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Politics: Are you tired of it too? M. Mobley, M.D.

By on June 23rd, 2017

Day in and day out, one cannot pick up a newspaper or tune-in to TV news without reading or hearing about the latest effort by Democrats to bring down our duly-elected 45th president, Donald Trump. The vitriol that accompanies their efforts shows a level of incivility I haven’t seen before in my eight decades of life.

It was well established by many writers, yours truly included, that on Election Day, November 8, 2016, voters would uncomfortably choose between two seriously flawed candidates for president – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – and one of them would win.

Looking back at Ronald Reagan’s campaign against Jimmy Carter, a sitting president in his fourth year presiding over the government of a country in economic straits worsened by high inflation, Reagan asked the voting public, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” There was general agreement that folks weren’t any better off and Carter was limited to one term.

Once the 2016 GOP and Democratic Conventions were over and presidential campaigns begun in earnest, the Reagan question resurfaced, highlighting President Obama’s 8 years in office, during which he had been unable to turn around high unemployment and the wretched economy he had inherited, despite Democratic control of both Houses of Congress augmented by a filibuster-proof Senate during his first two years. He did manage to double our nation’s debt, however. Hillary Clinton, a flawed candidate to begin with, chose a flawed platform to run on, which amounted to four more years of the Obama administration.

While Hillary was in essence saying that our country’s stagnation was the “new normal,” Trump, also a flawed candidate but a successful business man not of the Washington elites, was vowing to “Make America Great Again” by increasing jobs, restoring the economy, and resurrecting the American way. It was a winning platform.

In the short time Trump has been in the White House, he has had moderate success making good on some of his campaign promises. In addition to improving the economy and gaining jobs, the Trump agenda is also aimed at restoring the vision of the Founding Fathers, guaranteeing individual freedom and rights under a non-intrusive government while requiring individual responsibility under government that is protective of rights and fiscally responsible. And that is what the Democrats are up in arms about.

Democrats seem to see our future being assured by greater government dependency, bigger government and America being more like Western Europe. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations our country has been on a slow slide down that slippery slope. The Trump agenda seeks to put on the brakes, and the electorate appears to agree with him if recent special Congressional elections to fill empty seats are a yardstick.

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How the Dems Burned $40 Mil to Lose 4 Elections and Scam Supporters $30 million for 1%. Daniel Greenfield

By on June 23rd, 2017

“It’s a bellwether for what the Democratic Party is going to be about,” Democratic National Committee boss Tom Perez boasted.

That was back in March and the Dems had just begun their frantic spending spree in Georgia’s Sixth. By the time it was over, Jon Ossoff, an awkward immature hipster who didn’t even live in the district, had raised $23.6 million and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had burned through another $5 million. Other groups threw in around $2.6 million to achieve absolutely nothing.

$31 million had been spent and wasted on history’s most expensive congressional election. And the Dem experts congratulated themselves that they had lost by a smaller margin than in the past.

They had spent $30 million more than in their first special election in Kansas to gain a whole 1%.

Just as after their previous special election defeats, the charts and graphs came out comparing their performance to those of previous elections. Never mind that turnout differs dramatically during presidential and special elections. Or that spending $31 million to lose by 6 percent is a disaster.

What the Democrat Party really was going to be about was setting piles of money on fire.

In Montana, a quixotic bid by Rob Quist had garnered $5 million in donations and another $1 million in outside spending. Even after a stunt by a Guardian reporter caused the Republican candidate to lose many of his newspaper endorsements, Quist barely ended up with 44 percent.

The special election frenzy began in Kansas when the left decided that Rep. Mike Pompeo’s open seat might be winnable. After Trump’s victory, angry Dems decided to pour money into the campaign. Democrat James Thompson raised around $832,000, but Republican Ron Estes won by 7 percent.

Or single digits.

And the gold rush was on. The special election margin was compared to Trump’s margin of victory. The entrails and tea leaves were read. And the consultants declared it a referendum on Trump.

Millions from blue states flowed into special elections in red states to prove that Trump had lost public support. The deeper theory behind this spending spree was that setbacks in safe districts would lead the GOP to abandon Trump. And that played into feverish conspiracy theories about the 25th Amendment or Senate Republicans turning on Trump in time for impeachment that had gone mainstream on the left.

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Losing Again, For the Same Reason Jon Ossoff’s loss in Georgia shows that the Democrats have failed to broaden their appeal. Henry Olsen

By on June 23rd, 2017

Democrats are despondent over Tuesday’s loss in the special election for Georgia’s sixth congressional district seat. Though this part of metro Atlanta is historically Republican, the national Democratic leadership had convinced itself that voter dislike of President Trump was enough to pull normally loyal Republicans into the Democratic column. They were wrong, and until they learn the error of their ways, they will continue to lose.

Winning the sixth congressional district was always going to be an uphill climb for Democrats because of the district’s strong GOP tilt. While Trump received a much lower share of the vote there than did 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, he still beat Hillary Clinton, 48.3 percent to 46.8 percent; most of the remaining votes came from disaffected Republicans and independents who supported Libertarian Gary Johnson or wrote in other candidates, such as conservative Evan McMullin. Getting those voters to support a Democrat was a major challenge.

Democratic nominee Jon Ossoff had to do three things to win: mobilize and turn out Clinton voters; convince some Trump-voting Republicans either to back him or, more plausibly, stay home out of distaste for GOP nominee Karen Handel; and win about 60 percent of voters who had gone for Johnson or McMullin last year. Ossoff clearly accomplished his first task of motivating the Democratic base. Turnout was extraordinarily high for a special election: more than 259,000 people voted, compared with the 331,000 who voted in the presidential election. Ossoff’s 48.1 percent take was higher than Clinton’s showing. Voter apathy was not a problem for Democrats.

Ossoff clearly failed, though, to convince Trump voters to cross over or stay home. One reason Ossoff came so close to winning the district in the first round is that many Republicans, perhaps baffled by the dozen or so candidates, didn’t vote. But in the runoff, motivated by a clear choice between just two candidates and buoyed by millions of dollars in party get-out-the-vote money, GOP voters showed up: turnout in rock-ribbed Republican Cobb County was 79 percent of the proportion in November 2016, on par with turnout in DeKalb County, the bluest part of the district. Though Handel had barely made it to the runoff by winning just 20 percent of the vote in the first round, she easily consolidated her base when the choice came down to “R” or “D.”

Ossoff’s loss ultimately stemmed from his failure at the third task: persuading independents and never-Trumpers that he was the better choice. Third-party voters cast 4.9 percent of the vote in 2016, but Ossoff outperformed Clinton by only 1.3 percent. Since partisan turnout seems to have been about equal, this implies that Ossoff won by only about a quarter of the third-party supporters’ votes. Democrats hoped that he would do better, based on polls showing Trump’s low approval rating (less than 40 percent) among voters in the district. But Trump’s approval ratings were no better last November, and he still won because people who did not like either Trump or Clinton voted for him by a large margin. Apparently these mostly Republican voters remain willing to choose the Trump-backing GOP devil they know over the Democratic devil they don’t, even if they don’t like Trump himself.

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The Real Georgia Lesson GOP success in Congress can overcome liberal Trump loathing.

By on June 22nd, 2017

Democrats thought they could pick up a GOP-leaning House seat by turning Tuesday’s special election in Georgia’s sixth congressional district into a referendum on the Trump Presidency. The lesson of the GOP’s four-percentage-point victory is that Republicans can preserve their congressional majority despite doubts about Donald Trump—if they deliver on their agenda.

Republicans staved off what the press would have portrayed as a catastrophe and portent of a GOP wipeout in next year’s midterm elections. And they did so with a weak candidate in Karen Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state who lost bids for Governor in 2010 and U.S. Senate in 2014.

Democrats thought they could steal the seat because it is full of the upscale, college-educated Republicans who dislike Mr. Trump. While Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was re-elected last November by 23 points, Hillary Clinton came within two points of beating Mr. Trump. Democrats—who, by the way, favor limits on campaign spending—poured $31 million into the district to turn out liberal voters.

Yet Republicans managed to turn out their voters by portraying Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old former congressional aide who doesn’t live in the district, as a foot soldier for Nancy Pelosi. Conservative voters showed they aren’t ready to hand the House back to Mrs. Pelosi whatever their doubts about Mr. Trump.

One immediate benefit is that the victory might deter some Republican retirements that would create more open seats in 2018 if they fear a Democratic wave. But Democrats are still likely to turn out in big numbers next year. The challenge for Republicans will be to give their voters a reason to match that liberal enthusiasm. That’s all the more reason to put accomplishments on the board that voters can see on health care, taxes and more.

As for Democrats, the defeat underlies the contradiction between the total resistance to Mr. Trump needed to win a primary and the centrist coloration needed to flip a GOP-leaning seat in areas like northern Virginia (held by Barbara Comstock ) and Upper Hudson Valley New York ( John Faso ). Mr. Ossoff energized progressives by promising “to make Trump furious.” After the primary he tacked to the middle by running as a fiscal conservative and against tax increases on the rich.

But by then Republicans were already defining him as a Pelosi pawn. It didn’t help that so much of his cash came from liberal redoubts like San Francisco or that he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Some groups on the left like MoveOn.org are now saying that the lesson from Mr. Ossoff’s defeat is that Democrats need to run as pure left-wing populists in 2018.

This left-center tension in the Democratic Party is likely to intensify, especially if the GOP racks up some policy victories, which could propel Democrats to nominate candidates who are too far left for the districts they need to win in 2018. But Republicans can’t afford complacency, and their best defense against an anti-Trump wave is legislative success.

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Is Kamala Harris the Future of American Politics? We should all hope not. By Jonathan S. Tobin

By on June 17th, 2017

Democrats may not have gotten everything they wanted out of a series of recent televised Senate Intelligence Committee hearings that ostensibly concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. But as the party of the ‘resistance’ shifted its focus from alleged collusion between Moscow and Republicans to President Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice, the hearings also produced a new heroine for the anti-Trump Left.

Senator Kamala Harris emerged from confrontations with the three national intelligence chiefs and Attorney General Jeff Sessions with her reputation enhanced. Her manner of attack was praised and she was acclaimed as a victim of sexism on the part of her colleagues. Harris may lack the talent to fulfill her not-so-secret desire to emulate Barack Obama by parlaying a single unfinished term in the Senate into a successful presidential bid. But there’s no question that on the strength of these hearings, she can lay claim to a style that is the future of American politics: Her combination of incivility, bullying, and victimhood makes her the perfect reflection of our current moment.

Harris’s new celebrity stems from two incidents in which Republicans criticized her manner of questioning witnesses during an Intelligence Committee hearing. Her rapid-fire interrogation of Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein prompted Senator John McCain and then committee chair Richard Burr to reproofs in which she was cautioned to allow the witnesses to answer her questions. Harris clearly tried to bully both Sessions and Rosenstein, cutting them off as they spoke and not giving them a chance to speak before she moved on to a new insinuation. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the mainstream media or the liberal Twittersphere. As the New York Times headline on the incidents put it: “Kamala Harris Is (Again) Interrupted While Pressing a Senate Witness.”

The essence of the surge in support for Harris was not so much that she had scored points at the expense of either Rosenstein or Sessions as that she had been a victim of sexism if not racism. The headline of another, later Times article proclaimed that what had happened illustrated, “The Universal Phenomenon of Men Interrupting Women.” The intervention of Senators McCain and Burr was said to betray male contempt for women. Others, noting Harris’ multi-racial heritage, characterized the senators’ pushback as a defense of white privilege against the heroic efforts of minorities to be heard.

The exchanges turned Harris into a liberal star on Twitter, where an avalanche of support for her as a black women assailed by white men came crashing down in the days that followed. Sessions’s simpering confession that she was making him nervous was the icing on the cake; to her fans, it made her the newest “nasty woman,” a cause célèbre. Before the day was done, she was sending out a fundraising appeal to supporters that grandiloquently promised, “The women of the United States Senate will not be silenced when seeking the truth.”

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Counter-terror Lessons from America’s Civil War By David P. Goldman

By on June 5th, 2017

The essay below first appeared a year ago in The Asia Times, under the headline, “Why the terrorists are winning the intelligence war.” There’s a tried and true American approach to suppressing terrorism, and it worked quite well during Gen. Sherman’s 1863 Kentucky campaign and Gen. Phil Sheridan’s subsequent reduction of the Shenandoah Valley. We don’t have to be particularly smart; we merely have to do some disgusting things. Sherman and Sheridan suppressed sniping at Union soldiers by Confederate civilians by burning the towns (just the towns, not the townsfolk) that sheltered them. In other words, they forced collective responsibility upon a hostile population, a doctrine that in peacetime is entirely repugnant, but that in wartime becomes unavoidable. By contrast, the peacetime procedure of turning petty criminals into police snitches has backfired terribly. No doubt we will learn that the perpetrators of tonight’s horror at London Bridge were known to police, like the Manchester Arena suicide bomber and most of the perpetrators of large-scale terrorist acts in Europe during the past several years. (Update: “At Least One London Bridge Terrorist Was a ‘Known Wolf'”) The remedy is time-tested and straightforward. We merely require the will to apply it.

Why the terrorists are winning the intelligence war

Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.

The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015.
The terrorists, in other words, are adding insult to injury. By deploying police snitches as suicide attackers, terrorists assert their moral superiority and power over western governments. The message may be lost on the western public, whose security agencies and media do their best to obscure it, but it is well understood among the core constituencies of the terrorist groups: the superiority of Islam turns around the depraved criminals whom the western police send to spy on us, and persuades them to become martyrs for the cause of Islam.

These attacks, in other words, are designed to impress the Muslim public as much as they are intended to horrify the western public. In so many words, the terrorists tell Muslims that western police agencies cannot protect them. If they cooperate with the police they will be found out and punished. The West fears the power of Islam: it evinces such fear by praising Islam as a religion of peace, by squelching dissent in the name of fighting supposed Islamophobia, and by offering concessions and apologies to Muslims. Ordinary Muslims live in fear of the terror networks, which have infiltrated their communities and proven their ability to turn the efforts of western security services against them. They are less likely to inform on prospective terrorists and more likely to aid them by inaction.

The terrorists, in short, are winning the intelligence war, because they have shaped the environment in which intelligence is gathered and traded. But that is how intelligence wars always proceed: spies switch sides and tell their stories because they want to be with the winner. ISIS and al-Qaeda look like winners in the eyes of western Muslim populations after humiliating the security services of the West.

As a result, western European Muslims fear the terrorists more than they fear the police. The West will remain vulnerable to mass terror attacks until the balance of fear shifts in the other direction.

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Hillary Clinton is Delusional, Hateful and Insane Daniel Greenfield

By on May 29th, 2017

New York Magazine’s love letter to Hillary is an embarrassment even to an already biased media. Its thesis is that Hillary Clinton is a victim of sexism. It’s littered with absurd photos of a Hillary in yellow striding around campaign headquarters stiffly sorting through mail from her fans. And it gives Hillary a forum to be as delusional as she wants.

But this was an election that was, in many ways, about anger. And Trump and Sanders capitalized on that.

“Yes.” Clinton nods. “And I beat both of them.”

Okay then.

She argues, “what I was doing was working. I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin.”

All that voter suppression in a state she chose not to campaign in. A state that Bernie Sanders also won. A state with a 6.3% black population. But let’s not forget the FBI and the Russians who prevented black people in Wisconsin from voting.

When I ask Clinton about the eagerness to blame her and her alone for the election result, she gets impatient. “Oh, I don’t know, you’d have to talk to a psychologist about it. There’s always, what’s that word … Schadenfreude — ‘cut her down to size,’ ‘too big for her own britches’ — I get all that. But I don’t see this being done to other people who run, particularly men. So I’m not going to engage in it. I take responsibility, I admit that I’m not a perfect candidate — and don’t know anybody who was — but at the end of the day we did a lot of things right and we weathered enormous headwinds and we were on our way to winning. So that is never going to satisfy my detractors. And you know, that’s their problem.”

Yes, you would have to talk to a psychologist to understand why Hillary and New York Magazine assume a candidate shouldn’t take the full blame for an election defeat. It’s clearly sexism.

Having been on the receiving end of the right’s anger for decades, Clinton knows from relentless hate. They still chant “Lock her up” at Trump rallies, just as they did at the New York Stock Exchange as she gave her concession speech. “You know, these guys on the other side are not just interested in my losing, they want to keep coming after me. I mean, think about that for a minute. What are they so afraid of? Me, to some extent. Because I don’t die, despite their best efforts. But what [really drives them] is what I represent.”

Maybe it’s because Hillary Clinton committed a series of crimes. But maybe she has a point. It’s what she represents.

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McCain: Mueller Appointment Means We’ve Reached ‘Scandal’ Stage By Michael van der Galien

By on May 22nd, 2017

Leave it to John McCain to pour fuel on an anti-Trump fire. Said the senator yesterday on Fox News:

With the appointment of Mr. Mueller, we are now at that stage of a scandal. And now the question is how is it handled. Is it handled the way Watergate was where drip, drip, drip with every day, more and more?

Or do we handle it like Ronald Reagan handled Iran-Contra? It was a scandal. He fired people. He went on national television and said we made mistakes, we did wrong, and we’re not going to do it again and the American people let him move forward.

Here’s the video:

For all the talk of scandal, McCain and his establishment friends are glossing over the major detail: there is absolutely no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia to win last year’s election.

Yes, he’s a bit too friendly toward Putin for my taste, but attempting diplomatic relations with an adversary does not a traitor make. If it did, Hillary Clinton should’ve been jailed years ago when she gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a bizarre “reset” button in 2009.

McCain and the rest of the irrational Trump opposition — there’s a difference between being critical of the man, as I am, and being unable to assess his performance reasonably — are making fools of themselves with talk of “scandal” and “Watergate.”

Trump Derangement Syndrome is clearly an even worse malady than Bush Derangement Syndrome, the version that infected so many liberals in the first decade of this century. And that’s saying something.

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A Republican Survival Strategy The best defense against Trump scandals is to pile up policy victories.

By on May 20th, 2017

Republicans in Congress can’t control President Trump’s rolling controversies, but they are getting plenty of bad advice on how to handle them. Democrats and Never Trumpers agree that the GOP should denounce Mr. Trump, try to remove him from office, and if that fails wait for the Pelosi Democratic Congress to arrive in 2018. This is supposed to be requisite punishment for trying to work with a duly elected if deeply flawed President.

We trust Republicans will reject this counsel of suicide, because there is a better way: Get on with passing the agenda they campaigned on. The Trump investigations will proceed at the same time, and Republicans can respond to new facts as they develop. Whatever happens on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Republicans have an obligation to fulfill their reform mandate while they still have the political power to do so.
***This has the added advantage of being good for the country. The U.S. has struggled with subpar economic growth for more than a decade, and Republicans won in part because they said they’d do better.
Tax reform and deregulation are prime opportunities to unlock the growth and business investment that increase middle-class incomes. On Obama Care, the GOP can provide relief from surging insurance premiums and diminished choices by replacing the failing entitlement with a more market-based system.

Confirming conservative judges would correct for President Obama’s progressive tilt on the federal bench and perhaps restrain the runaway administrative state. And rebuilding the military is crucial to U.S. security in a world of increasing threats.

Going on policy offense is also the best defensive politics. Democrats want to talk about Mr. Trump all the time because they know this gives the public the impression that nothing else is happening in Washington. Paralysis is their strategy.

If Republicans start to move on policy, they automatically change at least some of the political conversation away from Mr. Trump. Debating tax cuts sure beats discussing Michael Flynn. Democrats would have no choice but to respond on the issues, and even the media would have to cover the tax and health debates. OK, maybe not the media, but that would also mean less relentless opposition on policy.

Speed is also increasingly vital as Mr. Trump’s difficulties mount. Perhaps he’ll recover if the Russia charges are overblown, but the news could also get worse and the media will play up every detail as potential impeachment fodder. Republicans can’t wait for Mr. Trump’s approval rating to rise.

Health care and tax reform would ideally both pass this year so their impact will be visible in 2018. The tax cut should be effective immediately so it doesn’t delay investment decisions as businesses wait for lower rates to kick in later; no phase-ins as with the 2001 George W. Bush tax cut.

Republicans also have to assume they’ll contest next year’s midterms with an unpopular President and a Democratic base eager to repudiate him by retaking Congress. Republicans are bound to suffer some collateral damage if the Trump scandals are still florid, but that’s all the more reason to have something else to talk about. The best defense against scandal by association with Mr. Trump is to point to accomplishments that Republicans and independents will support. That’s also the only way to get enough GOP voters to the polls.

Democrats and the Never Trumpers will continue to berate Republicans for not being sufficiently anti-Trump, but Republicans shouldn’t apologize for trying to work with a GOP President on shared goals. His character flaws aren’t theirs. Republicans in Congress ran on their own agenda, and House Republicans won millions of more votes than Mr. Trump did. They have every right to follow through on that agenda.

It would certainly help if Mr. Trump behaved better and controlled himself, but Republicans can’t count on that. Their best option is to plow ahead anyway and present Mr. Trump with legislation to sign. That’s what Democrats did when they controlled Congress while they investigated Richard Nixon, and they piled up significant policy wins.

No one knows how the various Trump investigations will play out, but Republicans can adapt and criticize or defend as new facts arise. Whatever happens, they’ll be in a stronger position if they don’t squander their current majorities as Democrats hope they will.

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Dallas County Whistleblower Tapes Democrat Campaign Worker Describing Voter Fraud Schemes By Debra Heine

By on May 18th, 2017

What is being described as one of the biggest voter fraud investigations in Texas history is currently unfolding in Dallas.

For the past couple of months prosecutors in the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office have been looking into allegations of voter fraud. Their investigation accelerated last week when more criminal and voter fraud allegations stemming from the May 6 election emerged. The D.A.’s office last week filed a notice of investigation of criminal conduct which reads in part:

The Dallas County Elections Department has in excess of 700 “Mail-In Ballots” that are directly linked to applications assisted by “Jose Rodriguez,” or are suspicious in nature.

Workers say the volume of complaints about questionable mail-in ballots has been “off the charts.”

“It’s totally frustrating,” said Dr. Pat Stephens of West Dallas. “You know, we all feel violated.”

Stephens is speaking out. She is still bothered about her signature being forged on an mail-in ballot application.

She’s among the 60 to 90 Dallas residents who investigators say have come forward over the past month, saying they received mail-in ballots which they did not request.

Stephens says red flags were raised when a suspicious man came to her home, saying he worked for Dallas County and wanted to pick up the ballot.

“I got a knock on my door and the guy was saying that he was coming to pick up the mail-in ballots and I told him, ‘Well I didn’t order one,'” she tells WFAA.

“Our forefathers fought for us to have this privilege, and for somebody to come along at take it away from us,” she continued.

The probe is beyond frustrating, not only for residents. It’s also keeping District Attorney Faith Johnson’s staff busy.

“There have been persistent rumors of voter fraud and messing around with mail-in ballots for years. But to the extent that I’ve been involved in Dallas County, this is off the charts,” Assistant District Attorney Andy Chatham said.

Dallas County prosecutors have been trying to discover the identity of the man who signed perhaps hundreds of the mail-in ballots, the mysterious “Jose Rodriguez.” Now a whistleblower has come forward, saying he knows who the culprit is.

Before the election, Sidney Williams, 33, made secret audio recordings of his interactions with Jose Barrientos, a campaign worker who suggested on tape that he pay off someone inside the county elections office to find out when mail-in ballots get sent out. “He’s not supposed to but yeah,” Barrientos told Williams. “But then you’ve got to drop a hundred or two or three. Whatever it is. He can’t do it for free.”

Barrientos also suggested in a phone call with Williams that he was the mysterious Jose Rodriguez, admitting that the signatures on the absentee ballots look just like his own. “You’re talking to the master, bro,” he boasted.

Williams shared the tape with the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office and WFAA ABC. According to his Facebook page, Williams also had an interview with the FBI.

Barrientos back-pedaled furiously when asked for comment: “I don’t do that stuff. I know that looks bad, me and Sidney talking s*** or trash. That looks bad. And I know it does, but that’s just talk,” he told WFAA.

Williams explained how he thinks Barrientos does it:

“He goes in there. He speaks to this county employee. The county employee tips him off by ZIP code, lets him know which precincts are dropping,” explained Williams. “Either he’s stealing them from the mailbox, yanking them from a little old lady who probably has them, says he’s going to assist her in a specific way for a specific candidate.”

In the secret recordings, Barrientos gave county prosecutors a lot to work with:

Williams: What do we do, chase the mailman or how does that work?

Barrientos: Your homeboy that’s at the elections office. He tells you when the f*****g ZIP codes are dropping. He’ll tell you like 75221 fixing to hit. Today. They’re going out.

Williams: He tells you that?

Barrientos: He’s not supposed to, but yeah. But then you’ve got to drop a hundred or two or three. Whatever it is. He can’t do it for free.

Barrientos also strongly suggested he has forged applications for mail-in or absentee ballots.

Williams: Where did you get this from?

Barrientos: Umm. You ask too many questions. What are you trying to be a cop or something?

Williams: No.

Barrientos: I just got a copy of it. That’s the first absentee ballot that was filed as a fraudulent absentee. CONTINUE AT SITE

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