posted July 02, 2017 08:15 AM            

July 2, 2017
Like Haman Being Hung on the Scaffold He Built for Mordechai
Clarice Feldman

An online friend watching the week’s events observes that they remind her of the villain Haman being hanged on the very scaffold he had built to hang Mordechai in the biblical Book of Esther. That sums up the week in which the federal investigators are themselves under investigation and the press is forced to recant the lies it has been publishing about the administration. Having watched the deep state eviscerate gentleman G.W. Bush and his administration on the Plamegate fiction, this turn of events warms my heart. It’s long overdue.

1. The Attempted “Russian Collusion” Coup Fails

The Plotters Are Under Scrutiny

Loretta Lynch, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and James Comey -- not President Trump -- have more to fear from the ongoing investigations than does President Trump, against whom not a shred of evidence of illegal or improper conduct of his campaign has turned up in a year of searching for one .

Even Comey’s replacement, as acting head of the FBI Andrew McCabe, is under investigation -- three separate inquiries into his behavior are, in fact, ongoing.

Circa reported Monday that former supervisory special agent Robyn Gritz, a decorated counterterrorism agent, has filed a sexual discrimination and retaliation complaint that names McCabe and other top FBI officials.

That is working its way through the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and is awaiting a review by an administrative law judge in the Office of Federal Operations.

Gritz also filed a complaint against McCabe with the main federal whistleblower agency in April, alleging social media photos she found show he campaigned for his wife’s Virginia state senate race in violation of the Hatch Act.

FBI employees are held to a higher standard than other federal workers under the Hatch Act and may not “endorse or oppose a candidate for partisan political office or a candidate for political party office in a political advertisement, broadcast, campaign literature, or similar material if such endorsement or opposition is done in concert with a candidate, political party, or partisan political group.”

The OSC told Circa that complaint is still being actively investigated.

In addition, the Justice Department Inspector General is investigating allegations from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that McCabe may not have properly disclosed campaign payments to his wife on his ethics report and should have recused himself from Hillary Clinton's email case.

Investors Business Daily concludes that the worm is beginning to turn on “the conspiracy mongers”:

Over the weekend, the New York Post reported that the firm behind the infamous Trump dossier -- Fusion GPS -- has been stonewalling the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has been trying to get information on who paid the firm to produce it and how it was used by government officials.

It has been publicly known since at least early January that Fusion GPS was behind the discredited dossier, which claimed that Russia had blackmailable information on Trump, and that it was a notorious opposition research firm that was often enlisted to dig up dirt on Republicans, including a 2012 smear campaign against a donor to Mitt Romney's campaign.

As the Post notes, one of the Fusion's founders, Peter Fritsch, contributed "at least $1,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund and the Hillary for America campaign."

The Post story has sparked renewed interest in this dossier, most of which has been discredited, but which appears to be serving as a "road map" to various investigations.

John McCain, who peddled the dossier story, knew better -- some of the same figures were involved with him in his presidential campaign, and the claims were proven groundless.

The press, which megaphoned the plot, has lost all credibility.

As my online friend Thomas Lipscomb notes, the press has to keep up its ad revenue in order to print all the corrections it has to publish.

CNN has been hurt the most for its around-the-clock promotion of the claims against Trump.

This week it forced the resignation of three of its employees for running a fake story based on an “anonymous” source. Mollie Hemingway details the sordid history of fake news at CNN:

But taking responsibility for just one of the many flawed stories CNN has been pushing is nowhere near sufficient a response to the institutional problems plaguing the media outlet. The serious problems with CNN’s approach to the Russia-Trump collusion conspiracy are much deeper than just one story, go back many months, and involve several stories and larger themes that no one at CNN has bothered to sufficiently explain.

But whether it’s the embarrassingly false Comey story, the discredited dossier hit job, the retracted collusion story, or any of the other thinly sourced and overhyped collusion stories, all of these problems are similar. The journalists are getting bad information from anonymous sources, not being transparent about what has gone wrong when sourcing fails, and generally being too credulous with anonymous -- always-anonymous -- sources.

Yes, letting three employees go is a good first step. But more needs to be done to restore credibility.

Sometimes, the errors are not even the result of bad sources as much as mindless reliance on the claims of those they endorse. This week, the NYT printed this correction to a long-repeated lie:

Correction: June 29, 2017

A White House Memo article on Monday about President Trump’s deflections and denials about Russia referred incorrectly to the source of an intelligence assessment that said Russia orchestrated hacking attacks during last year’s presidential election. The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies -- the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.

The Associated Press followed on, eating crow as well:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In stories published April 6, June 2, June 26 and June 29, The Associated Press reported that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump. That assessment was based on information collected by three agencies -- the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency -- and published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which represents all U.S. intelligence agencies. Not all 17 intelligence agencies were involved in reaching the assessment.

My online friend JMH notes how dumb was the assertion that all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community had concluded Russia hacked the DNC:

It only took one look at the Intelligence Community roster to figure that out. Did anybody really think that National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency weighed in on Russian hackery, or that Coast Guard Intel confirmed it? The patent risibility of the claim is what drove me crazy. All it takes is for something to appear in print once, and the left will run with it forever, no matter how thoroughly or often it gets debunked.

In the meantime, the administration just continues to drain the swamp while the press goes bananas over the President’s tweets.

Our own editor explains the significance of the President’s tweets

Can anyone argue that "pretending we are all Good Friends" when the other side doesn't works to Trump's (or conservatives') best interest? The norms associated with it need to change. There will be unpleasantness along the way. President Trump is setting about it in his own way and in his own style, which almost always occasions outrage, as it did in the presidential election. It turns out that the norms of the Beltway elite are not universal, and that a culture far larger than the media-political elite also has a voice in the end.

As Ken Masugi at American Greatness said:

If a candidate won’t defend his own interests, using all weapons at his command, why should the public think he will zealously defend their common interests, especially against pseudo-aristocratic racial/ethnic claims of privilege? It is scarcely egomania, let alone “white nationalism,” to defend oneself from fire coming at one from a safe space. Why are low blows and insults tolerated when they are directed at Republicans, but “unpresidential” and “beneath the dignity of the office” when they are repulsed in equal measure? In fact, Aristotle makes it clear that permitting an injustice to oneself is a vice. [snip] Just as the left makes every attack on the administrative state an attack on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, so every Republican Administration becomes for the media and Democrats a replay of Nixon and Watergate. Nixon tried to rollback the Democrats’ successor to the New Deal, the Great Society. Republicans still haven’t learned the meaning of Watergate, which was far more a political crisis engineered by partisan Democrats than a constitutional crisis brought about by Nixon. Republicans have yet to recognize that their Machiavellian enemies in the bureaucracy, media, and politics brought about Nixon’s demise. Trump has seen that crisis early on in his presidency, embodied in James Comey, and is gamely fighting it.

Iowahawk is also on target. David Burgeþ @iowahawkblog June 29

“Washington is now just a bunch of kittens with laser pointers stapled to their heads.”

They keep chasing that red dot and ignore the fact that the EPA can no longer claim the puddle in your driveway gives them jurisdiction over your property. Your son will no longer have to face a university star chamber if some gal claims he invaded her safe space. The military halted endorsing the recruitment of transgenders. No longer will energy sources be locked up from exploitation, or our allies be left hanging while we send a plane with pallets full of cash to the murderous mullahs. NATO members are paying more of their share of defense costs. Abbas has stopped paying terrorists in Israeli jails.