As the likelihood that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia seems headed toward zero, the likelihood of proof of a different form of collusion seems headed upward toward certainty.
The Russia collusion charge had some initial credibility because of businessman Donald Trump's dealings in Russia and candidate Trump's off-putting praise of Vladimir Putin.
It was fueled by breathless media coverage of such trivial events as Jeff Sessions' conversation with the Russian ambassador at a Washington reception -- and, of course, by the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel. But Mueller's prosecutions of Trump campaign operatives were for misdeeds long before the campaign, and his indictment of 13 Russians specified that no American was a "knowing participant" in their work.
Now there's talk that Mueller is winding up his investigation. It seems unlikely that whatever he reports will fulfill the daydreams so many liberals have of making Trump go the way of Richard Nixon.
Meanwhile, the evidence builds of collusion by Obama administration law enforcement and intelligence personnel in trying to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat and delegitimize Trump in and after the 2016 election.
The investigation of Clinton's illegal email system was conducted with kid gloves. FBI Director James Comey accepted Attorney General Loretta Lynch's order to call it a "matter" rather than an "investigation." Clinton aides were allowed to keep her emails and destroy 30,000 of them, plus cellphones. They were not subject to grand jury subpoenas, and a potential co-defendant was allowed to claim attorney-client privilege.
On June 27, 2016, Lynch clandestinely met with Bill Clinton on his plane at the Phoenix airport -- a meeting that became known only thanks to an alert local TV reporter. Lynch supposedly left the decision on prosecution to Comey, who on July 5 announced publicly that Clinton had been "extremely careless" but lacked intent to violate the law, even though the statute punishes such violations whether they are intentional or not.
Contrast that with the collusion of Obama officials with the Clinton campaign-financed Christophe Steele/Fusion GPS dossier alleging Trump ties with Russians. Comey and the Justice Department used it, without divulging who paid for it, to get a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign operative Carter Page's future and past communications -- the "wiretap" Trump was derided for mentioning.
Similarly, when Comey informed Trump in January 2017 of the contents of the then-unpublished Steele dossier, he didn't reveal that the Clinton campaign had paid for it. Asked on his iatrogenic book tour why not, he blandly said he didn't know. And maybe he doesn't actually realize he was employing J. Edgar Hoover-like tactics to keep his job. Maybe.
In any case, after he was fired, he immediately sent four of his internal memos, at least one of them classified, to a law professor friend to leak them to the press, with the intent of getting a special counsel appointed -- who turned out to be his longtime friend and ally Robert Mueller. Collusion, anyone?
Collusion can get complicated and sometimes fails to produce the intended results. Comey's deputy FBI director, Andrew McCabe, reportedly kept to himself for weeks the discovery that Clinton emails had been transmitted over the home computer of her aide Huma Abedin's then-husband, the disgraced ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner. After Comey learned of this, he made his Oct. 28 announcement that the Clinton email investigation was being reopened.
Comey and McCabe have produced contradictory accounts of events, and Comey's public praise of McCabe contrasts with his referral of McCabe to Justice's inspector general, who found him guilty of "lack of candor" -- a fireable offense for which he was indeed fired. Partners in collusion sometimes fall out.
Longtime Clinton friend Lanny Davis charges that Comey's statement was responsible for Clinton's defeat, and Comey, on his book tour, admitted that he may have made it only because he assumed Clinton would win.
Davis may be right, though no one can prove it. But one could also say that the Democratic Party lost the presidency because it nominated a candidate under investigation for committing a felony. And it seems as certain as these things can be that if Hillary Clinton had followed the law and regulations, there would be today no President Trump, no Attorney General Sessions, no EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, no Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The blame ultimately belongs to Barack Obama, who knew of Clinton's private email system and who could have ordered her to follow the law. But that's one bit of collusion that didn't occur.
The Real Collusion Story
The blame ultimately belongs to Barack Obama, who knew of Clinton's private email system and who could have ordered her to follow the law. But that's one bit of collusion that didn't occur.
That's it all wrapped up inside a nutshell. The public has grown weary of this prolonged and ludicrous sideshow by the whiny losers of the left, and their voting decisions in the midterms won't be influenced by faux scandals like Stormy Daniels and a fake dossier, but by their usual concerns...their jobs, their economic situation, with the country at peace and winding down current engagements.
The problems for the Democrats are just beginning and won't be going away. Watch for lots of action after the midterms.
I totally agree. There problems have only begun and talk about that pendulum, it's starting to swing in the direction of real justice instead of Totalitarian Left Wing Justice, with their Police State Justice System. Soviet Style, by the way.
WARNING TO ALL NT MEMBERS:
Do not collude with me. My father was born in Russia, and although he immigrated to Canada at the age of 13 and I was born in Canada, according to Russian law, I am still considered to be Russian. What you must also be aware of is that I am presently living in a COMMUNIST country, China, and even married to a Chinese woman. Two reasons to be VERY CAREFUL in the event that any correspondence takes place between us. You could be investigated for collusion with the enemy, lose your jobs, be shunned by your friends and even your children could be bullied in their schools. Hey, if an American teenage student is suspended from his American school for singing the American National Anthem in the school cafeteria, there could be a protest march with placards damning you for even reading my articles and comments.
BE CAREFUL.
You're probably pretty safe Buzz if you're part of the #Resistance against Trump. You can get away with murder if that is the case. By the way, you haven't seen any of Trump's relatives, friends, business associates, campaign people or anyone else you could somehow tie into Trump over there, have you? We're offering a $12 million dollar reward for any information, whether you can provide any evidence or not, doesn't matter. We have a very accommodating media here in the USA under the developing Police State tactics from the Left.
Since you aren't also involved in voter fraud and money laundering, among other things (presumably), I'm thinking it is safe.
You mean like this? This is a fact and there is evidence, just like the real collusion, there is evidence, unlike the Trump witch hunt where there is no evidence.
There was no voter fraud or money laundering that has been uncovered, except on the side of the Democrats. "What about" all those foreign campaign "donations" to the Clinton Foundation that amounted to trying to buy influence when Hillary became the prez??
I agree. I have found Buzz to be innocent of all these things.
I do wonder why you seem to think one crime being allegedly committed absolves all others from guilt for doing the same.
It doesn't. In the case of HRC there is credible evidence of wrong doing, in Trump's case none has been presented to date.
I don't agree with that, and one thing also has nothing to do with the other. You agree that they are not the same person, yes?
I agree with that, that they are two separate cases.
Good deal. It's appropriate that they don't get jumbled together and can both be viewed independently.
With so many conservative Republicans misusing that word, it's no wonder the definition has changed from "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others" to "communication with". With that idiotic definition everyone must be colluding with everyone else. When Chris Steele had concerns with the large number of Trump campaign members colluding, er, I mean "communicating" with Russian operatives in an attempt to get dirt on Hillary in exchange for lifting sanctions and repealing the Magnitsky act, he turned that info over to the FBI so he communicated, er, I mean "colluded" with the FBI. No wonder conservative Republicans are so confused, they are apparently so dumb they can't remember simple definitions.
Can Mueller be more honest than his colleagues?
Sharyl is known for getting to the heart of the matter and finding the truth. And now that Comey has been caught both leaking FBI info and lying to investigators, this melodrama should start to get really, REALLY, interesting.
Revolution and Worse to Come
O n the domestic and foreign fronts, the Trump administration has prompted economic growth and restored U.S. deterrence. Polls show increased consumer confidence, and in some, Trump himself has gained ground. Yet good news is bad news to the Resistance and its strange continued efforts to stop an elected president in a way it failed to do in the 2016 election.
Indeed, the aim of the so-called Resistance to Donald J. Trump is ending Trump’s presidency by any means necessary before the 2020 election. Or, barring that, it seeks to so delegitimize him that he becomes presidentially impotent. It has been only 16 months since Trump took office and, in the spirit of revolutionary fervor, almost everything has been tried to derail him. Now we are entering uncharted territory — at a time when otherwise the country is improving and the legal exposure of Trump’s opponents increases daily.
First came the failed lawsuits after the election alleging voting-machine tampering. Then there was the doomed celebrity effort to convince some state electors not to follow their constitutional duty and to deny Trump the presidency — a gambit that, had it worked, would have wrecked the Constitution. Then came the pathetic congressional boycott of the inauguration and the shrill nationwide protests against the president.
Next was the sad effort to introduce articles of impeachment. After that came weird attempts to cite Trump for violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. That puerile con was followed by plans to declare him deranged and mentally unfit so that he could be removed under the 25th Amendment. From time to time, Obama holdovers in the DOJ, National Security Council, and FBI sought to leak information, or they refused to carry out presidential orders.
As the Resistance goes from one ploy to the next, it ignores its string of failed prior efforts, forgetting everything and learning nothing. State nullification is no longer neo-Confederate but an any-means-necessary progressive tool. Suing the government weekly is proof of revolutionary fides, not a waste of California’s taxpayer dollars.
Anti- and Never-Trump op-ed writers have long ago run out of superlatives. Trump is the worst, most, biggest — fill in the blank — in the history of the presidency, in the history of the world, worse even than Mao, Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler. So if Trump is a Hitler who gassed 6 million or a Stalin who starved 20 million, then logically Trump deserves what exactly?
The book industry is doing its part. Mythographer Michael Wolff’s hearsay Fire and Fury suggested that Trump was a dangerous child despised as much by his friends as by his enemies. As FBI director, James Comey leaked confidential memos, lied to Congress, misled a FISA court, admitted that he based his handling of the Clinton-email investigation on the assumption she’d win the presidency, misinformed the president about the status of his investigation. And the now-former director book-tours the country slamming Trump hourly on the assumption that he would certainly not be former , if only his prior obsequious efforts to appease Trump had saved his job. Comey is building perjury cases against himself daily with each new disclosure that belie past sworn testimonies, but that is apparently less scary to him than simply ignoring Trump.
Robert Mueller and his “dream team” were long ago supposed to have discovered proof of Trump’s collusion with Russia. A year later, they have found nothing much to do with this mandate. Then the alternative scent was obstruction of justice. Then the chase took another detour to follow some sort of fraud or racketeering. Now the FBI is reduced to raiding Trump’s lawyer in an effort to root out the real story on Stormy Daniels. One wonders what might have happened had Michael Cohen panicked and destroyed 30,000 emails before Mueller seized his computers. No matter, Mueller’s legal army presses on, even as it leaves its own wounded on the battlefield, as resignations, reassignments, and retirements for improper conduct decimate the Obama-era FBI and DOJ hierarchies.
Trump has left the intelligence community unhinged. John Brennan (“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. . . . America will triumph over you”) and James Clapper (who called Trump a veritable traitor working for Putin) have both admitted to lying under oath to Congress in the past, and with their present invective, they have discredited the very notion of a Washington intelligence elite. At some point, Mueller’s zealotry will remind federal attorneys that equality under the law demands indictments of those with far greater legal exposure, regardless of the exalted status of Comey, Andrew McCabe, and — in the matter of lying under oath, leaking classified materials, and destroying evidence — John Brennan, James Clapper and Hillary Clinton.
In addition, a media, found to be more than 90 percent negative in its coverage of the Trump administration, sought to delegitimize the president. Journalists declare that disinterested reporting is impossible in the age of Trump — and therefore believe that Stormy Daniels or James Comey’s Dudley Do-Right’s memos are a pathway to accomplish what they are beginning to concede Robert Mueller cannot.
Everything from the NFL to late-night comedy shows have become Trump-hating venues. Almost every sort of smear from scatology to homophobia has been voiced by celebrities to turn Trump into a president deserving such abuse — and worse. Late-night television host Steven Colbert was reduced to incoherent and repellant venom: “You talk like a sign-language gorilla that got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c*** holster.” Actor Robert De Niro has become deranged and dreams of pounding on Trump’s face. But then so does former vice president Joe Biden, who on two occasions boasted that Trump is the sort of guy that a younger he-man Biden used to take outside the gym to give a whippin’ to.
Each cycle of hysteria demands another, as the race to the bottom has descended into which celebrity or politician can discover the most provocative — or crude — Trump expletive. “S***” and “f***” are now the ordinary vocabulary of angry Democratic politicos and officeholders. Are we reaching a point in the so-far-failed Resistance where little is left except abject violence in the manner of the Roman or French Revolution? The problem for Trump’s pop-culture foes is not whether to imagine or advocate killing the president. That’s a given. They just need to agree on the means of doing so: decapitation (Kathy Griffin), incineration (David Crosby), stabbing (the Shakespeare in the Park troupe), shooting (Snoop Dogg), explosives (Madonna), old-fashioned, Lincoln-style assassination (Johnny Depp), death by elevator (Kamala Harris), hanging (a CSU professor), or simple generic assassination (a Missouri state legislator).
First came the failed lawsuits after the election alleging voting-machine tampering. Then there was the doomed celebrity effort to convince some state electors not to follow their constitutional duty and to deny Trump the presidency — a gambit that, had it worked, would have wrecked the Constitution. Then came the pathetic congressional boycott of the inauguration and the shrill nationwide protests against the president.
Next was the sad effort to introduce articles of impeachment. After that came weird attempts to cite Trump for violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. That puerile con was followed by plans to declare him deranged and mentally unfit so that he could be removed under the 25th Amendment. From time to time, Obama holdovers in the DOJ, National Security Council, and FBI sought to leak information, or they refused to carry out presidential orders.
As the Resistance goes from one ploy to the next, it ignores its string of failed prior efforts, forgetting everything and learning nothing. State nullification is no longer neo-Confederate but an any-means-necessary progressive tool. Suing the government weekly is proof of revolutionary fides, not a waste of California’s taxpayer dollars.
Anti- and Never-Trump op-ed writers have long ago run out of superlatives. Trump is the worst, most, biggest — fill in the blank — in the history of the presidency, in the history of the world, worse even than Mao, Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler. So if Trump is a Hitler who gassed 6 million or a Stalin who starved 20 million, then logically Trump deserves what exactly?
The book industry is doing its part. Mythographer Michael Wolff’s hearsay Fire and Fury suggested that Trump was a dangerous child despised as much by his friends as by his enemies. As FBI director, James Comey leaked confidential memos, lied to Congress, misled a FISA court, admitted that he based his handling of the Clinton-email investigation on the assumption she’d win the presidency, misinformed the president about the status of his investigation. And the now-former director book-tours the country slamming Trump hourly on the assumption that he would certainly not be former , if only his prior obsequious efforts to appease Trump had saved his job. Comey is building perjury cases against himself daily with each new disclosure that belie past sworn testimonies, but that is apparently less scary to him than simply ignoring Trump.
Robert Mueller and his “dream team” were long ago supposed to have discovered proof of Trump’s collusion with Russia. A year later, they have found nothing much to do with this mandate. Then the alternative scent was obstruction of justice. Then the chase took another detour to follow some sort of fraud or racketeering. Now the FBI is reduced to raiding Trump’s lawyer in an effort to root out the real story on Stormy Daniels. One wonders what might have happened had Michael Cohen panicked and destroyed 30,000 emails before Mueller seized his computers. No matter, Mueller’s legal army presses on, even as it leaves its own wounded on the battlefield, as resignations, reassignments, and retirements for improper conduct decimate the Obama-era FBI and DOJ hierarchies.
Trump has left the intelligence community unhinged. John Brennan (“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. . . . America will triumph over you”) and James Clapper (who called Trump a veritable traitor working for Putin) have both admitted to lying under oath to Congress in the past, and with their present invective, they have discredited the very notion of a Washington intelligence elite. At some point, Mueller’s zealotry will remind federal attorneys that equality under the law demands indictments of those with far greater legal exposure, regardless of the exalted status of Comey, Andrew McCabe, and — in the matter of lying under oath, leaking classified materials, and destroying evidence — John Brennan, James Clapper and Hillary Clinton.
In addition, a media, found to be more than 90 percent negative in its coverage of the Trump administration, sought to delegitimize the president. Journalists declare that disinterested reporting is impossible in the age of Trump — and therefore believe that Stormy Daniels or James Comey’s Dudley Do-Right’s memos are a pathway to accomplish what they are beginning to concede Robert Mueller cannot.
Everything from the NFL to late-night comedy shows have become Trump-hating venues. Almost every sort of smear from scatology to homophobia has been voiced by celebrities to turn Trump into a president deserving such abuse — and worse. Late-night television host Steven Colbert was reduced to incoherent and repellant venom: “You talk like a sign-language gorilla that got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c*** holster.” Actor Robert De Niro has become deranged and dreams of pounding on Trump’s face. But then so does former vice president Joe Biden, who on two occasions boasted that Trump is the sort of guy that a younger he-man Biden used to take outside the gym to give a whippin’ to.
Each cycle of hysteria demands another, as the race to the bottom has descended into which celebrity or politician can discover the most provocative — or crude — Trump expletive. “S***” and “f***” are now the ordinary vocabulary of angry Democratic politicos and officeholders. Are we reaching a point in the so-far-failed Resistance where little is left except abject violence in the manner of the Roman or French Revolution? The problem for Trump’s pop-culture foes is not whether to imagine or advocate killing the president. That’s a given. They just need to agree on the means of doing so: decapitation (Kathy Griffin), incineration (David Crosby), stabbing (the Shakespeare in the Park troupe), shooting (Snoop Dogg), explosives (Madonna), old-fashioned, Lincoln-style assassination (Johnny Depp), death by elevator (Kamala Harris), hanging (a CSU professor), or simple generic assassination (a Missouri state legislator).
Now the Democratic party — whose presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, hired Christopher Steele to find dirt on Trump with the aid of Russian sources to warp the 2016 election — is suing President Trump, alleging collusion with the Russians. If Clinton were called as a witness, what would she say under cross-examination — that she did not hire Steele, that he never purchased Russian dirt, or that there was no collusion effort to enlist foreign nationals such as British subject Christopher Steele and Russian propagandists to warp an American election?
Insidiously and incrementally, we are in the process of normalizing violence against the elected president of the United States. If all this fails to delegitimize Trump, fails to destroy his health, or fails to lead to a 2018 midterm Democratic sweep and subsequent impeachment, expect even greater threats of violence. The Resistance and rabid anti-Trumpers have lost confidence in the constitutional framework of elections, and they’ve flouted the tradition by which the opposition allows the in-power party to present its case to the court of public opinion.
Instead, like the French revolutionaries’ Committee on Public Safety, the unhinged anti-Trumpists assume that they have lost public opinion, given their venom and crudity, and are growing desperate as every legal and paralegal means of removing Trump is nearing exhaustion. Robert Mueller is the last chance, a sort of Watergate or Abu Ghraib that could gin up enough furor to drive down Trump’s poll favorability to the twenties and thereby reduce his person to a demonic force deserving of whatever it gets.
After the prior era of hysteria, between 2005 and 2008, when books and docudramas staged the imagined assassination of George W. Bush, and celebrities like Michael Moore and activists such as Cindy Sheehan reduced Bush to the status of a war criminal, the Left in 2009 demanded a return to normal political discourse and comportment, with the election of Barack Obama. A newly contrite and apologetic America was abruptly worth believing in again. In 2009, the CIA and FBI suddenly were reinvented as hallowed agents of change.
Bush careerists, including Clapper and Brennan, were now damning the very counterterrorism practices that they once helped put in place, while offering Obama-like politically correct sermons on the benign nature of Islamism. Surveillance and jailing were appropriate punishments for suspected Obama apostates (ask James Rosen or Nkoula Basseley Nakoula). The IRS was weaponized for use against Obama’s ideological opponents. Suggestions that the president was unfit or worse became near treasonous. Unity was the new patriotism. The assumption was that Obama had ushered in a half-century of progressive norms, not that he so alienated the country that he birthed Donald Trump.
We are entering revolutionary times. The law is no longer equally applied. The media are the ministry of truth. The Democratic party is a revolutionary force. And it is all getting scary.
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