Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who is (<a href="https://nypost.com/2020/02/06/bloombergs-naked-bid-to-buy-the-white-house-is-an-assault-on-democracy/">quite literally</a>) currently attempting to buy the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination, has found himself in seriously hot water this week. A resurfaced audio clip from 2015 depicts the multibillionaire discussing in rather stark and unartful terms one key aspect of the famously aggressive policing policy he oversaw as New York City mayor. The clip can be <a href="https://twitter.com/BenjaminPDixon/status/1227067093692055553">heard here</a>, and The Daily Wire&#8217;s James Barrett <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-tweets-deletes-newly-uncovered-audio-of-bloomberg-total-racist">wrote it up</a> yesterday:
<blockquote>“95% of your murders — murderers and murder victims fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg allegedly states in the audio. “You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16–25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city and that’s where the real crime is.” &#8230;
“So, one of the unintended consequences is people say, ‘oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods,” he stated. “Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them. And then they start say[ing], ‘Oh I don’t want to get caught.’ So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.”</blockquote>
There is a lot to digest and break down here. First, Bloomberg&#8217;s statistics are <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/why-bloombergs-2015-stop-and-frisk-remarks-are-riddled-with-inaccuracies-john-lott">likely somewhat off</a>, at least using the FBI&#8217;s national Uniform Crime Reports as a helpful proxy for the local statistics in New York City itself. Second, Bloomberg&#8217;s line about &#8220;taking[ing] the description&#8221; of a suspect, &#8220;Xerox[ing] it, and pass[ing] it out to all the cops&#8221; is ugly and plays on some rather unsavory stereotypes. Third, and perhaps most importantly for those of us conservatives of a pro-police bent, Bloomberg&#8217;s rhetoric about &#8220;throw[ing]&#8221; kids &#8220;up against the walls&#8221; paints cops in an unfortunate light and does the thin blue line little in the way of justice or charity.
It would not be improper to describe this as racially charged rhetoric, even if it <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-bloomberg-isnt-racist-but-he-is-a-nanny-state-megalomaniac-control-freak">not per se racist rhetoric</a> because it is far likelier than not that Bloomberg simply exaggerated/misstated his statistics to make an overarching point. The <a href="https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/topic-pages/expanded-homicide">FBI&#8217;s 2018 Uniform Crime Reporting Program states</a> that &#8220;[w]hen the race of the offender was known&#8221; in federal murders, &#8220;54.9% were Black or African American, 42.4% were White, and 2.7% were of other races.&#8221;
The underlying policing policy at issue is stop-and-frisk, which was largely implemented in the 1990s during then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani&#8217;s historic crime reduction in the Big Apple, and which was largely continued by then-Mayor Bloomberg during New York City&#8217;s tumultuous post-9/11 years. Contrary to Bloomberg&#8217;s inflammatory description in the leaked audio clip, here is how <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stop_and_frisk">Cornell Law School&#8217;s Legal Information Institute (LII) describes</a> a cop&#8217;s stop-and-frisk procedure: &#8220;A stop-and-frisk refers to a brief non-intrusive police stop of a suspect. &#8230; If the police reasonably suspect that the suspect is armed and dangerous, the police may frisk the suspect, meaning that the police will give a quick pat-down of the suspect&#8217;s outer clothing.&#8221;
I understand that conservatives, (<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-here-are-three-reasons-why-i-plan-vote-josh-hammer">properly</a>) unified as the overwhelming majority of us are around Donald Trump&#8217;s hopeful re-election as president of the United States, see in Bloomberg&#8217;s audio clip an easy opportunity to score a cheap political shot. I also understand, as previously mentioned, that Bloomberg&#8217;s rhetoric is neither helpful nor (in all likelihood) truly statistically spot-on.
But conservatives, who largely defended stop-and-frisk policy while it was implemented by Giuliani and Bloomberg, must not now turn on it. Stop-and-frisk is (1) constitutional, (2) effective, and (3) proper.
The 1968 U.S. Supreme Court case of <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/392/1/">Terry v. Ohio</a> upheld standard stop-and-frisk procedure on Fourth Amendment grounds. &#8220;According to the Terry court,&#8221; LII notes, &#8220;a reasonable stop-and-frisk is one &#8216;in which a reasonably prudent officer is warranted in the circumstances of a given case in believing that his safety or that of others is endangered, he may make a reasonable search for weapons of the person believed by him to be armed and dangerous.'&#8221; The key words here are the multiple times &#8220;reasonable&#8221; (or some close derivative of it) is used. It is almost assuredly true that, while &#8220;probable cause&#8221; is traditionally required for the issuance of most search warrants, &#8220;reasonable suspicion&#8221; suffices as a legal standard to justify a mere stop-and-frisk of suspect believed to be armed and readily dangerous. The text of the Fourth Amendment, after all, prohibits &#8220;unreasonable searches and seizures&#8221; (emphasis added), and here there is necessarily &#8220;reasonable suspicion&#8221; for a Terry stop to be lawful. Some more libertarian-leaning conservatives may <a href="https://twitter.com/jonathanurick/status/1227435098879995904">disagree</a>, but I recall well my criminal procedure professor at the University of Chicago Law School, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Epstein">Richard Epstein</a>, announcing to our class his belief in the constitutional soundness of Terry. And Richard Epstein, for what it&#8217;s worth, is the single most influential libertarian legal theorist of the past century.
Stop-and-frisk policy in New York City, furthermore, was undoubtedly effective. &#8220;Since 1990, major crimes have fallen 81.9% in a period that spanned the administrations of four mayors, both Republican and Democratic, including Michael Bloomberg, who switched from being a Republican to an independent during his three terms in office,&#8221; Reuters <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-york-crime/murders-in-new-york-city-rose-in-2019-defying-long-term-decline-in-crime-rate-idUSKBN1Z525V">reported</a> last month while lamenting the fact that murders in the Big Apple actually rose last year under the infamously anti-cop reign of Mayor Bill de Blasio. While it is ultimately impossible to disentangle stop-and-frisk from other aspects of the Giuliani/Bloomberg anti-crime public policy portfolio, such as so-called &#8220;broken windows policing,&#8221; the reality is that New York City became one of the safest big cities in America over the exact same time span that stop-and-frisk proliferated in popularity. It is nothing short of tragic that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/jailbreak-is-to-blame-for-spike-in-nyc-crime-de-blasio-admits">de Blasio has reversed</a> these salutary trends.
Finally, stop-and-frisk, as implemented by Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, was a generally sound public policy initiative. It is simply true that law enforcement is beset by limited resources, and that police therefore have to routinely make decisions about how to maximize results — here, measured in terms of less crime and fewer criminals on the street — given those constraints. For example, prosecutorial discretion as a law enforcement concept has a centuries-long history in the Anglo-American tradition (that, of course, does not mean that prosecutorial secretion is not <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/jeff-sessions-right-end-obamas-unlawful-approach-josh-hammer">sometimes bastardized</a>). Similarly, cops — the procedural antecedents, in a sense, to prosecutors — need to make on-the-ground decisions about where to best deploy resources in order to safeguard the public safety and the common weal. It is simply common sense that they would disproportionately target the neighborhoods where there is actually disproportionate crime committed.
By all means, conservatives can find proper bones to pick with Bloomberg&#8217;s resurfaced audio clip. But please do not lump in all of stop-and-frisk policy with those criticisms.

NYPD

HAMMER: Conservatives Should Not Oppose Stop-And-Frisk Policy

2020 Election

Bill de Blasio

Constitution

Crime

Democratic Party

Fourth Amendment

Michael Bloomberg

New York Police Department (NYPD)

Police

Racism

As Soviet Union-honeymooning, Sandinista-supporting, Fidel Castro-praising, full-on socialist loon bag Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) emerges as the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/who-will-win-democratic-primary-latest-2020-josh-hammer">undisputed front runner</a> for the Democratic Party&#8217;s 2020 presidential nomination, it nonetheless seems that the median American is rather lukewarm about the possibility of supporting someone for the presidency who holds such historically fringe views.
According to a Gallup <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/285563/socialism-atheism-political-liabilities.aspx">survey</a> released yesterday, &#8220;[m]ore than 90% of Americans say they would be happy to vote for a presidential candidate their party nominated who would be black, Catholic, Hispanic, Jewish or a woman; 80% would accept evangelical Christians, homosexual men, and lesbians; 60-70% are willing to embrace a presidential candidate who is under 40, over 70, a Muslim or an atheist; but only 45% say they would vote for a socialist for president,&#8221; the Jewish Press <a href="https://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/gallup-90-of-americans-would-vote-for-jewish-black-catholic-hispanic-woman-candidates-but-not-for-a-socialist/2020/02/12/">summarized</a>.
&#8220;Gallup’s bottom line conclusion is: The self-declared socialist Sanders could count on 76% of Democratic voters, 45% of Independents and &#8230;  only 17% of Republicans,&#8221; the Press noted.
As Gallup noted at the top of its report, socialists are the &#8220;one group tested&#8221; who &#8220;receive[] majority opposition.&#8221; After all, &#8220;[l]ess than half of Americans, 45%, say they would vote for a socialist for president, while 53% say they would not.&#8221;
The is fairly brutal news for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and it goes a long way toward explaining why various levers of the DNC&#8217;s broader party apparatus have recently sounded the alarm about a possible Sanders nomination.
“The only thing, the only thing between the United States and the abyss is the Democratic Party. That’s it. If we go the way of the British Labour Party, if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days. … So I am scared to death, I really am,” former top Bill Clinton strategist James Carville said earlier this week while likening Sanders to the far-left Corbyn, as The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/end-of-days-carville-warns-dems-about-choosing-sanders-im-not-interested-in-being-in-a-cult">reported</a>.
“There’s a certain part of the Democratic Party that wants us to be a cult. I’m not interested in being in a cult. I’m 75 years old. I’m just not a very cult-y person,&#8221; Carville continued.
Similarly, former Obama-era secretary of state and failed 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry had to deny a recent report that he was considering jumping into the 2020 Democratic presidential race in a purported last-ditch attempt to stave off an impending Sanders nomination.
&#8220;NBC News reported on Sunday that Kerry &#8216;was overheard Sunday on the phone at a Des Moines hotel explaining what he would have to do to enter the presidential race amid &#8220;the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole,&#8221;&#8216;&#8221; The Daily Wire also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/fing-false-john-kerry-explodes-over-report-indicating-he-may-jump-in-2020-race">noted</a> earlier this month.
Sanders has a lifelong history as a rabid socialist activist, and Paul Sperry <a href="https://nypost.com/2016/01/16/dont-be-fooled-by-bernie-sanders-hes-a-diehard-communist/">argued</a> at the New York Post in 2016 that Sanders is actually best described as a “diehard communist”:
<blockquote>In the early ’70s, Sanders helped found the Liberty Union Party, which called for the nationalization of all U.S. banks and the public takeover of all private utility companies.
After failed runs for Congress, Sanders in 1981 managed to get elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, where he restricted property rights for landlords, set price controls and raised property taxes to pay for communal land trusts. …
In 1985, he traveled to [Nicaragua] to celebrate the rise to power of the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government. He called it a “heroic revolution.” …
Sanders also adopted a Soviet sister city outside Moscow and honeymooned with his second wife in the USSR. He put up a Soviet flag in his office, shocking even the Birkenstock-wearing local liberals. At the time, the Evil Empire was on the march around the world, and threatening the U.S. with nuclear annihilation.
Then, in 1989, as the West was on the verge of winning the Cold War, Sanders addressed the national conference of the U.S. Peace Council — a known front for the Communist Party USA, whose members swore an oath not only to the Soviet Union but to “the triumph of Soviet power in the U.S..”</blockquote>

New Hampshire Democratic Primary Debate

Top Pollster: Only 45% Of Americans Would Vote For A Socialist For President

Bernie Sanders

Communism

Democratic Socialism

Elizabeth Warren

Gallup

John Kerry

Leftism

Poll

National Horserace And Looking Ahead
In terms of the national horserace (for whatever such a metric may even be worth, at this point!), Soviet Union-honeymooning socialist loon bag Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has officially overtaken the rest of the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary field. <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html">Sanders currently stands 4.4% above second-place former Vice President Joe Biden</a> in the average of recent national polling. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who will not actually be in a primary race until Super Tuesday in a few weeks), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg round out the top five in most recent national polling.
Officially, Bernie Sanders is the <a href="https://www.creators.com/read/ben-shapiro/02/20/why-the-democrats-wont-stop-bernie">clear</a> and <a href="https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3633/Who-will-win-the-2020-Democratic-presidential-nomination">unequivocal</a> frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Unofficially, Bloomberg <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-bloomberg-makes-major-moves-after-democrats-screw-up-iowa-caucuses">seems to be gambling</a> that, with his carpet-bombing the airwaves and with his general war chest, he will be able to outlast a rapidly languishing Biden and prove to be the Democratic National Committee&#8217;s (DNC) last man standing in the way of a polarizing Sanders nomination. Of course, query whether the DNC would even be interested in lining up behind Bloomberg, who ran for New York City mayor as a Republican and had a rather controversial video resurface yesterday, if it were to ultimately come down to a Bloomberg versus Sanders long march to next summer&#8217;s nominating convention.
The obvious question, at this point, is whether anyone in the Democratic field (or perhaps not even presently in the field) can ultimately overtake Sanders. Large swaths of the Democratic Party&#8217;s institutional apparatus have been publicly fretting over the prospect of a Sanders nomination, as some within the more moderate older guard (not unreasonably) fear nominating someone with a decades-long track record of praising actual communist regimes, calling for the nationalization of entire industries, and so forth. But for the time being, it seems like Bernie Sanders is on cruise control. Polling in the upcoming caucus state of Nevada is very sparse, but Sanders should certainly be considered the favorite there, at this juncture.
State-By-State Results Since Last Week
Last night marked the first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire. Bernie Sanders was the night&#8217;s big winner, as The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-socialist-bernie-sanders-wins-new-hampshire">reported</a>. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang also ended his long shot bid earlier in the evening; I&#8217;d expect Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) to become the next candidate to follow Yang&#8217;s lead and drop out.
Here are the full New Hampshire results, as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/11/us/elections/results-new-hampshire-live-forecast.html">reported by The New York Times</a>:
<ol>
<li>Sanders 26%</li>
<li>Buttigieg 24%</li>
<li>Klobuchar 20%</li>
<li>Warren 9%</li>
<li>Biden 8%</li>
<li>Steyer 4%</li>
<li>Yang 3%</li>
</ol>
There are hardly any words to describe the simply calamitous nature of erstwhile national front runner Joe Biden&#8217;s start to this 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominating contest. He has now severely underperformed in both Iowa and New Hampshire, leaving his campaign&#8217;s future looking <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/11/biden-donors-divided-on-his-prospects-after-new-hampshire-primary-loss.html?__source=sharebar%7Ctwitter&amp;par=sharebar">exceedingly grim</a>. I&#8217;d expect him to bow out by the time South Carolina is over.
Latest National Polling Data
The <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html">RealClearPolitics</a> polling average for 2/04 – 2/11 shows Sanders with an average national polling lead of 4.4%. Here is the latest in national polling, via RealClearPolitics:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/79zfxkws33/econTabReport.pdf">Economist/YouGov</a> (2/09 – 2/11): Sanders 22%, Biden 18%, Warren 15%, Bloomberg 12%, Buttigieg 10%</li>
<li><a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-d/">The Hill/HarrisX</a> (2/07 – 2/10): Biden 23%, Sanders 20%, Bloomberg 16%, Warren 9%, Buttigieg 9%</li>
<li><a href="https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_US_021120/">Monmouth</a> (2/06 – 2/09): Sanders 26%, Biden 16%, Warren 13%, Buttigieg 13%, Bloomberg 11%</li>
<li><a href="https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3655">Quinnipiac</a> (2/05 – 2/09): Sanders 25%, Biden 17%, Bloomberg 15%, Warren 14%, Buttigieg 10%</li>
<li><a href="https://morningconsult.com/2020-democratic-primary/">Morning Consult</a> (2/04 – 2/09): Sanders 25%, Biden 22%, Bloomberg 17%, Warren 11%, Buttigieg 11%</li>
</ul>
Latest Upcoming State-By-State Polling Data
Nevada: Biden 21.0%, Sanders 17.5%, Warren 11.5%, Steyer 10.0%, Buttigieg 7.0%
South Carolina: Biden 31%, Steyer 18.5%, Sanders 17.0%, Warren 9.5%, Buttigieg 5.5%
This article has been updated to reflect the most recent survey data.

Democratic presidential debate stage

Who Will Win The Democratic Primary? The Latest On 2020 Presidential Primary Polling.

Democratic National Committee

Joe Biden

Pete Buttigieg

Following the absolute debacle that was the Democrats&#8217; first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses last week, tonight offers the Democrats a shot at redemption, of sorts, with the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.
Here is what I&#8217;ll be watching for.
1. How long will we have to wait for results, this time? The first and most obvious question is not even a substantive question, but a procedural one. There is dropping the ball, there is really dropping the ball, there is really, really dropping the ball, and then there is the absolutely catastrophic dumpster fire that was the Iowa Democratic Party&#8217;s performance last week. Deep-dive essays, and perhaps full-length books, will assuredly be written that analyze just how badly the Iowa Democratic Party managed to botch its quadrennial moment in the sun. &#8220;<a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-had-one-job">You had one job</a>,&#8221; as the popular meme goes. Alas, we shall see if Iowa manages to keep its first-in-the-nation status, come 2024. Hopefully in New Hampshire tonight, unlike in Iowa, we actually get results before we go to sleep.
2. Will favorite Bernie Sanders pull it off? Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the Fidel Castro-praising communist who decided to ditch possible sojourns to the Caribbean or the Pacific islands in order to (literally) honeymoon in the frigid former Soviet Union, demolished Hillary Clinton in the 2016 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. He is well-positioned to win yet again tonight, <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nh/new_hampshire_democratic_presidential_primary-6276.html#polls">leading by an average of 7.4% in recent polling</a> and having led the overwhelming majority of Granite State polls conducted over the past month or so. If Sanders indeed does wipe away the field tonight, then he only buttresses his status as the <a href="https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3633/Who-will-win-the-2020-Democratic-presidential-nomination">clear favorite</a> for the presidential nomination. All signs currently point toward Sanders pulling it off.
3. Can Pete Buttigieg pull off the upset and start two for two? If you believe the Iowa Democratic Party&#8217;s troubled (to put it mildly) results-reporting process, former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg left the Hawkeye State with the highest delegate count. He enters tonight in a clear second place position in New Hampshire, and he is the only person not named Bernie Sanders to outright lead a New Hampshire poll in nearly a month. If Buttigieg pulls off the upset tonight, he likely overtakes Sanders as the slight favorite for the nomination; after all, since the advent of the modern political party presidential nominating contest in 1972, no candidate has won his/her party&#8217;s first two nominating contests (Iowa and New Hampshire) and gone on to lose his/her party&#8217;s presidential nomination.
4. Can neighboring state Massachusetts&#8217; Elizabeth Warren resuscitate her ailing campaign? New Hampshire may be a last stand, of sorts, for the troubled socialist-lite candidate from the neighboring Bay State. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) emerged toward the end of last summer and into early autumn as a frontrunner, but her campaign has all but collapsed and enters tonight&#8217;s battle as a shell of its former self. Warren desperately needs a shot in the arm tonight — at bare minimum, she cannot afford to be outpaced tonight by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
5. Could Joe Biden really get fifth place? Former Vice President Joe Biden is starting to look an awful lot like a (politically) dead man walking. He <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-leaving-new-hampshire-early-i-think-ill-win-the-nomination">isn&#8217;t even sticking around tonight</a> to watch New Hampshire&#8217;s full results, and polls currently show him duking it out for fourth place. The man who was the frontrunner for most of the past calendar year could easily get fifth place tonight, making his so-called South Carolina &#8220;firewall&#8221; seem less and less like an actual firewall. My best guess? Biden is out by the time South Carolina is over.
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RELATED: <a href="http://lp.dailywire.com/getelectionwire/">Sign up here for Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer’s weekly newsletter on election news, polling data, and analysis: “Election Wire.”</a>
RELATED: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/who-will-win-democratic-primary-latest-2020-josh-hammer">Who Will Win The Democratic Primary? The Latest On 2020 Presidential Primary Polling.</a>

New Hampshire Democratic debate

HAMMER: What To Watch For During Tonight’s New Hampshire Primary

Amy Klobuchar

New Hampshire

Tom Steyer

The Trump administration secured a key victory yesterday at the hostile United Nations, as Holocaust-denying, kleptocratic, jihad-subsidizing Palestinian Authority (PA) chieftain Mahmoud Abbas failed to rally sufficient support to merely force a U.N. Security Council vote on a Palestinian draft resolution that would have rejected the Trump administration&#8217;s recently unveiled <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trumps-deal-of-the-century-for-israel-palestinians-a-realistic-plan-with-arab-states-backing-it">&#8220;deal of the century&#8221; peace plan</a>.
The Security Council vote assuredly would have been vetoed by the United States, a permanent member, but the failure to even successfully garner support to stage a symbolic vote represents a monumental embarrassment for Abbas, the PA successor to unrepentant terrorist Yasser Arafat — himself a mentee of <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-official-record-what-the-mufti-said-to-hitler/">Hitler ally Haj Amin al-Husseini</a>, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem. The diplomatic effort to stymie the symbolic vote, halting it dead in its tracks, thus also represents a clear win for the Trump administration&#8217;s United Nations diplomatic team. The United Nations, of course, is a body <a href="https://unwatch.org/2019-un-general-assembly-resolutions-singling-out-israel-texts-votes-analysis/">infamously hostile to the Jewish state</a> and infamously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/pro-palestinian-frauds-unrwa-called-out-lying-josh-hammer">mollycoddling of the Palestinian-Arab cause</a>.
Abbas is speaking today at a special meeting of the U.N. Security Council. He had initially hoped to stage a Security Council vote on the &#8220;deal of the century&#8221; to follow his speech.
&#8220;This is a significant setback for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,&#8221; Barak Ravid <a href="https://www.axios.com/palestinian-mahmoud-abbas-security-council-vote-81c12553-d692-4a77-a122-10dd7cc141ff.html">opined</a> yesterday for Axios. &#8220;The postponement follows efforts from Jared Kushner and other administration officials over the last few days to dilute the text of the resolution and prevent a vote.&#8221;
&#8220;U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian officials say the text had to be softened because several Security Council members wanted to avoid a confrontation with the U.S.,&#8221; Ravid continued. &#8220;Several sentences that referred directly to the Trump plan were removed.&#8221;
According to Ravid, PA officials still hope to bring the condemnatory resolution up for a Security Council vote later this week.
&#8220;There was immediate speculation that the delay was a backhanded way of pulling the resolution because it lacked the requisite support of nine members for passage,&#8221; The Jerusalem Post <a href="https://www.jpost.com/International/US-suggests-amendments-for-UNSC-resolution-on-Trump-peace-plan-617115">reported</a>. &#8220;Otherwise, it would have been considered that the resolution had failed. The delay comes amid U.S. pressure to soften the language of the resolution towards the U.S. and Israel. A U.S. source with direct knowledge of the negotiations between the members of the Security Council told the Post earlier on Monday that if the resolution would get a vote, a number of countries are expected to abstain.&#8221;
&#8220;The softening of the language comes after U.S. special envoy Jared Kushner’s briefing with [Security Council] members last Thursday,&#8221; the Post continued. &#8220;Kushner was accompanied by Trump&#8217;s assistant and special envoy for international negotiations Avi Berkowitz, and U.S. envoy Brian Hook. The source added that &#8216;there are numerous countries who are considering abstaining&#8217; if the wording is not changed.&#8221;
The U.S. has historically often used its permanent seat the Security Council to veto anti-Israel measures — a trend <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/choosing-not-to-veto-obama-lets-anti-settlement-resolution-pass-at-un-security-council/">notably bucked in December 2016 by the outgoing anti-Israel Obama administration</a>, with respect to U.N. Security Council Resolution 2234.
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RELATED: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-pairagraph-trumps-israel-palestinian-peace-plan-is-fair-and-just-part-1">Hammer At ‘Pairagraph’: Trump’s Israel-Palestinian Peace Plan Is Fair And Just (Part 1)</a>
RELATED: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-pairagraph-trumps-israel-palestinian-peace-plan-is-fair-and-just-part-2">Hammer At ‘Pairagraph’: Trump’s Israel-Palestinian Peace Plan Is Fair And Just (Part 2)</a>

United Nations Building

Abbas Embarrassed: Trump Admin Secures Key Victory At Hostile United Nations

Benjamin Netanyahu

Foreign Policy

Israel

Jared Kushner

Mahmoud Abbas

Middle East

Palestinians

Trump Administration

United Nations

As the 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48863/who-will-win-democratic-primary-latest-2020-josh-hammer">battle it out for the nomination</a>, politicos must pay close attention to President Donald Trump&#8217;s approval ratings — both nationally and across key swing states.
If anything, Trump&#8217;s approval rating has recently been on the affirmative rise, as evidence continues to mount that Democrats have <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/31/this-whole-pathetic-impeachment-effort-was-worse-than-a-waste-of-time/">overplayed their hand</a> on impeachment. Last week, the historically reliable pollsters at Gallup <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/284156/trump-job-approval-personal-best.aspx">released data</a> revealing Trump&#8217;s approval rating to be at an all-time personal best of 49%. &#8220;In addition to possibly reflecting sentiment regarding his impeachment, Trump&#8217;s increased approval rating may also result from other issues,&#8221; Gallup wrote. Those issues include the recent military skirmishes with Iran, foreign trade, and the economy.
Historically, presidents have fared well in re-election campaigns when they maintain approval ratings above 50%. This president has never had such an approval rating at any point throughout his presidency; but Trump is also a unique figure, in many ways, from the perspective of American political history. He defies many historical norms and loose &#8220;rules.&#8221; President Trump also oversees a genuinely soaring economy, with record-low unemployment rates, and regarding which Americans are the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/americans-are-more-optimistic-about-the-economy-than-they-have-been-in-decades">most optimistic they have been in decades</a>. One must also never forget the sheer power of incumbency: Since FDR, only Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were elected and then subsequently not re-elected four years later.
As of February 11, 2020, the <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html">RealClearPolitics average</a> for Trump&#8217;s national job approval rating sits at 45.1% — or 7.0% underwater. That Trump&#8217;s approval rating only rose while warding off impeachment only buttresses the theory that Democrats have overplayed their hand.
Henry Olsen of The Washington Post had an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/06/trump-is-down-far-out" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W3HmRfg8wKtnCW4cGZSL1CSrXg0/*W5BKVhh96Gpb4W8-1y2m5m6ghN0/5/f18dQhb0Sq5J8Y9XHdW80JfVF1k63-nW7sTg0H2P2ZFHW6Dk5Sd1Vq7GqVLDpF18CSvhfW8CRtsF3P0gztW5yJNx18l2p1TW1nPLDM8rZZ3CW3L3hj18BVHkvW3knCMv8yXl2fN5x53HbSbM86W8CZT8L8tBst7VScmWZ5wMTWVW5wL96L1sL3M0W3Mybvy6RNDcsN5wYBLnZvRBfVRH-mh1l5XsBW55nSC91VJH71W4c2Rr971B_trW1x4lQB6GKLK6W1s0LSF5mKjF6W3m2jX953X_ZpW52Ylfx3_8mplW9fgwMT4fdf2wW1CKFgB4fCj-4W6yGjGM57QYy5W1zslkT7LNKKVW2twnxd6z4yN9W1GQ1T21fqP84W1BQNJF2PXVH6N8W1FtxGX70sW5YCjHQ1HGqqhW3mV5CD6Y6gM5W1j14QF1j9W8pN7KWJRDpdj-nV4slhZ3MYtL8W4HrzTg45Ly2MVkwRN48b6cnqW2GFB531GH84tW27PQWj8tVZYWVj8tbN4c-1VzW6PZLJt8zhkqrW4ffn6C5LdRRhW8qBft_2PLnMWW4rGbTz5ymY9KMZpcmq9ZLg8f2CCSW411&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574867914609000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHkSMBe5OEEGUjYZNH6vGN2ZmbXFw">incisive piece</a> in November that analyzed the relationship between Trump’s approval ratings and his re-election chances. According to Olsen’s historically informed analysis, Trump would need his approval rating to rise to roughly 46% – 47% in order to confidently position himself to capture the Electoral College next November. That is well within the realm of possibility, given Trump&#8217;s current polling, although it will require the president to focus on reaching out to persuadable moderates, independents, and suburban swing voters. To that end, I have previously offered some <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-trump-needs-to-focus-on-a-safety-and-security-agenda-for-2020">unsolicited advice</a> to the Trump campaign: Focus on a safety and security agenda to appeal to these persuadable voters.
The Daily Wire will also be tracking Trump&#8217;s state-by-state approval rating as the general election nears. Here is the latest Trump approval rating information from across all the various swing states.
Battleground State-By-State Trump Approval Rating (latest data via <a href="https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump-2/">Morning Consult&#8217;s January 2020</a> monthly survey)
ARIZONA:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 3.57%</li>
<li>Governor: Republican</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -1%</li>
</ul>
COLORADO:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Clinton + 4.91%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -10%</li>
</ul>
FLORIDA:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 1.20%</li>
<li>Governor: Republican</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Republican</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -1%</li>
</ul>
GEORGIA:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 5.09%</li>
<li>Governor: Republican</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Republican</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: EVEN</li>
</ul>
IOWA:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 9.41%</li>
<li>Governor: Republican</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Republican</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -9%</li>
</ul>
MAINE:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Clinton + 2.96%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Independent</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -7%</li>
</ul>
MICHIGAN:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 0.23%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Democrat, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -12%</li>
</ul>
MINNESOTA:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Clinton + 1.51%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Democrat, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -7%</li>
</ul>
NEVADA:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Clinton + 2.42%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Democrat, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -15%</li>
</ul>
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Clinton + 0.37%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Democrat, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -12%</li>
</ul>
NORTH CAROLINA:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 3.66%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Republican</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -1%</li>
</ul>
OHIO:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 8.13%</li>
<li>Governor: Republican</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -1%</li>
</ul>
PENNSYLVANIA:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 0.72%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -2%</li>
</ul>
TEXAS:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 8.99%</li>
<li>Governor: Republican</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Republican</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: +5%</li>
</ul>
VIRGINIA:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Clinton + 5.32%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Democrat, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -4%</li>
</ul>
WISCONSIN:
<ul>
<li>2016 presidential result: Trump + 0.77%</li>
<li>Governor: Democrat</li>
<li>U.S. Senate: Republican, Democrat</li>
<li>Current Trump approval rating: -10%</li>
</ul>
This article has been updated to reflect the most recent survey data.

Trump rally Kentucky

Will Trump Win? The Latest On Trump’s National And State-By-State Approval Ratings.

Donald Trump

Economy

Republican Party

Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, who frequently opines on issues pertaining to Israel, Zionism, and anti-Semitism, has agreed to take part in a <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/8c47026d6af148588f3ad8f4c1c2935d">debate</a> about the Trump administration’s new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan at the new website <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/">Pairagraph</a>, which <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/about">describes itself</a> as “a platform for written dialogue between pairs of notable individuals” and “an online meeting place for the world’s most prominent figures across government, industry, academia, religion, and the arts.”
Hammer was previously scheduled to <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/b155455f1bf04a71a596bf1b8cb0cf13">debate</a> Palestinian-Arab activist <a style="font-style: italic;" href="https://twitter.com/Issaamro">Issa Amro</a>, but Amro <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/b155455f1bf04a71a596bf1b8cb0cf13/2">refused to respond</a> to Hammer after his <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/b155455f1bf04a71a596bf1b8cb0cf13/1">initial response</a>. Pairagraph then secured Omar Baddar as a new debate opponent, and Baddar <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/8c47026d6af148588f3ad8f4c1c2935d/2">responded</a> to Hammer on Sunday. The Pairagraph debate format consists of dueling 500-word entries. 
Here is Hammer&#8217;s <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/8c47026d6af148588f3ad8f4c1c2935d/3">rebuttal to Baddar</a>.
<div>
An old lawyer maxim goes: &#8220;If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.&#8221;
Omar Baddar is pounding the table. He has doused a field of straw men in gasoline and applied an industrial-grade blowtorch.
Baddar embraces countless obfuscations and outright lies. There was no &#8220;ethnic cleansing&#8221; in 1948 — only the fateful Arab rejection of November 1947. Blame for the 1967 war lies squarely with Gamal Abdel Nasser, who repeatedly vowed to exterminate Israel and militarized the Sinai in defiance of the 1956 demilitarization. U.N. S.C.R. 242 has never been internalized by the Palestinian Authority, but Israel has frequently offered a generous Palestinian state (e.g., 2000 and 2008) hewing closely to 1948&#8217;s harrowing &#8220;Auschwitz borders.&#8221; Israel did not instigate the civilizational jihad that was Arafat&#8217;s Second Intifada; rather, the mentee of Hitler ally Haj Amin al-Husseini planned it while rejecting the peace offered at Camp David in July 2000. (“[Arafat] did not negotiate in good faith; indeed, he did not negotiate at all,&#8221; President Clinton said.)
Baddar and his ilk nonsensically shout &#8220;apartheid,&#8221; but if the Palestinian-Arabs wanted peace, they would have negotiated one of the sundry times Israel has offered statehood. Instead, the PA has become the laughingstock of the Arab world. The vile 1967 Khartoum Resolution is now the very distant past; following Trump&#8217;s peace plan unveiling, Saudi Arabia said it &#8220;appreciate[d] the efforts of President Trump’s administration to develop a comprehensive peace plan.&#8221; The UAE&#8217;s foreign affairs minister approvingly tweeted a Bret Stephens column decrying Palestinian rejectionism.
Historically, separatist movements are rarely successful. Those separatist movements — Tibetans, Kurds, etc. — that might be offered a state by the &#8220;international community&#8221; would gladly accept. That the PA, which names parks after suicide bombers and directly subsidizes murderous jihad via &#8220;pay to slay,&#8221; rejects such offers gives the game away. The PA&#8217;s ultimate goal is not peace, but to kill all the Jews. &#8220;From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,&#8221; a rally cry frequently associated with terror-sympathizing hate groups, is nothing short of a call to genocide.
The Arab world, sobered by Iran, finally sees the Palestinian ruse. It wants to finally resolve this issue. Accordingly, the Trump peace plan is emphatically reasonable. That the plan&#8217;s bare-bones preconditions to full Palestinian statehood — cease indoctrinating Palestinian-Arab children in Jew-hatred, oust Hamas, etc. — are viewed as non-starters in Ramallah says all one needs to know about the moral midgets of the PA.
There is zero — zero — compelling U.S. national security interest in carving out a PLO/PA jihadist state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The PA is fortunate that it has enough addlebrained leftists to carry its flag and keep viable the &#8220;two-state&#8221; solution paradigm. Israel has yet again stretched out its hand, but the PA is again poised to throw its own people under the bus.
</div>
&nbsp;
RELATED: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-pairagraph-trumps-israel-palestinian-peace-plan-is-fair-and-just-part-1">Hammer At ‘Pairagraph’: Trump’s Israel-Palestinian Peace Plan Is Fair And Just (Part 1)</a>

Israel : Illustration

Hammer At ‘Pairagraph’: Trump’s Israel-Palestinian Peace Plan Is Fair And Just (Part 2)

Hamas

Radical Islam

Radical Islamic Terror

Students for Justice in Palestine

For perhaps the first time during his entire presidency, it seems reasonably clear that President Donald Trump is a favorite to win a second term at the ballot box this November.
For a myriad of reasons, Trump has always been an ahistorical president. He famously lost the national popular vote in the 2016 presidential election, instead relying on a Rust Belt-centric coalition to secure a narrow victory in the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-electoral-college-under-assault-heres-why-josh-hammer">Electoral College</a>. The somewhat lopsided nature of the final Electoral College margin obscured the fact that Trump&#8217;s victory was only due to <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-election-came-down-to-77-744-votes-in-pennsylvania-wisconsin-and-michigan-updated">a mere 77,000+ voters</a> spread across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And Trump&#8217;s job approval rating average has never once risen above 50%, which has oftentimes been viewed as a marker presidential incumbents strive to hit in order to feel comfortable about their chances for re-election.
The president&#8217;s margin for error, in short, is very slim. And while the Democrats&#8217; overly zealous <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/31/this-whole-pathetic-impeachment-effort-was-worse-than-a-waste-of-time/">partisan impeachment stun</a>t has no <a href="https://www.axios.com/trump-impeachment-poll-michigan-pennsylvania-wisconsin-6776a580-9a0f-4362-a8a7-e6180f18ed14.html">doubt disproportionately hurt Democrats</a> across many of the key Rust Belt swing states, the reality is that his approval rating in many of those same swing states was <a href="https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump-2/">was lagging far behind</a> a comfortable level prior to the impeachment saga&#8217;s onset.
But despite all these trends, there now seems to be an emerging consensus that Trump is a <a href="https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3698/Who-will-win-the-2020-US-presidential-election">favorite, albeit a slight one</a>, to be re-elected this fall. This emerging consensus is correct, and there are a few reasons for that.
The president had a <a href="https://theresurgent.com/2020/02/06/the-democrats-terrible-week-donald-trumps-best-week/">historically good week</a> last week. In a span of three days, the Democratic Party exhibited an unforeseen level of gross institutional incompetence in the dumpster fire that was their botched Iowa caucuses process, Trump gave a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-trump-successfully-framed-the-stark-2020-election-choice-during-last-nights-sotu-address">very well-received</a> State of the Union Address, and he was acquitted on each of House Democrats&#8217; two adopted articles of impeachment. Furthermore, the post-Iowa fallout and crystallizing polling consensus for tomorrow&#8217;s New Hampshire Democratic Party presidential primary have both been simply disastrous for erstwhile frontrunner Joe Biden — the leading purported &#8220;moderate&#8221; of the Democratic field who many promoted as the candidate perhaps best positioned to defeat Trump in the general election.
The Democratic Party also evinced for all to see, during the State of the Union Address, just how substantively out of touch it is with the desired political agenda of the median <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-who-will-stand-for-the-forgotten-american">&#8220;forgotten&#8221;</a> American. Democrats routinely refused to applaud objectively salutary data about the extraordinary state of the American economy — an economy, that is, about which Americans have a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/americans-are-more-optimistic-about-the-economy-than-they-have-been-in-decades">higher collective sense of optimism</a> than they have had in decades. Democrats at the State of the Union Address also audibly booed during the president&#8217;s powerful excoriation of the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-hammer-on-tipping-point-with-liz-wheeler-sanctuary-cities-are-neo-confederate">neo-Confederate</a>, <a href="https://cis.org/Camarota/NonCitizens-Committed-Disproportionate-Share-Federal-Crimes-201116">criminal-mollycoddling</a>, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-why-no-one-pointing-out-sanctuary-cities-josh-hammer">illegal</a> entities known as sanctuary cities. It is perhaps difficult to imagine a more out of touch moment than a political party opposing the deportation of violent illegal aliens who commit such heinous crimes as rape or homicide; alas, the modern Democratic Party, whose leading presidential candidates seem to love debating no issue more than they love debating whether to outlaw private health insurance for over a hundred million Americans, has become an utter <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-democratic-party-has-become-parody-itself-josh-hammer">parody of itself</a>.
The <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/who-will-win-democratic-primary-latest-2020-josh-hammer">leading candidate</a> for the Democrats&#8217; 2020 presidential nomination is an unvarnished communist who <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-bernie-sanders-entire-worldview-grotesquely-josh-hammer">literally honeymooned</a> in the former Soviet Union. Imagine the kind of person who gets married and decides to honeymoon abroad not in a Caribbean resort or a Pacific island, but in a freezing, gulag-riddled, totalitarian <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810">beacon of pure evil</a> that, at the time of the honeymoon, happens to be in an existential state of &#8220;mutually assured destruction&#8221; with the United States. Seriously, try to imagine the kind of human being who does such a thing. That kind of human being is now the leading candidate to win the presidential nomination of the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy.
Trump&#8217;s margin for error remains slender, and his <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html">average job approval rating</a> still has a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/06/trump-is-down-far-out/">bit of work to do</a> to allow his campaign operatives to sleep well at night. But for the first time of his presidency, it does seem that he is a favorite to win a second term.
&nbsp;
RELATED: <a href="http://lp.dailywire.com/getelectionwire/">Sign up here for Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer’s weekly newsletter on election news, polling data, and analysis: “Election Wire”</a>

President Trump Hosts Keep America Great Rally

HAMMER: Trump Is Finally A Favorite For Re-Election

Impeachment

Iowa Caucuses

State of the Union

On Monday, far-left New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio conceded that the recent high-profile surge in crime in New York City may, in fact, have something to do with New York state&#8217;s new deeply controversial &#8220;bail reform&#8221; law that de Blasio and his fellow leftist Democrats championed prior to its enactment.
&#8220;We had, for six years, steady decreases in crime across the board. There’s not a whole lot of other environmental things that have changed recently,&#8221; de Blasio said, as <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/02/07/de-blasio-admits-nyc-crime-jump-is-linked-to-bail-reform/">reported</a> by the New York Post. &#8220;It sort of stands out like a sore thumb that this is the single biggest new thing in the equation and we saw an extraordinary jump.&#8221;
“Of course there’s always a possibility this is plain statistical variation, that happens sometimes,” the mayor added, the newspaper noted. “But I think it’s pretty clear that there’s only one new major piece in the equation.”
De Blasio did offer one concrete proposed reform to the &#8220;bail reform&#8221; law: Offering judges the discretion to impose pretrial detention upon those defendants deemed a bona fide public safety risk. “I think judicial discretion should be clarified so that there are very clear checks and balances, so that we avoid any inkling of bias entering into the process, but I think a system predicated only on the question of flight risk misses the fact that there are some individuals who are just consistently, by their own actions, and by the proof of due process, consistently creat[ing] a threat to their neighbors,&#8221; he said.
New York&#8217;s new &#8220;bail reform&#8221; law, which outright eliminates bail for all but the most truly violent criminals, has faced mounting opposition amid a panoply of headlines showcasing the awful caliber of criminal defendants let off into the streets pretrial. In fact, as The Daily Wire&#8217;s Amanda Prestigiacomo <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/disaster-dems-consider-changes-to-ny-bail-reform-just-one-week-after-implementation">reported</a> last month, even many Empire State Democrats have been pushing to tweak the pro-criminal law.
&#8220;After an onslaught of bad press over the disastrous first week of Democrat-implemented &#8216;bail reform&#8217; in New York, Democrats are considering changes to the legislation,&#8221; Prestigiacomo noted.
&#8220;Bail reform, which was reportedly implemented early in New York City by &#8230; de Blasio, led to a woman charged with an anti-Semitic attack to be arrested and released three times in five days,&#8221; Prestigiacomo continued. &#8220;[Tiffany] Harris &#8216;was nabbed for allegedly slugging three Jewish women and yelling &#8220;F-U, Jews!&#8221; but let go Saturday with no bail, despite an open assault case. Last month, she got no jail for a felony in another incident,&#8217; [the Post] <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/30/revolving-door-injustice-serial-slugger-gets-sprung-again/">reported</a>. &#8216;Nabbed again Sunday in a new attack, she was once more freed, on no bail, Monday.'&#8221;
Appearing last month on “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network, I <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-hammer-on-tipping-point-with-liz-wheeler-new-yorks-insane-pro-criminal-bail-law">strongly criticized</a> New York&#8217;s new criminal-mollycoddling law:
<blockquote>The problem with the Left is the Left speaks about justice and compassion and all these fancy words. They never focus on the people who actually suffer … from their policies. So in the case of border security and amnesty, there is no one who suffers worse from an open border and the human trafficking by drug cartels than the aliens themselves who are trafficked. In the case of “criminal justice reform,” “bail reform,” no one suffers more than victims of crime.
Where is anyone speaking for the victims of crime? But you know what the Left also does, Liz? The Left is amazing at getting the right version of language for their policies. “Bail reform,” it sounds so innocuous, right? What they’re doing is they’re throwing out a system of bail that has existed since at least 13th century England! That is how far back bail goes — cash bail, monetary bail. This is literally a centuries-old phenomenon that they are just throwing out.</blockquote>

Jailbreak Is To Blame For Spike In NYC Crime, De Blasio Admits

bail reform

Jail

New York City

New York Post

Prison

True Crime

Violence

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced federal charges against four Chinese military/intelligence officials for their role in the infamous Equifax data breach scandal of 2017. In one of the greatest data theft operations in global history, hackers in 2017 pilfered from Equifax trade secrets and personal data belonging to up to 150 million Americans.
&#8220;A federal grand jury in Atlanta returned a nine-count indictment last week that accused members of China’s People’s Liberation Army of conspiring to steal reams of data as part of a sophisticated hacking operation that exploited a major vulnerability in the software used by Equifax’s online dispute portal,&#8221; The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/four-members-of-china-s-military-indicted-for-massive-equifax-breach-11581346824">reported</a>. &#8220;The breach into Equifax, disclosed in 2017, compromised data belonging to about 145 million Americans and has been viewed as one of the largest hacks on record. It prompted prolonged public outrage and led to a series of hearings in Congress that led to the resignation of the company’s former chief executive, Richard Smith.&#8221;
Attorney General William Barr was unequivocal in his denunciation of the malign activities: &#8220;This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,&#8221; Barr said earlier today.
&#8220;The hack was viewed as alarming both because of its size and the richness of the data that was stolen, which included Social Security and driver’s license numbers, addresses, birthdays and other information. The breach began in May 2017 at the latest and continued through July 2017,&#8221; the Journal continued. &#8220;The indictment alleges that the defendants used 34 servers located in nearly 20 countries to infiltrate the company’s network.&#8221;
According to <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/10/us-charges-chinese-spies-with-massive-equifax-hack-113129">Politico</a>, the formal charging instrument was a nine-count that charged the Chinese officials with &#8220;wire fraud, economic espionage, conspiracy to commit computer fraud and other offenses.&#8221;
“At the FBI we’ve been saying for years that China will do anything it can to replace the United States as the world’s leading superpower,” FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich said in connection with the formal indictments, as Politico reported. “This indictment is about more than targeting just an American business. It’s about the brazen theft of sensitive personal information of nearly 150 million Americans.”
The revelations of the alleged origins of the Equifax breach come at a time of increasingly escalating tensions between the U.S. and China. In a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-china-americas-greatest-21st-century-threat-josh-hammer">Daily Wire op-ed</a> last May, I described China as America&#8217;s &#8220;greatest 21st century threat&#8221;:
<blockquote>Calling China the number one 21st century geopolitical threat to the United States ought to not be a particularly controversial claim. As far back as 2011, The Economist <a href="https://www.economist.com/node/21527010/all-comments?page=10">noted</a> that, “[w]ith its rapidly improving military capability … China has the wherewithal to challenge the security status quo in the Pacific as well as potential motives to do so.” That trend has only exacerbated in recent years. In January, for instance, the Pentagon expressly <a href="https://wtkr.com/2019/01/16/pentagon-warns-about-rise-in-chinas-military-power/">warned</a> about China’s recent “series of ambitious military reforms and acquired new technology.” In March, the Chinese government assertively <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/04/asia/china-military-xi-jinping-intl/index.html">pronounced</a> an astonishing 7.5% annual rise in military spending — which was actually a mild decrease from the previous year’s military spending increase. Over just the past couple months, China has <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-06/djibouti-needed-help-china-had-money-and-now-the-u-s-and-france-are-worried">fortified</a> its military presence in the highly strategic Horn of Africa, and has even made <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/06/pompeo-arctic-china-russia-1302649">expansionist overtures</a> in the Arctic. &#8230;
The upshot is that everywhere from <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/power-problems-china-wants-control-north-korea-conundrum-54057">North Korean denuclearization</a> to the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/17/why-japan-is-making-a-big-fuss-over-tiny-islands-4-things-to-know/">Senkaku Islands</a> territorial sovereignty dispute in the East China Sea to the deeply combative <a href="https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/enforcement/301Investigations/301%20Report%20Update.pdf">forced technology transfer</a> and <a href="http://ipcommission.org/report/IP_Commission_Report_Update_2017.pdf">intellectual property theft</a> that the Chinese Communist Party claims as an allegedly necessary “cost” of doing business in China, China is a deeply adversarial geopolitical actor. This is a nation with rapidly escalating hard military power, the world’s second largest GDP, a huge landmass, the world’s largest population, ownership of a massive <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-who-owns-a-record-2121-trillion-of-us-debt-2018-08-21">reserve</a> of U.S. sovereign debt, a grossly <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/charleswallace1/2018/07/21/chinas-currency-manipulation-is-a-response-to-trumps-tariffs/">manipulated currency</a>, an aggressive regional foreign policy that seeks to undermine key U.S. allies, a desire to dictate the rules of trade from a hostile, communist perspective, a reflexive urge to publicly shame and embarrass Western corporations into toeing the Chinese Communist Party line on geographical disputes, and an unhinged zealotry in committing acts of cyberwarfare upon and pilfering the intellectual property of sundry Western corporations.</blockquote>
Read the <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/chinese-hackers-charged-in-equifax-breach-021020">FBI&#8217;s full press release from earlier today here</a>.

Attorney General William Barr Makes Announcement On Cyber-Related Law Enforcement Action

DOJ Charges Chinese Military Officials In Connection With Infamous Equifax Data Breach

China

cybersecurity

Department of Justice

National Security

William Barr

In a now-viral clip, 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was caught on camera, while campaigning in New Hampshire, affirmatively agreeing with a questioner&#8217;s utterly vile depiction of prominent bipartisan pro-Israel organization American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
&#8220;I&#8217;m an American Jew,&#8221; the leftist begins, &#8220;and I&#8217;m terrified of the unholy alliance that AIPAC is forming with Islamophobes and anti-Semites and white nationalists. And no Democrat should legitimize that kind of bigotry by attending their annual <a href="https://event.aipac.org/PolicyConference">Policy Conference</a>. I&#8217;m really grateful that you skipped the AIPAC Conference last year. And so my question is if you&#8217;ll join me in committing to skip the AIPAC Conference this March.&#8221;
All along, Warren is seen visibly and passionately nodding. She then simply responded to the interlocutor: &#8220;Yeah.&#8221;
Trump re-election campaign Deputy Director of Communications – Research Zach Parkinson tweeted out the following accurate description to accompany the video: &#8220;Tonight, Elizabeth Warren nodded along and smiled as a questioner slandered AIPAC as &#8216;an unholy alliance&#8217; of &#8216;Islamophobes,&#8217; &#8216;anti-semites, and white nationalists&#8217; that perpetuates &#8216;bigotry&#8217; Without blinking, Warren then agreed to boycott next year&#8217;s AIPAC conference.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Tonight, Elizabeth Warren nodded along and smiled as a questioner slandered AIPAC as &quot;an unholy alliance&quot; of &quot;Islamophobes,&quot; &quot;anti-semites, and white nationalists&quot; that perpetuates &quot;bigotry&quot;
Without blinking, Warren then agreed to boycott next year&#39;s AIPAC conference <a href="https://t.co/U2MJ6DCTdZ">pic.twitter.com/U2MJ6DCTdZ</a>
&mdash; Zach Parkinson (@AZachParkinson) <a href="https://twitter.com/AZachParkinson/status/1225619091739881472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Warren has been consistently anti-Israel, in terms of both policy and personnel, throughout her entire campaign.
“It is the official policy of the United States of America to support a two-state solution,” Warren <a href="https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1186052533405528067?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1186052533405528067&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailywire.com%2Fnews%2Fwatch-elizabeth-warren-says-shes-open-to-cutting-off-aid-to-israel">intoned</a> back in November, “and if Israel is moving in the opposite direction, then everything is on the table.”
&#8220;Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) revealed on Saturday that she is open to withholding billions of dollars in military aid to Israel until the government ceases building settlements in the country’s West Bank,&#8221; The Daily Wire similarly <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-elizabeth-warren-says-shes-open-to-cutting-off-aid-to-israel">reported</a> at the time.
Sounds a lot like a quid pro quo, no?
The Daily Wire has also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/where-does-elizabeth-warren-stand-issues-heres-josh-hammer">criticized</a> Warren&#8217;s naive foreign policy views with respect to Israel and her mollycoddling of anti-Semitic congresspeople: &#8220;She supports a &#8216;two-state solution&#8217; to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has often been critical of Israel’s need to robustly defend itself amid a sea of existential enemies surrounding it. Warren has disingenuously implied that congresswoman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has merely engaged in criticism of Israel’s present government, rather than also engaging in overt anti-Semitism.&#8221;
Perhaps worst of all, last summer Warren <a href="https://www.jta.org/2019/07/29/united-states/meet-max-berger-the-jewish-anti-occupation-activist-on-elizabeth-warrens-campaign">hired Max Berger</a>, a co-founder of vehemently anti-Israel, self-hating &#8220;Jewish&#8221; group IfNotNow, to be a top campaign operative. Amazingly, Berger was actually <a href="https://myemail.constantcontact.com/ANTI-SEMITE-OF-THE-WEEK--MAX-BERGER--ELIZABETH-WARREN-S-NEW-STAFFER--WANTS-TO-BE-FRIENDS-WITH-HAMAS.html?soid=1131491229186&amp;aid=9lf-XdrU8EU">once named &#8220;Anti-Semite of the Week&#8221;</a> by the organization <a href="http://StopAntiSemitism.org">StopAntiSemitism.org</a>: &#8220;<a href="https://canarymission.org/individual/Max_Berger" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Max Berger</a> is a co-founder and one of the most prominent leaders of the radical &#8230; group IfNotNow. The groups calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, idolizes terrorists and spreads lies and false propaganda against the Jewish State. &#8230; This week, Berger caused outrage for a now-deleted 2013 tweet in which he confesses he would &#8216;totally be friends with Hamas&#8217; — a designated terror organization in the U.S. which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.&#8221;
AIPAC, of course, is not exactly a fiery right-wing group. Last March, following its 2019 Policy Conference, I wrote a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-what-exactly-current-role-aipac-josh-hammer">Daily Wire op-ed</a> entitled, &#8220;What Exactly Is The Current Role For AIPAC?&#8221;:
<blockquote>And yet AIPAC is hardly a particularly conservative group. Indeed, many of us in the more traditional, Eretz Yisrael-inspired camp of Zionism tend to view AIPAC as a nuisance at best and a counterproductive gadfly at worst. AIPAC stubbornly continues to lend <a href="https://www.aipac.org/news-hub/articles/25-years-since-oslo">de facto</a> support to the Oslo Accords — the single biggest geopolitical blunder in Israel’s national history. Two bloody intifadas, countless thousands killed by Islamist extremism, and one <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/44732/hammer-israel-must-destroy-hamas-once-and-all-josh-hammer">outrageous</a> Gaza unilateral withdrawal later, AIPAC <a href="https://www.jta.org/2018/03/04/politics/aipac-launches-conference-appeal-progressives">continues</a> to support a <a href="https://www.aipac.org/learn/issues/issue-display/the-peace-process">“two-state solution”</a> entailing the carving out of a new PLO terrorist state somewhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. AIPAC’s institutionally self-aggrandizing support of mass U.S. military aid to Israel, furthermore, actually <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/09/04/support-israel-which-why-don-support-aid-israel/SXvLm92jTazjoV33k7Y65L/story.html">redounds against</a> the <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/rand-paul-is-right-about-aid-to-israel/">long-term interests</a> of Zionism.</blockquote>

Elizabeth Warren Holds Get Out The Vote Event In Derry, NH

WATCH: Elizabeth Warren Nods Along While Questioner Calls AIPAC An ‘Unholy Alliance’ Of ‘Islamophobes, Anti-Semities, And White Nationalists’

American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

Anti-Semitism

Islam

Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, who frequently opines on issues pertaining to Israel, Zionism, and anti-Semitism, has agreed to take part in a <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/b155455f1bf04a71a596bf1b8cb0cf13">debate</a> about the Trump administration&#8217;s new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan at the new website <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.pairagraph.com">Pairagraph</a>, which <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/about">describes itself</a> as &#8220;a platform for written dialogue between pairs of notable individuals&#8221; and &#8220;an online meeting place for the world’s most prominent figures across government, industry, academia, religion, and the arts.&#8221;
Here is Hammer&#8217;s <a href="http://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/b155455f1bf04a71a596bf1b8cb0cf13">opening salvo in his debate</a> against Palestinian-Arab activist <a href="https://twitter.com/Issaamro">Issa Amro</a>. The Pairagraph debate format consists of dueling 500-word entries.
In the entire history of human civilization, there has never, ever been an independent Arab state situated between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Never.
At the same time, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the historical Land of Israel — including the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, which &#8220;international community&#8221; ignoramuses nonsensically call the &#8220;West Bank&#8221; — for thousands of years.
The modern 20th/21st-century history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not difficult to grasp. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, San Remo Resolution of 1920, Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, and the Peel Commission all laid the pre-World War II positive law foundation for what we all already knew from Genesis: The Jews are entitled to our land. In November 1947, the U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine proposed a pro-Arab partition that would have given the Jews a tiny, unworkable state. The Jews accepted; the Arabs rejected and instead launched a genocidal war to kill the Jews. The Arabs lost. The Arabs tried in 1967 and lost again. They tried in 1973 and lost yet again. The unrepentant terrorist Yasser Arafat and his Holocaust-denying kleptocratic Palestinian Authority successor, the brutish Mahmoud Abbas, have similarly never been nearly as interested in negotiating peace as they have been in killing Jews and inciting bloody jihad. In a sign of good will, even after Arafat&#8217;s Second Intifada murdered over 1,000 Jews and grievously maimed many thousand more, Israel in 2005 unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip — forcibly uprooting its own citizens en route. Jihadist outfit Hamas took over and turned the Strip into an Iran-subsidized terrorist enclave.
Again, the history is not difficult to understand. As Dennis Prager has said, if the Israelis were to lay down their guns, Israel would be destroyed tomorrow. But if the Palestinian-Arabs were to lay down their guns, there would be peace tomorrow.
All the Palestinian-Arabs have to do is accept Israel as a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders, pursuant to U.N. Security Resolution 242, and there will be immediate peace. But they have not done so because the sprawling Arab world, with devastating rapacity, has never abided a Jewish state that is smaller than the state of New Jersey.
The Trump administration soberly recognizes that under properly construed international law, Israel has (by far) the best legal claim to all of Judea and Samaria. Jordan illegally occupied the territory after the failed 1948 Arab war of aggression, after all, and Israel won it back only in the defensive war of 1967. Israel has always been willing to make political concessions of the land for peace, as no less conservative a prime minister as Benjamin Netanyahu&#8217;s acceptance of the Trump peace plan demonstrates.
The Trump plan deals with the reality on the ground — the reality of inveterate Palestinian-Arab intransigence, rejectionism, and glorification of jihad. The U.S. cannot be &#8220;neutral&#8221; as between stalwart moral/strategic ally Israel and a thuggish Palestinian Authority. Good for Trump for recognizing that.

Western Wall, Jerusalem, Israel

Hammer At ‘Pairagraph’: Trump’s Israel – Palestinian Peace Plan Is Fair And Just (Part 1)

Zionism

At long last, the most brazenly partisan presidential impeachment in over a century and a half has come to an end. President Trump was formally acquitted on Wednesday by the U.S. Senate on each of the U.S. House’s adopted articles of impeachment: “Abuse of power” and “<a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge/">obstruction of Congress</a>.” The president was acquitted on the “abuse of power” article by a count of 52–48, and he was acquitted on the “obstruction of Congress” article by a count of 53–47. That lone vote discrepancy, of course, is due to the fact maverick Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), the Republican Party’s presidential standard-bearer a mere eight years ago, voted to convict on the first article and acquit on the second article.
Romney thus becomes the first senator in the history of the United States to vote to convict an impeached president from his/her own political party. His Senate floor speech explaining his vote made it seem like it was a decision he deeply wrestled with, but the reality is that his vote had — and will have — serious consequences.
First, Romney’s conviction vote — from a senator representing a deep-red state like Utah, no less — will place many moderate Republican senators facing potentially difficult re-election bids later this year (perhaps especially Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Cory Gardner (R-CO), and Thom Tillis (R-NC)) in a very difficult spot when they are grilled by adversaries as to why they did not join the former Republican presidential nominee in voting to convict Trump. Second, Romney providing nominal Republican cover to vote to convict Trump likely caused at least one — and perhaps more than one — of more moderate Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Doug Jones (D-AL), and Kyrsten Sinema to flip their respective votes from acquittal to conviction. Third, because of the second point, Romney thus likely single-handedly transformed a bipartisan acquittal of the president into a bipartisan conviction of the president.
Nonetheless, this impeachment is officially in the books. The outcome was foreordained, of course, from day one, and all signs still point toward the Democrats having overplayed their hand and the electoral politics redounding to Republicans’ interests in November.
From a historical perspective, The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky has a <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-impeachment-history-hans-von-spakovsky">good piece</a> on the eerie similarities between this impeachment and the post-Civil War impeachment of President Andrew Johnson on similarly frivolous grounds. I offered my own final commentary on the serious harm wrought by this lamentable saga in <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/31/this-whole-pathetic-impeachment-effort-was-worse-than-a-waste-of-time/">last weekend’s New York Post</a>: “[T]o call it a mere waste of time is likely far too charitable. The Democrats took stock of the decrepit state of our national politics, the bitterly fractious nature of our partisan tribalism, the pathetic regard the American people have for their Congress and took a sledgehammer to it all. The most immediate tangible result of this failed gambit will be to only further coarsen and debase our politics. … Most damaging of all, the Democrats’ pursuit of the draconian remedy of impeachment based on their claims of Trump’s corrupt subjective intentions on a diplomatic phone call has set a truly reckless precedent for the future. … For Democrats to argue that Trump’s purportedly corrupt motive somehow transmogrifies … constitutionally protected conduct into an impeachable offense is nothing short of astonishing.”
History will not judge the Democrats kindly for this stunt. But it’s now time to move on.
&nbsp;
This piece will be frequently updated.
RELATED: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-mitt-romney-is-no-shining-example-of-political-principle">Mitt Romney Is No Shining Example Of Political Principle</a>
RELATED: <a href="http://lp.dailywire.com/getelectionwire/">Sign up here for Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer&#8217;s weekly newsletter on election news, polling data, and analysis: &#8220;Election Wire&#8221;</a>

Chief Justice John Roberts

Impeachment Wire: The Latest On The Effort To Impeach President Trump

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Following his <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-mitt-romney-voting-to-convict-and-remove-trump-from-office">vote yesterday to convict</a> President Donald Trump on the House&#8217;s first adopted impeachment article, &#8220;abuse of power,&#8221; Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is being hailed and feted as a paragon of moral conviction and political principle by all sorts of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hollywood-celebrities-love-mitt-romney-following-impeachment-vote">strange new friends</a>. In Romney&#8217;s mild defense, his Senate floor speech explaining his vote evinced a genuine internal struggle, and he voted to acquit the president on the <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge/">risible, constitutionally illiterate</a> second impeachment charge of &#8220;obstruction of Congress.&#8221;
Let us first state the obvious: Romney made the wrong decision to vote to convict the president on the first article of impeachment. This was the most blatantly partisan impeachment sham in a <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-impeachment-history-hans-von-spakovsky">century and a half</a>, going back to the vehement &#8220;Radical Republican&#8221; opposition to President Andrew Johnson. The conduct upon which Democrats attempted to impeach Trump is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-what-exactly-are-they-impeaching-him-for-again">dramatically less ruinous</a> than the conduct upon which the Framers would have considered impeachment justified, and reeks of the sort of petty politics that led the Framers to deliberately reject the far lesser <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inside-founding-fathers-debate-over-what-constituted-impeachable-offense-180965083/">“maladministration”</a> as a possible constitutional standard for impeachment.
What&#8217;s worse, Romney&#8217;s vote rewards an unhinged Democratic Party that has only further coarsened our politics, further embittered an already fractious and tribal citizenry, and <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/31/this-whole-pathetic-impeachment-effort-was-worse-than-a-waste-of-time/">recklessly lowered the bar</a> for future impeachments so as to make them far likelier — perhaps even mundane — when differing political parties come to control the House and the White House. Romney&#8217;s vote also (1) will muddy the re-election waters for endangered Republican moderates who did vote to acquit, like Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Cory Gardner (CO), and Thom Tillis (NC); (2) likely caused at least one (perhaps more) of moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (WV), Doug Jones (AL), and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) to flip their votes from acquittal to conviction; and (3) therefore likely single-handedly transformed a bipartisan impeachment acquittal into a bipartisan conviction.
The analysis that Romney&#8217;s vote was merely a personal choice is thus too simplistic by half. There actually were, are, and will be tangible consequences to his decision. Those consequences will disproportionately redound against Republicans&#8217; interests, come November. Hopefully, Republican primary voters in Utah are paying attention.
But even more importantly, the emerging narrative that Romney&#8217;s vote was symptomatic of a broader fealty to devout political principle is beyond farcical and needs to be swatted down. Mitt Romney, the man who ran against Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) in 1994 by avowing he&#8217;d be to the &#8220;left&#8221; of Kennedy on &#8220;gay rights&#8221; but then famously described himself as &#8220;severely conservative&#8221; when seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, has taken both sides of essentially every major political issue imaginable in his career. He has publicly waffled on at least gun rights, abortion, embryonic stem cell research, health care, illegal immigration, tax cuts, and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-mitt-romney-dead-wrong-claim-there-no-josh-hammer">Israel</a>. Romney is undoubtedly a lifelong devout Mormon and we can all admire his devotion to his faith — but at least in the realm of politics, he has had no truer guiding light than the solipsistic pursuit of his own raw political power.
Consider Erielle Davidson&#8217;s column yesterday at The Federalist:
<blockquote>For starters, Romney’s track record on religious freedom has been poor. <a href="https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/romney-pulled-the-rug-out-from-under-catholic-hospitals-adoption-agencies-m" data-reader-unique-id="14">Catholic leaders</a> in Massachusetts, the state in which Romney formerly served as governor, have emphasized Romney’s role in forcing Catholic hospitals to administer the abortifacient Plan B, even if doing so violated the consciences of the employee required to administer the deadly drugs. “The injury to the conscience rights of Catholic hospitals was not done so much so much by the church’s ideological enemies on the Left but by the Romney administration,” C.J. Doyle, executive director of the <a href="http://www.catholicactionleague.org/" data-reader-unique-id="15">Catholic Action League</a>, explained to LifeSiteNews.com back in 2012. &#8230;
In a 1994 debate with Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, he proudly announced, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it. I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice.” He “evolved” to eventually arrive at the pro-life position. &#8230;
The playbook is the same for health care, where he went from supporting an insurance mandate — arguing that he would love to export the Massachusetts Romneycare model to the nation at large — to accusing Bret Baier of being “wrong” when the Fox host attempted to remind him of this. The Baier interaction occurred in 2011, as Romney geared up for yet another presidential bid.</blockquote>
I have met Mitt Romney and, by all accounts, he seems like a genuinely good, decent, and upstanding man. I will not join those who are now calling him a &#8220;traitor&#8221; to the republic. But he made a very foolish decision yesterday — a decision, that is, with far broader-reaching implications than many may immediately realize. Romney&#8217;s vote, furthermore, is hardly indicative of his being a principled conservative — or even a principled anything in the sphere of politics. Rather, his vote is indicative of life&#8217;s worth of political work in which the junior senator from Utah, former governor of Massachusetts, and twice-failed presidential candidate has flirted with more political stances than Bill Clinton has flirted with Little Rock call girls. Romney is not a shining example of principle so much as he is a shining example of overly finely tuned technocratic indecisiveness.

Mitt Romney

HAMMER: Mitt Romney Is No Shining Example Of Political Principle

It just continues to get worse and worse for the Iowa Democratic Party — and, by extension, for both the Democratic National Committee and grassroots Democrats across the country alike. The already-infamous app crashing that has resulted in politicos still not knowing the full and final results of Monday night&#8217;s first-in-the-nation caucuses was compounded by the fact, as The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/dhs-acting-secretary-iowa-democratic-party-refused-help-testing-failed-caucus-app">noted</a>, that the Iowa Democratic Party turned down express overtures from the Department of Homeland Security to help with vetting the technology.
As of Thursday morning, The New York Times&#8217; &#8220;live&#8221; caucus <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/04/us/elections/results-iowa-caucus.html?action=click&amp;module=Top%20Stories&amp;pgtype=Homepage">results tabulator</a> showed former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg with a remarkably narrow lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Buttigieg currently leads Sanders 26.2% to 26.1% in the total statewide popular vote, and by 550 to 547 in terms of state delegate equivalents. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is in third place, with 18.2% and 381 state delegate equivalents, whereas bumbling former Vice President Joe Biden is in fourth place with 15.8% and 331 state delegate equivalents. Overall, then, with 97% of Iowa precincts reporting, Buttigieg leads in 59 of Iowa&#8217;s 99 counties, Sanders leads in 19, and politicos everywhere eagerly anticipate the results of the final 28. Despite his minuscule deficit in statewide popular vote and state delegate equivalents, however, the Times&#8217; current &#8220;live estimate&#8221; of who will ultimately prevail shows Sanders as a narrow favorite over Buttigieg.
In short, this is total chaos and a dumpster fire of catastrophic proportions.
But now, the Times is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/upshot/iowa-caucuses-errors-results.html?emc=edit_na_20200206&amp;ref=headline&amp;nl=breaking-news&amp;campaign_id=60&amp;instance_id=0&amp;segment_id=21030&amp;user_id=b715e556383ae49550d07cacec388fa8&amp;regi_id=74074015&amp;fbclid=IwAR1YBbD9XtncQ9h-ewnL6kg3WQsQ6Jf4rekz3cDas72ynCHODBKdenZzTvs">separately reporting</a> that the results finally reported by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday are &#8220;riddled with errors and inconsistencies.&#8221;
&#8220;The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday were riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws,&#8221; the Gray Lady wrote. &#8220;According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.&#8221;
&#8220;In some cases, vote tallies do not add up,&#8221; the Times continued. &#8220;In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results do not match those reported by the precincts.&#8221;
&#8220;Some of these inconsistencies may prove to be innocuous, and the irregularities do not indicate an intentional effort to compromise or rig the result,&#8221; the newspaper reported. &#8220;But not all of the errors are minor, and they raise questions about whether the public will ever get a completely precise account of the Iowa results. With Mr. Sanders closing to within 0.1% with 97% of 1,765 precincts reporting, the race could easily grow close enough for even the most minor errors to delay a final projection or raise doubts about a declared winner.&#8221;
This is not exactly the way a political party ostensibly preoccupied with repelling election interference and preserving the integrity of the franchise would prefer that a leading left-wing newspaper cover its first-in-the-nation caucuses.
Separately this week, guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/iowa-might-have-screwed-up-the-whole-nomination-process/">weighed in with insights</a> on how &#8220;Iowa might have screwed up the whole nomination process.&#8221;
&#8220;To be &#8230; blunt: The Iowa Democratic Party’s colossal screw-up in reporting results will potentially have direct effects on the outcome of the nomination process,&#8221; Silver wrote. &#8220;The failure to report results will almost certainly help Biden, assuming that indications that he performed poorly in Iowa are correct, as they won’t get nearly as much media coverage. And they’ll hurt whichever candidate wins the state — most likely Sanders or Buttigieg.&#8221;
&#8220;It’s not a good situation for the Democratic Party,&#8221; he concluded. &#8220;And it’s already too late for the damage to be entirely undone, even if Iowa eventually gets its act together.&#8221;

Pete Buttigieg continues to hold lead over Bernie Sanders in Iowa

Iowa Results Reported Wednesday Apparently ‘Riddled With Errors’

Department of Homeland Security

Iowa

&#8220;In both law and politics, I think the essential battle is the meta-battle of framing the narrative. As Sun Tzu said, every battle is won before it’s fought. It’s won by choosing the terrain on which it will be fought.&#8221; – Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to The New Yorker&#8217;s Jeffrey Toobin, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/30/the-absolutist-2">June 2014</a>
Although President Donald Trump no doubt prefers to vent his off-the-cuff frustrations in tweet threads and campaign rallies, it is the planned teleprompter format in which he most clearly excels. Since assuming office, Trump&#8217;s State of the Union addresses have consistently been visceral, evocative, rhetorically fine-tune affairs that make brilliant use of audience guests to drive home his substantive agenda.
Last night&#8217;s speech was <a href="https://theresurgent.com/2020/02/04/best-state-of-the-union-ever/">no exception</a>, and the president was tremendously successful in framing the 2020 election as a stark choice between two competing visions of American governance: The economic prosperity, domestic security, and &#8220;peace through strength&#8221; deterrence of the Right, and the socialism, lawlessness, and capitulatory foreign policy of the Left. To borrow from Cruz&#8217;s quoting of Sun Tzu, Trump has &#8220;cho[sen] the terrain on which&#8221; the 2020 election &#8220;will be fought.&#8221;
The president <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/05/president-trump-offers-a-sharp-rebuke-of-socialism-at-precisely-the-right-time/">spoke at length</a> about the revving American economic engine, thus placing on the defensive the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-aocs-squad-will-destroy-democrats-2020-josh-hammer">toxic brand of socialism</a> that has come to dominate the modern Democratic Party. The Democrats are a political party with a <a href="https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3633/Who-will-win-the-2020-Democratic-presidential-nomination">statistical frontrunner</a> of a presidential nominee who is a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-bernie-sanders-entire-worldview-grotesquely-josh-hammer">lifelong communist activist</a> — a man who literally honeymooned in the Soviet Union and infamously hung a hammer-and-sickle Soviet flag inside his Burlington, Vermont mayoral office. They are advancing that nominee (and so many others who now mimic his economic illiteracy) in the context of an American electorate that, according to reliable pollster Gallup, is the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/americans-are-more-optimistic-about-the-economy-than-they-have-been-in-decades">most optimistic</a> it has been about the economy in decades. Americans <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval_economy-6182.html">currently approve</a> of Trump&#8217;s handling of the economy by over 17%, and Democrats&#8217; solution for that is to stage a presidential primary where one of the leading &#8220;intellectual&#8221; debates among the candidates is whether to literally abolish private health insurance in favor of a government monopoly.
Good luck with that.
The president also spoke about the gruesome horrors of sanctuary cities, the great majority of which are <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-why-no-one-pointing-out-sanctuary-cities-josh-hammer">clearly illegal</a> under a straightforward reading of <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1373">8 U.S.C. § 1373(a)</a>: &#8220;Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State, or local law, a Federal, State, or local government entity or official may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the [Department of Homeland Security] information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.&#8221; The president masterfully provided gut-wrenching details of the crimes committed by illegal aliens mollycoddled by sanctuary jurisdictions — thus seemingly borrowing a tactic from Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, each of whom has at times provided vivid details of the underlying murders of those defendants whose capital punishment appeals reach the Court. Trump forced Democrats in the House chamber to retreat to the unenviable position of loudly booing his oratory assaults on criminal aliens and the sanctuary jurisdictions that harbor them. It was a remarkable sight to behold.
The president has thus successfully framed the 2020 election as a referendum about whether the nation will reject the Left&#8217;s two most profoundly ruinous current hobbyhorses: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-a-political-wish-for-2020-less-socialism-more-law-and-order">Socialism and lawlessness</a>. He also spoke directly to the heart and mind of the proverbial <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-who-will-stand-for-the-forgotten-american">forgotten American</a> — the tax-paying, church-attending, law-abiding American who still has an innate love and appreciation for what has always made America great. Say what one might about Trump, but one cannot plausibly deny that he is an &#8220;Americanist,&#8221; properly understood.
The American people will head to the ballot box this November with an exceedingly straightforward choice before them. Here is hoping they make the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-here-are-three-reasons-why-i-plan-vote-josh-hammer">right decision</a>.

President Trump Delivers State Of The Union Address

HAMMER: Trump Successfully Framed The Stark 2020 Election Choice During Last Night’s SOTU Address

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Clarence Thomas

Law Enforcement

Qassem Soleimani

As the 2020 election cycle hits full swing, and as the Democratic Party&#8217;s quest to topple President Donald Trump got off to a fairly catastrophic start earlier this week in Iowa, polling now indicates that Americans are more optimistic about the economy than they have been in decades.
&#8220;For the first time in its history, the Gallup <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/284264/record-high-optimism-personal-finances.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-reader-unique-id="6">&#8216;Mood of the Nation&#8217;</a> economic survey found that 59% of people believe that they are &#8216;better off,&#8217; a trend that has soared under Trump,&#8221; Paul Bedard <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/record-economic-optimism-under-trump-better-than-reagan-clinton-obama">reported</a> this morning for the Washington Examiner. &#8220;It is higher than when President Ronald Reagan made his economy a campaign rallying cry and better than the so-called dot-com bubble under President Bill Clinton.&#8221;
&#8220;The survey follows several others that have showed public satisfaction with the economy,&#8221; Bedard added. &#8220;Just yesterday, Gallup reported a 63% satisfaction with the president’s handling of the economy, and calling it, &#8216;The highest economic approval rating not only for Trump, but for any president since George W. Bush enjoyed stratospheric job approval ratings in the first few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.'&#8221;
Specifically, Gallup <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/284264/record-high-optimism-personal-finances.aspx">notes</a> today that &#8220;[t]he current 59% of Americans who say they are better off financially than they were a year ago is essentially tied for the all-time high of 58% in January 1999.&#8221;
&#8220;Americans&#8217; levels of optimism about both their current financial situation and where it will be a year from now are at or near record highs,&#8221; Gallup concluded. &#8220;These views align with President Donald Trump&#8217;s contention that Americans are doing better under his presidency, and with his use of the economy and job growth as key selling points for his re-election. Republicans&#8217; positive views on their finances are something of a given for a GOP president, at least during good economic times. The majority levels of optimism among political independents are more significant for Trump&#8217;s re-election prospects — and something Trump will want to maintain in 2020 to stay competitive.&#8221;
The news from Gallup today comes just one day after the same famed polling outfit reported an all-time high approval rating for Trump, as The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/will-trump-win-latest-trumps-national-and-state-josh-hammer">noted</a>. Furthermore, the current RealClearPolitics <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval_economy-6182.html">polling average</a> for Americans&#8217; views of Trump&#8217;s handling of the economy shows that a whopping 56% currently approve, whereas a trifling 38.9% disapprove. That ought to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid">augur quite well</a> for the president&#8217;s electoral hopes this November.
The news of Americans&#8217; record optimism about their economy, and Trump&#8217;s handling of it, comes at a time when the Democratic Party is increasingly committed to implementing an unvarnished socialistic agenda. The bold contrast between these two visions of governance offers a stark choice for voters this fall.
&#8220;Pulling no punches in Tuesday’s [State of the Union] speech, President Trump pointedly attacked socialism, a policy that has increasingly become the heart and soul of the modern left, much to the chagrin of the Democratic establishment,&#8221; The Federalist&#8217;s Erielle Davidson <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/05/president-trump-offers-a-sharp-rebuke-of-socialism-at-precisely-the-right-time/">wrote</a> this morning. &#8220;In what may have been one of the most striking lines of his speech, Trump declared, &#8216;Socialism destroys nations. But always remember: Freedom unifies the soul.'&#8221;

Stock exchange graph and numbers

Americans Are More Optimistic About The Economy Than They Have Been In Decades

Barack Obama

George H.W. Bush

George W. Bush

Ronald Reagan

In a Wednesday morning speech on the U.S. Senate floor in anticipation of an expected ultimate impeachment acquittal vote later today, Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) announced that he will &#8220;reluctantly&#8221; vote to convict President Donald Trump on each of the two articles of impeachment adopted by the U.S. House: &#8220;Abuse of power&#8221; and &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-the-new-york-post-obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge">obstruction of Congress</a>.&#8221; Jones has been viewed as one of three possible Democratic senators, along with Sens. Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), who could cross party lines and join the overwhelmingly majority of Republican senators expected to vote to acquit Trump.
&#8220;After many sleepless nights, I have reluctantly concluded that the evidence is sufficient to convict the President for both abuse of power and obstruction of Congress,&#8221; Jones said in a statement, as <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/481610-doug-jones-says-he-will-vote-to-convict-trump">reported</a> by The Hill. &#8220;[A]fter careful consideration of the evidence developed in the hearings, the public disclosures, the legal precedents, and the trial, I believe the president deliberately and unconstitutionally obstructed Congress by refusing to cooperate with the investigation in any way.&#8221;
&#8220;The president’s actions placed his personal interests well above the national interests and threatened the security of the United States, our allies in Europe, and our ally Ukraine,&#8221; Jones added. &#8220;His actions were more than simply inappropriate. They were an abuse of power.&#8221;
Jones&#8217; decision leaves Manchin and Sinema as the remaining Democrats who still might join Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the majority of his Republican caucus in voting to acquit President Trump of his impeachment charges. Moderate Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Susan Collins (ME) have each announced their intent to vote to acquit the president, which leaves freshman Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) as the only Republican senator still considered to be a possible defector.
Jones shocked the political world in 2017, winning a special election over the deeply polarizing and scandal-plagued Roy Moore to secure a Democratic Senate seat from one of the reddest and <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/247016/conservatives-greatly-outnumber-liberals-states.aspx">most conservative states</a> in the country. Accordingly, Jones, who is on the ballot this November, is widely considered to be the single most politically vulnerable Senate Democrat. As The Hill notes, a &#8220;JMC Analytics and Polling survey released late last year found that 39% of voters in Alabama support impeaching Trump, compared to 54% who oppose it.&#8221;
The Alabama Senate Republican primary is a crowded field, but there is no bigger name than Jeff Sessions — the man who long held this very Senate seat before abdicating it to assume the role of the Trump administration&#8217;s first attorney general. Other candidates include Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-AL), former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, Moore, and State Sen. <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/levin-endorses-arnold-mooney-alabamas-gop-senate-primary/">Arnold Mooney</a>. Assuming Moore does not prevail, whichever candidate does emerge from the Republican primary will assuredly become an immediate general election favorite over Jones.
&#8220;A new <a href="https://winwithjmc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Alabama-Senate-Executive-Summary-General-Election-Poll-1.pdf" data-reader-unique-id="17">poll</a> on the 2020 Alabama U.S. Senate race finds an uphill race ahead for incumbent Doug Jones, but also no Republican candidate breaking from the pack,&#8221; local CBS affiliate WHNT News <a href="https://whnt.com/2019/12/23/new-polls-finds-uphill-climb-for-incumbent-u-s-sen-doug-jones-in-re-election-bid/">reported</a> in December. &#8220;The poll found also shows Jones with a solid lead over Republican Roy Moore, 47 to 33 with 20% undecided. &#8230; But in match-ups against the leading GOP contenders, including Sessions, &#8230; Tuberville, and &#8230; Byrne, Jones trails.&#8221;

Sen. Doug Jones

Doug Jones Will ‘Reluctantly’ Vote To Convict Trump Today

Alabama

Doug Jones

Jeff Sessions

Joe Manchin

Kyrsten Sinema

Roy Moore

Last night&#8217;s Iowa caucuses debacle was nothing less than a catastrophe for the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee. &#8220;You had one job,&#8221; as the <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-had-one-job">popular meme</a> goes, and the Iowa Democratic Party failed did not merely fail that job — it exhibited the kind of reckless and gross incompetence that would be merely embarrassing were it not for the rather Orwellian fact that these are the same people who want to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-the-democrat-party-cant-run-its-own-primary-but-wants-to-run-the-health-care-system">nationalize and control our health care</a>. As of this moment, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/what-to-watch-for-during-tonights-iowa-caucuses">politicos across the country</a> are still waiting with bated breath for official results from last night&#8217;s caucuses.
The Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) has issued a preliminary official response, as The Daily Wire&#8217;s Ashe Schow <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/iowa-democrats-on-caucus-debacle-we-gotta-learn-to-code">reported</a> this morning:
<blockquote>As precinct caucus results started coming in, the IDP ran them through an accuracy and quality check. It became clear that there were inconsistencies with the reports. The underlying cause of these inconsistencies was not immediately clear, and required investigation, which took time.
As this investigation unfolded, IDP staff activated pre-planned backup measures and entered data manually. This took longer than expected.
As part of our investigation, we determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via the app was sound. While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system. This issue was identified and fixed. The application’s reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately.</blockquote>
That underlying app, it turns out, was developed, in large part, with the failed 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign&#8217;s campaign manager, <a href="https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug/status/1224541115241680902">Robby Mook</a>. Some Democrats and leftists last night were indeed quick to blame Mook for their party&#8217;s Hawkeye State woes.
&#8220;I’ve always felt like Robby Mook didn’t get enough credit for his part in tanking Hillary’s campaign but now knowing he was behind this failed Iowa app I’m positive he was fully responsible for tanking Hillary’s campaign,&#8221; tweeted Mashable&#8217;s Matt Binder.
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I’ve always felt like Robby Mook didn’t get enough credit for his part in tanking Hillary’s campaign but now knowing he was behind this failed Iowa app I’m positive he was fully responsible for tanking Hillary’s campaign
&mdash; Matt Binder (@MattBinder) <a href="https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1224540937138966528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Now, as of this morning, we know that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initially reached out to the IDP to see if the state party wanted any help with vetting the new technology. The IDP, in turn, brazenly refused the feds&#8217; request.
&#8220;Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf says the Iowa Democrat[ic] Party declined to have their new caucus app vetted by the department,&#8221; Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/dhs-sec-chad-wolf-democrats-iowa-clinton-app">reports</a>. &#8220;Appearing on &#8216;Fox &amp; Friends&#8217; with co-host Steve Doocy, Wolf said that the DHS cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency had offered to test the app from a &#8216;hacking perspective,&#8217; but the party had declined.&#8221;
&#8220;They declined and so we are seeing a couple of issues with it,&#8221; Wolf added, according to the outlet.
Heather Swift, officials spokesperson for DHS, also corroborated Wolf&#8217;s on-air narrative.
&#8220;Homeland Security&#8217;s [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] offered to test the Iowa Caucus app,&#8221; she tweeted. &#8220;They declined. See [Acting Secretary Wolf] interview,&#8221; she added, linking to Wolf&#8217;s &#8220;Fox &amp; Friends&#8221; appearance.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Homeland Security&#39;s <a href="https://twitter.com/CISAgov?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CISAgov</a> offered to test the Iowa Caucus app. They declined. See <a href="https://twitter.com/DHS_Wolf?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DHS_Wolf</a> interview <a href="https://t.co/GoQeEMZbuJ">https://t.co/GoQeEMZbuJ</a>
&mdash; Heather Swift, DHS spokesperson (@SpoxDHS) <a href="https://twitter.com/SpoxDHS/status/1224684831558324225?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Suffice it to say this is not exactly the start the Democratic Party wanted for its campaign to defeat President Donald Trump this November.

Chad Wolf

DHS Acting Secretary: Iowa Democratic Party Refused Help Testing Failed Caucus App

2016 election

Fox News

Hillary Clinton

Robby Mook

On Monday, the always-inevitable U.S. Senate acquittal of President Donald Trump&#8217;s U.S. House impeachment charges barreled further along toward its natural conclusion.
&#8220;The impeachment trial of President Trump drew closer toward its almost-inevitable conclusion with closing arguments Monday, as Democratic House impeachment managers made a last-ditch push to convince the Senate that an acquittal would be a &#8216;death blow&#8217; to the ability to hold a president in check, while Trump’s defense team accused the Democrats of engaging in a rushed, partisan, unjustified endeavor,&#8221; Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-trial-nears-end-with-closing-arguments">reported</a>.
The outlet is predicting that Trump&#8217;s formal acquittal vote may happen as soon as Wednesday — seemingly as good a guess as any.
House impeachment manager Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) &#8220;addressed an argument put forth by Trump legal team member Alan Dershowitz, who claimed that Trump was working in the national interest, and not his personal interest, by asking Ukraine to investigate possible corruption related to former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter,&#8221; the cable news giant continued. &#8220;Dershowitz asserted that even if Trump was acting to aid his own re-election if he believes his re-election to be in the nation&#8217;s best interest, it would be proper.&#8221;
Another prominent Trump impeachment defense attorney, former federal judge and Clinton-era special counsel Ken Starr, also argued earlier on Monday against a freewheeling, exceedingly broad interpretation of Congress&#8217; impeachment power — including those impeachments haphazardly attempted with little substantive grist to back them up.
&#8220;They’ve got the power, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes,&#8221; Starr said on the Senate floor, as Fox News noted. &#8220;Did the House Judiciary Committee rush to judgment in fashioning the articles of impeachment? Did it carefully gather the facts, assess the facts, before it concluded we need nothing more than the panel of very distinguished professors and the splendid presentations by both the majority counsel and the minority counsel? What was being said in the sounds of silence was this: we don’t have time to follow the rules.&#8221;
In a <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/31/this-whole-pathetic-impeachment-effort-was-worse-than-a-waste-of-time/">New York Post op-ed</a> over the weekend, I decried the Democrats&#8217; partisan impeachment effort as &#8220;pathetic&#8221; and &#8220;worse than a waste of time&#8221;:
<blockquote>
After months of hype and pseudo-drama ginned up by the left, public and secret testimony and breathless “smoking-gun” headlines, it’s taking the Senate just two weeks to <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/31/senate-votes-against-new-witnesses-in-trump-impeachment-trial/" data-reader-unique-id="2">bring an end, finally, to the impeachment circus</a>. And it is ending with the always-inevitable acquittal of President Trump.
What a tragic, monumental waste of time it has been. After all, anyone capable of rudimentary arithmetic could have seen this foreordained outcome coming from Day One. &#8230;
Alas, to call it a mere waste of time is likely far too charitable. The Democrats took stock of the decrepit state of our national politics, the bitterly fractious nature of our partisan tribalism, the pathetic regard the American people have for their Congress and took a sledgehammer to it all. The most immediate tangible result of this failed gambit will be to only further coarsen and debase our politics. &#8230;
Most damaging of all, the Democrats’ pursuit of the draconian remedy of impeachment based on their claims of Trump’s corrupt subjective intentions on a diplomatic phone call has set a truly reckless precedent for the future. The general conduct of foreign policy is a core Article II function constitutionally vested in the president, and soliciting a “quid pro quo” while acting lawfully amounts to constitutionally protected free speech.
For Democrats to argue that Trump’s purportedly corrupt motive somehow transmogrifies such constitutionally protected conduct into an impeachable offense is nothing short of astonishing. Their zeal to impeach for what amounts to a policy disagreement over a diplomatic phone call reeks of the “maladministration” impeachment standard the Framers deliberated and then conscientiously rejected at the 1787 constitutional convention.
</blockquote>
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Democrats are making their final <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/impeachment?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#impeachment</a> arguments right this second. 
But there&#39;s no way around it. This whole sham has been a waste of time and resources.
Move on. <a href="https://t.co/6pHIece54X">https://t.co/6pHIece54X</a>
&mdash; Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPoversight/status/1224367498180677633?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 3, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Senate Impeachment Trial Of President Trump Continues

ALMOST OVER: Senate Impeachment Trial Reaches Closing Arguments

John Roberts

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