Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Don's Tuesday Column


              THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   5/01/2018

            Leakers, liars and sleazeballs

The pardoning of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, by President Trump, had me revisiting Libby’s conviction over the disclosure of a CIA employee’s name, Valerie Plame. It has echoes and parallels to the supposed Russian collusion by the Trump campaign in the 2016 election—bad, ugly and worse.
What jumped out of several news reports on the history of the Plame affair was the absence of several relevant facts proving the innocence of Scooter Libby for the non-crime of confirming the identity of Ms. Plame to news media. Not mentioned: 1) Plame had ceased being a field operative years prior to her name surfacing in news reports prompted by her husband’s (Joe Wilson) trip to Africa to try to verify Saddam Hussein’s attempt to acquire uranium for his nuclear weapons program. That program was real; Hussein’s intentions were noted in UN inspection reports. Wilson himself brought attention to Plame, who the AP and others still misidentify as a “covert operative.”
 2) The special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was well aware early in the investigation that the actual source of Plame’s name was a Colin Powell staffer, Richard Armitage. 3) The actual supposed crime by Libby was tied to statements by journalist Judith Miller, who was manipulated by Fitzgerald into making inaccurate statements that he then used to secure an indictment against Libby, who neither lied nor leaked illegally. Interestingly, James Comey was involved in that miscarriage of justice; he got Fitzgerald appointed and should have been aware of the facts that exonerated Libby. 
The withdrawal of Admiral Ronny Jackson from appointment to head the VA, coincidentally, shines a light on yet another example of the shameful perfidy of baseless accusations by Democrats, an “ends justifies the means” craven political fight. Democrat Senator-and-now-hack John Tester spewed lies (that’s what they are when thrown into the public sphere with nothing but some unnamed person’s say-so as proof) about Jackson drunkenly wrecking a car after a party. The rest of the baseless charges were likewise false.
It has now become just another tactic and tool to advance disgusting political warfare by the Democrats: Make stuff up, farm it out to compliant news media as “sources say,” gin up the reliable outrage machine by members of a “victims group” –and count on weak-kneed Republicans to run away from a Dem-created stench. So, where do Admiral Jackson and Scooter Libby go to get their stellar, untarnished reputations back?
How long will it take for the entire Democrat/news media complex to admit the vacuousness of baseless charges of Trump/Russia collusion, as is now proven by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Its 253-page “Report on Russian Active Measures” should send the partisans on the left away in shame, tails between legs, hopefully to never ask us to swallow another load of bovine refuse spread solely to punish and drive their enemies to ground.
We now have “admissions against interest” by both “James boys,” Comey and Clapper, showing them to be “leakers, liars and sleazeballs” (credit Powerlineblog.com). Comey admits that he not only never told Trump that the “Russian (Steele) dossier” was paid-for-dirt by the Hillary gang and the DNC, but he also expressed the fantastic belief that Republicans first funded Christopher Steele. No, The Free Beacon employed Fusion GPS, a dirt digger, I mean research firm for hire, but ended the collaboration before Steele was involved. He knows that, the liar!
Comey still insists against logic and FBI policy that his memos on meeting Trump were “like a diary,” although written with FBI resources, on FBI time and after meeting his boss, Trump. He unbelievably “never saw any bias” in the texts between lovers Strzok and Page, which dripped with their anathema and machinations to undermine candidate and then-President Trump. Bret Baier (Fox News interviewer) got Comey to admit to just wanting to keep his job rather than “push back on the president, who you said made you very uncomfortable.” He leaked classified material to his professor and lawyer friend to get it to the NY Times. Ends justify means, again.
In Mr. Clapper’s case (Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, who infamously lied to Congress about Americans’ communications being surveilled), he is now found to have lied to Congress when asked “Did you discuss the dossier or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists?” Clapper: “No.” He later admitted to talking to CNN’s Jake Tapper about the dossier so as to get it into his preferred outlet’s hands. CNN then hired Clapper as an analyst in August 2017. Conservative blogger Sean Davis pithily summed it up: “After getting dossier leaks from James Clapper, CNN ran a story featuring James Clapper denying that James Clapper leaked to CNN.”
Jack Goldsmith nailed it when he wrote that “there is significant evidence that the deep state has used secretly collected information opportunistically and illegally to sabotage the president.”
It should be no surprise that well over half (54%) “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, up from 49%” in January. Even “46% of Democrats said they would like to see a special prosecutor for the FBI.” (Rasmussen)
Meanwhile, 1) progressive Ruy Teixeira wrote about how the California model for marginalizing Republicans should be a road map for the entire country; 2) much of the Democrat left simply don’t feel the need to accept election results they don’t like; 3) the reality appears to be that laws and justice are applied in unequal measure depending on party; and 4) Mo Brooks (R-AL) said, “the assassination risk may become a factor in Republican retirements.” (Re: the murder attempt by “Bernie bro” James Hodgkinson of Steve Scalise at a baseball practice) It threatens our republic.

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