Donald trrump

Let's connect the dots between John Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Hillary Clinton. They strongly suggest the Clinton campaign ran a sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence operation against Trump with either the active or tacit support of the FBI. In the case of prong one, the dossier, the Clinton campaign hired MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The hiring was through its law firm, Perkins Coie, which hired Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to hide the funding source. The use of the law firm as a cutout allowed Hillary to deny that she'd funded the dossier, and the media to claim for a year or more that it was actually the Republicans themselves who paid for it.

There is a word for secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them. According to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, the Hillary Clinton campaign surreptitiously and likely illegally reached into protected White House and Trump communications data to try and show some link between Trump and Russia. The Clinton campaign during the election hid from FBI, CIA and the media that it was the source of the information gathered. Durham doesn't use the word "spy," but that in no way changes what happened. The recent filing relates to Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who represented the Clinton campaign while at the Perkins Coie law firm.

I’d like to state for the record that I’m officially sick of Donald Trump. Last Wednesday, Corey Lewandowski took to the airwaves with a bizarre announcement: Donald Trump is looking for someone to primary New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu. Lewandowski, who briefly ran Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was speaking to Boston radio host Howie Carr. “The president is very unhappy with the chief executive of the state of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu,” said Mr. Lewandowski. “And Sununu, in the president’s estimation, is someone who’s never been loyal to him. And the president said it would be really great if somebody would run against him.” First of all, Sununu has always been fiercely loyal to Trump — much to the Eastern Establishment’s dismay.

While President Trump was in office, White House staff periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet and came to believe the president had personally flushed documents. So reports the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, based on anonymous sources. Why should a literate media consumer think the story is garbage? Read it like an intelligence officer. Start by applying some of the same tests intelligence officers do to help them evaluate their own sources. Thinking backwards from the information to who could be the source is a good start when evaluating credibility. For example, is a source in a position to know what they say they know, what intelligence officers call spotting?

For a party that claims it wants to move on, the Republicans are doing a remarkable job of turning the national spotlight back onto one of the worst days in their history. Last week, the GOP returned to its circular firing squad, issuing a statement that censured Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, the only two Republicans serving on the House January 6 Committee. At the same time, it suggested that the actions of rioters who stormed into the Capitol constituted “legitimate political discourse.” Such a statement from a national political party is unusual. Almost as unusual as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issuing a rebuke of his own party apparatus.

Clubhouse may be dead, but Cockburn hears from his niece that Twitter Spaces is the hot news tool for social media seppuku. According to murmurings on Twitter, congressional candidate George Santos may be its latest victim. Santos, a Republican, is running to represent New York's 3rd congressional district. He previously lost in 2020 to Democrat Tom Suozzi, who earned 55.9 percent of the vote to Santos's 43.5 percent. Santos describes himself as "America First" and has received the endorsement of New York congresswoman and House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik. However, earlier this week, he drew the ire of right-wing Twitter for suggesting that he could see himself supporting reparations for American descendants of slaves.

The latest improbable Democratic champion, Representative Liz Cheney, just about said the quiet part out loud: her January 6 Committee has the singular goal of pre-defeating Trump ahead of any voting in 2024. As it becomes clearer that the Committee is failing in its propaganda campaign to get Republican power brokers to dump Trump, and as it is near crystalline that the Committee will not find evidence leading to formal prosecution of Trump for sedition, treason, or insurrection, they are getting desperate. The latest? Purposefully misinterpreting an obscure phrase from a post-Civil War constitutional amendment.

Nikki Fried, Florida’s commissioner of agriculture and Democratic candidate for the state’s governorship, recently compared Governor Ron DeSantis to Hitler. Fried’s deplorable comparison, sadly, was right in line with an erratic gubernatorial campaign laced with desperation and idiocy. Fried has attempted to position herself as Florida’s savior from the supposedly despotically inclined DeSantis. The problem for her — and for anyone who runs against DeSantis for that matter — is that over the course of the pandemic the incumbent has become an extremely popular political superstar. An increasing number of Floridians want him to continue transforming the state as he sees fit.

The music blares, sparks fly from the pyrotechnics show, and the star walks out, pumping his fist and soaking in the cheers of the adoring crowd. A WWE wrestling event? No, it’s Congressman Matt Gaetz at AMERICAFEST, a Turning Point USA conference in December in Phoenix, Arizona. Gaetz was not there to deliver a substantive policy speech, educate the crowd about the dangers of inflationary spending or warn about Russia’s geopolitical machinations in Ukraine. Instead, the thirty-nine-year-old MAGA firebrand delivered the goods his audience expected.

President Joe Biden delivered one of the worst and most widely condemned speeches of his presidency earlier this week in Georgia while lobbying for a federal takeover of elections. He asserted that Americans who do not support the Democrats' bill are "domestic enemies" who stand on the side of segregationist George Wallace. White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the unifier-in-chief on Wednesday by asserting that Biden's foes had nothing to say about former President Donald Trump's controversial use of language. "I know there have been a lot of claims of the offensive nature of the speech yesterday, which is hilarious on many levels, given how many people sat silently over the last four years for the former president," Psaki argued.

It’s often said that memory is a fickle thing. Today, that fickleness has become a danger to the republic. If you turned on any of the major news networks over the past week, with the possible exception of Fox News, you’d have seen wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol building. What’s concerning about this is all the misplaced lamentations. The travesty of the day was not the riot itself, though the assault was obviously horrific and a symbol of America’s democratic backsliding into an illiberal abyss. But the rampage was never an actual existential threat to the United States government and calling the attack an “insurrection” isn't accurate.

There are very few uncontroversial takes on what happened on January 6, 2021. Perhaps the only one is that that tumultuous day gave Americans a rare glimpse into what their republic looks like when its institutions fail. On the right, this would be taken to mean that the US election system, made up of fifty different state election regimes, failed to secure the ballot and that the mainstream media refused to report on obvious issues with the franchise. Even the judiciary, flush with judges appointed by President Trump, didn't hear the people. On the left, the same events are evidence that elections ought to be federalized to protect the vote, and that the Fourth Estate as a pillar of democracy requires buttressing against “disinformation” and outright sedition.