2016 Presidential Election
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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April 11, 2020 — Scott Johnson
I have been saying for quite a while that the government operation run against the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency is the greatest scandal by far in American political history. Based on the progress of the investigation he has commissioned, Attorney General Barr has arrived at the same conclusion. That is how I read his remarks in the interview with Laura Ingraham earlier this week. RCP’s Ian Schwartz has
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April 11, 2020 — Scott Johnson
This past January Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson called for the declassification of four footnotes in the Horowitz Inspector General Report on the review of the FBI’s four FISA warrant applications on Carter Page. Yesterday three of the footnotes were mostly declassified and unredacted (see correspondence and attachments at bottom). Catherine Herridge has a straight report on the footnotes for CBS News in “Footnotes in watchdog report indicate FBI
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March 5, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
In this post, I addressed claims by Bernie Sanders’s campaign and other leftists that the “establishment,” worried sick about the Vermont socialist’s early successes, is conspiring to deny him the nomination. Finding no evidence of conspiracy, I concluded that if Sanders doesn’t win the Democratic nomination, it won’t be because he was conspired against, but because not enough Democrats want to nominate a socialist, especially an old male socialist who
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February 10, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Jim Geraghty compares the 2020 Democratic nomination battle to the one Republicans waged in 2016. In 2016, he recalls, Trump profited from the fact that a crowded field of Trump rivals focused their fire on one another. Geraghty writes: [T]he other candidates were all convinced they could be the last man standing against Trump, and then beat him in a one-on-one matchup. Perhaps one of those non-Trump candidates could have
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December 18, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Several renowned journalists published hagiographic profiles of Christopher Steele as some kind of a savior: Howard Blum, John Cassidy, and, preeminently, Jane Mayer come to mind, among many others. Mayer wrote a ludicrous 15,000-word profile of Steele that appeared in the March 5, 2018 number of the New Yorker. I mocked Mayer’s profile of Steele in a five-part series that I called “Jane Mayer’s Dossiad.” The link is to part
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October 19, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
I want to take another look at Mick Mulvaney’s presser — the one that Democrats and the mainstream media claim nails down the existence of a quid pro quo arrangement between President Trump and Ukraine (or offer thereof) involving U.S. military aid. My previous post focused on the fact that if Mulvaney was talking about a quid pro quo, it wasn’t military aid in exchange for conducting an investigation of
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October 17, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney held a press conference today. Mulvaney cited two reasons for the holding up of military aid to Ukraine: (1) lack of a contribution by European countries and (2) corruption in Ukraine. Then he added: Did [Trump] also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the DNC server?” Absolutely, no question about that. But that’s it, and that’s why we held
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October 11, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is testifying today before congressional committees on Capitol Hill. As Ed Morrissey notes, it’s curious that, although the White House has blocked a number of government officials from testifying before Congress, Yovanovitch showed up today to testify. The White House may be okay with Yovanovitch testifying. According to this article by Debra Heine in American Greatness, Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of
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October 7, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Lee Smith is one of our most invaluable investigative reporters and political analysts. I have followed his work at the Weekly Standard and at Tablet. Lee is the author of the forthcoming book The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History. He is now with RealClearInvestigations, which has just posted his column “It’s not all about the
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October 5, 2019 — Scott Johnson
RealClearPolitics has posted video of President Trump’s invitation to the Ukrainian and Chinese governments to investigate the Bidens for corruption here. Trump spoke to reporters gathered on the South Lawn of the White House before leaving for a Florida rally. Asked what he had wanted Ukraine President Zelensky to do about the Biden and son, Trump responded that he thinks Ukraine and China should both look into their business deals.
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October 3, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The whistleblower complaint and impeachment frenzy find a context in the investigation of United States Attorney John Durham into the origins of the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Durham has been appointed by Attorney General Barr to conduct the investigation on behalf of the United States. Those who are its subject are sweating it. Lee Smith takes up the context of the impeachment frenzy in the New York Post
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October 2, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Mainstream media outlets and the former members of the Deep State who supply them with information and quotes are outraged that Attorney General Barr went to Rome to obtain information about Joseph Mifsud. Mifsud is the professor who helped ignite the controversy that led to the Mueller investigation. It’s almost as if these outlets and Deep Staters are fearful of what Barr might learn. Some critics suggest that flying to
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