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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Left-Wing Group Organized Barr Attack Letter The letter is just another destroy-Trump mission funded by leftists to deceive and inflame the public. Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/17/leftwing-group-organized-barr-attack-letter/

The headline sounded ominous: “Former Justice Dept. Lawyers Press for Barr to Step Down,” blared an article in Sunday’s New York Times. More than 1,100 former federal prosecutors signed a letter to condemn Attorney General William Barr and encourage Justice Department employees to tattle on the nation’s top lawman if they see anything naughty.

The lawyers were outraged at Barr’s decision to override “line prosecutors,” including two holdovers from the Robert Mueller investigation, who had recommended an excessive sentence against Roger Stone. “Barr’s actions in doing the President’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words,” they wrote. “Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice’s reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign.”

Times reporter Katie Benner, trying to make the stunt look like a legitimate grassroots effort, attributed the letter to Protect Democracy, which she described as a “nonprofit legal group.” But Protect Democracy is not an organic activist group spontaneously created by high-minded legal experts alarmed by Trump’s alleged flouting of the rule of law. Protect Democracy was launched in early 2017 as part of an extensive anti-Trump operation managed by a leftwing tech billionaire: Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. This is who is behind Protect Democracy and a number of other nonprofits formed to destroy the president.

President Trump slaps back when Obama tries to take credit for his economy By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/president_trump_slaps_back_when_obama_tries_to_take_credit_for_his_economy.html

It’s been fascinating watching the Democrats try unavailingly to address the fact that the economy under President Trump has been rocket-fueled. That effort reached its apex on Monday when Barack Obama put out a tweet boasting about how it was his Recovery Act, which he signed on February 17, 2009, that not only saved the economy but laid the groundwork for its current strength. The responses to his tweet were swift, especially from President Trump.

One of the things that truly riles the Democrats is that President Trump has so much to crow about. And crow he did during his State of the Union address, making sure to distinguish his economic accomplishments from the Obama malaise.

During his speech, Trump boasted about 7 million new jobs, which is 5 million more than projected in the Obama years; the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years; the lowest unemployment rates ever for minorities; the lowest overall unemployment for women since WWII; the record number of working Americans; the contrast between food stamp rolls under Obama (10 million added) and under Trump (7 million subtracted, plus 10 million leaving welfare); the contrast between the workforce under Obama (300,000 Americans left it) versus Trump (3.5 million joined it); the 47% gain in wealth for the bottom half of wage earners, a result of their rising wages (“a blue-collar boom”); the highest ever real median household income; the soaring stock market; and the unprecedented growth in consumer confidence.

The Roger Stone Double Standard By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/roger-stone-double-standard/

For all the hullaballoo around the Stone case, he still faces prison — while his partners in dishonesty are lauded as patriotic heroes.

Whether Roger Stone, the loopy, self-aggrandizing political operative, deserves nine years in Supermax for obstructing an investigation into Russia–Donald Trump “collusion” is debatable. Whether the powerful men who helped create the investigation that ensnared Stone have been allowed to lie with impunity is not. They have.

Only a few days after prosecutors melodramatically left the DOJ after Trump tweeted a defense of Stone and the DOJ subsequently revised its sentencing recommendation to be more lenient, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe was informed that he wouldn’t face charges. McCabe faced an inquiry into whether he broke the law when he denied to investigators that he had leaked information concerning a Clinton Foundation probe to the press.

McCabe went on CNN, where he is now paid to lecture citizens about the decaying state of American democracy, and claimed that being branded a liar was “one of the most sickening and demeaning experiences of my life.”

It’s a confusing statement — not merely because the IG report found that McCabe, once entrusted with immense power, had repeatedly lied under oath, but because McCabe himself had admitted to lying and apologized for it.

Was he lying about lying? Maybe he’ll tell us more in his next book.

As McCabe cozies up with his new colleagues, think of Michael Flynn, a decorated general and former national-security adviser, still mired in a four-year legal battle for allegedly misleading the FBI — not under oath — in the Russia-scare investigation that went absolutely nowhere.

Political Trials Should Be Tried Outside of the Beltway Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/17/political-trials-should-be-tried-outside-of-the-beltway/

The justice system situated in our nation’s capital is toxic, destructive, and demonstrably unfair. Barr should move any trial out of Washington—West Virginia or North Carolina, perhaps?—and at least give the accused a fighting chance.

Attorney General William Barr is enlisting U.S. attorneys outside the Beltway either to investigate or review several high-level cases related to President Trump, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. Barr has asked federal prosecutors from “far-flung offices,” as the Post described it, located in remote places such as Connecticut and Chicago, to handle these sensitive matters.

Barr’s legal shuffling of the deck includes the egregious prosecution of Lt. General Michael Flynn; the investigation into Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign; and new material collected by Rudy Giuliani detailing alleged corruption in Ukraine possibly tied to U.S. politicians.

Given the accusations from Trump foes that Barr is doing Trump’s bidding from his corner office at the Justice Department, this otherwise rational move prompted convulsions of panic in the nation’s capital. Some distraught observers grimly warn that transferring politically charged cases out of the most politically obsessed town in the world is just what Joseph Stalin would do.

David Laufman, a former Justice Department official and Obama donor involved in the agency’s 2016 exoneration of Hillary Clinton, claimed he was “baffled” as to why any federal lawyer would accept such an assignment. “‘Why would they be associating themselves with investigations that are evocative of the manner in which repressive regimes throughout history have behaved?’” Laufman told Post reporters.

FBI Unlawfully Passed Classified Intel to Steele It’s like a playground game of telephone, only big players used each other to confirm bogus intel. Nate Jackson

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68638-fbi-unlawfully-passed-classified-intel-to-steele-2020-02-17

Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer hired by Hillary Clinton and the DNC through GPS Fusion to dig make up dirt on Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, is back in the news, along with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI. And the circular corruption just gets crazier.

“A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau’s most closely held secrets, according to unpublicized disclosures in the recent Justice Department Inspector General report on abuses of federal surveillance powers.” So begins the latest revelation of deep-state corruption, courtesy of Eric Felten and RealClearInvestigations.

Felten continues, “Much of the public reporting regarding this meeting has focused on the information Steele shared with the FBI — and the many reasons agents should have doubted its credibility. But largely neglected has been the opposite side of the equation — what the FBI told Steele. The Inspector General reports that the bureau revealed to him much of the highly classified information that it had gathered regarding alleged Trump-Russia links.” That included information on Trump campaign staffers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn — information known only by a select few FBI officials.

DOJ Furor Latest Attempt To Help Democrats Hide Spygate, Undermine Elections By Joy Pullmann

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/17/doj-furor-latest-attempt-to-help-democrats-hide-spygate-undermine-elections/

When the cockroaches are all scurrying across the floor, you can be sure that somebody shone a light on their nest.

Another spin operation appears to be afoot to thwart Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the Russia collusion hoax and others perpetrated by high-ranking federal bureaucrats. The eye of the hurricane this weekend has focused on the Department of Justice, with news Friday that an assistant U.S. attorney declined to press charges against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for documented lying to federal investigators under oath.

Becket Adams explains that

In 2016, McCabe, who is now a paid CNN contributor, leaked sensitive details of the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation to the press. He then misled members of the FBI’s Inspection Division when they interviewed him about the leaks, according to a February 2018 Justice Department inspector general report. McCabe provided investigators with four misleading statements, three of which were while he was under oath.

Giving false statements to federal investigators is a crime. In fact, it is the same crime for which the Justice Department went after President Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

On Friday, news broke that Barr “has appointed the top federal prosecutor in St. Louis to review the criminal case against Michael Flynn – former national security adviser to President Donald Trump,” according to Reuters. This all occured in the same week an assistant U.S. attorney recommended up to nine years in prison for former Trump campaign associate Roger Stone on the grounds that he lied about gossiping about what WikiLeaks knew about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The corruption of Barack Obama – How to wake the media up about TRUMP J.B Shurk

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/how_to_wake_the_media_up_about_trump.html

The national media are flabbergasted that Americans won’t consent to President Trump’s removal from office.  How can so many of his compatriots be indicted and so many government bureaucrats condemn his behavior without giving them what they desire: self-assurance that they are “on the right side of history”?

If they ever wish to understand, the critical starting point in their education is not the current presidency, but the last one.  Although there are numerous ways to describe the present divide in America, one of the simpler is thus: those Americans who take Barack Obama at his word that his presidency was historically “scandal free” and those Americans who see the unrelenting stream of Deep State attempts to take down President Trump as a continuing coup and the natural extension of an unethical, criminal, and at times unconstitutional Obama presidency.

For those of us in the latter camp, Barack Obama presided over a corrupt administration and used his historic election as the first non-white American president as a get-out-of-jail-free card to abuse his power while silencing his critics.

Whataboutery is frowned upon now that President Trump is in office, but if President Trump had done a tiny percentage of what Obama orchestrated, he actually would be in federal prison.  Imagine what would have happened if President Trump had done the following:

‘Obama Personally Asked the FBI to Investigate Someone on Behalf of George Soros,’ Says Alan Dershowitz By Megan Fox

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obama-personally-asked-the-fbi-to-investigate-someone-on-behalf-of-george-soros-says-alan-dershowitz/

In an interview with Breitbart News, Alan Dershowitz claimed he is in possession of documents that will show Barack Obama asked the FBI to investigate an unnamed person on behalf of George Soros. Those documents, he says, will come out during a lawsuit that will be filed in the future. Dershowitz said the only difference between Trump and other presidents influencing the Department of Justice is that Trump is open about it while the others “whispered.”

“I have some information as well about the Obama administration, which will be disclosed in a lawsuit at some point, but I’m not prepared to disclose it now, about how President Obama personally asked the FBI to investigate somebody on behalf of George Soros, who was a close ally of his,” he said. Dershowitz was responding to the over-the-top hand-wringing going on in the media after Donald Trump tweeted out his disgust at the sentencing recommendation of up to nine years for Roger Stone, which was announced by prosecutors at the Justice Department.

“We’ve seen this kind of White House influence on the Justice Department virtually in every Justice Department,” continued Dershowitz. “The difference is this president is much more overt about it. He tweets about it. President Obama whispered to the Justice Department about it.” Dershowitz then went on to give historical context and claimed that while not advisable, it’s perfectly constitutional for the president to completely control the Department of Justice, as has been done before. “The president could make a decision to really decide to control the Justice Department…Thomas Jefferson did it.”

Listen below.

Reaching Peak Progressivism The frightening visions of the new peak progressives will ensure the reelection of Donald Trump, as well as either the likely end of themselves—or else a collective dystopian nightmare. Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/16/reaching-peak-progressivism/

In 2020 we have finally hit peak progressivism. The adjective “peak”—apex or summit— is often used to describe something that has reached its maximum extent but thereafter will insidiously decline—like supposed U.S. domestic oil production in 2000 when more oil was purportedly taken out of, rather than still in the ground. While the idea of peak oil in the days before fracking and horizontal drilling proved vastly premature, we likely are witnessing something like “peak progressivism” today.

By that I mean the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the accompanying progressive agenda now have reached an extreme—beyond which will only result in the steady erosion of radical ideology altogether.

The French Revolution hit “peak” coerced egalitarianism with the Jacobin takeover and so-called Reign of Terror. After all, when you begin guillotining fellow travelers on charges they are counterrevolutionaries and begin worshiping a new atheist secular power “Reason,” institutionalized as Robespierre’s “Cult of the Supreme Being,” you have mostly reached the limits of political radicalism and are into the territory of the nihilistic, if not the maniacal and absurd—with a rendezvous with Napoleon on the horizon.

From 2009 through 2016, Barack Obama recalibrated the Democratic Party’s liberalism into progressive radicalism. He opened the border and all but dismantled existing immigration law. Sanctuary cities sprang up with impunity. Executive orders bypassed the Congress. The Iran Deal ignored the Senate’s treaty-making responsibilities. Obama sought to nationalize healthcare. The concept of “diversity” replaced affirmative action, by redefining racial oppression as distinct from historical grievance and economic disparity and instead lumping together 30 percent of the population as nonwhite, and thus antithetical to the new buzz construct of “white privilege.” Fast and Furious, the surveillance of the Associated Press reporters, Benghazi, the weaponization of the IRS, and the use of CIA, FBI, and DOJ to seed the spurious Steele dossier were all written off as proof of the “most scandal free” administration in memory.

A Two-Year Terror Campaign Against One Small GOP Office Anyone who wants to take away your rights can also put a rock through your window.Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/two-year-terror-campaign-against-one-small-gop-daniel-greenfield/

Early Saturday morning, a bearded perpetrator in a hooded jacket, wearing gloves, smashed the glass door and windows of the Humboldt Republican headquarters with rocks. He poured an unknown liquid into the storefront office before escaping on a bike into the streets of Eureka in the pre-dawn hours.

There was one obvious clue. The bike had a giant BERNIE sticker on it.

When police caught up to the alleged perpetrator, Michael Valls attempted to escape on his bike, then he tried throwing the bike at the cops, and, when he was finally taken into custody, gave authorities a false name. But police caught him with the Trump flag that he had stolen from the vandalized office.

The Bernie Sanders supporter was charged with burglary, felony vandalism, attempted arson, resisting arrest, and providing a false name. The chemical liquid he had poured inside the office turned out to be flammable. Bail was set at only $25,000, and Valls was out of prison by Sunday. It is California after all.

And in an atmosphere of rising radical violence, maybe this story wouldn’t be so extraordinary.

But this wasn’t the first time that this happened to the Humboldt GOP HQ. It was the sixth time.

Not in a decade, but in only two years.