RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/12/the-deep-states-co

The Special Counsel’s investigation of Russiagate was supposed to end with the impeachment of President Trump and the termination of his illegitimate presidency. The Mueller Report, when it eventually saw the light of day, was going to expose Donald Trump as the arch-villain of all times. Not only did this charlatan happen to be a white-supremacist dog-whistler, sexual deviant and financial fraudster of the highest order, he was likely the greatest traitor in American history. This was the prevailing view expressed by the commentariat before the release of Mueller’s findings. The title of an article by Jonathan Chait, published in the New York Magazine on the eve of the 2018 summit between President Trump and President Putin, says it all: “Will Trump Be Meeting with His Counterpart—Or His Handler?” Ukrainegate, which is nothing but a reprise of Russiagate, reminds me of Karl Marx’s sardonic comment about Napoleon III: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Coming up empty-handed after $45 million and two full years of scrutiny would suggest that the Great Kremlin Conspiracy had all along been nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Perhaps, offered the tinfoil-hat conspiracists, Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice had been so thorough that all evidence of a conspiracy was erased. Whatever. The mainstream media, Democratic politicians and former directors of intelligence agencies adopted the curious notion that if Candidate Trump did not engage in actual collusion, maybe he was guilty—in the words of Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper—of “passive collusion”. But how can anyone, including President Trump, be guilty of a non-crime, one without a definite time or location and unsupported by corroborating evidence? It is as if Donald Trump, like a character in a Franz Kafka story, is guilty of something, and even if nobody is entirely sure of the nature of the crime, that does not make him any less guilty of it.

Paradoxically, perhaps, even those not taken in by the Trump–Putin collusion delusion assumed that Mueller’s team, led by the Justice Department’s Andrew Weissmann, would deliver a game-changer. Something, to put it bluntly, more emphatic than the Mueller Report’s non-condemnation/non-exoneration. After all, Mueller, Weissmann and Co have form when it comes to using coercive, unlawful and unscrupulous tactics to achieve a decisive outcome, if Sidney Powell’s Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (2014) is anything to go by. Surely Team Mueller could have unearthed some infraction of the law, however minor or obscure, during their inquisition. What about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting of Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr with a bunch of Russian lobbyists, including Natalia Veselnitskaya? No crime, according to Trump’s inquisitors, was committed. Weissmann did eventually nab Manafort on tax fraud unrelated to the Trump campaign. The feds put him away for seven and a half years. The anti-Trump brigade, to use the commentariat’s cliché of the time, talked up Manafort’s arrest as a sign that “the walls were closing in on Trump”, and yet those walls remained distant.

But before we move from the crumbly walls of Russiagate to the newly erected ramparts of Ukrainegate, some perspective. Matt Taibbi, an anti-Trumper and contributing editor to the trendily leftist Rolling Stone, an unlikely Great Kremlin Conspiracy denier, admonishes his peers for the damage they have done to democracy.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/02/fusion-gps-chiefs-spin-hard-before-the-horowitz-report/

Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch might try to equate the Steele dossier with the Pentagon Papers, but it’s more likely their efforts will go down as the biggest con job in American history.

There are a few bombshells tucked in the new book authored by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, co-owners of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm responsible for the most infamous dossier in American political history.

Here’s one that—as far as I know—hasn’t been disclosed until now: Before Fusion hired Christopher Steele in 2016 to produce his sketchy dossier on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Steele hired Fusion to help him with a client at odds with a key figure in the Trump camp. The London-based operative, misleadingly portrayed in the press as a mere former British intelligence officer, needed help investigating the Trump advisor for his client.

The campaign advisor? Paul Manafort.

Steele’s client? Vladimir Putin-tied oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

“Weeks before Trump tapped Manafort to run his campaign, Christopher Steele had hired Fusion for help investigating Manafort,” Simpson and Fritsch write. “The matter had nothing to do with politics and was a typical commercial assignment.” Fusion and Steele’s firm “inked a small deal to research Manafort’s finances for Steele’s client.”

The Fusion chiefs insist that Steele had been hired by an “unidentified client” to find out whether Manafort had stolen millions of dollars from him. That anonymous client—Deripaska—also happened to be in trouble with the U.S. government for money laundering.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/02/a-deplorable-strategy-beyond-2020/

In 2016 and since, we have learned that our ruling class has amassed the power and developed the taste to revel in making us miserable. We have also learned that to avoid this, we must undo or separate ourselves from them, their structures, and priorities.

Regardless of who wins in 2020, the mega-issue that drove the 2016 elections will grip the country more intensely than ever.

From President Obama on down, the political, educational, media, and corporate establishment had long since taken for granted that placing the opinions, interests, tastes, and the rights of the rest of America on the same plane as their own amounts to “false equality.” They had come to regard us as lower beings. No matter whether they attributed our purported inferiority to our alleged racism, sexism, etc., or just plain stupidity, they negated the possibility of common citizenship with us. The moment that Hillary Clinton’s reference to those disinclined to vote for her as “deplorables” and “irredeemables” made this unmistakable, Donald Trump’s victory became possible.

The people who voted for Trump, many despite reservations about him, did so seeking a shield against insult and injury from above. But the 2016 results confirmed the ruling class in its judgment, and emboldened it to act in “resistance” and in ways no one had ever imagined.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/censure-rather-impeachment-wont-end-political-bruce-thornton/

As the House impeachment farce doubles-down on its buffoonery, many voices are calling for an alternative: Don’t impeach, but censure the president. This compromise will end the Dems’ effort to impeach on the basis of second- and third-hand opinion and an Orwellian torture of terms like “bribery,” yet still “send a message” that Trump crossed some line of presidential decorum by asking a foreign head of state to “dig up dirt,” as some pundits call it, on a possible political opponent. Perhaps such a bipartisan gesture will also contribute to ending the stark divisions between the parties, and return us to our bipartisan “democratic norms.”

This “solution,” however, solves nothing, and begs the central question of the whole imbroglio: that the president did something seriously wrong. That claim is not self-evidently true, and should be contested as yet another obsession with Trump’s undiplomatic––i.e. not weaselly––words rather than his actions.

Let’s review the background of the alleged offense. Towards the end of the Obama administration, the issue of Ukraine’s endemic corruption had been raised. Also of concern was Hunter Biden’s cushy job with the corrupt Ukrainian Burisma company, as former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified during the impeachment hearings. Moreover, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik pointed out during her questioning that Yovanovitch was coached by Obama’s people about how Yovanovitch should respond to questions concerning the bad optics of the Bidens’ actions when she testified in her Senate confirmation hearings.

As the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman reported last month,  Obama administration officials, then, certainly were concerned about the Bidens, and with good cause. For example, a Washington consulting outfit used Biden’s name while requesting a State Department meeting to improve Bursima’s image, explicitly saying that Burisma put Hunter Biden on its board to leverage such meetings. A State Department official who tried to raise a red flag about the Bidens was ignored by a Biden staffer. An Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy also expressed concerns to Biden himself, with no results.