by David A. Patten
by Dan Blumenthal
by Daniel Greenfield{ defenddemocracy.org } ~ The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday imposed sanctions on six individuals and three entities responsible for major human rights abuses against the Iranian people... The designations reflect a reinvigorated U.S. effort to pressure Tehran for its domestic repression following Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s May 21 address articulating a new Iran strategy. The sanctions, which come as nationwide protests continue to consume Iran, target key nodes of the regime’s police state. First, Washington sanctioned Ansar-e Hezbollah and three of its top leaders, Abdolhamid Mohtasham, Hossein Allahkaram, and Hamid Ostad. The group serves as a nominally independent group that acts on the regime’s behalf to preserve its rule and administer some of its draconian religious edicts. In conjunction with Iranian forces, Ansar-e Hezbollah attacked protestors during the nationwide demonstrations of 2009 and the student riots of 1999. It has sought to ensure that Iranian women wear the mandatory hijab, or headscarf, in public by patrolling the streets and throwing acid at their faces, routinely blinding and disfiguring them....
The Trump Investigation: Origins and Motives
As with many “old guard” conservative publications, NR was befuddled both by Trump’s appeal and his ultimate election on November 8, 2016, and its editors still demonstrate some confusion about Trump’s populist support. That perplexity is rooted in the fact that many conservative intellectuals, most of whom reside inside the DC Beltway or in other equally high-brow protectorates like New York City, are disconnected from both the grassroots American Patriots who elected Donald Trump and those who didn’t initially support Trump but have since boarded the Trump Train to Make American Great Again.
Its grassroots disconnect notwithstanding, National Review still has, in my considered opinion, the best stable of political writers on the planet, far superior to those at The Atlantic, The New Republic and the rest of the Leftmedia propaganda machine.
There are a few NR writers whom I follow closely. One of those is Andrew McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. A few of his more notable prosecutions include the 1995 conviction of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (and who planned additional attacks against other New York City landmarks). McCarthy was also key to the prosecutions of the terrorists who bombed our U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
For the last 15 years, McCarthy has been a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.
He’s also my go-to guy for legal insights and analysis on the collusion to entrap Trump by Barack liar-nObama’s CIA director, John Brennan; liar-nObama’s FBI director, James Comey(and his high-ranking co-conspirators); and their candidate, liar-Hillary Clinton, and her corrupt campaign. This cadre of liar-nObama’s deep-state operatives has endeavored to frame Mr. Trump for “colluding with Russia” to throw the 2016 election, or to at least create the false impression that his election was illegitimate.
The fate of that investigation, and possibly Trump’s presidency, has, for a year, been in the hands of Comey’s FBI predecessor, special prosecutor Robert Mueller, and his team of “hard-core Democrats.”
The integrity of Mueller’s evidence was undermined again last week with revelations that the liar-nObama administration, ostensibly to protect Trump’s candidacy from Russian meddling, planted at least one “spy” within his campaign. In fact, this was just the latest chapter of the liar-nObama/liar-Clinton Trump/Putin collusion charade to be exposed.
I profiled that last week in my column, “From ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ to ‘Backfire Tornado’.”
This week, I’m providing you with some of Andy McCarthy’s more erudite observations about the investigation of Trump.
His analysis, “In Politicized Justice, Desperate Times Call for Disparate Measures,” focused on the Justice Department’s double standard in handling the liar-Clinton email subterfuge and Trump/Russia investigations:
The 2016 presidential election, we’re to believe, was stolen from liar-Hillary Clinton by disparate treatment. As Democrats tell it, the FBI scandalized their candidate while protecting Donald Trump. You might think peddling that story with a straight face would be a major challenge. But they figure it may work because it was test-driven by the FBI’s then-director, James Comey, in his now infamous press conference on July 5, 2016 — back when the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus on which we rely to read the security tea leaves was simply certain that Mrs. liar-Clinton would win.
If you or I had set up an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws; if we had retained and transmitted thousands of classified emails on this non-secure system; if we had destroyed tens of thousands of government records; if we had carried out that destruction while those records were under subpoena; if we had lied to the FBI in our interview — well, we’d be writing this column from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth. Yet, in a feat of dizzying ratiocination, Director Comey explained that to prosecute Mrs. liar-Clinton would be to hold her to a nitpicking, selective standard of justice not imposed on other Americans.
Regarding the fact that the Trump/Russia investigation did not originate with Carter Page or George Papadopoulos but with the liar-Obama administration, McCarthy notes:
With the revelation last week that the liar-nObama administration had insinuated a spy into the Trump campaign, it appeared that we were back to the original, Page-centric origination story. But now there was a twist: The informant, longtime CIA source Stefan Halper, was run at Page by the FBI, in Britain. Because this happened just days after Page’s Moscow trip, the implication was that it was the Moscow trip itself, not the dossier claims about it, that provided momentum toward opening the investigation. Then, just a couple of weeks later, WikiLeaks began publicizing the DNC emails; this, we’re to understand, shook loose the Australian information about Papadopoulos. When that information made its way to the FBI — how, we’re not told — the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation was formally opened on July 31. Within days, Agent Peter Strzok was in London interviewing [Australian Ambassador Alexander] Downer, and soon the FBI tasked Halper to take a run at Papadopoulos.
I’m not buying it. The real origination story begins in the early spring of 2016 — long before Page went to Russia and long before the U.S. government was notified about Papadopoulos’s boozy conversation with Downer. … From the “late spring” on, every report of Trump-Russia ties, no matter how unlikely and uncorroborated, was presumed to be proof of a traitorous arrangement. And every detail that could be spun into Trump-campaign awareness of Russian hacking, no matter how tenuous, was viewed in the worst possible light.
McCarthy concludes that liar-nObama’s DOJ and its political hacks within the FBI merged the liar-Clinton email case with the Trump/Russia probe:
The mistake is often made — I’ve made it myself — of analyzing the tanking of the liar-Clinton emails case in a vacuum. There are, after all, reasons unrelated to Donald Trump that explain the outcome: liar-nObama was implicated in liar-Clinton’s use of a non-secure email system; liar-nObama had endorsed liar-Clinton; many high-ranking liar-nObama Justice Department officials stood to keep their coveted positions, and even advance, in a liar-Hillary Clinton administration; the liar-nObama Justice Department was hyper-political and liar-Clinton was the Democratic nominee.
But the liar-Clinton investigation did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in the context of Donald Trump’s gallop through the Republican primaries and, just as important, of the liar-nObama administration’s determination to regard the Trump campaign as a Kremlin satellite.
With the pressure to finish MYE [Mid-Year Exam, the FBI’s codename for the liar-Clinton email probe] in the rearview mirror, liar-Hillary Clinton looked like a shoo-in to beat Donald Trump. By mid September, [FBI lawyer and Peter Strzok paramour] Lisa Page was saying as much at a meeting in Deputy Director McCabe’s office. But Strzok was hedging his bets: Maybe “there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Soon, as the campaign wound down, the FBI and the liar-nObama Justice Department were on the doormat of the FISA court, obtaining a surveillance warrant on Carter Page, substantially based on allegations in the Steele dossier — an uncorroborated liar-Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed. Meanwhile, the FBI/CIA spy was being run at George Papadopoulos, and even seeking a role in the Trump campaign from its co-chairman, Sam Clovis.
On the liar-nObama administration’s effort to spy on the Trump campaign, and its absurd pretext for authorizing operation Crossfire Hurricane in order to bolster its effort to frame Trump for the fake collusion delusion, McCarthy observes:
The liar-nObama administration decided to use its counterintelligence powers to spy on the Trump campaign, using at least one covert informant, electronic monitoring of communications, and other intelligence-gathering tactics. It ignored the norm against deploying such tactics against political opponents, not based on evidence of a Trump-Russia criminal conspiracy, but on speculation about the Trump campaign’s Russia contacts and Russia sympathies. Speculation by a government, an administration, and a Democratic-party nominee with their own abysmal histories of Russia contacts and Russia sympathies.
He concludes: In the end, it is not about who the spies are. It is about why they were spying. In our democratic republic, there is an important norm against an incumbent administration’s use of government’s enormous intelligence-gathering capabilities to — if we may borrow a phrase — interfere in an election. To justify disregarding that norm would require strong evidence of egregious wrongdoing. Enough bobbing and weaving, and enough dueling tweets. Let’s see the evidence.
So, when will we see the evidence or more tangential diversionary charges?
Nelson Cunningham, a decidedly left-of-center former federal prosecutor also from New York who worked for liar-Bill Clinton and the 2004 presidential campaign of hanoi-John Kerry, insists, “Mueller will want to avoid interfering with the November midterms, and so will try to conclude by July or August.”
Recall that Rudy Giuliani, as Trump’s lawyer, recently predicted Mueller would release his findings by 01 September.
Cunningham believes “Mueller will not indict the president, but will issue a comprehensive and detailed report. … [Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein will decide to release the report to Congress and the public. … Rosenstein’s move to release the Mueller report will lead to his firing. … And this is when the Senate and the Congress might finally engage.”
Well, that’s precisely what I’d expect from a liar-Clintonista — and if that’s the team Mueller is pitching for, Cunningham just might be right.
Frankly, I am still holding out some hope that Mueller holds to a higher standard than that of James Comey, the latter being a case study of what happens to once-right-minded government administrators who don’t properly maintain their political immunity against Potomac swamp fever, transforming as through metamorphosis into bureaucratic political hacks. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/56262?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3518&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
Comments