The mainstream media reporting on Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian attorney who he was told had dirt on Hillary Clinton covers it as if having a meeting to get dirt on a political opponent is illegal in and of itself.
But if that is the case, then what about the Hillary Clinton campaign hiring a foreign national to pay Russian informants for dirt on Donald Trump?
If Trump Jr. meeting for 10 minutes with a Russian attorney is illegal then somebody from the Hillary Clinton campaign should be in jail.
There is no dispute that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid the law firm Perkins Coie who paid Fusion GPS who paid Christopher Steele, a British citizen, who then paid Russian informants for salacious rumors about Donald Trump.
But according to the mainstream media, Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian attorney was wrong and the Clinton campaign paying Russian informants is perfectly acceptable.
Is it any wonder that people no longer trust the mainstream media?
*****
The hit piece in The New York Times on Thursday, May 17, is an incredible piece of work. Even if it had run on the editorial page instead of on the front page, it would be incredible for what is left out. But as a news article it is so one-sided and so biased that The New York Times should be embarrassed.
The article is extremely well written and appears to be well researched, but the facts that they chose to include – mixed in with an unhealthy dose of their own opinions – is shocking.
For instance, the article quotes former acting Attorney General Sally Yates as if she is some kind of unbiased source. Yates was fired by Trump. This is information that should be provided to the reader so that the reader can consider her statement, knowing that she may harbor some resentment against the man who ended her long career at the Justice Department by firing her. It could also mention that she was fired for refusing to obey a direct order from her boss, the president of the United States. Simply showing that kind of insubordination should be enough for someone to make the assumption that she is not an unbiased former Justice Department employee.
The article quotes former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe without mentioning that he was fired because the inspector general reported that he had lied repeatedly under oath while deputy director. Isn’t that information that the reader should be provided? The article is quoting a man as a reliable source who – according, not to Trump, not to a Trump appointee, but according to the inspector general appointed by President Barack Obama – was lying under oath.
What about this quote: “Congressional Republicans, led by Representative Devin Nunes of California, have begun to dig into F.B.I. files, looking for evidence that could undermine the investigation.” This is pure opinion. It fails to mention that Nunes is chairman of the House Select Permanent Committee on Intelligence and as such it is his job to dig into FBI files to make certain that the FBI is properly doing its job. If Nunes has said that he is attempting to undermine the investigation of Trump then the article should state that he said it. But the even New York Times reporters don’t know what is in a man’s heart. It appears that Nunes is trying to do his job as chairman of the committee.
Or how about this comment on the investigation of Trump by the FBI: “None was eager to re-enter presidential politics, former officials said, especially when agents did not know what would come of the Australian information.”
A powerful quote – but “none”? So the unnamed former officials had actually talked to all of the agents involved and knew how they all felt?
Who were these former officials? Was one of them McCabe. Was one former FBI Director Jim Comey who was fired by President Trump. What other former officials could possibly speak for all the agents involved in the investigation and know how each and everyone of them felt? I’d be willing to bet that a couple of the agents who were extremely pro-Hillary Clinton were itching to get involved in the investigation.
This is an opinion piece posing as a news article. It wasn’t even run as a “news analysis” piece, which gives reporters more freedom to express opinions. This is a front-page news article. The mainstream media have completely lost any semblance of professionalism when it comes to covering Trump.
It’s a sad day for journalism.
*****
School shootings are tragic and everyone is in agreement that something has to be done to stop them. However, after the school shooting in Florida, the solution promoted by the left and their cohorts in the mainstream media was to ban the particular model of gun used in the shooting – an AR-15.
In Texas, the shooter used a shotgun and a revolver. I haven’t heard anyone in the mainstream media claiming that the way to stop school shootings is to ban shotguns and revolvers.
The use of a shotgun actually demonstrates one of the problems with trying to solve the problem through gun control. Even many countries that have strict gun control laws allow citizens to own shotguns because they are so often used in hunting and are difficult to conceal.
*****
At least the actions by Trump’s enemies are starting to make sense.
I remember watching Rep. Jim Jordan talking about the fact that the Steele dossier may have been paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and if that were true what a horrible abuse of power that represented by the FBI. People seemed to think he was some kind of conspiracy nut because the idea of the FBI using a bunch of false information about one presidential candidate to spy on the other candidate didn’t seem possible. It’s the FBI, after all – one of the most highly respected law enforcement agencies in the world.
Then, by the time it was finally proven that the Steele dossier was definitely paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and by the Democratic National Committee, the mainstream media had decided that it wasn’t so bad. Republicans were outraged, but the Democrats and their colleagues in the mainstream media downplayed it.
Then when it was discovered that the Steele dossier, described by none other than fired FBI Director Comey as “salacious and unverified” turned out to have been used to get a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, this seemed like a horrible abuse of power by the FBI. Comey and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had both signed off on the FISA warrant renewals.
The congressional oversight committees, the very ones that discovered that the Steele dossier was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, asked for the FISA warrant applications because, according to the FBI, the Steele dossier wasn’t used to obtain the warrant but was simply a portion of the application. However, the FBI and the Justice Department have refused to turn over those applications to the congressional oversight committees even though those committees can’t do much oversight if they are only allowed to see what the FBI and Justice Department want them to see.
It has now become obvious why the FBI and Justice Department under the direction of Rosenstein – since Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from everything of any import going on in the Justice Department – has refused to supply these documents to the congressional oversight committees.
It appears there is other information in the FISA warrants and it came from informants the FBI placed in the Trump campaign.
Early reports were that there was one informant, and when the FBI realized that the news of an informant was going to come out, it did what clever operatives do – the FBI leaked a wealth of information about the informant to The New York Times and The Washington Post with the agreement that they wouldn’t print the informant’s name.
This may seem strange to some, but by leaking the information the FBI and the Justice Department are controlling the narrative. They have the information and by leaking out the portions they want, in the order that they want the information to be presented to the public, they can control the narrative.
What they have leaked so far doesn’t look that bad to the mainstream media – a professor with a history of working with the intelligence agencies had a couple of meetings with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. But it has already been discovered that the man they didn’t name, who is Stefan Halper, was also paid several hundred thousand dollars by the FBI, which indicates he was not only working for the FBI but the FBI thought this was valuable information.
Now what is leaking is that the FBI may have had as many as three informants in the Trump campaign. It appears the excuse that is being given is that Page and Papadopoulos had connections to Russia. But what seems to be constantly overlooked by the mainstream media is that Page and Papadopoulos didn’t really work for the Trump campaign.
Trump was being ridiculed in the media because he didn’t have a team of foreign policy experts advising him, so he told his campaign to come up with a list of foreign policy advisors.
These were foreign policy advisors in name only. Nobody in the real Trump campaign was paying any attention to them. These were simply names on a list to trot out when Trump was being abused in the press for not having a foreign policy advisory team.
Page has repeatedly said that he has never even met with Trump. Some of the information that Page was supposed to have handed out to Russians proving beyond any doubt that he was transferring information to Russians were handouts from a class he was teaching.
Also, Page was approached by Russian intelligence agents long before Trump started running for president and he did what a good American citizen would do, he contacted the FBI, which is one of the ways the FBI even knew who he was.
So the FBI knew Page and knew that he had called them when the Russians contacted him. They also knew that he didn’t really have anything to do with the Trump campaign.
So why did the FBI pay an informant to work with someone who they knew wasn’t a Russian spy and wasn’t even a real Trump campaign worker? It seems because they wanted to get inside the Trump campaign and were starting at a low level to work up.
Or what appears more likely is that the FBI was trying to set Trump up. They didn’t care if was really colluding with the Russians or not, if they could make it appear that he was.
Page has been described as “a knucklehead” and by others as an “idiot.” It may have seemed to the FBI that they could catch him in a trap.
Papadopoulos is young and lied on his resume to get on the Trump foreign advisory committee. It also appears that he drinks too much and was fairly easily caught lying to the FBI.
These two weren’t colluding with anyone, but there was certainly a lot of effort put forth to make it appear that they were.
Trump is going to make certain that the congressional oversight committees now receive the information they have been requesting for months and have every legal right to see.
One question the congressional oversight committees will need to ask is how many operatives the FBI had in the Hillary Clinton campaign.
We know for a fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign was paying Russian informants for information about Trump. The money was laundered through a law firm, Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, but it can be traced directly back to the Clinton campaign. So if the FBI felt the need to have informants in the Trump campaign, certainly it had informants in the Hillary Clinton campaign also.
If the FBI didn’t, and so far there is no evidence that it did, then the FBI was using the vast power given to one of the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the world in an attempt to undermine the Trump campaign and keep Trump from being elected president.
But it is actually much worse than that because this wasn’t just the FBI, this was the FBI under President Obama, who was campaigning hard for Hillary Clinton to be elected.
Campaigning is one thing, using the immense power of the federal government to attempt to change the course of an election is something far worse than any previous president has done.
Is it a coincidence that the FBI was using informants and electronic surveillance to attempt to get dirt on the Trump campaign when Obama was out bashing Trump in the strongest terms used on the campaign trail? If it is, that is a mighty big coincidence.
Fortunately for Trump and the American people, the folks at the top of the FBI at the time – Comey and McCabe, both of whom have since been fired – are not that bright about politics. They believed what they were reading in the mainstream media – that Hillary Clinton was absolutely going to win and might win in a huge landslide.
On election night, as the returns were coming in, the mainstream media were still talking about the length of Hillary Clinton’s coattails and whether or not she would be able to pull enough representatives and senators along with her to take control of the House and Senate as well as the White House. They did everything but pop the champagne corks right up until Trump went over 270 electoral votes and then the mainstream media didn’t know what to do because the impossible had happened.
But the FBI knew what to do. It had collected all this information and it could undermine President Trump with an investigation. Certainly a special prosecutor could turn up something.
It is an elaborate plan, but Trump played right into their hands by appointing Sessions as attorney general and having Sessions recuse himself from anything important in the Justice Department. This turned the Trump investigation over to Rosenstein, who was one of the conspirators all along. Rosenstein then wrote a memo all but forcing Trump to fire Comey and then Rosenstein called for a special prosecutor because Trump fired Comey. And Rosenstein hired an old friend of his, and of Comey’s, Bob Mueller, to be the special prosecutor.
What they didn’t count on is that, even given unlimited investigative authority by Rosenstein, Mueller hasn’t been able to come up with anything.
It is looking like the prosecution of Paul Manafort for actions he took a decade before Trump launched his campaign may backfire. Certainly the Mueller team hasn’t impressed the judge hearing the case.
Rosenstein and the FBI also didn’t count on the congressional oversight committees actually performing their job of congressional oversight.
The FBI and the Justice Department knew that the Steele dossier was paid for by the Clinton campaign – former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS trying to get dirt on Trump, so there is no way that the Justice Department didn’t know who was paying for the investigation. Ohr, proving the Justice Department is chock full of people working against Trump, was demoted but not fired and is still working for the Justice Department.
Either the FBI is really incompetent or it also knew what Steele was doing to make his report more credible. He was leaking it to the media and other sources and then using those sources as corroboration of his report. He did this with Yahoo News and the article was cited in one of the FISA warrant applications.
This is an old trick in journalism that is used by unethical journalists all the time. We know that Steele did the same thing.
At the end of all of this, some folks need to go to prison. Using the power of the FBI to try and affect the outcome of a presidential election cannot be tolerated. If the people behind this whole scandal don’t spend a good bit of time in prison, the FBI and the Justice Department will try it again and next time they should be better at it.
Those who don’t go to prison who had any involvement need to be fired. It will be a blow to the FBI and the Justice Department, but simply obeying orders on something of this magnitude is not good enough. Someone in the FBI or the Justice Department should have stepped forward and blown the whistle on what was happening. Anyone who knew and didn’t come forward with the information that the FBI and the Justice Department were meddling in the election at the very least can no longer work for the federal government.
At this point, Trump should let the congressional oversight committees, which have done a good job up until now, lead the investigation. And when all the dirty details are out there, Trump needs to clean house.
He has to start with Sessions, who in this case appears to be a useful idiot, and get someone in as attorney general that doesn’t mind hiring a whole new department.
Director Christopher Wray over the FBI was not involved in the crime, but he is certainly involved in the cover-up. Agent Peter Strzok is still working for the FBI.
And, of course, this could lead to Obama. He had have at least known about all of this, and certainly his attorney general, Loretta Lynch, had to have been involved.
Perhaps what Lynch and Bill Clinton were talking about on the plane in Phoenix was not the investigation of Hillary Clinton, because all of that had already been decided months earlier. Perhaps Bill Clinton wanted an update on what was going on in the Trump campaign from the FBI informants he knew were there. It’s certainly possible.
The only thing we know for certain about that meeting was that the two didn’t have a private meeting with no aides present to discuss their grandchildren and golf. If they are such big buddies and like to have private time together to talk about grandchildren and golf, perhaps some enterprising reporter could find out how many times they have met privately since the meeting in Phoenix just to gab with each other. I have no information, but I’d bet a lot of money that they haven’t met privately since.
*****
Since the Monday, May 21 meeting between Rosenstein, Wray and Trump, liberals in the media have written reams about how unprecedented it is for the president to step in and order the Justice Department to take action.
It doesn’t seem that unprecedented to me. President Obama stepped in between Congress and the Justice Department when Eric Holder was the attorney general and Congress was investigating Fast and Furious. But that was Obama, so whatever he did was by definition acceptable.
But one thing the liberal media keep ignoring is that the FBI chose to leak the information about an informant in the Trump campaign to The New York Times and The Washington Post. It seems the liberal media is saying that it is acceptable for the FBI to leak the information it wants out in the public to the media, but being forced to provide information to congressional oversight committees that have every right to the information is somehow unprecedented.
How could the congressional oversight committees provide any real oversight if they are only allowed to see the documents that the FBI and Justice Department want them to see?
It probably is unprecedented to have an FBI and Justice Department so politically partisan that they are actively working to overthrow a sitting president. In my opinion, Trump is showing a great deal of restraint.
One of the reasons the liberal media give to justify not giving the information to the congressional oversight committees is that then the information will leak to the media. So their belief is that the FBI and the Justice Department should be able to leak anything they want to the media – as they did in the case of the spy in the Trump campaign – but the congressional committees shouldn’t be able to leak information that puts the FBI in a bad light?
Trump said he was going to drain the swamp when he got to Washington and it is doubtful he had any idea just how difficult that was going to be. His own administration is fighting tooth and claw against him.
Trump made huge mistakes in dealing with the FBI and the Justice Department. He never should have allowed Comey to serve one minute as the FBI director. He never should have appointed Sessions as attorney general. He never should have allowed Rosenstein to serve in his administration. But Trump even went so far as to appoint hardcore Obama disciple Sally Yates as acting attorney general.
Trump was enormously naive about the ways of Washington when he took office. I imagine he thought that Sessions, being a big supporter of his, would have his back. It turned out Sessions, by his timidity, is allowing longtime Washington insiders to stab Trump in the back every time he turns around.
Politically Trump is in an untenable position. But imagine for a moment if, instead of Sessions, Trump had Rudy Giuliani as attorney general. He wouldn’t be having any of these problems.
Of course, in the end Trump may come out way ahead after all this is over because now we know that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier that was used to get FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. And now we know that the FBI had informants in the Trump campaign.
An amazing editorial in The New York Times states they discovered that seven people involved in the Trump campaign met with Russians or people linked to Russia.
It was a big campaign. I’m assuming that those seven include Page and Papadopoulos, neither one of whom worked for the campaign, but who were both on some list of foreign policy advisors. Campaigns have all sorts of lists of advisors. I would imagine that if you went through the lists of Hillary Clinton’s advisors you would find all sorts of questionable people.
And what in the world does “linked to Russia” mean? Is that someone with a Russian ancestor, someone who has visited Moscow or perhaps someone who has done business in Russia? Maybe what they mean is someone like Hillary Clinton who attempted to “reset” relations with Russia. Who knows? It’s a great term because it can mean anything.
*****
One of the valuable lessons kids should learn from sports is how to be a good winner or loser. It is unfortunate that Hillary Clinton never learned these lessons.
She lost the presidential election. She can blame herself. She can blame Trump. She can blame the weather. But none of that makes any difference because she lost. The votes were counted 18 months ago. Trump has been president for well over a year, and how or why she lost really doesn’t make any difference.
It’s time for Hillary Clinton to quit campaigning against the president. Maybe she could go to work on the Clinton Foundation. She worked hard to get all that money for the Clinton Foundation, perhaps now is the time to try and do something useful with that money. Having a couple of huge conferences/parties every year isn’t changing the world.
*****
If you want proof that socialism doesn’t work, Venezuela is a prime example. Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves in the world, more than Saudi Arabia, more than Canada and more than Iran and Iraq combined. But the economy is in tatters and people are starving and leaving the country in droves.
It should be one of the richest countries in the world, but the government has completely destroyed the economy.
