Power Line’s Top Posts of 2017

“Top” means most widely read, of course, not best or most influential. Still, it is fun to look back and see what posts got the most attention from our readers in 2017.

The year’s most-read post, with 150,933 views, was Proof that James Comey Misled the Senate Intelligence Committee, which I wrote on June 10. It was inevitable, I suppose, that many of our top posts related to the storm of controversy surrounding the 2016 election, the Clinton campaign’s collusion with Russia and the FBI via Fusion GPS, the firing of James Comey, Bob Mueller’s investigation, and so on. This post exposed James Comey as a liar.

You should read (or re-read) the whole thing, but briefly, Comey told the Intelligence Committee that his relationship with President Trump was different from his relationships with prior presidents, because Trump is uniquely dishonest. Comey told the committee:

COMEY: … When I was deputy attorney general, I had one one-on-one meeting with President Bush about a very important and difficult national security matter.

I didn’t write a memo documenting that conversation either — sent a quick e-mail to my staff to let them know there was something going on, but I didn’t feel, with President Bush, the need to document it in that way, again (ph), because of — the combination of those factors just wasn’t present with either President Bush or President Obama.

WARNER: I — I think that is very significant.

Significant? Maybe, but it was a lie. A sharp-eyed reader pointed us to the book Angler, an attack on Dick Cheney, which revealed that Comey actually documented his rather famous conversation with President Bush with a memo that included pages of supposedly verbatim dialogue. When it comes to covering his rear end, Comey is a consummate denizen of the Washington swamp. Likewise when it comes to lying to Congress.

Collectively, Steve’s most popular posts are no doubt The Week In Pictures series, which probably garnered a total of around 1,500,000 views in 2017. But his most-read individual post this year was The Millenial Job Interview, a hilarious but all too true video, which Steve posted on November 27. It continues to get views via social media. Here it is, once more:

Paul’s top post was also a recent one, Panic at the Washington Post, published on Christmas Day. The post documents WaPo’s growing hysteria over the fact that Mueller’s investigation is falling apart, and instead, attention is increasingly focused on the real scandal, which implicates, among others, the FBI.

The Washington Post is worried. The lead headline in today’s paper edition reads: “Mueller criticism grows to a clamor — FBI Conspiracy Claim Takes Hold — Driven by activists, GOP lawmakers, Trump tweets.”

Turnabout is fair play. Last year around this time, an honest newspaper could easily have written: “Trump criticism grows to a clamor — Russia Collusion Takes Hold — Driven by activists, Democratic lawmakers, leaks.”
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The FBI reportedly offered money to Christoper Steele to continue his work on the anti-Trump dossier (in testimony before Congress Rod Rosenstein refused to say whether the FBI paid or offered to pay for the dossier). The FBI may well have used information in the dossier to secure approval of surveillance efforts from the FISA court.

The FBI also helped push the dossier into the public’s consciousness. Its general counsel, James Baker, reportedly told reporter David Corn about the dossier, thus enabling Corn to write about it just before the election. And FBI director Comey briefed president-elect Trump on the dossier, which led to publication of its contents by BuzzFeed.

We also know about the quest of Peter Strzok, a high-level FBI man, for an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency.

But let’s return to the Washington Post’s story about growing criticism of Mueller. The three distressed Post writers are less than fully open when it comes to informing readers what — other than activists, GOP lawmakers, and Trump tweets — is causing criticism of Mueller to grow to a clamor.

They acknowledge that it has something to do with Strzok’s role as Mueller’s former top investigator. However, they do their best to make Strzok seem innocuous.

Read the whole thing, please.

Scott’s most-read 2017 post was Six Seconds to Live, published on October 26. The post includes an excerpt from a 2010 speech by General John Kelly in which he pays tribute to the heroism of two Marines who were killed in a suicide attack in Afghanistan:

What we didn’t know at the time, and only learned a couple of days later after I wrote a summary and submitted both Yale and Haerter for posthumous Navy Crosses, was that one of our security cameras, damaged initially in the blast, recorded some of the suicide attack. It happened exactly as the Iraqis had described it. It took exactly six seconds from when the truck entered the alley until it detonated.

You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives. Putting myself in their heads I supposed it took about a second for the two Marines to separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the truck came into their view at the far end of the alley. Exactly no time to talk it over, or call the sergeant to ask what they should do. Only enough time to take half an instant and think about what the sergeant told them to do only a few minutes before: “let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass.” The two Marines had about five seconds left to live.
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[T]he recording shows a number of Iraqi police, some of whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the normal and rational men they were—some running right past the Marines. They had three seconds left to live.
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For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines’ weapons firing nonstop, the truck’s windshield exploding into shards of glass as their rounds take it apart and tore in to the body of the son-of-a-bitch who is trying to get past them to kill their brothers—American and Iraqi—bedded down in the barracks totally unaware of the fact that their lives at that moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground.
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The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God. Six seconds. Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time for two very brave young men to do their duty—into eternity. That is the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight—for you.

As it happens, these four posts offer a pretty good cross section of what we do here at Power Line–and have done, every day, since May 2002. It may not be amiss to mention that our traffic hit an all-time high in 2017, with more visits and page views than at any time in the past. That is a sign, of course, of the level of interest in the Trump administration and events of the day among our readers.

So: Happy New Year, and may 2018 be even bigger.

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