It’s Monday, May 15th, 2017…but before we begin, here’s another brilliant bit of political strategery from the folks who brought the Senate the nuclear option for judicial appointments:
“Progressives have been lamenting the erosion of “democratic norms” in the Trump era, but they’d have more credibility if they didn’t trample constitutional norms in their own rush to run President Trump out of town.
Start with Democratic Senator Mark Warner’s assertion on Fox News Sunday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should play no role in vetting the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“I think it’s inappropriate that the attorney general, who was supposed to recuse himself for anything dealing with the Russian investigation, and clearly the Russian investigation is tied into who the next FBI director is going to be because the President fired [FBI director James] Comey because of his ties to the Russian investigation,” Mr. Warner said Sunday.
Fox’s Chris Wallace : “You don’t believe he [Mr. Sessions] could be part of this?”
Senator Warner: “I don’t believe he should be part of this review process if he can have a true recusal.”
Mr. Wallace didn’t follow-up, so we will. Mr. Sessions has recused himself from the Russia probe, but the FBI director reports to the Attorney General on hundreds of other matters beyond that one investigation.The AG has not recused himself from those matters. Mr. Warner seems to be saying that Mr. Sessions’s narrow recusal disqualifies him from supervising the FBI director at all.
Yet Mr. Comey’s usurpation of the power of the AG and Deputy AG last year in the Hillary Clinton email probe is one reason Mr. Comey deserved to be fired. The FBI is part of the Justice Department, not an independent actor who reports on his own to Congress and the public.Mr. Warner is essentially saying that the executive branch must disable the normal rules of constitutional accountability at the Justice Department because of the Russia probe…”
As Richard Epstein and Ken Starr go on to effectively elaborate.
Then again, Progressive politics have been one enormous theater of the absurd…
…for as far back as we can remember. And desperate times…
“As if we needed another example of civility gone off the rails at America’s institutions of higher learning, the treatment given Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week at Bethune-Cookman University deserves special mention.
Edison O. Jackson, the president of Bethune-Cookman, a historically black institution of higher education, invited Mrs. DeVos to be the schools commencement speaker. As she began, many students screamed at her and turned their backs to the stage. So it went for nearly the whole speech.
President Jackson, let it be noted, defended the Secretary at her side, and the school’s faculty stood onstage in solidarity with him.
The irony here is that Mrs. DeVos has dedicated her adult life to improving educational opportunities for inner-city black children, specifically so they can qualify for a higher education and the lifetime of benefits that brings…”
“Cincinnati Public School officials released a disturbing surveillance video on Friday of an attack on an 8-year-old boy in a school bathroom by another student — an incident that took place two days before the boy took his life.
In the grainy 24-minute video, taken at the entrance of a bathroom at Carson Elementary School, third-grader Gabriel Taye appears to be approaching a larger boy, who just pushed another boy, and extending his hand seemingly for a shake when the larger boy grabs his arm and pushes him into a wall, causing Gabriel to collapse and faint.
While the video is hazy, Gabriel’s motionless body is seen lying on the floor for several minutes, during which numerous children go past him, step over him, and even kick and poke him with their feet. Almost eight minutes later, an adult in a dark suit is seen walking over and attending to a still unmoving Gabriel.
Two days after the bathroom attack, the boy hung himself with a necktie in the bedroom of his Cincinnati home.
…Reynolds found out about the bullying incident after her attorneys received a copy of a police investigative file that contained an email from a homicide detective to school officials describing the surveillance video, she said. “If Gabe’s mom had known that her son was going to school every day and experiencing, and witnessing, and being involved in these violent, very unsettling events, she wouldn’t have continued to send him there,” Branch said…”
Not if the public education establishment (brought to you by the NEA and their Dimocrat lapdogs) have anything to say about it!
In a related item of Liberal Black inanity/insanity…
“A South Florida university awarded an honorary degree to Trayvon Martin, Saturday. Martin’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, took the stage at Florida Memorial University’s commencement in Miami Gardens to receive a posthumous bachelor’s degree in aeronautical science on their son’s behalf…”
We can only assume FMU conferred a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical science on Trayvon because…
…he was higher than a kite so much of the time!
Here’s the juice: the Bethune-Cookman protestors and the powers-that-be at Florida Memorial University epitomize how a significant number of Blacks can’t get out of their own way: like a Chinese finger trap…
…angry American Blacks are ensnared in a self-fulfilling, counterproductive prophecy/device of their own creation…one which has been exploited by those seeking personal power…
…at the expense of those they purport to protect. Any questions?!?
Since we’re on the subject of supposed-friends of the Black “community” who in reality should be counted among its most implacable foes, writing at Townhall.com, Brent Bozell recounts how…
“Like Pavlov’s dogs, the liberal media salivated over the arrival of former President Barack Obama to receive the Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. The mythic figure returned to accept the honor in the middle of a two-hour live special on MSNBC, loaded with the usual Chris Matthews slobbering over his “American eloquence.”
The words “mythic figure” truly apply, as another liberal historian has now underscored just how much “fake news” Obama manufactured on his way to the highest office in the land and the lucrative beyond.
In his 2012 book “Barack Obama: The Story,” Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss exposed Obama’s memoir, “Dreams of My Father,” as stuffed with false anecdotes. The author later recalled that when Obama objected, saying, “David, you called my book fiction,” he replied: “No, Mr. President, I actually complimented you. I called it literature.”
This time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow — best known for thick volumes on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. — is the author insisting that Obama’s memoir is a work of historical fiction in which the “most important composite character was the narrator.”
“Say it ain’t so, BO!” “Sorry kid…but it is!”
In his book “Rising Star” — a real doorstop of a book at 1,460 pages — Garrow concluded that Obama’s ambition devoured his progressive idealism. “While the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core,” he says.
Washington Post nonfiction book critic Carlos Lozada drew attention to a new character in the real life of Barack Obama: a woman who Garrow reports Obama asked to marry him. Sheila Miyoshi Jager is of Dutch and Japanese ancestry and now teaches at Oberlin College. In Obama’s memoir, she ended up blurred into the composite white women he dated. You can’t find her name in other Obama biographies either.How on Earth is it 2017 and no one in the media uncovered this simple yet significant fact?
There’s a simple answer: Obama didn’t want them to, and no one in the “objective” press displayed much interest in correcting his self-serving legend.
Garrow suggests that Jager originally said no in 1986 because her parents thought she was too young, but she says Obama grew ambitious and began to talk to her about being president one day.Herrace would complicate that journey. Garrow cites Illinois Sen. Richard Newhouse, an African-American who was married to a white woman and dogged by whispers that he “talks black but sleeps white.” One-term African-American Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, whose ex-husband was white, admitted that “an interracial marriage really restricts your political options.”
So Obama went to Harvard Law School. One former classmate of his told Garrow, “the only thing I would have voted for Obama to do would have been to shut up.” He reported that classmates created an “Obamanometer” to measure “how pretentious someone’s remarks are in class. But in fact, Obama was elected as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, which drew a gushing New York Times piece in 1990 — the first of many…”
And thus the myth was born, much to the detriment of the nation and the world…but to American Blacks in particular.
Next up, writing at NRO, Deroy Murdock reminds us just how badly the Clinton email investigation was bungled, whether inadvertently or with malice of forethought, which is why…
James Comey Deserved to Be Fired
From start to finish, Comey’s investigation of Hillary Clinton was very poorly handled.
Although President Donald J. Trump fired former FBI director James Comey this week, Obama should have sacked him last July. Comey’s behavior in the E-mailgate investigation suggests either staggering incompetence or a clumsy effort to whitewash Hillary Clinton’s crimes.(And more importantly, Obama’s!)
• During Hillary Clinton’s July 2 interrogation at FBI headquarters, she was not under oath.How could the FBI possibly reach“the last step of a year-long investigation” — as Comey described it at a July 7 House Government Oversight Committee hearing — with the focus of that probe answering questions without a potential perjury conviction hanging over her head?Especially given Hillary’s peanut-allergy-like aversion to the truth, not swearing her in confirmed either the FBI’s grotesque ineptness or a deliberate loophole through which Hillary(and Obama!)could slither away.
Clinton’s defenders say that, had she lied, she still could have been prosecuted for making false statements to federal officials. If so, why bother to put any American under oath?
Making Hillary raise her right hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God, would have reminded her of her solemn duty to come clean. This also would have exposed her to possible prosecution under both the perjury and false-statements statutes. But Team Comey could not be bothered with any of this.Perhaps they couldn’t handle the truth.
• Former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills participated in this session as one of Hillary’s nine attorneys, even though she is deeply implicated in many of Hillary’s misdeeds.Thus, a potential witness or even co-conspirator in Hillary’s possible prosecution offered legal aid as the FBI quizzed her.Noneof Comey’s people considered this a problem?
• Comey steered clear of Hillary’s three-and-a-half hour interview. Given the unusual and enormous stakes, he should have faced her or, at least, supervised nearby. From an adjacent room, he could have offered guidance, monitored Hillary for inconsistencies, and instructed his staffers to ask pointed follow-up questions.
• Hillary’s maid, Marina Santos, had regular access to Hillary’s classified documents, via secured communications equipment in her Washington, D.C., mansion. Santos reportedly printed records for the former secretary of state to read at home, apparently including Obama’s Presidential Daily Brief. Regardless, Paul Sperry reported in the New York Post, “It also appears the FBI did not formally interview Santos as a key witness in its investigation.” How could Comey possibly have let Santos go uninterrogated?
• The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of Cheryl Mills and Clinton campaign aide Heather Samuels. This extraordinary promise was part of Mills’ and Samuels’ immunity deals.
However, veteran Washington attorney Joseph DiGenova told Sirius XM host David Webb that FBI agents refused to destroy these computers, in hopes that congressional investigators would subpoena them.DiGenova said in October that when he learned that these laptops still existed, “I could not believe that the Republicans had not gotten their hands on them even yet.”
Wherever the laptops of these top Clinton henchwomen are today, why on Earth would the FBI even agree to junk evidence in this case — be it damning or exculpatory? If any of the judges involved in this case asked for those laptops, what did the FBI expect to say? “Sorry, your honor. We planned to throw them into a furnace.”
Also, classified material appeared on Mills’ laptop, where it did not belong.
• Comey breezily described Hillary aide Huma Abedin’s “regular practice” of forwarding “hundreds and thousands” of e-mails from Hillary’s computer, through her own, and then onto that of her perverted, estranged husband, Anthony Weiner.“My understanding is that his role would be to print them out as a matter of convenience,” Comey said.
The FBI later corrected Comey’s statement and indicated that only 10 e-mail chains with classified data were on Weiner’s computer, thanks to “backup activity,” while Abedin deliberately forwarded only two classified e-mails to Weiner’s laptop.
So what?
Why was even one classified e-mail on Weiner’s computer?Would the FBI let YOU have “a small number” of classified e-mails on your laptop?
• Despite this abundant skullduggery, Comey insisted that Hillary Clinton practiced no “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information.” This is utterly irrelevant to the Espionage Act, under which federal prosecutors still should lock her up.
As Comey should know, the Federal Espionage Act — 18 U.S. Code § 793 — merely requires evidence of “gross negligence” in order to secure convictions.Black’s Law Dictionary considers “negligence” and “carelessness” synonymous.
According to Comey’s July 5 statement, Hillary and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
Thus, Clinton and her associates were “extremely careless.”Extremely careless means grossly negligent.Gross negligence is the black-letter standard for conviction under the Federal Espionage Act.James Comey is neither Congress nor the Supreme Court.He did not have the authority to rewrite or reinterpret that legal standard.Yet he did so anyway and set Hillary free at his July 5 press conference. (Along with her and his boss!)
Justice Department veterans Jamie Gorelick (a Clinton appointee) and Larry Thompson (a G. W. Bush appointee) condemned Comey’s media event as “a kind of reality TV of federal criminal investigation.”
In his May 9 memo about Comey to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, recently confirmed by the Senate 94–6, explained that, “we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation.”Rosenstein added: “The Director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial.It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”
Comey’s press conference enraged Republicans who cherish equal justice and the rule of law. Comey’s October 28 letter to Congress indicating that he had reopened Hillary’s e-mail inquiry may have been an attempt to re-ingratiate himself with the Right.
But then, his November 6 letter re-exonerating Clinton two days before the general election may have been a bid to regain favor with the woman who nearly every expert thought was poised to win the presidency. Comey’s intentions may have been pristine throughout all of this. But they look shifty, at best, and thoroughly corrupt, at worst.
Will anyone on Team Clinton pay any price whatsoever for Hillary’s abuse of America’s state secrets and the Clinton Foundation’s auction house for government favors? Alas, it seems, the Duchess of Chappaqua and her royal court enjoy the immunity that flows from her orb and scepter.
Where is the outrage? Where are the indictments? Why are Hillary, Huma, and Anthony(along with Barry Soetoro)not in handcuffs right now?
Crooked Hillary should have been jailed decades ago, and she still should be behind bars. Here is a key reason why she still roams free, shirks responsibility for her dreadful campaign, and — last week — launched Onward Together, yet another political slush fund: Comey(deliberately, and with malice of forethought!)blew it.His half-hearted probe has let Hillary and her entire circle off the hook, state secrets and public integrity be damned. For this alone, James Comey earned his pink slip, fair and square.
So here’s to you, Jim:
Which brings us to The Lighter Side…
Finally, we wrap things up with today’s entry in the President Skroob Memorial“Five Consecutive Numbers Beginning with One Ain’t the Most Secure Combination“ segment, courtesy of the folks once flew the friendly skies:
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