Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke will head to New York next month for a live interview with Oprah Winfrey as he continues to mull a 2020 presidential run.
O’Rourke will be part of “Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations from Times Square” on Feb. 5. He’ll speak to Winfrey one-on-one as part of an event featuring others, including actors Bradley Cooper and Michael B. Jordan.
O’Rourke, 46, rose to national Democratic prominence while nearly unseating Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in deep red-Texas last November.
You remember when Oprah praised the black queer Jesus from Chicago.
Despite other top Democrats taking steps to likely join the 2020 presidential race, O’Rourke’s camp suggests he won’t make up his mind for at least a few more weeks.
Winfrey herself has been the subject of 2020 chatter, but has said she doesn’t plan to run.
Pollak: Michael Flynn Sentencing Document Shows Collusion — Between Media, Deep State, and Obama Admin
Drain the swamp, Trump. The clock is ticking
Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed a sentencing memorandum Tuesday with the federal court in Washington, D.C. that recommends General Michael Flynn receive no jail time after pleading guilty to the crime of lying to the FBI, citing “substantial” assistance to the government in its investigations.
The mainstream media interpreted that remark as evidence that Flynn gave Mueller key information against President Donald Trump and Russian “collusion.”
More likely, however, Mueller’s request reflects the fact that Flynn did not actually commit the crime to which he pleaded guilty. No less than then-FBI director James Comey told Congress last March that Flynn had not, in fact, lied to the FBI.
If Flynn had demanded a trial on the merits, he could have subpoenaed Comey in his defense. The Special Counsel likely pressured Flynn to cooperate using other accusations — against him, or perhaps his family.
It is not clear exactly what information Flynn provided Mueller. The only other crime referenced in the sentencing document is Flynn’s failure to register as a foreign agent for Turkey.
Again, though, that is rather flimsy. It is rare that anyone in Washington is prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and rarer still that anyone is pursued under the Logan Act, which was the reason Flynn was under surveillance in the first place.
In fact, the most explosive piece of information in the sentencing document is not about collusion with Russians, but about the collusion between the media, the intelligence services, and the outgoing members of the Obama administration.
The document begins its recitation of Flynn’s offenses by citing information that had appeared in the Washington Post from a leaked, classified surveillance transcript in which Flynn’s name had been “unmasked”:
Days prior to the FBI’s interview of the defendant, the Washington Post had published a story alleging that he had spoken with Russia’s ambassador to the United States on December 29, 2016, the day the United States announced sanctions and other measures against Russia in response to that government’s actions intended to interfere with the 2016 election (collectively, “sanctions”). See David Ignatius, Why did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s hacking?, WASH. POST (Jan. 12, 2017).
That information, the document suggests, led the FBI to interview Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017 — the conversation in which he did not (according to Comey) lie to them, but which landed him in trouble.
The government had the surveillance transcripts, and it knew what Flynn had told the Russian ambassador. But the Post‘s intervention was crucial in setting the trap in which to ensnare Flynn and turn him into a government witness.
Mueller’s sentencing document does not mention the fact that the information published in the Post was illegally leaked to the press by the intelligence services. And the reason that happened was that the outgoing Obama administration changed the rules on the sharing of classified surveillance among government agencies, weakening privacy protections, probably intending that such information be more difficult to keep secret, and easier to leak.
Moreover, someone in the Obama administration — we do not yet know who, though it had to be someone senior — “unmasked” Flynn’s name to make sure he was exposed.
So while we do not yet know Mueller’s next moves, what the Flynn sentencing document reinforces is the that the Russia collusion investigation was tainted from the start by a crime committed against Flynn himself — with the collusion of the media, the deep state, and Obama’s loyalists.
Tuesday on MSNBC’s “All In,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said President Donald Trump was a “poster boy for what a mob protester looks like.”
Discussing conservative media calling protests a “mob,” Waters said, “Well, I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s not believable. As a matter of fact, this country was built on peaceful protests. And those of us who were part of the Civil Rights movement, who understood the power of protest taught by Dr. Martin Luther King and others know that we cannot allow Donald Trump and anybody else to take protests away from us and to deem it to be violent and to try and make us look like a mob. It is because of peaceful protests, not only in the Civil Rights movement, but the labor movement was able to get better wages, able to get better working conditions, able to get better pay, everything because they learned to march and protest. And they still do it today. We know that protest is guaranteed to a democratic society. We know that this is guaranteed to us by the Constitution.”
What A Damn Joke
She continued, “They’re trying to change the description of protest and call it a mob. Well, this president is the poster boy for what a mob protester looks like. He is—matter of fact, he’s the one who has been violent in his speech. He’s the one in his rallies has said things like ‘I’d like to punch him in the face.’ Trump said that at one of his rallies, he said ‘knock the crap out of them, would you, and seriously, okay, just knock the hell out of them, I mean, I promise I will pay the legal fees.’ That’s the kind of talk that he has done. That’s violent talk. With don’t have that kind of talk that has come from the women who are protesting. As a matter of fact, this country is past due for the kind of protests that we have seen women do in the last few days as we have gone through this confirmation process of Kavanaugh. It is time for women to say that we’re tired of being disrespected.”
They don’t want the truth and no matter if Brett Kavanaugh is innocent they hate Donald Trump, so therefore Kavanaugh is a misogynistic pig.
Some of the things we discussed on last night show:
Insane Professor Shoots Himself At School To Protest Trump . Brett Kavanaugh Accuser’s Lawyer Defended Bill Clinton, And Al Franken. Christine Blasey Ford Accused Kavanaugh Of Rape When He Was 17 Years Old. Paul Manafort Deal Looks Like Good News for Trump, Terrible News for Democrats. ABC News Chief Political Analyst Matthew Dowd Alleges Clarence Thomas Is a ‘Sexual Predator.
Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson went on a rant against the president and even suggested that Hillary Clinton won the election during his eulogy at Aretha Franklin’s funeral on Friday.
“Then this orange apparition had the nerve to say she worked for him. You lugubrious leach, you dopey doppelgänger of deceit and deviance, you lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator, you foolish fascist,” Dyson continued. “She [didn’t] work for you, she worked above you. She worked beyond you. Get your preposition right. Then he [has] the nerve to say he’s going to grab it. That’s not what Aretha Franklin said. I’m going to give you something that you can feel.”
MARTHA MACCALLUM’S BURNING QUESTION ON LOUIS Farrakhan AT ARETHA FRANKLIN FUNERAL — ‘WHAT WAS HE DOING THERE?’
Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on Friday wondered what “unapologetic anti-Semite” Louis Farrakhan was “doing up there” in such a prominent position at Aretha Franklin’s funeral.
The Fox News host told her panel that, despite the “amazing” performances of stars like Jennifer Hudson and Gladys Knight, she was “distracted by Louis Farrakhan who was in every single shot.”
“What was he doing there?” she asked the panel.
Liberal economist Kylie Patterson acknowledged the “mixed” history of Farrakhan but also noted both Franklin’s and Farrakhan’s involvement in the “liberation movement.”
“This is her funeral,” Patterson said. “I mean, it’s her choice, who she wants there, how she wants people sitting.”
“I just wonder how much jockeying there was for prime position,” MacCallum asked. “I saw that he was kind of pushing his website and all of this on Twitter. And I thought, ‘Gee, that’s kind of a little bit unfortunate’ that it was distracting in that way. He, you know, has said awful things about Jewish people, about white people, about gay people and I thought it was never the message that I heard in Aretha Franklin’s music.”
SOURCES: CHINA HACKED HILLARY CLINTON’S PRIVATE EMAIL SERVER
A Chinese-owned company penetrated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to sources briefed on the matter.
The company inserted code that forwarded copies of Clinton’s emails to the Chinese company in real time.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General warned of the problem, but the FBI subsequently failed to act, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said during a July hearing.
A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.
The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant “courtesy copy” for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found that virtually all of Clinton’s emails were sent to a “foreign entity,” Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, said at a July 12 House Committee on the Judiciary hearing. He did not reveal the entity’s identity, but said it was unrelated to Russia. (RELATED: Gohmert: Watchdog Found Clinton Emails Were Sent To ‘Foreign Entity’)
Two officials with the ICIG, investigator Frank Rucker and attorney Janette McMillan, met repeatedly with FBI officials to warn them of the Chinese intrusion, according to a former intelligence officer with expertise in cybersecurity issues, who was briefed on the matter. He spoke anonymously, as he was not authorized to publicly address the Chinese’s role with Clinton’s server.
Among those FBI officials was Peter Strzok, who was then the bureau’s top counterintelligence official. Strzok was fired this month following the discovery he sent anti-Trump texts to his mistress and co-worker, Lisa Page. Strzok didn’t act on the information the ICIG provided him, according to Gohmert.
Gohmert mentioned in the Judiciary Committee hearing that ICIG officials told Strzok and three other top FBI officials that they found an “anomaly” on Clinton’s server.
The former intelligence officer TheDCNF spoke with said the ICIG “discovered the anomaly pretty early in 2015.”
“When [the ICIG] did a very deep dive, they found in the actual metadata — the data which is at the header and footer of all the emails — that a copy, a ‘courtesy copy,’ was being sent to a third party and that third party was a known Chinese public company that was involved in collecting intelligence for China,” the former intelligence officer told TheDCNF.
“The [the ICIG] believe that there was some level of phishing. But once they got into the server something was embedded,” he said. “The Chinese are notorious for embedding little surprises like this.”
The intelligence officer declined to name the Chinese company.
“We do know the name of the company. There are indications there are other ‘cutouts’ that were involved. I would be in a lot of trouble if I gave you the name,” he told TheDCNF.
A government staff official who’s been briefed on the ICIG’s findings told TheDCNF that the Chinese state-owned firm linked to the hacking operates in Washington’s northern Virginia suburbs. The source was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.
The company that penetrated Clinton’s server was not a technology firm and it served as a “front group” for the Chinese government, the source told TheDCNF.
The Fairfax and Loudoun county governments told TheDCNF that 13 state-owned Chinese companies operate in the area. Of those, three were not technologically oriented.
Fairfax County Economic Development Authority communications manager Seth Livingston told TheDCNF that all of the nine firms operating in his county were there in 2009 when Clinton began as secretary of state.
“Our Asian folks believe that all of the companies have been around and known to us since that time period,” he said in an email.
“This is the most combed over subject in modern American political history,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told TheDCNF. “The FBI spent thousands of hours investigating, and found no evidence of intrusion. That’s a fact.”
“But in an age where facts are alternative and truth isn’t truth, it’s no surprise that an outlet like the Daily Caller would try to distract us from very real and very immediate threats to our democracy brought by the man occupying the White House,” he continued.
Department of State Inspector General Steven A. Linick and then-ICIG I. Charles McCullough III scrutinized Clinton’s server in 2015. McCullough told Congress in July 2015 that her emails contained classified material.
“IC IG was involved in the classification review of certain information drawn from the private email server,” an agency spokeswoman told TheDCNF. She declined to comment further.
The two IGs asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether the classified information was compromised, according to a July 23, 2015, New York Times report based on unnamed senior government officials.
The FBI issued a referral to the Justice Department in July 2015. The bureau warned that classified information may have been disclosed to a foreign power or to one of its agents.
“FBIHQ, Counterespionage Section, is opening a full investigation based on specific articulated facts provided by an 811 referral from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, dated July 6, 2015 regarding the potential compromise of classified information,” a July 10, 2015, FBI memo stated.
An 811 referral informs the FBI of classified information that was potentially released to a foreign power or agent of a foreign power.
“This investigation is also designated a Sensitive Investigative Matter (SIM) due to a connection to a current public official, political appointee or candidate,” the memo stated.
Then-FBI Deputy Director Mark F. Giuliano sent a follow-up memo on July 21, 2015, to President Barack Obama’s deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, about two conversations he had with her about the criminal referral.
“On 13 July 2015 and 20 July 2015, I verbally advised you of a Section 811(c) referral from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community received by the FBI on 06 July 2015. The referral addressed the mishandling of classified information on the personal e-mail account and electronic media of a former high-level us Government official,” according to the FBI memo, which was hand delivered to Yates.
Justice Department spokesman Devin M. O’Malley declined to comment on this story.
Former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged in his recent book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” that the FBI was conducting a criminal investigation into Clinton’s conduct.
London Center for Policy Research’s vice president of operations, retired Col. Anthony Shaffer, told TheDCNF that Clinton’s server was vulnerable to hacking.
“Look, there’s evidence based on the complete lack of security hygiene on the server. Fourteen-year-old hackers from Canada could have probably hacked into her server and left very little trace,” Shaffer said. “Any sophisticated organization is going to be able to essentially get in and then clean up their presence.”
And a former consultant to the U.S. trade representative, Claude Barfield, told TheDCNF: “The Chinese were in the process of really gaining technological competence in 2009 to 2010. This begins to really take off in the early years of the Obama administration. The Obama administration was kind of late and there was this slow reaction about how sophisticated the Chinese were.”
