Here are my observations and opinions on some of the news.
NUNES WON’T GIVE UP – I am, of course, referring to Rep. Devon Nunes, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is doggedly seeking documents to bring to a close the probe into the Trump campaign.
Despite having oversight accountability, the FBI is refusing to show Nunes an unredacted copy of the document that initiated its investigation of Trump. The FBI is most surely trying to hide information that would reveal the politicization of the agency.
I have previously written about the shame of a number of individuals who we now know were so sure that Hillary Clinton was going to he elected; who, when Donald Trump won, put in motion an effort to bring down his presidency.
What a sad point in our nation’s history. When it all comes out in the open; and it will, the black mark will extend from the FBI’s Comey, McCabe and Strzok to the CIA (John Brennan) and the DOJ (Sally Yates and a host of Obama holdovers).
There has been extensive coverage of the FBI’s stonewalling of documents by Kimberly A. Strassel of The Wall Street Journal, Scott Johnson, for powerlineblog.com, and others, but I have excerpted here two paragraphs from a piece by George Neumayr of the American Spectator that I found particularly insightful.
“Were the redactions covering material harmful to Trump, that material would have been leaked by now. So the redactions can only be concealing the fingerprints of Hillary’s partisans in the Obama administration. The FBI will eventually have to fess up to the politicization of which it succumbed – that the most virulent Hillary partisan imaginable, John Brennan, has put pressure on FBI officials to start the probe; that a Trump hater, Peter Strzok, formally opened up the probe; that the smears of paid opposition researcher for Hillary, Christopher Steele, contributed to the probe; that scandalous ‘intelligence-sharing’ between Brennan and foreign intelligence agencies shaped the probe; and that FBI officials suspected the probe was unfounded but pursued it anyways at the insistence of Obama officials.
“The FBI says it is redacting ‘sensitive information.’ That’s true in an ironic sense: the FBI is very sensitive about the information, in that it illuminates the agency’s transformation into an opposition research shop for the Hillary campaign. Take her partisans out of the picture and the probe would never have started.”
HAVE YOU NOTICED how the media is so anxious to see EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt get the axe? It comes up at the daily White House press briefings and is one of the main topics on nightly news broadcasts.
At today’s White House briefing, a reporter asked why it takes so long to review Pruitt’s actions, and ‘how long will it take to complete the review?’
Meanwhile, the media doesn’t seem to be bothered by the stonewalling going on in the FBI and DOJ, where they are sitting on documents requested months ago by House and Senate investigators. And what about the long-promised Justice Department IG report that has been in the making since January 2016?
As Democrat partisans, the media knows that it will be the activities of Obama holdovers that will be revealed when those inquiries are completed, and they are in no hurry to see their leaks dry up.
Code Pink fool joined in protest of Pruitt’s nomination. (magseriesusa.net)
ON THE SUBJECT OF PRUITT, Molly Hemingway writes in The Federalist that “the media’s biggest target after Trump is Pruitt, the president’s most effective cabinet secretary. Ousting him would be a huge victory for Trump’s opponents.”
I wrote about how EPA bureaucrats protested when Pruitt was nominated to his post. It was unprecedented. They took to the streets and signed petitions against him. It goes back to when he was the attorney general of Oklahoma, when he sued the EPA more than a dozen times to get the EPA to stay within its legal authority.
Radical environmentalist groups have joined in the fight to see him fired. Nearly 100 death threats against him are under investigation.
The Washington Post provided op-ed space to John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, to write how Pruitt must go.
Pruitt has not been deterred. He has been one of the president’s most successful at cutting regulations. He gets no credit for awarding $100 million to upgrade the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and providing funds to deal with the EPA’s botching of the Gold King Mine release that polluted Colorado and Utah. Both incidents were under the watch of former administrator Gina McCarthy has received little national attention. And the corruption under McCarthy’s predecessor Lisa Jackson was also pretty much ignored by the media. Yes, they were both Obama appointees.
I hope the president will carefully weigh Pruitt’s accomplishments in helping him keep his promises to the American people. Reprimand him if he must, but stop short of “you’re fired.”
Upon Pruitt’s nomination, the left said he would be the most hostile EPA administrator toward clean air and safe drinking water in history.
“But that doesn’t matter to us conservatives,” wrote Seton Motley in Townhall, “because we breathe different air and drink different water than the rest of you yahoos.”
BUMP IN THE ROAD FOR BUMP STOCK – Surely, you will recall the uproar over the bump stock – the device that turns a semiautomatic rifle into a rapid-fire machine gun. The Las Vegas shooter had several of them in his possession.
As soon as the public learned what it was, there was a demand to outlaw it. President Trump even called on the Justice Department to ban them.
I learned Monday that the proposed federal ban would require owners to turn them in or destroy them. “That could be a challenge,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Americans own an estimated 280,000 to 520,000 bump stocks according to a proposal by the ATF. In 2010, the ATF classified the device as a firearm part, which it doesn’t regulate.
Sales of the device are not traceable and owners aren’t expected to turn them over or destroy them.
THE MAJORITY SPEAKS – Mark Robinson gave an impassioned speech on gun control at a city council meeting in Greensboro, N.C. earlier this month. It is well worth your time to listen to him. Click here.
