“But what’s worse, Trump world’s behavior or someone writing about trying to sound the alarm about it,” Stelter whined. “This is nothing to do with that,” [FBI Special Agent James] Gagliano exclaimed. “He held the moral ground, Brian, until he leaking to The New York Times. And then folks like me that defended him last May, you lost our respect.” (link below)
And amid his lionization of Comey during Sunday night’s CNN Newsroom, CNN law enforcement analyst and former FBI Special Agent James Gagliano embarrassed Stelter by calling out Comey for being a “feckless leader.”
[….]
“The issue I take with him, and many former agents and those on board, current on boards take this issue, James Comey is still an FBI employee,” Gagliano said, explaining why what Comey was doing was against DOJ policy. “He’s discussing matters that are relevant and salient to an open or ongoing investigation or case. I.e., the Russia probe. I.e. the Inspector General’s probe. I.e., a number of different congressional probes still going on right now.”
Gagliano noted that what Comey was doing (and what the media had been praising) in term of chiding and sliming the President both in the book and social media was exactly what they hated about Trump (NEWSBUSTERS)
On ‘Fox & Friends,’ Republican congressman from South Carolina slams the former FBI director’s new tell-all as a ‘tabloid book.’ Ainsley Earhardt, Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade.
The New York Times best seller list really isn’t that. What it is is merely an editorial “what you should read, not what actually sells the best.”
The NYT’s even had the audacity (or the lack of self awareness in their egalitarianism aims) to publish a graph of the male and female authors by decade. It showed a clear male dominance over the women. However, as the decades progressed, the sexes got closer to being even, until, the final decade in the graph, they were very similar in books on the New York Times best seller listing.
But this graph, then, is merely an illusion. Since they control the list and who makes it on the list — they can control whichever factors they wish to. Like gender for instance. So they can even out the sexes on the list to give the appearance that male and female authors are writing and selling great books, equally. It does not reflect reality. Nor does this “evening-out process” have anything to say about how well something is written. It merely projects what the few editors think is important to the New York Times.
The majority of authors are — I presume — white. So soon a similar graph will surely show an evening out of minority vs. Caucasian authors.
Facebook “Convo”
I posted a link to this article discussing Trump’s foreign policy advancements as compared to Obama’s in regard to “Nobel Peace Prizes.” Here is part of the article:
North and South Korea are discussing plans to make a stunning announcement at their leaders summit next week: a permanent end to the 68-year state of war between the two, according to reports.
North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in may release a joint statement saying they will seek to end military conflict, an unidentified Seoul official told the Munhwa Ilbo newspaper, Bloomberg reported.
The two men are scheduled to meet April 27 in the border village of Panmunjon — the third-ever summit of leaders from the two Koreas.
Pyongyang and Seoul have technically been at war since the 1950-1953 Korean conflict ended with a truce. Despite occasional flare-ups between the two nations in the years since the armistice, the two Koreas have managed to avoid an all-out war.
A successful summit could pave the way for a historic meeting between Kim and President Trump — the first between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader….
Later we find out that Pompeo met with the North over Easter weekend. A person simply said “Wow…..” MIND YOU, I am reading a lot into his “Wow,” but here is my response to the larger issue:
You do realize people like myself do not really want Trump to get the Nobel Prize in Peace, but what is being intimated by the article (OP) is that Obama got his just eight and a half months in the White House.
The prize was nothing more, then, than Leftist panels awarding a Leftist person they idealized with a hopeful fiction.
(In fact, all of Leftism is an idealization of a Utopian dream. A “Super Man” in the “Nietzsch’ian sense”… genderless, able to offend no one, always concerned for the welfare of others in the market place, etc. REALLY THEN, a pipe-dream but one enforced by legislative acts. Dangerous in other words.)
It is similar, then, to the NYTs posting this graphic as if it means something (https://tinyurl.com/y9jck4x3). Since the NYT Best Seller list are really editorial choices and not based on the reality of “which books actually sell the best,” their being proud of an evening-out of male-to-female authors is meaningless. (Unless you live in a bubble: SNL – https://youtu.be/vKOb-kmOgpI)
It is a form of self-gratification, or as David French calls them, the “New Holy Rollers.” That is, “social justice warriors.” The NYT sees themselves as such in creating a fictitious reality in order to fool people with what is really an illusion that says nothing of literary excellence.
You see, when you believe you are morally superior, when you have dehumanized those you disagree with, you can justify almost anything.
Like giving a Nobel Peace Prize to a person who will hold to an illusory ideal created whole cloth from nothing.
So, if that is the standard…
…then…
…the Trump administration has already surpassed it. As we found out with the meeting over the Easter weekend. Ultimately nothing may come of it, but it is more “hope and change” to the real world than what Obama had “accomplished.”
In the grilling of Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo, Corey Booker displays classic “thought control.” Dennis Prager rightly warns his listeners not just of Corey (although he does this), but of the tendency of all Leftism to degenerate into this form of fascism.
Facebook announced in early April that the data of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with a political consulting firm connected to President Trump during the 2016 election.
But in 2012 the Obama campaign harvested data from 190 million Facebook users.
The media cheered in 2012 the sheer brilliance of the Obama campaign. Data used for similar GOP “mining”? Not so much.
…But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.
That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”…
Another interesting article that links to Obama’s campaign managers Twitter is this one at THE DAILY MAIL:
‘They were on our side’: Obama campaign director reveals Facebook ALLOWED them to mine American users’ profiles in 2012 because they were supportive of the Democrats
Carol Davidsen, who worked as the media director at Obama for America, claimed Obama campaign mined millions of people’s information from Facebook
She said that Facebook was surprised at the ease with which they were able to ‘suck out the whole social graph’
But the firm never tried to stop them when they realized what was doing, and even told them they’d made a special exception for them
They ‘were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,’ she tweeted
Davidsen said that she felt the project was ‘creepy’ – ‘even though we played by the rules, and didn’t do anything I felt was ugly, with the data’
Davidsen posted this in the wake of the uproar over Cambridge Analytica, and their mining of information for the Trump campaign
[….]
Carol Davidsen, who worked as the media director at Obama for America and has spoken about this in the past, explained on Twitter that she and her team were able to ingest massive amounts of information from the social network after getting permission from Facebook users to access their list of friends.
‘Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing,’ wrote Davidsen.
She wrote that, not only did Facebook not try to stop them, but the company said they’d made a special exception for them.
‘They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,’ she tweeted.
Davidsen was then careful to note: ‘I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side.’ ….
“The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” Representative Maxine Waters told Roland Martin on Monday.
“That’s going to be very, very powerful,” Waters said. “That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s [President Obama] been very smart. It’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place.”
Former NY Times reporter Judith Miller’s testimony played a significant role in the case of Scooter Libby both when she originally made it and later when she recanted it. Now that Libby has officially been pardoned, Miller talked to Fox News to explain why she believes this was the right decision.
“I think it’s long overdue,” Miller said. She continued, “Ever since I got out of jail and began trying to look into the details of the Scooter Libby case…I became persuaded that my testimony had been in error and that he, in fact, had done nothing wrong.
“I decided to go back and correct the record in my own book, which I did, and when Scooter Libby was given his law license back a year and a half ago, the judge specifically cited my testimony, the recantation of my testimony, as one of the factors in his decision.”
All of this stems from a note Miller wrote about a conversation with Scooter Libby. She wrote “(wife works in bureau?)” in reference to Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame. That was taken as proof that Libby must of have raised Plame’s work at the CIA. But as Peter Berkowitz explained in a piece for the Wall Street Journal back in 2015, Miller later decided her note probably hadn’t been a reference to Plame’s work at the CIA at all, but was more likely a question about her cover working at the State Department:
Ms. Miller’s new memoir recounts that after her conditions had been met and Mr. Fitzgerald asked the court to release her from jail in September 2005, she was summoned to testify before the grand jury. While Mr. Fitzgerald prepared her, she recalls, his pointed queries led her to believe that a four-word question regarding Joseph Wilson surrounded by parentheses in her notebook—“(wife works in Bureau?)”—proved that Mr. Libby had told her about Ms. Plame’s CIA employment in a June 23, 2003, conversation (well before Mr. Libby’s phone conversation with Russert). She so testified at trial in 2007.
Three years later, Ms. Miller writes, she was reading Ms. Plame’s book, “Fair Game,” and was astonished to learn that while on overseas assignment for the CIA Ms. Plame “had worked at the State Department as cover.” This threw “a new light” on the June 2003 notebook jotting, Ms. Miller says, since the State Department has “bureaus,” while the CIA is organized into “divisions.”…
Mr. Fitzgerald, who had the classified file of Ms. Plame’s service, withheld her State Department cover from Ms. Miller—and from Mr. Libby’s lawyers, who had requested Ms. Plame’s employment history. Despite his constitutional and ethical obligation to provide exculpatory evidence, Mr. Fitzgerald encouraged Ms. Miller to misinterpret her ambiguous notes as showing that Mr. Libby brought up Ms. Plame…
If Ms. Miller had testified accurately, she would have dealt a severe blow to Mr. Fitzgerald’s central contention that Mr. Libby was lying when he said he was surprised to hear Russert mention Ms. Plame.
Fitzgerald knew all along that someone else, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, had leaked Plame’s name. Armitage was never charged with anything and an investigation found the leak did no harm to national security. Libby’s conviction hinged largely on Miller’s testimony which should have made her recantation significant….
This post is an import of an older post of mine dated July of 2007 (posted here April of 2015). It will be connected with my WMD page. I may update it a bit, as I go along.
Some seem to forget, conveniently, that the only person that lied in the Wilson case was, well, Wilson. Libby “lied” about when he found out Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. She wasn’t “covert,” nor did he leak the name to the press. Libby simply forgot when he first found out about her CIA job and testimony showed that he talked about that fact before he said he talked about that fact. That’s the facts.
Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame’s name. In fact, he learned early on that Mr. Novak’s primary source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, an unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame’s identity — and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert….
A great summation of the above article is found at Yahoo Answers:
A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false — and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame’s name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.
The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame’s name.
Update: “The trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame’s identity — and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert.” -Washington Post Update 2: I cited an editorial from a liberal newspaper. Read the entire bipartisan senate intelligence report (if you can handle reading many pages detailing how the Wilson’s lied). Update 3: I cited an editorial from a liberal newspaper. Read the entire bipartisan senate intelligence report (if you can handle reading many pages detailing how the Wilson’s lied).
I could defend Libby further here, but I have already done that. This is not the purview of this post. This post is to clearly show that Joe Wilson lied. I do need to — however — settle one other area here before we go any further, that is the “Yellowcake” ruse the Left often use.
You may want to watch an NPR liberal, a NYT’s lefty, one neo-con, and one Reaganite go at it on this very topic (video to the right).
Both the Butler report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report make clear that Bush’s 16 words weren’t based on the fake documents. The British didn’t even see them until after issuing the reports — based on other sources — that Bush quoted in his 16 words.
Bush’s “sixteen word” statement in his State of the Union speech has been shown to be correct. People keep speaking about forged documents, however no one in the Bush administration or in print uses these forged documents as their source to say Iraq was looking to purchase yellowcake uranium. Sheeeesh! The British have consistently stood by that conclusion. In September 2003, an independent British parliamentary committee looked into the matter and determined that the claim made by British intelligence was “reasonable” (the media forgot to cover that one too). Indeed, Britain’s spies stand by their claim to this day. Interestingly, French intelligence also reported an Iraqi attempt to procure uranium from Niger.
Yes, there were fake documents relating to Niger-Iraq sales. But no, those forgeries were not the evidence that convinced British intelligence that Saddam may have been shopping for “yellowcake” uranium. But that’s not all. The Butler report, yet another British government inquiry, also concluded that British intelligence was correct to say that Saddam sought uranium from Niger. The Financial Times has reported that illicit sales of uranium from Niger were indeed being negotiated with Iraq, as well as with four other states.
According to the FT: “European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq.”
There’s still more: As Susan Schmidt reported in the Washington Post: “Contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence.” She goes on to report that the bi-partisan Senate Intelligence “panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.”
Score ONE for radioactive material, ZERO for the Liberal bloggers out there who cannot see past there MoveOn.org/Keith Olbermann/Nancy Pelosi brown stained noses.
Okay, on we trudge.
…After a whirl of TV and radio appearances during which he received high-fives and hearty hugs from producers and hosts (I was in some green rooms with him so this is eyewitness reporting), and a wet-kiss profile in Vanity Fair, he gave birth to a quickie book sporting his dapper self on the cover, and verbosely entitled The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity: A Diplomat’s Memoir.
The book jacket talks of his “fearless insight” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) and “disarming candor” (which does not extend to telling readers for whom he has been working since retiring early from the Foreign Service).
The biographical blurb describes him as a “political centrist” who received a prize for “Truth-Telling,” though a careful reader might notice that the award came in part from a group associated with The Nation magazine — which only Michael Moore would consider a centrist publication….
Unfortunately for Wilson, the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report concluded that it is he who was telling lies. (See the Wall Street Journal)
Wilson claimed quite clearly in the press and in his book that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, was not the one who came up with the brilliant idea that the agency send him to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire uranium.
“Valerie had nothing to do with the matter,” Wilson says in his book. “She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.” In fact, the Senate panel found, she was the one who got him that assignment. The panel even found a memo by her.
…Wilson’s assertions — both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information — were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.
The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address…
[….]
…The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because “the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.”
“Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the ‘dates were wrong and the names were wrong’ when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports,” the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have “misspoken” to reporters. The documents — purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq — were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.
Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Niger and Iraq — which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that “although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq.”
According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.
Still, it was the CIA that bore the brunt of the criticism of the Niger intelligence. The panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.
The agency did not examine forged documents that have been widely cited as a reason to dismiss the purported effort by Iraq until months after it obtained them. The panel said it still has “not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa.”
So does Wilson lose his “truth telling” awards? No.
Again…
Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.
FactCheck.org had this to say about Wilson’s report:
The Intelligence Committee report said that “for most analysts” Wilson’s trip to Niger “lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal.”
What you have – in fact – is a Looney Left who affords murderers and terrorists the benefit of the doubt over a President they cannot stand. They choose Saddam over Bush, they support Afghanistan over America (yes, Democrats are starting to say “get us out of Afghanistan” as well). It was the same during the Reagan years as well. Reagan and the U.S. were the bad guys for putting ICBM’s along the borders of Western/Eastern Europe. The horrible things that were said about Reagan and the United States by Democrats and the left leaning media are well documented. The same would be true but for the increased platitudes.
(Via the LAST REFUGE) Alan Dershowitz and Joe diGenova appeared tonight on Sean Hannity to discuss the ramifications to the political FBI raid on Michael Cohen’s office and residence along with the ongoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation. Additionally, they discussed fired FBI Director James Comey and current Asst. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
LEGAL INSURRECTION uses the NYT commentary to note what is being given up:
There isn’t much of a pretense anymore that the Mueller investigation is about alleged Russian campaign collusion.
Maybe it started out about collusion, but it veered off course within a couple of months, when Mueller decided that Paul Manafort needed to be investigated for conduct many years ago having nothing to do with the campaign, or even Russia. Rod Rosenstein created the paperwork in early August 2017 to retroactively expand Mueller’s investigation and justify Mueller conduct that already had taken place.
The raid on Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen’s law office by the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, was at the referral of Mueller, and signed off by Rosenstein. That raid was a frontal assault on Trump’s business and personal history.
If reporting is accurate, the records seized concerned not just payments to Stormy Daniels, but also the Access Hollywood tape revealed during the campaign. It’s fair to assume that a wide range of records going beyond those salacious topics were grabbed by the FBI, including Trump’s other personal and business dealings over a long period of time.
The seizure of Cohen’s records surely goes more directly to taking down Trump for conduct unrelated to the campaign much less Russian collusion.
Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado. Those methods may be proving to have their limits when they are applied from the Oval Office. Though Republican leaders in Congress still keep a cowardly silence, Mr. Trump now has real reason to be afraid. A raid on a lawyer’s office doesn’t happen every day; it means that multiple government officials, and a federal judge, had reason to believe they’d find evidence of a crime there and that they didn’t trust the lawyer not to destroy that evidence….
Mr. Trump also railed against the authorities who, he said, “broke into” Mr. Cohen’s office. “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” the president tweeted early Tuesday morning, during what was presumably his executive time. He was wrong. The privilege is one of the most sacrosanct in the American legal system, but it does not protect communications in furtherance of a crime. Anyway, one might ask, if this is all a big witch hunt and Mr. Trump has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why does he care about the privilege in the first place?
That last highlighted sentence is very instructive. Would the NY Times Editorial Board be willing to give up its attorney-client privilege in litigation against the NY Times? If the NY Times has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why would it care about the privilege in the first place?……..
(Should start at the interview if “play” is pressed.) Talking all things media malpractice on the YouTube headquarters shooter, Detroit zoo poo, Japanese pregnancy forgiveness, and more. Dr Thomas Sowell stops in to talk economics and Owen Benjamin swings by to discuss his new YouTube strike and Twitter ban!
Christian pastor Robert Jeffress (from First Baptist Dallas) systematically destroys gay reverend Neil Cazares-Thomas’ (from the Cathedral of Hope) arguments point-by-point on same-sex marriage.
The DAILY MAIL has a good piece on all this, here is the headline with their bullet points:
Justice Department violated Michael Cohen’s constitutional rights just by seizing his records, Alan Dershowitz tells DailyMail.com – hours before Harvard law professor has dinner with Trump
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz will have dinner Tuesday at the White House with President Donald Trump
He tells DailyMail.com that the Department of Justice violated Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s rights when it seized his documents on Monday
The government will set up a team of agents and lawyers to review the material to make sure prosecutors don’t see anything ‘privileged’
That could include documents covered by the sanctity of an attorney-client relationship, whose mere presence in prosecutors’ hands could ‘taint’ a case
But since those ‘taint teams’ are made up of government agents, Dershowitz says the DOJ already has them – which is unconstitutional
UCLA Law School professor Harry Litman says the system works well and there’s ‘absolutely no cheating’ because the stakes are so high
Dershowitz also claimed Monday that if Trump were a Democrat, the American Civil Liberties Union would be protesting the search of his lawyer’s office
Here is Dershowitz again on today’s Michael Medved Show:
Michael Medved interviews Professor Alan Dershowitz about the raid on Michael Cohen’s home and office. Alan in another interview said that if,
“…this were Hillary Clinton [having her lawyer’s office raided], the ACLU would be on every TV station in America jumping up and down,” he said. “The deafening silence of the ACLU and civil libertarians about the intrusion into the lawyer-client confidentiality is really appalling.” (FOX)
Yep. The silence is deafening. How bout if Ken Starr referred Lanny Davis’s home and office to be raided? Wow… we would still be talking about that till this day.
