The former President played a central role in the operation against Michael Flynn.
June 25, 2020
ITEM #1: Wow, does President Obama have a lot to answer for.
The Federalist reports the latest on the Obama administration’s scandalous efforts to target Michael Flynn:
"Newly released notes confirm President Barack Obama’s key role in surveillance and leak operation against Michael Flynn, the incoming Trump administration national security adviser. The handwritten notes, which were first disclosed in a federal court filing made by the Department of Justice on Tuesday, show President Obama himself personally directed former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to investigate Flynn for having routine phone calls with a Russian counterpart. He also suggests they withhold information from President Trump and his key national security figures.
"The handwritten notes from fired former FBI agent Peter Strzok appear to describe a Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting between Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Comey, Yates, and then-national security adviser Susan Rice. The meeting and its substance were confirmed in a bizarre Inauguration Day email Rice wrote to herself.
"It was at this meeting, which was confirmed by testimony from Comey and Yates, that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration."
The word “bombshell” isn’t sufficient to describe this news.
It can’t be said enough how repugnant it is that the mainstream “news” press furthered the bogus Russia-collusion narrative and never expressed even an ounce of skepticism. The facts continue to prove that narrative was scandalously wrong all along.
And now that we’re learning even more about the depths of the Obama administration’s corruption in this matter — including the inexcusable behavior of President Obama himself — you can bet the media will do all they can to ignore this story and keep the country focused on other, more politically convenient things.
Especially since this news implicates Joe Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee for President:
“According to Strzok’s notes, Biden explicitly referenced the Logan Act, an 18th-century law that forbids certain political speech from private citizens. The law, even if it were constitutional, would not apply to a national security adviser for the newly elected president of the United States. Biden had previously denied that he knew anything about the investigation into Flynn.
“‘I know nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn,’ Biden said on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ when George Stephanopoulos asked what he knew of the FBI’s operations in early 2017. He later admitted that statement was false.”
Congressman Jim Jordan summed it up in a tweet:
"May 2020: Joe Biden says he knows 'nothing' about the Flynn investigation. June 2020: Peter Strzok’s notes reveal it was BIDEN’s idea to invoke the Logan Act against Flynn. Biden lied!"
Read more details here.
ITEM #2: In related news, as Bloomberg reports, a federal appeals court yesterday ordered the immediate dismissal of the criminal case against Flynn:
"A divided three-judge panel on Wednesday said U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington did not have the authority to decide on his own whether to grant the government’s surprise motion to dismiss the case or examine whether it was part of a corrupt effort to aid one of Trump’s political allies.
“'This is plainly not the rare case where further judicial inquiry is warranted,' the court said. 'The government’s motion includes an extensive discussion of newly discovered evidence casting Flynn’s guilt into doubt.'”
This rogue judge, constantly propped up and applauded by the press, was flat-out wrong throughout this charade. Which nowadays seems the best way to guarantee fawning coverage.
ITEM #3: As the coronavirus outbreak has prompted efforts by manipulative and opportunistic Democrats to push electoral changes that open the door to widespread voter fraud, much credit is due to the Trump administration and other national Republican leaders for having the guts to speak out on this growing threat.
The latest to weigh in is Attorney General William Barr, who recently talked about this issue in an interview with Fox News.
The full interview (available here) covered a wide array of topics, but here are the relevant comments from Barr on the threat that all-mail balloting poses to our election integrity:
"I'm also worried about undermining the public confidence in the integrity of the elections.
"The thing we have going for us, especially when there's intense division in the country, is that we have peaceful transfers of power. And our way of resolving it is to have an election.
"But when government, state governments start adopting these practices like mail-in ballots that open the floodgates of potential fraud, then people's confidence in the outcome of the election is going to be undermined. And that could take the country to a very dark place, if we lose confidence in the outcomes of our elections."
That’s a very key point — that in a democratic society such as ours, it is absolutely vital that no matter the outcome of an election, the people can at least have confidence that the result was arrived at honestly and fairly.
That principle is crucial to the health of our institutions and keeping our society stable and peaceful.
Barr elaborated on just how mail-in voting is especially susceptible to abuse:
“[Mail-in voting] absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud. Those things are delivered into mailboxes. They can be taken out.
“There's questions about whether or not it even denies a secret ballot, because a lot of the states have you signing the outside of the envelope. So, the person who opens — person who opens the envelope will know how people voted.
“There's no — right now, a foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots, and be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot.
“So, I think it can — it can upset and undercut the confidence in the integrity of our elections. If anything, we should tighten them up right now.”
ITEM #4: Of course, what Democrats are pushing all over the country right now is the complete opposite of “tightening” up the security of our elections. And that’s the whole point. Their goal is to exploit holes in the system to make it easier for themselves to get elected.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Marc Thiessen recently spelled out some of the other problems with mail-in voting and why concerns should be particularly high in the current environment:
“No one questions that mail-in ballots have much higher rates of not being counted. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that in the 2008 presidential election, 7.6 million of 35.5 million mail-in ballots requested were not counted because they never reached voters or were rejected for irregularities. That is a failure rate of more than 21 percent. In 2008, it did not matter because the election was not particularly close and mail-in ballots only accounted for a fraction of votes cast. But imagine the impact that would have in a close election in which mail-in voting is tried on a massive scale.
“If mail-in ballots are adopted widely for the 2020 election, mass failures would be inevitable because about half the states have either no or extremely limited vote-by-mail options, and thus lack the experience or infrastructure for sending out, receiving or securing millions of mail-in ballots. We’d be conducting an experiment of unprecedented scale right in the middle of one of the most contentious elections in US history.
“Moreover, there is a huge difference between sending ballots to a small number of citizens who request them and requiring that they be mailed to every registered voter, as Democrats are demanding. Under the Democrats’ plan, ballots would inevitably be sent to wrong addresses or inactive voters, putting millions of blank ballots into circulation — an invitation for fraud. Add to that the danger of what Democrats call ‘community ballot collection’ (a.k.a. ‘ballot harvesting’) where campaign workers collect absentee ballots in bulk and deliver them to election officials, and you have a recipe for disaster.”
We’ll have much more to say on this issue in the coming weeks and months, particularly as the integrity of our elections continues to come under assault right here in Nevada. Stay tuned.
ITEM #5: Back to Attorney General Barr for a moment.
Even as the blatantly ridiculous Russia-collusion narrative continues to fall apart in the most spectacular ways, Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee Chairman who did so much to advance this falsehood, has refused to back down from the charge.
As the Washington Examiner reports, Barr slammed Schiff during his Fox News interview, calling his behavior “infuriating” and noting the most obvious way to hold him accountable:
"Well, as far as public comments like these people have been making in press conferences and on television and so forth, you know, the accountability is really elections for Schiff. That’s why we have elections. If the people of his district want him to continue to behave as he has, then they can send him back to office. ...
"It is infuriating, and it’s the same phenomenon I discussed with the media, which is the media misled the American people grossly over a long period of time with exaggerated claims and misinformation, and they haven’t been held accountable — and the same for a lot of these talking heads."
In that same interview, Barr also opined that the Trump-Russia investigation "was the closest the United States ever came to a coup to take down a president since the assassination of Lincoln."
Bravo to Barr for being willing to unapologetically call out the left — not just elected Democrats but their media enablers as well — for their unconscionable behavior.
ITEM #6: Last week we shared the news that a special session of the Nevada Legislature is on the horizon, and that Governor Sisolak would not rule out raising taxes in order to deal with the current budget shortfall, estimated at $812 million.
We argued that “as our economy continues to suffer under the worst unemployment rate in the country (thanks to the Governor’s unnecessarily heavy-handed approach to shutting down economic activity), saddling Nevada’s families and job creators with a higher tax burden would be the absolute worst thing we could do.”
The Las Vegas Review-Journal this week published an editorial with its own take on the coming tax fight, writing:
“Simply put, asking Nevada’s private-sector workers and their employers to reach further into their wallets during this time of economic devastation and uncertainty would be an outrage and should constitute political suicide for elected officials. Neither the state’s business community nor those it sustains are in any position to take a further financial hit, what with the tourism and travel industry on the rack and unemployment at record highs. Particularly when public employees — at both the state and local levels — have been asked to bear so little of the sacrifice.”
Spot-on.
You can read the full editorial here.
ITEM #7: As we continue to see riots in cities across the country, it’s increasingly important for people in positions of prominence to show the courage to criticize these dangerous attacks on public safety.
David Bernhardt, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, is one such leader, recently tweeting:
“I just left Lafayette Square where another so called ‘peaceful protest’ led to destruction tonight. Let me be clear: we will not bow to anarchists. Law and order will prevail, and justice will be served.”
And here’s Buck Sexton, calling out the Democrats who are excusing these riots for their hypocrisy:
“The same Democrats who believe they have a right to vandalize priceless public property without criminal consequences cheered the FBI ambush of General Flynn and the paramilitary raid of Roger Stone’s house to the very end ‘Because they broke the law!’”
Sanity will prevail only as long as there are enough people with the guts to tell it like it is. Here’s hoping we’ll see more voices added to the chorus moving forward.
ITEM #8: The Nevada (Not)Independent’s Riley Snyder reports that “Gov. Steve Sisolak and state environmental officials are proposing a set of regulations that would adopt California’s standards for low or zero-emission vehicles by 2024 as part of an effort to reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change.”
We seem to recall many commentators on the left, including the (Not)Independent’s own editor, Jon Ralston, scoffing incessantly at those who raised concerns that Democrats were turning our state into California.
We await Ralston’s public chastising of his reporter for pedaling this dangerous lie.
NOTABLE QUOTE
"Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism." ― Thomas Sowell