RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/alan-dershowitz-buzzfeed-report-and-mueller-rebuke-a-vivid-example-of-get-trump-medias-mindset

As soon as I read the explosive BuzzFeed News report alleging there was evidence that President Trump had directed his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, I was very suspicious.

Even before the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a statement Friday night saying that the BuzzFeed account was “not accurate,” I wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News raising questions about whether there was actually credible evidence that Trump suborned perjury or obstructed justice by telling Cohen to lie to lawmakers.

It seemed obvious that there were no smoking gun emails containing any such direction from the president. Nor would there be eyewitnesses to any such alleged conversation.

Unlike the obstruction of justice case that led to articles of impeachment being drafted against President Nixon and his resignation – where tape recordings proved criminal conduct by Nixon – the accusations against President Trump would have to rely on the credibility of Cohen, who has a long history of lying and little if any credibility.

In fact, Cohen was sentenced in federal court in December to three years in prison after pleading guilty to lying to Congress, campaign finance violations and financial crimes.

President Trump’s spokeswoman and his lawyers strongly disputed the BuzzFeed report, which was published Thursday, even before the statement from Mueller’s spokesman knocking down the story.

“Two words sum it up better than anything anybody else can say, and that is ‘categorically false,’” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/19/schiff-for-brains

It’s a good thing President Trump canceled the Democrats’ overseas excursion this weekend because Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has some work to do here at home. For starters, he needs to take a red pen to his memo that defended the deceptive tactics used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant on Trump campaign aide Carter Page days before the 2016 presidential election.

The new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee authored a memo dated January 28, 2018, ironically titled, “Correcting the Record—The Russia Investigation.” But it is Schiff who needs to correct his own record in light of new and damaging information that contradicts several claims he made in that document.

The California congressman might also want to apologize to his predecessor, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who Schiff has spent the better part of a year trying to smear and discredit—even suggesting Nunes should be removed as chair of the committee—for releasing his memo that exposed how the FBI manipulated and misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to spy on the Trump campaign.

Thanks to reporting by The Hill’s John Solomon and others, we now know that the Justice Department and the FBI were in possession of parts of the dossier far earlier than Schiff suggested in his memo and that the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, also was in contact with top officials months before Schiff claimed he was. Further, these same officials were warned about Steele’s motivations as well as the connection between the wife of a key Justice Department lawyer, who also was employed by the same opposition research firm that had retained Steele.

The new details also bolster Nunes’s contention that a footnote in the FISA application did not fully and accurately inform the court about the political origins of the dossier, even though the department’s hierarchy was well aware of its partisan provenance at the time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/special-counsel-labels-buzzfeed-report-inaccurate/

A spokesman for special counsel Robert Mueller took the unusual step Friday of publicly correcting an inaccurate BuzzFeed News report that accused President Trump of suborning perjury.

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” special counsel spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement to BuzzFeed.

The statement was issued in response to a bombshell report, which cited two law enforcement officials and alleged Trump directed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about when exactly plans to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow concluded.

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress after admitting that his discussions with Russian officials regarding the construction of a Moscow Trump Tower continued until June 2016 and did not conclude in January of that year, as he previously testified before lawmakers. Cohen also admittedly lied to Congress about the extent of then-candidate Trump’s involvement in those discussions, many of which involved senior Kremlin officials.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-cannot-be-pressured-out-of-white-house/

Why would Trump ever quit?

The walls supposedly are always closing in on Donald Trump. The end is always beginning.

He’s going to quit. He’s going to be impeached and removed. He’s going to decide not to run again. Somehow or other, he’s going to relieve everyone of the responsibility of ever thinking of him again, and especially of the responsibility of defeating him in an election.

This is the perpetual backdrop to media commentary about Trump. It rocketed around the Internet a couple of months ago when Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker said Trump might not serve out his term. Fake Washington Post editions recently distributed in Washington were about Trump quitting. Such scenarios are a constant topic in private conversations.

The allure of all this is obvious. It is the promise of deliverance. After tormenting his enemies for so long, Trump’s going to make it easy for them. He’s just going to go away.

It is true that the odds of Trump somehow not serving out his term are, given his erratic personality and the wild card of the Mueller investigation, higher than those for a normal president serving in normal times. But they are still slim.

Perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report will send a torpedo into Trump’s bow. It seems more likely that a report will contain damaging and embarrassing revelations that, whatever the initial shock, will be quickly absorbed by the political system and especially Trump’s supporters.

The velocity of the news cycle, driven in part by the sheer volume and pace of Trump controversies, works in his favor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/womens-march-leader-refuses-to-acknowledge-israels-right-to-exist/

Embattled Women’s March co-chairwoman Tamika Mallory refused to acknowledge the state of Israel’s right to exist during a recent interview on PBS’s The Firing Line and seemed to suggest that, unlike Palestinians, Israelis were not “native” to the region.

Mallory, who has been forced in recent days to confront questions about her association with notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, acknowledged during the interview that “all people have the right to exist” but would not address the legitimacy of the Israeli state.

“I’m not Jewish, so for me to speak to that is not fair . . . because I’m speaking of the people who we know are being brutally oppressed at this moment,” Mallory told PBS’s Margaret Hoover. “Everyone has a right to exist. . . . I just don’t feel that everyone has a right to exist at the disposal of another group.”

“I believe that all people have the right to exist. And that Palestinians are also suffering with a great crisis. And that there are other Jewish scholars who will sit here and say the same,” she added. “I’m done talking about this, you can move on.”

The Women’s March lost the support of the Democratic National Committee and a host of other prominent liberal groups this week after Mallory defend her past praise for Farrakhan during a Monday appearance on The View.

“I didn’t call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric. I called him the greatest of all time because of what he’s done in black communities,” Mallory said Monday when asked about a February social-media post in which she labeled Farrakhan the “GOAT.”

More than half of the roughly 500 partner organizations that supported the nationwide Women’s March demonstration last year have abandoned the organization ahead of this year’s protests, which will take place Saturday in Washington, D.C. and other cities across the country.