Saturday, December 7, 2019
Friday, December 6, 2019
Did Commissar Schiff employ KGB tactics to spy on his rivals as well as Trump?
So now his denial of ever subpoenaing the phone records of his Republican counterpart, Rep. Devin Nunes, one of Nunes's aides, and reporter John Solomon, (as well as those of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his Ukrainian client named Lev Parnas) is worth looking at.
Power Line's Scott Johnson interpreted the apparent spying as evidence that Schiff got the phone data from his subpoenas of the Giuliani and Parnas phone records in the impeachment report, and yes, Johnson, unlike Schiff, is credible, so I was inclined to accept his take earlier.
But other reports suggest that Schiff is lying, spying on his rivals, doing it with subpoenas, putting the Soviet KGB to shame.
The Wall Street Journal, for one, dug deeper and reported an undisclosed source saying that yes, Schiff did indeed issue subpoenas to spy on Trump's lawyers, as well as his own political counterparts, and inconvenient reporters like Solomon. I'll bet Kimberley Strassel wrote that one:
This is unprecedented and looks like an abuse of government surveillance authority for partisan gain. Democrats were caught using the Steele dossier to coax the FBI into snooping on the 2016 Trump campaign. Now we have elected members of Congress using secret subpoenas to obtain, and then release to the public, the call records of political opponents.
Our sources says Mr. Schiff issued a subpoena in September to AT&T, demanding call logs for five numbers—including Mr. Giuliani’s. Subsequent subpoenas to AT&T and Verizon demanded more details. Republicans were told of the subpoenas, yet under rules of committee secrecy couldn’t raise public objections.
Readers may recall that only a few years ago Democrats were in high dudgeon over the executive branch’s collection of metadata against terrorists. They claimed the National Security Agency was “spying” on Americans, and in 2015 Congress barred NSA from collecting bulk domestic metadata. Federal investigators must offer legitimate reasons to obtain metadata from telecom companies, and they are subject to restrictions on divulging it.
Yet here the companies appear to have handed over metadata based on little more than Mr. Schiff’s say-so—and in AT&T’s case in response to a request that was made before the House began a formal impeachment inquiry.
AT&T released a statement Wednesday saying it is “required by law to provide information to government and law enforcement agencies.”
The fact that AT&T tried to extricate itself from controversy instead of just deny that it forked over any subpoena records relating to Devin Nunes and others suggests something damning going on, too.
For now, it comes down to whom you believe - Schiff, or the Journal, which probably fact-checked the hell out of that bombshell detail about the subpoenas before printing it.
Schiff says he only spied on...
Idiot Car Driver Vs. Truck....
More Great Gifs:
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Animated Gif Collection #5 -OR- Motorcycles And Bulls Don't Mix..
Animated Gif Collection #6 or Bet She Lost Some Teeth...
Animated Gif Collection #7 -OR- This Is What Happens When You Fall Asleep While Driving...
Animated Gif Collection #8 -OR- Fish: 1, Dog: 0
Animated Gif Collection #9 -OR-Out Of Control Bus -OR-
Animated Gif Collection #10 -OR- How To Launch An Oil Truck Into The Air
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Inspector General Ramps Up Investigations of FBI Employees
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| Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on June 18, 2018. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) |
The Office of IG Michael Horowitz had 104 “open criminal or administrative investigations of alleged misconduct related to FBI employees” as of Sept. 30, according to its latest semi-annual report to Congress (pdf).
The number fell from 112 open investigations just six months earlier, but still fit into a heightened trend. In fiscal 2018, the IG reported 84 and 93 open investigations, respectively. In the decade before that, the average was a bit under 51.
It’s not clear what’s behind the increase.
In the past few years, the IG has worked on a number of high-profile investigations, including one into former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for a self-serving media leak and another into former FBI Director James Comey for disclosure of sensitive information.
In June 2018, the IG released a report on his review of the investigation into the purported mishandling of classified information by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While the report criticized several FBI officials involved in the probe for political bias, it concluded that “we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed.”
Anticipated Report
Horowitz is expected to release on Dec. 9 his review of FBI actions to obtain a spying warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page and the counterintelligence probe into several associates of Donald Trump. The warrant was in large part based on the Steele dossier, a collection of unsubstantiated claims about collusion between Russia and the campaign of then-candidate Trump.
The warrant was taken out by the bureau in the fall of 2016, was renewed several times, and remained active well into 2017.
The FBI officially opened a counterintelligence investigation into claimed Russian ties of four Trump associates on July 31, 2016. In 2017, the investigation was taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose appointment was prompted by Comey’s release of sensitive information about his personal conversations with the newly elected President Trump.
Mueller released his final report in April, saying the investigation didn’t establish any collusion between Trump or his associates and...
Rudy Drops Ukraine Grenade on Biden & Obama With Mysterious Tweet About Billions of Missing U.S. Cash
KABOOM.
Rudy Giuliani just dropped a bank safe on the heads of Joe Biden and Barack Obama — a bank safe that might be missing billions in U.S. funds.
This is getting interesting.
And ugly. Fast.
And what a surprise, MORE missing money linked to Biden and his former boss.
And talk of another Obama-linked cover up.
Rudy Giuliani just dropped a bank safe on the heads of Joe Biden and Barack Obama — a bank safe that might be missing billions in U.S. funds.
This is getting interesting.
And ugly. Fast.
And what a surprise, MORE missing money linked to Biden and his former boss.
And talk of another Obama-linked cover up.
Tucker Carlson’s Critique Of Paul Singer Is Part Of The Reckoning Underway In America
The Fox News host’s exposé on “vulture capitalism” goes to the heart of a debate on the Right about the role of government.
Tucker Carlson is perhaps the only major media figure in America willing to attack across party lines to make his point. On Tuesday night he went after Republican mega-donor Paul Singer in a withering 10-minute special segment on how Singer destroyed a small town in Nebraska in a hostile takeover of the sporting goods retailer Cabela’s.
For those who don’t know, Singer is a New York hedge fund manager who has made billions as a so-called “vulture capitalist,” buying up the sovereign debt of financially distressed countries at a discount and then cashing in later, using lawsuits to pressure governments to pay up. He’s done something similar with U.S. firms—buying up debt, shipping jobs overseas, firing American workers and cashing out—in some cases at taxpayer expense.
In addition to donating to the GOP and running his hedge fund, Elliott Capital, Singer also funds a lot of conservative media, which is why you won’t hear much criticism of him from right-leaning outlets or Republican politicians. That of course makes Carlson’s segment on Tuesday all the more remarkable.
Carlson’s report focused on the town of Sidney, Nebraska, population 6,282. Sidney was the longtime home of Cabela’s and once employed thousands of local residents. It was the economic anchor of the town. But Singer’s firm took an ownership stake in the company in 2015, when the Cabela’s was making nearly $2 billion in annual profits, and pressured the board to sell. A year later Bass Pro Shops purchased Cabela’s, the company’s stock price surged, and Singer cashed out for at least $90 million.
But Sidney was destroyed. As Carlson explained, “The town lost nearly 2,000 jobs. A heartbreakingly familiar cascade began: people left, property values collapsed, and then people couldn’t leave. They were trapped there. One of the last thriving small towns in America went under.”
What Role Should Government Play In Our Civic Life?
The point of highlighting the fate of this one town and the role of Singer in its demise isn’t to vilify capitalism or the free market in general, but to point out how the system is engineered to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. As Willis Krumholtz explains nearby in greater detail, the story of Cabela’s and the people of Sidney is an example of “financial engineering that paid a select few off, while the whole suffered.”
This critique goes to the heart of what the political right has been grappling with in the age of Trump. What is the proper role of the government and public policy in American society? Whose interests should it serve?
Much of what’s behind Trump-era populism, not just in America but across the West, is the dawning realization that the post-Cold War global capitalist system doesn’t necessarily benefit working- and middle-class Americans—or at least that free trade and global capitalism aren’t unmitigated goods. They have costs, and those costs are borne disproportionately by ordinary people, the kind of people who get laid off from Cabela’s for no good reason other than it made Singer a pile of money.
This isn’t just an economic question. The role of government is also at the center of the ongoing Sohrab Amari-David French debate on the right about whether the public sphere can really ever be neutral and what, if anything, conservatives should do to advance what they see as the good. Libertarian-minded conservatives like French look at drag queen story hour and conclude, hey, this is just the price of liberty. We can no more use government power to prohibit drag queens in public libraries than we can use it to prohibit any other kind of free speech
Ahmari and others have challenged this way of thinking, positing that liberty has an object, which is the good, and that government’s role is not just to protect liberty but also to promote and defend the good. Things like stable and intact families, prosperous communities, and vibrant churches and schools aren’t merely what we hope might spring forth from unfettered liberty secured by a neutral and indifferent government; they’re the entire purpose of securing liberty in the first place.
In the same way, champions of global capitalism might look at the desolation of a town like Sidney and conclude, hey, this is just the price of free markets. Carlson argues that no, this is the price of maintaining a system designed to benefit people like Singer at the expense of middle-class Americans.
All of this is part of a reckoning now underway in America about what our government is for and whose interests it should serve. The status quo of recent decades, in which both major political parties crafted policies that served the interest of an established donor class, is coming to...
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