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After The Washington Post suspended reporter Felicia Sonmez allegedly for publicly sharing the names of those criticizing her decision to remind people mourning Kobe Bryant&#8217;s tragic death that the basketball star had been accused of rape, staffers at The Washington Post have accused the news publication of fostering a sexist work culture.
According to <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/women-washington-post-sexism-culture_n_5e34b8a3c5b611ac94d4aa89">HuffPost</a>, Sonmez fell subject to severe online harassment, including death threats. One person even discovered her home address and posted it online. Throughout this episode, WaPo allegedly did nothing to protect her.
&#8220;Instead of rushing to protect her from abuse or worse, her editors suspended her and suggested she go to a hotel for her safety,&#8221; reports HuffPost. &#8220;The situation was different for national security reporter Shane Harris last spring. Harris also was getting harassed online, although not at the same level of intensity as his colleague. Someone discovered his home address. He told his editors.&#8221;
WaPo staffers told HuffPost on the condition of anonymity that this kind of allegedly sexist behavior is routine at the media publication and is part of the work culture.
&#8220;The Washington Post doesn’t value women and men in the same way, these people said,&#8221; continued HuffPost. &#8220;This appears literally true when it comes to pay: Women in the newsroom are paid less than men, <a href="https://postguild.org/2019-pay-study/" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:6;elm:context_link;itc:0" data-rapid-parsed="slk">according to a report</a> published last year by the union that represents employees. (The paper disputed the findings at the time.) One former Post contractor told HuffPost she was let go after asking for a raise.&#8221;
Despite WaPo&#8217;s notoriously woke and progressive activism, the publication is largely male-dominated, with only four of 17 department heads being women.
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“The place is run by men and it creates a particular atmosphere and assigns a higher value to certain male characteristics,” said one female reporter. “I’ve been a victim of it in a broad way, as most women in the newsroom have.”
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“It seems that there’s a blind spot when it comes to the needs of female employees. So when this incident with Felicia happened, it turned up all these other concerns and worries and long-standing issues,&#8221; said another anonymous employee.
Kristine Coratti Kelly, a spokeswoman for the newspaper, disputed this narrative, arguing that the publication has always fostered a culture of fairness.
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“We dispute your narrative,” wrote Kelly. “The Washington Post has been equitable in its hiring, promotion and compensation for employees, in its security deployment on behalf of employees and in the high standards it applies to all stories.&#8221;
When it comes to equal pay, women in the newsroom earn less than men at The Washington Post, according to a union&#8217;s report.
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&#8220;The salaried men in the newsroom earn a median of $116,065 a year,&#8221; reports HuffPost. &#8220;The median for women is $95,595. The gap is widest for staffers under 40: Young men earn $95,890 compared to $84,030 for women. The report used age as a proxy for experience, which it did not expressly track.&#8221;
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Alleged #MeToo stories also have a higher editorial threshold at The Washington Post, such as when Irin Carmon, a former freelancer for the Post, tried and failed to publish a story about sexual misconduct allegations against &#8220;60 Minutes&#8221; producer Jeff Fager. Though WaPo turned the story down, Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker covered it, forcing Fager out of his job.
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WASHINGTON,  DC &#8211; JANUARY 23: Washington Post logo outside of t

Staffers Accuse The Washington Post Of Fostering A Sexist Work Culture

Washington Post

Amid strong backlash from members of its union, The Washington Post reversed its suspension of reporter Felicia Sonmez for an &#8220;ill-timed&#8221; tweet about the rape allegation against recently deceased NBA legend Kobe Bryant. The newly reinstated Sonmez responded Tuesday night by issuing a demand of the paper&#8217;s top editor, Marty Baron.
The suspension of Sonmez following her much-criticized tweet linking to a Daily Beast article about a 2003 rape allegation against Bryant — posted shortly after Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, along with seven others, tragically died in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California — was met with a strong public rebuke from The Washington Post Newspaper Guild, which wrote a letter to to the paper&#8217;s executive and managing editors that was signed by hundreds of Sonmez&#8217;s colleagues. The letter begins (full text below):
<blockquote>We write to share our alarm and dismay that our newsroom leaders have chosen to place Felicia Sonmez on leave over a social media post, and to urge The Post to take immediate steps to ensure the safety of our colleague.
Felicia received an onslaught of violent messages, including threats that contained her home address, in the wake of a tweet Sunday regarding Kobe Bryant. Instead of protecting and supporting a reporter in the face of abuse, The Post placed her on administrative leave while newsroom leaders review whether she violated the social media policy. Felicia had to leave her home out of fear for her safety and has gotten insufficient guidance from The Post on how to protect herself.    
We understand the hours after Bryant’s death Sunday were a fraught time to share reporting about past accusations of sexual assault. The loss of such a beloved figure, and of so many other lives, is a tragedy. But we believe it is our responsibility as a news organization to tell the public the whole truth as we know it — about figures and institutions both popular and unpopular, at moments timely and untimely.</blockquote>
On Tuesday, Grant issued a <a href="https://twitter.com/kriscoratti/status/1222281539100250114">statement</a> announcing that Sonmez had been reinstated following an internal review. &#8220;After conducting an internal review, we have determined that, while we consider Felicia&#8217;s tweets ill-timed, she was not in clear and direct violation of our social media policy,&#8221; said Grant. &#8220;Reporters on social media represent The Washington Post, and our policy states, &#8216;we must be ever mindful of preserving the reputation of The Washington Post for journalistic excellence, fairness and independence.&#8217; We consistently urge restraint, which is particularly important when there are tragic deaths. We regret having spoken publicly about a personnel matter.&#8221;
Tuesday night, the newly reinstated Sonmez issued her own <a href="https://twitter.com/feliciasonmez/status/1222335744687198209">statement</a>, which included a demand directed at Baron and called into question the paper&#8217;s commitment to reporting &#8220;ALL the truth&#8221; about important matters.
&#8220;I believe that Washington Post readers and employees, including myself, deserve to hear directly from Marty Baron on the newspaper&#8217;s handling of this matter,&#8221; said Sonmez.
&#8220;Washington Post journalists endeavor to live up to the paper&#8217;s mission statement, which states, &#8216;The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world,'&#8221; she continued. &#8220;My suspension, and Mr. Baron&#8217;s Jan. 26 email warning me that my tweets about a matter of public record were &#8216;hurting this institution,&#8217; have unfortunately sown confusion about the depth of the management&#8217;s commitment to this goal.&#8221;
&#8220;I hope Washington Post newsroom leaders will not only prioritize their employees&#8217; safety in the face of threats of physical harm but also ensure that no journalist will be punished for speaking the truth,&#8221; Sonmez concludes.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
I believe that Washington Post readers and employees, including myself, deserve to hear directly from <a href="https://twitter.com/PostBaron?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@PostBaron</a> on the newspaper’s handling of this matter. My statement on The Post’s decision tonight: <a href="https://t.co/t5ULzUQhYT">pic.twitter.com/t5ULzUQhYT</a>
&mdash; Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) <a href="https://twitter.com/feliciasonmez/status/1222335744687198209?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 29, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Below is the full text of the <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ErQ7bN352jQZ0Ka8kCzAW8CWr2zEnUIvms5BG2Kdt1E/preview?pru=AAABcA0trug*O_CCfCHERRMCGfGdjb_ZWA">guild&#8217;s letter</a>, including some of the signees in key roles in the guild:
To Marty Baron and Tracy Grant:
We write to share our alarm and dismay that our newsroom leaders have chosen to place Felicia Sonmez on leave over a social media post, and to urge The Post to take immediate steps to ensure the safety of our colleague.
Felicia received an onslaught of violent messages, including threats that contained her home address, in the wake of a tweet Sunday regarding Kobe Bryant. Instead of protecting and supporting a reporter in the face of abuse, The Post placed her on administrative leave while newsroom leaders review whether she violated the social media policy. Felicia had to leave her home out of fear for her safety and has gotten insufficient guidance from The Post on how to protect herself.    
We understand the hours after Bryant’s death Sunday were a fraught time to share reporting about past accusations of sexual assault. The loss of such a beloved figure, and of so many other lives, is a tragedy. But we believe it is our responsibility as a news organization to tell the public the whole truth as we know it — about figures and institutions both popular and unpopular, at moments timely and untimely.
This is not the first time that The Post has sought to control how Felicia speaks on matters of sexual violence. Felicia herself is a survivor of assault who bravely came forward with her story two years ago. When articles attacking her were published in other outlets, The Post did not release a statement in support of one of its respected political reporters. Instead, management issued a warning letter against Felicia for violating The Post’s vague and inconsistently enforced social media guidelines.
The Post’s handling of this issue shows utter disregard for best practices in supporting survivors of sexual violence — including the practices we use in our own journalism. Assault survivors inside and outside this newsroom deserve treatment that is fair and transparent; that does not blame victims or compromise the safety of survivors. 
This case also reflects fundamental flaws in The Post’s arbitrary and over-broad social media policy. We have repeatedly seen colleagues — including members of management — share contentious opinions on social media platforms without sanction. But here a valued colleague is being censured for making a statement of fact. Felicia did nothing more than what The Post’s own news stories have done when she shared an article about the past allegation against Bryant.
Even now, after numerous conflicting reports have been published about Felicia’s situation, The Post has failed to offer a clear explanation of why she was placed on leave — to Felicia or to anyone else. We are concerned by The Post&#8217;s unwillingness to be transparent about this issue, and alarmed by the implication that reporters will be penalized for talking about any topic not on their beat.
We urge The Post to immediately provide Felicia with a security detail and take whatever other steps are necessary to ensure her safety, as it has done in the past when other reporters were subject to threats. The company should issue a statement condemning abuse of its reporters, allow Felicia to return to work, rescind whatever sanctions have been imposed and provide her with any resources she may request as she navigates this traumatic experience.  
We also hope that Post management will work with the Guild to educate themselves on treatment of assault survivors and improve the social media policy so that employees can get back to the work we all want to be doing: journalism.
Sincerely,
The Washington Post Newspaper Guild
Katie Mettler, Post Guild co-chair for News
Sarah Kaplan, Post Guild chief steward 
Justin Moyer, Post Guild treasurer and vice chair
Alice Li, Post Guild equity and diversity co-chair
Sophie Ho, Post Guild equity and diversity co-chair
[et al]

Kobe Bryant

Washington Post Reporter Suspended For Kobe Bryant Tweet Issues Demand To Top Editor After Being Reinstated

The Washington Post released a new statement about left-leaning reporter Felicia Sonmez on Tuesday night after the newspaper suspended her at the start of the week for an inflammatory tweet she published in the wake of former NBA star Kobe Bryant&#8217;s death, saying that the newspaper should not have suspended her.
Sonmez was suspended on Sunday after she tweeted a news story immediately after news broke of Bryant&#8217;s death that highlighted the past rape allegations that he faced from years ago.
&#8220;After conducting an internal review, we have determined that, while we consider Felicia&#8217;s tweets ill-timed, she was not in clear and direct violation of our social media policy,&#8221; Washington Post Managing Editor Tracy Grant said in a statement. &#8220;Reporters on social media represent The Washington Post, and our policy states &#8216;we must be ever mindful of preserving the reputation of The Washington Post for journalistic excellence, fairness and independence.&#8221;
&#8220;We consistently urge restraint, which is particularly important when there are tragic deaths,&#8221; Grant continued. &#8220;We regret having spoken publicly about a personnel matter.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
New statement regarding Post reporter Felicia Sonmez <a href="https://t.co/HBt2s5VW68">pic.twitter.com/HBt2s5VW68</a>
&mdash; Kristine Coratti Kelly (@kriscoratti) <a href="https://twitter.com/kriscoratti/status/1222281539100250114?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 28, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Sonmez portrayed herself the victim of the situation, issuing the following statement:
<blockquote>I believe that Washington Post readers and employees, including myself, deserve to hear directly from Marty Baron on the newspaper&#8217;s handling of this matter.
Washington Post journalists endeavor to live up to the paper&#8217;s mission statement, which state, &#8216;The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.&#8217; My suspension, and Mr. Baron&#8217;s Jan. 26 email warning me that my tweets about a matter of public record were &#8216;hurting this institution,&#8217; have unfortunately sown confusion about the depth of management&#8217;s commitment to this goal.
I hope Washington Post newsroom leaders will not only prioritize their employees&#8217; safety in the face of threats of physical harm but also ensure that no journalist will be punished for speaking the truth.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Nine people died in a helicopter crash, but this WaPo reporter is the real victim. <a href="https://t.co/0bWtzioZyR">https://t.co/0bWtzioZyR</a>
&mdash; jon gabriel (@exjon) <a href="https://twitter.com/exjon/status/1222349796796583937?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 29, 2020</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;More than 300 of her colleagues rallied to her defense on Monday, adding their names to a letter addressed to The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, and its managing editor, Tracy Grant,&#8221; The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/business/media/felicia-sonmez-kobe-bryant-tweet.html">reported</a>. &#8220;In the petition, they argued that Ms. Sonmez had not violated the newspaper’s social media guidelines, a set of rules asking Post journalists not to share opinions online.&#8221;
Sonmez&#8217;s inflammatory tweets instantly went viral and gained well over 20,000 comments before she deleted all of her tweets on the matter.
In a follow up tweet, Sonmez wrote:  &#8220;Well, THAT was eye-opening. To the 10,000 people (literally) who have commented and emailed me with abuse and death threats, please take a moment and read the story &#8212; which was written 3+ years ago, and not by me. Any public figure is worth remembering in their totality.&#8221;
Sonmez&#8217;s explanation for why she tweeted the story, because &#8220;any public figure is worth remembering in their totality,&#8221; does not stand up well under scrutiny because she did not tweet about anything else from Bryant&#8217;s life other than the rape allegation, which he was never convicted of.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
The American Media Playbook:
Step 1: Do something unspeakably awful.
Step 2: Get dragged by pretty much everyone. 
Step 3: Don’t apologize. Play the victim.<a href="https://twitter.com/feliciasonmez?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@feliciasonmez</a> <a href="https://t.co/hymjJpRrIO">pic.twitter.com/hymjJpRrIO</a>
&mdash; Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) <a href="https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1221561178108891139?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 26, 2020</a></blockquote>
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This report has been updated to include additional information.

Washington Post Issues New Statement About Reporter Suspended Over Kobe Bryant Tweet

Long on narrative and short on sourcing, Washington Post writers Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker published <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/youre-a-bunch-of-dopes-and-babies-inside-trumps-stunning-tirade-against-generals/2020/01/16/d6dbb8a6-387e-11ea-bb7b-265f4554af6d_story.html">an adapted excerpt</a> from their new upcoming book “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America.”
In the article published Friday, the writers describe at length a meeting between President Donald Trump, some advisors, and military leaders. The conversation is alleged to have taken place in a secure room called “the Tank” back when Gen. Jim Mattis was still Secretary of Defense, Rex Tillerson was still the Secretary of State, and Steve Bannon was still a White House adviser.
The Post writers paint a narrative as if they had audio or video recordings of the meeting or personally witnessed the conversation. It’s a typical narrative topic, but in this case – and with the outlet’s past bias against Trump – such writing serves only to conceal the fact that the sourcing for the conversation is rather thin. At one point during the conversation, Trump is alleged to have told the military leaders: “I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”
Who claims Trump said this? The Post authors don’t let us know. The only kind of sourcing we get is Tillerson allegedly later told “close aides” that he felt Mattis said nothing during the discussion to defense himself because, as a Marine, he would not talk back to the commander in chief. Other sources include “one attendee,” “another,” and “a third attendee.” There were also “Others at the table,” apparently. Tillerson also apparently “told others” there was a woman in the room who was crying. There’s also a statement from “one senior official.” Eventually, the writers refer to one attendee as a “victim” of the meeting.
The Amazon description for the book suggests Leonnig and Rucker had “deep and unmatched sources throughout Washington, D.C.” who told them about Trump’s “rages and frenzies but also moments of courage and perseverance.” They also apparently spoke to “some of the most senior members of the Trump administration and other firsthand witnesses.”
We have seen from the Post’s past reporting, as well as The New York Times’ and other left-leaning outlets, that anonymous sources are constantly used to paint a particular narrative. These anonymous sources are allowed to control the news cycle without have to prove how they could possibly know what had transpired. Many times, as with this article, people who were told about the meeting after the fact are used to craft the narrative.
Let’s say Tillerson, Bannon, Mattis, and the other big-name people who were in the room spoke to the Post. They’re all former officials who have a bone to pick with the president, but in the Trump era of “journalism,” leaving the Trump administration and speaking ill of the media’s most hated president instantly provides an impenetrable shield of credibility.
This is not to say Trump absolutely did not say what the Post claims, but given the media’s willingness to accept bad faith, anonymous sources to paint their preferred portrait of the Trump administration, it’s hard to believe anything they publish.
For good measure, that Amazon description flat-out states their bias, claiming that despite Trump’s claims to help the country, we have only suffered with him as president and our nation has plunged into “chaos.” This conveniently ignores that wages are rising and the unemployment rate has dropped to its lowest in decades and that Americans who don’t already hate Republicans are actually doing much better than they were under the Obama administration.

Trump

Washington Post Writers Claim Trump Called Military Leaders ‘Dopes And Babies’

Donald Trump

Media Bias

Hours after finally announcing their decision to hold the vote on sending their delayed articles of impeachment to the Senate, the Democrat-led House impeachment investigation committee released new materials to the press that Democrats say prove a trial in the Senate cannot be &#8220;full and fair&#8221; without documents they&#8217;ve demanded from Trump.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed the transfer of the impeachment articles against President Trump for nearly a month in an attempt to pressure Senate Republicans to hold an impeachment trial that effectively retries the case the House Democrats were supposed to have already proven convincingly. Amid mounting pressure, including from key Democrats in the Senate, Pelosi finally caved Tuesday, the Democrats holding a press conference to announce that they would vote on sending the articles on Wednesday.
Tuesday night, on the eve of the big vote, House investigators released new documents that have &#8220;spurred Democrats to renew calls for the White House to turn over documents related to the Ukraine pressure campaign that it has refused to share with Congress,&#8221; reports <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ukraine-prosecutor-offered-information-related-to-biden-in-exchange-for-ambassadors-ouster-newly-released-materials-show/2020/01/14/cc45d19e-371e-11ea-9541-9107303481a4_story.html">The Washington Post</a>, which promptly reported on the conveniently timed document dump.
Along with the new materials, the chairs of the Democrat-led House Intelligence, Oversight, Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees issued a joint statement Tuesday night saying the &#8220;new evidence&#8221; means &#8220;there cannot be a full and fair trial in the Senate&#8221; until Trump hands over the demanded information he has thus far withheld.
&#8220;All of this new evidence confirms what we already know: the President and his associates pressured Ukrainian officials to announce investigations that would benefit the President politically,” reads the statement, as reported by the Post. “There cannot be a full and fair trial in the Senate without the documents that President Trump is refusing to provide to Congress.”
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&#8220;New materials released by House Democrats appear to show Ukraine’s top prosecutor offering an associate of President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, damaging information related to former vice president Joe Biden if the Trump administration recalled the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine,&#8221; the Post explains.
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&#8220;The text messages and documents provided to Congress by former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas also show that before the ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, was removed from her post, a Parnas associate now running for Congress sent menacing text messages suggesting that he had Yovanovitch under surveillance in Ukraine,&#8221; the Post continues.
&#8220;A lawyer for Yovanovitch said Tuesday that the episode should be investigated,&#8221; the outlet notes.
The Post goes on to emphasize the Democrats&#8217; argument that the new materials merit further investigation as they include &#8220;a number of previously unknown details about efforts by Giuliani and his associates to obtain material in Ukraine that would undermine Trump’s Democratic opponents.&#8221;
Among the materials is a document that includes a message from Giuliani to Parnas saying he has gotten a person he simply refers to as &#8220;no 1&#8221; involved in his attempt to lift a U.S. visa ban on the former Ukrainian prosecutor &#8220;who was planning to come to the United States to make claims about Biden.&#8221; (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ukraine-prosecutor-offered-information-related-to-biden-in-exchange-for-ambassadors-ouster-newly-released-materials-show/2020/01/14/cc45d19e-371e-11ea-9541-9107303481a4_story.html">Read the Post&#8217;s full report here</a>.)
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nancy-pelosi-appoints-adam-schiff-jerry-nadler-and-five-others-as-impeachment-managers">Nancy Pelosi Appoints Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, And Five Others As Impeachment Managers</a>
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Speaker Pelosi Announces Impeachment Managers, Signs And Transmits Articles To Senate For Trial

Democrats Dump New Impeachment Evidence On Eve Of Vote, Say It Proves Senate Trial Can’t Be ‘Full And Fair’

Ukraine

According to The Washington Post&#8217;s unnamed sources, the Justice Department investigation into alleged Clinton-involved corruption launched over two years ago by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions is winding down — and likely to disappoint Donald Trump and everyone else hoping to see &#8220;Lock Her Up!&#8221; come to fruition.
In yet another report that tips the establishment media&#8217;s partisan hand, the U.S. Attorney John Huber-led investigation, launched &#8220;to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton,&#8221; as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dept-winds-down-clinton-related-inquiry-once-championed-by-trump-it-found-nothing-of-consequence/2020/01/09/ca83932e-32f9-11ea-a053-dc6d944ba776_story.html">the Post</a> puts it, &#8220;has effectively ended with no tangible results.&#8221; The Post provides some background on the investigation:
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John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, was tapped in November 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to look into concerns raised by President Trump and his allies in Congress that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation and during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, when the U.S. government decided not to block the sale of a company called Uranium One.
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As a part of his review, Huber examined documents and conferred with federal law enforcement officials in Little Rock who were handling a meandering probe into the Clinton Foundation, people familiar with the matter said. Current and former officials said that Huber has largely finished and found nothing worth pursuing — though the assignment has not formally ended and no official notice has been sent to the Justice Department or to lawmakers, these people said.
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In the end, the Post&#8217;s sources say, Huber is likely going to recommend &#8220;no criminal charges&#8221; and the investigation will result in &#8220;no other known impacts,&#8221; a conclusion that the Post predicts will likely &#8220;roil some in the GOP who had hoped the prosecutor would vindicate their long-held suspicions about a political rival.&#8221;
Current and former unnamed law enforcement officials told the left-leaning outlet that they &#8220;never expected the effort to produce much of anything,&#8221; the Post notes. In other words, officials felt much the same way about the Huber investigation as Republicans felt about the Robert Mueller &#8220;Russia collusion&#8221; investigation, which likewise took two years and ended up burning up $30 million taxpayer dollars to look into a claim largely based on a DNC and Clinton campaign-funded opposition research document that including on-their-face absurd accusations from foreign sources.
The reality is that the investigation has largely fallen off Trump and Republicans&#8217; radars. The real focus on the right now is on the damning results of the Michael Horowitz investigation into the origins of the FBI probe of the Trump campaign for the Mueller-debunked &#8220;collusion&#8221; conspiracy theory and the bureau&#8217;s handling of the Clinton email probe, as well as the upcoming report by John Durham, which has turned into a &#8220;<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/john-durham-investigation-fbi-misconduct-criminal-probe">full-fledged criminal investigation</a>&#8221; and, as the Post acknowledges, Justice Department officials believe will be &#8220;far more consequential.&#8221;
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In his lengthy report on the origins of the FBI&#8217;s surveillance of the Trump campaign, Intelligence Community Inspector General Horowitz identified &#8220;at least 17 significant errors or omissions&#8221; by the FBI in its FISA surveillance applications into Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and &#8220;many additional errors in the Woods Procedures.&#8221; The report also found that the infamous Christopher Steele dossier, funded by Democrats and the Clinton campaign, &#8220;played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order&#8221; to surveil Page.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/fact-check-republicans-famous-memo-on-fisa-abuse-blasted-by-democrats-ended-up-getting-it-mostly-right">WaPo Admits: Republicans’ Famous Memo On FISA Abuse Blasted By Dems Ended Up Getting It Mostly Right</a>
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Hillary Clinton

Report: Justice Department Closing Out Clinton Corruption Probe, Will Disappoint Trump

John Durham

Michael Horowitz

On Thursday, Washington Post Media Critic Erik Wemple <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/26/rachel-maddow-rooted-steele-dossier-be-true-then-it-fell-apart/">slammed</a> far-left MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, claiming that she &#8220;seemed to be rooting&#8221; for the veracity of the now-infamous Steele Dossier before the document&#8217;s credibility ultimately &#8220;fell apart.&#8221;
&#8220;Name a host on cable news who has dug more deeply into Trump-Russia than MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow,&#8221; Wemple wrote. &#8220;She’s read hundreds, maybe thousands, of court filings; she’s read the plume of literature on Russia-Trump; and she’s out with a new book on the bane of petro-states: &#8216;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525575472/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0525575472&amp;linkId=2a858da9155bc9edba3471d6ec9df3bb" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-reader-unique-id="36">Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth</a>.'&#8221;
Wemple, entering the realm of full-on snark, then excoriated Maddow&#8217;s self-obsessed &#8220;Russianist phase.&#8221;
&#8220;As part of her Russianist phase, Maddow became a clearinghouse for news increments regarding the dossier,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;Just days after BuzzFeed published the dossier in its entirety, she reported on the frustration of congressional Democrats with then-FBI Director James B. Comey, who was declining to divulge whether his people had opened an investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.&#8221;
Wemple systematically walked the reader through a timeline of Maddow&#8217;s on-air reporting from 2017–2018, during which Maddow repeatedly glommed onto snippets of left-leaning reporting to tendentiously give off the impression to MSNBC viewers that the dossier was something other than the salacious rumormongering that Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General has since confirmed it indeed was.
Wemple continued to describe the release of former DOJ Special Counsel Robert Mueller&#8217;s eponymous report on 2016 Russian electoral interference as a &#8220;kick in the derrière&#8221; for those who were invested in the Steeler dossier&#8217;s overarching narrative of nefarious Trump-Russia collusion.
&#8220;The release of the Mueller report in April provided a kick in the derriere for backers of the dossier. 
Wemple wrote. &#8220;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/24/what-steele-dossier-said-vs-what-mueller-report-said/?tid=lk_inline_manual_40" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-reader-unique-id="116">As Glenn Kessler pointed out in The Post</a>, the central allegation of the dossier — an &#8216;extensive conspiracy between campaign team and Kremlin, sanctioned at highest levels and involving Russian diplomatic staff based in the U.S.&#8217; as well as an &#8216;agreed exchange of information established in both directions&#8217; — found no corroboration from Mueller’s investigation, even though the special counsel’s team was charged with probing just this matter.&#8221;
But Maddow didn&#8217;t seem to care for the Mueller&#8217;s report dismissal of the dossier, Wemple opined.
&#8220;Several days after the Mueller report emerged, Maddow addressed not the dissonance between Mueller and the dossier, but a point of possible corroboration,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;In perhaps its most famous allegation, the dossier claimed that Trump had rented a suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow and &#8217;employed&#8217; prostitutes to perform a perverted ritual for him. It suggested that there were tapes of the show, the better to amass kompromat against Trump. A <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Muelller-Report-Redacted-Vol-II-Released-04.18.2019-Word-Searchable.-Reduced-Size.pdf#page=32" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-reader-unique-id="130">footnote</a> in the Mueller report, noted Maddow, bore a possible connection to this part of the dossier.&#8221;
Wemple concluded by comparing the relative merits of the &#8220;case for Maddow&#8221; and the &#8220;case against Maddow,&#8221; and concluding that the latter is &#8220;far stronger.&#8221;
&#8220;The case against Maddow is far stronger,&#8221; Wemple stated. &#8220;When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document.&#8221;
Ouch.

Rachel Maddow

Washington Post Media Critic Blasts Rachel Maddow Over Steele Dossier

2016 election

Department of Justice

Leftism

Media

Progressivism

Russia

The Washington Post hacked into a Chevy Volt several days ago with the help of a automotive technology expert to find out just how much automakers are spying on their owners and discovered that vehicles are recording their owners&#8217; every move.
The Post used a 2017 Chevy Volt for its experiment and learned that the car collected a wide range of highly precise data ranging from the vehicles location to information about the driver&#8217;s cell phone, including call records — noting that many vehicles copy over personal data the moment that a smart phone is plugged into the vehicle.
The Post noted that the Chevy Volt did not inform drivers what information it was recording and did not make mention of it in the owner&#8217;s manual since there are no federal regulations protecting consumer&#8217;s privacy and data from automakers.
The Post went to Jim Mason, who has a PhD in engineering and reconstructs car accidents for a living by hacking into vehicles, for help hacking into the Chevy Volt.
Mason focused on hacking into the car&#8217;s infotainment system since it was the easiest computer, out of several computers in the vehicle, to physically get to inside the car.
After having to take a bit of the car apart to reach the computer, The Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/17/what-does-your-car-know-about-you-we-hacked-chevy-find-out/">found</a> that Chevy collected the  following information:
<blockquote>There on a map was the precise location where I’d driven to take apart the Chevy. There were my other destinations, like the hardware store I’d stopped at to buy some tape.
Among the trove of data points were unique identifiers for my and Doug’s phones, and a detailed log of phone calls from the previous week. There was a long list of contacts, right down to people’s address, emails and even photos.
For a broader view, Mason also extracted the data from a Chevrolet infotainment computer that I bought used on eBay for $375. It contained enough data to reconstruct the Upstate New York travels and relationships of a total stranger. We know he or she frequently called someone listed as “Sweetie,” whose photo we also have. We could see the exact Gulf station where they bought gas, the restaurant where they ate (called Taste China) and the unique identifiers for their Samsung Galaxy Note phones.</blockquote>
The Post noted that GM would not reveal what information it was collecting on drivers and that the other computers in the vehicle, including the infotainment computer, collect far more information than what Mason was able to pull up.
The vehicle also collected information on &#8220;acceleration and braking style, beaming back reports to its maker General Motors over an always-on Internet connection,&#8221; The Post added. &#8220;Coming next: face data, used to personalize the vehicle and track driver attention.&#8221;
The Post reported that 20 automakers pledged in 2014 to voluntarily adhere to privacy standards that protected consumers privacy by protecting their data — although none of the 20 automakers followed through on their promises.
As 5G cellular technology becomes integrated into cars in the future it will become even more important for Americans to advocate for their privacy rights as China&#8217;s potential entry into 5G markets in the U.S. is a <a href="https://www.heritage.org/technology/report/the-us-must-treat-china-national-security-threat-5g-networks">significant</a> national security threat for the U.S.
Fears that vehicles could be hacked and taken over by someone outside the vehicle who has a sinister intent are not only legitimate, they are well-rooted in reality because it has happened.
In July 2015, The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/07/22/hacks-on-the-highway/?tid=lk_inline_manual_10&amp;utm_term=.9a18df869426">reported</a> on one such criminal instance:
<blockquote>The complaints that flooded into Texas Auto Center that maddening, mystifying week were all pretty much the same: Customers’ cars had gone haywire. Horns started honking in the middle of the night, angering neighbors, waking babies. Then when morning finally came, the cars refused to start.
The staff suspected malfunctions in a new Internet device, installed behind dashboards of second-hand cars, that allowed the dealership to remind customers of overdue payments by taking remote control of some vehicle functions. But a check of the dealership’s computers suggested something more sinister at work: Texas Auto Center had been hacked. &#8230;
&#8230; Police later reported more than 100 victims and charged a former dealership employee with computer crimes. &#8230;
&#8230;Widespread hacks on cars and other connected devices are destined to come, experts say, as they already have to nearly everything else online. It’s just a question of when the right hacking skills end up in the hands of people with sufficient motives.</blockquote>
Also in 2015, Andy Greenberg wrote at Wired about how his Jeep was completely taken over by Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, who hacked the vehicle as part of an experiment to which Greenberg agreed. Greenberg <a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>I was driving 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold.
Though I hadn&#8217;t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass. &#8230;
&#8230; Their code is an automaker&#8217;s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.</blockquote>
The hackers were able to completely kill the transmission on the vehicle from miles away as it drove on the freeway, which is less than they did to Greenberg two years prior in 2013 when they &#8220;disabled [the] brakes, honked the horn, jerked the seat belt, and commandeered the steering wheel&#8221; on a couple of  different vehicles that they had Greenberg drive.
WikiLeaks released a trove of documents in 2017 that revealed that the U.S. government has extremely sophisticated hacking tools that it can use to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/07/why-the-cia-is-using-your-tvs-smartphones-and-cars-for-spying/">spy</a> on people through televisions, smartphones, and even anti-virus software.
&#8220;Tucked into WikiLeaks’ analysis of a trove of documents allegedly from the Central Intelligence Agency is a stunning line: That the agency has looked into hacking cars, which WikiLeaks asserts could be used to carry out &#8216;nearly undetectable assassinations,'&#8221; The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/03/08/what-we-know-about-car-hacking-the-cia-and-those-wikileaks-claims/">reported</a>.

The 2011 Chevrolet Volt on display at th

Washington Post Hacks Into Chevy To Show How Much Cars Are Spying On Owners

When The Washington Post infamously posted the motto &#8220;Democracy Dies in Darkness&#8221; on its masthead after Donald Trump was elected, it was implicit — The Post will deny it — that Trump is the enemy of democracy, and of &#8220;light&#8221; or transparency. So it was sadly poetic that after the House Democrats rammed through such an incredibly partisan impeachment vote — without a single Republican voting aye — Washington Post reporter Rachael Bade posted a photograph on Twitter of her and her colleagues celebrating with beers.
Bade tweeted: &#8220;Merry Impeachmas from the WaPo team! @pkcapitol is buying.&#8221; After it became controversial, Bade deleted it, claiming it had been misunderstood.
With all their tweets and all their angry, opinionated segments on CNN and MSNBC, these journalists cannot be misunderstood. This was a message of &#8220;mission accomplished.&#8221; The Post and all its brethren in the Trump-hating media have been seeking this vote since before President Trump was even inaugurated. It&#8217;s hard to tell whether the Democrats or the media have been more ardent in seeking Trump&#8217;s removal from office. It&#8217;s difficult to discern the slightest difference in partisan aggression between the Democrats and the press.
Our only question is: Who are the leaders, and who are the followers? Are the ideologues in the media forcing their will on the Democrats, or the other way around?
After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s crackpot impeachment vote came her declaration that she would withhold the articles of impeachment from the Senate. &#8220;So far, we haven&#8217;t seen anything that looks fair to us, so hopefully it will be fairer, and when we see what that is, we&#8217;ll send our managers,&#8221; she shamelessly proclaimed. As if the Democrats and their media allies have been fair to Team Trump all along. She called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a &#8220;rogue leader&#8221; for failing to bend to her will.
NBC located &#8220;a source familiar with the administration&#8217;s reaction&#8221; who asked, &#8220;How can these people be taken seriously?&#8221;
Mark Levin took it very seriously, tweeting: &#8220;So she&#8217;s unilaterally sitting on the impeachment. This is another brazen unconstitutional act.&#8221; He argued the impeachment should be declared &#8220;null and void&#8221; by the Senate and added, &#8220;Her effort to cripple the presidency &amp; blackmail the Senate must be defeated.&#8221; The founders didn&#8217;t set up this system so the House speaker could make demands of the Senate until it cries uncle.
This is where the media&#8217;s bowing to and scraping for Democrats and their strategists warps our system. They&#8217;re not part of the checks and balances. They have no balance, and they never check the Democrats. The media paint everything Team Chuck &amp; Nancy does as &#8220;historic&#8221; and &#8220;solemn,&#8221; and the Republican reactions as &#8220;diatribes&#8221; and &#8220;onslaughts.&#8221;
During the Clinton impeachment in 1998, TV reporters also sounded hopelessly devoted to the Democratic party line. They emotionally announced that special counsel Kenneth Starr&#8217;s report was a truck bomb and compared the entire process to a Puritan big brother obsessing over Bill Clinton&#8217;s sex life as if we all lived in George Orwell&#8217;s &#8220;1984.&#8221;
Perjury? Who cares about perjury?
The morning after the Trump impeachment vote, ABC &#8220;news&#8221; man George Stephanopoulos grimly implied Trump will have an &#8220;indelible mark on his record.&#8221; Indelible? This from the &#8220;journalists&#8221; who blatantly campaigned in 2016 to put Clinton back in the White House as first gentleman.
The media cannot credibly lecture anyone on the erosion of &#8220;democratic norms&#8221; under this president. They have eroded every journalistic norm in their crusade to remove Trump and are now stenographers for undoing constitutional norms. They are the ones casting a dark shadow over our democracy. And no one gets to remove these unelected, permanent politicians from their offices.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Newspapers.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: The Media Help Erode Our Norms

Impeachment

The Washington Post continues to argue that its preferred party would win if the game was checkers and not chess.
On Friday, the outlet published “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/12/13/if-britain-had-germanys-electoral-system-boris-johnson-may-have-lost-election/?tid=sm_tw">analysis</a>” with the headline: “If Britain had Germany’s electoral system, Boris Johnson may have lost the election.”
“Europe’s startled take on the British elections may — at least partially — also be based on one fundamental difference between Britain and continental Europe. Whereas Prime Minister Boris Johnson celebrated a historic win on Friday, the same results may very well have made him a loser if, for instance, the election had taken place in Germany,” the Post reported.
Sure, and if America’s election system was designed around the popular vote, Donald Trump may have lost the 2016 election.
The problem with this sort of analysis is that, aside from being meaningless, a different election system may very well have the same results because, naturally, candidates run an election based around a country’s election system. So, saying Trump would have lost if the popular vote determined the 2016 election doesn’t mean anything, because if that were the case Trump would have campaigned differently and may have ended up winning the popular vote. Instead, he campaigned under America’s current election system, while Hillary Clinton did not.
The same goes for the U.K. If it had Germany’s electoral system, Boris Johnson and his party would have campaigned differently, and may ultimately have won the election anyway.
The Post went on to bemoan Britain’s election system, because it is not a proportional representation system like that of Germany or New Zealand:
<blockquote>In a proportional representation system — in place in countries such as Germany and New Zealand — the results would have looked very different. There, the share of total votes a party receives largely determines the number of seats in parliament. The Conservative Party would still have won the most votes, with a share of 43.6 percent. But without a majority, Labour (32.2 percent) may have been able to form a Brexit-skeptical coalition with the Scottish National Party (3.9 percent), the Liberal Democrats (11.5 percent) and other parties, under the assumption of full proportionality with no minimum vote share threshold required for entry to Parliament.</blockquote>
In other words,” the Post continued, “while Johnson delivered his victory speech in front of a slogan claiming that he would lead <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/13/boris-johnson-leads-tories-historic-general-election-win">&#8216;the people’s government,&#8217;</a> his administration does not actually represent the majority of voters.”
President Bill Clinton also didn’t receive a majority of the popular vote, but the Post would never make such a claim about him.
This whole thing where the media imagines what it would be like if an election took place under different circumstances without acknowledging that the different circumstances would lead to different styles of campaigning has become common after Trump won in 2016. The saddest part of the Post’s article is the fact that it is essentially praising Germany’s election system over Britain’s, and in doing so it is bemoaning Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party’s loss.
Let’s not forget the ongoing and numerous allegations of anti-Semitism from Corbyn. If Britain had Germany’s election system, an anti-Semite may have won. That’s not exactly a pro-Germany stance.

Boris Johnson

Washington Post Imagines Boris Johnson Losing If Britain’s Electoral System Was Like Germany’s

Now that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has finally released his much-anticipated report on alleged misconduct by the FBI during the 2016 election, two famous memos — one released by Republican Rep. Devin Nunes while he was House Intelligence Committee chairman, and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who has since taken over the position — have come under renewed scrutiny. The memos presented dueling versions of how the FBI began to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in an effort to investigate alleged &#8220;collusion&#8221; with Russia.
So who had it right? A fact-checker for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/13/vindication-nunes-memo/">The Washington Post</a> has been forced to admit that Nunes got a &#8220;fair amount&#8221; right — in fact, his version of events aligned far more closely with what Horowitz found than the Democrats&#8217; rebuttal.
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&#8220;[H]ow much is the Nunes memo itself vindicated?&#8221; The Washington Post&#8217;s Aaron Blake asks in a fact-check published Friday. &#8220;A fair amount, it turns out,&#8221; writes Blake, adding in an attempt at a qualifier &#8220;at least, in Horowitz’s estimation.&#8221;
Blake then walks through the parallel passages in each memo and compares them with what Horowitz&#8217;s extensive report concludes, beginning with the most important disagreement between the two: &#8220;how accurate and complete the four [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)] applications to surveil Page were.&#8221; It turns out that Nunes&#8217; claims aligned more closely with what took place, while Schiff&#8217;s counter featured &#8220;probably the worst line of the Democrats’ rebuttal.&#8221;
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Nunes: “In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts. However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted.”
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Democrats: “FBI and DOJ officials did not abuse the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign. … DOJ met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet probable cause requirement.”
Horowitz: “We identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications, and many additional errors in the Woods Procedures. These errors and omissions resulted from case agents providing wrong or incomplete information to [the Justice Department National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence] and failing to flag important issues for discussion.”</blockquote>
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Horowitz additionally found that &#8220;a now-former FBI lawyer altered a document to make it look like Page wasn’t a source for another government agency, when in fact he was — a fact that could have been exculpatory for Page,&#8221; Blake notes.
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Another key claim made in Nunes&#8217; memo is that the Democrat-funded dossier by Christopher Steele was &#8220;an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application.&#8221; The Democrats countered by claiming that the FBI &#8220;made only narrow use&#8221; of the notorious, unverified and salacious Steele dossier:
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Nunes: “The dossier … formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. … Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.”
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Democrats: “DOJ cited multiple sources to support the case for surveilling Page but made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources about Page’s specific activities in 2016, chiefly his suspected July 2016 meetings in Moscow with Russian officials. … DOJ’s applications did not otherwise rely on Steele’s reporting, including any ‘salacious’ allegations about Trump.”
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Horowitz: &#8220;We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.&#8221; A fourth element of the initial FISA application, claiming Page coordinated with Russia on behalf of the campaign, &#8220;relied entirely on&#8221; information from the dossier.
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While Blake describes the differences here as &#8220;nuanced,&#8221; the language in Horowitz&#8217; report is clear enough: Nunes&#8217; once again presents a more accurate description of events than the Democrats&#8217;.
A third key disagreement: whether the FBI was transparent about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton&#8217;s role in funding the Steele dossier:
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Nunes: “Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts.”
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Democrats: “DOJ in fact informed the Court accurately that Steele was hired by politically-motivated U.S. persons and entities and that his research appeared intended for use ‘to discredit’ Trump’s campaign.”
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Horowitz: A footnote in the application &#8220;stated that Steele was hired by an identified U.S. person (Glenn Simpson) to conduct research regarding ‘Candidate # 1’s’ (Donald Trump) ties to Russia and that the FBI ‘speculates’ that this U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit the Trump campaign.&#8221; The FBI &#8220;assumed, but did not know at the time of the first application, that Steele was conducting opposition research.&#8221;
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While the Democrats&#8217; note is accurate, it fails to take into account that the ties to the DNC and Clinton were omitted in later applications despite the FBI having by then learned about the connection. Horowitz includes this omission as part of his list of 17 omissions and errors he details in his report.
Blake also looks at the differences in how the two memos presented the issue of Steele&#8217;s role as a key source for the Sept. 23, 2016 Yahoo News report cited in the FISA application. The failure to correct the note stating Steele was not a source for that article is also something Horowitz included in his list of 17 omission and errors by the FBI:
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Nunes: “The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News.”
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Democrats: “The Majority falsely claims that the FISA materials ‘relied heavily’ on a September 23, 2016 Yahoo! News article by Michael Isikoff … In fact, DOJ referenced lsikoff’s article, alongside another article the Majority fails to mention, not to provide separate corroboration for Steele’s reporting, but instead to inform the Court of Page’s public denial of his suspected meetings in Moscow, which Page also echoed in a September 25, 2016 letter to FBI Director Comey.”
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Horowitz’s finding: The FBI &#8220;failed to correct the assertion in the first FISA application that the FBI did not believe that Steele directly provided information to the reporter who wrote the September 23 Yahoo News article, even though there was no information in the Woods File to support this claim and even after certain Crossfire Hurricane officials learned in 2017, before the third renewal application, of an admission that Steele made in a court filing about his interactions with the news media in the late summer and early fall of 2016.&#8221;
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Blake again tries to give the Democrats some credit for their claim, particularly that the reference to the article appears to have been intended &#8220;to inform the Court of Page’s public denial of his suspected meetings in Moscow,&#8221; but, again, Nunes is correct in the key claim: Steele&#8217;s role as a source was inaccurately denied.
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While the Post titles its piece as a question — asking &#8220;Vindication For The Nunes Memo?&#8221; — the evidence provides a clear answer.
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Devin Nunes

WaPo Admits: Republicans’ Famous Memo On FISA Abuse Blasted By Dems Ended Up Getting It Mostly Right

On Wednesday, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-two-undocumented-housekeepers-took-on-the-president--and-revealed-trumps-long-term-reliance-on-illegal-immigrants/2019/12/04/3dff5b5c-0a15-11ea-bd9d-c628fd48b3a0_story.html">The Washington Post</a> published another hard-hitting investigative report designed to diss Donald Trump and his family by detailing the claims of illegal immigrants formerly employed by the now-First Family. The Post&#8217;s latest Trump-disparaging piece was met with a blistering response from the White House, which called the report &#8220;fabricated tabloid trash&#8221; that is emphatically &#8220;not journalism.&#8221;
&#8220;It was important for Sandra Diaz to be invisible,&#8221; the Post&#8217;s lengthy hit-piece begins. &#8220;Before entering the Trump family villa, she would tie back her hair, pull on latex gloves and step into delicate paper shoe coverings. She knew not to wear makeup or perfume that might leave the faintest trace of her presence. As Donald Trump&#8217;s personal maid, Diaz was dealing with a fussy celebrity owner who presided like a monarch over the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster long before he was elevated to president.&#8221;
Diaz was also an illegal alien, the Post underscores — &#8220;an immigrant from Costa Rica working illegally for Trump with a fake Social Security card she had bought for $50.&#8221;
The Post goes on to inform its readers that over the last year its reporters went through the effort of speaking with 48 people &#8220;who had worked illegally for the Trump Organization at 11 of its properties in Florida, New Jersey, New York and Virginia.&#8221;
Why did the Post dedicate all the time and resources to speaking to nearly 50 of the illegal immigrant former employees of Trump and his family? The most obvious answer is what these now ex-Trump employees have said previously to the Post and other outlets:
<blockquote>When they spoke in articles in The Post, The New York Times and other publications beginning last December, it was not for money — as some of their shocked and frightened colleagues assumed &#8211; or really for politics, they said, but to highlight what they consider a glaring hypocrisy.</blockquote>
But another reason, which becomes increasingly clear as the piece progresses, is that these former employees were able to give the Post a bunch of juicy gossip about &#8220;monarch&#8221; Trump and his &#8220;royal&#8221; family, like these gems:
<blockquote>Trump&#8217;s undocumented workers were forced to smile at stomach-churning comments from wealthy members once he became president. &#8220;You&#8217;re still here? How come we can&#8217;t get rid of you? I&#8217;m going to call Trump, you [expletive] Mexican,&#8221; Gabriel Juarez, who had been head waiter for a decade at one of Trump&#8217;s New York golf clubs, said a member told him jokingly.
It fell to them to scrub off the anti-Trump graffiti scrawled across the mirrors in the men&#8217;s locker room at Bedminster one day, and grit their teeth through pep talks by supervisors who they said echoed the boss&#8217;s stump speeches: &#8220;Now don&#8217;t forget, let&#8217;s make Mar-a-Lago great again.&#8221; &#8230;
Those who cooked and served Trump knew that he liked his cheeseburgers well done and his Diet Coke in small glass bottles with a plastic straw that no one could be seen touching.
Trump loved Tic Tacs. But not an arbitrary amount. He wanted, in his bedroom bureau at all times, two full containers of white Tic Tacs and one container that was half full. The same rule applied to the Bronx Colors-brand face makeup from Switzerland that Trump slathered on &#8211; two full containers, one half full — even if it meant the housekeepers had to regularly bring new shirts from the pro shop because of the rust-colored stains on the collars. A special washing machine in the laundry room was reserved for his wife Melania Trump&#8217;s clothing.
Donald Trump liked Irish Spring bar soap in his shower. But his housekeepers quickly learned not to throw out his soap even if it had worn down to the tiniest sliver: Trump decided when he wanted something discarded. When that happened, with clothes or newspapers, he would toss them on the floor.</blockquote>
In response to the Post&#8217;s &#8220;Trump hypocrisy&#8221; piece, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham offered her assessment of the paper&#8217;s brand of investigative reporting.
&#8220;The assertions made for this story are not only false, they are a disgusting attempt at invading the privacy of the First Family,&#8221; she wrote.&#8221;This is not journalism — it is fabricated tabloid trash.&#8221;
The Post, which includes Grisham response in its piece, swiped back by noting that Grisham &#8220;did not specify which details were inaccurate&#8221; and &#8220;declined to answer questions about Trump&#8217;s longtime employment of undocumented workers and how it squares with his rhetoric about illegal immigration.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-pelosi-makes-it-official-we-will-impeach-trump-responds">Pelosi Makes It Official: We Will Impeach; Trump Responds</a>

Tabloids

‘This Is Not Journalism’: White House Unloads On Washington Post For ‘Tabloid Trash’ Story On Trump Housekeepers

Illegal Immigration

Stephanie Grisham

In a lengthy report published Tuesday that peels back the curtain on the Trump administration&#8217;s &#8220;Ukraine pressure campaign,&#8221; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-ukraine-pressure-campaign-began-as-an-effort-to-undercut-the-mueller-investigation/2019/12/02/208204c8-12c9-11ea-9cd7-a1becbc82f5e_story.html">The Washington Post</a> ends up undermining the Democrats&#8217; attempts to focus public attention on President Trump&#8217;s request for Ukraine to &#8220;look into&#8221; his political opponent, rather than his attempt to prompt an investigation into alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election. What actually fueled the pressure campaign, which was headed up by Trump&#8217;s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the Post details, was a desire to prove that special counsel Robert Mueller&#8217;s &#8220;Russian collusion&#8221; investigation was based on false premises.
&#8220;As 2018 came to a close, the special counsel investigation was bearing down on President Trump,&#8221; the Post&#8217;s latest Ukraine-themed report begins. &#8220;Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had secured the cooperation of Trump’s onetime fixer, Michael Cohen, and appeared to be preparing to indict a longtime adviser, Roger Stone. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was in jail after pleading guilty to multiple felonies, and Mueller’s prosecutors were pressing him to explain why he had given 2016 polling data to an associate with alleged ties to Russian intelligence.&#8221;
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&#8220;It was in this uncertain moment that Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said he had the idea to focus on Ukraine,&#8221; the Post continues. &#8220;That November, he received a tip from a former colleague that it was the Ukrainians who had conspired to help Democrats in 2016, Giuliani said in recent interviews.&#8221;
As the Post highlights, Giuliani has openly explained this rationale, including in a recent interview with Glenn Beck. &#8220;I knew they were hot and heavy on this Russian collusion thing, even though I knew 100 percent that it was false,&#8221; said Giuliani. &#8220;I said to myself, ‘Hallelujah.’ I’ve got what a defense lawyer always wants: I can go prove someone else committed this crime.&#8221;
Giuliani made a similar statement in a tweet last month. &#8220;The investigation I conducted concerning 2016 Ukrainian collusion and corruption, was done solely as a defense attorney to defend my client against false charges, that kept changing as one after another were disproved,&#8221; he wrote.
&#8220;Giuliani’s efforts to undermine the special counsel probe eventually snowballed into the current impeachment crisis gripping the capital — highlighting how the pressure Trump and his allies put on Ukraine originated as an effort to sow doubts about the Russia investigation,&#8221; the Post explains.
While the Post does its best to make Trump&#8217;s attempts to &#8220;sow doubts&#8221; about the Russian investigation sound insidious, as Mueller himself was forced to admit in the final report, the Democrat-pushed narrative that Trump&#8217;s campaign somehow &#8220;colluded&#8221; with the Russians turned out to be baseless. After a two-year investigation costing over $30 million, the special counsel revealed in its final report that &#8220;the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.&#8221;
The Post&#8217;s report on team Trump&#8217;s belief that Ukraine was really the culprit in 2016 election meddling aligns with other evidence, including Mueller investigation <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/newly-released-mueller-docs-trump-campaign-thought-ukrainians-not-russians-behind-democrat-email-hacks-trump-get-emails">documents</a> released in early November focusing on the special counsel&#8217;s interview in May 2018 with former Trump deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates. Trump advisers, said Gates, believed the hacking of the Democratic emails ultimately published by WikiLeaks was &#8220;likely carried about by the Ukrainians, not the Russians,&#8221; and that &#8220;the Democrats were pushing the Russia narrative&#8221; presumably for political purposes.
Trump has reiterated both publicly and privately his belief that corruption has plagued Ukraine. In a recent tweet, Trump explained his rationale for delaying U.S. security aid. &#8220;I held back the money from Ukraine because it is considered a corrupt country, [and] I wanted to know why nearby European countries weren’t putting up money also,&#8221; Trump <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-heres-the-real-reason-i-held-back-money-from-ukraine-blocked-impeachment-testimony">tweeted</a> last week.
Fueled by this belief that Ukraine was corrupt and in part by his desire to undermine the premises of the Mueller investigation, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 — &#8220;<a title="www.washingtonpost.com" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-ukraine-call-reveals-a-president-convinced-of-his-own-invincibility/2019/09/21/1a56466c-dc6a-11e9-ac63-3016711543fe_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_16">the very day after Mueller testified </a>before Congress,&#8221; as the Post notes — to investigate alleged Ukrainian meddling.
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump told Zelensky, as revealed in the transcript of the famous July 25 call. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
As almost an afterthought, Trump also asked Zelensky to &#8220;look into&#8221; allegations of corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian-based energy company Burisma Holdings.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that,” Trump said. “So whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”
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While the Post makes sure to highlight criticism about the Crowdstrike &#8220;conspiracy theory&#8221; that partly motivated Trump&#8217;s camp, the evidence is clear that the desire to undercut the Mueller &#8220;Russia collusion&#8221; investigation by exposing alleged Ukrainian involvement in election meddling was what was truly fueling the Giuliani-led effort to &#8220;pressure&#8221; Ukraine, not Trump&#8217;s desire to take out his potential 2020 political rival.
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Rudy Giuliani

Washington Post: Trump Effort To Pressure Ukraine Was Really About Undermining Mueller, Not Biden

Trump Administration

It&#8217;s becoming ever more apparent that those at The Washington Post are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
The Post&#8217;s longtime fashion critic, Robin Givhan, penned a not-so-subtle <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/12/02/melania-trumps-christmas-decorations-are-lovely-that-coat-looks-ridiculous/">piece</a> on Tuesday headlined &#8220;Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations are lovely, but that coat looks ridiculous.&#8221;
Yes, the once-great newspaper decided to use a happy little story about the first lady&#8217;s Christmas decorations to blast her fashion sense.
&#8220;First Lady Melania Trump unveiled this year’s White House Christmas decorations in a gauzy video in which she strolls through the public rooms marveling at their holiday luster. She gingerly adjusts a single red rose in a lush floral swag draped over a mantelpiece and delicately sprinkles glittery faux snow on one of the many white-decorated trees. The theme this year is &#8216;The Spirit of America&#8217; and the dominant color is wintry white with festive bursts of holiday red. It’s all quite lovely. So there’s that,&#8221; Givhan writes.
Then she rips Melania Trump — for her coat.
<blockquote>For her tour, Trump wears all white: a dress with a simple jewel neckline, white stiletto-heeled pumps and a white coat. The coat is draped over her shoulders as she strolls through the White House.
The coat looks ridiculous.
But more than a silly fashion folly, the coat is a distraction. It’s a discomforting affectation taken to a ludicrous extreme. In a video that is intended to celebrate the warmth and welcoming spirit of the holiday season, that simple flourish exudes cold, dismissive aloofness.</blockquote>
OK, let&#8217;s unpack that. &#8220;The coat is a distraction.&#8221; Hmm. Maybe. Watch the video below and you can decide. A &#8220;discomforting affectation?&#8221; &#8220;Ludicrous?&#8221; That&#8217;s seems a bit of an over-read. But to say the coat draped over her shoulders &#8220;exudes cold, dismissive aloofness?&#8221; That&#8217;s just pure hatred from a TDS sufferer.
Givhan lets the hate flow from there.
&#8220;As Trump gazes pleasantly at all that her staff and a host of volunteers have accomplished, her attire suggests that she’s casually passing through and has little affinity for the occasion. She’s not getting comfortable, so why should you?&#8221; she writes. &#8220;She has styled herself in a manner that contradicts what her staff has so often insisted — that she is an engaged hostess who sweats the details and frets about her guests’ comfort. Instead, she looks like the sort of host who greets her guests at the front door, tells them to remove their shoes and warns them not to sit on the Lalanne sheep.&#8221;
But she continues to fixate on the coat, saying it is &#8220;a way of not having to be fully present.&#8221; And she takes one more swipe at the first lady, concluding her piece by saying: &#8220;She has asked that she be judged on what she does rather than what she wears. But as both a host and a guest, her attire would be less attention-grabbing if she took off her coat and indicated that she was happy to stay a while.&#8221;
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“The Spirit of America” is shining in the <a href="https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WhiteHouse</a>! I am delighted to share this beautiful exhibit of patriotism for all to see, and excited for everyone to experience the beauty of the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Christmas?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Christmas</a> season! <a href="https://t.co/qGxxl9qBrd">pic.twitter.com/qGxxl9qBrd</a>
&mdash; Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) <a href="https://twitter.com/FLOTUS/status/1201351943790174208?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 2, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Others liberal outlets also bashed the first lady. The Daily Beast reported that Melania&#8217;s “joyless Christmas decorations are back to haunt your dreams.” Mother Jones said she “displays virtually no enthusiasm for anything other than periodically straightening something that the lazy servants apparently didn’t get quite right.”
For the record, Melania Trump is a fashion icon and a former world-famous model. But women in the mainstream media still love to bash her for her clothes.
At the State of the Union Address in 2018, Melania wore a cream-colored pantsuit made by Christian Dior, a white Dolce &amp; Gabbana blouse, and tan Christian Louboutin pumps.
CNN White House reporter Kate Bennett saw something much more nefarious in Melania&#8217;s choice of &#8220;white.&#8221;
&#8220;Remember last year the female Democratic senators all wore white. A bunch of them to protest Trump&#8217;s policies against women. So there was even a hashtag, &#8216;#WomenWearWhite.&#8217; Listen, it could be a total coincidence, but I just find a lot of the stuff she does these days, to look at it twice,&#8221; Bennett said.
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Washington Post headquarters

‘COLD, DISMISSIVE’: Washington Post Blasts First Lady Melania — For Her Coat?

Melania Trump

The Napoleonic-era French diplomat Talleyrand famously offered a rather harsh assessment of the Bourbons after they regained power decades after the French Revolution that overthrew them: “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” The same might be said for a coterie of American diplomats who, decades after the failure of the Oslo Accords peace process of the 1990s, have failed to learn the lessons of Oslo&#8217;s failure. Worse still, many Western news outlets repeat their claims — many of which have been disproven by both history and experience — as gospel truth.
In last Sunday&#8217;s edition of The Washington Post, Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer, both former U.S. State Department officials, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/lets-not-pretend-washington-ever-really-tried-to-stop-israeli-settlements/2019/11/21/2fc18316-0c96-11ea-97ac-a7ccc8dd1ebc_story.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/lets-not-pretend-washington-ever-really-tried-to-stop-israeli-settlements/2019/11/21/2fc18316-0c96-11ea-97ac-a7ccc8dd1ebc_story.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237582000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFFtqdKQX8xdEfehadfC60p-kVo3g">lambasted</a> the Trump administration’s recent <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-the-trump-administration-is-absolutely-correct-to-call-israeli-settlements-legal">announcement</a> that it would not consider Israeli construction in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), or “settlements,” to be “illegal.” The decision, Miller and Kurtzer claim, has “compromised, if not killed” the possibility for any U.S.-brokered “peace deal” between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
They assert that the decision violates international law. <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/294359/israels-rights-in-the-west-bank-under-international-law" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/294359/israels-rights-in-the-west-bank-under-international-law&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE-8RFb84eA-Gbp-IwmxuYIhmsq4w">However</a>, the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, Article 6 (1922) encourages “close settlement by Jews on the land” west of the Jordan River. The U.N. Charter (1945), Chapter 12, Article 80 (“the Palestine article”) upheld the Mandate’s position, as did the San Remo Resolution (1920) and the Anglo-American Convention (1924), which either recognized or assumed the legality of Jewish settlement.
Miller and Kurtzer add: “The United States has known for decades how damaging settlement activity is in the search for peace — Palestinians cannot trade land for peace if they don’t possess the land.”
But the veteran diplomats have it backwards: U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, adopted shortly after Israel seized territories from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria in a 1967 war of self-defense, assumed “peace-for-land” negotiations; first the Arab side would commit to peace with Israel, then Israelis would withdraw from some of the land.
Miller and Kurtzer have misdiagnosed the problem at the root of the conflict. Palestinian-Arab leaders consider all of Israel to be a “settlement” — an “occupation.” And there’s a huge body of evidence to prove it.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has <a href="https://palwatch.org/analysis/97" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://palwatch.org/analysis/97&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEfClXxrHHlebOd717VruCYKiaLqQ">documented</a> how official Palestinian Authority (PA) media routinely refer to all of Israel as “occupied” and deny any Jewish connection to the land. The PA itself uses <a href="https://palwatch.org/page/12774" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://palwatch.org/page/12774&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHQWGntsTl5fQ3FSTKJeWDpNGVqSA">maps</a> that depict all of Israel as “Palestine” and its leaders have <a href="https://freebeacon.com/national-security/fiery-speech-palestinian-president-abbas-condemns-united-states-threatens-violence-denies-jewish-history/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://freebeacon.com/national-security/fiery-speech-palestinian-president-abbas-condemns-united-states-threatens-violence-denies-jewish-history/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG_vvSH7W2SfgJTk7lMeSh8vAr0tQ">asserted</a> that Jews have no historical link to Jerusalem, a city whose historical and religious ties to Judaism predate the creation of Islam by thousands of years.
Indeed, &#8220;settlements&#8221; would be a moot point if the Palestinian leadership had accepted U.S. and Israeli offers for statehood in 2000 at Camp David, 2001 at Taba, and 2008 after the Annapolis Conference. Each of these proposals would have given Palestinian leaders a state and the overwhelming majority of the West Bank. Yet, the PA rejected each offer — without so much as a counteroffer. The 2008 Israeli <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/195315/missed-opportunity-olmert-abbas-and-media-bias" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/195315/missed-opportunity-olmert-abbas-and-media-bias&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHhU0cmZJMsoDaS1OA2FCazaKqZTw">offer</a>, which provided for a Palestinian state with its capital in eastern Jerusalem, was the basis for U.S. attempts to restart negotiations in 2014 and 2016, both of which were <a href="https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/02/29/the-palestinian-authority-repudiates-oslo-and-no-one-reports-or-cares/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/02/29/the-palestinian-authority-repudiates-oslo-and-no-one-reports-or-cares/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH0RHR-l_OTbyqyBHIl97r6SVroKQ">also rejected</a> by PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
The PA’s refusal to resolve outstanding issues in bilateral talks is a violation of the Oslo Accords, which created the PA and remains the basis for its legitimacy. But the PA also <a href="https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/israel-plo%20recognition%20-%20exchange%20of%20letters%20betwe.aspx" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/israel-plo%2520recognition%2520-%2520exchange%2520of%2520letters%2520betwe.aspx&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFZZU947pFwBwWUcnWgd-NzRBhvNQ">violates</a> Oslo — which Miller and Kurtzer championed when in government — in more grotesque ways.
The PA has continued to pay salaries to those who carry out attacks against Jews — even increasing the amount by 11.8% in 2019 alone, as PMW noted in a July 4, 2019 Jerusalem Post <a href="https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/PA-increases-salaries-to-terrorists-in-2019-despite-financial-crisis-report-594600" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/PA-increases-salaries-to-terrorists-in-2019-despite-financial-crisis-report-594600&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF9Un9rY4uSU0mORb0zV7yVvq0Wjg">report</a>. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) has <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/international-affairs/333662-how-the-palestinian-authoritys-social-safety-net" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/international-affairs/333662-how-the-palestinian-authoritys-social-safety-net&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFlPfTZLreQ8608uef_JG1u5BL2gg">detailed</a>, the PA’s decision to pay terrorists and their families is enshrined in the PA&#8217;s own laws, passed in 2004 and amended in 2013, stipulating that convicted terrorists <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/04/28/palestinians-are-rewarding-terrorists-the-u-s-should-stop-enabling-them/?utm_term=.9aafce51bbb9" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/04/28/palestinians-are-rewarding-terrorists-the-u-s-should-stop-enabling-them/?utm_term%3D.9aafce51bbb9&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFw2r0vy_iOtIri-Ke0cvUfrYb2JA">receive</a> monthly “salaries.” Further, cash grants and priority civil service job placements are offered to those who carry out terror attacks.
Streets, sports teams, tournaments, and even schools are <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/missing-the-palestinian-after-terror-after-party" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/missing-the-palestinian-after-terror-after-party&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGYDQixaNXx05jAhdHQF5jKRDp3Mw">named</a> after murderers of Jews. In but one example, in October 2015, the PA Ministry of Education <a href="http://blog.camera.org/archives/2015/10/moderate_palestinian_authority.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://blog.camera.org/archives/2015/10/moderate_palestinian_authority.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGzAZCLgOBUMqYbjzjvUWSWRanh7A">announced</a> that it would plant olive trees and place signs with the names of terrorists who have died murdering Israelis. One of these terrorists, Muhannad Shafeq Halabi, killed two Israelis and stabbed a two-year old child in an October 8, 2015 terror attack in Jerusalem. For his actions, Halabi was posthumously <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/12/30/palestinian-bar-association-grants-honorary-degree-to-terrorist-who-murdered-two-israelis/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/12/30/palestinian-bar-association-grants-honorary-degree-to-terrorist-who-murdered-two-israelis/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGjCR_PmISArtnY84MvO61WdFc_1A">awarded</a> an honorary law degree by the PA Bar Association.
This is par for the course for the Palestinian-Arab leadership. Yasser Arafat, Abbas’s predecessor, acted similarly. In a May 10, 1994 <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=2&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiOycnJxLjdAhUlheAKHV47A88QFjABegQICRAB&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F1994%2F05%2F20%2Fworld%2Frabin-says-arafat-s-jihad-remark-set-back-peace-effort.html&amp;usg=AOvVaw3gpH0UWmxGZMhql_BuuEVm" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.google.com/url?sa%3Dt%26rct%3Dj%26q%3D%26esrc%3Ds%26source%3Dweb%26cd%3D2%26cad%3Drja%26uact%3D8%26ved%3D2ahUKEwiOycnJxLjdAhUlheAKHV47A88QFjABegQICRAB%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F1994%252F05%252F20%252Fworld%252Frabin-says-arafat-s-jihad-remark-set-back-peace-effort.html%26usg%3DAOvVaw3gpH0UWmxGZMhql_BuuEVm&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237583000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHhbD7E-yXz6jR7YnxGdWweX9vhMg">speech</a> in South Africa — and in another one on August 21, 1995 at Al-Azhar University in Cairo — Arafat compared his decision to participate in the Oslo process to deceptions that the Prophet Muhammad engaged in against rival tribes. As he <a href="http://washingtonjewishweek.com/34878/the-post-gets-lost-inside-a-dead-terrorists-bedroom/editorial-opinion/voices/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://washingtonjewishweek.com/34878/the-post-gets-lost-inside-a-dead-terrorists-bedroom/editorial-opinion/voices/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237584000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEiuj6dbwPGR_dkngM2s-EUd-Kbfw">stated</a> in a 1996 speech in Stockholm: “We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. … We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.”
If Miller and Kurtzer’s argument were true, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 or from most of the West Bank in the 1990s would have enhanced peace. Instead, a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-israel-must-destroy-hamas-once-and-all-josh-hammer">genocidal terror group</a> that calls for Israel’s destruction, Hamas, was emboldened, winning Gaza elections soon after Israel&#8217;s unilateral withdrawal. And as CAMERA analyst Steve Stotsky has <a href="https://www.camera.org/article/the-straight-facts-about-the-palestinian-authority-and-fighting-terrorism/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.camera.org/article/the-straight-facts-about-the-palestinian-authority-and-fighting-terrorism/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1574888237584000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEpFGT8nRFb_WlWN3NGX2JGqqYqLg">documented</a>, terror attacks increased after Oslo, as well.
Put simply: It is asinine to believe that Jewish home construction in Judea and Samaria is more “damaging” to peace than a faux “peace partner” honoring and celebrating those who stab Jewish babies. Palestinian-Arab terrorism, and indeed the 1964 creation of the PLO, predate the much-ballyhooed &#8220;1967 borders.&#8221;
Palestinian-Arab leaders have shown no interest in changing. And regrettably, the same can be said for some policymakers, journalists, and pundits who remain wedded to an idea long after its failure passed from opinion into the realm of fact.
&nbsp;
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for the Washington, D.C. office of CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

Israel map

DURNS: Slow Learning In The Middle East

Foreign Policy

Israel

Middle East

Palestinians

State Department

With the former president recently making public comments triggering to the radical left — including that all that hashtag &#8220;woke&#8221; activism isn&#8217;t actually activism — The Washington Post felt compelled to give Americans on the left side of the aisle a little more &#8220;perspective&#8221; on the man whose legislative legacy Donald Trump has almost completely wiped out. The reason Democratic presidential candidates have been struggling so hard to figure out how to discuss Barack Obama, David Swerdlick writes for the Post, is that Obama isn&#8217;t what they think he is.
&#8220;Perspective: Democratic presidential candidates still can’t figure out how to talk about the most popular figure in their party, [Swerdlick] writes, and there&#8217;s a simple reason,&#8221; the Post tweeted Sunday. &#8220;Barack Obama is a conservative.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Perspective: Democratic presidential candidates still can’t figure out how to talk about the most popular figure in their party, <a href="https://twitter.com/Swerdlick?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Swerdlick</a> writes, and there&#39;s a simple reason.
Barack Obama is a conservative. <a href="https://t.co/45gsMfhQ2c">https://t.co/45gsMfhQ2c</a>
&mdash; The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) <a href="https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1197925074042589189?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
As Swerdlick highlights, Obama has tweaked some of his fellow progressives in recent public comments about the flawed assumptions and approaches of Democrats and their supporters.
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly,” the former president <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/31/obama-woke-shaming-bipartisan-support-yang-coulter-gabbard/">told</a> a group of young activist at an Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago in late October. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”
As if that wasn&#8217;t enough to outrage the permanently outraged, Obama added a sobering reality check to those increasingly steering the party toward more overtly socialist policies: The Democratic presidential candidates would be wise to come back more to the center because &#8220;[t]his is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement.&#8221;
It&#8217;s becoming increasingly clear, writes Swerdlick, that the leading Democratic contenders &#8220;can’t quite figure out how to talk about the most popular figure in their party,&#8221; which poses a major problem because he &#8220;casts a long shadow over the 2020 primary campaign&#8221;:
<blockquote>
Preserving Obama’s legacy is the heart of former vice president Joe Biden’s pitch to voters — which has allowed his rivals to mark him as complacent. More left-leaning candidates, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), say the next president needs to do more to push for health-care reforms and combat income inequality — but lately, she’s struggling to sell her proposals. Onetime Obama Cabinet secretary Julián Castro has <a href="https://washpost.arcpublishing.com/pb/politics/2019/live-updates/election-2020/third-democratic-debate-analysis-and-fact-checking/castro-goes-after-biden-again-this-time-on-immigration/?arc404=true">ripped</a> his former boss’s record on immigration and deportation. Meanwhile, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg raced to have a reporter <a href="https://washpost.arcpublishing.com/pb/opinions/2019/11/11/failures-obama-era-los-angeles-times-misquotes-buttigieg/">correct</a> a story that misquoted him citing “failures of the Obama era.” Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) said in Wednesday’s debate that it’s crucial to “rebuild the Obama coalition” because “that’s the last time we won.” Picking and choosing which parts of Obama’s tenure to embrace, and how firmly to embrace them, has become a delicate game in the primary season.
</blockquote>
So why are they struggling to much to frame both their praise and criticism of The One? Because none of them have accepted what Swerdlick believes to be the hard truth about Obama.
&#8220;It’s because the former president, going back at least to his 2004 Senate race, hasn’t really occupied the left side of the ideological spectrum,&#8221; he insists. While he was of course no Republican, &#8220;Obama never dramatically departed from the approach of presidents who came before him.&#8221;
&#8220;There’s a simple reason: Barack Obama is a conservative,&#8221; Swerdlick declares. His &#8220;evidence,&#8221; that while Obama embraced left-wing positions like the Paris climate accords, Dodd-Frank, pro-choice policies, and same-sex marriage (after opposing it), his &#8220;constant search for consensus&#8221; ultimately made him be &#8220;conservative&#8221; on key domestic initiatives, like Obamacare and gun control, and foreign policy&#8230;
<blockquote>The <a href="https://www.heritage.org/social-security/report/assuring-affordable-health-care-all-americans">underlying concept</a> for his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, with its individual mandate, was devised by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and first implemented at the state level by Mitt Romney, then the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Obama wanted to protect Americans from the effects of a prolonged recession, so he agreed, in one of his defining votes as a senator, to a bailout of banks — and as president, he prioritized recovery over punishing bankers for their role in the financial crisis. In his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html">first inaugural address</a>, he affirmed the power of the free market “to generate wealth and expand freedom.”
Until the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012, Obama studiously avoided any push for gun control. Indeed, in his first term, he signed laws that <a href="https://washpost.arcpublishing.com/pb/politics/gun-control-proposals-could-split-president-obama-harry-reid/2013/01/23/68700e34-6262-11e2-b05a-605528f6b712_story.html">loosened restrictions</a> on bringing firearms to national parks and on Amtrak. Though cast as a “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/21/AR2009102104242.html">dithering</a>” peacenik who led “from behind,” he stuck with his <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/presidential.debate.transcript/">thesis</a> that the imperative “to end the war in Iraq is to be able to get more troops into Afghanistan,” and he prosecuted a drone war in Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.</blockquote>
Obama was a &#8220;conservative&#8221; in the end, suggests Swerdlick, because he &#8220;believes, fundamentally, that the American model works — even if it hasn’t been allowed to work for everyone.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/22/barack-obama-conservative/?arc404=true">Read the Post&#8217;s Overton window-shifting &#8220;perspective&#8221; piece here</a>.

Barack Obama

Washington Post: ‘Obama Is A Conservative’

President Trump and Republicans have been repeatedly slamming the Democrats&#8217; impeachment inquiry as a &#8220;partisan sham&#8221; that&#8217;s about politics rather than a patriotic duty to defend the interests of the country, as Democrats have insisted. A new detail about a sudden, unified shift in the Democrats&#8217; talking points, however, shows just how political the impeachment game really is.
As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrats-shift-trump-impeachment-focus-to-new-potential-offenses">The Daily Wire</a> and other outlets on the right have noted, after weeks of accusing Trump of imposing a &#8220;quid pro quo&#8221; on Ukraine — allegedly requiring the administration to follow through on investigations into alleged corruption involving Joe and Hunter Biden and Ukraine-based energy company Burisma and alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election in order to receive $391 million in U.S. military aid — the Democrats have dropped the Latin term altogether.
Now, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who is heading up the impeachment effort, and his colleagues are uniformly hammering a new allegation against Trump: &#8220;bribery.&#8221;
In an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” Tuesday, Schiff notably avoided mentioning the term &#8220;quid pro quo,&#8221; and instead said he believes he can prove that Trump committed several impeachable crimes, particularly “bribery” and “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/12/778380499/rep-adam-schiff-trumps-potentially-impeachable-offenses-include-bribery">NPR</a> pointed out are “both explicitly outlined in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.”
“Bribery, first of all, as the founders understood bribery, it was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader,” said Schiff, allowing himself as much room as possible in the allegation. “It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you’re offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation’s interest.”
So what prompted the switch? Many conservatives and Trump defenders pointed out one obvious possible rationale: the Democrats&#8217; &#8220;quid pro quo&#8221; argument has largely fallen apart. The transcript of the famous July 25 call that started it all released by the Trump administration shows no explicit quid pro quo. Ukrainian officials, including the president himself on multiple occasions, have made clear that they did not believe there was any form of quid pro quo attached to the investigations. And the U.S. released the aid without Ukraine beginning to conduct or publicly committing to conduct the investigations.
That all very well may be true, but according to a new report by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pelosi-calls-trumps-actions-bribery-as-democrats-sharpen-case-for-impeachment/2019/11/14/0ee9a202-0702-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html">The Washington Post</a>, another strong impetus inspired the Democrats to alter their rhetoric. The report sheds light on the Democrats&#8217; decision to drop &#8220;quid pro quo&#8221; and start hammering &#8220;bribery,&#8221; and it&#8217;s purely partisan politics: the opinion of voters in 2020 battleground states. The Post reported Thursday:
<div>
<blockquote>
Several Democrats have stopped using the term “quid pro quo,” instead describing “bribery” as a more direct summation of Trump’s alleged conduct.
</blockquote>
</div>
<div>
<blockquote>
The shift came after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee conducted focus groups in key House battlegrounds in recent weeks, testing messages related to impeachment. Among the questions put to participants was whether “quid pro quo,” “extortion” or “bribery” was a more compelling description of Trump’s conduct. According to two people familiar with the results, which circulated among Democrats this week, the focus groups found “bribery” to be most damning. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the results have not been made public.
</blockquote>
Publicly, the Democrats have tried to defend the significant shift by arguing that they are just trying to avoid using &#8220;Latin words&#8221; in getting out their message, suggesting Americans aren&#8217;t sophisticated enough to follow their high-minded arguments. But the Post exposes the Democrats&#8217; most urgent concern, 2020.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-ratcliffe-to-impeachment-witness-here-are-all-the-times-ukraines-president-said-there-was-no-quid-pro-quo">WATCH: Impeachment Witness Asked About All The Times Ukraine’s President Said There Was ‘No Quid Pro Quo’</a>
</div>

Adam Schiff

Report Reveals Why Democrats Really Dropped ‘Quid Pro Quo,’ Switched To ‘Bribery’: 2020

Nancy Pelosi

The New York Times and The Washington Post admitted that mass immigration and changes in demographics were a significant reason that Democrats took complete control of Virginia last week.
Democrats now control the governor&#8217;s seat, both chambers of the state&#8217;s legislature and the lieutenant governor&#8217;s seat for the first time in nearly 30 years.
Following the Democrats&#8217; dominate night in Virginia, The New York Times admitted that years of mass immigration are starting to radically change the electoral map &#8220;from Richmond to Atlanta, Houston, Denver and elsewhere and Democrats are starting to breach Republicans’ firewalls in elections.&#8221;
The New York Times <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/11/10/ny-times-tidal-wave-mass-immigration-hands-virginia-democrats/">reported</a>:
<blockquote>Not long ago, this rolling green stretch of Northern Virginia was farmland. Most people who could vote had grown up here. And when they did, they usually chose Republicans.
The fields of Loudoun County are disappearing. In their place is row upon row of cookie-cutter townhouses, clipped lawns and cul-de-sacs — a suburban landscape for as far as the eye can see. Unlike three decades ago, the residents are often from other places, like India and Korea. And when they vote, it is often for Democrats.
&#8230;
Once the heart of the confederacy, Virginia is now the land of Indian grocery stores, Korean churches and Diwali festivals. The state population has boomed — up by 38 percent since 1990, with the biggest growth in densely settled suburban areas like South Riding. One in 10 people eligible to vote in the state were born outside the United States, up from one in 28 in 1990. It is also significantly less white. In 1990, the census tracts that make up Mr. Katkuri’s Senate district were home to about 35,000 people — 91 percent of them white. Today, its population of 225,000 is just 64 percent white.
“It’s a totally different world,” said Charles Poland, 85, a retired history professor whose family has lived in Loudoun County for four generations. His family farm is now dotted with subdivisions filled with four and five-bedroom homes that sell for $750,000. The family legacy is a road named Poland. “If my parents came back today, they wouldn’t recognize the place. The changes came like a tidal wave.”</blockquote>
The Washington Post essentially <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-virginia-republicans-confront-a-fearful-electoral-future/2019/11/09/2bbdc7aa-026b-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html">reported</a> the same thing following last week&#8217;s election results:
<blockquote>Virginia now stands as a fearful avatar for Republicans of what the nation’s unrelenting demographic and cultural changes mean for the party, as the moderate-to-liberal urban and suburban areas grow and more conservative rural areas lose ground. Similar shifts are starting to hit such states as North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia and Texas, as minority populations increase and white college-educated voters continue to turn away from the Republican brand.</blockquote>
The Wall Street Journal&#8217;s Kimberley Strassel <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-holder-takes-virginia-11573167564">noted</a> that another significant factor that went into the Democrats&#8217; electoral sweep in Virginia was former Democrat Attorney General Eric Holder&#8217;s redistricting program in which he used the legal system to get Virginia&#8217;s congressional districts redrawn in a manner that was favorable for Democrats.
&#8220;While most prominent Democrats spent the months following Donald Trump’s election plotting future runs, Mr. Holder was launching the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, committed to domination of electoral map making through the courts and legislatures,&#8221; Strassel wrote. &#8220;The NDRC spent its first years aggressively litigating legislative maps it didn’t like, to great success. Virginia’s election was the first test of the electoral piece of Mr. Holder’s strategy, and it will now serve as the model by which Democrats attempt to gain redistricting power in 11 other key states next year.&#8221;
&#8220;The NDRC claims its efforts are aimed at simple &#8216;fairness in the electoral system.&#8217; It says it’s working to overturn gerrymanders that &#8216;disenfranchise&#8217; voters,&#8221; Strassel continued. &#8220;Don’t be fooled. Mr. Holder’s group has never engaged in blue states where Democrats routinely draw maps to disadvantage Republicans, such as Maryland, Massachusetts or New Jersey.&#8221;
Strassel concluded: &#8220;Democratic groups threw at least $54 million at Virginia—an unprecedented sum in an election that didn’t feature a single federal office—outspending Republicans by some $12 million. Outside groups accounted for at least $22 million of the Democratic effort, nearly four times what they spent in 2015. Three billionaires—Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer and George Soros—and their organizations spent more than all outside Republican contributors combined.&#8221;

Honduran Migrants

NYT, WaPo: Mass Immigration, Demographic Changes Fueled Democrat Wins In Virginia

Democratic Party

Eric Holder

New York Times

Virginia

On Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the media’s attempt to romanticize the next phase of impeachment proceedings in order to manipulate the public’s emotions. Video and partial transcript below: 
They’ve scheduled open impeachment hearings for next week — theoretically open impeachment hearings, and let&#8217;s just listen to the way CBS News, Norah O&#8217;Donnell, who is really bad. She is, she&#8217;s not just bad, she&#8217;s stiff and performative on the news. She&#8217;s so prejudiced, so biased that anyone with any sense of fairness has got to listen to her and think, &#8220;Wait a minute, this isn&#8217;t the news. These are Democrat talking points.&#8221; But you got to listen to this, the way she promotes the upcoming impeachment hearings.  
<blockquote>O’DONNELL: Tonight: Lights, camera, testimony. The stage is set for the first televised hearings of the impeachment inquiry. We now know when they will happen and who may be the Democrats&#8217; star witness. 
Good evening and thank you for joining us. It&#8217;s official: Historic, televised impeachment hearings begin a week from today, and it promises to be must-see TV. The Democrats plan to start with their star witness, a West Point grad with 50 years of public service. Acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor will testify Wednesday alongside Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent. Then on Friday, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch will testify. House Democrats say that&#8217;s just the beginning. 
Today, more Democrats — I should say, more of the Democrats released more transcripts from those closed door depositions, and Nancy Cordes says they offer a preview of what&#8217;s expected to be bombshell testimony.</blockquote>
Bombshell? It’s a bombshell! Lights, camera, action! I mean, it’s like over at NewsBusters, they said it&#8217;s like a prize fight, but it&#8217;s just like promotion for entertainment, promotion for a movie. It&#8217;s a blockbuster &#8230;
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3t2OFnH_VEY?start=411" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Anyway, so they&#8217;re promoting this thing like it&#8217;s a movie, and here&#8217;s a piece that The Washington Post ran on Adam Schiff, the congressman in my district. Now this guy to me is like a greasy McCarthyite dishonest guy. He&#8217;s been caught lying repeatedly. Right, he lied about the whistleblower, he lied about having evidence of Russian collusion with Trump, he has just lied from the beginning, plus he looks like a turtle taken out of his shell. I&#8217;m sorry, but he does, he looks like a turtle. [The] guy is a turtle taken out of its shell and he lies all the time, and the Left, both The New York Times, a former newspaper, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/adam-schiff-once-wanted-to-be-a-screenwriter-can-he-give-the-trump-presidency-a-hollywood-ending/2019/10/31/07cb9594-f748-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html">The Washington Post</a>, where democracy dies in crap, are trying to glorify this guy to make him look like a romantic figure. It is utterly amazing. I mean, people do have eyes. They do have ears, they do see things, but they&#8217;re living in their own world. So here&#8217;s the [headline]:
&#8220;Adam Schiff once wanted to be a screenwriter. Can he give the Trump presidency a Hollywood ending?&#8221; 
And we know what The Washington Post — this is in the style section, by the way. We know what The Washington Post thinks a Hollywood ending to the Trump presidency would be: It’s Trump led out of the White House in handcuffs. Ain&#8217;t going to happen, but let me read you some of this, because it actually does tell you exactly what&#8217;s happening when you think about it. 
<blockquote>When Adam Schiff was a young assistant U.S. attorney living in Los Angeles, he did what everyone does when they moved to Hollywood. He wrote a screenplay. He spent hours at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Sciences, reading the scripts for &#8220;Silence of the Lambs&#8221; and &#8220;Witness&#8221; in the library (it was the ‘90s). He leaned on his courtroom experience, thinking back on snippets of dialog during trials as he typed out a crime thriller. The prosecutor was the hero, naturally. He called it &#8220;Minotaur,&#8221; and, if you ask Schiff, it was pretty good.
&#8220;I got an offer of an option from Nick Wechsler,&#8221; Schiff said, leaning back in a leather chair inside his Capitol Hill office late last month. &#8220;He produced &#8216;The Player,’ remember that movie with Tim Robbins?&#8221;
Schiff turned down the offer, he said. He doesn&#8217;t remember it being a huge sum of money, and anyway, he was getting into a different kind of storytelling business: Politics.</blockquote>
This is The Washington Post glorifying this guy and yet also playing his hand.
<blockquote>In some ways, he&#8217;s become the chief storyteller of this drama-filled political moment. Schiff is the head of the House Intelligence Committee and leader of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry of President Trump. He&#8217;s in charge of calling witnesses, taking depositions, and subpoenaing documents. More than that, it&#8217;s his job to stitch it all together into a believable, easy-to-follow narrative. Imagine the pitch meeting: It&#8217;s like &#8220;The Manchurian Candidate,&#8221; except the president has heel spurs. It&#8217;s &#8220;The Godfather&#8221; meets &#8220;Borat.&#8221;</blockquote>
Alright, they’re telling you — you know, I talk about this on college campuses a lot because really, my expertise, is storytelling. That is what I&#8217;ve done all my life, that&#8217;s what I know about. I&#8217;ve studied it a lot, I’ve studied it deeply. I would say, I know about narrative and how it works, and I know about how it affects people and about how storyteller stories manipulate your emotions. 
Again, I think I mentioned this yesterday, you go to a movie and you cry over the death of someone who never lived, right? And that&#8217;s an important thing — it tells you that your emotions can be manipulated at a very high level, and it&#8217;s a good thing. We like it when it&#8217;s done right. But it can also be used against you, because they can manipulate emotions that are geared to one thing and tell you that they&#8217;re about another. 
The best example I can think about is a movie like &#8220;Avatar,&#8221; which is also the movie &#8220;Dances with Wolves,&#8221; which is also the movie &#8220;Pocahontas.&#8221; They&#8217;re all the same movie: A man from a civilized, in these cases white, society enters the world of a less civilized, non-white society and discovers that they&#8217;re the innocents and they&#8217;re these wonderful — what do they call them in the old days, the noble savage? — and his society is deeply corrupt. That&#8217;s the story in each one of those instances, right? His civilized society is bad, and the innocent brown people with their primitive society is good. 
Listen, all stories that move you are telling the truth, but it&#8217;s up to you to find out what that truth is. The truth is, we all know that there&#8217;s something distorting about technology, there&#8217;s something distorting about civilization. Freud called it &#8220;Civilization and Its Discontents,&#8221; and we all have this Rousseauvian feeling that there&#8217;s something we left behind, just like we have a feeling that there&#8217;s something we left behind in childhood. Maybe those feelings are connected? 
Okay, so they&#8217;re manipulating that to tell you that the white cavalry men in the West were bad and the Native Americans were good. They’re manipulating a true feeling to tell you something that is historically a lot more complicated than that, right? Historically, it&#8217;s a lot more complicated, and &#8220;Avatar&#8221; is even worse because they&#8217;re manipulating you to think that the American military is bad. Basically, they were telling you that the Iraqis and the Afghanis were innocent people and we were going in there to steal their oil. &#8230;
Anyway, this is what they&#8217;re doing: Manipulating us. They&#8217;re playing this up, [saying] it&#8217;s a dramatic moment in politics. It&#8217;s not dramatic, it&#8217;s really not. We know what the story is, we know the real story. We know that this is something that&#8217;s been going on for a long time — that they&#8217;re trying to get this president impeached.
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Nancy Pelosi And Adam Schiff

KLAVAN: Lights, Camera, Impeachment!

The loudest voices pushing the gender wage gap myth often fail to adhere to their own standards. The latest example comes from The Washington Post, which, other than some decent fact checks on the subject from Glenn Kessler, continues to insist the pay gap is real and due to discrimination against women.
A <a href="https://postguild.org/2019-pay-study/">report</a> from the Post’s union, however, shows that the legacy media outlet has its own gender wage gap problem. The report found that the median pay for women working at the Post is $91,816, while the median pay for men is $109,928. The median pay for hourly employees puts women ahead, with women making $30.77 per hour while men make just $25.84 per hour.
The union, or guild, then broke down the median salaries of Post employees by gender and race. The median salaries for white men ($111,035) and black men ($99,931) were higher than the median salary of white women ($95,780). At the bottom of the list were black women ($87,808), Latino women ($80,250) and women of two or more races ($75,000) or an undisclosed race ($73,000).
The report also found that merit raises at the company seem to favor white male journalists. White employees received 75.7% of all merit-based pay raises, while men received 51.7% of them (meaning near parity among the sexes). The report that performance evaluation scores allegedly favored white employees. Employees at the Post are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, and the report found that 85% of those employees who received a score of 4 or higher were white. The report found that 37% of those given a score lower than 3 were employees of color (meaning 63% of those receiving low scores were also white). Post employees are 64.4% white.
The Post guild claims the disparity persists even when controlling for age and job description, but there are numerous other factors that can lead to the gap, such as experience (may not necessarily be tied to age) and negotiating ability.
It is amusing to see a company like the Post, which is so committed to painting women as victims of mass discrimination, grapple with its own discrimination claims. The same has happened to lawmakers who push the gender wage gap.
President Barack Obama and his administration were one of the most persistent purveyors of the wage-gap myth (it is more accurately an earnings gap, as it typically measures what men and women earn at the end of the year, rather than what they are individually paid). A <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2017_economic_report_of_president.pdf">report</a> of the Obama White House found that the median salary for men was higher than the median salary for women. The Obama administration countered by pointing out the discrepancy was due to more men at top-level positions, but highlighted the fact that the administration was hiring more women to junior positions in an effort to enact change.
The Washington Free Beacon conducted several studies of Democrat campaigns and offices, finding pay disparities on Obama’s <a href="https://freebeacon.com/politics/the-democratic-war-on-women-continues/">2012 campaign</a>, as well as the senate offices of <a href="https://freebeacon.com/politics/hillary-clintons-war-on-women/">Hillary Clinton</a> and 2020 presidential candidate <a href="https://freebeacon.com/politics/men-paid-more-than-women-in-kamala-harriss-senate-office-and-campaign/">Kamala Harris</a>.

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