90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

The FBI Prostituted Itself...

A national disgrace of unprecedented historic proportions.

Citing unnamed “former law enforcement sources and others,” the New York Times reports that “in the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.”

The mainstream media has touted this story as major breaking news. But, to anyone who has been paying even a modicum of attention, it is crystal clear that Comey’s firing did not precipitate the FBI’s investigation of Trump. To the contrary, the readily available record facts demonstrate that Comey’s FBI began investigating Trump and his campaign for possible Russian collusion shortly after he won the Republican Party’s nomination.

Even though the Times would have us believe that the FBI investigated Trump out of a legitimate concern for national security, those same facts prove that, in launching and directing the investigation, the leadership of Comey’s FBI was engaging in partisan presidential politics to further their own selfish interests. Here’s why.

Recall that Hillary Clinton was supposed to win the 2016 presidential election. All of the pols, polls, and pundits agreed on that point. She was a lock for the White House.

Nevertheless, Clinton faced a number of politically sticky issues. Most prominent of these was her use as Secretary of State of an unsecure private email server to transact official business.

Because this had unavoidably become a matter of public concern, the FBI conducted a Potemkin investigation of Clinton for possible violations of a criminal statute that makes it a felony for anyone lawfully possessing information pertaining to the national defense to allow it, through “gross negligence,” to be removed from its proper place of custody and disclosed. In other words, under the statute, one need not intend to cause harm. As with a drunken driver who accidentally runs down a pedestrian, “gross negligence” alone was sufficient to warrant a felony charge.

In July 2016, when he announced the results of the investigation, Comey made it clear that Clinton had repeatedly and over a period of years stored, sent, and received “very sensitive, highly classified information” on her unclassified, nongovernment email server. But although Comey conceded that Clinton was “extremely careless” in doing so, he nevertheless concluded that she should not be charged because there was no “clear evidence” that she “intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information.”

So it was that, confronted by an insurmountable mountain of proof of Clinton’s grossly negligent and therefore felonious mishandling of classified information, Comey, with a straight face and without apparent embarrassment, raised an utterly irrelevant nonissue (lack of clear proof of intent) to give Clinton a pass.

This was the first overt sign that the FBI director had taken sides in the election and was doing his best to help Clinton’s candidacy and, he undoubtedly hoped, to become part of her administration.

Then things hit a snag. The NYPD was investigating former Congressman Anthony Weiner, husband to Clinton assistant Huma Abedin, for sexual solicitation of minors over the internet. Unfortunately for Clinton and Comey, the NYPD seized Weiner’s laptop computer and discovered on it thousands of classified State Department emails and documents.

The NYPD provided copies of those documents to the FBI. Faced with the possibility that the NYPD might disclose its findings, Comey reopened the FBI investigation.

In his auto-hagiography A Higher Loyalty, Comey states that “I believed that it was my duty to inform Congress that we were restarting the investigation. I would say as little as possible, but the FBI had to speak.”

Responding to subsequent fatuous claims that his announcement may have cost Clinton the election, Comey explains in his book that he might not have announced reopening the investigation if he had thought that Donald Trump had any chance of winning the election. “It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than...

In what may prove to be one of recent history’s biggest business blunders, razor maker Gillette has joined other corporations by entering the political realm with a new ad that attacks the biggest purchasers of their products by declaring war on toxic masculinity.

The classic definition of fascism is the collaboration between corporate and state power and as Democrats and the political left continue to exact their terrible vengeance against all things male out of fury over the rejection of Hillary Clinton, the corporate hustlers are by their side and pumping out propaganda that seeks to emasculate and already sissified male demographic into all but sawing off their own testicles with Gillette’s products.

This is just flat-out insanity and bodes ill for the future.

Via The Hill, “Gillette takes on toxic masculinity in new ad campaign”:

A new ad campaign from Procter & Gamble-owned razor brand Gillette is taking on toxic masculinity and calling on men to take action against sexual harassment and bullying.

The digital ad, titled “We Believe,” puts a twist on Gillette’s decades-old slogan, “The Best a Man Can Get.”

It addresses issues of harassment, bullying and men’s mental health, asking: “Is this the best a man can get?”

“We believe in the best in men. To say the right thing, to act the right way,” a narrator says over clips, both scripted and real, of men defending others from bullying or stopping friends from...