It’s Friday, June 22nd, 2018…but before we begin, two quick notes. First, 77 years ago today, at 0300 local time, the glare from some six thousand pieces of artillery heralded not only the start of the greatest land battle in history…
…but, thankfully, the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Tausendjähriges Reich.
“Immigration enforcement efforts should focus on criminals, not separating innocent children from their families.”Silly us, here we thought anyone attempting to illegally enter the country was a criminal; guess it depends upon what your definition of “criminal” is!
By the way, if this report from NRO’s Jack Crowe is accurate, we’re equally disappointed in The Donald:
“…“We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody,” a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) official told the Post.
The unnamed official further explained that many adults and children currently in federal custody will be released due to the lack of adequate family detention centers, where they could be held together in compliance with Trump’s executive order.
…CPB officials plan to watch migration patterns (Note: they plan to “watch”…not “disrupt”!) to determine if the failure to prosecute parents leads to a surge in family crossings. “We’re going to watch closely and do what we need to do,” the official said.“
Whatever that means! Does the right hand in this Administration have even the faintest idea what the left is doing?!? Hells bells, why not just lay out a welcome mat:
…and the fact neither The Disloyal Opposition nor their MSM shills are giving him any credit at all for his retreat. One begins to wonder whether the man’s lacking commitment to any core principle at all.
It’s purely by chance Trey Gowdy’s face is featured after the phrase “bullsh*t!
America LOST…the rule of lawLOST; mob rule, lawlessness and Progressive politics were the only winners here. Why Trump never publicly, patiently and precisely explained the facts behind Liberals’ fabricated outrage…The Obamao’s similar separation of children, the letter of the law, his unwillingness to resort to extra-constitutional executive orders to compensate for Congressional inaction, and, perhaps most importantly, Dimocrats continuing refusal to compromise to correct the problem they created…we’ll never know.
Trump could well be the greatest dealmaker ever (though if so, we’ve yet to see it), but he sure as hell doesn’t understand how to take advantage of his bully pulpit.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Leading off the last edition of the week, writing at NRO, Andy McCarthy offers, as regards the…
“Despite the sprawl of Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s 568-page report on the Clinton-emails investigation, there is precious little discussion of the most important issue: The Justice Department and FBI’s rationale for declining to prosecute Hillary Clinton. I believe this is intentional. The inspector general’s message is: “Despite pervasive political bias and investigative irregularities, which I have comprehensively documented, rest assured that nothing too terrible happened here.”
That silver-lining version of this dark spectacle could not have survived a searching analysis of the decision not to indict. (Keep in mind, this is Andy McCarthy talking, as honest and unwilling an attributor of ill-intent as we’ve ever known!)
…What made Clinton’s conduct outrageous was not that national-defense officials emailed each other frequently. That happens in every government agency that deals with national security. The unique fact here was that Mrs. Clinton willfully set up a system in which those communications would transit through and be retained on a non-secure system, outside the government’s layers of protection.That system was extraordinarily vulnerable to penetration by hostile actors, a fact of which Clinton was undeniably, intimately aware.(See, e.g., Clinton’sbanning of State Department employees from using private emailfor official business due to security concerns; Clinton’s citing of anambassador’s use of private emailfor government business in firing him; Clinton’sacknowledgment that she “received a security indoctrinationconcerning the nature and protection of classified information”; Clinton’s memoir, Hard Choices, in which she vividly recounts the thorough training she received about protecting intelligence from the omnipresent threat of espionage, includinginstruction to leave communications devices on planes with batteries removed during her frequent foreign travel, as well as the need to use an “opaque tent” or “a blanket over our head” when she and her staff read “sensitive material” outside the secure U.S. government setting.)
The IG report indicates that this indisputable evidence of intent and knowledge played little if any part in Justice Department and FBI hand-wringing over whether the evidence of intent and knowledge was sufficient to justify an indictment. Instead, the report recounts that “various witnesses told the OIG that the investigation focused on identifying what classified information transited former Secretary Clinton’s server, who introduced it, and why.”
In other words,obsess over the trees,ignore the forest…”
Which is particularly convenient when the two tallest trees in the forest were…
…a sitting President and his Heiress Apparent.
In a related item, courtesy of FOX News, Marc Thiessen highlights…
“...In fact, the overlooked bombshell of the report is the inspector general’s confirmation that classified information contained in Clinton’s emails was in fact compromised by foreign intelligence services, and that Clinton had recklessly emailed President Barack Obama using her unsecured personal email from the territory of a hostile foreign adversary.
Before the report was released, we knew from Comey’s July 2016 statement that Clinton’s private emails included “seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received.” We also knew that the FBI “also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail.” Comey further declared, “We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.” And he speculated that, given how “extremely careless” Clinton had been, it was “possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.” (“Possible” our a*s: it was inevitable!)
Well, it turns out, the FBI knew with certainty at the time that hostile actors had in fact gained access to classified information via Clinton’s emails.According to the inspector general, a special review of the Clinton email investigation in 2017 by the Office to the FBI’s Inspection Division (INSD) found that, before Comey’s 2016 statement, “the FBI…successfully determined classified information was improperly stored and transmitted on Clinton’s email server, and classified information was compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.”
The initial draft of Comey’s 2016 statement said it was “reasonably likely” that hostile actors had gained access to Clinton’s private email account. Moreover, the inspector general quotes FBI agent Peter Strzok as commenting on that “It is more accurate to say we know foreign actors obtained access to some of her emails (including at least one Secret one) via compromises of the private email accounts of some of her staffers.” Thesefacts were inexplicably left out of the final statement.
We still don’t know the full extent of the damage Clinton caused, because the inspector general reports that the FBI intentionally chose not to follow every potential lead of compromised classified information. The report notes that “Strzok further stated that the FBI’s ‘purpose and mission’ was not to pursue ‘spilled [classified] information to the ends of the earth‘ and that the task of cleaning up classified spills by State Department employees was referred back to the State Department.” (While Strzok’s task was, pressumably, to comfort his…
We also learned new details about Clinton’s recklessness and willful misconduct in using her private email. The final version of Comey’s statement didnote that Clinton “used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” But we did not know at the time that the original draft included one more sentence: “That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary.” According to the inspector general, “This reference later was changed to ‘another senior government official,’ and ultimately was omitted.”
When I worked in the George W. Bush White House, and traveled to certain foreign countries with the president, we were required by the Secret Service to remove the batteries from our BlackBerrys, place them in a sealed plastic bag, and leave them on Air Force One for the duration of our visit to prevent foreign adversaries from hacking into the White House email system. But Clinton was so cavalier that she actually used not her government communications device, but her unsecured private email to communicate directly with the president of the United States from the territory of a foreign adversary.By emailing Obama directly from hostile territory, she put both her own email system and the president’s at risk of foreign intrusion. (And vice versa!)
Many Democrats blame Comey’s July 2016 statement for causing Clinton irreparable harm in the election. But we now knowClinton’s actions were worse than what Comey presented to the American people. Just imagine if his statement had been full and complete.“
There’s only one possible outcome:
For more on the obfuscation and disinformation disseminated by those who would, were any other actors involved, by labeled traitors, Victor Davis Hanson details the…
“There are lots of strange things throughout Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s massive report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation. One of the weirdest is the extent to which the FBI went to make up words and phrases to disguise reality.
An early draft of the 2016 FBI report on the email scandal was reportedly subjected to linguistic surgery to exonerate the former secretary of state, who at the time was the Democratic nominee for president. Clinton was originally found to be “grossly negligent” in using an illegal email server.That legalistic phrase is used by prosecutors to indict for violation of laws governing the wrongful transmission of confidential government documents.
Yet the very thought of a likely President Clinton in courtso worried the chief investigator, FBI director James Comey, that he watered down “grossly negligent” to the mere “extremely careless.”
FBI investigators also had concluded it was “reasonably likely” that foreign nations had read Clinton’s unsecured emails. Comey intervened to mask such a likelihood by substituting the more neutral word “possible”: It was merely “possible” her emails had been read by foreign nations.
Barack Obama, while president, was found to have improperly communicated with Clinton over her illegal server while she was in a foreign country. Obama had denied that fact by falsely claiming that he never learned of her server until much later, after it was publicized in the news.
The FBI hierarchy under Comey tried to hide the embarrassing details of Obama’s conduct. As a result, the FBI deleted Obama’s name from its report.In its place, the FBI inserted the laughable “another senior government official” — as if the president of the United States were just another Washington grandee who had improperly communicated on an illicit email server.
According to Comey’s congressional testimony, Loretta Lynch, then the attorney general, ordered him not to use the supposedly incriminating noun “investigation” in connection with his investigation of the Clinton emails.Instead, she instructed Comey to use the benign-sounding “matter.”
One of the oddest mysteries of the IG report is the FBI’s delay in addressing the fact that disgraced former U.S. representative Anthony Weiner had a number of Clinton’s private emails on his unsecured laptop.They were all forwarded to him by his wife, Huma Abedin, an aide to Clinton. Their Washington-insider marriage had been widely publicized for years, but Comey, the nation’s premier public investigator, told the IG that maybe he didn’t know they were married.Comey would have the investigators believe that Abedin had forwarded numerous emails from Clinton, some of them classified, to a mere acquaintance.
And look closely at his Orwellian profession of ignorance about the Weiner–Abedin marriage: “I don’t know that I knew that [Weiner] was married to Huma Abedin at the time.”Translated, that means Comey claimed that he was not sure at one point that he was sure at another point that Weiner was married to Abedin, at least at the time when the emails came to his attention. Therefore, he did not act as he should have.
What were the common themes in the FBI’s linguistic distortions?
Two realities: One, the FBI made sure that Obama, the boss of most of the wayward FBI and DOJ officials, would not be entangled in any scandal.
Two, seemingly everyone at the Department of Justice and FBI assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to be president. They were sure Donald Trump was headed for a humiliating and well-deserved defeat.Therefore, in the heat of the 2016 campaign, the FBI and DOJ did what they could to ingratiate themselves with those they expected to be in power during a likely eight-year Clinton presidency…”
No evidence of bias here!
Next up, writing at Best of the Web, Jim Freeman opines on the rather inexplicable need for…
“At a Monday hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray assured lawmakers that he will implement anti-bias training to ensure that his agents don’t allow their political views to influence their work.Mr. Wray’s“Starbucks”response to bureau scandals suggests that he too requires training.
On Thursday the Justice Department released its inspector general’s report detailing the bureau’s mishandling of the Clinton email investigation and the extreme bias against Donald Trump expressed by some FBI officials. That day Mr. Wray said that he took the report “very seriously,” and then lauded himself and his colleagues for their response. “We’ve alreadystarted taking the necessary steps to address” the issues raised in the report, said Mr. Wray. He added:
Because change starts at the top—including right here with me—we’re going to begin by requiring all our senior executives, from around the world, to convene for in-depth training on the lessons we should learn from today’s report. Then we’re going to train every single FBI employee—new hires and veterans alike—on what went wrong, so those mistakes will never be repeated…We’re going to make sure we have the policies, procedures, and training needed for everyone to understand and remember what’s expected of us.
That includes: Drilling home the importance of objectivity—and of avoiding even the appearance of personal conflicts or political bias in our work...
Does the whole bureaureally need to be taught such lessons? This column wonders how FBI field agents—who were clearly more eager than the Washington leadership to pursue the Clinton case—are now reacting to this message from their current director.Career attorney Christopher Wray is only the latest man to reach the top of the FBI without ever serving as an agent. And now he says agents need to be instructed to remain impartial as they conduct investigations.Pentagon officials who never served in uniform typically don’t announce plans to teach their troops about patriotism, but perhaps the FBI is a very different institution.
…There is a standard of integrity, fairness and good judgment that citizens have a right to expect in an elite law enforcement organization.FBI agents in need of anti-bias training also have another need—to be fired immediately.“
Including the Director!
Moving on, again courtesy of NRO, Kyle Smith recounts the wet dream of Progressives across the Fruited Plains, as he reports how…
“The half-awake citizen may be unaware just how dexterously the arms of the Kochtopus have reached into every precinct of American life.Not one mile from my home stands a particularly egregious example: the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, home to the New York City Ballet.Koch put up $100 million toward renovating the theater, but consider his ulterior motives. Theaters like this one use a lot of floor wax. At intermission they serve drinks in plastic cups. Their seats are covered with upholstery. These are all byproducts of petroleum. Get the picture?
Look deeper.Just a couple of miles east of the Koch Theater there’s an actual Koch hospital: the New York–Presbyterian David H. Koch Center, a 740,000-square-foot ambulatory-care center that opened its doors this year with the aid of another $100 million Koch gift.Charity?No.Bonanza! The Kochs sellall kinds of items used in hospitals — medical devices, electronic components, and even hands-free paper-towel dispensers and stuffing for pillows.In 2014, David and Charles Koch gave $25 million to the United Negro College Fund.Don’t see the connection?Educated black people read more.The Kochs own Flint Group, one of the world’s largest suppliers of printing ink.
Wake up sheeple! I have all of these connections diagrammed out on the 80-foot-wide blackboard I keep in the bomb shelter.You go unprepared for the Kochpocalypse if you choose. I won’t.
The latest dastardly Koch scheme was exposed on Monday, and for this we must thank Hiroko Tabuchi, a climate-change reporter for the New York Times. In classic 80-foot-blackboard fashion, Tabuchi laid out the devious conspiracy for us.
Using a front group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which deployed a sneaky election-rigging tactic known as “talking to people,” the Kochs destroyed a proposal for a light-rail system in Nashville, thus keeping commuters in their gas-guzzling cars and hastening the end of the world via global warming to protect the Kochs’ interests in the barbaric, malevolent seatbelt industry. Actual sentence from the piece: “One of the mainstay companies of Koch Industries, the Kochs’ conglomerate, is a major producer of gasoline and asphalt, and also makes seatbelts, tires and other automotive parts.” (Guilty as charged!)
The dots connect themselves! Never mind that the Kochs are in so many industries, including ethanol (of which they are now the nation’s fifth-largest producer), that working out exactly how a given project might affect their bottom line is pretty complicated.Never mind that hardly anybody would have used light rail in low-density Nashville: Even in Portland, Ore., where light rail is considered a raging success, the system accounts for only 0.9 percent of passenger miles traveled. That doesn’t actually sound like much of a threat to the gasoline or asphalt industries, much less to seatbelt manufacturing.
So how much of their eleven-figure net worth did the Kochs’ AFP pump into Nashville in their fell scheme to protect their precious seatbelt industry? Less than $10,000. Apparently that largely went for a mailer sent out a week before the election.For context, the proponents of the rail plan spent $2.9 million. All opponents combined spent $1.2 million. (Of that $1.2 million, most came from a group called Smarter Nashville, Inc., which by law does not have to disclose its donors.)
…Given that Nashville voters defeated the light-rail proposal by 64 to 36 percent, it appears that the Koch brothers’ longstanding opposition to gigantic tax-and-spend projects of dubious worth was more consonant with the mood of the voters than was the Times’ philosophy of urging voters to gamble any amount of money on anything that could conceivably have the slightest beneficial impact on global warming.Alas, such exceedingly easy civic calculations sometimes have the unfortunate side effect of creating windfall profits for the Koch brothers via their ruthless sales of seatbelts.“
We report, you decide…though we must observe one would have to be an utter idiot to advocate on behalf of Nashville’s light-rail plan.
Then there’s this, courtesy of Cortney O’Brien and Townhall.com, from a reluctant Republican with no stomach for the inevitable conflict ahead:
“After three decades, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt will no longer have the “R” in his title. In fact, his dislike of President Trump has even sent him to the Democratic camp.
…Schmidt had long been a vocal critic of Trump. Yet recent reports about the White House’s zero tolerance policy at the border pushed him over the edge.The separation of illegal immigrant families, he suggested, is comparable to slavery…”
Really? And abortion-on-demandisn’t akin to murder?!? We’re of the opinion Mr. Schmidt’s defection to the Dark Side is symptomatic of something other than Trump observing the letter of the law…while at the same time wondering whether the highly-principled Mr. Schmidt voiced the same sentiments when The Obamao was similarly separating children from parents who’d illegally entered the United States.
And in the Muslim Minute, courtesy today of PJ Media, can anyone recall a single MSM outlet covering this story?
Now imagine if the ethnicities of the respective parties had been reversed!
A quick search of the web turned up only three news items on the, to borrow Jim Comey’s terminology, “incident”, only one of which mentioned the ethnic nature of the assaults. The other two, one from Lewiston’s Sun Journal, the second from the Bangor Daily News, omitted any reference to the racial nature of the attacks whatsoever.
Here’s the juice: Fake News isn’t just about how stories get reported, it also relates as to what stories aren’t covered at all!
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s another reporting “error” you never witnessed the eight years we suffered under The Obamao:
ABC remains unable to explain how the…”mistake”…could have happened.
Finally, we’ll call it a week with a must-read item penned by Christopher Roach, courtesy of American Greatness and our Uncle Cliffy:
Unfortunately, from what we’ve seen to date from the suddenly and inexplicably toothless “Mad Dog” Mattis, things aren’t likely to change in the immediate or foreseeable future.
John Paul Jones, Chesty Puller, George Patton and Robin Olds must be rolling over in their graves.
Magoo
P.S. If you missed it, we pay homage to the late, great Charles Krauthammer at Link #1 immediately beneath our Quote of the Day at the top of the page.
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