Category Archives: War Commentary

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

The Imran Awan Case

18 Comments

It needs a special counsel a thousand times more than Russiagate:

There are a lot of shoelaces to be tied up here. Among them:

Why did Debbie Wasserman Schultz keep this man in her employ right up until he was arrested Tuesday night when he has been under suspicion for months. Does he have something on her or other people?

Why did Nancy Pelosi lie when she said she never heard of Awan? Email revealed by Wikileaks says Awan had access to Pelosi’s iPad. (Wiklileaks has never been shown to be inaccurate.)

What is on the smashed hard drives Awan is trying to retrieve from the FBI? (Oh, those Democrats and their hard drives.)

Why is Awan suddenly being legally represented at the highest level by Clinton ultra-loyalist Chris Gowan — a fact-checker for Bill Clinton’s memoir of all things? (They are already using the same right-wing conspiracy baloney they used in the Lewinski case.) Does this make sense if Awan’s just a low-life fraudster? Why not let him dangle?

Just what is the relationship, if any, between the Awan case and the unsolved Seth Rich murder? Is it entirely an accident that Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s brother Steven is accused of blocking the investigation? Denials from Debbie aren’t worth much anymore.

Where did the Wikileaks come from anyway? Was it really Russia?

Funny thing, though, the alphabet news organizations don’t even seem to think this is a story.

[Update a few minutes later]

More links from Glenn.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Understanding the Awan connection:

Hezbollah aside, the danger posed by scandal-plagued, debt-ridden IT professionals on Capitol Hill is obvious, especially when (1) they have access to national security information and (2), if I may say so, when they are connected to Pakistan. It’s impossible not to wonder who may have received data the Awans had access to, especially given Pakistan’s history of collaborating with a various foreign countries and entities — including both friends and foes of America.

Finally, according to Raisley, Imran Awan had access to Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s iPad password. This probably means the brothers had direct access to DNC emails. Might they have sold them to Russians? Might they have sold them to non-Russians?

Clearly, I’ve entered the realm of speculation. But if the mainstream media is going to speculate endlessly about President Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, shouldn’t it also be speculating about the Awan connection? And if Trump is to be investigated endlessly by the government, shouldn’t the Awan connection be investigated, as well?

So what’s keeping Sessions from assigning a special prosecutor? He hasn’t recused himself from this.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Total MSNBC and CNN blackout of the story continues.

[Sunday-morning update]

This is about a lot more than bank fraud. As Mark Steyn says, want to see real collusion with a hostile power? Because this is what it looks like. And just how bad is the rot at the FBI that they let all this go on for so long?

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

Roger Simon reviews all of the scandals:

Quite a litany, huh? Are all six connected? It’s hard to say at this time. Maybe all are or none are. I would imagine it’s some, if not all. But they’re all connected morally — plus beneath all this are the endless leaks, which I suppose could constitute a scandal of their own.

Now let’s play that game from Sesame Street — “One of these things is not like the others.” Yes, you got it. It’s number one. In that case, Republicans are under suspicion. In the other five, it’s the Democrats. And yet the only one under official investigation by Robert Mueller and crew is one. Something rotten in the state of…? You bet!

Yup. If Republicans were smart, they’d be screaming for investigation into all of this, beyond what Jim Jordan and a few others have been doing. But if Republican were smart, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

[Monday-morning update]

Let’s investigate all the scandals:

The House Republicans identify no fewer than 14 additional scandals or potential scandals that they want investigated by a second special counsel, Robert Mueller having shown himself to be a tool of the Democratic Party (my characterization, not theirs).

…At a time when the corruption of the Democratic Party stinks to high heaven, it is absurd that the “investigation” garnering nearly all the headlines relates to something that didn’t happen. It is time to fight fire with fire.

The House Republicans addressed their letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Sessions may or may not have been correct in recusing himself with regard to the investigation into the Trump campaign, but he certainly has no need to defer with regard to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the fourteen additional subjects raised by the House Judiciary Committee members. He should appoint one or more additional special counsels to go after the Democrats. They should all be loyal Republican attack dogs. And when the dust has settled, the special counsel law should be repealed.

The Democrats have gotten away with (in some cases, literally) murder for decades, thanks to the Democrat operatives with bylines in the media.

[Bumped again]

[Update a while later]

Yes, Congress can, and should censure Debbie Wasserman Schultz. At a minimum.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Trump White House

53 Comments

Yes, there is no staff shake up that can fix it. The problem is Trump himself:

at every turn, the president has acted as if he has something to hide. Whether he actually does is an open question, but his obsession with the unfairness of the Russia story — and his refusal to credit claims that the Russians meddled in the election, or to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin — is a perpetual smoke machine causing people to think there’s got to be a fire somewhere. The author of Donald Trump’s problems is first and foremost Donald Trump.

So what’s my point? Simply: The author of Donald Trump’s problems is first and foremost Donald Trump. It’s fine to point out the excesses of the Democrats and the media. There’s certainly ample reason to criticize his staff. It’s understandable that Trump supporters think the “establishment,” the “swamp” or the “Deep State” have undermined him — because they have.

But Trump is not a victim. He is the hamster spinning the wheel in the massive Rube Goldberg machine that is the spectacle of presidential dysfunction.

And an ignorant emotional 71-year-old man with attention-deficit disorder and no impulse control isn’t going to change.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Louise Mensch

Charles Cooke isn’t impressed. To say the least:

In a more sensible world, a woman such as Mensch would be running around a train station warning commuters about the spaceships in the lavatory car. In America, 2017, alas, she was first elevated to the head of a News Corp property and is now is at the heart of what has become a popular and widely read conspiracy movement, which not only indulges her endless flights of hallucinatory fancy but repeats and retweets them under the heady imprimatur of “reporting.” Along with Eric Garland, Claude Taylor, Andrew Laufer, and a few other sorry victims of early onset absurdity, Mensch provides hope and titillation to the illiterate and the credulous, more than 250,000 of whom have elected to follow her on Twitter.

In the course of her breakdown she has ensnared some of those you’d imagine she’d ensnare — Joy Reid is a fan, naturally, as are Ted Lieu and Keith Olbermann – but she has also managed to attract some of those you would not. To his intense discredit, Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe has shared her material on more than one occasion, which should serve as a welcome reminder that brilliance in one’s field in no way guarantees the possession of common sense.

RTWT. Brutal.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Clinton’s Emails

11 Comments

Byron York: What campaign wouldn’t have wanted to get them?

It was, as the New York Times’ Mark Landler said in August 2016, the “original sin” of the Clinton email affair — that Clinton herself, and no independent body, unilaterally decided which emails she would hand over to the State Department and which she would delete.

Still, there were people who did not believe that Clinton’s deleted emails, all 30,000-plus of them, were truly gone. What is ever truly gone on the Internet? And what if Clinton were not telling the truth? What if she deleted emails covering more than just personal matters? In that event, recovering the emails would have rocked the 2016 presidential campaign.

So, if there were an enormous trove of information potentially harmful to a presidential candidate just sitting out there — what opposing campaign wouldn’t want to find it?

I certainly still want to see them. And I still want to see a special prosecutor appointed to do (unlike Comey’s) a proper investigation.

The problem for the Trump defenders (and after last week, I hesitate to bring the issue up again), is that the campaign spent months vociferously denying that they were colluding with the Russians to get this kind of information while simultaneously doing everything possible (other than saying they weren’t) to make it look as though they were, including Trump’s own public request of Putin almost a year ago to hack her and find the emails. His defenders now say there was nothing wrong about going to Russia for oppo research. OK, fine. If there was nothing wrong, why have they spent so much energy denying that they did so?

I hate to say what I would do if I were Trump, because, obviously, if I were Trump, I’d do all the stupid things that Trump does. But if I were someone in Trump’s position here’s what I would have done. I’d have given the following speech:

One of the reasons that I won this election is because my opponent was not only a terrible candidate with awful policies, but recognizably corrupt. And not only was, and is, she corrupt, but so was the previous administration that in addition to siccing the IRS on its political enemies while covering up the crime, refused to properly investigate her, and tied the hands of the FBI director in his investigation.

Because she did all she could to destroy all those emails, we have no idea what was in them that she so feared us finding, but the public still deserves to know. If getting them from the Russians was the only way to get them, then that was the price that had to be paid, to begin to restore the integrity of the American government, and I make no apologies for that.

But I’m not Trump.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of Clinton corruption, I’m sure that this is just a coinkidinky: Haiti official who exposed the Clinton Crime Family Foundation’s criminality and was going to expose much more next week “commits suicide.” Sure he did.

Oh, and a reminder from a year ago. Sad how being associated with the Clintons (and/or investigating them) makes so many people so despondent that they have to take their own lives.

[Update a few minutes later]

For those too young to remember, how the press ignored or helped cover up Clinton corruption two decades ago. Democrat operatives with bylines.

The sprawling fundraising scandal ultimately led to 22 guilty pleas on various violations of election laws. Among the Clinton fundraisers and friends who pleaded guilty were John Huang, Charlie Trie, James Riady, and Michael Brown, son of the late Clinton Commerce secretary Ron Brown. But many questions went unanswered, even after the revelations that Clinton had personally authorized offering donors Oval Office meetings and use of the Lincoln bedroom. A total of 120 participants in the fundraising scandal either fled the country, asserted their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, or otherwise avoided questioning. The stonewalling worked — and probably encouraged Hillary Clinton in her own cover-up of her private e-mail server and her ties with the Clinton Foundation.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449539/chinese-illegally-donated-bill-clinton-reelection-campaign-media-downplayed

The nineties were when I finally lost any vestige of support for Democrats I’d ever had.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Subpoena Fusion GPS:

Isn’t it interesting that a Russian-born American lobbyist with a Soviet counter-intelligence background just happens to have been tied to Fusion GPS?

The depth of corruption in DC is staggering. Trump was elected in part to drain that swamp, but he seems too incompetent to do it.

[Update a couple minutes later:

Which theory is harder to believe?

That Trump, who had never run for office before and who was panned as a clown by the Democrats and the media right up until Election Night last November, orchestrated a grand coup d’état with the assistance of the Russians to “hack” an American election, and that it was so well hidden that the Don Junior meeting is the only real evidence unearthed so far of the whole thing?

…Or that the Obama administration and the Democratic Party used their immense power to attempt to ensnare the Trumps in a damaging narrative that would either discredit him and the Republican Party as traitors in the event of a Clinton victory or cripple his administration in “scandal” should he pull an upset?

This is going to get very messy for the Democrats, I hope.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, War Commentary

Trump And Russia

119 Comments

Yes, the benefit of the doubt is gone. And I agree with this:

Why on God’s good Earth would you defend any of this? Since I’ve been having this ridiculous argument all week, let me skip ahead. Yes, “Crooked Hillary,” Ted Kennedy, and a host of other liberals did bad things. Whether those bad things were analogous to this is highly debatable. But let’s just concede the point for argument’s sake. Let’s also accept the president’s grotesquely cynical and false claim that pretty much anyone in politics would have done the same thing and taken the meeting. (I for one am perfectly happy to concede that Sidney Blumenthal would happily have done equally sleazy things for his Queen-master. But I have every confidence that if some shady Russian cutouts approached, say, James Baker with a similar scheme to “incriminate” Michael Dukakis, he would become a helicopter of fists.)

But here’s the thing: Who gives a dirty rat’s ass? If you spent years — like I did, by the way — insisting that the Clintons were a corrupt affront to political decency, invoking their venal actions as a moral justification for Team Trump’s actions is the rhetorical equivalent of a remake of Waterworld set entirely in the main vat of a sewage-treatment plant, i.e., the intellectual Mother of Sh*t Shows. This is a point Ben Shapiro made well earlier this week (and which I’ve been writing about for two years now). If you want to make the case that Democrats or the media are hypocrites, whataboutism is perfectly valid (and quite fun). But if you want to say that it’s fine for Trump to do things you considered legally and morally outrageous when Hillary Clinton did them, you should either concede that you believe two wrongs make a right or you should apologize for being angry about what Clinton did. And you should be prepared to have no right to complain when the next Democrat gets into power and does the same thing.

When Trump does something good, I’ll praise him. When he does something stupid and dubious, I’ll call him on it. I am consistent in my insistence that public officials be held to the same standards as the rest of us.

I wouldn’t mind him being impeached and removed, or even prosecuted, but if either of those things happen, I’ll be incandescent in my outrage if the investigation against her is not renewed and finally done properly, so she can finally be accountable to the law. I’m still glad she lost, but I will not worship this gang of ethically challenged incompetents.

[Saturday-morning update]

Wow, the comments sections is under attack by an army of strawmen.

Here’s what I didn’t say and what I don’t believe. I don’t believe that he is plotting with Putin against the United States. I don’t believe that he’s Hitler. I don’t believe that he is plotting to undermine democracy. I don’t believe he should be impeached (yet). I don’t even believe that he committed a crime (at least with regard to the Russian stuff). If I were as under the sway of the media as some fools fantasize, I would believe all these things.

All I (and Jonah) said is that, for months, we’ve been told by Trump supporters that any suggestion that the campaign had colluded (that is, had meetings with them to discuss how they could help elect Trump) with the Russians was “fake news.” For months, given the absence of evidence, we have given them the benefit of the doubt, despite all of the smoke, and the continuing changing stories (sometimes daily, which continues even now, with the number of attendees at the meeting continuing to grow). So now we know that we can do so no longer on this particular issue. I don’t believe this because I’ve been brainwashed by the media. This is not a position I came to from Trump hatred (though I continue to find him loathesome). I came to this rational, objective position because Trump’s idiot namesake told me that he colluded with the Russians (albeit unsuccessfully in terms of getting the desired Hillary dirt), even if he didn’t use that word.

But apparently (as with Obama) no criticism, no matter how objective, no matter how fact based, of the God King will be brooked by his acolytes. I don’t suffer in any way from Trump derangement, but apparently many of both his opponents and his supporters clearly do.

[Late-morning update]

“This isn’t Watergate. This isn’t treason. And there’s still no smoking gun.”

Oops, guess I shouldn’t have noted this, because according to my brilliant commenters, I’ve been brainwashed by the media (which I in fact find even more despicable than Trump).

[Afternoon update]

BTW, this is why I don’t post about Trump all that much. It’s impossible to have a sane conversation about him with both his opponents and defenders.

[Sunday-morning update]

I see that Ken continues to insult my intelligence in comments because I had and continue to have the temerity to criticize his God King in any way.