Why on earth would any American, much less a top law enforcement official, want to cover up a family with credible links to the 9-11 attacks?
This is likely why everyone in the Deep State lauded Mueller; they know he can be trusted to cover up anything no matter how awful. And it seems he did exactly that.
Ron Johnson thinks he has one. A "secret society" meeting off-site sounds a lot more serious than "Dumbledore's Army". Remember, these people are talking about a coup.
No, not everyone from muslim nations is going to try to burn down their school here in the US. But they're a lot more likely to try it than people from other regions, and even more so when compared to US citizens.
I've been generally discounting the various text messages and emails coming out of the FBI and Meuller's investigation referencing a "secret society" as being, basically, jokes. People treading just a little bit over the political line because they know the person they are talking to feels the same way. Like in the case of Lois Lerner's messages about Republicans, it shows animus but doesn't prove wrongdoing. And it's hard to take any group of government officials referring to themselves as "Dumbledore's Army" seriously.
Turns out I was hasty.
The "secret society" started right before the gap in their message history begins. That gap in their message history starts immediately after Mueller is appointed special counsel. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
They had something to hide. They had opportunity to conspire and expressed the desire to do so. They did in fact meet. That sounds like a real conspiracy to me.
Of course they were coordinating. You think Hillary would go anywhere near an FBI interview where the outcome wasn't preordained in her favor? That's exactly what was discussed at that tarmac meeting. Bill Clinton got assurances from AG Lynch that his wife, Hillary Clinton, would be interviewed as a mere formality and no charges would result. No charges on the email, no charges for lying to the FBI during the interview like Michael Flynn.
About those illegal aliens who aren't supposed to vote...
If illegal aliens didn't vote already, Democrats wouldn't be so focused on catering to them. Mostly, I think, they vote in areas like California that are already heavily controlled by Democrats. But that vote allows the Democrats to maintain a lock on those areas once they achieve the policy changes that permit illegal aliens to vote. Taking California as an example, within living memory it was a winnable state for Republicans. Now, the Democrats have supermajorities.
So remember: those 10,000+ text messages between Strzok and Page that included the "insurance policy" against a Trump win and god only knows what else? Those are the ones they thought we should be allowed to have. The missing messages -- between Dec 14th 2016 and May 17th 2017 -- must be much, much worse.
Funny how government agencies have their records go missing whenever this sort of investigation pops up. I remember when Lois Lerner destroyed her hard drives, laptops, and cell phones. And of course there's Hillary, who wiped her server with a cloth soaked in Bleachbit.
UPDATE: Sessions announces DOJ will probe missing messages. Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that needs a special counsel to investigate independently? Remember, DOJ is just as corrupt as the FBI...
So women can report being sexually harassed even if the harassment was failing to pick up on their non-verbal cues about being uncomfortable while getting naked and exchanging oral sex in a stranger's apartment... but if a man reports feeling uncomfortable, he's fired?
State and federal cooperation as applied to guns and immigration
In an uncharacteristic moment of stupidity, Rick Moran wrote:
Maybe he forgot that states don't all assist the federal government with enforcement of drug laws. See Colorado, among others, which has legalized "medical marijuana".
Insofar as states assist with gun law enforcement, it's because: 1) the federal government conditions such assistance on various funds, ie, the states get paid. 2) the "gun laws" being enforced are generally accepted as having a close relationship to crimes of violence, ie, the states want to cooperate.
And of course many of them don't -- see the various situations where states were found not to be reporting psychiatric confinements or disqualifying crimes to the NICS database.
"Sanctuary" states are a problem, but I'm not entirely sure it's a problem best solved by forcing states to cooperate. Cutting off federal funds if they don't seems workable. Arresting governors or mayors does not.
That said, there's not cooperating and then there's active resistance, as well as laws against harboring fugitives. If state law enforcement is told to interfere with or resist federal law enforcement, we have a name for that.
Senate reauthorizes FISA in the midst of political spying controversy
If the law can't be reformed under these conditions, just following an election where the party in power spied on the opposition and the opposition won anyway, are there any conditions at all under which the law could be reformed?
Perhaps if we elected a Congress with nothing blackmailable in the NSA database.
Remember the Pakistani IT guy who was running all the Dem servers?
This looks like a classic intelligence operation, one that penetrated to the highest levels of the Democratic party (at least in Congress) under Obama's administration. How much blackmail material did they manage to exfiltrate on representatives still in Congress? How much national security information?
This has been a slowly ticking scandal for over a year now. It's not a political disagreement or a particularly politicized scandal; the victims are Democrats, but other than that there's no political element that I can see.
When Obama was in power, there was significant incentive to cover this up and pretend it was ordinary crime. Under Trump, there's no such incentive, so why is it still flying under the radar?
Perhaps the FBI are diligently following leads and doing their counterintelligence task correctly for once. I hope so. But I'm not confident.
I'm not sure that a fine is the right response. The right response is probably just not giving them our intellectual property to steal. But doing something about the issue is a good place to start.
Classified report exposing FISA abuse made available to all Congressmen
The gist of the report will probably start to leak Friday evening, the traditional dumping ground for things the government or media want to cover up. Given that they've been leaking battlespace preparation for this for weeks, I wouldn't be surprised if people do lose their jobs over it. For people working in government, that's usually enough to prevent criminal charges.
The public needs to know the whole truth. Release the whole thing. And let's keep our copies around as reminders for when FISA next comes up for renewal.
Fusion GPS took dossier to press to salvage Hillary's campaign?
He doesn't say it outright, but he strongly implies it. Note that Comey's announcement that he was reopening the email investigation after discovering more emails (on Weiner's computer, if I recall correctly) is followed up rapidly by another announcement that nothing was found -- far too quickly to be real -- and by Fusion's attempt to push the dossier to the media.
People who grew up in huts woven from grasses, with no running water, no toilets, no concept of sanitation, no education, not even the ability to read and write in their own language never mind in english, will not do well in modern society. They simply will not. Their environment has not prepared them for it.
And yes, while we can afford to import and support some of those who are born in poverty and squalor to the United States for the rest of their natural lives, it is only a drop in the bucket compared to the people still living in that poverty and squalor.
How much more effective would it be to spend the same resources on educating a few of the local workers on plumbing and sanitation? A shovel, a toilet, and some pipe could go a very long way.
And lets not lose sight of the fact that some of those we import under present rules want to destroy America as we know it quite literally.
Since roughly 1965, the United States has had immigration policies contrary to our national interest. Those policies chose people from poor nations (or no nations at all) essentially at random. Sometimes literally at random. They could bring their family members over -- or anyone they claimed was a family member, or a spouse. We offered citizenship to anyone who could sneak over the border and have a baby here. (Sure, it took 18 years to do it that way, but it worked). We took in refugees. We gave "temporary" protected status to people who were here illegally when their home nations were hit by natural disasters, and prolonged that status for almost two decades. When foreign governments warned us that people we had accepted as our new proto-citizens were terrorists, we ignored the warning, and people died.
It's time we adjusted our immigration criteria to emphasize people who can, will, and want to assimilate into our society and become Americans. And at the same time, we need to increase our border security to ensure that the only people getting into the country are those we allow in.
There's room for some back and forth on some issues. Technical workers on H1B visas need to be limited to people with truly unique skills, not people who will serve as a cheap source of indentured labor, but the program doesn't have to end completely. It just has to be changed to ensure American jobs go to Americans first. The wall doesn't have to be a sea-to-shining-sea thing of concrete. We can do what makes sense for the terrain and will effectively block illegal crossers. But the status quo has been so harmful, for so long, that we cannot compromise on further amnesties. It will be hard enough to assimilate those already here legally.
Furthermore, we have already been sold the "amnesty now, border security later" deal twice at least. Even Reagan got taken in by it. He thought the other side would deal honestly; they didn't, and the border security never materialized. Bush the Younger got authorization for a border fence, but no funding to actually build it. Trump needs to demand actual border security measures, actually funded, actually implemented, actually proven effective. Only then can the question of what to do with the people already here be considered properly, with at least some measure of the trust necessary to make a deal reestablished.
I'm tempted to suggest dealing with the question of those already here by simply electrifying the fence using green power from big, beautiful windmills. Now that would be a powerful compromise!.