2016 Presidential Election
October 8, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The phrase, or admonition, “nobody knows anything” has become a popular one. It took off after the 2016 election, in which Donald Trump surprised nearly everyone supposedly in-the-know by defeating Hillary Clinton. The phrase can’t be taken literally. Even in 2016, we knew that Clinton would carry New York and Trump would carry Alabama. We can’t even say that nobody knew anything significant about the election. We knew that Clinton
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September 19, 2021 — Scott Johnson
On Thursday John Hinderaker noted the indictment of the prominent — prominent in the sense of connected — Washington attorney Michael Sussman. A District of Columbia grand jury handed up the indictment on one false-statement count at the behest of Special Counsel John Durham. John H. wasn’t impressed, calling it “small potatoes.” If Sussman is the end of the road Durham is traveling on, John is correct and, whether or
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July 9, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Michael Barone contends that both political parties are failing to respond to signals in the political marketplace. I think Barone is right and has stated the problem neatly. The market signals to the Republican Party are pretty clear. In 2020, the GOP couldn’t defeat an uninspiring Democrat presidential candidate whose mental capacity obviously is diminished, perhaps significantly. The signals to the Democratic Party aren’t faint, either. They couldn’t defeat an
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November 15, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Broadly speaking, there are three ways an administration that’s on its way out can treat an incoming administration. It can cooperate, it can largely decline to cooperate, or it can subvert. In 2016, the Obama administration, of which Joe Biden was a part, chose to subvert Team Trump. Therefore, Team Biden should not be heard to complain if the Trump administration chooses the less malignant approach of not cooperating. Rowan
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November 9, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Lee Smith is the author of The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in US History. Lee’s book is an invaluable companion to Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency; it adds to and amplifies the case McCarthy makes. One of Lee’s principal themes is the role played by the media
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October 26, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The case that Joe Biden will defeat President Trump rests mainly on the polls. The case that Trump will win rests at least in part on the fact that the polls got the 2016 race wrong. But differences in the ground rules of the two elections suggest that Hillary Clinton might have defeated Trump in 2016 under this year’s conditions. First, consider all of the early voting this year. In
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October 5, 2020 — Scott Johnson
I wrote about former FBI Director James Comey’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week in “Dirtiest cop testifies.” Maria Bartiromo invited Rep. Devin Nunes to discuss Comey’s appearance on her Sunday Morning Futures show yesterday (video below, posted here at FOX News). In his response to Bartiromo’s opening question, Nunes alluded to the letter by DNI John Ratcliffe that we posted in “Today in Russia hoax news.” In
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September 29, 2020 — Scott Johnson
We seem to be approaching the bottom of the biggest political scandal in American history thanks to the declassification of information that was somehow kept under wraps over the past four years. This information wasn’t leaked to the Times or the Post or any of the Democrats’ other co-conspirators in the mainstream media. In the latest information to emerge from our fabled intelligence community, DNI Ratcliffe advises that Hillary Clinton
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September 27, 2020 — Scott Johnson
It turns out that there was some truth to the Russian collusion we heard so much about over the past four years. Employing several cutouts including the Perkins Coie law firm, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee colluded with a suspected Russian spy to trash Donald Trump and give the FBI what it wanted to spy on the Trump campaign and undermine the Trump presidency. On that score,
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September 19, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Is there room for another book on the rural voters who delivered the surprising outcome of the 2016 election? Yes, there is, when the book is Trump’s Democrats, by Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields, just out from the Brookings Institution. Muravchik and Shields do something unusual in this book; rather than do yet another excursion into survey data and statistical mumbo-jumbo, they went out to three diverse areas where
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August 24, 2020 — Steven Hayward
When the Citizens United decision that said the federal government can’t censor political speech came down back in 2010, many Democrats said it was literally the worst decision since Dred Scott, because it would allow for “big money” to sway an election. Remember that the issue presented in the case was a documentary film, “Hillary: The Movie,” produced by the non-profit Citizens United group. Well, Democrats must feel differently now,
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August 18, 2020 — Scott Johnson
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a redacted version of the final volume of its report on RUSSIAN ACTIVE MEASURES CAMPAIGNS AND INTERFERENCE IN THE 2016 U.S. ELECTION. All five volumes of the report are accessible here. Volume 5 (pages 941-943) states ADDITIONAL VIEWS OF SENATORS RISCH, RUBIO, BLUNT, COTTON, CORNYN, AND SASSE. Here is their statement (emphasis in original): (U) Volume 5 of the report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns
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July 24, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Newly declassified FBI documents disclose how the agency used a so-called defensive briefing of the Trump campaign on August 17, 2016, to spy on and collect information about Donald Trump himself. Michael Flynn and Chris Christie also attended the briefing. The Federalist’s Sean Davis has posted the documents via Scribd together with his story on them. I have embedded the documents below. Davis notes that the documents were formally declassified
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July 23, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
In a post earlier today, Steve discussed a poll that finds 62 percent of Americans saying they have political opinions they are afraid to share out of fear of giving offense or losing their jobs. This finding raises potential problems for pollsters. I say “potential” because we don’t know whether, or to what extent, the fear of expressing political opinions extends to conversations with pollsters. No one risks losing a
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July 18, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Kim Strassel has tweeted out the Wall Street Journal editorial “The FBI’s dossier deceit.” It bears the hallmarks of her excellent work on the Russia hoax. The editorial is based on the declassification via the Senate Judiciary Committee of the FBI’s interviews over three days in January 2017 with the primary source for the infamous Steele dossier. Strassel reminds us: “The bureau used the dossier’s accusations as the basis for
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April 18, 2020 — Scott Johnson
You may recall that Attorney General Barr has characterized the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign and of President Trump as a historic travesty. “My own view,” he stated in his recent interview with Laura Ingraham, “is that the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. And if people
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April 16, 2020 — Scott Johnson
From the first moment I read the version of the Steele Dossier posted by BuzzFeed in January 2017, assuming the dossier is what it purports to be, I thought that it was the product of Russian disinformation. You’d have to be a fool not to see it. How could CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and all the rest who worked with it somehow overlook that? Steele’s Russian
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