A Russiagate Mishmash

Seemingly random stuff related to Russiagate. WaEx, John Brennan says he would testify before Congress and reacts to Durham investigation. Why not? He's lied to Congress before and got a scot free. 

Newsmax claims Flynn Lawyer Powell Eyed to Replace Wray at FBI. She'd be a great choice, but come on, now you're just trying to get me excited. It will never happen.

 

WaPoo prays Barr’s attack on his own prosecutors fed by frustration with both sides of political aisle, people who know him say. Barr is the last adult in D.C. At Power Line, John Hinderacker says The Washington Post Smears AG William Barr. I was There.  

The Post’s story bears the snarky headline, Barr accuses Justice Department of headhunting and interfering with politics. The headline is flatly false. Barr did not accuse DOJ lawyers of “interfering with politics.” The Post just made that up.

The Post story reads, as usual, like a DNC press release:

Speaking at an event hosted by Hillsdale College, a school with deep ties to conservative politics…

Someday I want to see a Post story about a public official speaking at Harvard, “a school with deep ties to liberal politics.”

…Barr directly addressed the criticism that has been building for months inside the department toward his heavy hand in politically sensitive cases, particularly those involving associates of President Trump.

Translation: some DOJ lawyers are activist leftists, who don’t like it when the AG doesn’t approve their pursuing a partisan agenda. And they know they will find a sympathetic ear at the Washington Post.

Barr’s comments were remarkable in that the head of the Justice Department catalogued all of the ways in which he thought his agency had gone astray over the years, and in its current formulation harms the body politic. Barr has drawn considerable criticism for intervening in criminal cases in ways that help benefit the president’s friends.

Actually, Barr praised DOJ, while also pointing out that its career lawyers are not perfect, and are subject to temptations like “headhunting.” Has Barr drawn “considerable criticism” for executing his duties as Attorney General? Yes, from the Washington Post.

Basically, the Post took the opportunity to repeat its past smears of the Attorney General, without even trying to portray the content of his speech fairly, let alone rebut the powerful arguments he made.

Excerpted from a new book October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election Hardcover, Da Mail, FBI agent who found Hillary Clinton's emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop says ‘immoral’ agency bosses sat on the discovery for a month and told him to ERASE his findings until he went direct to the US Attorney

An FBI agent who found the messages that led to the Hillary Clinton email investigation being reopened days before the 2016 election said the way the bureau handled the case was 'not ethically or morally right'.

John Robertson feared he would be made a 'scapegoat' when he found the new emails less than two months before voting day, in the wake of DailyMail.com's revelation that Anthony Weiner, whose wife Huma Abedin was Clinton's top aide, was sexting an underage girl.

Robertson watched nervously as the bureau did nothing for a month until he went outside the chain of command and spoke with the US Attorney's office overseeing the case.

The only advice from his bosses was to erase his office computer, which meant leaving no record of his investigations, a new book says.

As Robertson put it: 'To this day don't understand what the hell went wrong', the Washington Post reported.

Capt. Ed at Hot Air catches 'China Joe' in action, More Biden: China’s Not An Opponent Of The US, Just A “Competitor” Ace, Bought-and-Paid-For China Lobby Shill Sundown Joe Biden: Russia's an Opponent, But the Chinese Communists Are Merely "Competitors"

The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of making illegal donations to Democrat candidates, and is almost certainly using ActBlue's loosey-goosey donor verification system to illegally donate millions to Biden and the Democrats again.

Just like they did in 2008.

For all the complaining they do about so-called "dark money" in politics, it certainly appears that those on the left are eager to get a slice of the pie -- even if they possibly have to engage in some "creative accounting" to make it seem as though everything is above-board.

ActBlue is undeniably the cash cow of the progressive movement, boasting over $6 billion raised for favored candidates since 2004. The organization funneled more than $1.5 billion to leftist candidates in 2018 alone, and has moved almost $900 million to assist progressives thus far in 2019 and 2020.

Most of these contributions, according to ActBlue, come through donations of $100 or less. That's a lot of donations!

The organization has leveraged its powerhouse presence to negotiate a special relationship with banks so that it does not have to verify donors' identities when processing its gift cards, as is normally required for virtually all online transactions.

Some people have long suspected this allows ActBlue or a mega-donor to easily break large donations down into smaller gifts to avoid campaign finance laws and Federal Election Commission scrutiny -- once an individual donor or third-party organization has given $200 or more to a candidate, for instance, their information is supposed to be added to a public FEC database for the sake of transparency. ActBlue's structure could easily allow illegal donations made online to be broken down into smaller gifts from claimed U.S. sources with little chance of exposure. ActBlue's design would allow large donors to exceed contribution limits without even triggering the threshold for public reporting.

But now, computer analysis calls into question the legitimacy of these gifts.

Forensic analysis conducted by The Amistad Project in cooperation with Take Back Our Republic reveals that 4.7 million of the 9.7 million ActBlue donations are reported to be from the unemployed. That's a whopping 48.4% of all ActBlue donors in 2019-2020.

In comparison, analysis of the Republican counterpart to ActBlue, WinRed, reports that 4.1% of its donors were unemployed, a figure that roughly matches the national unemployment rate during that time period.

Yes, the Chinese are again donating to the Democrats illegally to subvert our democracy. 

Linked in the Saturday Roundup of Link Roundups at 357 Magnum. Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup and linkfest.