Memo Revealed Coup Against America - Now It’s Time To Release Everything

If everything is released - we're screwed!

by Daniel Greenfield: The Democrats and the media spent a week lying to the American people about the “memo.”

The memo was full of "classified information" and releasing” it would expose “our spying methods." By “our,” they didn’t mean American spying methods. They meant Obama’s spying methods.

A former White House Ethics Lawyer claimed that the Nunes memo would undermine "national security." On MSNBC, Senator Chris Van Hollen threatened that if the memo is released, the FBI and DOJ “will refuse to share information with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees."

Senator Cory Booker howled that releasing the memo was "treasonous" and might be "revealing sources and methods" and even "endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community."

The memo isn’t treasonous. It reveals a treasonous effort by the Democrats to use our intelligence agencies to rig an election and overturn the will of the voters.

The only two “sources” are Christopher Steele, who was funded by the Clinton campaign, and a Yahoo News article, that were used to obtain a FISA warrant against a Trump associate. That Yahoo story came from Michael Isikoff, the reporter who knew about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky but suppressed it. It was based on more leaks from Steele which the FBI and DOJ chose to ignore. Steele’s identity was already well known. The only new source revealed is Yahoo News.

No vital intelligence sources were compromised at Yahoo News. And no Yahoo News agents were killed.

The media spent a week lying to Americans about the dangers of the memo because it didn’t want them to find out what was inside. Today, the media and Dems switched from claiming that the memo was full of “classified information” that might get CIA agents killed to insisting that it was a dud and didn’t matter. Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.

On Thursday, the narrative was that the memo would devastate our national security and no one should ever be allowed to read it. By Friday, the new narrative was that the memo tells us nothing important and we shouldn’t even bother reading it. The lies change, but suppressing the memo remains the goal.

Rep. Nadler, infamous for securing pardons for Weather Underground bombers, got caught between narratives when he insisted that the memo was “overhyped,” but suggested that it “endangers national security.” "I don't think anybody will be terribly shocked by what's in the memo," he told CNN.

And requested an emergency meeting of the House Judiciary Committee – a body he will head if Democrats win the mid-term elections.

Calling emergency meetings is not the response to an “overhyped” and non-shocking memo.

There is no legitimately classified information in the Nunes memo. But it does endanger a number of “Americans” in the “intelligence community” who colluded with the Clinton campaign against America.

It endangers former FBI Director Comey, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and the current FBI General Counsel Dana Boente who had previously served as the Acting Attorney General. These men and women had allegedly signed FISA applications that were at best misleading and at worst badly tainted.

The Clinton campaign had enlisted figures in the FBI and the DOJ to manipulate an election. The coup against America operated as a “state within a state” inside the United States government.

“The political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials,” the memo informs us. But they did not reveal on the FISA application that their core evidence came from the Clinton campaign. Sources were certainly being protected. But they were Clinton sources.

The memo reveals that without the Steele dossier there would have been no eavesdropping on Carter Page, the Trump associate targeted in this particular case. “Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.” But the FISA application neglected to mention that its primary source had been paid by the Clinton campaign, was unverified and would continue to be unverified.

FBI Director Comey testified that he had told President Trump that the dossier was "unverified." Yet the "unverified" piece of opposition research was used as the basis for a FISA application.

As Rep. Jim Jordan noted, “FBI takes ‘salacious and unverified’ dossier to secret court to get secret warrant to spy on a fellow American, and FBI doesn't tell the court that the DNC/Clinton campaign paid for that dossier. And they did that FOUR times.”

"There's been no evidence of a corrupt evidence to obtain warrants against people in the Trump campaign," Rep. Adam Schiff insisted. That’s why he tried to block the release of the evidence.

The evidence was unverified opposition research. Its source had been paid by the Clinton campaign. Not only had Steele been indirectly working for the Clinton campaign (when he wasn’t being paid by the FBI), but he made no secret of his own political agenda to stop Trump.

"In September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president,” the memo informs us.

That’s former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr whose wife was being paid by an organization hired by the Clinton campaign to investigate Trump. Ohr then passed along his wife's opposition research to the FBI. The evidence couldn’t be any more corrupt than that.

Steele was passionate about Trump “not being president.” So were his handlers who ignored his leaks to the media until he “was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations—an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI.” His previous meetings, including the one that allegedly generated the Yahoo News article, were ignored.

Tainted investigations are nothing new. Law enforcement is as fallible as any other profession. But the memo reveals a snapshot of just how many top figures colluded in this corrupted and tainted effort.

What drove them to violate professional ethical norms and legal requirements in the FISA applications?

Top DOJ and FBI officials shared Steele’s “passion,” and that of his ultimate employer, Hillary Clinton, to stop Donald Trump at all costs. And they’re still trying to use the Mueller investigation to overturn the election results in a government coup that makes Watergate look like a children’s tea party,

Former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is already under investigation. He’s suspected of trying to sit on the Wiener emails until the election was over. This alleged failed cover-up triggered the Comey letter which hurt Hillary worse than a timely revelation would have. McCabe’s wife had financial links to the Clintons.

Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates was an Obama holdover who had foolishly tried to use the DOJ to go to war with President Trump. Both Yates and Dana Boente were Obama and Holder choices. During the groundless prosecution of the former Republican governor of Virginia, Boente had declared, “No one is above the law.” We’ll see if that’s true with everyone who signed the FISA applications.

If Boente signed false or misleading FISA applications, he should be removed as FBI General Counsel.

The memo is only the first crack in the wall. But it’s grounds for an investigation that will expose the abuses that led to eavesdropping on Trump officials. And the motives of those who perpetuated them.

A Washington Post piece suggested that just releasing the memo alone would allow Mueller to charge President Trump with "obstruction of justice." That’s how badly they want to get Trump.

A clear and simple fact emerges from the memo.

Top figures in the DOJ and the FBI, some loyal to Obama and Hillary, abused the FISA process in the hopes of influencing or reversing the results of an election by targeting their political opponents. The tool that they used for the job came from the Clinton campaign. Using America’s intelligence services to destroy and defeat a political opponent running for president is the worst possible abuse of power and an unprecedented threat to a democratic system of free open elections.

We have been treated to frequent lectures about the independence of the DOJ and the FBI. But our country isn’t based around government institutions that are independent of oversight by elected officials. When unelected officials have more power than elected officials, that’s tyranny.

A Justice Department that acts as the Praetorian Guard for a political campaign is committing a coup and engaging in treason. The complex ways that the Steele dossier was laundered from the Clinton campaign to a FISA application is evidence of a conspiracy by both the DOJ and the Clinton campaign.

It’s time for us to learn about all the FISA abuses, the list of NSA unmasking requests of Trump officials by Obama officials and the eavesdropping on members of Congress. We deserve to know the truth.

The memo has been released. Now it’s time to release everything.
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Daniel Greenfield is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. David Horowitz is a Contributing Author of the ARRA News Service

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Tags: Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Mag, Memo, Revealed Coup, Against America, Now It’s Time, Release Everything To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Speaker Ryan or Speaker Pelosi

by Newt Gingrich: On Wednesday, I was honored to speak at the Winter Meeting of the Republican National Committee about the how important and impactful the 2018 elections could be for America. Below is an excerpt of my remarks.

Let me thank all of you, particularly those I was just chatting with, for your generosity. I have been active in the Republican Party a fairly long time, longer than the younger people here have been alive. And I want to talk to you from the heart. When Ronna and I talked about coming by, I think it was precisely because I had enough distance to look at these things and to be involved on a number of occasions.

First of all, I thought last night’s State of the Union rivaled anything that Ronald Reagan did. It was just astonishingly effective. President Trump found specific individuals whose stories weren’t just important as wonderful human stories, but they each illustrated a part of the American tapestry in the American culture in a way that reminded all of us America is such a wonderful country. I thought it was a very powerful and very effective speech.

I also have to comment on Ronna and the financial report at the end of the year. She hit the ground running with a very simple model that said, “I’m going to work with the President. I’m going to help the President. How big of a check are you going to write?” And she must have repeated that a hundred thousand times over the past year, and she has been very, very effective.

Now, I came tonight in part because I think the Republican National Committee really matters. I’ll tell you candidly, I think without Reince Priebus and without the Republican National Committee, we would not have won in 2016 because we needed all of the extra effort, and we frankly needed Reince desperately holding the party together all through the spring when about a third of the party was certainly eager to commit suicide. And without that kind of effort and without the ground game of the fall, we would have lost. It’s just that simple.

Similarly, I believe the Republican National Committee under Ronna’s leadership is going to be decisive this year. So, I’m going to talk just a couple of minutes about where we’re at because I think it’s really important. And I know those of you who are on the committee are going to take it seriously and take it as a personal responsibility, and those of you who are friends of the committee are even going to take it seriously.

I’m going to start with a very simple model. How many of you noticed [during the State of the Union] that Nancy Pelosi wasn’t happy? Now, I have a ground rule, when the President won, I said to every conservative I would talk to, every time you start to get mad at Donald J. Trump, I want you to close your eyes and think: President Hillary Clinton. Well, I would say to every one of you, every day this year that you do not work for a Republican majority, I want you to think about Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I think this is a very grave threat.

I’m going to be very direct, and I hope it doesn’t get misinterpreted. I do not believe the traditional Republican Party could win this fall. And the fact is we’re at an edge of a wave election, and if we end up with a wave election on their side, you can’t raise enough money to win normal races against that kind of wave.

We saw it in 1994 when we did it. We saw it in 2006 when the Democrats did it. We saw it in 2010 when John Boehner came up with a very simple model: Where are the jobs?

If you start getting that kind of wave building, it’s very hard to be able to keep control. And our margin is not that big. In the great 62-year period of Democratic dominance of the House, they would start elections with 60-seat majorities. If they lost 25 or 30 seats, their margins would shrink, but they were still in control. We’ve never been in control with that size margin.

For us to maintain Speaker Ryan and the House GOP majority in 2018 there are bold things we have to do.

I’m going to draw a very deliberate distinction. Just so you understand this isn’t just some theory — get candidate Trump’s speech at Gettysburg in October of 2016, the President’s inaugural address last year, and the State of the Union you just watched Tuesday. Take those three and read carefully what President Trump says.

He is describing an American party that reaches out to every American, that makes the case that America is an idea worth fighting for. He suggests that we have a model for success: the American model of limited government, lower taxes, less red tape, more entrepreneurship, more take-home pay, more local control, which means more local responsibility, and a foundation of rights that come from our Creator.

You take those three speeches, put them together, and look at them. What does that mean? What would a Trump Republican Party be like? We are not yet there. With Ronna’s leadership and the President’s leadership, we can get there. I think by 2020, we will get there.

I think President Trump will get re-elected almost without regard to what happens this fall. But remember, it’s one thing to spend 2019 and 2020 with Speaker Ryan and a Republican House getting things done. It’s another thing to spend 2019 and 2020 in a life and death struggle against Speaker Pelosi and a Democratic House that will automatically want to impeach the President while having every House Committee launch investigations of the administration. They won’t have any idea what they’re impeaching him for and or what they are investigating for and it won’t matter to them. In the majority, House Democrats will spend two years in hostile assaults on the administration.

You may have seen the Fox and Friends interview of the New York University students who they asked on Monday morning, “What did you think of the President’s State of the Union speech?” And these students said things like it was, “Hateful. It was racial language. I can’t believe he said that.” It didn’t even matter that President Trump hadn’t given the State of the Union Address yet. This is the unthinkingly hostile Left we’re dealing with.

What you saw at the State of the Union was the face of hate. I mean when people sit there, and you explain to them that there’s the lowest black employment in history, and they can’t applaud. There’s the lowest Hispanic unemployment in history, and they can’t applaud. You’re looking at people so consumed by their passions they can’t think. Those are the people who will be in charge of the House if they win.

So, these next few months are really important, and here are a couple of very simple principles for a Trump Republican Party as opposed to a traditional Republican Party. Now, a Trump party largely grows out of the Reagan party and out of the 1994 Contract with America majority.

First Principle: Go home and take on everyone. Don’t talk about safe seats, not safe seats, all this bologna. When we won control in 1994, we ran against every Democratic candidate except three.

We beat the chairman of Ways and Means of downtown Chicago. We beat the first Speaker of the House to lose since 1862. We beat the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Houston suburbs. No Republican consultant would have recommended running against any of them.

We are in a similar situation this year because every Democrat went out idiotically and voted no on the largest tax cut in your lifetime, and they have to go home and explain that.

One example from the State of the Union : We are not tough enough, we’re not fast enough, we don’t think aggressively enough. Last night, they picked somebody to answer the State of the Union, Congressman Joe Kennedy. He was symbolically perfect standing in front of a broken car because the Democrats can’t fix anything.

We should have been asking Kennedy, “How could you vote against tax cuts and job creation? The Ways and Means Committee has analyzed every congressional district in the country. You can go to the Ways and Means Committee website for your district. In Kennedy’s district a median-income family of four got a $5,800 tax cut. Now we should be all over him. How can he vote to take $5,800 away from a family of four in his district to send it to Washington bureaucrats? We should have used every social media tool so people watching his response were waiting for him to answer for his vote.

Now, he’ll give you a left-wing answer. If you’re one of the families, how many have gone to find families of four and say, “What can you do with $5,800 per year, which is, by the way, $58,000 over 10 years? Do you think it’s better spent by a bureaucrat or you?” I think we should take on every single member of the black caucus. Again, every single district in America, it turns out, has a net tax cut. Every single one of the Democratic members of the Black caucus voted against the tax cut for their own people and could not applaud the lowest Black unemployment in history.

Now, you can’t get much further distance from the traditional Republican consultants. but the truth is, too many Republicans don’t have the nerve to go out to new neighborhoods and new voters. They talk in cost-benefit terms. Well, that’s not going to work if we are serious about growing a stable majority. I lost twice. And if we’d had that cost-benefit attitude toward my district, I’d never have gotten to Congress, and we wouldn’t have taken control in 1994.

We have to have the nerve to go nose-to-nose.

Second, don’t complain about the news media. The news media is a fact. The news media is the offensive wing of the other team. They are not the problem. They are a fact. What we do about them is the problem. So, we have to design a campaign plan, and we have to train our candidates assuming the worst about the news media. Whenever you interact with the news media you should assume you’re going into a war zone. You should plan to take the host head on and challenge their assumptions.

I read the transcripts every Sunday. You would be amazed how many of our folks are too slow, too untrained, and don’t know what they’re talking about. So, they walk in as though George Stephanopoulos is neutral. I mean not only was he the Clinton press secretary, who gave $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation, and we allowed him to chair a presidential debate in 2012. Now, you at least have a minimum rule. Nobody who’s completely on the Left is going to get to chair anything for this party’s good future.

Point One: Compete everywhere.

Point Two: Design strategies that win despite the news media because you overmatch them.

Point Three: We have to have the courage to fight. You have to be prepared. When someone gets up, the junior senator from New York, and says, “You know, if you talk about chain migration, it’s racist.” But we need to say: “You must be losing this debate on the facts so badly that you’re now reduced to scream ‘racism,’ which is, by the way, what you scream about virtually anything, unless of course that’s homophobia or something else.” The Left has no arguments left except to yell nasty names.

And we have to go nose-to-nose with them to knock them down mentally and psychologically. It’s very important for us to understand this is a fight. We are in a cultural civil war with people who despise us. There’s no neutrality in there. And that’s why they dislike Trump so much, because Trump has the nerve to talk about MS-13 because they can’t answer it. The more he is right, the more enraged they are.

If you’re a left-wing Democrat and totally for open borders, you can’t actually go up and say, “Well, I think it’s okay for a few hundred MS-13 folks to come in.” You just can’t. So, then you get furious at Trump because he’s found the angle of attack you can’t defend.

I would say to every candidate: study Trump. Trump is one of the greatest articulators I have ever seen. He understands fighting. He likes to fight, and he is prepared to figure out how to go at you at an angle you can’t defend. And that’s what we have to do for this whole campaign starting now.

The most useful book I have read to better understand this year is Karl Rove’s book on The Triumph of William McKinley. That 1896 campaign may sound obscure, but it relates directly to our challenge.

McKinley was faced with the great charismatic Democratic leader, the youngest major party nominee in history at 36 years old, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan is such a great passionate articulator of demagogic populism and was so influential in the Democratic Party for two generations (nominated three times for President) that Elizabeth Warren is his direct emotional descendant.

He literally – and I mean this as a tribute to Bryan – he imprinted the Democratic Party with a negative, anti-elite, anti-city, anti-modernity kind of populism, a populism of anger. He talks about mankind being crucified on a cross of gold. He says at one point that he wants grass to grow on the streets of the cities. McKinley realizes he’s going to lose the election unless he breaks the heart of Bryan’s argument. McKinley understood in 1896 what Margaret Thatcher said in the 1970’s when she warned: “First you win the argument. Then you win the election.” And so, McKinley created the most thorough educational campaign in American history.

They printed 18 brochures for every American. That’s a scale of organization that’s unimaginable. And Karl, who’s a great professional, really walks you through it. The first part of the book most of it you won’t find all that exciting, because it’s about how he got the nomination – although it’s very useful. But the second half of the book is amazing and is the campaign we need this year.

We need a campaign that is going right at the philosophical basis of the modern Democratic Party. We need a campaign, for example, to say, “How many Americans do you think want to abolish the Medicare trust fund?” That’s actually what’s in the Sanders bill that could create national health care. You know, to the average 65-year-old or 55-year-old say, “Hi, would you like to help Sanders in abolishing the Medicare Trust Fund? All it requires is that you trust politicians.”

You know, you could probably win that argument and keep them on defense all the time. So, I think it’s tremendously important. I think what Ronna is doing is extraordinarily important. She needs your help and every state in the country. I need your help talking to every incumbent and every candidate, and you need to understand, this is where we’re going. This is what we have to accomplish, and my last point is this: 50 percent should be spent on the tax cuts.

I mean literally, 50 percent of our effort should be explaining the tax cuts and their impact at multiple levels. At a cultural level, it puts America back on the road to being an entrepreneurial society. At the large economy level, it’s going to lead to growth – and at a personal level. When I talk about the example of reaching out to everyone, would you like to guess among all the Wal-Mart employees who just got bonuses what percent are African American? What percent are Latino?

Now today, they have no mechanism to say to them: “By the way, that was a Republican idea that just got money in your pocket.” That’s our job. It’s not their fault they don’t know it, and it’s certainly not NBC News’ fault. NBC News is the other team. So, we have to learn, and I would urge all of you to think about this literally. Fifty percent of our effort from now to election day should be very simple. We want you to have money in your pocket, a better job, a greater future, more money in your 401k for retirement. They want all of that money for their bureaucrats and their giveaways. You pick which team you like. You think it’s better to have Washington spend your money, you have a great party: the Democrats. If you think it’s better for you to have the money, you have a great party, the Republicans. The two parties are this far apart.

As RNC members, if you’ll do your job, if you’ll help convince every single candidate and every single incumbent, we’ll change history just the way Trump changed history.

So, when reporters and analysts say, “Well, it’s the first term off-year election. The average losses are X.” My first thought is, “How do you think President Clinton is doing?”

The truth is we are led by somebody who breaks the records. We ought to join in this fall to break the record, and next year if we have won control of the House altogether – if we’ve picked up six or eight Senate seats – President Trump and the Republicans will be able to say, as Ronald Reagan used to say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.
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Tags: Newt Gingrich, commentary,speaker Ryan, Speaker Peloissi,   To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Nunes Memo Alleges Page FISA Warrants Left Out Investigative Ties to Dems

Carter Page speaks in Moscow on Dec. 12, 2016.
 (Grigoriy Sisoev/Sputnik via AP & PJ Media)

by Bridget Johnson: The memo prepared by staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was released today, alleging as expected that the FBI withheld information from the FISA court and going hard after the British intelligence operative who crafted a controversial dossier.

A White House letter topping the document clarified that the memo "reflects the judgments of its congressional authors" and said President Trump "understands that oversight concerning matters related to the Memorandum may be continuing."

The memo notes that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was the subject of multiple approved Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants from the FBI and Department of Justice; new probable cause must be proven at each renewal. Former FBI Director James Comey signed off on three warrants and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one, the memo says, while at the DOJ then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "each signed one or more" applications. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been recused from the Russia investigation since March 2.

The memo does not go into detail about why Page was being monitored. Page, who has admitted to traveling to Russia during the presidential campaign but said it was for personal reasons, met with Russia's state-owned oil company Rosneft during his Trump campaign tenure, according to the Steele dossier.

Renewal by the FISA court, the memo states, "is necessarily dependent on the government's production to the court of all material and relevant facts," and "should include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application."

"In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts," the memo alleges. "However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted."

The memo states that the Democratic National Committee "paid over $160,000" to former MI6 operative Christopher Steele, referred to as "a longtime FBI source," via law firm Perkins Coie and research firm GPS "to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump's ties to Russia." The memo does not note that the dossier project was started by the Washington Free Beacon as a "never Trump" effort during the GOP primary.

The October 2016 FISA application to the court, as well "any of the renewals," the memo continues, didn't "disclose or reference the role of the DNC" or "any party/campaign in funding Steele's efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials." The first FISA application doesn't explicitly say Steele was working for Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson or say "the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information."

Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony in November that Steele told him in summer 2016 he felt had a national security obligation, considering the close intelligence relationship between the U.S. and Britain, to report his findings to the FBI. Simpson's telling of what led Steele to the FBI was not included in the Nunes memo.

The Page FISA application "extensively" cited from a September article by Yahoo News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff, which said in part that Page "came to the attention of officials at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow several years ago when he showed up in the Russian capital during several business trips and made provocative public comments critical of U.S. policy and sympathetic to Putin."

Two weeks before the Republican National Convention, the Isikoff piece continues, Page "met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil company" -- Sechin was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2014 -- and the oil boss "raised the issue of the lifting of sanctions with Page."

The memo says Steele "leaked" to Yahoo News and the FISA application left that out, and adds that Steele "was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations -- an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn." That article was titled, "A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump."

The memo asserts the FBI should have cut off Steele in September 2016, before the FISA application a month later, for leaking to Yahoo News.

Steele told then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr in September 2016, the memo alleges, that the former spy "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president." The memo adds that the FISA applications left out "clear evidence of Steele's bias ... recorded by Ohr" in the conversation a few months after Steele told Simpson potential evidence of Trump campaign wrongdoing led him to disclose his investigation's findings to the FBI. Ohr's wife, the Nunes staff memo adds, worked for Fusion GPS at the time, and "Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife's opposition research." The memo says that was not included in the FISA application.

The head of the FBI's counterintelligence division, Assistant Director Bill Priestap, said corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its "infancy" when the first FISA application was field against Page, the memo continues.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said that some of the details in the Steele dossier have been corroborated as true, while other details have not been corroborated or disproven. "We had some concerns about it from the standpoint of its sourcing which we couldn't corroborate," he told CNN this past October. "But at the same time, some of the substantive content, not all of it, but some of the substantive content of the dossier, we were able to corroborate in our Intelligence Community assessment which from other sources in which we had very high confidence to it."

Finally, the Nunes memo notes that the Page FISA application "mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos," who pleaded guilty Oct. 5 to "lying to federal agents about the nature and timing of his contacts" with Russians, but the GOP staffers claim there is "no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos." The memo goes on to mention Papadopoulos' information to the FBI that preceded the original July 2016 Russia investigation led by former chief of the Counterespionage Section, Peter Strzok, and cited Strzok's widely reported text messages with "a clear bias against Trump."

The memo does not go into detail about other evidence not related to Steele submitted in the Page applications.

Nunes, a former Trump transition team member, said in a statement accompanying the release that his committee "has discovered serious violations of the public trust, and the American people have a right to know when officials in crucial institutions are abusing their authority for political purposes."

"Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies exist to defend the American people, not to be exploited to target one group on behalf of another," he added. "It is my hope that the committee’s actions will shine a light on this alarming series of events so we can make reforms that allow the American people to have full faith and confidence in their governing institutions.”

House Intelligence Democrats released a lengthy rebuttal statement in which they said the memo "mischaracterizes highly sensitive classified information that few members of Congress have seen, and which Chairman Nunes himself chose not to review."

"It fails to provide vital context and information contained in DOJ’s FISA application and renewals, and ignores why and how the FBI initiated, and the Special Counsel has continued, its counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s election interference and links to the Trump campaign. The sole purpose of the Republican document is to circle the wagons around the White House and insulate the president," they added. "Tellingly, when asked whether the Republican staff who wrote the memo had coordinated its drafting with the White House, the chairman refused to answer."

They added that FBI "had good reason to be concerned about Carter Page and would have been derelict in its responsibility to protect the country had it not sought a FISA warrant." Page's interactions with Russian intelligence operatives are included in the Democratic memo not yet approved for release by the Intel Committee, lawmakers said.

The memo "ignores the inconvenient fact that the investigation did not begin with, or arise from Christopher Steele or the dossier, and that the investigation would persist on the basis of wholly independent evidence had Christopher Steele never entered the picture," the Intel Dems continued.

“The majority suggests that the FBI failed to alert the court as to Mr. Steele’s potential political motivations or the political motivations of those who hired him, but this is not accurate," they said. "The GOP memo also claims that a Yahoo News article was used to corroborate Steele, but this is not at all why the article was referenced. These are but a few of the serious mischaracterizations of the FISA application."

Democrats will make a motion Monday to seek approval of the release of their memo.
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Bridget Johnson is a veteran journalist whose news articles and opinion columns have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe. Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor at The Hill. She is the Washington Editor for PJ Media.

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Tags: Bridget Johnson, PJMedia, Devin Nunes, Memo, Alleges, Carter Page, FISA Warrants, Left Out, Investigative, Ties to Dems To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Nunes Memo Released, Drama Continues, Good News

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-CA
House Intelligence Committee Chairman

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Breaking News: The Nunes Memo has been released.

We are examining it now. Byron York and several conservative outlets are reporting these key points:

The Steele dossier was essential to the FBI getting a FISA warrant (and to all subsequent renewals) against Carter Page.
Andrew McCabe conceded that no FISA warrants would have been sought without the dossier.

Top FBI and Justice officials knew about the political origins of the Steele dossier, but failed to include that information on the FISA applications.

Justice official Bruce Ohr met with Christopher Steele beginning in the summer of 2016. Steele told Ohr that he was desperate to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. Ohr told Justice Department officials about Steele's bias.It is worth noting that two weeks ago, a Rasmussen poll found that by an 18-point margin (49% to 31%) voters supported the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate the FBI's actions in 2016. Even Democrats were split on the issue -- 38% in favor, 40% opposed and 22% undecided.

After today's bombshell revelations, those numbers will likely skyrocket.

The Drama Continues - When powerful people in Washington, with their hair on fire, are demanding that you not be allowed to see information about potential malfeasance within the government, it is reasonable to assume that the folks screaming the loudest -- Pelosi, Schiff, Schumer, Comey -- are afraid of what you might learn.

The idea that the information in the memo prepared by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes will help the Russians and compromise our secrets is absurd. And even more so given that this concern is coming from the left.

For the past 50 years, the left did its best to appease the Russians. Heck, it even colluded with the Russians to defeat Ronald Reagan. And the left did its best to expose our secrets.

The left loved the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Hollywood just made a new movie about that.

They loved Wikileaks when it was embarrassing the Bush Administration. They were strangely quiet when Obama commuted the sentence of traitor Bradley Manning.

Here's the most important point, which I alluded to yesterday:

Based on initial reports, this memo appears to confirm that unverified opposition research prepared and paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign was used to obtain warrants from the super-secret FISA court in order to spy on Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's political opponents.

In other words, the Obama Administration weaponized the FBI against Donald Trump.

It seems that elements of our government conducted themselves as if we are Russia.

Keep in mind, friends, that there is still one more shoe yet to drop. I have high hopes that the report coming out soon from the inspector general of the Justice Department will be even more revealing.

One final thought: Donald Trump was mercilessly mocked when he said Trump Towers had been wiretapped. Multiple Obama officials rushed to a microphone to condemn Trump. But I think it is increasingly obvious that Trump was right all along.

Comey Tries Comedy - Based on his tweets, it seems fired FBI Director James Comey is trying his hand comedy. Yesterday he tweeted this:

"All should appreciate the FBI speaking up. I wish more of our leaders would. But take heart: American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up. Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy."

Wow! Where to begin?

As for "weasels and liars," this is the guy who let Hillary Clinton off the hook. This is the guy who leaked classified memos of personal conversations with the president, which means that no future president can have candid conversations with the FBI director if Comey's behavior is the standard.

And for Comey to invoke Joe McCarthy is hilarious! This whole Russia collusion delusion IS McCarthyism at its worst.

The hatred Comey has demonstrated toward Trump likely explains why no Obama-era scandals were ever adequately addressed. Comey and some of the other bad actors at the FBI and Justice (Eric Holder comes to mind) make J. Edgar Hoover look like a civil libertarian by comparison.

When all is said and done, I think we can safely say that we won't be seeing James Comey Boulevard any time soon.

Good News - The economy added 200,000 jobs last month. But the big take away from the latest economic data is that wages increased at the fastest rate in eight years.

That's interesting. What happened about eight years ago that slammed the brakes on wages? That would be the beginning of the Obama-era of higher taxes, socialized medicine and regulation run amok.

In other news, more companies announced that they are giving bonuses and boosting pay and benefits as a result of the Trump tax cuts. UPS and Lowes join a growing list of more than 300 companies offering bonuses, pay raises and better benefits to their workers. Hostess is giving bonuses and free Twinkies too!

In a related note, President Trump's approval rating is up to 49% in the latest Rasmussen poll -- matching his highest rating in nearly a year. And Democrats' big polling advantage in the November midterm elections is quickly disappearing.
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Gary Bauer is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Should Treat the Law Equally

by Tony Perkins: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is a decades-old agency first created to enforce federal employment nondiscrimination laws -- which have extensive authority in public and private employment. Much of its work concerned the proper enforcement of civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination because of one's race, color, national origin, sex, and religion.

However, as time wore on, as is often the case, the corridors of federal power were infiltrated by those not merely interested in evenhandedly enforcing the law, but changing it as activists. Unable to accomplish changes to the law through the proper authority -- Congress -- they resorted to sneaky tactics in memoranda, legal slights-of-hand, and the courts. In the short term, it may accomplish what the activists want, but the price is trust in the system. In the long term, their legal activism causes damage to the public trust, rule of law, and our constitutional order.

Though beginning long before, such activism has spiked and most recently come home to roost at the EEOC under the Obama administration, with its aggressive tactics and strategy to force change upon the law in the area of LGBT issues. The EEOC had taken it upon itself to presume to make law, claiming in its Macy and Baldwin rulings that the Title VII sex discrimination prohibition it is charged with enforcing actually includes "gender identity" and "sexual orientation" too. While several courts have abandoned reason and accepted this legal weaseling, many have shot it down. Yet several unlawful and dangerous court opinions on this issue -- and the even more absurd administrative rulings of the EEOC -- are still out there in the minefield the EEOC has created.

Now, FRC's Travis Weber has catalogued some of the EEOC's damaging work a new publication: "The EEOC's Ever-Expanding Definition of Sex Discrimination,'" focusing on the EEOC's efforts to force private companies to pay out settlements and judgments as a result of its reinterpretation of the law in this area. Indeed, the scope of cases addressed by Travis is actually quite narrow; the EEOC's activism in this area has many more casualties.

Thankfully, President Trump appears to recognize the problem of legal activism more broadly and has taken steps to correct it. His federal judicial appointments have been rock-solid, filled with legal minds who fairly interpret the law and don't twist it to suit their own ends. His Department of Justice under Attorney General Sessions has similarly proceeded, ending Obama-era DOJ activist <interpretations of Title VII's sex discrimination prohibition to include "gender identity."

Yet the EEOC remains untouched. It is continuing its troubling strategy of legal activism instead of fairly and objectively enforcing the law, most notably by claiming in the courts that sex discrimination includes "gender identity" and "sexual orientation." On its website, the EEOC still claims it is "responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person's race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information." It brags about its activism, and has a whole webpage dedicated to how it has used the law to its own ends. Yet its strategy is without legal authority, and is solely a creation of legal activists within the federal government and executive branch.

As he did with DOJ, President Trump should directly address the problems with the EEOC. There are limits to his ability to do so, given the authority of the EEOC, but there are some things he can do. For example, he has control over nominations. At least one liberal activist Chai Feldblum -- who President Obama nominated to the EEOC -- has been re-nominated by President Trump's administration. There's no good reason for this re-nomination, as Feldblum has been a foe of religious freedom, even at one point stating: "There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win . . . In fact . . . I'm having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win." This is disastrous for religious freedom.

To top it off, Feldblum has unacceptably, openly, and blatantly disrespected the president. As has been standard practice for years, all government officials have photos of the president and vice president installed on their office walls in an administration transition. The standard-issue photos of President Trump and Vice President Pence were placed on EEOC Commissioners' walls, including Feldblum's. Yet Feldblum took down the photos, thumbing her nose at Trump on what typically is not a partisan issue. Even some liberal career employees -- no doubt not fans of Trump -- are apparently uncomfortable with such an inappropriate, blatant act of disrespect. Maybe Feldblum is ultra-confident her nomination will be confirmed. Yet I'm not sure why President Trump would re-nominate someone who is openly showing distain for him and the office he holds.
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Tony Perkins is President of the Family Research Council . This article was on Tony Perkin's Washington Update and written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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Do Democrats Even Want A Daca Deal If It Means Dealing With Trump?

Nancy Pelois (R-CA) Scowls During STOU

by Natalia Castro: President Trump gave a State of the Union which turned a new page for unity and opportunity between the executive branch and Congress. As Trump expressed his hope of a more productive legislative year, he outlined a path toward legislative achievements with immigration took center stage. Trump may be taking a risk to get Democrats on board, but after their negative reaction Tuesday night, is it even worth it?

In Tuesday night’s speech, Trump outlined the four pillars for his immigration plan which he hopes will retrieve bipartisan support in Congress. The pillars include a path to citizenship for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, border security funding, ending the visa lottery program, and ending chain migration.

White House legislative affairs director Marc Short explained to Politico, for conservatives, securing the border by garnering funding for the wall and assistance for border patrol officers is critical, as well as solving the long-term problems associated with chain migration and the visa lottery program. For Democrats, protecting DACA children was a necessity, but Trump took this a step further to guarantee their support.

Trump’s plan calls for a path to citizenship for 1.8 million people brought to the U.S. as children who either applied for DACA or meet DACA qualifications but have never been in the program.

As Trump explained during his address before Congress, “That covers almost three times more people than the previous administration. Under our plan, those who meet education and work requirements, and show good moral character, will be able to become full citizens of the United States.”

Yet when Trump made this announcement something strange happened. In a room half full of Democrats who have been pushing for and demanding a path to citizenship for DACA recipients, it was nearly only Republicans who stood and applauded Trump’s words.

Democrats have decided to hate this bipartisan policy simply because it is a Trump policy.

Meanwhile, Trump is risking losing the support of his own base while attempting to persuade Democrats to meet in the middle.

In an Ear to the Ground Listening Project conducting polling research on Trump supporters reactions to immigration news, researchers revealed that Trump supporters are tracking the immigration debate closely with mixed feelings about his current plan and overwhelmingly negative views on amnesty.

Polling data indicates 71 percent of Trump supporters say it is “extremely” or “very important” to eliminate DACA as part of immigration reform efforts. The report continues, “If Congress passed immigration reform that removed DACA but incorporated a form of Amnesty, 62 percent would not support it, 7 percent would, and 32 percent are unsure if they would or would not.”

One thing the report made clear is that securing the border wall and ending chain migration are a top priority for those who have supported Trump and hope to continue supporting him, while a path to citizenship is extremely unpopular.

Perhaps it is Trump’s recent push for amnesty that now only leaves 27 percent of Trump supporters “extremely confident” that the President will follow through on his campaign promises. But this is not a completely bleak outlook, as 44 percent are still “very confident” in Trump’s ability to follow through.

President Trump is not completely losing supporters’ trust by offering this plan—yet. For now, he is prioritizing their interest in border security and ending chain migration, but constant talks of amnesty could give them room for doubt.

President Trump might be using the path to citizenship as an opportunity to bring Congress together and promote comprehensive reforms, but when most Democrats are not even willing to clap for amnesty for 1.8 million illegal immigrants, Trump might need to ask himself at what cost this sacrifice is coming? Certainly if assisting three times as many illegal immigrants as President Obama is not enough, it is clear the Democrats were never interested in compromise and only furthering their rhetorical and “resistance” agenda. It seems clear that the Democrats are focused on their neverTrump base, and the only question is will the President abandon his supporters in pursuit of what he would call, a bad, bad deal.
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Natalia Castro is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government.

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Strengthen Pact

Rep. French Hill

by French Hill: On Jan. 14, my good friend Mack McLarty, former chief of staff to President Clinton, outlined the strong benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for our state of Arkansas. Like Mack, I have past experience with the early formation of NAFTA, having served in 1991 and 1992 as President George H.W. Bush's senior aide for his Economic Policy Council during those final months of the NAFTA negotiations.

Mr. McLarty outlined the benefits to Arkansans in the form of expanded export sales and growth in jobs, particularly in agriculture, where 45 percent of our farm exports are to Canada and Mexico. This column will offer a more detailed look at how President Trump can strengthen NAFTA and add more benefits for American workers and companies.

In 1992, America was a declining energy producer, and Mexico had constitutional protectionist rules blocking foreign investment in its energy sector. Now, America is leading the world in new energy technology both in developing clean energy, like solar and wind, and in producing oil and gas by fracturing shale. Mexico's energy monopoly, PEMEX, is suffering from lack of investment, and the government of Mexico has modified its rules around foreign investment participation. We need to expand the coverage of oil, gas, and electricity within the NAFTA framework. We knew in 1992 that the energy provisions were not ideal in our original agreement. Let's improve it.

One of the most contentious topics for improvement is how the three NAFTA partner countries treat "rules of origin"--particularly in the critical automotive sector. The NAFTA vision was that Mexico, Canada, and the United States would build--together--a North American auto powerhouse to compete with Asian manufacturers, mostly Japanese in 1992; today, our principal competitors include Japanese, Indian, Chinese, and South Korean manufacturers.

Under NAFTA, the North American content requirement is 62.5 percent of the manufactured and assembled car. President Trump wants to find a way to boost the American share of the North American content and has suggested a level of 85 percent--a worthy goal. However, over the past 25 years, America and her partners indeed have built a North American auto powerhouse. Changes to the "rules of origin" must be careful to ensure that a new NAFTA will not result in actually losing jobs to Asia by forcing intermediate suppliers of parts to exit Mexico. Reviewing content definitions and parts tracking will be essential to an acceptable proposal.

Next, a new NAFTA should have up-to-date language governing contemporary policies in regards to Mexico's labor and environmental obligations. In 1992, Mexico's then-President Carlos Salinas made clear that Mexico had no interest in becoming a "pollution haven" for U.S. companies; however, since then, enforcement of the Mexican labor and environmental standards has been less than successful. Enforcement was a concern in 1992, and it remains so in 2018. Improvements in Mexican enforcement should better protect the competitiveness of our American workers on this side of the Rio Grande River.

Finally, in 1992, we had fax machines and WordPerfect as examples of "high-tech," but no e-commerce! A new and improved NAFTA should reflect a digital trade agenda that recognizes the advances in technology, such as electronic signature, rejects data localization mandates whereby countries demand only local data centers, and ensures free movement of data across borders. Also, we continue to advance intellectual property protections, which benefit our software and entertainment industries. In the digital arena, there are many regulatory or stated security policies that are de facto non-tariff barriers to American know-how.

Related to e-commerce, in 2016, the United States raised our de minimis amount from $200 to $800 per person, thus increasing the amount an American can import free from custom duties. Canada's de minimis amount remains at only $20 per person. That means virtually all import purchases by Canadians are subject to duty and taxes. In Mexico, the duty-free import level is $50. Working on sensible, gradual change here would benefit American e-commerce innovators.

In 1992, we told President Bush that the market-opening measures and further tariff reductions would increase exports, lower U.S. consumer prices, increase competition, and lower the cost of production for American companies--in addition to increasing the real wages of U.S. workers. In 1991, we exported $33 billion of goods and services to Mexico. Today, we export over $270 billion to Mexico and over $1.3 trillion to Canada and Mexico combined. Our neighbor to the north has only 36 million people and is a little smaller than California, yet we export more to Canada than to all of the European Union with its population of more than 500 million.

The Trump administration should work to continue NAFTA and improve it to help America keep our eyes on the prize: more open markets for U.S. exports--services, agricultural, manufacturing, and energy. Combined with the realized benefits of an improving U.S. regulatory environment and now our new competitive tax law, an improved NAFTA means faster economic growth and more jobs for Arkansans and all Americans.
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Rep. French Hill ( @RepFrenchHill) , R-AR, represents Arkansas' second congressional district. He is majority whip on the House Committee on Financial Services. His article was shared onthe Democrat-Gazette and the article was provided for publication to the ARRA News Service by French Hill's staff.

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Who Really Created The Trump Dossier?

. . . Was it really a British intel agent or a Clinton political operative?

by Daniel Greenfield: In the very early nineties, the Democrats were as obsessed with cocaine as they are now are with Russia. The cocaine in question was alleged to have been bought by Vice President Dan Quayle. The 1992 election was coming up. The decades of corruption, slime and lies by the Clintons were about to pay off.

But that’s not how it looked then.

President George H.W. Bush was enjoying high approval ratings. Bill Clinton would weasel and claw his way to the front of the line largely because the election seemed like a lot cause for the Democrats.

But the Clintons still had plenty of dirty tricks left to play. The Quayle cocaine story was one of them. Like most discredited Democrat smears, it was forgotten once it was no longer needed. It’s hard now to understand how so many reporters and politicians could be sucked in by a ridiculous smear campaign.

One of the Quayle accusers had confessed to lying both to prison officials and to 60 Minutes.

"This guy not only flunked the lie detector test, but he broke down and cried in front of Morley Safer and said that he had made it up because he wanted to get out of jail," Don Hewitt, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, recollected.

But the more the story came apart, the more new conspiracy theories were spawned to bolster it. Like Michael Wolff’s smears, it was too good for the left not to believe. Much like Russian collusion, the story quickly shifted from whether Quayle had actually bought drugs to whether the Bush administration had tried to cover it up. The shift from a specific criminal accusation to nebulous conspiracy theories that can never be disproven, but that empower open-ended witch hunts, are a hallmark of Dem smears.

The Mueller investigation likewise isn’t actually hunting for Russian collusion, but trying to entrap President Trump with accusations that he covered up a crime that it can’t prove ever happened.

The second phase of a smear is to use the damage control tactics of the victim to create its own crime. The dubious original accusation, Quayle’s drugs or Trump’s Russian plot, never needs to be proven. It only needs to be shown that the target attempted to defend against the accusation.

Why does an old discredited Dem smear matter? Because it shares a number of troubling similarities with the Trump Russia smear, including the Clinton political operative who may have originated it.

In his syndicated column, Thomas Oliphant traced the popularization of the cocaine smear to Cody Shearer’s contact in the DEA. "I've known him for a long time and like him, but that wouldn't stop me from looking out the window if he told me the sun was shining," the columnist wrote.

Cody Shearer is also the author of another Russia-Trump dossier used by the FBI, a memo that Steele, the author of the better known dossier, passed along. How did Steele come to possess Shearer’s memo? Shearer was one of Bill’s plumbers, notorious for spreading and circulating scandals aimed at Republicans. He’s also been accused of targeting and intimidating Bill Clinton’s victims.

Is it more likely that a British agent happened to independently come across a memo by a Clinton political operative that echoed his own material or that his dossier was based on the memo? Was the Steele dossier an original piece of work by a former British intel agent doing his own research or had he been hired to put some meat on a conspiracy theory created by a Dem political operative?

We don’t know the answer. Yet. But it’s quite possible that Steele, Russian intel operatives and all the other elements of the vast campaign were never more than window dressing on a smear from the same guy who had peddled the Dan Quayle cocaine story the last time the Clintons needed help.

The Steele dossier, with its sloppy fact-checking and lurid tales of prostitutes urinating in a Moscow hotel, is far too unprofessional to be the work of a British ex-intel agent, but it reads like a Cody Shearer smear. Nasty and vicious has always been Shearer’s stock in trade as a variety of Republicans can testify.

The successful Shearer smear is a conspiracy theory built around a shocking image. A prisoner kept “in the hole” to stop him from testifying about Dan Quayle buying drugs or Senator John Tower starting a hotel fire in Dallas by drunkenly dropping a cigarette on an armchair. That’s followed by accusations of a cover-up, by Bush, the DEA, the CIA, the Russians, the Bureau of Prisons, and the media does the rest.

The Trump smear follows that same nasty pattern. And there are other curious overlaps.

Before Fusion GPS, there was Investigative Group International (IGI). Like Fusion GPS, IGI was a shadowy organization that specialized in digging up dirt for insiders. IGI’s boss was a longtime Clinton pal and the organization was turned loose on Bill Clinton’s political enemies. Shearer was accused of working as a subcontractor for IGI to go after George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle.

Like Fusion GPS, the Quayle push appeared to have married a politically connected journalist with an investigative firm and political sympathizers inside law enforcement to try and influence an election.

The Los Angeles Times reported in ’91 that a “free-lance journalist” had told the paper that an assistant U.S. attorney had tried to persuade the DOJ to conduct a sting operation by trying to sell cocaine to Quayle. No one involved in this story was named, but reports from the era showed that Shearer had been heavily involved in pushing the Quayle smear.

That particular sting was never approved. But another sting operation aimed at the Bush campaign was.

The FBI conducted a sting of James Oberwetter, the chairman of Bush's Texas campaign, offering him a supposed wiretap of Ross Perot's phones. “The decision to use an undercover agent as a step in a carefully constructed investigation came only after lengthy consideration in Dallas and here in Washington,” FBI Director William Sessions wrote in a letter to the New York Times.

Bush told Oberwetter that he would review the FBI’s conduct after the election. But there was no “after the election” to speak of. Before Comey, Sessions became the only other FBI director to be fired.

Like Comey, Sessions had attempted to navigate the abuses of a politicized FBI by grandstanding. And he paid the price. By ’93, he was another casualty of the Clinton efforts to further politicize the FBI.

"I always defended the FBI, but not anymore," President Bush would later reminisce.

There are still many questions to be answered about the Steele dossier. But the most important question is how a piece of opposition research was transformed into a law enforcement matter.

And what is most troubling is that it may not even be the first time that the Clintons have pulled that off.

The campaign against Trump is unprecedented because of the scale of the abuses. The collusion between Obama government officials and Clinton campaign personnel transformed opposition research into a license for surveillance on the political opposition. A conspiracy theory from the Clinton campaign became leverage for delegitimizing and trying to reverse the results of an election. And the conspiracy theory that elements of the FBI loyal to the Democrats relied upon to attack Trump originated from the deepest sewer in Clintonworld that had been covertly smearing political enemies for decades.

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones," Antony tells the Roman mob.

The Clintons are done. But their legacy lives on after them. The Russia conspiracies and the Mueller investigation continue to divide this nation even though Hillary’s political career is deader than Julius Caesar. Fusion GPS is still around. So is IGI. And there are other organizations like them out there.

There will always be political operatives like Cody Shearer out there. But if we don’t insulate law enforcement from them, elections won’t be determined by voters, they’ll be decided by political coups disguised as scandals. The establishment and its private police state will decide who runs the country.

After Hillary’s Reset Button with Russia and Obama’s hot mic vow to show Moscow more flexibility after the election, the Democrats now spend all their time claiming that Trump is secretly working for Putin.

And must be removed from office.

That’s not how we do things in America. But it’s how Putin does things in Russia.

Even as the Democrats pretend that they hate Putin, they fantasize about jailing their political opponents the way that Vladimir Putin does. Using police surveillance to spy on your enemies is a KGB tactic. So is accusing them of secretly working for foreign interests and trying to arrest them.

The final tragic irony of the Democrat’s Russian conspiracies would be to make America just like Russia.
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Daniel Greenfield is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. David Horowitz is a Contributing Author of the ARRA News Service

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A Never-Trump Press in Near Panic

by Patrick Buchanan: “All the News That’s Fit to Print” proclaims the masthead of The New York Times. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” echoes The Washington Post.

“The people have a right to know,” the professors at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism hammered into us in 1962. “Trust the people,” we were admonished.

Explain then this hysteria, this panic in the press over the release of a four-page memo detailing one congressional committee’s rendering of how Trump-hate spawned an FBI investigation of Republican candidate and President Donald Trump.

What is the press corps afraid of? For it has not ceased keening and caterwauling that this memo must not see the light of day.

Do the media not trust the people? Can Americans not handle the truth?

Is this the same press corps that celebrates “The Post,” lionizing Kay Graham for publishing the Pentagon Papers, top-secret documents charging the “Best and the Brightest” of the JFK-LBJ era with lying us into Vietnam?

Why are the media demanding a “safe space” for us all, so we will not be harmed by reading or hearing what the memo says?

Security secrets will be compromised, we are warned.

Really? Would the House Intelligence Committee majority vote to expose secrets that merit protection? Would Speaker Paul Ryan and White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly, who have read and approved the release of the memo, go along with that?

Is Gen. Kelly not a proven patriot, many times over?

The committee’s ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff, who earlier warned of a threat to national security, now seems ready to settle for equal time. If the majority memo is released, says Schiff, the minority version of events should be released.

Schiff is right. It should be, along with the backup behind both.

This week, however, FBI Director Chris Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein slipped into the White House to plead with Kelly to keep the Republican memo secret. Wednesday, both went public to warn the White House against doing what Trump said he was going to do.

This is defiant insubordination. And it is not unfair to ask if Rosenstein and Wray are more alarmed about some threat to the national security than they are about the exposure of misconduct in their own agencies.

The memo is to be released Friday. Leaks suggest what it contends:

That the Russiagate investigation of Trump was propelled by a “dossier” of lies and unproven allegations of squalid conduct in Moscow and Trumpian collusion with Russia.

Who prepared the dossier?

The leading dirt-diver hired by the Clinton campaign, former British spy Christopher Steele. In accumulating his Russian dirt, Steele was spoon-fed by old comrades in the Kremlin’s security apparatus.

Not only did the FBI use this dirt to launch a full investigation of Trump, the bureau apparently used it to convince a FISA court judge to give the FBI a warrant to surveil and wiretap the Trump campaign.

If true, the highest levels of the FBI colluded with a British spy digging dirt for Hillary to ruin the opposition candidate, and, having failed, to bring down an elected president.

Is this not something we have a right to know? Should it be covered up to protect those at the FBI who may have engaged in something like this?

“Now they are investigating the investigators!” comes the wail of the media. Well, yes, they are, and, from the evidence, about time.

In this divided capital, there are warring narratives.

The first is that Trump was compromised by the Russians and colluded with them to hack the DNC and Clinton campaign to destroy her candidacy. After 18 months, the FBI and Robert Mueller probes have failed to demonstrate this.

The second narrative is now ascendant. It is this:

In mid-2016, James Comey and an FBI cabal, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, lead investigator Peter Strzok and his FBI paramour Lisa Page, decided Clinton must not be indicted in the server scandal, as that would make Trump president.

So they colluded and put the fix in.

This alleged conspiracy is being investigated by the FBI inspector general. His findings may explain last week’s sudden resignation of McCabe and last summer’s ouster of Strzok from the Mueller probe.

If true, this conspiracy to give Hillary a pass on her “gross negligence” in handling secrets, and take down Trump based on dirt dug up by hirelings of the Clinton campaign would make the Watergate break-in appear by comparison to be a prank.

Here we may have hit the reason for the panic in the media.

Trump-haters in the press may be terrified that the memo may credibly demonstrate that the “Deplorables” were right, that the elite media have been had, that they were exploited and used by the “deep state,” that they let their detestation of Trump so blind them to reality that they made fools of themselves, and that they credited with high nobility a major conspiracy to overthrow an elected president of the United States.
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Patrick Buchanan is currently a conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior advisor to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. He blogs at the Patrick J. Buchanan.

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If Illegals Voted Republican . . .

. . . What would the Democrat’s wall look like if illegal Immigrants voted for Republicans?

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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The Smoking Russian Donut

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: “Politicians in prison garb,” headlined a recent Sun Sentinel editorial, “shake trust in government.”

It was not a fashion statement.

“What is it about a long career that makes some politicians — not all, let’s be clear about that — feel the rules don’t apply to them?” asked the paper, which serves Florida’s Broward and Palm Beach counties.

This week, after spending the last 24 years in Congress, former Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) began serving a five-year term in federal prison. Brown was convicted of 18 separate fraud and corruption counts stemming from her use of a public charity to benefit herself.

Not to be outdone, last week the FBI arrested Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper on various corruption charges following a six-year undercover sting operation. “From what is now known,” the editorial board judged “the case against Cooper” to be “devastating.”

There are taped conversations, reportedly, between FBI agents posing as “wealthy land owners [seeking] political favors” and the mayor, discussing pay (her) to play (with the city). At one point, undercover agents say a bribe was delivered to the mayor in “a Dunkin’ Donuts bag stuffed with $8,000 in cash and checks from people with a ‘bunch of Russian names.’”

Russians?

“If not so tragic,” the paper wrote of the corruption, “it would be laughable to imagine Russians colluding to control the Hallandale Beach city election.”

Humor is needed, truly. Yet, the Sun Sentinel concluded instead that “term limits are needed in Hallandale Beach.”

Of course.

And needed for Congress.

Now more than ever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacobs is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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