The Democrats keep losing political races. In 2016, their unbeatable candidate for president managed to snare defeat from the jaws of victory. But it wasn’t her fault – it was the fault of the awful people who voted for President Donald Trump who are all racist, misogynist, homophobic, redneck, naive, stupid, deplorable human beings.
Those same deplorables went to the polls and voted for a whole bunch of Republicans who now control the federal government. The Democrats are in the minority in both houses of Congress. The Republicans not only control the White House but also control the Supreme Court, which makes awful decisions like finding that Trump as president has the same powers over immigration issues as other presidents.
So the Democrats are out of power and, depending on who you believe, they may not make any significant gains in the midterm elections. Historically the Democrats should do well, but then historically Trump never should have been able to win.
So the attacks on Republican deplorables have intensified. It’s a pretty broad indictment of a solid half of the American populous. Since the election, according to the Democrats Trump supporters have gotten only worse; now too often they are being called Nazis.
It appears that Nazis are in favor of lower taxes and less government regulation of businesses and also in favor of having a US border.
Back when Barack Obama was president, it was acceptable to take children who crossed the border and put them somewhere they could be cared for. Most children being held had crossed the border unaccompanied by any family member or adult who wanted to take responsibility for them. According to former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, the Obama administration also separated children from their parents when necessary.
Evidently there was nothing wrong with that because there were no protests about it. But for Trump to do the same thing makes all Trump supporters Nazis.
The real problem here is not the border, not children and not immigration policy, the problem is that the Democrats see power slipping away and need to get their base riled up. The Democratic leadership knows full well that the 2018 midterm elections are going to be won by the party that can get its people to the polls. The Republicans know this also.
The whole crying children at the border campaign is brilliant. Who can be in favor of crying children? It even forced Trump to back down, which doesn’t happen often.
The reality is that the people crossing the border illegally with children are not being treated differently from American citizens who break the law.
Crossing the border without authorization is a crime. When people get arrested they don’t get to take their children to jail with them. When this happens to American citizens, often the children cry. Evidently the Democrats don’t care about the children of American citizens who cry because law enforcement is separating them from their parents, they only care about the children of illegal immigrants.
This simply proves the power of the media to drive an issue.
*****
Chapter nine of the Department of Justice inspector general’s report is one of the most damning documents I’ve ever read.
Chapter nine details what happened when the FBI in New York found that Anthony Weiner’s laptop contained about 650,000 emails and 350,000 of those belonged to Hillary Clinton and her top aide Huma Abedin.
Because the warrant that gave the FBI the authority to search the laptop was restricted to searching for emails of Weiner sexting with minors, the FBI couldn’t look at the 350,000 emails that went back to the beginning of Hillary Clinton’s term as secretary of state.
Until that time, the FBI had been unable, or perhaps a better term is unwilling, to find these emails and here they were.
FBI headquarters found out about the emails on Sept. 29. The agents in New York realized what they had found and immediately notified their superiors in Washington.
The man in charge of the Hillary Clinton investigation was none other than Deputy Director Andy McCabe. It turned out that the $650,000 to $800,000 the Clintons had invested in McCabe’s wife’s campaign for a Virginia state Senate seat was well worth every dime because McCabe sat on the information.
FBI Director Jim Comey says that he doesn’t remember being briefed on these emails until Oct. 27. On Oct. 29, Comey sent his now famous letter to Congress saying that the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails was being reopened.
Some say that cost Hillary Clinton the election, but it wasn’t that McCabe didn’t try to sit on this information until after the election. He did his best and he almost made it.
FBI agent Peter Strzok also knew about the emails, as did his mistress FBI attorney Lisa Page.
Strzok told the inspector general several times that he figured they would get around to looking at the emails in December or January. Notably that would be after the election when Strzok was certain that Hillary Clinton would be president.
Strzok doesn’t say this, but after Hillary Clinton won, who was going to care about the emails? It wouldn’t matter what they found in the emails because Hillary Clinton would be in the White House and you can bet that Hillary Clinton would not appoint a meek, scared-of-his-own-shadow type attorney general like Jeff Sessions. Hillary Clinton would have appointed an attorney general who had her best interests at heart, and if there were emails from Hillary Clinton telling her husband about a lucrative speaking opportunity, they would never see the light of day.
So what happened to McCabe’s plan to do nothing until after the election? What happened was the New York office went nuts in late October because they had been sitting on these emails for a month and the big boys in Washington refused to even send anyone to New York to take a look at what they had.
The inspector general doesn’t say this outright but suggests that at least one agent in New York was going to go public with the information and the US attorney for the Southern District of New York had also become involved.
That put McCabe – who had been sitting on the 350,000 emails refusing to even get a warrant so the FBI could see what was there – in a no-win situation.
If the information got out that the FBI had had these emails for a month and not even looked at them that would have been extremely damaging to the FBI and to the Hillary Clinton campaign. A decision had to be made on how to ameliorate the damage.
What would be even worse for Comey, McCabe and company would be if they did get a warrant, looked at the emails and there was a smoking gun. Then Comey would be forced to announce that his decision that Hillary Clinton had broken no laws was wrong.
The whole letter to Congress and the perfunctory look at the 350,000 emails was simply Comey and company trying to preserve their jobs.
Comey couldn’t take a chance that the news of the emails would leak, nor could he take a chance that the emails would have some incredibly damning information. So he sent his letter to Congress, the FBI glanced at a few emails and said, “Nothing to see here boys.” And Comey wrote a second letter before the election saying that they had found nothing.
But I don’t believe it was reported that the FBI managed to sort and read 350,000 emails in a couple of days. I believe that was kept to themselves.
But what was most important to Comey and company is that they all got to keep their jobs. When Trump was elected, Comey’s letter to Congress made the FBI look like they had been trying to do the right thing when in fact they had been caught in a big cover-up.
One point that was made by multiple FBI agents when interviewed by the inspector general was that they weren’t concerned about the new emails because they didn’t expect to find anything.
Wow. If that is the way the FBI investigates then it is a wonder that anyone is ever found guilty. It means the FBI had already made up its mind and didn’t want to look at new information because it could not possibly have been wrong.
What somebody needs to do now is go back and look at those 350,000 emails and see if there is new information.
Perhaps an unbiased FBI agent might think that Abedin should be prosecuted for putting classified documents on her husband’s laptop. Perhaps Hillary Clinton and Abedin should both be prosecuted for lying to the FBI when they were asked if they knew where the missing emails could be found.
But of course that assumes that they were asked. From reports it appears that the interview of Hillary Clinton was mainly about the weather, her grandchildren, golf and, you know, the same things that Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton discussed on the tarmac in Arizona.
The idea that the FBI went over 350,000 emails in a matter of days is absurd. Hillary Clinton only turned over 30,000 emails to the FBI and said that covered her entire time as secretary of state except for the first two months. So if that was even close to being true, where did the 350,000 emails come from?
Plus, there were evidently a lot of emails between Abedin and Hillary Clinton. Although Hillary Clinton treated Abedin as a personal servant, actually Abedin was not. She was an employee of the State Department and as such their emails are public records.
Why wasn’t Abedin ever prosecuted for stealing emails that belonged to the federal government and not turning them over to the FBI during its lengthy investigation? She placed classified documents on her husband’s laptop, which he was using for sexting with minors, and this was not considered anything worth investigating by the FBI?
Has the FBI ever looked at the emails? It was thought that the emails from the first two months of Clinton’s term as secretary of state would shed some light on how the whole homebrew server came about. Did it?
If emails in addition to the 30,000 that Hillary Clinton turned over to the FBI were found on the computer, why wasn’t Hillary Clinton charged with obstruction of justice?
McCabe and Strzok gave all kinds of excuses for sitting on the information about the 350,000 Hillary Clinton emails for a month, but none of them make any sense.
One excuse that is actually pretty funny is that they understood there were problems downloading Weiner’s computer.
It’s true there was a problem, and the problem was that it contained 650,000 emails, which kept causing the computer to crash. It’s not like that’s a huge problem. Evidently they hooked it up to a more powerful computer and that was it.
The reason the number of emails has been listed in some places as 141,000 is because, when the call from New York to FBI headquarters was made, they didn’t have a full count, but knew they had at least 141,000.
The number kept climbing as they completed the download, but the agents in New York thought that 141,000 would be enough to get the attention of the folks in Washington and they were right. It got their attention and scared them to death.
The last thing McCabe wanted to do was anything that was going to hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign. He had managed to run the entire investigation without finding out anything.
There is a lot of talk in the inspector general’s report about how the decision was made not to subpoena witnesses and have them testify before a grand jury because they were getting more information through voluntary cooperation. But none of the top aides to Hillary Clinton agreed to turn over their own laptops or computers through voluntary cooperation, so all the FBI had to work with was what Hillary Clinton gave them.
Compare that to the way special prosecutor Robert Mueller and the FBI has investigated Trump. It’s as different as night and day.
Another reason given for it taking a month to send someone from Washington to New York to even take a look at what was on Weiner’s computer was that the same people who ran the Hillary Clinton investigation were involved in the Russia investigation. They were reportedly so caught up in investigating the possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia that they didn’t have time to send an agent to New York to look at the 350,000 emails involving Hillary Clinton.
Strzok and others also said that they didn’t think they would see anything new, even though they knew they had an incomplete record from Hillary Clinton.
The agents in New York couldn’t examine the emails until those in charge of the Hillary Clinton investigation got a warrant to search the computer. So by not doing anything at all, McCabe and Strzok effectively made it as if the emails had never been found.
No doubt, if there had not been an honest FBI agent in New York who was willing to go public with the information, McCabe would have managed to push the entire investigation until after the election.
What is amazing about McCabe’s interviews with the inspector general about how these 350,000 emails were handled is that McCabe says he can’t remember anything about it. Even when McCabe was presented with memos, notes and emails to refresh his memory, it evidently was all a blank.
We know now that Strzok was trying to use his power as one of the top investigators in the FBI to keep Trump from ever being elected president. If his actions in the Weiner email debacle are not enough to charge him with obstruction of justice then the entire Justice Department is so entirely corrupt than Trump needs to get rid of everybody in a position of authority and start over.
The inspector general had limited power to investigate. The Weiner email matter is crying out for a full investigation by honest investigators who have the power to compel testimony, subpoena documents and put witnesses before a grand jury. All the players in Washington who were involved and allowed McCabe to sit on such potentially damaging information for a month should be brought up on charges.
The FBI has no right to meddle in presidential elections and this is overwhelming evidence that it attempted to do just that.
According to Comey’s testimony, he really didn’t know what had been found on Weiner’s computer until late in October. He could be telling the truth because McCabe says that he mentioned it in passing when he first received the information.
From the inspector general’s report it appears that McCabe and Strzok both knew exactly what was happening and did everything in their power to delay any investigation until after the election. That is a crime that should not go unpunished.
*****
According to the mainstream media, people are streaming across Mexico to the US border because their neighborhoods in Central America are so dangerous.
If that’s what people do when neighborhoods are dangerous then why hasn’t there been a mass exodus from Chicago to Canada? In Chicago, on Monday, June 25, 21 people were shot and two were killed. So the response should be that families pack up what they can carry and head for another country.
The reason there hasn’t been a mass exodus of people from Chicago to Canada is because most people don’t do that, and that goes for Central Americans as well as Chicagoans.
Most of the people leaving Central America and coming to the US border are there for economic reasons. They want better jobs, more government benefits, better education for their children, free health care, all the stuff that is available to poor people in the United States.
This is a great country to be poor in. If you don’t think so, spend some time in a third world country. Poor people in the US are not only given food, shelter, medical care and education, we give them smart phones as well.
People claim they are seeking asylum because of violence in their home countries only because asylum may be granted because they fear for their lives. Asylum won’t be granted if those seeking asylum say they are coming to the US because of all the free stuff we give away.
The US should control who gets to move to the US and benefit from our robust economy and freedoms. It’s why we have immigration laws.
There is no doubt that the immigration laws need to be reformed, but until they are it is the job of the president to enforce the laws that are on the books, and those laws say that entering the country without authorization, without going through a port of entry, is illegal.
*****
Has anyone else noticed that the Trump supporters who are being attacked in public, thrown out of restaurants and facing screaming liberals are mostly women? White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Neilson, and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi have all been harassed in public.
The list is growing and White House advisor Steve Miller and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao have also been harassed, so maybe the Democrats decided that the optics of only attacking women was bad.
But Democrats find Republican woman particularly deplorable, so it is no wonder that these attacks began with them.
*****
The FBI is a huge federal bureaucracy, so to expect it to behave as anything other than that is unrealistic. But there are times when someone like FBI Director Chris Wray, who is simply a government bureaucrat with a badge, should step back and consider the situation.
The standard procedure for a bureaucracy when it is under attack is to circle the wagons and repel the invaders. So what happens when the attack is from the inside, as in the inspector general’s report? Then it is clear that education is the problem and the good, honest, hardworking employees only made mistakes because they didn’t receive the proper education.
And that is Wray’s response. The FBI personnel are all going to have bias training.
I suppose this training will go over the fact that you should not send extremely critical text messages about the president of the United States to your lover on FBI electronic devices or even of a candidate running for president. If there are any FBI employees who don’t understand that this is a bad idea after what has happened then they should be fired for stupidity.
A far better solution, but one that Wray apparently is not even considering, would be to make an example of the FBI employees who brought such shame to the organization by doing what the FBI does to others – charge them with every conceivable offense and then allow them to plead guilty to something like lying to the FBI.
Having a felony on their record ends their career with the FBI and would make their future in law enforcement difficult.
Why doesn’t the FBI start the proceedings to have Lisa Page disbarred? That would get the attention of the other lawyers working for the FBI that attorneys should not operate as spies in the organization being a conduit for information that the recipient has no right to have.
If Wray doesn’t start treating the inspector general’s report like what it is, a terribly damning report on the activities of FBI agents and lawyers, he may not get the chance to fire anyone because he should be fired himself.
*****
The Republicans in Congress have started the process to hold in contempt and possibly impeach FBI and Justice Department officials. It appears Congress is focusing on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who certainly deserves to be impeached for denying Congress documents that it has every right to receive.
It is unreasonable to deny information to the congressional oversight committees. How can they be expected to provide any oversight, if the Justice Department and the FBI won’t provide them with information about what they have done wrong?
The congressional committees have good reason to be skeptical of the limited information they have been provided. For example, the FBI and Justice Department apparently believed the $70,000 cost of the conference table in now fired Deputy Director McCabe’s office was highly confidential information that could not be provided to Congress for reasons of national security.
The FBI and the Justice Department also determined that Congress should not be provided with the extremely controversial text message from FBI agent Strzok where his mistress FBI attorney Page texted him “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”
And Strzok replied, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
How is hiding that text message from Congress doing anything but protecting Strzok?
So Congress now knows that the redactions and omissions of documents it has requested have been done to protect FBI employees, not for any national security reason.
The only way to rebuild any trust is to provide Congress with everything it has requested. Congress with good reason is no longer going to accept the explanation that redactions and omissions are done for national security reasons or to protect ongoing investigations, and it shouldn’t.
But if Congress is going to start impeaching people, first on the list should be Attorney General Sessions. It might get Sessions’ attention if Congress began impeachment proceedings against him and it might even cause him to crawl out from under his desk and start acting like the attorney general.
Sessions foolishly recused himself from the investigation of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to affect the outcome of the 2016 election. It is now abundantly clear to everyone else in the country that the Mueller investigation has little or nothing to do with Russian collusion and there is no reason for Sessions to have a hands off approach.
Second on the list should be Rosenstein. By his actions, it appears he thinks he is above any congressional oversight. He certainly isn’t receiving any oversight from his boss, Sessions. He seems to think that he is a dictator who reports to no one and is answerable to no one.
Trump could end the impasse tomorrow, if he so desired. All Trump has to do is either order the Justice Department and the FBI to turn over every single document that the congressional oversight committees have requested by sundown and, if they don’t, start firing people for insubordination, or he could simply declassify all the documents and turn them over to the American people.
It appears that Trump doesn’t want to take that kind of action while the Mueller investigation is ongoing, and also, why should Trump take the heat for this battle when he can allow it to play out and Congress may take care of what has been his biggest error in judgment so far as president?
Trump got himself into this mess by not clearing out the Justice Department and the FBI when he took office. FBI Director Comey shouldn’t have been allowed to serve one day in the Trump administration, nor should Rosenstein. Trump completely misjudged the character of the people in the Justice Department and the FBI when he took office.
Trump thought he would be treated like any other president and when he took office those long-term federal employees would be working for him. He made Sally Yates, who he also had to fire, the acting Attorney General.
Now Trump knows better, but evidently his attorneys are telling him not to take any action until Mueller finishes his investigation. It seems like every week people see signs that Mueller is wrapping up his investigation. But Mueller is no dummy and he knows that when his investigation ends, heads will roll at the FBI and the Justice Department, so he may be dragging his feet on finishing up.
*****
Rep. Maxine Waters is a well-known kook. It’s hard to believe she could be elected to anything, much less be one of the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress. But she is.
Her statements about Republicans are un-American.
She said, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them! And you tell them that they are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.”
The part that is most troubling is the end, “And you tell them that they are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.”
What does that mean? Is Waters really saying that people she has political disagreements with are not welcome in this country? How else can that statement be interpreted?
She doesn’t say yell at them and let them know how much you disagree with them, which would be bad enough. She says, “They are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.” So there can be no redemption. No political discussion is possible. These people who represent half the American populace need to be removed from the country or perhaps the world.
If they are not welcome “anymore, anywhere,” what options does that leave?
Certainly it could be interpreted to mean they are not welcomed on this earth anymore, which means they should die. Not even Waters could possibly mean that, but there are a lot of misguided people out there – men who shoot their wives for bringing them the wrong brand of beer and people get shot on the street because they didn’t look at someone else with respect.
If a member of Congress is saying that Trump supporters are not welcome anymore, anywhere, it doesn’t take much of leap for someone to decide that she is calling for their extermination.
What is as troubling as the statements made by Waters is the fact that the entire Democratic Party hierarchy has not condemned the statement.
Where is Hillary Clinton coming forward to say that while she disagrees with the Trump presidency she thinks Trump supporters have every right to live in this country?
There have been some weak statements by House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying that the statements go too far, but those statements hardly compare to the statements made by Waters.
