Democrats

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Washington Post awards Adam Schiff ‘Four Pinocchios’ for false comments about whistleblower | Washington Post

The Washington Post awarded “Four Pinocchios” to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff on Friday, claiming he hadn’t told the truth about his knowledge of the whistleblower.

Schiff has played a leading role in investigating the Trump-Ukraine scandal but hasn’t been truthful in the process, according to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler.

Kessler laid out a compelling, fact-based argument that Schiff wasn’t honest when asked if he had advanced knowledge about the whistleblower’s concerns regarding the now-infamous phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a series of interviews.

“Schiff’s answers are especially interesting in the wake of reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post that the whistleblower approached a House Intelligence Committee staff member for guidance before filing a complaint with the Intelligence Community inspector general,” Kessler wrote.

Last month, Schiff sat down with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who asked if he was in contact with the whistleblower, or even if he simply knew their identity.

“I don’t know the identity of the whistleblower … I don’t want to get into any particulars. I want to make sure that there’s nothing that I do that jeopardizes the whistleblower in any way,” Schiff told CNN when asked if the whistleblower has contacted him.

The Post called this answer a “classic dodge” and noted that the CNN host didn’t bother with a follow-up question – which helped Schiff avoid giving a potentially damaging answer.

“He managed not to mislead; he just simply did not answer the question,” Kessler wrote of Schiff.

“Schiff earns Four Pinocchios.” — Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler

The very next day, Schiff appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where he seemingly graduated from dodging to lying, the Post says.

“We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower,” Schiff said on MSNBC.

Kessler noted that this is “flat-out false” given information that has since become available.

“Unlike the quick two-step dance he performed with Anderson Cooper, Schiff simply says the committee had not spoken to the whistleblower. Now we know that’s not true,” the Post’s fact-checker wrote.

A committee spokesman attempted to defend Schiff in a statement to the Post: “He intended to answer the question of whether the Committee had heard testimony from the whistleblower, which they had not… the whistleblower was then awaiting instructions from the Acting DNI as to how the whistleblower could contact the Committee. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that his statement should have been more carefully phrased to make that distinction clear.”

On Sept. 19, Schiff was at it again, according to the Post, when speaking with reporters at the Capitol.

“In the absence of the actions, and I want to thank the inspector general, in the absence of his actions in coming to our committee, we might not have even known there was a whistleblower complaint alleging an urgent concern,” Schiff said.

The Post’s fact-checker called this “misleading” comment “more dissembling” and noted that “his committee knew that something explosive was going to be filed with the IG.”

Kessler wrote there “are right ways and wrong ways to answer reporters’ questions if a politician wants to maintain his or her credibility” and there is “nothing wrong with dodging a question, as long as you don’t try to mislead.”

But Schiff “clearly made a statement that was false” on MSNBC and “compounded his falsehood” when speaking with reporters at the Capitol, Kessler wrote.

“The explanation that Schiff was not sure it was the same whistleblower especially strains credulity,” Kessler wrote. “Schiff earns Four Pinocchios.”

The Post’s Fact Checker team considered Four Pinocchios to be “whoppers” and most egregious offense outside of the rare “Bottomless Pinocchio.”

Republicans have also decried how Schiff, during a hearing last week, read a “parody” version of Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president.

Source: Fox News & Washington Post

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Court Forces Release of Clinton Wikileaks discussion email that confirms State Department knew about her email account | Judicial Watch

Editor’s Note: There is a long chain of events leading to this misguided impeachment inquiry initiated by the Democrats in the House of Representatives and it began during the Obama Administration when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. She was breaking with long-standing national security procedures by establishing a private server for her government and personal communications and the State Department knew she was doing this all along. Here’s the proof.

Judicial Watch announced today that the State Department provided a previously hidden email which shows that top State Department officials used and were aware of Hillary Clinton’s email account.

On December 24, 2010, Daniel Baer, an Obama State Department deputy assistant secretary of state, writes to Michael Posner, a then-assistant secretary of state about Clinton’s private email address:

Baer: “Be careful, you just gave the secretary’s personal email address to a bunch of folks …”

Posner answers: “Should I say don’t forward? Did not notice”

Baer responds: “Yeah-I just know that she guards it pretty closely”

Mr. Posner had forwarded Clinton’s email address, which was contained in an email sent to State Department senior leadership, about WikiLeaks.

It appears the State Department produced this email in 2016 in redacted form, blacking out Clinton’s personal email address and the discussion about Clinton’s wanting to keep her email address closely guarded.

Judicial Watch sought the email after a former top Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) State Department official testified to Judicial Watch about reviewing it between late 2013 and early 2014.

The testimony and the email production comes in discovery granted to Judicial Watch on the Clinton email issue in a FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Clinton also faces potential questioning under oath in this lawsuit.

Despite a recent court order requiring production of the email, the DOJ and State Departments only produced it 10 days ago after Judicial Watch threatened to seek a court order to compel its production.

“Judicial Watch just caught the State Department and DOJ red-handed in another email cover-up – they all knew about the Clinton email account but covered up the smoking-gun email showing this guilty knowledge for years,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

The scope of court-ordered discovery that produces this email find includes: whether Secretary Clinton used private email in an effort to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); whether the State Department’s attempt to settle this FOIA case in 2014 and 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.

During a recent hearing, Judge Lamberth specifically raised concerns about a Clinton email cache, carterheavyindustries@gmail.com, discussed in a letter to Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) and wants Judicial Watch to “shake this tree” on this issue.

Judge Lamberth also criticized the State Department’s handling and production of Clinton’s emails in this case stating, “There is no FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] exemption for political expedience, nor is there one for bureaucratic incompetence.” 

The court rejected DOJ and State efforts to derail further Judicial Watch discovery. Judge Lamberth called their arguments “preposterous” and cited a prior Judicial Watch FOIA case in which he ordered U.S. Marshals to seize records from a Clinton administration official.

Judge Lamberth detailed how the State Department “spent three months from November 2014 trying to make this case disappear,” and that after discovering the State Department’s actions and omissions, “Now we know more, but we have even more questions than answers. So I won’t hold it against Judicial Watch for expanding their initial discovery request now.”

Judge Lamberth stated his goal was to restore the public’s faith in their government, which may have been damaged because of the Clinton email investigation.

The court granted Judicial Watch seven additional depositions, three interrogatories and four document requests related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Hillary Clinton and her former top aide and current lawyer Cheryl Mills were given 30 days to oppose being deposed by Judicial Watch.

On December 6, 2018, Judge Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers and Clinton aides to be deposed or answer written questions under oath. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

This Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

Judicial Watch’s discovery over the last several months found many more details about the scope of the Clinton email scandal and cover-up:

  • John Hackett, former Director of Information Programs and Services (IPS) testified under oath that he had raised concerns that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff may have “culled out 30,000” of the secretary’s “personal” emails without following strict National Archives standards. He also revealed that he believed there was interference with the formal FOIA review process related to the classification of Clinton’s Benghazi-related emails.
  • Heather Samuelson, Clinton’s White House liaison at the State Department, and later Clinton’s personal lawyer, admitted under oath that she was granted immunity by the Department of Justice in June 2016.
  • Justin Cooper, former aide to President Bill Clinton and Clinton Foundation employee who registered the domain name of the unsecure clintonemail.com server that Clinton used while serving as Secretary of State, testified he worked with Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, to create the non-government email system.
  • In the interrogatory responses of E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, he stated that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President.
  • Jacob “Jake” Sullivan, Clinton’s senior advisor and deputy chief of staff when she was secretary of state, testified that both he and Clinton used her unsecure non-government email system to conduct official State Department business.
  • Eric Boswell, former assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, testified that Clinton was warned twice against using unsecure BlackBerry’s and personal emails to transmit classified material.

Source: Judicial Watch

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Democrats and Republicans Aren’t just Divided. They Live in Different Worlds | The Wall Street Journal



Click on Image or Source to View Visual Analysis…

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Marianne Williamson: ‘The system is even more corrupt than I knew’ | Fox News

Editor’s Note: We love Marianne for her fresh and insightful views originating from as an outsider to mainstream politics. In her appearance in the Democratic candidates debate she pointed out quite astutely that true health care cannot be achieved with the current system in place (whether it’s Obamacare or Medicare for All). The health care system is completely broken and must be rebuilt from the bottom up beginning with prevention and wellness. Thanks for contributing to this most important conversation and acknowledging the important of intelligent debate and civil discourse.

Marianne Williamson, a 2020 presidential hopeful and author, said she’s discovered the political system to be “even more corrupt” than she imagined, during a Tuesday interview with “Fox & Friends.”

“I was known in a world where people loved you and bought things from you. Now I’m in a world where a lot of people hate you,” she said. “I would say that I feel that I’ve learned the system is even more corrupt than I knew and people are even more wonderful than I hoped.”

Williamson also said there is a tendency in politics today to stifle opposing opinions, which weakens democracy and limits genuine debate.

“I have seen on the left as on the right, there are too many people who do not recognize how important honorable debate is in a democracy,” she said.

“You can disagree with somebody’s opinion but that doesn’t mean you should be shutting them down or lying about them or misrepresenting their views. That’s not a left-right issue. There’s a rough-and-tumble in politics.”

Co-host Lisa Boothe asked Williamson if she felt abandoned by the Democratic Party because she didn’t qualify for the upcoming debate, and she said that even if she did, she wouldn’t air her private grievances.

“No, I don’t feel abandoned,” she replied. “I’m a passionate Democrat… My mother always said if you have a problem with your family don’t talk about it outside the family. I’m not going to come on Fox and bad-mouth. The DNC has its rules and, listen, I signed up for this. And I’m playing by those rules”

Source: Fox News

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Bernie Sanders unveils comprehensive $16.3 trillion Green New Deal plan amid climate crisis | CNN

Editor’s Note: I include this post as an interesting conversation starter, but do not consider the Green New Deal a sound proposal for addressing climate change (unless you intend on bankrupting the country to achieve it). 

By Gregory King

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday added progressive meat to the bones of the Green New Deal with the release of his comprehensive $16.3 trillion climate change program ahead of a campaign stop in Paradise, California, the city leveled by a devastating 2018 wildfire.

Sanders was an early backer of the activist-inspired Green New Deal framework and introduced, with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Earl Blumenauer, a resolution in July to declare climate change a national emergency.

“Young people, advocates, tribes, cities and states all over this country have already begun this important work,” the campaign says in its new pitch, “and we will continue to follow their lead.”

The Sanders plan channels the rhetoric of the climate movement, calling for a World War II-style mobilization to halt and reverse the effects of global warming over a decade. In the process, the campaign claims, it would create 20 million new jobs in “steel and auto manufacturing, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants.” Sanders’ blueprint will be compared to proposals put forward by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who released a robust suite of cross-sector plans before ending his campaign on Wednesday.

In a CNN poll from late April, 96% of potential Democratic voters said “aggressive action to slow the effects of climate change” was somewhat or very important — the closest to a unanimous finding in the survey. The Democratic National Committee has so far not hosted a climate-specific debate, but 10 of the 2020 primary candidates will take part in a September 4 CNN town hall focused exclusively on the crisis.

During his time in office, President Donald Trump has rolled back dozens of environmental rules and regulations. Sanders in his plan promises to “aggressively enforce” the Clean Air Act, through the Environmental Protection Agency, to restrict dangerous emissions.

But the proposals unveiled Thursday go much further.

Sanders’ prime targets include meeting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s goal of 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030; cutting domestic emissions by 71% over that period; creating a $526 billion electric “smart grid;” investing $200 billion in the Green Climate Fund; and prioritizing what activists call a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers who would be dislocated during the transition.

The Vermont independent would also cut off billions in subsidies to fossil fuel companies and impose bans on extractive practices, including fracking and mountaintop coal mining, while halting the import and export of coal, oil and natural gas. Additionally, he would use his Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to pursue criminal and civil cases against energy companies that hid or withheld information — over decades — about the damage their businesses were doing to the environment.

Sanders in 2015 and 2016, during his first presidential campaign, memorably called climate change the foremost national security threat. In recent remarks on the campaign trail, he has promised to reassert US power internationally by taking a more assertive role in climate talks.

“Climate change cannot only be addressed by the United States. It is a global issue,” Sanders said this week in Iowa. “But my promise to you is, instead of ignoring this issue as Trump does, I will help lead the world in bringing countries together to address the issue.”

The proposal is the most in-depth to date from Sanders, who says it will “pay for itself over 15 years” and includes new details on the potential funding sources.

The most significant, at an estimated $6.4 trillion, would come from revenue generated by the sale of clean energy — which will be administered by publicly owned utilities — between 2023 and 2035. Before that, Sanders would cut military spending used to protect global energy interests by more than $1.2 trillion while hitting up fossil fuel companies for more than $3 trillion in “litigation (against polluters), fees, and taxes.” An additional $2.3 trillion, the campaign says, would be raised from the taxes paid on the 20 million new jobs it promises to create.

Part of that money would go toward mitigating the damage already done by climate change — with $162 billion set aside for coastal communities under threat and an additional $18 billion going toward firefighters to combat a spike in dangerous wildfires like the one in Paradise.

To deliver the political will for such a radical transformation, Sanders, as he has throughout his presidential campaigns, is counting on the youth-led activists and progressive movements that he has often inspired and, now, hopes to count on as a source of electoral strength.
Their continued vigor and ability to successfully pressure elected officials is written into the plan.

“We will do this,” the campaign says, “by coming together in a truly inclusive movement that prioritizes young people, workers, indigenous peoples, communities of color, and other historically marginalized groups to take on the fossil fuel industry and other polluters to push this over the finish line and lead the globe in solving the climate crisis.”

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The Net Worth Of Every 2020 Presidential Candidate | Forbes

Editor’s Note: Enough talk from the Democrats about identifying with the working class. Every one of these candidates are multi-millionaires, part of the 1% they so enthusiastically despise. So Bernie and Elizabeth, you might want to change your narrative and get real. Running for office and getting elected makes you pretty darn rich (especially with all those special congressional benefits). 

By Dan Alexander, Chase Peterson-Withorn and Michela Tindera

Everyone knows Donald Trump is rich. But how about the 25 people jockeying to replace him as president? Forbes dug into the details—examining financial disclosure statements, scouring local real estate records and calculating pension benefits—to figure out the finances of the 2020 candidates.

There were some surprises. Bernie is a millionaire. So is “middle-class Joe” Biden. Elizabeth Warren is richer than both of them, worth an estimated $12 million. But she’s a long way from John Delaney, whose $200 million fortune makes him twice as wealthy as every other Democratic candidate not named Tom Steyer. The hedge fund tycoon, who announced his candidacy in July 2019, is worth an estimated $1.6 billion.

Aside from Trump and Steyer, the average net worth is $12.9 million—the same as it was for the 2016 contenders. The median net worth is $2 million. The poorest is Pete Buttigieg, who has an estimated $100,000—or about 0.003% of Trump’s fortune.

We reached out to all of the candidates. No one, not even the Democrats who spend the most time bashing Trump for his financial dealings, answered every question. So we ranked the entire field on transparency, assigning scores ranging from 0 (lips sealed) to 5 (full disclosure). In the end, we uncovered the money, regardless of whether the candidates wanted it out in the open.

 

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Mark Steyn reacts to chaos (and political correctness) at Democratic Socialists of America convention | Fox News

Editor’s Note: I found this video to be not only informative as to what’s behind the scenes of Democratic Socialists, but some strange, dark comedy regarding the social behaviors of this particular subculture which has greatly influenced many of the Democratic candidates in the 2020 Presidential election.

Source: Fox News/YouTube

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Emails Show FBI-Media Collusion against Trump, CA Begins 1.5 Million Inactive Voter Cleanup | Judicial Watch

Source: Judicial Watch/YouTube

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Tulsi Gabbard Says She’d Drop All Charges Against Assange and Snowden as President | The Mind Unleashed

Editor’s Note: An interesting discussion of whether to reward or punish whistleblowers such as Snowden or Assange. Gabbard suggests that we encourage truth telling by insiders. I agree with her.

In midst of an interesting and wide-ranging discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said that if elected president she would drop all charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“What would you do about Julian Assange? What would you do about Edward Snowden?” Rogan asked in the latter part of the episode.

“As far as dropping the charges?” Gabbard asked.

“If you’re president of the world right now, what do you do?”

“Yeah, dropping the charges,” Gabbard replied.

Rogan noted that Sweden’s preliminary investigation of rape allegations has just been re-opened, saying the US government can’t stop that, and Gabbard said as president she’d drop the US charges leveled against Assange by the Trump administration.

“Yeah,” Gabbard said when asked to clarify if she was also saying that she’d give Edward Snowden a presidential pardon, adding, “And I think we’ve got to address why he did things the way that he did them. And you hear the same thing from Chelsea Manning, how there is not an actual channel for whistleblowers like them to bring forward information that exposes egregious abuses of our constitutional rights and liberties. Period. There was not a channel for that to happen in a real way, and that’s why they ended up taking the path that they did, and suffering the consequences.”

This came at the end of a lengthy discussion about WikiLeaks and the dangerous legal precedent that the Trump administration is setting for press freedoms by prosecuting Assange, as well as the revelations about NSA surveillance and what can be done to roll back those unchecked surveillance powers.

“What happened with [Assange’s] arrest and all the stuff that just went down I think poses a great threat to our freedom of the press and to our freedom of speech,” Gabbard said. “We look at what happened under the previous administration, under Obama. You know, they were trying to find ways to go after Assange and WikiLeaks, but ultimately they chose not to seek to extradite him or charge him, because they recognized what a slippery slope that begins when you have a government in a position to levy criminal charges and consequences against someone who’s publishing information or saying things that the government doesn’t want you to say, and sharing information the government doesn’t want you to share.

And so the fact that the Trump administration has chosen to ignore that fact, to ignore how important it is that we uphold our freedoms, freedom of the press and freedom of speech, and go after him, it has a very chilling effect on both journalists and publishers. And you can look to those in traditional media and also those in new media, and also every one of us as Americans. It was a kind of a warning call, saying Look what happened to this guy. It could happen to you. It could happen to any one of us.”

Gabbard discussed Mike Pompeo’s arbitrary designation of WikiLeaks as a hostile non-state intelligence service, the fact that James Clapper lied to Congress about NSA surveillance as Director of National Intelligence yet suffered no consequences and remains a respected TV pundit, and the opaque and unaccountable nature of FISA warrants.

Some other noteworthy parts of Gabbard’s JRE appearance for people who don’t have time to watch the whole thing, with hyperlinks to the times in the video:

  • Rogan gets Gabbard talking in depth about what Bashar al-Assad was actually like when she met him and what he said to her, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone bother to do before.
  • The two discuss Eisenhower’s famous speech warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, and actually pause their dialogue to watch a good portion of it. Gabbard points out that in the original draft of the speech, Eisenhower had intended to call it the “congressional-military-industrial complex”.
  • Good discussion on internet censorship and the dangers of allowing monopolistic Silicon Valley corporations to control public speech, then later discussing the possibility of breaking up these corporations or treating them as public utilities.
  • Rogan asks Gabbard what she thinks happens to US presidents that causes them to fail to enact their campaign promises and capitulate to the will of the warmongering establishment, and what as president she’ll do to avoid the same fate. All presidential candidates should have to answer this question.
  • Rogan asks Gabbard how she’ll stand against the billionaires for the American people without getting assassinated. All presidential candidates should have to answer this question as well.

I honestly think the entire American political system would be better off if the phoney debate stage format were completely abandoned and presidential candidates just talked one-on-one with Joe Rogan for two and a half hours instead. Cut through all the vapid posturing and the fake questions about nonsense nobody cares about and get them to go deep with a normal human being who smokes pot and curses and does sports commentary for cage fighting. Rogan asked Gabbard a bunch of questions that real people are interested in, in a format where she was encouraged to relax out of her standard politician’s posture and discuss significant ideas sincerely and spontaneously. It was a good discussion with an interesting political figure and I’m glad it’s already racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

Source: The Mind Unleashed