Ukraine is carving out big gains in Kharkiv, Texas is in the money, Biden taps Clinton’s bagman to divy up the graft manage climate change funds, more groomers unmasked, and some big changes in the UK. Plus a bit about tanks. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Ukrainian successes on the Kharkiv City-Izyum line are creating fissures within the Russian information space and eroding confidence in Russian command to a degree not seen since a failed Russian river crossing in mid-May.
Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv Oblast counteroffensives advanced to within 20 kilometers of Russia’s key logistical node in Kupyansk on September 8.
Ukrainian forces will likely capture Kupyansk in the next 72 hours, severely degrading but not completely severing Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum.
Ukrainian forces are continuing to target Russian GLOCs, command-and-control points, and ammunition depots in Kherson Oblast.
On Thursday, the state comptroller reported that the Lone Star State’s tax revenue rocketed by 25.6% to a total of $75.21 billion.
It’s only the fifth time since 1988 that revenue grew by a double-digit percentage — and it’s double the next largest increase over that 34-year span.
“Revenues continue to outpace even our most recent forecast as All Funds tax collections closed the fiscal year $841 million above the projection in our Certification Revenue Estimate,” said state Comptroller Glenn Hegar in an official release.
That’s a stark contrast to California, which saw July revenue come in 12% below forecast.
Texas has been a major beneficiary of migration from California: Over the last census cycle, 34% of new Texans arrived from California alone. Meanwhile, New York saw personal income tax collection fall 3.2% from April 1 through July.
Joe Biden has hired John Podesta to be the new Clean Energy Czar, citing his experience in progressive causes….
Bottom line, John Podesta is being now being hired to divvy up the $316 billion in Green New Deal money recently authorized by congress. That is what Podesta specializes in, the distribution of taxpayer money to DNC allied groups and networks in advance of the 2022 midterms. Podesta, Hillary’s fixer, is a bagman, nothing more.
Worse, one of the many bag clients he’s adept at channeling money into Democratic pockets for is China.
President Joe Biden on Friday tapped John Podesta to oversee $370 billion in climate spending, a move that has China hawks on Capitol Hill concerned over Podesta’s encouragement of Chinese investment in American infrastructure and praise for the top U.S. adversary on climate change.
Podesta has called for Chinese investment in American infrastructure, arguing in 2013 that there are “great opportunities for Chinese firms to directly invest in this nation, to build American infrastructure, to create American jobs, and generate steady and handsome returns.” He added, “There’s also the ability for Chinese firms to invest here and learn best practices, and take those home to the tremendous and growing middle class market in China.”
Instead, in the intervening decade, the Chinese government has committed widespread economic espionage—one 2017 estimate found that China steals up to $600 billion in trade secrets a year. Engineers in China, meanwhile, use popular social media platform TikTok to access nonpublic data from U.S. users.
Podesta has also praised China’s efforts to combat climate change, arguing in 2015 that the Chinese “are beginning to do a fair amount.” China, which is the world’s top carbon emitter, went on to dramatically accelerate its coal consumption, which reached a record high in 2020.
That record has China hawks on the Hill concerned that America’s top adversary has a new—and powerful—ally in the White House. Podesta’s role will see the liberal consultant implement $370 billion in spending toward alternative energy, a sector that China dominates when it comes to raw materials. As such, alternative energy companies receiving the Podesta-steered funding could turn to China to secure supplies. The new Biden aide will likely take no issue with that dynamic, given that he has argued the United States and China should “align” on a green economy. Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Ted Cruz (R., Texas) argued that the move reflects the White House’s soft-on-China stance.
Democratic County Administrator Robert Telles charged in the death of journalist Jeff German, “an investigative reporter with the Las Vegas Review-Journal who had spent the last few months exposing misdeeds and turmoil in the official’s office.” For all Sundown Joe’s dark mutterings about “UltraMAGA,” it seems like Democrats are the ones doing all the killing…
A now-former elementary school teacher previously charged with sexual abuse of a 7-year-old student was arrested again and charged with sexually assaulting a second victim.
Victor Moreno, 28, was charged in July with continuous sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony, and an improper relationship between a student and educator, a second-degree felony.
The accused pedophile’s victim was a second-grade girl in Irving Independent School District, where Moreno was a teacher at the time of the alleged assaults during the 2020-2021 school year.
Snip.
Meanwhile, a teacher’s aide in Mesquite Independent School District was arrested Tuesday after being accused of engaging in inappropriate relationships with students.
Bryan Garcia, 22, was charged with two counts of sexual assault of a child and one count of indecency with a child.
“Higher Ed’s New Woke Loyalty Oaths: A ballooning number of hiring and tenure decisions require candidates to express written fealty to political doctrines.” And you can bet those doctrines have nothing to do with constitutionally limited government based on universal rights…
Indeed, they’re talking about restarting old production lines to start manufacturing older BMP-2s. “The costs and challenges of bringing more modern designs into production are now surely aggravated by Western sanctions cutting access to many basic electrical components, requiring pricey and time-consuming workarounds.”
This is like a scene from a porn movie, only a lot creepier. “Las Vegas landlord requires tenant to sign sex contract in order to lease home.”
“Kim Kardashian Is Starting Her Own Private Equity Company.” Why not? But I’m betting being a genius at self-promotion doesn’t equate to being a genius at investing, especially since she’s starting in the middle of a fierce, widespread downturn…
Easiest way to win Dad of the Year? Pick your son up from school in a tank. Looks like a Scorpion light tank, most likely the FV107 Scimitar reconnaissance variant.
“FBI Drops Investigation After Discovering Trump’s Top Secret Nuclear Documents Were Just Print-Outs Of Hillary Clinton Emails.”
The big scandal in the Hunter Biden Laptop story isn’t Hunter’s deplorable actions, it’s Joe Biden’s corruption.
Investigative reporter Peter Schweizer reiterated what he’s said about Hunter being close to criminal indictment. He said The New York Times “got a lot of cooperation from Team Biden” before they ran the story on Hunter that included their admission that the laptop was, indeed, real. He says Biden’s team was “trying to position themselves.” Of course, this case isn’t really about Hunter but the President of the United States, and a criminal indictment would open up “that whole can of worms” concerning dad’s connections to dirty money and the associated tax issues and huge national security concerns.
Snip.
George Soros, probably the most influential man in Ukraine, is a big part of this story, too. He gave $1 million to the humorously named Democratic Integrity Project, headed by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI analyst and staffer for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Jones had started the nonprofit (seems pretty profitable to me) after Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS approached him with the idea of forming the organization. Then, after filling its coffers to the tune of $7 million, Jones turned around and wrote a check to Fusion GPS for $3.3 million. I am not making this up. The same players keep turning up again and again.
Fusion GPS’s task: to research how Russian intelligence operations were affecting elections around the world. And they brought in Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta to help. Still not making it up, my friends. This was after Podesta’s and the DNC’s emails had been purloined (the narrative became that they were hacked by Russia) and published by WikiLeaks, to the DNC’s embarrassment.
(Incidentally, John’s lobbyist brother Tony was under investigation at that time for “cashing in” in Ukraine. He was paid $1.2 million to promote a plan conceived, ironically, by Manfort and Gates.)
Then there’s the story you know, the investigation of Burisma by prosecutor Viktor Shokin until then-Vice President Biden got him fired by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee. By now everyone has seen the video of Biden bragging about it before a live audience — without mentioning Hunter was on the Burisma board.
There’s much more, involving Soros and an investigation by Shokin’s replacement into a Soros-funded organization, the ironically named Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC). This was when the new U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch (remember her from Trump’s impeachment?) gave the prosecutor a list of people not to prosecute, including a founder of AntAC. Second-in-command George Kent had already tried to discourage the prosecutor from investigating. According to reporter John Solomon, their message to Ukrainian officials was this: “Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama.”
There are others in Ukraine tied to both the Russia hoax and Trump’s impeachment. California Rep. Adam Schiff, running the impeachment, trotted out our diplomatic “experts” from Ukraine to talk about Trump and his “impeachable” phone call to President Zelenskyy. Those were Americans, our diplomatic corps, who’d been telling Ukrainian prosecutors who they could and could not prosecute and treating a Soros-funded organization like some sort of sacred cow. Soros supported Hillary and was Trump’s political enemy. He funded an organization conceived by Glenn Simpson. Something smells like bad borscht.
Questions asked: “Did The New York Times Admit Joe Biden Is Corrupt So Democrats Can Get Rid Of Him?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Will Rogers once famously said he did not belong to an organised political party because he was a Democrat. Yet today the traditional factiousness of the Democratic coalition has been engulfed by an almost Stalinist attitude that brooks no dissent on its most treasured policies – even though these do not resonate well with the bulk of the electorate.
To recover, Democrats need to find a way back to their historic base of working-class and minority voters, who now seem to be heading to the GOP. Franklin D Roosevelt’s alliance between big cities, small towns, labour unions and farmers was often awkward, but it still achieved remarkable success in restoring US confidence and winning the war. In contrast, President Biden’s boneheaded embrace of a progressive agenda that is widely detested across most of the population may prove to be one of the greatest political blunders of recent American history.
Given the probability of a significant loss in this November’s Midterms, we should expect – and hope for – a full-scale brawl over the party’s trajectory. There needs to be something equivalent to the New Democrats who, under Bill Clinton, revived the party after the devastating defeats of George McGovern and Michael Dukakis in the 1970s and 80s by moving the party to the centre and connecting it to the country’s diverse regions. ‘Too many Americans’, wrote New Democrats Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck in 1989, ‘have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defence of their national security’.
Snip.
The economic metrics are awful. Despite nominal GDP gains and higher wages, inflation, largely driven by energy prices, has been particularly cruel to minority and working-class voters. Overall, when asked if they are better off now than a year ago, twice as many Americans said ‘worse’ than better in a recent poll.
The cave-in to the greens has increased the Democrats’ economic vulnerability, particularly in the wake of Russian aggression and the continued role of China as the world’s dominant greenhouse-gas emitter. The well-funded American environmental elite lack the grudging sense of realism of their German counterparts, who have been forced to reconsider some of their energy policies in light of the invasion. But in resource-rich America, the green grandees still oppose boosting fossil-fuel energy supplies, despite 80 per cent of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favouring the use of both fossil fuels and renewables. Public support for Net Zero / the Green New Deal hovers around 20 per cent.
Essentially the Democrats’ Net Zero obsession could result in a political disaster. In February, according to Gallup, only two per cent of voters named climate or the environment as their biggest concern, one-fifth the number who named inflation and barely one-tenth the number who cited poor government leadership. Relentless climate scaremongering has not moved the needle among voters. ‘Climate catastrophism’, notes political strategist Ruy Teixeira, is a political ‘loser’, particularly among working-class voters of all races.
Cultural issues represent another fault line between the bulk of the electorate and the tin-eared elites of the party. Democrats’ have embraced what former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville scathingly labels ‘the politics of the faculty lounge’, such as support for the increasingly discredited Black Lives Matter movement and its calls to ‘defund the police’. This idea may be beloved at places like Harvard, but among the less elevated mortals it is widely unpopular, even among minorities, including two of the nation’s Democratic African-American mayors, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and New York City’s Eric Adams.
Voters view crime as the second-most pressing issue, after the economy and inflation. Here again the survey results are equally distressing for the progressive agenda. Voters, according to one recent survey, blame the Democrats for the current crime wave by a margin of two to one. Moderate Democrats, like retiring Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, herself a refugee from Vietnam, found her support for legislation that would penalise undocumented criminals got her labeled as ‘anti-immigrant’ by the party’s dominant progressive mob.
“Hispanic Texans Overwhelmingly Believe There Is a Border Crisis and Support Security Measures.” “Almost three-quarters of respondents agreed that there is a crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico with only 23 percent disagreeing with that characterization.”
Turns out even Democratic primary voters don’t think you should be talking to kindergartners about sex:
“U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela will resign early from Congress. The South Texas Democrat announced last year that he wouldn’t seek reelection. He’s leaving early to take a job at a law firm.” Yeah, people don’t leave the United States Congress early for a law firm job. There’s something else going on there. (Hat tip: Push Junction, who noted Republicans have a good chance to flip the seat.)
“Hidalgo Staff Allegedly Plotted to Steer $11 Million Contract, ‘Slam the Door’ on Competing Bid, per Warrants. A grand jury investigation found probable cause of tampering with governmental documents and misuse of official information related to a contract awarded to a woman with ties to local and national Democrats.” My working theory is that whenever you see something like this going on, kickbacks, graft and illegal donations to hard left groups and individuals are all but a certainty.
Also: “Hidalgo Says Communications About $11 Million Vaccine Outreach Contract Were Private, Taken Out of Context.” When you’re talking about a public official discussing a public contract using taxpayer money with her public staff, also paid using taxpayer money, there is no such thing as “private.”
Nicholas Moran cautions to avoid drawing too many conclusions from the limited video information coming out of the Russo-Ukranian War. “That tanks unsupported by the other arms are easy prey is tanking 101, and what we are seeing in Ukraine isn’t revolutionary, it’s exactly what you would expect to happen if you send vehicles in unsupported into areas infested with infantry and not denied to enemy air.” Also: We’re only seeing the Ukrainian side because they’re the ones uploading cell phone footage, and an important reminder that an anti-tank hit is not an anti-tank kill. (Previously.)
Borepatch is not impressed with the level of security in the latest online voting scheme.
Heh:
I was robbed at a gas station in NJ last night. After my hands stopped trembling..I managed to call the cops and they were quick to respond and calmed me down….. My money is gone.. the police asked me if I knew who did it..I said yes.. it was pump number 9…
This seems disturbing: “Seven hospitalized ‘including four juveniles’ in mass fentanyl poisoning after deadly drug is released through air vents.” This was in Ohio. So add “aerosolized Fentanyl” to the list of things to worry about…
“United Airlines Rolls Back Vaccine Requirements for Employees. United Airlines announced that it would be changing its policy and that unvaccinated workers would be allowed to return to their normal positions by March 28.” Personally, I’d try to get them to pay through the nose for my return…
Another week, another high-profile staffer quitting Kamala Harris’ office. “On Monday, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ disastrous visit to Poland, it was reported that her National Security Adviser Nancy McEldowney, will become the latest staffer to leave Harris’ office.”
“Investors at BuzzFeed are reportedly pressuring CEO Jonah Peretti to close down its entire money-losing news operation as senior journalists announced their resignations on Tuesday.” See, the problem here is that they used “Buzzfeed,” “journalists” and “news” all in the same sentence…
Speaking of failing leftwing outlets, the Texas Observer is circling the drain.
In September, the Observer’s editorial staff comprised 13 journalists. As of this month, after a rash of resignations — and one firing — only four of them remain. The five-person business team dwindled to zero in February. This mass exodus, former staffers said, can be traced to a series of board decisions — from the handling of a complaint by former Editor-in-Chief Tristan Ahtone, which led to his resignation; to promising Executive Editor Megan Kimble the top job in the interim, only to pass her over for an outside hire; to unilaterally halting publication of the magazine just days before it went to print.
Read on for the blow-by-blow, but evidently the staff got too uppity for the board of directors and we’re shown the door, with some side orders of “diversity” and “a web-first publication.” I would say this was all good schadenfreude, but I doubt I’ve even thought of the Observer since George W. Bush was governor…
Louis Rossmann finds the same problems plaguing New York City also plague D.C., namely high retail vacancies and general disorder. “It’s literally like somebody just picked up all the problems of New York City, control-C, and control-V them somewhere else.”
Speaking of New York City, Democratic Mayor Eric Adams wants you to know that athletes and actors are simply better than you common peasants, so vaccine mandates don’t apply to them. “The exemption for athletes and entertainers comes ahead of the upcoming baseball season, opening the field for unvaccinated Mets and Yankees to play home games too. Roughly two-thirds of Yankees players and at least ten Mets remain unvaccinated and will now be able to participate, Jon Heyman of the MLB Network noted.” Plus Kyrie Irving on the Brooklyn Nets.
Biden promises to shovel trillions into Social Justice and green energy ratholes, how Democrats plan to steal the election, more Slow Joe verbal stumbles, and a potential VP pick has a commie past. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Joe Biden says he wants equality. Who could be against that? But if just declaring yourself in favor of equality were enough, we would not still be arguing about equality in 2020. As always, when politicians talk about inequality, watch your wallet. And in this case, watch the Constitution, too.
In the past week, the Biden campaign has announced plans of Castro-esque length aimed at racial equality and women’s equality. We suppose we should at least welcome Biden’s continued willingness to use that old-fashioned word “women.” But Biden is so stuck in the past that he would pronounce the Equal Rights Amendment already ratified based on state legislative approvals in the 1970s. The deadline for the expiration of those long-ago votes was so clear, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg considers them dead letters. Biden would go further, demanding Senate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a radical-feminist 1970s treaty under which even Scandinavian countries get hectored for allowing women to assume the primary role in child-rearing. Biden would also restore the Obama-era unilateral executive fiat under which domestic violence and sexual violence are made the basis for political asylum, a position with no basis in the immigration laws enacted by Congress, and no limiting principle.
Human rights get rough treatment under the plans. Biden proposes to roll back due-process protections for the accused in campus sexual-assault cases. The secret ballot for union elections is to be replaced by reviving “card check” elections. Biden once posed as a pro-lifer reluctantly supporting legal abortion, while opposing — for four decades — taxpayer-funded abortion. So much for that. He pledges that “his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate Roe v. Wade,” and that he will “restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood,” restore U.S. funding to the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund, and “restore the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate” to ignore the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision and restart the government’s assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Many of the proposals boil down to the same old thing: more federal spending of taxpayer money, more power and goodies for unions, more workplace regulations, more dividing people up by race. The price tag of all these initiatives adds up to some $7 trillion in new spending, most of it permanent. Right off the bat, a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” is pledged in a “clean energy future,” with the restriction that “disadvantaged communities receive 40 percent of overall benefits of spending in the areas of clean energy and energy efficiency deployment” — a telltale sign that this is more about spreading money around to favored constituencies than about “science.”
The Biden plan requires we eliminate all greenhouse gases from the electricity grid that powers the country by 2035. As is usual, Biden is an underachieving. We’re all supposed to be dead in 10 years if you believe the climate alarmists. This deadline is just more proof that no one does.
As Reason editor Nick Gillespie pointed out, the current plan is just another way to pander to organized labor. He also correctly pointed out that there is no way we should be spending $2 trillion after all the pandemic spending. However, you can be sure that it will not deter Biden.
However, the Guardian is also pointing out what serious opposition the plan will face. The program requires building tens of thousands of new wind turbines and millions of new solar panels. These numbers are likely an underestimate. Renewable energy sources are very low-density and not well suited to powering urban areas. There are also some areas of the country where neither would be particularly efficient.
Sergio Aguirre and Nitin Chadda had reached the most elite quarters of U.S. foreign policy. Aguirre had started out of school as a fellow in the White House and a decade later had become chief of staff to U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Chadda, who joined the Pentagon out of college as a speechwriter, had become a key adviser to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in even less time. Now, Chadda had a long-shot idea.
They turned to an industry of power-brokering little known outside the capital: strategic consultancies. Retiring leaders often open firms bearing their names: Madeleine Albright has one, as do Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. Their strategic consultancies tend to blur corporate and governmental roles. This obscure corner of Washington is critical to understanding how a President Joe Biden would conduct foreign policy. He has been picking top advisers from this shadowy world.
Snip.
The problem for Aguirre and Chadda was that neither young man was a marquee name. Chadda realized that the latest crop of senior officials hadn’t yet started their own named consultancies. “The thought for us was to build a living and breathing platform, with those who are enthusiastic about serving again,” he said. Staying up late one night, they drafted a plan and came up with the first target they would pitch.
Michèle Flournoy had served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012. Both Aguirre and Chadda had known her well in the Obama administration. Since leaving office, she’d spent several years in consulting and was hitting her stride. With Flournoy as senior adviser, Boston Consulting Group’s defense contracts grew from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. Before she joined, according to public records, BCG had not signed any contracts with the Defense Department.
Flournoy, while consulting, joining corporate boards, and serving as a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, had also become CEO of the Center for a New American Security in 2014. The think tank had an annual budget of about $9 million, and defense contractors donated at least $3.8 million while she was CEO. By 2017, she was making $452,000 a year.
If a Democrat were to win office, she would likely become the first woman defense secretary. She had considered an offer to serve as deputy to Trump’s first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, but ultimately withdrew from the vetting process and stuck to consulting. “That’s more of a labor of love,” she told me. “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important.”
Intrigued by Aguirre and Chadda’s idea of starting her own shop, she had one condition: find another big name, so it wouldn’t just be Flournoy and Associates.
They needed another co-founder. Establishing a new firm was an investment and a risk, and many Obama officials were already spoken for, some headhunted by corporations or consultancies, others returning to academic appointments or finding respite in research institutions—many wearing all those hats at once.
Flournoy could carry her own private practice, but she didn’t want a firm with her name on it alone. The trio reached out to defense and intelligence honchos, but with no luck. Then a particular Washington fixture came to light.
He had been Vice President Joe Biden’s right-hand man for almost two decades and finished out the Obama administration as deputy secretary of state. He was known for his unimpeachable ethics. Having written Biden’s speeches for years, he had started to enunciate with the vice president’s drawl when he appeared on CNN. He had never cashed in on his international connections, years of face time with Saudi, Israeli, and Chinese leaders.
His name was Tony Blinken. With his commitment to join Flournoy as founding partner, a new strategic consultancy was born. They called it WestExec Advisors.
Add Avril Haines, another Obama alumnus, to the list of names.
If you believe that personnel is policy, it’s worth reading the whole thing. WestExec sucked up a lot of defense contractor consulting cash.
They think a businessman is best suited to turn the country around economically. They feel Covid-19 was not Trump’s fault, and he’s doing the best he can to contain it. They conflate the Black Lives Matter protesters with the rioters attacking federal buildings and retail shops. They don’t want historic monuments torn down. And they dismiss defunding the police as ridiculous.
These voters tell me they want America finally to be put first; they oppose immigration and trade policies they say give benefits to foreigners at their expense. And they want a non-politician who relentlessly fights back, after witnessing too many office holders fold in the face of special interests.
These voters may sound like typical Fox News watchers, but, significantly, the overwhelming majority are not. Many are, instead, people who get their news disproportionately from local television, regional websites and Facebook. Compared to the kinds of people who seek out news from national cable channels, many swing voters reside in a national politics desert.
Reading between the lines: “These people are beyond the reach of, or see through, the national MSM preference falsification system.”
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has pledged $20 million this cycle to oppose Democratic-backed efforts to ease voting restrictions while Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said his campaign has assembled 600 attorneys as a bulwark against election subterfuge.
With a little more than three months until Election Day, the voting rules in key battleground states are the focus of bitterly partisan court fights that could influence the outcome of the presidential race. These include lawsuits to expand mail-in voting in Texas, extend vote-by-mail deadlines in key Rust Belt swing states and restore the voting rights of up to one million indigent Floridians with felony records.
At present, the Democrats are attempting to unseat an incumbent president by devising a plan where their candidate doesn’t have to be seen in public for most of the general election campaign. They’re desperate to keep Joe Biden hidden until as many early and mail-in votes as possible are cast for him because they know that the first time he’s on his own in public he’s going to pull down his mask and start sniffing strangers, all the while barking, “Barack likes me!”
On the rare occasions when the idiot in the basement is let off-leash by his wife and handlers, he’s babbling about President Trump trying to “steal” the election. He keeps saying it, too, most recently at a virtual fundraiser hosted by one of the celebrities Hillary Clinton thought would wish her to victory.
Snip.
In each one of these “steal the election” rants, Biden immediately rambles on about mail-in ballots. Again, that’s all they’ve got and they know it. That’s where the real election-stealing can happen and it’s not going to be done by the Republicans.
The Democrats have shown — especially in the Trump era — that most of what they throw at the Republicans is just a bunch of twisted political psychological projection.
For example, take the absurd notion that Dems have recycled from 2016. They are again insisting that President Trump won’t accept the election results, giving it a minor update, saying that he won’t leave the White House now that he’s the incumbent.
This from the party whose vanquished alcoholic grandmother from 2016 is still going on television and saying that the election was stolen from her. Throw in Stacey Abrams and her ongoing psychotic break about being the real governor of Georgia and I think we can see which side has a difficult time accepting the results of an election.
In fact, the violence we’re seeing now has more to do with hating Trump than it does with the death of George Floyd. The Democrats began their “peaceful protests” almost the moment Trump was elected and have been ranging back and forth between simple public incivility and violence ever since. It’s been one long tantrum about not accepting the 2016 election results.
“It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of s–t in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still s–t’, ” Sanders co-chair Nina Turner told The Atlantic.
Turner, a former Ohio state senator, was quoted in an article analyzing Trump’s paths to re-election, including by exploiting disaffected supporters of Sanders’ socialist campaign, which lost to Biden despite winning the first three state Democratic contests this year.
UK’s Sunday Expresshas a poll up showing President Trump leading Biden by a couple of points:
The third in a series of monthly Democracy Institute/ Sunday Express polls has given President Trump a surprise lead over his Democrat rival of 48 percent to 46 percent, his clearest lead yet.
Crucially, President Trump has a lead of 48 percent to 43 percent in the swing states Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin which would put him back in the White House with an electoral college tally of 309 to Biden’s 229.
Specifically, in Florida Trump has a 47 to 45 point lead, Minnesota (where the black lives matters protests began) a 46/45 lead, and New Hampshire a 46/43 lead.
The polling suggests Mr Trump is emerging as the race leader because of a belief he is best in handling the economy.
With a third of voters putting the economy as the top election issue and 66 percent thinking that the economy is bouncing back after coronavirus, voters believe that Trump is better for the economy by 57 percent to 43 percent.
Snip.
According to the poll 71 percent of Trump voters are “shy” to admit it compared to 66 percent a month ago.
However, 79 percent of Trump voters are enthusiastic about their candidate compared to just 41 percent of Biden voters, two points lower than a month ago.
Meanwhile, only 4 percent of Trump voters believe they could change their mind while 10 percent of Biden voters could switch.
And here’s a Twitter thread on just that question:
Joe Biden last year in Keene, New Hampshire: "I’ve been here a number of times…I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?” pic.twitter.com/YZBP4ybQ3z
Democrats are waking up to the terrifying realization that if #HollowJoe debates, he's done. And if he doesn't debate, he's done because he didn't debate.
Dems also suspect they really DID push Trump supporters to lie to pollsters. #Landslide2020
Bill Clinton’s ex-pres secretary (not him, not her, yeah, him) wants you to know that Biden can still lose. But you have to wade through Democratic Party talking points to get to that, so I’ve saved you some time…
‘Squad’ Member Tlaib Won’t Endorse Biden. She supported Sanders in the primaries.
“Biden Campaign Says He Is So Close To A VP Pick He Can Smell Her.”
Here’s a bit from Joe Rogan interviewing Pat Miletich, a former MMA fighter who runs a podcast called The Conspiracy Farm. He talks about a lot of scandals and conspiracy theories, both domestic and foreign, involving the Obama and Bush43 administration.
The particular Obama scandal stuff they discuss (using regulatory arbitrage to enrich friends who buy depressed stock, who then benefit when the decision is reversed) I was unfamiliar with, but sounds entirely plausible.
The Hillary Clinton (and John and Tony Podesta) stuff is not just plausible, it’s stuff we already know. (Correction: Yellowcake is not depleted uranium, it’s mildly processed uranium oxide which can later be enriched into energy or weapons-grade uranium.)
Did the Obama Administration directly fund the Islamic State? I would like to think not, if only because, however much they hated Bashar Assad’s Syria, they were also trying to curry favor with Iran, and it seems like funding a radical Sunni fundamentalist Islamic State would be at odds with that goal. Certainly the Obama team was funding some Islamist Syrian radicals, but I had the impression that the Islamic State was primarily being bankrolled by Qatar and various Saudi royals. I could be wrong. If Obama Administration officials were knowingly funding the Islamic State, they deserve war crimes tribunals.
The John McCain stuff I find a little harder to believe, not because I hold McCain in particularly high regard, because he could be a real piece of work, but because there was no love lost between McCain and either the Bush43 or Obama Administrations, making him an unlikely insider conduit for arms sales.
Left-wing website ThinkProgress is shutting down after failing to find a buyer, according to the Daily Beast.
Launched by the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress (CAP) which had been hemorrhaging cash to keep the site afloat, ThinkProgress came under severe financial strain after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 US election – and not one liberal billionaire was willing to step in with what would be relative pocket change to keep it afloat.
I’m quickly depleting my Strategic Nelson Reserve.
“The staff unionized in 2015 as a result of editorial friction and they proceeded to try to wrestle editorial control away from the top people at CAP.”
I’m surprised it took them this long to shut it down…
More Q1 numbers are trickling out. Harris, Sanders and O’Rourke all did well, Gillibrand and Castro did poorly. Insert your own Biden as Hamlet sentence here.
Fundraising
More Q1 fundraising numbers, continued from last week, with new additions announced
Bernie Sanders: $18.2 million from 525,000 donors
Kamala Harris: $12 million from 138,000 donors
Beto O’Rourke: $9.4 million from 218,000 contributions (number of donors not specified)
For the sake of comparison, incumbent president Donald Trump pulled in pulled in $30 million, and has $40 million in hand.
Polls etc.
Emerson: Sanders 29, Biden 24%, Buttigieg 9%, Harris and O’Rourke at 8%. I think that’s the first poll that had Sanders over Biden, or Buttigieg over Harris and O’Rourke.
Washington Post‘s The Fix rates the candidates in order of likeliness to be a nominee. Any list that ranks Warren third and Biden sixth can’t be taken seriously.
Heh: “Scientists Recommend Reducing The Number Of Democratic Presidential Candidates To Help Fight Climate Change.” “Scientists recommend the current Democratic field be reduced to less than half the current number or we could see an increase in hurricanes, droughts, kaiju, and ‘other climate change things.'”
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Krystal Ball (yes, her real name) make the case for Abrams. “You can just hear the narrator intoning: “With hard work and perseverance, anyone can succeed. America is the land of opportunity.’ But, Abrams doesn’t seem to buy that narrative. For one thing, in spite of all of her success in the grand American meritocracy, Abrams still found herself filing for governor at a time when she owed $170,000 in consumer and student loan debt and $50,000 in taxes.” Wait, you’re making the case for Abrams? As for running statewide:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out. But see Friday’s LinkSwarm for more information on this prince among men and his multiple felony indictments.
Addition: Actor Alec Baldwin: Maybe? No news from Baldwin himself since floating last week’s Twitter balloon, but this piece suggests Democrats should run a celebrity…just not Alec Baldwin.
In one of the Twitter rants he is always getting up to, Alec Baldwin claimed the other day that if he ran for president in 2020, he could beat President Trump. It would be “easy,” he said. “So easy. So easy.”
I’m not so sure he’s right about this. No one over the age of 35 watches Saturday Night Live anymore, certainly not outside our major cities. Normal people don’t know who is being parodied in your 37th different sketch about some minor White House official, which makes laughing along kind of difficult. What else do Americans associate Baldwin with these days, apart from 30 Rock and that one funny monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross? His stint narrating Thomas and Friends? The Hunt for Red October? I just don’t think he’s beloved enough.
Wait, people under the age of 35 watch Saturday Night Live? I’ll need to see documented evidence of that…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning toward a run. Despite his cancer diagnosis, he was visiting Iowa, which suggests he’s not easily deterred.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning Towards Running. He’s evidently planning to run as Obama’s pale third term. I’m not sure that’s the red tofu Democratic activists are longing to hear, but it may not matter. Biden also has an advantage in having every old Democratic office holder at his beck and call. Here’s a Vanity Fair piece on how the #MeToo creeper stuff is going to hurt him; it’s unconvincing, and it’s the same argument liberals made about the Billy Bush tape sinking Trump. He’s also delivering Fritz Hollings’ eulogy.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Maybe. Nothing since last week’s “he might run after all” blip.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He did the “I was already running but now I’m officially officially running” thing. A report on his speech makes it sounds like all the usual Democratic talking points. “Buttigieg criticized what he called the more conservative connotation of the word “freedom,” one that he said refers simply to freedom from the government. He instead talked about government having a role in promoting other freedoms: from racism, gender inequality, unfair working conditions, financial exploitation, a lack of affordable health care.” Big Brother needs to get bigger! Kurt Schlichter wants us to remember how annoying Buttigieg is. Hmmm: “Austin Mayor Steve Adler backing Buttigieg two weeks after welcoming Beto at hometown rally.” Those liberal college town mayors have to stick together…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But for some inexplicable reason she and her husband are out on a speaking tour. Of course, it could be the very explicable reason of “money.”
Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He campaigned in Pennsylvania. “At a Tuesday night event hosted by Penn Democrats, Delaney billed himself as a different type of Democrat, offering a centrist vision for the nation.” The picture shows a crowd of what looks to be about 25 people, despite a plate of free sandwiches in the room…
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She raised $3 million in Q1, which is piss poor by the standards of a sitting new York senator. She should have been able to shake down that much from Wall Street the day she announced. her staff is blaming her stand on Al Franken. Heh: “White House National Security Adviser John Bolton could not stop laughing when played a clip of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) discussing her opposition to “tactile” nuclear weapons on the campaign trail.”
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. Seeing no sign he’s running for President in 2020. But this is interesting: “Former Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum built up some serious hype when he launched a voter drive. That work will be done with his Forward Florida political committee, which he now chairs. But it appears Gillum also formed a corporation with a similar name and function. Division of Corporations records show on April 5, paperwork was filed for the Forward Florida Action not-for-profit corporation.”
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. She released 15 years of tax returns, which showed she and her lawyer husband made nearly $2 million in 2018. Must be nice. She’s leading the Hollywood fundraising race (just like Alan Cranston did in 1984), which donations from Shonda Rhimes, Elizabeth Banks, Quincy Jones, and J.J. Abrams, who is reportedly considering buffing up her campaign with more lens flare. She’s also the candidate of big tech:
the national obsession with ethnicity and novelty obscures the more important reality: Harris is also the favored candidate of the tech and media oligarchy now almost uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party. She has been a hit in all the important places—the Hamptons, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—that financed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Unlike Warren and Sanders, or Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, Harris has not called for curbs on, let alone for breaking up, the tech giants. As California’s attorney general, she did little to prevent the agglomeration of economic power that has increasingly turned California into a semi-feudal state dominated by a handful of large tech firms. These corporate behemoths now occupy 20 percent of Silicon Valley’s office space, and they have undermined the start-up culture that once drove the area’s growth.
Snip.
By the time Harris ran for the Senate, she could count on massive support from Bay Area law firms, real-estate developers, and Hollywood. More important, she appealed, early on, to tech mavens such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Sean Parker, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, venture capitalist John Doerr, Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell, and various executives at tech firms such as Airbnb, Google, and Nest, who have collectively poured money into her campaigns. Their investment was not ill-considered. Harris seems a sure bet for the tech leaders. Her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, was a managing partner with Venable Partners, whose clients include Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and trade associations opposing strict Internet regulations.
She’s also building out her campaign in South Carolina, probably a smart move. With so many candidates in the race and proportional delegate allocation, I don’t think Iowa and new Hampshire are going to winnow the field nearly as much in the past, which is going to make South Carolina’s February 29th primary more important than in year’s past. Speaking of which: “Bakari Sellers, a CNN commentator and former South Carolina state representative, endorsed Sen. Kamala Harris for president, her campaign announced Monday.” Wait, Harris is a gun owner? That will make for some interesting Harris-Swalwell deabtes. (Hat tip: CarpeDonktum.)
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. He had a CNN town hall. At least one review was not kind: “He really did sound like he has just half a brain, as he himself said earlier this week. CNN didn’t do Inslee any favors by airing this interview.” He said his state would love to get all those illegal aliens. One wonders if his constituents feel the same.
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
So you’re a thin-shelled, easily boiled crustacean deluded enough to think you can defeat a natural killing machine a hundred times more powerful than you are. Got it.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Maybe? “Seth Moulton is running social media ads asking if he should run for higher office.” Expect him to throw his hat into the ring under his new name of Candidate McCandidateFace.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “The big idea? Beto doesn’t have one.” “Beto O’Rourke’s most distinctive policy position? To be determined. There’s no signature issue yet, no single policy proposal sparking his campaign. Convening crowds — and listening to them — is the central thrust of his early presidential bid.” The roots of Beto’s money. Hint: It’s not record sales. “O’Rourke co-owns a shopping mall worth seven figures; He received his half as a gift from his mother.”
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has accused a leading liberal think tank, founded and run by longtime Hillary Clinton allies, of orchestrating attacks on him and two other 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
In a letter provided to CNN by his campaign, Sanders addressed the board of the Center for American Progress and CAP Action Fund on Saturday, alleging that its activities are playing a “destructive role” in the “critical mission to defeat Donald Trump.” Sanders cited two posts about him by ThinkProgress, a website run by CAP’s political arm, and past pieces focused on Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.
The exchange threatens to shred an already frayed public détente between the wider circles surrounding both Sanders and Clinton, who fought a bitter 2016 presidential primary that still looms large in the minds of many Democrats — if only because they fear a divisive replay in 2020.
CAP, founded in 2003 by John Podesta, who was former President Bill Clinton’s final chief of staff and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, and its top officials have often been accused by progressives loyal to Sanders of seeking to undermine his political agenda — debates that frequently blow up on social media platforms like Twitter.
Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Probably Out? Said he wasn’t running, but there’s this: “California billionaire Tom Steyer may be reconsidering his decision last January to remove himself as a possible candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, according to a new report. A citizen in Iowa recently recorded a robocall that tested political messaging related to Steyer, according to a report from Iowa Starting Line.” Still think he’s out, but not this for the record.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yang had some of his own bad ideas, like “monitoring malicious speech.” He also wants to decriminalize heroin and other opiates (along the lines of Portugal), which may be the first genuinely new idea any Democratic Presidential candidate has floated this cycle. Here’s a review of his book. “Once you read his book, it is apparent that Andrew Yang is running for president because he is afraid of normal people.” He’s an idea-a-minute guy, many of them bad, sort of a Democratic version of 2012’s Newt Gingrich. Yang also leads the candidates in Facebook spending.
This week in the clown car update: Spartacus is In and LA mayor Eric Garcetti is Out. Oh, and Oprah’s spiritual advisor joined the race, because why the hell not?
This is the point in campaign cycles when key campaign staffers and donors stop returning the calls of undeclared longshots, either joining up with a declared campaign or waiting for a bigger fish (“Sure, Mike, I think you’d make a great President, but old Joe Biden and I go way back…”). Biden can wait. Bloomberg can wait. O’Rourke has enough residual fawning media afterglow and a big enough contributor list that he can probably wait as well. Beyond them, the train has already sounded the whistle and announced final boarding. There will be another one along in 2023…
538’s weekly roundup. And National Review‘s Jim Geraghty sorts the Democratic candidates by age. “To get a sense of the generational difference, when Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate, Buttigieg, Gabbard, and Castro had not been born yet and O’Rourke was two months old.”
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Maybe. All quiet on the Bennet front.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning toward running. Did Biden embrace segregation in 1975? Will being Obama’s Veep inoculate him from charges of racism? We all know the answer to that: If you’re inconvenient for Social Justice Warriors, nothing inoculates you from charges of racism.
Michael Bloomberg has bigger plans for 2020 than running for president. The billionaire and former New York City mayor has been openly dreaming of the White House for 25 years, and spent huge amounts of time and money four times over the past 10 years trying to figure out a way to get himself there.
But he has hesitations about this race, too. He’s not sure there is a realistic space in the Democratic primaries for his centrist record. And he almost certainly won’t run if Joe Biden does, members of his team believe.
Note that “centrist” has now come to mean “not completely insane on law and order issues” in Democratic circles…
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Website. Twitter. Spartacus is in. I predict we see a vicious series of attacks against Booker from a mainstream media desperate to keep him from eating into anointed favorite Kamala Harris’ base. Upgrade from Probably In.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. In an interview with New York magazine, he says the race is all about immigration, Because Trump. I’m sure he wishes it was, but I bet Democratic strategists who can actually read polls dread seeing that happen…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not. Never mind what Hillary herself said last week, Clinton toady John Podesta says she’s not running. Back in the crypt, Grandma Death. Downgrade from “Maybe.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Out.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Maybe. New York Timesnotices that the appetite for De Blasio rivals the popularity of [spins pop culture reference wheel] New Coke. Assuming the pitchman was still Bill Cosby…
Maryland Representative John K. Delaney: In. He was on Iowa public television, sounding disturbingly normal by Democratic Party chances, so I can only assume he’s toast.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. This week’s obligatory MSM “Tulsi Gabbard is doomed” piece comes via Politico, who claim her campaign is in “disarray.” You know, just like the all those 2017 stories on the Trump White House. Glenn Greenwald goes on to debunk another NBC hit piece: “NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party.”
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out. “This is where I want to be, and this is a place where we have so much exciting work to finish.”
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Out. Just joined CNN. A downgrade from “Probably Out.”
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Probably in. Says he’s the guy to beat Trump rather than someone “far left.” Compared to any field but this one, Hickenlooper himself is pretty far left himself…
Addition: Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder: Leaning toward a run. Didn’t want to add him, but he’s speaking in Iowa. Maybe threatening to take votes away from Kamala Harris is the only way to get the MSM to do honest reporting on Fast And Furious…
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Leaning toward In. Get’s a semi-fawning profile from NeverTrumper George Will, with a slam at “skateboarding man-child” Beto O’Rourke along the way.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Maybe? Zero buzz.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Maybe? He evidently stopped raising money months ago. Also:
A Facebook Live chat he did in response to President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address on immigration earlier this month began with about 2,600 viewers. By the end, after an hour of him walking around his El Paso neighborhood trying to show the calm reality of a border town, and looking at the decorations in friends’ homes, and then sitting on a couch and chatting at length, the viewers steadily dropped to just over 1,000.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning toward In. “I’m close to making a decision. I’ll be in New Hampshire tomorrow, so I’m excited for that.” Yes, nothing says “excitement” like midwinter New Hampshire…
Addition: Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. So let me get this straight: Oprah’s not running, but her spiritual advisor is? She most recently placed fourth in a California congressional race, but Team Kamala must be shitting bricks at the possibility that Oprah might endorse her.
As I previously mentioned, several Clinton Corruption scandals, and the Obama Administration FISA/Unmasking scandal, have been converging into one giant scandal for some time.
Well things just got a whole lot more convergy. So I’m going to crank this out beforethe FISA abuse memo drops.
Would you believe that the FBI has a second secret Trump “dossier”, this one written by well know Clinton crony and dirty tricks man Cody Shearer?
More on the same subject:
Shearer's older brother Derek got a plum job as Clinton's ambassador to Finland in part because of dirty tricks from Sid Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. Derek bragged about them in a 1993 memo to the Clintons. https://t.co/JzfKWwo2c9pic.twitter.com/rQu6swYJ1k
Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SCS) wrote six Judiciary Committee letters requesting information from: John Podesta, Donna Brazille, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Robbie[sic] Mook, the DNC, and Hillary For America Chief Strategist Joel Benenson.
The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s PAC was revealed by The Washington Post to have paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS for the creation of a dossier that would be harmful to then-candidate Donald Trump.
Fusion commissioned former UK spy Christopher Steele to assemble the dossier – which is comprised of a series of memos relying largely on Russian government sources to make allegations against Donald Trump and his associates.
According to court filings, Fusion also worked with disgraced DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and hired his CIA-linked wife, Nellie Ohr, to assist in the smear campaign against Trump. Bruce Ohr was demoted from his senior DOJ position after it was revealed that he met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson as well as Christopher Steele – then tried to cover it up.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, denied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he knew about the dossier’s funding, while Clinton’s former spokesman, Brian Fallon, told CNN that Hillary likely had no idea who paid for it either.
Current and past leaders of the DNC, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) also denied knowledge of the document’s funding.
Podesta met with Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson the day after the Trump-Russia dossier was published by Buzzfeed News.
the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity.
On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1 percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.
Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails. Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of the United States?
Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation” in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation.
How could Lynch in the middle of an election have been so silly as to allow even the appearance of impropriety? Answer: There would have been no impropriety had Hillary won — an assumption reflected in the Page-Strzok text trove when Page texted, about Lynch, “She knows no charges will be brought.” In fact, after a Clinton victory, Lynch’s obsequiousness in devising such a clandestine meeting with Bill Clinton may well have been rewarded: Clinton allies leaked to the New York Times that Clinton was considering keeping Lynch on as the attorney general.
How could former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe assume an oversight role in the FBI probe of the Clinton email scandal when just months earlier his spouse had run for state office in Virginia and had received a huge $450,000 cash donation from Common Good VA, the political-action committee of long-time Clinton-intimate Terry McAuliffe?
Again, the answer was clear. McCabe assumed that Clinton would easily win the election. Far from being a scandal, McCabe’s not “loaded for bear” oversight of the investigation, in the world of beltway maneuvering, would have been a good argument for a promotion in the new Clinton administration. Most elite bureaucrats understood the Clinton way of doing business, in which loyalty, not legality, is what earned career advancement.
Some have wondered why the recently demoted deputy DOJ official Bruce Ohr (who met with the architects of the Fusion GPS file after the election) would have been so stupid as to allow his spouse to work for Fusion — a de facto Clinton-funded purveyor of what turned out to be Russian fantasies, fibs, and obscenities?
Again, those are absolutely the wrong questions. Rather, why wouldn’t a successful member of the Obama administrative aparat make the necessary ethical adjustments to further his career in another two-term progressive regnum? In other words, Ohr rightly assumed that empowering the Clinton-funded dossier would pay career dividends for such a power couple once Hillary was elected. Or, in desperation, the dossier would at least derail Trump after her defeat. Like other members of his byzantine caste, Ohr did everything right except bet on the wrong horse.
From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.
These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton–Obama emails. If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.
If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.
The Justice Department’s inspector general has been focused for months on why Andrew McCabe, as the No. 2 official at the FBI, appeared not to act for about three weeks on a request to examine a batch of Hillary Clinton-related emails found in the latter stages of the 2016 election campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.
The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, has been asking witnesses why FBI leadership seemed unwilling to move forward on the examination of emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) until late October — about three weeks after first being alerted to the issue, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
A key question of the internal investigation is whether McCabe or anyone else at the FBI wanted to avoid taking action on the laptop findings until after the Nov. 8 election, these people said. It is unclear whether the inspector general has reached any conclusions on that point.
A major line of inquiry for the inspector general has been trying to determine who at the FBI and the Justice Department knew about the Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop, and when they learned about them. McCabe is a central figure in those inquiries, these people said.
It’s not just McCabe. FBI Director Christopher Wray will be replacing his chief of staff James Rybicki just a week after the latter testified to congress about his handling of EmailGate.
The Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner divorce is off. Gee, do you think this might have to do with the fact that spouses cannot legally be compelled to testify against each other, but ex-spouses can?
it turns out the primary subcontractor worked not for Steele but for Simpson at Washington-based Fusion GPS, and he contributed key material for the investigation of Trump underwritten by the Clinton campaign. His name is Edward Baumgartner, a British national who speaks fluent Russian and runs a p.r. shop out of London (and who spent 2016 tweeting his forceful opposition to Trump’s candidacy).
While Baumgartner was working on the dossier, he was also working for Simpson on another case to smear an anti-Putin whistleblower in an effort to help Putin-tied company Prevezon defend itself against US charges of money laundering.
During that contract, which ran through October 2016, Baumgartner worked closely in Moscow with the Russian lawyer who lobbied Donald Trump Jr. at a now-infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 to help lift US sanctions on Russia. Her talking points were written by Simpson, who also dealt directly with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
During the case, Simpson and Baumgartner also met with her partner, former Russian military intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin.
As the Prevezon case was winding down, Simpson said he assigned Baumgartner, who shares his enmity toward Trump, to help dig up dirt on him. Baumgartner contributed research targeting the central Trump campaign figures charged in the dossier.
No sooner do I post the Tony Podesta resignation story than I read everybody talking about this Tucker Carlson video, in which he reveals that a lawyer working for Podesta tried to silence him:
“If you’re looking for a summary of all of this, here’s the one sentence cliff note of the whole affair: the chairman of one major presidential campaign colluded with the brother of the chairman of the other major presidential campaign to enrich themselves by secretly advancing the interests of a foreign adversary. That happened. That’s the swamp they told you needed to be drained.”
Democratic power lobbyist Tony Podesta, founder of the Podesta Group, is stepping down from the firm that bears his name after coming under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure.
The investigation into Podesta and his firm grew out of investigators’ examination of Manafort’s finances. Manafort organized a PR campaign on behalf of a nonprofit called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. Podesta Group was one of several firms that were paid to do work on the PR campaign to promote Ukraine in the U.S.
Podesta Group filed paperwork with the Justice Department in April stating that it had done work for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine that also benefited the same Ukrainian political party that Manafort once advised. Podesta Group said at the time it believed its client was a European think tank untethered to a political party.
Podesta is handing over full operational and financial control of the firm to longtime firm CEO Kimberley Fritts, according to multiple sources with knowledge of Monday’s meeting. Fritts and a senior group of the Podesta team will be launching a new firm in the next one or two days. Sources said the transition has been in the works for the past several months.
Sort of like Harvey Weinstein stepping down from The Weinstein Corporation, only presumably less rapey.
I’ve long reported on Podesta’s documented ties to Putin’s Russia. Remember than John and Tony Podesta formed The Podesta Group way back in 1988, even before John became Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff.
[Tony] Podesta has long been a larger than life figure on K Street, growing his business from a boutique firm into a massive lobbying and public relations operation. He is well known for his flashy dressing, vast art collection, generous campaign donations across all levels of Democratic politics and, of course, for his brother John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
Podesta Group has struggled in the wake of the Mueller investigation. More than a dozen of its lobbying clients have cut ties with the firm this year, according to lobbying filings. Revenues have also declined: The firm brought in an estimated $4.8 million in the third quarter of 2017, down from $5.2 million in the second quarter of 2017 and from $6.1 million in the third quarter of 2016.
I would caution those who believe “Indictments for Hillary are just around the corner!” to temper their expectations. These things take time, and the Podestas are so deeply enmeshed in Democratic Party politics I would expect them to take the fall rather than flip on either Clinton or Obama.
