op ed review 10/29
Clinton campaign and DNC helped pay for work on dossier
about Russia and Trump
The resulting Trump dossier then became a factor in Obama
administration decisions to launch an FBI counterintelligence investigation of the
Trump campaign, and after the election to trumpet suspicions of Trump collusion
with Russia.
We
now know Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee paid as
much as $9 million for the discredited dossier on Trump.
Now
it’s Democrats’ turn in the barrel.
It’s about time: The
Republican chairmen of two House committees announced Tuesday they’re opening
an investigation into actions the Obama administration Justice Department took
during last year’s presidential election.
Trump Presidency Is Shifting Finally Into High Gear As
Scandal Engulfs Clintons
????? University of Wisconsin-Madison Students Protest
Abraham Lincoln Statue Because ‘He Owned Slaves’
President Trump´s tax reform framework could raise GDP by as
much as 5 percent and wages by as much as 7 percent, according to a new study
from Boston University economists.
A protester managed to breach security at the Capitol
Building Tuesday as President Donald Trump arrived for a lunch with Republican
Senators to talk tax reform. “….one of the most secure places in Washington….”
The National Park Service told the Washington Free Beacon it
is no longer providing funding for a controversial project "honoring the
legacy" of the Black Panther Party after outrage that the agency would
spend taxpayer dollars to memorialize a group that murdered a park ranger in
the 1970s.
Some Democrats are reaching out to renegade mental health
experts, some of whom are getting into political organizing and campaign
fundraising with the aim of removing Trump from office.
An
MSNBC reporter recently
received a real world lesson in why President Trump’s promised border wall is
crucially important to stop illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border. A
reporter covering prototypes of the wall when the interview was interrupted by
a group of “migrants” hopping over the existing fence. “This is the
reality of every day border enforcement.
Not good for national unity:
44.6% in California Don’t Speak English at Home; 35.6% in Texas; 34.5%
in NM; 31.7% in NJ; 31.0% in NY
Encouraging, if true: “Saudi Arabia will return to moderate,
open Islam and 'will destroy extremist ideas', says new crown prince.”
No, this is not breaking news from 1945. “The Associated
Press reports all German submarines are out of commission. All six of them.” Question:
Should Germany pay more for its own defense?
The government spends billions to help send low- income
students to college. Only half are graduating
___________________________________________________________________
COLUMN OF THE WEEK
Investors Business Daily
The question swirled for months around Washington, D.C.,
like a dirty whirlwind: Who paid for the now infamous, largely spurious
campaign "dossier" of background innuendo, half-truths and rumors
about Donald Trump that made its way into the hands of the media and served as
a basis for U.S. intelligence agencies' surveillance of the Trump campaign?
We now know, and the answer should surprise no one: The
Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to a report
in the Washington Post. The newspaper said that, starting in April of 2016,
Clinton attorney Mark Elias paid a "research firm," Fusion GPS, for
opposition research on Trump. Fusion subsequently hired Christopher Steele, a
former British spy with known ties to the U.S. intelligence community and to
the Russians, to dig up dirt on the billionaire candidate for the dossier.
As the Post reported, Elias and his firm, Seattle-based
Perkins Cole, got paid $5.6 million in legal fees from the Clinton campaign from
June 2015 to December 2016. It was a highly lucrative legal gig, and a vital
part of the Clinton campaign. In comments to the media, the Democrats, the
Clinton campaign and Elias denied categorically and repeatedly any involvement
by the Clinton campaign or DNC in the Fusion GPS anti-Trump dossier. He lied.
And so did Hillary Clinton.
Further confusing the matter is that Fusion GPS worked with
the Russian government starting in 2012 to reverse the Magnitsky Act,
bipartisan sanctions put in place against a number of Russian officials in
response to the imprisonment and subsequent brutal beating death of Sergei
Magnitsky. And it hired Steele, who was as they say "connected" to
Russian officials. So, unlike Trump, Hillary's opposition research firm literally
was colluding with the Russians.
The tainted Clinton-Fusion dossier containing alleged
scandalous behavior that came from questionable Russian sources was widely
circulated, becoming the basis for much of the media's salacious reporting on
Trump during the 2016 campaign. But it wasn't just the media that used it. Of
far greater importance is how the FBI and other spy agencies used the dossier
for their own investigations. More specifically, as Washington Examiner
columnist Byron York wondered, "Did the FBI or other agencies use any
information from the dossier as a basis for warrant requests before the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court?"
It sure looks that way. And if the answer is
"yes," it will have major ramifications. After all, by law U.S.
intelligence agencies aren't allowed to meddle in our elections. The dossier
seems to be the centerpiece of both former FBI chief James Comey's and current
special counsel Robert Mueller's investigations into Russian ties to the Trump
campaign. But other intelligence agencies apparently viewed it, too. So did
President Obama.
Were they operating together to get Hillary Clinton elected
over the suddenly threatening maverick candidacy of Donald Trump? More to the
point, was this a massive deep-state operation to undercut and perhaps take
down Donald Trump? Was special counsel Robert Mueller, tasked earlier this year
to investigate the Trump campaign's ties to the Russians, hired not to find the
truth but to deliver a legal coup de grace to Trump's still-young presidency?
The Washington Post reported last February that the British
ex-spy Steele, the former head of British MI-6's Russia desk and a former field
agent in Moscow, had "reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before
the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work." Did the FBI
become, in essence, an adjunct to the Democratic National Committee and the
Clinton campaign, by picking up where its opposition research left off?
And how much did Russian officials contribute to the
dossier? Were the FBI and the DNC knowingly operating in cahoots with Russian
officials? The answers matter. It's flat-out illegal for a U.S. intelligence
agency to act on behalf of one candidate against another in a U.S. election.
That's real meddling, the criminal kind.
The possible involvement of intelligence agencies in our
election on behalf of one candidate is uncharted territory, the stuff of bad
spy fiction. If it's true, and current investigations in the Senate and House
should get to the bottom of all this, then someone ought to go to prison for a
spell.
The questions are many. Unfortunately, the possibility that
crimes were committed by our own government means that both former FBI chief
James Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller have irreconcilable conflicts of
interest. Mueller should be removed, and both men's future in this sordid
scandal should be limited to one, and only one, role: Witness.
It's time to push the real "reset button" on this
whole bogus Russian investigation and look at the real collusion that seems to
have existed between the Democrats, the Clinton campaign, the FBI and the
Russians.
____________________________________________________________________
OTHER COLUMNS
“If we found out that Donald Trump’s campaign and the
Republican National Committee had paid a firm working for the Russians to
create a file of fabricated attacks on Hillary Clinton during the election,
would the media treat it as an impeachable offense?”
-David Harsanyi
“What goes
unappreciated is just why America’s leftists’ movement attacks the Founders. If
they can delegitimize the Founders themselves, it goes a long way toward their
agenda of delegitimizing the founding principles of our nation. If the leftists
can convince the nation that men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson
and James Madison were good-for-nothing slave-owning racists, then their ideas
can be more easily trashed. We find the greatest assaults on our founding
documents on the nation’s college campuses.”
-Walter
Williams
___________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
DNC Chair Tom Perez tells fellow Democrats that President
Donald Trump is an "existential threat" to the nation. "We have
the most dangerous president in American history and one of the most
reactionary Congresses in American history,"
MSNBC anchor: Members of Trump Admin “Do Not Appear to Be
Human Beings”
Anguished Liberals Plan to 'Scream Helplessly at the Sky' on
Anniversary of Trump Election
A University of Illinois math professor believes that
algebra and geometry perpetuate “white privilege” because Greek terms give
Caucasians unearned credit for the subject. But that isn’t the professor’s only
complaint. She also believes that evaluations for math proficiency perpetuates
discrimination against minority students, if they do worse than their white
counterparts.
What the Left Hopes to Achieve by Attacking the Founders
The U.K. government blasted the United Nations for using the
term "pregnant women" in a new version of the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights, claiming the term excludes transgender people
who have given birth, and is therefore disrespectful.
_______________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
A practice known as "sue and settle" used by the
Environmental Protection Agency to enact controversial regulations cost
taxpayers $68 billion since 2005 and has an annual cost of $26 billion,
according to a new report. The American Action Forum found that "sue and settle,"
killed this month by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, also dumped millions of
hours of red tape on industries. Pruitt ended the practice last week.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt
says the death threats against him have extended to his family.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/epas-scott-pruitt-family-getting-death-threats-too/article/2638702
___________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Former NPR president leaves the blue bubble and is shocked
by what he learns about non-elite Americans
It was another week of hunting for witches to burn in
Washington. Even Gen. John Kelly, a man who has served our nation with honor
and sacrifice, was nearly consumed by the flames. Kelly’s sin is his
willingness to be chief of staff to President Trump, and to try to stop the
madness that appears determined to destroy Trump, no matter the cost to
America. Last week’s episode was instructive about the state of our disunion.
That the deaths of four soldiers, ambushed in Niger, would be reduced to
political fodder for the bonfire reveals the depths of depravity. The first
false charge
Clarice Feldman: Secrets
and Lies: Three Russian Stories
Let’s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool
half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the
amount it spent on those Facebook ads — the ones the media-Democrat complex
ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. The
Facebook-ad buy, which started in June 2015 — before Donald Trump entered the
race — was more left-wing agitprop (ads pushing hysteria on racism,
immigration, guns, etc.) than electioneering. The Clintons’ own long-time
political strategist Mark Penn estimates that just $6,500 went to actual
electioneering. (You read that right: 65 hundred dollars.)
So what happened to Sen. Jeff Flake? “Jeff Flake had a 100 percent lifetime Club
for Growth record in the United States House of Representatives. He was a
conservative’s conservative and stood up to the House GOP leadership. He used
that reputation to catapult himself into the Senate with the backing of most
every major conservative group. He towed a tough line on the budget, ObamaCare,
immigration, etc. Then he got to the Senate and promptly caved on it all…...The
smaller Senate with fewer conservatives unleashed Jeff Flake’s need to be
liked. He went from being a reliable Club for Growth member to a reliable Mitch
McConnell member….His war with President Trump..yesterday (was an)
opportunistic attempt to gain sympathy from the city he once pledged to shrink
and rewrite the truth.”
_____________________________________________________________________
WISE
WORDS
“A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is
natural to abuse it, when acquired.”
-Alexander
Hamilton
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