Posted on 05/15/2020 5:53:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
For Americans hoping Senate Republicans might finally engage the Russia collusion hoax seriously, last night’s interview of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell by “Special Report’s” Bret Baier was a tremendous disappointment. McConnell better figure out quickly that if he doesn’t hold the Resistance accountable for the Russia hoax that harmed his party and the entire country for many years, he won’t have a majority in the next term. If it helps to motivate him, he should remember that not having the majority in the next term means he won’t get to confirm judges, an issue he hopes will be his defining legacy.
For three years, a false and dangerous narrative of treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election was woven throughout the media and government. This conspiracy theory harmed international relations, domestic governance, and the lives of many individuals. It ended when a special counsel probe was finally forced to admit in 2019 that there was no evidence that any American had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, much less anyone close to President Donald Trump.
Debunking this false narrative was for many years left to a very small band of reporters and congressional investigators. Most of the attention-getting congressional work was done on the House side, including the revelation that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had secretly paid for the false narrative and that there was serious abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in how the government secured wiretaps to spy on Trump campaign affiliates.
Despite being controlled by Republicans throughout the ordeal, the Senate was largely absent from the fight with the exception of just a few senators — Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin being the primary investigators whose oversight work and document demands paid off. And their work should not be underplayed.
It is due to them that the detailed texts got out about the anti-Trump machinations of FBI investigator Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. They sounded the alarm about Christopher Steele, author of the Clinton research, whom the media and government had falsely claimed was trustworthy. They detailed FISA abuse. They were concerned about the Flynn case from the very beginning, and fought with the FBI for information about it. They were also responsible for seeking information about the unmaskings that recently made the news. It all should have been much bigger news.
After the Russia collusion hoax helped Democrats win the House of Representatives in the 2018 election, the Senate needed to step up the fight. Yet McConnell didn’t prioritize the issue in any way. He never noticeably supported the senators or committees who were doing actual work. He instead deferred to Richard Burr of North Carolina, the ostensible head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which for years has in effect been run by Democrat Mark Warner.
Burr was a Russia hoaxer, threatening legislation to protect Robert Mueller, the Republican who was presented as heading the probe. When Mueller appeared before Congress to defend the special counsel report, he had very little knowledge of it and appeared extremely befuddled. Read more about the failures of the Senate Intelligence committee with regard to the Russia hoax.
Only yesterday, after Burr’s cell phone was seized by the FBI as part of its investigation into alleged insider trading, did he finally step down from chairing the committee. That committee’s major addition to the Russia collusion storyline was the arrest of a staff member for lying about leaks to the reporter(s) with whom he was having extramarital relations.
McConnell didn’t just whiff on the Russia collusion hoax investigation in general, he failed to investigate after the implosion of the Mueller probe, and he failed to investigate after the inspector general report showing the problems with how the Trump campaign was spied on. He appears ready to fail once again in the aftermath of the Mike Flynn case being withdrawn.
In last night’s interview, McConnell appeared not just uninterested but uninformed on the scandal of Democrats weaponizing the intelligence community for partisan gain. Baier asked McConnell to comment on the case of Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor who was a major victim of the Russia collusion hoax. Here’s McConnell’s limp response:
Well, If there were in fact misbehavior surrounding the Flynn case, the American public needs to know. And clearly that was the view of the attorney general. I gather it’s now in a rather unusual procedure of being reviewed by the district judge before whom the case was. I think we’re just anxious to get the facts. what actually happened. The American public needs to know; all of us would like to know. And one thing about Washington: you guys are so good at your job, truth always comes out, sometimes it takes a little longer than other times, but we’ll find out what in fact did happen.
Oh dear, where to begin. Let’s leave aside the blasé attitude McConnell has toward Flynn and those who went after him — the criminal leaks, the destruction of evidence, the failure to supply mandated exculpatory evidence, the campaign to undermine, and the game-playing with plea deals. Let’s focus instead on McConnell’s view that the media — yes, the media — are good at their job of uncovering the truth and that it’s their job to do that and not Senate investigators who are actually charged with oversight of federal agencies.
McConnell is shockingly wrong on both counts. The media are complicit in the hoax, as anyone with even the most modest knowledge must know, and the Senate is desperately needed in this fight. The Senate can subpoena records and compel testimony — holding hearings if necessary — to get to the bottom of the effort from inside the U.S. government to use a false and dangerous conspiracy theory that threatened the health and safety of the republic.
If that’s not the Senate’s business, what in the world is? And if the Senate majority leader won’t care even about how this scandal uniquely harmed Republican voters, then who will?
At the end of the interview, Baier asked McConnell if he agrees with President Trump that former President Obama should be called into a Senate hearing and whether he agreed with President Trump calling the scandal Obamagate. Obama’s personal role in the scandal was confirmed in additional documents released as part of the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss charges against Flynn. Here’s McConnell’s response:
Look, that will be up to [Judiciary Committee] Chairman [Lindsey] Graham to make those kind of decisions — I think he may have addressed it already. I’m not certain… Look, that would be up to Chairman Graham to determine how to handle this. I have a lot of confidence in him and he knows what he is doing and I’m going to follow his lead.
Graham took over the Judiciary Committee last year and is known for going on television to claim that he will investigate the Russia collusion hoax. His track record with actually investigating the Russia collusion hoax is extremely spotty. While Graham is good with funny aphorisms, his work ethic and focus are noticeably lacking. For a scandal as complicated as the Russia collusion hoax, both are desperately needed.
McConnell is praised throughout the Republican Party for his focus on confirming originalist judges to federal courts. It’s easily his greatest legacy, and one I wrote about at length in “Justice On Trial,” my book with Carrie Severino. But he should remember that he can’t confirm good judges if Republicans are not in the majority and if a stalwart person isn’t president to nominate them. Both of those key factors are threatened by his long-time lack of interest in holding Russia hoaxers accountable for what they did.
If McConnell and Graham want to confirm judges after November, they need to understand how viscerally outraged many Americans are by the spying and leaking scandal. They need to know that refusal to do anything about it will hurt Republicans, not Democrats, at the ballot box.
They should remember how once they got aggressive in pushing back on the campaign to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s life and reputation, it redounded to their benefit. Even in an election year where Democrats swept into the House majority, they picked up Senate seats by fighting for Kavanaugh and against the dirty tricks deployed against him and the voters who elected Republicans to the Senate and presidency. Channeling Republican anger in those hearings, at least by the very end, helped them.
They should remember that. They should know that the Republican base is every bit as angry about the Russia hoax as they were about Kavanaugh. And they should know that Americans who care about corrupt government are not seeing nearly enough effort coming from the Senate.
If McConnell doesn’t start demanding more be done to hold the Resistance responsible for its damaging and dangerous Russia collusion hoax, his party will lose, and he won’t confirm another judge in his lifetime.
Ms Hemingway writes some pretty good articles, but she is pretty damned naive! McConnell and Multiple Senators and Congressmen have Known About the COUP and were Actively Involved in it’s deployment or played an instrumental part in keeping it Covered Up.
WAKE UP MOLLIE, THEY WERE ALL IN ON IT!!!!
15 May: Fox News: Jordan accuses media of being ‘cheerleaders at interesting times’ in Michael Flynn investigation
by Charles Creitz; Gregg Re contributed to this report
VIDEO: THE MEDIA’S ROLE N ALLOWING FBI ABUSES
Rep. Jim Jordan: When you drain the swamp, the swamp fights back
https://www.foxnews.com/media/jim-jordan-media-cheerleading-michael-flynn-case
14 May: The Australian: Incorruptible Barack Obama’s halo in serious danger of slipping
By Gerard Baker, Columnist, The Wall Street Journal
A year ago, an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. For years, this claim had been trumpeted by news organisations, fed by statements and leaks from Obama administration officials, to make the case that Mr Trump might be some kind of agent for the Russians. James Clapper, Mr Obama’s director of national intelligence, told CNN in 2017, “He [Vladimir Putin] knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president.”
But recently published transcripts show that, at around this time, Mr Clapper told Congress in secret and under oath that he “never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting [or] conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Several other Obama aides said the same thing.
Then came the news that the justice department wanted to drop its case against Michael Flynn, Mr Trump’s first, short-lived national security adviser...
“Obamagate!”, President Trump tweeted this week in the wake of the new revelations. It won’t be that. The Obama-adoring press will never let their idol be held to the investigative standards that did for Richard Nixon 50 years ago. But we can at least hold off on the canonisation.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/incorruptible-barack-obamas-halo-in-serious-danger-of-slipping/news-story/5f092420cdbe8fc5947dfbf3cb039af6
I can’t imagine a scenario wherein top levels of the House and Senate weren’t aware that Obama and his minions were actively engaged in political spying WAY before the Russian Collusion hoax.
Mitch doesn’t want the “People” to know the truth, doesn’t want us to see how bad DC really is.
Hey Mitch, we need the new judges, agreed. However, “WE THE PEOPLE” CAN handle the truth. Can you handle it?
Mitch McConnell will do nothing, he is a swamp dweller.
I doubt if McConnell really cares whether he’s in the majority or minority. He probably actually likes being in the minority better, because being in the majority means that he has to actually do things. That’s why McConnell didn’t support Trump. He was expecting Clinton to win the presidency and the dems to take the senate as well. He and most congress critters are pathetic.
More likely, McConnell is aware of things that - in his view - simply cannot be allowed come out. The great game of "Let's Pretend we are still a Constitutional Republic" has to continue. But McConnell, like many other Republicans, sees Trump's bull-in-a-china-shop approach to managing political scandal as a bigger threat to the remnants of the Republic than Democrat knavery.
Yep, He will get elected for another 6 years, does he really want Schumer to be his boss for the remainder of his Senate career?
14 May: NY Post: Who, O, who can the Flynn leaker be?
By Lee Smith
One obvious route by which Obama would have been briefed on unmaskings of US persons was through Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. The list of Obama officials who asked for Flynn’s name shows that McDonough made one request on Jan. 5, 2017...
https://nypost.com/2020/05/14/who-can-the-flynn-leaker-be/
Tweet: Techno_Fog
Developing…
The INITIAL Flynn/Kislyak leak was not to David Ignatius – it was to WaPo reporter Adam Entous.
The leak came directly from “sources [who] saw a transcript and described it to [Entous].”
10 May 2020
We suspect the Flynn/Kislyak occurred around 1/5/17 - the same date Obama was allegedly briefed on the call by Clapper.
This date coincides with Entous reporting on other “intercepted communications” from Russian officials leaked to Entous...
Entous: “My sources start whispering to me that there were these mysterious communications” between Flynn and Kislyak.
This caused an internal WaPo discussion about whether to run the Flynn/Kislyak story.
To his credit, Entous didn’t find it newsworthy...
https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog/status/1259582006784032770
ignore the Howard Kurtz video, more details in text:
10 May: Fox News: Washington Post had ‘divisions in the newsroom’ over Flynn’s Russia calls, before publishing opinion piece
By Gregg Re; Fox News’ Brooke Singman and Wilson Miller contributed to this report
A transcript unearthed Sunday indicates that The Washington Post’s newsroom was deeply divided over whether it was even worth reporting that incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was speaking to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016 — before the Post published details in a column from an opinion writer who “was able to just throw this piece of red meat out there.”
On January 12, 2017, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that Flynn had phoned 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 asked whether Flynn violated the “spirit” of the Logan Act — an obscure statute that has never been used successfully in a criminal prosecution...
But, Ignatius wasn’t the only one at the paper with information on the communications. Washington Post reporter Adam Entous stated at a 2018 Georgetown Law panel discussion that “sources start whispering to me that there were all these mysterious communications between Michael Flynn, who was then the National Security Advisor designate for Trump and the Russian ambassador, Kislyak.”...
According to Entous, this information caused “divisions within the newsroom.”
The transcript of Entous’ remarks at Georegetown was first spotted Sunday by Twitter user Techno_Fog, who has extensively reported on the Trump-Russia investigation...
The leak to Entous may have occurred around Jan. 5, 2017 — when, according to former FBI Director James Comey, then-President Obama apparently was briefed on the Flynn call by then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/washington-post-michael-flynn-russia-divisions-opinion
great stuff from Greenwald:
14 May: The Intercept: New Documents from the Sham Prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn reveal broad corruption in the Russiagate Investigations
by Glenn Greenwald
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/14/new-documents-from-the-sham-prosecution-of-gen-michael-flynn-also-reveal-broad-corruption-in-the-russiagate-investigations/
Memo To Mitch McConnell: You Won’t Get Judges If You Don’t Hold Resistance Accountable For Russia Hoax
I can think of a lot better things to “ block” than judges. That’s the one thing he is doing well on
Mitch doesn’t really care about the judges.
It’s been his only way to fake support for the President.
“Let’s Pretend we are still a Constitutional Republic”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There’s a lot of that going around
McConnell is concentrating on judges precisely because he doesn’t expect Trump to win in November, and isn’t sure he’ll be majority leader come January. Fill the seats while he can.
If Trump wins again and with a Dem. Senate, all judicial nominees are DOA unless Trump tries to find “moderates.” So retiring judges won’t be replaced for two to four years.
McConnell wants Trump gone. If he stays, he’ll deal with it, grudgingly, and as little as possible. But if he goes, even better. He certainly won’t spend a nickels worth of political capital in defense of Trump. He only shut down impeachment because he rightly saw that if they kicked Trump out it would have been the end of the GOP as a national party.
Calling them Congress Critters just makes them sound cute. Those darn congresscritters, what are they up to now? (hahahahaha) Call them what they are, Congressmen, Congresspeople, Senators, Representatives, maybe add some adjectives like criminal or swamp-dwelling.
bump for later
Trump could let the positions stay empty then and not nominate judges. He’s already got younger conservatives in place now so when the older lib judges age out, Trump can let those positions stay stagnant and give a posited future Dem dominated senate nothing to do.
Holding some stupid hearing won’t “hold anyone accountable”, there were about 500 Bengazi hearings. Judges on the other hand are actually important.
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