Senator Blumenthal Needs To Read The First Amendment

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article about some recent comments by Senator Blumenthal.

The article reports:

On Tuesday Senator Dick Blumenthal questioned Mark Zuckerberg on why Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit and Steve Bannon still have accounts on his platform.

Obviously, Blumenthal and today’s Democrats show NO REGARD for the US Constitution.

Conservative publishers have been censored and put out of business by Facebook since the 2016 election.

But this is NOT ENOUGH for these fascists.

The article includes a video clip of Senator Blumenthal calling for the removal of Breitbart, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and The Gateway Pundit from Facebook. There are also other videos requesting that other people be removed from Facebook.

Senator Blumenthal swore in an Oath of Office to support the Constitution.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

Asking Facebook to kick people off their platform does not encourage free speech. A law prohibiting free speech will not be far behind if the Democrats manage to take control of the government.

 

Gradually The Truth Emerges

Yesterday John Solomon posted an article at Just The News about some new information regarding the Mueller investigation.

The article reports:

In Robert Mueller’s final report on the Russia investigation, a little-known translator named Anatoli Samochornov played a bit role, a witness sparsely quoted about the infamous Trump Tower meeting he attended in summer 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and a mysterious Russian lawyer.

The most scintillating information Mueller’s team ascribed to Samochornov in the report was a tidbit suggesting a hint of impropriety: The translator admitted he was offered $90,000 by the Russians to pay his legal bills, if he supported the story of Moscow attorney Natalia Veselnitskya. He declined.

But recently released FBI memos show that Samochornov, a translator trusted by the State Department and other federal agencies, provided agents far more information than was quoted by Mueller, nearly all of it exculpatory to the president’s campaign and his eldest son.

Despite learning the translator’s information on July 12, 2017, just a few days after the media reported on the Trump Tower meeting, the FBI would eventually suggest Donald Trump Jr. was lying and that the event could be seminal to Russian election collusion.

Samochornov’s eyewitness account entirely debunks the media’s narrative, the FBI memos show.

The article continues:

The translator’s detailed account — omitted from the Mueller report — validated most aspects of Trump Jr.’s original story. And the FBI knew it from the start of the controversy.

The belated release of the FBI interview report under a Freedom of Information Act request is likely to raise serious questions among congressional oversight committees about why the information was suppressed in the Mueller report, why the FBI kept it quiet for two years while Trump Jr. was being politically pilloried, and why the news media has failed to correct its own record of misleading reporting.

“The omission from the Mueller report leaves a distorted picture that has been allowed to persist for more than two years,” a Senate staffer involved in the Russia investigation told me on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t approved to talk to the news media. “We are looking into the circumstances of the editing of that report and why DOJ allowed such investigations and false public narratives to carry on in the face of significant evidence of innocence.”

People need to go to jail over this–leaving out exculpatory information in order to feed a false narrative to the American people is inexcusable. These are the actions of a police state. If we do not hold people accountable, we can expect more of this behavior in the future.

What We Know Didn’t Happen With The Mueller Report

Yesterday Byron York posted an article at The Washington Examiner titled, “Five things that didn’t happen in the Mueller investigation.” Please follow the link and read the entire article. It is very insightful.

The article reports:

1. Mueller did not indict Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, or other people whose purported legal jeopardy was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year.

2. Mueller did not charge anyone in the Trump campaign or circle with conspiring with Russia to fix the 2016 election, as was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year.

3. Mueller did not subpoena the president, as was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year.

4. The president did not fire Mueller, as was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year.

5. The president did not interfere with the Mueller investigation, as was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year. In his letter to Congress, Barr noted the requirement that he notify lawmakers if top Justice Department officials ever interfered with the Mueller investigation. “There were no such instances,” Barr wrote.

All of those five things are very different than what we have been hearing from the media for the past two years. What about the reckless comments made by former government officials and cable news anchors? Can they be held responsible for what was either total ignorance masquerading as inside knowledge or outright lies? When are the government officials who violated the civil rights of innocent people by unmasking their identifies when it was unnecessary? When are the people who used government agencies to wiretap on spy on an opposition party candidate going to be held accountable? When are the public officials who leaked information going to be held accountable? I have no answers to any of the above questions. My hope is that there is an Inspector General somewhere who is looking into these matters. It is a faint hope, but it is a hope.

The Problem With The Tower Meeting

One of the lynchpins of the Democrat theory about Russian collusion is the meeting at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016.

According the The Gateway Pundit in an article posted today, the people present were:

— Donald Trump Jr.
— Jared Kushner (left early)
— Paul Manafort
— Natalia Veselnitskaya (Fusion GPS)
— Anatoli Samochornov (translator and Fusion GPS)
— Rinat Akhmetshin (lobbyist – Fusion GPS)
— Rob Goldstone
— Rep. of the Agalarov Family

The Gateway Pundit reported the following regarding that meeting:

Congressional testimony confirms that consultant Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS, was hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee to work his “political opposition” magic against President Trump.

Simpson has testified he put former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele on the job and sent him to Russia. Simpson and Steele both kept a constant back channel to Bruce Ohr, the fourth-highest ranking member of the Department of Justice, as recently declassified messages prove.

…Ohr, who’s wife Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion GPS right alongside Simpson, “coordinated before, during and after the election” with both Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson.

Also, Hillary Clinton wasn’t Simpson’s only employer.

The night before the Trump Tower meeting, Simpson had dinner with another client, Natalia Veselnitskaya. He had dinner with her again the night after the meeting, he told Congress. [Veselnitskaya was at the Trump Tower meeting and is suspected of working for Simpson.]

The article quotes Devin Nunes:

… but something also probably important to note about the so called Trump Tower meeting.  This is the meeting that actually Fusion GPS met with the people before and after that meeting.

Fusion GPS, once again, was a Clinton Campaign paid for operations outfit.  They were clearly involved in the set up of the Trump Tower meeting.  So if they want to bring Cohen in and talk to him, that’s great, we’ll participate.  But the truth, if you really want to get to the truth behind the Trump Tower meeting, Fusion GPS and the Clinton campaign are all over it, and probably behind it.

One other note about that meeting.

The American Thinker reported today:

But yesterday, someone privy to the information held by the Senate Intelligence Committee leaked the Awful Truth to CNN, who reported it (credit to CNN for not burying it) with sad faces:

Senate investigators have obtained new information showing Donald Trump Jr.’s mysterious phone calls ahead of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting were not with his father, three sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN.

As a number of people in Washington have said after various witch hunts have proved to be wild goose chases, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” I wonder where the Department of Justice and the FBI will go to get their reputations back after what they have been involved with for the past two years.

I Guess It’s All A Matter Of Perspective

I have watched “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at Christmastime for years. I thought it was a wonderful story about how someone who was different finally found his usefulness and gained friends and a place in society. Evidently I just didn’t understand the movie.

Fox News is reporting today on the HuffPost’s reaction to the movie.

These are some of the HuffPost’s comments on the movie:

“Yearly reminder that #Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a parable on racism & homophobia w/Santa as a bigoted exploitative prick,” read one comment shared by HuffPost. “Santa’s operation is an HR nightmare and in serious need of diversity and inclusion training. #Rudolph,” read another.

The video also suggests it was problematic that Rudolph’s father verbally abused him by forcing him to wear a fake nose to be accepted by others.

Some eagle-eyed social media critics also said the cartoon is sexist because Rudolph’s mom was snubbed after she wanted to help reindeer husband Donner to search for their son after he goes missing. “No, this is man’s work,” Donner says.

But HuffPost’s effort to highlight the perceived bigotry of the beloved movie attracted tens of thousands of negative comments, most of them mocking the video.

“Oh look! Something people like and enjoy; let’s go ruin it!” tweeted Rebeccah Heinrichs.“If you try hard enough you can find offence in almost anything,” Chloe Westley seconded.

Others pointed out that HuffPost misunderstood the cartoon as the troubling characters learn their lesson in the end. “But… but… the bigoted characters learn they were wrong. It teaches a lesson. It doesn’t endorse the problematic stuff,” tweeted Robby Soave.

Even President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. weighed in on the topic, tweeting “Liberalism is a disease.”

Does anyone really believe that children don’t sometimes treat other children badly? Does this movie not show the error of that? Do parents sometimes make mistakes? Isn’t it nice to see a parent’s mistake corrected? Do liberals have a problem with happy endings? Has anyone ever educated liberals to the fact that a good story needs a conflict at some point to make it interesting? Have we reached the point where we are afraid to let our children see a conflict–even when it is beautifully resolved?

This Really Was Not Unexpected

Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about the Russian investigation. It seems as if this investigation has been going on forever, and so far nothing has been found. I am waiting for the eventual charge that someone went to a Russian tea room for a cup of tea and therefore should be prosecuted. Unfortunately, because special prosecutors tend to want to charge someone with something, all these lawyers with political leanings may eventually charge someone with a process crime (they forgot something in their testimony and gave an answer on a minor point that did not satisfy the investigators). However, it is becoming rather obvious that the tale the left has been spinning since the election of foreign intrigue tied to the Trump campaign or Trump Administration is pure fiction.

Breitbart reports:

Investor William Browder testified at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday that Fusion GPS, the firm that had been responsible for creating and pushing the so-called “Russia dossier” against Donald Trump, had been paid by the Russian government to push for the repeal of the human rights sanctions in the Magnitsky Act of 2012. In other words, the Russian government may have been paying to smear Trump with false and salacious accusations.

Until now, the media and the Democrats have proceeded under the assumption that Russia intervened in the 2016 election by hacking the email server of the Democratic National Committee, as well as the private email of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and releasing their emails via Wikileaks. They have further claimed — with no evidence — that the Trump campaign may have colluded with the Russians in obtaining or releasing the emails.

The entire theory rests on the ridiculous claim that Trump had invited Russia to hack Clinton and the Democrats when he joked last July about the Russians releasing the emails Clinton had deleted from her illicit private server.  (The left-wing HuffPost observed Thursday as the anniversary that Trump “asked for Russian help in the election.”) That joke prompted then-CIA director John Brennan to convene an investigation of alleged Russian interference.

Thursday The Wall Street Journal posted an article by Kimberly Strassel (the article is not linked here because it is subscribers only) noting a connection between Fusion GPS and the Democratic party.

In an interesting move, Congressional Democrats, who were ready to hold public hearings about Russian election interference featuring Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, have decided to hold those hearings in private (where they can’t pontificate instead of asking questions). Why? Because if Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort were questioned in public, then Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson would also be questioned in public. For whatever reason, the Democrats were willing to give up their dog and pony show to avoid Glenn Simpson’s public testimony (where he would have been asked who paid for the false dossier on Donald Trump).

The Wall Street Journal article asks:

What if, all this time, Washington and the media have had the Russia collusion story backward? What if it wasn’t the Trump campaign playing footsie with the Vladimir Putin regime, but Democrats? The more we learn about Fusion, the more this seems a possibility.

We know Fusion is a for-hire political outfit, paid to dig up dirt on targets. This column first outed Fusion in 2012, detailing its efforts to tar a Mitt Romney donor. At the time Fusion insisted that the donor was “a legitimate subject of public records research.”

The article at Breitbart concludes:

Or the truth could be that Russia was trying to embarrass both parties, to weaken the eventual winner. Browder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that it is common for Russia to back both sides in elections, simply to create chaos.

Regardless, the Russia conspiracy theory has now collapsed. There is no evidence that Russia was colluding with the Trump campaign. But there is evidence Russia was working against it. And the truth is only beginning to emerge.

The following quote is from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The same thing can be said about the investigation into President Trump’s ties to Russia.

 

For Your Consideration

The fact that I am posting this does not mean that I believe it is true–it means that I think this is a necessary item to add to the current debate.

The U.K Daily Mail posted an article today based on a National Enquirer story .

The U.K. Daily Mail article states:

Hillary Clinton and a firm with ties to the Democratic party setup President Donald Trump and his family in an attempt to destroy the billionaire businessman and politician according to the National Enquirer

The tabloid magazine, which has made no secret of its pro-Trump agenda, came to this conclusion after what they describe as an ‘exhaustive investigation’ into the matter.

These attempts by ‘evil’ Hillary to bring down her rival included luring Donald Jr. into meeting with shadowy Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskyaya claims the tabloid.

And the firm in the middle of all this is Fusion GPS according to the tabloid, the same group that allegedly compiled Christopher Steele’s scandalous dossier of claims about President Trump that was published in January.

I don’t know if this story is true or false. What I do know is that there is a group of establishment politicians in Washington that is intent on preventing President Trump from accomplishing anything. The Washington establishment has become the ‘cool’ kids at the high school lunch table who refuse to let anyone they deem unworthy to enter their group. It is high time that someone tipped their table over and sent them home.

Remember, the National Enquirer broke the John Edwards story. Lately they have a better track record than The New York Times.

Changing The Definition Of A Word For Political Purposes

John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article today about the attempts to claim that Donald Trump, Jr., is guilty of collusion.

The article includes the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of collusion:

secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose * acting in collusion with the enemy

The article further explains that definition and how it relates to the charges against Mr. Trump:

Thus, when the U.S., Russia and other countries jointly operate the International Space Station, they aren’t colluding, they are cooperating.

Liberals talk about “collusion” in connection with Trump, Jr’s meeting to paper over the fact that there was nothing wrong with it. Collecting information about corruption on the part of a candidate for office is a good thing, not a bad thing. We know from Clinton Cash that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played a key role in turning over a large part of America’s supply of uranium to the Russians, at about the same time when Russians associated with that country’s government paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bill and Hillary Clinton. So we know about the quid and the quo, the only question is whether there was a pro. If the Russian lawyer had had information on this point, it would have been a public service to disclose it.

It is different, of course, if false information about a candidate is being fabricated. Thus, we can properly say that Democrats colluded in the production of a fake dossier on President Trump.

I have always felt that most of the things the Democrats accuse the Republicans of are things that the Democrats are doing. I think the make-believe case against Donald Trump, Jr., is an example of this.

The Democrats have so altered the definition of collusion that it could theoretically apply to any conversation with anyone who was remotely connected to any country other than America. It will be interesting to see if karma is going to show up in the near future.

A Tale Of Two Collusions

I’m tired of hearing about a meeting of the President’s son that resulted in nothing while at the same time a presidential candidate who actually met with a foreign power to interfere in  the 2016 election got totally ignored. Just as an aside, I don’t think foreign meddling in an election is all that unusual–look at the Obama Administration’s efforts to influence the last election in Israel. They were unsuccessful, but they certainly tried.

While the Democrats and the media are screaming that Donald Trump should be hung from the yardarm, they have totally ignored the efforts of the Clinton campaign to use the Ukrainians to opposition research on Donald Trump.

On January 11, 2017, Politico posted an article with the headline, “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire.”

The article reports:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

At this point I would like to note that the Russian hacking of Democratic emails is probably an urban legend with little basis in fact. First of all the Democratic National Committee (DNC) never allowed to FBI to directly examine their computer servers that they claimed were hacked. Second of all, how would simply releasing private information influence a campaign–would the release be damaging if it contained only mundane campaign information? Let’s not forget what the leaks contained–evidence of giving Hillary Clinton debate questions ahead of time, evidence of rigging the Democratic primary elections, and generally sleazy stuff. Had the DNC not been engaging in sleazy behavior, the leaks would not have mattered.

The purpose of sharing this information now is to remind everyone that in the mainstream media nothing is as it appears. I don’t believe Russia successfully interfered in our election. I believe they may have tried, but I don’t believe they were successful. Because our voting machines are not interconnected, it would be very difficult to actually change the results of an election–you would have to have hundreds of hackers at hundreds of locations, and voting machines would have to be connected to the internet. Although voting results are reported on the internet, the voting machines are not directly hooked up to it.. I have read reports of voting machines tallying votes incorrectly, but as far as I know, that has nothing to do with the Russians. At any rate, Donald Trump was duly elected, and it is time to move on.

A Rookie Mistake

The Trump family are not politicians (although I hope Donald Trump, Jr., will eventually find his way into politics). They are not in the habit of playing political games–they emerged from the New York City real estate business, not known for its finesse and political correctness. Now they are attempting to drain a swamp in Washington that has established itself over decades by means of deception, big money, backroom deals, etc. Draining the swamp is not going to be easy, but I believe that they are up to the task. However, I am very tired of watching the media attempt to duplicate their ‘success’ of Watergate. I don’t think this President is going to quietly step down for any reason. In fact, I suspect that those attempting to remove him unlawfully will eventually be hoisted on their own petards.

The latest Russian dust-up is about a meeting Donald Trump, Jr., had with Natalia Veselnitskaya during the presidential campaign of 2016. Ms. Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer. She scheduled the meeting saying that she had information on Hillary Clinton’s campaign accepting Russian money. Actually, anyone who follows the escapades of the Clinton Foundation has information on the Clintons accepting Russian money, but that is another story. When Donald Trump, Jr. met with Ms. Veselnitskaya, he discovered that the real agenda for her meeting was a discussion of the adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act. The 2012 Magnitsky Act (named for Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who was arrested and died in a Russian prison after he discovered massive fraud by corrupt Russian officials) lets U.S. officials withhold visas and freeze financial assets of Russians suspected of human rights abuses.

So who is this lady and what are her political connections?

A picture is worth a thousand words (the photo is from The Gateway Pundit):

The article at The Gateway Pundit reports the following:

That looks like Emin Agalarov sitting next to Natalia Veselnitskaya. He was mentioned in Donald Trump Jr’s statement this morning. Emin helped set up the meeting with Veselnitskaya.

Veselnitskaya was also connected to Fusion GPS, the DNC opposition research firm that produced the fraudulent and discredited Trump Dossier.

So why was Veselnitskaya hanging out with Obama officials just days after her meeting with Donald Trump Jr.?

And why was Veselnitskaya given a privileged seat up front during the Congressional hearing?

This meeting was obviously a set-up. The deep state was at work doing mischief in case Donald Trump was elected–this was a staged, planned attack to be used at a future date. It really is time for the Democrats and the media to realize that Donald Trump is a legally elected President and that he should be allowed to do his job. The American voters will ultimately decide in four years whether or not he needs to be removed from office. The degree of opposition President Trump has faced should be an indication to all of us that the swamp is deeper and more entrenched than any of us might have imagined.

UPDATE:

There is more here than I originally found. Yesterday Paul Mirengoff at Power Line posted an article about the meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya that included the following:

These facts are well known to anyone who has been following the news recently. What’s less known is that Veselnitskaya was not in the U.S. lawfully.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley has written to Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to complain about this and related matters. Grassley informs Kelly and Tillerson:

According to her sworn declaration, former Russian prosecutor Natalia Veselnitskaya was denied a U.S. visa to travel to the United States from Russia to participate in litigation. Although she was subsequently granted immigration parole to make the trip, her parole was set to expire on January 7, 2016. Her request to extend was denied on January 4, 2016.

Yet she was still in the U.S. in June when she met with Trump, Jr. Grassley’s letter seeks information about how could have happened.

I am sure there will be more to come.