Key Dem pressured feds on Trump files

Democratic partisan politics emerged as an issue in the reasoning behind the FBI's Mar a Lago raid.

Conservative commentators were quick to voice suspicion that Democratic machinations were the real reason for the raid.

The suspicions of political pressure arose in light of a Justice Department filing over whether a judge should appoint a special master to sift out any seized records that are under attorney-client privilege.

Included in the filing is a February 18 letter from the National Archives responding to a list of questions from Manhattan Democrat Carolyn B. Maloney, chairwoman of the House oversight and reform committee.

The letter responded to eight questions from Maloney on how the government was handling the presidential files dispute.

Maloney -- who just lost a primary election to Jerry Nadler -- wanted to make sure that Joe Biden's political appointee to head the Justice Department, Merrick Garland, had been notified that Trump had removed his records from the White House. Democrats are now arguing that the records aren't really his and that the federal government owns them. This interpretation is a novel one when applied to a former president.

Though there has been a political tussle over possession of these records, neither the Biden White House nor Biden's national security adviser and staff members sounded congressional or public alarms over any danger posed by Trump's retaining of the seized files. In fact, the White House denied that Biden was even informed that an FBI raid was in the offing at Mar a Lago, indicating that the file contents were not a high priority issue in the White House.

National Archives letter
https://www.archives.gov/files/foia/ferriero-response-to-02.09.2022-maloney-letter.02.18.2022.pdf

Japan block runs giant anti-Trump media group

Top exec forced out as USA Today Network's controller falters

The implacably anti-Trump national newspaper network USA Today is headed into rough waters as the investment concern managing the media outfit moved swiftly to stem losses.

Rajeev Misra, a top executive at SoftBank and a key ally of the bank's chief executive, Masayoshi Son, stepped down from roles at the Japanese investment giant after it recorded losses, the company announced today.

Misra relinquished his roles of corporate officer and executive vice president at the SoftBank Group, effective today.

SoftBank owns Fortress Investment Group through an affiliate, according to InfluenceWatch. Fortress manages New Media Investment Group, which took over USA Today and two large U.S. newspaper chains in 2019 as the 2020 presidential election campaign began to loom large.

New Media Investment Group is a New York City-based private equity firm that is the parent company of Gannett Co. Inc., the largest newspaper publisher in the United States.

New Media today oversees the operations and publishing of 260 daily newspapers and 300 weekly publications in 47 states and Guam and administers over 130,000 business advertising accounts with a weekly reach of over 12 million. Many, if not most, of these local newspapers carry Washington news reported by New Media's flagship paper, USA Today.

USA Today's reporting has been decidedly one-sided on the attempts to derail Donald Trump, before, during and after his presidency. The paper's writers and editors slant their news to make Trump appear to be always in the wrong while playing down and smoothing over evidence of government misconduct under the influence of top-level Democrats.

In April, a panel of editors recommended saving money by paring the editorial pages of New Media properties. Readers dislike being told what to think, the editors said.

Biden leaps to defense of FBIamid furor over his son's laptop

Dem brands bureau's critics as soft on crime -- or worse

Joe Biden is striking out at critics of the FBI, which has been coping with high-level political scandals, including the pre-election squelching of an investigation, and even news about, damaging national security information found on his son Hunter's abandoned laptop computer.

Other woes besetting the bureau include the reasoning behind the raid on ex President Donald Trump's residence at Mar a Lago -- which had White House input before it was carried out -- and the orchestration of a plot, using entrapped men as dupes, to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a plot that was sensationally exposed during the election season.

Biden, in his remarks, did not address these scandals but sought instead to make it appear that critics of the FBI were in general opposed to law enforcement, while pointing out that he has promoted more federal funds for (and controls on) local police.

'Whistleblowers must follow the rules'
In related news, Biden's harried attorney general, Merrick Garland, yesterday warned FBI agents against speaking directly with members of Congress.

Garland imposes gag order
https://www.justice.gov/jmd/file/834496/download

FBI agents -- including whistleblowers -- must go through bureaucratic procedures, Garland insisted in his written orders. The attorney general denied that he was trying to limit protection of the FBI whistleblowers who have been informing GOP lawmakers on political rigging of investigations.

Amid the furious scandal on the handling of the Hunter Biden laptop case, Garland also cautioned agents and other career Justice Department employees against playing politics on the job. Among the restrictions cited was against anyone who might "Use their official authority or influence to interfere with or affect the result of an election."

A high-level Washington field office agent, Timothy Thibault retired suddenly last week after being accused of having squelched a probe into the Bidens. The squelching was accompanied by a chorus of former security officials announcing that the New York Post's Biden laptop story looked like a Russian smear attack.

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Pick up at 6:48 for Biden's remarks

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The perils of federalization of local cops

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The Biden group's justification for the Mar a Lago raid completely bypassed a 2012 federal judge's ruling that a former president had sole authority over records taken from the White House.

John Solomon of Just the News reports:

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington D.C. ultimately rejected Judicial Watch's suit by concluding there was no provision in the Presidential Records Act to force the National Archives to seize records from a former president.

But Jackson's ruling — along with the Justice Department's arguments that preceded it — made some other sweeping declarations that have more direct relevance to the FBI's decision to seize handwritten notes and files Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago. The most relevant is that a president's discretion on what are personal vs. official records is far-reaching and solely his, as is his ability to declassify or destroy records at will.

"Under the statutory scheme established by the PRA, the decision to segregate personal materials from Presidential records is made by the President, during the President's term and in his sole discretion," Jackson wrote in her March 2012 decision, which was never appealed.

"Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records," she added.

You can read the full ruling here:
https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/memorandum%20opinion.pdf The judge noted a president could destroy any record he wanted during his tenure and his only responsibility was to inform the Archives.

A peek at the feds' blackball systemHow FBI, social media curb what you can know

Social media can assist their FBI "advisers" on controlling purported "disinformation" thru various means. Among those are:

✓ Shadow ban. The user is unaware that only she or he can see the post or that many people have been prevented from seeing it.

✓ De-platform. The user is barred from posting anything at all on a social media platform, as happened to President Trump when he complained on Twitter of election fraud.

✓ De-boost. Facebook quickly ratcheted down promotion by Facebook users of the New York Post's pre-presidential-election story on evidence found -- in Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop -- of kickbacks by foreign interests to Joe Biden while he was vice president.

✓ Restriction of access to content. Various routines are used to curb access. In 2016, the Google system barred access to a foreign report on statistical evidence that that year's Democratic primaries appeared to have been rigged. The Bing system however permitted access.

✓ De-monetization. Youtube is well-known for demonetizing sites that express news judgments or opinions with which its management disagrees. Those targeted for de-monetization may have engaged in unethical practices. But many others have been targeted over content that clashes with the "consensus views" promulgated by the privileged elite (America's oligarchs, such as Black Rock's Larry Fink).

✓ Requirement that users take down content or face shut-off. For example, if someone says something like "XYZ Airlines lies!" in a Youtube video, the video-caster will be told that such opinion goes against community policy of protecting the feelings of major potential advertisers and told to delete the offending matter or face permanent blackballing.

✓ Use of warning labels requiring click-thru to access content. Every extra step a potential reader must take decreases overall readership -- especially if the warning label is couched in language that makes a potential reader feel somewhat criminal for wanting to read or view the site.

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You may also like our companion site Grist
https://paulconant.substack.com/p/how-fbi-social-media-control-what?sd=pf

Whose on first?

Another rant from the Copy Desk

Why do we write whose to indicate possession and not who's, as the apostrophe-s form normally signals possession? Well, as my grade school teacher responded, "That's because who's is short for who is and so whose is used to avoid confusion."

The culprit here seems to be the apostrophe, which was introduced in the 16th Century as a means of signaling that a letter was being skipped because it was not pronounced. Back when, it was rather common to replace the "silent e" with an apostrophe. But the apostrophe might also replace some other letter, usually a vowel.

You might encounter a sentence like, "The wick'd first mate stood on the fo’c’sle." Seafarers would be unlikely to pronounce out forecastle. (Heaven knows why the final silent e might make the cut.)

So consider the term the king's English. What does the apostrophe replace? Evidently the former way of indicating possession (or was only strong association meant?), was to use es endings, as in kinges English. In any case, the apostrophe-s form gained strength in the 18th and 19th Centuries with the rise of the popular press and the desire for unformity entailed by that rising culture.

Another idea has it that the apostrophe-s form supplanted the word his, as in the king his English. That theory is losing traction, however, says Merriam Webester.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/history-and-use-of-the-apostrophe

But, speaking of grade school teachers, did yours -- like mine -- tell you to avoid the use of whose to imply posession by a non-person. You were not to write "the plane, whose engine was billowing smoke" but rather, "the plane, the engine of which was billowing smoke."

Of course, nearly everyone these days detests the "of which" form as just too prissy. And quite a few copy desk chiefs and writers of style books will tell you to go ahead and use whose with non-persons -- a usage I dislike mainly because I can't get used to a who being a non-person.

Think of the alternative possessive form using of, as in the cross of gold. Here we have a property of a specific cross indicated, which can also be expressed via an adjectival form, the gold cross. (Though we might these days write of the cross's gold, the connotations here differ substantially and so we'll bypass that form in this instance.)

In the cross of gold case we have the idea that the cross is associated with the concept (has the property of) gold. This, I suggest, did not strike our forefathers as implying possession. Only humans, and possibly higher mammals, could own anything. Then along came some philosophers and quite a few ordinary writers who assumed that if an object has a particular property or attribute, then it must possess it -- with the words possession and ownership converging in meaning.

So that leaves us without a good word to indicate that a non-person possesses something.

My usual way out of this dilemma -- barring an occasional barbaric misapplication of whose -- is to "write around it," as we'd say in the city room. That is, restructure the sentence. What of, say: the plane, with an engine billowing smoke... ?

We really could use a new word. But nothing likely to catch on comes to mind.

Twisted tale of FBI intrigue

See Miranda Devine's NY Post reporting
https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story-right-in-facebooks-lap/

Top-level FBI official gets the bootin furor over nixing of Biden probe

Anti-Trump agent suspected of playing election politics
https://nypost.com/2022/08/29/fbi-agent-resigns-amid-hunter-biden-probe-scrutiny/
Ex prez says fired agent was behind Mar a Lago raid
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-slams-fbi-truth-social-posts-after-special-agent-leaves-bureau-1738031

Former President Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social site, "The fired agent who was just escorted out of the FBI headquarters is the person who got the FBI to do a Raid on a home, Mar-a-Lago, that has 'stirred' the World and created anger and hostility toward the FBI and DOJ [Justice Dept.], the likes of which have perhaps never been seen in our Country before."

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Timothy Thibault: Termed part of get-Trump FBI 'cabal'

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Trump added, "The 'Special Agent' In Charge of the unprecedented and unnecessary Raid and Break In of Mar-a-Lago, who concealed the partisan nature of evidence to secure the FBI's approval to open an investigation into the 45th President in the first place, was also involved in the hiding and suppressing from the Public and the Media, the 'Laptop from Hell,' the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, and so much more!"

Officials said the agent had nothing to do with the raid, news accounts say, though the identity of the FBI agent who signed an affidavit concerning the Mar a Lago raid is being concealed by the Justice Department. Presumably Trump would know who signed it.

In any case, as FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, Timothy Thibault would very likely have been involved -- if not in an official capacity -- in the dispute over the formerly classified files held at Mar a Lago but which the White House and National Archives claimed are still-classified.

Thibault's partisan bias had been targeted by GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, after whistleblowers identified Thibault as obstructing justice for political reasons. And on Thursday Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., wrote to the Justice Dept.'s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, charging politically motivated "corruption" within the bureau.

It seems plausible that the agent's sudden retirement came about after a political decision by higher level FBI and Justice Dept. officials to do quick political damage containment. The hope would be to limit the matter to one FBI person as a means of deflecting public attention from what Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., identifies as a top-tier "cabal" in the bureau.

FBI deployed Soviet 'agent provocateur' methodin staging its Whitmer kidnaping conspiracy

Official repeatedly refuses comment on entrapment acquittals;
bureau shows high skill in its ability to plan political assassinations

FBI 'routinely' advises social media firmson speech it brands as Russian disinfo

Admits to close collaboration on political matters
https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2022/08/27/fbi-clarifies-that-it-routinely-notifies-social-media-companies-of-potential-disinformation/

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OpinionWhite elite progressives mistake virtue for class war on workers

Biden intel appointee to conduct Trump dox 'damage assessment'

Uh huh, oh yeah, that should be unbiased...
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3619687-white-house-us-intel-review-of-mar-a-lago-docs-appropriate/

Was Mar a Lago raid a Deep State bid to squelch evidence of Trump frameup?

First sentence in heavily redacted Mar a Lago search warrant affidavit:

The government is conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of govermnent records.

The premise of the Mar a Lago raid is spurious. There can have been no crime since a president has the right to summarily declassify any secrets he wishes and has had the longstanding discretion to remove papers used during his presidency.

Ergo, there was no probable cause for a criminal investigation.

Had the National Archives wished to pursue further civil means, it could have done so.

The name of the FBI special agent who promulgated the search warrant affidavit has been redacted. Thus, responsibility is "kicked upstairs" to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland and unnamed White House officials. Yet, that agent's name is a matter of public concern.

The anonymous agent claims that a basis for the probe is that someone with "unauthorized" access to serious national security secrets might be intent on transferring that information to a dangerous foreign power.

The affidavit then goes on to imply that Donald Trump, as president, was required to go through various bureaucratic procedures before declassifying anything. In the case of a president, this interpretation of the law is novel.

The FBI includes in its affidavit an illegible reproduction of a Trump statement of response.

Among 15 boxes seized from Mar a Lago, the FBI said, were 184 unique docmnents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET. Further, the FBI agents observed markings reflecting the following compartmental/dissemination controls: HCS, FISA, ORCON, NOFORN, and SI.

✓ "Confidential" is the lowest classification. That classification is routinely applied to documents that officials would rather that the public not see.
✓ "Secret" is the second tier of classification. Low-level officials and military personnel are routinely given access to material marked "secret." This classification is ambiguous, as the data covered might be of critical importance to an adversary -- but generally isn't. But if so, time sensitivity generally figures in. Old "secret" information has by now probably leaked (such as enlisted personnel knowledge of standard weapons systems).
✓ "Top secret" is the highest classification. People who work in national security, whether for the government or contractors, must have top secret clearance. A great deal of trivia, along with genuinely important secrets, have that classification.

This says that Trump had on hand 25 documents that could notionally have compromised national security -- though it is possible that other highly secret materials were removed prior to the raid. In any case, surely Trump and his staff could easily have reviewed 25 documents and declassified them before Trump's term expired.

Other markings are hcs = intelligence community consumers only; fisa = foreign intelligence surveillance act; orcon = can't be moved without approval; noforn = can't be distributed among foreign agencies; and SI = signals intelligence.

In addition, the FBI said, "Several of the documents also contained what appears to be FPOTUS's handwritten notes." FPOTUS is FBI lingo for former president.

Of course the unnammed agent claims that the FBI was worried about a danger to national security. But it is fair to ask whether the Biden White House, Joe Biden's Justice Department and the FBI's top brass were actually worried about what information Trump had on the FBI's involvement in the Democrats' bogus "national security" attack on Trump during his 2016 campaign and after he took office. In particular, the presence of FISA material brings up that possibility since, as we know, a politically cooked FISA warrant was used to justify eavesdropping on Trump's campaign.

The fact that Trump wanted some of the materials protected under attorney-client privilege adds fuel to conjectures that the documents at issue concern the Deep State's desire to protect itself from strong evidence of misuse of the FBI, CIA and other agencies in order to railroad an undesired person.

Many of the papers that the FBI and Justice Department are poring over are not classified, implying that the motive for documents seizure may be largely political.

Further context is added by the disclosure by Mark Zuckerberg, top gun at Facebook, that he ordered the shadow-banning of the New York Post's story on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, which pointed to "high crimes and misdemeanors" in the taking of hefty emoluments from foreign sources by his father Joe when he was vice president. Zuckerberg said the FBI had pressured him to curtail "Russian disinformation."

In this respect, more than 50 former intelligence officials in October 2020 issued a public letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop story gave off a very strong odor of Russian disinformation. These persons, most of whom retained top secret clearances, made this statement while knowing that the FBI held the original laptop and had issued no such claim about its content.

The New York Times, citing government sources, has reversed itself and conceded that the laptop information is genuine. Yet, the laptop's whereabouts are unknown, according to Garland, and if there has been an FBI investigation, it has been very muted so far, with no sensational actions like the raid on Trump's residence.

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FBI's Mar a Lago claims
https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/editorialfiles/2022/08/26/govuscourtsflsd6178541021.pdf

Amazon's gigantic spy ring

Illinois' no-due-process gun grab

Tea Partiers organizing election integrity

White House's hand foundbehind the Mar a Lago raid

Report by John Solomon
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/biden-white-house-facilitated-dojs-criminal-probe-against-trump

McConnell fears a Senate GOP majority

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, senior senator from Kentucky, will not benefit from a GOP majority in the Senate. What did he mean when he said he was worried about the "quality" of GOP Senate candidates, which he said might cause the Senate to remain in Democrat hands?

He was talking about the Trump-backed candidates who won GOP primaries. McConnell won't retain his leadership post if the Trump faction dominates. He can only hope that Trump's candidates are routed by the Democrats so that he and other anti-Trumpers can hold the old-style GOP line in the Senate. McConnell, once he saw that the fix was in and that Trump had been declared the loser, threw over Trump and discouraged the Senate from adopting Ted Cruz's plan for a special commission to determine who could or could not be seated -- a maneuever that has a historical precedent.

McConnell's lukewarm support for new GOP Senate hopefuls signals that he and other stop-Trump Republicans plan to stifle appropriate campaign spending on behalf of this group of candidates. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., in June decried a large shortfall in campaign funds for the Take Back the Senate drive that is under his leadership. That drive is plainly aligned with Trump.

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Patriot Act hypocrisy

Cheney goes down in 30-point horror diveas Mar a Lago ploy fails to save anti-Trumper

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, Donald Trump’s fiercest Republican adversary in Congress, suffered a humiliating 30-point rout in a GOP primary Tuesday, falling to a rival backed by the former president in a defeat that reinforced his grip on the party’s base.

Trump’s backing gave Harriet Hageman considerable lift in the state where he won by the largest margin during the 2020 campaign.

Staged shortly before the primary, which would be seen as a referendum on Congress's handling of the Jan. 6 inquiry, was a bizarre FBI raid on the former president's Mar a Lago estate that saw him painted as involved in espionage over possession of some presidential records. Joe Biden's attorney general had authorized the raid, purportedly without informing Biden first of such an important decision.

If the Biden-Garland bunch had been hoping that such a dramatic "national security" move would discredit Trump in the public eye sufficiently so save Cheney -- who had targeted Trump as instigating an "insurrection" from her GOP seat on the J6 panel -- their hopes went down ingloriously in flames yesterday as voters gave Cheney as hard a boot as could be imagined.

Oddly, she's thinking of running for president.

China fires missiles over Taiwan that land in Japanese waters

Beijing curtails military communications with the U.S.
in aftermath of Pelosi's defiant one-woman diplomacy
https://www.ntd.com/china-cuts-military-communications-and-climate-ties-with-us_820163.html

Ellen. A terrific interview

Ellen,

☑ Hey thanks for explaining what's going on with Julz's projected path thru academia.

☑ I know you are very cheerful and personable, but this podcast shows how easily you sustain that attitude thru an extended interview, plus your nimble "think on your feet" style.

☑ Thanks for explaining why fans often think that Emmett, the dobro maestro, seems to sound better in person than on video and also explaining that he offers a lot of arrangements, but that Katie actually controls arrangements. Very nice of you to emphasize his abilities and contributions rather than focus on one fan complaint.

☑ I love to know that you have a mathematical mind, which makes you prefer the more digital/interger quality of the banjo over the other strings. Yeah, in some respects the banjo is more percussive, even tho not a percussion instrument. [Of course the PIANO (ahem) really is percussive...]. PS: I have a math mind. I'm no mathematician but I sometimes go beyond HS algebra.

☑ Nice to know your mom helps you with weird chords cz she knows music theory. That's actually a valuable skill, I've found, tho I can't remember anything beyond a few simple ideas. I wish I would get beyond the phase of "I wish I would learn a musical instrument."

☑ Nice to know that Matt's a runner. Had no clue. Yeah, Matt! I always thought it was obvious that Katie is a runner, but nothing on that. Well, I still think Katie runs.

☑ Loved the way the interviewer assumed family cohesiveness did not mean everybody is always on best terms with each other. Ellen did not blush, but her eye movements and sly smile told us that she did not disagree. But those were honest eyes.

☑ Buckets of love to you all!!

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Starring NANCY as International Drama QueenPelosi usurps presidential power on foreign policy, announcing that HER Taiwan policy IS U.S. policy

The Constitution places the president, not the House speaker, over foreign policy. The Secretary of State position was created by the Constitution so that the foreign policy burden could be shared with that office-holder.

Nancy Pelosi assured her status as an "international drama queen" by contemptuously tearing up Biden's strong suggestion that she steer clear of Taiwan, later saying she enjoyed the thrill of danger during her visit while scorning the possibility that she had put islanders in danger. Critics say she was grandstanding on the taxpayer dime in order to impress the large anti-communist block of voters in Chinatown, a major constituency in her North San Francisco congressional district.

Critics also point out that the Taiwan visit came the day before her husband Paul's court hearing on charges of drunken driving that resulted in another person's injury. The "International drama queen" also needed to divert attention from the reveal that Paul had made a killing on inside information that most likely came from her or someone in her office.

China's Xi Jinping quickly tore up Pelosi's script by authorizing live-fire naval excercises in the waters around Taiwan. A U.S. battle group was steaming to Taiwan's waters, in a situation now spiraling into an A-level international crisis sparked by someone who knows better than anyone how to run the United States and sees no limits on her authority.

Trump-backed candidate takes primarybut which of Mo.'s Erics was he backing?

Initially, Trump had endorsed -- it seemed -- former Gov. Eric Greitens among a field of Republicans aiming to become the party's candidate for U.S. senator from Missouri.

But state party activists feared that Greitens's political baggage would make him a dead duck in the general election. So they ran a series of brutally negative ads against him using testimony from his divorce case, testimony they did not authenticate further. They did not note that all criminal charges had been dropped.

Greitens had been forced out as governor based on the marital discord and allegations he broke campaign finance rules -- allegations of a type which only seem to force conservatives from office.

But Greitens also took some hard blows in ads that portrayed him as excessively supportive of and friendly with China.

And last year, Schmitt filed a rather expensive lawsuit demanding that the Chinese Communist Party, Wuhan Institute for Virology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences be held accountable for keeping the world in the dark about the severity of the covid menace. Predictably, that suit was tossed by a federal judge on July 9 on ground that the state AG lacked standing. Critics said Schmitt had been grandstanding via the taxpayer dime. (The U.S. Consititution puts the federal government at the helm of such matters.)

Apprised of the "Greitens problem," Trump kept touch with the anti-Greitens Republicans.

But fortunately for Trump, another Eric was a top contender, Eric Schmitt, Missouri's attorney general who won in a landslide. This then permitted Trump at the last minute to say that he was endorsing "Eric," while not giving a last name.

This quick-witted "endorsement" now allows Trump's political people to say that another winner had had Trump's backing.

At a Columbia, Mo., campaign stop just a few days ago, Schmitt broke his silence on keeping Mitch McConnell at the party's U.S. Senate helm. Schmitt agreed that McConnell must go after he moved to ditch Trump's attempts to have the 2022 election results blocked until properly verified.

Note to Ms Kennedy

To:
Ms Caroline Kennedy
Hon. Ambassador
to Australia

The premise of the UK high court in granting the U.S. demand that Assange be extradited is that the extradition treaty between the countries accepts the good-faith use of justice in either country. The same premise allegedly binds Australian-U.S. extradition requests.

Yet clearly political cases do arise in which one government wants to punish someone who embarrassed some political person, group or coalition. Of course, a ridiculous pretext is provided, and in this case the U.S. CIA and the Clinton gang prevailed. Assange's 'real' offenses: Possibly tilting the election against Clinton by disclosing certain tawdry facts. (She suggested droning him as "a joke." This crudity should be matched against her hot-mike belly laugh when she was told Moammar Khadafy was dead. Atheists and agnostics everywhere see nothing wrong at laughing at an enemy's death.)

Then followed an aggressive campaign by security agency politicians to obscure Assange's 2016 disclosures by calling them potential Russian "disinformation." Before that, he had embarrassed the Pentagon with footage of a U.S. helicopter killing journalists and others (admittedly, this incident may not have been deliberate, but his view was that of a typical civilian and not that of someone who had experienced heavy combat).

Another awful offense was Assange making Clinton's life difficult with the release of a large cache of diplomatic reports -- though these were only classified "confidential, with no foreign distribution permitted. As a former newsman, I thought it very refreshing to see these little sketches of what diplomats really think (maybe).

One of the "background accusations" is that Assange is not a "real publisher" but a head of a non-state verbal terrorist organization. He was also smeared by politicians who pointed out that he is a leftist and associated mainly with leftists. Once his back was to the wall, Assange's only recourse was to get help from the left, especially the hard left. No one else would help him. Any port in a storm, as the saying goes. Regardless, if leftist ideology is defined as a crime or as treason, we don't live in a democracy. (As your father and brother Robert well knew, there ARE traitors on subversive missions for foreign states. Quite a few are communists or crypto-communists. Most traitors, the security agencies say, are just looking to pick up some extra cash.)

When the UK seized Assange as he was expelled from the Ecuador embassy, the U.S. charges were so dodgy that the UK told the U.S. Justice Dept to invent something better, or they wouldn't be able to hold him once he'd served his 2-year sentence for flight from arrest in a prison where "terrorists" are sent. Later, once a UK judge barred Assange's extradition on grounds he'd already taken too much mental and physical strain, and was in precarious health, the U.S. was permitted to submit new "evidence" to the effect it would guarantee that his medical care would be sufficient. That "evidence" was accepted by judges and later affirmed by a Tory home secretary who was in a fight to become Tory prime minister. She lost that intrigue.

Note that Assange was not in America and was not American when his purported "crimes" occurred. Initially, the extradition demand was based on his being charged as a cyber-terrorist and so he was to be treated as an international terrorist, even though that charge came long after the events in question. The former CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, has publicly said that once Assange published a "secret" list of CIA spy tricks, he and Wikileaks had to be brought down as not journalists but terrorists. This is a public admission that the Justice Dept. charges are a mere substitute for Pompeo's peeve. Trump could do little, because if he did something Republicans might easily have joined Democrats to convict him in a Senate trial. The tricks that were exposed were largely "classified," which in Washington is not terribly meaningful. Also some of the spy tricks had already been made public -- clandestinely turning on your cell phone to eavesdrop -- but the CIA had not admitted to using this trick. There may have been some real security breaches, but no U.S. arrest warrant was issued for Glenn Greenwald. In fact, in my estimate, the CIA wanted the file slipped to Wikileaks so that it would have a political reason to "get" Assange.

So then federal prosecutors, as they are wont to do, pressured someone in their clutches to "confess" that Assange had helped his reputed fellow cyber-terrorist to hack a defense computer network and steal the information. The U.S. explained that as Assange is Australian, he had no right to freedom of the press. They did not bring up that they were abridging the free press right of many Americans to read his materials.

So, consider this scenario: One of Australia's publishers -- which are all non-state actors that use computers to release data capable of verbally abusing, say, an Australian prime minister -- publishes data objectionable to the PM. He or she does this from a base in Iceland. But soon after she or he arrives in the U.S. for some ordinary reason, that person is arrested and held for extradition on thin charges, which serve the Aussie prime minister's image as a tough guy who protects his turf.

We might laugh, and say that that would never happen. But based on the precedent set by America to extradite people who are wanted by America for political crimes, it would be very difficult for the "land of the free" not to comply with this vicious practice.

Supposing the Assange extradition were to go through, any journalist who is in America but has crossed the Tories on purported national security stories, will be forced to stand trial in Britain. The situation is really bleak once you know that Britain's home secretary, Priti Patel, squelched Assange's request while her press control bill was about to go to Parliament. She did not recuse herself from the Assange decision. The bill is far more draconian against press freedom than the early 20th Century Official Secrets Act.

Note that very reputable human rights organizations everywhere, including Amnesty International, deplore this maneuver by the United States and the way Assange is continually mistreated. After all, if he must be held to avoid flight risk, why not use an ankle bracelet and close monitoring by surveillance experts? This extreme maltreatment shows bad faith by Conservative British authorities. The erosion of the American political system toward the style of the Establishment system in Britain is a blight on true democracy.

Best of luck in your new assignment.

Crook Pelosi can't be trusted-- especially on Taiwan policy

Too bad San Fran's Chinatown can't elect a young, vigorous Chinese American to Pelosi's seat in Congress.

We know that Pelosi's husband confers large benefits on their joint income from insider knowledge she (who else?) passes to him about potential changes in stock value. Such a pattern of self-enrichment implies she's too dishonest to be trusted with U.S. policy on Taiwan.

Let a Chinese heritage person have a chance, for once.

Shazaam! No more ghost botnets to worry about

I deactivated my Twitter account. Why? Because every time I try a social medium, I discover I just hate it.

Reason: I guess my head was never geared for social media. It's generally an obstacle in the pathway of my thoughts, which was pretty much established by the time I was 25 -- long before the cellphone and laptop era.

I'd rather converse with the Lord, my true friend.

And the other point is that I'm heavily shadow-banned. But I'm used to that. I can deal with it. But why should I? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

Well, if you call Blogger a social medium, I do a fair amount of blogging. I have faith that the writings that need to have an impact will have an impact. Besides I can do all sorts of things with Blogspot other than routine blogging. And since my bloggings carry no ads, there is little danger Google's Blogger police will get all het up about those little extras. I imagine Blogger will cease providing freebie services anyway not long from now. Isn't Google in a tailspin or something?

Plus I lost heart when Twitter went to court to avoid providing proof that it wasn't swarming with botnets. That sounds pretty shady.

The Petersens in DC: Hot! Hot! Hot!

Bluegrass, sweat and fun -- at 103 in the shade