Tag: DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Pelosi Gives Omar A Pass As “Anti-Semitism” Resolution Morphs Into Indictment Of Trump Supporters

By Tyler Durden

After a contentious closed-door session on Wednesday among House Democrats who are deeply divided over a resolution to indirectly condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) over anti-Israel comments, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) almost got whiplash from pivoting 180-degrees; excusing Omar, while dramatically altering resolution’s language from condemning anti-Semitism, to Democratic talking points commonly used against Trump supporters.

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When asked if Omar should apologize for saying that supporters of Israel have an “allegiance to a foreign country,” Pelosi gave a pass to the freshman Rep, telling reporters: “I do not believe she understood the full weight” of her words, adding that Omar’s comments “were not based on any anti-Semitic attitude.” 

If true, some have suggested that Omar is tone-deaf and not fit to serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction of the relationship between the United States and Israel.

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Meanwhile, House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said that the House hopes to vote on Thursday on a resolution condemning all forms of hate, saying the message would be “we are against bigotry, we are against prejudice and against hate.” – which just happens to echo commonly used Democrat talking points about conservatives. 

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As we noted on Wednesday, Pelosi’s 180 comes after chaos broke out Wednesday during a closed-door meeting of House Democrats.

Inside the meeting, according to multiple people present, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tried to keep her caucus focused on a planned Friday vote on a sweeping campaign and elections reform bill. She acknowledged “internal issues,” according to notes taken by a Democratic aide present, and urged members not to “question the motivations of our colleagues.”

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But moments later, multiple House members stood up to challenge the decision — endorsed by Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic leadership — to move forward with a resolution condemning religious hatred. Initially the measure targeted only anti-Semitism, with some Democrats pushing for a direct rebuke of Omar, but by Tuesday night — facing backlash from members not on board with the plan — leaders decided to expand it to include anti-Muslim bias. –Washington Post

Several Democrats those who took issue with the measure were members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who opposed even an indirect rebuke of Rep. Omar when they should be focusing on how to attack President Trump.

“I think there’s a big rise in anti-Semitism and racism, and that’s a bigger conversation we need to be having.” said Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-LA). “But it starts at 1600 Pennsylvania. It doesn’t start with one member out of 435 members of Congress.”

“Why are we doing this?” asked Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), who said that a resolution would be “redundant and unnecessary,” likely referring to the January 11 rebuke of Omar after she accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) of contributing to pro-Israel politicians.

In the end, Rep. Omar seems to have won the day.

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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 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:

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

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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).

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Trump or Clinton, Brexit or Remain, Maduro or Guaido? They are both worse! (by Slavoj Zizek)Trump or Clinton, Brexit or Remain, Maduro or Guaido? They are both worse! (by Slavoj Zizek)

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.

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Hate in the heartland: America is stumbling towards disaster one virulent tweet at a timeHate in the heartland: America is stumbling towards disaster one virulent tweet at a time

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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CNN, Democratic Party accused of conspiring against Sanders with ‘stacked’ audience at Q&A event

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CNN and the Democratic Party have been accused of trying to sabotage Bernie Sanders after the network masked the political affiliations of audience members who pelted the senator with questions during a town hall event.

The Vermont senator found himself bogged down in complicated policy issues – and apologies – after fielding questions from audience members whose political loyalties and possible ulterior motives were obscured by CNN. The eyebrow-raising oversight was first spotted by Paste Magazine, which accused CNN, in concert with the Democratic Party, of “stacking” the audience against Sanders by not being upfront about who was tasked with asking the senator questions.

For example, a young woman identified by CNN as a student at American University suggested that Sanders had turned a blind eye to his campaign’s alleged sexist behavior during the 2016 primaries, and asked what the democratic socialist would do to make women feel more included in his 2020 presidential bid. Curiously, the network failed to disclose that the student also happens to be an intern at a major DC lobbying firm – an odd coincidence considering her question was adapted from a Sanders-bashing talking point popular among corporate-friendly Democrats.

CNN was similarly tight-lipped about the backgrounds of other audience members selected to interrogate Sanders.

One audience member labeled as a “George Washington student” was later revealed to be an intern for a Democratic fundraising organization, the Katz Watson Group, and was previously a campaign fellow for ‘Hillary Clinton for America’.

Town hall moderator Wolf Blitzer introduced another audience member as a mother of two who is “active in the Maryland Democrat Party.” It turns out the innocuous mom was actually the chair of her county’s Democratic Central Committee.

CNN conceded that it should have been more transparent about its question-askers.

“Though we said at the beginning of the Town Hall that the audience was made up of Democrats and Independents, we should have more fully identified any political affiliations,” the network said in a statement.

Edward Hall, an economist and co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement, told RT that CNN’s deceptive identification practices were “par for the course” and part of a “long-running disease” in US politics, which uses in-fighting to protect corporate interests.

This isn’t the first time that CNN has given Sanders a raw deal. In one notable example, the network was taken to task for declaring Clinton the Democratic candidate even though, at the time, she lacked the required number of pledged delegates to clinch the nomination. Emails published by WikiLeaks famously revealed that CNN contributor Donna Brazile passed town hall debate questions to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 primary against the Vermont lawmaker.

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In America, talk turns to something unspoken for 150 years: Civil war…

By  Greg Jaffe and Jenna Johnson

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At a moment when the country has never seemed angrier, two political commentators from opposite sides of the divide concurred last week on one point, nearly unthinkable until recently: The country is on the verge of “civil war.”

First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump. “We are in a civil war,” he said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It’s going to be total war.”

The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of diGenova’s commentary on her show and agreed with him – although she placed the blame squarely on the president.

Trump, she said, “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.”

With the report by special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly nearly complete, impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election ramping up, fears that once existed only in fiction or the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate. These days, there’s talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war.

A tumultuous couple of weeks in American politics seem to have raised the rhetorical flourishes to a new level and also brought a troubling question to the surface: At what point does all the alarmist talk of civil war actually increase the prospect of violence, riots or domestic terrorism?

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Speaking to conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, diGenova summed up his best advice to friends: “I vote, and I buy guns. And that’s what you should do.”

He was a bit more measured a few days later in an interview with The Washington Post, saying that the United States is in a “civil war of discourse . . . a civil war of conduct,” triggered mostly by liberals and the media’s coverage of the Trump presidency. The former U.S. attorney said he owns guns mostly to make a statement, and not because he fears political insurrection at the hands of his fellow Americans.

The rampant talk of civil war may be hyperbolic, but it does have origins in a real crumbling confidence in the country’s democratic institutions and its paralyzed federal government. With Congress largely deadlocked, governance on the most controversial issues has been left to the Supreme Court or has come through executive or emergency actions, such as Trump’s border wall effort.

Then there’s the persistent worry about the 202o elections. “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,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, told a congressional committee Wednesday.

On that score, Cohen’s not the only one who is concerned. As far back as 2016, Trump declined to say whether he would concede if he lost to Hillary Clinton, prompting former president Barack Obama to warn that Trump was undermining American democracy. “That is dangerous,” Obama said.

The moment was top of mind for Joshua Geltzer, a former senior Obama administration Justice Department official, when he wrote a recent editorial for CNN urging the country to prepare for the possibility that Trump might not “leave the Oval Office peacefully” if he loses in 2020.

“If he even hints at contesting the election result in 2020 . . . he’d be doing so not as an outsider but as a leader with the vast resources of the U.S. government potentially at his disposal,” Geltzer, now a professor at Georgetown Law School, wrote in his piece in late February.

Geltzer urged both major parties to require their electoral college voters to pledge to respect the outcome of the election, and suggested that it might be necessary to ask the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to reaffirm their loyalty to the Constitution over Trump.

“These are dire thoughts,” Geltzer wrote, “but we live in uncertain and worrying times.”

His speculation drew immediate reaction from the right. Former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin tweeted a link to an article that called Geltzer’s warnings “rampant crazy.” News Punch, a far-right site that traffics in conspiracy theories, blared: “Obama Official Urges Civil War Against Trump Administration.”

Said Geltzer: “I don’t think I was being paranoid, but, boy, did I inspire paranoia on the other side.”

The concerns about a civil war, though, extend beyond the pundit class to a sizable segment of the population. An October 2017 poll from the company that makes the game Cards Against Humanity found that 31 percent of Americans believed a civil war was “likely” in the next decade.

More than 40 percent of Democrats described such a conflict as “likely,” compared with about 25 percent of Republicans. The company partnered with Survey Sampling International to conduct the nationally representative poll.

Some historians have sounded a similar alarm. “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Victor Davis Hanson, a historian with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, asked last summer in an essay in National Review. Hanson prophesied that the United States “was nearing a point comparable to 1860,” about a year before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina.

Around the same time Hanson was writing, Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor who is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, imagined his own new American civil war, in which demands for Trump’s impeachment lead to calls from Fox News commentators for “every honest patriot to take to the streets.”

“The way Mr. Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest,” Reich wrote in the Baltimore Sun. “That’s how low he’s taken us.”

Reich got some unlikely support last week from Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. “I think that 2019 is going to be the most vitriolic year in American politics since the Civil War, and I include Vietnam in that,” Bannon said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

All the doom, gloom and divisiveness have caught the attention of experts who evaluate the strength of governments around the world. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, a measure widely cited by political scientists, demoted the United States from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy” in January 2017, citing a big drop in Americans’ trust for their political institutions.

Similarly, Freedom House, which monitors freedom and democracy around the world, warned in 2018 that the past year has “brought further, faster erosion of American’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory.”

Those warnings about the state of America’s democratic institutions concern political scientists who study civil wars, which usually take root in countries with high levels of corruption, low trust in institutions and poor governance.

Barbara Walter, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, said her first instinct was to dismiss any talk of civil war in the United States. “But the U.S. is starting to show that it is moving in that direction,” she said. “Countries with bad governance are the ones that experience these wars.”

James Fearon, who researches political violence at Stanford University, called the pundits’ warnings “basically absurd.” But he noted that political polarization and the possibility of a potentially serious constitutional crisis in the near future does “marginally increase the still very low odds” of a stalemate that might require “some kind of action by the military leadership.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he added, “but I guess it’s not entirely out of the question.”

Less clear in the near term is what kind of effect the inflammatory civil war rhetoric has on a democracy that’s already on edge. There’s some evidence that such heated words could cause people to become more moderate. A 2014 study found that when hard-line Israeli Jews were shown extreme videos promoting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as essential to Israeli pride, a strong army or national unity, they took a more dovish position.

“Extreme rhetoric can lead some people to pull back from the brink,” said Boaz Hameiri, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author on the study. But that only happens when people already believe a “more moderate version of the extreme views” and find the more extreme message shocking, he said.

In such cases, people recognize the absurdity of their position, worry it reflects badly on them and reconsider it, he said.

If the extreme messages become a normal part of the political debate, the moderating effect goes away, the study found.

Violence is most likely to occur, Hameiri added, when political leaders use “dehumanizing language” to describe their opponents.

Most experts worried that the talk of conflict here, armed or otherwise, was serving to raise the prospects of unrest and diminish trust in America’s already beleaguered institutions.

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The latest warnings of civil war from diGenova drew an exasperated response from VoteVets, a liberal veterans advocacy group whose members have fought in actual civil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Amazing we have to say this but: 1. We are NOT in civil war. 2. Do NOT buy guns (or any weapons) to use against your fellow Americans,” Jon Soltz, the group’s chairman, tweeted in response to diGenova. “Trust us, we have seen war.”

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Justice Department preparing for Mueller report as early as next week

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By Evan Perez, Laura Jarrett and Katelyn Polantz,

Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce as early as next week the completion of special counsel Robert Mueller‘s Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller’s confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans.

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The preparations are the clearest indication yet that Mueller is nearly done with his almost two-year investigation.
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The precise timing of the announcement is subject to change.
The scope and contours of what Barr will send to Congress remain unclear. Also unclear is how long it will take Justice officials to prepare what will be submitted to lawmakers.
But with President Donald Trump soon to travel overseas for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Justice officials are mindful of not interfering with the White House’s diplomatic efforts, which could impact the timing.
The Justice Department and the special counsel’s office declined to comment.
Barr has said that he wants to be as “transparent” as possible with Congress and the public, “consistent with the rules and the law.”
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Under the special counsel regulations, Mueller must submit a “confidential” report to the attorney general at the conclusion of his work, but the rules don’t require it to be shared with Congress, or by extension, the public. And, as Barr has made clear, the Justice Department generally guards against publicizing “derogatory” information about uncharged individuals.
As a result, one of the most pressing questions Barr will face in the coming weeks is the extent to which Mueller’s findings should be disclosed to Congress.
Michael Cohen won't have to report to prison until May, judge rules

Michael Cohen won’t have to report to prison until May, judge rules
The regulations require Mueller to explain in his report all decisions to prosecute or not prosecute matters under scrutiny. Barr would also need to inform Congress if the Justice Department prevented the special counsel team from pursuing any investigative steps.
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Trump said Wednesday that it’s “totally up to Bill Barr” as to whether Mueller’s report comes out while he is overseas in Vietnam next week.
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“That’ll be totally up to the new attorney general. He’s a tremendous man, a tremendous person, who really respects this country and respects the Justice Department, so that’ll be totally up to him,” Trump told reporters in the White House.
Speculation about the end of the probe has been running rampant in Washington. NBC News reported recently the probe would be done by mid-February.

Life after Mueller

While the Mueller investigation may soon come to a close, there continue to be court cases that will be handled by other federal prosecutors.
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In addition, Mueller has referred certain matters that fell outside the scope of the Russia probe to other US Attorneys to pursue. Some of those investigations have already been revealed, including the investigation in New York into former Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen. That probe has spawned subsequent federal investigations in New York into the Trump Organization and the Trump Inaugural Committee. It is possible the special counsel’s team has referred other matters that have not yet come to light.
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RELATED: Michael Cohen won’t have to report to prison until May, judge rules
For close watchers of the federal courthouse and the Mueller team, small changes have added up in recent weeks.
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On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday last week, special counsel’s office employees carried boxes and pushed a cart full of files out of their office — an unusual move that could foreshadow a hand-off of legal work.
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At the same time, the Mueller prosecutors’ wo
-rkload appears to be dwindling. Four of Mueller’s 17 prosecutors have ended their tenures with the office, with most returning to other roles in the Justice Department.
And the grand jury that Mueller’s prosecutors used to return indictments of longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and several Russians hasn’t apparently convened since January 24 the day it approved the criminal charges against Stone.
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Even with these signs of a wrap up, the DC US Attorney’s office has stepped in to work on cases that may continue longer than Mueller is the special counsel.
Judge calls new hearing on gag order after Roger Stone's inflammatory post

Judge calls new hearing on gag order after Roger Stone’s inflammatory post
That office has joined onto some of the Mueller’s team’s casework, including the cases against Stone, a Russian social media propaganda conspiracy, and in an ongoing foreign government-owned company’s fight against a grand jury subpoena.
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Mueller and his prosecutors are still reporting to work as frequently as ever — with some even coming in on recent snow days and Presidents’ Day. But also visiting them more often than ever before are the prosecutors from the DC US Attorney’s Office and others in the Justice Department who’ve worked on the Mueller cases.
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In one court case, against Concord Management for its alleged support for the social media conspiracy prosecutors told a judge in January there’s still a related “matter occurring before the grand jury.”
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In other cases, including Manafort’s, the Mueller team has made heavy redactions to its recent public court filings, including to protect pending investigations and people who haven’t been charged with crimes.
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Here We Go… Crazy Uncle Bernie Enters Crowded Democrat Party Primary

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by Jim Hoft February 19, 2019

Here we go…
Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders entered the crowded Democrat Party primary on Tuesday.

The 77-year-old jumped into the race with a video release this morning.

This comes after President Trump’s historic speech against Socialism on Monday in Miami.

In 2016 the Democrat Party rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders, and to Crooked Hillary Clinton.

FOX News reported:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., announced Tuesday he will make another bid for president by entering the already crowded 2020 race, as he tries to rekindle the grassroots energy from his 2016 primary run against Hillary Clinton.

Sanders made the announcement in an interview with Vermont Public Radio, followed by a web video and email to supporters.

“Together, you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution. Now, it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for,” he told supporters.

While blasting President Trump as a “pathological liar,” Sanders said in the radio interview he’s running to pursue policies like universal health care and a $15 minimum wage. His challenge this time, however, will be standing out in a field of candidates who largely have adopted the big-government policies he championed three years ago.

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