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Wiretap Firestorm May Finally Sink James Comey

After holding on through a tumultuous year, FBI Director James Comey may finally have gone a bridge too far by trying to undermine President Donald Trump in the public sphere.

Comey asked the Justice Department last weekend to “publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Trump’s phones,” unnamed senior federal officials told The New York Times Sunday.

The theory has roots in mainstream media outlets, and even left-wing newspapers. Notably staff to Obama also refused to categorically deny over the weekend that Trump Tower could have been the target of Justice Department surveillance.

Yet instead of letting the issue play out, Comey reportedly sent out messages that he disagreed with the president [and leaked it to the media, no less]. Normally, such a move would cause the president to lose faith in his subordinate. .

At this point, some political observers wonder if Comey behaves in ways to score points with certain factions. Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, said Comey was looking to show he could stand up to Trump.

"[Comey] clearly has had a credibility issue and he's reacting to that by challenging the president," said Sekulow.

"If I were Trump, I would have never kept Comey," said Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia under former President Reagan.

giujohn wrote:

let's remember Obama's abuse of the IRS against political enemies

Yeah, let's — since you've obviously forgotten!

Quote:

FBI investigation

In January 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that it had found no evidence warranting the filing of federal criminal charges in connection with the affair. The FBI stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting" of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand. The officials indicated, however, that the investigation is continuing.[155][156][157][158]
DOJ investigation

In October 2015, the Justice Department notified Congress that there would be no charges against the former IRS official Lois Lerner or against anyone else in the IRS. The investigation found no evidence of illegal activity or the partisan targeting of political groups and found that no IRS official attempted to obstruct justice. The DOJ investigation did find evidence of mismanagement and Lerner's poor judgement in using her IRS account for personal messages but said "...poor management is not a crime."[159][160][1

(wiki)

On the brand-new political news website, the headlines could have been ripped from a speech by President Trump: Immigrants commit more crime, Syrian refugees are raping girls, and Muslim education is taking over the school system.

But the two-month-old Gatestone Europe website is based in the Netherlands; the contributors are Dutch. And their aim, their editor says, is to swing the debate ahead of European elections this year to deliver a tide of anti-
immigrant leaders to office in the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere.

Websites that focus on the perils of open borders, immigration and international alliances are expanding in scope and ambition in Europe, seeing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to harness the energy from Trump’s win to drive deep into a continent where traditional political parties are struggling. Some of the websites are registered in Russia. Others, like Gatestone Europe, are being supported by Americans with ties to Trump.

The official images — which show attendees up close, Park Service police monitoring crowds, protesters on the ground as well as aerial photographs shot from government helicopters — show the crowd in attendance is sparser than the president said, and certainly thinner than the crowd that Obama drew in 2009.

“I’m assuming they show exactly what the rest of the world knows,” said Keith Still, a mathematician and crowd expert at Manchester Metropolitan University in England who analyzed the news footage from the Trump inauguration. Still had not seen the Park Service images released Monday.

“It was a very large crowd,” Still said. “It was also a third of the Obama crowd in 2009.” That estimate is shared by other crowd experts.

In America you'll get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American

Ain't no lions or tigers ain't no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Everybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard little wog sail away with me

Sail away sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You're all gonna be an American

Donald Trump is not lying about his smarts. He has a very high IQ.

President Trump and congressional Republicans are poised to roll back a series of Obama-era worker safety regulations targeted by business groups, beginning Monday night with a vote by the Senate to kill a rule that required federal contractors to disclose and correct serious safety violations.

...A half-dozen other worker safety regulations are in Republican crosshairs, with one headed to the Senate floor as soon as this week. Many are directed at companies with federal contracts. Such companies employ 1 in 5 American workers — meaning the effort could have wide-ranging effects.

Donald Trump is not lying about his smarts. He has a very high IQ.

We owe it to all the people who were harmed by that abusive witch hunt against conservatism.

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): When I use shadow government here in these descriptions I’m talking about Obama administration holdovers in what I call the deep state which is these deeply invisible bureaucratic positions, people who are there by virtue of appointment, they’ve never been elected you don’t know who they are. These are the people leaking. These are the people held over from the Obama administration. [Premiere Radio Network, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 3/2/2017]

THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SHOOK the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victory—with theories ranging from Russian hacking to “fake news.”

We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.

While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season...