2016 Presidential Election
August 26, 2018 — Scott Johnson
I recently quoted Seth Lipsky’s unsigned New York Sun editorial “The president in a vise” observing of the Mueller prosecutions: “This is part of an effort by the Democrats and their collaborators to overturn a presidential election that they thought they would win.” The editorial expressed my thoughts exactly. By the same token, so does the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial “Let the people decide: A special prosecutor shouldn’t negate an election.”
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August 26, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Washington attorney Cleta Mitchell is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Foley & Lardner and a bona fide legal expert on the thorny federal law of campaign finance. She brings her expertise to bear on the question we examined yesterday in “Both sides not now.” She asks what is by now a rhetorical question concerning the Mueller Switch Project: “Fair-minded investigation or partisan witch hunt?” Cleta bores in
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August 25, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Kim Strassel decries the inherently one-sided nature of the Mueller Switch Project in her weekly Wall Street Journal column. Her column runs under the headline “When justice is partial.” She writes: If there is only “one set of rules,” where is Mr. Mueller’s referral of a case against Hillary for America? Federal law requires campaigns to disclose the recipient and purpose of any payments. The Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS
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August 23, 2018 — Scott Johnson
My point, and I did have one, in placing the Michael Cohen plea agreement and related charges before readers here this morning, was to note “the trouble down the road for others,” as I put it. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that the the chief executive of the company that publishes the National Enquirer was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for providing information about Michael Cohen and Donald Trump
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August 23, 2018 — Scott Johnson
RealClearPolitics has just posted Paul Sperry’s 7,000-word investigation into the FBI’s misrepresentations and nonfeasance in the matter of the Weiner laptop and the Clinton emails. Sperry’s column runs under the headline “Despite Comey Assurances, FBI Failed to Examine Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails.” Sperry reports that the FBI examined only a tiny fraction of hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton emails discovered on the Weiner laptop six weeks before
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August 23, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The organs of the federal government have had the Trump campaign, President Trump and those around him under the microscope since some time before his first day in office. The counterintelligence investigation formally opened at by the FBI in July 2016 has become the Mueller Switch Project dogging the Trump administration. Whatever happened to “collusion”? It has served its purposes to feed the campaign against Trump while something like the
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August 22, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Seth Lipsky expresses my thoughts exactly in the unsigned New York Sun editorial “The president in a vise,” nowhere more so than in his conclusion: What needs to be kept in mind at every stage is that this whole investigation is not about Russian meddling. Everyone agrees that they did it and it was wrong. No one needs a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of that. This is
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August 19, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The mind-boggling scandal of the Obama administration’s treatment of the Trump presidential campaign continues to unravel, but you’d never know from taking in your news via the mainstream media. Former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr is scheduled to testify under oath this week before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees on August 28. Ohr seems to have served as a conduit for Christopher Steele’s continued service to the FBI
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August 18, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The confidence of the oleaginous Mark Warner in his colleague Richard Burr gives me my doubts. Burr is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has kept up a bipartisan vibe in the committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the election. The parallel House committee operating under Chairman Devin Nunes has filed its Report on Russian Active Measures. Burr’s committee labors on. I have my doubts about Burr, but
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August 18, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Holman Jenkins finds press coverage of the origin of the FBI counterintelligence investigation wanting. Today he elaborates on this theme in his Wall Street Journal column “The press abets a coverup.” The counterintelligence investigation has been taken over by Robert Mueller. Mueller is to unravel the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the friends of Vladimir Putin. One problem, if the Steele Dossier os taken at face value: only the Clinton
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August 16, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Today the New York Times has published a column by John Brennan under the headline “President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash.” Brennan served as Director of the CIA until January 2017 and held the highest security clearance until yesterday. He must know what he is talking about. Looking for the goods, I turn to his column. Here is the nub of the column: The already challenging work of
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August 14, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Anyone who bothered to read the transcript of Glenn Simpson’s testimony and absorb its contents would have been left with deep suspicions about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting of Donald Trump, Jr. and campaign officials with the connected Russian lawyer. The Russian lawyer met with Simpson before and after the meeting for some reason or other. Now Lee Smith puts the pieces of the puzzle together in an excellent
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August 13, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that the FBI has fired Peter Strzok, the anti-Trump man who assured his FBI girlfriend that “we’ll stop” Trump from being president. The FBI’s inspector general concluded that Strzok showed a “willingness to take official action” to hurt Trump’s electoral prospects. Though the inspector general went no further, there is reason to believe that Strzok acted on this “willingness.” Strzok was escorted out of the FBI
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August 12, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Devin Nunes called in to speak from the republic of Georgia to speak with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Sunday Morning Futures show this morning. The interview previews the testimony of former United States associate deputy attorney general regarding his communications with Christopher Steele after the FBI had supposedly terminated its relationship with him. John Solomon and Byron York have covered the latest revelations regarding Ohr’s involvement in the
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August 10, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll has a few thoughts on what WHAT TO TELL OUR DAUGHTERS ABOUT THE ELECTION. She writes: I was browsing in Walmart’s meager book department and chanced to spy a slim volume called Madam President. Bwahahaha! I skimmed it in about 15 seconds. I am affirmatively uninterested in GENERAL in voting for someone simply on the basis of the color or shape of xer skin. Specifically, I was not
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August 8, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Byron York reports: Emails in 2016 between former British spy Christopher Steele and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr suggest Steele was deeply concerned about the legal status of a Putin-linked Russian oligarch, and at times seemed to be advocating on the oligarch’s behalf, in the same time period Steele worked on collecting the Russia-related allegations against Donald Trump that came to be known as the Trump dossier. The emails show
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August 5, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The New York Times breathlessly reports: “President Admits Focus of Trump Tower Meeting Was Getting Dirt on Clinton.” But in portraying this “admission” as news, the Times is playing fast and loose with the English language. In the process, it is dishing out fake news. What Trump acknowledged was that “this was a meeting to get information on an opponent.” In other words, the purpose of holding the meeting, from
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