Trumped Up Charges

Donald Trump’s largest donor is a guy named Robert Mercer. He is a hedge fund zillionaire and a republican activist. He and his family have put more money into the effort to elect Donald Trump for president than anyone else in the country, including Trump himself. In this election cycle, one of the ways Robert Mercer spent his money was by funding one of the many republican super pacs that played a role during the primary process this year. 

Robert Mercer funded his own group of related super pacs known as Keep the Promise and the person he put in charge of running them was Kellyann Conway who you know now as being Donald Trump’s campaign manager. When Kellyann Conway accepted the job as Donald Trump’s campaign manager, she had to quit her old job, running the Robert Mercer super pacs. So Robert Mercer had to replace her.

The guy Robert Mercer chose to place Kellyann Conway to run his super pac was a guy named David Bossie but very shortly after they hired him, he also left the Mercer family super pac to go work for the Trump campaign just like Kellyann Conway did. He became the Deputy Campaign Manager to Kellyann Conway in the Trump Campaign.

Robert Mercer is also reportedly the principle funder of Breitbart.com. Breitbart.com is a website which is on kind of a ragged, slightly unnerving edge of conservative media depending on where you’re coming from. They’ve been around for a while but if you want a little flavor of what Breitbart.com is like in the conservative media universe, Breitbart.com is these guys:

Breitbart famously called conservative commentator Bill Kristol a “Renegade Jew” for the crime of not supporting Donald Trump. 

After the massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina where nine black church goers were killed in cold blood by a white supremacist who fetishized the confederate flag, Breitbart.com responded to that massacre with this:

The Breitbart.com editors are also seemingly encouraged to make as big a splash online as they can. One of their editors, Milo Yiannopoulos, very famously was banned from twitter permanently after he led an online campaign of racist and sexist abuse against the comedian Leslie Jones: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/18/milo-reviews-ghostbusters/

 And

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-just-permanently-suspended-conservative-writer-milo?utm_term=.mb8aZLlEg2#.vdNwRmAVEv

In general Breitbart’s whole take on the Ghostbuster’s movie that featured SNL star Leslie Jones, was that it shouldn’t have been called “Ghostbusters”, it should have been called “Weight-watchers”.

So that’s what Breitbart is like.

When Donald Trump said he would “ban all Muslims” from the United States that struck most people as not just obscene but also kind of obscure. Where did that come from? It seemed like such a nutty idea. Where would someone even get that idea if they were going to propose that in a political campaign? Turns out, that’s not a nutty idea at Breitbart.com. Looking at their online footprint, in particular, one of their writers, Katie McHugh, who now goes by @deplorableKatie, frequently uses the hashtag #DeportAllMuslims, not that you can’t come here if you’re Muslim, but if you’re a Muslim who is here already, we’ll find you, round you up and deport you. Samples of her tweets:

“Immigration is terrorism, forever, until you’re conquered, close the borders”

“British settlers and their descendants built civilization, Indians never bothered to build more than a few teepees”

“British settlers built the USA. “Slaves” built the country much as cows “built” McDonalds”

This is Breitbart.com. Notice how in that last one the word “Slaves” has scare quotes around it…like they weren’t really slaves.

So that’s the flavor of Breitbart. Donald Trump biggest donor, Robert Mercer, is also reportedly the main funder of Breitbart.com. The head of Breitbart.com, Stephen Bannon, took leave from that publication at the same time Kellyann Conway came over from the Mercer super pac to become campaign manager. He took leave from Breitbart.com at the same time because the two of them, at the same time, were installed at the top of the masthead of the Trump campaign. At the same time Kellyann Conway from the Mercer super pac became the Trump campaign manager, the head of Breitbart.com, Stephen Bannon, became the campaign CEO. So, from two Mercer funded outfits, came the Trump campaign manager and the Trump campaign CEO. 

It’s one thing to connect desperate dots but these dots are very close together and not hard to understand…Robert Mercer, the Mercer family and the Trump campaign.

Robert Mercer and the Mercer family also fund something that’s called the Government Accountability Institute. That sounds good, right? Sounds like it might be kind of a generic “good government” thing. It’s not a generic good government thing. It’s a right wing activist group, run by Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart.com, who is now CEO of the Trump campaign. It is also run by Peter Schweizer, who himself is a senior editor at Breitbart.com. So both places that Peter Schweizer works, is funded by Donald Trump’s biggest donor, Robert Mercer. 

So, with that support, all funded by this one guy, Robert Mercer, Peter Schweizer wrote a book. And you will be very surprised to learn that this book spins some very elaborate, very damning, very dubious conspiracy theories about how "crooked", terrible and awful Hillary Clinton is. Once he produced this anti-Hillary Clinton book, called by the way “Clinton Cash”, with all these elaborate dubious theories about Hillary Clinton’s terribleness, the head of Breitbart, Donald Trump’s now campaign CEO, Stephen Bannon, decided to turn the book into a movie of the same name.

It’s all very neat and tidy. It’s all one piece, it’s all one freaking donor. This is the very specific pedigree of one corner of the conservative media world and now Republican presidential campaign, that doesn’t look very much like anything else in Republican politics. And yes, it is super right wing stuff, its conspiratorial stuff, but in a lot of ways, it is not normal Republican messaging. It’s unusual, “Banning all Muslims from the country”. This is the corner of the conservative media world that says that Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan is secretly working for Hillary Clinton and has been for months and he must be destroyed. And they maintain that every republican you’ve ever heard of who is NOT named Donald Trump, must be destroyed. Everyone from John Boehner, to Eric Cantor, to Paul Ryan to John McCain, in Breitbart.com “ville”, they aren’t just the Republican household names that have led this party, who every American has heard of if they care anything about politics, in Breitbart.com “land” all of those folks are Traitors. They’re evil secret liberals who must be destroyed. Breitbart.com has campaigned for primary challengers against John McCain, against Eric Cantor, against Paul Ryan, against John Boehner. They were the ones that led the online media campaign to throw John Boehner out as speaker of the house.

Also, I should let you know that Breitbart.com wants you to know about the rising threat of “Eco-sexuals”. http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/03/bored-of-lgbtqi-try-ecosexuality/  Yes, people who have sex with trees. Yeah, people are “doing it” with trees you guys! Terrible! And if you like that story, you’ll notice in the upper right corner of the page, Breitbart will send you your very own copy of Clinton Cash FREE! Get yours now! And if you don’t read you can always click the button to get the DVD! Hurry! Supplies are Limited! Yeah, right! I don’t think supplies are limited. I’m pretty sure they have tons of them laying around.

This week, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that there has been a “break-out” from this otherwise insular little Breitbart.com corner of conservative media and political activism. Those two papers reported that apparently there are Breitbart.com fans, true believers, who buy this stuff who are working in the New York field office of the FBI. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were the first to report that the New York field office of the FBI actually used that anti-Hillary Clinton Book and the DVD of the same name, from the Breitbart.com guys, the Breitbart.com senior editor and his boss, the now CEO of the Trump campaign, they actually used that book as their source, for launching a local FBI inquiry into Hillary Clinton. That was their evidence; that was their research. These agents in the New York field office of the FBI decided that they needed to look into what Breitbart.com was saying about Hillary Clinton. “Sounds terrible, sound totally legit, we should look into that. We’re the FBI”. It had previously been reported that these New York Field office FBI agents had brought this anti-Hillary stuff to a meeting with career Justice Department prosecutors back in February 2016. One of the participants in that meeting described it as “One of the weirdest meetings I have ever been to”.  But all we knew prior to this was that they had brought some stuff about Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation to that meeting. We now know, with this new reporting that what these agents brought to that meeting was not just generic anti-Hillary Clinton stuff, or anti Hillary Clinton stuff they had cooked up on their own. No, this was stuff that had been cooked up at Breitbart.com. This was stuff that came from the “Eco-sexuals having sex with trees” website. That is what they had. That is what they brought to this meeting with the career Justice Department Prosecutors. And the career prosecutors were scratching their heads and saying “ummm I’m not sure that’s a case”.And they promptly denied the Field Agents request to investigate the dubious claims about Hillary Clinton and Clinton Foundation in the conspiracy laden, fact free book of Peter Schweizer.

Thanks to whatever is going on in that New York field office of the FBI, that little “adventure”, which is now reportedly over, that little adventure from the Breitbart.com readers in that New York FBI field office, that’s what’s out now, five days before the election. That’s what was breathlessly reported last night on Fox News. “Based on FBI sources, a whole new FBI investigation, one that was definitely going to lead to an indictment”. Fox News has since walked back the part about it definitely leading to an indictment but the Trump campaign? They’re still running with it. And of course they would. You’d expect them to. They bought and paid for it! The donor who is mostly funding the Trump for President Campaign, paid the people who created this story TO create this story! So, of course the Trump campaign is going to use it. But it’s one thing to cook up a dubious conspiratorial attack and fling it at your political opponent. It another thing altogether when you cook up a dubious conspiratorial attack and have the FBI fling it at your opponent. That’s a different thing. And that is what the FBI is doing in this election. They are using stuff from Breitbart.com as their research, as their evidence, and then they’re leaking about their “new” investigation into this “evidence”, to Fox News right before the election. And here’s the really creepy part, here’s the prospect that the Breitbart.com readers in this one FBI field office, they’re not just leaking this stuff to Fox News, not just leaking the stuff to the conservative media, here’s the prospect that they are leaking this stuff directly to the Trump campaign. Wayne Barrett, a writer for the Daily Beast, reports that two days BEFORE Director Comey sent his letter to congress, Rudy Giuliani appeared on Fox News, unprompted, bringing up on his own, two days BEFORE Director Comey sent his bombshell letter to congress about the Anthony Weiner computer and the emails that were found on it, and said this, “We have a surprise or two that you are going to hear about in the next few days. I’m talking about a pretty big surprise”. When asked by the Fox News Anchor what he meant by that he replies “You’ll see. We’re not going to go down. We’re going to keep fighting. We have a couple things up our sleeve that will turn things around”.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMWzTvOZ5sw

That was Rudy Giuliani TWO DAYS BEFORE Director Comey sent that letter to congress. That bombshell letter, which arguably put the Presidency back within reach of Donald Trump. How did Rudy Giuliani know that? Did somebody at the FBI leak to the Trump campaign, two days in advance, that the FBI was about to throw an anti-Hillary Clinton grenade into the Presidential race?

Yesterday, Mark Hosenball of Reuters, reported that when the FBI Director decided to send that letter to congress, “He was driven in part by fear of leaks from within his own agency”. He quoted his sources saying “Two law enforcement sources familiar with the FBI’s New York field office, which initially discovered the emails, said a faction of investigators in that field office are known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton”. 

Over at the Guardian Newspaper, reporter Spencer Ackerman reports “Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election”. One currently serving FBI agent tells the Guardian “The FBI is Trumpland. Clinton is the anti-Christ personified to a large swath of FBI personnel…the reason why they are leaking is that they are pro-Trump”. The FBI has refused to comment on any of this reporting about its New York field office essentially trying to throw the election in favor of Trump.

But that’s where we are right now. If part of the FBI is a Breitbart.com fan club, and they are trying to use the power of the FBI to throw the election in Trump’s favor, how does Hillary Clinton fight back against that? How does anybody?

The Bully Pulpit

For most of our existence, the bullies had no national voice. People who bullied others, did it in the privacy of school yards, in the privacy of corporations, in the seclusion of their own neighborhoods. Then  along came the internet where bullies could bully people anonymously, hiding behind their computer screen, saying whatever they want to whomever they want without being held accountable.  Bullies aren’t interested in having an intelligent debate. They are only interested in showing the world that they are the more powerful person; debasing others with name calling and shaming. They are only interested in tearing down others so they can feel more powerful.

Hillary Clinton has been bullied for more than 30 years. She has suffered indignities that most women could not and would not put up with and she has come out stronger for it. People say she is untrustworthy. These are people who can’t tell the difference between “guarded” and “untrustworthy”. These are people who don’t have all the facts about her and are making a judgement. When you look at her and her story with an open mind and an open heart, you realize that while she may have flaws like everyone else in the world, she has been blamed for things that either had nothing to do with her or were completely out of her control. Has she made some “mistakes” or done things that people consider mistakes? Sure. Hasn’t everyone? But the mistakes she has actually made are nowhere near what people accuse her of. And she is most certainly NOT a criminal nor should she be “locked up”. If you are going to lock her up for the things she has done, you would have to lock up a lot of people who have done a lot worse. Let’s look at some of the things she has been accused of.

Let’s start with the email scandal since that has been prominent in the news as of late. Hilary Clinton had a personal email server. The server was actually set up for Bill Clinton when he was president. Ok, so what does that mean? That means that the server was actually Bill Clinton’s originally. That he used this server before and after he was President. Did he use it for email? Probably. Were there classified documents on it from his use of it? Maybe. But here is the thing. I work for the government and I can tell you, that their email servers are no more secure than a server in the basement of the house of the former president. In fact, the server in the basement is probably more secure because it is not set up on a huge network with gapping security holes, with hundreds of thousands of people accessing it and accessing phishing scammers, and malware emails, compromising the security of all the hundreds of thousands of machines on the network. My agency had to replace almost 2,000 machines last year. Why? Because someone got an email with a file attached and clicked on it, unleashing a wide swath of infections on everyone in the public address book which was pretty much everyone in the agency. When others got the same email, they clicked on the link and the virus spread like wildfire. This would not happen on a private server that only one person was accessing. People don’t consider this when they look at Hilary Clinton’s email “situation”.

The other thing people don’t consider is that it was neither against any policy or rule at the state department at the time to use a private email server nor a private email address, which let’s be clear, Hilary Clinton is not in IT. She was using a private email ADDRESS which happened to be on a private server. It was better than using a private email address for example, a google email or Hotmail, or msn. These email addresses again, are private, but they are connected to a huge network with millions of people accessing that network. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was hacked, while she was running for VP! It’s easy for a person who doesn’t have extensive IT knowledge to think that she did something horribly wrong, particularly if you listen to FOX or any of the other people who try to compare her use of a private email address to Watergate. This comparison is totally and utterly ridiculous. In the Watergate scandal 69 people were indicted on charges of things ranging from perjury to burglary resulting in 48 people being either found guilty or pleading out, many of whom were Nixon’s top administration officials. A president resigned in disgrace after being found guilty of abuse of power before being impeached and was probably lucky that he did not go to jail. He probably would have ended up there had President Ford not pardoned him. To compare that to Hilary’s use of a private email address is ignorant. I lived through the Nixon scandal and I can tell you, it does not even compare.

Consider this, many people very high up in government STILL use private email addresses even though there has been a policy in place since after Hilary left the state department. Previous to that, almost every Secretary of state used a private email address/server from before Colin Powell all the way to John Kerry. See https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-20/homeland-security-leaders-bent-rules-on-private-e-mail to learn the facts.

Trump claims that Hilary Clinton deleted emails after receiving an FBI subpoena. This is factually incorrect for a number of reason. First of all, the subpoena did not come from the FBI, it came from the Benghazi Committee, a congressional committee convened to look into the Benghazi incident. There have been 7 Benghazi investigations led mostly by republicans in congress, NOT by any law enforcement branch. It is also factually incorrect that Hilary deleted the emails. In fact, an employee of the company that managed the server is the one who deleted them and he got the order to do so from Cheryl Mills, an aide to Hilary who oversaw the review of Secretary Clinton’s email archives to produce documents to the state department. Let’s look at the timeline

Feb. 1, 2013: Clinton serves her last day as secretary of state.

July 23, 2014: The State Department reaches an agreement with the Benghazi committee about producing records for its investigation into the 2012 attack on a U.S. embassy in the Libyan city.

Oct. 28, 2014: The State Department sends an official letter to Clinton’s staff requesting "emails related to their government work." Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, and aide Cheryl Mills oversaw the review of Clinton’s email archives to produce work-related documents to the department.

Dec. 5, 2014: Clinton’s team provides 55,000 pages of emails, or about 30,000 individual emails, to the State Department. Mills tells an employee at Platte River Networks, which managed the server, that Clinton does not need to retain any emails older than 60 days.

March 2, 2015: The New York Times breaks the story that Clinton used a personal email account while secretary of state.

March 4, 2015: The Benghazi committee issues a subpoena requiring Clinton to turn over all emails from her private server related to the incident in Libya.

Between March 25-31, 2015: The Platte River Networks employee has what he calls an "oh s---" moment, realizing he did not delete Clinton’s email archive, per Mills’ December 2014 request. The employee deletes the email archive using a software called BleachBit.

March 27, 2015: Clinton’s lawyers send a letter to the Benghazi committee saying that the State Department already has the relevant emails, as they were included in the Dec. 5, 2014, turnover.

Trump’s timeline is correct. The congressional subpoena came on March 4, 2015, and an employee deleted the emails sometime after March 25, 2015, three weeks later. However, the implication that Clinton deleted emails relevant to the subpoena in order to avoid scrutiny is flat wrong. The FBI’s investigation did find several thousand emails among those deleted that were work-related and should have been turned over to the State Department. However, FBI Director James Comey said in a July 2016 statement that the FBI investigation "found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them." Comey added in a later congressional hearing that the FBI learned no one on Clinton’s staff specifically asked the employee to delete the emails following the New York Times story and subpoena. Rather, the employee made that decision on his own. Clinton told the FBI that she was not involved in deciding whether individual emails should be sent to State Department, nor "did she instruct anyone to delete her emails to avoid complying with FOIA, State or FBI requests for information."

So, let’s look at Benghazi, which resulted in the email “scandal” to begin with. To understand how much time and money was spent on trying to find Hilary Clinton guilty of something, only in the end, to admit that the only reason they had all those hearings was to bring her down politically, see this: http://benghazicommittee.com/benghazi-by-the-numbers/

Trump likes to blame president Obama and Secretary Clinton for what happened in Benghazi when the truth is, Benghazi happened because congress declined provide the full funding for the embassy security funding that both President Obama and Secretary Clinton requested. This is a fact that has been simply ignored by the republicans in congress because acknowledging this fact would make the American people aware of just how much this congress has NOT done the job that they were put in office to do. They have fought every measure, including embassy security in order to make President Obama look incompetent. They can spend their time and the people’s tax dollars renaming public buildings but they can’t seem to find the time or the money to approve appropriate funding for something as important as securing our embassies around the world.  Then when it all goes pear shaped and people get killed, they try to pin it on the President and Hillary Clinton. 

This has been the most “do-nothing” congress in our nation’s history. They can’t even pass common sense gun legislation after 25 small children are killed in a school, or after 50 people are killed in a nightclub by a madman who should have never been able to buy a gun because he was on the no fly list. In 2016 they were in sessions 111 days. Yes, that’s right, 111 days. Let’s look at the numbers. There are 260 working days in a year. That’s 149 days our congress was not working for us, or to put it in terms of weeks, they had 29.8 weeks of vacation. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m lucky to get 3 weeks off in a year, let alone 29. And every single one of them is making a six figure salary paid for by the people of the United States. I would like to know, exactly what are we paying for again? After seeing those figures, if you don’t think it’s time to remove these do nothings, then you are not being very fiscally responsible. They are laughing at us. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/congress-supreme-court-budget-do-nothing-221057

I was and am a Bernie Sanders supporter. His presidency would have also been historical – The first Jewish President. But, we’re not ready for Bernie yet. And at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, there really is only two choices, one of which would be completely insane to choose considering all we know about Donald Trump. The poor blind people supporting him believe he is actually going to do something for them. He’s not. When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. And he has told us over and over in the last 15 months exactly who he is. And we have found out through the miracle of good research and reporting exactly who he is, where he came from, and what he has been doing for his 70 years on this earth and it certainly has NOT been doing ANYTHING for anyone else. Trump is, was and always has been about his brand, his fans, and his own opinion of himself. He is a bully and he encourages others to be bullies as well. He has given a voice to those bullies in our country who previously did not have a national voice. And there is a reason they had no voice. The majority of people in this country believe in the good. They believe in equal rights for everyone, they believe in religious freedom, they believe in personal responsibility and that every person in this country has a right to make their own healthcare decisions, they believe in every person’s right to a good education, they believe that laws should be fair and fairly applied to everyone. Donald Trump believes none of that. He has spent his life, cheating people out of money he owed them, bullying people with lawsuits or threats of lawsuits. He has used the laws in this country to take advantage of people. He has not EVER done something because it was the right thing to do, he has only done what would benefit himself in some way. This is a man who is a selfish bully, and becoming President would inflate his over exaggerated opinion of himself. He has a horrible disgusting dark view of our country and its people and believe me when I tell you, that will not change if he becomes president. He lives in a fact free bubble surrounded by people who cannot contain him because he doesn’t take their advice. Do you think that if he gets in office he will suddenly start listening to people? No, is the answer. He won’t. He calls Hillary a liar and “crooked”. The only thing I can say to that is “Hello Pot, this Kettle, I just wanted to let you know that you’re black!”. He is the most untruthful candidate that has ever run for office. 76% (yes this is an actual statistic backed up by research into statements he has made) of what he says are pants on fire, lies, or mostly false. On this same scale, Hilary rates 26% and no “pants on Fire” ratings for her, not one. Pants on Fire rating is reserved for the most egregious falsehoods. Donald Trump’s “pants on fire” rating is at almost 50%. So, 50% of the time Donald Trump is egregiously lying to the American people. Do you really think that will stop if he becomes president? I think not. In fact, I would go out on a limb here and say he would only just lie even more.

And crooked? Really? Seriously folks, I hardly think a private email address compares to someone who has ties to the Russian government and lies about it, cheats people out of money he owes them, scams people out of their life savings by promising them some kind of “education”, encourages people to “poll watch” when he knows full well the RNC is under a Consent Decree because his own brother-in-law lost a case in the 80’s where the RNC was convicted of interfering with elections and targeting minority neighborhoods trying to suppress their vote, denying housing to minority people so much that he was sued, not once, but twice by the justice department. He has been either the plaintiff or defendant in thousands of lawsuits, not tens, not hundreds…THOUSANDS. This is a man who fully admits to not paying taxes for almost twenty years, who won’t release his tax returns, while every other presidential candidate in US history has. He feel the rules don’t apply to him. Like he said himself, he is a star and he can do whatever he wants. Do you really think that attitude is going to change if he becomes President? That he will suddenly become humble, that he will suddenly apologize for all the bad things he has done to so many people, many of whom trusted him? Just ask Barbara Corcoran who saved Trump from bankruptcy, was expecting a thank you card and instead got a subpoena to appear in court because Trump was suing her so he didn’t have to pay her the 4 million dollars he owed her after selling a property she brokered for him for 92,000,000 dollars. He lost the case, and ended up sending her commission checks for more than two years till he paid it off. And this guy is supposed to be a “Billionaire”? He was so broke, he had to pay the money in installments. I mean seriously folks, you can’t believe anything this guy says.

And I mean come on, look at his comportment, the sniffing and face making, the orange face with the white eyes and the terrible comb over. He talks about women’s looks. I mean seriously, has he EVER looked in a mirror? This is a man who talked about his penis size in a presidential primary debate…on national television. This is who we want representing us to the world? I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t. I’ll take the lady in the pantsuit thank you.