DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Hollywood star Robert De Niro took aim at the Trump administration’s stance on climate change, telling a packed audience in the Middle East that he was visiting from a “backward” country suffering from “temporary insanity.”
He said that in the country he’s describing, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency suggested last week that global warming may be a good thing for humanity.
This POS Robert De Niro loved the communist queer Obama.
“I am talking about my own country, the United States of America. We don’t’ like to say we are a ‘backward’ country so let’s just say we’re suffering from a case of temporary insanity,” he added.
De Niro received applause and laughs when he said the U.S. “will eventually cure itself by voting our dangerous leader” out of office. He spoke Sunday at Dubai’s World Government Summit.
Rachel Brand, and Rod Rosenstein both should leave.
Rachel Brand, the associate attorney general in the Department of Justice, is stepping down from her position, Fox News has confirmed. (Reuters)
Rachel Brand, associate attorney general in the Department of Justice, is stepping down from her position, Fox News confirmed on Friday. Brand, the No. 3 official in the DOJ, will be leaving following a nine-month tenure in the role.
A friend of Brand’s says she was “not looking to leave,” but was approached with a “dream job.” Brand will now head to work for Walmart as executive vice president, global governance and corporate secretary.
DOJ officials say Principal Deputy Associate AG Jesse Panuccio will step in as the acting Associate Attorney General.
All 3 needs to go.
In the line of succession, Brand had been behind Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein is overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. She was in line to oversee the investigation if Rosenstein stepped down.
Should Rosenstein step down now, Solicitor General Noel Francisco would take over the probe, not Panuccio. (Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia inquiry last year.)
“The men and women of the Department of Justice impress me every day,” Brand said in a statement on Friday. “I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish over my time here. I want to thank Attorney General Sessions for his leadership over this Department. I’ve seen firsthand his commitment to the rule of law and to keeping the American people safe.”
Brand had been overseeing the DOJ’s antitrust, civil and civil rights divisons. She also assisted in an extension of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program.
Brand, Sessions said in the same statement, “played a critical role in helping us accomplish our goals as a Department—taking on human trafficking, protecting free speech on campus, and fighting sexual harassment in public housing.
“And when I asked her to take the lead in the Department’s efforts on Section 702 re-authorization, she made this her top priority and combined her expertise and gravitas to help pass legislation keeping this crucial national security tool. Rachel has shown real leadership over many important divisions at the Department. I know the entire Department of Justice will miss her, but we join together in congratulating her on this new opportunity in the private sector. She will always remain a part of the Department of Justice family.”
Currie Gunn, Brand’s assistant, has also left the department, according to The Times.
For months and months, our fake news media have been freaking out over a meeting Donald Trump Jr. took with a Russian lawyer in the hopes of getting some dirt on Hillary Clinton. Again and again, we have been told that this is the smoking gun of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Of course, that is nonsense. Moreover, Don Jr. and the others in attendance caught on to the scheme within a few minutes, and as far as we now know, that was the end of that.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of others, who actually have colluded with the Russians as a means to dig up dirt on Trump.
Here are seven American politicians and institutions who have or are at least suspected of colluding with the Russians as a means to destroy President Trump.
The CIA
This former CIA Director lied under oath about unmasking.
Although the far-left New York Times is desperately hoping to control the explosion of this bombshell by shrouding it in a laughable story about the CIA trying to retrieve stolen National Security Agency cyber-weapons, the anti-Trump outlet is still forced to report that after “months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials.”
And that $100,000 was only supposed to be the first down payment towards a cool million.
The CIA was hoping for images of Trump urinating on hookers in Moscow hotel rooms. All they got was a 15-second clip of some guy in a hotel room talking to some women.
The payoff happened in September of last year.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Tell me that this pervert and liar should not be investigated.
In early 2017, Democrat Adam Schiff, the ranking member of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (so you would think he would know better), thought he was colluding with Ukrainian officials to get compromising materials against Trump. The Ukrainian officials ended up being Russian pranksters. The best you can say about Schiff is that he colluded with Russians to make a horse’s ass of himself.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)
The horse man was working with the Russians to bring Trump down. Look at those damn horse teeth.
In March of last year, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, colluded with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch to dig up dirt on Trump.
Naturally, because he has no spine, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) immediately ran to Warner’s defense. “Sen. Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago,” the jellyfish tweeted. There is just one problem… If you look at the timeline, that “full disclosure” came a full seven months after the collusion occurred.
Rubio fired off another non-sequitur in Warner’s defense. “Has had zero impact on our work,” Rubio wrote, as though that means anything when it comes to the fact that Warner colluded with Russians to harm a sitting president and hid that information from the committee for more than a half-year.
Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele
Steele is the former British spy hired by the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put together the phony Russian dossier that even disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey declared “salacious and unverified.”
To compile these lies, Steele reportedly worked directly with Kremlin officials:
How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.
In other words, Steele and Fusion GPS colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump. Steele then leaked those lies to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Fusion GPS also “spearheaded the campaign to undo the Magnitsky Act, American legislation imposing sanctions on Russian officials and other figures close to Vladimir Putin. Their work featured a smear campaign against the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, financier William Browder.”
If successful, this Fusion GPS campaign would have been of great benefit to the Russian government and countless oligarchs who want the Magnitsky Act’s sanctions lifted.
The Hillary Clinton Campaign
This woman should me handed after being shot.
Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the Clinton campaign’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The Democrat National Committee (DNC)
Why is Little Debbie and Simpson not been indicted?
The DNC hired the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the DNC’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The FBI
You can trust the honest sex symbol James Comey right?
Our own FBI not only put Steele on the payroll, a guy who colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump, the FBI used lies and the dossier — including Kremlin lies — to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump campaign affiliates.
DOJ’s Rosenstein OK’d Surveillance of Ex-Trump Adviser
This corrupt looking child molester.
A controversial and classified memo shows that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein okayed an application shortly after taking office last year to monitor a former Trump campaign associate, according to a report.
The Department of Justice under President Trump extended surveillance on Carter Page, believing that he was acting as a Russian agent, the New York Times reported late Sunday, citing people familiar with the memo’s contents.
The document faulted the FBI and the DOJ for failing to completely explain to the intelligence court judge in seeking the warrant that they were relying on information supplied by Christopher Steele, who compiled the disputed dossier that contains unsubstantiated claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, the newspaper said.
Research for the dossier had been paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
A number of top DOJ officials can approve such surveillance but the responsibility usually falls to the deputy attorney general, the newspaper said.
The report also said the FBI and the DOJ did nothing improper in seeking the surveillance warrant against Page, who was part of the campaign until September 2016.
A White House spokesman said Trump wants “transparency throughout this process.”
“Based on numerous news reports, top officials at the F.B.I. have engaged in conduct that shows bias against President Trump and bias for Hillary Clinton,” Hogan Gidley told the Times.
“While President Trump has the utmost respect and support for the rank-and-file members of the F.B.I., the anti-Trump bias at the top levels that appear to have existed is troubling.”
The FBI had been keeping an eye on Page for years and an investigation in 2013 showed that a Russian spy tried to recruit him.
But a visit to Russia in July 2016 when he was working with the Trump campaign renewed the bureau’s interest and they began monitoring him again that fall, the Times said.
That surveillance led the FBI and DOJ to seek to renew the application in the spring of 2017, shortly after Rosenstein was confirmed in April, the newspaper said.
Trump has had Rosenstein in his crosshairs, venting to staff his frustration with the DOJ’s No. 2 and mulling whether he should fire him, according to reports.
Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to investigate Russian meddling in May 2017 after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who had been heading up the probe.
Trump wanted to fire Mueller last June, but backed off after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign, the Times reported last Friday.
The White House and some Republican lawmakers are calling for the memo to be declassified and released to the public to show how the agencies are biased against the president.
But Democrats who have seen the four-page memo — written by House Republicans — say they carefully selected information that is intended to discredit the investigation into Russian involvement in the election and any collusion on the part of the Trump campaign.
The DOJ called efforts to release the memo “reckless” without the department and the FBI first being able to review the document to see if it harms national security.
So-Called Conservative Free Beacon Paid Fusion GPS For Anti-Trump Research
Fake republican and Anti-Trump fraud Paul Singer of Free Beacon.
The conservative website the Washington Free Beacon triggered the research into then-candidate Donald Trump by Fusion GPS that eventually led to the now-infamous Trump “dossier,” the publication’s editor-in-chief and chairman acknowledged in a statement Friday night.
The research effort was known to have been supported by Republican allies before the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign picked up the tab for the research, but the original funder of the research was unknown until now. The resulting dossier was compiled by former British spy Michael Steele and contained unsubstantiated allegations about then-candidate Trump’s connections to Russia. Mr. Trump has denied the allegations.
The Free Beacon’s connection to the dossier was first reported by the Washington Examiner’s Byron York Friday night.
The site began as a non-profit entity before becoming a for-profit enterprise several years ago. It has never disclosed its owners or financial backers, but the New York Times reports hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer provides a large amount of its funding. The site covers national security issues, politics, culture and media criticism, among other topics.
The Free Beacon says Steele was not involved in the research at the time of its involvement, and “none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier.” The Free Beacon also said it had no knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the DNC or Clinton campaign. The Free Beacon has retained third-party firms since its launch in 2012, the statement says.
In the statement, editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb said that the publication retained Fusion GPS “to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton.” The statement said representatives of his publication approached the House Intelligence Committee Friday and offered to answer questions.
“But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods,” Continetti and Goldfarb wrote.
Here is the full statement from the Free Beacon:
Since its launch in February of 2012, the Washington Free Beacon has retained third party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us and our readers. In that capacity, during the 2016 election cycle we retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton. All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.
Representatives of the Free Beacon approached the House Intelligence Committee today and offered to answer what questions we can in their ongoing probe of Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier. But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods. We consider it our duty to report verifiable information, not falsehoods or slander, and we believe that commitment has been well demonstrated by the quality of the journalism that we produce. The First Amendment guarantees our right to engage in news-gathering as we see fit, and we intend to continue doing just that as we have since the day we launched this project.
Network corrected exclusive story involving Trump and hacked documents
Trump: ‘Their slogan should be CNN – the least trusted name in news’
Donald Trump, in his first tweet on Saturday, said: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?” Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump on Saturday fired more shots in his offensive against CNN, after the network was forced to correct an exclusive report that had seemed to implicate his administration in a scandal involving the release of leaked documents.
“Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday,” the president tweeted. “They were caught red handed.”
He added: “CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!”
The CNN report said Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, received an email offering him access to hacked Democratic party emails from WikiLeaks before the documents had been made publicly available.
But in fact, the email was sent on 14 September 2016, after the material was made publicly available – and not 4 September as CNN first reported.
In a statement, CNN said its “initial reporting of the date on an email sent to members of the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks documents, which was confirmed by two sources to CNN, was incorrect. We have updated our story to include the correct date, and present the proper context for the timing of email.”
It was the second major correction in a CNN story involving Trump and Russia. Russia is believed to have been behind the original hacking of the documents.
In June, three CNN journalists resigned after the network retracted a report on alleged ties between Trump officials and a Russian investment fund. “What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS,” Trump tweeted then. The network said the three journalists who reported that story failed to follow editorial procedures.
In his first tweet on Saturday, Trump added: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?”
CNN said it would not fire the reportersbehind the Friday story, as editorial procedures had been followed.
The president also attacked “fake news” on Friday night in Florida, at a rally endorsing Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. In particular, Trump zeroed in on an error made last week by ABC News correspondent Brian Ross, over the prosecution of Mike Flynn in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the US election.
ABC suspended Ross but did not fire him. The president suggested that attendees at his rally should sue the news outlet for the stock market losses that resulted from the original story.
“Did you see all the corrections the media’s been making?” Trump said. “They’ve been apologizing left and right.”
Trump also said CNN had “apologised” for its corrected story. It has not.
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‘We want Roy Moore’: Trump endorses controversial candidate at rally – video
Also on Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders used Twitter to highlight CNN’s use of a picture of the wrong Raj Shah in a report on her deputy. “CNN this is definitely not @RajShah45 but it is #FakeNews,” she wrote.
Donald Jr added his thoughts in a tweet Saturday morning, writing: “Strange that the #fakenews media never gets stories wrong in favor of Trump. It’s almost like they do it on purpose.”
There is no evidence that reporting errors and corrections have become any more frequent during the Trump presidency. Trump’s embrace of the concept of “fake news”, though, has allowed him to make substantial political hay from every corrected story.
According to an October Politico poll, 46% of Americans said they believed the media was guilty of wholesale fabrications about the Trump administration. More than three-quarters of Republican voters thought so.
David Frum, a former George W Bush speech writer who is now senior editor at the Atlantic, has become one of Trump’s most vociferous critics. He addressed the issue on Saturday morning on Twitter.
While reporters “slip in their work”, Frum wrote, “the work itself is trying to inform the public about the doings of the most systematical untruthful administration in American history”.
Frum continued: “Never forget, though, that the media are not the protagonist in the drama. The protagonists are the officials engaged in the deception, headed by the president himself.”
Plus 10 points for creativity. Minus 1,000 points for a stupid lie with inevitable consequences.
While the media rushes frantically from one manufactured Trump scandal to another, the examination of the deeply troubling lenghts to which Obama Inc. went to sabotage his political opponent and successor using eavesdropping continues. One of the most striking revelations has been the number of ‘unmasking’ requests filed by Samantha Power.
Not only did Power file a whole lot of them, 260 requests to unmask the identities of Americans being spied on is a whole lot, but why would an ambassador to the UN even need such classified info?
And to that, Samantha Power had a simple and incoherent response. “It wasn’t me.”
South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy revealed in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday that Power was “emphatic” on the point that someone else in the Obama administration made the unmasking requests that have been attributed to her.
Fox News recently reported that Power made approximately 260 unmasking requests — a rate of one per business day — in her final year in office, including up through the end of Obama’s term.
Unmasking has become an issue because someone inside the Obama administration unmasked the identities of Trump associates identified in classified intelligence reports collected by the intelligence community during surveillance of foreign targets. Some of those details were illegally leaked to the media.
Gowdy, a member of the Intelligence committee, said that Power “was pretty emphatic” last week in disputing that she made 260 unmasking requests.
“She would say those requests to unmask may have been attributed to her, but they greatly exceed by an exponential factor the requests she actually made,” Gowdy told Fox’s Bret Baier.
“Her perspective, her testimony is, ‘they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests.’”
It’s a really bizarre defense that relies on either challenging the relevant paperwork or suggesting that someone else using her name made those requests. The latter defense is rather crazy. If true, it would constitute a major crime. If untrue, then Power has hung herself. Susan Rice repeatedly lied about her unmasking requests, but what Power is doing here is Hillaryesque. And we know how that worked out for her.
Obama administration knew about Russian bribery plot before uranium deal
The Obama administration knew that Russia had used bribery, kickbacks and extortion to get a stake in the US atomic energy industry — but cut deals giving Moscow control of a large chunk of the US uranium supply anyway, according to a report Tuesday.
The FBI used a confidential US witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed the Kremlin had compromised an American uranium trucking company, The Hill reported.
Executives at the company, Transport Logistics International, kicked back about $2 million to the Russians in exchange for lucrative no-bid contracts — a scheme that violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the report said.
The feds also learned that Russian nuclear officials had gotten millions of dollars into the US designed to benefit the Clinton Foundation at the same time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government committee that signed off on the deals, sources told The Hill.
The racketeering operation was conducted “with the consent of higher-level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, an agent later stated in an affidavit.
But the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder did not bring charges in the case prior to the deals being cut.
At the time, President Barack Obama and Clinton’s State Department were trying to “reset” relations between the two nuclear rivals — an effort that largely failed.
The first deal was wrapped up in October 2010 when the State Department and the Committee on Foreign Investment agreed to sell part of Uranium One, a Toronto-based mining giant with operations in Wyoming, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, South Africa and elsewhere, to the Russian nuclear company Rosatom.
The move gave the Russians control over roughly 20 percent of the US uranium supply — and gave Russian strongman Vladimir Putin a large and profitable stake in the US atomic power industry.
When Donald Trump slammed Clinton on the campaign trail in 2016 over the sale, her spokesman said she was not involved in the committee review and that the State Department official who handled it said she “never intervened . . . on any [committee] matter.”
In the second deal, in 2011, Obama gave the OK for Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary to sell the Canadian company’s uranium to American nuclear power plants.
Before, Tenex could only sell reprocessed uranium from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons to power plants in the US.
“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions,” a source told the paper.
Instead of disclosing the racket in 2010, Justice continued investigating for nearly four more years, so Americans and Congress didn’t know about Russian nuclear corruption at the time the deals were completed.
Obama and the Clintons defended their actions in 2015, declaring that there was no evidence that Russians had done anything wrong and there was no national security reason to oppose the Uranium One deal.
The decision to approve Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One has been a source of political controversy since 2015, when author Peter Schweizer documented how Bill Clinton pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Russian entities.
But FBI, Energy Department and court documents showed that the feds had gathered a mountain of evidence well before the committee’s decision that Vadim Mikerin — the top Russian overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansion inside the US — was engaged in crooked behavior starting in 2009.
Holder was also on the foreign investments committee at the time the Uranium One deal was approved — but multiple current and former government officials told The Hill they did not know whether the FBI or DOJ ever told other committee members about the crimes they had uncovered.
Evidence of the illegal conduct was gathered with the help of an American businessman who acted as a confidential witness and who began making kickback payments at Mikerin’s direction and with the permission of the FBI.
The first kickback recorded by the FBI through its informant was dated Nov. 27, 2009, the records show.
In affidavits signed in 2014 and 2015, an Energy Department agent assigned to help the FBI in the case testified that Mikerin supervised a “racketeering scheme” that involved extortion, bribery, money-laundering and kickbacks that were directed by Russia and provided kickbacks to top Russian energy officials with ties to the Kremlin, according to the report.
The case exposed a serious national security breach, The Hill reported, as Mikerin had given a no-bid contract to Transport Logistics Intern
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been leading a congressional investigation into President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, had extensive contact last year with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch who was offering Warner access to former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele, according to text messages obtained exclusively by Fox News.
“We have so much to discuss u need to be careful but we can help our country,” Warner texted the lobbyist, Adam Waldman, on March 22, 2017.
“I’m in,” Waldman, whose firm has ties to Hillary Clinton, texted back to Warner.
Steele famously put together the anti-Trump dossier of unverified information that was used by FBI and Justice Department officials in October 2016 to get a warrant to conduct surveillance of former Trump adviser Carter Page. Despite the efforts, Steele has not agreed to an interview with the committee.
Secrecy seemed very important to Warner as the conversation with Waldman heated up March 29, when the lobbyist revealed that Steele wanted a bipartisan letter from Warner and the committee’s chairman, North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, inviting him to talk to the Senate intelligence panel.
Throughout the text exchanges, Warner seemed particularly intent on connecting directly with Steele without anyone else on the Senate Intelligence Committee being in the loop — at least initially. In one text to the lobbyist, Warner wrote that he would “rather not have a paper trail” of his messages.
An aide to Warner confirmed to Fox News that the text messages are authentic. The messages, which were obtained from a Republican source are all marked “CONFIDENTIAL” and are not classified, were turned over to the Senate panel by Waldman last September.
Waldman, who did not return calls seeking comments, runs the Endeavor Group in Washington.
Waldman is best known for signing a $40,000 monthly retainer in 2009 and 2010 to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of controversial Russian billionaire Oleg V. Deripaska. Deripraska had his visa revoked by the State Department in 2006 because of charges, which he has denied, that he has organized crime ties.
An aide to Burr, the Republican chairman, told Fox News that Burr was aware of the “contact” Warner made with Steele’s representative but added, “I don’t believe he was aware of the content of the text messages” initially.
North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, left, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, with Warner.
The senators released a joint statement to Fox News stressing they are working together, while blasting the “leaks of incomplete information.”
They said the committee has been in possession of this material for several months and committee investigators have pursued all relevant investigative leads related to the material.
“From the beginning of our investigation we have taken each step in a bipartisan way, and we intend to continue to do so,” Warner and Burr said in the statement. “Leaks of incomplete information out of context by anyone, inside or outside our committee, are unacceptable.”
The conversation about Steele started on March 16, 2017, when Waldman texted, “Chris Steele asked me to call you.”
Warner responded, “Will call tomorrow be careful.”
The records show Warner and Waldman had trouble connecting by phone. On March 20, Warner pressed Waldman by text to get him access to Steele.
“Can you talk tomorrow want to get with ur English friend,” Warner texted.
“I spoke to him yesterday,” Waldman texted.
“We have so much to discuss u need to be careful but we can help our country”
– Warner, in text to lobbyist Adam Waldman, March 22, 2017
The two men appear to have finally connected about Steele by phone on March 22, according to the records.
“Hey just tried u again gotta give a speech but really want to finish our talk,” Warner texted.
Waldman, at one point, texted back that Steele really wanted a bi-partisan letter requesting his testimony first. He added that Steele was concerned about word leaking to the media that they were talking.
In one text, Warner suggested he did not want Burr or any other senator included in the discussions: “Ok but I wud (sic) like to do prelim call u me and him no one else before letter just so we have to trail to start want to discuss scope first before letter no leaks.”
Waldman noted repeatedly that Steele was concerned about leaks and was “spooked” by all of the attention he had received around the world. Steele, he said, was skittish about talking to Warner.
Warner texted back on March 30: “We want to do this right private in London don’t want to send letter yet cuz if we can’t get agreement wud rather not have paper trail.”
On April 5, Warner texted, “Any word on Steele.”
“Yes seems to have cold feet from the leaks. Said he wanted a bipartisan letter followed by written questions,” texted Waldman, adding that the Wall Street Journal had contacted him asking if he was an intermediary between the panel and Steele.
In the text messages, Warner also discussed the possibility of a trip to see Steele.
On March 23, Warner texted, “Need to coordinate date for trip can u talk with my scheduler also want to discuss Paul,” an apparent reference to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, whose initials are used in the next text by Waldman.
On March 26, Warner texted, “Really need to set date things r going to really pick up.”
“Standying by to do it,” texted Waldman. “Awaiting call from your scheduler and also the letter he (Steele) would like they(sic) we discussed. And have second interesting thing to raise. Pls call.”
But after calls back and forth, Warner made clear that he wanted to talk to Steele directly without Burr or anyone else being involved, even though Steele was insisting through Waldman that the contact start with a bipartisan letter inviting him to cooperate with the Senate panel.
“Hey can’t we do brief (off the record) call today before letter so I can frame letter,” Warner texted Waldman on March 29.
“Steele wants to have letter first. Or did you mean call w me?” Waldman texted back.
Warner’s text messages were quietly given to the intelligence committee after he and Burr signed a joint request for the messages last June. Warner and Burr privately informed the rest of the Democratic and Republican senators on the panel of Warner’s text messages in a meeting last October.
A Warner aide acknowledged that Warner and Burr revealed the texts to their colleagues on the panel because “they realized out of context it doesn’t look great.” But aides to Warner and Burr both stressed that the chairman was kept apprised of Warner’s efforts.
An aide to Burr knew there was a “back channel” Warner was using to try and get to Steele and was not concerned that Warner was freelancing on the matter.
Warner began texting with Waldman in February 2017 about the possibility of helping to broker a deal with the Justice Department to get the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to potentially face criminal charges. That went nowhere, though a Warner aide told Fox News that the senator shared his previously undisclosed private conversations about WikiLeaks with the FBI.
Over the course of four months between February and May 2017, Warner and Waldman also exchanged dozens of texts about possible testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee from Deripaska, Waldman’s primary Russian billionaire client.
In January 2009, Harper’s Magazine reported that Deripaska had hired an advisory firm with close ties to Hillary Clinton to help him get a visa to enter the United States.” The magazine quoted Waldman as saying his firm does not lobby, though he filed paperwork with the Justice Department to represent Deripaska before the U.S. government.
In the dozens of text messages between February 2017 and May 2017, Waldman also talked to Warner about getting Deripraska to cooperate with the intelligence committee. There have been reports that Deripraksa, who has sued Manafort over a failed business deal, has information to share about the former Trump aide.
In May 2017, the Senate and House intelligence committees decided not to give Deripraska legal immunity in exchange for testimony to the panels. The text messages between Warner and Waldman appeared to stop that month.
Isn’t it great that Maryland will be celebrating this BLM Moment?
The school board approved the resolution on Thursday making it one of the first school districts in the state of Maryland to do so. On Monday, the first day, people were encouraged to wear all black.
FOX 5’s Anjali Hemphill visited Parkdale High School where she found lots of participation but also some opposition. Hemphill says some students watched a video called “The Talk,” when she visited on Monday. “The Talk” is an example of one of several films and books that are recommended by the teacher’s union for “Black Lives Matter Week of Action.”
Organizers say “Black Lives Matter Week of Action” is about encouraging conversation and reflection about social justice in schools. “We start this conversation in schools because for many people and for many students, this is community. This is where you learn and where you talk to your peers. Maybe your professors and advisor that are going to advise you later on in life. So school is the most appropriate place to have these conversations,” said Joshua Omolola, a Parkdale High School student.
Let’s Celebrate These Model Citizens.
Participation is not mandatory, only encouraged. Hemphill said she spoke to both students and teachers who are excited to incorporate this subject into a week that is already being spent celebrating Black History Month. Hemphill said she also spoke to a teacher who didn’t want to go on camera in fear of retaliation. The teacher, who is an African American woman, says she does not support “Black Lives Matter Week of Action” and is very concerned about this new resolution passed by the board.
“I’m uncomfortable because I don’t believe in their thirteen principles – and I’m an African American. But I don’t believe in their cause. I don’t particularly want to try and teach anybody about their thirteen principles because I don’t believe in their thirteen principles. I’m also a parent, and my children go to Prince George’s County Public School, and I don’t want a teacher trying to teach my children about “Black Lives Matter,” said the unnamed teacher.
“I haven’t had a kid to walk out of my classroom. Only kid I’ve had – we’ve had discussions, and we’ve had heated discussions in the class. For some reason the students that are in this school are really – I guess because it’s so diverse – they are really good with respecting each other’s opinions,” said Neville Adams, and English and student government teacher at Parkdale.
Hemphill said she asked the board if they would allow other activist groups to have a “Week of Action” in their schools. The board said they would consider other ideas that encourage tolerance, equity and social justice.
I’m not addicted to opioids, I can stop anytime I want to but I just don’t want to.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee released a report in mid-January that received surprisingly little media attention despite its provocative assertion that Obamacare, and particularly its enormous expansion of Medicaid, is a driving force behind the opioid epidemic.
The case laid out by the report is straightforward, logical, and politically unspeakable. It’s an argument generally made in hushed tones until now, and it’s easy to see why. Even the Senate Homeland Security report was swiftly denounced as a “partisan fantasy” peddled by chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) in what little mainstream media coverage it received. Thou shalt not speak ill of Medicaid.
Older people are becoming addicted to opioids also.
And yet, the critics could find no way to refute the actual data in the report. They denounced it with thunderous virtue-signaling outrage, attacked those involved in preparing it, criticized arguments it did not make – such as pretending the report claims the opioid epidemic was caused by Medicaid expansion, rather than exacerbated by it – or simply assumed that all critiques of Medicaid and Obamacare must be partisan hit jobs, Q.E.D.
This validates one of the core concerns about politicizing medicine, or any other scientific field, by putting Big Government in charge of it. Rational discussion becomes impossible. Every analysis quickly devolves into a partisan brawl.
The report postulates Medicaid expansion is a contributing factor to the epidemic of opioid abuse – not the sole or original cause, as the report itself and Sen. Johnson took pains to point out, despite mischaracterizations by critics. Much of the opioid crisis involves prescription drugs, which can become addictive even when legitimately prescribed, and are often stolen through fraud and resold on the street. Medicaid expansion greatly increased access to prescription drugs. Medicaid also includes programs to fight drug abuse, but some of those programs involve pharmaceutical treatments that can themselves become addictive, especially when they fall into the hands of street pushers.
It requires no great leap of logic to see the connection between a dramatic increase in access to drugs and a problem driven by easy access to drugs, and yet it is evidently heretical to state that relationship out loud. That’s even more remarkable when the increased use and abuse of painkillers is universally acknowledged as a major element of the opioid crisis.
No one seems to have trouble acknowledging that fact when blaming pharmaceutical companies for creating and pushing drugs, doctors for over-prescribing them, or Americans for reporting remarkably high levels of pain and demanding truckloads of pills to deal with it. The Senate report itself states at the very beginning that the opioid epidemic is complicated, and “most agree that development, marketing, and medical training regarding drug usage – and the resulting over-prescription of opioids – have played a key role.”
Ask if a massive government program that makes it much easier for over one-fifth of the population to get drugs could be part of the problem, however, and you’re a hyper-partisan monster who really just wants to kill poor people by taking away their Obamacare. The Senate committee demonstrated its understanding of just how hot this political potato is by filling the early pages of the report with lavish praise for Medicaid and its good intentions, and repeatedly stating that government spending on drugs is but one factor in a complex crisis that deserves careful analysis.
The report studied hundreds of cases in which Medicaid was abused and defrauded to obtain opioids that were often resold on the streets. The report quotes Sam Quinones’ award-winning book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic to explain why this outcome was entirely predictable: “We can talk morality all day long, but if you’re drawing five hundred dollars a month and you have a Medicaid card that allows you to get a monthly supply of pills worth several thousand dollars, you’re going to sell your pills.”
Some of the fraud cases detailed in the report go far beyond individual beneficiaries making the sort of calculation Quinones described. Some of them were organized conspiracies involving large numbers of Medicaid beneficiaries recruited to provide inventory to drug dealers. The largest scheme chronicled in the report saw over a billion dollars change hands.
A police officer quoted in the report observed that pharmacists are more likely to fill dubious prescriptions when Medicaid is involved. The Justice Department launched a program over the summer to study the role played real and fraudulent prescriptions for opioids in the drug crisis.
The Senate Homeland Security report further notes that Medicaid fraud is rampant and has not been handled effectively by the government, a fact known to any serious student of the waste, fraud, and abuse that politicians of both parties vow to crack down upon during every election.
Other fraud-susceptible programs such as Medicare, the VA, and the food stamp program are duly cited by the report as sources of opioids.
(Yes, the food stamp program. Among other things, it is well-known to investigators that some SNAP card holders engage in “trafficking” of their benefits, and often purchase drugs with the money they receive. This has been specifically cited as a contributing factor to the opioid crisis. Also, shop owners have been prosecuted for allowing customers to use SNAP benefits to pay directly for forbidden items. One such case documented in the Senate report involved a small grocery store with a back-room stash of “Medicaid-funded OxyContin pills.”)
“The research suggests, however, that Medicaid is the federal program most prone to abuse, and the primary government funding source for the epidemic,” the authors point out.
“There appears to be no limit to the types of schemes used to scam the Medicaid program, from large drug rings that employ beneficiaries as ‘runners’ to fill oxycodone prescriptions, to nurses working the night shift who steal hydrocodone pills from patients. Illicit painkillers obtained with Medicaid cards are being resold at handsome profits nationwide, in places ranging from the streets of Milwaukee to a Native American reservation in upstate New York,” says the report.
Another problem is the illicit use of drugs intended to treat drug addiction, notably suboxone. The attorney general of Kentucky is quoted declaring that “wrongful prescribing of suboxone is flooding our communities with yet another drug that is killing our children.”
It’s not just illicit street purchases increasing in tandem with Medicaid expansion. National Review points to Centers for Disease Control data that “opioid prescribing rates among Medicaid enrollees are at least twofold higher than rates for persons with private insurance.” In Washington State, the CDC found that Medicaid beneficiaries were 5.7 times more likely to die of opioid-related causes.
The most provocative section of the report introduces facts and figures to buttress the argument that opioid abuse has grown worse in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare.
“More than 80 percent of the 298 separate Medicaid-opioids cases identified were filed in Medicaid expansion states, led by New York, Michigan, Louisiana, New Jersey, and Ohio,” the report states. “The number of criminal cases increased 55 percent in the first four years after the Medicaid expansion, from 2014 to 2017, compared to the four-year period before expansion.”
It is further noted that drug overdose deaths are increasing almost twice as fast in expansion states, hospital stays for opioid-related issues “massively spiked” after expansion, and Medicaid spending for drug abuse treatment is rising faster in expansion states.
Conversely, as Investors Business Daily notes, eight of the 15 states with the lowest overdose rates did not expand Medicaid. All of these observations should be considered with the usual caveat that correlation does not necessarily indicate causation – there are almost certainly other factors common to expansion states that help to explain their rising addiction rates, although the dramatic increase immediately after the expansion is not easily dismissed.
These assertions are based on official figures that most analysts agree are significantly under-stating the depths of the opioid crisis. One specialist quoted in the Senate report said the opioid epidemic is “deadlier than the AIDS epidemic at its peak.”
Reviewing the Senate Homeland Security report for Forbes, Sally Pipes notes that state Medicaid expansion had the perverse effect of “enrolling able-bodied, childless adults in their Medicaid programs than it does for children and the destitute elderly.” Able-bodied childless adults are also the group experiencing an anomalous increase in mortality rates, which in turn is believed to be strongly influenced by opioid addiction.
“About 80 percent of heroin and fentanyl users spiraled into their addictions after first getting hooked on prescription painkillers. The Medicaid expansion made those painkillers widely and cheaply available,” Pipes notes, succinctly stating the point nobody is supposed to make.
She also tackles the bizarre argument that Medicaid is a net plus because it treats more drug addicts than it creates, which is the sort of argument that only makes sense to people whose capacity for reason has been eroded by decades of worshipping Big Government. (Try this argument for comparison purposes: “Tobacco companies are a net plus for public health because they provide so much funding to treat smoking-related illnesses.”)
Pipes suggests addressing the crisis by rolling back the Medicaid expansion and block-granting funds to states, which could help to drain the bureaucratic swamp that hides so much Medicaid corruption and strongly incentivize states to watch their health-care dollars more carefully.
Such suggestions run strongly against the current political tides, with Democrats pushing hard for even more centralized political control of medicine and ever-larger bureaucracies, with an eye toward midwifing the birth of the doomsday bureaucratic monstrosity known as single-payer socialized medicine. Imagine how bad the opioid crisis will get if everyone gets Medicaid.
But of course, you’re not supposed to imagine that, much less conduct hard research into any aspect of the absolutely forbidden notion that government makes problems worse by subsidizing them.
