The challenge before our nation is fairly simple. What is the truth? How do we make a fair determination of fact? Apparently, this is now something we can no longer do. As a nation, as a collection of individuals, we can’t seem to make a clear decision. One person says “Red”, another says “Blue” and we are at an impasse. The correctness of one declaration versus the other can not be made.
It comes down to who said what. Is the “Red” person a political ally, or is it the “Blue?” What is the “agenda” of Red-man vs the agenda of Blue-woman? We can’t trust expert sources. We can’t figure out the difference. The declaration is entirely a matter of opinion and opinions vary. Any opinion is as good as any other opinion. Round and round we go, where we stop nobody knows.
The scariest words in the world are now — I did my own research.
We are dealing with a generation that does not know how to do basic. critical. thinking.
We know who we're dealing with:
“Hunter Biden hasn't been arrested.” Uh, yeah. For what exactly? Seriously, what would be the charges — making a good living? Shakes head.
Here's the case in point: The debate over the classified documents retained by Trump in the basement of Mar-A-Lago.
The DOJ executed a search warrant to reclaim 11 boxes of documents, after previously taking 15 boxes from the property which contained hundreds of pages of classified material.
The Left says that this was a completely reasonable search warrant for national security material, the Right says this was a political attack and assault on Trump’s home for his personal property which he had already declared “declassified.”
Which is it? How can we tell? What is the political agenda of the people making the claim? You know you can't ever trust anything the Left says, and you can believe anything the Right says.
When those on the Left argue that this couldn't have possibly been “Trump’s property” they get ignored. They can go to the Presidential Records Act and point out that all presidential records become the physical property of the National Archives once that person leaves office but it doesn't matter.
(2) The term "Presidential records" means documentary materials, or any reasonably segregable portion thereof, created or received by the President, the President’s immediate staff, or a unit or individual of the Executive Office of the President whose function is to advise or assist the President, in the course of conducting activities which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.
(A) includes any documentary materials relating to the political activities of the President or members of the President’s staff, but only if such activities relate to or have a direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President; but
(B) does not include any documentary materials that are (i) official records of an agency (as defined in section 552(e) of title 5, United States Code; (ii) personal records; (iii) stocks of publications and stationery; or (iv) extra copies of documents produced only for convenience of reference, when such copies are clearly so identified.
[...]
(4) The term "Archivist" means the Archivist of the United States.
(5) The term "former President", when used with respect to Presidential records, means the former President during whose term or terms of office such Presidential records were created.
§ 2202. Ownership of Presidential records
The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records; and such records shall be administered in accordance with the provisions of this chapter.
[...]
(f) During a President’s term of office, the Archivist may maintain and preserve Presidential records on behalf of the President, including records in digital or electronic form. The President shall remain exclusively responsible for custody, control and access to such Presidential records. The Archivist may not disclose any such records, except under direction of the President, until the conclusion of a President’s term of office, if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, or such other period provided for under section 2204 of this title.
(g)(1) Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President. The Archivist shall have an affirmative duty to make such records available to the public as rapidly and completely as possible consistent with the provisions of this chapter.
So that should determine it right? The documents were legally the property of the archives. Period. It's possible for the archives to loan copies to a former President — as it has done with the Obama Library — but those documents are still handled and managed by the Archive.
The Left says any classified documents being removed from their proper secure storage is a crime, the Right says that Trump had already declassified all of these documents whenever he removed them from the oval office.
Specifically, Trump issued a tweet that stated that he was declassifying all of the documents associated with the Hillary Clinton and Russia investigations.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he has declassified all documents related to federal investigations into Russian election interference and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for government emails.
“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
So the documents that Trump kept in his basement were part of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into his 2016 campaign and Russian election interference? This information is supposed to “exonerate” Trump? If that's the case - why didn't he release it publically? We didn’t he give all those documents to Fox News and the New York Post? Apparently, Julian Assange of now off the market for "Whistle Blowing.” Trust me, Donald Trump is not fucking Daniel Ellsberg.
And yet, didn’t he already proclaim that Mueller had given him “Total exoneration” already? (Even though Mueller actually said he was specifically “Not Exonerated?” and then Bill Barr lied about that.)
A federal judge excoriated Attorney General Bill Barr on Thursday for distorting the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller during his investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In a stinging 23-page opinion, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said Barr’s efforts to spin the report before its public release last year raised serious doubts about whether the Justice Department faithfully applied the law when deleting certain information from the publicly disclosed version.
“The Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report,” wrote Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
“The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller Report that conflict with those statements cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary,” the judge added.
He's the thing, there is a specific process by which items are declassified which starts with an Executive Order.
The President has the authority to declassify documents in the public interest that originated in any department or agency of the executive branch. A recent example is Executive Order 14040, Declassification Reviews of Certain Documents Concerning the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on September 3, 2021. This executive order directed government departments and agencies that originated records pertaining to September 11 to conduct declassification reviews to disclose as much of this material as possible in the public interest
So Donald, where's the executive order that documents that you “declassified" these records? Bueller? Bueller…?
Also, when something is declassified, the agency which generated the information has to do a review and approval for that declassification. Once that review is complete, the documents which all contain markings of their current classification have to be re-marked to indicate that their former classification is no longer valid, it is then dated and stamped by the original classifying agency.
As I’ve previously noted you can see on James Comey's personal notes that each page has a classification marking and that those markings have been changed as a result of being declassified.
There is also the fact that the president can not declassify Nuclear Secrets which had been classified by Congress, not by executive order.
Where is the documented declassification trail? If these documents were all declassified, all of their markings should have been changed — but the DOJ has already announced that they were still marked “Confidential”, “Top Secret" and “TS/SCI.” Whoops.
So we should have a consensus here, right? We should have a determination that the search warrant was absolutely legal and justified. The documents were in fact still classified. We should have a factual consensus that Trump and potentially others, need to be prosecuted for these crimes.
But of course, no we don’t. You can tell that by just how confused Joe Rogan here is about this subject and his CIA buddy is not much help since he's a bit CT himself and gets the issue about "personal correspondence" totally wrong (although he does get the bit about the classification process correct.)
Instead of clarity, we have Lindsay Graham threatening “riots in the streets” if Trump gets indicted because years ago Hillary Clinton wasn't.
The Right says that Trump was a “classification authority" and that he gets to put classified documents anywhere he wants including his basement. The Left (if they’re smart) points out that that authority expired when Trump left the White House and that while she was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had the exact same declassification authority.
But that's not really the deciding fact. Clinton didn’t personally grab a stack of documents and take them home, then put them in her basement. She had an email server in her basement - which was allowed by government rules. Colin Powell used AOL as his email. So did Mike Pence. Jared Kushner. Ivanka, Steve Bannon, Jason Miller, KT Mcfarland and Reince Preibus all had their own private email while working in the White House. She didn't place the allegedly classified documents in her email, they were actually sent to her by her staff as a part of doing her job — and most of them were wrongly marked as “classified” when they were not.
Some classification markings found in email messages on Hillary Clinton's private server were the result of "human error" and the related information was not considered classified at the time it was sent to her, State Department spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday.
When FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday that investigators were not recommending any charges in the Clinton email matter, he noted that "a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information."
[...]
At a regular briefing for reporters Wednesday, Kirby said State is aware of two instances in the set of roughly 30,000 messages turned over to the agency by Clinton where classification markings appeared in the emails. However, he said those were mistakes where staff failed to remove the notations while preparing background and talking points for Clinton in a planned phone call with a foreign official.
"It appears that those...that those markings were a human error. They didn’t need to be there. Because once the secretary had decided to make the call, the process is then to move the call sheet, to change its markings to unclassified and deliver it to the secretary in a form that he or she can use," Kirby said. "And best we can tell on these occasions, the markings — the confidential markings — was simply human error. Because the decision had already been made, they didn’t need to be made on the email."
Hillary had four documents marked “Confidential” out of 30,000 emails that she provided to the State Dept, and three of those four were wrongly marked. So there was only one legitimately “classified" document in her emails. ONE. The FBI found that this was not part of any “systematic plan" it was merely incidental and accidental. On the other hand, Trump collecting hundreds of classified documents and squirreling them away in the basement was absolutely deliberate and part of some kind of weird, wacky plan.
But again, that's not what the Right believes. That's not what they know even though it's written in English, it was part of Comey's testimony on why he didn't charge Clinton — which was delivered to Linday Graham's committee.
Graham questioned Comey during that testimony. He asked about whether Anthony Weiner should be prosecuted for having classified information in his email — which he didn’t — but he didn't even mention the decision to not prosecute Clinton.
The Right still thinks Hillary Clinton should go to jail. They think Hunter Biden should go to jail for something or the other. LAPTOP! They think the classified information in her email — which wasn’t really classified — was her fault when she was the recipient, not the sender. They think having your own server is a crime, even though Jared and Ivanka and Steve and Reince and KT and Jason did the exact same thing.
And that is exactly why what Lindsay Graham said is absolutely true. Some have said it was a “warning”, others have argued that it was a “threat” - but what it truly was — is a confession.
Because ideology and political allegiance matter more than truth, and it matters more than facts — despite the fact that issuing a search warrant for Anthony Weiner’s emails 11 days before the election in violation of DOJ rules is exactly what decimated Hillary Clinton's campaign, despite the OLC not allowing for Trump to be indicted while he sat in the White House, despite Rod Rosenstein blocking Mueller from doing a counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, despite Bill Barr lying about the conclusions of the Mueller report and blocking Trump's indictment for obstruction, despite all the times the DOJ and FBI threw themselves on the hand grenade to protect Trump — the Right believes that the FBI has relentlessly and viciously pursued Trump for partisan reasons, and if he is finally indicted for his crimes — they will not have it.
They will — trapped within the bubble of their own deluded perception — lash out and attack. There will be riots. There will be violence directed at the FBI. It's already happened with the attack on the FBI's Cincinnati Field Office.
There are already riots going on in our states houses with restrictive voter suppression laws, anti-LGBTQ legislation such as “Don't say Gay”, assaults on teachers with crazed anti-CRT and anti-Woke bills where teachers can be sued for teaching the truth with dozens of books being banned, people being told to teach that “Slavery wasn't so bad", and that there is no wall separating Church and State. There is a massive partisan disinformation effort taking place across the nation right now, and it's ugly.
Graham isn't stoking the fire, he's just admitting that there's already smoke in the air. Graham is admitting that the American Right is a cowardly, ignorant, violent lot.
The attackers will be Proud Boys. It will be III Percenters. It will be Oath Keepers. It will be Boogaloo Bois — who are already responsible for violence and murders perpetrated during the Floyd riots.
SAN FRANCISCO — A former U.S. Air Force staff sergeant and alleged member of the "boogaloo" extremist movement pleaded guilty Friday in the fatal shooting of a federal security officer in the San Francisco Bay Area amid large 2020 protests against police brutality.
Steven Carrillo, 33, changed his plea to guilty to a federal murder charge in the killing of David Patrick Underwood and to the attempted murder of Underwood's colleague after federal prosecutors last month agreed not to seek the death penalty.
The men were shot on May 29, 2020, while they stood in front of a federal building in Oakland as hundreds marched on the streets.
We will have middle-aged weekend warriors in a state of rage attacking anyone they think is an easy target, they will show up at Pride protests, Women's marches and anti-Police violence rallies. Again.
If Trump is indicted, they will lash out. They will act out. They will seek easy targets, they will exact vengeance. Just as it did on January 6. It wasn't Antifa climbing the scaffolding at the Capitol. It wasn't BLM in disguise. It wasn't a pack of FBI Informants.
It was exactly who it looked like. And thousands of them are still at large.
Lindsay Graham did say something true. He admitted it better than Biden did when he said the Ultra-Maga were "Semi-Fascist." They are in agreement. But Kurt Bardella said it best: They are a “Domestic Terrorist Cell."
"Let's be clear. The Republican Party, the MAGA Republicans are a domestic terrorist cell operating in America," said Bardella. "This is a group of people who have decided that it is acceptable to use violence and threats of violence to try to achieve their political means. That it's okay to threaten law enforcement to stop them from doing their job and anytime you have people dedicated to using violent rhetoric, to incite violence against other people — that's terrorism. That's what we're seeing from the Republican Party."
Christina Greer, associate professor at Fordham University, agreed with the assessment, saying that President Joe Biden is finally realizing that the far-right groups are domestic terrorists and that it's his responsibility to call it like it is.
All because they can't determine what the truth is, they can't identify a “fact.” They can't think clearly. They can't make a reasonable decision. Determining truth is a practiced skill, you can't just take anyone’s word for it. You have to question the statements, research the origin of any particular claim then contrast the validity of all of the sources of each argument. Question. Compare. Contrast. Decide.
At least when the dust clears many of these people will be exactly where they belong.
LOCK THEM UP.