Followup: Fat Leonard Probe Expands

November 9th, 2017

Hey, remember “Fat Leonard Francis” the contractor who infiltrated the U.S. Navy more thoroughly and efficiently than the Russians ever did?

Well, the Fat Leonard probe has now expanded to more than 60 Admirals:

The “Fat Leonard” corruption investigation has expanded to include more than 60 admirals and hundreds of other U.S. Navy officers under scrutiny for their contacts with a defense contractor in Asia who systematically bribed sailors with sex, liquor and other temptations, according to the Navy.

Most of the admirals are suspected of attending extravagant feasts at Asia’s best restaurants paid for by Leonard Glenn Francis, a Singapore-based maritime tycoon who made an illicit fortune supplying Navy vessels in ports from Vladivostok, Russia to Brisbane, Australia. Francis also was renowned for hosting alcohol-soaked, after-dinner parties, which often featured imported prostitutes and sometimes lasted for days, according to federal court records.

The 350-pound Francis, also known in Navy circles as “Leonard the Legend” for his wild-side lifestyle, spent decades cultivating relationships with officers, many of whom developed a blind spot to his fraudulent ways. Even while he and his firm were being targeted by Navy criminal investigators, he received VIP invitations to ceremonies in Annapolis and Pearl Harbor, where he hobnobbed with four-star admirals, according to photographs obtained by The Washington Post.

Given the the number of Admirals in the Navy is statutorily limited to around 160 at any given time, that’s a pretty staggering number…

Texas News Roundup for November 9, 2017

November 9th, 2017

Bunch of Texas news, none of which I feel like doing a separate post on. Ready? Go!

  • The state of Texas, with the assistance of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, has successfully thwarted the Obama Administration’s Bureau of Land Management land grab along the Red River. Good job for TPPF, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush successfully getting BLM to give up.
  • All Texas constitutional amendments pass.
  • U.S. Rep. Ted Poe announces retirement.
  • I also missed that Lamar Smith announced his retirement a few days ago as well. With Jeb Hensarling, that’s three incumbent Texas Republican Reps who have announced their retirement.
  • Ranger College: Want to pay higher taxes to support our corrupt community college? Brown, Erath and Comanche County: Get stuffed! Not often you see a proposition defeated 97% to 3%…
  • Russian Lawyer Met With Fusion GPS Before and After Trump Jr. Meeting

    November 8th, 2017

    Can you say “Honeypot”?

    The co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind the unverified Trump dossier, met with a Russian lawyer before and after a key meeting she had last year with Trump’s son, Fox News has learned. The contacts shed new light on how closely tied the firm was to Russian interests, at a time when it was financing research to discredit then-candidate Donald Trump.

    The opposition research firm has faced renewed scrutiny after litigation revealed that the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for that research. Congressional Republicans have since questioned whether that politically financed research contributed to the FBI’s investigation of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign – making Fusion’s 2016 contacts with Russian interests all the more relevant.

    The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya occurred during a critical period. At that time, Fox News has learned that bank records show Fusion GPS was paid by a law firm for work on behalf of a Kremlin-linked oligarch while paying a former British spy Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on Trump through his Russian contacts.

    But hours before the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, Fusion co-founder and ex-Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson was with Veselnitskaya in a Manhattan federal courtroom, a confidential source told Fox News. Court records reviewed by Fox News, email correspondence and published reports corroborate the pair’s presence together. The source told Fox News they also were together after the Trump Tower meeting.

    Simpson’s presence with Veselnitskaya during this critical week in June — together with revelations about Fusion’s simultaneous financial ties to the DNC, Clinton campaign and Russian interests — raise new questions about the company’s role in the 2016 election.

    Snip.

    In December 2012, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act was passed into U.S. law, freezing Russian assets and banning visas for sanctioned individuals. Fusion’s Simpson is believed to have been working with Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet counter-intelligence officer turned Russian-American lobbyist, to overturn the sanctions.

    Akhmetshin also attended the June 9 Trump Tower meeting, along with about a half-dozen others including Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, publicist Rob Goldstone, Natalia’s Russian translator Anatoli Samochornov and Ike Kaveladze from a Russian-American real estate agency.

    Let’s review a few salient facts:

  • Hillary Clinton’s campaign jointly funded the fake Trump dossier contracted through Fusion GPS to Christopher Steele with the DNC.
  • The fake dossier was used by the Obama Administration as the basis to both wiretap various members of the Trump presidential campaign, and to unmask the names of those ensnared in government intelligence gathering.
  • Whose names were then illegally leaked to the press.
  • The only documented meeting between anyone on Trump’s team (in this case Donald Trump, Jr.) and Russian nationals during the campaign itself was probably arranged as a honeypot operation by Fusion GPS for the Clinton campaign, possibly in collusion with Russian interests.
  • More “hmmmmm”:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    What The Hell Is Going On In Saudi Arabia?

    November 7th, 2017

    I’m hardly the most astute of Saudi-watchers, but a tremendous amount of upheaval has wrecked Saudi Arabia in a very short period of time:

  • Dozens of the Saudi royal family have been arrested on corruption charges, presumably for opposing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who seems hellbent on dragging Saudi Arabia into at least the 15th Century. (When he starts arresting or sidelining Whabbist clerics, I’ll start believing that he’s a real reformer.) The Saudi government is sayng that these anti-corruption moves are just a start.
  • In a remarkable coincidence, roughly the same time arrests were being made, a helicopter carrying “Prince Mansour bin Muqrin, the deputy governor of Asir province,” crashed while he was returning from an inspection tour. Given that Mansour was the son of Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, a former intelligence chief who was crown prince between January and April 2015, before Mohammed bin Salman’s father King Salman pushed him aside for his own son, the chances that this was a mere coincidence would seem remote.
  • Saudi Gulf Affairs Minister Thamer al-Sabhan stated that Lebanon has “declared war” against the kingdom, which is more than a little loopy. The tiny kernel of truth here is that Hezbollah is, in fact, part of the current ruling Parliamentary majority in Lebanon, and that Hezbollah is backing Assad and Iran in the Sunni-Shia civil war that’s raging across multiple fronts. This followed the resignation of Saad Hariri, Lebanon’s Saudi-backed prime minister over the weekend.
  • The Saudis are also threatening open war (rather than the current proxy war) with Iran over the Houthi in Yemen firing long range missiles at them. Can’t say as I blame them.
  • So what’s going on? Here’s my half-assed guess:

    The Saudis are getting their asses kicked on two fronts:

    1. They’re slowly losing the proxy war against a newly emboldened Iran, which is breathing much easier thanks to the billions Obama foolishly handed them and the sanctions he lifted not so much for a handful of magic beans, but rather the vague promise that Iran might possibly send him a picture of said magic beans.
    2. Their plan to drive American oil sands frackers out of the market by ruthlessly driving down prices backfired, and now they’re hurting on the oil revenue front as well.

    Because America is the Saudi’s unipolar patron and main weapon supplier, there’s fark all they can do about Problem 2. Either they need to take the war directly Iran, or they need to buy themselves some economic breathing room and hope oil prices rise again.

    My guess is that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is about to lay a serious perestroika-style smackdown on the largely hidebound, stagnant Saudi economy, along with just enough glasnost to make the whole thing palatable to the non-royal Saudi masses. If this theory is correct, the “hey, woman can drive” thing was actually a trial balloon designed to smoke out the most fervent traditionalists out of the woodwork so he can sideline them while he puts his plan into action.

    Of course they could very well be bracing for more direction action against Iran as well. There’s a lot more they could do against Iran, including more direct support for the largely-Sunni Kurds.

    The Saudis are not our friends, just the least bad of various options in the region (just imagine theocratic Iran or a revitalized Islamic State in charge of Mecca). It will be a significant improvement if Mohammed bin Salman can merely make them a bit less loathsome.

    Reminder: Election Tomorrow for 2017 Texas Ballot Propositions

    November 6th, 2017

    Once again, an off-year election is sneaking up on us on tomorrow.

    There are a number of Texas constitutional amendments on the ballot. Here’s my quick “one-eyed man in the land of the blind” summary:

  • Proposition 1: “Authorizes tax exemption for property of partially disabled veterans received as donations.” Yes.
  • Proposition 2: “Makes changes to home equity loan provision of constitution.” This is a tricky one. Libertarian in me says “Yeah, sure, do whatever you want. Your funeral.” The other part of me thinks that, after 2008, having too stringent rules on tricky types of home equity borrowing isn’t exactly at the top of my list of problems. The fact that realtors and bankers have poured money into supporting this tip the balance to me recommending No.
  • Proposition 3: “Provides for how long an appointed officer may serve after his or her term expires.” Yes. Think of this as the “Texas Racing Commission” rule.
  • Proposition 4: “Requires a court to provide notice to the attorney general of a challenge to a statute.” Yes. Evidently a judge got chuffed in 2013 that mere legislators passed a law stating this, so now we have a constitutional amendment to do the same thing…
  • Proposition 5: “Defines professional sports team in charitable raffles.” Yes. Basically clarifies the terms of a previous constitutional amendment.
  • Proposition 6: “Authorizes property tax exemption for surviving spouses of first responders killed in line of duty.” Yes.
  • Proposition 7: “Authorizes financial institutions to offer prizes to promote savings.” Tentative No, since this is a carve-out for a particular industry.
  • Travis County also has some bond issues.

    Also, Williamson County voters will get a chance to eliminate the position of County Surveyor, and pretty much any time you can eliminate a government position, you should go for it…

    Deir Ez-Zor Falls

    November 5th, 2017

    The Syrian army just ousted the Islamic State from their last urban stronghold in Syria.

    Syrian government forces have liberated the last remaining Isis stronghold in the country as the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate continues to crumble.

    The Syrian military said it had driven extremist fighters from Deir Ezzor and regained full control of the eastern city on the west bank of the Euphrates following weeks of fighting, state media reported.

    Isis had held most of the city since 2014, except for one large pocket where Syrian army troops and 93,000 civilians were trapped for three years.

    Syrian forces and pro-government allies first broke the militant group’s siege on the city in a Russian-backed offensive in September and have been advancing against Isis positions ever since.

    The recapture of the city, the largest in eastern Syria, leaves Isis militants isolated and encircled in the region’s countryside.

    In a statement issued on Friday through state TV, army spokesman General Ali Mayhoub said the military had “completely” liberated the city and declared it had entered the “last phase” of its fight to annihilate Isis.

    Isis is estimated to have lost 90 per cent of its territory since 2014, including key urban strongholds Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in northern Syria.

    Deir Ezzor was strategically significant to the extremist group due to its location near the Iraqi border and its importance as the capital of the oil-rich province which shares its name.

    The city’s liberation all but reduces Isis’s self-proclaimed caliphate to a pair of border towns on the Iraq-Syria frontier.

    Iraqi forces and allied Shia militia are chasing remnants of the terror group inside the town of al-Qaim, on the Iraqi side of the border.

    Deir ez-Zor, rumored to be the Islamic State’s backup capital after the encirclement of Raqqa, was fully invested by the Syrian Army and Syrian Democratic Forces one month ago.

    And here’s the same territory today:

    (Pictures, as usual, from http://isis.liveuamap.com/.)

    Elsewhere in the war against the Islamic State, Iraqi forces have taken Qaim on the border between Iraq and Syria. That leaves Rawa City, a town of some 20,000 east of Quim in western Anbar province, as the last populated Islamic State stronghold in Iraq. That’s expected to fall soon as well.

    In Abu Kammal, one of the last towns in Syria held by the Islamic State, security checkpoints have been abandoned as both civilians and Islamic State fighters are fleeing the area to due to Russian Air Force bombardment.

    What remains of Islamic State territory after that is largely uninhabited.

    After the falls of Raqqa and Mosul, there may be no true “Last Stand” for the Islamic State, no Fuhrer bunker end for al-Baghdadi, just the rest of the supposed caliphate’s territory melting away as onetime fighters flee into the night and try to melt back into the civilian population. Meanwhile, expect the Islamic State to turn into just another stateless jihadist terror network like al Qaeda, blowing people up across the world but holding no territory, and thus no moral authority upon which to demand the allegiance of Muslims worldwide:

    Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding.

    It’s possible that the failure of the Islamic State will take wind out of the sails of Islamic fundamentalism for a generation. This wouldn’t mean an end to Islamic terrorism and attempts to Islamicize the west in general and Europe in particular, only a lessening of it.

    But the fall of the Islamic State’s last remaining territory is still a cause for celebration among the millions once enslaved by its brutal medieval death cult.

    LinkSwarm for November 4, 2017

    November 4th, 2017

    Welcome to an out-of-band Saturday LinkSwarm! Between Halloween, dental work, and a runaway dog (since recovered), this week has been a bear. So let’s jump right in:

  • “A former portfolio manager for an investment fund founded by financier George Soros sexually abused women at a Manhattan penthouse dungeon, according to a $27 million Brooklyn federal suit.” “Abused” as in “needed serious medical attention.” Also, here’s the “he’s a real sweetheart” money quote: “I’m going to rape you like I rape my daughter!” (Hat tip: Ace.)
  • Today’s second example of a prominent liberal turning out to be a sexual harassing sleaze comes to you from David Corn at Mother Jones. Maybe they should rename it Velvet Jones
  • Instapundit wonders: Where were all those vaunted Hollywood and D.C. truth tellers when Harvey Weinstein and Mark Halperin were doing their thing? “‘Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run toward a story,’ MSNBC’s Katy Tur told us. Well, unless it’s a story that reflects badly on their profession or their politics. Then they keep it quiet.”
  • President Trump on pace to appoint a record number of circuit court judges during his first year.
  • The DNC needs IT people. Tiny problem: straight white males need not apply. Sort of like saying “Professional basketball players needed, but no tall black people need apply.”
  • How the Obama Administration lied about documents seized during the Bin Laden raid. In particular, Obama hid close links between al Qaeda and Iran that might have derailed his asinine “Iran deal.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “How Google and MSM Use “Fact Checkers” to Flood Us with Fake Claims.” Basically it involves one tentacle of the Democrat-Media Complex creating a fake version of a real story, then having another tentacle debunk the fake version claiming it’s the real version. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • New York City jihad murderer came to U.S. on a “diversity” visa program sponsored by Chuck Schumer. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • The UK’s gun control laws didn’t prevent assailants from opening fire during an illegal rave with automatic weapons in north London.
  • Owner of Gothamist: “We’ve lost money every month.” Staffers: “Screw you! We’re unionizing!” Owner: “Enjoy some pink slips. I’m shutting everything down.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Speaking of publications shutting down, “Teen Vogue Shutters Shortly After Publishing ‘Guide to Anal Sex’ for Teen Girls.” How’s that flipping off your own readers working out for you, Conde Nast? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Papa Johns would like the NFL to stop screwing up their sales with the disrespecting the national anthem bullshit.
  • Broadcom expected to offer $100 billion merger with Qualcomm, which would make it the third largest chipmaker in the world after Intel and Samsung. Note that Qualcomm is already in the midst of a merger with NXP (formerly Philips Semiconductors, which just finished merging with Freescale, formerly Motorola’s fab business until it was spun off). Also note that, unlike Intel and Samsung, Broadcom currently owns no wafer fabrication plants of its own, outsourcing production to foundries like TSMC or Global Foundries. (Though merging with Qualcomm would get them the former NXP fabs.)
  • French butter shortage. Tout le monde panique!
  • Cahnman looks at possible successors for Jeb Hensarling’s U.S. congressional seat. By and large he’s not enthused…
  • Wendy Davis is now running…some lefty feminist thing. Unclear whether it’s actually designed to do anything, or just line Davis’ pockets. Judging how poorly her 2014 gubernatorial campaign was run, I don’t foresee it accomplishing much.
  • Bonus! Davis is actually thinking about running again! “Oh, please do, Ms. Davis. Then, we can watch this clown show all over again.”
  • Want to put up a garage sale or lost pet sign? Not in Fort Worth, comrade! “People who break the sign law could be convicted of a misdemeanor and fined up to $2,000 per day for each violation.”
  • Evidently there’s a sport called “baseball,” and Houston has a team called the “Astros.” Evidently they just won something called “the World Series, which supposedly some sort of big deal.
  • Donna Brazile Admits Hillary Clinton Gutted the DNC And Wore Its Skin To Shovel More Campaign Cash Into Her Gaping Maw

    November 3rd, 2017

    It’s been a ten pound week in a five pound bag, but there’s no rest for the wicked working the Clinton Corruption beat, so let’s just jump into this inescapable top story:

    I had promised Bernie [Sanders] when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers [No proof they were Russian hackers. -LP] and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

    So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

    Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

    By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

    * * *

    The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

    “What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

    That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

    If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

    On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

    “No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”

    “Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.

    Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

    “Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

    Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

    “That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

    “What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”

    The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.

    I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.

    When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.

    * * *

    Right around the time of the convention the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

    Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

    I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

    When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard [She was head of the DNC in the late phases of the 2016 campaign and she decided to go on vacation? -LP I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

    The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

    I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

    When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

    I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. [I’m imagining Brazil going office to office and asking “Hey, Random DNC staffer, are you fair and impartial, or are you working only for Hillary Clinton?” Random: “Oh, I’m totally fair!” -LP] Then I found this agreement.

    The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal [I’m not so sure about that. -LP], but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

    Some of the new details are welcome, though the fact that Clinton was using the DNC as her own personal money-laundering scam should be no surprise to anyone who follows this blog.

    If you wanted to destroy the Democratic Party, it would be harder to top the 1-2 punch of Obama-Clinton that’s left it broke and reeling. And all Trump Derangement Syndrome has done has distracted liberals from just how badly off their party is.

    But let’s be realistic: How on earth could the DNC pay for trivia like “running a political party” when there were all those Fusion GPS consultants to pay?

    (Probably pushing the LinkSwarm to Saturday. It’s been that kind of week…)

    His Motives Remain a Mystery

    November 2nd, 2017

    A little bit of news just in case you missed it:

    A terrorist in a rental truck [Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan] sped for nearly a mile down a popular bike-only path in lower Manhattan on Tuesday — killing eight people in the shadow of the World Trade Center and then shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

    His motives remain a mystery.

    Note found near truck claims Manhattan attack done for ISIS, source says.”

    We may never know why he committed this senseless act.

    NYC terror suspect requested ISIS flag in hospital room.”

    Authorities remain at a loss to explain his actions.

    Saipov Bragging About Attack, Claims ‘ISIS Will Endure.'”

    Above all, we must not jump to hasty conclusions about why the perpetrator committed this completely random act of non-premeditated violence…

    Jeb Hensarling To Retire

    November 1st, 2017

    Texas U.S. Representative Jeb Hensarling announced he’s retiring at the end of his term.

    Here’s his retirement statement in full.

    Hensarling, head of the House Financial Services Committee, is a solid conservative, earning a 96% rating from the American Conservative Union, and a 93% rating from the NRA.