It's sort of hard to go after Comey for leaking classified information now that the memos he leaked have been (mostly) declassified. Perhaps what's under the redactions is sufficiently serious to matter.
It's also a little questionable to go after memos that were retroactively classified. Except that doesn't quite take into account the full facts. Comey wrote the memos and evaluated their classification himself. It's not like he want to some other authority and asked, got an answer, and then had the answer changed on him afterwards. No; what this means is that Comey failed to accurately evaluate the classification level of the documents he created and released. It's analogous to a sailor who takes a selfie at his station in a nuclear submarine. He doesn't think it's classified, and it's not marked classified, but the information in the picture -- the dials, gauges, and general design of the submarine in the background of the picture -- is classified and he should have known that.
It's something I wouldn't want to make a judgement call on without knowing more about what's under the redactions and what was considered classified that Comey missed. It could be a reasonable mistake. But... Comey's motives were full on improper leaking here. He appears to have conspired with Clapper to set up the president. He doesn't get any moral benefit of the doubt there. His only defense is that he properly evaluated the classification level of what he released and the subsequent evaluation by a third party was improper and in error.
I think he's going to be on the hot seat for this one until a jury sees it. And given the abundant evidence Comey was not acting in good faith here, the jury is unlikely to be sympathetic.
Environmentalism as a moral cause is the result of a whole generation being brainwashed in the educational system. Even when I was growing up, environmental propaganda was continuously shoveled at students. It's only gotten worse since then.
Gun control isn't so much brainwashing or moral issues as it is the easy, instinctive, primitive response to threats. Learning to respond rationally to a threatening situation, even one seen only secondhand on the media, requires education and knowledge to overcome ignorance. Most high school students have the capacity to do this, if anyone ever taught them to, but obviously no one has. At least not for the vast majority of high school students, and even significant numbers of adults.
But what's most telling about this is that Rubin reveals herself to have never been what she was pretending to be. The media hires people to pretend to be conservatives, serving the same basic function as a straw man serves in a debate.
I support Cruz trying to make these permanent, but I don't think it's going to happen. The GOPe is far too wedded to the idea of making another set of political hay over the same tax cuts after these expire. That's why they are always temporary, never permanent.
IG Horowitz sent criminal referral to US Attorney Huber some time ago
I suspect this is being announced today because of the criminal referral from Congress yesterday that included McCabe. The only new news is that we (and Congress) now know it happened.
The memos are here. My analysis is below the fold. Notably, the first three memos are marked classified or higher (pre-redaction), as is the last.
Broadly, there's nothing here except a President furious about leaks, expecting loyalty from his appointees in the context of stopping leaks, and asking the head of the FBI to announce publicly what he has already told the President privately: that the President is not being investigated by the FBI. Given that the leaks are coming from the FBI and its investigation of non-Trump things, Comey is either lying about that, or denying a reasonable request to clear up false rumors.
The fact that the Parkland murderer had only ten round magazines in his duffle bag filled with magazines and simply reloaded whenever he needed to should be sufficient to demonstrate how pointless this law is.
There was a subpoena issued for those files. Check.
The Clintons knew of it. Check.
Intent can be implied from the fact that they initiated the destruction of the emails remaining on their server shortly after the subpoena was issued. Check.
Gene-sequencing companies selling medical and genetic data of their customers?
If they are actually doing this -- and I have no doubt they are -- they should be prosecuted under the HIPPA act for releasing medical information about their customers without their consent. There are serious penalties involved for doing that, and a clickwrap agreement when you sign up for the test without even knowing what you will find shouldn't count.
On April 19th, 1993, the government sent military troops to confiscate American guns, and those who had previously resisted the confiscation died in fire, crushed under the treads of tanks, suffocated or burned alive in their own homes by the very government that had been established in response to the earlier confiscation. The government claiming to be by the people, for the people, and of the people... killed the people. It violated the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th amendments. It covered up the results, nearly 80 people who were (depending on who you believe) either murdered outright or chose to die as martyrs rather than submit to a government that clearly wanted to kill them.
Watching the Waco massacre at the hands of the government and the subsequent cover ups should disabuse anyone of the notion that they can trust their government, even in a country like America.
A criminal referral doesn't mean much unless the FBI and/or DOJ decide to act on it. Under Obama, for example, they ignored AG Holder's criminal referral for contempt of Congress in the Fast and Furious scandal. With Trump in charge, at least theoretically, and some sort of criminal investigation already under way by a Utah prosecutor, this referral may carry more weight.
When politicians give your money to charity, it tends to stick to their fingers
Remember, for the vast majority of the well-known charities, continuing the money flow to pay the professionals who work for the charity is more important than actually accomplishing the mission of the charity itself. That goes double for any charity affiliated with a famous person and triple for those affiliated with politicians. There's almost always a scam.
When it's two famous political families and one of them is the Clintons, well, I'd be surprised if any money actually made it to the intended recipients.
Judge with Clinton, Soros ties allows prosecutors to read Trump's privileged files
Here's the thing.
Once you give the privileged documents to the so-called "taint team" of New York prosecutors, they can't unsee what they saw. Even if the judge decides in a week or two to change her mind and appoint a special master to sort through the documents, the "taint team" will go through everything in there in the week that they have. They will make copies; they will take notes; they will leak to the media anonymously and on background for stories to come out from now until the midterms. And even if there is nothing in the actual files worth leaking, they will make things up and leak that, citing the files that they have seen and no one else has. There is no way for the judge to undo this decision, which means the judge should have been very careful to consider it before releasing documents to the "taint team".
Why might the judge decide to rush things and give the prosecutors the chance to read and leak?
Well, she did officiate at George Soros' wedding, and Soros is notoriously unhappy about Trump and heavily politically involved (usually as a fundraiser). And she was nominated to the AG post by William Clinton, though she had to withdraw from the nomination over a "nanny problem". That was back when employing an illegal immigrant was actually a problem, politically.
Funny, isn't it, how when the left is being investigated they just stonewall and refuse to hand over documents and cite executive privilege and refuse FOIA requests and generally use every trick in the book... but Trump gets the benefit of none of that?
A wise person on the Trump team would be looking hard at how the case landed on her desk and considering a motion to recuse.
Lawsuit over FEC ignoring complaints about Hillary's campaign
I'm not sure about the strategy of suing the government to force them to enforce their own rules, but it seemed to work for the environmental groups and the EPA, so we might as well give it a try.
Comey did not tell Trump the source of the dossier information
What does that sound like to you?
It sounds to me like what you would say if you were trying to blackmail someone. It's not very far at all from "We know about the golden shower you had in Moscow, and if you don't want the public to know about it..."
Given that the FBI knew from the beginning that the Steele dossier was Clinton-financed opposition research, if they were being honest, they would note that source or not even bother giving it credibility by briefing Trump. Instead, they did brief him, and immediately leaked the briefing itself to the media. Was that the plan all along, or was it because Trump refused to cooperate with whatever blackmail demands they made?
The presentation of Mueller as some sort of upright man of impeccable moral and ethical credentials was just that -- a presentation. He is as weak and flawed as anyone else.
Ballot question: Should California be split into three states?
The answer depends heavily on how exactly the split works. It makes sense to split the state into three states with population mixes such that they are politically competitive, rather than millions of urban illegals ruling over farmers. It doesn't make sense to give the same Democrats now in power 4 more Senators from one-party states.
So, McCabe lied to Comey about leaking to the Wall Street Journal, then lied to INSD agents investigating the leak under oath, then lied to the IG about those prior lies. In addition, the IG says McCabe wasn't authorized to leak the information in the first place.
The IG is referring the report to the FBI, which will likely do nothing.
