The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Once in a While, a Good Leak
by Judge Andrew Napolitano
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. Comey’s Coy Testimony Indicts Himself, Not Trump
It is indeed interesting that Donald Trump’s biggest request and frustration with former FBI Director James Comey deals with the question of “honest loyalty.” It’s only this week, after Trump has repeatedly insisted that he was not personally under FBI investigation, that Comey finally confirms that truth. This after, according to Comey’s own testimony, Trump had requested the FBI clear the record regarding himself and the investigation into Russian election meddling. Clearly, Comey made little effort to set the public record straight; instead, he seemed to prefer allowing the continuation of “the cloud” of the MSM’s unsubstantiated collusion narrative to remain unchallenged.
Indeed, he told the Senate he took notes because “I was honestly concerned that [the president] might lie about the nature of that meeting.”
In a phone call from Trump on March 30th, Comey recollects, “[The President] asked what we could do to ‘lift the cloud.’ I responded that we were investigating the matter as quickly as we could, and that there would be great benefit, if we didn’t find anything, to our having done the work well. He agreed, but then re-emphasized the problems this was causing him.” Regarding the same phone conversation, Comey’s written testimony continues, “I explained that we had briefed the leadership of Congress on exactly which individuals we were investigating and that we had told Congressional leaders that we were not personally investigating President Trump. I reminded him I had previously told him that. He repeatedly told me, ‘We need to get that fact out.’ (I did not tell the President that the FBI and the Department of Justice had been reluctant to make public statements that we did not have an open case on President Trump for a number of reasons, most importantly because it would create a duty to correct, should that change.)”
That statement by Comey sums up the whole problem and gives insight into interpreting what Trump meant in his request for “loyalty” from Comey. While at least three times by Comey’s own admission he told Trump that the president was not under investigation, Comey remained reluctant to share this information with the general public because he was worried that the status could change. Talk about blatant bureaucratic hog wash. Comey certainly had no qualms about telling the public when the FBI had opened and then closed its investigation into liar-Hillary Clinton, only to announce that he was reopening it, followed by a another election-layup announcement that he had closed it again.
Comey also noted, as he did in May, that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch leaned on him to downplay the liar-Hillary Clinton by calling it a “matter” and not an “investigation.”
In all honesty, Comey’s testimony ends up providing greater support for Trump’s decision to fire him. In fact, if anything, it corroborates Trump’s account of his communications with Comey — that Comey had indeed repeatedly assured him that he was not under investigation. However, the Leftmedia will still attempt to spin this as the “smoking gun” of Trump obstructing the Russia investigation. The reality is there’s not even smoke here.
~The Patriot Post
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Was Comey Covering For
liar-Clinton By Reopening Her Case?
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Lou Dobbs notes that former FBI Director James Comey had a most interesting comment to make in the Thursday hearings... He plays a clip of Comey saying, “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it.” That special counsel, as it turns out, was also is also a close friend of his and his former boss at the FBI. Rep Louie Gohmert was busy during the hearings doing real work, but he has reviewed Comey’s testimony and described it as “shocking.” Gohmert says, “I understand apparently President Trump says he didn’t actually question his loyalty, but you know, Lou, you know the President could tell. ‘There’s a potential problem here with his being honorable and loyal’ and man, was that the truth!” Gohmert quotes a Twitter user who said, “Comey: ‘Loretta Lynch told me to lie and I didn’t write that down, but I wrote down that Trump stuff because I was afraid he would lie.’ I mean, you know, holy cow. It makes no sense but one thing is very, very clear, he was 100 percent loyal to Loretta Lynch and to liar-Hillary Clinton... http://rickwells.us/dobbs-gohmert-comey-covering-clinton-reopening-case/
‘Sessions Resigning’ Narrative Gets
Another Blow with White House Vow of Confidence
by Ian Mason
{breitbart.com} ~ Sanders’s statement to Acosta and other reporters came after days of mainstream media promotion of rumors from unnamed White House sources that the Attorney General and the President have been at loggerheads... and that Sessions had even offered his resignation. Acosta noted the over 48 hours that passed between the report and Sanders’s rebuke, the first official White House refutation of the idea that Sessions might be on his way out for having criticized the president. The Daily Caller’s Alex Pfeiffer, however, reported Wednesday that multiple sources close to the Attorney General found the insinuation of his demise ridiculous. “He’s not going anywhere,” one official who spoke with Sessions in the aftermath of the reports told the Caller... http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/08/sessions-resigning-narrative-gets-another-blow-with-white-house-vow-of-confidence/.
Trey Gowdy To Takeover As
Chairman Of House Oversight Committee
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ The next chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, replacing the resigning Rep Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has been selected... It is Rep Trey Gowdy (R-SC) who was chosen Thursday by the House GOP Steering Committee. Gowdy issued a statement in response to being selected for the position, saying, “I am grateful to the Steering Committee and the Conference as a whole for this opportunity to serve. I look forward to working alongside the other Committee members, as well as any member of Congress, as we discharge the jurisdiction assigned to us.” The House GOP conference is expected to ratify the Steering Committee’s selection as soon as Tuesday. Gowdy would then immediately take over the duties of Oversight Committee chairman from Chaffetz...Yes, this is great! http://rickwells.us/trey-gowdy-takeover-chairman-house-oversight-committee/.
Limbaugh: Comey Is A ‘Drama
Queen,’ GOP Senators Are ‘Squishy’
by Jack Davis
{westernjournalism.com} ~ Talk show host Rush Limbaugh noted Thursday that although former FBI Director James Comey’s hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee was a vindication for President Donald Trump... not all members of the party that should be supporting Trump seemed to be with the president. “I have been somewhat disappointed in the squishiness of Republican senators in this hearing today, and then I had to catch myself and realize they don’t like Trump. They have no brief for Trump. Half of them are running around salivating President Pence,” he said Thursday. “Maybe it is that the Republicans in the House and the Senate are not convinced that Trump’s gonna survive and they’re holding their fire and they’re keeping their powder dry in the event that Trump doesn’t make it, either resigns, is impeached, is forced out by the media, or whatever. Maybe they’re holding out to find out if Trump will survive all this,” he noted on his Facebook page... http://www.westernjournalism.com/limbaugh-comey-is-a-drama-queen-gop-senators-are-squishy/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=libertyalliance&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm
_content=libertyalliance
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ISIS' top recruiting secrets exposed
By Joe Wilson
{wnd.com} ~ In the wake of the latest wave of terror attacks across the UK and Europe, more people than ever are wondering aloud how young people in the West are so easily recruited into committing the most heinous, barbaric, evil acts imaginable... In a recent interview, veteran journalist and best-selling author David Kupelian explained the tactics and techniques jihadist groups, including ISIS and al-Qaida, use to persuade people to embrace the deranged belief that the creator of the universe requires them to murder innocent people or else they will go to hell. The main trick, said Kupelian, managing editor of WND and author of several culture-war classics including “The Marketing of Evil,” is in conjuring up a counterfeit religious martyrdom experience and selling it to people as the real thing... http://www.wnd.com/2017/06/isis-top-recruiting-secrets-exposed/.
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by Judge Andrew Napolitano
{townhall.com} ~ Last weekend, the FBI arrested an employee of a corporation in Augusta, Georgia, that had a contract with the National Security Agency and charged her with espionage. Espionage occurs when someone who has been entrusted to safeguard state secrets fails to do so. In this case, the government alleges that the person to whom state secrets had been entrusted is 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, who had a top-secret national security clearance.
The government claims that Winner downloaded and printed a top-secret NSA report, removed the printed version of the report from her employer's premises, and then mailed it to The Intercept, a highly regarded international media outlet that exposes government wrongdoing.
The government says it learned of this when folks from The Intercept called the NSA and told agents what they had received and what they planned to publish. After hearing agents describe the potential harm to their work if the full report were to be released, The Intercept agreed to redact certain portions, though it published the bulk of the report.
The report is startling, as it reveals that the NSA discovered that Russian hackers in late October and early November 2016 planted cookies attractive, uniquely tailored links into the websites of 122 American city and county clerks responsible for counting ballots in the presidential election. This means that if any employee of those clerks' offices clicked onto any cookie, the hackers had access to -- and thus the ability to interfere with -- the tabulation of votes. This NSA report is at sharp odds with the denials of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election made last year by President Barack liar-nObama and made last week by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it is profoundly more detailed and alarming than anything the federal government has thus far revealed.
Doesn't the American public have the right to know what the Russians did in the election? Is it necessarily criminal to make such things public? Isn't the NSA supposed to protect us from foreign hackers who are attempting to interfere with the core American electoral process -- the election of the president -- and not keep us in the dark if it fails to do so?
Here is the back story.
I have argued since 2013, when we first learned from the Edward Snowden revelations that the NSA has gathered too much data about too many innocent people since 2005, that it does so in violation of the Constitution and federal law and that it suffers from information overload -- meaning it has more raw data than it has resources to examine in a timely and effective manner.
The result of all this is liberty lost -- as innocents have their privacy invaded and, as we know, sometimes even revealed to the public for political purposes -- and our safety compromised, since the NSA repeatedly discovers that it had all relevant communications of killers before the killings but does not connect the dots until too late, as in Boston, San Bernardino and Orlando; and the same can be said for our British partners in Manchester and London during the past two weeks.
The stated purpose of all this suspicionless bulk spying on all of us all the time is to keep us safe. Yet we know that the NSA has failed at that, and we know from a recent judicial condemnation of the NSA that it has failed to protect our liberties. Now we know that it has failed to protect our presidential election.
Is it a crime to reveal what the FBI says Winner revealed? In a word, yes. Yet I argue for understanding the full picture here. If she did as the FBI alleges, she committed a violation of federal law. However, it appears she did not do so for petty, political, financial or venal reasons; rather, she may have done so for the American people to know that the spies who have failed us would keep us ignorant and vulnerable.
Can The Intercept be prosecuted for revealing top-secret material to the public? In a word, no. The Supreme Court made clear in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 that a media entity may freely publish matters that are material to the public interest, notwithstanding the source of the matters or the behavior of the source that delivered the matters to it. This is grounded in the essence of personal liberty in a free society. In matters of material interest to the public, the public's right to know what the government is doing or has failed to do constitutionally trumps the government's right to secrecy.
Where does all this leave us? Reality Winner may very well be a patriot who risked her career and freedom to warn the American public of what the government was afraid to acknowledge -- that mass spying keeps us neither safe nor free. No doubt the government doesn't see it that way. This case has embarrassed the government, and she will most likely be prosecuted. I hope the judge in her case lets her lawyers argue that because we live in perilous times, the people are entitled to know what the government does and fails to do in our names to address the peril so we can change the government when it fails.
The remedy for the revelation of truth should consist in the truth's ability to flourish in the marketplace of ideas rather than in the punishment of person revealing information. The core principle of democracy is that the people have consented to the government. When the government keeps vital secrets from us -- particularly secrets that embarrass it, secrets that cause us to view it differently, secrets of failure -- we end up with a government that we do not know or trust. And one that ultimately lacks our consent.
Once in a While, a Good Leak
{townhall.com} ~ Last weekend, the FBI arrested an employee of a corporation in Augusta, Georgia, that had a contract with the National Security Agency and charged her with espionage. Espionage occurs when someone who has been entrusted to safeguard state secrets fails to do so. In this case, the government alleges that the person to whom state secrets had been entrusted is 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, who had a top-secret national security clearance.
The government claims that Winner downloaded and printed a top-secret NSA report, removed the printed version of the report from her employer's premises, and then mailed it to The Intercept, a highly regarded international media outlet that exposes government wrongdoing.
The government says it learned of this when folks from The Intercept called the NSA and told agents what they had received and what they planned to publish. After hearing agents describe the potential harm to their work if the full report were to be released, The Intercept agreed to redact certain portions, though it published the bulk of the report.
The report is startling, as it reveals that the NSA discovered that Russian hackers in late October and early November 2016 planted cookies attractive, uniquely tailored links into the websites of 122 American city and county clerks responsible for counting ballots in the presidential election. This means that if any employee of those clerks' offices clicked onto any cookie, the hackers had access to -- and thus the ability to interfere with -- the tabulation of votes. This NSA report is at sharp odds with the denials of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election made last year by President Barack liar-nObama and made last week by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it is profoundly more detailed and alarming than anything the federal government has thus far revealed.
Doesn't the American public have the right to know what the Russians did in the election? Is it necessarily criminal to make such things public? Isn't the NSA supposed to protect us from foreign hackers who are attempting to interfere with the core American electoral process -- the election of the president -- and not keep us in the dark if it fails to do so?
Here is the back story.
I have argued since 2013, when we first learned from the Edward Snowden revelations that the NSA has gathered too much data about too many innocent people since 2005, that it does so in violation of the Constitution and federal law and that it suffers from information overload -- meaning it has more raw data than it has resources to examine in a timely and effective manner.
The result of all this is liberty lost -- as innocents have their privacy invaded and, as we know, sometimes even revealed to the public for political purposes -- and our safety compromised, since the NSA repeatedly discovers that it had all relevant communications of killers before the killings but does not connect the dots until too late, as in Boston, San Bernardino and Orlando; and the same can be said for our British partners in Manchester and London during the past two weeks.
The stated purpose of all this suspicionless bulk spying on all of us all the time is to keep us safe. Yet we know that the NSA has failed at that, and we know from a recent judicial condemnation of the NSA that it has failed to protect our liberties. Now we know that it has failed to protect our presidential election.
Is it a crime to reveal what the FBI says Winner revealed? In a word, yes. Yet I argue for understanding the full picture here. If she did as the FBI alleges, she committed a violation of federal law. However, it appears she did not do so for petty, political, financial or venal reasons; rather, she may have done so for the American people to know that the spies who have failed us would keep us ignorant and vulnerable.
Can The Intercept be prosecuted for revealing top-secret material to the public? In a word, no. The Supreme Court made clear in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 that a media entity may freely publish matters that are material to the public interest, notwithstanding the source of the matters or the behavior of the source that delivered the matters to it. This is grounded in the essence of personal liberty in a free society. In matters of material interest to the public, the public's right to know what the government is doing or has failed to do constitutionally trumps the government's right to secrecy.
Where does all this leave us? Reality Winner may very well be a patriot who risked her career and freedom to warn the American public of what the government was afraid to acknowledge -- that mass spying keeps us neither safe nor free. No doubt the government doesn't see it that way. This case has embarrassed the government, and she will most likely be prosecuted. I hope the judge in her case lets her lawyers argue that because we live in perilous times, the people are entitled to know what the government does and fails to do in our names to address the peril so we can change the government when it fails.
The remedy for the revelation of truth should consist in the truth's ability to flourish in the marketplace of ideas rather than in the punishment of person revealing information. The core principle of democracy is that the people have consented to the government. When the government keeps vital secrets from us -- particularly secrets that embarrass it, secrets that cause us to view it differently, secrets of failure -- we end up with a government that we do not know or trust. And one that ultimately lacks our consent.
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