The Many Unanswered Questions About the Trump Investigation

Sharyl Attkisson

   

Commentary

With the Justice Department’s release of the “summary” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, some Americans are spiking the football. There was no coordination or collusion of any kind between Russia and President Donald Trump—or any American, says Mueller. There will be no arrests or indictments for any such alleged crime.

Others remain unconvinced. They are certain that Mueller’s full report, if revealed, will somehow tell an entirely different story. They want the investigations of Trump and his associates to continue. Indeed, some Democrats in Congress promise to soldier on.

But it seems there are a few major questions that all sides might wish to ask.

If, in the end, Mueller found no convincing evidence that Americans colluded with Russia, how did top current and former U.S. intel officials supposedly become so convinced otherwise?

In fact, one might ask, were they really convinced, or were they promulgating a narrative they knew was at best unproven and quite possibly false?

And if so, why?

Answering those questions requires digging into some details that investigators and reporters haven’t seemed terribly curious about. Here are just a few of them.

How and why did ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele come to meet with certain Russian sources close to President Vladimir Putin in 2016, as they supposedly passed on the wildest sort of rumors about Trump, which Steele then wrote up in his “dossier” for Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS?

Did these Russian sources, Steele, and Simpson conspire to influence the 2016 campaign?

How did the former UK ambassador to Russia, Sir Andrew Wood, learn about the “dossier,” and how was it that he then told Sen. John McCain and McCain’s onetime adviser David Kramer about it as they attended a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November 2016?

Did this contact qualify as an additional foreign attempt to influence our election?

Who at the FBI and Justice Department believed that the dossier, funded by Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign, passed the credibility test without even minimal verification?

Who further determined that the dossier merited inclusion as evidence in an application to wiretap Trump campaign adviser Carter Page?

Who thought it was a valid idea to continue to wiretap Page, time after time after time, as if he were a Russian agent, while they apparently turned up no evidence that he was?

Did any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges question the FBI’s relentless pursuit of Carter Page and the dragnet the wiretaps allowed them to secretly cast for those around him, including, quite possibly, Trump?

Who was behind the campaign of anti-Trump leaks—frequently including false information—that became ubiquitous in the news media?

Who worked to make the entire false conspiracy theory about Russia colluding with Trump or the Trump campaign dominate our news and political landscape day in and day out?

What does it say about the judgment of some of our one-time top intel officials if they really believed Trump colluded with Russia? This includes former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former national security adviser Susan Rice, and former ambassador Samantha Power.

What other mistakes did they make, and what actions did they take based on any such mistakes?

Were any of the “unmaskings” of American citizens by these intel officials in 2016 politically motivated?

Power reportedly told Congress that many of the hundreds of “unmasking” requests made in her name in 2016 were not made by her. It should be simple to track where those requests originated and who signed her name to them. Has anybody attempted to learn who committed this alleged national security crime?

What did the Justice Department ever do about the criminal referral Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made against Steele in January 2018?

What happened to the criminal referral made by the Justice Department inspector general almost a year ago against former FBI official Andrew McCabe over his alleged lying to investigators about his media contacts?

Has anyone been held accountable for the FBI’s supposedly lost or accidentally erased text messages and emails relevant to the investigation?

Were some of those involved in furthering the false Trump–Russia collusion narrative trying to deflect from real crimes or other wrongdoing? If so, what?

Did Mueller’s investigation touch upon or attempt to answer any of these questions as his work led him to conclude that Trump–Russia collusion never happened?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-many-unanswered-questions-about-the-trump-investigation_2853788.html

Blacklisting Chick-fil-A

In San Antonio, a popular fast-food chain becomes the target of a progressive crusade.

Mark Pulliam

March 26, 2019 

Texas

The Social Order

No one is surprised when cities like San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle enact policies driven by the latest progressive imperatives. In Texas, where I live, observers have long believed that a statewide Republican majority would insulate the Lone Star State from such pressure. Capital city Austin’s traditionally liberal politics—its unofficial slogan is “Keep Austin Weird”—have usually seemed like an exception to the statewide rule. But now it appears that San Antonio, the state’s second-biggest city (and seventh-largest in the U.S.), has gotten “woke,” too, blacklisting a well-respected business because of its owners’ political contributions and religious beliefs.  

San Antonio’s left-leaning city council, backed by mayor Ron Nirenberg, recently banned Chick-fil-A from becoming a concessionaire at the city-operated international airport. City officials reportedly cited Chick-fil-A’s political positions as justification for its boycott of the company: “With this decision, the City Council reaffirmed the work our city has done to become a champion of equality and inclusion,” said councilman Roberto Treviño. “San Antonio is a city full of compassion, and we do not have room in our public facilities for a business with a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior.”

The city is targeting a company that is about as mainstream American as it gets. Chick-fil-A is wildly successful because it offers appealing fast food and courteous service at reasonable prices. The privately owned fast-food chain, based in Georgia, operates more than 2,100 restaurants in 46 states and the District of Columbia (including 32 outlets in the San Antonio area, employing more than 2,000 people). Founded in 1946 by a devout Christian, family-owned Chick-fil-A is famously closed on Sundays. Yet despite operating only six days a week, Chick-fil-A leads the fast-food industry in average sales per restaurant. The company has rapidly expanded, becoming the nation’s third-largest fast food chain, behind McDonald’s and Wendy’s.

The charge that Chick-fil-A is “anti-LGBTQ” is based on its owners’ private contributions (made through the WinShape Foundation) and statements in support of traditional marriage. The city does not claim that the company’s employment practices or business policies are illegal; Chick-fil-A’s personnel policies conform to federal employment law, and the company has issued a statement of respect for all people, regardless of sexual orientation, in an internal document called “Chick-fil-A: Who We Are.” Nonetheless, LGBT activists have targeted Chick-fil-A for years. In 2012, when LGBT groups organized a national campaign to boycott the chain for its owners’ opposition to same-sex marriage, a backlash by the company’s devoted customers—led by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee—resulted in record-breaking sales. The public has demonstrated that it does not object to the owners’ allegedly objectionable positions. Yet the activists persist.

San Antonio’s airport boycott may have been influenced by a recent Think Progress report criticizing the company’s corporate donations to charitable groups described as “anti-LGBTQ,” including the Salvation Army, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and—prior to 2017—a program for at-risk young men called the Paul Anderson Youth Homes. What these organizations have in common is adherence to traditional Christian beliefs. The city’s blacklisting of Chick-fil-A seeks to punish the company for espousing mainstream beliefs shared by millions of Americans and an overwhelming majority of San Antonio’s residents, many of them Catholic. Prior to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in the Obergefell case, Texas did not recognize same-sex marriage, so opposition to it was hardly extreme or improper—and in any case, maintaining that opposition does not amount to discrimination against LGBT employees or customers.

The San Antonio city council, as a government entity, cannot selectively punish constitutionally protected speech based on its content. Google fired engineer James Damore for expressing opinions deviating from progressive orthodoxy, and Mozilla sacked its CEO, Brendan Eich, in 2014 for having contributed $1,000 years earlier to California’s initiative in support of traditional marriage. But Google and Mozilla are not subject to the First Amendment, as a city government is. Government contracts cannot be withheld or withdrawn based on potential vendors’ political or religious views. A similar case arose in New York City, where officials unsuccessfully tried to cancel contracts with Donald Trump, whose company manages a municipal golf course and other franchises; the city backed down when the constitutional violation was demonstrated.

Like many progressive crusades, San Antonio’s campaign against Chick-fil-A is largely symbolic—but important for precisely that reason. When politics become a weapon in the culture war, the stakes quickly escalate. Winning emboldens bullies to become still more aggressive. A lawsuit by Chick-fil-A is almost certain; San Antonio taxpayers will foot the bill for their city council’s vindictive foolishness.

https://www.city-journal.org/san-antonio-progressive-crusade-chick-fil-a

Russiagate: why did the press do it?

 by neo

Yesterday it was all about the Mueller report and the Barr letter.

Today the news and commentary seems to be focusing more on the press itself: whether the MSM will ever own up to the magnitude of their mistake/lies (I very much doubt it). How much their coverage of Russiagate has damaged their reputation, and with whom. Whether they even recognize how much this has damaged their reputation. What their next move will be.

And on and on and on—for a few examples, see this, this, this, this, and above all this from Matt Taibbi, who is most definitely not on the right and not a Trump-supporter in any way. And the MSM tries gamely but ridiculously to defend itself here, here, and in what is perhaps my favorite headline of all: “Trump Is Bullying the Media Into Falsely Exonerating Him of Russia Corruption.”

You cannot make this stuff up. But the headline writers at New York Magazineapparently can, and it’s not in parody.

The question I want to try to answer right now is why did they do it? Why the nonstop incessant seemingly-interminable beating of the “Trump is guilty of collusion and there is evidence” drum? By “they” I mean the MSM, more than the Democrats, although the two work hand in hand of course. Why did the media stick their collective necks out on such shaky-to-nonexistent evidence, knowing how tenuous it was, and that the day of reckoning might indeed come?

I offer the following reasons, not mutually exclusive (although some are):

(1) They truly thought Mueller would find collusion, either because they really believed Trump colluded with Russia, or because they thought Mueller was partisan enough to find collusion where none existed.

(2) It was a kind of tulip mania, a contagion that spread throughout their ranks, a wishful thinking squared and then cubed.

(3) They didn’t think of the future at all. There was only the eternal-seeming present, in which this story fed their own Trump-hatred and drove ratings. Their audience craved it, and so did they.

(4) They figured that if the day of reckoning and Trump’s exoneration ever came, they could spin it to their advantage (or at least deflect it), as they had done so many times before with so many other stories.

(5) They thought Trump would make many many more missteps, and one of those missteps might intervene to cause his downfall independently of this. And meanwhile, they had a great and ongoing story to keep them going.

(6) They were gearing this to Congress, and thought that a combination of all the Democrats and a significant number of Republicans would believe the story and impeach Trump or even impeach and convict him, even before Mueller was finished.

(7) I actually think this last one is the most important: Watergate.

Watergate turns out to have been the worst thing that ever happened to the press in my lifetime, although they probably think it was the best and the high point. It gave them not just delusions of grandeur but an actual example of their power to bring down the mighty with their metaphorical pens instead of swords.

Watergate was many things, but one of them was a triumph for the press. The press hated Nixon prior to Watergate, and in Watergate several elements came together: an actual wrongdoing with actual evidence of it by the president, an FBI informant with his own agenda, a GOP willing to take the high road and convince its own president to resign or be thrown out, and a public unjaded by all that’s happened since.

The press also became heroes, not only in their own eyes but generally. A movie was made in which Woodward was played by Robert Redford in his handsome prime, and Bernstein was played by the less-comely but still very popular Dustin Hoffman. Who could ask for anything more?

Only a few of today’s journalists were around back then (except as little children), but you better believe that Watergate was not lost on them nor was it lost on their professors at journalism school or school in general. The narrative was so compelling that I’m virtually certain that one of the main things that drove them in Russiagate was the desire for a repeat. They believed they had the ingredients, or at least the most important ingredients to them: a Republican president they hated, informants in the FBI and elsewhere, tales of secret machinations by the administration, and Republicans in Congress who they thought could be rather easily persuaded to turn on that president.

The fact that Russiagate was actually the un-Watergate probably did not even cross their minds. This was the reverse Watergate, the Watergate in which the president was not the perp, and the instruments of intelligence and justice were weaponized against him rather than that he made a blocked attempt to enlist them against his enemies. In the un-Watergate the press, instead of being able to successfully cast itself as the bold uncoverer of the terrible truth about the president, has been revealed to have been mainly in the business of amplifying lies about the president.

https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/03/25/russiagate-why-did-the-press-do-it/

We should all be celebrating the collapse of Hillary’s big lie

By Michael Goodwin

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AFP/Getty Images

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Stick a fork in impeachment. It’s dead.

Victory doesn’t get any sweeter for the winners. Or more important for our country.

The results of the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller are a tremendous vindication for President Trump and the many millions of Americans who never doubted his innocence. The findings prove, once and for all time, that he won the 2016 election fair and square.

Let me repeat the point: It is now a fact beyond any doubt whatsoever that Donald Trump is the legitimate 45th president of the United States.

“Hail to the Chief,” this time with feeling.

The great news of that settled truth is not limited to Republicans and Trump supporters. Every American can take comfort in this historic reaffirmation of our nation as exceptional, as the shining city on the hill for all mankind.

Think of it this way: Yes, Russians tried to tip a presidential election, especially through hacking into email systems. They even tried to help Trump.

Yet Mueller, after conducting the most exhaustive test ever of election integrity, reached this stunning conclusion: “The Special Counsel did not find that any US person or Trump campaign official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated” with Russians “despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

No American — not a single one — took the Russian bait. And that includes every member of the Trump campaign.

That is a fact worthy of celebration, for it shows our democracy is strong and our institutions uncompromised.

Other implications of the report’s findings are also enormous.

We now know that Hillary Clinton and her supporters misled the country in claiming that the White House was stolen from her. She started the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax and her claims, aided by the Obama White House and magnified by a thoroughly partisan media, set in motion a wild-goose chase.

The chase undermined a duly elected president and cost taxpayers more than $30 million for an investigation that proved the accusations were flat-out false.

Yet money alone is hardly the full price. The probe itself was a giant cloud over the presidency. Trump’s cabinet, his family, his aides and every policy he put forth were viewed with suspicion by those who bought Clinton’s Big Lie. Many of those people shelled out thousands of dollars for legal bills merely to answer questions and prove themselves innocent of any wrongdoing.

It is also a given that China, North Korea, Iran and, yes, Russia have factored into their relations with us the possibility that Trump might not be long for the Oval Office.

We will never know exactly what price America paid for that possibility, but you can be certain it was high, and that the ramifications will not instantly disappear.

Perhaps there would have been a trade deal with China by now. Perhaps North Korea would have scuttled its nukes if it knew Trump wasn’t going anywhere for at least four years.

Those are just some of the actual and potential consequences Clinton set in motion with her false claims. In a better world, or if she were a better person, she would apologize and publicly acknowledge Trump’s legitimacy. I won’t hold my breath.

But until she does, she should be shunned in public life. She has no credibility to speak on any issue or endorse any candidate. She has put the nation through hell all because she lost an election she should have won.

Let’s remember, too, that her campaign actually did work with Russians, through FusionGPS and British agent Christopher Steele, to create a fictional scenario about Trump being compromised.

Which brings us to today’s Democrats. They bought into Clinton’s Big Lie and built a house of cards on smoke and mirrors. The collapse is total.

If they had any sense, they, too, would accept the Mueller findings and get to work developing serious policy alternatives. Adopting the path of the resistance movement — no compromise, no negotiation — is no longer viable. It, too, is dead.

The long list of 2020 candidates are suddenly facing the fact that Mueller cannot help them. In fact, Trump is stronger and will be emboldened for having survived the gantlet.

Sadly, the first indication is that the party’s loudest huffers and puffers — Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters and assorted other odd ducks — will not accept that the world has changed.

They vow to contest the Mueller conclusion on collusion and cast doubt on the limited release of underlying documents. They also are already seizing on the fact that Mueller left it to Attorney General William Barr and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to rule that there was no provable case for obstruction of justice as a reason to continue their jihad.

In fairness, that decision by Mueller is curious, and serves as an unfortunate invitation for mischief. But Barr and Rosenstein are on solid ground because, as they explain, in normal circumstances, there can be no obstruction of justice if there was no underlying crime.

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They also lay out the high bar for proving obstruction charges, and conclude the evidence Mueller found could not meet that test.

Still, it is a free country and the Dems are welcome to pursue the pipe dreams that RussiaGate isn’t over. Their denial recalls those Japanese soldiers who hid out in island caves for 30 and 40 years after World War II, determined never to surrender.

The pledge by Schiff and others to try to destroy Trump with investigations sets them up to be a suicide caucus of their own.

It’s been clear for some time that, although most Americans trusted Mueller and wanted him to be able to finish, they were impatient it was taking too long. Now that he has spoken, fair-minded voters will welcome the end of the circus and embrace its findings as final. That’s what patriots do.

Yet as I wrote Sunday, the end of Mueller must not mean the end of investigating what happened in 2016. It was, after all, the Clinton-financed Russian dossier that formed the basis of the FBI investigation launched by the disgraced James Comey that summer.

How did that happen? How did a partisan dirty trick result in an FBI probe of the other party’s presidential candidate?

And how did so much classified information leak, including the names of Trump associates picked up incidentally on wiretaps? Who in the Obama White House broke the law?

These and other questions deserve at least as much scrutiny as Clinton’s false claims. As Trump said Sunday, “This was an illegal takedown that failed. And hopefully, somebody’s going to be looking at the other side.”

Amen to that.

https://nypost.com/2019/03/24/we-should-all-be-celebrating-the-collapse-of-hillarys-big-lie/

Trump-Russia collusion did affect an American election — the one in 2018

BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR 

Now that we know for sure that special counsel Robert Mueller, the U.S. intelligence community and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees found no evidence that President Trump conspired with Russia to hijack the 2016 election, it is worth stepping back and evaluating the electoral impact of one of the greatest faux scandals in history.

Before doing that, though, let’s summarize what we now know about the origins of the investigation.

Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee asked their law firm, Perkins Coie, to hire the political opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt during the 2016 election on Trump and Russia. Fusion, in turn, hired former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, who turned to a “retired” Russian intelligence officer in the United States to get most of this dirt.

Steele took his information to the FBI and senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr to interject it into law enforcement circles and make it a criminal matter. According to Ohr, Steele was “desperate” to defeat Trump and viewed his dossier as raw intelligence that was not verified. To augment that research, the Clinton campaign had a Democratic operative working with Ukraine’s embassy in Washington to research Trump's Russia ties, as well as aUkrainian lawmaker feeding information to Fusion GPS.

In another words, the main evidence used by the FBI to justify a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on the Trump campaign in its final weeks before the 2016 election, and for much of 2017, came from a political dirty-trick operation paid by Trump’s Democratic rival and run by a foreigner who disliked Trump.

That operation gathered uncorroborated evidence from foreigners in Russia and Ukraine who had their own motives for influencing the election.

Now, if the FBI probe ran with the secrecy of a normal counterintelligence operation, Americans never would have heard all of this, especially when the core allegations — in the Steele dossier — turned out to be bogus.

But the FBI, Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson, Steele, U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers briefed in Congress all leaked various details to the news media, creating a furor unseen since Watergate. The only difference is, Watergate involved proven crimes by a president and the Russia-collusion narrative ultimately did not.

Simpson acknowledged in a conversation with Ohr that his and Steele’s last-minute contacts with reporters during the 2016 election were a “Hail Mary attempt” to influence voters.

Over the past two years, I have talked with law enforcement and U.S. intelligence officials who unequivocally told me they found no evidence that Trump and Russia colluded. Yes, Russia hacked Democratic emails and bought some Facebook ads to influence the election, but such activity was not coordinated with the Trump campaign.

Yet, key lawmakers such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Sen. Mark Warner(D-Va.) continued to insist there was evidence of collusion, circumstantial or otherwise. They were talking to the same FBI and intelligence agencies as Mueller and I did — and that means what they said in public was not consistent with what they were told in private.

But Schiff, Warner and others found a receptive audience in the news media, where misinformed or inexperienced reporters delivered a 24/7 barrage of stories intended to corroborate a collusion plot that did not exist.

CNN, for example, reported there was evidence a Russian bank’s servers secretly transmitted instructions to the Trump Tower. The FBI said it did not.

The New York Times reported senior Trump campaign officials met with senior Russian intelligence to collaborate during the election. The FBI, Congress, U.S. intelligence and Mueller found no such meeting happened, and former FBI Director James Comey publicly debunked the newspaper report.

Carl Bernstein, the reporter of Watergate fame, declared another Nixonian-sized scandal was brewing and that Mueller’s report would prove how Trump helped Russia “destabilize” the United States. The report did not.

Former CIA Director John Brennan boldly predicted on MSNBC that Mueller had secured numerous sealed indictments. He had not.

In all, more than 530,000 stories were written between May 2017 and this month about a Trump-Russia investigation that, ultimately, found no collusion. The earned media impact of that negative coverage likely would have cost billions of dollars if a Democratic candidate had tried to buy such coverage.

But the news media provided it free of charge, fanned by the commentary of lawmakers and intelligence officials such as Brennan and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, whose public comments contrasted with the secret intelligence.

As the “Impeach Trump” machine raged with fuel provided by Democrats and an errant media, a funny thing happened: More than three dozen Republican incumbents in Congress announced they were retiring in 2018, leaving the GOP with a gaping hole in the House that Democrats exploited.

Polls showed the impact of the Russia coverage on voters. About half of American voters declared they believed Trump or his aides had colluded with Russia, even though they hadn’t.

It is the most compelling proof in a long time that false information repeated long enough becomes truth for many people.

Although we are still coming to grips with the finality of the Mueller report, one thing has become increasingly clear: The Russia collusion narrative — fanned by foreigners, dirty tricksters and a willing media — did, in fact, impact an American election. Not the one in 2016, but the midterm that came two years later.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/435700-trump-russia-collusion-did-affect-an-american-election-the-one-in-2018

The Real Threat to Our Republic: The Democratic Party

The Real Threat to Our Republic: The Democratic Party

 

BY MATT MARGOLIS 

(Getty Images)

It seems like only three years ago that liberals were accusing Donald Trump of not committing to accepting the election results if he were to lose — as everyone expected him to. Oh, wait, that was three years ago. In fact, there were a lot of things being said by liberals three years ago that are amusing to look back on today, such as this gem from Jason Silverstein, national politics reporter at the New York Daily News: 

Even if Donald Trump wins the popular vote for President in November, it is entirely possible — and even Constitutionally acceptable — that we could be spared from his leadership. For that, we can thank the Electoral College.

“We take for granted every four years that the Electoral College will vote accordingly to the winners of each state's popular vote,” Silverstein said, but "there is nothing in the Constitution, federal law or electoral history” that says that’s how it has to work. “The Electoral College has the freedom to override the people's choice — in part, to expressly stop someone like Trump from taking over.” To Silverstein, the Electoral College was designed to stop Trump, not enable him to be president. The scenario he then presented, that rogue Electors could simply ignore the popular vote in their state and not cast their ballots for Trump, was a ridiculous pie-in-the-sky scenario, but is a fascinating look into how the left fantasized that the Electoral College could “save us” from Trump. In fact, Silverstein’s scenario may have inspired anti-Trumpers to harass and threaten Electors to do just as he envisioned… you know, to preserve the Republic, or something.

Others believed that the Electoral College system gave Hillary Clinton an advantage from the start. “Even before candidates were decided in the 2016 presidential election,” explained MSNBC political reporter Alex Seitz-Wald, “Democrats started with a major advantage – thanks to changes in the Electoral College – over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.” Of course, once Trump won the election without winning the popular vote, Democrats’ attitudes toward the Electoral College changed drastically. What they had counted on to keep Trump out of the White House had suddenly put him in. The last time this happened was, of course, the 2000 election, where Bush’s narrow margin in Florida gave him an Electoral College victory without winning the national popular vote.

Democrats are pointing to these two elections as reasons why the Electoral College is outmoded, racist, homophobic, transphobic, something-phobic, whatever. The national popular vote is the only truly democratic way to choose our president, they now say. Democrat presidential hopefuls are embracing this idea, and blue states across the country are entering into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in the hopes of, essentially, overthrowing the Electoral College system. To “preserve” our Republic.

The problem with their position now, besides the obvious, is that when it comes to the Electoral College, it’s not the system they have a problem with, it’s that's the system doesn’t work for them. The last time a Republican won both the national popular vote and the Electoral College vote was in 2004, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry. But Democrats didn’t simply concede defeat when it was obvious they’d lost fairly.

Bush won Florida easily in 2004, but the results in Ohio were a lot closer, and John Kerry was urged to contest the results in Ohio over allegations of voting “irregularities” statewide. He did not. No number of recounts in Ohio could have resulted in flipping the state and the national popular vote. The only purpose of challenging Ohio was to overturn the Electoral College results. A recount in Ohio only netted Kerry about 300 votes statewide, but that didn’t stop Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) from filing an objection (on behalf of a group of Democrats in Congress) to the counting of Ohio’s electoral votes, and delaying certification of the 2004 presidential election results. This was only the second time in history such a challenge occurred. Nothing came of the challenge, as we know, but it’s also interesting to note that even now, John Kerry believes that the election was stolen from him.

The Democrats’ attitudes toward the Electoral College have nothing to do with the merits of the system, but the merits of the results. If they lose, the system is rigged and undemocratic. If they win, the system has proven itself to work. Democrats have a history of wanting to change the rules for their benefit. Senate Democrats were more than happy to use the filibuster to block President Bush from nominating judges to the courts, but took that power away from Republicans when they used it to block Barack Obama from nominating judges, citing a “broken system.” Democrats don’t believe in the sanctity of rules or law and order, they believe in winning at all costs. They won’t be happy in a system that doesn’t allow them to win 100 percent of the time.

Democrats the mentality of four-year-old children. They have to win every time, otherwise, it’s not fair. The Electoral College isn’t a threat to our Republic, the Democratic Party is.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-real-threat-to-our-republic-the-democratic-party/