Andrea Widberg "On Friday, Special Counsel John Durham filed with the D.C. Federal District Court a what should have been a boring conflict of interest motion, but it hid a surprise: The Clinton campaign, through Perkins Coie, spied on Trump both before and after he was president. The following is a plain English-language summary of relevant parts of the motion:
Michael Sussman was a partner at Law Firm-1 (i.e., Perkins Coie). He met with the FBI General Counsel (i.e., James Baker), and offered data and “white papers” purporting to show that Trump was communicating covertly with a Russia-based bank (i.e., Alfa-Bank). Mueller, incidentally, had to admit this was untrue.
"Durham indicted Sussman because he allegedly told Baker that he was not divulging this information for a client. In fact, he was acting for at least two clients: the Clinton campaign and “Tech Executive-1” (i.e., Rodney Joffe), who worked at a “U.S.-based internet company” (i.e., Neustar Inc., a federal contractor).
"As part of his work on the Clinton campaign, Sussman repeatedly met and communicated both with Joffe and with “another law partner” who was “Campaign Lawyer-1.” (I guess we can await that indictment soon....)". . .
The American Spectator | USA News and Politics"When Donald Trump claimed that he and his campaign had been spied upon by Democrat operatives, the corporate media mocked him as either a delusional paranoid or an outright liar. But now, thanks to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, it appears that once again Trump has been proven right.
" 'In the case of United States v. Michael Sussmann, Durham has filed a motion to inquire into defense counsel’s possible conflicts of interest in which he states that his office possesses evidence proving that, while attempting to establish a false narrative tying Trump to Russia, Sussmann and others serving Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign “exploited” Internet traffic pertaining to “Trump Tower,” “Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building,” and “the Executive Office of the President of the United States (‘EOP’).” (Emphasis added.)
" 'As stated in the indictment, Sussmann, a partner at the law firm which represented the Clinton campaign, worked in concert with others to concoct a false but “plausible” narrative that the “Trump Organization, owned by Donald J. Trump” was using a “secret channel of communications” to interact with “a particular Russian bank,” i.e., the Alfa Bank.". . .
"This is what the Left does all the time, to the point where it feels like half of their people are professional protesters, funded either by leftist billionaires or, if they’re public sector unions, your tax dollars."
What if we were actually to invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year into grassroots activism rather than wasting it on white papers, think tanks, and “hot air” events?
"It’s pretty amazing how a few weeks of honking in Ottawa combined with parents standing up to autocratic school boards appear to be doing more to move public opinion and change the everyday lives of Americans for the better than decades of funding CPAC social events and conservative think-tanking have done. Fascinating when you think about it.
"Just take a moment to reflect on how much this activism has changed the debate and brought to the surface the fascistic tendencies of the Left in Canada and in the United States. Prime Minister Justin “Low-T” Trudeau has invoked draconian emergency powers in Canada, while all across the United States, school boards are digging in—essentially telling parents and taxpayers to pound sand when they object to mask mandates and critical race indoctrination. The arrogant, out-of-touch responses to the protests has been illuminating for many and it has had and will continue to have real-world consequences.
"The political realignment of parents because of school boards’ behavior was on display recently in Virginia. The state flipped by 12 points in a year due, in large part, to the activism of parents who stood up and simply said, “No more.” But the arrogant, ham-handed reactions from people in power would never have been on display for all the world to see without that activism triggering those responses from the powers that be.". . .
. . ."Wearing a pale blue shirt and a smile, the fresh-faced Liberal Party leader answered Communist China.
" 'There is a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green, we need to start, you know, investing in solar,” Justin Trudeautold the group of women. “There is a flexibility that I know [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper must dream about: having a dictatorship where you can do whatever you wanted, that I find quite interesting.”
"The comments drew fire, particularly from Canadians who noted China’s oppressive regime anddocumented human rights abuses.". . .
The Daily Wire "NBC Sports reporter Michele Tafoya revealed in an interview this week that the reason she left the leftist news organization was because she wanted to fight for American values by advocating for middle of the road ideas and pushing back against far-left wokeness in schools.
“It’s been on my mind for quite a while,” Tafoya told Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “I’ve been waking up every day with a palpable pull at my gut. That my side, my view, my middle ground, kind of moderate viewpoint is not being represented to the rest of the world, I didn’t feel. And so, rather than, you know, just banging it out on Twitter or Instagram every day, I thought, I’ve got to do something. I have benefited greatly from the American dream. And I feel like for the sake of my kids, and because I so love this country, I’ve got to start giving back.”. . .
. . ."Tafoya was asked about a recent appearance that she had on ABC’s “The View” where she pushed back against attempts to racialize things in public schools.
" In the clip, Tafoya said:
My kids in school, there is a big, big focus on the color of your skin. My children are now 16 and 13. It’s been going on since they were in lower school. And it is that there are affinity groups on campus for — my son’s first best friend was a little African American boy, they were inseparable, get to a certain age, they start having what’s called an affinity group, which means you go for lunch and pizza with people who look like you. Suddenly, my son wasn’t hanging out with him anymore. Why are we even teaching that the color of the skin matters? Because to me, what matters is your character and your values. More...
Will the people ever learn how false information was seeded throughout the government and media in a conspiratorial effort to destroy a sitting president?
"Hillary Clinton’s never-ending shenanigans in 2015-2016 could be summarized as an attempted slow-motion coup.
"Four years of national hysteria, a divided nation, and dangerous new tensions with Russia were some of the wages of Clinton’s machinations.
"Clinton hired a British national and ex-spy, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on her election opponent, Trump. She hid her likely illegal campaign payments to him through at least three paywalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and the opposition research firm Fusion GPS.
"Partisans in the FBI helped her, by variously spying on minor officials affiliated with the Trump campaign, like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. To expedite its improper surveillance, a corrupt FBI hierarchy presented fraudulent documents to a FISA court that authorized the illicit surveillance.
"Clinton’s orbit of former subordinates and friends seeded the lies in the dossier throughout the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA.
"During the Trump transition, the FBI also tapped into the communications of national security advisor designate General Michael Flynn. The illegally leaked surveillance put an end to his service to the Trump Administration and ruined his life.
"The country went through 22 months and $40 million in legal expenses under special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Clinton-inspired Russian collusion hoax.
"When it was all over, Mueller’s “dream team” found no such actionable Trump-Russian collusion.
"Mueller himself ended up nearly humiliated, preposterously claiming under oath no knowledge about the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin pillars of deceit that prompted his own investigation.
"But Clinton was undaunted.
"According to a recent affidavit filed by Special Counsel John Durham, Clinton furthermore had previously hired members of the Perkins Coie law firm to contract with tech experts to leverage their own existing access to the White House and Trump servers—and tap into the top-secret communications data of candidate and then President Trump.". . .
Don Surber: Media obsession with Trump kills Democrats . . ."The media's obsession with Trump a year after he left reflects the DNC's obsession with President Trump. I have never seen a party talk about its predecessor like this. A successful party makes their new president the topic. JFK shook Ike's had at the inauguration and moved on. Nixon didn't talk about LBJ after taking office, and neither did the press. Carter moved on from Ford. Reagan moved on from Carter. Clinton moved on from Bush. And so on.
"The only reason Trump mentioned Obama was to point out he spied on him.
Of all the stories about President Trump, that is the one thepress overlooks,
. . ."Voters in the City by the Bay, the mecca of modern American progressivism, threw out three members of the San Francisco school board in recall elections on Tuesday. And the results weren’t close: 75 percent voted to recall board president Gabriela López, 73 percent voted to recall vice president Faauuga Moliga, and 79 percent voted to recall board member Alison Collins.
"Their reason for doing so: Progressivism run amok. Ryan Mills reported on the two parents who led the recall effort, Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen, last March. Raj was frustrated his children’s schools were not opened, so he attended a school-board meeting. There he found members arguing about identity politics instead of working to reopen schools. Reopening was at the bottom of the agenda, and discussion of it didn’t begin until almost midnight.". . .
PJ Media"The school board recall election results in San Francisco on Tuesday came as a shock to many on the left. Three perfectly diverse, perfectly woke school board members apparently never knew what hit them.
"It wasn’t even close. Indeed, the electoral massacre of the radical left was part of a trend that has seen victories for normalcy over craziness in Seattle, Minneapolis, Virginia, and New York.
In Seattle, voters elected Ann Davison city attorney. Davison resigned from the Democratic Party because it had veered “so far left.” She defeated a candidate who wanted to abolish the Seattle police.
In Minneapolis, the radical city council cut the number of police by one-third and then complained when violent crime skyrocketed. Voters there defeated a measure to replace most of the city’s armed officers with social workers.
In New York, voters elected Eric Adams, a former police officer who just presented a budget to the city council that slashed every single department—except the police department.
Glenn Youngkin’s big win in Virginia was heavy with portent for the radical left, signaling that suburban parents are finished with social experiments and overly-controlling teacher’s unions. Worrisome for Democrats, these are exactly the kinds of voters who put Joe Biden in office and could lead a GOP revival in the big-city suburbs.
"All of the above has taken place since the first of the year. Pollsters are telling us that voters are tired of COVID restrictions. What they’re missing is the quiet revolution being carried out by quiet people in the quiet corners of America.". . .
Talk about projection. She allegedly cooked up the Russia smear to distract from her own scandal. She’s once again accusing Trump of what she’s alleged to have done. She just can’t stop. She is, even now, stuck in spreading the “vast right-wing conspiracy” mode to deflect from her scandal.
As we previously reported, Hillary Clinton ducked questions the other day about the Durham probe. A recent filing from the probe said people working for her campaign worked with a tech executive to collect “derogatory” information on Donald Trump by looking into DNS look-ups in various servers including Trump Tower and the White House. The purpose was to support a “narrative” about a Trump connection to Russia. That was on top of information that had already been alleged about intel in a CIA memo that Clinton wanted to do that to distract from the investigation into her own private server scandal that was exploding at that time.
But when she was approached by a Daily Mail reporter, she rushed as quickly as she could into the building she was entering.". . .
. . ."By commenting on it, she feeds the story more, doing herself no favors. Plus it’s never good to talk when you don’t know what legal actions might be pending and might involve you. But you notice what you don’t see her do? Deny the plot to smear Trump. What’s the explanation for the indictment of people working for her? Notice she’s silent on those questions.
"Jonathan Turley had a few things to say about Hillary’s response." . . .
Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady – a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation – is a congenital liar.
Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.
"Could anyone who has followed her political activities since make any sensible rebuttal to Safire's observation? As many of her critics have noted, Hillary Clinton will lie when she'd be far better served by the truth. Now here we are just days away from an election that could put this woman into the most powerful political position in the world, and apparently she's still at it.". . .
Hillary Clinton is, quite clearly, a congenital liar. But here's the sobering thought to take away from this: if she can't separate truth from lies, is she also incapable of distinguishing between honest and dishonest behavior? Her behavior as secretary of state would seem to indicate the answer is no, she can't.
Therefore, ask not "Why didn't she just come clean at the beginning?" She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.
They reacted with arrogance to the latest John Durham report.
Tony Branco
The American Spectator | USA News and Politics "Democrats howled in protest when Richard Nixon absolved himself of wrongdoing in the Watergate scandal by saying, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But today’s Democrats, caught out in a political dirty trick far greater than Watergate, adopt the same arrogant posture. Spying isn’t spying if Democrats do it, they have implicitly said in response to the investigation by Department of Justice special counsel John Durham. He is establishing that it was the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign, not the Trump campaign and Putin, that colluded during the 2016 election.
"It is laughable to hear all the villains in this saga — from Hillary Clinton to John Brennan to Christopher Steele — prattle on about the purity of democracy after they assaulted it so egregiously in 2016. The Obama administration’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion was a dirty trick from beginning to end. Its genesis traces to John Brennan, a virulent anti-Trump partisan who had no business running the CIA. He turned it into something approaching a branch office of Hillary’s campaign. It is no wonder, as Durhamtells usin a recent legal filing, that one of her lawyers felt comfortable pitching anti-Trump propaganda to CIA officials.
"The FBI liaison to Brennan was Peter Strzok, the agent who infamously told his mistress that he was going to “stop” Trump. That Brennan and Strzok spearheaded the investigation into Trump-Russia collusion tells you all you need to know about its partisan origins. They would later solemnly spin their partisan fishing expedition as a “counterintelligence probe” into foreign interference in the election. Former FBI director James Comey even tried to spin it as an investigation into the campaign, not Trump — an obviously bogus explanation given that he never tipped Trump off to his alleged fears.
"Even at this late date, the media, to the extent that it acknowledges the Durham investigation, still casts the Obama administration’s blatant spying on the Trump campaign as proper and dutiful. The chutzpah of it all is breathtaking. Reporters continue to treat Trump as the villain, not the victim, in the story. Never mind that Durham’s findings show the spying on Trump to be even more extensive than anyone realized.
"Now we know why the denials of spying on Trump Tower were so lawyerly. Both the Obama administration and Hillary’s dirt-diggers targeted it for surveillance. Comey, who never directly denied Trump’s complaint, was able to intercept communications at Trump Tower through FISA warrants based on nothing more than Hillary’s campaign smears.
"Walter Duranty, theNew York Timescorrespondent famous for his defense of Stalin, won prizes for overlooking the transgressions of Russian leaders. . ."
"As the Super Bowl approaches, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has instituted a citywide
"hold-your-breath" order to keep people safe during the big game.
" 'As I said earlier this week when reporters asked me why I wasn't wearing a mask at the NFC Championship game, I was holding my breath, so it was ok," said the Mayor to reporters. "There is a zero percent chance of infection if you're holding your breath. That's just science. That's why today I'm issuing a 'hold-your-breath' mandate. If everyone just holds their breath for 15 days, we'll get through this thing. We're all in this together!"
Last Wednesday, asked about photos of him maskless with Los Angeles Lakers icon Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Garcetti stated, “I’ll take personal responsibility, and if it makes you and everyone else happy — or even the photographs with people where literally I’m holding my breath for two seconds — I won’t even do that,” Deadline reported.
“I wore my mask the entire game,” Garcetti protested. “When people ask for a photograph, I hold my breath and I put it here and people can see that. There is a zero percent chance of infection from that.”
He added, “I won’t pull it down for two seconds anymore — that’s easy. But to me, it is crystal clear that nobody has been endangered by that and I’m trying to model the good behavior of making sure we wear this (for the) entire game,” The Daily Mail noted.
This isn't hypocrisy. This keeps happening because the politicians who impose all these COVID rules and restrictions on everyone else see them as a useless joke, and that's why they ignore them in their own lives and end up saying darkly hilarious things like this to justify it:
Putin will say, "Just kidding!" and Biden will be honored un-skeptically by himself and networks with an "N" in their name as being a world leader in the mold of JFK and FDR.
...So I guess we can forget that sonorous horse crap about the First Amendment protecting ideas that "society finds ... offensive or disagreeable." The left's new model is a public-private partnership to prohibit speech unacceptable to Joy Ann Reid....
"In 2017, as fear and loathing of Donald Trump seized the nation, a U.S. mayor got a four-star resort
to cancel a conservative conference by threatening to withdraw police and fire protection.
"With all the media blubbering about "attempts to DESTROY our democracy" and violations of
"constitutional norms,
" it's remarkable that this Howitzer blast to the First Amendment has received
barely any attention, much less the front-page coverage it deserves, not even from the conservative
press.
"The banned conference, you see, was about immigration.
"Wow, our elites really don't want Americans thinking about immigration! (Remember, kids: It's a
right-wing conspiracy theory -- and racist, to boot! -- to think that liberals are using mass
immigration to change the country.)
"The sponsor of the conference was VDARE, a long-standing immigration website espousing ideas
that are basically identical to Trump's 2016 immigration promises -- both before he made them and
after he broke them. The main difference is that the arguments on VDARE are expressed in proper
English, and the writers actually believe what they say.
" As the 2016 election demonstrated, these ideas are quite popular with a certain segment of voters.
Not everyone, just enough to elect a president no one thought could ever be elected, who was loathed
by the media, and who was outspent 2-to-1.
"Named for Virginia Dare, the first European born on U.S soil, VDARE promotes the novel idea that
U.S. immigration policy should benefit Americans. (Obviously, that includes white, Hispanic, Asian
and black Americans -- whom, by the way, mass immigration hurts the most.) Naturally, therefore,
it has been designated a "white supremacist" website by the country's largest hate group, the
Southern Poverty Law Center.". . .