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Donald Trump should do a better job of picking aides who pay their taxes - but he's not responsible for their financial problems and crimes. These investigations, essentially based on an opposition-funded dossier, were never anything other than an
attempt to push into a corner as many Trump aides and family members as possible and shake them down until they could get close enough to Trump to try to take him down. That's why so many of his aides, lawyers and actions in the campaign and in the White
House have undergone hour-by-hour scrutiny to find anything that could be colored into a crime, leaving far behind the original Russia-collusion theory as the fake pretext it was. Paying for nondisclosure agreements for perfectly legal activities is not
a crime, not a campaign contribution as commonly understood or ruled upon by the FEC - and squeezing guilty pleas out of vulnerable witnesses does not change those facts.

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FLASHBACK: Remember When Obama Campaign Was Fined $375,000 for Campaign Reporting Violations AND NO JAIL TIME?
Jim Hoft by Jim Hoft August 22, 2018
On Tuesday, Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen surrendered himself to the FBI after it was reported he reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors.
Michael Cohen admitted he violated campaign finance laws in relation to the Stormy Daniels payment at direction of a ‘candidate.’ He paid off the porn star over $100,000 in a hush money agreement which she later violated. Democrats and their liberal media cheered that this was the end of the Trump “regime.”
But it wasn’t that long ago that a presidential campaign was charged with much worse.
In 2013 Maggie Haberman at Politico reported on the criminal campaign reporting
violations against the Obama campaign.
According to the Politico the Obama campaign was fined $375,000.
President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign was fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for campaign reporting violations — one of the largest fees ever levied against a presidential campaign, POLITICO has learned.
The fine — laid out in detail in FEC documents that have yet to be made public — arose from an audit of the campaign, which was published in April.

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Only courts can rein in 'King Rosenstein'
By Mark Penn, opinion contributor — 08/20/18 10:00 AM EDT

The expression “where there is smoke, there is fire” appears to date to 43 B.C., but it sure applies to a decision by District Judge Beryl Howell. It seems less a court opinion and more an opposition brief to knock down any challenges to the
authority of special counsel Robert Mueller. Yet its length at 92 pages and its
reasoning suggest quite the opposite. This ruling blows around so much smoke that there is likely plenty of fire behind the argument of there being no basis
for the
appointment of the special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Hopefully the decision will be swiftly appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court.

The ruling comes from the planned defiance of a subpoena of Andrew Miller, an associate of political strategist and former Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone. Attorneys for Miller argued that the Mueller appointment is unconstitutional because he is an
unconfirmed principal federal officer, because Congress has not explicitly authorized the position, and because Rosenstein had no authority to appoint him. The decision begins with a detailed history of the role of the attorney general, which began as a
limited position that grew in scope and power. Today, the job, in addition to advising the president on the law, includes appointing U.S. attorneys with the advice and consent of the Senate and hiring “special attorneys.”

But these special attorneys were never meant to have unimpeded power greater than U.S. attorneys without confirmation. In fact, just about everyone in the Justice Department with any substantial power requires Senate approval. This includes all assistant
and associate attorney generals, and those who report directly to Rosenstein, with the exception of Mueller. With more than 1,200 administration officials across the government, including all inspector generals, requiring confirmation, it would be near
impossible to find anyone with the vast authority and independence of Mueller without Senate approval.

Howell says not to worry because the office of the special counsel was created by regulations that the attorney general could swipe away any day to take direct charge of Mueller. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, she says, could even end his voluntary
recusal and fire Mueller. Yeah, right. It is an irrelevant argument anyway, since all confirmed and appointment officers can be fired at will. She also ignores the inconvenient fact that it was the very firing of the FBI director that triggered
appointing the special counsel, undercutting her rationale that Mueller could easily be fired.

The Mueller appointment, in particular, is extraordinary. His full scope and powers reside in a secret document. He operates across jurisdictions, can indict foreign officials, and was not appointed by the attorney general himself. If Howell is right,
the attorney general, without Senate approval and by his own regulations, can establish independent prosecutors with vast budgets, secret powers, and no effective oversight by the president or Congress. These are powers denied even to the president in
the Constitution, but they have landed in the hands of King Rosenstein.

The plain fact is that this special counsel has been given such broad authority
that his appointment should absolutely require Senate confirmation. True, his term is not limited because it is unlimited. His scope is not just national but
even
international. Firing him cannot be accomplished without likely triggering an impeachment threat, making him the single hardest person to fire despite regulations that technically permit it. He is perhaps the only appointment with
the power to upend the
national election. Judges must put aside legal fictions to face the reality of this unprecedented and unconfirmed government appointment.

The second major argument dismissed by Howell is that Congress has not explicitly authorized the position and so there is no statutory authority for the appointment. She finds that because the statute allows the attorney general
to hire special attorneys
to assist him, there was no need for Congress to specifically authorize the appointment of a special counsel, as it is such a temporary and limited position. By her reasoning, when lawmakers let the independent counsel statute expire out of exasperation
with the creatures they had created, Congress actually increased rather than decreased the authority of the attorney general to do exactly the same thing, minus proper judicial and legislative oversight.

Howell saves her weakest arguments for last, getting around the excepting clause of the Constitution that requires even inferior officers to be appointed
only by the president, the courts of law, or the heads of departments. Here, she jumps through hoops
to define recusal as the same thing as disability so that Rosenstein could step
in as though the attorney general were incapacitated. Clearly that is not what the vacancy statute intended. Howell eventually concludes that, the excepting clause
notwithstanding, this is a big government and lots of people delegate lots of responsibilities, so the attorney general could just delegate the appointment anyway. So much for the Constitution.

It is a well written opinion, but it is deeply flawed when held up to the light
of reality. Its implications are its weakness. Under the ruling, a crafty deputy attorney general could appoint the most powerful prosecutor in the land with an unlimited
term, hidden authority, independent budget, and with little oversight by the president or Congress just by declaring the attorney general to have a conflict
and therefore to be disabled. Or an attorney general looking to sink a president can simply say
his hands are tied and delegate the process to folks immune from direct authority.

Come to think of it, one of those alternatives is exactly what we are living through right now, and it has bitterly divided the country. Given that an impeachment trial requires two-thirds of the Senate, the appointment of independent counsels with a
majority vote of the Senate makes sense. It would prevent the runaway appointments and prosecutions that have been the ignominious hallmark of special counsels. It would put the Constitution back in the driver seat, and end these secret processes that
have allowed the hijacking of our government by unelected officials.

I hope this case gets to the Supreme Court with all deliberate speed so the ruling can be overturned. The entire country knows that one presidential campaign was treated one way and another was treated much differently. Rosenstein and Mueller have become
blind to the corrosive effect of this unfair justice. Ending the appointment of
the special counsel on grounds that it needed Senate confirmation could be the best way out of the mess created by this backdoor granting of power.

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Kay said it best, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred
years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew
that humans were
alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."




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Gohmert on FBI’s Claim That No Evidence Was Found Regarding Hillary Clinton Server Breach

Washington, August 29, 2018 |

WASHINGTON, D.C. –Congressman Louie Gohmert (TX-01) released the following statement today regarding the claim made by the FBI that they have ‘not found any evidence’ regarding Hillary Clinton’s serving being breached:

“It’s not surprising that the FBI ‘has not found any evidence’ regarding Clinton’s servers being breached. Like I stated to Former FBI Agent
Peter Strzok in the House Judiciary Hearing, it was the Obama-appointed Intelligence Community
Inspector General that discovered the breach. It was not the FBI that found it,
so their statement was technically correct, but very deceptive in its omission.

When I asked Peter Strzok about this, he said that he remembered being briefed by the ICIG investigator but did not remember what it was about. That is not credible. We know that the FBI’s head of counter-intelligence, Mr. Strzok, was doing all he
could to help protect Hillary Clinton. So, when the Intel IG investigator came to report to Mr. Strzok that a specific foreign intelligence entity (which was not Russian) was receiving virtually all the emails from Secretary of State Clinton’s private
server in real time, it is not remotely believable that he would not remember the conversation. In fact, if he testified that he remembered the briefing, he would be potentially incriminating himself in a coverup or obstruction role.

One thing has been made acutely clear – partisan politics, sadly, are very much at play within some of the leadership at the FBI. Though Strzok and other FBI personnel were briefed on Hillary Clinton's server being hacked, as now reported, they
knew this would devastate Hillary Clinton’s chances of being elected and they
were not about to let that happen.

Fortunately, progress is currently being made at the FBI and there are good
people there who are making a difference. Unfortunately, the FBI’s deceptive omission in its statement reveals that the FBI has not been completely cleansed
of the
partisanship that so pervasively corrupted it in Washington, DC.”

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If You Want To Know Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Media, Watch CNN
Trump’s hyperbole has currency because the media often live up to conservatives' worst expectations.
August 29, 2018 By David Harsanyi

On July 27, CNN reported that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, would be willing to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that the president knew
in advance of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his campaign and a Kremlin-linked
lawyer who was allegedly selling dirt on Hillary Clinton. This revelation not only contradicted Trump’s denials, but also Cohen’s testimony to Congress. It was quite the exclusive—the closest we’ve come to ferreting out “collusion” since the
last time CNN botched a big scoop.

The story, bylined by Carl Bernstein, Marshall Cohen, and former Obama administration political appointee Jim Sciutto, cited numerous “sources” with knowledge of the supposed bombshell. The Washington Post, chasing the same
story, soon outed Cohen’
s lawyer, the preternaturally mendacious Lanny Davis, as the source of the contention.

But Davis was forced to walk back the claim, first conceding that he “should have been more clear” and that he “could not independently confirm what happened,” and then he sort of apologized. (It’s worth noting that anyone who trusts Davis as a
primary source for any story is likely to be either consciously allowing themselves to be duped or irreparably incompetent.)

Well, on Monday BuzzFeed ran another article in which Davis admitted to being CNN’s source as well, even though the network had initially claimed that Davis had declined to comment for the article—which turns out not only to be untrue but a ham-
fisted way to hide the story’s origin.

“We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it,” the network responded. Brian Stelter, CNN’s sometimes censorious media reporter, argued that “pro-Trump web sites are claiming that the CNN story was a ‘lie,’ and that it’s
been ‘debunked.’ They might want it to be ‘debunked,’ but it’s not. The critics don’t know who CNN’s sources were.”

We don’t. Does Stelter? My guess is that the second source is Davis’ assistant. Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps Davis, not only the source of the story but also Cohen’s lawyer, is lying about his initial lie. But there are other sound reasons
not to trust CNN’s position.

Let’s remember this is the network that maintained it had multiple sources on
the record purporting to prove that Donald Trump Jr. was involved in an email correspondence with a random person about WikiLeaks and the DNC hacking before it was released
to the public. That was back in December 2017. The article turned out to be bogus. Both independent anonymous sources somehow got the same exact date wrong
on the exact same email. Not once has CNN explained how this miraculous event transpired.

Let’s also remember that it was CNN that cited multiple sources confirming that former FBI director James Comey was going to tell a congressional committee under oath that Trump had lied when the president claimed that the former FBI director had told
him three times that he hadn’t been under investigation. That was in June 2017. The opposite turned out to be true.

Burn the source? No way. CNN hasn’t even really corrected the piece.


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