How Indeed Do You Defend Yourself From a Smear Campaign Alleging That You Are Stupid or Unstable? DOV FISCHER  January 8, 2018, my piece in today’s The American Spectator:  https://spectator.org/ https://spectator.org/how-indeed-do-you-defend-yourself-from-a-smear-campaign-alleging-that-you-are-stupid-or-unstable/ How Indeed Do You Defend Yourself From a Smear Campaign Alleging That You Are Stupid or Unstable? DOV FISCHER January 8, 2018, 12:11 pm President Trump is just the latest Republican to be on the receiving end of such cheapness. Facebook Twitter Print Email In the latest iteration of the never-ending Democrat campaign to disrupt President Donald Trump’s agenda and to throw him off message, a full-blown smear campaign now is afoot alleging that he is stupid or, even more concerning, mentally unbalanced. This campaign initially must be understood in the context of two factors. First, the Democrats and their mainstream liberal media allies have leveled the same defamations against virtually every Republican President who has served during the past forty years. Second, this smear campaign is the latest in a series of never-ending Democrat efforts to find a weak spot in President Trump’s personal armor in the hope finally of unsettling him to the point of disgust with being President. Forty Years of Democrat Liberals Defaming the Intelligence of Republican Presidents In many ways, the Democrat arrogance dates back to the Gerald Ford presidency. After Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman occupied the White House throughout most of the 1930s and all the 1940s, Dwight Eisenhower was elected President in 1952. He had been the commanding general of the victorious American forces during World War II and thereafter served as president of Columbia University in the City of New York. The label “stupid” could not fit him. After the Kennedy-Johnson years, the next Republican president was Richard Nixon. No matter what one thought of Nixon, he clearly was not intellectually stupid. And then came Ford. Gerald Ford graduated college at the University of Michigan where he was a star football athlete with the Wolverines. After next starting at University of Michigan law school, he transferred to Yale Law School, where he graduated in the top quarter of his class. He then served heroically in the United States Navy during WWII and was awarded several decorations. Thus, he was academically brilliant, athletically gifted, and heroic. He also proved sophisticated, as he went into politics and rose to become House Minority Leader. Amid the chaos of the Nixon-Agnew Administration, Ford was named Vice President after Spiro Agnew resigned while pleading nolo contendere to corruption charges, and Ford became America’s 38th President when Richard Nixon resigned under the cloud of Watergate. It did not take long before the Democrats and their media cohort began depicting Gerald Ford as a bumbling, stupid fool. Indeed, Ford had two mishaps, slipping on airport runway stairs, the first time amid rain. As President his every move was caught on film. He once tumbled while skiing. And, famously, one of his errant golf shots hit a spectator in the head. The media ran with it. Young comedian Chevy Chase made a specialty on Saturday Night Live of depicting the President falling all over the place, week after week. The image stuck. It was a pure lie. The President was a fit and gifted athlete. He was not the only person who ever slipped on an outdoor wet metal step. He was not the only person who ever tumbled on a ski slope. But, despite Ford’s Ivy League law brilliance, political astuteness, football prowess, and distinguished military service, the Democrats successfully tagged him in the popular mind as a bumbling fool. He was followed by a Democrat, Jimmy Carter. Through Carter’s four years, America was told how brilliant he was, how hard working. CBS icon Walter Cronkite, for example, called him America’s “smartest President.” During Carter’s four years, Iran held Americans hostage in Teheran, inflation approached 20%, the bond market collapsed, and the United States lost ground to the Soviet Union throughout Africa, Asia, and South America. Then came Ronald Reagan. It was time once again for the Left to pull out the “stupid” canard. Reagan was depicted by the liberal media as a fun-loving stupid cowboy actor, who even had been in a movie, Bedtime for Bonzo, where he shared a bed with a chimpanzee. In fact, Reagan successfully had risen to be elected president of a union, the Screen Actors Guild. He had been elected twice to be governor of California, and he had conducted his terms with effectiveness. He had spoken to the nation in a nationally televised address during the Goldwater presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for a new conservatism in America. (And, oh yeah, for those engaged in dumb: In Bedtime for Bonzo, he played a psychology professor…) During his presidency, the economy healed and boomed, America reasserted a domineering role throughout the world that ultimately collapsed communism. And the Iran hostages were on the way back home as soon as he was sworn in. Next — George H.W. Bush. Newsweek called him a “wimp,” even though he had been a war hero flying 58 combat missions during World War II, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, three air medals, and the Presidential Unit Citation. (It is not easy to determine what the heroic credentials of the Newsweek writer, Margaret Garrard Warner, were.) And the Democrats famously mocked his intelligence during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign to succeed him with their insider slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Then came Clinton. Again, the media tone shifted with emphases on Clinton’s superior genius. Even years after his presidency, liberals were touting Clinton’s superior genius. Despite his never-ending years of scandal culminating in being disbarred, and despite mismanaging his presidency to the degree that Americans gave Congress to the Republicans for the first time in decades, Clinton was the genius who had succeeded Stupid. Then George W. Bush — and back to the canard of stupid. He was mocked for lacking“intellectual curiosity.” There even were web pages with titles like “Why do many people perceive George W. Bush as being highly unintelligent?” Contrast those with the treatment of his successor, Barack Obama, whom the media crowned as one of the most brilliant people who ever served in Washington. Interestingly, Obama’s college and law school grades have remained a carefully guarded national secret, protected with the seeming level of security otherwise associated with guarding Fort Knox, and even his stint at the top of Harvard Law Review during his 3L student year remains one of the most puzzling of biographical footnotes because, other than Barack Obama, it is virtually unheard-of in academic annals for someone who heads a law review never to have authored a law review article. And now President Trump. With the return of the Republicans to the White House comes the attendant return of the Big Lie: “The President is stupid and is mentally unbalanced.” Tellingly, this lie is advanced by a political party that counts among its prized representatives one Maxine Waters, whose pure and richly demonstrated mind is on full display at such YouTube links as this one and this. But is the President stupid? It depends. Without any prior political experience, he defeated a field of serious Republican candidates for the nomination and then defeated a former United States Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, Yale Law grad with half a century of political experience for the Presidency. In a year, he has set the economy booming with a huge nationwide increase in consumer confidence, a soaring stock market, sustained economic growth exceeding three percent for consecutive quarters, muted unemployment, a record number of successful appointments of federal appellate judges, and much more. He has revived the energy sector, deregulated the economy, honored promises from approving the Keystone XL and Dakota oil pipelines to recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, induced allied world leaders to start paying their fair share of NATO costs, sharply reduced illegal immigration along our southern border, restored civil liberty protections to college students accused of assault, promoted charter schools and school choice, enacted the most overarching tax reduction in the past thirty years — perhaps the most ever — and advanced an ambitious agenda for his second year. So, if that is the mark of stupid, then this guy is a dope. The Never-Ending Democrat Effort to Sabotage Donald Trump’s Hard-Won and Well Earned Presidency Throughout the President’s first year, the Democrats and their liberal media cohort have pursued one campaign after another, aimed at delegitimizing the President and piercing the President’s personal armor, hoping to unsettle him and simply to bog him down with detritus that will obstruct his effective and focused governing. First, he was lambasted for supposedly suggesting in a debate that he would not accept the legitimacy of the election results if he lost. Then, after he won, it was the Democrats who refused to accept the results. First they demanded recounts in several states. After Mr. Trump emerged from those recounts successfully, often picking up more votes and further extending his victory margins in states he won, they publicly pleaded with electors not to honor their pledges to vote for the candidate who had won their respective states. Then, after the electors honored their oaths and elected Donald J. Trump to be 45th president of the United States, the Democrats and their liberal media cohort sought to overturn the Electoral College itself. Next they declared themselves “The Resistance” and vowed to block his appointees from assuming their federal offices, posing time-killing procedural hurdles that still have left more than 100 of his nominations awaiting final votes. They then intimidated Jeff Sessions and manipulated him into foolishly naming a special counsel to investigate apocryphal allegations that the Trump presidential campaign had colluded with Vladimir Putin and “the Russians” — even as it was the Clinton campaign who helped finance the Fusion GPS dossier against Trump. Each of these distractions has aimed at slowing down Trump in the added hope that, because he is not a Washington politician studied in the ways and protocols and procedures of Congress, these playbook diversions will throw him off his game. Moreover, because he has demonstrated a thin-skinned side that gets distracted when attacked personally, they carefully have devised a strategy of ping-ponging from one campaign of distraction to the next, one canard to the next. And now they are attacking his sanity, his intelligence, and his mental equilibrium. The Difficulty of Countering a Smear Campaign Alleging That One Is Stupid or Unstable The President now finds himself in the unenviable position of having to counter the lies about his intelligence and mental fitness. Democrats never get stuck with that canard because Republicans do not volley in that direction. So John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama glided on myths of their brilliance, while Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and now Donald Trump have had to deal with the canard. It is a terrible canard, and the defamation is exacerbated by the impossibility of finding an elegant way to counter the defamation in the media. Do you present an I.Q. test? “Look — here is my I.Q. core!” But how can you seriously do so without appearing to be self-obsessed and just plain crass? Do you list your schools attended, your grades, your professional successes? But how can you do so without being mocked? Do you tell people that, like, you are really smart, have run successful businesses, created a blockbuster television program, got elected President? Well, we see the result: Those who level the initial defamation then laugh at the rejoinder. It is a terrible thing, to be sane and called insane, to be smart and yet to be called stupid. When a demonstrable fool siting on a street corner or in a bar calls you a name, you ignore the put-down unless you are the late Billy Martin. You just walk away. But when CNN and CBS and ABC and NBC and NPR and the op-ed contributors to the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the others join in a chorus, night-and-day, 24-7, echoing that you are mentally unbalanced, how do you leave the lie unanswered without risking losing the brand you have earned? How do you answer? How do you protect the crown of your good name that is your most valuable life commodity? If you are thin but called fat — or vice-versa — then your height and weight and BMI can set the matter straight. But if you are called mentally unstable when in fact you are perfectly fine and indeed mentally keen — and probably more mentally sound than the vast majority of your accusers — how do you counter the lie? It is a terrible thing. There always will be liberal Ivy League professors to call a Republican president “stupid.” Does that prove the truth of the matter? And how many of those professors, though bona fide scholars in their fields, otherwise are stark-raving nuts — crazy, unstable characters who would commit suicide if they ever lost their safe jobs in their safe spaces and had to earn a living in the outside world without the lifetime job security of tenure? Similarly: Is Alec Baldwin, who mocks the President on Saturday Night Live, mentally stable? How about other critics of the President like Leonardo DiCaprio? Lena Dunham? Russell Brand? Miley Cyrus? Ashley Judd? Look them up. Wikimedia Commons Copyright © 2018 Rabbi Dov Fischer Political and Social Commentary, All rights reserved.  You are receiving this email because you opted to receive these samizdat.  Our mailing address is:  Rabbi Dov Fischer Political and Social Commentary Box 122 5319 University Drive Irvine, Ca 92612 Add us to your address book

The New York Times Takes Fake News to Disgusting New Level

Humberto Fontova   Townhall 1-6-18

https://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2018/01/06/the-new-york-times-takes-fake-news-to-disgusting-new-level-n2430535?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

Imagine a “prestigious” international paper writing a feature on the town of Oswiecim in Poland without mentioning the associated Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps.

Bad enough, right?

Well, now imagine that same prestigious paper finally coming around to mentioning the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, but while claiming that Hitler and Himmler were not its creators--but its victims!

“NO WAY!”-- right?

Well, now imagine that same prestigious paper hailing Hitler and Himmler for subsequently closing those camps and freeing the prisoners!

“WHAT?!”

In fact, the above outrage is perfectly imaginable –had Hitler won the war and admitted “journalists” and “scholars” to his fiefdom to “report”—but only after careful vetting by his secret police to assure they’d play by the totalitarian regime’s rules (i.e. “you transcribe and parrot our propaganda-- or you’re outta here!”)

Change Hitler to Castro and I’ve just described the actual process by which you get “news” from Cuba as “reported” by the mainstream media in general, and by The New York Times most notoriously.

This week’s story from Cuba by The New York Times cranked up their historic transcription and parroting of Castroite lies to an entirely new and –for those actually conversant with Cuban history—disgusting level. Change Poland to Cuba and I pretty much described the nature of their story this week. Here’s part of it (emphasis mine):

“A Cuban island that has played both paradise and prison; The Isle of youth which has been both a Utopian Communist getaway and home to a brutal prison that housed Castro for a while—is a world apart …Within an hour of landing on La Isla de la Juventud, the Isle of Youth, (Cuba’s isle of Pines) I was clamoring through an underground tunnel in the Presidio Modelo, or Model Prison, Cuba’s most dreaded pre-revolutionary prison….The Presidio was closed a few years after Castro’s victory in 1959, and is now maintained as a shrine to the revolution’s early struggle, with photos of each prisoner over his bed. It’s a tribute to the resilience of the young rebels who — whatever their later faults once they took power — took on the brutal Batista dictatorship at great personal risk.”

In fact, amigos: On that very Isle of Pines the Castro regime created the biggest prison/torture and forced labor complex for political prisoners in the history of the Western Hemisphere!

“(under the Castro regime) Terror reigned on the Isle of Pines…horror stories were told about what went on there…political prisoners were being concentrated in unimaginable numbers at the Model prison on the Isle of Pines.” This is not some passage from an obscure self-published book by some crackpot. It’s from the internationally-acclaimed and harrowing prison memoirs titled Against All Hope by a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission Armando Valladares.

“Mr. Valladares and other prisoners who refused ''political rehabilitation'' were forced to live in the greatest heat and the dampest cold without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed; they were thrown into punishment cells, including the dreaded ''drawer cells,'' specially constructed units that make South Vietnam's infamous tiger cages seem like homey quarters. Mr. Valladares speculates that when the truth about Cuba's political prisoners (many who suffered at Isle of Pines) is made known, ''mankind will feel the revulsion it felt when the crimes of Stalin were brought to light.'' (This is from an old review of Against All Hope by Ron Radosh in-- none other than-- The New York Times! Somebody up at the Grey Lady goofed big-time!)

Yes, this week The New York Times went well beyond their traditional practice of fabricating fake news —by totally upending historical truth. It’s not like they’re mere deniers of the Cuban holocaust. No, they imply that the Castros and Che Guevara gallantly and put an end to political repression in Cuba!

To add a human-interest quotient to their story, it would not have been difficult for  The New York Times reporter to contact Ambassador Valladares, who lives in the U.S. today. But, needless to add, had he performed as reporter (rather than as proud heir to Walter Duranty) it would mark the last time that sniveling New York Times “reporter” set foot in Cuba!

The New York Times also “overlooked” an item that might have added an immensely dramatic quotient to their Cuba story this week. To wit:

In spring of 1961, when the huge Castroite prison’s main building was crammed with upwards of 10,000 ill-fed and horribly mistreated political prisoners, Castro ordered tons of explosives placed under the main building. The plan was to blow it up and murder the 10,000 prisoners if (what came to be known as) the Bay of Pigs invasion showed any sign of succeeding.

Former U.S. ambassador to the UN Armando Valladares thoroughly documents this attempted atrocity in his prison memoirs. You’d think this positively Hitlerite (and fully-documented) datum would add some drama to the Washington Post’s story, right?

Hah! Nary a mention appears in the story.

Would any New York Times readers even get even a hint of the evil milestone the Castro regime and the Isle of Pines prison-complex played in the history of the Western Hemisphere and communism? HAH! Instead the only evil mentioned by this latest Castroite shill employed by  The New York Times was of pre-communist Cuba—when Cuba boasted net immigration from the First World, a higher living standard and more (uncensored) newspapers and TV stations than much of Europe, and when Cubans were totally free to emigrate at their whim (and very few did.)

Now regarding those “dreaded” conditions in the “brutal” pre-Castroite prison of New York Times lore, why not consult its most famous inmate? Well, here’s Fidel Castro himself in a letter he wrote to a friend while serving the light and tiny sentence Cuba’s totally independent judiciary of the time (Batista’s term) gave him for murder and terrorism:

“I feel like I’m on vacation! (wrote the convicted terrorist from the Modelo prison)... “I’m preparing to dine on spaghetti and squid, Italian candy for dessert, a cup of hot coffee and then an H. Upmann No. 4. When I sit outside in my shorts in the morning sun and the sea breeze, I think I’m on a beach and later in a restaurant. I feel I’m on vacation!” (Fidel Castro, Prison letters, April 10, 1955.)

Again, it would not have been difficult for The New York Times “reporter” to find these fully-documented passages. Alas, they make a pathetic joke of practically every word in his story, including “and” and “the.”

SMOKING OUT THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THEIR ALLEGATIONS OF COLLUSION BETWEEN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT.[“OBSTRUCTION INQUIRY SHOWS TRUMP’S STRUGGLE TO KEEP GRIP ON RUSSIA INVESTIGATION” By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT  JAN. 4, 2018]

 Previous New York Times history includes: There was no Soviet induced famine  which killed 5 million people in the Ukraine; there were no forced labor camps in the Soviet Union; there was no   Nazi Holocaust in Europe; Fidel Castro was an agrarian reformer; The Obama nuclear deal would reinforce the "moderates" in Iran; etc.

 Many of these “anonymous testimonies” in Schmitt’s article are violations of federal law.

While  truth in public reporting  should require sworn testimony under oath by Michael Schmidt, Matt Apuzzo , Julie Hirschfeld Davis  and Maggie Haberman   current freedom of the press practices do not permit this acid test of truthfulness.

However, another feasible approach is to place Robert Mueller under oath as to the truthfulness of these anonymous assertions which have presumably leaked from his office. He could also be questioned as to the positive steps he is taking to locate the leakers and ensure that they are subject to adequate legal penalties for their violations.

OBSTRUCTION INQUIRY SHOWS TRUMP’S STRUGGLE TO KEEP GRIP ON RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT  JAN. 4, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/us/politics/trump-sessions-russia-mcgahn.html?emc=edit_th_20180105&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=60863050&_r=0

WASHINGTON — President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election.

Public pressure was building for Mr. Sessions, who had been a senior member of the Trump campaign, to step aside. But the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump then asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986.

The lobbying of Mr. Sessions is one of several previously unreported episodes that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has learned about as he investigates whether Mr. Trump obstructed the F.B.I.’s Russia inquiry. The events occurred during a two-month period — from when Mr. Sessions recused himself in March until the appointment of Mr. Mueller in May — when Mr. Trump believed he was losing control over the investigation.

Among the other episodes, Mr. Trump described the Russia investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated” in a letter that he intended to send to the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, but that White House aides stopped him from sending. Mr. Mueller has also substantiated claims that Mr. Comey made in a series of memos describing troubling interactions with the president before he was fired in May.

The special counsel has received handwritten notes from Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, showing that Mr. Trump talked to Mr. Priebus about how he had called Mr. Comey to urge him to say publicly that he was not under investigation. The president’s determination to fire Mr. Comey even led one White House lawyer to take the extraordinary step of misleading Mr. Trump about whether he had the authority to remove him.

The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this episode.

Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president reportedly dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.

Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with the special counsel’s investigation, declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have said the president has fully cooperated with the investigation, and they have expressed confidence that the inquiry will soon be coming to a close. They said that they believed the president would be exonerated, and that they hoped to have that conclusion made public.

Legal experts said that of the two primary issues Mr. Mueller appears to be investigating — whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice while in office and whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — there is currently a larger body of public evidence tying the president to a possible crime of obstruction.

But the experts are divided about whether the accumulated evidence is enough for Mr. Mueller to bring an obstruction case. They said it could be difficult to prove that the president, who has broad authority over the executive branch, including the hiring and firing of officials, had corrupt intentions when he took actions like ousting the F.B.I. director. Some experts said the case would be stronger if there was evidence that the president had told witnesses to lie under oath.

The accounts of the episodes are based on documents reviewed by The Times, as well as interviews with White House officials and others briefed on the investigation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.

Regardless of whether Mr. Mueller believes there is enough evidence to make a case against the president, Mr. Trump’s belief that his attorney general should protect him provides an important window into how he governs. Presidents have had close relationships with their attorneys general, but Mr. Trump’s obsession with loyalty is particularly unusual, especially given the Justice Department’s investigation into him and his associates.

A Lawyer’s Gambit

It was late February when Mr. Sessions decided to take the advice of career Justice Department lawyers and recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

The pressure to make that decision public grew days later when The Washington Post reported that Mr. Sessions had met during the presidential campaign with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. The disclosure raised questions about whether Mr. Sessions had misled Congress weeks earlier during his confirmation hearing, when he told lawmakers he had not met with Russians during the campaign.

Unaware that Mr. Sessions had already decided to step aside from the inquiry, Democrats began calling for Mr. Sessions to recuse himself — and Mr. Trump told Mr. McGahn to begin a lobbying campaign to stop him.

Mr. McGahn’s argument to Mr. Sessions that day was twofold: that he did not need to step aside from the inquiry until it was further along, and that recusing himself would not stop Democrats from saying he had lied. After Mr. Sessions told Mr. McGahn that career Justice Department officials had said he should step aside, Mr. McGahn said he understood and backed down.

Mr. Trump’s frustrations with the inquiry erupted again about three weeks later, when Mr. Comey said publicly for the first time that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. were conducting an investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia. Mr. Comey had told Mr. Trump in private that he was not personally under investigation, yet Mr. Comey infuriated Mr. Trump by refusing to answer a question about that at the hearing where he spoke publicly.

After that hearing, Mr. Trump began to discuss openly with White House officials his desire to fire Mr. Comey. This unnerved some inside the White House counsel’s office, and even led one of Mr. McGahn’s deputies to mislead the president about his authority to fire the F.B.I. director.

The lawyer, Uttam Dhillon, was convinced that if Mr. Comey was fired, the Trump presidency could be imperiled, because it would force the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether Mr. Trump was trying to derail the Russia investigation.

Longstanding analysis of presidential power says that the president, as the head of the executive branch, does not need grounds to fire the F.B.I. director. Mr. Dhillon, a veteran Justice Department lawyer before joining the Trump White House, assigned a junior lawyer to examine this issue. That lawyer determined that the F.B.I. director was no different than any other employee in the executive branch, and that there was nothing prohibiting the president from firing him.

But Mr. Dhillon, who had earlier told Mr. Trump that he needed cause to fire Mr. Comey, never corrected the record, withholding the conclusions of his research.

Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, called the episode “extraordinary,” adding that he could not think of a similar one that occurred in past administrations.

“This shows that the president’s lawyers don’t trust giving him all the facts because they fear he will make a decision that is not best suited for him,” Mr. Vladeck said.

Searching for Dirt

The attempts to stop Mr. Trump from firing Mr. Comey were successful until May 3, when the F.B.I. director once again testified on Capitol Hill. He spent much of the time describing a series of decisions he had made during the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal email account.

Once again, Mr. Comey refused to answer questions from lawmakers about whether Mr. Trump was under investigation.

White House aides gave updates to Mr. Trump throughout, informing him of Mr. Comey’s refusal to publicly clear him. Mr. Trump unloaded on Mr. Sessions, who was at the White House that day. He criticized him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, questioned his loyalty, and said he wanted to get rid of Mr. Comey. He repeated the refrain that the attorneys general for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Obama had protected the White House.

In an interview with The Times last month, Mr. Trump said he believed that Mr. Holder had protected Mr. Obama.

“When you look at the I.R.S. scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, aah, real problems they had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems,” Mr. Trump said. “When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”

Two days after Mr. Comey’s testimony, an aide to Mr. Sessions approached a Capitol Hill staff member asking whether the staffer had any derogatory information about the F.B.I. director. The attorney general wanted one negative article a day in the news media about Mr. Comey, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said the episode did not occur. “This did not happen and would not happen,” said the spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores. “Plain and simple.”

Earlier that day, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, had pulled one of Mr. McGahn’s deputies aside after a meeting at the Justice Department. Mr. Rosenstein told the aide that top White House and Justice Department lawyers needed to discuss Mr. Comey’s future. It is unclear whether this conversation was related to the effort to dig up dirt on Mr. Comey.

Mr. Trump spent the next weekend at his country club in Bedminster, N.J., where he watched a recording of Mr. Comey’s testimony, stewed about the F.B.I. director and discussed the possibility of dismissing him with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller. He had decided he would fire Mr. Comey, and asked Mr. Miller to help put together a letter the president intended to send to Mr. Comey.

In interviews with The Times, White House officials have said the letter contained no references to Russia or the F.B.I.’s investigation. According to two people who have read it, however, the letter’s first sentence said the Russia investigation had been “fabricated and politically motivated.”

On Monday, May 8, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein to discuss firing Mr. Comey, and Mr. Rosenstein agreed to write his own memo 

outlining why Mr. Comey should be fired. Before writing it, he took a copy of the letter that Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller had drafted during the weekend in Bedminster.

The president fired Mr. Comey the following day.

A week later, The Times reported that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey in February to shut down the federal investigation into Michael T. Flynn, who at the time was the national security adviser. The following day, Mr. Rosenstein announced that he had appointed Mr. Mueller as special counsel.

Once again, Mr. Trump erupted at Mr. Sessions upon hearing the news. In an Oval Office meeting, the president said the attorney general had been disloyal for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, and he told Mr. Sessions to resign.

Mr. Sessions sent his resignation letter to the president the following day. But Mr. Trump rejected it, sending it back with a handwritten note at the top.

“Not accepted,” the note said.

Matt Apuzzo and Julie Hirschfeld Davis contributed reporting from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on January 5, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Expected Sessions to Keep Leash on Inquiry.

Fusion GPS…The Steele Dossier Russian Fog  hit men now claim to be political victims

Wall Street Journal  Editorial Board  Jan. 3, 2018 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fusions-russia-fog-1515024911?mod=djemMER

Let’s see. The Clinton campaign hires Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, to investigate the Trump campaign. Fusion hires a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who produces a dossier based on Russian sources full of rumor, hearsay and an occasional fact to allege collusion between the Kremlin and Trump campaign. The dossier gets to the FBI, which uses it to justify opening a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign, perhaps including a judicial warrant to spy on Trump officials. Then Fusion has Mr. Steele privately brief select media reporters, ensuring that the dossier’s contents become public before the election.

And now Fusion GPS complains about being a victim? Only in Washington, folks.

***

That’s the sob story spun by Fusion GPS founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch Wednesday in a New York Times op-ed that matches the Steele dossier for disinformation. The Fusion duo portray themselves as valiantly working to “highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties” by providing the FBI with “intelligence reports” that corroborated “credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia.”

For exercising their “right under the First Amendment,” Fusion laments that it has been subject to Congressional harassment and a “succession of mendacious conspiracy theories,” including by us. Oh my.

Fusion is talented at producing dirt for hire, including for Russians to smear human-rights activist Bill Browder. The problem is the veracity of its work, and the cofounders don’t name a single example in their op-ed of something that proves the dossier’s claim of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Eighteen months after the dossier hit Washington, the FBI, special counsel Robert Mueller and Congress have also offered no public validation of its collusion allegations.

The Fusion boys pat themselves on the back for “having handed over our relevant bank records,” but the firm stonewalled Congressional committees for most of 2017, refusing to divulge the names of its clients (the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee) and even suing to prevent access to its bank records. In court documents, Fusion has also admitted to paying journalists during the election, though it refuses to disclose the names, amounts or purposes of the payments.

As Mr. Browder notes on Twitter , the Fusion op-ed also “conveniently omits” that it “worked for Russian gov’t interests trying to repeal Magnitsky Act [sanctions] at the same time [it] was working on the dossier.” Mr. Simpson met with his Russian client, Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, before and after she sat with Donald Trump Jr. in Trump Tower in June 2016.

Mr. Simpson continues to claim he knew nothing about her Trump meeting and that she knew nothing of his Steele dossier work—though you’ll have to take his word for the coincidence. As for Fusion’s deep concern about “an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power,” the firm’s concern about Russia—and its human-rights abuses, for which the Magnitsky sanctions were imposed—would seem to stop at its bank account.

Far from being victimized, Fusion has been protected by a Beltway press corps stocked with allies who rely on the firm for scoops. Fusion also has friends in the FBI and Justice Department who have a mutual interest in blocking Congress from discovering how the dossier was used to investigate the Trump campaign.

Toward that end, the New York Times reported on the weekend that the real Rosetta Stone of the Trump-Russia probe was a drunken conversation in May of 2016 by junior Trump staffer George Papadopoulos. This narrative would have us believe that the FBI hinged its probe on a man it didn’t bother to interview until 2017, and about whom it didn’t brief Congress until months after the election.

By the way, the FBI or Justice Department sources who leaked this story almost surely broke the law in disclosing classified information about details collected by intelligence agencies about the meetings and conversations of Mr. Papadopoulos, a private citizen. Yet the FBI and Justice still refuse to tell Congress how they used the Steele dossier.

***

Fusion now says it wants Congress to release transcripts of Mr. Simpson’s interviews with committees, a change from his refusal last year to appear in public session before the Senate Judiciary Committee. By all means, disclose it all, along with FBI agent-source reports on the Steele dossier and the surveillance warrant applications that Justice refuses to release.

Americans deserve to know what really happened last year—not merely accept the obfuscation of Fusion’s political hit men.

BIGGEST STORY OF ALL:

 Glenn Simpson and his  successful collusion with Russian intelligence to sow  distrust of the US Government  ,US Media, and US justice systems.  Simpson has already admitted bribing reporters ("with research money") to plant slanted stories for clients

The Republicans’ Fake Investigations

By GLENN R. SIMPSON and PETER FRITSCH    NEW YORK TIMES   JAN. 2, 2018

A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”

Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.

In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.

We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.

Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.

We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.

We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.

We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.

Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?

What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.

We did not discuss that decision with our clients, or anyone else. Instead, we deferred to Mr. Steele, a trusted friend and intelligence professional with a long history of working with law enforcement. We did not speak to the F.B.I. and haven’t since.

After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary. We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power. We did not, however, share the dossier with BuzzFeed, which to our dismay published it last January.

We’re extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties. To have done so is our right under the First Amendment.

It is time to stop chasing rabbits. The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firm’s testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.