[PJ] NATIONAL HARBOR, MD ‐ Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign, who was wiretapped by the FBI, spoke on Wednesday at CPAC. After Page had been accused by Democrats of being a traitor to his country for two years, the Mueller investigation "did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election." Page was also exonerated by the Horowitz report, which also found the allegations in the Steele dossier to be false. Even so, Page's life was turned upside down and he has not recovered his reputation or been compensated for being spied on illegally. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe Page is referring to US taxpayer dollars.
"That was one of the hardest days for me and my family in March of 2017," he said, "the day [Adam Schiff] was on television reading from this fake dossier." Page described having his phone tapped while he was working with the Trump transition team: "Director Comey was asked about the wiretapping of Trump Tower and my office was right next to Trump Tower and I was in communications with so many of [the Trump team] my phone was being monitored. All of our communications, emails, and my phone." He's run the numbers. Needs extra dough for baby shoes upcoming legal defense.
#1
FBI services contract terminated once you departed the Trump campaign? Losing access really sucks. Get out of the beltway you crooked, deep state bastid! Go somewhere and get a real job.
[Just The News] The FBI agent who ran the bureau’s warrantless spying program said Wednesday he warned ex-Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe that the program was a useless waste of taxpayer money that needlessly infringed Americans’ civil liberties but his bosses refused to take action.
Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef ran the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit from late 2004 until his retirement in late 2014. He told Just the News he fears the deeply flawed program, which was started in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, was allowed to keep going to give Americans a false sense of security in the war on terror and possibly to enable inappropriate spying, such as that which targeted President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
"I have no doubt, or very little doubt, that it was used for political spying or political espionage," Youssef said during a lengthy interview for the John Solomon Reports podcast.
Youssef confirmed that the FBI performed an audit of the highly classified program (also known as the NSA program because it searched call records captured by the National Security Agency) after Edward Snowden leaked its existence.
The audit showed that while the program had generated two moderate leads for counterterrorism cases, it had not helped thwart dozens of terrorism attacks as officials had claimed, despite costing tens of millions of dollars per year.
In fact, the program was generating large numbers of "false negatives and positives," Youssef said.
The audit, he added, also showed "there was collateral damage in terms of civil liberties" of Americans whose phone records were unnecessarily searched or who were falsely identified as connected to terrorism.
[National Interest] FW De Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid-era president, and his foundation, have learnt the hard way the dangers of the comparative politics of sin. He recently gave an interview to mark his historic speech to parliament on 2 February 1990 when he announced the freeing of Nelson Mandela and unbanning of political organisations. During the interview on the national TV broadcaster he was asked for his thoughts on the declaration by the United Nations that apartheid was a crime against humanity, he replied:
I don’t fully agree with that.
He went on to assert that he was not justifying apartheid in any way whatsoever, saying:
But there is a difference between calling something a crime. Like genocide is a crime. Apartheid cannot be, for instance, compared with genocide. There was never a genocide.
He added that more black people were killed by other black people than by the National Party government. But in making this statement he conveniently chose to forget that a great deal of violence was fomented by the government’s security forces.
De Klerk was immediately engulfed in controversy. Condemnation of his statement came in thick and fast. Big names entered the fray, including former president Thabo Mbeki and Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. The South African Council of Churches issued a statement as did the governing African National Congress (ANC). And the opposition party Economic Freedom Fighters called for his ejection from parliament when President Cyril Ramaphosa was waiting to deliver his State of Nation speech.
De Klerk’s foundation responded by dismissing the UN’s statement as a product of Soviet-style "agit-prop". This aroused yet more popular fury.
Such was the outcry that De Klerk opted for an immediate and humiliating retreat, issuing an abject apology, and insisting that he remained firmly committed to the politics of national reconciliation. His foundation also backtracked. It issued an apology for any anger and hurt caused. In its statement it said it agreed with the International Criminal Court’s definition of a crime against humanity as acts
#1
A number of nations, including western democracies, have neither signed nor ratified the ICSPCA, including Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
In explanation of the US vote against the convention, Ambassador Clarence Clyde Ferguson Jr. said: "[W]e cannot...accept that apartheid can in this manner be made a crime against humanity. Crimes against humanity are so grave in nature that they must be meticulously elaborated and strictly construed under existing international law..."
Posted by: European Conservative ||
02/27/2020 20:24 Comments ||
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It's Kurt
Ahoy, suckers! Conservative, Inc., is back at it again, trading in its classic cruise ship motif for a figurative dinghy in its never-ending quest to separate you from your money and themselves from the shredded tatters of their ruined dignity.
Woke Rule No. 1 is that anything with "Principles" in its name is a grift. Now, something called "Principles First" ‐ ugh ‐ is trying to shoehorn into CPAC’s spotlight with its "National Summit on Principled Conservatism" to be held in D.C. on February 29th, and for the low, low, almost certainly lib tech tycoon-subsidized price of $10, you can attend this sexless Never Trump Freaknik.
...From political consultants who are no longer consulted to writers who are no longer read, this is the Woodstock for conservatives who never actually conserved anything.
...Who’s coming to this soiree? Well, just imagine the universe’s worst county fair dino-rock concert line-up, and this is its political equivalent. Mona Charen! Bill Kristol! David Frum! It’s basically the Swamp’s version of Bachman Turner Overdrive, Blue Öyster Cult, and Average White Band ‐ except this band of totally white people are well below-average,
...Sadly, Ana Navarro isn’t on the bill, but she probably has important work to do completing Dr. Stephen Hawking’s string theory research. And there’s no sign of Jennifer Rubin, probably because the event occurs during the hours of daylight. OK, I LOL'd
...So, what’s on the agenda? The magic begins at 9:00 a.m. sharp, with "Registration, Networking Breakfast, Meet & Greet." Get there early before the ex-Weekly Standard staffers make off with all the donuts. And be sure to snag a photo with super-plausible 2016 candidate Evan McMullin, but if he asks to borrow a couple bucks because he "left his wallet at home," don’t count on getting paid back.
...In the era of Bernie Sanders being the alternative to Trump, the Never Trump rump faction has managed to do what we all thought was impossible ‐ become even less relevant to the debate. There’s no point to them anymore. You’re either for Trump, or for the communist, and for 99.9999% of Republicans, even those who still sniff at Trump, Bernie is a Bolshevik too far.
[American Thinker] Now that Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg look to be the last two standing in the Democrat primaries ‐ the communist and the plutocrat ‐ each side is spending overtime digging up dirt on the other. One of Bernie's supporters found some of the allegations a woman made in a lawsuit she filed in 1998 directly against Michael Bloomberg (as opposed to a lawsuit more generally against his company).
The lawsuit described a workplace environment in which Bloomberg generally degraded women; demanded that they have sex appeal to work with him; and engaged in repeated, and unwanted, sexual gestures and touching.
#3
As long as he doesn't have an (R) next to his name they'll forgive and forget if he wins the primary. Ideals only go so far when confronted by power.
#11
I'm guessing this is Sekiko Sakai Garrison. She's easy on the eyes, but I really don't see these allegations anywhere else. Not a Bloomberg fan except relative to the other Dems. I suspect, however, that she kitchen-sinked it in her lawsuit. She threw everything at the wall and hoped something would stick. It worked - sort of - she got her pound of flesh via a confidential settlement and an NDA.
As it turns out, ever since she left Bloomberg LP, she's been a glorified temp. You can see her profile at LinkedIn. You don't know what you have until you've lost it. Bloomberg LP is probably the best gig most of these women will ever have. It's got a rep for being a great place to work, with good salaries and benefits. I don't know why her SJW impulses won out over the sensible part that would have pushed her to stick around, but somehow that's what happened.
[Breitbart] Wednesday on Fox News, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) gave Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate low marks, adding that it did not focus on issues in need of immediate attention, such as coronavirus.
"I couldn’t watch much of it, to be honest," she said. "And I believe that voters probably walked away not getting much value and feeling pretty frustrated, given the serious, serious challenges that we’re facing right now, with things like ‐ like the coronavirus, something that is threatening the safety, health, and well-being, and lives of the American people, and something that requires all of us, as Americans, coming together, standing together, and standing together just as we would in wartime, except now, in this case, the enemy is a virus. And we have got to make sure that we prevent its spread.
Host Neil Cavuto asked the Hawaii congresswoman to react to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the presidential field’s frontrunner who many in the Democratic Party establishment reject as a viable nominee.
#5
“This is really about putting the interests of the American people first and really working to address those challenges and bringing the different ideas that we all have as Americans to the forefront, whether they are Democrat or Republican or Independent ideas, saying, we have got to put country first, because people are suffering and struggling and being left behind, so long as politicians in Washington are playing games with their lives,” Gabbard continued.
American first, Rep. Gabbard? I could get behind that.
Posted by: Bobby ||
02/27/2020 9:25 Comments ||
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#6
Yes. What isn't said is that Americans first have to be disarmed. Then the "suffering and struggling," as defined by government, must expropriate the wealth generated by others. For starters. St. Tulsi. Spare me, please...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
02/27/2020 11:00 Comments ||
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Opinion: Two of the Iranian protesters who were sentenced to death last week had fled to Turkey in December in order to apply for political asylum; instead, they were arrested and handed back to Iran for imprisonment, writes @BabakTaghvaee.#IranProtestshttps://t.co/WDuh4MeOb8
[The Hill via Townhall] A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the Department of Justice (DOJ) could withhold funding from cities and states that refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
A three-judge panel on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously overturned a district court judge's ruling that the department lacked the authority to impose immigration-related conditions on certain funding.
The panel’s opinion, written by Judge Reena Raggi, found that Congress had delegated authority to the attorney general to set conditions on the federal grant program it had created, called the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program.
"Repeatedly and throughout its pronouncement of Byrne Program statutory requirements, Congress makes clear that a grant applicant demonstrates qualification by satisfying statutory requirements in such form and according to such rules as the Attorney General establishes," wrote Raggi, who was appointed to the court by George W. Bush. "This confers considerable authority on the Attorney General."
A group of seven states and New York City sued the DOJ in 2017 after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the agency would start withholding funding from local governments that refused to share information about undocumented immigrants or provide jail access to federal authorities investigating inmates' immigration status.
The states challenging the policy are New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington, Massachusetts and Virginia.
[Breitbart] President Trump’s firing of John Rood, the top policy official at the Pentagon, is a sign the agency is not immune from an effort to purge from influential positions across the administration "snakes" who do not support the president, according to four current and former officials.
Rood had been on the chopping block for months, but his firing just last week amid a spate of other personnel changes shows that the president is finally ready to clean house at a department that has tried to distance itself from politics, they said.
"All of them are getting tossed," a senior administration official told Breitbart News. "You’re either on the team or you’re out, everywhere."
Political appointees like Rood serve the administration and at the president’s prerogative. However, it was well-known at the Pentagon and beyond that Rood was not a supporter of the president. remember, though: "a department that has tried to distance itself from politics"
"Plenty of people from the transition and at the National Security Council knew Rood was not playing on the same team as the president when it came to policy or personnel," a defense official told Breitbart News after his firing. "Complaints have made it to the highest levels at the White House for awhile now."
At at least two meetings he held for staff, Rood spoke profusely and glowingly about the late Sen. John McCain, but did not once mention the president, according to the defense official.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[PJ] NATIONAL HARBOR, MD ‐ Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign, who was wiretapped by the FBI, spoke on Wednesday at CPAC. After Page had been accused by Democrats of being a traitor to his country for two years, the Mueller investigation "did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election." Page was also exonerated by the Horowitz report, which also found the allegations in the Steele dossier to be false. Even so, Page's life was turned upside down and he has not recovered his reputation or been compensated for being spied on illegally.
[American Thinker] Now that Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg look to be the last two standing in the Democrat primaries ‐ the communist and the plutocrat ‐ each side is spending overtime digging up dirt on the other. One of Bernie's supporters found some of the allegations a woman made in a lawsuit she filed in 1998 directly against Michael Bloomberg (as opposed to a lawsuit more generally against his company).
