Conservative. Tennessee (now). Ex-Idaho. Software engineer. Historian. Trying to prevent Idiocracy from becoming a documentary.
Email complaints/requests about copyright infringement to clayton @ claytoncramer.com. Reminder: the last copyright troll that bothered me went bankrupt.
"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." -- Rom. 8:28
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee have agreed to pay $113,000 to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into whether they violated campaign finance law by misreporting spending on research that eventually became the infamous Steele dossier.
That is according to documents sent on Tuesday to the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, which had filed an administrative complaint in 2018 accusing the Democrats of misreporting payments made to a law firm during the 2016 campaign to obscure the spending.
Trump suesHillaryClinton, alleging ‘plot’ to rig 2016 election against him
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The Clinton campaign hired Perkins Coie, which then hired Fusion GPS, a research and intelligence firm, to conduct opposition research on Republican candidate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. But on FEC forms, the Clinton campaign classified the spending as legal services.
“By intentionally obscuring their payments through Perkins Coie and failing to publicly disclose the true purpose of those payments” the campaign and DNC “were able to avoid publicly reporting on their statutorily required FEC disclosure forms the fact that they were paying Fusion GPS to perform opposition research on Trump with the intent of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” the initial complaint had read.
I think they should also repay the government for the costs of the Mueller investigation.
Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, admitting that he altered an email that he used to apply for a FISA warrant against former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page.
Clinesmith changed the email, which was originally sent to him by the CIA and which he was forwarding to the FISA Court, to make it seem as though the agency did not consider Page to be an intelligence source, when in fact Page had worked as a source for the CIA on several occasions. However, Clinesmith told the court that while he altered the email, he believed that Page was not a source.
Did Clinesmith do this out of his own hatred, or are there bigger names he can out in exchange fgor turning state's evidence?
A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge published an unusual and harsh rebuke of the FBI over its handling of wiretap applications and demanded that the bureau respond to the court by next month with a plan to ensure that the information in its surveillance applications is true and reliable.
"The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable," Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in an order published Tuesday.
I have long suspected the FBI is a more subtle form of the KGB. This is major news, and even the presstitutes are covering it.
CNN interview with Director of National Intelligence Clapped had him saying that what he and the rest of the intelligence agencies did to organize this fraud was under Obama's orders. https://pjmedia.com/trending/did-former-dni-james-clapper-implicate-barack-obama-in-trump-spying-scandal/
Could Obama be prosecuted for this, along with Clapper et al.? That would be rich.
In one point of partisan agreement over Mueller's work, 69% think Congress ought to investigate the origins of the Justice Department's inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, including 76% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 62% of Republicans.
Even non-swamp Democrats smell something swampy there.
St. Bob of Mueller's report changed nothing for the Democratic activists with bylines. They are single-mindedly chasing obstruction of justice for something where no crime existed.
3/22/19 CBS News reports Mueller is done and there are no more indictments. I am pretty sure that means they found no evidence of wrongdoing by Trump. Watch for the Democrats hollering for Mueller's head. And here is the Attorney-General's summary to Congress. Classes at many elite universities will likely be canceled Monday because of faculty head explosions.
As the Left prepares itself for the disappointment of the Mueller report, the Hill reports:
Ukraine’s top prosecutor divulged in an interview aired Wednesday on Hill.TV that he has opened an investigation into whether his country’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.
The Senate Finance Committee is probing meetings reportedly held in 2015 between two of former President Barack Obama’s top economic officials and Maria Butina, a Russian national who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to covertly influence U.S. foreign policy, the panel said Friday.
Committee leadership published letters sent to the current heads of the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve raising concerns over reports that Ms. Butina, a 30-year-old gun-rights activist, met with officials from the agencies during the Obama administration.
There was a crapfest in the comments on an article by Cass Sunstein. As I read the increasingly nasty and prejudiced comments about why the ivory tower has almost no Republicans or conservatives (remember these are not identical), I remembered that an early discovery of Mueller was that Russians organized post-election rallies for and against Trump--apparently to promote internal division in the U.S. A civil war here would likely allow Russian expansion into Europe.
I suspect many of these hyperbolic comments are being posted by guys named Ivan and Sergei for that same purpose.
In an interview with Hugh Hewitt on Friday, Bob Woodward said that in his two years of investigating for his new book, 'Fear,' he found no evidence of collusion or espionage between Trump and Russia. Woodward said he looked for it "hard" and yet turned up nothing.
You may be aware that the DNC-funded Steele dossier was used by the Justice Department to get FISA wiretap warrants. The DOJ official involved was Bruce Ohr. This little detail is troubling:
“The fundamentals don't change the fact that a top Department of Justice official’s wife is working for the firm the Clintons hired to put together the dossier and the FBI uses that dossier that they’re getting from Bruce Ohr ... to then go get the warrant to spy on the Trump campaign,” Jordan said. “So that’s a big concern, who at the DOJ knew that?"
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said Sunday there is not enough evidence yet to bring impeachment proceedings against President Trump.
On ABC’s "This Week," Swalwell said Trump is not above the law, but Democrats don’t have enough evidence yet to say that he has committed a high crime and misdemeanor.
“We don’t want to be as reckless with the facts as he is,” he said. “I think having thorough investigations, putting forth an impenetrable case, doing it in a bipartisan way is the proper way to do this, but we’re not there yet.”
PowerLineBlog points out that Trump's former lawyer pleaded guilty to something that is not actually illegal:
However, one of Cohen’s guilty pleas relates to Trump and the 2016 election. Cohen admitted violating election law by paying money to sexual partners of Trump in order to keep them quiet during the campaign. The theory is that these were illegal campaign contributions.
Let’s be clear. The fact that Cohen entered this guilty plea doesn’t mean he actually broke campaign finance laws. There is a substantial argument that the payments to Stormy Daniels and the other woman weren’t crimes. Election law expert Bradley Smith, among others,maintains that paying hush money to silence people with potentially damaging information on a political candidate does not constitute a campaign contribution. In my view, this is a murky area of the law.
Cohen simply decided not to contest the campaign finance count against him in order to avoid major prison time for violations he apparently couldn’t plausibly contest — tax evasion and bank fraud. These are violations that, unlike the election law count, carry severe sentences.
If Trump reimbursed Cohen for these, then Cohen gave nothing to the campaign. No campaign finance violation. Why would Cohen confess to a non-crime? Cohen is represented by Lanny Davis, one of Clinton's fixers.
Paul Manafort's trial will stretch into a fourth week, as jurors headed home Friday without reaching a verdict for the second straight day and the judge overseeing the case alluded to "threats" the jury may be receiving.
“I had no idea this case would incite this emotion,” U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III said in an open court hearing, responding to a motion from seven news organizations, including POLITICO, seeking access to sealed materials related to the trial that would have publicly identified the jurors.
Ellis denied the motion, telling the courtroom that jurors were "scared” and “afraid.” As a result, Ellis said, he didn’t “feel right” releasing the names of the 12-person jury.
Incite this emotion? The Swamp will do whatever it can to engage in coup d'etat.
You probably know the Manafort jurors asked the judge for clarification of "beyond a reasonable doubt." Now the lamestream media are asking the judge to give them the names and addresses of the jurors. Antifa on your doorstep? This is such an obvious attempt to intimidate the jury. We may be reaching the point of doxxing the lamestream media reporters to get the message across.
This AP story about Omarosa Manigault Newman reports:
In the book, Manigault Newman suggests she joined Trump’s campaign — despite the misgivings she said she had about her longtime friend and mentor — after an arrangement to join Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign fell through and left her feeling spurned.
She writes that Trump and his campaign were “eager for my help” and she wanted to experience working on a campaign at a “high level.” And, “since Trump had little chance of winning, it would be ‘no harm, no foul’ for me to have worked with the campaign for however long it lasted,” she wrote.
She preferred Clinton, but helped Trump get elected? Wow. She stood for nothing but her own advancement. The overall story is about how black Americans don't respect her. Even if you aren't black, her own statements make her hard to respect.
Gates appeared nervous on the witness stand at the court in Alexandria, Virginia, blinking frequently, his throat apparently dry as he spoke. He frequently used the phrases “It’s possible” and “I don’t recall” as Downing challenged him about inconsistencies in testimony he gave to the special counsel’s office.
“When did you start providing false and misleading information to the special counsel’s office?” the defence counsel asked bluntly.
Gates struggled so badly to give a straight answer that eventually Judge T S Ellis III was forced to intervene. “Did you provide false information or did you have a bad memory?” he asked.
Gates finally admitted that he had provided false information prior to striking a plea agreement. “I did, to one count, your honour,” he said.
So he admits to lying to the prosecutors; striking a plea bargain; now he is testifying against someone the prosecutors want to put in a vise to squeeze. He also admitted to embezzling funds from both Manafort and the inaugural committee. What jury is going to give Gates' testimony much trust?
