2016 Presidential Election
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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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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