…but enjoy it while you can.
No, your account has NOT been suspended
[BUMPED UP. Scroll down for new posts.]
A lot of people are getting that message (“Your account has been suspended”) when they try to comment.
It is a glitch that has been fixed. I have no idea why it happened, but everyone was getting that message—including me! It may persist for a while because of caching. I suggest clearing your cache and if you’re on wifi you may also need to unplug and then replug in your router.
Sorry about that. Very strange, but apparently not a hack, according to my host.
After you try the cache clearing and the unplugging and replugging, you should be able to comment. If you still have problems doing so, please email me.
[ADDENDUM: Strangely enough, the long-lamented and deeply-desired edit function seems to have come out of hiding for a lot of people. Let’s hope it’s not just a cameo appearance.]
Conveniently changing the rules: blowing that second-hand whistle, hard
The long-held definition of what constitutes a whistleblower seems to have been changed just in time for the hearsay/secondhand/gossip Ukainian phone call whistleblower to file his complaint.
Fancy that.
Some conspiracy-minded people think that just because the DNI suddenly changed decades-old rules which only allowed those alleging direct, first-hand witness testimony of wrongdoing to file a whistleblower complaint, to suddenly permit second-hand hearsay gossip, then that means that maybe Deep Staters at DNI changed the rules specifically to allow their coconspirator to file his second-hand hearsay gossip complaint that same week.
This all happened last month– the sudden change to stop requiring first-hand information, and then the “whistleblower,” coincidentally I’m sure!, being the first to hop on and use those changed standards to file a non-IC related complaint with the ICIG.
See this by Sean Davis:
The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”
The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed.
The complaint alleges that President Donald Trump broke the law during a phone call with the Ukrainian president. In his complaint, which was dated August 12, 2019, the complainant acknowledged he was “not a direct witness” to the wrongdoing he claims Trump committed…
“The [Intelligence Community Inspector General] cannot transmit information via the ICPWA based on an employee’s second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing,” the previous form stated under the bolded heading “FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED.” “This includes information received from another person, such as when an employee informs you that he/she witnessed some type of wrongdoing.”
This is terrible. Even if there had been no whistleblower allegation against Trump’s Ukraine call, this sets a very dangerous precedent and allows mere gossip to become whistleblower material.
As it already has, to be used against Donald Trump.
John Solomon on Biden/Shokin/Ukraine
Yesterday I wrote a post about whether Ukraine’s former head prosecutor Viktor Shokin, fired after the pressure from Joe Biden, was actually corrupt. I found plenty of articles alleging that he was, but not much about the substance of said corruption. One thing that’s clear is that Ukraine is a country swamped by corruption, which has also been intermittently (and apparently so far unsuccessfully) fighting corruption.
Today John Solomon has published some documents connected with the case. This is apparently the first of many such reports by Solomon. Today’s revelations center on the contention by the fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin that his firing was a response to Biden’s pressure, which was in turn was motived by Biden’s desire to protect his son Hunter.
Solomon writes:
Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative.
And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
For instance, Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and offered “an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures” about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian government’s official memo of the meeting. The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor’s firing was announced.
In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal team’s internal emails.
The memos raise troubling questions:
1.) If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma’s American legal team refer to those allegations as “false information?”
2.) If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?
Ukrainian prosecutors say they have tried to get this information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since the summer of 2018, fearing it might be evidence of possible violations of U.S. ethics laws. First, they hired a former federal prosecutor to bring the information to the U.S. attorney in New York, who, they say, showed no interest. Then, the Ukrainians reached out to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told Trump in July that he plans to launch his own wide-ranging investigation into what happened with the Bidens and Burisma…
Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. A British-based investigation of Burisma’s owner was closed down in early 2015 on a technicality when a deadline for documents was not met. But the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. One of those cases involved taxes; the other, allegations of corruption. Burisma announced the cases against it were not closed and settled until January 2017.
After I first reported it in a column, the New York Times and ABC News published similar stories confirming my reporting…
In a newly sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation. “The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin testified.
“On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation,” Shokin added.
Shokin certainly would have reason to hold a grudge over his firing. But his account is supported by documents from Burisma’s legal team in America, which appeared to be moving into Ukraine with intensity as Biden’s effort to fire Shokin picked up steam.
There’s way way too much to quote; you’ll just have to read the whole thing. But it is deeply troubling.
And it’s also troubling that most people in this country will probably never look at it.
Please also read this article on the subject by Mary Chastain at Legal Insurrection, which also contains Shokin’s statement.
The whistleblower is Christopher Steele 2.0
John Hinderaker at Powerline writes:
…I am starting to think the Ukraine matter may have been orchestrated just as fully as the Steele dossier/Russia collusion hoax…
We now know that the “whistleblower” had nothing, just as Christopher Steele had nothing. His complaint consists of rumor and hearsay that turned out to be wrong. But, just as it didn’t matter that Steele’s dossier was nonsense, it hasn’t mattered that the “whistleblower’s” complaint was inaccurate, and perhaps fabricated out of whole cloth. It nevertheless serves the Democrats’ purposes.
It seems obvious that the Democrats have been planning for a while to proceed with impeachment against President Trump. I infer this from the fact that almost immediately after Nancy Pelosi announced publicly that House committees would proceed with impeachment inquiries, Democratic politicians of all kinds were sending out emails that recited nearly identical talking points and concluded with the assertion that President Trump must be impeached–not investigated, but impeached. This was not just a Nancy Pelosi operation, it was coordinated by the Democratic Party more broadly….
The Democrats pretend to believe the whistleblower just as they pretended to believe Steele, even though in both cases, there is clear evidence that the claims against Trump are false.
No matter: the Steele dossier was used as the pretext to fraudulently obtain FISA warrants to spy on the Trump presidential campaign and the Trump team post-election, while the already-refuted Ukraine complaint is nevertheless the pretext for beginning impeachment proceedings.
I think this is absolutely correct. It explains, for example, the speed of Pelosi’s actions re impeachment. It also explains the nearly-monolithic refusal of the MSM to cover the story properly.
I may have missed it, but did a single Democrat criticize Schiff’s little performance yesterday in which he falsely “paraphrased” Trump’s call and then, when criticized by Republicans, stated that it was a parody? I have never seen such behavior in a hearing of that type, and it is part and parcel of the same disinformation campaign.
You might be having trouble accessing the blog or parts of the blog
There was some glitch that seems to be fixed now, but there’s a cache problem persisting. So you may get a message that says something like “Account has been suspended” when you try to go to the blog or especially certain parts of the blog, such as comments in particular.
Try clearing your cache. I had to clear my cache plus unplugging and replugging my router.
My account has NOT been suspended and my host says there’s no hacking problem either. Hopefully this will clear up soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I have more posts coming today but for a while I have to concentrate on making sure this problem is fixed. Very frustrating, I must say.
The m.o. against Trump and Netanyahu
Here’s a fascinating article by Caroline Glick comparing the tactics of the anti-Netanyahu crowd in Israel to that of the anti-Trump crowd in the US.
An excerpt [emphasis mine]:
…[T]here is nothing unique about Trump’s actions [re Ukraine]. As Mark Thiessen noted in the Washington Post, in 2018, three Democratic senators urged the Ukrainian government to continue investigations into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.
National Review noted that during the 2016 campaign, the Obama administration asked the Ukrainian government to open a criminal probe against Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. So too, revelations regarding the origins of the Trump-Russia probe which fomented the nearly two-year Special Counsel investigation showed that the Obama Justice Department based wiretap requests against Trump campaign officials on a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and compiled by a former British spy on the basis of contacts with Russian operatives.
Democrats braying for impeachment have never shown the slightest interest in investigating the Obama administration’s actions. No Democratic lawmakers has called to impeach Obama or members of his administration.
The criminal probes against Netanyahu relate to actions he took to secure positive media coverage that are similar, if not identical to routine political behavior. The two major probes against Netanyahu – dubbed Case 2000 and Case 4000 allege that Netanyahu acted criminally when he met with media owners in bids to secure more positive coverage.
In Case 2000, Netanyahu is accused of having breached the public faith when he met with Yediot Ahronot publisher Arnon Moses in an effort to secure positive media coverage. Yediot Ahronot’s coverage of Netanyahu has been unstintingly negative. In Case 4000, prosecutors allege Netanyahu accepted a bribe in the form of positive media coverage on Walla news portal from Walla owner Shaul Alovich. Like Yediot, Walla coverage of Netanyahu has almost uniformly hostile.
Leading jurists from Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard University to Prof. Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University agree that the legal proceedings against Netanyahu are political and based on prejudicial and selective enforcement of statutes which prosecutors are interpreting inventively.
As is the case with the allegations related to Trump’s dealings with Zelensky, the first problem with the probes against Netanyahu is that his actions were far from unique – although less successful than similar actions by other politicians.
In just one striking example of the inherent bias of the charges against Netanyahu consider the behavior of the prosecutors in relation to Blue and White party co-chairman, and Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid.
While serving as finance minister in 2013 and 2014, Lapid held regular meetings Mozes. Government ministries controlled by Lapid’s party colleagues provided millions of shekels in government advertising to Yediot Ahronot. And Lapid and his Yesh Atid party received unstintingly positive coverage in Yediot Ahronot.
Lapid has never been investigated for his actions.
Selective Lawfare is the weapon of choice to destroy and/or undermine the elected leader of a nation.
Please read the whole thing.
The mechanisms intended to prevent abuse of power by an executive are being used by that executive’s political opponents to destroy him because they cannot defeat him at the ballot box.
“The American people are exhausted by this”
The title of this post is a direct quote from commenter “Cornhead” today on one of the posts about the Ukraine phone call and its fallout.
I don’t know about the American people, although I suspect Cornhead is right. I do know that I’m exhausted by it.
No, I don’t mean I’m going to give up blogging. But I know that I’m exhausted by the mendacity and the relentless undermining of whatever unity we’ve had in this country for most of my life, as well as the constant demonstrations of the susceptibility of way too many people to propaganda.
Last night I was at a social gathering with about six other women, all pleasant people, all intelligent and educated and fun-loving. We were having dinner, and most of the time we didn’t discuss politics or anything related to it.
But now and then something somewhat political would come up – although interestingly enough, the topic of Ukraine/Biden/Trump/impeachment was never mentioned. The longest political discussion we did have, which lasted perhaps five minutes maximum, was about police shooting black people at routine traffic stops.
All the other women were in complete agreement that this is a frequent problem and a symptom of anti-black racism. There was no question in their minds that any random black person stopped by police is far more likely to be killed by that officer than any random white person similarly stopped.
When I listen to discussions like that, the first thing that comes over me is that aforementioned weariness at the persistence of such beliefs in the face of hard evidence to the contrary. I am also tired of being the lone voice speaking some difference of opinion to a group uninterested in hearing it – and most groups of a single persuasion are uninterested in hearing evidence that contradicts their strongly-held viewpoints. And sometimes not just uninterested, but hostile.
So each time this happens I must decide what to do. Silence is one option. Full bore disagreement is another. I’ve found through experimentation that the latter never works, and just marks me as a crank. So often I take a middle road, which isn’t very satisfying either, which is to just drop a few statements here and there that indicate I believe differently and why.
Last night I made two such statements. The first involved the fact that numerous white people are shot by police, and the second was a brief discussion of the risks to police from traffic stops and why they are so suspicious of uncooperative people in those situations.
I left with a headache.
Then today one of the first things I saw when I got online was this article by Heather Mac Donald on the topic of her recent Congressional testimony about police shootings and race. It’s a good article, as is just about everything she writes. It advances the arguments (with much more detail) that I would have offered last night at dinner, had I thought my audience was the least bit receptive and in the unlikely event that I was given the floor to discourse for about a half hour.
I thought of sending the attendees the link. But I desisted. I’ve learned over time that such a move gets one of two responses, or maybe both together: the links are ignored, or the recipient becomes angry. Either way, it doesn’t seem to help the situation.
But even more dispiriting was actually reading the Mac Donald article (although I suggest you do so; it’s very good). That’s because it outlines the distortions and lies told by the “experts” testifying before Congress and by the members of Congress themselves, at the hearing Mac Donald attended. Propaganda drowns out facts, at least it seems that way to me. My friends are merely the pawns in the game at the moment.
[ADDENDUM: Another problem with an argument introducing the work of someone like Heather Mac Donald is that it relies on a basic understanding of math and statistics. I find that most people just don’t have that knowledge. That’s another reason why so many tend to be very susceptible to propaganda and very resistant to taking in evidence that might counter their belief system.]
More coming
This is bad news for Biden pic.twitter.com/A4JfbQqOV3
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 26, 2019
But I have a sneaking suspicion the MSM will ignore all of this.
Ukraine and corruption and US influence
Yesterday I became interested in the question of just how corrupt the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was – the man Joe Biden bragged about pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire. That’s because it is at least possible that Joe Biden’s pressure to fire the prosecutor was a bona fide exercise of US government policy due to that corruption – although it would still remain suspicious because it serves the financial interests of his son, who already appears to be enriching himself from connections related to his father’s position rather than any skills that son may possess.
The search led me deeper and deeper into the complex politics and exceedingly murky atmosphere of Ukraine, where corruption seems to be so widespread you can’t tell who’s who or what’s what, and the good guys are hard to find. Continue reading →
Sean Davis puts the pieces together: “whistleblower” plus leaks plus media plus Adam Schiff plus…
[Hat tip: commenter “sdferr.”]
In one of today’s posts I wrote: “This time they decided to go the ‘whistleblower’ route instead of the ‘leak to the Times‘ route, just to add variety and supposed gravitas.”
And that was true, as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough.
Sean Davis went further, in this Twitter thread. The m.o. he describes may start to sound rather familiar:
Adam Schiff was tweeting out allegations from the rumor-mongering anti-Trump leaker’s complaint while claiming that he didn’t have access to the complaint.
The complaint was addressed to Schiff on August 12, 2019. This tweet is from August 28, 2019: “Trump is withholding vital military aid to Ukraine, while his personal lawyer seeks help from the Ukraine government to investigate his political opponent.”
And which media propagandist did Schiff use as a prop to hide the true source of his allegations? One of Fusion GPS’s favorite stenographers of discredited Steele-esque innuendo: Natasha Bertrand.
The whole thing has been a Fusion GPS-style info op from the very beginning.
Schiff and his allies even stovepiped information in the same manner as during the collusion hoax: they leak claims to compliant media, media runs with claims, then leakers point to the media reports they seeded as proof of their allegations. They started back in May.
And surprise! The anti-Trump leaker cited as proof of corruption in his complaint the very same articles that Schiff and his allies quite obviously seeded to form the narrative they desired.
This raises the troubling question of whether Schiff orchestrated the complaint.
This pattern of behavior from Schiff, his “whistleblower,” and their media allies makes it all the more necessary for the anti-Trump complainant to publicly testify under oath and answer questions about his team’s interactions w/ media and Democrat lawmakers about his complaint.
And lest anyone forget, Adam Schiff and Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson have a long history of working together in this fashion. Recall that Schiff and Simpson, who perjured himself in congressional testimony, secretly met together in Aspen.
ADDENDUM: Much more in that vein can be found here:
In the lengthy [Twitter]thread, [former CIA analyst] Fleitz first points out that the whistleblower’s intent is clearly political based on the language in the given text and that he/she should never have had knowledge of the July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky.
“As a former CIA analyst and former NSC official who edited transcripts of POTUS phone calls with foreign leaders, here are my thoughts on the whistleblower complaint which was just released,” begins Fleitz. “This is not an intelligence matter. It is a policy matter and a complaint about differences over policy. Presidential phone calls are not an intelligence concern. The fact that IC officers transcribe these calls does not give the IC IG jurisdiction over these calls. It appears that rules restricting access and knowledge of these sensitive calls was breached. This official was not on this call, not on the approved dissem list and should not have been briefed on the call.”
Fleitz goes on to say that the “whistleblower” clearly had help in authoring the report and wondered if he spoke to House Intelligence Committee members beforehand.
“The way this complaint was written suggested the author had a lot of help. I know from my work on the House Intel Commitee staff that many whistleblowers go directly to the intel oversight committees. Did this whistleblower first meet with House Intel committee members?” ponders Fleitz. “It is therefore important that Congress find out where this complaint came from. What did House and Senate intel committee dem members and staff know about it and when? Did they help orchestrate this complaint?”
“My view is that this whistleblower complaint is too convenient and too perfect to come from a typical whistleblower,” he continues. “Were other IC officers involved? Where outside groups opposed to the president involved?”…
“This complaint will further damage IC relations with the White House for many years to come because IC officers appear to be politicizing presidential phone calls with foreign officials and their access to the president and his activities in the White House,” says Fleitz. “Worst of all, this IC officer — and probably others — have blatantly crossed the line into policy. This violates a core responsibility of IC officers is to inform, but not make policy. This is such a grievous violation of trust between the IC and the White House that it would not surprise me if IC officers are barred from all access to POTUS phone calls with foreign officials.”
It really just gets worse and worse for the Democrats, although they rely on the supposition that their buddies in the MSM will not be covering this part of the story any time soon.
What superpower does Trump have?
You know that game people sometimes play? The one where you choose which superpower you’d want?
Sometimes the choices are limited, such as in this typical group: “Telepathy, teleportation, super-strength, invisibility or the ability to regenerate your cells.”
But I’ve never seen a list that includes the one Donald Trump seems to possess, which is the ability to drive your enemies crazy and make them do stupid things.
We first saw this in evidence, at least somewhat, during the 2016 campaign. The Republican challengers were surprisingly flat-footed against him. And since his election we’ve seen it over and over and over with Democrats, the press, and NeverTrumpers.
I think what’s going on is twofold. The first is that Trump is very very different from their usual opponents. He’s unpredictable. He hits below the belt and above the belt. Whatever he does, they don’t see it coming.
But the second is that they really truly are convinced that he is the crazy stupid one. Therefore, if they can just rile him enough, he’ll reveal this unequivocally to the world. Plus, he’s not just crazy and stupid, he’s also corrupt, and so – like the boy in the joke about shoveling manure in the barn because he knows there must be a pony somewhere – they know that if they just dig and dig and dig they will find the pony that will sink Trump. This is not a pose on their part; they believe it.