps justice may yet have its day!   One issue that would have to be dealt with would be the validity of the grants of immunity to Abedin, Mills and others during what was obviously a mock investigation in which “the fix was in!!!”

What cannot be hidden behind the defense of “Prosecutorial Discretion”, is whether the “unverified and salacious” allegations of the “Steele Dossier”, as financed by the Clinton campaign and fostered by the Justice Department and the FBI during the “Russia” probe, were used by the same key law-enforcement officials of the Obama Administration, to seek and receive permission from the FISA Court to conduct electronic eavesdropping of Donald Trump and members of his campaign – Hillary Clinton’s electoral opponent, both before and after the election of November 8, 2016, who then illegally “unmasked” the identity of hundreds of Americans,  in contravention of the FISA statute!!!

-LORETTA LYNCH, SUSAN RICE, JOHN BRENNAN, BEN RHODES and SAMANTHA POWER:    As stated, on June 27, 2016, Attorney General Lynch met with Bill Clinton, the husband of the target of an ongoing federal investigation, on the tarmac of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport in what was supposed to be a secret meeting, in which they “talked about their grandchildren”.   Seven days later, Hillary Clinton was finally interviewed by Peter Strzok and two days after that, James Comey delivered his Exoneration Declaration.   The timeline of events that has been outlined above, makes it clear that even as of June 27th, the “fix” was already in to bend both the law and the facts to exonerate Mrs. Clinton, so what was the purpose of the meeting?   Was the meeting to “seal the deal” to insure that only the right result would be forthcoming from the Justice Department?   Or, was the meeting intended to formally offer Loretta Lynch the option to stay on as the Attorney General in the Hillary Clinton administration-to-be, after Mrs. Clinton’s expected exoneration?   What has been learned about the meeting as of only August 9, 2017, was that at least ten high-level Justice Department staffers were assigned after the tarmac meeting to devise “talking points” for Attorney General Lynch to explain the purpose and the content of the meeting to the Press!   It was also learned that these staffers were also tasked to investigate how the secret of the meeting between Lynch and Clinton was exposednot on how such a breach of Justice Department protocol and obvious conflict of interest occurred!!!   Mrs. Lynch, like Andrew McCabe, did not seem to feel that legal ethics required her to recuse herself from the ongoing “Clinton” probe after her rendezvous with President Clinton was revealed, despite the blatant conflict of interest and “appearance of impropriety!”   Obviously, the election polls gave all involved a feeling of invulnerability!

Section 1804 of Title 50, U.S. Code, which established the FISA Court in 1978 and set the ground rules for the appropriate use of the Government’s now vast and massive powers to monitor, eavesdrop and surveil all forms of electronic  communications, clearly states that the only legal usage for electronic surveillance under the Act is if the “significant purpose” for the need for FISA intercepts is to obtain “foreign intelligence information” and only if “appropriate minimalization procedures are in place” to safeguard American individuals’ identities that are incidentally ensnared in a FISA cyber dragnet.

Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch  was of course the chief executive officer of the Justice Department; Sally Yates, the Deputy A.G. who ran both the “Clinton” and the “Russia” probes on a day-to-day basis, ultimately reported to her.   However, pursuant to Justice Department rules and regulations, the Attorney General herself was the official that was required to personally authorize Motions to be presented before the secret FISA Court to seek warrants for electronic surveillance and was the only functionary authorized to sign a surveillance warrant once approved by the FISA Court.   What appears clear is that Loretta Lynch did sign-off on a  FISA warrant targeting Carter Page in August, 2016, after the now famous meeting in Andrew McCabe’s office, which was most likely based on the spurious claims of the Steele Dossier.   Reports that have subsequently come out suggest that this warrant led to the “incidental” intercept of the communications of hundreds of Americans, including many members of the Trump campaign and perhaps the candidate himself; the illegal leaking of surveilled conversations to the Media and the “unmasking” of the identities of those Americans, such as Carter Page and Michael Flynn, surveilled during otherwise “incidental” conversations with foreign (and not only Russian) individuals and/or entities.    As has been reported, Obama Administration functionaries such as Susan Rice, John Brennan, Ben Rhodes, and most curiously Samantha Power over at the UN, apparently had an insatiable desire to “unmask” the identities of hundreds of Americans who were incidentally surveilled in this FISA cyber dragnet, even going so far as to seek the names of Trump associates just before the Inauguration!  The cyber surveillance also most likely led to the constant leaks that were a daily fact during the opening weeks of the new administration, including the leaked transcripts of Mr. Trump’s telephone conversations with foreign leaders, all aided by President Obama’s decision just before Donald Trump’s inauguration, to alter past practices and allow the National Security Agency to disseminate information from FISA intercepts to now be shared among 16 other governmental agencies and hundreds of additional governmental officials!   In affect, these activities of the Obama Administration constituted nothing less than a calculated plan, unprecedented in U.S. history, to lay a pattern of “land mines” by an outgoing party, to be dealt with, in turn, by a new administration of the opposite political party!!!

Was the “significant purpose” of the FISA warrant targeting Carter Page to obtain “foreign intelligence information”, or was the real reason for Mrs. Lynch’s approval of the Motion to seek approval of the surveillance of Carter Page; most likely based on “unverified and salacious” claims of the Steele Dossier as financed by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, in order to spy on the inner workings of Trump campaign to ensure Mrs. Clinton’s electoral victory?   Further, was Carter Page even an appropriate target to be electronically surveilled under the FISA Act?

Once again, voicing Andrew McCarthy in his December 23rd National Review article:

“under federal surveillance law (Section 1801 of Title 50, U.S. Code), the probable-cause showing the Government must make to prove that a person is an agent of a foreign power is different for Americans than for aliens.   If the alleged agent is an alien, Section 1801(b)(1) applies, and this means that no probable cause of evidence of a crime need be established, the Government need only show that the target is acting on behalf of a foreign power in the sense of abetting its clandestine anti-American activities.   By contrast, if the alleged agent is an American citizen, such as Carter Page, Section 1801(b)(2) applies: the Government must show not only that the person is engaged in clandestine activities on behalf of a foreign power but also that these activities: (1) involve or may involve a violation of criminal statutes of the United States; (2) involve the preparation for or commission of sabotage or international terrorism; (3) involve using a false identity to enter or operate in the United States on behalf of a foreign power; or (4) involve conspiring with or aiding and abetting another person in the commission of these criminal activities.   All of these involve evidence of a crime.”

For Carter Page, as an American citizen, to be electronically surveilled pursuant to the FISA Act, the Government must have shown probable cause that no only was Mr. Page engaging in clandestine activities on behalf of Russia, but also that he was engaging in one of the crimes as spelled out in Section 1801(b)(2) of the FISA Act, as cited above!   To date, Carter Page has not been charged with any crime.

Several questions need to be answered:  (1):  What were the specific “allegations of collusion with Russia” that prompted the FBI to launch an aggressive investigation of the Trump campaign in August, 2016?   That answer has been sought for by months by Chairman Devin Nunes (R.-Ca.) of the House Intelligence Committee; the FBI and the Department of Justice have slow-walked and stonewalled the Committee’s demands for answers, citing “protection of intelligence sources” and an ongoing, internal Justice Department probe by Inspector General Michael Horowitz.   As of January 3, 2018, the FBI and the DOJ and Congressman Nunes have reportedly finally reached an agreement that the documents sought by the Committee should finally be released.   (2):  Were the specific allegations of collusion between Trump and Russia based on the “unverified and salacious” Russian-fueled claims as contained in the Steele Dossier?   (3):  If so, were the specific allegations of the Steele Dossier spelled-out in the sworn Affidavit that was submitted to the FISA Court by the FBI and the DOJ to contend that there was “probable cause” for the FISA Court to issue a warrant to surveil the communications of Carter Page?   It appears clear that the approval of this FISA warrant resulted in the “incidental” intercept of the communications of many Americans and the illegal “unmasking” of their identities, including many members of the Trump campaign and potentially Donald Trump himself, as he so famously charged: “being wiretapped in Trump Tower!”   A copy of the actual Affidavit has also been sought for months by Chairman Nunes’ Committee.   (4): At what point did the FBI and the DOJ learn that the Dossier was actually a partisan “opposition research” project funded by Donald Trump’s electoral opponent?   Was that fact learned before the Motion was presented before the FISA Court by the FBI and the DOJ to seek a warrant to surveil Carter Page?  Finally, (5):  if the Steele Dossier claims were included in the Affidavit presented to the FISA Court and if the FBI and the DOJ knew the Dossier was in actuality a product of “opposition research” project commissioned and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was that fact kept from the FISA Court as it weighed the evidence to determine whether there was “probable cause” to issue a warrant to surveil Carter Page?

If this scenario is true, it would amount to nothing less than government- sanctioned electronic eavesdropping on a political opponent during a presidential election, a tactic worthy of a banana republic!!!   It would amount to a massive “fraud upon the Court!”   And, it would have caused a wholesale trashing of the Fourth Amendment by the Obama Administration!!   The civil right implications would be incalculable!!   And yes if true, this scandal would truly be “WORSE THAN WATERGATE!!!!!”

As of this date, no evidence has been unearthed that the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russians to hack DNC emails; to conspire with Russian intelligence to propagate “fake news” against Hillary Clinton; to tamper with the electoral process or to alter the vote count.   George Papadopolos’ free-lance London meeting with a Russian professor and Putin’s “niece” who claimed they had “dirt” on Hillary Clihton was obviously a post-KGB trap.   Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, has since been proven to be, in actuality, a staged Set-Up by Fusion GPS – both were naïve, amateur attempts at opposition research that are not even illegal, let alone constitute “collusion”.   The indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates for tax evasion from years back and the “Lying to the FBI” plea of Michael Flynn, both have nothing to do with the election.

In contrast, there is abundant evidence that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee commissioned and funded the Dossier authored by Christopher Steele, who utilized unverified, untrustworthy and perhaps fictional Putin regime disinformation to craft a Dossier of salacious “opposition research” against Donald Trump and his campaign.   The evidence further shows that Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee then COLLUDED with the Obama Administration to use the spurious allegations of the Steele Dossier, as the vehicle to obtain a FISA warrant to electronically surveil the Trump campaign, which yielded information that was leaked to Obama’s Mainstream Media allies and fueled the narrative that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians to win the election in return for the lifting of sanctions against Russia.   This then morphed into the “Russia Probe!”

In the name of justice and in the name of history, all of the above questions must be fully answered!

-The Chicago Patriot

 

Copyright 2018, William O. Fasciana.   All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Slow-Motion Coup D’Etat Misfires? (6/19/17)

The Washington elites (some from the GOP), aided by their Deep-State allies embedded within the intelligence agencies, the Justice Department and the administrative apparatus, and allied with the Left; its lap-dog Democratic Party, Academia and the virulently anti-Trump mainstream media-entertainment complex, all waited with saliva-dripping and palpitation-inducing anticipation for the testimony last week of fired FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee.   Comey’s testimony no doubt would drive the mortal stake into the heart of the Incubus-in-Chief, Donald Trump, and his pledge to clean the Augean Stables of the District of Columbia; in this millennium manifested as the grotesquely expanded federal colossus, by unmasking President Trump as being guilty as charged; guilty of TREASON for being a Manchurian Candidate-like foreign agent of Russia and engaging in collusion with Vladimir Putin to subvert our democracy and (somehow)  “steal” the 2016 presidential election that rightfully belonged to Hillary Rodham Clinton!(This “Collusion Narrative” was allegedly cooked-up just days after Hillary’s surprise loss by none other than her top aide, John “Password” Podesta!)

James Comey’s appearance was sure to be the climax of this carefully-planned, slow motion Coup D’Etat to remove the offensive Trump Administration and its promises to trim the bloated DC Administrative State and curtail the all-powerful federal government (“The Swamp”), only months after Mr. Trump’s ascension to power!

But, a funny thing happened on the Road to Impeachment of this constitutionally elected president.   In the Hearing, James Comey readily conceded that, at least as of May 9th, the date of his dismissal, Donald Trump had NEVER been the target of any investigation for colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election!   The time span of the investigation against Donald Trump and his campaign that Comey was alluding to, dates back eleven months to JULY, 2016.   Comey also testified that as of the date of his removal, NO evidence of collusion with Russia had yet to have been found against Donald Trump, OR any of his associates.   Further, Mr. Comey confirmed what President Trump had repeatedly asserted and for which he had been roundly mocked; that Comey had indeed personally assured Trump on three occasions, that he had never been a target of the investigation!

As Senator Rubio pointed out during the Hearings, the fact that the President had never been under investigation for collusion with Russia was the only important “fact” that was NOT leaked to the Left press, during these past tumultuous months!   Did the slow-motion Coup D’Etat to remove Mr. Trump, engineered with relentless coordination by the oligarchs of The Swamp since the surprise results of November 8th, misfire right in front of the Democrat senators at the Hearings and in front of all of the world?

Of course, with the GOP caving in to pressure to agree to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to look into Russia’s involvement in the election, the Inquiry continues.    (Could you imagine Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch acceding to such a demand?).   The Swamp hopes against hope that the President will still somehow be tied into nefarious Moscow conspiracies that have been claimed to have been engineered by Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, et al.   But as Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz (a liberal Democrat and Hillary supporter) has repeatedly posited, if the shadow accusations of Russian involvement concerning any of these individuals are true, what specific constitutional provisions, federal statutes, or Code of Federal Regulations were violated?   Where is the crime?

Legal fact: meetings with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak are not illegal.   They do not violate any law, treaty or custom.   In fact, meetings with ambassadors; including Mr. Kislyak, are actually encouraged and are scheduled, and have been scheduled with both Democratic and Republican members of Congress, on a constant and continuing basis, in both official and unofficial settings, since the District of Columbia was a meadow with a commanding hill!    The goal is diplomacy and maintenance of peace; that’s why governments maintain embassies in all nations for which they have diplomatic recognition.

Sure, the Russian embassy in Georgetown is a hive of FSB activity (the post-Soviet KGB) as our embassy in Moscow is a CIA nest.   Everybody acts under diplomatic cover and everybody knows the players.   Is Kislyak the FSB rezident in Washington?    Probably not, most likely it’s his First Secretary, who nevertheless reports to him.   But Mr. Kislyak’s portfolio is irrelevant as everybody knows the players, even without a scorecard!   As Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified to before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 13th, he recalled met with Sergey Kislyak, with several members of Sessions’ staff present, in his role as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee – a regular occurrence that happens with all members of Congress; Democrat and Republican alike.   (It was this meeting that Sessions had failed to include in his prior testimony, as he interpreted Senator Franken’s question as inquiring about meetings with Kislyak in his role as a Trump surrogate rather than as a senator).   Attorney General Sessions also met with Mr. Kislyak in a function in Cleveland during the Republican convention, a get-together that was also attended by Democrats!   Finally, he testified that he could not recall whether or not he greeted Kislyak at a function at the Mayflower Hotel, where Mr. Sessions was surrounded by hundreds of other people.

Jeff Sessions declared that the swirling innuendo that he and other members of the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign was a “appalling and detestable lie” and further stated that the idea that he could have colluded with the Russian ambassador during the campaign season was “like looking through the looking glass” in Alice in Wonderland!   Not for nothing did Vladimir Putin exclaim to Megyn Kelly in her interview of him that “have you all lost your senses over there?”   While the Russians failed to hack into any of the individual states’ vote-tally systems, they were hugely successful in sowing massive suspicion and discord into the American body politic.   And the question must be asked: which American political party’s rhetoric and actions are (unwittingly) serving to advance Moscow’s nefarious designs to disrupt our democracy?

As with Jeff Sessions, no evidence of Russian collusion been unearthed to date over contacts that National Security Advisor-to-be Michael Flynn had with the Russian ambassador.   Short of some sort of conspiracy (to violate which statute?), conversations with Sergey Kislyak were not illegal.  Flynn had the absolute right to discuss the prospective fate of Obama-imposed sanctions on Russia once the new administration took office on January 20th.   The Trump administration was not bound by the executive order of Barack Obama.   Why Flynn kept secret his meeting with the Kislyak when questioned by Vice President Pence; which led to the stated reason for his ouster, is puzzling.   But the “illegality” of merely meeting with the Russian ambassador; as revealed by an leaked FISA intercept for which Michael Flynn’s identity was illegally “unmasked”, was not a viable reason, in itself, for the destruction of his career.   However, I predict that Flynn is one individual who now is in legal jeopardy – but for other reasons, as discussed below.

Then, there is Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner.   Page was one of five people named as foreign policy advisors to the Trump campaign back in March, 2016, through Mr. Trump claims that he never had met him.   Page is the founder of Global Energy Capital, a New York investment fund specializing in the Russian and Central Asian oil and gas business.   He reputedly was the subject of a FISA warrant that allegedly revealed he was dealing with Russian individuals that were subject to US sanctions during the pursuit of his Russian investments.   He left the Trump campaign in September, 2016.   While the extent of his legal trouble due to his business dealings; if any, is speculative, what do these facts have to do with the “fixing” of the US Presidential election for Donald Trump?

Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign manager from March to August, 2016.   A long time Republican political operative, Mr. Manafort had for the past decade been involved in lobbying on behalf of the Government of Ukraine and had served as a political consultant to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who favored closer ties to Moscow.   Manafort has denied working on behalf of Russian as opposed to Ukrainian interests and has claimed that he strove to move Kiev more in the direction of the West, rather than to Moscow.   Nevertheless, Paul Manafort was fired as Donald Trump’s campaign manager in August, 2016.   What the Mainstream Media now seems to forget, was that it was the Trump campaign that declared that the stated reason for Manafort’s removal last August was “due to his past ties with Russia” – the reason for the dismissal of Mr. Manafort was not broken by the Mainstream Media or revealed through the bombshell of some anonymous leak!   Paul Manafort has offered to testify before Congress.   But again, what do the facts concerning Manafort’s past lobbying activities have to do with the “fixing” of the US Presidential election for Donald Trump?   And as Professor Dershowitz asks: what crime has been committed here, in any event?

Finally, there is Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, now accused to seeking to open a back-channel line of communication with Moscow after the November 8th election.   While the claim that Kushner attempted to open surreptitious channels to Russia AFTER the election now blows to smithereens the Collusion Narrative to all but the most-remedial Anti-Trump “The Election was Stolen” Conspiratorial Maniacs, back channel communication links to foreign governments have been used by U.S. administrations since the beginning of the republic; the latest being the Obama contacts with Iran during the Iran nuclear deal.   Mr. Kushner has also offered to testify before Congress concerning the details of his attempt to open up a back channel line to Moscow.   As stated, such communication links are not per se illegal.

The FBI’s investigation of Mr. Trump and his campaign dating back to last July, included James Comey’s payment of a taxpayer-funded bounty (for how much?) for the purchase of the now-infamous and totally discredited dossier cooked-up by former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele that was originally commissioned by a Republican Never-Trump lobby group, that claimed; among many groundless accusations, that Donald Trump had golden showers administered upon him by Russian prostitutes on a bed in a Moscow hotel suite formerly occupied by Barack and Michelle Obama!   This baseless and totally unsubstantiated report was the apparent pretext that prompted longtime Democrat operative and Obama CIA Director John Brennan, to brief the President-Elect that the Russians claimed to have compromising information on him.   The briefing was then promptly leaked (by Brennan himself?) to the Buzzfeed website and then to CNN, who breathlessly reported its salacious details on the day before Donald Trump’s Inauguration.

However, what was unknown on that date, was that the FBI’s acquisition of this “evidence” provided the pretext for James Comey and the Obama administration to obtain warrants from the FISA Court for electronic surveillance to ostensibly seek information on the “facts” relating to this unbelievable dossier.   As subsequent developments have revealed, Obama operatives such as John Brennan, Susan Rice, Ben Rhoades, and most curiously, Samantha Power over at the UN, apparently used the wiretaps authorized by the FISA warrants to surveil Trump campaign personnel and perhaps the candidate himself during the 2016 campaign, and then illegally unmasked the identity of Michael Flynn and other Trump operatives during otherwise “incidental” conversations with foreign (and not only Russian) individuals and/or entities.   This surveillance continued well after the November 8th election and persisted right up to the Inauguration and even beyond – consider surveilled and leaked telephone transcripts of Donald Trump’s conversations with the prime minister of Australia and the president of Mexico in the opening weeks of his administration.

Section 1804 of Title 50, U.S. Code, stipulates that a “significant purpose” of a FISA intercept must be to obtain “foreign intelligence information” and that “appropriate minimalization procedures are in place”, to safeguard American individuals’ identities that are incidentally ensnared in a FISA cyber dragnet.   This national security apparatus was unconstitutionally and with corrupt intent, maliciously launched upon the Republican challenger to Hillary Clinton and his campaign by the Obama administration for naked political purposes, in true KGB style!   Talk about Russia!   What now appears to be just the tip of the iceberg, the Obama Administration’s wholesale trashing of the Fourth Amendment throughout its tenure, via its misuse of the FISA statute to pursue electronic surveillance for which the “significant purpose” was NOT “foreign intelligence information” but eavesdropping on electoral opponents and members of the Media (for example, James Rosen of Fox News), is the true scandal here.   THIS IS THE TRUE COLLUSION!

Have you noticed that since the testimony of James Comey at the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Russian Collusion Narrative has now largely taken a back seat in the drive to unseat Donald Trump, in favor of other schemes to force his removal, such as accusations that the President should be impeached for being guilty of Obstruction of Justice?   Well at least Mr. Trump can now remove the “TRAITOR” sign that the unhinged Left has rhetorically thrown around his neck!

Of course, the testimony of James Comey at the Senate Intelligence Committee also provided other theatric bombshells to the DC feeding frenzy.   Comey claimed that the President asked him “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go”, during a private dinner in the Green Room in the White House right after Mr. Trump supposedly demanded loyalty from the FBI Director.   (The Left immediately dubbed the meeting the “Loyalty Dinner” and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews; always Godfather-centric, has likened the meeting to an audience with Don Corleone!)   Comey was coy on opining whether Trump’s words amounted to Obstruction of Justice in an attempt to thwart the investigation of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (who had been dismissed by Trump the day before), stating that whether the President is guilty of obstruction should be decided by others.   However, later in the Hearing, Comey launched a second bombshell in revealing that he was the leaker of the notes that he supposedly contemporaneously took after his meeting with the President, by relaying them to a Columbia law school professor friend for the expressed purpose of having the memo leaked to the New York Times, after Mr. Comey was fired!   He further testified that he engineered the leak of his notes with the intention of forcing the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the President, whom Mr. Comey had cleared of any Russian collusion only minutes before during the Hearing!   One may reasonably speculate that Comey has been one of the main sources of leaks, if not the prime leaker, since Mr. Trump’s electoral victory.   Is James Comey the “Deep Throat” of the new millennium?

Legal fact:   Donald Trump had the supreme constitutional right to fire James Comey, for any reason, or no reason!   In fact, as Chief Executive, he has the perfect constitutional power to order the shutting down of any investigation, though it may not be politically wise.    Despite what many pundits on the Left claim, the FBI does not have some sort of independent watchdog status under the constitutional framework; neither does the Justice Department, they are both organs of the executive branch and report to the president.   J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure as head of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924; which became the FBI in 1935, spanned seven administrations, from Calvin Coolidge through Richard Nixon, when Hoover died at the helm in 1972.   Most historians have concluded that Hoover survived as head of the FBI for that long a period because he maintained a file of incriminating or embarrassing evidence for each successive occupant of the White House.   Did Donald Trump fire James Comey because of the Russian probe; because of poor morale at the FBI; because of his handling of the Hillary email investigation, or because Comey refused to reveal to the public what he had reported to Congress and admitted to Trump on three separate occasions, that he was never a target of the Russian Collusion investigation?   For whatever reason, James Comey served at the pleasure of the President.   And does Comey’s deliberate leaking of his notes of the dinner with the President after his firing; which Comey admitted was deliberately calculated to force the appointment of a special prosecutor (which turned out to be one of his best friends, Robert Mueller), be the sort of retaliation worthy of a Hoover, one that would have earn him the moniker that some commentators have hung on the former Director; that being J. Edgar Comey?

Most legal experts are in agreement that there is insufficient evidence to credibly claim that the President was engaging in Obstruction of Justice in asking James Comey “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go”, even if Comey’s recollection is to be believed, word for word.   There must be proof of corrupt intent.   An entirely plausible argument could be made that, in light of Trump’s firing of Michael Flynn the day before; an act that the President obviously felt bad about and concerned a loyal individual who had a sterling thirty-year career serving his country, that Mr. Trump was asking James Comey for mercy for Flynn, for whom he felt had been through enough.

Further, Trump’s alleged statement was couched in term of the fact that he “hoped” that the investigation of Michael Flynn would end.   When questioned by Republican Idaho Senator James Risch during the Hearing, Mr. Comey claimed that he took Trump’s words about the Flynn investigation “as a direction”, though Trump’s words were not couched in the form of an order.   However, Comey was forced to concede to Senator Risch that he knew of no other prosecution in which someone had been charged with Obstruction of Justice “for hoping something.”

The greatest irony of this situation is that Michael Flynn is the one individual in this saga who most likely will be faced with criminal prosecution; not due to his contacts with Sergey Kislyak, but by failing to register as a foreign agent under the Registration of Foreign Agents Act, as a lobbyist for TURKEY, not Russia!   This news broke on March 10, 2017, some five weeks after the “Loyalty Dinner”.   Was that fact the gist of Trump’s comment?   Was the President even aware of Flynn’s Turkish involvement at that point?

While the statements of a defendant in a Obstruction of Justice prosecution must be couched in unambiguous terms, as opposed to “hoping” for a certain legal resolution, Donald Trump is not out of the woods on this issue.   Special Counsel Mueller will look into other conversations about the Flynn Affair that the President may have had with NSA director Mike Rogers and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, and perhaps others.   How were the President’s precise words phrased with these individuals, concerning the Flynn investigation?   Mr. Trump should have long ago realized that he is the president now; he can no longer couch his conversations as if negotiating with wildcat strikers who had interrupted the construction of one of his buildings!   The words of a president have fine, precise legal meanings.   While cleared of being a Traitor in the Service of the Kremlin, Trump’s indiscipline may have opened up a self-inflicted wound allowing for a new avenue of attack from the Left.

While an impeachment proceeding has a legal basis – the Constitution requires “High Crimes or Misdemeanors”, it is ultimately a political process.   There is no such thing as a Motion to Dismiss the charges, for the failure to prove the required elements of an offense.   Impeachment can only occur when 2/3 of the House of Representatives votes to impeach (i.e., to indict) and then 2/3 of the Senate votes to convict an individual for removal of office.   A subsequent criminal prosecution of the person could then proceed in a court of law.    At the minute, the Democrats have 193 members in the House and 48 in the Senate.   Assuming all Democrats would vote to impeach, they would additionally need 90 Republican representatives to join them in the House to impeach, and a further 19 Republican senators to join all Democratic senators to vote to convict after a trial in the Senate, for Donald Trump to be removed from office.   The evidence against Mr. Trump must be pretty clear cut and egregious for that many Republican members of Congress to join their Democrat brethren in the ouster of the winner of the 2016 election.   Unless the tentacles of the Washington Elites and the Deep State are that far reaching and pervasive!

Compare the evidence to date, of Donald Trump’s alleged Obstruction of Justice in attempting to impede the investigation of Michael Flynn, with just some of the Byzantine machinations of Hillary and Bill Clinton and their respective staffs, and of the Obama Administration, in squelching the Hillary Clinton email investigation:

(*)  Early 2014: Hillary Clinton’s aide Monica Hanley mailed  a copy of the “Hillary Clinton email archives”, downloaded from Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized, private server in her home at Chappaqua, New York, which was utilized during her tenure as Secretary of State, to Clinton’s new I.T. provider – Platte River Network (PRN), located in Denver, Colorado.   Hanley downloaded the emails onto an Apple MacBook with a copy on a thumb drive.   Upon receipt, PRN loaded the emails to a G-Mail account for transfer to a PRN server, then deleted the emails from the G-Mail account, but inadvertently failed to erase some 940 emails of which 56 were classified and 302 were not among the 55,000 State Department emails subsequently released by Hillary Clinton in December, 2014.

(*)  Early 2014:  PRN allegedly mailed back the Apple MacBook and the thumb drive back to the Hillary Clinton offices and they are promptly “lost”.

(*)  December, 2014:  Hillary Clinton released 55,000 State Department emails.

(*)  December, 2014:  An unknown Clinton staff member instructed PRN to delete the entire Clinton email archive from PRN’s server.

(NOTE:  Deletion of ANY of the emails from the Hillary Clinton email archives was in violation of the Federal Records Act.)

(*)  January, 2015: Hillary Clinton staffer Heather Samuelson was tasked to determines which emails were personal (to be deleted) and which were work-related from the Chappaqua server, which resulted in the deletion of over 36,000 emails.   Then both Samuelson and Clinton staffer Cheryl Mills requested that all emails from the hard drive of their respective computers also be eradicated using the BleachBit software.

(*)  Hillary Clinton orders all emails older than 60 days to be deleted.

(*)  March 2, 2015:  The New York Times released an article showing that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server violates State Department rules.

(*)  March 4, 2015:  Hillary Clinton received a subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi instructing her to preserve all emails from her private server and deliver them to Congress.

(*)  March 25, 2015:  An undisclosed PRN staff member had a conference call with a member of President Clinton’s staff.

(*)  March 25-31, 2015:  An undisclosed PRN staff member realized he forgot to delete the Hillary email archives from the PRN server as instructed in December, 2014.   Said PRN staff member proceeded to eradicate the hard drive of the server using BleachBit, despite later admitting that he “was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton’s email data on the PRN server.”

(*)  June, 2016:  FBI discovers the 940 emails that were uploaded by PRN to the G-Mail account in early 2014 that were inadvertently not deleted, contrary to orders by the Hillary Clinton staff.

(*)  June 10, 2016:  FBI reached immunity deal with Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson.  The FBI granted both of Hillary’s aides immunity from prosecution and also agreed to limited their search of the Hillary Clinton emails to only those generated up to January 31, 2015, meaning investigators could not review subsequent communications after the email server became public, thus tying the FBI’s hands on any inquiry concerning measures taken to obstruct justice; including destruction of evidence, after that date!   Further, the deal called for the FBI to destroy the laptops of both Mills and Samuelson after they finished reviewing them and thus kept the computers out of the hands of Congressional investigators!   A highly improper deal, as the FBI could have subpoenaed the laptops and seized them, condition free!

(*)  Late June, early July, 2016:  As related by James Comey in the Hearings of June 8, 2017, Comey met with then Attorney General Loretta Lynch to produce a sensitive document about the Hillary email investigation; its been existence having been unknown to Lynch, which caused a “frostiness” and a “steely gaze” from the Attorney General.   The meeting concluded with Ms. Lynch instructing Comey that the Hillary inquiry was to be referred to as a “matter” rather than an “investigation.”

(*)  June 27, 2016:  Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton engaged in a secret rendezvous from their private jets on the tarmac of Sky Harbor Airport, Phoenix, Arizona.   Their respective staffs are excluded from the private meeting.   The story of this surreptitious rendezvous is broken by a tip to a local Phoenix TV host.   The Attorney General and the spouse of a target of an investigation being run from her office, allegedly talked for 35 minutes “about their grandchildren”, eight days before the disposition of the email investigation was announced.

(*)  July 2, 2016: Hillary Clinton was finally interviewed by the FBI at their headquarters.   She was not required to be put under oath.   She was allowed to be accompanied to the meeting with Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson as “her attorneys”; highly improper as both were witnesses to the investigation.   Reputedly, Hillary told the FBI that she didn’t know that the (c) on many of the emails put before her, meant the communications were confidential or classified.

(*)  July 5, 2016:  James Comey held a press conference announcing the details of the investigation and concluded that Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” in the handling of classified emails.   However he then misstated the terms of the applicable criminal statute for mishandling classified communications stating “there was no evidence that Hillary Clinton intentionally or willfully mishandled classified information” –  the statute actually only requires proof of “gross negligence” which is the same as “extreme carelessness!”   As a result, Comey concluded that as the FBI found no evidence that Clinton intentionally or willfully mishandled classified information, it was “our judgment that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”   The email investigation was, (as it turned out, temporarily) closed.

(NOTE:  There are several individuals serving prison sentences at the minute, convicted of mere Gross Negligence (as opposed to intentional and willful intent) in mishandling classified documents.    Clever defense attorneys are already utilizing “The Hillary Rule”, to try to get these charges dismissed against their clients!)

(*)  In the week of July 5, 2016 after Comey’s declaration:  The Hillary Clinton campaign indicates that Loretta Lynch will be highly considered to stay on as Attorney General in the new Hillary Clinton administration. (!)

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees several rights, one of which is that no federal prosecution can proceed without an indictment from a grand jury.   As it is clear from the above narrative that Loretta Lynch (and President Obama) had no intention of EVER empaneling a grand jury to review the evidence of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, no indictment could thus ever be issued to bring any charge against Mrs. Clinton, pursuant to the Fifth Amendment!   Is that the real, underlying reason that James Comey stated that it is “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case?”

Susan Rice has already refused to testify before Congress concerning the “unmasking” probe; probably Loretta Lynch will also refuse to appear when summoned to The Hill to testify about this chronology.   A crisis will no doubt be forced.   The Democrats are past masters at taking the stance that Republican congressional majorities don’t have any legitimacy and their demands; let alone their subpoenas, need not be honored.   If the Republicans force the issue, the Democrats will label the GOP as being mean spirited, call their demands outrageous if not actually illegal, claim that their efforts are merely wasting taxpayer money and then turn the Mainstream Media on them!   It’s nice having powerful friends!

The actions of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and their respective staffs in destroying evidence; the decision of Bill Clinton to surreptitiously meet with Attorney General Lynch as a decision was looming about the disposition of the investigation against his wife; thr improper conduct of Attorney General Lynch in meeting with President Clinton and in impeding a true investigation of the Hillary Clinton email scandal: THIS IS THE TRUE OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE!

The election of Hillary Clinton would have empowered her to become the final architect of the all-powerful, unanswerable and unresponsive Administrative State, and set a final seal on the Progressive dream; dating back to Woodrow Wilson, of a nation ruled by panels of unelected experts in an all-powerful and unreachable bureaucracy – set above and beyond the reach of the unwashed masses!   Obamacare is an example of that template.   The American Constitutional framework would have been forever altered!  However, Hillary Clinton was barely defeated; against all odds, by the little people (and not by Putin!); common folks largely from Middle America; by those Americans who dared to demand for limited and representative government and for adherence to the Bill of Rights, as set out by the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.    And the unlikely vessel of their heart-felt petitions that ended up serving as their messenger and their champion, amazingly became Donald J. Trump! The Left has never, and most likely will never, get over it!

The Anti-Trump forces describe themselves as “The Resistance”; as if their griping and sniping against the new administration is akin to the heroic French resistance against the Nazi occupation in World War II!   What nonsense!   However, the Resistance has been effective in largely bringing to a screeching halt the many facets of Donald Trump’s agenda – all the Democrats and the Media want to talk about is Russia, Russia, Russia!   Or maybe now Obstruction?   At the minute, it is as if Donald Trump is tied down with the bind of innumerable threads, like the fabled Gulliver!   However, the tactics of the Democratic Party; the stalking horse of the The Swamp and of the Left, may exact a perilous self-inflicted price!   If the 24-hour news cycle impeachment frenzy does not ultimately bear fruit; if Donald Trump is not forced from office; if the President is exonerated; if Robert Mueller only comes up with an indictment of Michael Flynn for his undisclosed lobbying efforts for Turkey and not much more, the majority of Americans will see this campaign as a failed and naked attempted Coup D’Etat to nullify the legal results of the 2016 election!   And see it as a colossal finely orchestrated charade and fraud!   And see it as a colossal waste of time while vital issues are left unattended!   And see it as a colossal waste of money!   And the Democratic Party will pay…..

-The Chicago Patriot

 

 

 

Thoughts on the “Resistance” (2/17/17)

As we approach the one-month “anniversary” of the Donald Trump presidency, it is instructive to review the full gamet of all of the Left’s multi-dimensional and fever-pitched, all-out daily attempts to discredit, delegitimize and mock the new administration and to continue to stymie the confirmation of as many cabinet nominees; and thereby frustrate the appointment of as many under-secretaries, administrators and staffers of the various federal departments, as possible.   One consequence: Obama political appointment holdovers and career staffers continue to wield power in many agencies and might very well be the sources of the wave of adverse leaks fed to a ravenously hostile Press, including those that led to the dismissal of national security advisor Michael Flynn on February 13th, as discussed below.   As was declared by some after Donald Trump’s upset election on November 8th, there will be no attempt to “normalize” relations with this president!   And, as was said by others, the goal of this coordinated and multi-faceted “Resistance” to President Trump, conducted by the Left and their handmaidens – the Democrat Party, is nothing less than to make the country “ungovernable” under Mr. Trump’s stewardship!   That towering legal intellect, Rep. Maxine Waters (D.-Ca.),  has declared that articles of impeachment are already in the works!   For what High Crime or Misdemeanor?

While admittedly, some of the chaos of the past few weeks can be attributed to President Trump’s tweeting – which often steps upon the story of a positive development the night before; his precedent-shattering “alternative” style in serving as president; the multiple power centers in the White House vying for the President’s ear; the current ad hoc status of the new administration’s nascent bureaucracy – caused by Senator Schumer’s delaying tactics, and the turmoil over the immigration order, inartfully-drafted by non-attorney Stephen Miller, the following are just some examples of the coordinated and integrated efforts of the Resistance by the Left over the last few weeks, carried-out with the one goal of making the nation “ungovernable” under this duly-elected president:

* Protests that occurred beginning on the night of Trump’s victory by college “snowflakes” quickly metamorphisized into coordinated rallies in dozens of U.S. cities protesting Trump’s win, illegally blocking freeways and city streets, and then in many cases turning into violent riots, most notably in Portland, Oregon, Oakland, California, Washington, DC and UC Berkeley.   Chants of “not my president” and “this is what democracy looks like” rang in the air.    All staged to what end?    To overturn the results of the election, due to vague charges that Russia somehow affected the outcome of the election?   That was already tried in the attempted electoral college coup of December 19th!  Or were these initial protests nothing more than thousands of primal screams melded into one, lamenting that their candidate did not win?

The reality that these demonstrations; while perhaps spontaneous in the first few hours, were quickly hijacked by the Professional Left/Media Complex is obvious: witness the identical professionally-printed signs that sprung up in such disparate locales as Seattle, Boston,  Miami and the Women’s March in DC and later, the posters of the Arab woman in the stars and stripes chador found everywhere during the protests over the immigration order.   Additionally consider the rioting anarchists, all identically-clad in hooded black garb.   Who outfitted them?  And who paid for all of the buses that transported and assembled all of these “organic” demonstrators at the hundreds of marches and demonstrations; some of which turned into riots, and at all of the airports upon the outset of the immigration order?   One can almost detect the whiff of George Soros’ billions behind this turmoil!   Was DNC dirty-tricks chief Robert Kramer’s fingerprints also on these operations?   Kramer was the Democratic apparatchik fingered by WikiLeaks as the coordinator of most of the mayhem that occurred within (and outside of) the Trump rallies during the campaign – violence, of course, blamed on the Trumpsters!   Further, was Kramer working on behalf of Organizing for Action (OFA), the rump organization formerly known as Obama for America and was OFA coordinating these protests on a nationwide basis?

The fawning press coverage lauded these protests (and excused the over-rambunctious rioters) as signifying the birth of a new Tea-Party-like movement of the Left, sprung spontaneously from the soil as a knee-jerk reaction to the expectations of the new Donald Trump presidency!   But are they?   Nancy Pelosi famously labeled the Tea Party as “Astroturf”; artificially created by the GOP rather than organically arising from within the body politic, to protest the policies enacted by Barack Obama.   The question arises: do these demonstrations signify a Left-Wing revolt that will catapult the Democrats to Congressional gains in the 2018 Mid-Term elections and the White House in 2020?   Or, are these protests the true Astroturf, with the only affect of destabilizing the new administration?

* Another facet of the Resistance of the Left is the inauguration boycott of the 54 Democrat Congresspersons, led by civil-rights icon Congressman John Lewis (D.-Ga.), ostensibly called for by Lewis to protest alleged Russian interference in Donald Trump’s election.   The Media failed to report that this was not the first time that Rep. Lewis boycotted a GOP inauguration.   In 2001, he boycotted the first inauguration of George W. Bush as he declared that Bush was “not a legitimately elected president” due to the Florida recount.   Further, there would have been a good chance Lewis would have also skipped the 2008 inauguration had John McCain won, as he had (for no discernible reason) called the McCain/Palin campaign a “throwback to (segregationist) George Wallace”.

Of course, in light of the fact that John Lewis, of Edmund Pettis Bridge fame, is an inviolable civil rights saint, the Mainstream Media did not bring up his past inaugural boycott and past statement about Senator McCain, nor questioned the wisdom of leading a boycott of a president that; like it or not, would be occupying the White House for at least, the next four years.

Nevertheless, John Lewis’ inaugural boycott certainly set the tone for the most contentious senatorial confirmation process in modern times. To date, only nine of the fifteen most senior positions requiring senatorial approval have been confirmed, 28 days into the new administration, despite the fact that the Democrats lack the votes to defeat any nominee.   Using any obstructionist tactic at their disposal, including unprecedented mass boycotts of committee hearings on multiple nominees, the Democrats are acting on the wishes of their inflamed base, which demands zero accomodation with the Trump administration!   What price may end up being paid by the country for this engineered turmoil?

* Another powerful front of the Resistance exists within the new Trump administration, in the form of Obama holdover political appointees, those Obama officials who transferred to career civil service positions and those ostensibly non-political bureaucrats who merely feel threatened by Donald Trump’s calls to shake up the bureaucracy, which may cost some jobs.   It appears that the agencies most infected with this behind-the-scenes Resistance are the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department.   These operatives of what has become in affect a “shadow government”, have acted daily to undermine and subvert the new administration, via selective leaks of highly sensitive intelligence and/or law enforcement communications that were monitored or wiretapped by the National Security Agency or other intelligence organs.

Donald Trump’s disparaging comments about the CIA in calling them “Nazis” (in commenting about the CIA’s role in the Russian prostitutes story; see below) while President Obama’s DCI John Brennan was still in full control of the intelligence apparatus, was a decision rife with potential peril!   The foremost critic of the intelligence community during the Obama years and of Obama’s foreign policy, was Michael Flynn.   Whether or not Flynn had conversations with the Russian ambassador on the issue of the fate of Obama-imposed sanctions under the incoming administration, is legally irrelevant as Flynn, the national security advisor-to be, had the perfect right to prospectively discuss the sanctions; consequently this episode did not run afoul, nor was even applicable, to the never-invoked Logan Act of 1799.  Yet Flynn, for whatever reason, apparently hedged on whether sanctions were brought up.   While the stated reason for his ouster was “lying” to Vice President Pence about whether he discussed the Obama-imposed sanctions on Russia with its ambassador (a knowing prevarication, or a mere lapse of total recall of the whole content of the December conversation?), the reason that Flynn was targeted in the first place by the shadow insurgents is the real story here.   What apparently was not known by Flynn, Trump or his inner circle at the time, was that  transcripts existed of Flynn’s December phone conversation, intercepted by Obama’s National Security Agency that were kept for the right time for release to the anti-Trump Media for the hit-job on Flynn.

The NSA regularly wiretaps foreign diplomats.   The applicable law dictates that when an American citizen is a party to a telephone conversation with a foreigner that is monitored by U.S. intelligence, a warrant must be obtained by the secret FISA Court to unmask the identity of the American who was a party to the phone call.   Was a warrant obtained to approve the release Michael Flynn’s identity to the Press?   The release of his identity without such a warrant is a Federal felony.   Additionally, these continuing leaks risk revealing intelligence means and methods.   The FBI should immediately launch investigations for this subversion that is putting the nation’s security at risk!

Obama holdovers and/or sympathizers may also be behind other leaks involving intercepted communications from within President Trump’s inner circle, like the much-criticized private telephone calls between the President and the Mexican president and between Trump and the Australian prime minister.    These are not the run-of-the-mill leaks of past administrations.   Like other examples cited here, these are organized, systematic and undermining efforts by this “shadow government!”

Who will be the next victim to have his/her communications be “outed?”

A word on the alleged Russian connection:  Democrat talking points that the Russians “stoled” the election from Hillary Clinton are baseless!   No evidence has ever been received that any vote count was tampered with and some states’ ballot machines, (like crucial Michigan) weren’t even wired into the Internet to begin with!    Despite what one hears on a daily basis in the liberal media echo chamber that Trump is a Kremlin tool, the hyper-critical New York Times reported on February 15th,(for a second time) that NO evidence has been unearthed that the Trump campaign, in any way, colluded with Russian intelligence during the election campaign!   Yet, daily headlines scream that unnamed Trump operatives were in constant contact with unnamed Russian agents throughout the election season, on unspecified dates and times!

Russian intelligence has engaged in campaigns of “disinformation” since the 1920s, initiated by the KGB’s great-great grandfather Felix Dzerzhinsky.   The FSB (the post-Soviet KGB) regularily floats misleading or discrediting stories to undermine elections in liberal democracies worldwide; the U.S. operation was not unique.  And let’s not forget, the Russians also attempted to hack into the RNC systems; they were better protected than the vulnerable DNC computers (perhaps due to the fact that the password to John Podesta’s gmail account was “password!”).  If WikiLeaks’ source for the hacking of the DNC systems were the Russians; denied by Julian Assange, the discreditation of the Clinton campaign by airing Hillary’s staffers’ own, undisputed words, wasn’t floated to aid Trump as much as to discredit Hillary Clinton, the odds-on favorite to win the election!    The simple fact is, that unless Russia has developed an all-powerful future-predicting Oracle, THEY WERE AS SURPRISED AS ANYONE ELSE THAT DONALD TRUMP WON!!!   The claim that the election was deliberately hijacked by the Russians with the specific intention of delivering a victory for Donald Trump, is pure malarky!!!

Donald Trump wants to pursue a strategy of attempting better relations with Russia, as Obama and George W. Bush had desired in the past.   His goal: a common front to destroy ISIS.   Franklin Roosevelt and the rabidly anti-communist Winston Churchill allied with Josef Stalin to defeat a common foe, Hitler’s Germany.   Rationalizing the alliance with the monstrous mass-murderer Stalin, Churchill famously stated: “If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”   President Trump has said he has never met Putin and does not know whether or not they will get along.  Are Trump’s desires for an anti-ISIS alliance with Vladimir Putin naive?   Maybe!   But that fact alone does not mean Trump’s strings are being pulled from Moscow!!

*The Resistance is also embodied by the relentless, one-sided and daily attacks carried out by the Mainstream Media, allied with the constant condensation, ridicule and undisguised hatred carried-out by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, fronted by Saturday Night Live.

While the Media’s relationship with Mr. Trump was near zero during the election season, things reached a new low with internet rag BuzzFeed’s release of a previously rejected, totally baseless and unsubstantiated yarn about a visit Donald Trump made to Moscow and his alleged dalliance with urinating Russian prostitutes, released in the week prior to the inauguration.   In light of the fact that Obama CIA chief John Brennan saw fit to brief incoming president Trump on this baseless story which had been floating out there for months and then released that fact to the Media, CNN saw justification to then label the tale as “news” and breathlessly aired this trash, which was then eagerly snapped up in a feeding frenzy by their comrades in arms!   The salacious rumor was then quickly debunked but the journalistic tone had been set to a new micro-decibel low!    Could you imagine such a rumor being advanced by any respected media source about Barack Obama?   Suddenly, after an eight-year Rip Van Winkle-like spell of dreamy somnambulism; in which the classic “hard-hitting” question posed to Barack Obama at the beginning of his presidency was the New York Times’ Jeff Zeleny’s: “Mr. President, what has enchanted you the most in these first one hundred days of your presidency?”, the Mainstream Media has suddenly rediscovered aggressive, investigative journalism!

With President Obama, the watchword was always “keep the family out of it”, which was admirable and correct.   Not so for the Trump household!   Melania Trump was a former call girl who over-stayed her visa.    Donald Trump has sexual desires (unrequited or consummated, depending on the account) with his daughter Ivanka.    Young 10-year old Barron Trump has ADHD.

Already, a magazine has hit the racks with a cover depicting a sniperscope aimed behind the ear of the image of President Trump’s head.   Will a recreation of the 2006 film “Death of the President”; a fantasy of the assassination of George W. Bush, be far behind for Donald Trump?

Around the same time as the release of the BuzzFeed garbage, actress Meryl Streep initiated what had now become a continuing hectoring assault of Mr. Trump at the Golden Globes Awards, where she lectured him that “disrespect invites disrespect and violence incites violence” and implored the “principled” press to hold power to account; to call them on the carpet for every outrage…”  While that would have been refreshing to hear from golden Hollywood during the IRS scandal with Lois Lerner, the only violence that had been perpetrated as of that date, and currently, has come from the Left!

After the laughable Hollywood/ Television boycott of the inauguration (as if half of the country that had voted for Trump had not already tuned-out what they had to say), the Women’s March was staged and organized in Washington on the day after the inauguration.   Among the plethora of vulgar signs and chants, Madonna mused that “she wished she could blow up the White House” (which would rate a knock on the door in any other age) and Ashley Judd said the new president “looked like he bathed in Cheeto dust”.   (I thought skin color was out of bounds!).   In the meantime, Chelsea Handler equated Melania Trump’s accent with stupidity (can Handler speak five languages?) and Sarah Silverman; so in love with the Constitution, calls for the U.S. military to stage a coup against the duly-elected president!   The relentless assault by the entertainment glitterati has continued daily, with the spearhead being the now unwatchable, mean-spirited Saturday Night Live, with Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump (Darrell Hammond did a much better job); Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer and perhaps still, Rosie O’Donnell as Steve Bannon.

The lockstep hatred of Trump by the entertainment industry, along with the movement started in San Francisco to chase Trump-labeled products off the shelves; starting with Ivanka’s fashion line, is evidence that the elites and the glitterati prefer to sing to their own choir and have deliberately chosen to consciously write-off the other half of the country that voted for Trump, especially Middle America!

* The fracturing of the United States of America that is occurring before our eyes, which started with the sanctuary cities movement and the agitation for unlimited and uncontrolled illegal immigration, has gone to critical mass with the election of Donald Trump.   This is another facet of the Resistance.   Since the election, a referendum has been launched for California, Oregon and Washington-State to succeed from the Union to form the nation of “Pacifica” (they want Las Vegas too!).   In the meantime, California has declared that it will become the first “sanctuary state.”   There are now over 200 sanctuary cities nationwide; all controlled by Democrats, that have sworn to not only not cooperate with Federal immigration agencies but actually resist their operations!

In 1830, the powerful Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina formulated the political doctrine of Nullification, which postulated the idea that “states’ rights” superseded federal law and thereby a state need not follow a federal law and could therefore “nullify” a federal law if it so chose.   The issue at hand was, of course, slavery, and the Nullification movement predated the Civil War by thirty years.

With the Left keeping the kettle of hatred and the refusal to accept the results of the election to a boil, are we witnessing the potential of a new civil war: Left vs. Right as opposed to free soil versus slave soil; the Coastal Enclaves vs. Middle America as opposed to North versus South?   Do sanctuary cities represent a new doctrine of Nullification?   What steps must be taken to reign in this unconstitutional anarchy?

Open border protesters staged demonstrations and shut down freeways last week to “resist” DHS Secretary Kelly’s first raids of illegal inmigrants with criminal convictions, which netted aporoximately 600 individuals.   A couple of points of irony: (1) these raids were planned months before by the Obama administration, and (2) President Obama could well have been labeled the Deporter-in-Chief, by ordering the removal of over 3,000,000 illegals during his tenure, which provoked nothing but silence from the Left and the Mainstream Media!

A further fracturing of the body politic is evidenced by the sudden infiltration of out-of-district, Left-wing agitators to disrupt town hall meetings in reliably Republican congressional districts, such as ones of Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R.-Ut.) and James Sensenbrenner (R.-Wi.).  Mainstream Media reports inaccurately identified the agitators as constituents “dissatisfied with Trump’s progress to enact his agenda” (after only three weeks?).    In actuality, these infiltrating disrupters were actually leftist agitators; paid members of OFA:  Organizing for Action, formerly Obama for America, now reputedly 32,000 strong and growing. (They gave themselves away with chants of “this is what democracy looks like” and agitating against the repeal of Obamacare!)  OFA menbers may have also been involved in the blocking of the public school that new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was attempting to visit in DC, the day after her confirmation.   Will OFA operatives be utilized as the spearpoint of the anti-Trump Resistance from coast to coast?

The de facto central node of control of the Resistance will be shortly established on Kalorama Circle, a couple of miles North of the White House in Washington, DC, once he has had his fill of windsurfing in the British Virgin Islands.    Barack Obama will be the first former president in modern times to stay in the capital to appraise; from not very far, the policies and decisions of his successor – a president from the opposite party who defeated his handpicked choice in a most bitter election!   Obama has spoken out once already in this short month.   He will not offer the courtesy of silence to Donald Trump that was afforded to him by his predecessor, George W. Bush.   Barack Obama will not go gently into the night!   His residence on Kalorama Circle will rapidly be seen as the headquarters of the Government-in-Exile and the Mainstream Media will no doubt flock to it seeking his latest pronouncement on the issue of the moment.   Perhaps the most potent facet of the Resistance!

* The final front of the anti-Trump Resistance has turned out to be the Federal judiciary.   In an exercise of blatant forum shopping, the Trump Administration’s immigration Order banning entry of residents from seven predominantly Muslim countries that lack effective central governments so that the identity of entrants from these countries can not be positively identified, was challenged in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle, Washington, on the “Left Coast”.   While it had been reported that Judge Robart was a Republican appointee by George W. Bush, in reality; via the tradition of Senatorial Courtesy, the choice of Judge Robart was left up by President Bush to left-wing Senator Patty Murray (D.-Wa.), “the senator in tennis shoes.”

Though the Immigration Order was admittedly flawed for calling for “extreme vetting” of entrants that had permanent resident status and bore both Green Cards and U.S. passports, in addition to individuals with no prior contact with the U.S., Judge Robart chose not to strike down the Trump administration’s Order on these narrow grounds, but instead staged a judicial coup d’etat that, without constitutional or statutory basis, enacted a sweeping injunction that usurped the executive branch’s primacy in matters of immigration, control of entry into the country and foreign affairs (and parenthetically, enjoined a ruling by the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston; a court superior to Judge Robart’s court, that found the Immigration Order constitutional).    The Judge, in a novel and perhaps vindictive view, found that the Democratic-controlled plaintiff states of Washington and Minnesota had judicial “standing” to stand in the shoes and represent non-present, but aspiring entrants from the seven countries, who claimed some sort of affiliation with business firms or educational institutions in the two plaintiff states.   But the court did not stop there!

“Discovering” additional rights in the Constitution in the “penumbras” that he apparently saw between the lines of the written text; as in Roe v. Wade more than forty years before, Judge Robart found that individuals who had no prior contact with America had a constitutional right to a due process hearing on their desires for entry into the U.S.   Talk about an open borders philosophy!    So denizens of Mogadishu, Aden or Khartoum, from across the seas, can now remotely petition the Federal judiciary for entry into the United States!

Robart did not stop there.   Near the end of the text of the Constitution, there is an obscure clause that states “that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”   Obviously, the clear meaning of that constitutional provision is to prohibit the requirement that any person seeking a position in the federal government be forced to first submit to a religious quiz or test.   Though the plain text of the Immigration Order made no reference to single out Muslim entrants for “extreme vetting”, and though the plain text of the religious test clause is only applicable to persons seeking federal employment, Judge Robart  “discovered” a further “penumbra” between the lines of that clause of the Constitution and held that the Immigration Order amounted to an unconstitutional religious test for entrants from the seven nations involved, in violation of the Constitution!

Robarts further went beyond the “four corners” of the Immigration Order and cited statements made by Mr. Trump in the election campaign as evidence that the Immigration Order unconstitutionally discriminated against Muslims, despite the fact that the Order only affected 15% of Muslims worldwide.   The use of extrinsic election campaign rhetoric to derive a hidden motivation in determining that a legal Order is unconstitutional, rather than ruling on the plain text of the Order, is highly improper!

The tip-off of the fact that Judge Robart’s injunction halting the Trump Administration’s Immigration Order in its tracks was blatantly unconstitutional, is the fact that his decision and ruling made no mention and ignored 8 U.S.C. Section 1182(f), the federal statute that grants a president “the authority to suspend the entry of any aliens or class of aliens into the U.S. if he believes they would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

In order to win a temporary restraining order (TRO), a petitioner must show: (1) that irreparable harm would occur if the injunction is not granted and (2) that the petitioner would likely prevail at trial on the merits.

Despite the problem with standing; despite the novel interpretations of alleged constitutional rights of the citizens of the world, and despite the the clear wordage of Section 1182(f), Judge Robart held that the petitioner states would likely prevail at trial, and issued the injunction!

A study had concluded that liberal, activist judges are more influenced by how their decisions would be received by their friends at cocktail parties and are more guided by their political affiliations, rather than by following the plain meeting of the Constitution, statutes and case law in making their rulings.   This phenomenon is a good argument for the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch!    It is obvious that these factors were in play here, to explain Judge Robart’s ruling.

So when the administration appealed Robart’s ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco (the future supreme court of Pacifica?), that appellate court would set things straight, right?    Well, no………….The ultra-liberal Ninth “Circus” Court, the most reversed Appellate Circuit in the system, apparently also had cocktail party attendees to impress and upheld Judge Robart’s constitutionally-unsupported injunction!   The final stage would be an appeal to U.S. Supreme Court, a risky proposition as the Court is still tied at four liberals and four conservatives as Justice Scalia’s seat is still left unfilled.   A tie would leave the Ninth Circuit’s ruling stand, emasculating the president’s power to control the nation’s borders!   Bad rulings make bad law!

All the facets of the integrated and coordinated anti-Trump “Resistance” of the Left and the Democrat Party, to reject “accepting the results of the election” continue to fire on all cylinders!  How long will this turmoil continue?   Until the 2018 mid-term elections?   For the entire four years of the Trump presidency?  And, irrespective of how long this agitation goes on, can the nation survive it?

-The Chicago Patriot

The Last Gasp of the Clintonistas? (12/19/16)


The Democrats utter inability to “accept the results of the election” (remember that?) has metamorphized through the first two of the Five Stages of Grief; Denial and Anger and for the last several days has been focusing on the third stage of grief, Bargaining.   To that end, the Left has viciously attempted to extort, intimidate, harass and/or threaten the lives of the 306 presidential electors who represent the states that voted for Donald Trump, to cajole them to become “faithless electors” and change their vote for someone other than Mr. Trump.   If Trump supporters had been pursuing these tactics if Hillary Clinton had won a close electoral vote victory, Loretta Lynch would already have had the Grand Jury hand down indictments for violations of Federal voter intimidation statutes!

As  part of this campaign, Martin Sheen, Mike Farrell, Debra Messing and other faded Hollywood luminaries have seen fit to cut television commercials directed to certainly one of the smallest intended audiences in mass communication history: the 538 presidential electors, urging them to “vote their conscious” and abrogate the will of over 62,000,000 voters by overturning Donald Trump’s electoral college victory!    Why would these Tinseltown “superstars” believe that these electors, largely from Middle America, would listen to them now, when their constituents; the citizens of forgotten, Fly-Over America, tuned them out on and before November 8th?

The fourth Stage of Grief; Depression, will set in once the electors convene at high noon today at the fifty state capitals (and Washington, DC’s city hall) to cast their ballots for president and vice president.    Donald Trump and Mike Pence hold a 36 electoral vote majority over the magic number of 270, to be ratified as the incoming president and vice president.   By all accounts, only one GOP elector, a gentleman from Texas, has publically pronounced that he intends to buck his state’s vote for Trump/Pence and cast his ballot for another Republican (not for Hillary).    There have been nine “faithless electors” that chose to reject their states’ presidential choices in the 17 elections since World War II.    The Democrats and the Left would need a total of 37 Republican electors today, to betray the voters of their states by not voting for Trump and thus deny him the 270 vote majority, which would be historically unprecedented, to say the least!   By all odds, the electoral process will be constitutionally complete today with Trump’s and Pence’s ratification by the electoral college and the fourth stage of Depression will fully set in – as Michelle told Oprah: “we are now feeling what not having hope feels like.”   Will the Democrats and the Left ever reach the fifth and final Stage of Grief: Acceptance??

To what end is this attempted Leftist coup, directed behind the camera by WikiLeaks star John Podesta and in front of it by Democratic California elector Christine Pelosi (the daughter), attempting to accomplish? To merely deny Donald Trump the 270 electoral votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives and delegitimize his election, as described below?   Or to cajole enough Republican electors to defy their constituents and vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton as President of the United Ststes today?   For Hillary to win the electoral college in what would amount to a banana republic-like coup (we’re now drifting into the realm of fantasia!), 38 Republican electors must become so “faithless” as to not only reject their respective states’ election of Donald Trump, but cast their ballots instead for the opposition Democratic candidate as opposed to an alternative Republican!

The Constitution directs that if no presidential candidate achieves a majority of electoral votes, the incoming House of Representatives will choose the new president and the incoming Senate shall choose the new vice president, once they convene on January 6th.  However, there is a catch to this constitutional process in the event that no presidential candidate achieves a majority of the electoral college: each state, regardless of its population, gets an equal vote in the House of Representatives’ election in determining who will be the new president.

There are seven sparsely populated states that due to their small populations have only one representative in the House of Representatives: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.   Of these seven, only Delaware and Vermont are under Democratic control.  Under the Constitution and the Twelfth Amendment, each of these one-representative states has the same voting power to choose a presidential candidate who has not attained the requisite 270 electoral vote majority, as Democratic behemoths such as California with 53 representatives and New York with 27!   All told, in the 115th Congress to come, Republicans will control 32 state delegations, the Democrats only 17 and one state delegation (Maine) is tied.   In light of the political control of these delegations, there is no way Hillary Clinton would ever be elected president by the House of Representatives if enough GOP electors became “faithless” to deny Donald Trump 270 electoral votes.       Conversely, Trump would need only 26 of the 32 Republican controlled delegations to be elected by a majority of the states and thus be elected president, if the choice did devolve upon the House.    In such a scenario, the vice president would be elected by the Senate, with each senator having one vote.    Mike Pence would no doubt be elected,  most likely by a tally of 52-48.

So, what is the true motivation behind this Leftist Kabuki theater?   38 Republican electors defintely are not going to buck their respective states’ voters and vote for Hillary Clinton!   37 GOP electors are not going to cast their votes for another Republican candidate and throw the election into the House.   If such a GOP defection, unprecedented in history, would against all odds happen, Donald Trump nevertheless would most likely win at least 26 House state delegations and be elected president.   Vox Populi, Vox Dei!   So is this entire show merely an attempt to delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency even before it gets off the ground?

The Democrats are still reeling from Hillary Clinton’s upset defeat.    Nefarious conspiracies must have been afoot to deny her the presidency; after all, no right-minded American could have rejected the Democratic platform entitled “Stronger Together!”   Progressives believe that the arc of history is inexorably moving in their favor.   How could this have happened?   To have been beaten by Donald Trump???

It was the Comey letter!

(Well, you shouldn’t have set up a private server in the first place!).

The polls were hacked; that’s what happened!   Let’s have Jill Stein demand recounts for us in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

(Well, Trump won 131 more votes on the Wisconsin recount. And none of Michigan’s voting machines were wired into the Internet to begin with!)

Clinton won the popular vote!   As the majority of Americans voted for her, the electors should ratify the People’s Will!

(The Founders saw a danger in Boston, New York and Philadelphia – the population centers of their day, deciding the presidency every time.   A successful presidential candidate is required to seek support from disparate areas of the country, and not just population centers such as California (which alone put Hillary over), New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois.   Middle America would never again see a presidential candidate if the Constitution is amended and a popular vote system is instituted!)

The Russians hacked and influenced the election via WikiLeaks!

(There has been zero evidence that the Russians tampered with the vote count.   Further, not one member of Clinton’s inner circle ever denied the veracity of their respective emails!   So, the electorate was tainted by being supplied with too much information??)

Perhaps Hillary Clinton was just an arrogant, out-of-touch, self-entitled relic from the past with no explanation for her candidacy (other than it’s my turn), who was surrounded by an elitist, out-of-touch staff, who ran in a change election year as the status quo candidate, who escaped prosecution only because of who she was, who was burdened with a ton of other corrupt baggage including a Foundation that was a transparent pay-to-play scheme, who took too many states for granted, who due to hubris and a lack of respect for her opponent did not campaign hard enough in the closing weeks, who offered no economic message of hope for struggling blue color Americans and who exuded utter contempt for the average citizens of Middle America.   Maybe that’s what happened!

It’s time for the Fifth Stage of Grief, Democrats!

-The Chicago Patriot

 

 

 

 

Revenge of the Fly-Overs (11/15/16)

There is a famous sketch that appeared on a March, 1976 cover of the New Yorker magazine entitled “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” that (jokingly?) depicts a New Yorker’s perceived view of the total insignificance of the United States beyond the Hudson River.   The illustration shows the last three blocks of the Western extremity of Manhattan from Ninth Avenue on, to be as large as the rest of the United States put together!   The country beyond the Hudson River is depicted as a sparse desert land with varied scattered rocks in front of the Pacific, which is drawn only slightly wider than the Hudson!   On the horizon are flattened landmasses labeled China, Japan and Russia.

Did this Manhattan-centric bubble-view of the rest of the U.S., somehow contribute to the suppression of media curiosity on what voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin were really feeling about their choice in this presidential election?

The shocking triumph of Donald J. Trump as the future 45th President of the United States; no doubt the greatest upset in U.S. political history, has caused stunned Democratic leaders, politicos, hacks, strategists, retainers, media lackies and myopic pollsters to begin the post-mortem autopsy of the Democratic Party, an organism that until approximately 10:00 pm Central Standard Time, had been thought to be vital, viral and ready to resume the march forward in lockstep to a confident future!

The liberal elites in their coastal enclaves along the Acela Corridor and the Left Coast rejected all anecdotal evidence that was mounting by the week in the land they contemptuously call the Fly-Over States, of hundreds of highway miles being lined with Trump lawn signs in states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.    The attendance of 10,000, 15,000 or even 20,000 at Trump rallies around the country was dismissed by the pundits as having no relevancy to gauge electoral support – after all, didn’t Mitt Romney have large crowds at the end?   But did the almighty seers consider the fact that the attendees at the Romney rallies did not wait in line to get in to the arenas for four, five or six hours, like the Trump supporters?   Did the Romney backers queue up to two hours just to buy a campaign cap?   Donald Trump’s supporters were more than mere “likely voters!”   These voters  were bound to show up on election day, no matter what!

The mainstream pollsters and the Clinton Media almost universally predicted that the Rust Belt states of the fabled “Blue Wall” would once again stand impregnable for the Democrats in this election, as they based their prognostications on the turn-out models of the 2012 Obama-Romney election.   But, Oh Masters of the Universe, Obama was not on the ballot this year!    Was the use of the 2012 turn-out model based on a glaring misconception, or were these “predictions” used to attempt to SHAPE rather than to GAUGE the vote on November 8th?   Obviously, the turn-out models from the 2010 and 2014 Congressional elections; elections which did not have President Obama on the ticket and went disastrously for the Democrats, all bore the hallmarks of a more accurate predictor.  Perhaps through ignorance, overconfidence, or fear, the Media elites and their polling arms didn’t want to venture down the path of the 2010 or  2014 turn-out models!

Good thing that Hillary ordered the Hudson River fireworks show planned for election night, to be canceled the day before!   Did she have a hint?

One of the central themes of Donald Trump’s campaign was to renegotiate globalist trade deals such as NAFTA and the TPP which were supported by Republican and Democratic “Free Traders” alike, but left blue collar workers in the Rust Belt states, staring through locked gates of their now closed factories, relocated to Mexico and other countries.   Other workers were fired in favor of illegal immigrant laborers who were eager to perform the same tasks at half the wages.   Those workers who protested their livelihood being shipped off to Mexico or replaced by “undocumented” labor were decried as “racist” and “xenophobic” by the smug coastal elites and the Clinton campaign.    But did the Clintonistas and the Left ever consider that the protests of these workers were grounded on something other than the skin tone of their replacements?

At the same time, coal miners in Pennsylvania, and Ohio were informed by Hillary Clinton in no uncertain terms that their  industry was to be sacrificed on the altar of the theory of Man-Made Global Warming.  They were vaguely told they would be “retrained.”

Hillary Clinton and her cohorts were counting on an electoral college victory by cobbling together a coalition of independents, African- Americans, Latinos, women, the millennials, the college educated and union members.   Those groups were expected to repulse any assault upon the blue ramparts by the rest of American voters, whom Hillary famously stated were “irredeemable” and were consigned by her to her now famous “Basket of Deplorables!”

However, independents were repelled by Clinton’s serial lies concerning her private email server, the controversies that keep swirling about the pay-to-play corruption of the Clinton Foundation, and the massive increases in Obamacare premiums and insurance deductibles scheduled for the coming year.   Trump won independent voters by a ratio of 48-42%.

African-Americans remained uninspired by Hillary’s candidacy as predicted, and their turn-out was greatly reduced from 2012.   Of the Black Americans that did vote,  Trump got 8% of the vote, 2% more than Romney received in 2012.

Surprisingly, Latinos weren’t universally offended by Trump’s comments about the incursion along the porous Southerm border, proving that the financial status of some citizens with Hispanic surnames can also be threatened by illegal immigration.  Others seemed almost titilated by some of Trump’s more boorish comments (“He said I ate like a pig”) and reveled in Trump’s anti-P.C. machismo!   Many who were interviewed after the election said they voted for Trump because “all laws, including immigration laws, should be enforced.”   Like African-Americans, Trump amazingly picked up 2% more Latino voters than Romney and snared 29% of the total Hispanic vote, a far greater percentage than was predicted!

Concerning the Gender Gap, Hillary Clinton carried the female vote, but only by 12 points, 54-42%.   53% of all White women voted for Donald Trump and 32% of all Latino women voted for him, a major shock to the pollsters!   The Gender Gap worked both ways in this election, as Trump ran up the White male vote by an astounding margin of 63-31%!   He won the total White vote by a ratio of 58-37%.

For the Millennials; so enthralled with Bernie Sanders, the WikiLeaks revelations of how Debbie Wasserman- Schultz and the DNC “jobbed” the Sanders’ campaign to the extent of feeding debate questions to Hillary in advance, over 1/3 of Millennials did not even show up to vote.   Of those who did, Clinton won 55%, but Trump banked 37% of that voter bloc!

Of college graduates, Hillary Clinton won that demographic, but only by four points, 49-45%; a great disappointment, perhaps due to her serial prevarications!   Male college grads actually favored Trump, 54%-45%.

Finally, the union vote, so concentrated in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, was won by Hillary Clinton by 8%, but that was the smallest margin by a Democratic presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan’s second election in 1984!   As examples, Romney lost the union vote by 18%, McCain by 20%, Bush by 19% and 22%, Bob Dole by 30%!    The rising of the forgotten blue collar voters to largely reject Hillary Clinton’s steaming platter of the status quo was nothing less than the revolt by the Deplorables; those flown-over by the Elites as they transited between their secure coastal enclaves centered in New York and Hollywood!

The simple fact is that Hillary Clinton, who liked Teddy Kennedy in 1980 could not articulate a reason for her candidacy (other than the argument that “it’s now my turn”), got five million less voters than Barack Obama received in 2012!   Of those voters that found Clinton and Trump both distasteful, Donald Trump snared that group on election day by an amazing 2 to 1 margin; true evidence that this was  a “change election!”

The Democratic Party rigged the primaries for Hillary in any way it could, as revealed by WikiLeaks.   It wasn’t a nomination as much as a coronation!  Yet, Hillary Clinton lost due to the fact that she was such a deeply-flawed candidate.   Memo: a major American political party should avoid the temptation of nominating a candidate under past (or future) FBI investigation!!!!   It will be quite interesting to see if there will be a precipitous drop in contributions to the Clinton Foundation in the coming year, now that Hillary has been denied access to the levers of power!   If so, that would be compelling circumstantial evidence that these “charitable” contributions were in actuality bribes for future considerations!!!

Hillary outspent Trump by better than two to one in waging her relentless negative campaign against him.   Further, she had everyone behind her: President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, President Bill Clinton, almost all of the electronic and print media, almost all of Academia, almost all of Wall Street, virtually all of Hollywood, Saturday Night Live and Alec Baldwin, the late night talk shows and television in general, and let’s not forget, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Lena Dunham, Bruce Springsteen, etc.    It was no secret that the only time Hillary drew big crowds was when one of the glitterati appeared on stage with her!   Isn’t it worth the price of admission to see the revelation on Miley Cyrus’ face that few gave a damn about who that intellect favored for president???

Yet, despite the huge financial advantage and the non-stop torrent of anti-Trump messages from all directions that it was futile to even get out of bed on November 8th, Hillary lost decisively, in the electoral college vote, 306-232!

In the aftermath of Trump’s shocking victory, pampered, emotionally -crushed Leftist college students are too distraught by the results of the election to take scheduled tests and must be soothed in their designated “safe spaces” with hot chocolate, play-doh, crayons and therapy dogs!   At the same time, professional anarchists, no doubt funded and coordinated by the DNC as before with help from George Soros and “usual suspects” Marxist groups, are bussed in to stage their nightly riots in an attempt to instantly delegitimize Trump’s election.

New York magazine had an edition ready to go with a cover sketch of an unflattering depiction of Trump’s face with a red ribbon plastered across his nose bearing the word LOSER!  The magazine cover of The Week was ready with a sketch showing archetypal Trump-supporting grubby rednecks, blue-color workers, hardhat construction workers, bikers, Nazis and Klan members marching in protest of his loss, well-armed with AR-15s!

Still waiting for next week’s magazine covers that lampoon the Left’s violent protests….!

So, who’s not accepting the results of the election now???

-The Chicago Patriot

The “Unshackled” Donald Trump and the Shiny Object in the Room (10/13/16)

Hyper-liberal MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews observed over the summer that Donald Trump obviously had lived a life in which he never seriously contemplated running for the presidency, until last year! Appearing on a show like Howard Stern’s to brag about your sexual conquests, would have never been considered to be a safe career move to gain the Oval Office by the likes of Adlai Stevenson or Edmund Muskie!

Donald Trump’s past words and past actions have offered unlimited targets of opportunity for Hillary Clinton’s oppo. research team and they have taken full advantage of the rich landscape of The Donald’s past – aided royally by many of his more contemporary choice comments!   The well timed Access Hollywood video of Trump’s “locker room talk”, which NBC reportedly had possession of for over a year (its release delayed to ensure Trump’s nomination as Clinton’s weakest opponent?), was coordinated with the Washington Post to be dropped on the Trump campaign within the same hour as the Wikileaks emails of HRC’s aides.   The all-too predictable parade of Donald’s alleged victims that has now followed, have all but drowned out the far more substanative revelations that have been exposed, TO DATE, about the true Hillary Rodham Clinton:

(1)  Hillary’s “dream” of a Western Hemisphere EU-like Free Trade Zone with unfettered immigration into the United States and a total relaxation of whatever still exists of border controls on the Southern border;

(2)  Hillary’s admission that it is “neccessary” to hide her real views on issues such as trade and Wall Street reforms, which were made to her fat-cat donors in her secret Wall Street speeches, from diametrically opposite opinions expressed to her adoring throng –

(to Bernie voters – you just can’t HANDLE the truth!);

(3)  Reassurances to Wall Street leaders in Hillary’s secret speeches that they will be delegated the power to regulate themselves, as they know their business best –

(to Bernie voters – ditto!);

(4)  The sage observation by John Podesta that the Mrs. Clinton often has problems telling the truth

(!);

(5)  A warning by John Podesta to Hillary that her contempt for the average American was becoming all too obvious and that rallies should be organized to counter that appearance

(An observation that can only be characterized as “deplorable!”);

(6)  Views exchanged by Clinton aides that express utter contempt for the faith and belief systems of American Catholics and Evangelicals that have “severely backwards gender relations.”   (Can you imagine substituting the term “Islam” in that phrase?)    The same email also spoke disparagingly of Southerners and “needy Latinos”;

(7)  The blatant (but no longer shocking) interplay of the Main-Stream Media, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI with the Clinton organization, in a coordinated campaign to suppress the reporting and minimalize the impact of the Clinton email scandal;

(8)  The fact that CNBC reporter John Harwood took marching orders from the Clinton campaign on how to best bait Donald Trump in a GOP debate (he asked him whether he was running a “comic book candidacy”), prior to serving as an ostensibly neutral moderator at the debate;

(9)  The fact that a question about the death penalty that was to be posed to Hillary in a Town Hall debate with Bernie Sanders by an uncommitted voter, was leaked to Clinton’s campaign the day before (to craft a well-thought out “spontaneous” answer) by CNN contributor (and past and present DNC chairperson) Donna Brazile;

….with more to come.

Note that with the exception of Clinton communication director Jennifer Palmieri’s claim that she does not remember the email concerning Catholics and Evangelicals, there has been no response from the   Clinton campaign that the content of the hacked emails released so far by Wikileaks have, in any way, been altered or fabricated.   They prefer instead to slay the messenger instead of the message, who they claim is Russia.

Yet, in light of these revelations, and all of the scandals swirling around Hillary Clinton and her serial lies and unprecedented corruption, all her dutiful Main Stream Media wants to talk about is Donald Trump boasting that he is “attracted to beautiful women like a magnet” and of his claimed ability to carry out unsolicited sexual advances because of his fame.   It’s the shiny object in the room meant to divert attention from the smoke coming from the basement!   (“Lookee here” says James Carville!)  Truly, these are issues that are hugely relevant for the uncertain future of all Americans!   But it’s working….

Trump had a far more successful second debate and had Hillary on the defensive for much of the contest.   His promise to have a special prosecutor appointed to look into the irregularities of the FBI email probe and Clinton Foundation, and his off-hand comment she’d “be jailed” if justice was allowed to take its course, has evoked outrage that if Trump were to be elected, the “banana republic” tradition of jailing the electoral loser would be instituted!    Yet, with all the details of the FBI whitewash mounting by the day, while ordinary government employees are jailed for 1/1,000th of the secutity violations committed by Mrs. Clinton, aren’t we Nicaragua now???

As the result of the relentless character assassination assault upon Trump by the Clinton campaign and its media lackies (whether each charge is justified or not – it’s ALL she’s running on) in this mad dual race to the bottom, Mr. Trump has retaliated by bringing up the past claims of forced sexual assault and rape committed by Bill Clinton.  Prior to the debate he held a most unusual “press conference” where Juanita Broddrick related her account of bring raped by Bill Clinton in the ’70s; Paula Jones being sexually assaulted by him in the ’80s and Kathleen Willey being groped by him (in the White House) in the ’90s.    Hillary was implicated as coordinating the character assassination of all three of these women (along with Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky), as the de facto head of what was facetiously described as the Clinton Bimbo Eruption Squad!    Additionally presented at the Trump event was Kathy Shelton, who at the age of 12 was raped by a drifter in Arkansas.    He was represented in court by the young Hillary Rodham who got him off on a technicality and was then caught on tape laughing and bragging about it.   How do these accounts square with Hillary’s past statement that all women who claim they were sexually assaulted must be believed?   Not for nothing was Hillary Clinton described in the ’90s as “having the soul of an East German border guard.”

The affect of Trump’s controversial tactic with his “press conference” and his performance in the second debate have yet to be fully gauged.   It is true that a large percentage of millennials, who Hillary needs to come out to vote for her (who were toddlers during the Bill Clinton presidency), have little knowledge of the details of the Bill Clinton saga.  In this heightened age of PC conduct concerning male-female relationships, how will the millennials react to these claims about the past conduct of both Bill and Hill?    Will they hold it against her and largely stay home?    Will many vote for Johnson or Stein as a protest?   Would some actually vote for Trump?   Or will it be a wash?

There is no doubt that due to Trump’s undisciplined, incessant tweeting about Miss Universe after the first debate and now the Access Hollywood clip, he has has lost his September momentum and has now fallen behind in most of the polls.   As the result of his raw talk with Billy Bush, Speaker Paul Ryan and many other prominent Republicans have now disavowed their candidate, fearing Trump will take the whole ticket down with him.   In response, Donald Trump has declared war on the GOP; claims he doesn’t need the party’s support; claims he will win it all on his own and says he now feels liberated to be “unshackled” from the Republicans!!!   A winning strategy?  The only remaining questions, now that he is “unshackled” and with the final debate coming up, is how much further “unconventional” can Donald Trump go?  And in this most unusual election year, can his scorched earth strategy lead to victory?

-The Chicago Patriot

 

 

A Deplorable Week (9/15/16)

Since Kellyanne Conway took the reigns of the Trump campaign as campaign manager on August 17th, the candidate has become somewhat more disciplined, with a greater focus on prosecuting the case against the Obama/Clinton record.   Together with overtures to tempt the resisters in the Republican base and (perhaps) Black Americans in the inner cities (“what do you have to lose”), the polls have suddenly tightened in this most unpredictable  of elections.    But the affect of these Conway-directed strategems toward tightening the polls, may end up paling in comparison to the impact of the blunders committed by Hillary Clinton; intentional or inadvertent, in this “deplorable” week that could very well become a watershed in the race for the White House. Continue reading “A Deplorable Week (9/15/16)”