Tag Archives: Democrat Party

News

FBI and DOJ used Democrat-funded Steele dossier to justify wiretapping of Trump campaign

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Left to right: Comey, Lynch, Clinton, McCabe
Left to right: Comey, Lynch, Clinton, McCabe

Wow, so for some time, the mainstream media had been telling me that the FBI and DOJ, during the Obama administration, never did any surveillance of the Trump campaign at the request of the Democrats. But whenever anyone asked them to release information about the basis for their investigations of Trump, they wouldn’t reveal anything.

But Judicial Watch was on the case, and they finally managed to get heavily redacted copies of documents showing what the FBI and DOJ were doing during the election.

The basis of the FBI and DOJ surveillance of Trump campaign personnel was the Steele dossier, which was collected for Fusion GPS, a Democrat opposition research firm.

Fox News explains:

On four occasions, the FBI told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court that it “did not believe” former British spy Christopher Steele was the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating former Trump aide Carter Page in Russian collusion, newly released documents reveal.

Instead, the FBI suggested to the court, the September 2016 article by Michael Isikoff was independent corroboration of the salacious, unverified allegations against Trump in the infamous Steele Dossier. Federal authorities used both the Steele Dossier and Yahoo News article to convince the FISA court to authorize a surveillance warrant for Page.

But London court records show that contrary to the FBI’s assessments, Steele briefed Yahoo News and other reporters in the fall of 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS — the opposition research firm behind the dossier.

The revelations are contained in heavily-redacted documents released over the weekend after a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the organization Judicial Watch.

The materials released by the DOJ include an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Page as well as several renewal applications.

So, there was only one source used as the basis for the surveillance warrant request: Steele’s dossier. The articles that appeared in the mainstream media was all based on Steele himself.

Conservative Review has more on what was in the released FBI and DOJ memos:

Over 400 pages of documents related to the FISA court warrant applications to surveil former Trump campaign operative Carter Page have been released. Now we know for certain: The unverified “Steele dossier” was used as evidence to get a warrant to spy on Page.

Though heavily redacted, the documents make clear that the FBI told the FISA court Page is a Russian agent who was betraying the United States. The dossier, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, served as the first piece of evidence cited to allege Page coordinated with the Russians to influence the election. The FBI cited additional evidence, an article written by Michael Isikoff for Yahoo news, but failed to disclose that Isikoff received his information from Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who authored the dossier.

What does that mean? It means that the FBI presented unverified campaign opposition research to FISA court judges to spy on Page, and the judges signed off on the applications.

So, who paid for the Steele dossier?

The far-left Washington Post explains:

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

The FBI and DOJ didn’t tell the FISA court about who was funding the Steele dossier when they applied for the warrant. Because if they had, they would have been denied the warrant. No FISA court would approve surveillance of the Republican party if the sole basis for the warrant was uncorroborated opposition research funded by the Democrat party. In order to get the FISA warrant, the request had to be written in such a way that the funding of the Steele dossier was not revealed, and Steele was not declared to be the source of the news articles used as corroborating evidence.

News

Are the policies of the secular left good for children?

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Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?
Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?

The buzz on Friday was all about a fake news article put out by Time magazine, and later celebrated by CNN and the Washington Post. Let’s quickly review the mistakes in the Time / CNN / Washington Post propaganda, and then we’ll ask the question in the title: do people on the secular left really care about children?

The review comes from The Federalist:

The cover features a 2-year-old Honduran girl sobbing as she looks up at Trump, with the words “Welcome to America.” Inside, TIME reported the little girl was one of those separated from her mother because of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy on families crossing the border illegally. She was taken “screaming” from her mother by border agents, the report claimed.

[…]“The original version of this story misstated what happened to the girl in the photo after she taken from the scene,” the correction reads. “The girl was not carried away screaming by U.S. Border Patrol agents; her mother picked her up and the two were taken away together.”

Reuters talked to the little girl’s father, who said she was not separated from her mother. The Honduran government confirmed his version of events. A border patrol agent who was at the scene, Carlos Ruiz, described what actually happened to CBS News.

We were patrolling the border, it was after 10 o’clock at night. We asked her to set the kid down in front of her, not away from her … and so we can properly search the mother. So, the kid immediately started crying as she set her down. I personally went up to the mother and asked her, ‘Are you doing okay, is the kid okay?’ And she said, ‘Yes, she’s tired and thirsty and it’s 11 o’clock at night.

The father also revealed the mother left three other children behind, and was crossing the border in search of a job — not in search of asylum. She didn’t tell any of them when she left. He told The Daily Mail the photo “broke his heart,” and he didn’t support her decision.

“Why would she want to put our little girl through that?” he said. “But it was her decision at the end of the day.”

In addition, Immigration and Customs Enforcement told media outlets the mother was attempting to cross the border illegally for a second time — moving her crime from a misdemeanor up to a felony.

“I don’t have any resentment for my wife, but I do think it was irresponsible of her to take the baby with her in her arms because we don’t know what could happen,” the father added.

He also claimed he heard the mother paid a smuggler $6,000 to get her across the border .

Even after the facts came out, Time continued to defend the piece, but then was forced to print a major correction. Time was celebrated by other #FakeNews media. CNN posted an article praising the #FakeNews story, before correcting it. The Washington Post also celebrated the #FakeNews story, until they had to issue a correction, but they hid the correction. A commonsense interpretation of these facts shows that the mainstream media really has no interest in reporting the news objectively. As I explained before, all the peer-reviewed studies show that the mainstream media is almost entirely composed of secular leftists.

But nevermind all that. I want to focus on whether the people on the secular left, and their allies in the #FakeNews media, really do have an authentic concern for children.

Do secular leftists really care about children?

This article by Trevor Grant Thomas from The American Thinker lists a few secular leftist policies that are anti-child, and then I’ll excerpt one, and add some that he missed.

The list:

  1. abortion (kill unwanted children)
  2. welfare state (makes women to swap fathers for welfare)
  3. poverty (socialism and fatherlessness kills prosperity)
  4. public schools / teachers unions (against school choice and voucher programs)

The excerpt is about #2:

Even longer than they have ignored the right to life, American liberals have worked to build a massive welfare state that has played a terrible role in the destruction of the family — especially the black family. Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh again reminded Americans which political party enabled generations of children — again, especially black children — to be separated from their parents.

The Democrat Party exists on dependency, and people that escape it pose a problem. So don’t buy that the Democrats care about separated families. Because, after all… the Democrat Party literally subsidized single motherhood in the black community for decades. It was called AFDC.

The Democrat Party promoted a welfare policy that gave single women additional money for every child they had. The father need not ever be around. In many cases, the father was not even known, the father was not even identified because the Democrat Party assumed the role.

If you want to talk about honestly separating families, the Democrat Party wrote the book on it and promoted it and campaigned on it and won elections on the basis of separated families where the government took over the economic responsibilities of the father.

Never forget that it was Democrats who destroyed the black family in America.

Black women were more likely to be married before welfare programs
Black women were more likely to be married before welfare programs

For my contribution, I’ll note that the two great redefinitions of marriage, no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage, were both championed by secular leftists. These deprived children of their biological mother or father, or both in the case of gay adoption. The sexual revolution also a project of the secular left, made sex about recreation instead of keeping it inside of a life-long commitment. Finally, the secular left under Obama increased the national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. This basically means that future generations of children will have all their income taxed away to pay for the hedonism of secular leftists today. The Democrat Party is truly the party of slavery – children not yet born are their slaves.

Here is a corrected version of the Time Cover with the inaccuracies fixed:

This is what the Time magazine cover should have said
What the Time magazine cover should have said (Source: The Daily Caller)

OK, and finally, check out this hilarious tweet by an actual journalist, Stephen Miller, who accurately predicted how CNN would attack anyone who pointed out the mistakes in the Time story. He tweeted that to Brian Stelter of CNN. And sure enough, CNN later mailed out an attack on the fact-checkers that matched Miller’s prediction almost word for word.

News

Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter ally with leftist group linked to domestic terrorism

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Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

If you care about religious liberty, then you know all about religious liberty litigation groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Center for Law and Justice. These are the lawyers who argue religious liberty cases against secular-leftist fascists at the Supreme Court. In fact, Kristen Waggoner just won a case at the Supreme Court, defending Christian small business owner Jack Phillips from Colorado gay activists.

With that in mind, take a look at this story from the Daily Caller, about the big media corporations who oppose groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Excerpt:

Four of the world’s biggest tech platforms have working partnerships with a left-wing nonprofit that has a track record of inaccuracies and routinely labels conservative organizations as “hate groups.”

Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter all work with or consult the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in policing their platforms for “hate speech” or “hate groups,” a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.

The SPLC is on a list of “external experts and organizations” that Facebook works with “to inform our hate speech policies,” Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja told TheDCNF in an interview.

So, most people reading this are probably thinking “what’s the big deal? I’m just an ordinary mainstream Christian / conservative. My speech doesn’t count as hate speech”. If you’re thinking that, you clearly do not know who the SPLC is.

More:

Of the four companies, Amazon gives the SPLC the most direct authority over its platform, TheDCNF found.

[…]Jeff Bezos’ company grants the SPLC broad policing power over the Amazon Smile charitable program, while claiming to remain unbiased.

“We remove organizations that the SPLC deems as ineligible,” an Amazon spokeswoman told TheDCNF.

[…]The Smile program allows customers to identify a charity to receive 0.5 percent of the proceeds from their purchases on Amazon. Customers have given more than $8 million to charities through the program since 2013, according to Amazon.

Only one participant in the program, the SPLC, gets to determine which other groups are allowed to join it.

Christian legal groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom — which recently successfully represented a Christian baker at the Supreme Court — are barred from the Amazon Smile program, while openly anti-Semitic groups remain, TheDCNF found in May.

One month later, the anti-Semitic groups — but not the Alliance Defending Freedom — are still able to participate in the program.

So, Amazon actually banned a law firm that won a religious liberty case at the Supreme Court. Won that case 7-2, by the way. I wonder if Amazon considers that law firm a “hate group”. And whether it considers the speech that persuaded 7 out of 9 Supreme Court judges to be “hate speech”.

Ben Carson, the former Republican presidential candidate and current Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was also labeled an “extremist” by the SPLC.

Carson responded:

“When embracing traditional Christian values is equated to hatred, we are approaching the stage where wrong is called right and right is called wrong. It is important for us to once again advocate true tolerance,” Carson said in response.

The Daily Caller article notes that the SPLC has been criticized from the left as well:

The SPLC has faced tough criticisms not just from conservatives, but from left-wing establishment publications, as well:

“At a time when the line between ‘hate group’ and mainstream politics is getting thinner and the need for productive civil discourse is growing more serious, fanning liberal fears, while a great opportunity for the SPLC, might be a problem for the nation,” Ben Schreckinger, now with GQ, wrote in a June 2017 piece for Politico.

Washington Post Reporter Megan McArdle, while still reporting for Bloomberg, similarly criticized the SPLC’s flimsy definition of “hate group” in  September 2017. Media outlets who trust the SPLC’s labels, McArdle warned, “will discredit themselves with conservative readers and donors.”

First, recall from this article posted at The Federalist that the Southern Poverty Law Center was the source of the “hate map” which was used by convicted domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins in his attempt to shoot and kill everyone at the Family Research Council.

Excerpt:

Corkins would later admit that he had located Family Research Council’s office on a “hate map” produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and he planned to shoot people in the building and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches on them.

[…]Much of the ensuing media coverage ignored or downplayed Corkins’ motives, which the Washington Post referred to as “a detail sure to reignite the culture wars.” A year later, Southern Poverty Law Center founder Morris Dees was still publicly defending the inclusion of Family Research Council on the organization’s “hate map.”

Just to be clear, this gay activist was convicted of domestic terrorism, and received 25 years in prison. He was stopped by a security guard, and this video is the footage of the attempted mass murder.

Let’s find out more about SPLC, courtesy of this article from the centrist City Journal, a very respected source.

Here is the article from City Journal.

Excerpt:

Ironically, the SPLC not only overlooks most of the real hate groups in operation today, along with overtly race-based organizations, such as the pro-Latino National Council of La Raza and MEChA, but also labels moderates with whom it disagrees “extremists” if they deviate from its rigid political agenda, which embraces open borders, LGBT rights, and other left-wing totems. The SPLC has branded Somali-born reformer Ayaan Hirsi Ali an “anti-Muslin extremist” for her opposition to female genital mutilation and other oppressive Islamic practices, and designated the respected Family Research Council as a “hate group” for its opposition to same-sex marriage. Likewise, the organization deems mainstream immigration-reform advocates such as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) as hate groups. British Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz—regarded by most observers as a human rights leader—is suing the SPLC for listing him as an extremist.

More:

Critics of the SPLC accuse the lavishly funded organization of peddling fear and smearing political opponents—mostly conservatives—as bigots. Its “Hatewatch” list is avowedly ideological, acknowledging that it “monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right.” Few left-wing organizations—and no Islamist groups—are branded in this way by the SPLC. Nevertheless, the SPLC, founded in 1971, has burrowed itself into the civil rights movement, the organized bar, the cloistered culture of large law firms, the education system, and even law enforcement as a champion for “the exploited, the powerless and the forgotten.” Its executives are richly compensated, some in excess of $400,000 annually. Operating from palatial six-story quarters in Montgomery, Alabama (sometimes called the “Poverty Palace”), it enjoys a $300 million endowment, including more than $23 million in cash.

The non-profit rating group “Charity Watch” gives the SPLC an “F” rating. This is the lowest grade possible.

More:

The SPLC frequently rails against public figures as “enablers” not technically designated as hate groups or extremists, such as Texas governor Greg Abbott, former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, radio talk show host Glenn Beck, Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano, and Kentucky senator Rand Paul. Rush Limbaugh, the Breitbart News Network, the Boy Scouts of America, and Focus on the Family (founded by psychologist, broadcaster, and best-selling author James Dobson) have also earned the SPLC’s wrath.

And finally:

What many of the individuals and groups condemned by the SPLC have in common is a conservative orientation. Favoring traditional marriage becomes the moral equivalent of cross-burning; opposing illegal immigration or amnesty for illegal immigrants equates to advocating genocide; resisting the spread of radical Islam invokes Timothy McVeigh; and anti-tax Tea Party groups are now indistinguishable from armed militias or Holocaust deniers. Thus, dissent is de-legitimatized, and political foes are demonized.

[…]SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok, a 20-year veteran of the organization and editor of its “hate list”—a quarterly publication—has admitted that “our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.”

Previously, I blogged about a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Academic Questions, found that the SPLC “…fails to use objective criteria in determining which organizations should be labeled a “hate group”…”. Something to keep in mind now that you know that media corporations are letting them censor content.