2016 Election
December 8, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The Special Counsel filed a 10-page memo yesterday supporting its determination that Paul Manafort has breached his cooperation agreement with the office. The heavily redacted document is posted below. The memo notes that the Special Counsel has supporting material to be filed under seal. Manafort met with the prosecutors as well as the FBI on twelve occasions and testified twice to the grand jury. The Special Counsel asserts that Manafort
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December 8, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The government filed two sentencing memos late yesterday afternoon in the cases brought against Michael Cohen. The Special Counsel referred the investigation of the largest basket of Cohen’s misconduct to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (the prosecutors, as I will refer to them). The 38-page sentencing memo filed by the prosecutors is below. It is a biting document. Despite his plea
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December 3, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Regarding the “irredeemable deplorables”—the white working class that liberals now openly disdain—a few perceptive liberals have pointed back to something written in 1998 by Richard Rorty, the “neo-pragmatist” epigone of John Dewey, in his book Achieving Our Country: Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.
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October 30, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Much (if not most) of what we have learned about the real scandals and true Russian collusion underlying the 2016 presidential election derives directly or indirectly from the dogged work of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and his Republican colleagues on the committee. In recognition of his efforts, Rep. Nunes has been punished by the dross of April Doss and others soldiering in the Democrat/Media complex. Rep. Nunes deserves
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July 17, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Vladimir Putin sat down for a 30-minute interview with Chris Wallace for broadcast on FOX News yesterday. Putin is of course an extraordinarily cold-blooded liar and murderer. See, for example, David Satter’s The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep. I thought that Putin’s qualities of character emerged with some clarity in the course of the interview. Putin’s treatment of responsibility for Russian interference in the 2016 election is of
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April 26, 2018 — Scott Johnson
We have yet to ascertain the source of the counterintelligence investigation that culminated in the Mueller Switch Project. Andrew McCarthy and Lee Smith are the two analysts who have both refused to disseminate the carefully cultivated stories of the Obama/Clinton apparatus and provided their own invaluable analysis to the proceedings. Today Lee Smith complicates my understanding of the Steele Dossier in the intensely reported RealClearInvestigations column “Unpacking the other Clinton-linked
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April 19, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday Rep. Ron DeSantis and ten other Republican congressmen sent a letter to Attorney General Sessions, FBI Director Wray and Sessions designee John Huber seeking the investigation of Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Loretta Lynch and other players “in connection with 2016 campaign controversies,” as FOX News puts it in its report. Observing “the dissimilar degrees of zealousness” that have marked the investigations of the respective presidential campaigns, the letter cites
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April 16, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Fox News reports on an AP American History textbook that tells our kids what happened in the 2016 presidential election. From Hillary Clinton’s point of view, of course: Tarra Snyder, a student at Rosemount High School in Minnesota, who saw a copy of the book sent to her school, told Fox News she was “appalled” after seeing how “blatantly biased” the newest edition of “By the People: A History of
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March 20, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I don’t know if anyone has yet used the term “digitalship” to describe the rising “dictatorship of the digerati”—perhaps both the term and phrase are too ungainly—but if not I’ll lay claim to it as a literary device (hat tip to Jeane Kirkpatrick, too) for pointing out the massive hypocrisy of the left over Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data on behalf of the Trump campaign. Because as near as
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February 16, 2018 — Steven Hayward
John has offered his take on the Mueller news just below. Here’s my first pass at it: The indictment of 13 Russians handed down today by special prosecutor Robert Mueller is going to dominate the news cycle at least through the weekend and likely beyond. This is a “Groundhog Day” event, assuring at least six more weeks (if not months) of the Trump-Russia story line. The indictment provides details of
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February 2, 2018 — Steven Hayward
The infamous Nunes memo has been released in the last hour. The House website is intermittently clogging up as you might imagine, but you can try to download it yourself here or here. On a quick first read, there is not much in it that we didn’t already know in general terms— the flyblown Steele dossier was the sole “evidence” the FBI used to obtain a FISA warrant to monitor
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January 3, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Back in 2011 I noted over at National Review the work of three Stanford political scientists who dove deep into the data of the 2010 election to discern the causes of the wave that saw Republicans win 63 House seats from Democrats, when none of the pre-election prediction models forecast that Republicans would come anywhere close to that large a gain. Their article, “The 2010 Elections: Why Did Political Science
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December 29, 2017 — Steven Hayward
As followers of academia—in other words, people known otherwise as masochists—know, liberals of a Rawlsian variety always like to have us do thought experiments behind a “veil of ignorance,” which, yes, is ironic given that the ignorance of most liberals is seldom veiled at all. Still, bear with me here, and indulge this favorite liberal trope for a minute. Imagine a new president whose first year saw: withdrawal from the
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December 5, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Ishmael Jones writes to revisit the infamous “Trump Dossier.” It is the Rosetta Stone to the “collusion” hysteria and related “fake news” with which we have been inundated since the 2016 election. Mr. Jones is the pseudonymous former CIA officer and author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. He advises that his comments here are based upon his knowledge of how intelligence reports are written and
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October 26, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Writing about the Fusion GPS scandal, Conrad Black uses the metaphor of the exploding Hindenburg. Although it’s a metaphor that should be avoided when talking Clinton scandals, I think it would more aptly be described with the metaphor of an exploding cigar. Here’s why. The Trump Dossier has been widely used to foment and propagate the hysteria over Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. How widely we don’t know. What
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September 29, 2017 — John Hinderaker
It is an article of faith among liberals that Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election–the word that is always used–was of world-historical significance. But what exactly the Russians did has been murky. Maybe they spearphished the DNC’s email account and tried unsuccessfully to spearphish the RNC’s account, although Julian Assange–who should know, but is an unreliable witness–apparently denies that claim. Beyond that, the Russians are accused of publishing anti-Hillary stories
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September 19, 2017 — John Hinderaker
So far, I have refrained from weighing in on Hillary Clinton’s post-mortem, What Happened, even though, as one of the few pundits who predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidential election, I perhaps can claim at least some insight into what happened. Why did I foresee that Trump would win? Not because I anticipated or understood what became the Trump phenomenon. Rather, because I thought that Hillary was such
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