It’s Friday, June 15th, 2018…and here’s The Gouge!
First up, as Jim Geraghty details at his Morning Jolt, immediately following the Singapore Summit, The Donald evidently had places to go, people to see, because…
“Some folks think I was too hard on President Trump, his comments, and the overall gist of the potential agreements at the Singapore summit.I wonder if those folks saw thecomments from the president such as, “You have things that weren’t included that we got after the deal was signed.I’ve done that before in my life.And we didn’t put it in the agreement because we didn’t have time.”
Didn’t have time?
What, was there some other place these guys needed to be? Was either leader worried about missing a flight or something?Trust me, Air Force One isn’t going to take off without the president. This isn’t the SAT, and there is no proctor declaring “pencils down” when the hour is complete.
…I keep hearing from Trump fans, “Why can’t you show a little optimism?”
Well, because optimism requires us to believe that these latest promises are completely different from all of the previous promises from this regime. The skepticism I have about this latest round of promises from North Korea is the exact same skepticism I bring to the Iran deal, which every Trump fan is thrilled to see scrapped.History teaches us that hostile regimes lie a lot.It’s not a matter of the United States not reaching out to them in the right way.If they have the opportunity to cheat, they will cheat. One might argue that duplicity is intrinsic to the nature of any regime that is unwilling to subject itself to the limit of free and fair elections.No one’s ever looked at a dictator, tyrant, despot, or ayatollah and said, “Wow, that guy’s a really honest leader.”
Trump’s fans are convinced he’s got some unique “don’t mess with him” mojo that will intimidate the North Koreans into keeping their promises.I hope they’re right. Maybe Trump has communicated that breaking a promise to his administration will indeed bring “fire and fury.” If it works out, give him the Nobel. (At least HE’LL have earned it!)
But I think any U.S. leader hoping to successfully negotiate a deal with the North Koreans has to keep all of this history of broken promises in the back of his mind.
Judging from Trump’s comments, he wants to approach Kim Jong-un with a clean slate: “Look, he’s doing what he’s seen done, if you look at it. But I really have to go by today and yesterday and a couple of weeks ago because that’s really when this whole thing started.”“
Yeah,…
…whatever. As for us, the proof will be in the pudding…along with the verified dismantling/destruction of the NoKo nuclear arsenal.
Next up, as regards the long-awaited Inspector General’s report, while we deeply respect the opinion of the WSJ‘s Kim Strassel...
“Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 500-page report covers plenty, but it can be distilled to two words he uses to describe the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the 2016 election: insubordination and bias.Two terms that are chilling in connection with such a powerful agency…”
…rather than “careful”, we find Michael Horowitz’s conclusions incomprehensibly naive at best, and the product of deep-state corruption at worst. It’s frankly impossible to believe any reasonable, unbiased individual could review the facts surrounding the activities of Jim Comey’s FBI and reach any conclusion other than they were driven purely by politics! Yet somehow, someway, this Obama appointee determined…
“While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice…”
Likewise for Peter Strzok and his repulsive paramour Lisa Page:
“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative actions we reviewed…”
Sorry, but what reason other than politics could possibly explain their conduct?!? And exactly how hard did Horowitz look? It’s not like the evidence detailing the political bias of Strzok and Page wasn’t staring him in the face:
As importantly, proof of this patently-exhibited prejudice wasn’t restricted to Comey, Strzok and Page, as this exchange courtesy of Townhall.com‘s Matt Vespa confirms:
“The second exchange we identified occurred on November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election. FBI Attorney 2 and another FBI employee who was not involved in the Midyear investigation exchanged the following instant messages. Note that the sender of the instant message is identified after the timestamp and intervening messages that did not contribute to the understanding of this exchange are not included.
09:38:14, FBI Attorney 2: “I am numb.”
09:55:35, FBI Employee: “I can’t stop crying.”
10:00:13, FBI Attorney 2: “That makes me even more sad.”
10:43:20, FBI Employee: “Like, what happened?”
10:43:37, FBI Employee: “You promised me this wouldn’t happen. YOU PROMISED.”
10:43:43, FBI Employee: Okay, that might have been a lie…”
10:43:46, FBI Employee: “I’m very upset.”
10:43:47, FBI Employee: “haha”
10:51:48, FBI Attorney 2: “I am so stressed about what I could have done differently.”
10:54:29, FBI Employee: “Don’t stress. None of that mattered.” 10:54:31, FBI Employee: “The FBI’s influence.”
10:59:36, FBI Attorney 2: “I don’t know. We broke the momentum.” 11:00:03, FBI Employee: “That is not so.”
11:02:22, FBI Employee: “All the people who were initially voting for her would not, and were not, swayed by any decision the FBI put out. Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS that think he will magically grant them jobs for doing nothing. They probably didn’t watch the debates, aren’t fully educated on his policies, and are stupidly wrapped up in his unmerited enthusiasm.”
417
11:11:43, FBI Attorney 2: “I’m just devastated. I can’t wait until I can leave today and just shut off the world for the next four days.”
11:12:06, FBI Employee: “Why are you devastated?”
11:12:18, FBI Employee: “Yes, I’m not watching tv for four years.”
11:14:16, FBI Attorney 2: “I just can’t imagine the systematic disassembly of the progress we made over the last 8 years. ACA is gone.Who knows if the rhetoric about deporting people, walls, and crap is true. I honestly feel like there is going to be a lot more gun issues, too, the crazies won finally. This is the tea party on steroids. And the GOP is going to be lost, they have to deal with an incumbent in 4 years. We have to fight this again. Also Pence is stupid.”
11:14:58, FBI Employee: “Yes that’s all true.”
11:15:01, FBI Attorney 2: “And it’s just hard not to feel like the FBI caused some of this. It was razor thin in some states.”
11:15:09, FBI Employee: “Yes it was very thin.”
11:15:23, FBI Attorney 2: “Plus, my god damned name is all over the legal documents investigating his staff.”
11:15:24, FBI Employee: “But no I absolutely do not believe the FBI had any part.”
11:15:33, FBI Attorney 2: “So, who knows if that breaks to him what he is going to do.”…”
“The House Intelligence Committee is investigating whether the government has used the Justice Department’s awesome investigative authorities as a weapon against political adversaries. We learned yesterday that, in response to this very investigation, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein…threatened to use the Justice Department’s awesome investigative authorities as a weapon against political adversaries.
That Rosenstein threatened to subpoena the committee’s records does not seem to be in serious dispute.There are differing accounts about why.House investigators say that Rosenstein was trying to bully his way out of compliance with oversight demands; the Justice Department offers the lawyerly counter that Rosenstein was merely foreshadowing his litigating position if the House were to try to hold him in contempt for obstructing its investigations. Either way, the best explanation for the outburst is that Rosenstein is beset by profound conflicts of interest, and he’s acting like it.
The first thing to bear in mind about thenews reported Tuesday by Fox News’s Catherine Herridgeis that the dispute in question — which is just one of many during a year of Justice Department stonewalling — happened five months ago, on January 10.
So, what was going on back then?
…To recap: In January 2018, Congress was investigating whether the Justice Department had abused the FISA process. The top Justice Department official for purposes of responding to this congressional investigation was resisting it; this includedfighting the disclosure of the last warrant relevant to that investigation, which he had personally approved — a warrant that relied on the unverified Steele dossier (floutingFBI guidelinesholding that unverified information is not to be presented to the FISA court), and that failed to discloseboth that the dossier was a Clinton-campaign product and that Steele had been booted from the investigation for lying…”
There are few people whose opinions we respect more than McCarthy’s (and, as previously noted, Kim Strassel’s), so this is what gets us, as Andy goes on to note:
“…To point this out is not to attack Mr. Rosenstein’s integrity. I do not know the deputy attorney general personally, but people I do know and trust regard him as a scrupulous person and professional.That’s good enough for me…”
Here’s the juice: were we utterly ignorant of Barack Hussein Obama’s record and history, had someone suggested we sit down with him over a beer, we might…might (though any extended conversation would certainly have revealed his true character)…have been tempted to believe his bullsh*t. Andy McCarthy does not enjoy the benefit of such doubt. Rod Rodentstein is a bad apple, in fact prima facia evidence of the existence of the Deep State.
Which fairly screams the question why does Rodentstein still have his job…let alone why Andrew McCarthy still grants him the benefit of the doubt?!?
Meanwhile, as Catherine Herridge reports at FOX News…
““Foreign actors” obtained access to some of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails — including at least one email classified as “secret” — according to a new memo from two GOP-led House committees and an internal FBI email.
…The memo does not say who the foreign actors are, or what material was obtained, but it notes that secret information is defined as information that, if disclosed, could “reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.”
The committees say that no one appears to have been held accountable either criminally or administratively…”
BIG surprise…as the GOP-led House has yet to hold anyone…
…accountable for anything.
Nothing to see here, folks…please move along!
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these sage bits of marital wisdom from Bob Chagares:
And in New of the Bizarre…At Least to Anyone Outside Minnesota…or West Virginia, as this forward from Bill Meisen and the CBS Minneapolis affiliate relates…
“A young woman found herself in the wrong place at a central Minnesota music festival. Officials said she got her head stuck in a truck’s exhaust pipe near the Winstock Music Festival in Winsted. It is not clear why she did so. The McLeod County Sheriff’s office said they cited her for underage drinking…”
It’s clear now…
Finally, we’ll call it a week with another forward from Bill Meisen, which suggests…
If true, this would make Mr. Meisen, the incomparable Stilton Jarlsberg and ourselves the polar opposite of the Cuomo clan, and thus among the brightest bulbs in the box!
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