Category Archives: Corruption
House Judiciary Committee One, Barr None
The House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Attorney General Barr in contempt of Congress. Chairman Jerry Nadler demands that Barr turn over a complete unreacted copy of the Mueller report on collusion with Russia. But Nadler knows Barr can’t do that because the report contains grand jury testimony. And that’s illegal. Barr has made a minimally redacted version available to certain members of Congress. But so far no Democrats have bothered to take a look.
Hanging With Chad
Click Chad to enlarge the image.
The Democrats dispatched Marc Elias to oversee the Florida recount. The same guy the Hillary campaign hired to dispute Trump’s 2016 election win. And that gave us Fusion GPS and the dubious Steele Dossier.
Chad
Now he’s hoping to trigger a hand recount in Florida. And that’s something the WSJ says could become “hanging chads, the sequel.”
Campaign Spending Laws Apply Equally
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After busting Trump fixer Michael Cohen for violating campaign spending laws, U.S. attorney Robert Khuzami bragged “we are a nation of laws, with one set of rules that applies equally to everyone.”
Kimberly Strassel at the WSJ doesn’t buy it:
If there is only “one set of rules,” where is Mr. Mueller’s referral of a case against Hillary for America? Federal law requires campaigns to disclose the recipient and purpose of any payments. The Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to compile a dossier against Mr. Trump, a document that became the basis of the Russia narrative Mr. Mueller now investigates. But the campaign funneled the money to law firm Perkins Coie, which in turn paid Fusion. The campaign falsely described the money as payment for “legal services.” The Democratic National Committee did the same. A Perkins Coie spokesperson has claimed that neither the Clinton campaign nor the DNC was aware that Fusion GPS had been hired to conduct the research, and maybe so. But a lot of lawyers here seemed to have been ignoring a clear statute, presumably with the intent of influencing an election.
Manafort’s Money
Click on Manafort to enlarge the cartoon.
President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was convicted on eight charges of bank and tax fraud. The judge ruled a mistrial on 10 other charges. The conviction isn’t related to Robert Mueller’s collusion investigation.
But maybe it was related to Manafort’s taste for the the finer things in life. He once spent $15,000 on an ostrich jacket. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Except that he lied to banks for loans and didn’t pay taxes on $16 million.
Vox follows Manafort’s money here.
Thank You For Spying
Eric Holder’s Justice Department threatened Fox News Reporter James Rosen as a co-conspirator under the espionage act. Except Holder never really intended to charge Rosen. It was all a pretext to spy on his phone calls and emails to find out who in the government was leaking information to him.
The Obama administration also spied on the phone records of Associated Press journalists.
More Spying
And of course they lied about spying on us too.
This week Joy Behar, of all people, outed James Clapper for spying on the Trump campaign. Clapper claimed Trump should be happy about this because his agent was really spying on Russians.
The Washington Post and New York Times find this explanation perfectly reasonable.
