Category Archives: crime
Federal Funding Sanctuary Cities
President Trump cracked down on sanctuary cities. He ordered restrictions on federal funding to cities that refuse to turn over undocumented immigrants to the feds. Federal District Court Judge William Orrick, blocked his order.
Last year President Obama threatened to pull federal funding from schools that don’t provide transgender restroom facilities. Trump revoked that rule in February.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had sued over the bathroom issue on the grounds that Obama had bypassed congressional authority. Judge Orick used the same reasoning to block Trump’s sanctuary order.
Follow the Unmasking
The Trump/Russian conspiracy theory is dragging. For one thing, no real evidence is being presented. And for another Trump bombed Syria, the ally of his alleged co-conspirator Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, there is evidence Team Obama spied on Team Trump. Bloomberg‘s Eli Lake and others broke the story last week. Obama national security adviser Susan Rice purused raw intelligence data on Russians’ conversations with Trump associates. Spying on foreigners is legal but spying on Americans isn’t. When American citizens get caught up in foreign surveillance their names are supposed to be masked in the intelligence report.
Follow the Unmasking
But Susan Rice had American names unmasked. Adam Housley at Fox News reported that she then circulated raw reports with the unmasked names.
The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.
Somewhere along the line somebody leaked Michael Flynn’s name and he was forced to resign as Trump’s national security adviser. Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal suggests that FBI Director Comey has a conflict of interest in all this. And that it’s even possible “his staff was among the leakers.”
Andrew McCarthy wrote a column in National Review titled Susan Rice’s Unmasking: a Watergate style scandal.
Weapon of Choice for Terrorists
Motor vehicles are the new weapon of choice for terrorists.
Only Explanation for Hillary Loss: Russians Stole Election
Hillary lost the election to Trump. It could be that she was a weak establishment candidate while Trump tapped into a deep vein of voter anger and resentment.
Or it could be that Russians stole the election.
Russians
FBI Director Comey told the House Intelligence Committee that the latter explanation is under federal investigation. But he offered no evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to rig the election. And Director of National intelligence Clapper has also said there is no evidence.
Comey also found no evidence to support President Trump’s early morning tweet that Obama wiretapped Trump tower.
CNN reports that there’s only one known crime in this caper. Someone in the government unmasked Michael Flynn’s name as a result of the intercepted phone calls of Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
While Comey was willing to discuss the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign he was unwilling to say if the Flynn leak was under investigation. That did not please Trey Gowdy.
Killing Putin
In his Super Bowl interview with President Trump, Bill O’Reilly accused the Russian President of killing people. Trump’s response? “You think our country’s so innocent?”
That made me think of one of my favorite exchanges between Michael Corleone and Kay Adams:
Michael: My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.
Kay: Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don’t have men killed.
Michael: Oh. Who’s being naive, Kay?
Except Trump is president, not a mob boss. Now who’s being naive?
Putin
Anyway, I got the idea for this cartoon from a Holman Jenkins column in the WSJ.
His assessment of Trump’s comments was, “unwise, spoken by somebody with a thin grasp of his circumstances.” But he went on to say, “Trump, clumsily, was actually keeping up a longstanding U.S. policy of covering up for Mr. Putin.” Then Jenkins detailed the Ryazan bombing plot by Putin security thugs to frame Chechen terrorists. It rarely gets mentioned by American officials. Jenkins thinks that’s because everybody wants to make a deal with Putin.
He concludes, “Read a certain way, Mr. Trump’s comments make him the first U.S. president to address Mr. Putin’s real nature.”
BTW: Not climbing on the assassination chic bandwagon or anything here with the title. Just having a little fun with a commentator’s line of books.
