MARCH 8, 2019
At the center of the controversy is CNN’s Oliver Darcy who has spearheaded efforts to have Infowars and Alex Jones banned.
But who is Oliver Darcy?
A deeper look into his past reveals how the establishment is using both sides to purge the right of blue-collar conservatives.
By Gregg Re, Catherine Herridge
The sources said the sessions covered a slew of topics addressed during the public hearing before the oversight committee — including the National Enquirer’s “Catch and Kill” policy, American Media CEO David Pecker and the alleged undervaluing of President Trump’s assets.
COHEN DOCS UNDERCUT CLAIMS TRUMP LAWYERS MADE EDITS TO ALTER CRUCIAL TIMELINE
But, Republicans have raised concerns with the sessions, with Ohio Rep. Mike Turner sending a letter to Cohen’s team on Wednesday demanding answers.
‘No matter how much witness tampering you do, you’re not going to find collusion,’ the Republican tells ‘Fox & Friends’ after sources say President Trump’s former personal attorney met with the Intelligence Committee chairman for hours before testifying.
Turner specifically asked for confirmation of Cohen’s contacts, if any, “with Democratic Members or Democratic staff of SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence], COR [House Committee on Oversight and Reform], or HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] prior to his appearances before House and Senate committees last week” — as well as the lengths of such contacts, their locations and who exactly was involved.
“These questions are important for the public to understand whether or not they were watching witness testimony, a public hearing, or well-rehearsed theater,” he wrote.
During last month’s seven-hour public hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Cohen hesitantly acknowledged, under questioning from Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, that he had spoken with Schiff “about topics that were going to be raised at the upcoming hearing.”
But, he did not elaborate on the discussions, which Fox News is told extended significantly longer than the seven hours that the public hearing itself lasted.
One by one, during the dramatic hearing, Cohen fielded questions on precisely the same topics that the sources told Fox News he discussed with Schiff’s staff during the sit-downs in New York.
For example, in response to questioning from Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., Cohen discussed the purported practice of paying for the rights to news stories harmful to Trump, only to bury them.
“I was involved in several of these catch-and-kill episodes,” Cohen told Maloney, “but these catch-and-kill scenarios existed between David Pecker and Mr. Trump long before I started working in 2007.”
Records provided by President Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen on his false 2017 congressional testimony undercut allegations that Trump attorneys made critical edits to alter the timeline of the Trump Tower negotiations in Moscow; Catherine Herridge reports.
Cohen went on to testify that Pecker, whose company publishes the National Enquirer, had paid $30,000 to a former Trump World Tower doorman who alleged he had information about a supposed love child fathered by Trump. The former Trump fixer asserted that Trump was concerned also about the “treasure trove of documents” Pecker had that could implicate him.
Further, Cohen was asked by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., “To your knowledge, did the president ever provide inflated assets to an insurance company?”
Cohen replied: “Yes.”
COHEN SUES TRUMP ORGANIZATION FOR MILLIONS IN LEGAL FEES
“Who else knows that the president did this?” Ocasio-Cortez pressed.
“Allen Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari,” Cohen said, referring to the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer and other key Trump associates. “You deflate the value of the asset and then you put in a request to the tax department for a deduction.”
Cohen also brought documents that he claimed proved Trump “inflated” his assets in order to obtain loans from Deutsche Bank.
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, testified last month before the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Asked about the revelations by email, a House Intelligence Committee spokesman defended the Schiff staff’s pre-hearing discussions with Cohen.
“We are running a professional investigation in search of the facts, and we welcome the opportunity to meet with potential witnesses in advance of any testimony to determine relevant topics to cover in order to make productive use of their time before the Committee,” spokesman Patrick Boland told Fox News.
“Despite this professed outrage by Republicans, it’s completely appropriate to conduct proffer sessions and allow witnesses to review their prior testimony before the Committee interviews them — such sessions are a routine part of every serious investigation around the country, including congressional investigations.”
Schiff was asked about the frequency of his contacts with Cohen on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” this weekend, and gave the number “seven” — but Schiff did not distinguish between the number of his own contacts with Cohen and the committee staff’s interactions with him.
Schiff asserted, “The extent of my contact was just inviting him to testify and also trying to allay his concerns about the president’s threats against him and his family … but our staff certainly sat down to interview him, and that’s what you do in any credible investigation.”
A source close to Schiff claimed some details about the staff meetings were “not accurate” but did not point to specifics.
On Cohen, a source familiar with his closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee would not comment directly on the number and substance of the meetings between Cohen and the Schiff staff, but said more broadly that Schiff “pledged to release the full transcript of Mr. Cohen’s eight hour testimony, at which point Mr. Cohen will be vindicated and others will be implicated.”
By Hank Berrien
Tlaib blustered, “We saw record turnout in an election year, where people wanted to elect a jury that would begin the impeachment proceedings to Donald Trump. We want to work on these economic justice issues, racial justice issues and everything. But guess what? There is a wall there, and a constitutional crisis that is not going to [let us] do our jobs as American Congress members to push a lot of these agendas forward,” according to The Hill.
Bragging about the new Democratic members of Congress, Tlaib added, “This is the largest class since Watergate. This is a class — a diverse class — that comes … with a sense of urgency to act. To act to hold corporations accountable, to act in holding President Trump accountable, to act to really try to see real reforms, even within our congressional process. This is an emergency for many of us.”
On the night after she joined the House of Representatives, Tlaib cried, “People love you and you win. And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Momma, look you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘Baby, they don’t, because we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the mother***er.’”
President Donald Trump is a direct and serious threat to our country. On an almost daily basis, he attacks our Constitution, our democracy, the rule of law and the people who are in this country. His conduct has created a constitutional crisis that we must confront now …
We already have overwhelming evidence that the president has committed impeachable offenses, including, just to name a few: obstructing justice; violating the emoluments clause; abusing the pardon power; directing or seeking to direct law enforcement to prosecute political adversaries for improper purposes; advocating illegal violence and undermining equal protection of the laws; ordering the cruel and unconstitutional imprisonment of children and their families at the southern border; and conspiring to illegally influence the 2016 election through a series of hush money payments …
We are also now hearing the dangerous claim that initiating impeachment proceedings against this president is politically unwise and that, instead, the focus should now shift to holding the president accountable via the 2020 election. Such a claim places partisan gamesmanship over our country and our most vulnerable at this perilous moment in our nation’s history. Members of Congress have a sworn duty to preserve our Constitution. Leaving a lawless president in office for political points would be abandoning that duty …
This is not just about Donald Trump. This is about all of us. What should we be as a nation? Who should we be as a people? In the face of this constitutional crisis, we must rise. We must rise to defend our Constitution, to defend our democracy, and to defend that bedrock principle that no one is above the law, not even the President of the United States. Each passing day brings more pain for the people most directly hurt by this president, and these are days we simply cannot get back. The time for impeachment proceedings is now.
Tlaib is not the first House Democrat to pursue impeaching Trump. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) has introduced articles of impeachment; Rep. Al Green (D-TX) has promised to reintroduce a motion to impeach the president.
READ MORE: DONALD TRUMP RASHIDA TLAIB
Tuesday, March 05, 2019
Waters has hardly modulated her impeachment rhetoric, even when other Democrats did so in the lead up to the 2018 midterm elections.
Now that House Democrats have launched a sweeping probe into the President’s affairs, Waters is doubling down on her wild claims regarding Trump’s alleged misdeeds.
“Obstruction of justice reality show: Firing Comey, sending coded messages to Manafort & others that he has the power to pardon; lying abt Trump Tower meeting; threatening Cohen’s in-laws; attempting to destroy Mueller,” Waters tweeted. “What more do we need to know? Impeachment is the only answer.”
“For the faint of heart, who’ve been waiting for every “t” to be crossed and every “i” to be dotted, now is the time to demonstrate your patriotism. Support impeachment!”
During recent comments following the testimony of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, Waters claimed to believe the Trump Foundation is actually a tax evasion front.
“There’s one thing that I think should not be missed that came out of the hearing, and that is how [Trump] directed payments into the foundation to keep from paying taxes,” Waters said. “I think there’s more than we know about at this time.”
“I think that’s an area that should be looked at because I think the foundation has been used by him to avoid paying taxes on money he’s earned.”
A new Quinnipiac poll found that only 35 percent of Americans favor impeaching the President, while an overwhelming 59 percent oppose the idea.
By Guy Benson
(2) The Senate panel’s parallel probe has been much more professionally handled, with sober bipartisan leadership, but its resources and powers are incomplete, so its ‘no collusion‘ findings cannot be considered conclusive. (3) What really matters are the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team. Mueller is so important, in fact, that there has been constant hand-wringing about his investigation being canceled or disrupted by Trump. But now that it’s reportedly almost Mueller Time, there appears to be a concerted effort in anti-Trump circles to redefine the battlefield. No matter what Mueller’s verdict may be on Russian ‘collusion,’ we’re increasingly told, Trump is already guilty:
That first tweet is a CNN analyst preparing his audience for a potential letdown, preemptively pivoting to focusing on already-known facts if Mueller doesn’t drop new bombshells. The second is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking member (who is slowly backing away from his call for his state’s governor to resign) not exactly contradicting Chairman Burr, but basically arguing, “what we already know is bad enough.” Perhaps most importantly, the new leader of the House committee that would instigate the impeachment process against the president went on television over the weekend and declared that he’s seen enough to conclude that its “very clear” the president has committed an impeachable crime:
Amid last week’s Michael Cohen hearings, a number of liberals, journalists, and Republicans observed that the proceedings felt like the first step toward removing Trump from office. Byron York argues that Democrats have now officially tipped their hand:
Think what you will about the reasons — calling an investigation a “witch hunt” is obstruction of justice? — but Nadler sounded less like a man weighing the evidence than a man who has has made up his mind.Given that, Nadler’s ABC interview led to a question: President Nixon was threatened with impeachment for obstruction of justice. President Clinton was impeached for obstruction of justice. Why is Nadler, who heads the committee in the House that originates articles of impeachment, not moving forward with impeaching President Trump right now? … Nadler’s talk with ABC was the clearest indication yet that Democrats have decided to impeach Trump and are now simply doing the legwork involved in making that happen. And that means the debate among House Democrats will be a tactical one — what is the best time and way to go forward — rather than a more fundamental discussion of whether the president should be impeached…
Other House Democrats are sending similar messages. “There is abundant evidence of collusion,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said on CBS Sunday…So now the Democratic plan is coming into sharper relief. The impeachment decision has been made. Various committee chairs are moving forward in gathering and organizing the formal justification for removing the president. The timing decision is still up in the air, as is an overarching communications plan — selling impeachment to the American public, or more specifically those Americans who don’t already support impeachment…whatever the stated rationale, impeachment is on.
The goalposts are moving before our very eyes. But Allahpundit seems to agree that the Axios-floated grand strategy from House Democrats is not to pull the trigger on the I-word over the next year-plus, but rather to execute a slow-bleed of politically-damaging pain over that time span. The idea would be to cripple and overwhelm Trump’s presidency all the way up to election day, then let the voters oust him from office. “The smart play is to do what they’re doing, launching an open-ended investigation that will dig up plenty of dirt on Trump and grind on to Election Day next year,” he writes. “Instead of passing articles of impeachment and seeing them die in the Senate, they’re probably going to produce a Democratic counterpart to the Mueller report, laying out everything they find in gory detail and publishing it next summer so that the Democratic nominee and the media have a treasure trove of oppo to use against Trump.” If I were a betting man, that would be my wager, too. I’ll leave you with Trump-skeptical conservative writer David French attacking the Steele Dossier (the credibility of which was further eroded by Cohen’s testimony):
Gowdy did, in fact, make this point, and Russia’s 2016 electoral interference undoubtedly deserved very serious scrutiny. But a shady and unverified Clinton/DNC oppo research scheme serving as a primary driver of key elements of the investigation is a very bad look — and it almost certainly fed a pernicious spiral of mutual mistrust between Trumpworld and the DOJ that has convinced people on each side that the other is dangerous and must be stopped. The toxicity in American politics right now is palpable and worrisome. By the way, not all Democrats agree that Nadler’s sprawling, open-ended investigation is a smart move:
By Ian Hanchett
Murphy said, “[T]here are so many different ways that you can check the president. The free press checks the president, the judiciary checks him, and Congress checks him. But you are also right that the ultimate check is impeachment. And what we know is that the president’s behavior has already crossed the threshold of what was brought for impeachment before the House in the Nixon administration and the Clinton administration. In fact, he crossed those thresholds in the first weeks or months of office. And so, that is another means, if these other means fail, to control this president.”
By Robert Bridge
The predominantly left-leaning US media has just entered its third consecutive year of open warfare against President Donald Trump. This non-stop assault risks aggravating political passions to the point where ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ snowballs into something completely beyond our ability to control. Like full-blown Civil War.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post, one of most prominent serial producers of partisan agitation, publishedan article entitled, ‘In America, talk turns to something unspoken for 150 years: Civil War’. The piece, which deftly places Democrats above the fray, opens with the following whiff of grapeshot:
“With the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III reportedly nearly complete, impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election ramping up … there’s talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war,” the Bezos-owned paper forewarned.
With a level of audacity and self-righteousness that has become a trademark of the Left, not once did the article float the possibility that just maybe the mainstream media is complicit in the ongoing deterioration of political discourse, or that the Democrats are just as much to blame as the Republicans for the political fallout that now presents a grave risk to the Republic.
As many knowledgeable Americans will openly admit, battle lines have been drawn across the political and cultural frontier. This division is perhaps most conspicuous on social media, where friends and family who disagree with our political worldview get the ‘nuke option’ and are effortlessly vanquished (‘unfriended’) with the push of a button. This is a worrying development. The real danger will come when Americans from both sides of the political divide stop talking and start erecting electronic barriers around their political belief systems. Not even family members are spared from the tumult; just because people share the same bloodline does not automatically mean they share the same political views. America, though still green behind the ears, may understand that fact better than many other countries.
The United States has taken part in its fair share of military conflicts over the years, but its deadliest war to date has been the one that pitted Americans against each other. The so-called Civil War (1861-1865), waged between the North and South over the question of Southern secession from the Union, resulted in the death of some 620,000 soldiers from the Union and Confederate armies (and possibly as high as 850,000, according to other estimates).
Put another way, more Americans died in the Civil War than in all of the country’s other conflicts combined. For a country that has been at war for much of its existence that is a sobering fact.
With that historical footnote in mind, the mainstream media should better appreciate its responsibility for presenting an objective and balanced depiction of modern events. Yet nothing today would suggest that is the case. One need only look at the way it has blotched recent politically charged events – like the Covington High School and Jussie Smollett scandals, not to mention the ‘Russia collusion’ hoax – to say that something is seriously out of whack inside of the Fourth Estate. The muzzled mainstream media has simply lost its mind over Donald Trump and can no longer perform its duties with any discernible amount of objectivity.
Indeed, the US leader continues to serve as a piñata for the agenda-driven media, which takes daily swings at him and his administration – and despite the fact that his popularity remains very high among voters. Only on the fringes of the media world, in the far away land of Fox News and Breitbart, will the reader find level-headed reports on the American president. This is not to suggest, of course, that Trump is beyond criticism. Not at all. There is a lot not to like about the 45th president. At the same time, however, to assume that Trump and his administration is the root of all evil, as the media would lead us to believe, is not only ridiculous, it is outright dangerous.
With no loss of irony, a good example of the media bias against Trump can be found in the very Post article that frets over the outbreak of another Civil War. While everyone knows that it takes two to tango, you would never guess that by reading this piece. In the sheltered world of the Liberal-dominated media, ‘tango’ is a solo event where the political right is portrayed as engaged in a dance with itself, while the political left watches – innocuously, of course – from the sidelines.
Michael Cohen, for example, Trump’s turncoat personal lawyer who committed perjury by lying to Congress, was quoted high in the article as saying, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”
Now that is certainly rich. Ever since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, Washington has been consumed by the Mueller investigation, and amid mindless chatter that Trump is an illegitimate president slated for impeachment. In other words, the last thing that can be said about the Democrats is that they facilitated a “peaceful transition of power.” In fact, they have hobbled Trump and his administration ever since he entered the Oval Office.
Another pro-Liberal voice dragged into the Civil War story was Robert Reich, who served on Barack Obama‘s economic transition advisory board. The Post linked to an article Reich wrote last year where he posited the fictional scenario where an impeachment resolution against the president is enacted, thus kicking off mass civil strife on the direct command of dear leader.
“Trump claims it’s the work of the ‘deep state’”, according to Reich’s febrile imagination. “Sean Hannity of Fox News demands that every honest patriot take to the streets. Right-wing social media call for war. As insurrection spreads, Mr. Trump commands the armed forces to side with the ‘patriots.’”
“The way Mr. Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest,” Reich continued. “That’s how low he’s taken us.”
Now that is some world-class chutzpah. In fact, it is the same self-righteous, ingratiating tone that weaves itself throughout the Post article. In keeping with the mainstream media’s non-stop narrative, Trump and the Republicans are blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the country, while the Democrats come off as little angels trying to piece the fractured country back together.
As already mentioned, Donald Trump is certainly not above criticism. Far from it. But for the mainstream media to place all of the blame for the current political malaise at the Republican’s door is about as responsible as lighting up a cigarette inside of a Chinese fireworks factory. The US media has an unmistakable agenda, and that is to make damn sure Trump is not reelected to another term in 2020. To that end, it has shown a devious willingness to betray all journalistic ethics and standards, which has the effect of increasing the political temperature to boiling point. It then points the finger of blame at the political right for the accumulated pile of pent-up tensions, which are ready to ignite at the first spark.
If the mainstream media continues to slavishly serve just one political master over another, it will only have itself to blame for what comes next. Its prejudiced and agenda-based reporting is a disgrace and really nothing short of a bona fide national security threat.
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March 3, 2019
As reported earlier this took place at Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
According to a press release from the activist group Indecline, over two-dozen “men and women of color and members of the LGBT community” placed leashes and custom made dog collars on white men in red M.A.G.A. hats and walked them on all fours up and down Hollywood Boulevard on Sunday.
The group says that their “performance” was based on Cardi B’s recent Twitter battle with Tomi Lahren, in which the crass rapper told the right-wing pundit, “Leave me alone, or I’ll dog walk you.”
“The project, entitled ‘Hate Breed’, speaks to race relations in America, specifically the patience exhibited by those most affected by racism and bigotry and their willingness, despite having the greatest right to anger, to walk their attackers down a path to empathy,” the press release states.
The men wore dog collars with tags that each had the name of a “racist white man.”
Hollywood Blvd is a popular destination for tourists and families, whom the artists clearly did not consider when staging their inappropriate stunt.
This “art” comes at a time when assaults on Trump supporters appears to be on the rise.
Last month, a Massachusetts woman was charged with assault and battery after hitting a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat off of a stranger’s head at a Mexican restaurant.
Later in the month a Turning Point USA activist was attacked by a deranged leftist at UC Berkeley. Earlier that week, conservative activist Scott Presler reported that he was hit with projectiles and had gay slurs shouted at him while out holding a pro-Trump sign and advocating for the president’s policies. The same morning, a woman locked her Twitter account after posting a video of herself harassing an elderly man in a thrift store over his Make America Great Again hat.
A couple also had a gun pulled on them while shopping at Sam’s Club because they were wearing MAGA hats.
None of these incidents have received mainstream media coverage.
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