Important, from Judicial Watch:
Judicial Watch: FBI Admits Hillary Clinton Emails Found in Obama White House
Also Confirms Over 49,000 Clinton Server Emails Found on Weiner Laptop
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that a senior FBI official admitted, in writing and under oath, that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President. The FBI also admitted nearly 49,000 Clinton server emails were reviewed as result of a search warrant for her material on the laptop of Anthony Weiner.
E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, made the disclosure to Judicial Watch as part of court-ordered discovery into the Clinton email issue.
U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides, as well as Priestap, to be deposed or answer writer questions under oath. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”
Priestap was asked by Judicial Watch to identify representatives of Hillary Clinton, her former staff, and government agencies from which “email repositories were obtained.” Priestap responded with the following non-exhaustive list:
- Bryan Pagliano
- Cheryl Mills
- Executive Office of the President [Emphasis added]
- Heather Samuelson
- Jacob Sullivan
- Justin Cooper
- United States Department of State
- United States Secret Service
- Williams & Connolly LLP
Priestap also testifies that 48,982 emails were reviewed as a result of a warrant for Clinton email account information from the laptop of Anthony Weiner, who had been married to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
A complete copy of Priestap’s interrogatory responses is available here. Priestap, is serving as assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division and helped oversee both the Clinton email and the 2016 presidential campaign investigations. Priestap testified in a separate lawsuit that Clinton was the subject of a grand jury investigation related to her BlackBerry email accounts.
“This astonishing confirmation, made under oath by the FBI, shows that the Obama FBI had to go to President Obama’s White House office to find emails that Hillary Clinton tried to destroy or hide from the American people.” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “No wonder Hillary Clinton has thus far skated – Barack Obama is implicated in her email scheme.”
Priestap was ordered to answer the written questions by United States District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth when he ruled in January that Judicial Watch’s discovery could begin in Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. This action came in Judicial Watch’s July 2014 FOIA lawsuit for:
Copies of any updates and/or talking points given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency concerning, regarding, or related to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Any and all records or communications concerning, regarding, or relating to talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency.
Judicial Watch’s discovery seeks answers to:
- Whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system;
- whether the State Department’s efforts to settle this case beginning in late 2014 amounted to bad faith; and
- whether the State Department adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.
###t
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for this:
Tuesday, April 23, 2019. Crazy Elizabeth Warren gives a town hall that
never notes foreign issues but promises give-aways that she could never
pay for unless the forever wars are ended.
In the crazy of the last two decades a number of things have gone wrong. I'm a Democrat. I'm a Democrat because I believe in the party of FDR (and am shocked that we're not pitching Medicare for All as a way of honoring the late president who wanted us to have true universal healthcare). Republicans are nice people. Despite the press trying to play them as racists, the bulk of Republicans are not racists (and there are some racists in the Democratic Party). The Republicans, broadly speaking, have a mindset of punishment. Everything is the end of the world and must be punished. Nothing is a mistake or an accident, everything must be punished. It's why they're considered a law and order party. As someone who actually knows the law, I've spent my lifetime rolling my eyes over what Republicans call the law.
That's why I really don't care for the wafflers. We didn't embrace John Dean. He's a felon. He's trash. People who should know better -- as well as people who never bothered to learn his actual role in Watergate -- embraced him. I hope they survived whatever social disease he passed on to them.
Senator Elizabeth Warren's always been a liar. And, let's be honest, from cheap trash. I've never been a fan. She's a Republican who swung over to the left when she finally realized she wouldn't have a career in Massachusetts as a right-winger. What had been embraced in an Oklahoma trailer park and elsewhere, wasn't going to play in the state of Ted Kennedy, Deval Patrick, etc. So she called herself a Democrat and some people really are stupid enough to look at her and say, "She's calls herself a democrat, she's a Democrat."
It's not that simple and she made that clear at her CNN town hall where she brought up her looks (you really hope there's a tiny person in there and that outside is just husks and a hard shell concealing that tiny person) and other topics.
But where it got scary -- and telling -- was in the section below:
COOPER: And welcome back. We're live in Manchester, New Hampshire, for a special CNN Democratic presidential town hall event. Five town halls tonight, with some of the top Democratic contenders, all of them are taking questions from college students.
Right now, it is Senator Elizabeth Warren's turn.
We're going to have questions from the audience in a minute. I do just want to ask you, you have called for impeachment proceedings to be initiated against President Trump. What do you say to those Democrats who say, look, this is not the time, it's going to take away the focus from winning in 2020? Speaker Pelosi told her caucus again just today that she no plans to immediately initiate impeachment proceedings.
WARREN: So, there is no political inconvenience exception to the United States Constitution.
(APPLAUSE)
WARREN: This one is -- if I can, I want to take a little time on this because I think this is really important.
Last Thursday, I had been out -- I had been to South Carolina. This was all about climate change. That's where I was, South Carolina, coastal communities protesting off shore drilling.
I then came to Colorado, the biggest drought in 1,200 years. And then to Utah where they had one of the worst wildfire seasons in a generation.
I'm on an airplane and the Mueller report drops. And so, I start reading it on the airplane, I read it on through the evening, I read it into the wee hours of the morning. And when I get to the end, three things just jump off the page.
I don't care if you're a Democrat, a Republican, an independent, a libertarian, a vegetarian.
(LAUGHTER)
WARREN: Three things just totally jump off the page. The first is that a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election in order to help Donald Trump. The evidence is just there. Read it, footnote after footnote, page after page documentation.
Part two, Donald Trump welcomed that help.
So, on the first one about what they did, understand, this was a sophisticated attack. They attacked part of voting system. That's going to be an ongoing federal investigation. They hacked into more than 50 computers at the DNC, the DCCC, a very serious attack.
And Donald Trump welcoming it -- in the Mueller report, just read it. He gets off the phone from an unnamed caller and looks up and says to the other person on the phone, there are more leaks coming.
The idea that he was welcoming what was happening from the Russian government, and by the summer of 2016, the report documents that by that point, the Trump adminis -- the Trump campaign actually had a worked out formal process for dealing with the leaks that were coming in from the Russians. So that's part two.
Part three is when the federal government starts to investigate part one and part two, Donald Trump took repeated steps aggressively to try to halt the investigation, derail the investigation, push the investigation somewhere else, but otherwise keep that investigation from going forward and turning into a serious investigation about a hostile foreign government that it attacked us and about his own personal interests.
So, here's how I see this: if any other human being in this country had done what's documented in the Mueller report, they would be arrested and put in jail. Obstruction of justice is a serious crime in this country. But Mueller believed because of the directions from Donald Trump's Justice Department that he could not bring a criminal indictment against a sitting president. I think he's wrong on that, but that's what he believed. So he serves the whole thing up to the United States Congress and says, in effect, if there's going to be any accountability, that accountability has to come from the Congress. And the tool that we are given for that accountability is the impeachment process.
This is not about politics. This is about principle. This is about what kind of a democracy we have. In a dictatorship, everything in government revolves around protecting the one person at the center, but not in our democracy and not under our Constitution.
We have checks and balances, and we have to proceed here in a way understanding our place in history that not only protects democracy now, but protects democracy when the next president comes in and the next president and the president after that.
COOPER: But you...
WARREN: That's our responsibility.
(APPLAUSE)
COOPER: But you started off by saying -- by talking about some of your travels and people talking about climate change and their concerns and tabletop issues.
WARREN: Yes. Yes.
COOPER: Doesn't putting a lot of Democrats' focus on impeaching the president, which is not going to pass in the Senate, it's not really going to go anywhere in that sense, doesn't that take away focus from the tabletop issues that you and other Democrats say they want to run on?
WARREN: So, you know, let me just say, if you've actually read the Mueller report, it's all laid out there. It's not like it's going to take a long time to figure this out. It's there. It's got the footnotes. It's got the points. It connects directly to the law.
But this really is fundamentally -- I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and so did everybody else in the Senate and in the House. And I believe that every person in the Senate and the House ought to have to vote and to say either, yeah, that's OK with me, yeah, let a president just step in the way he did when he told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller, and then told the White House counsel to go lie about having told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller, and then told the White House counsel to write a letter saying that Donald Trump had not told him to go fire Mueller, and then to say, why on Earth would you take notes about what I said to you? The lawyers I deal with never put anything in writing.
If there are people in the House or the Senate who want to say that's what a president can do when the president is being investigated for his own wrongdoings or when a foreign government attacks our country, then they should have to take that vote and live with it for the rest of their lives.
And there it is: The GOP's everyone's guilty, let's all live in fear. In fairness, they would argue that we're unrealistic about humanity and our belief in the ability to learn and change, they'd laugh that we'd leave our front doors unlocked if left to our own devices. (And, yes, I have done that many times in my life, let the front door unlocked while I went out on errands.)
There is so much that is wrong and flat out disturbing about the statements Elizabeth Warren made. They prove that she does not understand the Constitution or Constitutional law at all. No surprise, check her transcripts, that wasn't her field. I don't need another Republican in the White House. If it happens, it happens and I won't spend four years obsessing. But I don't need another Republican in the White House and everything she said goes to the fact that she remains a Republican and as reactionary as ever.
She talks about her oath to uphold the Constitution and that's flat out laughable but we'll come back to that. Let's instead focus on her three-point b.s.
WARREN: Three things just totally jump off the page. The first is that a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election in order to help Donald Trump. The evidence is just there. Read it, footnote after footnote, page after page documentation.
Footnotes, and I don't expect Warren to grasp this, are not inserted in a document to make an argument. That's not what a footnote is. I'm glad that she's learned to read them -- at the University of Houston, she hadn't and was laughed and destroyed in a class discussion because she didn't read the footnotes on the work being discussed (oh, Lizzie, I know so much about you).
"A hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election." Attacked? We need secure voting, that's not particular to 2016. Bev Harris, Randi Rhodes and many others have long highlighted the needed for a paper trail and secure voting machines. I'm glad that 2016 is motivating many people to call for that -- US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard being only one example -- but let's not pretend that Russia -- with or without the troll farm on social media -- constitutes an attack on the US election.
An attack on election would be, for example, the US government's attack on the 2010 election in Iraq when the Iraqi people voted thug Nouri al-Maliki out as prime minister. And President Barack Obama tossed out their votes with the US-negotiated Erbil Agreement. It went around the Iraqi Constitution, it went around the will of the people. It was illegal, as Nouri would note after he used it to secure his second term as prime minister -- that was the term where he increased his persecution of all Iraqis with a special emphasis on Sunnis and a real zest in raping and beating Iraqi girls and women. That was the term where his thug ways led to the rise of ISIS. Elizabeth Warren has heard of ISIS, hasn't she? Sometimes it does seem as though she tosses out this and that laundry list of domestic programs just because she wants to avoid addressing international issues -- one of her greatest weaknesses.
So that's just one example of an attack on an election -- and the attacker was the US government. Poor Liz, as they say, if it weren't for situational ethics, she'd have none at all.
Part two, Donald Trump welcomed that help.
So, on the first one about what they did, understand, this was a sophisticated attack. They attacked part of voting system. That's going to be an ongoing federal investigation. They hacked into more than 50 computers at the DNC, the DCCC, a very serious attack.
And Donald Trump welcoming it -- in the Mueller report, just read it. He gets off the phone from an unnamed caller and looks up and says to the other person on the phone, there are more leaks coming.
The idea that he was welcoming what was happening from the Russian government, and by the summer of 2016, the report documents that by that point, the Trump adminis -- the Trump campaign actually had a worked out formal process for dealing with the leaks that were coming in from the Russians. So that's part two.
Part three is when the federal government starts to investigate part one and part two, Donald Trump took repeated steps aggressively to try to halt the investigation, derail the investigation, push the investigation somewhere else, but otherwise keep that investigation from going forward and turning into a serious investigation about a hostile foreign government that it attacked us and about his own personal interests.
Lizzie's spinning like a top. Donald Trump made a joke -- I interpret it as a joke -- that Russia should dig into Hillary's e-mails. It was a public joke.
What else was it, Lizzie Warren?
Because this is where you are at your most idiotic.
It was political speech. He was speaking at a campaign event. Political speech, pay attention, Elizabeth, being ugly won't let you pass for smart here, is protected -- Constitutionally protected.
Also pay attention: You want to campaign in 2020 as the presidential candidate? Don't expect Barack to be standing next to you too often. You're saying that in the middle of 2016, an attack took place, a gross attack and you're saying Barack did nothing. Was he too stupid to notice? Are you calling him stupid, Elizabeth, or just incompetent.
The Mueller report is a joke with regards to any hacking. It did not interview Julian Assange (who states the leak did not come from Russia, it came from a DNC staffer), it did not interview the man who has publicly stated he was the one who passed the drive with the e-mails on to Julian. Mueller didn't do his job there. If there's a reason for Mueller to appear before the Congress -- Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi believes there is -- it would be to give details on that section of the report because -- footnotes or not -- it doesn't hold up.
But what does hold up is Donald's very public remarks. If you don't see them as a joke, we can debate that. What we can't debate is that it was political speech, delivered at a campaign event and, therefore, Constitutionally protected as political speech.
I know this is hard for Lizzie Warren and ever harder for the idiots that she's whipping up using her McCarthy tactics because, let's be honest, she's forever a right-winger, that's what she's demonstrating.
For over two years, the crazies -- in the press, in the Congress, on social media -- have held the nation hostage as they've pimped one conspiracy notion after another. They don't like the results of the 2016 election. I'm sorry, was everyone born yesterday? Was this really the first election in your lifetime that ever disappointed you. Hate to break it to you but, in the US, you're going to be disappointed again, in fact a lot more times.
There was no collusion. That was the claim Lizzie and others insisted took place. An investigation was launched over this lie, our focus was diverted over this lie. And when Mueller finds no collusion, here's Elizabeth Warren showing up to whip up hatred, fear and hysteria yet again.
As I've noted repeatedly, I took maybe 24 hours -- if that -- for 9/11. Mourn by all means, don't wallow and certainly don't use a tragedy to preach fear and scare people. I don't handle fear well. When THE NATION tried to insist that 2004 would be the last election ever if the Democrats didn't win because this was the torture election, they lost me as a subscriber. Fear isn't a way to appeal to me. Fear appeals are really the terrain of bullies and liars. I believe in a better world and I believe people are better than that.
Part three is when the federal government starts to investigate part one and part two, Donald Trump took repeated steps aggressively to try to halt the investigation, derail the investigation, push the investigation somewhere else, but otherwise keep that investigation from going forward and turning into a serious investigation about a hostile foreign government that it attacked us and about his own personal interests.
Those statements could have been made about Bill Clinton. Believe me, they could have been. I left the country to avoid that moement and a conversation I overheard. I know damn well Bill could have been brought down. And BP was the one to do it. BP? You never heard of BP. Should Bill have been brought down? There were no high crimes and misdemeanors there. That was a witch hunt.
So is what's taken place against Donald Trump. I don't like Donald, I never have and that goes back to a long, long time ago -- and in fact, I've called him out online forever and a day -- you can go back to 2005 and this site only started in 2004. (Go to THIRD for the first call out in a piece Ava and I wrote.) I did and do like Bill. But it was wrong when it was done to Bill and it's wrong when it's done to Donald or to anyone. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
It is not the job of any president to help someone convict them.
Did Donald destroy evidence?
Nope. What did he do? According to Elizabeth:
And I believe that every person in the Senate and the House ought to have to vote and to say either, yeah, that's OK with me, yeah, let a president just step in the way he did when he told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller, and then told the White House counsel to go lie about having told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller, and then told the White House counsel to write a letter saying that Donald Trump had not told him to go fire Mueller, and then to say, why on Earth would you take notes about what I said to you? The lawyers I deal with never put anything in writing.
According to Elizabeth, Donald said fire Mueller and, as we know, Mueller wasn't fired.
So Donald's private conversations and deliberations -- not his actions -- are now the crime?
That wouldn't fly with any president. Elizabeth doesn't know the law and all she's doing is lying and whipping up fear and hysteria.
She went on and on about how, as a woman, she was disrespected by the press.
She's butt ugly, she's a cross between an ass and a frog in the face. I'm sorry that the press didn't celebrate her and even sorrier that Elizabeth had expected that they would.
But here's a thought: Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House. Are Elizabeth Warren's actions respectful of Nancy Pelosi and her role? I don't believe so. And, last I checked, Nancy was the voice in the House. I have no problems with members of the House calling for impeachment. I think they're wrong but have at it. But if Maxine Waters wants to call for her chamber to impeach, for example, that's within her rights, she's a member of that House. For a Senator to do so and to use Nancy as a foil to pump up her fundraising?
It's not going to work. I find it offensive and I'm not the only one. Elizabeth is creating a lot of ill will in the party -- so much so that should she do well in primaries (it's doubtful she will), she'd still have trouble wooing superdelegates.
In her town hall, it was no surprise that right-wing Liz would recognize Libertarians but not the Green Party. Guess the plan for regaining those votes is just to keep screaming at Greens, huh? That's a winning strategy! (That was sarcasm.)
I also loved it when she insulted Oklahoma, "So understand this, Cecilia. I grew up in a family that wasn't political. I grew up out in Oklahoma, and to this day I couldn't tell you how my parents were registered or my grandparents or much of anybody else." Oh, yes, because Oklahoma's so stupid, right, Elizabeth?
When not ignoring Greens, insulting Oklahoma or babbling on about her own smile, Elizabeth ignored a lot. Like this.
A US service member died Saturday in Iraq. Why did Elizabeth Warren have no comment on that? I guess you can't offer nutty impeachment fantasies and also address reality.
In fact, the entire town hall was a joke. Elizabeth never addressed any foreign relations issue, not war, not anything. She apparently has no vision or even a notion of how to end a war. Maybe she thinks -- as Donald Trump apparently did -- that the presidency is an occupation for on-the-job training and you just show up. Is that it, Elizabeth?
Does she realize how shallow she comes off. 'Here's my give away to this group, here's my give away to that group.' But she's got no world vision while wanting to be the president -- the so-called leader of the free world?
She makes empty promises because as long as these forever wars go on, there's no money for anything else. US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard grasps that, former US House Rep Beto O'Rourke grasps that, Senator Bernie Sanders grasps that . . .
Somehow it eludes Elizabeth Warren. Three trillion and counting for these forever wars and she thinks she can hand out free college without addressing that?
I'm all for free tuition. I'm all for immediate debt forgiveness on all student loans (and believe that would be a huge and immediate stimulus to the US economy). I'm for many programs domestically that will improve the lives of Americans. But I grasp we can't continue to run up the bill on these never-ending wars and have money for anything else.
Elizabeth Warren doesn't appear to grasp that and appears to have little to no interest in foreign relations. When she published her piece a few months back everyone was laughing because she didn't write it. I didn't care about that. She put her name to it. Hopefully, that meant it reflected her own beliefs. But, more and more, it looks like it was nothing but her asking someone to write about foreign policy for her because she didn't have any real ideas or thoughts of her own.
Is Joe running? As a superdelegate told me on the phone after Elizabeth's town hall, "He's running and he's going to be a good thing because the first thing that's going to happen is his announcement going to shut-down these vanity campaigns like [Elizabeth] Warren's so real issues can be focused on."
I'll admit that would be a good thing. Elizabeth's styled herself as Santa Claus with all these promises to give this and that but she can't pay for them. The only way to pay for them is to end the forever wars. And that's where she refuses to go. Speech after speech, she's got no answer for how the US leaves Iraq. She wants to be President of the United States but she can't even tell you how US troops leave Iraq after 16 years. She truly has run a vanity campaign. She might want to try to get real before Joe announces because I do believe a lot of these barely-on-life-support campaigns like hers will have their plugs pulled once Joe announces.
Let's include this from David DeGraw:
The following sites updated:
In the crazy of the last two decades a number of things have gone wrong. I'm a Democrat. I'm a Democrat because I believe in the party of FDR (and am shocked that we're not pitching Medicare for All as a way of honoring the late president who wanted us to have true universal healthcare). Republicans are nice people. Despite the press trying to play them as racists, the bulk of Republicans are not racists (and there are some racists in the Democratic Party). The Republicans, broadly speaking, have a mindset of punishment. Everything is the end of the world and must be punished. Nothing is a mistake or an accident, everything must be punished. It's why they're considered a law and order party. As someone who actually knows the law, I've spent my lifetime rolling my eyes over what Republicans call the law.
That's why I really don't care for the wafflers. We didn't embrace John Dean. He's a felon. He's trash. People who should know better -- as well as people who never bothered to learn his actual role in Watergate -- embraced him. I hope they survived whatever social disease he passed on to them.
Senator Elizabeth Warren's always been a liar. And, let's be honest, from cheap trash. I've never been a fan. She's a Republican who swung over to the left when she finally realized she wouldn't have a career in Massachusetts as a right-winger. What had been embraced in an Oklahoma trailer park and elsewhere, wasn't going to play in the state of Ted Kennedy, Deval Patrick, etc. So she called herself a Democrat and some people really are stupid enough to look at her and say, "She's calls herself a democrat, she's a Democrat."
It's not that simple and she made that clear at her CNN town hall where she brought up her looks (you really hope there's a tiny person in there and that outside is just husks and a hard shell concealing that tiny person) and other topics.
But where it got scary -- and telling -- was in the section below:
COOPER: And welcome back. We're live in Manchester, New Hampshire, for a special CNN Democratic presidential town hall event. Five town halls tonight, with some of the top Democratic contenders, all of them are taking questions from college students.
Right now, it is Senator Elizabeth Warren's turn.
We're going to have questions from the audience in a minute. I do just want to ask you, you have called for impeachment proceedings to be initiated against President Trump. What do you say to those Democrats who say, look, this is not the time, it's going to take away the focus from winning in 2020? Speaker Pelosi told her caucus again just today that she no plans to immediately initiate impeachment proceedings.
WARREN: So, there is no political inconvenience exception to the United States Constitution.
(APPLAUSE)
WARREN: This one is -- if I can, I want to take a little time on this because I think this is really important.
Last Thursday, I had been out -- I had been to South Carolina. This was all about climate change. That's where I was, South Carolina, coastal communities protesting off shore drilling.
I then came to Colorado, the biggest drought in 1,200 years. And then to Utah where they had one of the worst wildfire seasons in a generation.
I'm on an airplane and the Mueller report drops. And so, I start reading it on the airplane, I read it on through the evening, I read it into the wee hours of the morning. And when I get to the end, three things just jump off the page.
I don't care if you're a Democrat, a Republican, an independent, a libertarian, a vegetarian.
(LAUGHTER)
WARREN: Three things just totally jump off the page. The first is that a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election in order to help Donald Trump. The evidence is just there. Read it, footnote after footnote, page after page documentation.
Part two, Donald Trump welcomed that help.
So, on the first one about what they did, understand, this was a sophisticated attack. They attacked part of voting system. That's going to be an ongoing federal investigation. They hacked into more than 50 computers at the DNC, the DCCC, a very serious attack.
And Donald Trump welcoming it -- in the Mueller report, just read it. He gets off the phone from an unnamed caller and looks up and says to the other person on the phone, there are more leaks coming.
The idea that he was welcoming what was happening from the Russian government, and by the summer of 2016, the report documents that by that point, the Trump adminis -- the Trump campaign actually had a worked out formal process for dealing with the leaks that were coming in from the Russians. So that's part two.
Part three is when the federal government starts to investigate part one and part two, Donald Trump took repeated steps aggressively to try to halt the investigation, derail the investigation, push the investigation somewhere else, but otherwise keep that investigation from going forward and turning into a serious investigation about a hostile foreign government that it attacked us and about his own personal interests.
So, here's how I see this: if any other human being in this country had done what's documented in the Mueller report, they would be arrested and put in jail. Obstruction of justice is a serious crime in this country. But Mueller believed because of the directions from Donald Trump's Justice Department that he could not bring a criminal indictment against a sitting president. I think he's wrong on that, but that's what he believed. So he serves the whole thing up to the United States Congress and says, in effect, if there's going to be any accountability, that accountability has to come from the Congress. And the tool that we are given for that accountability is the impeachment process.
This is not about politics. This is about principle. This is about what kind of a democracy we have. In a dictatorship, everything in government revolves around protecting the one person at the center, but not in our democracy and not under our Constitution.
We have checks and balances, and we have to proceed here in a way understanding our place in history that not only protects democracy now, but protects democracy when the next president comes in and the next president and the president after that.
COOPER: But you...
WARREN: That's our responsibility.
(APPLAUSE)
COOPER: But you started off by saying -- by talking about some of your travels and people talking about climate change and their concerns and tabletop issues.
WARREN: Yes. Yes.
COOPER: Doesn't putting a lot of Democrats' focus on impeaching the president, which is not going to pass in the Senate, it's not really going to go anywhere in that sense, doesn't that take away focus from the tabletop issues that you and other Democrats say they want to run on?
WARREN: So, you know, let me just say, if you've actually read the Mueller report, it's all laid out there. It's not like it's going to take a long time to figure this out. It's there. It's got the footnotes. It's got the points. It connects directly to the law.
But this really is fundamentally -- I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and so did everybody else in the Senate and in the House. And I believe that every person in the Senate and the House ought to have to vote and to say either, yeah, that's OK with me, yeah, let a president just step in the way he did when he told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller, and then told the White House counsel to go lie about having told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller, and then told the White House counsel to write a letter saying that Donald Trump had not told him to go fire Mueller, and then to say, why on Earth would you take notes about what I said to you? The lawyers I deal with never put anything in writing.
If there are people in the House or the Senate who want to say that's what a president can do when the president is being investigated for his own wrongdoings or when a foreign government attacks our country, then they should have to take that vote and live with it for the rest of their lives.
And there it is: The GOP's everyone's guilty, let's all live in fear. In fairness, they would argue that we're unrealistic about humanity and our belief in the ability to learn and change, they'd laugh that we'd leave our front doors unlocked if left to our own devices. (And, yes, I have done that many times in my life, let the front door unlocked while I went out on errands.)
There is so much that is wrong and flat out disturbing about the statements Elizabeth Warren made. They prove that she does not understand the Constitution or Constitutional law at all. No surprise, check her transcripts, that wasn't her field. I don't need another Republican in the White House. If it happens, it happens and I won't spend four years obsessing. But I don't need another Republican in the White House and everything she said goes to the fact that she remains a Republican and as reactionary as ever.
She talks about her oath to uphold the Constitution and that's flat out laughable but we'll come back to that. Let's instead focus on her three-point b.s.
WARREN: Three things just totally jump off the page. The first is that a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election in order to help Donald Trump. The evidence is just there. Read it, footnote after footnote, page after page documentation.
Footnotes, and I don't expect Warren to grasp this, are not inserted in a document to make an argument. That's not what a footnote is. I'm glad that she's learned to read them -- at the University of Houston, she hadn't and was laughed and destroyed in a class discussion because she didn't read the footnotes on the work being discussed (oh, Lizzie, I know so much about you).
"A hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election." Attacked? We need secure voting, that's not particular to 2016. Bev Harris, Randi Rhodes and many others have long highlighted the needed for a paper trail and secure voting machines. I'm glad that 2016 is motivating many people to call for that -- US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard being only one example -- but let's not pretend that Russia -- with or without the troll farm on social media -- constitutes an attack on the US election.
An attack on election would be, for example, the US government's attack on the 2010 election in Iraq when the Iraqi people voted thug Nouri al-Maliki out as prime minister. And President Barack Obama tossed out their votes with the US-negotiated Erbil Agreement. It went around the Iraqi Constitution, it went around the will of the people. It was illegal, as Nouri would note after he used it to secure his second term as prime minister -- that was the term where he increased his persecution of all Iraqis with a special emphasis on Sunnis and a real zest in raping and beating Iraqi girls and women. That was the term where his thug ways led to the rise of ISIS. Elizabeth Warren has heard of ISIS, hasn't she? Sometimes it does seem as though she tosses out this and that laundry list of domestic programs just because she wants to avoid addressing international issues -- one of her greatest weaknesses.
So that's just one example of an attack on an election -- and the attacker was the US government. Poor Liz, as they say, if it weren't for situational ethics, she'd have none at all.
Part two, Donald Trump welcomed that help.
So, on the first one about what they did, understand, this was a sophisticated attack. They attacked part of voting system. That's going to be an ongoing federal investigation. They hacked into more than 50 computers at the DNC, the DCCC, a very serious attack.
And Donald Trump welcoming it -- in the Mueller report, just read it. He gets off the phone from an unnamed caller and looks up and says to the other person on the phone, there are more leaks coming.
The idea that he was welcoming what was happening from the Russian government, and by the summer of 2016, the report documents that by that point, the Trump adminis -- the Trump campaign actually had a worked out formal process for dealing with the leaks that were coming in from the Russians. So that's part two.
Part three is when the federal government starts to investigate part one and part two, Donald Trump took repeated steps aggressively to try to halt the investigation, derail the investigation, push the investigation somewhere else, but otherwise keep that investigation from going forward and turning into a serious investigation about a hostile foreign government that it attacked us and about his own personal interests.
Lizzie's spinning like a top. Donald Trump made a joke -- I interpret it as a joke -- that Russia should dig into Hillary's e-mails. It was a public joke.
What else was it, Lizzie Warren?
Because this is where you are at your most idiotic.
It was political speech. He was speaking at a campaign event. Political speech, pay attention, Elizabeth, being ugly won't let you pass for smart here, is protected -- Constitutionally protected.
Also pay attention: You want to campaign in 2020 as the presidential candidate? Don't expect Barack to be standing next to you too often. You're saying that in the middle of 2016, an attack took place, a gross attack and you're saying Barack did nothing. Was he too stupid to notice? Are you calling him stupid, Elizabeth, or just incompetent.
The Mueller report is a joke with regards to any hacking. It did not interview Julian Assange (who states the leak did not come from Russia, it came from a DNC staffer), it did not interview the man who has publicly stated he was the one who passed the drive with the e-mails on to Julian. Mueller didn't do his job there. If there's a reason for Mueller to appear before the Congress -- Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi believes there is -- it would be to give details on that section of the report because -- footnotes or not -- it doesn't hold up.
But what does hold up is Donald's very public remarks. If you don't see them as a joke, we can debate that. What we can't debate is that it was political speech, delivered at a campaign event and, therefore, Constitutionally protected as political speech.
I know this is hard for Lizzie Warren and ever harder for the idiots that she's whipping up using her McCarthy tactics because, let's be honest, she's forever a right-winger, that's what she's demonstrating.
For over two years, the crazies -- in the press, in the Congress, on social media -- have held the nation hostage as they've pimped one conspiracy notion after another. They don't like the results of the 2016 election. I'm sorry, was everyone born yesterday? Was this really the first election in your lifetime that ever disappointed you. Hate to break it to you but, in the US, you're going to be disappointed again, in fact a lot more times.
There was no collusion. That was the claim Lizzie and others insisted took place. An investigation was launched over this lie, our focus was diverted over this lie. And when Mueller finds no collusion, here's Elizabeth Warren showing up to whip up hatred, fear and hysteria yet again.
As I've noted repeatedly, I took maybe 24 hours -- if that -- for 9/11. Mourn by all means, don't wallow and certainly don't use a tragedy to preach fear and scare people. I don't handle fear well. When THE NATION tried to insist that 2004 would be the last election ever if the Democrats didn't win because this was the torture election, they lost me as a subscriber. Fear isn't a way to appeal to me. Fear appeals are really the terrain of bullies and liars. I believe in a better world and I believe people are better than that.
Part three is when the federal government starts to investigate part one and part two, Donald Trump took repeated steps aggressively to try to halt the investigation, derail the investigation, push the investigation somewhere else, but otherwise keep that investigation from going forward and turning into a serious investigation about a hostile foreign government that it attacked us and about his own personal interests.
Those statements could have been made about Bill Clinton. Believe me, they could have been. I left the country to avoid that moement and a conversation I overheard. I know damn well Bill could have been brought down. And BP was the one to do it. BP? You never heard of BP. Should Bill have been brought down? There were no high crimes and misdemeanors there. That was a witch hunt.
So is what's taken place against Donald Trump. I don't like Donald, I never have and that goes back to a long, long time ago -- and in fact, I've called him out online forever and a day -- you can go back to 2005 and this site only started in 2004. (Go to THIRD for the first call out in a piece Ava and I wrote.) I did and do like Bill. But it was wrong when it was done to Bill and it's wrong when it's done to Donald or to anyone. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
It is not the job of any president to help someone convict them.
Did Donald destroy evidence?
Nope. What did he do? According to Elizabeth:
And I believe that every person in the Senate and the House ought to have to vote and to say either, yeah, that's OK with me, yeah, let a president just step in the way he did when he told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller, and then told the White House counsel to go lie about having told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller, and then told the White House counsel to write a letter saying that Donald Trump had not told him to go fire Mueller, and then to say, why on Earth would you take notes about what I said to you? The lawyers I deal with never put anything in writing.
According to Elizabeth, Donald said fire Mueller and, as we know, Mueller wasn't fired.
So Donald's private conversations and deliberations -- not his actions -- are now the crime?
That wouldn't fly with any president. Elizabeth doesn't know the law and all she's doing is lying and whipping up fear and hysteria.
She went on and on about how, as a woman, she was disrespected by the press.
She's butt ugly, she's a cross between an ass and a frog in the face. I'm sorry that the press didn't celebrate her and even sorrier that Elizabeth had expected that they would.
But here's a thought: Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House. Are Elizabeth Warren's actions respectful of Nancy Pelosi and her role? I don't believe so. And, last I checked, Nancy was the voice in the House. I have no problems with members of the House calling for impeachment. I think they're wrong but have at it. But if Maxine Waters wants to call for her chamber to impeach, for example, that's within her rights, she's a member of that House. For a Senator to do so and to use Nancy as a foil to pump up her fundraising?
It's not going to work. I find it offensive and I'm not the only one. Elizabeth is creating a lot of ill will in the party -- so much so that should she do well in primaries (it's doubtful she will), she'd still have trouble wooing superdelegates.
In her town hall, it was no surprise that right-wing Liz would recognize Libertarians but not the Green Party. Guess the plan for regaining those votes is just to keep screaming at Greens, huh? That's a winning strategy! (That was sarcasm.)
I also loved it when she insulted Oklahoma, "So understand this, Cecilia. I grew up in a family that wasn't political. I grew up out in Oklahoma, and to this day I couldn't tell you how my parents were registered or my grandparents or much of anybody else." Oh, yes, because Oklahoma's so stupid, right, Elizabeth?
When not ignoring Greens, insulting Oklahoma or babbling on about her own smile, Elizabeth ignored a lot. Like this.
A Kentucky soldier has died in Iraq. The Department of Defense says Spc. Ryan Riley died yesterday. His death was not combat related. Spc. Riley was from Richmond.
A US service member died Saturday in Iraq. Why did Elizabeth Warren have no comment on that? I guess you can't offer nutty impeachment fantasies and also address reality.
In fact, the entire town hall was a joke. Elizabeth never addressed any foreign relations issue, not war, not anything. She apparently has no vision or even a notion of how to end a war. Maybe she thinks -- as Donald Trump apparently did -- that the presidency is an occupation for on-the-job training and you just show up. Is that it, Elizabeth?
Does she realize how shallow she comes off. 'Here's my give away to this group, here's my give away to that group.' But she's got no world vision while wanting to be the president -- the so-called leader of the free world?
She makes empty promises because as long as these forever wars go on, there's no money for anything else. US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard grasps that, former US House Rep Beto O'Rourke grasps that, Senator Bernie Sanders grasps that . . .
Somehow it eludes Elizabeth Warren. Three trillion and counting for these forever wars and she thinks she can hand out free college without addressing that?
I'm all for free tuition. I'm all for immediate debt forgiveness on all student loans (and believe that would be a huge and immediate stimulus to the US economy). I'm for many programs domestically that will improve the lives of Americans. But I grasp we can't continue to run up the bill on these never-ending wars and have money for anything else.
Elizabeth Warren doesn't appear to grasp that and appears to have little to no interest in foreign relations. When she published her piece a few months back everyone was laughing because she didn't write it. I didn't care about that. She put her name to it. Hopefully, that meant it reflected her own beliefs. But, more and more, it looks like it was nothing but her asking someone to write about foreign policy for her because she didn't have any real ideas or thoughts of her own.
Is Joe running? As a superdelegate told me on the phone after Elizabeth's town hall, "He's running and he's going to be a good thing because the first thing that's going to happen is his announcement going to shut-down these vanity campaigns like [Elizabeth] Warren's so real issues can be focused on."
I'll admit that would be a good thing. Elizabeth's styled herself as Santa Claus with all these promises to give this and that but she can't pay for them. The only way to pay for them is to end the forever wars. And that's where she refuses to go. Speech after speech, she's got no answer for how the US leaves Iraq. She wants to be President of the United States but she can't even tell you how US troops leave Iraq after 16 years. She truly has run a vanity campaign. She might want to try to get real before Joe announces because I do believe a lot of these barely-on-life-support campaigns like hers will have their plugs pulled once Joe announces.
Let's include this from David DeGraw:
On #EarthDay
, we should probably pay attention to the fact that our natural resources are being looted for pennies on the dollar at record-breaking extraction rates... Read All About It: facebook.com/ddegraw/posts/…
, we should probably pay attention to the fact that our natural resources are being looted for pennies on the dollar at record-breaking extraction rates... Read All About It: facebook.com/ddegraw/posts/…From David DeGraw:
On
Earth Day, we should probably pay attention to the fact that our
natural resources are being looted for pennies on the dollar at
record-breaking extraction rates. It's such a smash and grab heist that
our land is being polluted in unprecedented fashion. Water supplies are
being contaminated in communities across the entire country.
The Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management, the agencies who oversee our natural resources, are being run by people who worked with the global corporations that are currently looting our natural resources.
The U.S. is now the world's top oil and gas "exporter."
In 2018, petroleum production increased by 1.3 million barrels per day… by 1.3 million barrels per day.
Quite the smash and grab imperial heist.
Everyone
talks about how the wars in the Middle East are driven by oil and the
theft of natural resources, yet here we are in the US, having our
resources stolen by the same Global War Profiteers who are robbing
Middle Eastern resources... and we are the biggest energy exporter now.
So not only do we get buried in debt by paying trillions to fund the
Global War Profiteers, now we even have the most energy resources being
"exported" (stolen)!
A win-win for war profiteers, a lose-lose for Americans.
And our corrupted Congress has now decided to "sell" off 290 million barrels of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Given
the strategic importance of keeping our energy reserve supplies after
recent extreme weather events, after major storms caused us to use more
of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve recently, it is shocking that they
would now decide to cut our Strategic Petroleum Reserve in half now.
That leaves us wide open & exposed for when new disasters strike.
It's imperial plunder. Corruption is running amok.
We have to overcome divide & conquer propaganda / partisanship / identity politics, and unite against global imperialism.
We are all on the same sinking / burning ship...
Happy Earth Day!!
This excerpt was posted to Facebook here.
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