No Hurry. I Can Wait

Americans got excited about two things last week: the arrival of spring on Wednesday and the release of the Mueller Report on Friday. However, not much change is noticeable in either case.

It’s been a long winter in western Maine. We’ve been buried in snow since last November and there’s still more than a foot of it on the ground — more than two feet in places. Sunday I had to walk through drifts up to my thighs to check a meter on a property for which I’m responsible. As I write this on Monday, my thermometer hasn’t risen above the thirties. The same is predicted for Tuesday. We still can’t see over the snow banks at several intersections and must nose out a few inches at a time before safely accelerating.

The Mueller Report was released Friday to Attorney General Robert Barr. Democrats demanded it be made public immediately and AG Robert Barr issued a four-page summary Sunday afternoon. House and Senate Democrats doubt Barr’s honesty because Trump appointed him and demand to see the whole thing. Years of saturation coverage by Mainstream Media have convinced half of all Americans that Trump colluded with Russia but Barr quoted from the Mueller Report as follows: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” In spite of that, House Democrats insist their myriad investigations will continue. Expect little change for the foreseeable future.

In spite of our long, cold winter, Democrats claim global warming will destroy the world in twelve years. They want a “Green New Deal” which would eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear energy to rely solely on wind and solar power. It would eliminate 99% of cars within ten years. Any Democrats who disagree stay pretty quiet, especially the ones running for president. Neither polar ice caps nor Himalayan glaciers have melted as predicted. Polar bears are thriving too, but none of that has quieted global warming alarmists.

On election day, I go to the Lovell Town Hall and vote, but I don’t stay up late that night to see who wins or loses. On New Year’s Eve, I don’t stay up late to see the ball drop in Times Square either. I discover sometime after waking up in January that the ball dropped without me and things go on as they always have.

I’m in no rush to know things unless it’s either a medical emergency or someone is trying to break into my house. Break-ins are rare in rural Maine because most of us have guns and criminals know that. Medical emergencies, however, can happen to anybody, anywhere, and we have to wait longer for help out here. It’s a tradeoff if you prefer life in the slow lane, which I do.

I grew up way back in the twentieth century when mail came in envelopes. Telephones were attached to wires and there was only one line per household. When it rang, people answered it. They didn’t let it go to voicemail because there wasn’t any such thing. In my family of origin, I had four sisters and three brothers, so there was often a race to see who could get to the ringing phone first. Whoever the call was for couldn’t tie up the line long because there was always a sibling or parent either expecting a call or waiting to make one.

By the 1970s life in Massachusetts was getting fast and busy so I moved my family to rural Maine where only party lines were available. Our children were little and enjoyed playing with each other, so they didn’t need to talk on the phone to friends who lived miles away. That came a decade later — but by then we had a private line. With three teenage girls, I had to impose a ten-minute limit on each call. If someone was trying to reach me and the line was busy, they had to try every five minutes or so by actually dialing several numbers each time, then waiting for either another busy signal or a ring. Nobody “dials” anymore; we press buttons, but the word stays with us sans function.

Politics have always interested me. They still do, but I’m increasingly put off by breathless, sensational reporting on radio as well as affected eyebrow-raising and forehead-knitting by pretentious television news anchors and reporters. To avoid all that, I’m getting most of my news from reading text online.

By the time this appears in newspapers, it will have warmed up a bit and spring will have become less of a tease. Nearly all this snow will be gone in a month, but we can expect partisan rancor against our president to continue regardless of Meuller Report revelations. It may even escalate.

My Working Hypothesis

Shenanigans in our federal government are so numerous and they’re being exposed so rapidly that’s it’s very hard to keep up, much less to make sense of it all. Several months ago I developed a working hypothesis — a theoretical framework — to put new information into a plausible context. Here it is: Officials in the Obama Administration, together with their allies in mainstream media, the Clinton campaign, and “never Trumpers” in the Republican establishment, have been working to sabotage first Donald Trump’s campaign, and now his presidency.

I realize that to some I sound like a conspiracy nut who should be fitted for a tinfoil hat, but I haven’t had to change my hypothesis as new information emerges. It all fits. Six months ago I would have considered the above paragraph ridiculous. I never believed it could get this bad, but now I’m thinking it could be even worse. Did leftist Democrats in charge of our federal government weaponize our intelligence community to use against an opposing party candidate for president? Evidence is mounting and the question becomes: Who was involved? Many names we already know. Eventually we’ll be resurrecting the refrain from the Watergate investigation: “What did the [now former] president know and when did he know it?”

The latest datum is a plausible claim that Obama’s FBI planted a spy in the Trump campaign sometime around July, 2016. It could even have been even before Trump won the Republican nomination but neither the FBI nor the Department of Justice (DOJ) will reveal either the spy’s identity or the timing of his implantation. Both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal reported on this last week but neither names him. Kim Strassel, who wrote the WSJ piece, said she believed she knew his identity but couldn’t completely verify it.

However, the anonymous source who calls himself “Sundance” at the Conservative Tree House web site does name him: Stefan Halper. So does The Daily Caller. A background article on Halper indicates he worked in three or four Republican Administrations from Nixon to Bush, including several campaigns but I had never heard of him. This is big, but you’d never know it if you get all your news from mainstream media (MSM). Except for the Washington Post, they’re giving it a good leaving alone.

When President Trump tweeted that President Obama was wiretapping Trump Tower, MSM outlets too numerous to list here ridiculed Trump and insisted it was an outrageous allegation for which there was no evidence. It was eventually proven true, however, when we learned about the “Trump Dossier” and its use to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil Trump’s campaign. We only know about that because of digging by Devin Nunes and his committee — and he only started investigating after Trumps wiretapping tweet March 4, 2017. He’s still at it.

Nunes has gathered lots of evidence but he’s still being stonewalled at FBI and DOJ. According to the Washington Post:

A subpoena that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) issued to the Justice Department last week made a broad request for all documents about an individual [the implanted spy] who people close to the matter say is a sensitive, longtime intelligence source for the CIA and FBI. The Justice Department has refused to provide the documents. Intelligence officials say the material could jeopardize the source, a U.S. citizen who has aided the special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign.

President Trump, however, can force DOJ to declassify any DOJ documents or release them to Congress. So, why doesn’t he? Rush Limbaugh speculated on his program last Friday that Trump wants it all to play out on its own, that he wants his base to see him as the persecuted victim of a witch hunt by his opposition — the MSM and “The Swamp.” If Limbaugh is right, that wouldn’t necessarily negate my working hypothesis, but it’s troubling. Why not expose it all now? Is Trump playing “Rope-a-Dope” with his enemies? Is he timing the release for just before the mid-term elections? Is he waiting for a new John Dean character to emerge from the Deep State? For the “Why doesn’t he?” question, all I can do is speculate.

But for now, consider how MSM would react if there were evidence that George W. Bush’s FBI planted a spy in the Obama campaign, then used a bogus dossier for a warrant to wiretap his offices. What if the “national security” justification for all this turned out to be completely fabricated? That’s how this whole thing is shaping up, but you’d never know it if you got all your news from the New York Times and the alphabet networks.

Will continuing events prove it necessary to modify my hypothesis? We’ll see.

Left & Right April 17, 2018

With Gino in Florida, Mark Guerringue filled in. Mark is publisher of the Daily Sun newspapers, including Conway Daily Sun, Berlin Daily Sun, Laconia Daily Sun, and the Portland Phoenix, one or more of which run my column.

We start with the Meuller investigation and recent happenings. Then it's media bias in various manifestations. We try to define conservative and liberal. Judge Kimba Wood background; Carter/Trump attorney/client privilege; comparing Ken Starr and Robert Meuller investigations; Facebook difficulties; regulating social media; likelihood of impeachment in 2019 if Democrats win the House.

Facebook in the news: does it need regulation? Political restraints on newspaper advertising should apply to social media as well.

Watergate Was Nothing Compared to This

First thing every morning I skipped down two flights of stairs to get the Boston Globe because I couldn’t wait to read the latest developments in the Watergate scandal then bringing down the Nixon Administration. Familiar as I still am with those details, they pale by comparison to abuses of power under the Obama Administration and its collusion with the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign recently coming to light.

President Nixon’s campaign had hired a group called “the plumbers” to plug leaks of information from his administration to the media. Their activities were legal up to the point when they broke into to a rented office of DNC Chairman Larry O’Brien in Washington, DC’s Watergate Hotel, hence the name of the infamous scandal. They were hoping to find embarrassing information to hurt Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern’s 1972 campaign against Nixon.

During the long investigation into this break-in, other illegal activities came to light including another break-in to the office of Daniel Ellsburg’s psychiatrist. Ellsburg had leaked the classified “Pentagon Papers,” which revealed that some of Nixon’s public statements about his conduct of the Vietnam War were erroneous, and the New York Times published them. Nixon was not aware of the Watergate break-in until the Washington Post began publishing stories about it. At that point he began using his executive power to thwart the investigation. That led to credible charges of “obstruction of justice,” for which he resigned to avoid impeachment.

Nixon had contemplated other abuses of his power like using the IRS to harass political enemies of which he had made an infamous list. He never did, but Americans were appalled that he considered it. The Obama Administration, however, did more than consider it. It actually used the IRS to harass political enemies, but The Washington Post and the rest of mainstream media were disinclined to investigate.

Conservative pundits claim most of the 62,979,879 Americans who voted for Trump last year believe Democrats, Republican leadership, and Mainstream Media all cooperate with each other against them. Variously called “Bitter Clingers” by Obama and “Deplorables” by Hillary Clinton, Trump supporters see their man as someone with the temperament necessary to kick all their a**es while he “drains the swamp” in which they all reside.

Denizens of the swamp went into a collective panic when Trump unexpectedly won. After the shock wore off, the lame-duck Obama Administration began laying traps for him using an obscure, never-enforced 1799 law called “The Logan Act” according to columnist Byron York. Using the Logan Act as justification, Obama officials cited the dodgy “Trump Dossier” constructed by an opposition research firm paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee (DNC). FBI agent Peter Strzok, whom Special Counsel Mueller recently dismissed from his investigation, used the dodgy dossier to obtain FISA warrants to wiretap both the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team.

Strzok and Mueller

It was Strzok, presumably under the direction of then-FBI Director Comey, who offered to pay $50,000 of taxpayer money to Christopher Steele, author of the dodgy dossier, to continue his research against Donald Trump during the campaign! Strzok also led the dubious FBI “investigation” of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Compared to these revelations, Nixon’s actions during Watergate seem trivial. Why aren’t Washington Post reporters looking into these developments?

Under dubious authority, other Obama officials including Susan Rice and Samantha Power requested hundreds of FISA transcripts including General Flynn’s December, 2016 contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak during Trump’s transition. They unmasked Flynn to set him up for FBI interrogation four days after Trump’s inauguration. ABC reporter Brian Ross breathlessly reported last Friday that Trump directed Flynn’s conversations during the campaign! Ross had to retract it hours later and was suspended by ABC, but not before his report caused the stock market to plunge.

Flynn and Kushner

According the Buzzfeed, it was Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner who instructed Flynn to contact Kislyak and discuss the then-upcoming UN Security Council vote against Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. According to Fox News, it was K.T. McFarland. Whoever it was, their instruction was during the transition after Trump had won — not during the campaign — and therefore not within the realm of Mueller’s original charge to investigate alleged Russia/Trump campaign collusion. It’s perfectly reasonable for a transition official like Flynn to contact foreign governments, yet Flynn evidently lied about them to the FBI. Why? We don’t know.

As of this writing, neither Mueller nor anyone else has yet found evidence of Trump/Russia campaign collusion despite a year-and-a-half of investigations by mainstream media and Congressional Democrats. Trump supporters see them all as part of “the swamp” conspiring to bring down the Trump Administration. For that, there’s plenty of evidence.

Watergate was nothing compared to what I’m seeing now.