Maxine Waters is a discredited has been, got a federal TARP bailout for husband's bank

From the story in March, here:

During the height of the 2008 fiscal crisis, Waters helped arrange a meeting between the Treasury Department and top executives of a bank where her husband was a shareholder. Using her post on the House Financial Committee as leverage, she called Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson personally, asking him to meet with minority-owned banks.

When Treasury followed through, there was only one financial institution present: OneUnited. Had that bank gone under, the New York Times reported, Waters' husband would've lost as much as $350,000. Luckily for the Waters family, OneUnited received a cool $12 million in bailout funds.

After three years of special investigation, the ethics committee eventually ruled that Waters didn't technically break any rules. But that ruling came after unearthing her more than questionable family business practices, like making her grandson, Mikael Moore, her chief of staff.

NeverTrumper Bret Stephens bolts The Wall Street Journal for happier digs at The New York Times

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Bret!

From the story here:

The Journal's editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, said in a memo he is thankful for Stephens' 16 years with the paper.

Trump and his advisers know all about the intelligence Obama gathered on them and leaked like water

The New York Times, March 1st, here:

In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. ...

American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information ... classified intelligence.

Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates. ...

Obama White House officials grew convinced that the intelligence was damning and that they needed to ensure that as many people as possible inside government could see it, even if people without security clearances could not. Some officials began asking specific questions at intelligence briefings, knowing the answers would be archived and could be easily unearthed by investigators . . ..

At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.

There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress. ...

... [W]ith the most sensitive intelligence, including the names of sources and the identities of foreigners who were regularly monitored . . . [o]fficials tightened the already small number of people who could access that information. They knew the information could not be kept from the new president or his top advisers, but wanted to narrow the number of people who might see the information, officials said. ...

On Jan. 2, administration officials learned that Mr. Kislyak — after leaving the State Department meeting — called Mr. Flynn, and that the two talked multiple times in the 36 hours that followed. American intelligence agencies routinely wiretap the phones of Russian diplomats, and transcripts of the calls showed . . ..

Maureen Dowd, upper-class bunko artist

Maureen Dowd, the ever clever mistress of written fraud, makes it appear as if Nunes says Trump must be taken literally as commander in chief, but makes sure not to quote him saying as much:

Even Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave up the Sisyphean effort of defending Trump’s tripe. He said that if you took Trump’s remarks “literally” — as we expect to do with our commander in chief’s words — “clearly the president was wrong.”

The fundamentalism is all hers.

Fundamentalist Maureen Dowd calls her own newspaper's claim of Trump wiretaps "unhinged" from which the Times hasn't backed off since publishing it

Here:

For two weeks, [Trump] has refused to back off his unhinged claim that his predecessor tapped his phones during the election. ... Even Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave up the Sisyphean effort of defending Trump’s tripe. He said that if you took Trump’s remarks “literally” — as we expect to do with our commander in chief’s words — “clearly the president was wrong.”

If the surveillance of Trump was about "financial transactions" (NYT) and "money from the Kremlin" (McClatchy) maybe the Treasury Dept. spearheaded it

I still haven't read anyone saying this.

Instead of obsessing on the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the DNI, and on the process, maybe journalists ought to be focusing their efforts on the last named agency instead, and the substance.

If it's about the money, the Treasury Dept. might very well have led the investigation for the government of Barack Obama, and the spying.

McClatchy, January 19th, 2017:

The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election, including whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided President-elect Donald Trump, two people familiar with the matter said.

The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.

The New York Times, January 19th, 2017:

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said. ...

The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit.

Justin Raimondo is so close and yet so far:

So the FISA issue is, I believe, a false trail . . ..

Jack Lew has been awfully quiet.

Best news so far from CIA Wikileaks: CIA has cracked encryption like Signal used by Deep State

Every cloud has its silver lining.

From The New York Times, here:

Among other disclosures that, if confirmed, would rock the technology world, the WikiLeaks release said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

Assuming Clapper's denial that there was a FISA investigation is true, maybe everyone ought to consider they've been had

James Clapper, who lied to Congress about surveillance in the past and was never prosecuted but should be, has stated over the weekend that there was no FISA investigation at all, contrary to the New York Times and everybody else, as reported here:

For the part of the national security apparatus that he oversaw, "there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign," Clapper told Chuck Todd in an exclusive interview on Sunday's "Meet The Press."

So . . ..

Either Clapper is lying again, or there's an alternative explanation.

The New York Times etc. have been reporting a narrative based on anonymous sources, a narrative which derives from the Obama Administration and which it wanted everyone to believe.

I say it's an "Oh look! A deer!" narrative. It was designed to get the bloodhounds off the trail and follow to an inconclusive nowhere.

The real story instead might be that Obama was using the Treasury Dept. to investigate Manafort, giving the FBI, CIA and the NSA the plausible deniability they have asserted. So far Comey and Clapper have denied any spying on Trump.

Well, the Treasury Dept. was involved according to news reports, but so far no one's asked Jack Lew to comment as far as I know.

It was Manafort's financial connections in Ukraine which the Times reported in the summer which caused Manafort to have to bail from the Trump campaign, and Bannon and Conway to be tapped by Trump in August 2016.

The spying on Trump by the Treasury Dept. might have then continued, quite lawfully, endeavoring to uncover evidence of Trump financial wrongdoing in connection with Russia, or some one else, in order to finish him off, but it failed.

Jack Lew served Obama at Treasury to the bitter end.

[T]he Inspector General of the Department of the Treasury shall be under the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to audits or investigations, or the issuance of subpenas, which require access to sensitive information concerning— ...
(E) intelligence or counterintelligence matters; or
(F) other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security or to the protection of any person or property authorized protection by section 3056 of title 18, United States Code, section 3056A of title 18, United States Code, or any provision of the Presidential Protection Assistance Act of 1976 (18 U.S.C. 3056 note ; Public Law 94–524).

And the White House examined a transcript of a wiretapped conversation of Michael Flynn

Someone in the US government was wiretapping all over the place, and the White House read all about it.

It doesn't matter that Comey at FBI denies he's doing it, or that the FISA court refused to allow wiretaps. Someone wiretapped Flynn during the transition, and Manafort during the campaign, which means at Trump Tower.

President Trump is not wrong.

The New York Times, February 13, 2017, here:

The White House had examined a transcript of a wiretapped conversation that Mr. Flynn had with Mr. Kislyak in December, according to administration officials. Mr. Flynn originally told Mr. Pence and others that the call was limited to small talk and holiday pleasantries.

But the conversation, according to officials who saw the transcript of the wiretap, also included a discussion about sanctions imposed on Russia after intelligence agencies determined that President Vladimir V. Putin’s government tried to interfere with the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Still, current and former administration officials familiar with the call said the transcript was ambiguous enough that Mr. Trump could have justified either firing or retaining Mr. Flynn. ...

Officials said classified information did not appear to have been discussed during the conversation between Mr. Flynn and the ambassador, which would have been a crime. The call was captured on a routine wiretap of diplomats’ calls, the officials said.

And when did the wiretapping of Trump Tower begin?

The same NY Times article told us when, here:

The F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring, and was an outgrowth of a criminal investigation into his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and for the country’s former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. In August, The Times reported that Mr. Manafort’s name had surfaced in a secret ledger that showed he had been paid millions in undisclosed cash payments. The Associated Press has reported that his work for Ukraine included a secret lobbying effort in Washington aimed at influencing American news organizations and government officials.

New York Times in print version reported American wiretaps provided to Obama White House, now we're supposed to believe there weren't any?

Here, January 19, 2017, in "Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates":

The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit. The investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said. One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House. ... It is unclear which Russian officials are under investigation, or what particular conversations caught the attention of American eavesdroppers.

This editorial note appears in fine print at the bottom of the online story indicating that these "intercepted Russian communications" were really American wiretaps:

A version of this article appears in print on January 20, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.

Obama pollster Cornell Belcher gets one thing right: Hillary failed to hold the Obama coalition

Or as we say, 5.1 million former Obama voters in 39 states from 2008 didn't vote for Hillary in 2016.

Do Belcher's math. He estimates from exit polling data that about 7% of the non-white millennial electorate voted third party, allowing Trump to squeeze in. Hillary's total of 65.85 million popular votes supplemented by the 5.1 million in 39 states who didn't vote for her is 70.95 million, 7% of which is 5 million.

Belcher, who is black, racializes the whole thing from there, complaining that Democrats failed to make the race about race. But obviously these non-white millennials still voted for whites, so it wasn't about race for them either. It was about young progressives being unable to bring themselves to vote for two loathsome candidates, one of whom turned out to be more loathsome to more people than the other.

As they say in the legal profession, hard cases make bad law. Election 2016 was a hard case, and we shouldn't draw the wrong conclusions from it as both Democrats and Republicans still seem to be doing.

Belcher, here in Salon:

Demographics are destiny. What happens to a centrist Democrat quite frankly who can’t hold that Obama coalition? Donald Trump is a president who did not win a plurality of the public. In fact, one of my reports was leaked to the New York Times, saying that millennials were rejecting the binary choice of the lesser of two evils.

When you look at the exit data, you have 8 or 9 percent of younger African-Americans voting third-party. You have 6 or 7 percent of younger Latinos voting third-party. Hillary is almost off Barack Obama’s winning margins by the same percentage of our young people voting third party. So that’s how [Trump] squeaked in.

Again, Trump didn’t expand the Republican tent. He didn’t bring in all these millions upon millions of new Republican voters. This was about Democrats losing, more so than Trump remaking the electorate and winning in some sort of profound and new way. It should not have been a winning percentage, right? ...

When you look at battleground state after battleground state, Hillary was off Obama’s margins by five or six points and Trump was, at best, one or two points up in Michigan or Wisconsin or Florida. Again, it wasn’t like he was four, five points better than Mitt Romney. It was that she was five or six points below what Barack Obama did.

Ross Douthat might as well write for The New Republic instead of The New York Times

Here, sounding just like Brian Beutler:

[R]ight now [Trump's] presidency is in danger of being very swiftly Carterized — ending up so unpopular, ineffectual and fractious that even with Congress controlled by its own party, it can’t get anything of substance done. ... [T]he more the Trump White House remains mired in its own melodramas, the more plausible it becomes that the Trump-era House and Senate set a record for risk avoidance and legislative inactivity.

Yeah, 23 days in and he's already a failure because there's no . . . wait for it . . . [infrastructure] spending bill and a tax cut bill, the two great incompatibles which Gallup says most people want.

Isn't The New York Times supposed to be wiser than that, admonishing that you can't have your cake and eat it too? Well, its so-called conservatives at least should be so wise.

The fact of the matter is the Gallup poll result, which is the same as the Douthat wish list, reveals the bipartisan nature of Trump's support. The people who support increased spending and the people who want tax cuts populate two different political parties. Perhaps Douthat has heard of them? Getting them to agree on this stuff is going to take a lot more time than 23 days. It took Barack Obama over four years to come up with his tax cut. Unfortunately for Obama it was Bush's tax cut, not delivered by Dingy Harry and San Fran Nan but by John Boehner at the dawn of 2013. What Harry and Nancy did immediately deliver was jacked up "infrastructure" spending within a month of 44's inauguration, adding a $700 billion increase to Bush 2009 fiscal year spending, making the one time stimulus a permanent part of the budget.

It is the biggest untold scandal since the Fed secretly lent trillions and trillions of dollars to the world at rock bottom prices on questionable collateral during the financial crisis from 2008-2010.

Because Republicans took the House in 2010, that additional $700 billion got no higher, but what do we have to show for it after increasing outlays $700 billion in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016?

Where's the infrastructure after eight years and $5.6 trillion in increased spending?

Another trillion dollars will accomplish nothing.

Meanwhile Trump is delivering to his base, which is the first thing he must do, rescinding Obama executive orders, undercutting the ObamaCare mandate as Congress prepares its repeal, actually laying the groundwork to build The Wall (infrastructure!), rounding up criminal aliens (the horror) and trying to reduce terrorism threats which exist because of a chaotic immigration system, except the courts the enemy is trying to stop him.

He's also vilifying the media whom we also hate every chance he gets, and now the judiciary, the tag team which advances liberalism against the will of the people who overwhelmingly support Trump 2600 counties to 500 counties for the enemy.

And most of all, he's not being Hillary.

It's been a great 23 days. 

Maoist struggle session: So-called president shames Supreme Court surrounded by Democrat jackals who give him standing ovation

Flashback to NYT here in January 2010 and video here:

Yeah, and The New York Times is a magnet for enchoriaphobic speech

Heh heh.

What do ISIS and The DC Swamp have in common?

Reliance on encrypted messaging.

They are both using encrypted messaging to organize, plot and attack their enemies, the chief common one being Donald J. Trump.

From the New York Times story here:

They vetted each new member of the cell as Mr. Yazdani recruited helpers. They taught him how to pledge allegiance to the terrorist group and securely send the statement. ...

Because the recruits are instructed to use encrypted messaging applications, the guiding role played by the terrorist group often remains obscured. As a result, remotely guided plots in Europe, Asia and the United States in recent years, including the attack on a community center in Garland, Tex., were initially labeled the work of “lone wolves,” with no operational ties to the Islamic State, and only later was direct communication with the group discovered. ...

“If you look at the communications between the attackers and the virtual plotters, you will see that there is a direct line of communication to the point where they are egging them on minutes, even seconds, before the individual carries out an attack.” ...

One of the Islamic State’s most influential recruiters and virtual plotters was known by the nom de guerre Abu Issa al-Amriki, and his Twitter profile instructed newcomers to contact him via the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Among those who sought him out, asking for instructions on how to reach Syria, was Mr. Yazdani, who had convinced himself that it was his religious duty to move his family to the caliphate. ...

The Hindi-speaking handler guiding the men in Hyderabad also insisted on using a kaleidoscope of encrypted messaging applications, with Mr. Yazdani instructed to hop between apps so that even if one message history was discovered and cracked, it would reveal only a portion of their handiwork. As soon as Mr. Yazdani indicated he was willing to undertake an attack, the handler instructed him to download ChatSecure, a messaging app to be used when they spoke by phone. When he used his laptop, he was told to contact the handler via Pidgin, another encrypted tool. He was told to create an account with Tutanota, a secure email service. And the handler taught Mr. Yazdani how to use the Tails operating system, which is contained on a USB stick and allows a user to boot up a computer from the external device and use it without leaving a trace on the hard drive.

The French sculptor of The Statue of Liberty found most Americans insufficiently supportive of the pedestal for The Statue of Liberty, let alone of the statue itself

Bartholdi [from 1871] crossed the United States twice by rail, and met many Americans who he thought would be sympathetic to the project. But he remained concerned that popular opinion on both sides of the Atlantic was insufficiently supportive of the proposal, and he and Laboulaye decided to wait before mounting a public campaign. ...

The committees in the United States faced great difficulties in obtaining funds for the construction of the pedestal. The Panic of 1873 had led to an economic depression that persisted through much of the decade. The Liberty statue project was not the only such undertaking that had difficulty raising money: construction of the obelisk later known as the Washington Monument sometimes stalled for years; it would ultimately take over three-and-a-half decades to complete. There was criticism both of Bartholdi's statue and of the fact that the gift required Americans to foot the bill for the pedestal. In the years following the Civil War, most Americans preferred realistic artworks depicting heroes and events from the nation's history, rather than allegorical works like the Liberty statue. There was also a feeling that Americans should design American public works—the selection of Italian-born Constantino Brumidi to decorate the Capitol had provoked intense criticism, even though he was a naturalized U.S. citizen. Harper's Weekly declared its wish that "M. Bartholdi and our French cousins had 'gone the whole figure' while they were about it, and given us statue and pedestal at once." The New York Times stated that "no true patriot can countenance any such expenditures for bronze females in the present state of our finances." Faced with these criticisms, the American committees took little action for several years. ...

Grover Cleveland, the governor of New York, vetoed a bill to provide $50,000 for the statue project in 1884. An attempt the next year to have Congress provide $100,000, sufficient to complete the project, also failed. The New York committee, with only $3,000 in the bank, suspended work on the pedestal. With the project in jeopardy, groups from other American cities, including Boston and Philadelphia, offered to pay the full cost of erecting the statue in return for relocating it.

Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, a New York newspaper, announced a drive to raise $100,000—the equivalent of $2.3 million today. Pulitzer pledged to print the name of every contributor, no matter how small the amount given. The drive captured the imagination of New Yorkers, especially when Pulitzer began publishing the notes he received from contributors. "A young girl alone in the world" donated "60 cents, the result of self denial." ... Even with the success of the fund drive, the pedestal was not completed until April 1886. 

Read the whole thing here.

The Biden Rule: No nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year is in keeping with the past practice of a majority

Senator Joe Biden in 1992, here:

But in a speech on the Senate floor in June 1992, Mr. Biden, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said there should be a different standard for a Supreme Court vacancy “that would occur in the full throes of an election year.” The president should follow the example of “a majority of his predecessors” and delay naming a replacement, Mr. Biden said. If he goes forward before then, the Senate should wait to consider the nomination.

“Some will criticize such a decision and say that it was nothing more than an attempt to save a seat on the court in hopes that a Democrat will be permitted to fill it, but that would not be our intention,” Mr. Biden said at the time. “It would be our pragmatic conclusion that once the political season is underway, and it is, action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over.

“That is what is fair to the nominee and essential to the process. Otherwise, it seems to me,” he added, “we will be in deep trouble as an institution.”

Obama denied Iraqi Abu Hassan a visa in 2011 but no one rallied for him

Story here and here.

"Where was the outrage when Obama was hurting innocent foreigners?"

Glenn Greenwald writes that the CIA was trying to defeat Trump and elect Hillary Clinton

Here:

FOR MONTHS, the CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton, and went to the Washington Post to warn, in the week before the election, that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it. Clinton clearly wanted a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted improved relations and greater cooperation. In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decadeslong international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it.