January 18, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar hasn’t even been in office a month and decent people everywhere must be sick of her. In one of her latest pronouncements, she has declared (on Twitter — where else?) that Senator Lindsey Graham’s frequent support of President Trump reflects the (alleged) fact that “They got to him, he is compromised!” CNN subsequently followed up with a few questions asking Omar to state the
»
January 18, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll announces GOOD ORAL HYGIENE & OTHER GOOD NEWS. She writes: In an amazing coincidence, I was having MY teeth cleaned the same week as Beto O’Rourke! Dental Mania! I did not think to livestream the event for my tens of fans. My hygienist is Laura, not Diana, like Beto’s. And I knew you’d want to know that. By the way, my actual real middle name is Marie, so
»
January 17, 2019 — Scott Johnson
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has responded to my post “It started in January 2017” with the following message, which I am pleased to post essentially verbatim: Dear Scott, I noticed your piece based on my interview with Gadi Eisenkot. Your entire premise is mistaken. I asked him directly if Trump’s election had anything to do with the change in policy. He categorically denied it. The change in strategy
»
January 17, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani appeared on CNN for a little roughhousing with Chris Cuomo yesterday. All over the news is Giuliani’s failure to deny that some on the Trump presidential campaign may have “colluded” with the friends of Vladimir Putin. I have posted Cuomo’s tweet with the video excerpt below. Cuomo to the contrary notwithstanding, I believe that Trump himself has acknowledged the possibility while denying that he himself committed
»
January 17, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held its second confirmation hearing on the nomination of William Barr to serve as Attorney General. The hearing took the form of a panel of nine character witnesses making statements and fielding questions from the members of the committee. C-SPAN has posted video of the entire three-and-a-half hour hearing here. Former federal judge and Attorney General Michael Mukasey appeared to testify as a character witness.
»
January 16, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Judge Jesse Furman went a fur piece — over a 277-page decision (embedded below) — in ruling yesterday that the Trump administration cannot lawfully add its proposed citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Judge Furman, by the way, is an Obama appointee to the busy bench of the Southern District of New York who presided over an eight-day trial of the case. I am tuning in to the case late
»
January 16, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Victor Davis Hanson brings his scholarly temperament and detachment to what he calls “The new, new anti-Semitism.” The new, new anti-Semitism has manifested itself in the House of Representatives, but I seriously doubt that it will be discussed or condemned there any time soon. Professor Hanson deserves a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, but that won’t be happening any time soon either. Doing the job that the Star Tribune refuses to
»
January 15, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Bret Stephens is a proud NeverTrumper; he supported Hillary Clinton for president and still wishes she had won the election. In his informative column on the war fought by the Israel Defense Forces against Iranian elements including Hezbollah and the Quds Force in “the campaign between the wars,” however, we can find a hidden message that belies his NeverTrumpism. Analyze this: By 2016, [just-retired IDF chief of staff Gadi] Eisenkot
»
January 15, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The Sunday morning gabfests are turning into asylums a la Marat/Sade, without the pathos or human interest. This past Sunday they meditated deeply on President Trump’s non-denial denial that he was acting as a foreign agent for Russia. He had been posed the question by Jeanine Pirro on Saturday evening, following up on the New York Times story disclosing that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation on Trump himself
»
January 14, 2019 — Scott Johnson
William Campenni spent 33 years in the Air Force/Air National Guard. He served as a pilot alongside then Lieutenant Bush in the the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970’s and has frequently commented on factual issues related to the Rathergate story, as he does in the new Fox Nation documentary “Black Eye: Dan Rather and the Birth of Fake News.” These are his comments on the documentary: Kudos
»
January 13, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Andrew McCarthy’s FOX News column “FBI Russia investigation was always about Trump” is only his most recent contribution to our understanding of the greatest scandal in our history — the one underlying the presidential election of 2016, from the Clinton campaign to the highest reaches of the Obama administration. He takes the occasion of the New York Times story on the FBI’s investigation of President Trump (see my comments here)
»
January 13, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The Mueller madness has intensified to such an extent this past week that I was unable to keep up. We covered the story of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s passing on polling data to his former Ukrainian/Russian associate Konstantin Kiliminik in the January 9 edition of this series. In that post I drew on the Wall Street Journal and AP stories while neglecting this New York Times story (accessible here
»
January 13, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Below is a one-minute preview of the new Fox Nation documentary Black Eye: Dan Rather and the Birth of Fake News (courtesy of the producers, with a little technical help from Joe Malchow). The preview features our role in the Rathergate story. I thought readers might find it of interest and perhaps want to follow up with a look at the whole thing. I reviewed the documentary in “My eye
»
January 12, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Brit Hume alerts us to my new friend Techno Fog’s takedown of Jim Acosta’s latest report from the southern border with the comment: “OMG, Acosta has done it again.” You therefore know it has to be good. In a series of linked tweets accessible here and beginning with the one below, Mr. Fog penetrates the CNN/Acosta fog. I guess it’s a good thing that CNN and Acosta are incapable of
»
January 12, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Democrats now freely display the sort of anti-Catholic bigotry that JFK was thought to have vanquished in the 1960 presidential campaign. As they have done with so much of their history, the Democrats have deposited JFK and the 1960 campaign down the memory hole. I wrote about the anti-Catholic bigotry on display in the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017. It was the subject of my City Journal column “The unfunniest
»
January 12, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The hits keep on coming from the New York Times and their deep state adjunct within the government. Today’s page-one story comes courtesy of Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt, and Nicholas Fandos under the headline “F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia” (accessible here on Outline). Last night Paul Mirengoff treated the Times story with care and penetration in the nearby post “Report: FBI opened
»
January 11, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Today’s New York Times exposé of the nefarious activities under investigation in the the Mueller probe is “Prosecutors Examining Ukrainians Who Flocked to Trump Inaugural” (accessible here on Outline). It carries the bylines of four of the Times’s top reporters — Kenneth P. Vogel, Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti and Iuliia Mendel, but they also had the help of Sharon LaFraniere and Maggie Haberman, who contributed reporting from Washington. That makes
»
