It’s probably a good question, before we go forward on a wider cultural discussion that involves unanimous consent for the three-word construct “black lives matter,” what those words really mean. The phrase itself, unless your views on race and culture are rebarbative, is axiomatic and has been since it was coined over a half-decade ago. You could plug almost any group into the blank space in “_______ lives matter” and you’d be right. This isn’t what it means.
The general conclusion we’ve reached over the gut-wrenching past few weeks, ever since the events leading up to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody was available to watch by anyone with a cell phone, is that it means something nebulous-ish involving the force of the state being brought to bear on people of color in an inappropriate manner. The problem is that “nebulous-ish” part. The group Black Lives Matter was never quite just an official organization, it also wasn’t just a hashtag. This means that while it currently has one foot in mainstream acceptance, another foot remains in its roots as an organization on the far-ish reaches of the left.
If you wanted evidence of this residual hard-leftist slant, you need have looked no further than Patrisse Cullors’ appearance on CNN on Friday. Cullors was one of the founders of the movement back in 2013 and has remained one of its most prominent voices, which means she’s in demand again. On Friday, she appeared on CNN to discuss the movement and what its goals were. You may not be surprised at one of them:
During the interview on “The Lead,” Jake Tapper and his perma-scrunched face asked Cullors just what is it she wanted to do — at least when it came to the election.
Advertisement – story continues below
“I’ve heard a lot of criticism of former Vice President Joe Biden from civil rights activists,”Tapper said.
“The election, obviously, will be a choice. How do you think Biden matches up compared to President Trump when it comes to these issues that are important to you?”
The Lead CNN
✔@TheLeadCNN
President “Trump not only needs to not be in office in November but he should resign now,” says co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Patrisse Cullors. “Trump needs to be out of office. He is not fit for office.”
“Trump not only needs to not be in office in November, but he should resign now,” Cullors said.
“Trump needs to be out of office. He is not fit for office. And so what we are going to push for is a move to get Trump out. While we’re also going to continue to push and pressure Vice President Joe Biden around his policies and relationship to policing and criminalization. That’s going to be important. But our goal is to get Trump out.”
Advertisement – story continues below
In other words, at a basic level, this isn’t really about black lives — at least not for Cullors. After all, if Cullors’ belief is that all black people are in danger from a bigoted law enforcement structure, the obvious choice would be to work not only with white allies but also black individuals who make common cause with Trump on enough issues to vote for him.
And even though the possibility that Trump has support among black voters, polling from as recently as June 5 shows the incumbent president with black support that should give Democrats nightmares.
Rasmussen Reports
✔@Rasmussen_Poll
Reader Tip: Coming Later
Our Daily Presidential Tracking poll today shows Black Likely Voter approval of the job @realDonaldTrump is now over 40%.
Of course, Democrats won’t buy that number. And the mainstream media won’t be trying to sell it. But the point is, Rasmussen is a respectable polling organization. If Trump is running at 40 percent black voter support — or even half that number — he’s getting more support in that segment of the electorate than leftists believe.
And if that Rasmussen number is anywhere near correct, the woman who is accepted as speaking for Black Lives Matter is ignoring a substantial number of actual black lives in the United States. But building unity in the black community, or even reaching out to black Trump supporters, is not what this wing of Black Lives Matter is about. It’s about beating Donald Trump.
Now, the thing with Black Lives Matter is that Cullors does not — in fact, cannot — speak for the entire movement. That’s a weakness, both when it comes to organization and leadership, but it’s a strength when it comes to nailing down the protean nature of the organization. Black Lives Matter is more than just a slogan, but the great thing for its principals is that it’s like a slogan: It means exactly what you want it to mean.
It’s also good to know that at the same time Black Lives Matter is demanding redress for centuries-old issues, it’s ostensibly throwing its weight behind the Democratic Party, which was — in some of our lifetimes — the party of segregation and Jim Crow. (And as a relatively young senator in the 1970s, Biden had no problems buddying up to some of its most segregationist members.)
Cullors ignores this racist history.
And notice how Cullors makes it clear that her group needs to need to “pressure Vice President Joe Biden around his policies and relationship to policing and criminalization.” In other words, they know the former veep’s record around policing in this country
But this is just one voice, you may say. True — and therein lies the advantage.
Black Lives Matter is whatever you think it is, at least when it’s ingratiating itself to the public. Give its members a modicum of power, however, and you’ll see that change posthaste, especially in the run-up to the 2020 election.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal for four years.
Former Vice President Joe Biden is pushing Facebook to strengthen rules regarding election-year misinformation on the platform even as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee distributes misinformation about COVID-19 and President Donald Trump.
Facebook’s inability to police political misinformation and disinformation “corrodes our democracy” and allows the president “to say anything,” Biden wrote in a letter to the Silicon Valley giant Thursday. The former vice president asked his Twitter followers to sign the letter in an attempt to pressure Facebook into acting before the November election.
“Folks, we saw in 2016 what can happen when social media platforms are left unchecked and allow disinformation to run rampant. It puts the very integrity of our elections at risk,” Biden wrote in a tweet Thursday. “We simply cannot let it happen again in 2020.”
Trump’s post was in reference to protests against the death of George Floyd, a black man who died May 25 after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, video of the incident showed. Zuckerberg reportedly defended the decision as an adherence to free speech principles.
Since 2016, Facebook has created an independent oversight body, wherein the company’s platform can impartially protect free speech and create an arbitration system. The body is made up of a bipartisan crew of conservative and liberal judges to help determine whether specific comments, posts or links comply with Facebook’s terms of service.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone dismissed Biden’s open letter, telling the Daily Caller News Foundation that, “[t]here is an election coming in November and we will protect political speech, even when we strongly disagree with it.” Zuckerberg reportedly defended the decision as adhering to free speech principles.
Biden has misinformed his supporters and voters repeatedly on the campaign trail. Here are seven times the former vice president made false claims about the coronavirus pandemic, Trump, and other election-related issues.
Biden Falsely Says Trump “Owes” China Money
Biden promoted fake news from a Politico report claiming the president “owes” millions of dollars to the Bank of China.
Politico reported in an April 24 article that Trump currently “owes” millions of dollars to the Bank of China and that “the loan is due soon,” before editing the story after determining Trump did not, in fact, owe the Bank of China money.
Biden made the comment after being asked during a CBS interview on April 28 — days after Politico corrected its article – if Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China make the former VP more vulnerable.
“No, I don’t believe so at all,” Biden replied. “My son’s business dealings were not anything where everybody – what he’s talking about. Not even remotely, number one. Nothing to do with me, number two.”
He added: “And talk about business dealings – look at the business dealings the president has with China. He owes, apparently, millions of dollars to the Bank of China.”
Biden Falsely Claims He Found GOP Votes For Obamacare
Biden falsely said at a rally in December 2019 that he found Republican votes to pass the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, while he was vice president.
“We need someone with a proven ability to bring people together and do the hard work of getting legislation passed,”Biden said at a rally in Texas. “I’ve done that before … finding Republican votes for the Recovery Act, Obamacare, helping keep us from falling into a Great Depression.”
The House passed the Senate bill with a 219–212 vote in 2010, with 34 Democrats and all 178 Republicans voting against the bill, which became a flash point that ultimately made passing future bipartisan legislation nearly impossible.
Biden Campaign Falsely Suggests Trump Called Virus A “Hoax”
The vice president falsely suggested that Trump referred to the coronavirus pandemic as a “hoax” during the president’s Feb. 28 campaign rally in South Carolina. The virus originated in China and has reportedly killed 116,000 people in the United States.
Biden tweeted a video in March that misleadinglyspliced together snippets of Trump saying “coronavirus” followed by, “this is their new hoax.” In reality, Trump was referring to Democrats’ political reaction to the virus, calling their criticism of his response a “hoax.”
“The video makes it seem like Trump is calling the disease itself a hoax, which he hasn’t done. The words are Trump’s, but the editing is Biden’s,” PolitiFact noted before rating the claim “false.”
Biden Falsely Said Trump Slashed The CDC’s Budget
Media fact-checkers hit Biden in February after he falsely accused the president of slashing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget.
“We increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget. … He’s wiped all that out. … He cut the funding for the entire effort,” Biden said at a Feb. 26 debate.
Biden was “wrong to say the agencies have seen their money cut,” the AP noted in its fact check of Biden’s claims. Trump “proposed cuts but Congress ignored him and increased financing instead. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren’t suffering from budget cuts that never took effect,” the fact check stated.
Biden Falsely Said Trump Dismissed WHO’s Help
The former vice president was also hit for falsely suggesting Trump rejected the World Health Organization’s attempt to provide the U.S. coronavirus tests.
“The World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them,” Biden stated during the March 15 Democratic debate.
Biden Falsely Says Trump Called White Supremacists “Very Fine People”
Biden began his 2020 presidential run on a false claim that Trump called white supremacists “very fine people” after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, three years ago.
“Very fine people?” Biden said in an April 2019 video launching his campaign for president. “With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”
Biden omitted important context to Trump’s comments in which the president noted in comments reacting to the rally that the “fine people” were those who were there to protest the removal of a confederate statue.
Trump went on to say: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”
Biden Falsely Says He Was “Arrested” In South Africa
Biden claimed on the campaign trail in February that he was arrested in the 1970s while trying to visit then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa.
“When I said arrested, I was not able to — I was not able to move. Cops would not let me go with them [the Congressional Black Caucus],” Biden said in a CNN interview that month.
His campaign clarified the false claim on Feb. 25, saying that Biden was “separated from a congressional delegation.”
Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush endorsed President Donald Trump’s re-election on Tuesday. The son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and nephew of former President George W. Bush informed The Dallas Morning News of his intention to vote for Trump in November.
“President Trump is the only thing standing between American and socialism,” Bush said.
He added that “it’s clear” the policies implemented by the Trump administration are working for the country.
“Even in a global pandemic where we have had to take unprecedented measures to protect public health, the economy is already returning,” Bush said.
“It’s clear, America and Texas will continue to be stronger than ever.”
Trump thanked Bush for his endorsement on Twitter, saying that it was a “great honor.”
The younger Bush’s endorsement comes on the heels of a New York Times report saying many top Republican leaders will not be voting for Trump. The Times cited people familiar with the family’s thinking who said George W. Bush won’t support the president’s re-election and Jeb Bush is still unsure how he will vote in November.
Former President Bush’s spokesman, Freddy Ford, told The Texas Tribune that The Times’ report was wrong.
Advertisement – story continues below
“This is completely made up,” Ford said. “He is retired from presidential politics and has not indicated how he will vote.”
Trump tweeted an article reporting Ford’s statement but did not make any other comment on it. The president took shots at George P. Bush’s father during the 2016 election, calling him “Low Energy Jeb.”
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Low energy Jeb Bush just endorsed a man he truly hates, Lyin’ Ted Cruz. Honestly, I can’t blame Jeb in that I drove him into oblivion!
However, the younger Bush and Trump have supported each other in their political endeavors, and the president has called him the “Bush that got it right.”
“I like him,” Trump said, adding that he is a “friend of my son and he’s a great guy.”
Erin Coates started as an editor for The Western Journal for over two years before becoming a news writer. A University of Oregon graduate, Erin has conducted research in data journalism and contributed to various publications as a writer and editor.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to promote religious freedom for oppressed religious minorities around the world.
“Religious freedom, America’s first freedom, is a moral and national security imperative,” the order read, according to a text posted on the White House website. “Religious freedom for all people worldwide is a foreign policy priority of the United States, and the United States will respect and vigorously promote this freedom.”
Trump signed the order privately, without any media present.
The president’s action came on the same day he and first lady Melania Trump visited the Saint John Paul II National Shrine, where they laid a wreath at the statue of the former pope, according to Fox News.
EWTN News Nightly
✔@EWTNNewsNightly
President Trump signed an executive order that seeks to promote international religious freedom and stop religious persecution overseas after visiting @JP2Shrine. One of the items in the EO calls for spending millions of dollars to assist programs that advance religious freedom.
Washington Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory lashed out at the visit, which came a day after Trump visited St. John’s Episcopal Church across from the White House, which had been damaged Sunday by rioters.
“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree,”Gregory said in a statement.
“Saint Pope John Paul II was an ardent defender of the rights and dignity of human beings. His legacy bears vivid witness to that truth. He certainly would not condone the use of tear gas and other deterrents to silence, scatter or intimidate them for a photo opportunity in front of a place of worship and peace,”Gregory said, repeating an apparently false report that protesters were tear-gassed after scuffling with police so that the president could have a photo opportunity.
“[O]ur Founders understood religious freedom not as a creation of the state, but as a gift of God to every person and a right that is fundamental for the flourishing of our society,” the order read.
“Religious communities and organizations, and other institutions of civil society, are vital partners in United States Government efforts to advance religious freedom around the world. It is the policy of the United States to engage robustly and continually with civil society organizations — including those in foreign countries — to inform United States Government policies, programs, and activities related to international religious freedom.”
The order requires the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to “prioritize international religious freedom in the planning and implementation of United States foreign policy and in the foreign assistance programs of the Department of State and USAID.”
In addition, the order requires than $50 million per year be spent on programs “intended to anticipate, prevent, and respond to attacks against individuals and groups on the basis of their religion, including programs designed to help ensure that such groups can persevere as distinct communities; to promote accountability for the perpetrators of such attacks; to ensure equal rights and legal protections for individuals and groups regardless of belief; to improve the safety and security of houses of worship and public spaces for all faiths; and to protect and preserve the cultural heritages of religious communities.”
“Yet again, President Trump is taking a decisive action to keep his promise to people of faith around the world,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said of the order, according to Fox.
“This executive order fully integrates the president’s vision – a vigorous defense of international religious freedom rights for all – into key aspects of United States foreign policy.”
Trump to sign executive order promoting global religious freedom
President Trump on Tuesday will sign an executive order to promote religious freedom overseas. Trump is scheduled to sign the order after a visit to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in
The order calls for the State Department to work with nations that have been identified by the Commission on International Religious Freedom as those where religious freedom is either absent or under siege.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Federal riot teams have been dispatched to two U.S. cities as the Trump administration gears up to shut down riots that have taken place across the country. President Donald Trump has also instructed “thousands and thousands” of soldiers and police to quell violence in Washington, D.C.
Attorney General William Barr has ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to send riot teams to Miami and Washington, D.C., according to a senior Justice Department official, NPR reported. The FBI will also deploy its Hostage Rescue Team to assist in controlling riots that have taken place in the streets of Washington, D.C., the senior official said. Protesters on Sunday night lit fires in Lafayette Park across from the White House.
Overall, 88 people were arrested in the Washington, D.C., protests, according to The Washington Post.
Trump said he was sparing no effort to restore order.
“I swore an oath to uphold the laws of our nation and that is exactly what I will do,” Trump said in a Rose Garden speech Monday night.
“I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters,” the president went on.
“A number of state and local governments have failed to take necessary action to safeguard their residents.
“I am taking immediate presidential action to stop the violence and restore security and safety in America.
“I am mobilizing all available federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting, to end the destruction and arson and to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights.”
Trump said that he will act if a city cannot control the violence on its own.
“If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” the president said.
Trump also said he was bolstering security in the nation’s capital.
“As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property,” he said.
After his address, Trump walked across the street from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church, which was founded in 1816. The church’s parish house was the target of arson during Sunday night’s riots, The Washington Post reported.
“Greatest country in the world,” Trump said as he inspected the damage, according to a White House media pool report. “And we’re going to keep it safe.”
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
The far-left Politico admitted Tuesday that Democrats are “dreading” the idea of a fast economic boom as America reopens, which explains the anti-science push among many Democrat governors to extend their pointless coronavirus lockdowns.
Thanks to these lockdowns, some 40 million people are unemployed, some 40 million lives have been shattered; lines at food pantries seem to go on forever; countless small businesses are in danger of closing or already have… Nevertheless, what America’s oh-so compassionate Democrats dread most is a quick economic rebound that might undermine their grasping desire to hold on to and obtain power.
“The general election scenario that Democrats are dreading,” the Politico headline reads.
And what is that scenario?
“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” a former economic adviser to Barack Obama told a bunch of bigwigs from both parties last month.
His name is Jason Furman and Politicosays he “laid out a detailed case for why the months preceding the November election could offer Trump the chance to brag — truthfully — about the most explosive monthly employment numbers and GDP growth ever.”
Furman’s counterintuitive pitch has caused some Democrats, especially Obama alumni, around Washington to panic. “This is my big worry,” said a former Obama White House official who is still close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said, “It’s high — high, high, high, high.”
And top policy officials on the Biden campaign are preparing for a fall economic debate that might look very different than the one predicted at the start of the pandemic in March. “They are very much aware of this,” said an informal adviser.
What Furman already sees are signs of what’s known as a “V” recovery, as a opposed to a slower or gradual recovery, or a recovery that takes a while to get back to where we were before these stupid lockdowns began. Furman sees an economy that’s already unleashed.
Consumption and hiring started to tick up “in gross terms, not in net terms,” Furman said, describing the phenomenon as a “partial rebound.”The bounce back “can be very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V.”
Furman’s argument is not that different from the one made by White House economic advisers and Trump, who have predicted an explosive third quarter, and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who said in late April that “the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.”
White House officials were thrilled to hear that some of their views have been endorsed by prominent Democrats.
While no one expects the second quarter numbers — the numbers that will tell us the GDP between April 1 and June 30 — to be anything but terrible, if we can come to our senses nationwide and get these absurd lockdowns behind us, the third quarter numbers (that will be released at the end of September) could show real growth. This would be good for the incumbent president, especially since that incumbent president has been predicting a “pent up” desire within the American people to get back to normal.
Good news for America and Americans would, of course, be terrible news for Joe Biden, who is desperate to strangle our economy with record high taxes and an obscene amount of regulations. Biden’s policies would hurt a flourishing economy, but they would kill a post-lockdown recovery in the same way the Obama-Biden economic policies of 2009 killed any hope of a real rebound after the 2008 economic crash. It’s no accident the Obama-Biden administration oversaw the worst “recovery” since the Great Depression.Their taxes, regulations, and constant threats of more kept a boot firmly on the neck of our economy for eight long years.
Plus, no matter how much Biden might crybaby about Trump’s Twitter account, his golf game, and his violation of the establishment’s “precious norms,”the American people tend not to fire a president when the economy is humming — especially if we are coming out of a downturn.
But what does it say about Democrats that with nearly 40 million lives shattered, they “dread” a fast comeback for those 40 million people?
Obviously, that’s a rhetorical question, but it does answer the question as to why — and for no valid scientific or medical reasons, a number of mercenary Democrat governors are desperate to push these pointless lockdowns as far into next month as possible (especially in swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania).
It is all about doing whatever damage they can to those third quarter GDP numbers; even if that means more pain for those who cannot work from home — primarily the working class.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
It’s a number that informed so many of our public policy decisions regarding COVID-19: 3.4 percent.
On March 3, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made a remark during a media briefing that guided how we viewed the threat posed by the novel coronavirus.
“While many people globally have built up immunity to seasonal flu strains, COVID-19 is a new virus to which no one has immunity. That means more people are susceptible to infection, and some will suffer severe disease,” Tedros said during the briefing.
“Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected.”
Now, was this based on incomplete information?Of course. At some level, it’s difficult to blame individuals working from a very limited data set.
On the other hand, that limited data set influenced how we approached the disease — and it turns out that, if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current “best estimate”of the COVID-19 death rate is accurate, it’s 13 times lower than the initial WHO claim.
According to statistics“based on data received by CDC prior to 4/29/2020,” the death rate from COVID-19 could be as low as 0.26 percent.
The numbers are based on the newest of “five COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios that are designed to help inform decisions by modelers and public health officials who utilize mathematical modeling,” the CDC said.
“Each scenario is based on a set of numerical values for biological and epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19. These values — called parameter values — can be used to estimate the possible effects of COVID-19 in U.S. states and localities. The parameter values in each scenario will be updated and augmented over time, as we learn more about the epidemiology of COVID-19.”
Scenario 5 — the operative scenario at the moment, at least given the data that we have — has some interesting data regarding the death rates for the novel coronavirus.
According to the CDC’s data, the symptomatic case fatality percentage is 0.4 percent.
Reading further into the data reveals it’s even lower than that.
Scenario 5 includes data on “[p]ercent of infections that are asymptomatic.”That, according to the CDC, is 35 percent.
So, do the math: It turns out that means the death rate is only 0.26 percent, according to the CDC’s own numbers.
Now, does this mean the death rate is truly 0.26 percent? Of course not.Even now, we’re in the early days in terms of statistics for the novel coronavirus. However, what’s clear is that, when all is said and done, we’re going to be nowhere close to the 3.4 percent originally predicted by the World Health Organization.
This was predicted by plenty of people at the beginning — including President Donald Trump, who was criticized when he said March 4 that 3.4 percent was “really a false number”and the actual death rate would be “under 1 percent.”
Now, does this mean that the president or any of the others who predicted this are doctors or epidemiologists? No. However, they had a basic understanding of how statistics work. They knew that, in the early days of the virus, with limited testing and limited data, the numbers were going to seem a lot higher than they actually were.
And yet, Tedros wasn’t the only one who thought the death rate for the coronavirus was an order of magnitude higher than current data says it is. In February, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it was 2 percent.
“If you look at the cases that have come to the attention of the medical authorities, in China, and you just do the math — the math is about 2 percent. If you look at certain age groups, certain risk groups, the fatality is much higher,” Fauci told Congress, according to CNBC.
There’s a reason this matters. If there’s a disease that spreads rapidly and has a death rate of 2 or 3 percent, yes, locking down the populace is a reasonable reaction. If we’re talking about something closer to 0.26 percent, putting the world into a new Great Depression seems a bit of an overreaction.
We don’t know the final death rate for the novel coronavirus yet. One thing’s for sure, though — it’s not 3.4 percent or anything close to that. It might not be 13 times lower, but it’s a lot closer to that than anything predicted at the beginning.
That has a lot of implications going forward, including when we start second-guessing what we did to our society and economy in order to arrest the spread of the disease.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal for four years.
The mayor of Baltimore wasn’t holding the president back.
President Donald Trump went ahead Monday with a planned Memorial Day visit to historic Fort McHenry, despite criticism from Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, who said the trip sets a poor example amid the coronavirus crisis.
“Dear Mr. President@realDonaldTrump, please stay home!”Young tweeted Thursday. “The City of Baltimore is currently under a Stay at Home order for the safety of our residents, who have been hit hard by #COVID19.
The White House wasn’t buying it for a second, and Trump was en route to the city late Monday morning.
“The brave men and women who have preserved our freedoms for generations did not stay home and the president will not either as he honors their sacrifice by visiting such a historic landmark in our nation’s history,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Fort McHenry is the scene of the battle during the War of 1812 that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
And while it’s true that Trump has had his own tangles with Democratic leaders of Baltimore (particularly the late Rep. Elijah Cummings), for an American president on Memorial Day, visiting the site that inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner” is as natural as his planned visit earlier Monday to Arlington National Cemetery.
While much of the social media responses to Trump’s planned trip to Charm City included the usual liberal cesspool of abuse (even after three years of the Trump presidency, it only gets more vile), the president had plenty of supporters online.
Clare Lopez@ClareMLopez
Anyone too frightened can stay home but our President will be honoring patriots like himself this Memorial Day who were prepared to give all for our country
Baltimore Mayor Tells Trump To Stay Away And Not Visit Fort McHenry On Memorial Day – The Lid
The POTUS is set to visit Fort McHenry On Memorial Day the site of the War of 1812 battle that inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star Spangled Banner
Americans appreciate your commitment to America. We WANT you to visit the resting place of our fallen heros who sacrificed ALL. Mayor Young needs to worry about fixing his DELAPITATED city! #HonorOurFallenHeros
Trump visits Arlington cemetery, Fort McHenry for Memorial Day as Baltimore mayor criticizes trip
President Trump will mark Memorial Day with appearances at Arlington National Cemetery and Baltimore’s historic Fort McHenry, honoring fallen military members while also sending a clear signal to the…
Fortunately, not all Maryland elected officials have a knee-jerk anti-Trump attitude. Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, was not planning to attend Trump’s visit because he was spending the day with his family and celebrating his 64th birthday, the Sun reported Monday. But last week, according to a Thursday Sun report, Hogan’s spokesman welcomed the president’s presence.
“We are honored that the president and first lady have chosen to spend Memorial Day at Fort McHenry,” Hogan communications director Mike Ricci said, according to the Sun. “Although Marylanders are encouraged not to gather in large numbers this year — now more than ever — it’s important to reflect on the American heroes who sacrificed their lives for our freedom.”
Democrats and the mainstream media might do well to remember that honoring those American heroes is what Memorial Day is supposed to be about. For Trump to do that with a visit to Arlington National Cemetery, the resting place of so many of those heroes, followed by a trip to the birthplace of the American national anthem isn’t just appropriate, it’s just about perfect.
And the mayor of Baltimore can’t hold the president back.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden applaud during President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremonies at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017. (Paul J. Richards / AFP via Getty Images)
Former President Barack Obama directed the conspiracy of top intelligence community aides who sought to take down former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump said Sunday. Trump appeared Sunday on the Fox News show “Sunday Morning Futures.” He was interviewed Wednesday by host Maria Bartiromo.
Much of their conversation centered around the case of Flynn, who had been accused of improperly communicating with a foreign official after his phone calls to a former Russian ambassador during Trump’s transition period were listened to and later leaked. Flynn was forced to step down, and later faced charges after an FBI investigation.
The Justice Department is currently seeking to drop charges against Flynn and have his case dismissed. Flynn was among those “unmasked” by Obama-era officials. Unmasking is the intelligence term used for those instances when American citizens speaking to foreign nationals under surveillance have their identities revealed. It takes an official request to do so.
In recent days, the Trump administration released a list of Obama administration officials who made unmasking requests and who could have learned of Flynn’s identity through them. Due to the presence on that list of former Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, and comments from the attorney currently representing Flynn, Obama’s name has now become linked to the effort to target Flynn.
Other names on the list include former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.
Trump pulled no punches in the interview.
“It was the greatest political crime in the history of our country,” he said.
“If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would have been in jail a long time ago. And I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” the president said. “It is a disgrace, what’s happened. This is the greatest political scam, hoax in the history of our country, and people should be going to jail for this stuff. And, hopefully, a lot of people are going to have to pay.”
He said that “Flynn and others are heroes, heroes, because what’s happened to them — they weren’t after General Flynn. They wanted him to lie about me, make up a story. And with few exceptions, nobody did that,” he said.
“This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt. And we caught them. We caught them,” Trump said.
The president fired a shot at Biden.
“I watched Biden yesterday. He could barely speak,” Trump said. “He was on ‘Good Morning America,’ right? And he said he didn’t know anything about it. And now it just gets released. Right after he said that, it gets released that he was one of the unmaskers, meaning he knew everything about it.”
The president said the Obama-era intelligence community “went after these people viciously, all because they wanted to hurt the president of the United States. They figure they’ll either hurt him or they’ll take him out. That would be the ideal.
“Comey is a corrupt person, but let me tell you, Brennan bad. They’re all bad, everyone. Clapper is a not-smart guy, in charge of intelligence. But here’s the thing. It was impossible for it to happen without the man that sits right in that chair in the Oval Office. He knew everything.”
Bartiromo asked Trump whether Obama directed the effort against him.
“Yes, he probably directed them. But if he didn’t direct them, he knew everything. And you will see that,” he said.
Trump noted that communications from FBI agents involved in the hunt for evidence to show his campaign colluded with Russia mentioned that the then-president wanted to see everything.
“They’re not talking about me. I wasn’t president. They’re talking about ‘POTUS wants to see everything.’” Trump said.
He said Brennan was “totally involved.”
“John Brennan was one of the architects, in my opinion. You look at Brennan, you look at Clapper, you look at them all,” the president said.
Trump said the intelligence community did not go rogue.
“But, ultimately, the president knew everything. The president knew everything. President Obama and Vice President Biden, they knew everything,” he said.
The president said the truth has finally emerged.
“If this happened to Obama instead of to a Republican president that’s popular, 96 percent in the Republican Party, but it’s a whole different thing. If this happened to Obama instead of to me, you know what? Everybody would be in jail for years already, for years. It’s a disgraceful thing,” Trump said.
“We caught them in the act, Maria. It’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “And every day, we’re seeing more and more information come out. We caught them. And their guys are gone. They were guarding the fort. Comey and all these guys, they were guarding the fort. And once they left, it got easier and easier.
“And now it’s like an avalanche of really bad — call it treason, call it whatever you want, but they tried to take down a duly elected president of the United States.”
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Monday night on Spectrum News 1’s “Inside the Issues,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said President Donald Trump and the lockdown protesters should be ashamed of themselves for pressuring governors to reopen their states.
Waters said, “You know our governors are under great stress. The protests that have been organized, the protests trying to intimidate our governors to open up everything are protests where the people participating in that should be ashamed of themselves. They should not be encouraged in any way. They should not be encouraged from the top leadership of this country to go out and do that.”
She continued, “I know the pressure is on. I know that you’re trying to hold the line. I want you to hold the line. I don’t want to see these establishments opened back up. I want the federal government to join with the cities and the states to support these families in every way that we can. I do want a moratorium on rent evictions. I have a huge bill. I have a $100 billion bill to pay the landlords. We don’t want them to risk their properties, many of them have bought a small number of units, ten units, four units as retirement property. I know that they need to pay their mortgages. I am going to absolutely see to it that they are reimbursed, that they are paid for the moratorium on evictions on their apartments.”
Waters added, “So we’re doing everything that we can give support to our constituents, to our citizens, to the people who work every day, who have families to take care of. So if we do that, this will support our states and our governors and not having to open back up. So that you know the small businesses that are in direct contact with people nail shops, beauty shops, barbershops, flower shops, these are people in touch with folks every day, and they’re risking their lives, and we don’t want them opened up. We are very sympathetic to the pressure that is being put on by the president of the United States and organize efforts of these protesters. We want the governors to hold the line. Be as tough as you can be. Be as thoughtful as you can be. Do everything you can to hold the line. I know that Governor Newsom is doing that. And any small steps that he takes, he is doing it with a lot of support. We are with you, governor. Hold the line. ”
Chip Somodevilla / Getty ImagesSpeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) speaks during her weekly news conference at the U.S. Capitol on April 30, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made it clear she’s going to work very hard to pin the coronavirus pandemic on President Donald Trump. Just don’t ask her to find out where the pandemic actually started.
Pelosi, as you may have heard, has put together a committee to oversee the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis. In a “Dear Colleague” letter, she assured everyone this was about ensuring the relief money was spent the way it was supposed to.
“We must make sure that the historic investment of taxpayer dollars made in the CARES Act is being used wisely and efficiently to help those in need, not be exploited by profiteers and price-gougers,” Pelosi wrote in the letter late last month, according to Politico.
However, you can probably tell where this whole thing is headed when you consider that each of the seven members she appointed to the committee were Democrats. The chairman, meanwhile, will be House Majority Whip James Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat best known as the man who pretty much saved Joe Biden’s campaign by endorsing him before the South Carolina primary in February. No conflict of interest there whatsoever.
Just don’t ask Pelosi to join an investigation of the origins of the novel coronavirus.
According to GOP Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, his attempts to investigate a New York firm that sent money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — potentially the source of the virus, according to some sources — have been stymied by Pelosi and House Democrats. During an appearance on “Breitbart News Saturday” this weekend, Reschenthaler talked about a letter he sent to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper regarding a Pentagon grant that went to EcoHealth Alliance, which has given money to the Wuhan institute on a number of occasions. (It’s unclear whether the Pentagon grant went directly to the Wuhan institute.)
Another grant he talked about involved the National Institutes of Health (in particular the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, run by Dr. Anthony Fauci) giving money to the EcoHealth Alliance — which, in turn, gave some of that money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to research coronaviruses in bats.
Just don’t expect much to come of any of this from Congress.
“We should have an investigative body looking at these grants, but Nancy Pelosi is not going to do that,” Reschenthaler said. “So you have myself and House Republicans. I can tell you I’m going to continue to look into these grants. I’m going to continue to look into the Department of Homeland Security as well to see what grants are going from there to China. I’m also looking at defunding the World Health Organization and we can talk about that as well.
“But the bottom line of the Democrats’ behavior is this: They hate this president so badly that they would rather side with the Chinese Communist Party than defend Americans and defend our spending and spend wisely and just be honest. That is their hatred for President Trump and disdain for President Trump’s supporters.”
Advertisement – story continues below
Reschenthaler said he is trying to determine if money from the Pentagon grant went to the Wuhan lab.
“The [Department of Defense] also gave EcoHealth Alliance $6.5 million in a grant, and like you said, that grant was to understand bat-borne zoonotic disease in context with weapons of mass destruction, what I’m trying to find out is whether or not the DOD funding that went to EcoHealth also went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he said.
“We know that the NIH funding did, and we also know that all money is fungible, but I want to see if we can trace that money to Wuhan to see how much and to what extent the DOD and American taxpayers actually funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
His ability to investigate these grants has been blocked specifically because the Democrats are in control of the House of Representatives and have no intention of conducting such an investigation. They already have a committee to deal with the coronavirus, after all, and they’re going to investigate pretty much nothing else but Trump.
“It’s imperative that we as House Republicans take back the House in this next election because Nancy Pelosi and the far-left Democrats are thwarting everything we do,” Reschenthaler said. “I do have to say I cringe when the media says ‘Nancy Pelosi and the squad’ because that minimizes how far left this party has gone. It’s just not ‘the squad.’ It’s not just Nancy Pelosi. It’s most of their members.
“Look at the Green New Deal. When that was floated, half of their co-sponsors were on the Green New Deal. Most of these Democrats vote 90 plus percent of the time with [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez],” he continued.
“This party has moved drastically to the left to the point of siding with the CCP over Americans. They don’t want to get to the bottom of these grants and they also don’t want my resolution run on the floor about defunding the World Health Organization or at least getting Dr. Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO] to resign and getting an international organization to investigate how the World Health Organization was either grossly negligent in dealing with the Wuhan virus or how they worked hand-in-glove with the Chinese Communist Party in trying to cover up the virus early on. But that’s the extent of their hatred, again, of this president and his supporters where they will not run these bills and they will not do these investigations because, again, they would rather side with the CCP than do the right thing.”
Unless Republicans take back control of the House in November, the body isn’t going to be doing much when it comes to investigating how much money went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, much less whether the institute was at all responsible for the accidental release of the coronavirus — something that the American intelligence community hasn’t ruled out and that the president and others in the administration say they’ve seen evidence of, according to NBC News.
“But I think whether or not this disease came from a bat through a wet market or it came from a lab, we’ve got to see where it originated and we’ve got to see what we can do to make sure we stop these pandemics in the future,” Reschenthaler said.
“That could be something like encouraging other nations to stop interactions at wet markets, which should be happening anyhow. If it originated in a lab and somehow leaked from the lab, we shouldn’t be funding labs that study virology and weapons of mass destruction in terms of biological weapons. We shouldn’t fund these labs unless they have procedures in place where the disease won’t leak out and kill 60,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands around the world. This is a very responsible thing to do as good stewards of taxpayer money.”
And, as Reschenthaler pointed out, we don’t know how much data on coronaviruses we got from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We know that we certainly didn’t get any investigators inside of China after the coronavirus went worldwide. We still haven’t gotten investigators on the ground in Hubei province — and we won’t. But what we will get is Clyburn’s committee, which features firebrands like Reps. Maxine Waters of California and Nydia Velazquez of New York, among others.
This will certainly be a way for Democrats to go after the Trump administration, at least until the election and possibly beyond. It could even be, as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called it, “another impeachment committee.”
But the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Don’t expect that to be investigated anytime soon — not until the Democrats are out of power in the House.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal for four years.
Eva Hambach / AFP via Getty ImagesVarious rifles are on display at Clark Brothers gun store in Warrenton, Virginia, on Jan. 16, 2020. (Eva Hambach / AFP via Getty Images)
As local and state governments across the country have restricted the liberties of their citizens since the coronavirus began its spread, many Americans have found themselves quietly exercising their rights by buying guns in record numbers. Purchases of firearms continued to break records last month during the nation’s health and economic crises. Gun sales, which reached all-time highs in March, continued their surge in April amid uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus and the government’s response to it.
Americans bought almost 1.8 million guns in April, according to estimates from Small Arms Analytics, which tracks the sales of firearms. While fewer people bought guns in April than they did in March, when 2.5 million firearms were purchased, the number of arms purchased in April was an increase of 71 percent compared to sales estimates for the same timeframe in 2019. Small Arms Analytics noted that more handguns have been sold than rifles or shotguns.
NICS ran more than 3.7 million checks in the month of March.
The news is certainly welcome for the gun industry, but it should be celebrated that so many Americans are exercising their Constitutional rights during such an unprecedented time in the country’s history. Governments across the country have released potentially dangerous criminals back onto the streets as a way to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus in jails and prisons. With the influx of so many possibly dangerous people now among us, people are reminded that they are the first responders to emergent situations, and are taking steps to ensure they can protect themselves and their families.
Far-left politicians, such as former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, have also promised to go after Americans’ firearms if elected in November, which could be contributing to the spike in sales and background checks. But whether the increase in sales is due to fears of government overreach, talk of gun control or a reaction to other factors, the country’s current predicament is evidence of just how essential the Second Amendment is, and Americans are recognizing that.
Last month, the proprietor of a gun store and shooting range in deep blue Southern California described the unprecedented demand for firearms in Orange County. Gregg Bouslog, the proprietor of On-Target Indoor Shooting Range in Laguna Niguel, explained his shock at the influx in gun sales.
“As the owner of an indoor shooting range and gun store here in California these past 14 years we have never experienced such a huge demand for firearms and ammunition — even higher than the famous Obama rush of 2012/2013,” Bouslog told Red State.
Bouslog added he believed a great number of his new customers were first-time gun buyers.
While toilet paper shortages grabbed headlines in the early weeks of the crisis, and others warn of potential meat shortages coming, the one industry having the most difficulty staying ahead of demand is the gun industry. In the last month, I have personally visited multiple gun retailers, multiple times, seeking to purchase ammunition and to browse for firearms. In what is both inspiring and frustrating, I have found the shelves and walls of gun stores in Oklahoma to be mostly barren, as sellers attempt to keep up with demand.
As the firearms industry is considered essential by the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security, according to the NRA, gun sellers are mostly open for business, and some are having a difficult time keeping their inventory replenished — and there is something significant to be taken from that. Americans are sending a clear message: Constitutional liberties will not be suspended or surrendered in the face of a national emergency or by government decree, and people are taking measures to protect themselves from all potential threats to their rights.
Johnathan has authored thousands of news articles throughout his career. He has also worked as an editor and producer in radio and television. He is a proud husband and father.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is flanked by President Donald Trump as he speaks during the daily briefing on the coronavirus at the White House on April 22, 2020. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump confirmed Tuesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci will be testifying before the Senate this month but will not appear in front of the Democrat-led House of Representatives.
“The House is a setup. The House is a bunch of Trump haters. They put every Trump hater on the committee. The same old stuff,” Trump told reporters outside the White House.
“They, frankly, want our situation to be unsuccessful, which means death. Which means death. And our situation’s going to be very successful.”
He added that Fauci, the director of the Nationals Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will testify before the Senate, “and he looks forward to doing that.” The president went on to say that Democrats in the House “should be ashamed of themselves.” “They want us to fail so they can win an election, which they’re not going to win,” he said.
Fauci will join Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in testifying before a Senate committee on May 12, NPR reported.
Trump’s comments about the House confirmed reports that the White House had blocked Fauci from appearing before the House Appropriations Committee as part of its investigation into the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey of New York, the chairwoman of the committee, and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut condemned the White House’s decision to allow Fauci to testify before the Senate and not the House panel in a Saturday news release.
“The White House’s decision to allow Dr. Fauci to testify in the Republican-controlled Senate but not before the House Appropriations Committee is letting politics overtake public health. There is no distinction between our two co-equal legislative bodies,” they said in a statement.
“The COVID-19 pandemic should not and cannot become a partisan issue — there are too many lives at risk,” the lawmakers said. “We are all Americans first. But the White House’s partisan politics are clearly at play in this decision during our nation’s most challenging public health and economic crisis, and that is both alarming and offensive to the work the American people have elected us to do.”
White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said that allowing Fauci to appear before the committee would be “counter-productive.”
“While the Trump Administration continues its whole-of-government response to COVID-19, including safely opening up America again and expediting vaccine development, it is counter-productive to have the very individuals involved in those efforts appearing at Congressional hearings,” Deere said in a statement last week, according to The Hill.
“We are committed to working with Congress to offer testimony at the appropriate time,” he said.
Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Democratic lawmakers should not conduct their “usual fishing expedition” if they hear testimony from Fauci.
“I just hope that the people who are asking the questions are asking intelligent, rational questions that are actually relevant to the American health because we’ve seen what they do before,” Conway told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Tuesday.
“For example, they say stupid things like, ‘This is a job interview — this is a job interview for a lifetime appointment’ about Brett Kavanaugh. ‘Let’s believe all women’ — or at least those three women, most of whom then retracted or didn’t have corroborating evidence,” she said.
Erin Coates started as an editor for The Western Journal for over two years before becoming a news writer. A University of Oregon graduate, Erin has conducted research in data journalism and contributed to various publications as a writer and editor.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem gives her first State of the State address in Pierre, S.D., Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2019. / James Nord/AP Photo
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican and the governor of one of just a handful of states that has not issued a statewide lockdown order, told Breitbart News exclusively on Wednesday her state is winning the war against the coronavirus without the extreme and draconian measures some other states have implemented.
Noem said that despite earlier projections of a surge on the hospitals in South Dakota and nationwide, “no, we haven’t” seen such a surge. In fact, South Dakota has—again, without a lockdown—cut that number down by 75 percent of the projections, with much less than a hundred people in the hospital.
According to the state’s Department of Health website, there have been 1,858 cases of coronavirus in South Dakota—937 people have recovered. There have been only 9 deaths, and there are 62 people currently hospitalized. In total, only 111 people were ever hospitalized for coronavirus in South Dakota—far less than ever was expected.
“I think we’ve got maybe 60 people in the hospital right now,” Noem said in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. “We have 2,500 beds set aside for COVID-19 patients, but we only have 63 in. We probably, from all of our projections and studying the science behind the virus, we won’t peak until the middle of June. But we already have done much better than what we had thought would have been hitting our state already.”
“We already have cut our peak projections by 75 percent just putting in place the recommendations I asked people to do, staying at home and they’ve practiced social distancing,” she explained. “They’ve washed their hands and they stayed home if they weren’t feeling well and called their doctors. Just by doing that, we’ve cut the hospitalization rates by 75 percent. So, I’ve just been super proud of what the people in South Dakota have done—they recognized that I wasn’t going to dictate to them, that I valued their freedoms and liberties and that I was going to let them take action on behalf of their families and communities.”
When asked how she made her decision to not issue a closure of businesses in South Dakota and to not issue a statewide stay-at-home order like many other governors did when the crisis was beginning, Noem told Breitbart News that she was focused on providing the best and most scientific response to the coronavirus crisis.
“I looked at our state and our people here and knew they would take on the personal responsibility that would be necessary to protect their families and their communities,” Noem said. “I had a real honest conversation with them and told them what we were facing and that I needed them to make some decisions to follow CDC guidelines and that by doing that we could look at how this virus would impact our state and peak hospitalization rates going forward and do it together.”
“I’m not one who believes in a one-size-fits-all approach, and even in South Dakota I’ve got pretty diverse communities,” she noted. “I’ve got some that are pretty sparse with not many people and then I’ve got some that are big cities as well. So I wanted to leave some flexibility there for local folks to make decisions but also recognizing that when it comes down to it that these guys had to take on the personal responsibility that is necessary to really go after this virus.”
Noem added that when it came to her decision against issuing a lockdown, she factored in her oath to defend the state’s Constitution that she took when she was sworn in as governor and her oath to defend the U.S. Constitution that she took when she was previously sworn in when she was in the U.S. Congress. She was concerned for the civil liberties and freedoms of the people of her state and did not think the facts on the ground warranted a lockdown—something that, again, the statistics have proven to be true.
“It was a decision that I made. The facts on the ground here did not support shelter-in-place,” she said. “We just didn’t have the spread. For me personally, I took an oath to uphold our state Constitution. I took an oath when I was in Congress to uphold the United States Constitution. So I believe in people’s freedoms and liberties and I always balance that with every decision that I make as governor. I get overly concerned with leaders who take too much power in a time of crisis because I think that’s how we directly lose our country someday by leaders overstepping their proper role.”
“So I was balancing all of that perspective and my value system and principles with what I was seeing here in South Dakota and never believed it was appropriate for us to take that kind of action,” Noem explained. “I trust my people. I know that if business owners here are given an opportunity to be innovative, they will protect their customers. They will take actions and change business models to make sure their employees are safe and that they can practice social distancing while still serving their customers. I knew I had to give them an opportunity to survive.”
“What I was going to ask them to do was not going to be something they would have to do just for a week or two,” she explained. “I knew they would have to do it for months, and I didn’t know how they would survive if I shut them down, and for me, it’s always been about whatever I ask you to do today you have to sustain, and I knew that doing that kind of an action was not sustainable. People would not be able to shelter in their homes for six weeks on end, and businesses would not be able to survive and have an economy to be able to put food on the table for folks.”
“All of that was part of my decision-making process, and I decided as well—I knew it was unconventional and it was something that would not be widely embraced across the country–but I knew I had to communicate it and I knew I had to make myself available to South Dakota and tell them why I was making these decisions and make sure we were having real palms-up honest conversations, and I think by and large they’re seeing the wisdom in the action and decisions we’ve made, and they’re grateful for it, but we have a long ways to go though,” Noem said. “We’ve got, that’s the thing, a lot of people want to be done with this now, and I have to keep reminding people we still have not even hit our peak—our numbers are going to continue to get worse, and that reality is something that we’re going to have to deal with for quite some time here.”
Just because there is no stay-at-home order or statewide mandated closure of businesses does not mean South Dakota is just waiting and doing nothing to fight the coronavirus. Noem has undertaken a number of initiatives in South Dakota, including alongside the state’s northern neighbor, North Dakota, the introduction of a cell phone application that helps state health officials with contact tracing of those who test positive for the virus—something she said has been very effective in helping control the spread of the disease.
“The app is called CARE19 and it’s downloadable on both android and iPhones, but what it does is so much of the time of individuals—when somebody tests positive for COVID-19 our Department of Health immediately calls them, asks them to isolate, and then follows up with them and then also does extensive interviews with them to find out about where they had been the previous three or four or five days, where they had been, where they had stopped, so we can identify other individuals that may have been exposed to the virus to let them know and ask them to isolate and slow down the spread,” Noem said. “This app will do all of that in seconds. So, it’s completely voluntary. People can download it on their phone, then turn on location services and then forget about it. Then if they do test positive a week or two weeks down the road they can decide if they want to share that information with us or not and then that will tell us everything about where they were and people that may have been exposed to the virus so they don’t have to try to remember.”
“It literally takes hours of interviews we would have with an individual down to getting all of that same information and having it be much more accurate in seconds,” she explained. “It helps us be much more aggressive in slowing and isolating the spread. The average person we have to contact—if somebody tests positive, we have to call eight or nine people on average that they may have come in contact with and let them know. So even if we only have a hundred cases a day, that’s 800 to 900 phone calls we have to be making to them. Then everybody who tests positive and everybody who has been exposed we call them back the next day and then the next day and so on to make sure they’re still doing okay and that they’re still isolating and all that. By being able to cut down that amount of time it takes to know who may have been exposed, boy it just saves us hundreds of hours and is really helpful. We’re the only—I think North Dakota started it first, I think we started it the next morning, and I think we’re the only two states that are using that kind of technology.”
South Dakota has also, at Noem’s direction, formally launched a statewide, fully-funded, and all-encompassing trial to study the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for coronavirus.There have been some studies that suggest the drug is promising as a potential treatment, and President Donald Trump has touted it as a hopeful possibility, while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized its usage on a compassionate care basis if a doctor decides a patient should use it. But no formal studies yet exist to demonstrate the effectiveness of the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19, so Noem stepped up and rallied all of the state’s major healthcare systems to lead a statewide test of the drug.
“What’s happening here in South Dakota is really unprecedented,” Noem said. “There has never been anything like this that has happened before. There is the state government partnering with all of our major health systems to run a statewide, state-backed-and-funded clinical trial. We have Sanford Health in our state that does a lot of research, and they’re running many other clinical trials, and they came to the table and said they would lead it, and I said the state would support it and help secure the drugs with the White House’s help, the hydroxychloroquine and whatever else we would need, and then the other two health systems, Avera and Monument, were excited to partner as well. So we will literally have a clinical trial now where every person in the state will be allowed to participate in.”
“So it’s the first statewide one. I think we’re the only state where it would have been possible to get all of the healthcare systems to agree to participate in,” she continued. “It really is unprecedented as well to get them all to step up and agree to participate, and then we can include up to 100,000 people so it is much larger than a typical clinical trial would be.”
“Sometimes the accuracy of a clinical trial is in question when it’s a super small sample and you don’t get enough people to participate,” Noem explained. “By this, including this many people getting access to the drug and seeing what the results would be, not only allows us to meet the current need but also allows us to get the background data and research that we can use to be on offense against this virus into the future.”
“So, I think this is kind of what South Dakota does best—we’re much better on offense than we are just sitting back and playing defense, and this is one way where I said let’s not just sit back and access the drug and let people use it that are in ICUs and in healthcare systems that need it to save their lives,” she said. “But let’s use it as an opportunity to build out our capacity for doing research so that in the long run we’re contributing to addressing COVID-19 for years into the future.”
South Dakota is still, Noem added, planning to have fireworks over Mount Rushmore this year—a promise President Trump made when signing a phase one trade deal with China earlier this year.
“They are—we’ll decide what it looks like but there will be fireworks over Mount Rushmore this year. We’re still moving ahead,” Noem said.
Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty ImagesPolice officers strengthen security in the El Carmelo neighborhood of Havana on April 4, 2020, after Cuban authorities announced its isolation as a measure to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus after the detection of COVID-19 cases. (Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty Images)
The coronavirus pandemic should remind all Americans how fortunate we are that we don’t live in a socialist country.
Most of my family fled to the United States from socialist Cuba; not all of them made it out alive, and some of them are still there. Growing up in California, I heard countless stories from my mom and grandparents of the government oppression that my relatives faced in their daily lives.
As I watch our own government’s efforts to mobilize the population in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I’m grateful that my family’s sacrifices enabled me to live in a country that has such immense respect for individual liberties. Curfews, restrictions on economic activity, scarce food and punitive, overbearing policing practices are a hallmark of both communist and socialist regimes in normal times. Here in the U.S., these things cause a shock to our system even during a crisis when they’re voluntary, precisely because so many of us take our individual liberties for granted.
This shock you feel should serve as a reminder that we’re all united by our great fortune to live in the most free country ever to exist. There is no better time to reflect on and appreciate our freedom as we get a small glimpse into what others living under communism and socialism experience every day.
Counterintuitively, the sight of bare shelves in grocery stores across the country also underscores the superiority of our capitalist system. Americans are shocked by the fact that it has become difficult to obtain certain staples such as toilet paper, but for citizens living under socialist regimes, severe shortages are simply a fact of life — and they don’t even have the option of settling for lasagna instead of spaghetti, because the shortages they endure day in and day out are far more widespread than anything Americans have encountered in recent weeks.
Rationing is common in Cuba for this very reason. The government limits the amount of food and supplies each Cuban is allowed to buy, and enforces those limits brutally.
When my mom’s cousin was dying of cancer in Cuba, the government wouldn’t provide sheets or food for her feeding tube. Our family in Cuba had to scour the black market to get her the appropriate food to be able to feed her through a tube during her last days. This was after the Cuban government missed her brain cancer diagnosis for years due to broken machines and poorly educated doctors. It was only discovered when she had months left to live.
When you hear that “health care is a right,” this is an example of what the health care Cubans have a “right” to looks like.
Innocent Cubans have been killed and jailed over violating rationing rules and for speaking out about their hunger. We don’t have to worry about that here in the United States. The closest thing to rationing that we’ll ever experience are reasonable per-customer limits on high-demand products put in place by the stores themselves.
President Trump may have encouraged Americans to scale back their hoarding of toilet paper, but there’s no way he would ever restrict how much we can buy, because he knows that the free market will restock those shelves far faster than any draconian government intervention could possibly manage.
Since long before the coronavirus crisis, I have been concerned that too many Americans have accepted a whitewashed history of socialism that glosses over the widespread brutality and hardship that characterize socialist governments. It’s no secret that our education system is dominated by the ideological political left, who have made strides in normalizing socialism as a Norwegian fairytale, ignoring the fact Norway is not a socialist country. I’ve seen American teachers with my own two eyes proud to prominently display a celebratory image of Marxist murderer Che Guevara in their classrooms — a distressing sight for those who actually know the brutality of his actions.
It seems that some Americans are so accustomed to freedom that we can’t even imagine the privation and fear that families like mine endured under socialism. It’s easy to think socialism is the answer when the words sound pretty, but when faced with the ugly reality it becomes too late to turn back. Once these ideologies take root in a country, the rot rapidly infects every crevice of the government and suddenly the citizens have no freedom to lawfully change it.
It’s no surprise that Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants living in the United States are overwhelmingly conservative and pro-capitalist. We see the empty shelves in the meat, dairy or toiletry sections at the grocery store caused by this pandemic and are reminded that in our home countries, the everyday reality is much worse.
For people like my mom, it evokes memories of having her last possession, a doll, destroyed and stolen from her by a Cuban government official. That was the one item she was allowed to flee with, but an overwhelming need for control drove the official to make sure my mom wasn’t hiding money inside of the doll.
Similarly, we were bewildered when Democrats praise the government-run health care system in Cuba — the same type of system that is failing so spectacularly to cope with coronavirus outbreaks in countries such as Italy.
When my grandpa visits our family still stuck in Cuba, we all rally together to fill suitcases full of medicine, female hygiene products and other basic health necessities because we know those things aren’t available in a socialist country. Unfortunately, the coronavirus is exposing the deficiencies of socialized medicine in a much more serious way — ventilators aren’t nearly as easy to fit in a suitcase.
As state and local governments across the U.S. ask citizens and business owners to make sacrifices in order to stop the spread of a deadly virus, I’m reminded of my time traveling in China with the recording artist Akon, where our guide was required to obtain special government permits just to enter certain parts of the country. Curfews, internet firewalls, bans of social media like Twitter and shutdowns are a regular part of life in China — and violating them brings severe consequences. Freedom of speech does not exist in China; people live in fear of vocalizing their thoughts. When I’d ask a hard question about living under communism, their eyes told me what they could not vocalize due to their fear of being monitored. Even Chinese citizens are restricted from entering certain districts, based on their status. As an American, that was strange to watch; it felt like we had been transported into the Hunger Games universe. It served as a stark reminder that we have such remarkable freedoms and opportunities in America that we often don’t even realize just how good we have it.
The parallels between our temporary “coronapocalypse” and everyday life under socialism should make us wary of those who try to present socialism as some kind of panacea. It should also make us grateful to have a president who knew communist China wasn’t being honest with us about the severity of the virus that originated there. President Trump’s instincts about communist China led to flights from China being shut down in January, despite the protests of xenophobia from Democrats, a decision we now know saved countless lives.
Most of all these parallels should make us grateful that we have a president committed to ensuring that the United States of America never becomes a socialist country. As I reflect on the difficulty my relatives stuck in Cuba face every day, I’m more grateful than ever to be an American.
Robby Starbuck is a Cuban-American producer and director. Robby was nominated for Best Rock Video and Best Indie Video at the Much Music Video Awards and has won the YouTube Play award, the Kerrang! Video of the Year award and Best Video with a Message at the MTV VMAs.
A Michigan state Democratic lawmaker who was suffering from the coronavirus credited President Donald Trump with saving her life, saying on Monday that his constant touting of hydroxychloroquine is what led her to ask her doctor for the malaria drug.
Rep. Karen Whitsett (Detroit) “said she started taking hydroxychloroquine on March 31, prescribed by her doctor, after both she and her husband sought treatment for a range of symptoms on March 18,” The Detroit Free Press reported. “‘It was less than two hours’ before she started to feel relief, said Whitsett, who had experienced shortness of breath, swollen lymph nodes, and what felt like a sinus infection.”
Whitsett said that she had taken the drug before for a separate medical issue but would not have thought to ask her doctor about it unless Trump had been repeatedly talking about it.
“It has a lot to do with the president … bringing it up,”Whitsett said. “He is the only person who has the power to make it a priority.”
When The Detroit Free Press asked her if she thought that Trump may have saved her life, she responded, “Yes, I do. I do thank him for that.”
Trump sent out a link to the report, writing, “Congratulations to State Representative Karen Whitsett of Michigan. So glad you are getting better!”
Congratulations to State Representative Karen Whitsett of Michigan. So glad you are getting better! https://t.co/v6z46rUDtg
Last week, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an “Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of hydroxychloroquine sulfate supplied from the Strategic National Stockpile to treat adults and adolescents who weigh 50 kg or more and are hospitalized with COVID-19 for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.”
While experts are still waiting on clinical trials and additional testing to officially determine the efficacy of using the drug to treat coronavirus, many doctors have said that it works very well.
Los Angeles based Dr. Anthony Cardillo, CEO of Mend Urgent Care, praised the drug over the weekend during an interview with ABC 7 news anchor Jory Rand.
“What we’re finding clinically with our patients is that it really only works in conjunction with zinc. So the hydroxychloroquine opens the zinc channel, zinc goes into the cell, it then blocks the replication of the cellular machinery,” Cardillo said. “So, it has to be used in conjunction with zinc. We are seeing some clinical responses in that regard. There are people that take it regularly for other disease processes, we have to be cautious and mindful that we don’t prescribe for patients who have COVID that are well. It really should be reserved for people that are really sick, in the hospital, or at home very sick that need that medication, otherwise we’re going to blow through our supply for the patients that take it regularly for other disease processes.”
“Every patient I’ve prescribed it to has been very, very ill and within 8-12 hours they were basically symptom free and so, clinically I am seeing a resolution that mirrors what we saw in the French study and some of the other studies worldwide,” Cardillo continued. “But what I am seeing is that people that are taking it alone, by itself, it’s not having efficacy.”
During an interview on Fox News last week, Dr. Stephen Smith, an infectious disease doctor, said, “It’s a game changer. It’s an absolute game changer. I think this data will go to really support the French data. … I think this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic. I’m very serious.”
Biden said, “We don’t need the kind of talk is president is using. In fact, the president has to stop the belittling of the governors with whom he disagrees, stop making accusations that somehow some New York hospitals are — they all of a sudden they need more masks, we ought to investigate them. Maybe they are going out the back door. What is that all about? That is bizarre, absolutely bizarre. Get the help to where it is needed now. And what they are doing right is they should let Dr. Fauci and the experts run the show, speak more, let them lay out exactly what is happening. Just tell the truth to the American people. They are tough. They can take it. But don’t mislead them.”
He continued, “Let’s do everything in our power to do it. And the social distancing the president gets around to it really late. He talked about social distancing not being required. Then he said it is going to be required, but everybody will be in church on Easter. Now he is acknowledging that’s not going to happen. I mean, let’s just level with the American people.”
He added, “Mr. President, let’s get things done. Let’s put the politics aside. You know we need more of everything. Why are you not insisting it be produced and demanding it using your presidential authority to get it done? Nobody disagrees with that. Get it done. Step up and do your job. Stop campaigning.”
One of the primary critiques of President Donald Trump’s new border wall is that such a barrier would be ineffective at achieving the stated goal of increasing security. Specifically, some critics have ludicrously claimed that barriers at the border won’t stop drug traffickers and illegal aliens from entering the country. They argue that at best it would be little more than a costly hindrance that could be rapidly overcome.
However, three illegal aliens from Mexico learned the hard way that the border wall critics were incredibly wrong in that assessment.
The trio of interlopers attempting to sneak into the country ended up trapped atop a section of the 30-foot-tall fence in the San Diego, California, area on Jan. 5, The Washington Times reported. After U.S. Border Patrol agents spotted the three perched atop the tall wall, and with an assist from the San Diego Fire Department, they were promptly helped down from the precarious position and taken into custody.
According to a news release from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, the three individuals had attempted to use the cover of a dense fog in the area to illegally enter the United States. Unfortunately for them, after reaching the top of the 30-foot steel wall near Otay Mesa, the three intruders found that they were unable to safely descend to the other side of the fence due to the wet and slippery condition of the mist-slicked steel. Making matters worse for them, it also appeared that they had been abandoned and left atop the wall by whoever had initially assisted their attempt to smuggle themselves across the border.
Once safely lowered from the top of the wall, the three individuals — a man and two women — were questioned and discovered to be Mexican nationals who’d illegally entered the country. At that point, they were taken into custody and transported to the nearest Border Patrol station for processing.
“These three were very fortunate to not have fallen from the top of the wall which could have resulted in serious injury or death,” Aaron Heitke, acting Chief Patrol Agent of the San Diego Sector, said in a statement. “These dangers are not important considerations to smugglers, who place an emphasis on profits over safety.”
The Times noted that the three illegals trapped atop the wall were indeed lucky to have not fallen and hurt themselves. Falling off the wall is apparently a fairly regular occurrence that Border Patrol agents must deal with, according to Supervisory Agent Jeffrey Stephenson, who pointed out that injured illegal aliens are immediately given whatever medical attention is necessary as soon as they are discovered.
He explained, “The falls have led to numerous serious injuries including broken legs, broken ankles, skull fractures, brain bleeds, broken scapula, fractured vertebrae, and appendicitis.”
Interestingly, Fox News reported that this incident occurred in an area near San Diego where President Trump’s proposed border wall system has been fully realized. The old 8-foot “landing mat”-style barriers and mesh fences directly on the border had been replaced with 18-foot steel bollards featuring a steel plate at the top, which the three invaders had managed to clear. However, they were stymied by the secondary 30-foot bollard wall that is set back a short distance from the shorter primary wall, creating a sort of corridor between the walls that agents can traverse in their efforts to enforce the border.
The section where the incident occurred was part of a project that started in 2018 to completely replace about 14 miles of the old single barrier that was easily breached with the new double-layered system that has now been proven to be much more difficult to overcome.
It should be obvious to all that, despite what the naysayers may claim, the new border wall system is being built — slowly but surely — and it is rather effective at preventing illegal incursions or, at the very least, slowing down and delaying interlopers until they can be apprehended by agents.
Ben Marquis is a writer who identifies as a constitutional conservative/libertarian. He has covered current events and politics for The Western Journal’s Conservative Tribune since 2014. His focus is on protecting the First and Second Amendments.
President Donald Trump put his foot down on Democrats’ attempts to advance their leftist political agenda by hijacking the coronavirus relief bill and filling it with partisan demands that are not related to the coronavirus crisis. The president made the announcement late on Monday night after Democrats ruined an opportunity to advance a $1.8 trillion stimulus bill on Sunday night.
“Republicans had a deal until Nancy Pelosi rode into town from her extended vacation,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “The Democrats want the Virus to win? They are asking for things that have nothing to do with our great workers or companies. They want Open Borders & Green New Deal. Republicans shouldn’t agree!”
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Republicans had a deal until Nancy Pelosi rode into town from her extended vacation. The Democrats want the Virus to win? They are asking for things that have nothing to do with our great workers or companies. They want Open Borders & Green New Deal. Republicans shouldn’t agree!
About an hour later, Trump quote retweeted an article from National Review that was titled: “Congressional Democrats Add Last-Minute Ideological Demands to Coronavirus Relief Package”. Trump wrote: “This will never be approved by me, or any other Republican!” The article listed a number of things that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have added to the spending bill.
On Monday, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) highlighted some of the spending items that Democrats are seeking that have nothing to do with the coronavirus:
Corporate pay statistics by race and race statistics for all corporate boards at companies receiving assistance.
Bailing out all current debt of postal service
Required early voting
Required same day voter registration
10k bailout for student loans
For companies accepting assistance, 1/3 of board members must be chosen by workers
Provisions on official time for union collective bargaining
Full offset of airline emissions by 2025
Greenhouse gas statistics for individual flights
Retirement plans for community newspaper employees
$15 minimum wage at companies receiving assistance
Permanent paid leave at companies receiving assistance
USA Today noted that Pelosi’s bill calls for nationwide ballot harvesting, a shady practice that is believed to lead to voter fraud:
Perhaps the most troubling sections of the bill are under the rubric ‘‘American Coronavirus/COVID–19 Election Safety and Security”or ‘‘ACCESS” Act. This section would impose requirements on states for early voting, voting by mail, required mailing of absentee ballots to everyone, ballot harvesting (i.e., having third parties deliver absentee ballots), online voter registration, same-day registration and other practices which undermine confidence in the integrity of the ballot. In these days of increasing threats to election security we should be moving rapidly back to in-person paper ballots, but this bill would be a radical step in the wrong direction.
Some of the other absurd things that were included in the bill include $35,000,000 for the JFK Performing Arts Center.
toddstarnes
✔@toddstarnes
Democrats believe #coronavirus can be cured by providing $35 million in funding to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Numerous publications have correctly placed the blame on the Democrats for stalling the process for getting suffering American families the relief that they need to make it financially as companies have been forced to shutdown as a result of the coronavirus, which originated in China.
CNN noted that Democrats were engaging in “political gamesmanship” with the bill,
MSNBC’s @GarrettHaake on Dems' Coronavirus bill: They're looking to include "election security and vote by mail … [things] that are arguably not a current crisis” pic.twitter.com/BcC2YoCqA4
Even MSNBC noted that the Democrats’ bill involves issues “that are arguably not a current crisis.”
MSNBC’s @GarrettHaake on Dems' Coronavirus bill: They're looking to include "election security and vote by mail … [things] that are arguably not a current crisis” pic.twitter.com/BcC2YoCqA4
The New York Times even called out the Democrats in the lead headline on the front page of their newspaper, writing, “Democrats Block Action on $1.8 Trillion Stimulus”
Dan Crenshaw
✔@DanCrenshawTX
US House candidate, TX-2
Democrats torpedoed a bipartisan emergency bill that:
-Provides payroll & rent for small business
-Credit to businesses across America to keep them afloat
– Cash in American’s pockets
– unemployment benefits
They have no good reasons. Just partisanship. Call your reps NOW.
After the George Zimmerman Hoax failed, after it was discovered that a white man had not hunted down and murdered a black teen (Zimmerman is Hispanic and a jury ruled he killed in self-defense), the fake news media moved on to the Hands-Up-Don’t-Shoot Hoax, which was led primarily by far-left CNN and the far-left Washington Post.
The lies and hate spread by the corporate media resulted in multiple nights of rioting in the working class, predominantly black city of Ferguson, Missouri. Then, like a plague of locusts, and apparently under the impression the city doesn’t already have enough problems, CNN moved on to Baltimore.
The reason the media’s coronavirus lies remind me of the CNN Race Riots of 2014 is because This Matters.
What I mean by that is that George Zimmerman, Ferguson, and Baltimore mattered. This was our malevolent media behaving exactly like a Bond villain: pushing a political agenda and looking to juice ratings at the expense of real people. Zimmerman, an innocent man, had his life and reputation ruined. The homes and businesses destroyed by those race riots are homes and businesses owned by everyday Americans, not the wealthy and certainly not CNN chief Jeff Zucker or anti-Trump activist Jake Tapper, whose fancy homes are miles away from the devastation they caused.
You see, as awful as the media have been over the last three years, the Russia Hoax and the Impeachment Hoax were D.C. food fights. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t collateral damage or that innocent people weren’t hurt — like President Trump and his family — but politics is politics. You know the risks going in…
Coronavirus is not a D.C. food fight. Like the CNN Race Riots of 2014, it affects everyday people: we have shut down our economy. The stock market is going insane. People are scared, worried, stressed, and have reason to be. Even if you remove the fear of the virus, no one can escape the fear of the panic, and the media’s blatant lies are only adding to this uncertainty and fear — and are doing so by design.
And for what? To what end..? Well, for the exact same reasons the media ginned up those race riots: a depraved indifference to human life driven by nothing more than a political agenda and the naked greed that comes with ratings and clicks.
Don’t believe me?
Here’s the evidence…
All the media’s coronavirus lies….
Keep in mind, these are not mistakes. Mistakes are random. Mistakes fall both ways. Our fake news media’s “mistakes” fall only one way — in the direction of ginning up panic in our streets and hatred of Trump and his supporters, who have already paid a very heavy price.
As you read this list, no matter what you do, do not call the media the enemy of the people … because that would be wrong.
Trump Told Governors to Get Their Own Goddamned Ventilators!
Now that the media can no longer attack Trump over the coronavirus testing (as you’ll see below), we’ve moved to ventilators. “Ventilators” is the new Katrina, the new metric with which to beat Trump senseless… So naturally, the media are going to lie shamelessly, which is exactly what they are doing, even as I write these words:
At least eight New York Times authors shared a deceptively edited quote Monday from President Donald Trump’s recent call with state governors, creating the false impression that the president is denying federal support for ventilators that are needed in hospitals treating coronavirus patients.
In his message, the president recommended that states procure respirators and ventilators because it would be faster — but added that the federal government “will be backing you.”
The Times journalists omitted the bulk of the president’s statement as they shared the story on social media. The misleading, partial quote was also boosted by a CNN correspondent and became the lead headline at the left-wing Huffington Post.
Despite growing online backlash to this misinformation, the journalists have yet to delete or retract their comments.
Here’s the president’s full quote:
Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves. We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.
He’s telling the governors, Do what you can while we do what we can do. This is excellent advice the liars at the far-left New York Times are deliberately twisting to cause panic, to tell the public the president doesn’t care.
Trump Seeks Monopoly on Coronavirus Vaccine
What better way to increase the world’s hatred of America, everyone’s hatred of Trump, and cause even more illegal aliens to crash into our country (seeking a vaccine) than to spread the fake news the American president is looking to monopolize any potential coronavirus vaccine?
But that is exactly what Reuters, The Guardian, Business Insider, and staffers at the New York Times and MSNBC did.
This lie doesn’t even make sense.
What good would it do America to corner the market on a vaccine? It costs us nothing to share the information so other countries can create their own vaccine. What good does it do the U.S. to sit around and watch everyone else die?
Nationwide Curfew!
Good ol’ Jim Sciutto, one of the most infamous liars in the country, a former Obama official hired by the serial liars at CNN to serial lie.
“New: There are active discussions within the Trump administration to encourage a possible ‘curfew’ across the nation in which non-essential businesses would have to close by a certain time each night,” Sciutto wrote on social media, citing “CNN reporting.”
It’s not true. And unless you’re looking to sow panic, it also makes no sense. What good would a curfew do, most especially a nationwide curfew? Does the virus only strike at night? There are reports Patient Zero ate a bat.
Maybe it was a vampire bat!
Trump Lied About the Google Website
“Google says it’s not publishing a national-scale coronavirus site,” CNN anti-Trump activist Jake Tapper tweeted to his 2.3 million Twitter followers last week.
He linked to a CNN story with the headline, “Google says it’s not publishing a national-scale coronavirus site anytime soon.” This was a story that smeared Trump as a liar for announcing Google will be building a national-scale coronavirus website.
The original and very fake CNN story can be found here.
Here’s the opener:
Google will not be publishing a national-scale website for coronavirus testing anytime soon, contrary to claims made by President Donald Trump during a Friday news conference.
Instead, a health-focused subsidiary owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, intends to launch a small-scale website next week to begin to triage California-based patients. The website will aim to serve a broader population only “over time” — not “very quickly,” as Trump said.
“What we’re building is a triage tool that will live on ProjectBaseline.com, and we plan to pilot it in California next week,” said Carolyn Wang, a spokesperson for the Alphabet subsidiary, Verily.
Here’s the Google Search screencap which captured CNN’s lie:
But now, if you click on that Google link, the CNN story says the exact opposite of what the original story said. Here’s the new headline and opener:
Google will partner with US government to develop a nationwide coronavirus website, company says
Google now says it is working with the government on the creation of a national website containing information about coronavirus symptoms and testing information.
“Google is partnering with the US Government in developing a national website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk and testing information,” the company said in a series of tweets Saturday evening.
The company did not give a time frame of when such a website would be up and running.
On Friday after the President said Google was helping to develop a website and it would be available soon, the company declined to say it would be publishing a national-scale website for coronavirus testing anytime soon.
Naturally, there is no editor’s note informing readers the original story was a lie or has been retracted or updated, which is highly unethical.
CNN spread a bald-faced lie to undermine the president, got caught, and did everything in its malevolent power to cover that lie up.
Trump Shut Down the CDC’s Pandemic Department!
Do I even need to point out how virulent and widespread this talking point has been?
No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.
It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.
…
It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.
The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected[.]
…
It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.
In other words, it wasn’t dissolved, it was streamlined.
Trump Declared the Coronavirus a Hoax!
This desperate lie, launched by the far-left Politico, was quickly debunked by fact-checkers, including the far-left Washington Post. That’s how big of a lie it is — the Washington Post conceded it was a lie.
Calling the Wuhan Virus the ‘Wuhan Virus’ Is Racist
As has already been exhaustively pointed out, the naming of a virus or disease after a location — including a lily-white location like Lyme, Connecticut — is just how it’s done and has been done forever.
But now it’s racist, even though the very same media declaring it racist is the very same media that first called it the “Chinese Virus” or the “Wuhan Virus,” or some variation thereof.
Here’s a pretty comprehensive list that’s been floating around. There are probably more examples, but this more than makes the point:
“Japan and Thailand Confirm New Cases of Chinese Coronavirus,” The New York Times, 1/15/20
“The CDC and Homeland Security begin screening for Chinese Coronavirus at three major US airports as outbreak spreads in Asia,” CNBC, 1/17/20
“Vaccine for new Chinese coronavirus in the works,” CNN, 1/20/20
“First U.S. case of potentially deadly Chinese coronavirus confirmed in Washington state,” Washington Post, 1/21/20
“Chinese coronavirus outbreak has reached U.S. shores, CDC says,” Los Angeles Times, 1/21/20
“The First Case Of The Chinese Coronavirus Has Hit The US, CDC Reports,” Buzzfeed, 1/21/20
“First case of Chinese coronavirus confirmed in Washington state,” NBC’s Today Show, 1/24/20
“Chinese coronavirus infections, death toll soar as fifth case is confirmed in U.S.,” Washington Post, 1/26/20
“Japan confirms case of new Chinese virus, spread is ‘concerning,’” Reuters, 1/15/20
“How the Chinese virus outbreak impacts Lunar New Year travel,” National Geographic, 1/24/20
“China coronavirus ‘spreads before symptoms show,’” BBC, 1/26/20
“Over a thousand ‘likely’ infected by Wuhan virus in China: Study,” Al Jazeera, 1/18/20
To sum this up, the fake news media floods these words and terms into the American lexicon, and then sanctimoniously turns around and attacks those who repeat them as racist.
Trump Blocked Testing Because Lower Numbers are Good for His Reelection
This lie arrives courtesy of the welfare queens at NPR and a Newsweek staffer’s hysterical amplification that has been retweeted almost a quarter-million times.
And once again, I ask, how does this makes any sense?
In the face of the facts, Trump is doing back-flips to start testing. What’s more, how does not testing benefit his re-election chances? It’s not as if people who test positive won’t eventually become symptomatic.
This is not just a lie (no other media outlet has confirmed it, which means even CNN couldn’t find a lying source that has lied to them so many times before to lie about this one), it’s by far the stupidest lie on this list.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Tuesday that the blame for the slow pace of testing for coronavirus in the U.S. does not lie with either President Trump or the CDC.
Fauci told Hugh Hewitt on “The Hugh Hewitt” show that a “technical glitch” resulted in the delay in production of usable tests in the U.S., something Fauci prescribed to random error.
…
“This has nothing to do with anybody’s fault, certainly not the president’s fault.”
11. Trump Silenced Dr. Fauci
This lie spread like wildfire before Fauci himself was given a chance to tell the truth.
We are plagued with a dishonest, unreliable, unserious, dangerous media, driven only by political calculation and naked greed.
The media are so evil and indecent, even a pandemic can’t cure them.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
All along America’s highways, trucks hauling vital relief supplies are cutting through red tape, thanks to President Donald Trump.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on Friday announced that a 1938 law regulating the hours of service for truck drivers was being waived on a national basis to battle the coronavirus. The agency said this was first time the rule had ever been waived throughout the country.
“I will never hesitate to take any necessary steps to protect the lives, health, and safety of the American people. I will always put the well-being of America first,” Trump said, according to a White House media pool report.
The rule currently forbids truck drivers from driving more than 11 hours during a 14-hour work period. After that, drivers are required by law to have 10 hours of down time. The waiver, issued by Trump and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, exempts truckers hauling medicine and other supplies necessary to battle theoutbreak of the virus, FMCSA Acting Administrator Jim Mullen said.
“Because of the decisive leadership of President Trump and Secretary Chao, this declaration will help America’s commercial drivers get these critical goods to impacted areas faster and more efficiently. FMCSA is continuing to closely monitor the coronavirus outbreak and stands ready to use its authority to protect the health and safety of the American people,” Mullen said in a statement.
In addition to medicine, the waiver covers haulers carrying food to restock depleted store shelves, sanitation and cleaning supplies, equipment needed to construct temporary housing, or those who are being moved to either provide emergency services or to be removed to quarantine. The waiver requires that after drivers reach their destination, they have at least 10 hours of down time if they’ve been carrying goods, and at least eight hours if they have been transporting people.
Although the decision announced Friday is the first of its kind nationally, the rule has been suspended on a more limited basis during other emergencies, according to Business Insider.
“Waivers of this type are a common response by FMCSA to natural disasters and crises because trucks delivering food, fuel and medicine are a critical part of the response,” America Trucking Associations spokesman Sean McNally said, according Business Insider. “This waiver will help keep loads of medicine, supplies and food moving as the country manages this current pandemic.”
The waiver will be in effect until the national emergency that has been declared ends or April 12, whichever comes first, according to Transportation Topics.
“[T]here’s been a tremendous amount of coordination with states, with cities, and they’re a little smaller form of government, and they have things going well. They’re coordinating with us. And certain, in particular, I think California has been terrific — the relationship. New York has been really good. We’ve had some really good relationships in terms of — especially the hotspots. And we’re focused on those hotspots,” he said.
“We’re all in this together. It’s something that nobody expected. It came out of China, and it’s one of those things that happened. It’s nobody’s fault. We all — we all will solve this problem. We’ll solve it well,” Trump said.
“I think the American people have been incredible in the way they’ve acted,” Trump said. “There’s been — and if you look at companies and sports leagues and all of the things, what they’ve done is — is just something very special, without being told, necessarily. In some cases, perhaps they were told, actually. But for the most part, they want to get it over with.”
Vice President Mike Pence also praised the nation’s response to the crisis.
“[T]he American people are all responding to look after not only their own health but their families and their communities. And one story after another is truly inspiring to the president and to all of us,” he said.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Jack can be reached at jackwritings1@gmail.com.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) on Thursday endorsed Joe Biden for president, a significant boost for the former vice president ahead of next week’s primary in the Wolverine State. Whitmer, whose state’s primary will allocate 125 pledged delegates, cast Biden as an advocate for working families, citing his work on health care, bailing out the auto industry and more during his time in the Obama administration.
“Working families in Michigan need a president who will show up and fight for them, and Joe Biden has proven time and again that he has our backs,” she said in a statement. “Michiganders have grit. We’re tough. We know what it’s like to be overlooked and counted out. And we know that when you get knocked down, you pick yourself up and get back to work. Joe Biden has been right there with us in the tough fights.”
“Joe Biden is the candidate we need to defeat Donald Trump in November. He’s always had our backs. Now, I’m proud to have his,” added Whitmer, who is also being named a national co-chair to Biden’s campaign.
Whitmer said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”that Biden’s commitment to expanding health care was personal to her, noting that the same type of brain tumor killed both her mother and Biden’s son.
“I have commiserated about Joe about this very thing,” she said of her mother’s brain cancer diagnosis. “I know his commitment.”
Biden is set for up for a battle in Michigan next week with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who narrowly took the state’s primary in 2016 over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
The Wolverine State is a key contest for both candidates’ claims of support from white working-class voters. The state was one of the key victories, along with others in the Rust Belt, for President Trump in the 2016 general election.
Whitmer, who was endorsed by Biden during her 2018 gubernatorial bid, has steadily gained a national profile after winning the gubernatorial election two years ago and delivering the Democratic Party’s response to President Trump’s State of the Union in February. Her endorsement comes just one day after former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm also threw her support behind the former vice president.
They are just the latest in a slew of establishment Democratic figures falling in line behind Biden after resounding victories in South Carolina and several Super Tuesday states vaulted him back into the front-runner position in the primary.
Though Biden put up underwhelming showings in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, a 30-point win in the Palmetto State and victories in 10 out of 14 Super Tuesday states have revived his campaign, setting him up to have a narrow delegate lead after all of California’s primary votes are tallied.
Sanders, meanwhile, won California, Colorado, Utah and his home state of Vermont on Super Tuesday.
Biden appears set to capitalize on his Super Tuesday resurgence in upcoming primary and caucus states, which consist heavily of demographics that appear to favor the former vice president. Six more states will cast ballots on Tuesday, with Michigan representing the heftiest delegate haul.
President Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate have taken the reliably liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and tilted it to the Right. The 9th Circuit is the largest circuit court, covering many of the West Coast states, including California, Hawaii, and Arizona. The court just received its 10th judge from the Trump administration, effectively changing the court’s liberal makeup into a more ideologically diverse lineup. In just three years, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Trump joined forces to place more justices to lifetime appointments on the 9th Circuit than President Barack Obama did in his eight years in office.
One judge from the circuit said the rapid influx of Trump appointees had been jarring, telling the Los Angeles Times, “Ten new people at once sends a shock wave through the system.”
Many of Trump’s appointments have been praised by their peers on the 9th Circuit, but others appear to be rattled. For instance, Judge Daniel Collins has been criticized for his “combative” objections to other judges on the circuit.
“Collins has definitely bulldozed his way around here already in a short time,”one judge from the 9th Circuit said. “Either he doesn’t care or doesn’t realize that he has offended half the court already.”
Democratic-appointed judges still hold a slight majority in the circuit, with 16 appointees compared with 13 Republican appointees, but 9th Circuit Judge Milan Smith Jr., an appointee of George W. Bush, said Trump’s judicial picks were about to take over.
“Trump has effectively flipped the circuit,” Smith said. “You will see a sea change in the 9th Circuit on day-to-day decisions.”
Democratic appointees have controlled the 9th Circuit Court since 1978, when federal law changed to add 10 seats to the court, allowing President Jimmy Carter to select every judge to fill the openings. President Ronald Reagan got only three nominations on the circuit, and appointees from President Bill Clinton and Obama built out the rest of the former liberal stronghold.
Because the court was reliably liberal, it was often the go-to court to challenge Trump’s policies, often forcing a review from the Supreme Court. In the early days of Trump’s presidency, the 9th Circuit struck down his “travel ban” from several Muslim-majority countries and deemed many of his immigration policies unconstitutional. The Supreme Court overturned many of the rulings from the 9th Circuit. Still, delays caused by the lower courts can hinder the president’s policies from moving forward when he wants them to begin.
In total, Trump has appointed 51 circuit court judges to lifetime appointments alongside the two justices he landed on the Supreme Court. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has joked that his motto while leading the GOP majority in the Senate is to “leave no vacancy behind.”
Donald Trump smiles at State of the Union (Win McNamee / AFP / Getty)
Trump received 1,871,515 total votes in the Texas Republican primary on Tuesday, with 99.5 percent of the vote reporting. That’s more than the top four remaining Democrats combined, as currently former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg, and Elizabeth Warren have earned a total of 1.7 million votes in Texas, with 91.3 percent of the vote reporting, although the Democrat votes are still being counted.
Trump received the most votes ever for an incumbent president running in Texas.
Fifteen years ago, 635,948 Republican Texans voted for then-President George W. Bush in the 2004 Republican primary. In 2012, 520,410 Democrats voted for then-President Barack Obama in their primary.
Texan Republicans did have a Senate primary in the state in 2020, but Sen. John Cornyn was the easy winner with 74 percent of the vote.
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 15: Former advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, Roger Stone, departs the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse with his wife Nydia (R) after being found guilty of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on November 15, 2019 in Washington, DC. Stone faced seven felony charges and was found guilty on all counts. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The lead juror at Roger Stone’s trial said in a written questionnaire for prospective jurors that she was “not sure”whether she posted online about the Russia investigation or Stone, and that she “may have shared an article” on social media on the topics, according to a portion of the document reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
But Tomeka Hart’s Twitter feed shows that she indeed posted multiple times about the Russia probe and at least once about Stone,who was sentenced on Thursday to 40 months in prison in a case that stemmed from the special counsel’s investigation. Stone’s lawyers filed a motion on Feb. 14 alleging that Hart’s social media activity shows that she was biased against President Donald Trump and Stone. Trump also criticized Hart during a press conference after Stone was sentenced.
Trump called Hart an “anti-Trump activist,” and suggested that she “tainted” Stone’s jury.
Hart, who ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2012, commented negatively about Trump on Twitter and circulated news stories about the Russia probe. In one Aug. 2, 2019 post, she called all of Trump’s supporters racist.
Stone, 67, has been one of Trump’s most longstanding supporters, and is sometimes credited with convincing the real estate mogul to run for president.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who presided over Stone’s case, said last Tuesday that she would decide after Stone’s sentencing whether to grant a retrial. Jackson did not comment directly on reports about Hart during Stone’s sentencing on Thursday, but did say that the jury in Stone’s case acted with “integrity.” Jackson on Sunday rejected Stone’s request, filed Friday, that she recuse herself from the retrial decision because of her praise of the jury. Stone is arguing that Hart gave misleading answers during the jury selection process. Jackson’s rulings suggest that Stone faces an uphill battle in getting a retrial granted. And judges are generally reluctant to toss out a jury’s verdict without strong evidence of jury or prosecutorial misconduct. In order for a retrial to be granted, Stone will have to convince Jackson that he has met two requirements for a retrial set by the Supreme Court, according to Leslie McAdoo Gordon, a criminal defense and security clearance attorney who practices in Washington, D.C.
The Supreme Court requires defendants to show that a juror provided materially false information, and that the information, had it been known, would have been a valid basis for a request to strike the juror from the jury pool. McAdoo Gordon said that Hart’s responses on her written jury questionnaire paired with her answers verbal interview during a process known as voir dire are enough to warrant a retrial.
“I think he could satisfy the Supreme Court’s test for requesting a new trial,” McAdoo Gordon told The DCNF.
She said that it appeared that Hart downplayed her awareness of the Russia probe in her written questionnaire. That alone would not be enough to merit a retrial, McAdoo Gordon said. But Hart’s comments about Trump supporters and her failure to disclose those views during voir dire are enough to satisfy the Supreme Court’s requirement, according to the lawyer.
“If that information had been presented to the judge that she thought all supporters of the president were racist, the judge would have excluded her,” McAdoo Gordon said.
“She minimized her answers to the voir dire and she was not honest in answering that question about whether she could be impartial.”
Hart came under scrutiny earlier this month after she revealed herself to have been the foreperson on Stone’s jury in a social media post in which she defended four prosecutors who withdrew from the case in protest over a sentencing recommendation.
Right-wing blogger Michael Cernovich tracked down some of Hart’s social media posts which showed that she was highly critical of President Trump and his supporters.
Trump weighed in on Stone’s sentence on Thursday, and said that he will decide on whether to pardon Stone after Jackson rules on whether to have another trial.
“I want the process to play out,” Trump said at a press conference in Las Vegas. “I think that’s the best thing to do, because I’d love to see Roger exonerated, and I’d love to see it happen because I personally think he was treated very unfairly.”
In one Aug. 19, 2017 post, Hart referred to Trump as the “#KlanPresident,” an apparent reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
Ginsberg also notes a 2017 post calling Trump '#klanpresident.' Judge says she wants to keep moving 'We have jurors (plural) cooling their heels.'
Why should she call Trump #KlanPresident when even David Duke, PhD former Grand Wizard of KKK has said himself the Klan thing was when he was much younger.
“Co-signing and defending a racist and his racist rhetoric makes you racist. Point blank,” she wrote on Aug. 2, 2019.
The DCNF obtained one page of Hart’s written jury questionnaire on the condition that the document not be published in full.
WATCH:
Hart’s responses on the questionnaire and during the voir dire process on Nov. 5 show that she acknowledged having Democratic leanings. But she also appears to have downplayed her awareness of developments in the Trump-Russia investigation.
During her voie dire interview, Hart said that her political views would “absolutely not” influence her opinion about Stone at trial, and that she “didn’t pay that close” attention the Russia investigation.
Hart and other prospective jurors filled out a 20-page, 56-question form in September 2019 during the jury selection process. The questionnaire asked prospective jurors about their awareness of the Stone investigation, the Russia investigation, and their opinions about various people involved in the case. The page viewed by The DCNF includes questions 21, 22, and 23 about Hart’s social media activity and awareness of news coverage about the Russia investigation.
In response to a question about whether she watches the news, Hart said “not regularly” but said that she followed CNN’s Anderson Cooper and MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes.
Hart offered a vague response regarding her awareness of the multiple investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
One question asked Hart whether she had written or posted anything regarding Stone, or the special counsel and House Intelligence Committee’s investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“I can’t remember if I did,”wrote Hart, who was identified as Juror 1261, “but I may have shared an article on Facebook.”
“Honestly not sure.”
Hart’s Twitter feed shows that she made far more than the single social media post that she indicated making in her jury questionnaire.
On Jan. 30, 2019, she retweeted a comment from CNN contributor Bakari Sellers criticizing conservatives who decried the circumstances of Stone’s arrest days earlier. Sellers admonished conservatives for complaining about Stone’s arrest by pointing to several high-profile cases of African-Americans who were killed by police.
Hart referred to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe in several posts, and appeared to support the notion that Trump associates colluded with Russia.
“Fox News keeps pushing excuses for Trump Jr.’s collusion with Russia that are just really, really bad,”reads a tweet she reposted on July 14, 2017.
In a May 29, 2019 tweet of an article at The Hill, Hart emphasized remarks that Mueller made at a press conference he held that same day.
“After that investigation, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that,”Hart quoted Mueller saying.
She also commented about the special counsel’s investigation on Facebook, though the post has now been deleted. She linked to the post in a March 24, 2019 tweet.
“Ignoring the numerous indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions of people in 45’s inner-circle, some Republicans are asserting that the Mueller investigation was a waste of time because he hasn’t found evidence of…,”the tweet begins.
In a Feb. 28, 2019 tweet linking to a now-deleted Facebook post, Hart wrote: “In his press conference 45 said M Cohen lied a lot during his testimony, but told the truth when he said he had no knowledge/evidence that 45 colluded with Russia. Then 45 said since Cohen lied about everything…”
It is still unclear if Stone’s legal team was aware of Hart’s social media activity before selecting a jury.
Grant Smith, Stone’s lead attorney, declined to talk about the case. Stone and his lawyers remain under a gag order issued by Judge Jackson.
World Food Program USA Board Chairman Hunter Biden (L) and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden attend the World Food Program USA’s Annual McGovern-Dole Leadership Award Ceremony at Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. / Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images
According to CBS News’ sources, Department of Justice officials, at the direction of Attorney General William Barr, have been “quietly” reviewing over the past “several weeks” records and documents related to the “Ukraine matter,” including documents provided by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Citing a source familiar with the matter, CBS News’ Catherine Herridge and Clare Hymes reported Tuesday that “staff outside of Main Justice in Washington have been assigned by Attorney General William Barr to review the Ukraine matter, adding that the review is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Pittsburgh and is separate from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s probe into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe.”
Among the materials reportedly being reviewed by Justice Department officials at Barr’s behest are some provided by Giuliani, who was specifically mentioned by President Trump in his famous July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and who appears to have served as point man for the pursuit of investigations into allegations of corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
Herridge and Hymes note that that investigation also “goes beyond” matters related to the Bidens, according to the source.
In the call which sparked the Democrats’ impeachment campaign, President Trump asked Zelensky to “look into” the allegations involving the Bidens and Burisma. After a whistleblower complaint accused Trump of attempting to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rival, Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry resulting in two articles of impeachment, which passed in the House but for which Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
As Herridge and Hymes reports, the allegations involving the Bidens and Ukraine “have gained new life” since Trump’s acquittal, with Barr stating Monday that the department has established an “intake process in the field” for material concerning Ukraine.
During the impeachment trial in the Senate, Trump’s lawyers repeatedly brought up the issue of corruption in Ukraine, around which Trump’s request to Zelensky centered. At one point, President Trump’s deputy counsel Patrick Philbin connected the “Ukraine matter” to the whistleblower whose complaint sparked the impeachment.
“If the whistleblower, as is alleged in some public reports, actually did work for then-Vice President Biden on Ukraine issues, exactly what was his role?” asked Philbin. “What was his involvement when issues were raised — we know from testimony that questions were raised — about the potential conflict of interest that the vice president then had when his son was sitting on the board of Burisma. Was the alleged whistleblower involved in any of that and in making decisions to not do anything related to that? Did he have some reason to want to put the deep-six on any question raising any issue about what went on with the Bidens and Burisma and firing Shokin and withholding a billion dollars in loan guarantees and enforcing a very explicit quid pro quo — you won’t get this billion dollars until you fire him? We don’t know. And because Manager [Rep. Adam] Schiff was guiding this whole process, because he was the chairman in charge of directing the inquiry and directing it away from any of those questions, that creates a real due process defect in the record that has been presented here.”
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 3: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) speaks to members of the media at the U.S. Capitol on February 3, 2020 in Washington, DC. Closing arguments begin Monday after the Senate voted to block witnesses from appearing in the impeachment trial. The final vote is … Alex Edelman/Getty Images
Klobuchar’s remarks were made during an interview with CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe on her campaign bus after an event in Keene, New Hampshire. O’Keefe pressed Klobuchar on her decision to raise her hand on the debate stage after the candidates were questioned on whether they worry about having a democratic socialist for a presidential nominee.
“The question should be why didn’t everyone else raise their hand?” Klobuchar told O’Keefe. “But they didn’t because people are looking at each other, and it may not be popular, and you’re going to anger some people, but I believe in leading and doing what you think is right, and that’s why I raised my hand because I am troubled by having a socialist lead our ticket.”
Klobuchar also said voters “are tired of the extremes in our politics and the noise and the nonsense” and claimed they want a candidate who can “bring in ideas and actually get them done.”
The Minnesota senator went on to say that it would be a “lot tougher” for freshman Democrats to keep their seats in November should Sanders be the nominee.
“The debates have been an even playing field for me,” Klobuchar told CBS News. “People can’t buy their way into being able to respond on the debate stage. They can’t have the bigger name. So, people are able to look at the candidates and think, ‘Wait a minute, who can really stand up to Donald Trump? Who has ideas that are similar to mine?’”
According to a national average from Real Clear Politics, Klobuchar sits in sixth place with 4.3 percent support from voters.
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 20: Gordon Sondland, the U.S ambassador to the European Union, makes an opening statement before testifying to the House Intelligence Committee in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill November 20, 2019 in Washington, DC. The committee heard testimony during the fourth day of open hearings in the impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Donald Trump, whom House Democrats say held back U.S. military aid for Ukraine while demanding it investigate his political rivals and the unfounded conspiracy theory that Ukrainians, not Russians, were behind the 2016 computer hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
President Donald Trump continued to clean house late on Friday after removing two brothers from the National Security Council, notifying Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union that he was fired.
“I was advised today that the president intends to recall me effective immediately as United States ambassador to the European Union,” Sondland said in a statement. “I am grateful to President Trump for having given me the opportunity to serve, to Secretary Pompeo for his consistent support, and to the exceptional and dedicated professionals at the U.S. Mission to the European Union. I am proud of our accomplishments. Our work here has been the highlight of my career.”
Sonland, who testified in Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, initially said during his testimony that there was a quid pro quo involving withholding aid to Ukraine for the announcement of an investigation into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Later, Sondland later admitted that what he had stated was just his assumption.
HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN ADAM SCHIFF: And you’ve also testified that your understanding — it became your clear understanding that the military assistance was also being withheld, pending Zelensky announcing these investigations. Correct?
SONDLAND: That was my presumption, my personal presumption, based on the facts at the time. Nothing was moving.
Sondland later continued:
GOP COUNSEL STEVE CASTOR: I want to turn back to your – your opener on Page 5, under – when – when you talk about in the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, I later came to believe that the resumption of security aid would not occur until there was a public statement from Ukraine committing to the investigations. Correct?
SONDLAND: Correct.
CASTOR: And you acknowledged that this is speculation, right?
SONDLAND: It was a presumption.
Sondland later admitted that he had no evidence to prove his initial claim.
Sondland late confirmed again during his testimony that what he had initially claimed was just his presumption:
REP. MIKE TURNER (R-OH): OK. Well, you know, after you testified Chairman Schiff ran out and gave a press conference and said, he gets to impeach the president of the United States because of your testimony. And if you pull up CNN today right now their banner says “Sondland ties Trump to withholding aid,” is that your testimony today, Mr. — Ambassador Sondland, that you have evidence that Donald Trump tied the investigations to the aid? Because I don’t think you’re saying that.
SONDLAND: I’ve said repeatedly, Congressman, I was presuming. I also said that President Trump —
TURNER: So no one told you. Not just the president — Giuliani didn’t tell you, Mulvaney didn’t tell you — nobody — Pompeo didn’t tell you? Nobody else on this planet told you that Donald Trump was tying aid to these investigations, is that correct?
SONDLAND: I think I already testified to that —
TURNER: No, answer the question. Is it correct, no one on this planet told you that Donald Trump was tying this aid to the investigations? Because if your answer is yes, then the Chairman’s wrong and the headline on CNN is wrong. No one on this planet told you that President Trump was tying aid to investigations, yes or no?
SONDLAND: Yes.
TURNER: So, you really have no testimony today that ties President Trump to a scheme to withhold aid from Ukraine in exchange for these investigations?
SONDLAND: Other than my own presumption.
TURNER: Which is nothing. I mean, that’s what I don’t understand. So you know what hearsay evidence is, Ambassador? Hearsay is when I testify what someone else told me. Do you know what made up testimony is? Made up testimony is when I just presume it.
I mean, you’re just assuming all of these things and then you’re giving them the evidence that they’re running out and doing press conferences and CNN’s headline is saying that you’re saying the president of the United States should be impeached because he tied to investigations and you don’t know that, correct?
SONDLAND: I never said the president of the United States should be impeached.
TURNER: Nope, but you did — you have left people with the confusing impression that you were giving testimony that you did not. You do not have any evidence that the president of the United States was tied to withholding aid from Ukraine in exchange for investigations. I yield back.
WATCH:
Democrats reference Gordon Sondland EVERYWHERE in their case. Spread this clip far and wide:
“No one on this planet told you POTUS was tying aid/political investigations?”
Girl closed her eyes and folded her hand in prayer on a Holy Bible / Sasiistock/Getty Images
The guidance will be posted in the Federal Register on January 21, 2020 and it states, in part:
Section 8524(a) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act and codified at 20 U.S.C. 7904(a), requires the Secretary to issue guidance to State educational agencies (SEAs), local educational agencies (LEAs), and the public on constitutionally protected prayer in public elementary and secondary schools. In addition, section 8524(b) requires that, as a condition of receiving ESEA funds, an LEA must certify in writing to its SEA that it has no policy that prevents, or otherwise denies participation in, constitutionally protected prayer in public schools as detailed in this updated guidance.
Education Week’s report on the guidance noted precedent for the Trump administration’s move:
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, in its current and past versions, requires the U.S. Department of Education to provide guidance on prayer in schools every two years, but that guidance hasn’t been updated since 2003, a senior administration official said.
“President Trump is committed to making sure that people of faith, particularly children,” are not discouraged from constitutionally protected rights to pray, an administration official said in a conference call with reporters.
The new school prayer guidance, which will be published in the Federal Register Thursday Jan. 21, reiterates requirements under existing law that school districts must annually certify to their state departments of education that they have “no policy prohibiting participation in constitutionally protected prayer,” officials said. State education departments must have a process for fielding complaints the right to prayer has been violated, and they must report any complaints or lawsuits over school prayer to the federal Education Department, the guidance says.
The guidance also states that student religious groups should have the same access to school facilities as secular groups, which has been in place since 1998, Education Week reports.
The Trump administration will also issue a directive on Thursday that states religiously affiliated groups can get federal grants even if the group is located in a state that prohibits public funding of such groups.
“Those laws, known as Blaine amendments, are the subject of a case on tax-credit scholarships for private schools that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court next week,” Education Week notes in its report.
Fox Nation host Lara Logan admitted Tuesday evening that she doesn’t understand how Americans are essentially siding with Iran to attack President Donald Trump.
Logan, speaking with Fox News host Laura Ingraham and fellow guest Dinesh D’Souza, recounted some of her own experiences with the Iranian regime during her time in the Middle East.
“It is kind of depressing,” Logan replied. “I’ve been a journalist for more than 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like it. What about the voices of the Iraqi people? What about the voice of the Syrians and the Yemenis and all the people across the region who have been celebrating Soleimani’s death? You won’t see them on the streets of Tehran. You are not going to see this great display because they are afraid. They are so afraid of what the proxy forces, the revolutionary guards are capable of.”
Ingraham turned the question to D’Souza, who argued that if former President Barack Obama had been the one to order the strike against Soleimani the response would have been very different.
“If Obama had taken him out there would be celebrations, Obama is a genius,” D’Souza said. “But since it is Trump, they want to mobilize the Soleimani assassination against Trump. They are, in a way, willing to go to bed with the far enemy to defeat the near enemy, who is a greater threat to their agenda here at home.”
Logan went on to recount her experiences in the region with Iranian proxy forces, noting the extreme brutality of Soleimani and his proxies.
“That commander that was trained in Iran, loyal to Iran, run by Soleimani, he killed, according to the U.S. Embassy, two and a half thousand Sunnis,” Logan said. “His preferred method to kill them was to drill holes in their heads while they were alive. They would be meat hooks on the wall that the Iranian militias used to hang people there.”
“And I remember interviewing a young Iraqi boy, his father was taken in the night by an Iranian militia, and I will never forget him holding my hand and saying, when they took his father he had no shoes,” Logan continued, adding that the boy was turned away when he caught up to them. “He won’t need shoes where he’s going,” was what the militia member told the boy.
Logan concluded by saying that that boy’s father was one of many bodies that was eventually found in a dumpster after interacting with Iranian militias.
In this Aug. 25, 2009 file photo, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., holds a healthcare town hall meeting in Sun City, Ariz. McCain’s family says the Arizona senator has chosen to discontinue medical treatment for brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York) AP Photo/Matt York
There have long been questions about why it was necessary for McCain to pass Steele’s anti-Trump dossier to Comey on December 9, 2016, several weeks after the November 2016 presidential election. By then, Steele had already met numerous times with FBI agents to provide them with his controversial reports. Steele, however, was terminated as an FBI source in the fall of 2016 because he spoke to the news media.
The IG report discloses that McCain gave five new Steele reports to Comey that the FBI did not previously possess, showing that McCain served as a conduit for Steele’s information to reach the FBI even after the British ex-spy was formally cut off as an FBI source.
It is not clear whether McCain knew at the time that Steele had previously been terminated as an FBI source.
The IG report also verifies that a McCain aid obtained the Steele reports directly from Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, meaning that when McCain transferred the anti-Trump charges to Comey he had to have known that the material originated with a firm that specializes in controversial opposition tactics. Fusion GPS was paid for its anti-Trump work by Trump’s primary political opponents, namely Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.
States the IG report:
Several weeks later, on December 9, 2016, Senator John McCain provided Comey with a collection of 16 Steele election reports, 5 of which Steele had not given the FBI. McCain had obtained these reports from a staff member at the McCain Institute. The McCain Institute staff member had met with Steele and later acquired the reports from Simpson.
The unnamed McCain staff member is known to be David J. Kramer, who also infamously provided BuzzFeed with the Steele dossier.
BuzzFeed published Steele’s full dossier on January 10, 2017 setting off a firestorm of news media coverage about the document.
Prior to his death, McCain admitted to personally handing the dossier to Comey but he refused repeated requests for comment about whether he had a role in providing the dossier to BuzzFeed, including numerous inquiries sent to his office by this reporter.
In his book published last year, McCain maintained he had an “obligation” to pass the dossier charges against Trump to Comey and he would even do it again. “Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell,”McCain exclaimed.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him onTwitter @AaronKleinShow.Follow him onFacebook.
WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 18: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) delivers remarks alongside Chairman Jerry Nadler, House Committee on the Judiciary (D-NY) and Chairman Eliot Engel, House Foreign Affairs Committee (D-NY), following the House of Representatives vote to impeach President Donald Trump on December 18, 2019 in Washington, … Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
In a brief submitted to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the panel’s counsel Doug Letter argued its subpoena of McGahn, who departed the White House last year, is not moot despite the House’s approval of two impeachment articles — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — in a partisan vote on Wednesday evening.
“If McGahn’s testimony produces new evidence supporting the conclusion that President Trump committed impeachable offenses that are not covered by the Articles approved by the House, the Committee will proceed accordingly—including, if necessary, by considering whether to recommend new articles of impeachment,” the brief reads.
The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), subpoenaed McGahn in March for its investigation into whether President Trump or senior White House officials obstructed justice during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into now-debunked collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
The Trump White House requested McGahn refuse to comply with the subpoena, citing “absolute immunity” that has long shielded top advisers from testifying before Congress.
Late last month, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay of previous ruling directing McGahn to testify. The court said it would consider granting a longer stay and scheduled a hearing for oral arguments on January 3.
In a ten-page filing, the Department of Justice argued the House’s impeachment vote “eliminate[d] the need” for McGahn to answer congressional questioning and “underscore the reasons why this Court should dismiss or deny the Committee’s suit without adjudicating the subpoena’s validity.”
“Indeed, if this Court now were to resolve the merits question in this case, it would appear to be weighing in on a contested issue in any impeachment trial,” DOJ lawyer wrote. “That would be of questionable propriety whether or not such a judicial resolution preceded or post-dated any impeachment trial.”
US President Donald Trump speaks at the White House Summit on Child Care and Paid Leave on December 12, 2019, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Support for impeaching President Trump is dropping while opposition is growing, a CNN poll released this week reveals.
A full House vote on the two approved articles of impeachment against the president, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, is expected to take place this week. However, as recent polls have indicated, support for impeachment is dropping and opposition is growing.
A CNN poll released this week, conducted by SSRS December 12-15, among 1,005 adults, found that 45 percent support impeaching the president. That reflects a 5-point drop from November’s results, which showed support for impeachment at 50 percent.
Support for impeaching the president, even among Democrats alone, is dropping. In November, 90 percent of Democrats supported impeaching the president. The most recent results show the number falling to 77 percent — a 13-point drop in one month.
Meanwhile, opposition is growing. According to the poll, 47 percent oppose impeaching the president, reflecting a four-point jump from last month’s results, when opposition stood at 43 percent. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 3.7 percentage points.
The results coincide with the House Judiciary Committee’s decision to advance articles of impeachment against the president. The full House is expected to vote this week. According a report from the Wall Street Journal, Democrats have enough votes to impeach, making a trial in the Senate inevitable.
By Monday afternoon, at least 18 from the 31 Democratic-held districts that Mr. Trump won in the 2016 presidential race had announced they would support the abuse-of-power and obstruction of Congress charges, according to a Wall Street Journal survey, with two saying they are opposed.
…
With the new announcements of support, and assuming no unexpected defections, Democrats have enough votes to impeach the president. While Americans nationally are about evenly split on whether they back impeachment, according to an average of polls by RealClearPolitics, some of the Democrats in the Trump-won districts acknowledged potential political risks.
About one-third, 32 percent, believe the partisan impeachment effort will ultimately help Trump’s reelection bid. The number is even greater among Republicans, with 54 percent indicating that impeachment will help him in the 2020 election.
An IBD/TIPP poll released Monday suggested that impeachment is already having an impact on the 2020 race, with voters shifting to the president over his potential Democrat contenders in hypothetical general election matchups.
“Yet another poll bad for House Democrats impeachment. CNN poll out today: Impeachment under water at 45-47,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) wrote, noting the significance of impeachment support dropping and opposition growing.
“Support for the charade falling just about everywhere,” he added:
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 22: U.S. President Donald Trump (C) shakes hands with James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during an Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on January 22, 2017 in Washington, DC. Trump today … Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images
The Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general (IG) released his report, which found that the FBI had an authorized “purpose” to investigate the 2016 Trump campaign; however, the agency committed a series of wrongdoings in the process.
The IG report found that the FBI made “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the agency’s applications to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, stating agents “failed to meet the basic obligation” to make sure their applications were accurate.
We do not speculate whether the correction of any particular misstatement or omissions, or some combination thereof, would have resulted in a different outcome. Nevertheless, the department’s decision-makers and the court should have been given complete and accurate information so that they could meaningfully evaluate probable cause before authorizing the surveillance of a US person associated with a presidential campaign.
House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jordan said that this report revealed that the FBI spied on more people than previously known as part of its investigation into the Trump campaign.
Jordan said in a statement Monday:
We thought they spied on two Americans, we now know it was four. The Inspector General’s report confirms what many of us feared: James Comey’s FBI ignored guidelines and rules in spying on President Trump’s campaign in 2016. We now know that within one week of the investigation opening, the FBI was surveilling the campaign and four specific individuals associated with it.
“The U.S. government’s powerful tools designed and authorized for international intelligence gathering were deployed to monitor the activities of a Presidential campaign,” Jordan added. “This is a grave matter that should deeply trouble Americans of all political stripes. There are many lingering questions and I expect both Chairman Nadler and Chairwoman Maloney to convene hearings with Inspector General Horowitz as soon as possible.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff hired a former National Security Council aide who worked with alleged Ukraine whistleblower Eric Ciaramella at the NSC during the Obama and Trump administrations the day after the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
It was previously reported by the Washington Examiner that public records indicated Sean Misko, 37, started work on Schiff’s committee in August as a professional staff member. A specific start date was not available until this week, when the latest congressional quarterly disbursements were released.
The new records show that Misko’s official hire date was July 26.
Misko was the director for the Gulf States at the NSC between 2015 until the first half of 2018. The Washington Examiner has established that the whistleblower is a CIA officer who was on the NSC during the Obama administration and worked on Ukrainian issues with Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic candidate, when he was vice president.
Ciaramella, 33, is a career CIA analyst and was the Ukraine director on the NSC from 2016 until the summer of 2017. In October 2016, he was Biden’s guest at a State Department banquet.
More independents oppose the impeachment proceedings against President Trump than support them, according to a recent poll conducted after the beginning of public testimony.
A Morning Consult- Politico poll released Tuesday said 47% of independents “oppose the current impeachment inquiry,” while only 40% of independents support impeachment. The poll represents a 10% drop in support among independents for the impeachment.
Overall, opposition increased to 45%, while support for impeachment dropped from 50% to 48%. The decrease in support follows the start of the second week of testimony by impeachment witnesses.
House Democrats opened the impeachment proceedings against Trump, claiming he threatened to withhold aid from the Ukrainian government if they did not investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. The poll was taken by 1,994 United States voters between Nov. 15 and 17.
A state senator from Luzerne County said Tuesday he is changing his party registration from the Democratic Party to become an Independent, and will start attending caucus meeting in Harrisburg with the majority Republicans.
John Yudichak said in a statement that he is leaving his old party because he is weary of “’purist’ politicians who demand that you choose a battle camp. You must pass their litmus test, and declare if you support ‘us,’ or ‘them.’”
Yudichak, who won his third term in the Senate in 2018, said he believes that going forward he will best be able to serve the interests of his constituents as an independent, supporting Democratic and / or Republican ideas case by case when he believes they “serve the greater good and help government work for people rather than the narrow interests of the partisan ‘purists.’”
In a phone interview after he made his announcement, Yudichak said his move is the culmination of a growing feeling that the Democratic caucus in the Senate – which added a number of more liberal Democrats in the last election cycle – has become a harder place for him to represent his constituents from northeastern Pennsylvania.
George Soros, Chairman, Soros Fund Management and Open Society, testifies before US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry on ‘Foreign Policy and the Global Economic Crisis’ March 25, 2009, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC. AFP Photo/Paul J. Richards (Photo credit should read PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)
Eric Ciaramella, whom Real Clear Investigations suggests is the likely so-called whistleblower, received emails about Ukraine policy from a top director at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
The emails informed Ciaramella and a handful of other Obama administration foreign policy officials about Soros’s whereabouts, the contents of Soros’s private meetings about Ukraine and a future meeting the billionaire activist was holding with the prime minister of Ukraine.
A primary recipient of the Open Society emails along with Ciaramella was then-Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who played a central role in the anti-Trump dossier affair. Nuland, with whom Ciaramella worked closely, received updates on Ukraine issues from dossier author Christopher Steele in addition to her direct role in facilitating the dossier within the Obama administration.
The emails spotlight Soros’s access to national security officials under the Obama administration on the matter of Ukraine. In one instance, Jeff Goldstein, senior policy analyst for Eurasia at the Open Society Foundations, sent a June 9, 2016 email to Nuland and Ciaramella, who were the missive’s primary recipients.
CC’d were three other State Department officials involved in European affairs, including Alexander Kasanof who worked at the U.S. embassy in Kiev.
The message read:
I wanted to let you know that Mr. Soros met with Johannes Hahn in Brussels earlier today. One of the issues he raised was concern over the decision to delay the visa liberalization for Georgia and the implications for Ukraine.
The email revealed that “GS” – meaning Soros – “is also meeting [Georgian] President [Giorgi] Margvelashvili today and speaking with PM Groyman,” referring to Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman.
The email stated that Soros told Hahn “that Ukrainian civil society is concerned that without reciprocity from the EU for steps Ukraine has taken to put in place sensitive anti-corruption and anti-discrimination legislation and institutions it will not be possible to continue to use the leverage of EU instruments and policies to maintain pressure for reforms in the future.”
Soros also “urged Hahn to advocate with member states to move ahead with visa liberalization for Ukraine,”the email related.
“I’m sure you’ve been working this issue hard; if you have any thoughts on how this is likely to play out or where particular problems lie I’d appreciate if you could let us know,” the email concluded.
Goldstein’s email text sent to Nuland and Ciaramella was not addressed to any one individual. Nuland replied that she would be happy to discuss the issues by phone. Goldstein set up a phone call and wrote that Soros specifically asked that an employee from the billionaire’s “personal office” join the call with Nuland.
The email was released last August as part of a separate Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative group Citizens United. The FOIA request was unrelated to Ciaramella.
Johannes Hahn, referenced in the emails as meeting with Soros about Ukraine, is the European Commissioner for Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations. In 2015, Hahn participated with Nuland in the YES Summit, which bills itself as “the leading public diplomacy platform in Eastern Europe.” Another summit participant was Vadym Pozharskyi, a board advisor to Burisma, the Ukranian natural gas company at the center of the impeachment trial and the allegations related to Hunter and Joe Biden.
On scores of occasions, Hahn was a featured speaker at roundtables and other events produced by the Atlantic Council think tank, which is funded by and works in partnership with Burisma. The Atlantic Council is also financed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations and has been in the news for ties to various actors associated with the impeachment issue.
In one of several instances, Breitbart News reported, itinerary for a trip to Ukraine in August organized by the Atlantic Council reveals that a staffer on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a meeting during the trip with Acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, now a key witness for Democrats pursuing impeachment. The Schiff staffer is also an Atlantic Council fellow, while Taylor has evidenceda close relationship with the Atlantic Council.
Breitbart News previously reported on other emails that show Ciaramella worked closely with Nuland. Nuland has come under repeated fire for her various roles in the anti-Trump dossier controversy.
In their book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, authors and reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that Nuland gave the green light for the FBI to first meet with Steele regarding his dossier’s claims. It was at that meeting that Steele initially reported his dossier charges to the FBI, the book relates.
FBI notes cite career Justice Department official Bruce Ohr as saying that Nuland was in touch with Fusion GPS co-founder and dossier producer Glenn Simpson.
Sen. John McCain, who infamously delivered the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey, reportedly first dispatched an aide, David J. Kramer, to inquire with Nuland about the dossier claims.
Meanwhile, looped into some other email chains with Ciaramella was then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff at the State Department, John Finer.
An extensive New Yorkerprofile of Steele named Finer as obtaining the contents of a two-page summary of the dossier and eventually deciding to share the questionable document with Kerry. Finer reportedly received the dossier summary from Jonathan M. Winer, the Obama State Department official who acknowledged regularly interfacing and exchanging information with Steele, according to the report. Winer previously conceded that he shared the dossier summary with Nuland.
After his name surfaced in news media reports related to probes by House Republicans into the dossier, Winer authored a Washington Postoped in which he conceded that while he was working at the State Department he exchanged documents and information with Steele. Winer further acknowledged that while at the State Department, he shared anti-Trump material with Steele passed to him by longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whom Winer described as an “old friend.” Winer wrote that the material from Blumenthal – which Winer in turn gave to Steele – originated with Cody Shearer, who is a controversial figure long tied to various Clinton scandals.
In testimony last year, Nuland made statements about a meeting at the State Department in October 2016 between State officials and Steele, but said that she didn’t participate.
At a June 2018 hearing, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) revealed contents of the State Department’s visitor logs while he was grilling Nuland. At the hearing, Burr asked: “I know you talked extensively with our staff relative to Mr. Steele. Based upon our review of the visitor logs of the State Department, Mr. Steele visited the State Department briefing officials on the dossier in October of 2016. Did you have any role in that briefing?”
“I did not,” Nuland replied. “I actively chose not to be part of that briefing.”
“But were you aware of that briefing?”Burr asked.
“I was not aware of it until afterwards,” Nuland retorted.
Nuland did not explain how she can actively chose not to be part of Steele’s briefing, as she claimed, yet say she was unaware of the briefing until after it occurred.Nuland was not asked about the discrepancy during the public section of the testimony, which was reviewed in full by Breitbart News.
Nuland previously served as chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott under Bill Clinton’s administration, and then served as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.
Nuland faced confirmation questions prior to her most recent appointment as assistant secretary of state over her reported role in revising controversial Obama administration talking points about the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks. Her reported changes sought to protect Hillary Clinton’s State Department from accusations that it failed to adequately secure the woefully unprotected U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi.
Likely ‘whistleblower’
A RealClearInvestigations report by investigative journalist and author Paul Sperry named Ciaramella as best fitting the description of the so-called whistleblower.
Officials with direct knowledge of the proceedings say Ciaramella’s name has been raised in private in impeachment depositions and during at least one House open hearing that was not part of the formal impeachment proceedings.
Federal documents show Ciaramella also worked closely with Joe Biden and worked under Susan Rice,President Obama’s national security adviser. He also worked with former CIA Director John Brennan, an anti-Trump advocate who has faced controversy for his role in fueling the questionable Russia collusion investigation. Rice participated in Russia collusion probe meetings and reportedly unmasked senior members of Trump’s presidential campaign.
Sperry cites former White House officials saying Ciaramella worked for Biden on Ukrainian policy issues in 2015 and 2016, encompassing the time period for which Biden has been facing possible conflict questions for leading Ukraine policy in light of Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma.
Mark Zaid and Andrew Bakaj, the activist attorneys representing the so-called whistleblower, refused to confirm on deny that their secretive client is indeed Ciaramella.
“We neither confirm nor deny the identity of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower,” the lawyers told the Washington Examiner in response to an inquiry about Ciaramella.
Zaid and Bakaj added, “Our client is legally entitled to anonymity. Disclosure of the name of any person who may be suspected to be the whistleblower places that individual and their family in great physical danger. Any physical harm the individual and/or their family suffers as a result of disclosure means that the individuals and publications reporting such names will be personally liable for that harm. Such behavior is at the pinnacle of irresponsibility and is intentionally reckless.”
Soros funding and ‘whistleblower’ complaint
Besides Burisma funding, the Atlantic Council is also financed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Google, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., and the U.S. State Department. Google, Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund, and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower’s complaint alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country”in the 2020 presidential race.
The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the so-called whistleblower’s document and released by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower’s own claims, as Breitbart News documented.
One key section of the so-called whistleblower’s document claims that “multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov.”
This was allegedly to follow up on Trump’s call with Zelensky in order to discuss the “cases” mentioned in that call, according to the so-called whistleblower’s narrative. The complainer was clearly referencing Trump’s request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden corruption allegations.
Even though the statement was written in first person – “multiple U.S. officials told me” – it contains a footnote referencing a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
That footnote reads:
In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.
The so-called whistleblower’s account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three more occasions. It does so to:
Write that Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko “also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these matters.”
Document that Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani “had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani.”
Bolster the charge that, “I also learned from a U.S. official that ‘associates’ of Mr. Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team.” The so-called whistleblower then relates in another footnote, “I do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced above.”
The OCCRP report repeatedly referenced is actually a “joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine.”
BuzzFeed infamously also first published the full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and was produced by the Fusion GPS opposition dirt outfit.
The OCCRP and BuzzFeed “joint investigation” resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump’s political rivals. The so-called whistleblower’s document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP and does not reference BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia collusion claims.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.
WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 20: Former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland testifies during a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee June 20, 2018 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The committee held a hearing on “Policy Response to Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. … Alex Wong/Getty Images
Eric Ciaramella, whom Real Clear Investigations suggests is the likely so-called whistleblower, was part of an Obama administration email chain celebrating the eventual signing of a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to Ukraine.
That and other emails show Ciaramella interfaced about Ukraine with individuals who played key roles in facilitating the infamous anti-Trump dossier produced by Fusion GPS and reportedly financed by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. One of those individuals, then-Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (pictured), received updates on Ukraine issues from dossier author Christopher Steele in addition to Nuland’s direct role in the dossier controversy.
Also part of the email chains was Christopher J. Anderson, who was a special adviser to former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker. Anderson testified to the Democrat-led House committees running the impeachment inquiry.
Ciaramella’s name comes up in six Obama-era government emails that were released by the State Department as part of two previous Freedom of Information Act requests. At the time of the exchanges, Ciaramella served as the Director for Baltic and Eastern European Affairs for the Obama-era National Security Council, where he worked on Ukraine policy. He is now an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.
One email, titled, “Loan Guarantee,” involved Nuland, who was reportedly a key champion of the Ukraine loan guarantee policy.
“Hurray,” a celebratory Nuland wrote in response to a translated Ukrainian government announcement about the signing of the $1 billion loan guarantee. The announcement singles out Joe Biden as being present for the conclusion of an agreement leading to the loan guarantee.
Ciaramella was one of several people CC’d in the email, which was sent from the U.S. ambassador at the time, Geoffrey Pyatt, who was another key champion of the loan guarantee to Ukraine along with Nuland.
The email is one of several that shows Ciaramella in the loop with top officials such as Nuland working on Ukraine policy under the Obama administration.
The loan guarantee was pushed through after Ukraine agreed to several reforms, especially the firing of the nation’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. This at a time that Shokin was reportedly investigating Burisma, the Ukranian natural gas company paying Hunter Biden. Joe Biden infamously boasted on video about personally threatening to withhold loan guarantees from Ukraine unless Shokin was removed.
Another released email shows Ciaramella himself sending a message to Nuland and others. Most of the contents are blocked out, including the email’s subject line. One non-classified section of that email shows a reply stating, “Embassy Kyiv — coordinated with our USAID mission folks — will have detailed input tomorrow.”
One email involving Nuland was sent two days before the loan guarantee was signed on June 3, 2016. “Can you confirm who will be doing the actual signing for each side?” the exchange asked.
Nuland has come under repeated fire for her various roles in the anti-Trump dossier controversy.
FBI notes also cite career Justice Department official Bruce Ohr as saying that Nuland was in touch with Fusion GPS co-founder and dossier producer Glenn Simpson.
Sen. John McCain, who infamously delivered the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey, reportedly first dispatched an aide, David J. Kramer, to inquire with Nuland about the dossier claims.
In their book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, authors and reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that Nuland gave the green light for the FBI to first meet with Steele regarding his dossier’s claims. It was at that meeting that Steele initially reported his dossier charges to the FBI, the book relates.
Meanwhile, looped into email chains with Ciaramella was then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff at the State Department, John Finer.
An extensive New Yorkerprofile of Steele named Finer as obtaining the contents of a two-page summary of the dossier and eventually deciding to share the questionable document with Kerry.
Finer reportedly received the dossier summary from Jonathan M. Winer, the Obama State Department official who acknowledged regularly interfacing and exchanging information with Steele, according to the report. Winer previously conceded that he shared the dossier summary with Nuland.
After his name surfaced in news media reports related to probes by House Republicans into the dossier, Winer authored a Washington Postoped in which he conceded that while he was working at the State Department he exchanged documents and information with Steele.
Winer further acknowledged that while at the State Department, he shared anti-Trump material with Steele passed to him by longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whom Winer described as an “old friend.” Winer wrote that the material from Blumenthal – which Winer in turn gave to Steele – originated with Cody Shearer, who is a controversial figure long tied to various Clinton scandals.
In testimony last year, Nuland made statements about a meeting at the State Department in October 2016 between State officials and Steele, but said that she didn’t participate.
At a June 2018 hearing, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) revealed contents of the State Department’s visitor logs while he was grilling Nuland.
At the hearing, Burr asked: “I know you talked extensively with our staff relative to Mr. Steele. Based upon our review of the visitor logs of the State Department, Mr. Steele visited the State Department briefing officials on the dossier in October of 2016. Did you have any role in that briefing?”
“I did not,” Nuland replied. “I actively chose not to be part of that briefing.”
“But were you aware of that briefing?” Burr asked.
“I was not aware of it until afterwards,” Nuland retorted.
Nuland did not explain how she can actively chose not to be part of Steele’s briefing, as she claimed, yet say she was unaware of the briefing until after it occurred. Nuland was not asked about the discrepancy during the public section of the testimony, which was reviewed in full by Breitbart News.
Nuland previously served as chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott under Bill Clinton’s administration, and then served as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.
Nuland faced confirmation questions prior to her most recent appointment as assistant secretary of state over her reported role in revising controversial Obama administration talking points about the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks. Her reported changes sought to protect Hillary Clinton’s State Department from accusations that it failed to adequately secure the woefully unprotected U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi.
Likely ‘whistleblower’
A RealClearInvestigations report by investigative journalist and author Paul Sperry named Ciaramella as best fitting the description of the so-called whistleblower. Officials with direct knowledge of the proceedings say Ciaramella’s name has been raised in private in impeachment depositions and during at least one House open hearing that was not part of the formal impeachment proceedings.
Federal documents show Ciaramella also worked closely with Joe Biden and worked under Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser. He also worked with former CIA Director John Brennan, an anti-Trump advocate who has faced controversy for his role in fueling the questionable Russia collusion investigation. Rice participated in Russia collusion probe meetings and reportedly unmasked senior members of Trump’s presidential campaign.
Sperry cites former White House officials saying Ciaramella worked for Biden on Ukrainian policy issues in 2015 and 2016, encompassing the time period for which Biden has been facing possible conflict questions for leading Ukraine policy in light of Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma.
Mark Zaid and Andrew Bakaj, the activist attorneys representing the so-called whistleblower, refused to confirm on deny that their secretive client is indeed Ciaramella.
“We neither confirm nor deny the identity of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower,” the lawyers told the Washington Examiner in response to an inquiry about Ciaramella.
Zaid and Bakaj added, “Our client is legally entitled to anonymity. Disclosure of the name of any person who may be suspected to be the whistleblower places that individual and their family in great physical danger. Any physical harm the individual and/or their family suffers as a result of disclosure means that the individuals and publications reporting such names will be personally liable for that harm. Such behavior is at the pinnacle of irresponsibility and is intentionally reckless.”
On Sunday, Trump responded to press reports naming Ciaramella, calling him a “radical” known for his close ties to Brennan and Rice.
“Well, I’ll tell you what. There have been stories written about a certain individual, a male, and they say he’s the whistleblower,” Trump told reporters. “If he’s the whistleblower, he has no credibility because he’s a Brennan guy, he’s a Susan Rice guy, he’s an Obama guy.”
Trump added, “And he hates Trump. And he’s a radical. Now, maybe it’s not him. But if it’s him, you guys ought to release the information.”
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.
The New York Times building is seen on September 6, 2018 in New York. – A furious Donald Trump called September 5, 2018 for the unmasking of an anonymous senior official who wrote in the New York Times that top members of his administration were undermining the president to curb …ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty
The New York Times on Wednesday published what would have been a major story on White House National Security Council (NSC) aide Kash Patel—if only it had been true.
The story, which relies on leaks from Democrats conducting the “impeachment inquiry” into President Donald Trump of testimony by one witness who had no firsthand knowledge of the allegations she was making, claims Patel had provided President Trump with documents on Ukraine and met with the president about them.
Citing as its sources “people briefed on the matter,” the Times’ Julian Barnes, Adam Goldman, and Nicholas Fandos wrote that Patel was referred to by President Trump as “one of his top Ukraine policy specialists” and that President Trump “wanted to discuss related documents with him.” The Times reporters claimed that Patel’s NSC and White House colleagues “grew alarmed” over all this.
Later in the Times piece, it became clear where exactly this allegation came from—Fiona Hill, a former Trump administration Russia hand, whom the Democrats have been relying on for testimony in the impeachment inquiry. Hill testified earlier this month in the secret room in the basement of the Capitol building from which Democrats have been running their private impeachment proceedings.
Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s former senior director for Eurasian and Russian affairs, testified to House investigators last week that she believed Mr. Patel was improperly becoming involved in Ukraine policy and was sending information to Mr. Trump, some of the people said. Ms. Hill grew alarmed earlier this year when an aide from the White House executive secretary’s office told her that Mr. Trump wanted to talk to Mr. Patel and identified him as the National Security Council’s ‘Ukraine director,’ a position held by one of Ms. Hill’s deputies. The aide said Mr. Trump wanted to meet with Mr. Patel about documents he had received on Ukraine. Ms. Hill responded by asking who Mr. Patel was. While the aide from the executive secretary’s office did not state explicitly that Mr. Patel sent the Ukraine documents to Mr. Trump, Ms. Hill understood that to be the implication, according to a person familiar with her testimony.
As the Times notes, if true, this would mean there were multiple backchannels for Trump on Ukraine matters—the other being through his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s associates—and it would make it appear as though Trump was up to something by circumventing established channels for such policy, even though the president as the nation’s chief executive officer is well within his rights to do that.
But the problem with the Times story, and its sources that appear to be leaks from Democrats of Hill’s testimony, is that the entire premise is untrue, sources familiar with Patel’s meetings with the president told Breitbart News. Since the Times published its story, Breitbart News has spoken with a dozen sources including current White House officials, then-current-now-former White House officials, congressional officials familiar with the investigation and the meetings Patel had with President Trump, and others in the know about what actually happened and discovered that Patel’s meetings with President Trump had “absolutely nothing,” in the words of one source, to do with Ukraine whatsoever.
One now-former White House official confirmed that President Trump did in fact meet with Patel on a number of occasions, though it’s unclear if these were one-on-one meetings or there were others present.
A source close to House GOP leadership told Breitbart News that Patel’s meetings with the president were focused on domestic national security matters, and that Ukraine did not come up at all.
That source said of the Times story:
This story is complete nonsense. The meeting was arranged at the suggestion of multiple GOP congressmen and senators to discuss domestic national security issues that Kash has specific knowledge and unique expertise in. This meeting had absolutely nothing to do with Ukraine.
A second well-placed source familiar with Patel’s interactions with the president told Breitbart News that the Times story that relies on Hill’s testimony—leaked by Democrats—is “100 percent false.”
“The New York Times story is 100 percent false,”this source familiar with Patel’s interactions with Trump told Breitbart News. “Kash did not discuss Ukraine with Trump in any meeting, nor did he discuss any Ukraine-related documents with him. The Democrats involved in the impeachment interviews were obviously tipped off that Fiona Hill would invent some story like this if asked about Kash, and that’s why they brought up his name to her, then they leaked the exchange to their lackeys at the Times.”
Hill, Breitbart News has learned, was asked a number questions about Patel by the Democrats during her testimony, and a source in the room said her “responses appeared scripted,” suggesting that there was some coordination between Hill or her lawyers and the Democrats on Capitol Hill before her appearance.
Then, as has happened with so much more that has gone on in the secretive U.S. Capitol basement room in which House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) is running the impeachment proceedings away from public view, this information was leaked to the Times and weaponized against the president and his administration—the actual truth and facts be damned.
This episode paints a broader and darker picture of what exactly Schiff and his team are doing in the secretive room and raises bigger questions about why Schiff is not holding these hearings in public.
The system Democrats have set up basically goes as such: They bring witnesses in for testimony and depositions and transcribed interviews for hours on end to a private room known as a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF)–behind closed doors and away from the press and public.
They allow no lawyers for the administration inside to challenge anything, present facts in defense of the president, or hear what’s happening down there. Then, Schiff and his team control the information gathered and collected down there—not allowing the minority sufficient access to it.
After that, Schiff, his team, and other Democrats leak the most damaging information to the media—usually out of context, and without the full story—in order to create a public narrative that the president is in serious trouble.
Then it takes a couple days at least for Republicans to get the full truth out about each of these instances to turn around the narrative and expose each “fact” the Democrats are putting forward as flawed. This latest example saw the Times story on Hill’s testimony as the official public record on this matter, until now, for about a full day.
Technically speaking, Hill did make these claims that the Times reported in her testimony—but the veracity of them was never checked by the Democrats who gathered said testimony then leaked it to the New York Times for publication.
The Times also did not check their veracity, even though the first source who spoke to Breitbart News, the one close to House GOP leadership who confirmed Hill’s claims were false, noted that Hill’s inaccurate claims were reproduced uncritically by the Times based upon Democrat leaks. And the Times, this source said, as an institution was aware of the fact that Hill’s claims were false because a separate White House correspondent at the Times was aware of Patel’s meetings with the president at the time of said meetings well before Hill’s testimony happened and well before Democrats even launched an impeachment inquiry—and that this Times reporter was aware that the content had nothing to do with Ukraine.
“What’s particularly shameful is that at least one New York Times White House reporter was told about this meeting in advance off the record, and knew what this meeting was about—and that it was not about Ukraine—but they printed this fake story anyway,” the source close to House GOP leadership told Breitbart News.
Part of the reason the media and the Democrats wanted to smear Patel and attempt to tie him into the impeachment madness, the second source who was familiar with Patel’s conversations with the president said, is because Patel was critical of exposing the failures of the narrative surrounding the previous attempts by the so-called “deep state” to entangle Trump in a scandal on the Russia narrative.
“The story is a lazy hit piece based entirely on rumors and purported second-hand and third-hand information,”that source told Breitbart News. “Both the Times and the Democrats have a vendetta against Kash because he helped blow up their three-year investment in the Russia hoax.”
In fact, this is evident by the fact that the Times story actually opens with a recounting of Patel’s history as an aide on the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans were in the majority and his role in exposing what has become known as “Spygate.”
Barnes, Goldman, and Fandos wrote to open their article, before they even got into the substance of the new but false allegations that Hill leveled against Patel over meetings with the president:
When Kashyap Patel was an aide to the House Intelligence Committee in the first years of the Trump administration, he played a key role in helping Republicans try to undermine the Russia investigation, writing a memo that accused law enforcement officials of abusing their power. The memo, which consumed Washington for weeks, was widely dismissed as a biased argument of cherry-picked facts. But it galvanized President Trump’s allies and made Mr. Patel a hero among them. After Republicans ceded control of Congress this year, he landed on Mr. Trump’s National Security Council staff.
Later in the story, the Times reporters further explain Patel’s role in exposing the Russia scandal as a hoax designed to harm the president.
“Mr. Patel was previously best known as a lead author of the politically charged memo released early last year accusing the F.B.I. and Justice Department leaders of abusing their power in the early stages of the Russia investigation,”Barnes, Goldman, and Fandos wrote. “Mr. Patel worked at the time as an investigator for the House Intelligence Committee under Representative Devin Nunes of California, who ran the panel when Republicans had control of the chamber. Mr. Patel’s efforts to discredit the Russia investigation made him a minor celebrity in conservative circles but a divisive figure on Capitol Hill.”
When asked about the impeachment timeline, Pelosi said, “I keep saying to people, impeachment is about the truth and the Constitution of the United States. Any other issues that you have, disapproving of the way the president has dealt with Syria, whatever the subject is, reluctance, the cowardice to do something about gun violence, the cruelty of not wanting to help our Dreamers and transgender people, the denial about the climate crisis that we face, the list goes on, that’s about the election. That has nothing to do with what is happening in terms of our oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution and the facts that might support. And we don’t know where this path will take us, it could take us down further path but the two are completely separate.”
A reporter asked, “At what point might you say let’s just let the voters decide.”
Pelosi said, “The voters are not going to decide whether we honor our oath of office. They already decided that in the last election.”
ABC News allowed Hunter Biden to get away with the claim he did not make “one cent” from his company’s mega-deal with a Chinese bank that is a subsidiary of the Chinese government — when its own past reporting has said just the opposite.
During the sit-down interview, ABC’s Amy Robach set up the segment about Hunter’s China deal with the background on President Trump’s desire to look into Hunter’s shady $1.5 billion — with a “B” — deal with the Chinese bank (starts at around 5:03)::
ROBACH: Also on Trump’s list of accusations against Hunter Biden: that Hunter flew on Air Force Two with his father during an official government trip to China in 2013, leveraging that connection for financial gain in an investment deal with Chinese businessman Jonathan Li.
What Robach’s question omitted is that the deal was not just with an individual businessman but with the Bank of China — a subsidiary of the Chinese government itself.
She then asks Hunter directly:
ROBACH: The president has repeatedly said you have received $1.5 billion, despite no experience and for no apparent reason. Obviously fact checkers have said that that is not true.
HUNTER: This literally has no basis in fact in any way.
ROBACH: Have you received any money from that business dealing?
HUNTER: No.
ROBACH: At all?
HUNTER: Not one cent.
ROBACH: Definitely not 1.5 billion.
HUNTER: It’s crazy. They feel as though they have the license to go out and say whatever they want.
Hunter is then allowed to trash Trump and his family as liars while Robach, who has just lauded fact checkers and their fact checking, says nothing about the fact that — and this is important — according to her own network’s reporting, and Hunter’s own attorney, Hunter has a ten percent stake in BHR, the company that made that mammoth $1.5 billion China deal.
Just a few months ago, ABC aired an in-depth report on Hunter’s shady business dealings that included this nugget (starts at about the 2:00 minute mark):
This video shows Chinese diplomats greeting Vice President Biden as he arrives in Beijing in December of 2013. Right by his side? His son Hunter. Less than two weeks later, Hunter’s firm had new business, creating an investment fund in China, involving the government controlled Bank of China, with reports they hopes to raise $1.5 billion. Hunter still plays a role in the fund. His lawyer says his stake is worth about half a million dollars.
Where was Robach’s followup question? Where was her oh-so-vital fact checking? Why did she let him get away with saying “not one cent” when her own network reported just a few months ago that he had equity in the firm that made a massive $1.5 billion deal?
Obviously, Hunter is playing a semantic game with that “not one cent” comment. Hunter’s attorney appears to do the same in a statement he released just two days ago, on October 13, 2019:
Hunter neither played a role in the formation or licensure of the company, nor owned any equity in it while his father was Vice President. He served only as a member of its board of directors, which he joined based on his interest in seeking ways to bring Chinese capital to international markets. It was an unpaid position.
…
To date, Hunter has not received any compensation for being on BHR’s board of directors. He has not received any return on his investment; there have been no distributions to BHR shareholders since Hunter obtained his equity interest.
So Hunter hasn’t “received” “one cent” because there has been no payout to investors. There was no direct commission for that deal, which dum-dums would obviously suspect like he’s a bottom-run sales rep. But here’s the rub, according to no less than FactCheck.org: Hunter might not have been paid “one cent” yet, but he is still could be looking at an eventual payoff that hits the $20 million mark:
[Hunter’s lawyer George] Mesires told the New York Times that while Hunter Biden now has a 10% stake in BHR, which he acquired through a company he created named Skaneateles LLC, “there have been no distributions to the shareholders since Hunter has been an equity owner.”
But that doesn’t mean Biden won’t eventually make millions from the deal. Steven Kaplan, who conducts research on issues in private equity, venture capital, entrepreneurial finance, corporate governance and corporate finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told us that a private equity fund with $2 billion under management will typically generate fees over its life of hundreds of millions of dollars.
“It is difficult to imagine, if not incomprehensible, that a 10% stake in those economics is worth only $420K,” Kaplan told us via email. “The distinction they appear to be making is they capitalized the management company with $4.2 M even if the fund manages $2 B. The value of that management company is likely far in excess of $4.2 M if they are managing $2 B.”
Kaplan pointed to two large publicly traded private equity firms for reference, both of which have a market value of about 10% of the assets under their management. Using that as a rough guide, that would put the value of Hunter Biden’s share closer to $20 million, he said.
Basically, it looks as though Hunter claiming not have made one cent off the China deal is like a CEO claiming he was not paid one cent to run a company because his compensation came from stocks or bars of gold or pearls or the gift of a home. But the fact is this: any deal that increases the value of the company that Hunter Biden has a stake in — and a $1.5 billion deal with a bank owned by one of the world’s biggest economies does just that — is a deal where Hunter Biden has a financial interest.
Maybe ABC will reveal Hunter’s semantic dishonesty when the rest of the interview airs later tonight. Maybe Robach will ask him what he has “earned” or “gained” as a result of the deal, rather than “received.” If not, it is a gross dereliction of duty on the network’s part. And all of this comes just one day after ABC was caught presenting 2014 video from a Kentucky gun range as video of Turkish military operation against the Kurds.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
In an Aug. 26 letter, the Intelligence Community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, wrote that the anonymous whistleblower who set off the Trump-Ukraine impeachment fight showed “some indicia of an arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate.”
A few weeks later, news reports said the whistleblower’s possible bias was that he is a registered Democrat. That was all. Incredulous commentary suggested that Republicans who were pushing the bias talking point were so blinded by their own partisanship that they saw simple registration with the Democratic Party as evidence of wrongdoing.
“Give me a break!” tweeted whistleblower lawyer Mark Zaid. “Bias? Seriously?”
Now, however, there is word of more evidence of possible bias on the whistleblower’s part. Under questioning from Republicans during last Friday’s impeachment inquiry interview with Atkinson, the inspector general revealed that the whistleblower’s possible bias was not that he was simply a registered Democrat. It was that he had a significant tie to one of the Democratic presidential candidates currently vying to challenge President Trump in next year’s election.
“The IG said [the whistleblower] worked or had some type of professional relationship with one of the Democratic candidates,” said one person with knowledge of what was said.
“The IG said the whistleblower had a professional relationship with one of the 2020 candidates,” said another person with knowledge of what was said.
“What [Atkinson] said was that the whistleblower self-disclosed that he was a registered Democrat and that he had a prior working relationship with a current 2020 Democratic presidential candidate,” said a third person with knowledge of what was said.
All three sources said Atkinson did not identify the Democratic candidate with whom the whistleblower had a connection. It is unclear what the working or professional relationship between the two was.
In the Aug. 26 letter, Atkinson said that even though there was evidence of possible bias on the whistleblower’s part, “such evidence did not change my determination that the complaint relating to the urgent concern ‘appears credible,’ particularly given the other information the ICIG obtained during its preliminary review.”
Democrats are certain to take that position when Republicans allege that the whistleblower acted out of bias. Indeed, the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a public document, for all to see. One can read it regardless of the whistleblower’s purported bias.
Nevertheless, Republicans will want to know more about the origins of the whistleblower complaint, especially given the unorthodox use of whistleblower law involved. There is more to learn — like who the Democratic candidate is — before Republicans will say they know enough about what happened.
resident Donald Trump smiles during a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Tuesday, July 16, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Donald Trump received an approval rating of 53 percent from likely voters, according to a Rasmussen poll released Tuesday.
The latest poll reflects the highest approval rating for the president in five months, as the last time Trump got a 53 percent approval rating was in April 2019.
Forty-five percent of likely voters disapproved of his performance as president.
The president’s approval rating dipped as low as 44 percent in late August but has steadily risen in September — a nine-point jump in 35 days.
Trump received a string of 53 percent approval ratings in February 2017 after he was inaugurated.
Rasmussen tracks daily results via 500 likely voters per night from telephone surveys as well as an online survey tool. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,500 likely voters is +/- 2.5 percentage points.
US President Donald Trump arrives for a “Keep America Great” campaign rally at The Crown Arena in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on September 9, 2019. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP) (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump can claim credit for pushing poverty among black American adults to record lows, according to data in the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 economic report.
The good news is hidden deep in the 77-page report, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2018, which was released Tuesday, September 10. Table B5 on page 65 shows that poverty among married black families dropped to 18.8 percent, down from 20.2 percent in 2015 and 23.8 percent in 2007, which was the peak of the housing boom and bubble inflated by Congress and President George W. Bush’s terms.
Poverty among black female-headed families also dropped to 31.7 percent, down from 35.7 percent in 2015 and 39.7 percent in 2007.
Poverty among all black Americans dropped to 20.8 percent, down from 24.1 percent in 2015 and 24.5 percent in 2007
For comparison, black poverty is still somewhat higher than the poverty rate for all Americans, which is at 11.8 percent, and at 9.7 percent for all intact families and 26.8 percent for female-headed households.
The report does not suggest why the poverty rate is falling. But other data — including comments from industry CEOs — show that wages are gently rising as employers reluctantly begin to compete for employees in a low-immigration, tight labor economy.
Trump’s unprecedented combination of “Hire American” and economic growth policies is helping create those wage gains nationwide. The growth policies pressure companies to hire more workers.
The “Hire American” policy suppresses the inflow of legal and illegal migrants and also blocks demands from businesses for special infusions of cheap foreign labor, such as extra refugees, asylum-seekers, visa workers, and legal immigrants. Trump’s low-immigration policies have prompted many progressives and Democrats to claim he is racist. But his growth and “Hire American” combination is pressuring companies to compete for Americans workers — including blacks and Latinos — by offering higher wages and better benefits.
One expected impact of the shortage is a growing number of non-white Americans who are being hired and are getting wage increases. The Washington Postreported September 9:
Economists say the minority hiring boom is explained mainly by a tight labor market that is forcing employers to look beyond their normal pool of candidates …
“Now there are more job opportunities, I think. I look for jobs that want English and Spanish speakers,” said [Milagros] Tasayco, who spends her mornings at the community center and her afternoons at a private day care. “My children say, ‘Wow, Mommy, you have two jobs!’ My husband is proud, too.”
The Census Bureau said men who work full time and year-round got an average earnings boost of 3.4 percent in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291, a 3.4 percent gain after adjusting for inflation. Women gained 3.3 percent in wages, to bring their median salaries to $45,097 for full time, year-round work.
Trump’s wage gains may mark a historic shift in the nation’s economy.
This growth is already visible as a rising line at the end of a Census Bureau chart, which shows the flat-lined wages between 1973 and 2018. The flat wages followed 25 years of rapid wage growth in a low-immigration economy between 1959 and 1973,
Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of about 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, it tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and it does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
The mainstream-media use Trump knowing Jeffrey Epstein as a way to cover for Bill Clinton’s close relationship with the famous pedophile and his many rides on his Lolita Express.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley are known for their racist anti-American rhetoric now calling Trump a racist for saying if you hate America you can leave.
Which Democrat Presidential Hopeful Has The Wildest Campaign Promise So Far?
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
President Donald Trump, his 2020 re-election campaign, and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are attempting to revolutionize GOP fundraising by bringing the whole process for all party candidates under one roof in an outfit called “WinRed,” but some in the consultant class who stand to lose significant business are fighting back against it.
Democrats have had, for more than a decade under their banner fundraising tool “ActBlue,” essential uniformity, especially among small-dollar donors with a tool that allows them to, at peak effectiveness, steer dollars to where they are most needed to win elections. Republicans, because they have used a variety of fundraising vendors and tools across a disparate array of firms, have essentially been at a disadvantage as a party.
In late June, Politico’s Alex Isenstadt explained the thinking behind WinRed in a piece just ahead of its launch:
Republicans are set to launch a long-awaited, much-delayed online fundraising platform on Monday, a move aimed at closing Democrats’ massive small-donor money advantage ahead of the 2020 election.
WinRed is being billed as the GOP’s answer to the Democratic Party’s ActBlue, which has already amassed over $174 million this year. The new tool is intended to reshape the GOP’s fundraising apparatus by creating a centralized, one-stop shop for online Republican giving, which the party has lacked to this point.
The launch caps months of behind-the-scenes discussions involving top Republicans. President Donald Trump and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner were involved, as were GOP congressional leaders and mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. The end product, Republican leaders hope, will fill a gaping void in the party’s machinery.
The RNC and the Trump campaign envision WinRed as the future of GOP fundraising.
“WinRed has the full backing of President Trump and his campaign,” Mike Reed, a senior RNC official, told Breitbart News on Friday. “WinRed is a revolutionary tool in the fundraising arsenal for Republicans that will transform the way GOP candidates and conservative causes across the country raise money. This platform offers candidates and committees convenience, a user-friendly interface, and allows them to efficiently raise money while allowing supporters to more effectively donate to candidates with like-minded beliefs.”
Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, added in a statement to Breitbart News that the GOP committees and president’s campaign are fully behind WinRed and expect all candidates, state parties, and other political action committees (PACs) affiliated with the GOP to get on the WinRed platform.
“There’s a reason President Trump and all the major GOP campaign committees are united behind WinRed: it has the best technology and data integration that will lift all conservative boats and actually help Republicans win in 2020,”Parscale said.
Republican officials insist that all candidates will have access to the WinRed platform, no Republican will be barred from it for any reason including anti-establishment primary challengers, and that all candidates and party committees nationwide are encouraged to sign onto it because uniformity on this front is the only way the GOP can create a true grassroots countermeasure to the left’s ActBlue fundraising machine. Putting their finger on the scale by barring anyone access to the platform, party officials agree, would be harmful to the overall goal of building a grassroots machine that they say they only have an opportunity while Trump is president to get up and running because of his unique ability to connect with small-dollar donors. In other words, the GOP views this setup as the long-term future of the party’s fundraising apparatus and is working to ensure that they seize this chance to implement it party-wide.
A problem Republicans are running into as they seek to implement WinRed across the GOP with all candidates and committees is pushback from consultants with other competing technology. For it to process fundraising donations, WinRed has contracted with Revv–which is a vendor that serves a back-end fundraising platform. Trump’s campaign has used Revv for years. Competing processor Anedot has created a competing website that used the RNC’s and the president’s likeness to try to hit back at the party for not being the selected vendor.
Part of the reason why party officials selected Revv over Anedot, however, is because Revv is partisan and only works with Republicans, but Anedot is nonpartisan and does work with candidates and people outside the Republican Party. While Democrats are all on ActBlue, Anedot has done fundraising work with Never Trump types like Evan McMullin and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld–who is challenging Trump in the GOP primary in 2020, but polling in the single digits at best–and bills itself as a nonpartisan firm. Revv, on the other hand, is partisan–and only works with Republicans–hence the GOP’s decision to choose that route as the way to go.
“The decision to not use Anedot was made in part because of their long history of working with scam PACs,”the RNC’s Reed added in his quote to Breitbart News. “Anedot also positions itself as a non-partisan entity. It obviously makes more sense for the RNC to work with a platform that is aligned completely with the Republican Party and the president.”
But Anedot, which previously has done significant amounts of work with many senior Republicans, ranging from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to House GOP leaders to many state parties and lawmakers across the party, stands to lose that business as the RNC and GOP across the board make the shift to WinRed and, by extension, Revv. As such, in response, Anedot recently launched a website called Give.GOP that, until the GOP sent cease-and-desist letters demanding they be removed, included imagery that had the GOP’s likeness on them.
In a follow-up story this week, Politico’s Isenstadt wrote about the rising tensions inside the GOP over the WinRed fight with Anedot:
Tensions over the future of the GOP’s grassroots fundraising are reaching a breaking point, with the national party turning to strong-arm tactics to get Republicans behind its new, Donald Trump-endorsed platform for small donors.
The Republican National Committee is threatening to withhold support from party candidates who refuse to use WinRed, the party’s newly established online fundraising tool. And the RNC, along with the party’s Senate and gubernatorial campaign arms, are threatening legal action against a rival donation vehicle.
The moves illustrate how Republican leaders are waging a determined campaign to make WinRed the sole provider of its small donor infrastructure — and to torpedo any competitors.
On Monday, the RNC sent an eight-page cease-and-desist letter to Paul Dietzel, a Republican digital strategist who earlier this month launched Give.GOP, a fundraising platform that includes a directory through which donors can give to party candidates and organizations. In the letter, RNC chief counsel Justin Riemer writes that while Give.GOP has a page inviting donors to give to the RNC, the committee hasn’t yet received any funds from the platform or received any outreach from it. Riemer also accuses Dietzel of using the committee’s trademark and logo without its permission.
The cease-and-desist letter from the RNC, provided to Breitbart News, also questions where the money from Give.GOP is going and how it would be provided to the party committees if it does end up going there. There is no answer to that question from the Anedot leaders at this stage, which has party leaders concerned that anyone who gives to Give.GOP could be getting hoodwinked into donating to a structure that does not help the party or the president or Republican candidates but, instead, is enriching political consultants attempting to hold onto the cash flow they are likely to lose if WinRed is implemented across the board as the Trump campaign and party officials envision.
Regarding the Anedot situation, Trump’s campaign manager, Parscale, in his quote to Breitbart News, described it as a “scheme” that hurts the GOP and helps Democrats.
“This is the same kind of scheme that has prevented Republicans for having an answer to ActBlue for 15 years,”Parscale said.
While WinRed was just rolled out a couple of weeks ago, party officials are working across the country with candidates, state parties, and other party fundraising vehicles to implement it universally–and are convinced that if it can be utilized everywhere, they can stand up to ActBlue once and for all down the road. It remains to be seen if the GOP will be successful in doing this, but if they pull it off–and if they are able to do it without hurting grassroots anti-establishment candidates–it could, in theory, be a major step forward for Republicans. Couple this machine with GOP fundraising numbers at record levels, and Republicans believe they can significantly strengthen their chances in elections down the road long into the future.
The number of Americans who consider themselves “extremely proud” of their country is at a record low ahead of Independence Day.
A new Galluppollreleased on Tuesday found that while 70 percent of all U.S. adults say they are proud to be Americans, only 45 percent say they are “extremely” proud of their country.
This was the second consecutive year in which the number of individuals identifying as extremely patriotic fell below 50 percent. Overall the share of Americans identifying as “extremely” patriotic is now at the lowest level since Gallup began asking the question in 2001.
Gallup found the decline in patriotism to be largely driven by Democrats. Of those identifying with the party, only 22 percent said they were “extremely” proud to be Americans. Similarly “subgroups that typically identify as Democrats — women, liberals and younger adults,” also expressed lower levels of patriotism, according to Gallup.
The new polling confirms trends witnessed among Democrats since President Donald Trump took office. The share of Democrats expressing patriotism plummeted by double digits from 43 percent in 2017 to 32 percent in 2018. Although Democrats have historically reported lower levels of pride in their country, this year’s total of 22 percent is the lowest on record since Gallup began measuring the question.
Republicans, on the other hand, continue to express record levels of patriotism. Gallup found that 76 percent of individuals associated with the GOP identified as “extremely” proud to be Americans—only ten percentage points less than the group’s recorded high in 2003.
Even though Gallup shows a correlation between levels of patriotism and which party controls the White House, the level of pride among Democrats since Trump took office is exponentially low. During the administration of President George W. Bush, the percent of Democrats expressing extreme pride in their country never fell under 46 percent. In comparison, during the presidency of Barack Obama the share of Republicans identifying as extremely proud to be American never dropped below 68 percent.
Gallup, however, did find that the two parties more broadly agreed about “American economic achievements,” with 89 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats expressing pride. Likewise, Republicans and Democrats showed reverence for the U.S. military, with 98 percent of Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats saying they were proud of the institution.
Gallup conducted the poll between June 3 through June 16 by surveying 1,015 adults from across the country. The poll had a margin of error of +\- 4 percentage points.
Democrats planning their bid to win back control of the Senate will run hard against the Washington swamp next year, repurposing one of President Trump’s most effective campaign messages from the 2016 election as their own.
Top party operatives are poll-testing messages aimed at winning over voters who are fed up with a gridlocked capital, searching for ways to build an advantage among swing voters who may still like Trump, but not the senators who are seeking reelection in 2020.
And while Democrats could not convince some of their best-known candidates to forgo long shot presidential campaigns in favor of bids for Senate seats, the party will now rely on a once-unorthodox stable of candidates with little or no experience in elected office.
It is a strategy reminiscent of 2006 and 2018, when House Democrats ousted Republican majorities on the backs of candidates with unusual profiles. This year, the stable of Senate Democratic candidates includes more women and veterans than has been typical in recent cycles.
“In races around the country, there are strong Democrats stepping up to run who fit their states and will be a breath of fresh air with new perspectives to bring to the Senate,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
When former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D) and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D) opted against challenging Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Democrats turned to M.J. Hegar, a veteran and businesswoman who lost a closer than expected bid for Congress last year.
In Iowa, another former congressional candidate, Theresa Greenfield, is Democrats’ preferred candidate against Sen. Joni Ernst (R), though she faces a primary fight.
Arizona Sen. Martha McSally (R) will face Mark Kelly, the retired astronaut making his first run for public office. In North Carolina and Maine, Democrats recruited two state legislators to challenge Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).
Those candidates will pitch themselves as fresh-faced outsiders who can shake up a corrupt and broken political system — even if, as is the case in Texas, Iowa and North Carolina, the favored Democratic candidate has lost a race before.
“In this race for Senate, it’s time for somebody who will stand up and fight, to build an economy that works for everybody, for the health care that each family deserves, and to reform the corrupt political system in Washington,” former North Carolina state Sen. Cal Cunningham (D) said in a video announcing his bid to unseat Tillis.
Complicating matters for Democrats, only two states that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 have incumbent
Republican senators today: Maine and Colorado. To win back the Senate majority, Democrats must win states like North Carolina, Arizona, Iowa and even Texas — all states that gave Trump their electoral votes three years ago and where he remains either popular or at least competitive today.
That has Democrats also focusing on a different villain: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Several Democratic groups are testing whether portraying Republican senators as McConnell’s minions can be effective.
Those surveys and public polls show McConnell is surprisingly well-known, and not in a good way.
A Harvard-Harris Poll survey conducted in May pegged McConnell’s favorable rating at just 23 percent, lower than Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), at 36 percent, or Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), at 27 percent. His unfavorable rating stood at 44 percent, lower than Pelosi’s 50 percent but higher than every other politician tested except Trump, Clinton and Vice President Pence.
In a poll conducted for the Democratic group End Citizens United, Global Strategies Group found reading messages against McConnell moved voters toward Democratic candidates more effectively than messages against Trump or the Republican Congress at large.
“Mitch McConnell is beholden to special interests and he’s blocking progress on everything from making prescription drugs more affordable to addressing political corruption to making health care more affordable,” said Patrick Burgwinkle, who heads communications for End Citizens United.
McConnell appears twice in Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon’s (D) video announcing her bid against Collins. Greenfield lumped Ernst and McConnell together in her own video. In Texas, Hegar called Cornyn “that tall guy lurking behind” McConnell.
More than half of the 295 advertisements the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is currently running on Facebook show McConnell’s image or mention his name.
Attacks against national party leaders are nothing new to Republicans, who spent several cycles using Pelosi as shorthand to tie every prominent Democratic challenger to liberal San Francisco values.
Republicans aren’t convinced that McConnell will be the poison pill that they saw in Pelosi.
“You use party leaders in midterms to polarize an electorate when you have registration advantages in the state or district. In a presidential election the electorate is polarized and motivated. The middle isn’t making a decision to show up for a presidential election based upon a three-way bank shot in the side-pocket about whether a senator serves in the same conference as somebody else,” said Josh Holmes, a longtime Senate Republican strategist and top aide to McConnell.
“The reality for him is that any resource spent attacking Mitch McConnell is a resource that is not used to attack his Republican colleagues, and that’s just the way he likes it,” Holmes said.
But Democrats hope the focus on corruption can be the beginning of a discussion of other issues, too: That health care costs rise because of pressure from special interest groups or that gun safety legislation has not passed because of the power of the National Rifle Association.
Democrats “can make the case that Mitch McConnell and special interests in Washington are the ones preventing these priorities from being addressed,” Burgwinkle said.
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
Family
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
Military
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Ann Coulter
Conseritive Political Articles and Discussions
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
The Lead CNN
Rasmussen Reports
unemployment benefits
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
