SCOTUS Strikes Down Public Employee Union Fees For Non-Members

June 27th, 2018

In a 5-4 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court has struck down the compulsory collecting of public employee union dues from non-members for collective bargaining, ruling that it violates non-members’ First Amendment rights. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Kennedy and Gorsuch.

States and public-sector unions may no longer extract agency fees from nonconsenting employees. The First Amendment is violated when money is taken from nonconsenting employees for a public-sector union; employees must choose to support the union before anything is taken from them. Accordingly, neither an agency fee nor any other form of payment to a public-sector union may be deducted from an employee, nor may any other attempt be made to collect such a payment, unless the employee affirmatively consents to pay.

Text of the decision here.

This is a huge blow to the Democratic Party’s union dues collecting machine. And the small remaining rump of #NeverTrump’s mocking cries of “But Gorsuch” ring particularly hollow today.

SCOTUS Upholds Trump Travel Ban

June 26th, 2018

In a 5-4 decision (Roberts writing the majority opinion, joined by Kennedy, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch), the Supreme Court has upheld President Donald Trump’s travel ban from terrorism-supporting countries:

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, foreign nationals seeking entry into the United States undergo a vetting process to ensure that they satisfy the numerous requirements for admission. The Act also vests the Presi- dent with authority to restrict the entry of aliens when- ever he finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” 8 U. S. C. §1182(f). Relying on that delegation, the President concluded that it was necessary to impose entry restrictions on nationals of countries that do not share adequate information for an informed entry determination, or that otherwise present national security risks….

By its plain language, §1182(f) grants the President broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States. The President lawfully exercised that discretion based on his findings—following a worldwide, multi-agency review—that entry of the covered aliens would be detrimental to the national interest. And plaintiffs’ attempts to identify a conflict with other provisions in the INA, and their appeal to the statute’s purposes and legislative history, fail to overcome the clear statutory language….

In addition to the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion takes a very strong swipe at the Ninth Circuit Court’s increasing tendency to issue blanket, “universal” injunctions:

Injunctions that prohibit the Executive Branch from applying a law or policy against anyone—often called “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions—have become increasingly common. District courts, including the one here, have begun imposing universal injunctions without considering their authority to grant such sweeping relief. These injunctions are beginning to take a toll on the federal court system—preventing legal questions from percolating through the federal courts, encouraging forum shopping, and making every case a national emergency for the courts and for the Executive Branch.

I am skeptical that district courts have the authority to enter universal injunctions. These injunctions did not emerge until a century and a half after the founding. And they appear to be inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts. If their popularity continues, this Court must address their legality.

The text of the decision is here.

Supreme Court Validates (Most) Texas Redistricting

June 25th, 2018

“Most” in this case means that the Supreme Court sided with Texas in Abbot v. Perez for 10 out of 11 disputed districts:

Extinguishing the possibility that Texas could be placed back under federal electoral supervision, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday pushed aside claims that lawmakers intentionally discriminated against voters of color when they enacted the state’s congressional and state House maps.

In a 5-4 vote, the high court threw out a lower court ruling that had found that lawmakers intentionally undercut the voting power of Hispanic and black voters, oftentimes to keep white incumbents in office. The Supreme Court found that the evidence was “plainly insufficient” to prove that the 2013 Legislature acted in “bad faith.”

The Supreme Court also ruled that all but one of the 11 congressional and state House districts that had been flagged as problematic could remain intact. The one exception was Fort Worth-based House District 90, which is occupied by Democratic Rep. Ramon Romero and was deemed an impermissible racial gerrymander because lawmakers illegally used race as the predominant factor in deciding its boundaries.

The decision also means that “preclearance” (i.e., Texas having to have all redistricting cleared by the federal government) is finally well and truly dead.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, with concurrences from justices Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Gorsuch.

Here’s the text of the decision.

As for House District 90, the text of the decision states that “On remand, the District Court will have to consider what if any remedy is appropriate at this time.” Since it’s already held by a democrat, expect the lower court’s enthusiasm for an immediate remedy to the issue to be tempered, and this late in the game, they might merely order that the issue be addressed following the 2020 census, which would fall to the 87th Texas legislature in 2021.

Watch Hollywood Morons Fail A Citizenship Test

June 24th, 2018

For your Lazy Sunday Video™ viewing pleasure, here’s some morons in Hollywood failing to answer some of the most basic question from a citizenship exam:

Enjoy the smug sense of superiority you get from watching an MTV reality show, without the annoyance of having to watch an MTV reality show…

China’s Semiconductor Play

June 23rd, 2018

This is interesting:

Beijing is set to announce a new fund of about 300 billion yuan ($47.4 billion) for the development of China’s semiconductor industry, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The government-backed China Integrated Circuit Investment Fund is heading up the new investment vehicle, the report said. The fund was not available for comment outside of Beijing business hours.

The 300 billion yuan fund would go toward improving China’s ability to design and manufacture advanced microprocessors and graphic-processing units, among other initiatives, the Journal said, citing one source. The size of the fund and other details could change, another source told the newspaper.

Last week, Chen Yin, spokesman and chief engineer of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said the fund welcomes foreign investment.

“The second phase of fundraising is underway, and we welcome foreign companies to participate in this round of financing,” Chen said at a news conference in Beijing, according to a report from state-run English-language newspaper China Daily.

Beijing is seeking to develop domestic technological innovation in areas such as robotics and semiconductors through an initiative called “Made in China 2025.” One of the U.S. trade delegation’s aims in talks with China this week was to ask Beijing to stop subsidies of that program. The visit ended Friday with little apparent progress in resolving a trade dispute between the two countries.

Should we worry? About that, no. Semiconductors are a very complex and expensive game to play. China is already in the game, and goodly portion of any semiconductor spending in China goes into the pockets of American and Japanese fab equipment suppliers like Applied Materials, LAM Research and Tokyo Electron. China has a native semiconductor equipment industry, but it’s hardly setting the world afire.

Tsinghua Unigroup is already in the process of building three fabs at a cost of $70 billion, focused on the memory business. Samsung is currently the top player in this space, followed by Hynix and Micron, and right now that space is pretty profitable.

In China the question is always how much of that investment is real, and how much is illusion. A lot of those “under construction” fabs never materialize, either unable to attract investors or having their funds magically siphoned off to some other enterprise. Also, memory chips are an extremely volatile business: In boom times (like now), they make money hand-over-fist. During busts (which are always around the corner), memory fabs barely break even, which is a big problem if you’re trying to earn back your $10 billion investment in a cutting edge 300mm fab.

A bigger concern for any foreign investor who helps build a fab in China to serve the Chinese manufacturing market is the blatant intellectual property theft, and China retaliating when a foreign manufacturer blows the whistle:

Three weeks ago, Micron and South Korean chipmakers Samsung and SK Hynix all reported that the Chinese government had launched antitrust probes into their firms, and accused them of setting artificially high prices for memory chips.

  • Yes, but: American companies and the U.S. government have long been suspicious about the link between China’s anti-monopoly policies and its industrial goals.
  • “They want access to the intellectual property. They need us to teach them how to do it. Once they have the industry, they want to push us out,” an industry source familiar with China’s investigation into Micron tells Axios.
  • The price hikes, the source says, are largely due to a boom in demand for memory chips in everything from smartphones to autonomous vehicles. China’s investigation is “a clear indication that they’re not ready to make [semiconductors] work,” says the source.
  • Micron’s fight to protect its IP is not new. Other U.S. firms have run up against the same Chinese antitrust policies or regulations and have been forced to strike deals with Beijing.

  • The New York Times’ Paul Mozur dove into the story a heist of Micron’s crown jewel — its chip design — in Taiwan, where the company keeps its trade secrets.
  • Qualcomm tangled with China: “To get back in Beijing’s good graces, the company agreed to lower its prices in China, promised to shift more of its high-end manufacturing to partners in China, and pledged to upgrade the country’s technology capabilities,” the New York Times’ David Barboza reports.
  • The same thing has happened to IBM and Apple and others.
  • “‘I’m not sure who’s fought China and won, just like I’m not sure who’s fought a casino and won in the long run,” says Bruce Mehlman, who was an assistant secretary of commerce for technology policy under the Bush administration and now lobbies for several tech companies.
  • Worth noting: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all have thriving semiconductor industries, too. The difference is, these countries accept competition, whereas Beijing wants to give its national champions the advantage, Jimmy Goodrich, vice president of global policy at the Semiconductor Industry Association, says.
  • The bottom line, per the industry source: “We’re all dependent on China because everything is assembled there.”
  • This is a bigger problem, and will remain a bigger problem until American companies commit to building the infrastructure for a full-blown American flexible manufacturing supply chain to rival China’s.

    All that said, IP theft only gets you so far in semiconductors. By the time you’ve stolen all the IP you need for a current generation chip, chances are good your rivals have already started to fab the next generation of product. And it’s not just the chip design you need to steal; you also need to steal the hundreds, if not thousands, of process step tweaks you need to properly fab 50 layer, 7nm node chips at acceptable uniformity across 300mm wafers. Screw up any one of those steps and your wafer yields crash and you’re making really large, expensive coasters.

    Equally challenging for China is hiring qualified semiconductor engineers in China, people with the knowledge and experience to correct process steps to improve yields. There aren’t nearly enough being produced domestically, so China has recently started setting up satellite offices in America and Japan.

    Tawain, on the other hand, has all the pieces to the puzzle (save, once again, semiconductor equipment manufacturing), with TSMC dominating the global foundry market. Foundries don’t design their own chips, they manufacture chips designed by others, and TSMC’s mastery of process control is probably second only to Intel’s. This is one reason defending Taiwan is in America’s national interest.

    The Trump Administration should continue to push China on the intellectual property issue, and if the cost of doing business in China is giving away your intellectual property, foreign companies should refrain from manufacturing in China. (Alas, a resolution that’s easier said than done…)

    LinkSwarm for June 22, 2018

    June 22nd, 2018

    The whole “OMG, we lock up illegal alien kids!” panic the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have ginned up is a sign of just how good the economy is under President Donald Trump, and just how desperate Democrats are to find an issue to run on in November. Faced with the prospect of running on tranny bathrooms, gun control and calling ordinary Americans racists (yet again), they hit upon screeching about the fate of some 2,000 illegal alien minors as the only naked emotional appeal left in their arsenal.

    Here it is, folks: the only tactic Democrats could agree to run on this fall.

    So naturally, President Trump defused the issue he inherited from Obama with an executive order, causing Democrats to turn on a dime from “OMG, this is the most important moral crisis of our time!” to “That’s not good enough, you heartless monster, we want immediate full amnesty or we keep screaming our heads off!” Ditto for Sen. Ted Cruz’s legislative fix, which was instantly labeled a “cynical ploy.” You know, just like Democrats manufacturing the whole issue.

    Expect Democrats to to start bloviating about something equally ludicrous but completely different with the same overheated emotional furor next week…

  • Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Manuel Padilla says the entire problem stems from Obama-era laxness:

    “It’s a very complex situation,” he told “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King. “When you have high levels of activity, and a lack of resources – personnel, technology, infrastructure – it creates this kind of chaotic environment.”

    I know this is complicated for you and your team, but what people are talking about is cruel and inhuman behavior, is how it’s perceived,” said King. “Do you actually agree with this policy?”

    “I do agree that we have to do something. We created this situation by not doing anything,” Padilla said. “So what happened with zero tolerance is, we were exempting a population from the law. And what happens when you do that, it creates a draw for a certain group of people that rises to trends that become a crisis.”

    “I’m going to give you an example: Because we were releasing family units, May 2, just last month, we had a full-blown MS-13 (gang member) accompanied by his one-year-old child. He thought he was going get released into the community; that was not the case.”

  • Congressional Democratic candidates are more left-wing than ever. I’m sure a platform of repealing tax cuts will go over swell among ordinary voters… (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Actor Peter Fonda (who you may remember as The Devil in Ghost Rider) went off on an “unhinged even by the standards of blue checkmark liberals on Twitter” rant in which he called for Barron Trump to be raped by pedophiles. To which reporter Juan Williams said Fonda’s rant was “poorly worded.” Oh really? Just how should someone word an appeal that the children of one’s political opponents be raped by pedophiles? Where does Miss Manners stand on this vital issue of 21st century American etiquette?
  • Related tweet:

  • Eric S. Raymond on the mathematics of gun confiscation. “The critical fraction of American gun owners that would have to be hard-core enough to resist confiscation with lethal violence in order to stop the attempt is lower than 1 in 317. Probably much lower. Especially if we responded by killing not merely the doorknockers but the bureaucrats and politicians who gave them their orders. Which would be more efficient, more just, and certain to follow.”
  • More on American gun owners:

    The Small Arms Survey estimates there are 393,300,000 civilian-owned firearms in the United States. The survey, performed by the Graduate Institute of Geneva, estimated the United States military has about 4.5 million firearms. It put the number of firearms owned by police throughout the United States at just over 1 million.

    That means American civilians own nearly 100 times as many firearms as the U.S. military and nearly 400 times as many as law enforcement.

    Federal Bureau of Investigation background check records suggest that civilians bought more than 2 million guns in May alone, which means civilians purchase more than double the number of firearms owned by police departments. The number of gun-related civilian background checks in May and April, at over 4.7 million, is greater than the number of firearms currently owned by the American military.

    The FBI reported processing more than 25.2 million gun-related civilian background checks in 2017, which is more than the 22.7 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are currently held by every law enforcement agency in the world combined. Between 2012 and 2017, the FBI reported conducting more than 135 million civilian gun checks—more than the 133 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are in all the world’s military stockpiles.

    The Small Arms Survey estimated there are about 1 billion firearms currently in circulation throughout the world. By its estimate, about 85 percent are owned by civilians and American civilians own nearly 40 percent of all the guns in the world. Researchers said worldwide firearms ownership was up since the last time they studied the issue about a decade ago.

  • In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that cell phone metadata is protected from warrantless search and seizure:

    “We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “In light of the deeply revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection.”

    Roberts was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

    This is the rare case where I side with the court’s liberal wing against its conservative wing. If there is a constitutional right to privacy, then surely metadata, which reveals your minute-by-minute physical location, among many other things, should be covered.

  • Federal court rules that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional for exercising executive authority but putting its director beyond the each of Presidential power.
  • Turkish jihadist scumbag president Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls a snap election, a tactic that could backfire.
  • The Southern Poverty Law Center just paid $3,375,000 to British politician Maajid Nawaz for smearing him as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”
  • In the wake of that settlement, the SPLC could be facing dozens of lawsuits from anti-jihad organizations and activists it has similarly smeared.
  • Germany just gave in to President Trump’s tariff reduction demands. Our President just might know more about negotiation than his critics would admit… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Evergreen State College professor warns that the campus Social Justice Warrior crisis is worse than people think. (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)
  • Texas Democratic State Senator Carlos Uresti resigns after his felony conviction.
  • The Texas Supreme Court smacks down Austin’s plastic bag ban. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • D.C. votes to eliminate tipping.
  • Portland feminist bookstore closing. Naturally they blamed their poor business decisions on white male patriarchy. Insert your own Portlandia joke here.
  • West Virginia Democratic House candidate Richard Ojeda said he voted for Donald Trump.
  • As he himself foretold, Charles Krauthammer has died. He was a welcome voice of reason during the initial burst of Obamamania.
  • Commie soldier boy given an other-than-honorable discharge.
  • A long, sad profile of actor Johnny Depp. Stoned and broke because you can’t stop stupidly spending your money is no way to go through life, son…
  • Onion Social Embraces Diversity By Adding Prophet Mohammed Emoji.”
  • Ted Cruz kicks Jimmy Kimmel’s ass.
  • Hong Kong banks don’t want your stinking money.
  • “Stop! Hammertime!” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • SCOTUS: States Can Force Online Retailers to Collect Sales Tax

    June 21st, 2018

    In a 5-4 decision that broke across the court’s usual ideological lines (Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Ginsburg, and Gorsuch in favor, Roberts, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissenting), the Supreme Court has ruled in South Dakota v. Wayfair that states can force online retailers to collect sales tax for them, rejecting previous Quill Corp. v. North Dakota precedent from 1992 that required a physical presence in the state. “Rejecting the physical presence rule is necessary to ensure that artificial competitive advantages are not created by this Court’s precedents.”

    As someone who both buys and sells books online, this is not an outcome I would have wished, but having Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch on the affirmative side of the opinion does give me pause. But the golden age of the wide-open online commerce Internet appear to be drawing to a close.

    Here’s the text of the decision itself (Legal Insurruection initially had a link to the wrong decision).

    EU Votes To Censor the Internet

    June 20th, 2018

    This isn’t going to end well:

    This morning, the EU’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) voted in favor of the legislation, called the Copyright Directive. Although most of the directive simply updates technical language for copyright law in the age of the internet, it includes two highly controversial provisions. These are Article 11, a “link tax,” which would force online platforms like Facebook and Google to buy licenses from media companies before linking to their stories; and Article 13, an “upload filter,” which would require that everything uploaded online in the EU is checked for copyright infringement. (Think of it like YouTube’s Content ID system but for the whole internet.)

    EU lawmakers critical of the legislation say these Articles may have been proposed with good intentions — like protecting copyright owners — but are vaguely worded and ripe for abuse. “The methods to address the issue are catastrophic and will hurt the people they want to protect,” Green MEP Julia Reda told journalists earlier this week. After this morning’s vote, Reda told The Verge: “It’s a sad day for the internet … but the fight is not over yet.”

    Both Article 11 and Article 13 were approved by the JURI committee this morning but won’t become official legislation until passed by the entire European Parliament in a plenary vote. There’s no definite timetable for when such a vote might take place, but it would likely happen sometime between December of this year and the first half of 2019.

    “Vaguely worded and ripe for abuse.” Music to a bureaucrat’s ears!

    Both those provisions fly in the face basic structure of the Internet, where linking is free and censorship is damage to be routed around. And make no mistake, once they have an “upload filter” in place, there’s no way it will be limited to “copyright infringement.” Expect them to start by censoring “hate speech” (such as videos critical of unassimilated Muslim immigration into Europe) and anything else sufficiently critical of sacred European goals. Calls for Italy to quit the Euro? Sorry, those have to be banned in the interest of “economic stability.”

    Set aside, for now, the impossibility of implementing this for all but the biggest sites in Europe, much less the world. Merely attempting it would no doubt do a lot of damange and have that fabled “chilling effect” on free speech.

    Let’s hope this legislation gets killed by Eurocratic inertia…

    (Hat tip: Slashdot.)

    Clinton Corruption Update for June 19, 2018

    June 19th, 2018

    We know that Hillary Clinton, through FusionGPS, was deeply involved in the FBI/CIA/deep state/FISA abuse affair that’s come to be known as the “Scandularity.” That’s why news on that came to dominate the semi-regular Clinton Corruption updates.

    The problem is that so much information is coming out on the Scandularity that I don’t have time to do the regular Clinton Corruption updates if I include the Scandularity stuff. This thing just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, so that I never had time to finish one before another huge Scandularity revelation came down the pike. This meant the regular Clinton Corruption updates grew so large and stale that I was unable to whip them into coherent form.

    So now I’m separating them out again into distinct updates for my own sanity.

    Because I kept adding to that update, some of this is going to be oldish news, but this let’s me empty out the Clinton Scandal bucket so I can pour fresh new links in going forward.

    First up: The Inspector General report on the Clinton Email Investigation!

  • Mollie Hemingway has read all of the report and has 11 takeaways. Like this one:

    2. FBI Agent Who Led Both The Clinton and Trump Probes Promised He’d Prevent Trump’s Election…On page 420, the IG says that the conduct of five FBI employees who were caught talking about their extreme political bias in the context of their duties “has brought discredit to themselves, sowed doubt about the FBI’s handling of the Midyear investigation, and impacted the reputation of the FBI.” The Midyear investigation was the code for the Clinton probe. Or note this blistering passage:

    [W]hen one senior FBI official, [Peter] Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, [Lisa] Page, that ‘we’ll stop’ candidate Trump from being elected—after other extensive text messages between the two disparaging candidate Trump—it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.

    The report goes on to say that the text messages and Strzok’s decision to prioritize the counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign over the Clinton email criminal investigation “led us to conclude that we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision was free from bias.”

    This text is not just interesting because the FBI’s deputy head of the counterintelligence division who was investigating a major-party candidate told the woman he was cheating on his wife with that “we” would stop the candidate from becoming president. It’s also interesting because this text was hidden from congressional committees performing oversight of the FBI.

    And this:

    3. Comey Mishandled The Clinton Probe In Multiple Ways

    It’s worth re-reading Acting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s May 9, 2017, recommendation that James Comey be fired as FBI director. He cited Comey’s usurpation of the attorney general’s authority in his press conference announcing that Clinton’s case would be closed without prosecution, the release of derogatory information about Clinton despite the decision to not indict her, and Comey’s letter to Congress announcing the FBI had reopened a probe against Clinton.

    The IG backs up each and every one of those critiques, and adds much more detail to them.

    We concluded that Comey’s unilateral announcement was inconsistent with Department policy and violated long-standing Department practice and protocol by, among other things, criticizing Clinton’s uncharged conduct. We also found that Comey usurped the authority of the Attorney General, and inadequately and incompletely described the legal position of Department prosecutors.

    The IG said Comey violated longstanding department practice to avoid “trashing people we’re not charging.” He also inadequately and incompletely explained how Justice prosecutors came to make decisions. “Many of the problems with the statement resulted from Comey’s failure to coordinate with Department officials,” the IG wrote. Had he talked with them, they would have warned him about the problems his statement posed. What’s more, the prosecutors had a very different understanding of why they were declining to charge Clinton than the one Comey claimed they had in his public press conference.

    Comey also violated departmental practice in announcing publicly he reopened the probe after additional relevant emails were found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Both of these decisions were controversial inside and outside the agency.

    Also this:

    7. Breathtaking Bias

    Some FBI defenders latched onto the IG’s claim that he “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed.” All that means is that none of the politically biased texts specifically said political bias was leading them to make certain decisions. Of course, that would be a weird thing to find in any case.

    What the investigators found, however, was breathtaking anti-Trump and pro-Clinton bias from five of the key employees handling the Clinton email probe. No evidence was found of pro-Trump bias. And this evidence of profound bias is only for those who were foolish enough to record their extreme views. The IG also apparently had no texts from Justice Department officials, perhaps because Justice didn’t preserve them.

    The texts range from vile insults of Trump and his supporters to fears about how awful a Trump presidency would be and the need to prevent it. One employee said Trump voters were “all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS.” One FBI lawyer discussed feeling “numb” by Trump’s November 2016 election win, later proclaiming “Viva le Resistance” when asked about Trump.

    Strzok wrote in July 2016, “Trump is a disaster. I have no idea how destabilizing his Presidency would be.” After the election, Page wrote that she’d bought “All the President’s Men,” adding, “Figure I needed to brush up on watergate.” The two openly fantasize about impeachment.

    In the preparation to interview Clinton as part of the criminal probe, Page tells a handful of her colleagues to take it easy on Clinton. “One more thing: she might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear.”

    After each text exchange, the IG report includes defenses from the agents, some even harder to believe than the previous:

    August 8, 2016: In a text message on August 8, 2016, Page stated, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok responded, ‘No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.’ When asked about this text message, Strzok stated that he did not specifically recall sending it, but that he believed that it was intended to reassure Page that Trump would not be elected, not to suggest that he would do something to impact the investigation.

    Sure, hoss.

    All five of the FBI employees were referred back to the FBI for disciplinary action.

    Read the whole thing.

  • It appears that deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe didn’t add Lisa Page to his team despite her having an affair with FBI agent Peter Strzok, but because of it, as a way to monitor the Clinton probe:

    Then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe tasked the mistress of lead agent Peter Strzok to stay appraised of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private server — a decision that other bureau officials took issue with at the time, according to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s bombshell report.

    McCabe was supposed to be insulated from the probe by two levels of management: Strzok worked for counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, who worked for national security head Michael Steinbach, who reported up to McCabe. However, Strzok communicated about the probe with his mistress, Lisa Page, who worked directly for McCabe and acted as a liaison for the Clinton investigation for the deputy director.

    The report says:

    Lisa Page, who was Special Counsel to McCabe, became involved in the Midyear investigation after McCabe became the Deputy Director in February 2016. Page told the OIG that part of her function was to serve as a liaison between the Midyear team and McCabe.

    Page acknowledged that her role upset senior FBI officials, but told the OIG that McCabe relied on her to ensure that he had the information he needed to make decisions, without it being filtered through multiple layers of management.

    Several witnesses told the OIG that Page circumvented the official chain of command, and that Strzok communicated important Midyear case information to her, and thus to McCabe, without Priestap’s or Steinbach’s knowledge. McCabe said that he was aware of complaints about Page, and that he valued her ability to “spot issues” and bring them to his attention when others did not.

    Luke Rosiak also uses this image from the report:

  • Ironically, if Strzok hadn’t tried to sit on the Weiner laptop information discovered in September 2016, Hillary Clinton might be President now. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • I’ve asked before: Why was Strzok on both the Clinton email and Trump Russia probes? Does the FBI not have any other field agents? It appears that Strzok’s role was precisely to “to ‘stop’ Trump from being elected.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Wait, Strzok and Page weren’t the only FBI lovebirds texting each other about the case? Where the hell was this investigation being run from, The Love Boat? Bonus: “She joked to Agent 1 that Donald Trump’s supporters in Ohio were ‘retarded.’ She sneered that she didn’t know who was worse, Trump, the FBI, or ‘+o( Average American public.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • More love for American voters from Strzok: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”
  • And speaking of what FBI agents on the Clinton email probe thought about American voters:

  • “FBI analysts and Prosecutor 2 told us that former President Barack Obama was one of the 13 individuals with whom Clinton had direct contact using her clintonemail.com account.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Which Obama blatantly lied about.
  • This Wall Street Journal piece on the fall of Tony Podesta. Is well worth reading if you can find a way around the paywall. I especially like the part how Podesta was buying expensive new artworks while laying people off…
  • And remember: the Podesta Group worked for pro-Russian Ukrainian political party “Party of Regions.”
  • FBI Informant In Uranium One Scandal Testifies Against Obama

    The FBI’s informant in the Uranium One scandal involving the Obama administration gave written testimony to three congressional committees this week in which he accused the Obama administration of making decisions that directly benefited the Russian government and their goals of gaining geopolitical advantages over the United States.

    The informant, Douglas Campbell, told congressional investigators on Wednesday that Moscow sent millions of dollars to the U.S. with the expectation that it would benefit the Clintons, while Hillary Clinton “quarterbacked a ‘reset’ in US-Russian relations” in her role as Secretary of State during the Obama administration, The Hill reported.

    Key facts:

  • Campbell participated in closed-door interviews with the Senate Judiciary, House Intelligence and House Oversight and Government Reform committees.

    Campbell said that Russian nuclear officials told him that Moscow hired an American lobbying firm, APCO Worldwide, because it was in a unique position to influence the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton in particular.

    Democrats are aggressively trying to discredit him but are having little success as “the FBI found Campbell’s undercover work valuable enough to reward him with a $50,000 check in 2016.”

    Campbell says that the FBI told him that his work was “briefed to President Obama as part of his daily presidential briefing,” which would mean that Obama was aware of the crimes committed by the Russian officials.

    The FBI forced him to pay $500,000 of his own money to Russian officials as bribes to facilitate his cover, and the bureau never reimbursed him despite their praise of his work and the fact that the ordeal was so stressful that he developed serious, life-threatening illnesses.

    Initially, reports indicated that Campbell was threatened by the Obama administration in an attempt to silence him before the 2016 election as they did not want this case hurting Hillary Clinton after then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department learned that he filed a lawsuit in a Maryland federal court. It was not immediately clear what the lawsuit was about, however Sara Carter reports: “Campbell filed a lawsuit in Maryland federal court against the Russian nuclear entities asking for the return of the money he had to launder out of his own paychecks.”

    “Russian and American executives implicated in the Tenex bribery scheme specifically asked him to try to help get the Uranium One deal approved by the Obama administration,” The Hill noted.

    He provided documentation of the corruption and crimes taking place to help Russia to the Obama administration months before they made a series of decisions that directly benefited Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

    He provided documentation to the Obama administration that showed that the Russian government was actively involved in trying to help Iran develop their nuclear capabilities years before the Obama administration implemented the now-infamous Iran deal.

    He said that he was told by the FBI that the politics of the Obama administration overruled justice from taking place against the criminal activity that was happening.

    “I was frustrated watching the U.S. government make numerous decisions benefiting Rosatom and Tenex while those entities were engaged in serious criminal conduct on U.S. soil,” Campbell said in his testimony, as reported by The Hill’s John Solomon. “Tenex and Rosatom were raking in billions of U.S. dollars by signing contracts with American nuclear utility clients at the same time they were indulging in extortion by using threats to get bribes and kickbacks, with a portion going to Russia for high ranking officials.”

    “I remember one response I got from an agent when I asked how it was possible CFIUS would approve the Uranium One sale when the FBI could prove Rosatom was engaged in criminal conduct,” Campbell continued. “His answer: ‘Ask your politics.'”

    Some of the key players that were engaging in the criminal racketeering case have started to face justice, albeit years later. Sara A. Carter reports:

    It wasn’t until years later in 2015 that American businessman Daren Condrey, whose company Transportation Logistics International, plead guilty to conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and conspiring to commit wire fraud, according to the DOJ.

    Russian national Vadim Mikerin, who was a top official of the Russian nuclear arms subsidiary Tenex and would later become president of Tenam the American subsidiary of Rosatom, was also sentenced in December 2015. Mikerin, who only plead guilty to money laundering, was arrested for a racketeering scheme that dated back to 2004. He was sentenced to 48 months in prison.

    Boris Rubizhevsky, another Russian national from New Jersey, who was president of the security firm NEXGEN Security, was also involved in the conspiracy and plead guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering in 2015. He served as a consultant to Tenam and to Mikerin. Rubizhevsky was sentenced to prison last year along with three years of supervised release and a $26,500 fine, according to a recent Reuters report.

    And Mark Lambert, 54, a co-owner of Transportation Logistics International, was charged this month on an “11-count indictment with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and to commit wire fraud, seven counts of violating the FCPA, two counts of wire fraud and one count of international promotion money laundering,” as stated in the DOJ press release. Lambert’s charges stem from an alleged scheme to bribe Mikerin in order to secure contracts with TENEX, according to the DOJ release.

  • “The Clinton Foundation Borrowed $28.5 Million. Who Made It Disappear?”

    If we are to believe public filings submitted to the IRS under penalties of perjury, an entity known today as the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation borrowed $28.5 million on Feb. 20, 2004 — see page 30.

    Yet the foundation’s accounting firm, BKD LLP, issued on June 9, 2006, “Independent Accountants’ Report and Financial Statements” that contradict earlier IRS filings by claiming that proceeds from the $28.5 million in borrowing arrived at the Clinton Foundation by Dec. 31, 2003, or 51 days before the loans were actually secured.

    Read the whole thing for the forensic accounting details.

  • “How The Obama Justice Department Tried To Shut Down The FBI’s Investigation Into The Clinton Foundation
  • “Top Liberal Think Tank and Clinton Adviser Accused of Sheltering Sexual Harassers and Retaliating Against Victims.”

    Leading liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), stands accused of sheltering sexual harassers and operating a toxic culture that made victims fear retaliation for speaking out.

    A heavily-reported exposé by Buzzfeed News on Tuesday documented those allegations–made by 19 former and current employees and staffers with the organization.

    One former junior staffer, who asked to be identified as Mary, left the organization by sending an exit memo to top CAP officials. This memo detailed sexual harassment she had experienced from a manager on her team named Benton Strong. Mary alleged that Strong’s harassment was well known within CAP’s upper ranks, that they did nothing about it, and that she was retaliated against for reporting the harassment in the first place. Mary’s emailed exit memo reads, in part:

    [O]n several occasions, myself and others on the team felt as if reporting had been a mistake and that the retaliation, worsening of already tenuous team dynamics, and treatment by supervisors outweighed the seemingly positive act of reporting sexual harassment in the workplace.

    At another point in her exit memo, Mary described “lewd and inappropriate text messages” from Strong which made her “uncomfortable being in the workplace around him.” One of those text messages–confirmed by multiple other CAP staffers at the time–was sent after midnight and expressed Strong’s desire to perform oral sex on Mary. Others included discussions of blowjobs, comments about her body and frequent entreaties to meet for drinks.

    Snip.

    One former union member singled out CAP’s president Neera Tanden. In comments to Buzzfeed, they described an allegedly unproductive meeting with Tanden regarding sexual harassment at CAP:

    Neera’s approach was maybe we can start hosting brown bags with HR so people will feel more comfortable coming out and doing things. So they had almost a do-nothing approach. … They said they would think about things that [the union brought up], and that was essentially it.

    Tanden is a high-profile Twitter user, staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton and the former secretary of state’s longtime advisor.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Hillary Clinton remains consistently tone-deaf when it comes to those bitter, clinging freaks known as “voters”:

    For years, I’ve been writing that the great myth about Hillary Clinton is the notion she shared even a fraction of her husband’s political skills. There is no transitive property to marriage. If Bill Clinton could play the xylophone, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have gained the skill when she said, “I do.” So it goes with politics. Bill Clinton would never dream of saying anything like this. Having risen in Arkansas politics — not an over-performing state GDP-wise — he understood how to talk to working-class voters in ways Hillary never learned in 40 years of standing next to him sagely nodding.

    So, what’s wrong with what she said? Well, nearly everything, starting with the fact that she probably believes all of it. It shows that she really doesn’t like large swathes of the country. She has a Manichaean view that says people who voted against her are backward, racist, sexist, and kind of dumb. I didn’t love the slogan “Make America Great Again,” and Lord knows I didn’t like Trump’s campaign style. But for millions of decent Americans, Trump’s program was optimistic. “We’re gonna make America great again” may sound unequivocally racist to the race-obsessed, but that’s not how everyone who liked it heard it. How easy and comfortable it must be to think that anyone who voted against you is against “black people getting rights.”

  • Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees have inexplicably declined by 90%. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Why does Bill Clinton get a pass on #MeToo?

    It’s 2018. One of the world’s most powerful married men had a 22-year-old intern perform oral sex on him in his office. He’s been accused of sexual assault by three other women. One claims, as is the case with so many of the men who have fallen from positions of power as a result, that he exposed himself to her (which always makes me, at least, pause and wonder why on earth so many men seem to want to do this). We know, too, that he lied about his tryst with the intern.

    So why is Bill Clinton still presiding over glamorous parties?

    When Monica Lewinsky was disinvited from a Town & Country Philanthropy Summit earlier this month where Bill Clinton was speaking, the question shouldn’t have been why was she disinvited. It should have been why is Bill Clinton is headlining events at all.

    And boy, is he ever. Clinton has a full social schedule this summer. In June he’ll be publicizing his book “The President is Missing” along with his co-author James Patterson all across the country. He’ll also make time to host the Clinton Foundation dinner, where tickets range from $2,500 to $100,000 and Shaggy and Sting are scheduled to perform.

    Again, he’s almost certainly guilty of actions that would be categorized as harassment in 2018. The fact that the Lewinsky affair happened as long ago as 1995 is no matter.

    Charlie Rose is accused of harassment by several employees dating back to the late 1990s — and he lost his job in November.

    People seem curiously willing to hold Clinton to a different standard than other men accused of sexual harassment. Many don’t seem especially bothered by his actions at all and lay the blame for the scandal squarely on Lewinsky. In a 2014 Economist/YouGov poll, 58 percent of those surveyed had a favorable opinion of Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, 48 percent had an unfavorable opinion of Lewinsky.

    As recently as 2016, the very liberal Joy Behar was dismissing the women who slept with Clinton as “tramps” on “The View.” Not that much has changed since the period in the ’90s when Maureen Dowd dismissed Lewsinky as being “nutty and slutty” and “a ditsy, predatory White House intern who might have lied under oath for a job at Revlon.”

    A Rasmussen Reports poll taken in November 2017, a month after the #MeToo movement began, found that 59 percent of people believe the accusations against Bill Clinton. But you wouldn’t know it from the way he’s being treated.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • You know that NXIVM sex cult that’s been so much in the news as of late? At least three members are “invitation-only” members of the Clinton Global Initiative:

    On March 14 and April 13, records show, more than a dozen contributions poured into Clinton’s coffers from NXIVM, an executive and group-awareness training organization led by Brooklyn-born Keith Raniere, 47.

    Most were from first-time political donors, each giving the $2,300 maximum.

    Three of the March and April Clinton pledges came from Raniere’s most high-profile followers: Seagram heiresses Clare and Sara Bronfman, and Pamela Cafritz, daughter of D.C. A-listers Buffy and Bill Cafritz.

    Hillary isn’t the only Clinton NXIVM officials are attracted to.

    At least three of them – group President Nancy Salzman and the Bronfman sisters – are members of Bill’s charitable organization, the Clinton Global Initiative. Membership is by invitation only and requires at least a $15,000 donation per person for one year.

  • Family’s Illegal Control of Clinton Charity Violates Multiple State Laws, Regs.
  • “No Evidence of Trump-Russia Collusion, But ‘Clear Links’ Between Clinton Campaign & Russians.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Judicial Watch: At Least 18 Classified Emails Found on Weiner’s Laptop.”
  • “Hillary Clinton’s team pressured the New York Times into printing misleading corrections.”
  • So this is evidently not a Photoshop:

  • Hillary Clinton, Boozehound.
  • Not-so-coincidentally, Hillary Clinton has been trying to hide still more health problems, such as a broken wrist and…
  • a back brace.
  • British nationals illegally campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
  • Did Chelsea Clinton help funnel $11 million in federal contacts to her best friend’s phony think tank?

    During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, more than $11 Million of federal contracts were awarded to a questionably legitimate think-tank, which is owned and operated by Chelsea Clinton’s “Best Friend”.

    Jacqueline Newmyer, who Chelsea Clinton says is her “best friend”, owns and operates Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG). Over the past 10 years, LTSG has been awarded more than $11 million from a Department of Defense think-tank known as the Office of Net Assessment (ONA).

    Long Term Strategy Group, has a virtually non-existent website and has no security clearances, yet to date they have received $11.2 Million in federal contracts according to USAspending.gov.

  • Man claiming to be Bill Clinton’s son wants another DNA test.
  • My Hovercraft Is Full Of Moose

    June 18th, 2018

    When you see a phrase like “Moose vs. Hovercraft,” you think it’s probably about some ironic iPhone game you can back on Kickstarter. (That, or a SyFy movie, in which case it would be Giant Moose vs. Megahovercraft.) But today the phrase pops up in relation to a case the Supreme Court has agreed to take up. Bonus: For the second time.

    An Alaska hunter who wants to use his hovercraft to hunt moose persuaded the Supreme Court to take up his case Monday for the second time.

    After its last hearing on John Sturgeon’s case, the Supreme Court found that the Ninth Circuit failed to recognize the unique conditions of Alaska that usually make the state the exception, not the rule, when it comes to Nation Park Service regulations.

    On remand from the Supreme Court, however, the Ninth Circuit again ruled against Sturgeon, finding that the U.S. government had authority to regulate Sturgeon’s use of a hovercraft on the federally protected Nation River.

    Sturgeon’s latest petition for certiorari, which he filed this past January,

    Asks whether the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act prohibits the National Park Service from exercising regulatory control over state, tribal or private land that overlaps with the National Park System in Alaska.

    The Supreme Court decision for the first round of Sturgeon vs. Frost can be found here. An excerpt:

    In 2007, John Sturgeon was piloting his hovercraft over a stretch of the Nation River that flows through the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, a conservation system unit in Alaska that is managed by the National Park Service. Alaska law permits the use of hovercraft. National Park Service regulations do not. See 36 CFR §2.17(e). Park Service rangers approached Sturgeon, informing him that hovercraft were prohibited within the preserve under Park Service regulations. Sturgeon protested that Park Service regulations did not apply because the river was owned by the State of Alaska. The rangers ordered Sturgeon to re move his hovercraft from the preserve, and he complied. Sturgeon later filed suit against the Park Service in the United States District Court for the District of Alaska, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief permitting him to operate his hovercraft within the boundaries of the Yukon-Charley. Alaska intervened in support of Sturgeon.

    The Supremes remanded the case back to the Ninth Circuit saying they had misinterpreted the regulation in question:

    Looking at ANILCA both as a whole and with respect to Section 103(c), the Act contemplates the possibility that all the land within the boundaries of conservation system units in Alaska may be treated differently from federally managed preservation areas across the country, and that “non-public” lands within the boundaries of those units may be treated differently from “public” lands within the unit. Under the Ninth Circuit’s reading of Section 103(c), however, the former is not an option, and the latter would require contorted and counterintuitive measures.

    The Ninth basically responded as they are usually wont to do. “Nah-uh, you’re not the boss of me! I do what I want! Screw you, moose-hunting hovercraft guy!” (I might be paraphrasing just a tad here.)

    Having been ignored the first time, expect the Supreme Court to strike down upon the ninth with great vengeance and furious anger issue a more strongly-worded decision. The only question is whether it will be a narrowly-based textual decision, or a broader decision about federal regulation of state and private lands.

    (Hat tip for my headline swipe.)