The war on Barr
   
Democrats have grown infuriated by Attorney General William Barr’s indifference to their hysteria over the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

Barr recently released a brief summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to warp the 2016 election. Barr added that Mueller had not found enough evidence to recommend that Trump be indicted for obstruction of justice for the non-crime of collusion.

Progressives, who for 22 months had insisted that Trump was a Russian asset, were stunned. But only for a few hours.

Almost immediately, they redirected their fury toward Barr’s summation of the Mueller report. Yet few rational people contested Barr’s synopses about collusion and obstruction.

Both the Mueller report and Barr’s summation can be found on the internet. Anyone can read them to see whether Barr misrepresented Mueller’s conclusions.

Again, there have been few criticisms that Barr was wrong on his interpretation that there was no collusion and not enough evidence to indict on obstruction of justice.

But now Democrats are calling for Barr to resign or be impeached for not regurgitating the unproven allegations against Trump. In other words, Barr acted too much like a federal prosecutor rather than a tabloid reporter trafficking in allegations that did not amount to criminal conduct.

The besmirching of Barr’s conduct is surreal. He certainly has not done anything even remotely approximating the conduct of former President Obama’s two attorneys general.

Has Barr dubbed himself the president’s “wingman” or called America a “nation of cowards,” as did former Attorney General Eric Holder?

Has Barr’s Department of Justice monitored reporters’ communications or ordered surveillance of a television journalist? Has Barr used a government jet to take his family to the Belmont Stakes horse race, as did Holder?

Has Barr met secretly on an airport tarmac with the spouse of a person his Justice Department was investigating, as did former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who had such a meeting with Bill Clinton?

The Mueller report ignored the likely illegal origins of the Christopher Steele dossier, the insertion of an FBI informant into the Trump campaign, the unlawful leaking of documents, and the conflicted testimonies of former high-level intelligence officials.

All of those things were potential felonies. All in some way yielded information that Mueller drew on in his investigation. Yet Mueller never recommended a single indictment of any of the Obama-era officials who likely broke laws.

Mueller was instead fixated on possible collusion with Russia. But it is a crime to knowingly hire a foreign national to work on a presidential campaign — in other words, to “collude.” That is exactly what the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee did when they paid British subject Christopher Steele to smear Trump.

Did Mueller argue that the possible crimes of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and other former government officials — lying to federal investigators, perjury, obstruction of justice, deceiving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, planting an informant into a political campaign, unmasking and leaking the identities of individuals under surveillance — were only peripheral to his investigation?

Not really. After all, Mueller indicted Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone and others for crimes that had nothing to do with collusion and were far less serious than the improper behavior of top Obama administration bureaucrats.

So what really explains the furor now directed at Barr?

One, progressives are terrified that a number of Trump’s critics — Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe — may soon be indicted. They apparently seek to preempt such indictments by attacking Barr, a seemingly no-nonsense prosecutor who will likely follow up on any criminal referrals from any inspector general that reach his desk.

Two, the 2020 progressive agenda — whether defined as the Green New Deal, a wealth tax, Medicare for All or open borders — will not compete well with Trump’s currently booming economy. Impeaching Trump for collusion and obstruction is seen by progressives as the best (or perhaps only) way to return to power. That effort so far is failing, causing even more hysteria.

Three, the Mueller investigation is over, finished after 22 months, $34 million and a 448-page, two-volume report.

There will be no indictments of Trump for either collusion or the obstruction of justice during the investigation of that non-crime. So now what?

Since late 2015, Trump, as the supposed Russian puppet or the Machiavellian obstructer of justice, was nightly cable-TV news fare. Now, such fantasies are shattered. But progressives are not willing to let the Mueller investigation rest in peace and move on with their lives.

Perhaps they feel in the political sense that there is nothing to move on to. And they are probably right.

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Democrats and their phony "constitutional crisis."

"Not one of the six Democrats granted access to what amounts to 99.9 percent of volume II of the Mueller report, which details the president's behavior as it relates to obstruction of justice, have taken the opportunity to examine it," writes National Review's Jack Crowe. But according to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), there's a "constitutional crisis" after President Donald Trump, at the request of the Justice Department, asserted executive privilege to protect Attorney General William Barr from being held in contempt of Congress. Undeterred, Democrats maintained their vacuous assertion that Barr is hiding something and voted to hold him in contempt anyway.

Spare us the hand-wringing over constitutional fidelity and the Rule of Law. This is nothing more than pure Democrat political theater meant to advance their manufactured faux scandal. Nadler peddles a myth when claiming that Barr is "not being truthful with Congress." How has Barr not been truthful? In fact, the AG went above and beyond the requirements of law in order to get as much of Robert Mueller's report to the American public as is legally possible. Anyone can get a copy, and key Democrats even have access to all but a few lines of redacted material.

But that's not enough for Democrats. Their demand is that Barr break the law by presenting the report fully unredacted. As Hans von Spakovsky of The Heritage Foundation explains, "Unless Congress's request for Rule 6(e) grand jury material falls squarely into one of the statutory or court-created exceptions, the attorney general — any attorney general — is prohibited from disclosing that material to Congress. And the congressional request doesn't fit any of the exceptions."

Why are Democrats making this demand, since Mueller's team, which consisted of mostly Democrat lawyers, determined after nearly two years of investigation that no crime was committed? Because, as Mark Alexander notes, "It's not about the substance of the Mueller report. It's about keeping the fake narrative alive." Democrats will not be satisfied with anything short of removing Trump. So, if there is a "constitutional crisis," it's not coming from Trump and the executive branch.

Nadler's claim that the executive branch has somehow overstepped the Constitution's delineation of powers is a charge that is nonsense on its face. Using the term "co-equal," Nadler and the Democrats act like that means the executive branch is fully answerable to the legislative branch's every petty demand. Clearly, Democrats believe their political position and interests are "more equal" than Trump's.

Recall that it was the same Jerry Nadler who back in 2012 touted that he "just joined the #walkout of the House chamber to protest the shameful, politically-motivated GOP vote holding AG [Eric] Holder in contempt." When it was a Democrat sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Nadler was singing a completely different tune. But it's 2019 and Trump is president...

The truth is, Democrats know that there is no "smoking gun" to be found in any of the redacted portions of the Mueller report. They just want an excuse to claim that Barr is engaged in "obstruction." And they're trying to tar Barr as a biased Trump stooge who is so politically compromised that he cannot be trusted as the nation's number-one lawman. The real play? Self-protection. As Victor Davis Hanson observes, "Progressives are terrified that a number of Trump's critics — Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe — may soon be indicted. They apparently seek to preempt such indictments by attacking Barr, a seemingly no-nonsense prosecutor who will likely follow up on any criminal referrals from any inspector general that reach his desk." Those coup co-conspirators pose the real constitutional crisis.

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What The New York Times Left Out Of Trump Tax Story: It Changes Everything

Trump in fact survived the 1988 property slump better than many others

Donald Trump must have breathed a sigh of relief as 1995 drew to a close. The epic crash of New York City (NYC) real estate, which had battered Trump’s investments and left many of his fellow real estate investors clinging to any lifeline of solvency, was finally over. Prices of New York City real estate, which had fallen in each of the previous five years, had finally started to rise.

Breitbart Reports:

Apartment rental prices fell by 15 percent during the slump that had begun in 1988. The prices of co-ops and condos were down by nearly twice that much. Manhattan homes fell by 32.9 percent between 1989 and 1996, according to a study by the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy. In Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen — that westside stretch where Trump had invested so much in a plan to turn an old railyard into a new neighborhood — home prices fell 40.4 percent.

The giant Canadian real estate company Olympia & York had declared bankruptcy. At one point, it had been the largest landlord in New York. By 1992, it had fired its bankers from J.P. Morgan and hired Felix G. Rohatyn, the guy who had saved New York City itself from the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s. In the end, it would be swallowed up by its creditors, vanishing into the ash heap of history.

Banks were getting crushed. New Jersey’s largest savings association was seized by federal regulators after real estate losses. Wall Street was scrambling, with real-estate king Goldman Sachs suddenly finding it could not raise money from investors for real estate projects

“Even Goldman, which has dominated the business on Wall Street, is telling many of its real estate bankers to look for new jobs,” a news story noted in 1991.

Trump had made it through the worst period in New York City real estate in living memory while bigger, deeper-pocketed rivals had failed — a sigh of relief, at least.

Yet according to the New York Times story detailing glimpses at Trump’s finances from “tax transcripts” of his filings from 1985 to 1994, Trump’s personal financial losses during the New York City real estate crisis somehow mark him as a failure rather than someone who persevered through an economic story.

From the Times:

Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.

The story goes on to describe how Trump reported negative income — meaning he lost money — every year from 1985 until 1994, the years for which the Times obtained tax transcripts. The big losses, however, come the years from 1990 through 1994, with 1990 and 1991 showing up as the worst. In other words, the Times story shows that Trump’s business of real estate investing in and around New York City suffered massive losses in the years when New York City real estate crashed.

The Times story on Trump’s taxes does not include the condition of the New York City real estate market in those years, although every link to data in this article (saving the Furman Center study) is to articles in the New York Times.

This is not the first time the Times has declared Trump a business failure. In 1991, when the losses the New York Times reported on this week were mounting, Times columnist Floyd Norris declared that Trump’s financial troubles meant “the Trump aura will never be the same.”

“For Mr. Trump, Fed easing might not help that much. Bankers may not be fast learners, but they do catch on. For him, the era of easy credit is unlikely to ever return,” Norris wrote in 1990.

As it turns out, that announcement of the financial death of Trump was as exaggerated as claims made decades later that Trump could not possibly win the 2016 presidential election.

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More Leftist murderers

It's in their DNA  -- check the Communists

Earlier this week, two teenagers perpetrated a premeditated mass shooting at their charter school in suburban Denver.  They murdered one of their classmates, a hero who rushed his killer in an effort to stop the slaughter, and wounded eight more.  As authorities investigate the motives behind this horrific crime, we've learned new details about at least one alleged assailant's political views.  He resented gay-"hating" Christians, and shared pro-Obama and anti-Trump material on social media.  Via the Washington Examiner (redactions mine):

The social media posts by a suspect in the STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting in Colorado included opposition to "Christians who hate gays," criticism of President Trump, and support for the left-wing Occupy Democrats...On his now-deleted Facebook account, [the alleged shooter], 18, posted: "You know what I hate? All these Christians who hate gays, yet in the bible, it says in Deuteronomy 17:12-13, if someone doesn’t do what their priest tells them to do, they are supposed to die. It has plenty of crazy stuff like that. But all they get out of it is ‘ewwwwww gays.'"The other suspect in the shooting, which left one dead and seven wounded, has been identified as in court documents as [the other alleged shooter], a 16-year-old female who identifies as a transgender male and prefers to be called Alec...In 2016, Erickson shared a video of late-night host Seth Meyers criticizing President Donald Trump prior to the 2016 election, and had shared an Occupy Democrats post that praised President Barack Obama.

An Occupy Democrats meme he posted also criticized Fox News.  When anyone associated with any element of the right -- even the extreme alt-right fringe -- commits an act of violence these days, many in the media rush to blame President Trump, or at least tie his rhetoric to a cultural 'climate' in which such despicable acts take place.  As I've written about repeatedly, I find such arguments abhorrent.  Deranged and evil people are responsible for their crimes, not politicians or mainstream political ideologies. I stand by that view.  But much of the press seems to be rather selective in applying standards on this front.  Indeed, the suspected shooter's apparent leftism has hardly generated any major coverage at all.  If he were a MAGA hat-wearing, 'build the wall'-chanting teenager, do you think that information would have been reported far more prominently?  Don't bother; it's a rhetorical question.

We're just a few short news cycles removed from lefties lecturing conservatives about their supposed "incitement" against Rep. Ilhan Omar, assailing critics of her bigotry and ignorance for allegedly making her unsafe.  In this Colorado case, we have a young man whose brain was apparently full of left-wing ideas, including the notion that Christians 'hate' gay people.  He then decided to team up with a classmate to shoot as many people he could at his high school.  Is it time for liberals to tone down their rhetoric and incitement?  After all, people are getting shot.  Whether or not his true motives were even remotely political (the Congressional baseball shooter was undoubtedly driven by intense partisan animus) is almost immaterial.  Harsh words of criticism, even against bona fide bigotry, can have dangerous ripple effects, and might even put people in physical peril, right?  That was the lesson from the Left on Omar.  It was the "climate of hate" lesson from the Left on Giffords. 

Indeed, it's a recurring theme whenever the facts appear to fit a certain narrative (even if they actually don't).  Based on their own standards, shouldn't we be having a national conversation about left-wing rhetoric, debating the extent to which Democratic leaders and liberal influencers may have contributed to an overall environment that allows hate to fester and boil over? 

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