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May 2020

MY SAY: THE MEDIA’S MITIGATION AND LOCK DOWN OF NEWS

There is a huge, really huge story out there about an attempted coup of an elected President by a rogue’s list of high ranking officials and legislators leading up the White House stairs to former President Obama. When the investigations conclude and the dust settles it could be the greatest political scandal of our time. The mainstream media skims and airbrushes the issue.

Philosophers have asked “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

One may ask “If the media ignores  it did it happen?” rsk

Obama Chief of Staff Unmasked Flynn Day of Crucial White House Briefing By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/13/obama-chief-of-staff-unmasked-flynn-day-of-crucial-white-house-briefing/

According to declassified documents released Wednesday by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, President Barack Obama’s chief of staff requested the unmasking of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn on the same day as a crucial White House meeting that involved all the perpetrators of the Russian collusion hoax.

Denis McDonough, a longtime Obama loyalist and the president’s chief of staff during his second term, asked the NSA to unmask Flynn’s identity on January 5, 2017 related to an unspecified foreign intelligence report. That date is significant because it’s the same day that President Obama met with top aides including James Comey, James Clapper, Susan Rice, and John Brennan for the ostensible purpose of reviewing the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russia’s attempted election interference. (Vice President Joe Biden also attended the Oval Office meeting. Biden made an unmasking request on January 12, 2017, the day David Ignatius at the Washington Post first reported on the Flynn-Kislyak call.)

The real purpose of the meeting, as new evidence suggests, was to discuss how to set up the incoming president and entrap Flynn. After the general briefing, President Obama asked Comey and Sally Yates, the number two at the Justice Department who would serve as acting attorney general until Trump’s appointee was confirmed, to stay behind. (Yates and Comey, it’s worth noting, both signed the initial FISA application on Carter Page.)

That’s when Obama informed Yates about Flynn’s infamous December 29, 2016 phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions. “At that point, Yates had no idea what the president was talking about, but figured it out based on the conversation,” according to the special counsel’s 2017 interview with Yates. “Yates recalled Comey mentioning the Logan Act. It was not clear to Yates from where the President first received the information.”

It now appears that we know the source: McDonough. There are no other unmasking requests between Flynn’s call on December 29, 2016 and the January 5, 2017 meeting.

But that might not have been the only leak tied to McDonough. Mary McCord, former head of the National Security Division that was responsible for seeking the FISA warrants on Page, testified to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that “in theory” the leak to the Washington Post came from the Obama White House.

Igantius’ article first floated the outlandish Logan Act case against Flynn. “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking,” Ignatius wrote. “What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about ‘disputes’ with the United States. Was its spirit violated?”

The illegal leak of classified government information is a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison. The “senior U.S. government official” who tipped off Ignatius about the Flynn-Kislyak call has not yet been identified or charged with a crime.

McDonough’s request is the closest tie between President Obama and the framing of Michael Flynn; as this massive scandal unfolds, Barack Obama still has not been asked a single question about what he knew or when he knew it.

Wisconsin special election goes to GOP’s Tom Tiffany

Republican Tom Tiffany, a Wisconsin state senator endorsed by President Trump, easily won a special congressional election Tuesday in the state’s heavily conservative, rural 7th Congressional District.

Meanwhile, with less than half the vote in, Trump has already doubled his 2016 total in the Nebraska presidential primary, also underway Tuesday. That led GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to tout what she called surging “enthusiasm” for the president’s reelection.

Obamagate Smashes Media Myth Of A ‘Scandal-Free’ Administration

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/14/obamagate-smashes-media-myth-of-scandal-free-administration/

Despite its many policy failures and foreign affairs disasters, the Obama administration always escaped serious criticism in the media because, we were told, there were no serious scandals during his two terms in office. As just-released documents show, President Barack Obama himself was neck-deep in the silent coup attempt by top U.S. officials at the FBI, Justice Department and CIA.

Another media myth, generated by left-leaning journalists to prop up their favorite politician, bites the dust. How do we know? #ObamaGate is now trending on Twitter, a sure sign of spreading interest in the scandal.

The latest document dump from the trove of secrets that the DOJ and FBI withheld from the public shows that the plot to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency by entrapping his National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn went all the way to the top.

Among the documents is one from the Mueller investigation regarding alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russian officials.

In it, according to the Washington Examiner, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates “told special counsel Robert Mueller’s team (in August of 2017) that she first learned the FBI possessed and was investigating recordings of Flynn’s late 2016 conversations with a Russian envoy following a Jan. 5, 2017, national security meeting at the White House. It wasn’t Comey who told her, but former President Barack Obama.

“Yates, who was briefly the acting attorney general during the early days of the Trump administration before getting fired, also laid out how in the ensuing days, Comey kept the FBI’s actions cloaked in secrecy and repeatedly rebuffed her suggestions that the incoming Trump team be made aware of the Flynn recordings.”

Let that sink in. Comey was investigating a key member of the incoming presidential administration, but didn’t inform the White House about the investigation, apparently at the behest of Obama.

Also attending that meeting, in addition to Yates and Comey, were Vice President Joe Biden, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and others.

Yates says Obama and Comey pulled her aside after the meeting ended to tell her what they were doing, and to keep it quiet.

CNN Buries Its Own Poll Results on Trump’s Favorability. Guess Why. By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/cnn-buries-its-own-poll-results-on-trumps-favorability-guess-why/

His approval ratings have never been higher, including on Election Day 2016. Plus, he’s ahead of Biden in battleground states.

Well, that’s interesting, I thought, as I noted that the RealClearPolitics homepage stated that President Trump was tied for his all-time high in CNN polling. Then I went over to the CNN homepage for confirmation. Guess what I found?

The main story was about a church that lost 44 parishioners to COVID-19. The second-most prominent story told us that “Grocery Prices Are Soaring” (which is true if you think that a 2.6 percent increase in April should be called “soaring”), the third-most-prominent item told us, “Doctors treating coronavirus patients are seeing odd and frightening syndromes.” Running down the rail on the right we were given such important developments as “Man refusing to wear a mask breaks arm of Target employee,” “CNN Investigates: He’s willing to get Covid-19 to speed up vaccine efforts,” “Five surfers die after huge layer of sea foam hampers rescue” and “How coronavirus spread from one member to 87% of the singers at a choir practice.”

Only after all of this stuff did we learn that CNN has a new poll out, under the headline, “CNN Poll: Biden tops Trump nationwide, but battlegrounds tilt Trump.”

CALIFORNIA DISTRICT 25

Republican and combat pilot veteran Mike Garcia wins big! Mike Garcia, who won the endorsement of President Trump, flipped California’s 25th Congressional District after Representative Katie Hill, a Democrat, resigned last year.

Ben Sasse Defeats GOP Primary Challenger by 50 Points By John McCormack

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/ben-sasse-defeats-gop-primary-challenger-by-50-points/

The freshman senator from Nebraska cruised to victory despite his sometimes-uneasy relationships with both President Trump’s supporters and opponents.

Incumbent freshman Ben Sasse coasted to victory in Tuesday’s Nebraska GOP Senate primary with 75 percent of the vote.

Sasse had faced a challenge from Matt Innis, a businessman who argued he’d been insufficiently supportive of President Trump in the Senate. Sasse angered some Trump loyalists because he cast his presidential ballot for Mike Pence in November 2016 and has been more willing to criticize Trump than many of his GOP colleagues on a wide range of matters, from the president’s character and the Ukraine scandal to trade policy.

At the same time, Sasse’s record over the last few years has left some staunch Trump critics disappointed. He voted to uphold the president’s declaration of a national emergency to divert funding toward the construction of a border wall in March 2016, and he came to the conclusion that the president’s behavior in the Ukraine scandal was bad but didn’t merit removal from office. His criticism of the president also became quieter last year as he geared up for the primary, a development that helped earn him Trump’s endorsement and scorn from Michigan congressman Justin Amash, who left the Republican Party over his opposition to Trump:

When it came to Flynn, it seems everyone on the Obama team wanted ‘in.’ By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/when_it_came_to_flynn_it_seems_everyone_on_the_obama_team_wanted_in.html

Thanks to interim Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, we can finally see which people in the Obama administration unmasked General Michael Flynn’s name. Twenty-six names turned up, with some of them making multiple requests. We’ve heard about the big guys (Biden, Brennan, Clapper, etc.), but what’s also interesting is how many people were looking into Flynn who seemingly had no reason to do so. This should disturb us all.

To understand why these many requests point to serious problems in the Obama White House and American intelligence, you have to know how unmasking works. The government routinely spies on written or spoken conversations involving foreign actors. If Americans participate in or are mentioned, their names are considered “incidental” until proven otherwise, and their identities masked to protect their privacy.

Fauci’s Song and Dance By Daniel John Sobieski

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/faucis_song_and_dance.html

Dr. Anthony Fauci has never been muzzled by President Trump, as the lamestream media often charged, but maybe he should have been and should be still. Before his tour de farce before the Senate Health Committee, the shy, modest, and unassuming Dr. Fauci emailed a New York Times reporter with a preview of his testimony,  an apocalypse now prediction if we don’t hang on to and follow his sage and expert advice:

Dr. Anthony Fauci emailed New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg Monday night with a preview of his message for a Senate hearing on Tuesday in which he warns of “needless suffering and death” if the country opens “prematurely” from the COVID-19 Chinese coronavirus lockdowns…

Stolberg posted Fauci’s message to Twitter:

“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely. If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”

Or we could just sit here and wait for a vaccine that may or may not come and may or may not work while our economy atrophies and people turn to drugs, alcohol, child abuse, domestic violence and even suicide as their nest eggs dreams, livelihoods evaporates. Many would argue, and I count myself among them, that Fauci’s consistently wrong advice using consistently wrong computer models has led to needless suffering and death.

Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show recently asked Dr. Marty Makary, professor of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. what he thought of Fauci’s performance thus far and his assessment was not good:

China’s Coronavirus: How the EU is Betraying Europe by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16016/china-coronavirus-how-the-eu-is-betraying-europe

Chinese ambassadors, particularly those based in Western capitals, simply resort to blackmail, threatening to deny governments vital medical supplies to cope with the pandemic if they do not comply with Beijing’s wishes.

All these countries have good reason to want to stand their ground against Beijing. Italy has been the target of a skilful fake news campaign by Beijing with cleverly edited videos that show Italians showing their gratitude for China’s help in the pandemic when no such demonstrations took place.

The French government was outraged after the Chinese embassy in Paris accused French care-workers of abandoning their posts, thereby causing elderly residents to die; while Germany has complained that Chinese diplomats tried to pressure officials to make positive statements on how Beijing was handling the coronavirus pandemic.

As the EU, by constantly capitulating to Beijing’s demands, has shown it is totally incapable of protecting the interests of member states, the governments of Europe are finally waking up to the reality that, in order to defend themselves against China’s bully-boy tactics, they will have to look after themselves.

The latest capitulation by the European Union in the face of Chinese intimidation demonstrates that, when it comes to protecting the interests of member states, the Brussels bureaucracy is no match for Beijing’s new breed of warrior diplomats.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the more notable features of China’s response has been the willingness of senior Chinese diplomats to intervene forcibly in defence of China’s interests.