Displaying posts published in

April 2020

FBI Director Wray Behind Suppression of ‘Stunning’ Exculpatory Evidence in Flynn Case By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/24/report-fbi-director-wray-behind-suppression-of-stunning-exculpatory-evidence-in-flynn-case/

The Federal Bureau of Investigations withheld “stunning” exculpatory evidence in the case of President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn at the behest of FBI Director Christopher Wray, the Daily Caller reported Friday.

The Federalist meanwhile reported that FBI general counsel Dana Boente was behind the effort to block the release of the Brady Material.

According to the FBI official who spoke to The Federalist, FBI general counsel Dana Boente led the charge internally against DOJ’s disclosure of the new materials. Boente, who briefly served as acting Attorney General after Trump became president, personally signed off on one of the federal spy warrants against former Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page. The new documents, which were filed under a protective order by DOJ on Friday, will reflect poorly on the FBI, the official told The Federalist. It is not clear when, or even if, those documents will be unsealed and made available to the public for review.

A source with “direct knowledge of the situation” told the Daily Caller that Boente was acting in coordination with the Trump-appointed Wray.

Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, announced on Twitter Friday that she filed the new court documents containing exculpatory evidence.

“This afternoon, the government produced to Mr. Flynn stunning Brady evidence that proves Mr. Flynn’s allegations of having been deliberately set up and framed by corrupt agents at the top of the FBI,” Powell wrote in a Supplement to Flynn’s Motion to Dismiss. “The government has deliberately suppressed this evidence from the inception of this prosecution—knowing there was no crime by Mr. Flynn.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez still championing the ‘unwilling to work’ By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/that_hill_shell_die_on_alexandria_ocasiocortez_still_championing_the_unwilling_to_work.html

“The socialist ‘it girl’ lays another egg, telling unemployment-wracked New Yorkers to go on a ‘job strike.'”

Talk about dimwit.

At a time when millions of Americans are demanding to be allowed to return to work, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for a “work strike.”

According to PJMedia’s Tyler O’Neill:

“When we talk about this idea of reopening society you know, only in America does the president — when the president tweets about liberation — does he mean ‘go back to work.’ When we have this discussion about going back or reopening, I think a lot of people should just say no — we’re not going back to that,” AOC told Anand Giridharadas in the first episode of his upcoming Vice show.

“We’re not going back to working 70-hour weeks just so that we could put food on the table and not even feel any sort of semblance of security in our lives,” she argued.
Which ought to go over real well with hungry workers wondering how the rent’s going to get paid. They know it’s bad for them.

Democrats to Replace Biden at Convention Over Tara Reade Sexual Assault Allegations? By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/election/democrats-to-replace-biden-at-convention-over-tara-reade-sexual-assault-allegations/

While the mainstream media has mostly kept a lid on this story, the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden aren’t going away soon. As PJM’s Rick Moran reported earlier this week, the D.C. police are treating the allegations as an “active and ongoing” investigation. Many liberals are turning a blind eye to the story, but there are some who have a vested interest in keeping this story alive and front and center: Bernie Bros.

In fact, Briahna Joy Gray, Bernie Sanders’ former campaign press secretary, who has been a vocal critic of Biden, suggested in an interview with The Atlantic that the allegations might just thwart Biden’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

Gray told Emma Green that the Democratic primary is far from over. “The Democratic Party would like us to believe [we’re now in the general election season], and they behaved that way even before Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race. But we are, in fact, still in a Democratic-primary season. Biden is only the presumptive nominee,” she said, before adding, “And there’s all kinds of whispers and rumors about whether or not something might happen at the convention, which might mean Joe Biden isn’t even the nominee.”

“Are you talking about the Tara Reade allegations?” Green asked.

The Times Inflates Trump’s Foolishness into Monstrousness By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/media-donald-trump-new-york-times-inflates-foolishness-into-monstrousness/

President Trump should not spit-ball on live television, especially on topics that are outside his ken.

How depressing is the erosion of the principle that when the president of the United States speaks, it means something, that it’s not just stream-of-consciousness that willy-nilly gets revised or reversed or treated like he never really said it. Just as depressing, though, is the media’s abandonment of straightforward fact reporting, in favor of unabashed alliance with Trump’s political opposition.

Why do blind partisans and demagogues have such sway these days? Because no one can trust the reporting of institutions we used to expect would give us an accurate rendition of the facts being debated.

The president’s meanderings about imaginary coronavirus treatments at Thursday’s press conference, and the press’s reporting on them, are case in point.

While it is good for the president to project engaged leadership, that should never take the form of free-flowing dialogue with his advisers. Those conversations should happen behind closed doors. When the president speaks publicly, he should stick to what he is in a position to convey factually, not hypothetically. Especially when it comes to scientific and medical information, as to which he is quickly out of his depth.

At the same time, no matter how much the press abhors Trump, no matter how sincerely believed its conviction that he is a dangerous man who will induce people to do dangerous things, reporters worthy of the name do not have license to portray Trump as living down to their worst fears when he has not.

Battering Norman Borlaug PBS rewrites the history of the father of the Green Revolution.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/battering-norman-borlaug-11587769611?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

It seems to be an iron law of modern life: Be successful at what you do, and sooner or later you will be labeled an enemy of the people. The latest target of this treatment is the late Norman Borlaug, who is featured in a new PBS documentary called “The Man Who Tried to Feed the World: A Tale of Good Deeds and Unintended Consequences.”

Borlaug was an Iowa-born agronomist who is rightly regarded as the father of the Green Revolution. By producing disease-resistant strains of wheat, and later rice, Borlaug dramatically increased the yields that farmers—especially those in Third World nations—could extract from the land.

As the film does acknowledge, feeding the world without Borlaug’s innovations would be difficult. Readers of a certain age will recall the laments in the 1960s that humanity’s expanding population, especially in the developing world, would lead to mass starvation. Famines were not uncommon in those years in India, China and elsewhere, and Borlaug helped to make them rare and almost solely the result of bad governance. In 1970 Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now comes PBS to rewrite history, going light on the lives saved and heavy on the “unintended consequences.” These include everything from diminished water supplies and depleted soil to increased urbanization in Mexico and a “broken society” in India.

Leftist Nonsense––Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel By Joan Swirsky

https://canadafreepress.com/article/leftist-nonsenselike-shooting-fish-in-a-barrel

Happily, an overwhelming majority of Americans have both eyes and ears. They are watching. They are listening. They are keenly aware that Democrats are not on America’s side.

After the 2016 presidential election of President Donald J. Trump, I stopped counting the numbers of Republicans and Conservatives who told me how unpleasantly life had changed for them.

Through eight years of President George W. Bush––even through the Reagan years, they said––they could still speak to their friends and relatives and agree to disagree about political issues.

But the reaction to the Trump presidency, they told me, was so extreme, the hysteria so sustained, the venom so poisonous, the rationality so nonexistent, that they couldn’t even go to a happy affair like a birthday party or wedding or dinner at a restaurant without World War III breaking out.

No surprise. While glamorous billionaire businessman and TV star Donald Trump had been lionized for decades before he became president by the very people who are vilifying him today, while office-seeking Democrats held out both hands for his generous contributions to their campaigns, and while leftists like Oprah and the fake-news media whores considered it either a privilege or a scoop to interview him, all that changed when he descended the Trump Tower escalator with his dazzling wife Melania in June of 2015 to announce his candidacy.

WHY THE CHANGE?

Indeed, why did the “tolerant” Progressives display––and exhibit to this very day––such florid and feverish intolerance?

The Bearer of Good Coronavirus News by Allysia Finley

Stanford scientist John Ioannidis finds himself under attack for questioning the prevailing wisdom about lockdowns.

Defenders of coronavirus lockdown mandates keep talking about science. “We are going to do the right thing, not judge by politics, not judge by protests, but by science,” California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defended an order that, among other things, banned the sale of paint and vegetable seeds but not liquor or lottery tickets. “Each action has been informed by the best science and epidemiology counsel there is,” she wrote in an op-ed.

But scientists are almost never unanimous, and many appeals to “science” are transparently political or ideological. Consider the story of John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine. His expertise is wide-ranging—he juggles appointments in statistics, biomedical data, prevention research and health research and policy. Google Scholar ranks him among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists. He has published more than 1,000 papers, many of them meta-analyses—reviews of other studies. Yet he’s now found himself pilloried because he dissents from the theories behind the lockdowns—because he’s looked at the data and found good news.

In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died. Based on the demographics of the ship’s population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1%—comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”