Liberals Turn On Mueller, Accuse Him Of Being Too Stupid To Find Trump Guilty Of Everything

By Joseph Curl

Special Counsel Robert Mueller was the darling of the liberal intelligentsia for the past two years, but as soon as he released his long-awaited report that ended up clearing President Trump of all charges that he colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election, liberals turned on him. Hard.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who has made a career of appearing on liberal cable stations alleging all kinds of criminal activity by Trump and his campaign team, quickly said Mueller was wrong.

“It was a mistake to rely on written responses by the president,” Schiff said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “That’s generally more what the lawyer has to say than what the individual has to say.” Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee, said Mueller should have interviewed Trump under oath.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews, the guy who always got a thrill up his leg whenever he saw former president Barack Obama, also thought Mueller must be kinda dumb.

“Maybe he missed the boat here,” Matthews said of Mueller. “Why was there never an interrogation of this president? We were told for weeks by experts, ‘You cannot deal with an obstruction-of-justice charge or investigation without getting the motive.’ … How could they let Trump off the hook?”

Well, Chris, a few days ago you were singing the praises of the special counsel, now he’s “missing boats”?

Uber liberal Cenk Uygur, host of online news show The Young Turks, wasn’t going to let some stinkin’ report color his world. “Let me be clear, I CONCEDE NOTHING!” he wrote on Twitter. “If #MuellerReport didn’t look into Trump’s business ties with the Russians before the elections and didn’t look into his secret meetings with them after the election, then this is an epic debacle that looked into the exact wrong things.”

HBO talk show host Bill Maher agreed. “Did the Democrats put too much trust in the Mueller report? Because I don’t need the Mueller report to know he’s a traitor. I have a TV,” Maher told his panel of guests on his show — apparently referring to Trump (although by now, liberals are beginning to consider Mueller a traitor to their cause).

“Comedian” Chelsea Handler said: “I will admit my feelings for Mueller are conflicted now and my sexual attraction to him is in peril, but I still believe there is a lot more to come, and we must all march in the streets if we don’t see that report.”

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The Washington Post detailed the back-biting in a piece headlined, “For Democrats, the Mueller report turns their politics upside down.”

Democrats put their faith in Mueller. Now they are questioning how and why he did what he did. Should he have forced the president to answer questions in person, rather than in writing? Why didn’t he make a judgment on obstruction, rather than turning it over to the attorney general to make perhaps the most important call of the investigation? Did he interpret his mandate too narrowly? The second-guessing, still at a low level, reflects the frustration among Democrats and opponents of the president who already had connected dots that Mueller found not conclusive.

Soon, the charges will emerge that Mueller, who was once appointed head of the FBI by (gasp) George W. Bush, was in the bag for Trump all along. And of course, after the Mueller report was released, exonerating Trump of all those collusion allegations, Democrats simply moved on, joining together to collectively demand the full release of the report and all evidence gathered.

Which is what made the tweet by former FBI director James Comey‘s tweet so fantastic.

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Uh, Jimbo, you gotta back up a bit. A little more. There, don’t you see it? It’s not just trees, it’s a forest!

President Trump Bashes ‘Illegal Takedown That Failed,’ Hints That Republicans Will Investigate The Hoaxers

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President Donald Trump was magnanimous in victory as the Robert Mueller investigation formally cleared him of Russia collusion and obstruction of justice, according to attorney general William Barr. Trump hinted that investigators will now look into “the other side,” as Rep. Devin Nunes prepares to probe the Democrats who cooked up the media hoax in an effort to divert attention from their Uranium One dealings with the Russian government.

Trump told reporters that the idea of Russia collusion is “the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” while White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said that Trump and his supporters are “vindicated” and Rudy Giuliani trolled Adam Schiff with a call for an apology.

“It’s a shame that the country had to go through this,” President Trump said.

The Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who set up Don Trump Jr. for a meeting in Trump Tower as part of a Fusion GPS plot was operating out of the Washington offices of Cozen O’Connor, a law firm run by an anti-Trump former Obama administration official whose super PAC donated to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential election.

Veselnitskaya’s work from the Cozen O’Connor office provides more evidence of a Democrat and establishment Republican effort to set up the Trump campaign for a future Russian collusion case. Veselnitskaya was allowed into the United States by the Obama Department of Justice while the former Obama official who runs Cozen O’Connor publicly warned then-candidate Trump that if he became president he would be investigated by the DOJ for contacts with foreign leaders. Veselnitskaya reportedly had dinner meetings with Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson the day before she met in Trump Tower and also the day after she went inside Trump Tower.

Big League Politics has confirmed that a Cozen O’Connor partner who lives in the same apartment building as James Comey’s friend Daniel Richman — who leaked classified information to the press on Comey’s behalf — spoke with Richman during the period that Comey and the Fusion GPS team were trying to obtain FISA warrants on Trump Tower.

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Let’s break down the facts of an Obama administration official’s involvement in the Trump Tower plot:

Russian and U.S. citizen Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet military veteran, was present at Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower after leading a lobbying push supposedly to repeal the Magnitsky Act. Akhmestshin is believed by insiders to be linked to Russian government intelligence, a fact that the Washington Post seized on when reporting that he met with Don Jr. and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower. A nonprofit group focused on promoting Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya’s cause to lawmakers actually hired Cozen O’Connor, which the law firm confirms.

The Washington Post reported (emphasis added):

“In the spring of 2016, as the presidential race was heating up, Akhmetshin and lobbyists he hired sought meetings on Capitol Hill to make their case against the sanctions law. Akhmetshin hired former Democratic congressman Ron Dellums, along with a team of lobbyists from the law firm of Cozen O’Connor.
Steve Pruitt, a business colleague speaking on Dellums’s behalf, said his involvement was brief and ended when he determined that Congress was unlikely to change the law.

In June, after visiting Trump Tower in New York, Veselnitskaya came to Washington to lend a hand in the lobbying effort.

She attended a meeting of the team at the downtown offices of Cozen O’Connor, where she spoke at length in Russian about the issues but confused many in the room, who had not been told previously about her involvement, according to several participants.”

Washington Post passage ends

Cozen O’Connor managing partner Howard Schweitzer is listed here on a DOJ form from an investigation into the breaking of lobbying laws by Russians trying to repeal the Magnitsky Act — which was just a front to get Russians in the room with Don Jr. We know now that Natalia Veselnitskaya was actually operating out of the Cozen O’Connor offices.

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Schweitzer worked as general counsel for the Export-Import Bank under George W. Bush and was chief operating officer of the TARP bailout program under both Bush and Obama from 2008-2009.

“In October 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson appointed Howard as the first COO of TARP. In this position, Howard led program execution and built the TARP infrastructure. He served as a key point person regarding the financial crisis through the presidential transition and continued to serve as TARP COO under Secretary Timothy Geithner until August 2009,” reads Schweitzer’s Cozen O’Connor bio.

“He served as chief operating officer of the TARP in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations,” reads Schweitzer’s bio for a Politico piece he wrote in August 2016 headlined “7 Reasons Why Trump Would Hate Being President.”

Schweitzer’s virulently anti-Trump piece for Politico tries to make the case that Trump was “sabotaging his own bid for the White House.” Schweitzer said that if Trump became president then “He’ll be investigated to death” by Congress and the Justice Department for his business dealings and “relationships with foreign leaders.”

The narrative was being set.

The Philadelphia-based Cozen O’Connor law firm also has a political action committee that donated to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, in addition to Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Martin O’Malley. In the 2018 election cycle, the Cozen O’Connor PAC donated more money to Hillary Clinton’s dormant campaign.

Here is Veselnitskaya seated behind Obama ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul at a June 2016 congressional hearing focused on Russia.

Cozen O’Connor’s connections to the anti-Trump “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot are wide-ranging, and show up in unexpected places.

James Comey’s friend, Columbia University professor Daniel Richman, leaked classified information that Comey gave him. During this leaking period, Richman was apartment-building neighbors with a partner at the Cozen O’Connor law firm that strategized with Fusion GPS operative Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian plant who set up Don Jr. in Trump Tower.

Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, led by Glenn Simpson, were part of John Brennan and Peter Strzok’s CIA-led “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot aimed at President Donald Trump and the Trump campaign.

“Yes, he is my neighbor,” Amy Wenzel, a partner at Cozen O’Connor, confirmed in a phone conversation with Big League Politics, confirming that they spoke. They live near each other in a Brooklyn high-rise.

The Washington Post’s release of Trump Tower documents shows the crowd surrounding non-sexual honeypot Natalia Veselnitskaya. The crowd of conspirators knew they were damaging Trump by setting up the meeting.

The Post confirms British-citizen music promoter Rob Goldstone’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he described the conspirators’ push to get the meeting despite the fact that they knew it would create trouble for the Trump campaign.

The Post reports:

“Rob Goldstone told the committee that his client, the Russian pop star and developer Emin Agalarov, had insisted he help set up the meeting between President Trump’s son and the lawyer during the campaign to pass along material on Clinton, overriding Goldstone’s own warnings that the meeting would be a bad idea.

“He said, ‘it doesn’t matter. You just have to get the meeting,’ ” Goldstone, a British citizen, testified.

The intensity with which Agalarov and his father, the billionaire Aras Agalarov, sought the Trump Tower meeting, which has become a key point of scrutiny for congressional inquiries and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, was revealed in more than 2,500 pages of congressional testimony and exhibits released by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning.”

Washington Post passage ends

Natalia Veselnitskaya is also inextricably linked to the case against Paul Manafort.

The Russian attorney partner of Paul Manafort who was named as a defendant in new Robert Mueller charges is also linked to the Russian spy Natalia Vesenilskaya, who attended a meeting with Don Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower.

According to Mueller’s new charges, Manafort’s Russian partner Konstantin Kilimnik tried to intimidate or coerce witnesses in Manafort’s upcoming money laundering trial. That puts Konstantin Kilimnik at the center of the Mueller effort to find obstruction of justice in Trump-World (Mueller is giving himself until September 1 to try to find obstruction of justice, after finding no Russian collusion involving Trump).
So who is Konstantine Kilimnik? It turns out that Kilimnik is linked to Veselnitskaya, the Fusion GPS agent, according to Senate documents.

Here is how ProPublica described Kilimnik: “Konstantin Kilimnik: Manafort, who worked for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine before running Trump’s campaign, had an employee in Kiev named Konstantin Kilimnik who U.S. and Ukrainian authorities have suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence, according to Politico. Kilimnik served in the Russian army and learned English at a school that experts say often trains spies. Kilimnik denied being a spy to The Washington Post. Manafort had dinner with Kilimnik last August in New York, just before he was forced out of the Trump campaign amid growing questions about his work in the Ukraine, the Post reported.”

Documents reveal Kilimnik’s ties to Veselniskaya. Let’s take a look at United States Senate Judiciary Committee documents questioning Veselniskaya in October. Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Veselniskaya if she knew a handful of characters believed to be conspirators in the case.

Grassley and Feinstein specifically asked Veselnitskaya if she knew Konstantin Kilimnik.

Here is page 4 of the documents, naming Kilimnik:

Current Attorney General Jeff Sessions was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as senator from Alabama.

Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower provided some of the basis for warrants to surveil Trump Tower and for other FBI surveillance measures on the Trump campaign.

The fact that Veselnitskaya, a lawyer herself, was in the meeting with Trump Jr. and Kushner opened the president’s son and son-in-law up to being qualified as “target associations” for law enforcement under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed during the Bush administration.

Veselniskaya’s link to suspected conspirator Kilimnik is now coming under scrutiny.

GOP Congressman Releasing Transcripts From Closed-Door Testimonies Of Russia Probe Investigators

By ASHE SCHOW

U.S. Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) speaks during a House Rules Committee meeting at the U.S. Capitol February 25, 2019 in Washington, DC.

For the past two weeks, one GOP congressman has been on a mission to release transcripts of government officials who testified to Congress behind closed doors regarding the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, began releasing transcripts into the congressional record on March 8, starting with the closed-door testimony of Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr. Collins took to the House floor to explain his decision to release the transcripts, asking, is “the only ‘collusion’ among agency personnel who hated the president and started this investigation?”

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Collins said that the transcripts were “pertinent to a congressional investigation,” but the investigation was ended after Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives. Collins said further that the committee had given the DOJ time to review and redact information related to national security, but received little response from the department, so they made minor redactions and released the transcripts.

The 268-page transcript from Ohr’s testimony revealed that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British Spy Christopher Steele used Ohr to get their salacious claims about Russia collusion into the federal government. Ohr also revealed that, contrary to what House Intel Chairman Adam Schiff has said, the FBI had received reports from Steele as early as July 2016, not September 2016, as Schiff claimed.

Further, Ohr testified that Steele continued to feed him information after the ex-spy was no longer a credible source for the FBI. The FBI would interview Ohr as a backdoor to Steele’s intel.

Four days after releasing Ohr’s testimony, Collins returned to the House floor to publicly release former FBI lawyer Lisa Page’s testimony.

“The American people deserve to know what transpired in the highest echelons of the FBI during that tumultuous time for the bureau,” Collins said at the time.

The Page testimony was explosive, as she had not been publicly interviewed by the committee or anyone else after her text messages with then-fellow FBI agent Peter Strzok, with whom she was having an affair, were revealed.

In her testimony, Page revealed that the FBI’s Russia investigation really was an “insurance policy” in the unlikely event that Donald Trump was elected president, and that investigators had only a “paucity” of evidence in the beginning, which they still used to launch investigations into the president. Page also suggested that it was President Barack Obama’s Justice Department that essentially told the FBI not to find Hillary Clinton responsible for “gross negligence” in regard to classified information being sent over her unsecured, private email server.

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Two days after releasing Page’s testimony, Collins released Strzok’s. In his testimony, Strzok revealed that he deleted communications between himself and his mistress, Page, prior to being removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, but did so for “personal” reasons. He claimed to have deleted personal communications regarding his affair, but some of those messages showed anti-Trump sentiments and discussed the “insurance policy” of investigating “collusion” if Trump won the election.

On Sunday, Collins told Fox News host Maria Baritomo that he was planning to release more transcripts. Baritomo asked if Jim Baker, the former FBI lawyer who is now under criminal investigation for leaking to the media, was on the list for future transcript releases.

“There will be more transcripts released. Baker will be one that we’re looking at releasing,” Collins responded.

 

COHEN MET WITH SCHIFF STAFF FOR OVER 10 HOURS BEFORE HEARING – REPORT

Schiff team traveled to NY at least 4 times for Cohen meetings

By Gregg ReCatherine Herridge

President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen told House investigators this week that staff for Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., traveled to New York at least four times to meet with him for over 10 hours immediately before last month’s high-profile public testimony, according to two sources familiar with the matter — as Republicans question whether the meetings amounted to coaching a witness.

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.

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.”

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)

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.”

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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.”

 

Maxine Waters: “Impeachment the Only Answer”

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Dems swept up in impeachment frenzy

Tuesday, March 05, 2019

Democrats are on a warpath to impeach President Trump, with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) leading the charge alongside Congressional colleagues Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff.

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.

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“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!”

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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.

Hoo Boy: Are Democrats Planning to Move Forward With Impeachment, Regardless of What Mueller Finds?

By Guy Benson

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For months and months, we’ve been told the following — and not without good reason: (1)The House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation is hopelessly partisan and beset with intense infighting.

(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:CAP

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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 liberalsjournalists, 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:

UPDATE – Adam Schiff has apparently decided that Mueller’s verdict on collusion won’t be good enough. This is absurd:

Impeach-a-mania! Sen. Murphy: Trump ‘Already Crossed the Threshold of What Was Brought’ Against Nixon

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By Ian Hanchett

 

On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) stated that President Trump’s actions have “crossed the threshold of what was brought for impeachment” against President Nixon and President Clinton.

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.”

American Civil War 2: US media will have only itself to blame if all hell breaks loose

By Robert Bridge

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For the first time in years, the drumbeat of civil war has become audible across the United States. The nation looks destined to repeat history thanks to a media that is no longer able to objectively perform its job.

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.

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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.

@Robert_Bridge

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YOUTUBE DEMONITIZES ANTI-VAX CHANNELS AFTER BUZZFEED CONTACTS ADVERTISERS

YouTube Demonitizes Anti-Vax Channels After BuzzFeed Contacts Advertisers

BuzzFeed’s journalistic activism is reminiscent of CNN – which hounded advertisers to ‘unperson’ InfoWars founder Alex Jones last year

Zero Hedge – FEBRUARY 23, 2019

YouTube on Friday demonetized channels which promote anti-vax content, after BuzzFeed notified a spate of advertisers that their ads were being run alongside anti-vax videos, reports BuzzFeed. YouTube said that such videos fall under its policy prohibiting videos with “dangerous and harmful” content to be monetized. 

“We have strict policies that govern what videos we allow ads to appear on, and videos that promote anti-vaccination content are a violation of those policies. We enforce these policies vigorously, and if we find a video that violates them, we immediately take action and remove ads,” reads an emailed statement from YouTube to BuzzFeed.

Seven different advertisers said they weren’t aware their ads were appearing on videos like “Mom Researches Vaccines, Discovers Vaccination Horrors and Goes Vaccine Free,” which advocates against vaccinating children, and reached out to YouTube to pull the programmatic placements.

Their ads appeared on videos from channels including VAXXED TV, LarryCook333 (a proponent of StopMandatoryVaccinations.com), and iHealthTube, all of which YouTube has since demonetized, or prevented from running ads. –BuzzFeed

One health tech company, Nomad Health, told BuzzFeed News that it “does not support the anti-vaccination movement,” and was “not aware of our ads running alongside anti-vaccination videos.” The company said it would “take action to prevent it from happening in the future.”

Another such advertiser – discount vitamin company Vitacost, said it pulled all of its advertising on Tuesday after a blogger made a viral video highlighting a “soft-core pedo ring” operating on the platform.

“We pulled all YouTube advertising on Tuesday morning when we noticed content issues. We had strict rules to prevent our ads from serving on sensitive content and they were not effective as promised,” said a VitaCost spokesperson via email, who added. “We will continue to remain off of the platform until those changes are made and are proven to be effective by other advertisers.”

The advertisers contacted by BuzzFeed said they were unaware that their algorithmically dictated “programmic ads” were appearing alongside anti-vax videos.

“When we purchase programmatic media, we specify parameters that restrict the placement of our ads from association with certain content. Even so, however, sometimes ads get served in places that we don’t approve of. This is one of those cases,” said a Retail Me Not spokesperson. “We’re working to exclude this placement now.”

A spokesman for software company Grammarly said the company also took immediate action.

“Upon learning of this, we immediately contacted YouTube to pull our ads from appearing not only on this channel but also to ensure related content that promulgates conspiracy theories is completely excluded,” they said, adding “We have stringent exclusion filters in place with YouTube that we believed would exclude such channels. We’ve asked YouTube to ensure this does not happen again.”

Grammarly was one of several companies which asked YouTube to pull its ads from sexually suggestive children’s videos. AT&T, Hasbro, Kellogg, Epic Games and Nestle were among the other brands who did the same.

“Any content – including comments – that endangers minors is abhorrent, and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities, and disabling comments on tens of millions of videos that include minors,” YouTube said in a Thursday statement to USA Today. “There’s more to be done, and we continue to work to improve and catch abuse more quickly.”

According to BuzzFeed, “Other companies that asked YouTube to stop their ads from appearing alongside anti-vax content include:

  • Brilliant Earth, a jewelry company, which said it has “made internal adjustments to our ad settings and will also follow up with our advertising partners to prevent our ads from appearing next to this content.”
  • CWCBExpo, a marijuana trade show, which said it would be “implementing strict guidelines on content placement and is eliminating hundreds of YouTube channels/videos and negative keywords.”
  • XTIVIA, which said it was “reviewing the ad placement,” which was “not [its] requested target.”
  • SolarWinds, a software company, which said the placement was unintentional and that it had “adjusted [its] filters to further refine the targeting of our ads on YouTube to better align with our targeted audience, MSPs and technology professionals.”

YouTube responded earlier this week to another controversy after Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) demanded that Facebook and YouTube parent company Google address anti-vax information on their platforms.

BuzzFeed‘s journalistic activism is reminiscent of CNN – which hounded advertisersto ‘unperson’ InfoWars founder Alex Jones last year. The result? “Many of the brands — including Nike, Moen, Expedia, Acer, ClassPass, Honey, Alibaba and OneFamily — have suspended ads on InfoWars’ channels after being contacted by CNN for comment.”

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