This year on March 11, which was a Monday, the Sacramento police review commission met. They passed a unanimous motion to recommend city leaders support Assembly Bill 392.

That bill would restrict the use of deadly force by police. Now police may use deadly force only when “necessary to prevent imminent and serious injury or death as opposed to when “reasonable.”

Office may not fire their weapons if nonlethal alternatives are available.

The city brilliantly adopted AB 392, before it went into effect:

“The bill doesn’t take away the ability of police officers to use force if it is necessary, if their life is in danger or the life of someone else is in danger,” Commissioner Mario Guerrero said. “What this bill does is say if that isn’t the situation; there are steps that you can take to ensure the safety and sanctity of life for everyone.”

The police union responded with the following comment:

AB 392 is a deeply flawed and unconstitutional bill. We are supporting SB 230, which will help achieve better outcomes for everybody by providing officers clear guidelines and training on de-escalation and alternative tactics.”

SB 230 is different from the AB 392 because it focuses on policies and de-escalation training instead of redefining when officers can resort to use of force.

In case you were wondering how this would work in the real world, well now you know. Police responded to a domestic violence situation last week. They were there to help a woman collect her belonging. They were allegedly ambushed by Adel Sambrano Ramos. He has a long criminal record. A judge twice granted domestic violence restraining orders against Ramos in 2004 and 2007. In both cases he was required to give up his guns. Either those orders expired or he didn’t really care.

A black family who lived next door said that Ramos had threatened three children with kitchen knives and frequently shouted racial slurs. They complained to the police, but no one was willing to do anything.

https://heavy.com/news/2019/06/adel-sambrano-ramos/

Video appears to show that when officers arrived on the scene Ramos started shooting. There is no evidence that the police ever shot back. Instead, they took cover. Officer Tara O’Sullivan was lying in the back yard seriously wounded. The decision was made to wait for an armored vehicle to arrive before attempting rescue. There are reports that she lay on the ground bleeding for more than 45 minutes and that the suspect blasted every time he saw movement.

The Police Chief explained that they waited for the armored vehicle because they did not feel a police car offered adequate protection. He complained that the suspect had an illegal assault weapon. He had an AR15 with a pistol grip. An Assault Rife. THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

In the meantime there is video of anti-police protesters celebrating and insulting the police. The suspect was not arrested until after an 8 hour stand-off. Office O’ Sullivan was already dead. He eventually just walked out and surrendered.

The police department is now reporting that she suffered a non-survivable wound. They, of course, blame the assault rifle. They always blame the rifle. Maybe she couldn’t have been saved, but is that really an excuse for not even trying?

There were numerous police officers at that scene, many, if not all of them wearing bullet proof vests. Most, if not all of them, were armed. What, exactly, would an imminent threat look like if it was not a man literally shooting at a wounded police officer? In Florida a police officer is being accused of cowardice for not confronting a school shooter. Here police are being praised for showing restraint by not confronting someone who just shot a cop. By the way, that school shooter had an AR15.

The local media is praising Officer O’Sullivan, which is great. The police chief said she was like family. Wonderful. Imagine you are a 26 year old police officer lying wounded in that backyard. You are surrounded by fellow police officers, all wearing body armor, crouched behind their patrol cars. You are being shot by a mad-man with a rifle. In the meantime, everyone is waiting for an armored vehicle to arrive. I suspect she would rather someone at least try to rescue her.

I know. It’s the gun. This guy had an illegal AR15. Let’s pass more gun control laws to ban a gun that is already illegal. That’s what really matters here. We desperately need to pass more gun laws to make this gun that is already illegal, even more illegal. Someone like Ramos would never consider owning an illegal fire arm. Right?

Welcome to the family.

TDM

Several candidates for the 2020 DNC nomination for President are openly supporting reparations for descendants of slavery. Like most things promoted by liberals, they are more than a little short on logic and ignorant of obvious facts. This issue is one that is guaranteed to backfire big time. The problem is that those pushing for reparations are ignoring something really important. It was Democrats, not Republicans who were responsible for slavery.

The justification for compensation is for people enslaved or their descendants. Liberals are very good at identifying who was hurt by slavery. They just give little consideration to who should be to blame.

We know that there were about 35 million Americans here in 1865. Approximately 3.5 million of them were African American. Another 20 million people arrived between 1865 and 1900. They were almost all white, because few black people were immigrating to the United States. I have seen some estimates that over 90% of the black population descended from slaves. But a only a very small percentage of white people descended from slave owners.

So while it is pretty easy to say that a high percentage of African Americans do have an argument that they were harmed by slavery, that does not mean that a high percentage of white people were responsible. In fact, it is morally irresponsible to blame the descendants of people who were not even here when slavery existed. It is also hard to hold people in the north, where slavery was banned, for the action of Southern Democrats. It is even difficult to hold people in the south who did not own slaves responsible, since they hardly benefited from slavery. The sad truth is that slavery made a small number of rich people even richer and benefited almost no one else.  If anything it made it harder for a non-slaver owner in the south to find work, because the rich people owned all the land and why pay someone to work when you have all that free labor.

So, we should give reparations. They should be paid primarily by descendants of the 275,000 people living in the south who actually owned slaves. That is only fair. Certainly a majority of the blames belongs to them. Let’s assume that they are responsible for 90% of the damage.

Let’s then split up the remaining 10% among others who share “some” level of shared responsibility. We can exclude anyone descended from people who arrived here after 1865. Since slavery was illegal in the north it is hard to justify charging their descendant for reparations. If there should be some charge, a majority should be charged to people who descended from Democrats. The Republican Party was founded in opposition to slavery, so one could argue that their descendants should also be exempt. Why should Republicans be forced to pay for things they opposed done by Democrats?

This means the remaining 10% should be charged to descendants of people who lived in the south, prior to 1865 and allowed slavery to exist and Democrats in the north who supported pro-slavery southern Democrats.

This brings up the next question, which is how to allocate costs. Some of these people, descended from rich southern plantation owners, may have significant assets. Since one could argue that those assets were only possible because of slavery, they should pay the highest price. This is complicated by the fact that at least some of these plantation owners could not survive financially when they actually had to pay for labor. So while their descendant may be justifiably liable, they don’t necessarily have any significant assets with which to fund compensation.

And, oh, there’s this other problem. If we start actually looking at who was responsible for slavery that is going to be embarrassing for the Democratic Party. In fact the entire history of the Democratic Party was that of institutionalized racism. That only ended when Al Gore’s father along with friends like Robert Byrd lost the last battle to block civil rights legislation.

Then these same people started handing out money to African Americans to show them who their real friends were. They also set about to explain why the Republicans are the racists. This worked remarkably well and typically about 90% of African American vote for Democrats. I suspect most of them don’t really understand the true history of racism in this country. Trying to fund reparations from slavery might offer some embarrassing facts with regard to who was who most definitely was not responsible.

TDM.

In 1965 I was a senior in High School. I knew we had some people fighting in Vietnam, but wasn’t sure were Vietnam was and this was of little interest to me. I had zero interest in joining the U.S. military. I should have known better. The winds of war were already blowing and I would soon be caught in the path of destruction. On August 2, and August 4, 1964 two U.S. Navy Destroyers, the U.S.S. Maddox and the U.S.S. Turner Joy were allegedly attacked in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. It is still unclear if the attacks actually occurred. However, on August 7, 1964 congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorized President Lyndon Johnson to “take all necessary measures to prevent further aggression” by the communist government of North Vietnam. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

That set off a chain of events that resulted in me being notified that I was about to be drafted. I chose to enlist in the Air Force, primarily because I wanted to avoid combat. That almost worked. But, I made some serious career miscalculations and ended learning to speak Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute. Ultimately I spent most of my Air Force career flying combat missions and frankly I consider myself lucky to have survived the experience.

This was hardly the first time a major war started with a relatively minor incident. Hitler invaded Poland after the Gleiwitz incident. Most people believe this was a false flag operation where Nazi troops posed as Polish nationals and staged an attack on Germany. Regardless of what really happened, the result was the invasion of Poland and World War II was the final result.

On June 28, 1918 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo. I still am not sure why this resulted in World War I, but most historians believe this was the precipitating incident.

There were two occasions where North Korean attacked us in international waters. One was the shoot down of an EC121 on April 15, 1969. Richard Nixon was President and he backed off from attacking North Korea. North Korea actually captured the USS Pueblo on January 23, 1968. This took place a week after Lyndon Johnson gave his State of the Union address and one week prior to the start of the Tet Offensive. There were unconfirmed reports that Johnson seriously considered attacking North Korea with nuclear weapons. Ultimately, he did nothing.

Earlier there was an incident, never reported in the media, where a U.S. fighter pilot reported that his wingman had been shot down, over international waters, by a Chinese fighter plane. Johnson ordered a Defcon 2 and prepared to attack China. Fortunately, there was a U.S. reconnaissance plane in the area monitoring the Chinese Air Force and they quickly notified Washington that China had not shot down that plane. I know this because I knew a Chinese Linguist on that plane. It turned out that the navy pilot had got lost and accidentally shot down his own wingman.

The point is that these types of events are extremely dangerous. They have resulted in major military conflicts. It is impossible for anyone to predict all the possible outcomes. I do know that the most dangerous thing anyone could do under these circumstance is what Democrats did in the House today. They passed a resolution blocking Trump from taking action. This is a meaningless effort, since there is zero chance the Senate will ratify this act of stupidity. However, if Iran fails to realize that Trump has the power to deal with this they may be tempted to do more. Any escalation by them would be almost certain to start some kind of military conflict. Ironically the self-righteous fools in the House are not only making the situation worse, they will undoubted blame Donald Trump if things go south.

If Barack Obama was President and Republicans tried to handcuff him like this Democrats and the MSM would be outraged. They would be right to be outraged. Whether we like him or not, trust him or not, the reality is that we only have one President at a time and he absolutely needs the authority to take whatever action is necessary to protect us. This is further evidence that neither the DNC nor members of the MSM have the character necessary to just do what is right, for once, without regard to the politics. Whether this was done because they are merely stupid or hopelessly biased doesn’t really matter. Either way, we can never risk trusting them with national security. We can only hope that neither President Trump nor our enemies will take this silly and childish act seriously, because the consequences of that could be beyond catastrophic.

This is unfortunately not all that new. Even after Hitler invaded Poland and France there were people in high levels of the British Government who still thought the smart move was to try and negotiate a peace settlement with him. Fortunately the prime minister was Winston Churchill and he knew exactly what to do.

TDM

Democrats think they have a winning argument by proposing Medicare for all. The theory is that the government will take over all health care resulting in better care and lower costs. They obviously learned nothing from the failure of ObamaCare. The problem is that the federal government has never demonstrated the capability of managing anything. Medicare for all primarily appeals to people who want the government to pay for everything. Many of these people pay no taxes, so they view all this as more free stuff. People who actually pay taxes are less easy to fool.

The only reason ObamaCare was even considered is that the health care system in the United States had some major flaws. This dates back to FDR. Actually it dated back to Teddy Roosevelt. I researched this subject many years ago when I was working on my Master’s Degree. I was shocked to discover that the same issues that caused problems in 1901 were the same issues preventing solutions today. It is quite simple. The Hospitals think they deserve the most money. The Doctors think they deserve the most money. The Drug companies think they deserve the most money. The Medical Equipment providers think they deserve the most money. The Insurance Companies think they deserve the most money. None of them showed any willingness to compromise in 1901 and none of them show much interest in compromise today. When there is little competition, there is little incentive to change.

That brings us to FDR, who wanted to increase the number of people with insurance. The solution was to provide huge tax incentives to large employers if they provided health insurance. They could pay for insurance with pre-tax dollars. That reduced the taxes paid by the employer and the employee. It worked brilliantly, but there was a problem. It made it difficult for individuals who are not employed by large corporations to buy insurance. So while this did increase the number of insureds, people who did not work for large employees had few good options.

Prior to FDR there were associations that had been formed solely to buy health insurance. They were eliminated by the employer mandate and the result was a lack of competition.

Well very quietly Trump did something that changed EVERYTHING. It is very simple, it is brilliant and Democrats are oblivious. The Trump administration finalized rules that will let companies put money into tax-exempt HRAs that employees can use to buy an individual insurance policy. At the same time, he loosened federal rules that blocked association health plans. This means that associations can be formed solely for the purpose of purchasing health insurance. Jackpot. Hello competition, even for individuals. In fact, employers will no longer have to even bother purchasing health care, they can just put those delicious pre-tax dollars into a fund and the problem is solved.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/19/trump-just-revolutionized-health-care-and-nobody-noticed/

I purchased the health care for two major corporations. There were always insurance companies more than willing to compete for our account. That is because we had thousands of employees that represented a wide demographic spread of risk. The insurance industry looked at the entire population and priced accordingly.

In the individual health insurance world, people who are young and healthy can purchase health insurance very cheaply, but they often do bother. They consider themselves to be immortal and insurance, even if very cheap, is just an unnecessary cost. Those people who are willing to pay for insurance are older and they have more significant health care needs. That resulted in little, if any, real competition in the individual market.

But now a whole bunch of people will have money that they not only can spend on health care, they must spend it on health care. It is a use it or lose it environment. Associations will quickly form and they will be designed to get participation from a wide demographic range. Those who fail to do that, will fail. Younger people, who are getting money from their employer, will be more willing to purchase health insurance. They will pay less than older people, but a lot more than the real cost of insuring them. This will help subsidize the rates for older people, and keep insurance more affordable for all.

The Associations will compete. They will compete to attract Doctors, Hospitals, Drug Companies, Medical Equipment Providers and Insurance Companies. This type of competition ALWAYS results in higher quality and lower costs. It also results in more creative benefit structures.

This will happen at the speed of light. The health insurance industry is extremely large and some really smart people are about to be unleashed. In many ways this will be similar to the high tech explosion only with much more competition and far greater potential for profits. It will be a case study regarding capitalism on steroids.

I am shocked, because while a lot of people on both sides of the aisle have been loudly promoting solutions that could never work, Donald Trump may have just revolutionized the health care industry. All the time people were saying he didn’t have a plan; he actually came up with a strategy that is beyond brilliant. He did this quietly and in private and rolled it out before his opponents knew he was even working on it. This could easily be one of the most important actions taken by this or any other President and so far, only a few people have figured this out. I never heard about the Issues & Insights editorial board, but this article is stunning and based on my own personal experience, they have absolutely nailed it.

TDM

Any top executive an insurance company can tell you about adverse selection. That is when you attract the wrong customers. For example those insurance companies in California who offered more flexibility in writing homes in areas with a high wild-fire risk literally got burned. A lot of insurance carriers lost money in California. Those who were more competitive in places like Paradise suffered catastrophic losses. One even went insolvent. Other carriers, who were more selective, had much better results.

The insurance industry in California has figured this out. Today no standard admitted carrier will write any new homeowners’ insurance if your home is located anywhere near a wild-fire area. In addition, insurance carriers have greatly expanded what they consider to be high risk areas to make sure they don’t accidentally miss anyone.

This problem was easy to predict. One of my first assignments in the insurance industry was to underwrite homeowners’ policies in California. That was more than 40 years ago, and everyone already knew about the risk of wild-fires in California. Although our esteemed governor thinks this is a new development because of global warming (climate change) it actually isn’t new at all. We just have built a lot more homes in areas where wild-fires are not only possible, they are not only probable, in some cases they are inevitable. Now everyone is shocked to learn that what is was and will be obviously true is obviously true.  When you think about it, only a Democratic politician would be stupid enough to bitch about the weather in California.

Incredibly Democrats are doubling down on adverse selection. It started with the homeless population. California passed laws to make it easier to be homeless. Police can’t arrest you anymore. New taxes are designed to generate more revenue to provide additional services to the homeless. Nothing will change, except the number of homeless people. People all over the country are waking up and deciding that if they have ever considered trying for the coveted homeless lifestyle, now is the time and California is the place.

Los Angeles and San Francisco have already deteriorated to the point where the problems are drawing national attention. Nothing being proposed has any chance of even reducing the problem. Even diseases like the bubonic plague are showing up again.

So what could make this worse? Easy. In addition to encouraging homeless people, go all out to be more welcoming to illegal aliens. Explain that California is the place you want to be. We’ll even offer you free medical care. No one is illegal here.

The great migration is already underway. People with jobs, we call them taxpayers, are moving out of state. People here illegally and those who are homeless are already flooding in. The only person doing anything to stop the flood, Donald Trump, is being resisted at every opportunity.

Now Donald Trump just took steps to increase the pace on the road to destruction. Democrats were too stupid to realize what will happen. He announced plans to deport over one million people who are here illegally. Chuck Schumer says this is impossible. It would be if people like Schumer were in charge. But Trump doesn’t actually need to deport these people, he just needs to encourage them to move someplace else, like California.

ICE will deploy to locations where local law enforcement will actively cooperate. Illegal aliens will either get arrested or move. The MSM will help Trump in his mission by publicizing all these nasty arrests and deportations. Once again, Trump is getting free advertising from the MSM. Those here illegally who are not already in California are packing their bags. With each deployment by ICE, large sections of the country will be cleared of illegal aliens. They will flock to places like Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco. They will also flock to states like New York, but in spite of the best efforts by people like Governor Cuomo, the weather still sucks. California will be the big winner of the illegal alien lottery.

Democratic politicians will respond by making things worse, much worse. They will raise taxes and use the money to fund free housing and free medical for the homeless. Then they will wonder why there are more homeless. They will block the police from arresting illegal aliens and then wonder why the crime rate is skyrocketing.

Those who already live here, who have jobs and who pay taxes will be punished. They will also be lectured by liberals and the Hollywood elite on the need to be more welcoming. Liberals will be shocked to discover that a lot of people are just leaving. They will be even more shocked when the outrage reaches the point where they are thrown out of office.

If you doubt that, start paying attention to Europe. All of those progressive politicians who embraced open borders and mass migration are being voted out of office. The same thing will happen here. It is not only possible, it is not only probable, it is inevitable. The homeless and the illegal aliens will not help Democrats win elections, because they don’t pay taxes and they don’t vote. Eventually the rest of the people, who do pay taxes, will revolt and vote the bums out of office.

Anyone who has studied the insurance industry knows all about adverse selection. This has happened many times before and the results have always been the same. California is using adverse selection to gain new residents. It is only a matter of time before they pay the price for that. The last people to figure this out will be Democrats. But eventually, even they won’t be able to tolerate the stench.

TDM

Roger Stone is definitely not playing the game. He refuses to plead guilty and his legal counsel is questioning whether Russia even hacked the DNC servers in the first place. I should point out that some of the filings by his legal team have been less than impressive, but in this case he may have a point. We already know that neither the FBI nor the NSA had the opportunity to do a forensic evaluation of the DNC server(s). They both relied on an analysis by CrowdStrike, which had been hired by the DNC. CrowdStrike does not have a lot of credibility here. Suppose you hired a guard to protect the hen house against an attack by a fox. You wake up to discover that a fox got in and all your hens are dead. You then rely solely on the guard who failed to protect the hen house to advise you regarding what went wrong. Brilliant!

But another question is” “if there was a hack, wouldn’t the NSA has evidence of that? There are even unconfirmed reports that the NSA has copies of those e-mail deleted by Hillary Clinton. But, there is no report of the NSA having evidence of a hack of the DNC servers by Russia. Hmmm.

That begs the question, how else would someone get access to the data. The answer is actually quite obvious. Any employee could have brought a thumb drive to work and just downloaded the data. That would have taken about a minute. In addition, there are reports that DNC employees were allowed to bring their laptops home and to access the database from home. That makes sense, because a lot of employees work remotely these days. All one of those employees would have needed to do is log in and download the data to a thumb/flash drive.

In addition, it has been reported that John Podesta’s password was allegedly “password.” Almost anyone with his user ID could have logged into the system downloaded everything and logged out. There might not be even a record of that. It certainly wouldn’t have looked anything like a hack.

If Mueller can’t prove that Russia hacked the DNC servers, he had no probable cause to investigate Roger Stone for anything. Frankly, without Russia hacking the DNC servers, it is hard to justify Mueller investigating anything or anyone.

I previously wrote that Mueller was either secretly working for Trump, or he is hopelessly incompetent. It was hard for me to believe that a former Director of the FBI could be this sloppy, but with each new development that looks increasingly possible. The Mueller report has already been exposed making some very obvious mistakes. One example was including a “parsed” version of a recorded phone conversation. That was a silly mistake. There are other reports of major errors. For example the Mueller report failed to disclose that Konstantin Kilimnik was a U.S. State Department informant. If Mueller did not know that, he is hopelessly incompetent. Yet, if he included this, knowing about Kilimnik that has the potential to discredit his entire report. Either way, this is beyond bad.

For months Democrats were desperately waiting for the Mueller report to take down Trump. When the report was released and that didn’t happen they just kept on pretending. The result is that both liberals and conservatives are united on only one subject. They both agree that Mueller botched this big time. No one is impressed.

At some point even the Adam Schiff’s of this world will realize the obvious. Mueller’s report is nothing more than a major disappointment. Eventually, they will turn on him. The only alternative would be for them to admit they were wrong and they are totally incapable of doing that.

In the meantime, while liberals have convinced themselves that Joe Biden would trounce Donald Trump in a general election, they are ignoring the obvious. Trump is scheduled to speak in Orlando later this week and people are already lined up more than 40 hours before the doors open. When both Biden and Trump spoke in Pennsylvania on the same day Biden drew a much smaller crowd than Trump. This was so obvious that even Politico couldn’t pretend any more.  Instead they said: “Focusing on crowd size is Trump’s game, it says, an emphasis on style over substance that attempts to turn audience engagement into an argument about the 76-year-old Biden’s energy level.”

This is exactly the way they evaluated those Trump crowds in 2016. My response is “don’t stop believing.” It is so fun to watch.

TDM

Donald Trump told George Stephanopoulos that if a foreign government offered dirt on a political opponent, he would probably listen. In addition, he wouldn’t necessarily notify the FBI. The liberal left went ape, as they always do. Anderson Cooper described this as treason, which is par for the course. But, by this time, they should know better. This was hardly a case where Trump went off script. He knew exactly what he was saying and this was deliberate. Part of the reason is probably to protect his son for agreeing to attend a meeting where dirt was promised on Hillary Clinton. But perhaps a bigger reason is that Hillary Clinton actually did ALL OF THE ABOVE. When that was mentioned, the MSM said: there’s no proof of that. Of course there isn’t, because you can’t see anything if you don’t bother to look. The MSM has never even considered looking at Hillary Clinton.

It is important to remember that Trump knows things you do not know. He knows what Barr and Durham have already found. He knows what the IG has found. He also knows what Christopher Wray and Rod Rosenstein have found. He also has the full, unredacted version of the Mueller report. There is an old saying that one should be careful when pointing the finger at someone else, because three other fingers are pointing back at you. I suspect Trump did this for exactly that reason. He knows the louder the DNC and the MSM screams about this, the more embarrassing it will be when they are confronted solid proof that Hillary Clinton did the same thing, only on steroids. They will be left with nothing other than to say it doesn’t matter because she isn’t President of the United States. At which point all Donald Trump needs to do is smile and say: “Thank God!”

I suspect the real reason Trump gave them the finger is that he knows they will only end up pointing it at themselves. This was easy to predict. Liberals give a knee jerk response to anything Trump says or does. They seldom bother to even consider the possibility that they are getting this wrong. That makes them extremely vulnerable.

TDM

On July 7, 1865 Lewis Powell, David Harold, George Atzerodt and Mary Surratt were hanged at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth had already been killed by government troops. But the person who probably set the whole conspiracy up, John Surratt, Jr. was never punished at all.

If John Surratt had been captured shortly after the assassination he would almost certainly had been hung along with the rest. He certainly looked more responsible than his mother. He allegedly flew to Montreal. He was spotted in Europe in April 1866. He escaped again and was finally captured on a boat to Egypt.

But Surratt was tried by a civilian court, not a military tribunal. He hired highly skilled attorneys who argued that he only wanted to kidnap Lincoln, not kill him. The jury couldn’t reach a verdict. In the meantime, the statute of limitations had passed and Surratt was set free. He spent seven months in South American and then returned to the U.S. and went on the lecture tour. He openly admitted that he knew John Wilkes Booth and he knew of the plot to kidnap Lincoln, but claimed he didn’t know about the assassination. He lived to a ripe old age and died on April 21, 1916.

The point being that people who can delay being tried can often be successful at beating the rap, even when they are obviously guilty. Think of O.J. Simpson as an example of this. That brings us to Michael Flynn. He quickly plead guilty and was apparently close to being sentenced. But that was delayed, and delayed and delayed again. There are reports that he plead guilty to spare his son. Since Mueller investigation has been shut down, there is unlikely to be any continued threat to his family. Mueller is no longer in a position to indict anyone.

Flynn has fired his attorney and hired Sidney Powell. She is one tough cookie and is almost certain to take on the validity of the entire Mueller investigation. Based on some of the recent revelations, including the suppression of exculpatory evidence, it is possible that none of the indictments by the Mueller investigation will survive. If a judge rules that the investigation was tainted, all of the evidence is inadmissible. If documents recently disclosed in the media are accurate, it could be very hard to convict anyone of anything. That, by the way, is exactly what Sidney Powell predicted.

Almost anything could happen. It will probably take Ms. Powell about three months to just read the file. But, anyone remotely familiar with Sidney Powell would not bet against her. One thing is already certain; she absolutely believes that Flynn should withdraw his guilty plea. She even wrote a book called “Licensed to Lie” about corruption at the DOJ. At a minimum; this should be fun to watch.

TDM

Good attorneys quickly learn to never ask a question to which they do not know the answer. Few would accuse Jerrold Nadler of being a good attorney. As far as I can tell, he never actually practiced law at all. The attached letter to Nadler from Attorney General William Barr is devastating for Democrats and it demolishes the so-called impeachment hearings before they begin. Nadler ASKED Barr for information which he probably now regrets receiving:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6145811/2019-6-10-DOJ-Review-of-Intelligence-Activities.pdf

The only real question is whether Nadler is bright enough to realize he is in serious trouble.

The letter says that: “It is now well established that, in 2016, the U.S. government and others undertook certain intelligence-gathering and investigative steps directed at persons associated with the Trump campaign.”

What is not established is whether or not these activities were justified. We already know that the Mueller investigation found zero evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. If there is no evidence now, there was no evidence then.

Barr said his investigation includes a “collaborative, ongoing effort between the Departments’s Review Team and the intelligence community as well as certain foreign actors.”

He has assigned this to John Durham:

“The Review is being conducted primarily in the Washington, D.C. area by Mr. Durham and a number of U.S. Attorney’s office personal and other Department employees. The Department has made existing office space in Washington available for this work. Mr. Durham’s Review will be funded out of the U.S. Attorney’s Salaries and Expenses appropriation.”

In the meantime, Nadler is embarrassing himself by calling John Dean who was publicly humiliated by the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. These hearings are a joke. They have zero evidence, since everything is already published in the Mueller report. They can neither add to nor detract from that. They have less than nothing and they don’t have enough resources to investigate anything.

In the meantime, John Durham has a staff of U.S. Attorney’s office personal at his beck and call. The U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) is there to prosecute criminal cases on behalf of the United States government. It is not there to make political points.  It is not investigating Donald Trump. It is not investigating any of his associates. It is investigating the people who ordered the investigation of Donald Trump and his campaign.

The only question is whether there is some justification for doing this. Since there is zero evidence that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, or anyone else, there is unlikely to be such justification. Think about this. A lot of people are still harping about the totally discredited Russia Dossier. There is a reason for that. They apparently have nothing else.

When you combine this with the bone chilling comment that this is a collaborative effort between our intelligence community and “foreign actors” this is a very serious investigation. Add in the fact that he is including activities by civilians (Hillary Clinton was a civilian in 2016) and this becomes even more significant.

We are very close on this. It sure looks like Barr is setting the stage for indictments. Barr would never has disclosed this information unless he already had almost everything he needed. Think about any TV show you have watched about law enforcement. When they show up with a search warrant, the end is near.

The DOJ almost never comments on an ongoing investigation. Perhaps Barr did so this time because he wanted to send a message. Part of that message is to let people know that the window to “let’s make a deal” is closing rapidly. Those people not already singing like canaries are probably seeking legal counsel with voice coach training.

There is always the potential that this will all end with nothing. That has certainly happened many times before. But, there is increasing evidence that this is headed in a different direction. Here are some clues with regard to what is really happening. Watch for people who start screaming loud accusations about anyone and everyone other than themselves. That may signal a desperate attempt to change the subject. Then watch for these same people to suddenly go strangely silent. That often results after competent legal counsel has warned them to shut up. They say it is often darkest just before dawn. When people are in serious legal jeopardy, it is often most silent when they are sitting at home, terrified, waiting for a very big legal hammer to drop.

TDM

Wow! The liberal media is ripping Nancy Pelosi a new one for saying that she wants to see Trump in prison. Even someone as far out there as Chris Matthews has a limit. While Trump said he would like to see Hillary investigated and the crowd responded by “lock her up” that is very different than Pelosi wanting to imprison Trump based on zero evidence. For one thing, the need to investigate Hillary Clinton is beyond obvious and there actually is evidence of crimes. For another, Trump never said lock her up, nor did he mention imprisoning her.  Continue reading →