Wednesday, January 31, 2018

House Republicans 'Charting Path' to Release Explosive FISA Memo

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., returns to a secure area in the Capitol where his panel is interviewing former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as part of its ongoing Russia investigation, in Washington.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
House Republicans, led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, are reportedly in the process of moving forward on releasing the explosive classified memo on alleged surveillance abuses.
According to the Washington Examiner's Byron York,  Reps. Nunes, Gowdy, and Goodlatte met on Saturday to discuss memo and chart a path forward.
In addition to York, Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio) also shared information about the effort to release the memo on Twitter Saturday.
According to Joyce, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) is in the process of releasing the classified memo. The process may take up to 19 congressional work days.
A group of 65 Republican lawmakers pushed for the immediate release of the alleged bombshell document in a letter to Nunes on Friday.
In the letter, Florida Rep. Gaetz states thate “the audience of this document should not be limited to Members of Congress — the American people deserve to know the information it contains.”
Approximately 180 members have now read the memo, including at least three Democrats, according to York.
CNN reported on Saturday that Republicans on the HPSCI were "considering using an obscure committee rule" to bypass executive branch declassification hurdles in order to publicly release the memo.
Rep. Mike Conaway, the Texas Republican leading the committee's Russia investigation, said he believed the rule "had never been invoked in the committee's 40-year history."
The four-page memo reveals what some Republicans are calling “shocking,” “troubling,” and “alarming” government surveillance abuses under President Obama. One congressman — Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — even likened the details of the memo currently circulating in Congress to "KGB activity in Russia."
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said that when the details of the document become known, not only are some Obama holdovers currently serving in the Trump administration going to get fired, they are going to jail.
If the committee votes in favor to make the bombshell document public, it falls on President Donald Trump to decide whether it should be released.

Flashback: Jerry Brown, Biden and other Dems refused to accept Vietnamese refugees

by WorldTribune Staff
Some liberal Democrats are fighting back tears when discussing President Donald Trump’s travel ban on Muslims from seven nations.
But in 1975, leftist Dems went to great lengths to keep Vietnamese refugees (even orphans) out of the United States.
During his first stint as governor, Jerry Brown fought to stop Vietnamese refugees from being delivered to California. /AP
Trump issued the order, the White House said, so that a better system to vet refugees coming from those nations can be put into place.
The Democrat complaints in 1975 appeared to center on the fact that the refugees were escaping communism, an ideology, analysts say, liberals did not find that objectionable.
Leading the effort to ban the Vietnamese refugees was California’s Gov. Jerry Brown. Other prominent Democrats calling for the ban were Delaware’s Sen. Joe Biden, former presidential “peace candidate” George McGovern, and New York Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman.
Julia Taft, who in 1975 headed up President Gerald Ford’s Inter-agency Task Force on Indochinese refugee resettlement, told author Larry Engelmann in his book, “Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam” that “the new governor of California, Jerry Brown, was very concerned about refugees settling in his state.”
National Public Radio host Debbie Elliott retraced Brown’s refusal to accept any refugees in a January 2007 interview with Taft. According to a transcript, which was aired on its flagship program, “All Things Considered,” Taft said, “our biggest problem came from California due to Brown.” She called his rejection of Vietnamese refugees “a moral blow.”
Taft recalled another reason liberals opposed the refugees: “They said they had too many Hispanics, too many people on welfare, they didn’t want these people.”
“They didn’t want any of these refugees, because they had also unemployment,” she told NPR.
“They had already a large number of foreign-born people there. They had – they said they had too many Hispanics, too many people on welfare, they didn’t want these people.”
Author Larry Clinton Thompson recounted in his book, “Refugee Workers in the Indochina Exodus,” that Brown said, “We can’t be looking 5,000 miles away and at the same time neglecting people who live here.”
The CQ Almanac shows New York’s Elizabeth Holtzman – who was one of the House’s most visible liberal congresswomen — opposed helping the Vietnamese refugees. She said, according to CQ Almanac, “some of her constituents felt that the same assistance and compassion was not being shown to the elderly, unemployed and poor in this country.”
Rep. Donald Riegle, a liberal representative from Michigan who later would serve as its senator, offered an amendment that would have barred funds for the refugees unless similar assistance was given to Americans. The amendment was rejected by the House, 346 to 71, according to the Almanac.
Another House Democrat even tried to slow down the airlift of Vietnamese orphans. The Almanac reported that Rep. Joshua Eilberg, the Democratic chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and International Law, accused the Ford administration of having acted “with unnecessary haste” in the evacuation of the orphans.
Then-Sen. Joe Biden tried to slow down the refugee bill in the Senate, complaining that he needed more details about the quickly unfolding refugee problem before he would support it. He said the White House “had not informed Congress adequately about the number of refugees,” according to the Library of Congress history of the legislation.
Quang X. Pham, who was born in Saigon and later served as a Marine pilot in the Persian Gulf War, later criticized Biden in an op-ed published by the Washington Post on December 30, 2006. Quang wrote, Biden “charged that the [Ford] Administration had not informed Congress adequately about the number of refugees — as if anyone actually knew during the chaotic evacuation.”
Twenty years later, another Democrat was getting a standing ovation in Congress for demanding stronger border defenses, and deporting criminal illegal immigrants.
In his 1995 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton said:
“We are a nation of immigrants.. but we are a nation of laws. Our nation is rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country…
“Illegal immigrants take jobs from citizens or legal immigrants, they impose burdens on our taxpayers…
“That is why we are doubling the number of border guards, deporting more illegal immigrants than ever before, cracking down on illegal hiring, barring benefits to illegal aliens, and we will do more to speed the deportation of illegal immigrants arrested for crimes…
“It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws that has occurred in the last few years.. .and we must do more to stop it.”

IS TRUMP ABOUT TO TRUMP THE DEMS ON IMMIGRATION?

IS TRUMP ABOUT TO TRUMP THE DEMS ON IMMIGRATION?

Angelo Codevilla and, as Paul has noted, Mark Krikorian both express dismay over President Trump’s offer of a path to citizenship for up to 1.8 million illegal immigrants who could be classified as among the “dreamers” (kids brought here by their parents), which is a lot more than the 800,000 or so officially registered DACAns.
They are right on the merits. But I wonder if Trump isn’t calling the bluff of the Democrats about the DACAns. I don’t think Democrats want a deal—or any deal short of complete amnesty for everyone and anyone, which ain’t gonna happen. I’m guessing the Democrats would rather have the issue to run on in November, thinking they can whip up their base and, if they gain a majority of one or both houses of Congress in November, cram what they want down Trump’s throat. Resistance and all that. The last thing they want is for Trump to have a signing ceremony on the White House lawn for an immigration reform that has eluded the last three presidents, and which will necessarily involve compromises that will leave people on both sides unhappy to some extent. (Above all they can’t give Trump the satisfaction over The Wall, even though that would be the sensible thing substantively for Democrats to trade away.) But it would remove the issue for Democrats, and likely boost Trump with some Hispanic voters, where some polls show him actually increasing support from election day 2016. Mickey Kausthinks along the same lines. (See below.)
I’m hoping the Democrats are this stupid and will stick with this intransigent position, rather than running on the issues where they might actually find more favor from the general public. Meanwhile, Democrats say they are going to have some DACA kids in the gallery for Trump’s upcoming state of the union speech. Some clever person has suggested that Trump mention one of them out by name, note that he’s ready to offer them a path to citizenship, and that they should ask Chuck and Nancy why they are standing in the way of it. Stand back, and watch liberal/media heads explode.

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

EXPLOSIVE HOUSE MEMO TO BE RELEASED, AS MCCABE LEAVES FBI

EXPLOSIVE HOUSE MEMO TO BE RELEASED, AS MCCABE LEAVES FBI

The House Intelligence Committee voted today to release the four-page memo that sums up FBI and Department of Justice abuses relating to the Steele dossier, the Obama administration’s FISA applications, and improper spying on the Trump campaign by the Obama administration.
It appears that the memo’s contents are as has been rumored:
South Carolina GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy, who helped write the four-page memo, said Sunday he wants it made public.
He also suggested the memo indeed addresses whether the FBI relied at least in part on the dossier — paid for partially by Democrats and the Clinton campaign during the 2016 presidential election — to apply to a secret federal court to get a surveillance warrant, purportedly on then-Trump adviser Carter Page.
“If you … want to know whether or not the dossier was used in court proceedings, whether or not it was vetted before it was used. … If you are interested in who paid for the dossier … then, yes, you’ll want the memo to come out,” Gowdy told “Fox News Sunday.”
You can also judge the memo’s contents from the remarks of arch-Democrat Adam Schiff:
“Today this committee voted to put the president’s personal interests, perhaps their own political interests, above the Democratic Party’s national interests,” the Democrat said.
President Trump has five days in which he can block the memo’s release. I don’t know why he would want to do that.
More good news: Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI, resigned today. Better late than never:
Andrew G. McCabe abruptly stepped down on Monday as the F.B.I.’s deputy director after months of withering criticism from President Trump, telling friends he felt pressure from the head of the bureau to leave, according to two people close to Mr. McCabe.
If that is true, it is the most tangible contribution that Christopher Wray has made as FBI Director. The New York Times, in the linked article, says that Wray had expressed concerns about the forthcoming Inspector General’s report “examining the actions of Mr. McCabe and other senior F.B.I. officials during the 2016 presidential campaign, when the bureau was investigating both Hillary Clinton’s email use and the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.”
The Times manages to report on McCabe’s ouster without mentioning that Democratic Party activists in the FBI apparently held meetings in McCabe’s office, where they talked about the 2016 election and whether Donald Trump could or should be blocked from winning. Hence, Peter Strzok’s famous text in August 2016:
I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.
Is is long overdue for political activists like Andrew McCabe to depart from the FBI. As I have written many times, Barack Obama’s politicization of the Department of Justice, including the FBI, is perhaps the worst scandal of his administration.

COMMENTARY: Looming scandal will hammer the Democrats

COMMENTARY: Looming scandal will hammer the Democrats

The fix was in. The 2016 election was rigged — and Donald Trump won anyway.
All hell is breaking loose in D.C. The next few weeks will be the most shocking in America’s history. The revelations about to be made public will shake this nation to its core.
Liberals who watch only CNN and MSNBC probably haven’t a clue what’s about to hit them. Trust me, that light at the end of the tunnel is a train headed straight for the Democrat Party.
We all know — thanks to former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile — that Hillary rigged the Democrat presidential primary against Bernie Sanders. That was a precursor of what was to come.
Does it shock anyone that someone brazen enough to rig a presidential primary would also try to rig the general election?
Don’t look now, but Donald J. Trump may be the first person in world history to win an election rigged against him. Hillary — with the backing of Barack Obama and the leadership of the FBI and Department of Justice — fixed the general election so Trump couldn’t win. And Trump — this relentless bull in a china shop — won anyway.
No wonder Hillary was so confident in the days leading up to Election Day. No wonder she was so shocked and distraught on election night. Keep in mind the point of fixing the election. It wasn’t just about Hillary winning. It was about covering up her crimes.
It’s all coming down upon this cabal of criminals like a ton of boulders. Hillary, Obama, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, John Podesta, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, Huma Abedin and leaders of the FBI and DOJ — they’re all looking at possible prison terms as this massive, brazen scandal and conspiracy unravels.
First there’s the recent testimony of the co-founder of Fusion GPS. He admitted the FBI may very well have paid for the travel expenses of the author of the dossier — a fraudulent work of fiction used by the same FBI to obtain FISA warrants against Trump and his team. If the FBI leadership was doing the bidding of Hillary, her campaign and the DNC, who together paid millions for the fake dossier, based on lies from Russian officials, it’s not just fraud and abuse of the FISA court. It could very well be called treason.
Think of their goals. First, to use the dossier itself to frame and slander Trump during the campaign. Second, to use the dossier to get warrants and listen in on Trump. Third, to use what they found through surveillance to feed Hillary all the campaign inside info she needed to guarantee victory. Fourth, if by miracle Trump still won, use what they heard to frame his team and impeach Trump. This is Watergate on steroids.
Then there is a four-page memo just made available to the entire House of Representatives. Members of Congress who have seen the memo call it “shocking,” “explosive,” “alarming” and “mind-blowing.” They say it shows conspiracy and collusion between the Obama administration, the FBI, the DOJ and the Clinton campaign to stop Trump from reaching the White House.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said, “Part of me wishes I didn’t read it, because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country.”
This is a political earthquake. Before this is over, the Democrat Party will be in shambles. The legacies of Hillary and Obama will be in ashes. The FBI may never recover.
And dare I say it? Hillary herself could wind up in prison — along with many of her closest friends and confidants.
But the most amazing part of all is … somehow, Trump won a rigged election.
Contact Wayne Allyn Root at Wayne@ROOTforAmerica.com. Hear of watch the nationally syndicated “WAR Now: The Wayne Allyn Root Show,” from 3 to 6 p.m. daily at 790 Talk Now and at 5 p.m. on Newsmax TV.

Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   1/30/2018

              Secrets, lies shouted from roofs

From Luke 12, “what you have whispered…will be proclaimed from the roofs.” It seems to apply to numerous recent events. Exposed secrets felled the FBI’s McCabe, Strzok and Page. The Democrat/media/Deep State complex falsely thought Trump guilty of secret “Russian collusion; the real secret “Russian collusion” was the use of Russia-sourced propaganda by Clinton, the DNC and FBI partisans in a despicable attempt to smear Trump—to this day.
Reporters harbor such inner anathema and self-righteous indignation towards President Trump that USA Today featured a wishful piece about how “Trump may give his speech to an empty room,” the day before he addressed the Davos Economic Forum. Funny thing how, for the actual speech, it was British PM Theresa May that suffered embarrassment as her hall emptied out so that her audience could rush to get their place in the “standing room only” venue for Trump’s appearance. Imagine that: Trump is popular in Davos; they lined up for an hour.
Sometimes, news “journalists” willingly pull the veil aside to reveal their inner anti-American bent; Ryan Cooper posted a piece at “The Week” titled “America’s Constitution is terrible. Let’s throw it out and start over.” It’s been an accepted, secret position among the progressive/liberal left for most of a century that America’s founding documents were deeply flawed and in need of being “fundamentally transformed.” To wit: Woodrow Wilson’s denigration of said documents. FDR (and just about every prominent Democrat up to and including Barack Obama) spoke of a “positive Bill of Rights”—specifying what the government (meaning We, the People) owes We, the People—replacing the “negative” protections from the government at the core of the actual Bill of Rights.
It is slowly dawning on many Americans that Democrats don’t really care a fig about the DACA immigrants, or the “Dreamers” for that matter, beyond their usefulness as prospective mindless future Democrat voters. Hence, the Democrats’ obsession with legalization for their furthest distant relative—together with California-style automatic voter registration for the “undocumented”—while playing “Lucy with the football” to Republican Charlie Browns. Undefeatable protection and prohibitions against future illegal entry? Disingenuous promises.
In another cartoon-character analogy, it’s been over 30 years since the first Wimpy–like Democrat offer to “gladly give you border security later for legalization today.” If the Schumer-led Democrats don’t give whatever Trump wants for fencing, walls, and ending chain migration and lottery visas, they alone are the ones saying “no” to DACA and “Dreamer” status.
The accusation that Donald Trump somehow “colluded” with Russians to win the election suggests a serious, impeachable offense; however, there is no federal statute being cited on which to base the evidence, if any is discovered, of criminality. You might not know that Mueller is not seeking a criminal case against Trump. It is an open-ended intelligence inquiry that, as former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has thoroughly proven, has never relied on evidence that justify a federal criminal warrant. Hence, the reliance on the far-lower standard necessary for a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant, which was done to secure authority to “surveil” (including “wiretaps”) the Trump campaign and transition. To date, no proof of collusion has emerged, as admitted by every Democrat.
However, to the extent that those FISA warrants were predicated on the so-called “Steele Dossier”—the product of real, verifiable collusion between the Hillary campaign, the DNC, Fusion GPS, Steele and numerous unnamed Russian government and spy sources—the request for said warrants would be laughed out of a criminal court judge’s chambers. It’s called “insufficient evidence” to warrant a Fourth Amendment search of a private citizen’s effects.
The fact is, in a news media/unnamed-source environment, nothing damning has been leaked to provide the voters and taxpayers with reason to believe the trope of “Trump/Russian collusion.” That should give any fair-minded person sufficient reason to dismiss it; Trump has repeatedly and confidently asserted it a witch-hunt, a well-funded fishing expedition—basically, wild assertions in search of a crime, or even proof. What “process crimes” have, so far, been charged (Michael Flynn) or admitted (Papadopoulos) are irrelevant if all they ever had to go on were the flimsy spy-novel-type of wild, unverified, unprovable stories from Steele’s dossier.
Hence, we’ve circled around to a perversion of the Luke adages: What is being disclosed, “made known” and “proclaimed from the roofs” (an allusion, perhaps, to current communication technology) is not what was actually “concealed,” “hidden” or “whispered” as the Democrat/media partisans would have us believe. It more resembles the “lies that circle the world before the truth can get its slippers on.” Through the subpoenaed DOJ and FBI documents (legally acquired despite opposition from key people), Republicans have written a summary memo to inform the public. We are now in the midst of discovering what hitherto secret perfidy has been done to promulgate phony charges of “Russian collusion” against Trump.

Democrats and the corrupt investigators in those two agencies are now in a last-ditch, full assault to prevent disclosure of the scandalous methods and fraudulent processes that have been employed by a cabal of partisans. They’re willing to cast aside propriety, rules, constitutional protections and common decency to effectively conduct a “coup de tat” against the duly elected President, Donald J. Trump. But for a judicial veneer, much like the “emperor’s new clothes,” their intentions and methods reveal an attempted coup, a crass power grab by Democrats in the DOJ, FBI, Congress and the media. The goal: remove a political enemy, reversing the election.

THE SAD DECLINE OF THE FBI: YOU READ IT HERE FIRST [UPDATED]

THE SAD DECLINE OF THE FBI: YOU READ IT HERE FIRST [UPDATED]

The FBI scandals continue to unravel. Scott has chronicled the saga of the missing Strzok/Page text messages, now apparently on the road to recovery. The FBI has continued to stonewall Congressional investigations, to the point where Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley says the FBI is playing “a bureaucratic game of hide the ball.”
And House Republicans have prepared a four-page memo that apparently summarizes the FBI’s malfeasance in connection with the fake Trump dossier. Some who have read it say it may lead to criminal prosecutions within the Department of Justice. DOJ is demanding a look at the memo, but so far House Republicans won’t turn it over. Why? Because they know what Justice bureaucrats will do with it. They will leak it to their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post so they can preemptively attack the memo before the public gets to see it.
These scandals have been going on for quite a while, but people are finally beginning to notice. Howie Carr says it is time to abolish the FBI. Is that going too far? Maybe, but the Bureau has been coasting on its reputation for a long, long time. At a minimum, I would say that those who can be fired within the Bureau’s leadership, should be. Starting with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Rasmussen finds that a remarkable number of voters support appointment of another special counsel to investigate the FBI:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 49% of Likely U.S. Voters believe a special prosecutor should be named to investigate whether senior FBI officials handled the investigation of Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump in a legal and unbiased fashion. Thirty-one percent (31%) disagree, but a sizable 19% are not sure.
To say that the FBI has lost the confidence of the American people is an understatement. But it isn’t just the FBI; Barack Obama corrupted the Department of Justice from the top down. Those who were paying attention have known this for a long time. We started writing about the DOJ scandals early in Obama’s administration. I haven’t done a thorough search, and this may not be the first such instance, but on September 7, 2010, a year and a half into Obama’s first term, I wrote:
One of the real scandals these days is the way in which Barack Obama and Eric Holder have politicized the Department of Justice. The Democrats criticized the Bush administration for politicizing DOJ, but that was sheer fabrication. It didn’t happen. Immediately upon taking office, however, Obama and Holder embarked on a program of partisan law enforcement the likes of which this country may never have seen before.
A few months later, on January 28, 2011, I wrote:
The corruption of the Department of Justice under Barack Obama and Eric Holder is one of the saddest of many sad stories that have emerged from the Obama administration. Under Obama, the Department has been politicized to a degree this country has never experienced; certainly not in its modern history.
In the years that have gone by since then, Obama’s corruption of the Department of Justice, including but not limited to the FBI, has been a recurrent theme on this site. If “mainstream” reporters had joined us in blowing the whistle on DOJ’s rather obvious corruption under the Obama/Holder/Lynch regime, would we ever have gotten to the point where Loretta Lynch was meeting with Bill Clinton, apparently to assure him that Hillary was safe from prosecution, regardless of the evidence, while senior FBI officials huddled to discuss how they could prevent the outsider, Donald Trump, from assuming the presidency?
Perhaps not.
UPDATE: At the Hill, Sharyl Attkisson weighs in: “As walls close in on FBI, the bureau lashes out at its antagonists.”
Democrats and many in the media are taking the side of the intelligence community, calling the Republican efforts partisan. House Democrats are said to be writing a counter-memo.
“We need to produce our own memo that lays out the actual facts and shows how the majority memo distorts the work of the FBI and the Department of Justice,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Which is consistent, obviously, with the fact that what we are dealing with here is the unprecedented politicization of the Department of Justice by Barack Obama and his minions.
Meantime, the Department of Justice has officially warned the House Intelligence Committee not to release its memo. It’s like the possible defendant in a criminal trial threatening prosecutors for having the audacity to reveal alleged evidence to the judge and jury.
More evidence of how far gone in Democratic Party partisanship the Department of Justice is. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a conservative Attorney General? Someone like Jeff Sessions?
This is the first time I can recall open government groups and many reporters joining in the argument to keep the information secret. They are strangely uncurious about alleged improprieties with implications of the worst kind: Stasi-like tactics used against Americans.
Actually, I don’t think it is surprising at all. “Jim Treacher” diagnosed this journalistic disease long ago:
Michael Ramirez gets the last word. Click to enlarge: