2016 Presidential Election
June 24, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday’s Washington Post carried the Russia story of the day. Post reporters Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous purport to deliver the goods on “Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault.” It’s a long, long story that is of interest from a variety of perspectives. The Post purports to give us the inside story on the collection of intelligence on Russian interference in the presidential election
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June 23, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Washington Post reporters Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous bring us “Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault.” They purport to give us the inside story on the collection of intelligence on Russian interference in the presidential election and apologetics in defense of the Obama administration’s response. Taken at face value, the story does great damage to the national security of the United States. Their long,
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June 13, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
The Democrats’ latest talking point about the “Russia” investigation is that President Trump has shown no interest in the part of it that pertains to what Russia did to interfere in the 2016 election. Not surprisingly, the Washington Post peddles this talking point in a story by Phillip Bump about Attorney General Sessions’ testimony today. He writes: In his testimony, Sessions told Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) that he “did
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June 9, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The New York Times reporters who wrote the February 14 story conceded by former FBI Director Comey to be “almost entirely wrong” in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday now take a look back in “Comey disputes New York Times article about Russia investigation.” They write: Answering a question about the Times article during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Comey said that “in the main,
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June 8, 2017 — Scott Johnson
On February 14 the New York Times published a story by Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo with reporting contributed by Adam Goldman and Matthew Rosenberg. The story was headlined “Trump campaign aides had repeated contact with Russian intelligence.” The usual “current and former officials” make their cameo appearance when the Times is disclosing, or purporting to disclose, highly classified information. These were the story’s lead paragraphs: Phone records
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June 8, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Back in the day when liberals castigated Joe McCarthy for witch hunting — searching for Communists in the government — there were real witches. The allegation of Trump campaign “collusion” with Russia in the 2016 campaign has gone from pretext for Clinton’s stunning loss to Donald Trump in the election to the current hunt for conspirators on the Trump campaign. As the news leaks and congressional hearings that touch on
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June 6, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
During a news conference last December, President Obama claimed that Russian interference in the 2016 election ended after he told Russian President Vladimir Putin to “cut it out” in early September. In Obama’s telling, he warned Putin of “serious consequences” if Russian interference continued. As a result the interference ceased. Here is what Obama told the American public: What I was concerned about in particular was making sure [the DNC
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June 6, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton sat for an interview with former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod late last week at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics (video below, posted here on YouTube). Judging by the derisive laughter of the audience in response to Axelrod’s lame japes and brain-dead left-wing talking points, I take it that the interview was conducted before a crowd mostly hostile to Senator Cotton. Axelrod, of course,
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June 2, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Our friends at that American Greatness site are pushing back on the alleged “collusion” scandal narrative. Andy McCarthy’s “Real collusion” was the first in a series. Brandon Weichert and Chris Buskirk’s “The anatomy of a lie” (i.e., the Trump-Russia collusion scandal) is the second. It aims to tell how the Russia story evolved from a campaign talking point into a witch hunt in search of a crime. Weichert and Buskirk
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June 1, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Below is the Fox News graphic compiling “everyone and everything” Madam Hillary has blamed for her loss to Donald Trump. Even this list may not be complete. Implicit in Clinton’s latest recitation is the Electoral College factor (as Shannen Coffin pointed out to me this afternoon). I posted Shannen’s list here. The Fox News Insider article that is a companion to the tweet below is posted here. A list of
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June 1, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I actually didn’t do justice to Hillary Clinton’s laundry list of blame for her loss to President Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Not even close. Fox News is using an excellent graphic that extracts the items that can be gleaned from the full transcript of her remarks at the 2017 Recode Conference yesterday. I can’t find the graphic online. Our friend Shannen Coffin, however, provides an almost completely reliable
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June 1, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Hillary Clinton sat for an interview with Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher at Recode’s 2017 Code Conference yesterday. The full video (below) runs 75 minutes. Recode has posted a transcript here. Swisher gingerly reminds us of Clinton’s invocation of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Swisher asks “how many years did you talk about the vast right-wing conspiracy?” Clinton’s definition of the VRWC amounts to opposition to her political causes. “[There are
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May 22, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist, a military historian and a shrewd observer of the current scene. Everything he writes is worth reading. I do my best to catch all his columns and essays, but I missed his recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. RealClearPolitics has posted a video of the segment below along with a partial transcript including embedded links here. In it Dr. Hanson argues that
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May 17, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Robert Mueller, a former prosecutor who served as the FBI director from 2001 to 2013, has been appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to serve as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the U.S. election, etc. Rosenstein explained: In my capacity as acting attorney general, I determined that it is in the public interest for me to exercise my authority and appoint a special counsel to assume responsibility
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May 9, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I recently recognized Minnesota Senator Al Franken as the de facto leader of the Democrats’ tin foil hat brigade. Last week Franken sought to enlist FBI Director James Comey in the brigade when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Comey politely declined. Franken sees the tendrils of “a conspiracy so immense” between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign. To expose
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May 2, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Marc Thiessen has the clever idea of taking the metric of “the first 100 days” and applying it to the Democrats. Thiessen writes in the Washington Post, no less: The Democrats spent much of Trump’s first months in office pushing their unfounded narrative of Trump’s alleged collusion with Vladimir Putin. But that narrative went up in smoke when Trump launched missile strikes against Putin’s Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad. Trump not
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April 18, 2017 — Steven Hayward
The Trump White House may or may not be a scene of chaos and personnel conflict and Trump may yet turn out to be a poor president—certainly the media has an interest in exaggerating any difficulties there may be—but one thing is certain from the release of the new book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign: Trump has spared us a much worse fate in the form of President Hillary
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