The [Unprecedented] Presidency of Donald John Trump—A Retrospective
If ever there was an American President about whom it must be said that he was the embodiment of classic anti-establishment Americana, it would be the 45th President of the United States of America, Donald John Trump. In many ways, Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the highest office in the land (and his determination to remain in that office) was from beginning to end a Homeric tragedy, set upon with ruthless determination by every manner of dog-eared establishmentarian both inside and outside the DC Beltway. Not only did President Trump face withering opposition from the left throughout his presidency, but also from within his own party, from Bush-Era corporatists, neocons, RINOs and “Never-Trumpers.”
From the moment Mr. Trump announced his candidacy for the Office of President of the United States on Tuesday, June 16, 2015, not only did calcified Washington establishmentarians, both on the left and right, begin lining up against him, but so did a burgeoning minority of anti-American Democratic Socialists and their progressive courtiers in legacy media, who mocked and jeered and ridiculed him, all while, behind the scenes, his primary political rival, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, with the help of her political allies at the top of the Obama administration, beginning with former President Obama himself, got to work undermining him, not only politically, but personally.
As time will tell, I predict, the intentions of Clinton and the Washington establishment will prove far darker than merely the defeat of a determined political outsider. In order to preserve and maintain power in the hands of Washington’s uniparty—that entrenched class of political elites, both Democrat and Republican, that owns by fiat the right of access to the levers of political power in America—and to serve as a warning to any anti-establishmentarians who in the future might dare challenge their positions or merely toss a stink bomb into their exclusive clubhouses, Clinton, Obama, mainstream media, and twofaced and outright “Never-Trump” Republicans in the house and senate would seek to utterly destroy Donald Trump, not only the political entity, ‘President’ Trump, but the man himself, even if that meant running over his entire family along with half of the nation, and they would seek to accomplish this by aligning against him, both publicly and in secret, all the powers and players in former President Obama’s Executive Branch, including FBI, CIA, NSC, DOJ, and every Democrat in the house and senate that purposely ignored or actively aided and abetted the Marxist, anti-American Black Lives Matter Black Power junta and the anarchist revolutionary front Antifa as those groups rampaged through America’s city streets and neighborhoods for a year, looting and burning and murdering in the name of “racial equity.”
By late Autumn, 2020, it had become obvious to those of us who had followed Donald Trump’s presidency with scientific interest, that from the day he and his wife Melania—the sublime, multilingual, Slovene American former supermodel Melania—descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, Washington’s political establishment had decided that Donald John Trump was to be a one-term President. From that fateful June day in 2015 to the present, America’s political establishmentarians have plotted—and continue to plot—against President Trump, first, to get him (and his “America-First” MAGA movement) out of the White House, and second, to keep him out.
According to available documentation, specifically, the Horowitz Report, the establishmentarians’ initial thrust at the presidency of Donald J Trump came on July 31, 2016, with FBI’s opening of its covert Crossfire Hurricane investigation. That was two months after Trump was declared (on May 3) the winner of the 2016 Republican primaries. FBI’s predicate for opening Crossfire Hurricane, according to Michael Horowitz, Inspector General for the US Department of Justice (April 16, 2012-April 29, 2020) was, purportedly, a top secret communique from a Friendly Foreign Government (FFG), later determined to be the person of Australia’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer, who CIA operative Joseph Mifsud had run into George Popadopoulos, a junior Trump campaign national security advisor, at the tony Kensington Wine Rooms in the Notting Hill section of London, England on or about May 10, 2016. At this meeting, according to ABCNews, Australia, Popadopoulos allegedly told Downer he had “dirt” from Russia on Hillary Clinton, (supplied by Mifsud) that would be damaging to both Mrs. Clinton (and President Obama). That “dirt,” according to Horowitz, was contained in a trove of emails intercepted (and later released) by Wikileaks from Clinton’s unsecured server at her home in Chappaqua, New York. Part of what made those “dirty” documents “dirty” was the fact that they were classified as either “Top Secret” or “Secret” and thus, by keeping them on her private, unsecured server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, Clinton exposed US government secrets to hackers, in Clinton’s case, the notorious “Gucifer 2.0” in violation of federal statute 18 U.S. Code § 793(e) and (f), “Gathering, Transmitting or Losing Defense Information.” For anyone interested in seeing these emails, because on Tuesday, October 6, 2020 President Trump ordered them declassified, I may legally direct the reader’s attention to the website ReadHillarysEmail.com, where you may peruse to your heart’s content as many of former Secretary of State Clinton’s contested emails as you wish, but as far as Trump’s former campaign aide George Popadopoulos goes as a deep-state target, to this day he vehemently denies having cooperated in any way with either Mifsud or Downer, telling one confidential FBI informant, Stephan Halper, in October 2016, “First of all, it’s illegal, you know, to do that shit. No one would put their fucking life at risk of going to jail for the next 50 years to back some bullshit [opposition research] that may mean nothing.” Well said.
Meanwhile, United Kingdom’s agent provocateur Christopher Steele would not appear on the scene with his imaginative “Steele Dossier” until September 2016, when he began shopping it around to various news outlets, beginning with Yahoo News in September 2016, Mother Jones a month later, and BuzzFeed, in January 2017. FBI was very unhappy to learn of Steele’s disclosures to the media and promptly (though only temporarily), dropped him as a Confidential Human Source (CHS). It was a month after Steele waved his bogus dossier under Yahoo News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff’s nose that FBI, on October 21, 2016, applied for its first Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump Campaign aide Carter Page, with IG Horowitz saying of Steele’s US Election “reporting” that it played a “central and essential role” in FBI’s decision to seek FISA surveillance of Page.
As for what motivated Steele to assume such an active interest in interfering in the 2016 US Presidential Election, besides the fact he was being paid by both FBI and Hillary Clinton’s opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump, Steele told FBI, according to Horowitz, that based upon his research of then-presidential candidate Trump’s alleged nefarious activities in Russia, he was “fearful” of the negative impact a Trump presidency would have on America’s “special relationship” with UK. Steele, a former British MI6 agent, maintains that all his meddling in the US 2016 Election was done as part of his normal work as part-owner of London-based corporate counter-espionage firm Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, yet it is not unreasonable to speculate that for whatever reason, UK government had something to do with setting up and facilitating Steele’s relationship with US State Department officials at the highest level in a conspiracy to derail Donald Trump’s presidency.
We know, for instance, from testimony provided by Steele on March 17 and 18 via videoconference from a secret location in London to England’s High Court of Justice that then-Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland were being fed parts of the dossier by U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement, John Winer, who was getting his information directly from Steele, whom Winer refers to in an email to Nuland as “my friend Chris Steele (Orbis Intelligence, former MI-6 Russia expert).” But the question is, why? It just makes no sense that Christopher Steele, a private British citizen, albeit one with deep connections to British government as a former MI6 agent, would seek to enmesh himself as completely as he did in a US Presidential Election without his own government’s imprimatur, unless UK intended using Steele’s status as a private citizen to put distance between itself and its own interest in effecting the outcome of the Election. After all, Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., had been concerned, up to that point, with private enterprise, not the inner workings and outcomes of other nations’ presidential elections.
So, here we can see Obama Administration’s conspiracy to undermine and dismantle the succeeding administration proceeding along two parallel paths, even before President Trump was sworn into office, first by running CIA operatives Alexander Downer and Joseph Mifsud into Trump Campaign Aide George Popadopoulos in order to implicate him and fellow Trump campaign advisor Carter Page in a fabricated “Russian collusion” conspiracy. Then we see Obama’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State John Winer and his ‘old pal’, former British MI6 man Christopher Steele, attempting to push Steele’s ridiculous “dossier,” not only to FBI, but also to US media, who, for the most part, were only too happy to gin up some garbage on the anti-Obama guy, Donald Trump, leading, accordingly, to a an illegal FISA Court subpoena to surveil Trump, his transition team, and even his family, leading, in turn, to FBI’s opening of its illegitimate wrecking ball investigation, Crossfire Hurricane.
Another of Donald Trump’s campaign advisors to become caught up in Crossfire Hurricane was Trump’s National Security Advisor, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, whom FBI codenamed “Crossfire Razor.” Two years before joining the Trump campaign in March 2016, Flynn had been working for former President Barack Obama as his Director of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), but after Flynn began pushing back on some of Obama’s counterterrorism initiatives, especially in Iran, Flynn found himself on the outside looking in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and by 2014, the former general was looking for a new job.
FBI’s surveillance of Flynn began on August 16, 2016. What it was that had attracted FBI’s attention to Flynn as a person of interest can be arrived at only indirectly. That is, in light of available evidence, Flynn came under the gaze of the FBI at the same time as Popadopoulos, Page, and President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in what was essentially a dragnet operation to get Trump. This theory is supported by text messages extracted from LYNC, FBI’s internal messaging system between FBI agents tasked with monitoring Flynn, going back as far as August 11, 2016, five days prior to FBI’s opening of its Crossfire Razor operation. In those conversations, agents discussed doing “election research” and their preference for a Clinton presidency “instead of a wildcard like Trump.” By November, having found nothing actionable, agents were eager to close Crossfire Razor, and there was chatter on LYNC by early December of their misgivings with their use of “traces” and “tripwires” and National Security Letters in their deep dive into former general Flynn’s life, especially his financial transactions. They were getting nowhere and seemed to sense that they were treading on soft earth legally, with one agent saying, “I’m telling you man, if this thing ever gets FOIA’d, there are going to be some tough questions asked,” and another describing the probe as “a nightmare.” By early November it appeared as though FBI’s top brass were about to give up on Flynn, with one agent texting “I went an [sic] joined the ops powwow…looks like next week’s the end,” and another replying, “so glad they’re closing Razor.”
Unfortunately, even as it was becoming abundantly clear to FBI’s frontline agents that their target was clean, (that since they began following Flynn around in the summer of 2016, they had turned up “no derogatory information” on him), Obama and his top people had made up their collective minds that destroying Flynn was the key to realizing their plan, which was what, exactly? undoing Donald Trump? preserving the Clinton-Obama dynasty, and along with it the American “progressive” state? or, stupidly, saving American democracy?
In fact, on January 5, the day after Deputy Assistant Director of FBI Counterintelligence Peter Strzok intervened to keep Crossfire Razor alive, Obama and his inner circle—Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and United States Deputy Assistant Attorney General Sally Yates—met in the Oval Office to brainstorm how they might railroad Flynn into a crime based on some phone calls Flynn had had with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and it was then-Vice President Biden who, at that meeting, suggested using the “Logan Act” to get Flynn, which we know from transcripts of notes obtained by Flynn’s attorney Sydney Powell from Department of Justice pertaining to Obama’s January 5 meeting; notes scrawled on a piece of notepad paper attributed to Peter Strzok, who, reportedly, was probably physically not present at that meeting, but nonetheless, somehow received the notes on January 4, according to the date attributed to them in Powell’s affidavit, from someone who had been at the January 5 White House meeting.
The important thing to take away from this fog of conflicting information is that the “Logan Act” notes are a real. (They are a matter of public record in United States District Court, District of Columbia, under the heading “Case 1:17-cr-00232-EGS Document 231-1 Filed 06/24/20 Page 1 of 1),” and, whether Strzok had been prompted by some third party to intervene on January 4 in FBI’s decision to close Crossfire Razor or was acting upon his own personal hatred of Donald Trump, Biden’s Logan Act scheme opened the door to charges against Flynn, especially after someone leaked the notes from the January 5 White House Meeting to Washington Post opinion writer David Ignatius, who, in turn, wondered publicly in a January 12 column whether the 1799 law, which had only been used twice in American history, unsuccessfully, and which is considered by most legal experts to be, in fact, unconstitutional, could actually be used to proffer a criminal charge against President-Elect Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor.
The Logan Act was named after George Logan, the Revolutionary War Era Pennsylvania legislator who, in August 1798, secretly visited Paris to negotiate an end to the so-called Franco-American Quasi-War (1798-1800). Though Logan was ultimately successful in bringing about an end to increasingly bellicose exchanges between France and America, because he carried out his negotiations with the French without first consulting the Executive or seeking permission of the Commander in Chief, President John Adams, six months after his return home, in January 1799, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed 18 U.S. Code § 953 (Private Correspondence with Foreign Governments), which prohibits “any citizen of the United States” who, “without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.” Obviously, as President-Elect Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn had every legal authority to, and expectation that he would acquaint himself with foreign leaders as part of his official duties, but if things are as they seem to be, and in its investigations into the Trump campaign, transition team, and presidency, FBI had not gone rogue, but was in fact working at the behest of their boss, then-President Barack Obama, using the Logan Act to initiate an illegitimate legal process designed to undermine his successor’s presidency, then Obama’s use of the Logan Act to get Flynn was, in fact, a key element of a grand conspiracy; a perjury trap cooked up by FBI Director James Comey that would trigger the sole felony charge brought against Flynn under 18 U.S. Code § 1001, “making a false statement” to FBI, which we know because Comey bragged about it on National TV.
The salient fact of Comey’s interview with MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace on December 10, 2018, was that he did it because he knew he could get away with it, that is, sending a couple of agents over to the White House to interview Flynn without his attorney present. That got a lot of laughs from Wallace’s Trump-hating, progressive studio audience. To be sure, the atmosphere inside Flynn’s offices at the White House a year earlier, on January 24, 2017, were anything but jovial, as two FBI agents, Joseph Pientka and Peter Strzok, grilled Flynn for hours over the phone calls he had had with Kislyak. Pientka and Strzok were to use the Logan Act as a pretext for tricking Flynn into a misstatement of fact, and then charge him under 18 USC.
About three weeks after Pientka and Strzok interviewed Flynn at the White House, in fact, on February 14, 2017, in the early morning hours following a meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office the previous evening, then-FBI Director Comey typed out a memorandum (memo 4) on his laptop in which he recorded his conversation that evening with the President, a conversation in which President Trump allegedly asked Comey to drop the case against General Flynn, saying, according to Comey’s memo, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. [Flynn] misled the Vice President but he didn’t do anything wrong in the call. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
One day earlier, on Monday, February 13, Trump fired Flynn for “lying” to Vice President Pence about whether he had talked on the phone to Ambassador Kislyak, specifically, about lifting sanctions on Russia that former President Barack Obama had imposed on the country shortly before leaving office in response to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Election. A subsequent release of the transcripts of Flynn’s phone conversations with Kislyak three years later, on May 29, 2020 by the Office of Director of National Intelligence, along with the records of FBI’s January 24 interview of Flynn, support Flynn’s case, or at least the case that, according to Pientka and Strzok, they did not think Flynn believed he was lying to them in their interview with him. In fact, the phone transcripts reveal that in all ten of Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak, between January 5, 2016, and January 19, 2017, forms of the word “sanction” (“sanctions” and “sanctioned”) were used a total of two times, both in the same sentence, and only by Kislyak, where Kislyak said of Obama’s Russian 2016 Election meddling sanctions, “We agree. One of the problems among the measures [sanctions] that have been announced today is that now FSB and GRU are sanctions, are sanctioned, and I ask myself, uh, does it mean that the United States isn’t willing to work on terrorist threats?” to which the former Lieutenant General replied following some useless crosstalk, “Yeah, and please make sure that its uh – the idea is, be – if you, if you have to do something, do something on a reciprocal basis, meaning you know, on a sort of an even basis. Then that, then that is a good message and we’ll understand that message….and also, basically we have to take these, these enemies on that we have. And we definitely have a common enemy. You have a problem with it, we have a problem with it in this country, and we definitely have a problem with it in the Middle East.”
So it went for the next couple of months, until on May 9, when then-US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein dropped a bomb in the President’s lap: their letters recommending President Trump fire his FBI Director, James Comey based on Comey’s mishandling of FBI’s July 2016 probe into Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s destruction of emails, which, as mentioned earlier, she had stored on a private, unsecured server at her home in Chappaqua, New York; and based upon the question of whether, in subsequent interviews with FBI, she had lied to agents about what she knew about the deletion of those emails, exposing herself, potentially, to charges of felony misconduct under 18 U.S. Code § 1924(“Unauthorized Removal and Retention of Classified Documents or Material”) and 18 U.S. Code § 1001 (lying about it).
Although the fix was in on the Clinton email scandal—Obama’s head of DOJ Loretta Lynch would never have dared think of charging Hillary Clinton, President Obama’s presumptive successor, with a crime—the story of it, especially of how some classified Clinton emails wound up on convicted serial ‘sexter’ Anthony Weiner’s laptop, crippled Clinton’s chance of a tickertape parade to the White House. Meanwhile, the same day that Trump’s top lawmen brought to his desk their letters condemning Comey, Trump struck pen to paper, firing off a two-paragraph letter to Comey letting him know he was “terminated.” Comey would not go quietly.
Beginning on the night of January 6, 2017, following a meeting in Trump Tower with President-elect Trump in which then-FBI Director Comey briefed the soon-to-be President on the US Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), Comey had gotten into the habit of memorializing any in-person, one-on-one meetings with Trump. Over the course of Comey’s abbreviated tenure under President Trump, Comey would, one way or another, insinuate himself into the President’s exclusive company, especially after Inauguration Day, a total of eight times, from January 6 to April 11, 2017, a pattern which FBI General Counsel James Baker would later describe in an interview with DOJ IG Horowitz as “quite outside the norm of interactions between the FBI Director and a President of the United States.” According to Comey, in interviews with Horowitz, due to the highly sensitive nature of his discussion with the President on January 6, which involved, in part, “salacious and unverified” allegations being made by Great Britain’s fixer, Christopher Steele, regarding Trump’s affairs in Moscow in 2013, Comey had more or less been pushed into his first one-on-one meeting with Trump at a prior meeting with FBI top management, a meeting which included then-FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, and the supervisors of FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation: Special Agents Joe Pientka, Peter Strzok, and FBI’s Counterintelligence Section Chief, Jonathan Moffa. Expecting that Trump might say something self-incriminating with regard to Crossfire Hurricane, Comey was urged by the same, especially Baker and McCabe, to memorialize the meeting, but thereafter, Comey memorialized (in memoranda) each of his six remaining interviews with the President of his own accord, especially “memo 4.”
The “Comey memos,” as they would be dubbed, would prove critical in shaping the history of Donald Trump’s presidency, especially memos 1, 2, and 4. That is because two days after Trump fired Comey, on May 11, 2017, a story dropped in the New York Times written by Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt titled “In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred.” The piece drew on details from Comey’s first and second one-on-one meetings with President Trump at the White House on January 7 and 28, respectively; details shared, incidentally, in violation of FBI protocol, by Comey with his personal attorney and longtime personal friend, Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman, during an informal conversation over lunch which at some point had meandered onto the topic of Comey’s “job challenges”: how hard his job was getting at FBI (dinner with the President in the Green Room, with the President making a pitch for Comey’s “honest loyalty,” and so on).
The next day, May 12, tipped off to the Michael Schmidt piece, Trump hammered out a ‘Tweet’ threatening his former FBI Director, saying “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” The President could not have known that in his confidential talks with his FBI Director he had been talking himself right into a trap. Trump’s “Tapes” tweet was exactly the type of linguistic device Comey and his associates at FBI had been waiting for with which to ensnare the President. Memo 4 would be used to chain the President to a Special Counsel investigation that he would push before him like the boulder of Sisyphus for the next eighteen months of his presidency.
In the wee hours of Tuesday, May 16, Comey realized, “as if struck by a bolt of lightning,” he would later tell the Office of the Inspector General, that he could use Trump’s “Tapes” tweet to force DOJ to “appoint a Special Counsel to go get the [nonexistent] tapes” in support of an “independent investigation” of the President on a charge of “obstruction of justice.” Later that morning, Comey texted digital photos of Memo 4 (the “go-easy-on-Flynn” memo) to his Columbia Law School pal Richman, instructing him to relay the contents of the memo (though not the memo itself), to the New York Times for publication. The next day, Wednesday, May 17, Times’s Schmidt came out with his piece “Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation.” That same day, alerted to the Times piece and aware of its legal implications, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed the aged, and many say, senile, former FBI Director Robert Mueller III to head the “independent” investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and criminal obstruction of justice; an investigation that would become known, infamously, as the “Mueller Probe.”
The Mueller Probe:
First, a little background on Robert Swan Mueller III: When one ponders the homage “All-American Hero” in the context of traditional Americana, a face that might spring readily to mind might be that of young Robert Swan Mueller, the tall, lean, square-jawed scion to old chemical and railroad money. Born at Doctors Hospital in the Manhattan borough of New York City in 1944, Mueller’s father, Robert Swan Mueller Sr., was an executive at Dupont, and his mother’s great grandfather, William Haynes Truesdale, a giant of the rail industry, at various stages in his career President of Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Lackawanna Railroad, and the third Vice President and General Manager of Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad.
Mueller was raised in Princeton, New Jersey until the ninth grade, at which point his father sent him to St. Paul’s, an elite, private boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire. In 1966, Mueller earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics from Princeton University, then in 1968 joined the US Marine Corps and served with distinction as a second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon in Quảng Trị Province, in what was then northern South Vietnam.
Mueller retired from the Marines with the rank of captain in 1970, and in 1973 received a degree in law from the University of Virginia. In 1976, Mueller entered public service as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco, then in 1982 flew back east to take a job in Boston as Assistant US Attorney. Four years after that he went to Washington DC, where he took the job of US Attorney for the District of Columbia under then-Attorney General Ed Meese. In 1998, Mueller returned to the “City by the Bay” to take the US Attorney position there under then-US Attorney General Janet Reno. In 2001 President George W. Bush tapped Mueller to be FBI Director, a position he held until 2013, when President Barack Obama put in James Comey as head of FBI. Then, in May 2017, Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller Special Prosecutor in charge of the now-infamous Special Counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election, possible collusion between Donald Trump and his associates and the Russians, and fired FBI Director James Comey’s bogus obstruction-of-justice charge.
By the time the Mueller Probe had ground to a close in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on July 24, 2019, it had become embarrassingly clear just how much the ravages of time had transformed Mueller from a lion of traditional, blue-nosed Americana into a used-up, doddering establishment fixture who could not recall key elements of the report bearing his name, such as the name of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, leading many Americans privy to the hearings to observe that Mueller was Special Counsel in name only, and that it was Mueller’s legal wrecking ball, Andrew Weissmann, former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York and Mueller’s General Counsel at FBI who had been running all along the day-to-day operations of the Mueller probe. Prior to joining the Mueller team, Weissmann was Section Chief of DOJ’s Criminal Division under then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and an important player from the beginning of Crossfire Hurricane, along with FBI COINTEL Section Chief Peter Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page, who was at that time Special Counsel to Deputy FBI Director Andy McCabe. Beginning in November 2016, Weissmann began trying to find a way to fit Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort into an indictment. Thus, from the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Weissmann had been immersed up to his neck in all things Donald Trump.
In all, the Mueller team consisted of eighteen prosecutors and lawyers working for twenty-six months at a total cost, according to DOJ, of $31.7 million dollars, proving nothing:
“Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
—Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, Volume II, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III. Submitted Pursuant to 28 C.F.R. § 600.8(c), Washington, DC, March 2019.
The FISAs:
As the title of this essay indicates, in the opinion of this author, the presidency of Donald J Trump was “unprecedented,” but “unprecedented” is a big word meaning a lot of different things to a lot of different people, therefore, I expect it will be necessary at this point for me to explain what I mean by the word. Although there are many aspects of Trump’s presidency that many Americans, especially the 74 million of us who voted for him in 2020 perceived to be “unprecedented”—his unpretentious affinity for ordinary people and total absence of racial bias, his unabashed patriotism, most prominently exemplified by his obsession with the American flag, illegal immigration, his vehement opposition to professional athletes kneeling to the playing of the National Anthem, and his unflappable resolve and effectiveness as leader of the nation in the face of unrelenting and historic adversity—in this exposé I wish to focus on the last of these qualities: President Trump’s uncanny ability to thrive in the face of a concerted effort to overthrow him, an effort initiated by the previous ‘Obama’ administration and continued by the entrenched establishmentarian uniparty and their proxies: violent, revolutionary Black-Power socialists, virulent ‘Antifa’ nihilists, enemy foreign states, (especially China), and a relentless pack of ankle-biting, progressive, establishment news media.
Insofar as it may serve to indicate just how completely invested the establishment political class was in deposing its anti-establishment President, the depth and breadth of the conspiracy it had hatched to destroy him and transform (or allow to be transformed) America into a vast, Gramscian reeducation camp, it is important that I examine in this treatment FBI’s unprecedented use of the FISA warrant:
A FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant, as its name suggests, is used by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to surveil and gather information, either on foreign nationals residing here in the US whom federal officers believe are either engaged in or planning acts of espionage or terrorism against the US, or US persons acting on behalf of some foreign entity to do the same.
In Crossfire Hurricane, among FBI’s four principal targets (other than President Trump): Paul Manafort, George Popadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and Carter Page, it was only Trump’s transition team’s foreign policy advisor and petroleum industry investment consultant Carter Page who FBI decided to target with a FISA warrant. Why? Because Page was the Trump transition team associate most prominently (and erroneously) implicated by FBI’s Confidential Human Source (CHS) Christopher Steele as working with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 Presidential Election. FBI knew Steele’s Election reporting was biased in favor of Hillary Clinton and that his primary Russian subsource Igor Danchenko’s claims about Carter Page were the musings of a clutch of Danchenko’s drinking buddies, “hearsay” gleaned from “conversation with friends over beers.” (Danchenko himself was born in Russia, lives in the US, was formerly employed as a Russia analyst at the progressive Brookings Institute, and was on Christopher Steele’s payroll at Orbis in 2016 when Steele touched him to go after Trump.) FBI also knew that until 2013, Page, a former naval intelligence officer, had been a CIA asset, but in order to get approval for what would be its fourth and final FISA warrant on him, FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith altered the text of an email from CIA to say that Page “was not a source.” FBI also did not mention in their FISA applications that Page had denied in interviews with FBI ever having met with the Russian operatives who Steele said he had, principally, Igor Sechin, Chairman of Russian energy conglomerate Rosneft and close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Igor Divyekin, Deputy Chief of Staff to the Russian President.
According to Steele, Carter Page met in July 2016 with Sechin to talk about getting Trump to lift sanctions on Rosneft that had been imposed by former President Obama, this in exchange for a “19 percent stake” in the company; and with Divyekin that same month to discuss sharing compromising information about Clinton with the Trump campaign—all made up. Carter Page had never even heard of Igor Divyekin, he told an FBI source in an October 2016 meeting.
The problem is that FBI used this phony information in all four of its applications to obtain FISA warrants against Page, all four of which top officials at FBI and DOJ, including FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, signed off on, and which the FISA Court (FISC) approved, prima facie.
Although FBI’s four FISA warrants on Carter Page comprised only one thread in the most comprehensive attempt in American history by an outgoing President and his administration to sabotage a succeeding President, and although this coup would ultimately unravel and fail under exhaustive examination, three years after FBI submitted its first application to FISC for a FISA warrant on Carter Page, and three-and-a-half years after CIA operative Joseph Mifsud put George Popadopoulos together with Australia’s Alexander Downer in London, triggering Crossfire Hurricane, on December 9, 2019, FBI’s new Director, Christopher Wray, under pressure from FISA Court presiding judge Rosemary M Collyer and President Trump’s new Attorney General, William Barr, issued twelve reforms to FBI’s FISA application process. If anything, FBI’s opening of FISA warrants on Page served only to deepen the faults in Obama’s coup attempt and spotlight its corrupt intent, leaving FBI with egg on its face and Wray with no choice but to issue reforms.
Impeachment 1 (The Ukraine Phone Call):
Incredibly, despite having failed in its first coup attempt to take Trump down, the establishment had not yet finished punishing the anti-establishment President for daring to become President and “drain the swamp.” Though I do not wish to spend very much time rehashing what the reader already knows about the Ukraine Phone Call Impeachment, it is worth revisiting the topic if only to recapture the sheer determination with which the Washington uniparty, especially the Democrat wing of the uniparty, and Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi particularly, strove to ruin Donald Trump. Indeed, Pelosi, who could no longer contain her hatred of Trump one month before inauguration day, blurted out in an interview with Politico, “I plan to pull him [President Trump] out of there [the White House] by his hair, his little hands and his feet.” So much for a “smooth transition of power.”
But the Ukraine phone call impeachment, conceived, as it was, of sheer spite and not much else, had been a long time coming. Even prior to President Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, busy little Jacobins in the establishment media had begun openly scheming to impeach Trump, and Trump’s administration was utterly infested with holdovers from the Obama regime who absolutely detested (secretly) their new, ‘unwoke’ boss.
Going back to August 2015, according to text messages recovered by DOJ IG Horowitz between now-disgraced FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, they, along with other Obama-Administration officials, had begun cooking up a clandestine “insurance policy” that would give license to Obama loyalists in the Trump Administration to conspire to either remove Trump outright or to bollix up his presidency with continuous charges of corruption just plausible enough to justify their continuous investigations of him. Meanwhile, activist, progressive, Trump-hating mainstream news media, to wit, New York Daily News (March 2, 2016), and Politico a month later, began calling for, publicly, presidential candidate Trump’s removal from office with headlines like “Impeach Trump. It’s not too Early to Start,” and “Could Trump be Impeached Shortly After He Takes Office?”(Darrel Samuelsohn, Politico, April 17, 2016), and then, 32 minutes after President Trump’s inauguration: “The Campaign to Impeach the President has Begun.” (Matea Gold, Enterprise/investigations editor, Washington Post, Jan. 20, 2017, 12:19 pm).
Indeed, by the time President Trump had hung up the phone on his ill-fated call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019, a call the main point of which was to congratulate Zelensky on his election two months earlier, the drumbeat for impeachment emanating from Pelosi’s offices had reached a fevered crescendo, so much so that by the afternoon of Tuesday, September 24, 2019, the Democrat Speaker of the House announced for the first time the beginning of an impeachment “inquiry” into the President’s call. No matter that there was nothing to the Zelensky call to merit Trump’s impeachment. (To this day the former President continues to insist it was a “perfect phone call.”) But because a “whistleblower” complained formally about the phone call to the Intelligence Community Inspector General, Michael Atkinson, and in turn, Atkinson determined the complaint to be of “urgent concern,” meaning, in Intelligence Community parlance, that based on IG’s reading of the text of the complaint and the complainant’s pedigree, IG found that the complainant’s complaint “appeared credible,” thus warranting opening an investigation into the matter, this despite the fact the that the complainant, CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, “was not a direct witness to the President’s telephone call with the Ukrainian President;” another National Security Council (NSC) apparatchik, Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, was. As Director of European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), Lt. Colonel Vindman was responsible for compiling the President’s talking points in conversations with heads of foreign states, especially Ukraine, but Vindman was also pals with Ciaramella, a man who, like Vindman, was also an Obama holdover and progressive activist who flatly disliked Donald Trump. According to “sources” working within NSC, speaking on background, Vindman “leaked information” about President Trump’s Ukraine call in a phone call to Ciaramella the day after the call, and from there, Ciaramella’s attorneys at Compass Rose Legal Group, Andrew Bakaj and Mark Zaid, became involved, with Bakaj introducing Ciaramella as his client in a letter to ICIG Atkinson on September 28, 2019. (Incidentally, Compass Rose is a Washington DC-based law firm specializing in whistleblower cases and Andrew Bakaj and Compass Rose Senior Counsel Mark Zaid, who helped Ciaramella draft his complaint, are known from their pronouncements on Twitter to have been—at the time of Trump’s Zelensky call—committed revolutionaries, with Zaid proclaiming in a Tweet days after Trump took office, a “coup has started,” and that “impeachment will follow ultimately,” and not to be outdone, on August 17, 2017 Bakaj advocated on his Twitter account for the use of the 25th Amendment against Trump, tweeting, “The 25th Amendment concerns @POTUS’ inability to discharge the powers and duties of office. Says nothing about mental health. We’re there.”
Although the law governing ICIG’s handling of whistleblower complaints, 50 U.S.C.§3033, does not require an allegation of wrongdoing to be based on a direct, first-hand observation, because language further along in the statute, 50 U.S.C.§3033(k)(5)(B), gives the IG only fourteen days to determine whether a complaint is credible and sufficiently urgent, not having direct knowledge of the alleged act does bear upon ICIG’s decision to open an investigation. No matter that Ciaramella’s complaint was secondhand. Seventeen days after President Trump called Zelensky, which was, not coincidentally, the day after FBI’s hollowed-out former Director Robert Mueller fell flat on his face in front of the House Intelligence Committee trying to explain how it was that he knew so little about the report bearing his name, Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson received Ciaramella’s lawyered-up whistleblower complaint about President Trump’s Ukraine call. Smartly, Trump made no attempt to conceal the contents of the call, and in fact, upon learning that the call had become the subject of yet another major investigation of himself, called for a transcript of it to be immediately released to the public.
On December 18, 2019, after nearly three months of torturous parsing in the establishment news media of every word contained in the transcript of the Zelensky call, a Democrat-controlled Congress voted along party lines to impeach President Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Two weeks later, Pelosi held a signing ceremony in which she gleefully signed the Articles of Impeachment in preparation for them to be transmitted to the Senate for disposition. Afterwards, she handed out pens inscribed with her name.
The President’s senate trial opened on January 16, 2020, and ran until February 5. (Incidentally, the first cases of Coronavirus began appearing in the US beginning on January 19, and by January 31, even as the nation’s top politicians and establishment news media were preoccupied with tearing down the President with a bogus impeachment and show trial, President Trump maintained the presence of mind to unilaterally shut down all travel from China, knowing, even, the enormous damage doing so would cause to the economy, an economy which President Trump prized—and in fact, boasted of—more than he did any of his accomplishments as President.
By now, the reader is perhaps beginning to see a light emerging at the end of this narrative, in the way that, even prior to his inauguration, right up to the emergence and spread of the Wuhan virus across America, Donald Trump’s presidency was beset by a series of cascading calamities, a narrative which suggests that either Donald J Trump, America’s 45th President, was either one of the unluckiest Presidents in US history, or one of the most conspired against, and that, as part of a grand conspiracy, the Chinese Communist Party purposely permitted the flights of commercial airliners loaded with SARS-CoV-2-infected passengers to go abroad while locking down air travel inside their own country, all in an effort to scuttle President Trump’s chances at reelection.
In any event, on February 5, the US Senate voted to acquit President Trump of the charges brought against him by Pelosi and her anti-Trump cabal in Congress, as everyone knew from the beginning it would. The two charges, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were, at best, contrivances, for as the reader is well aware, and as the President’s team of attorneys brilliantly elucidated, Article II of the US Constitution vests in the President, as the nation’s “repository of executive power…sole and solemn” responsibility for crafting and executing American foreign policy, and as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer under the Constitution’s “Take Care” Clause, Section III, Article II, President Trump was not only within his rights, but dutybound to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter on suspicion of corruption in Ukraine, especially since the senior Biden bragged openly about threatening to withhold a billion dollar loan to Ukraine, which had been approved by Congress, unless Ukraine’s then-President, Petro Poroshenko, fired the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Ukraine’s corrupt petroleum company, Burisma, on whose board of directors sat the washed-out, drug-addled Vice President’s son, Hunter, pocketing over $85,000 a month.
Ultimately, the Senate found that President Trump did not, by asking Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to “look into” the Bidens, violate US Election law USC Title 52, §30121, “Contributions and Donations by Foreign Nationals.” Biden had to be vetted, and it had become obvious to Trump, nearing the end of his third year in office, that no one, not the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, or even establishment news media, were going to do anything that might obstruct Biden’s path to the White House. By the time the Zelensky phone call impeachment reared its ugly head, it had become obvious to Trump fans that Joe Biden was the establishment’s ‘establishment’ President. Preordained. Nonetheless, even with Crossfire Hurricane and the Zelensky phone call impeachment behind him, and with just under a year remaining in what would turn out to be his first (and last) term as President, suddenly President Trump was faced with a third calamity—the Chinese Coronavirus, SARS-Cov-2.
The Wuhan Virus
Imagine for a moment that you are the President of the United States of America; half of the country loves you; the other half hates your guts. You have just emerged from what history will likely record as a “soft” coup attempt with your presidency still intact, are currently in the midst of a new kind of massive smear campaign concocted by Congressional Democrats—a “snap impeachment” based on nothing—and as if things could not get any more chaotic for you and your administration, suddenly you learn that for weeks the Chinese have been launching passenger airliners abroad, including into the US, from a city in central China called Wuhan, loaded with passengers infected with a new, highly contagious and deadly virus called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) or COVID-19, as the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is popularly known, and that if something is not done immediately to stop the virus from spreading, it could kill as many as two million Americans. (Comparatively, the death toll in the US from the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 reached 675,000.)
So, what did President Trump do? On January 7, 2020, the same day that China’s National Health Commission informed World Health Organization (WHO) that person-to-person transmission of “2019-nCoV” was occurring, and twelve days before the first case of the Chinese coronavirus appeared in the US, on January 19, 2020 in Snohomish County, Washington, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under President Trump’s direction, set up a coronavirus tracking system to provide support for a comprehensive American response to the disease. That system, which, fifteen months later, continues to serve its intended purpose, is called “COVID Data Tracker.” On January 29, just six days after the Chinese government shut down all travel inside China from Hubei Province, where the City of Wuhan and China’s only BSL-4 biolab, Wuhan Institute of Virology, are located, Trump hit the ground running with his “Coronavirus Task Force (CTF).” Headed by United States Secretary of Health and Human Services’ Alex Azar and staffed with America’s corps d’elite in the field of epidemiology, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health and CDC Director Robert R. Redfield, the purpose of the Task Force, according to a statement from Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany at a January 29, 2021 press conference, was to “monitor, contain, and mitigate the spread of the virus, while ensuring that the American people [had] the most accurate and up-to-date health and travel information.”
Two days later, on January 31, 2020, five weeks and four days before World Health Organization (WHO) finally admitted (on March 11, 2020), based on overwhelming empirical evidence, that COVID-19 had become a global pandemic, and with only fifteen confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States, Trump issued Proclamation 9984, suspending entry from China into the United States of all foreign nationals other than immediate family of U.S. citizens and permanent US residents. The next day, on February 1, upon hearing the news of Trump’s decision to ban flights from China, the current, wooden-headed occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, speaking through his press team, issued the following tweet: “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fearmongering [sic]. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.”
On February 26, President Trump appointed Vice President Mike Pence to chair the Task Force, and Pence brought on board that same day US Surgeon General Vice Admiral Jerome Adams and Deborah Birx, who, at that time, serving as United States Global AIDS Coordinator, became the President’s Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Then, on March 1, President Trump brought in FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn to begin the development of a vaccine, and two weeks later, on March 13, Admiral Brett Giroir, Assistant Secretary for Health, to coordinate nationwide production and distribution of COVID-related medical supplies.
Shrouded in secrecy, in early April 2020, President Trump launched a “Manhattan Project”-styled operation dubbed “Operation Warp Speed” to develop the COVID-19 vaccine, and revealing the President’s level of commitment to the project and to the American people, on May 21, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany announced that the President had gifted to the project his entire salary for that quarter, a check for $100,000.00. (Incidentally, Donald J Trump became only the third President in US history, after Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy, to donate almost his entire salary over four years to federal agencies, as he had promised to do as a candidate in 2016.)
Four days later, on Memorial Day, May 25, 2020, in a sudden, socially cataclysmic turn of events, a black Minneapolitan, 46-year-old career criminal and drug addict, George Floyd, died while being placed under arrest by four Minneapolis police officers. With six months left in his first term, suddenly President Trump found himself face to face with a two-headed Hydra: a deadly, fast-moving global pandemic and a rapidly developing, violent revolution headed by the Marxist Black Lives Matter Black Power movement and Antifa anarchists.
It is difficult to quantify comprehensively the number of organized riots, instances of organized looting and arson that have occurred since Floyd’s death, reportedly in the name of “social” and “racial justice.” That is because that is not the kind of information the Democratic Socialists, who control the nation’s mainstream news media and social media, want the public to know. Though the feeling in the land now seems to be that the frequency and intensity of such social tremors have diminished, especially since the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) hijacked the 2020 Presidential Election and installed a stupid but devious, septuagenarian President and “woke,” chucklehead fashionista Vice President—the “Biden-Harris Administration”—at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the City of Portland, Oregon continues to experience on a near-daily basis violent uprisings by Antifa. Still, as far as quantifying the number of such uprisings goes, according to one authoritative source, Major Cities Chiefs Association’s (MCCA’s) Intelligence Command Group (ICG), over a ten-week period, from May 25 to July 31, there were 8,700 instances of civil unrest across the country, with 3,692 of those instances described by ICG as “illegal but non-violent acts of civil disobedience,” acts that included shutting down highways and harassing restaurant patrons; and another 574 instances which ICG described as “violent”: organized looting, arson, and attacks with weapons, including firearms, with a “riot” defined here as “a form of civil disorder commonly characterized by a group lashing out in a violent public disturbance against authority, property, or people.”
Although riots did occur in some Republican-held cities in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, such as in Jacksonville, Florida on May 30, 2020, and in San Diego, California and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the next day, unlike in those cities, where riots were quickly suppressed and rioters punished, in Democrat-run cities, rioting was either tacitly condoned or outright applauded by Democrat officials, and rioters actively supported.
In Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the night of Thursday, May 28, 2020, the City’s mayor, Jacob Frey, ordered his police to evacuate their post at their 3rd Precinct headquarters in order to preclude an encounter between “protesters” and his “outnumbered officers that might escalate into “hand-to-hand combat.”
“We are a police force totaling roughly 800 [sic] with far, far less than that on active duty at a given time,” Frey told Minneapolis’s WCCO TV the next day. “Simply by the numbers, we were going to be overwhelmed. It’s a matter of math, not planning.”
In response to the news of George Floyd’s death, riots exploded in Democrat-run cities across the nation, and on June 1 then-US Senator and failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris posted the following statement to her Twitter account: “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund [Minnesota Freedom Fund] to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
A week later, as Minneapolis residents cautiously reemerged from their homes to find their city in ruin, Minneapolis City Council members issued a pledge to about a thousand Minneapolitans assembled in their COVID masks at Minneapolis’s Powderhorn Park “to begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating [a] new, transformative model for cultivating safety in Minneapolis.” One after another, Social Democratic leaders of cities and states from coast to coast heard the call and began stoking the flames of racial division, defunding their police departments, and coddling their criminals. By the end of July, 65 Minneapolis police officers had quit and two hundred more out of a total force of 850 put in their retirement papers, according to a New York Times report, and in early December, amid a wave of violent crime, Minneapolis’s Common Council voted to cut $8 million dollars from its police department. Immediately afterwards, according to Minneapolis Police Department, homicides in the City rose by 70.8%, robberies went up 46.6%, and aggravated assaults, by 23.5%, and by February 2021, Minneapolitans had had enough of getting clobbered over the head by their city’s resident criminals. On Friday, February 12, responding to a citywide outcry, Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to spend $6.4 million dollars on the recruitment of new police officers.
Meanwhile, as Black Lives Matter and Antifa hooligans (along with a huge contingent of unmoored, misguided white, Black Lives Matter “allies”) marched through the streets “peacefully protesting,” the China virus, SARS-CoV-2, swept down across America like a scythe. In the month of May 2020, the month George Floyd passed into oblivion, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) there were 110,599 deaths in the United States from SARS-CoV2, by the end of June, 128,534, and in the month of July, 2020, 159,549 Americans succumbed to the disease. Still, President Trump, along with First Lady Melania, did their best to keep America’s spirits up. Leading from the front, unmasked, on the 4th of July the President and First Lady held a stirring rally at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, an event widely criticized in establishment media as “reckless.” Nonetheless, as Election Day, November 3, grew increasingly near, despite the China virus, the President’s “crowd sizes” at his rallies steadily increased. Known for his laissez faire attitude toward mask-wearing, when, on October 2 President Trump announced in a Tweet that both he and First Lady Melania had contracted the Rona, the left again attacked him. Still, the President’s and First Lady’s swift recoveries from the deadly illness and President Trump’s immediate return to work was seen by his MAGA minions as vindicating him.
While Joe Biden’s handlers continued to keep President Trump’s rival tucked away in his home in Wilmington, Delaware, President Trump, after a brief convalescence at Walter Reed Medical Center, hit the road, actually increasing the number of rallies he would hold per day, even into the eve of Election Day, November 2, when he held four rallies, flying from DC to Fayetteville, North Carolina, to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Traverse City, Michigan, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and finally back to Michigan, (Grand Rapids), drawing tens of thousands of supporters all along the way who were willing to brave the threat of the China virus while standing shoulder to shoulder for hours in freezing-cold temperatures to see and hear their President speak.
And while President Trump was doing all of this, all right out in front of the American people, the Democratic Socialists schemed behind the scenes to steal the Presidency and install feeble Joe Biden in President Trump’s place.
The 2020 Election:
First, the numbers:
According to Federal Election Commission (FEC), the total number of votes cast for President in the 2020 Presidential Election was 158,383,403 votes, the highest number of votes for President ever recorded in US history. The share of votes for the winner of the Election, President Joseph Robinette Biden? 81,268,924 votes, and for the loser, Donald John Trump? 74,216,154 votes.
The astonishing—really, unbelievable—thing about these numbers, more than the numbers themselves, is that so many Americans voted amid one of the most calamitous periods in American history, one marked by both a devastating global pandemic and an unprecedentedly ugly race revolt; and that apparently more Americans, in record numbers, grudge-voted to un-elect Donald Trump than voted to elect his challenger, Joe Biden, a superannuated political fixture beset by occasional public lapses into dementia, with no original thoughts in his head and no convictions of his own, this, despite the fact that Trump presided over one of the most successful terms as President in US history, with record low unemployment at home (pre-pandemic) and peace abroad, drastically reduced illegal immigration, energy independence, and the successful development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine in record time.
Ergo, from the perspective of a Trump supporter there are, I think, two ways to arrive at a conclusion that the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen, and, indeed, no way to conclude anything other than that it was stolen. First, one might conclude that the entire Democratic Socialist establishment—the Washington uniparty, progressive establishment news networks, Hollywood, professional sports, Black Power groups, the anarchists Antifa, all working in some capacity either with or for the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) and its China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF)—conspired not only to frustrate materially Trump’s Presidency but also his Presidential campaign by fomenting, supporting, and even participating directly in the chaos in the American street after the killing of George Floyd, while maligning incessantly President Trump as a racist and a pathological liar.
Parenthetically, as for China’s involvement in our Presidential Elections (especially in the 2020 Presidential Election), consider that from November 2016 to April 2020, China’s Communist Party mouthpiece, China Daily, paid a total of $34,585,803.60 to major American “news” companies, including Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Sun Sentinel Company (Miami), Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Foreign Policy (magazine). Over that same period, China Daily also paid Twitter $295,394.49 for “advertisement expenses.”
The other way to arrive at a conclusion that the 2020 Election was stolen would be to deduce that it was stolen through sheer political legerdemain: using the China virus as a pretext to suddenly and discreetly change long-held voting laws, rules and customs; to take hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations from Democratic Socialist Mark Zuckerberg and spend it on ballot drop boxes, strategically place those drop boxes in precincts populated and run predominantly by Democratic Socialists, and then, amid the confusion and fear of the pandemic, manufacture and overcount those ballots: Biden’s bogus ballots.
Either way, when ESPN’s former resident racist Jemele Hill, (currently an Atlantic contributor and a Twitter twit ‘influencer’, tweeted in yet another recent diatribe about “white supremacy,” that “Record number of black voters show up to save this democracy…,” presumably a reference to the record number of blacks recorded as having voted in the 2020 Presidential Election, was that an accurate statement of fact? How many blacks were actually recorded as having voted for President in 2020 compared with 2016? Moreover, we know that according to FEC, more Americans voted in 2020 than any other time in American history, but how many black Americans, as a proportion of America’s total population, voted in 2020 compared with 2016? and did they alone “save this democracy,” as Hill Tweeted?
To answer this question I shall rely upon two sources, primarily, US Census Bureau and the progressive Limited Liability Company (LLC) Catalist, which describes itself on its website as a “data trust” that keeps tabs on “256 million unique voting-age individuals across all 50 states and the District of Columbia”…to…“build membership, target persuasive messaging, engage activists, drive an issue agenda, and register or mobilize voters.”
So, according to US Census Bureau, the largest turnout in the 2020 Presidential Election among all racial groups was that of non-Hispanic Asians with a 10% increase in voter turnout, from 49% in 2016 to 59% in 2020. For non-Hispanic whites, the difference was a 6% increase over that same time period, for Hispanics, 6%, and for non-Hispanic blacks, 3%. As for Catalist’s data, they found that 63% of blacks voted in 2020 compared with 74% of whites, 62% of Asian American/Pacific Islanders (AAPI), and 50% of Latinos, not exactly a ringing endorsement of Hill’s claim that “Record number of black voters show up to ‘save this democracy.’” The fact is, racists, all of us, the rainbow of humanity that comprises America’s electorate, showed up in 2020 to save our democracy. The question is, did we succeed?
There are two seminal papers that I refer to in this treatment of our 2020 Presidential Election, both, in certain aspects, partisan and mutually contradictory, and in other aspects, intersecting and complementary. The first of these papers is the 86-page “The Navarro Report” written by former President Trump’s Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, Peter Navarro, and the other, Time Magazine’s national political correspondent Molly Ball’s “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”
In his “Report,” Navarro delineated a “two-pronged” strategy which he claims the Democrat Party used to “steal” the 2020 Presidential Election from incumbent Donald John Trump, a strategy targeted specifically at the six “battleground” states Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin, to tip the Election in Joe Biden’s favor. The strategy? Flood those states with “absentee” and “mail-in” ballots while at the same time dramatically limiting those ballots’ verification. To do this, Navarro contends, government officials in the six “swing” states either bent (or broke) their own election laws, a scheme which, in her expose’, Time Magazine’s Ball described, contrarily, and not without a note of triumph, as a “’conspiracy to save’ the 2020 Election.”
Indeed, with respect to what will probably have proven to be one of the most consequential Presidential Elections in US history, whereas Navarro explained the ‘what’—acting as President Trump’s political ‘cut man’, especially through the months pursuant to Saturday, November 7, 2020, the day that the establishment media declared Joe Biden the winner of the Election, to the moment (11:48 am, January 20, 2020) when President Trump and First Lady Melania departed the White House on a one-way trip to Mar-a-Lago amid yet a new political firestorm, the January 6 “white supremacist insurrection” at the US Capitol—Ms. Ball, who one might describe, in retrospect, as working from within the fold of an ascendant Democratic Socialist Democratic Party as a writer for the decidedly “woke” Time Magazine, elucidated, perhaps with even greater insight than Navarro could, ‘how’ the Democratic Socialists stole the 2020 Presidential Election from President Trump.
With one important caveat—the installation of Dominion Voting Systems and Election Securities and Software (ES&S) vote tabulation machines in all six battleground states beginning in March 2017—as Navarro revealed, both authors’ accounts put the beginning of the main thrust of the conspiracy to deny President Trump a second term in office at the same starting point: early in the fourth year of Trump’s first term, March 2020.
That month, seeing the writing on the wall—that President Trump was beginning to pick up steam in his race toward Election Day while the Democratic National Committee spun its wheels, running seventeen candidates, as of December 1, 2019, with not one of them (especially not the marble-mouthed gaffe machine and Washington-establishment shuffler Joe Biden) having the stuff to take on President Trump—a man whom Ball names in her “Secret History” as “The Architect”, Mike Podhorzer, began an all-out personal crusade to stop Trump. Podhorzer, aside from his day job as senior advisor to Richard Trumpka, President of AFL-CIO, also happens to be, in his spare time, co-founder and primary mover behind two progressive, for-profit political enterprises, the Analyst Institute and, as described earlier, Catalist.
Beginning in early March, 2020, as Ball picturesquely reported it, equipped with the Zoom social media platform on a laptop at his kitchen table in his leafy suburban Washington DC apartment, Podhorzer began soliciting every progressive organization and leftist affinity group he could think of that might be willing to join him in his campaign to take down the Orange Man. Over the next nine months, Podhorzer managed to marshal the participation of hundreds of organizations both within and outside of government, from the Sierra Club to Movement for Black Lives. For money, aside from the $400 million delivered through the COVID-19 CARES Act to state Election administrators, Podhorzer appealed to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which managed to secure from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative a handsome $300 million, and former US Congressman Dick Gephardt (D) Mo, as CEO of his lobbying firm Gephardt Group, managed not only to scrape together a tidy $20 million for the cause, but more importantly, successfully elicited the help of his friends among the nation’s progressive political elite; not only “former elected officials, cabinet secretaries, [and] military leaders,” but more importantly, current “secretaries of state, attorneys general, and governors,” establishment heavyweights with both the authority and the want to twist their state’s election laws, temporarily at least, to help defeat President Trump. The Courts could sort it all out later, once The Donald and Melania were securely aloft aboard Airforce One, out of town. “They were not rigging the election,” wrote Ball with regard to Podhorzer and his friends; “they were fortifying it.”
Of course, from Navarro’s perspective, March 2020 stood out for a different reason: On March 16, 2020, Podhorzer Group allies inside the Democratic Socialist William Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School issued a ten-page memorandum titled “How to Protect the 2020 Vote from the Coronavirus.” Addressed to “Interested Parties,” the memo called for, among other things, an option for voters “to cast their ballot[sic] by mail (with multiple submission options),” in order to avoid lines at the polls and exposure to COVID-19.” Apparently, the “interested parties” got their memos:
On August 3, Nevada’s Democrat governor, Steve Sisolak, signed Assembly Bill 4 (AB4) into law, directing his state’s election officials to begin automatically sending mail-in ballots to all the state’s registered voters ahead of the November 3 Presidential Election. The Bill modified Nevada’s election law to permit “’any person’ to return an absentee ballot or mail-in ballot to the county or city clerk on behalf of the voter.” In other words, for the first time in its history, purportedly due to COVID-19, the state of Nevada legalized ballot harvesting. These changes to both Nevada’s election law and to the election laws of other states that adopted similar changes ahead of the 2020 Presidential Election raised serious questions related to “chain-of-custody” of ballots and ballot tampering.
To wit, according to Jesse Binnall, an attorney speaking as an expert witness before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on December 16, 2020:
“On August 3, 2020, after a rushed special session, Nevada legislators made drastic changes to the state’s election law by adopting a bill known as AB 4. The vulnerabilities of this statute were obvious: it provided for universal mail voting without sufficient safeguards to authenticate voters or ensure the fundamental requirement that only one ballot was sent to each legally qualified voter. This was aggravated by election officials’ failure to clean known deficiencies in their voter rolls. Because of AB 4, the number of mail ballots rocketed from about 70,000 in 2016 to over 690,000 this year.”
Mr. Binnall went on to state that:
“The election was inevitably riddled with fraud and our hotline never stopped ringing. While the media and the Democrats accused us of making it all up, our team began chasing down every lead. Our evidence came both from data scientists and brave whistleblowers. Here’s what we found:
• Over 42,000 people voted more than once. Our experts were able to make this determination by reviewing the list of actual voters and comparing it to other voters with the same name, address, and date of birth. This method was also able to catch people using different first name variations, such as William and Bill, and individuals who were registered both under a married name and a maiden name.
• At least 1,500 dead people are recorded as voting, as shown by comparing the list of mail voters with the social security death records.
• More than 19,000 people voted even though they did not live in Nevada; to be clear, this does not include military voters or students. These voters were identified by comparing the lists of voters with the US.
• About 8,000 people voted from non-existent addresses. Here we cross-referenced voters with the Coding Accuracy Support System which allowed our experts to identify undeliverable addresses.
• Over 15,000 votes were cast from commercial or vacant addresses. Our experts found these voters by analyzing official U.S. Postal Service records that flag non-residential addresses and addresses vacant for more than 90 days.
• [] Almost 4,000 non-citizens also voted, as determined by comparing official DMV records of non-citizens to the list of voters in the 2020 election.”
Officially, Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state of Nevada in the 2020 Presidential Election was 33,596 votes.
One state over, in Arizona, where currently a third audit of the results of January’s Presidential Election is underway, Navarro alleged, among other things, that as many as 150,000 ballots were cast by voters who registered to vote after that state’s registration deadline, which became something of a moving target after two “social justice” groups, the George Soros-backed Mi Familia Vota and “black-led” Arizona Coalition for Change, sued the state of Arizona to have its voter registration deadline moved up to October 23 from October 5 due to “COVID restrictions,” only to have the date moved back one week on appeal by Arizona’s Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, to October 15. (Though I have not been able to independently verify Navarro’s “150,000” number, I was at least able to further substantiate that 36,473 non-citizens voted for President in the state of Arizona in 2020 and that another 19,997 absentee ballots were cast from addresses in the state of Arizona where, at the time they were officially counted, the voters named on those ballots did not legally reside, according to state records. The margin of victory for Joe Biden in Arizona was 10,457 votes.
Next, in the state of Wisconsin, where, in 2020, George Soros donated $500,000 to the state’s Democratic Party’s “‘Seg’ Fund,” unelected Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) clerks in Wisconsin’s two most populous counties, Dane and Milwaukee, issued guidance, illegally, to all Wisconsin voters that they should declare themselves “indefinitely confined” due to COVID-19. That was on March 25, eight days after William Brennan Center issued its “Coronavirus” memo, as mentioned earlier. Doing this, Navarro contends, led directly to 216,000 ballots being mailed in and counted in the state of Wisconsin without signature or photo ID verification, as required per WISC. STAT. § 6.86(2)(a), (3)(a). From a report of a full meeting of WEC on May 20, 2020, we can see that according to the Commission’s own findings, the number of Wisconsinites claiming to be “indefinitely confined” at the time of the November 3, 2020 General Election for President of the United States was 194,544 souls, compared with 2019, when only 71,882 Wisconsinites were on record with WEC as being so confined.
Furthermore, Navarro claims in his report (with evidence) that in Wisconsin another 170,000 absentee ballots were counted without legally required absentee ballot applications, here and here, and that due to voting machine “irregularities,” so were another 143,379 ballots in the state of Wisconsin miscalculated. Biden’s margin of victory in the state of Wisconsin: 20,682 votes.
Meanwhile, across the Great Lake in the State of Michigan, the ‘Michigan mud’ was deep in the Autumn of 2020. According to Navarro, here, here, and here, Michigan’s Democratic Party made off with 195,755 votes for Joe Biden by rigging the state’s voting machines, and another 174,384 votes by counting that number of absentee ballots without any legally required, corresponding precinct registration numbers attached to them. As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton revealed in his December 7, 2020 filing in US Supreme Court, (STATE OF TEXAS v. COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, STATE OF GEORGIA, STATE OF MICHIGAN, AND STATE OF WISCONSIN):
[T]he Wayne County Statement of Votes Report lists 174,384 absentee ballots out of 566,694 absentee ballots tabulated (about 30.8%) as counted without a registration number for precincts in the City of Detroit. See Cicchetti Decl. at ¶ 27, App. 8a. The number of votes not tied to a registered voter by itself exceeds Vice President Biden’s margin of 146,007 votes by more than 28,377 votes.
The extra ballots cast most likely resulted from the phenomenon of Wayne County election workers running the same ballots through a tabulator multiple times, with Republican poll watchers obstructed or denied access, and election officials ignoring poll watchers’ challenges, as documented by numerous declarations. App. 25a-51a.
Biden’s potentially purloined margin of victory in Michigan was 154,818 votes.
The way the seagull flies across the horizon, about 163 miles due east of the City of Detroit, lies the rustbelt, blue collar City of Erie, Pennsylvania, where, according to official results, the old political hand puppet, Joe Biden, who hid in his basement in Wilmington, Delaware through most of the winter of 2020, won the Presidential Election in that city by 1,319 votes.
But Navarro contends that as many as 680,774 ballots were illegally counted in the state’s two largest counties, Allegheny and Philadelphia, where ‘square’ Republican Election observers were physically blocked by Pennsylvania Board of Elections vote counters from “meaningfully” viewing incoming [] absentee and mail-in ballots, per Pennsylvania statute 25 P.S. § 3146.8(b). However, this statute, as interpreted on appeal by Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Debra Todd, does not contain the qualifying adverb “meaningfully,” and as Justice Todd stated in her opinion, Pennsylvania State Legislature purposely left ambiguous this clause in the state’s election law in order to give Pennsylvania’s county’s Boards of Elections ample “discretion” in their conduct of elections. As the statute plainly says, “Watchers shall be permitted to be ‘present’ when the envelopes containing official absentee ballots and mail-in ballots are opened and when such ballots are counted and recorded.” Thus, Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the initial ruling by United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania on November 17, 2020, clarifying the definition of the word “present” in the “Watchers” statute to mean “present in the same building.” However, whereas the Court ruled, in this case, based upon the letter of the law, it failed to adequately consider the ‘spirit’ of it. Given the critical role of election observers or “watchers” in establishing credibility and legitimacy in the electoral process, it is paramount that they be given equal access to the ballots in real time, as they are being counted, which, in the State of Pennsylvania, did not happen. To wit, as attested to under oath in Pennsylvania Supreme Court by Trump Campaign designated representative, attorney Jeremy Mercer, acting as an observer at Philadelphia Convention Center on November 3:
1. While he could see the Board employees in the first section of the workspace examining the back of the ballot return envelopes, from his position, he could not read the actual declarations on the ballot envelopes.
2. [Although] he could see employees removing the ballots contained in secrecy envelopes from the return envelopes, and that, when “watching closely,” he could discern if any return envelopes contained naked ballots…he could not see whether there were any markings on the security envelopes themselves.
To this, the Court found that Trump et. al.:
did not establish a violation of Section 3416.8, inasmuch as that statute “provides for no further specific activities for the watchers to observe, and no activities for the watchers to do other than simply ‘be present’.” Instead, the court opined that, under this section, “watchers are not directed to audit ballots or to verify signatures, to verify voter address[es], or to do anything else that would require a watcher to see the writing or markings on the outside of either envelope, including challenging the ballots or ballot signatures.”
Nevertheless, rank and file Republican poll watchers reported from numerous polling stations around Philadelphia on Election Day instances of intimidation and outright denial of access to the ballots.
In the next largest tranche of allegedly purloined votes in the State of Pennsylvania, Navarro claims that 202,337 more votes were cast in that state than there were registered voters, based on an accounting by Pennsylvania State Assemblyman Russ Diamond (R) of all votes cast in the state on November 3. Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania: 81,660 votes.
Incidentally, further substantiating Navarro’s claims of rampant fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election, inadvertently, Time Magazine’s Molly Ball made dubious and, in fact, demonstrably false claims of racial and social justice warriors descending upon Detroit’s TCF [Convention] Center on November 3 to act as a “counterweight” to Republican election observers who Ball claims “[crowded] the vote-counting tables, refusing to wear masks, [and] heckling the mostly Black(sic) workers.” Again, if by “crowding the voting tables,” Ball means attempting to gain equal access to the ballots, then she only proves my point that state-registered Republican election observers (called “challengers”) in the State of Michigan, were in fact denied proper access to those ballots, and as for Ball’s other claims about ‘mask-wearing’ and “heckling,” from the reports here and here that this author saw and heard that day and night, masks were something of an afterthought to the occasion on both sides and all the threats, harassment and heckling were going the other way, from members of leftist Michigan revolutionary groups We the People, Detroit Will Breathe, and Fems for Dems, as TCF Center security guards and Detroit police escorted Republican poll watchers out of the place, effectively depriving them of equal access to the ballots.
Now, proceeding across the country from west to east, we arrive in the “Peach” State, the last of the six battleground states, and to understand what happened there in the 2020 Presidential Election, we must revisit Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race, which Georgia’s then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp won by 54,723 votes out of a total 3,939,328 votes cast on Election Day, November 6 of that year.
In 2018, the race for Governor of Georgia was run primarily by two candidates: Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, and former Georgia House Minority Leader, Democrat, Stacey Abrams. A third candidate for Georgia’s Governorship, Libertarian Ted Metz, finished in a far distant, and ultimately inconsequential, third place, winning only 37,235 votes.
Though much has been made of Georgia’s 2018 Gubernatorial Election in establishment media since then, it may interest you to know a little of the background of each of the candidates, Kemp and Abrams, some of which may surprise you.
First, the current Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp:
As mentioned earlier, Kemp entered the race for Governor of Georgia as that state’s Secretary of State, which, as the man responsible for the conduct of Georgia’s elections, is something that generated much of the controversy surrounding his election to the Governorship; an alleged ‘conflict of interest,’ if you will, which I will come to in a moment. But let us look a bit further back in time. Prior to being appointed Secretary of State of Georgia by then-Governor Sonny Perdue in 2010, when then-Secretary of State Karen Handel resigned from the position to run, unsuccessfully, for Governor, Kemp served as a state senator representing Georgia’s 46th Senatorial District, comprised of Clarke, Oconee, and Walton Counties in Georgia’s north-central region, just east of Atlanta; and prior to all of that, Kemp earned a living mainly in home construction and development, amassing a net worth of over $5 million.
In a manner of speaking, Governor Kemp is the stereotypical white, southern gentleman: soft-spoken, healthy, hard-working, well-tanned, and successful, with a large family tree deeply rooted, purportedly, in Georgian culture and history going back to the Habersham family, after whom Georgia’s Habersham County was named, along with countless less significant landmarks about the State of Georgia. However, this author could not independently verify Kemp’s connection with the Habershams, and therefore concludes about the man that although he may not have in fact descended from “Southern Royalty,” Governor Brian Porter Kemp exemplifies, by all appearances, Southern Republican establishment.
At the other extreme, Governor Kemp’s Democrat opponent in the 2018 Georgia Governor’s race, Stacey Yvonne Abrams, was, at the time of her run for the Governorship of the State of Georgia, no stranger to Georgia politics, having served up to that point as a State Representative for Georgia’s 89th District in DeKalb County, Southwestern Atlanta, beginning in 2007.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1973 to working-class parents, Abrams moved with her family to Gulfport, Mississippi, and then to Atlanta, where both parents attended United Methodist Candler School of Theology at Emory University. A gifted student, Abrams spent her summer break between High School and college in a Telluride Association Summer Program (TASP), hobnobbing with some of the nation’s best and brightest youth while honing her skills in politics, after which, she graduated with valedictorian honors from the Atlanta “magnet school” Avondale High in DeKalb County, Georgia. After that, Abrams went on to Spelman College, a private, historically black women’s liberal arts college, also located in Atlanta, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in interdisciplinary studies (political science, economics, and sociology). After earning her B.A. at Spelman, Abrams earned a Master of Public Affairs degree at University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, and then, in 1999, a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. Wow! That is impressive!
After graduating from Yale, Abrams found work as a tax attorney at the Atlanta law firm Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan, and in 2002, then-Mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, appointed her to the position of Deputy City Attorney. Beyond her remarkable academic achievements and her illustrious career in politics, as if not already impressive enough, in her spare time as a member of Georgia’s House of Representatives, in 2014 Abrams served as Senior Vice President of the Atlanta-based financial services firm NOW and is even the author of a number of “romance” novels of varying repute.
All told, Stacey Abrams is the product, obviously, of her own personal drive and genius, but also of dedicated parents and the preening guidance of pedagogues specially dedicated to the advancement of black youth. In a way, by sheer luck perhaps, Abrams got sucked into and through the ‘school-to-prominence’ pipeline as opposed to the oft heard-of “school-to-prison pipeline” so often cited by racial justice advocates, producing the conceited, entitled, race-proud woman Stacey Abrams is today. As for Abrams’s failed 2018 candidacy for the Office of Governor of Georgia and her continued insistence that the election was rigged, I can understand, based on precedent, why she might believe that. Whereas in 2010, then-Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel resigned her position to run (unsuccessfully) for the Governorship of Georgia, candidate Kemp did not. What does Georgia election law say about that? Does Georgia law require that a candidate for Governor who currently holds the Office of Secretary of State, which oversees Georgia’s elections, first vacate that office, as former Georgia Secretary of State Handel did?
No, it does not. Although Georgia’s “Resign-to-Run” law, Article II, § II, ¶ IV, states, narrowly, that “[t]he office of any state, county, or municipal elected official shall be declared vacant upon such elected official qualifying (for another office) if the term of the office for which such official is qualifying for begins more than 30 days prior to the expiration of such official’s present term of office, this point was not in dispute with regard to then-Secretary of State Kemp’s 2018 run for Governor. However, it is easy to see how a Secretary of State running for Governor, insofar as it is his office that is responsible for overseeing the conduct of his own state’s elections might be perceived as having a conflict of interest, of potentially, at least, leveraging his position to steer the election in his favor, and in Georgia’s 2018 Gubernatorial Election, Abrams wasted no time hanging that sign around the neck of Georgia’s then-Secretary of State, Brian Kemp.
Georgia’s “Exact Match” Controversy:
According to Abrams and her camp, which included what had become by 2018 (two years into Donald Trump’s presidency) a virulently anti-conservative, hyperbolic and dissembling national propaganda mill, “exact match,” referred to a July 2017 amendment to Georgia’s election law titled HB268,“AN ACT to amend Chapter 2 of Title 21 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to elections and primaries generally…” The amendment required simply that the signatures on voter registration forms match those on other official documents in the possession of the State such as voters’ driver license records and social security numbers; not a big ask. Nevertheless, exponents of “Voter ID” laws generally, including Abrams’s own minority voter registration initiative, the New Georgia Project, filed a lawsuit on October 11, 2018 in Georgia’s 11th Circuit Court against then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp alleging, based upon data from US Census Bureau’s 2016 American Community Survey showing that a larger percentage of Georgia’s nonwhite residents than white residents live in poverty, are less well-educated and are less proficient in their use of the English language, that HB268 disproportionately disenfranchised “electors of color.”
The lawsuit, brought under the auspices of Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, et al., also relied on testimony from University of Florida Associate Professor Michael McDonald showing that Asian and Latino voters in the State of Georgia were disproportionately more likely than whites to be flagged by Georgia’s computerized voter registration system, “Enet,” as non-citizens.
On November 2, 2018, four days before Georgians went to the polls to vote for their next Governor, US District Judge Eleanor L. Ross ruled for the plaintiffs, but only with regard to the second part of their case, what Ross determined to be an unfair burden placed on some of Georgia’s racial minorities to prove citizenship. As for the first part, (the plaintiffs’ claim that aside from questions of citizenship, nonwhite Georgians were unfairly burdened by HB 268 to verify their identity), Ross merely reiterated protocols under the statute which she found afforded those voters sufficient remedy. On November 6, 2018, Georgia Secretary of State Kemp got a promotion, but his election to Georgia’s Governorship marked the beginning of a new career path for his opponent, Stacey Abrams, as well: professional political spoiler.
The reader will have noticed that up to this point in my investigation into the 2020 Presidential Election, and in particular, into former Trump advisor Peter Navarro’s “The Navarro Report,” I have focused primarily upon the outcomes of the Election in the six “battleground” states, and even more particularly, (in order to avoid rewriting Navarro’s “Report” in its entirety), upon the tranches of votes in those states in excess of 100,000 which Navarro claims were fraudulently cast or recorded.
To wit, Navarro claims (with citations) that in the State of Georgia, 305,701 absentee ballots were illegally cast, “either before or after the statutory deadline,” and that another 136,155 ballots were falsified using corrupted voting machines, and although I was able to verify, based on Navarro’s citations, most of his claims in the first instance, here, the specific source Navarro names as evidence of his “statutory deadline” claim, “Exhibit 3,” described in said petition as “attached hereto and incorporated by reference,” is nowhere to be found, neither in the petition, nor anywhere else on the internet where I endeavored to recover it. Also, this author’s attempt to find an email address where I could raise the discrepancy with Mr. Navarro directly proved frustratingly fruitless. I was similarly unable to verify Navarro’s “voting machine” claim. (That link led to a map in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showing where to find absentee ballot drop boxes in and around the City of Atlanta. Not much help there.)
Still, unable to simply dismiss Navarro’s outrageous claims of election fraud in Georgia, I sought to at least determine whether those claims could be true. Recalling from various news reports of a “secret settlement” between Abrams and Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger to ease voter ID requirements for absentee voters ahead of the 2020 Presidential Election, here, and that due to the pandemic six times as many Georgians voted in the 2020 Presidential Election by absentee ballot than in 2016, I must conclude that without access to “Exhibit 3” as evidence, while it is at least plausible that Navarro is correct that 305,701 Georgians out of a total of 1,320,154 such voters whose absentee ballots were “returned and accepted” by Georgia election officials voted illegally in the 2020 Presidential Election, I am unable to prove it, and in any event, the petition at issue here, submitted to Georgia Superior Court on December 4, 2020, was withdrawn a month later, on January 7, by counsel for the President, Kurt R. Hilbert, one day after Congress certified Joe Robinette Biden the nation’s 46th President amid a much ballyhooed “assault” on the US Capitol by angry Trump supporters.
As for Navarro’s claim of “voter machine irregularities” in the state of Georgia and elsewhere, on Friday, May 21, Georgia’s Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero agreed to a forensic audit of 145,000 absentee ballots accepted by Fulton County election officials amid a slew of lawsuits by Republicans alleging various forms of election fraud having to do with both alleged illegal mail-in voting and misuse of Dominion vote tabulating machines, including electronic vote switching and duplicate scanning of ballots. Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia? 11,779 votes.
On Jan 20, 2021, at 11:49 AM, former Vice President, 78 year old Joseph Robinette Biden, was sworn in as the nation’s 46th President, unbelievably, with 81,281,888 votes, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC), winning, incredibly, more votes than any other President-Elect in American history, and, evidently, more votes than there were registered voters in some states, all while hiding out in his basement in Wilmington, Delaware. Meanwhile, the incumbent President, Donald John Trump, won 74,223,251 votes, a number also previously unmatched in American Presidential Election history, and all amid the deadliest pandemic in American history since the so called “Spanish Flu” of 1918, and amid the worst civil unrest in sixty years. For supporters of Donald Trump, based on what they were seeing, those numbers simply did not add up, and on January 6, 2020, a group of about a thousand ground-down yet determined Americans, mainly Trump supporters, overran the US Capitol Complex; the big, white, rectangular building with lots of windows and a giant, white dome on top; the place referred to in quaint political jargon as “the People’s House.”
The “Insurrection”
So, on January 6, 2020, the day Congress was set to certify the votes of the nation’s Electoral College, officially naming Joseph Robinette Biden President of the United States of America, then-President Trump delivered a speech to a crowd of “hundreds of thousands” of his supporters, gathered together on the Ellipse, which is basically a field measuring about 52 acres in diameter situated between the White House and the National Mall.
It was a cold, grey, blustery day in “the swamp” that day, with temperatures hovering in the low forties beneath a low ceiling of bruised and sullen storm clouds laying in from the Atlantic. The vast majority of the people who had come to see President Trump speak, many of whom had been waiting around on those cold, rain-soaked grounds for days, remained peaceable, even affable throughout the President’s speech, which lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. About twenty minutes before the President concluded his speech on the Ellipse, at 12:53 PM, in something of a real-life rendition of “Beavis and Butthead Do America,” about a thousand down-and-out American citizens began to push their way past metal barricades manned by Capitol Police into the Capitol Complex. From footage of video available online it can be seen that while a small minority of those who breached the Capitol Complex did so violently, many others could be seen being waved into the building by Capitol Police, walking calmly through the building’s corridors, with a few of those even cooperating with police to help maintain order inside the place.
Though technically an “insurrection,” the breach of the Capitol Complex on January 6 was a mostly disorganized, spontaneous, and all-in-all respectful effort by a lot of mostly poor, white, slightly bewildered, forgotten Americans to steal a look inside of a place that they had only ever seen prior to that day in television footage and in pictures in magazines: the ‘big white building with lots of windows in it and a giant white dome on top. Their “House.” The “People’s House.”
What little we have been allowed to know of those people on that day who breached the Capitol Complex is that Ashley Babbit, an unarmed Navy veteran and Trump supporter, was shot dead by a dark figure emerging briefly like a phantom from a doorway and then retreating into oblivion, never to be seen again; that the guy in a MAGA hat who copped a seat and kicked his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk has been released pending trial; that the tall, funny guy wearing red, white and blue face paint, Viking horns and fur pelts remains stuck in solitary confinement in a DC jail awaiting something; and that a mysterious hooded figure who planted pipe bombs outside the headquarters of both the Republican and Democratic National Committee offices in Washington, DC on the eve of January 6 remains at large.
Also, we know there were a number of run-of-the-mill agitators and possibly a handful of professional agents provocateur ( a matter which I will come to later) in the crowd both outside and inside the Capitol Complex the day of the “insurrection”—a smattering of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, and a brown-looking Black Lives Matter hang-around named John Earle Sullivan, a neurotic 26-year-old, washed-out former tryout for the US Olympic speedskating team who came to the Capitol intent on “fucking shit up.” At one point, according to government transcripts, Sullivan can be heard saying in his own recording of the riot that day, “I brought my megaphone to instigate shit. I’m gonna make these Trump supporters fuck all this shit up. I have it all, I have everything, everything on camera….and I mean everything. Trust me when I say my footage is worth like a million of dollars, millions of dollars. I’m holding on to that shit.”
According to court records, here and here, Sullivan sold the rights to his photojournalism from the Capitol Hill riot to CNN, NBC and others for a total profit of $90,875. On April 29, 2021, upon issuance of warrant and based upon the legal principle that the “[money] would not have been obtained [by Sullivan] but for the underlying violation of law” [that Sullivan committed], the government seized Sullivan’s bank accounts, retrieving what was left of his ill-gotten gain: $62,813.76. Sullivan remains free on bond pending trial.
So far, according to Insider.com, May 21, 2021, FBI has charged 532 Americans with crimes related to the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, none of which include the crime of “insurrection.” An untold number of “insurrectionists” remain at large.
Now, thanks to some interesting investigative reportage from Revolver.com recently, those who may feel inclined to do so may amuse themselves with the idea that the January 6 insurrection was actually planned and directed by individuals named in US District Court in DC only as “unindicted co-conspirators,” individuals so named because they were actually FBI agents (Undercover Employees) and their Confidential Human Sources (paid informants). And here is the interesting part: According to Revolver, the method of operation (M.O.) used by the January 6 insurrectionists was the same as that used to “foil” the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, “Big Gretch,” back in October 2020, just under a month prior to the November 3 Presidential Election: Scour obscure right-wing social media for chatter among some clique of half-baked, back-woods weekend warriors—Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, whomever—seed the group with FBI Undercover Employees (UCE) and their Confidential Human Sources (CHS), who then plan, organize, and activate some hair-brained, highly illegal conspiracy; then, once that conspiracy has been “foiled,” arrest the patsies and shut them all up in Federal Prison and recycle the infiltrators; that is, send the professionals back to their desk jobs and let their informants recede quietly from the netherworld of FBI wet work, back into their usual routines in civil society. Rinse and repeat.
A Parting Impeachment
On Wednesday, January 13, 2021, one week prior to the nation’s “transition of power” from Trump to the utterly corrupt and half-senile Joe Biden, in a darkly comical parting kick in the ass out of the White House of President Trump and Family, the eternally Trump-hating Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and fellow Congressional Democratic Socialists issued yet another impeachment of the former President on one count of “incitement of insurrection,” attempting, laughably, to tie him, based upon a bunch of nothing, to the January 6 Capitol Hill riot.
The Democrats’ idea was to bamboozle the public into thinking that because President Trump publicly contested the validity of the outcome of the corrupt 2020 Presidential Election and used the word “fight” in his speech on the Ellipse on January 6, that caused directly (and intentionally) the insurrection on Capitol Hill that led to the deaths of no one except one unarmed insurrectionist, a Navy veteran named Ashli Babbit. (Though culpability for the shooting death of Babbit remains unresolved, available video evidence points convincingly to a Democrat deep-state coverup.)
In any event, former President Trump’s legal team, led by attorneys David Schoen and Bruce L. Castor Jr., made quick work of Democrats’ ridiculous charge of “incitement.” Not only is it unconstitutional to impeach a former President, as DonaldTrump was at the time Congress got around to parading across the Capitol rotunda to the Senate its sole impeachment charge, on January 25, 2021, five days after President Trump and First Lady Melania had left the White House for Mar-a-Lago, but as any first-year, paper-chasing law school student could tell you, a charge of “incitement” requires a whole lot more of a public figure than merely using the word “fight” in a political speech. (See Brandenburg v. Ohio “Imminent Lawless Action.”)
Pelosi’s ‘Third Impeachment’: The “January 6 Commission”
Introduced on the House floor on May 14, 2021 by US Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D), Mississippi, H.R.3233, “National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex Act” was intended to establish a “Commission” “[t]o investigate and report upon the facts and causes relating to the January 6, 2021 ‘domestic terrorist’ attack upon the United States Capitol Complex.”
What leaps from the page, here, I think, is the label “domestic terrorist attack.” Yes, there was a small group of Americans who, on January 6, 2021, did “attack” the big white building with lots of windows in it and a big white dome on top, and they broke some windows, and one of them was shot dead attempting to climb through one of those broken windows. But not even those people could in any seriousness be described as “terrorists” like the ones who piloted commercial jet airliners into the World Trade Center in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, instantly incinerating 2,606 Americans. Insurrectionists? Well, from a certain angle, sure, okay, but terrorists? Give me a break. Not even close. As mentioned earlier, the vast majority of those who entered the Capitol Complex on January 6 were waved into the place by Capitol Police, and once inside, comported themselves, for the most part, as seen in video coverage of the event, far more like tourists—well alright, maybe like head bangers at a Motley Crue concert—than like terrorists. What the Washington political elitists who are pushing the January 6 Commission simply cannot get over is the fact that just for a moment in a day America’s effluent dared without permission to touch the same marble floors they themselves walk upon, the floors of the “People’s House.”
What made H.R.3233 yet another referendum on former President Donald Trump and the 74 million Americans who voted for him in 2020 and American conservativism generally, is that first, it pointedly ignored all of the rioting and looting that occurred over the eight months leading up to January 6, instigated and perpetrated by Black Lives Matter Bolsheviks and Antifa anarchists and cheered on by Democratic Socialist politicians at the highest levels of US federal government, including current Vice President Kamala Harris, who advocated openly for those committing that violence, saying, remember, in a John Colbert interview back in June, 2020, “They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that on both levels. They’re not going to let up and they should not, and we should not.”
Recall that Harris even went to her Twitter account to openly advocate giving money to Minnesota Freedom Fund, an organization set up to help spring rioters out of jail in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd, here.
Second, as long as H.R.3233 remained alive, in order to prevent the return of “45” as “47” in 2024, Nancy Pelosi and the national progressive media establishment would make sure to keep Donald J Trump, his supporters, and American conservativism/nationalism at the forefront of the Commission’s investigation well into the 2022 midterm election season. Fortunately, on May 28, US Senate Democrats failed in a voice vote to obtain the sixty votes needed to pass H.R.3233.)
Epilogue: The Role of Progressive Mass Media and Big Tech in the Outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election, and a Nasty Little Development in the Southern District of New York.
It cannot be overstated the impact that Big Tech social media platforms Facebook and Twitter had on the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election. I find it astonishing, as someone who has never had a Facebook or Twitter account, just how persuasive these companies appear to have been in manipulating public opinion and political action right up to Election Day, November 3, 2020.
First, as a September 2019 Pew Research Center investigation revealed, here, “more Americans get news on social media than from print newspapers,” and among digital social media companies, Facebook continues to carry the most water for the progressive establishment media, with 43% of Americans getting their news from that site, the report said.
More astonishing is the power these social media companies have in controlling political narratives by baldly promoting progressive, and even radically anti-American Marxist-Leninist propaganda while suppressing the voices of pro-American conservatives. Long before Twitter and Facebook decided to ban President Trump from their platforms in the days immediately following January 6, they began red-flagging or “demoting” posts (not only the President’s) that failed to advance those companies’ Democratic Socialist political agendas. It seems somehow otherworldly that America’s two largest social media companies would ban permanently from their platforms Donald John Trump, one of the most popular Presidents in American history, with over a hundred million social media followers, while continuing to give an open forum to the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who routinely preaches the destruction of Israel and “Death to America!” here; and to China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping, who, remember, knowingly allowed jet airliners loaded with passengers infected with the deadliest plague since the 1918 Spanish Flu to fly abroad from Wuhan, China, while at the same time freezing flights out of that city to destinations inside China. Really amazing!
And because Facebook and Twitter are private companies, they are immune from First Amendment controls on censorship, and so are they immune, or at least sufficiently insulated from government oversight, that when in January those companies teamed up with Google, Apple, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to crush Parler, an emerging, self-described “free-speech” social media alternative, US Department of Justice said nothing. Parler sued AWS on January 11 in US District Court in Seattle, Washington on grounds that it violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which seeks to prevent large companies from constraining unfairly smaller firms’ participation in the “free market,” but less than two months later, Parler acquiesced, opting instead to sue for simple breach of contract, and when a Federal judge, Barbara Jacobs Rothstein, dismissed that case, here, caving to peer pressure from Google and Apple, Parler agreed to ratchet up restrictions on free speech, here, and resurfaced on the server of a different web hosting company, California-based SkySilk.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the universe of American mass media, whereas it is no secret that going back at least a generation, America’s news industry has taken a decidedly leftward slant, as illustrated here, since the death of George Floyd and his subsequent deification, and the resurrection of Black Lives Matter and the election of the left’s marionette President, Joe Biden, most of the nation’s media—news, film, and professional sportscasting—has slidden off a cliff of leftist utopianism.
Though roughly half of the country remains ideologically solidly conservative, if anything, the 2020 Presidential Election only deepened the divide between the country’s left and right. In the months leading up to the Election, all elements of progressive mass media, from big, East Coast News media giants CNN, MSNBC, NPR, to West Coast celebrity pundits and NBA stars in Xi Jinping’s back pocket who simply could not get enough of themselves, all fell in together, especially in the final days of the Election, to slam the Donald. Still, all the dissembling and loud talk from the left could not turn Trump’s conservative base. It would take a Chinese superbug and a subversive network of Democratic Socialists with the determination and skill to make the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic work for them to steal the Election from Donald Trump.
And now, even as former President Trump has begun to set the groundwork for a possible return to the Presidency in 2024, like the deep-state trolls who tried to take him down during the four years of his first term in office, alas, a new anti-Trump cabal has risen to the fore: the combination of New York State Attorney General Laticia James and District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.
What had begun in November 2016 as a cry from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton for Trump’s tax returns has been carefully and persistently cultivated over the four years that were his presidency into a special grand jury probe in the Southern District of New York State into the former President’s business enterprise, Trump Organization.
Although it has become customary, since the day then-President Richard M Nixon famously proclaimed his innocence with regard to his tax returns in a November 1973 press conference, saying “I am not a crook,” to this day, candidates for the Office of President of the United States are not legally required to release them. In fact, to compel presidential candidates to release their tax records would violate their right to privacy under 26 U.S. Code § 6103, Confidentiality and Disclosure of Returns and Return Information. However, this law did not prevent Vance and James from using Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns as a pretext for launching a full criminal investigation of Donald Trump, his sprawling business empire, and its principals.
A year before President Trump’s former attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen began blabbing to a House Oversight Committee on February 27, 2019 about the intimate details of his business relationship with his former client, citizen Donald Trump, regarding non-disclosure agreements with former porn stars Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal and some fanciful notion of building Trump Tower, Moscow, based on a pledge to ‘get Trump’, New York City Public Advocate (President of the City Council) Laticia James launched her campaign to become New York State Attorney General.
In a bold pronouncement reminiscent of Stalinist-Era show trials, James began in February 2017, long before being elected NYAG, opining publicly that Trump was an “illegitimate” President, that “[h]e (Trump) should be charged with obstructing justice, []that he can be indicted for criminal offenses,” promising to “join law enforcement and other attorneys general across this nation in removing [President Trump] from office,” and proclaiming “[it’s] important that everyone understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end.” And the state’s star witness in former President Trump’s prosecution? Convicted pathological liar and Trump arch nemesis, Michael Cohen, here and here.
Witness for the Defense,
James Thomas Lukasavage
Ithaca Crow’s Nest (ithacacrowsnest.com)