Summations Only

Sarah Huckabee is leaving at end of month.

Well, she quit holding press briefings a long time ago. At least that minimized the number of lies she told. She said she wants to be remembered as honest and transparent.Sorry Huckasand, no one is going to remember you.

On Wednesday President Trump said he'd accept information about campaign opponents from Russia or other foreign governments. Some reporting, like this very article, said that while accepting foreign money was illegal, accepting information was "murkier."But I have always said that it isn't "murkier." Campaign law says:

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It shall be unlawful for a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election;

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Many apparently have doubt about whether information is a "thing of value," but there can be no doubt. Information is obviously a "thing of value." People pay for news, and campaigns pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for opposition research. Information is obviously and unambiguously a "thing of value."Today Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub released a statement that was obviously a response to Trump's comments and that makes the law unambiguously clear to everyone:

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Let me make something 100% clear to the American public and anyone running for public office: It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election. This is not a novel concept. Electoral intervention from foreign governments has been considered unacceptable since the beginnings of our nation. Our Founding Fathers sounded the alarm about "foreign Interference, Intrigue, and Influence." They knew that when foreign governments seek to influence American politics, it is always to advance their own interests, not America's. Anyone who solicits or accepts foreign assistance risks being on the wrong end of a federal investigation. Any political campaign that receives an offer of a prohibited donation from a foreign source should report that offer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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Even after this announcement some in the media still expressed doubt about whether information constitutes a "thing of value." I cannot for the life of me figure out where their doubt is coming from.The Trump campaign considered damaging information on Hillary Clinton so valuable that they sent Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort (and others) to a meeting in Trump Tower with Russians offering such information. And that they understood the illegality of it is made clear by the fact that they later lied about the nature of the meeting.--Percy

My guess is that their doubt comes from a fear that not only Hillary, but the entire Democratic National Committee could be called into question for doing the exact same thing that is the latest Trump attack.Hillary Clinton, like Donald Trump, endorsed idea of political dirt from overseas - Washington Timeshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/...68-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html

Trump and many people on his campaign had dealings with Russia. The Clinton campaign wanted to know if there was anything about these dealings that would be helpful to the campaign, and so they decided to investigate. They contracted out this opposition research, which all presidential candidates do. The research required seeking evidence and information from those who would know about it, which would mostly be Russians.Trump, on the other hand and for just a couple examples, sent top campaign officials to a meeting in Trump Tower with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, and Manafort met with a Russian who had Russian intelligence connections where he shared internal Trump polling data so that Russian intelligence agencies could better target their social media election-influencing efforts.Please explain how these are "the exact same thing."An absence of evidence was not why Mueller declined to raise any indictments for conspiracy. There was plenty of evidence. He charged no indictments only because he felt the bar for conviction was higher than the available evidence could justify. He also said that obstruction efforts played a role in keeping the evidence below a conviction-worthy level.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Fix grammar mistake, and improve the clarity of the first two sentences of the last paragraph.

I am continuously astonished that this bullshit refuses to die. There's a fundamental and critical difference between the scenarios.Receiving or soliciting a donation of information of value is flat-out illegal. That's what Trump said he would do, and it's what many think Don Jr. did in that infamous June 2016 meeting. The reason is that when one party receives something of value and the other doesn't there's a good possibility it creates an undesirable debt owed to the second party. Ask a Mafia Don for a favor and he does it, but some day Vito Corleone's on the phone saying "remember when I did you a solid...".Hillary's campaign paid (in part) for the Steele dossier. A normal commercial transaction that all campaigns do. Some or all of it coming from foreign entities is no problem. One party gets (presumably) legally collected information and the other party gets money. Nobody's done anyone any favors and Vito is stymied.The mendacity of the right-wing media is sickening. I've looked at a half-dozen or so web sites and seen several more quoted. All of them say "Hillary did it so nyah nyah nyah!" and none of them mention the fundamental difference.As to the value of information, it can be a little fuzzy. From Is it actually illegal to accept “campaign dirt” from foreigners?:

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“Campaign-relevant information from a foreign national definitely can be an illegal in-kind contribution, but it gets trickier when the information does not have obvious cash value and isn’t necessarily something that a campaign regularly needs to buy,” Michael Kang, a law professor at Northwestern University, told me in an email. “The policy concern is that any valuable advice or tip from a foreign national could, at least in theory, become an illegal in-kind contribution.”

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And while the value of opposition research might be hard to gauge, experts said it’s difficult to argue that it doesn’t have some worth, as campaigns regularly pay for it. Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School, told me that practical considerations would suggest that, yes, campaign dirt does have value.

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Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid, at the end of the article:

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Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” ” software code that can be used for surveillance or attack ” inside the Russian grid.

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Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction ” and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

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Because the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be necessary, they added.

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This paragraph seems to imply that all of Hillary's foreign dealings were a reaction to Trump's peoples dealings with Russia. She was accepting foreign donations back during the Obama administration when Democrats were doing little more than laughing at the color of Trump's hair. From my above (Washington Post) link;

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The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.

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Yes yes, that's been trumpeted in the news for a long time, and hasn't died down too much even though Mueller couldn't do anything with it. But the cause for latest Democrat hysteria is Trump's response to Stephanopoulos's gotcha question, which Trump couldn't possibly answer without setting Democrats / mainstream media into a frenzy. He said "he'd listen", and we see what's happening. If he'd said; "oh no, I wouldn't listen", then we'd have heard "LIAR LIAR LIAR, WHAT WERE YOU DOING WHEN YOU SENT YOUR SON TO MEET WITH THE RUSSIANS?" Maybe he could have just said "no comment", do you think the media would have had something to say about that? ABC claims that Stephanopoulos spent 30 hours with Trump - at first glance, one wonders why Trump would allow this much of his time to be wasted, playing defense with a bunch of loaded questions from a former member of Bill Clinton's cabinet, a biased Democrat who now masquerades as a "journalist". Trump probably figures, correctly, that this interview will help him in the long run. Many voters will see ABC's attempts to edit and distort it to try to discredit him. It probably won't completely backfire on them, but it won't help them much either. Also, it shows a difference between him and past presidents - would a past president allow a journalist who is clearly biased against them to spend 30 hours with them, firing one question after another at them? Would Obama have allowed a Fox News journalist, like Brett Bair, or Britt Hume, 30 hours to question him? Actually, Bair and Hume aren't in the same league as Stephanopoulos, a better equivalent would be a former member of the Reagan administration who is now a political commentator, one Mark Levin. I wonder how Obama would have held up after 30 hours, or 30 minutes of questioning from him? You're right, they probably aren't much the same, what Hillary did was probably far worse. But as is rightly pointed out by Democrats, Hillary isn't president and has no power. Not much of anything is going to come of any of this, other than what the voters are seeing. I think a significant number of voters who voted in this current Democrat house were expecting them to address a few things other than a hatred of Trump, a movement to get him out of office before his first term is up. I think a few of them had things like healthcare costs, some bi-partisan action on the southern border, etc. on their minds. They're not seeing much of that, are they? I wasn't aware that this "bar" varied all around in its height - who is in charge of moving this bar around? I suspect that this bar is at the same height all the time, and this available evidence was too flimsy to hold up in proper legal scrutiny. But he couldn't prove them. So case closed. But Democrats keep crying. And voters are watching.

How about a donation of MONEY? If only the Steele dossier wouldn't have been full of lies, maybe Hillary would have had something. Here's one of them, get your barf bag out.

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Trump’s response immediately became red meat for the liberal media who were consumed with self-righteous indignation. Considering that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $12 million to a foreigner to not only dig up dirt on candidate Donald Trump, but to disseminate it among the Washington political community, the Intelligence agencies and then to the media, their reaction was extraordinary indeed.

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One of the most amusing of all came from Obama’s DNI Director, James Clapper, who told CBS News’ Anderson Cooper that he was just “stunned.” It is believed that Clapper leaked word to the media that former-FBI Director James Comey had briefed the President-elect on the Steele dossier, which gave them the green light to break the story.

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More here;Democrats are Apoplectic That Trump Would Listen To A Foreigner With Dirt On An Opponent – RedState"Fundamental difference"? Or a liberal dance?

Trump has ordered that the number of science advisory committees be reduced by a third across all federal agencies.Clinton reduced the number of all types of advisory committees by a third in 1993, not just science advisory committees. The number of advisory committees grew only slightly during the Bush and Obama years, and Trump already reduced them by 20% during the first year of his presidency (and the membership by 14%).Many committees are not science related (many are focused on things like economics or foreign policy), so this represents a comparatively severe reduction in the amount of informed and knowledgeable input the government will receive on science based issues.To put this in perspective, the total number of advisory committees numbered around a thousand near the end of 2016, which does seem like a great many. It is Trump's targeting of science committees that is concerning.Source: Trump's order to slash number of science advisory boards blasted by critics as 'nonsensical'--Percy

A Washington Post opinion/analysis piece describes how Trump silenced critics and blew his own horn in order to create the myth of a wealthy and successful businessman. Some interesting excerpts:

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How did Donald Trump, a self-serving promoter who lost billions of dollars for his investors, convince the world that he is a financial genius? It wasn’t just by fabricating tales of his success. It was also by bullying and silencing people who could have stopped those deceits ” particularly reporters and Wall Street analysts ” forcing all but a very few into a conspiracy of silence.
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Journalists told me how he’d tried to block their reporting on his empire ” by making up ethical scandals about them, furnishing fake documents and, in one case, threatening to expose the private life of a closeted media executive. Wall Street analysts witnessed a campaign of intimidation that began when Trump got one of them fired for (correctly) doubting his casinos’ ability to pay off their debts.

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Even while he was suffering tremendous financial setbacks ” and precisely because he was suffering those setbacks ” these efforts show Trump in the desperate act of spinning a mythology about himself (rich) that would sweep aside the facts (broke). And he did it by imperiling the livelihood of his doubters, silencing them and inducing a chilling effect both in the press and among the very people who are supposed to protect investors from terrible gambles like Trump’s businesses. If this self-promotion scheme had failed, Trump would never have become a reality-TV-starring symbol of business acumen. He would have skulked off into anonymity or ignominy, just another failed real estate developer and speculator.
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It made a man with limited business savvy and less money than he claimed into someone famous for having a surfeit of both. These early (and shockingly impudent) fabrications built one of the greatest brands in American history ” one that made Trump a household name and, eventually, president.
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The next year, 1990, would prove to be the year the facade collapsed. But with an eye toward salvaging his future reputation, Trump waged a startlingly effective campaign to suppress the truth about his failures as a businessman. That effort took several forms.
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Besides neutralizing media reports that would have imperiled his brand as a business genius, Trump also set his sights on a tough-minded documentary directed by Ned Schnurman called “Trump: What’s the Deal?” Schnurman had hired me to report on Trump’s net worth, which is when I learned that he had lied to Forbes for seven years about the number of apartments his family really owned...In a September 1989 New York magazine cover story that detailed Trump’s efforts to stop the harshly critical documentary, Schnurman, who is now deceased, said Trump was “threatening litigation before, during, and after the airing of the program.” He believed that Trump pressured TV syndicator LBS Communications to withdraw from its agreement to sell the film, and he told the New York Times that the syndication effort failed because Trump “made an enormous effort to kill the program.” LBS went out of business two years later.

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Other broadcasters were too intimidated by Trump to touch the project, according to reporting in New York magazine, and it was not released to the public until it became available online in 2015.
Trump had blocked a broadcast that would have endangered his long-term reputation.
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lsewhere, Trump’s bullying was even more brazen ” and the consequences even more dire. In March 1990, Marvin Roffman, one of the nation’s leading casino industry stock analysts, told Wall Street Journal reporter Neil Barsky that Trump might not be able to gross the $1.3 million per day he needed to keep the Taj Mahal going. Trump retaliated. He called Roffman’s boss at Janney Montgomery Scott and threatened to sue unless the firm fired Roffman or printed a letter from him saying, in Roffman’s telling, “that sonofabitch reporter Barsky misquoted” him and that “the Taj Mahal was going to be the greatest success ever.” Roffman, a 17-year veteran analyst, resisted and was fired the next day. The following year, not long before the Taj went belly up, Roffman won a $750,0000 arbitration decision against his former firm. Soon after that, he settled a defamation suit, for an undisclosed sum, against Trump.

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Still, the firing didn’t go unnoticed on Wall Street, and other observers began to moderate what they told investors about Trump’s stocks and bonds, even though they were clearly terrible investments.
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One might think that after the 1991 bankruptcy, which caused lenders to lose billions of dollars, analysts would warn their clients against buying Trump’s stock or junk bonds. Yet in searching news reports from those years, I could not find a single Wall Street analyst who told the media anything negative about Trump’s new public company. Trump’s finances were a mess: His Taj Mahal casino had lost more than $136 million during the four previous years, and he was just weeks from defaulting on his own loans when the stock debuted in 1995. But Wall Street was careful not to criticize.
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rump had waged a relentless, vindictive campaign to build his own myth by suppressing the facts: Between the collapse of his empire in 1991 and the issuance of more than $1 billion in Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts stock and junk bonds by 1996, he’d compromised the truth-telling capacity of Forbes magazine, the Wall Street Journal, TV broadcasters, Arthur Andersen and casino analysts on Wall Street. By the time Trump resigned in 2009 as chairman of the public company he founded, he had paid himself an estimated $82 million in personal compensation, while the company’s stocks and bonds had become nearly worthless.
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Trump’s greatest and most cynical skill, honed during the 1980s and 1990s, was learning how to win by silencing truth-tellers and suppressing the truth when it matters most.

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--Percy

The Clinton Foundation is not a campaign. If you want to establish illegality, you have to demonstrate that money somehow being transferred to the campaign, or explicitly demonstrate a quid pro quo.Which nobody's done. Republicans oppose Democrats because of what Republicans say Democrats do. Democrats oppose Republicans because of what Republicans do.Your vivid fantasies are not evidence.

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what Hillary did was probably far worse

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What HIllary did was legal and accepted practice for campaigns. As I explained, it was a straightforward commercial transaction that all campaigns do.

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But he couldn't prove them. So case closed.

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Until Congress acts. Yes, the voters are watching, and the majority of them don't like what they see Trump and the Trumpettes doing.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

It is illegal for a campaign to accept any donation of value from a foreign entity (directly or indirectly), which includes money. Duh. The Clinton Foundation is not a campaign. Do you have evidence showing foreign-sourced money being transferred from the Clinton Foundation to the Clinton campaign, or a quid pro quo being established?Didn't think so. Irrelevant to the legality of the Clinton campaigns's actions. Thank you for emphasizing the truth of my point. Your quote does not mention the fundamental difference, the fact that Hillary's campaign did nothing illegal in obtaining the dossier.ABE Yes, the appalling lies in that quote do make me want to barf. To me the difference between legal and illegal is fundamental. Do you disagree?Edited by JonF, : No reason given.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Hillary Clinton's campaign had no "foreign dealings" that anyone has ever reported. All presidential campaigns always do opposition research. Hillary Clinton's campaign would have conducted opposition research on Trump no matter what, just as the Trump campaign conducted opposition research on Hillary Clinton. That Trump was so involved with Russia no doubt came up in discussions with Fusion GPS about what to focus attention on. The Clinton Foundation is a charitable organization, not a political campaign. No money from the Clinton Foundation ever leaked into a Hillary Clinton political campaign. The Clinton Foundation continues to engage in charitable work throughout the world, while the Trump Foundation was found to have engaged in "persistently illegal conduct" and was shut down by the state of New York where the investigation continues and could result in criminal charges against Trump after he leaves office. Even many Republicans, such as staunch Trump supporters Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Kennedy (R-LA), have made clear they understand that Trump's answer is a violation of the law. Everyone but Trump seems to understand that accepting foreign help in a political campaign is illegal. You'll have to explain your logic. How is doing opposition research, engaged in by both the Clinton and Trump campaigns, far worse than taking meetings with Russians to get dirt on a political opponent and to help Russian intelligent services engage in social media campaigns to influence the US election? I don't know why you would say this. House Democrats have, for example, passed bills to reduce prescriptions drug prices, to protect preexisting conditions, and to address veterans issues, and when they tried to present their infrastructure plan to Trump a few weeks ago he walked out of the meeting. You should read what I said again. There's nothing about a moving bar. The bar for conviction on conspiracy charges is always very high. The evidence was insufficient to meet that bar, but there was still a great deal of evidence. The Mueller report wouldn't have been over 400 pages long if there hadn't been a great deal of evidence. You should read the report again. It says that Justice Department guidelines state that a sitting president cannot be indicted, so the report only lays out the evidence without drawing any conclusions, except to say that in the face of that evidence it was impossible to exonerate the president.William Barr seriously erred when he declared the president exonerated. The Justice Department, as Mueller layed out in his report, does not have the power to do that. Only Congress has that power.--Percy

Trump tweets:

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......If Republicans ever did [the Steele dossier] to the Democrats, there would be all hell to pay. It would be a scandal like no other!

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Trump is, of course, ignorant of the fact that a good part of the dossier was paid for by the conservative Washington Free Beacon.While I'm here, from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Report on Russian Active Measures at the time led by a Republican):

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It is not illegal to contract with a foreign person or foreign entity for services, including conducting opposition research on a U.S. campaign, so long as the service was paid for at the market rate

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