Month: June 2018

Eager to defend the virtue of porn star Stormy Daniels against Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani questioning her character and credibility, on her Thursday 9:00 a.m. ET hour show, NBC anchor Megyn Kelly actually compared First Lady Melania Trump to the adult film actress. The host claimed that the president’s wife “sold her body for sexual exploitation” when she once posed nude for GQ magazine 18 years ago.

Kelly began the panel discussion by playing a clip of Giuliani telling an audience in Israel: “I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman or a woman of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman and as a person, and isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation.”

In response, NBC reporter Stephanie Gosk ranted:

Megyn, if you sat me down right now and said, “Stephanie, please script the worst possible thing that could come out of Giuliani’s mouth in answer to that question,” I’d be hard pressed to come up with something worse. I mean, honestly. It is shockingly, shockingly dumb. And offensive.

That prompted laughter and applause from the studio audience.

Moments later, Kelly decided to compare the First Lady to Daniels:

And can I just tell you, so the notion that, you know, he respects women of substance, a woman who won’t sell her body for sexual exploitation. So Melania Trump is classy and gorgeous, and I really admire her, but she has posed nude for GQ magazine back in 2000. [Applause] And so, to suggest that Trump would never respect, and that Giuliani wouldn’t respect anybody who’s ever sold her body for sexual exploitation, I mean, is not –

At that point, the morning show host realized what she was saying and attempted to clarify: “…now, I’m not comparing the two, posing nude is not the same as being a porn star – but come on. Right? Come on.” Of course the comparison had already clearly been made.

I’m sure viewers can expect that the next celebrity who shows up on Kelly’s program or the Today show who’s ever done a nude scene in a movie can expect to be asked about selling their body for sexual exploitation. 

To her credit, Kelly attempted to briefly “play devil’s advocate” for Giuliani:

I went back and I looked at Stormy Daniels’ Twitter feed, which I cannot say that I recommend to you. But she’s very open about how she is offensive, how she’s offensive. And talking about “Whores do lie, but on their backs. Sometimes we kneel or bend over.” “Have you seen my [blank]. Of course you have.” “F-off” to people on Twitter. Talking about what kind of sex she’ll do on camera in very vulgar terms. So there is a contingent of folks out there watching Giuliani who are going to be, like, “Right!” I’m playing devil’s advocate.

While Gosk acknowledged that “those things are going to be offensive to people,” the correspondent argued that it was inappropriate for Giuliani to be “going after her character and her substance.” Kelly chimed in: “And being an adult film star does not make you a liar. Doesn’t make you a liar.”

Also on the panel was New York Times reporter Megan Twohey, who testified to the work ethic and values of those in the porn industry:

I was doing reporting on Stormy Daniels this winter, and I actually traveled out to Los Angeles for the Golden Globes equivalent for the porn industry….Stormy was up for best director for a film at the time. I thought maybe I’d be able to catch her there. She didn’t show. But I actually spent a lot of time talking to women in the adult entertainment industry and spent – you know, have had many conversations with women in the field since then. And you can say whatever you want about them, but they are certainly career women. I mean, these are professional women who take their jobs very seriously. And oftentimes are running their own companies and directing their own films. And it’s just, I think that beyond what he’s saying about Stormy Daniels, to do a categoric dismissal of this, you know, entire profession of women is – you know, is uncalled for.

In a bizarre attempt to bolster the credibility of Daniels’s claims of having an affair with Trump, Kelly decided to poll her audience by asking: “Do you believe that Melania Trump believes Donald Trump?” Crowd shouted back: “No!”

Well, I guess that proves that it happened, Megyn Kelly’s audience says so.

Here is a full transcript of the June 7 segment:

9:06 AM ET

MEGYN KELLY: We’ve got to get to Rudy. So Rudy Giuliani was over in Israel and he answered all sorts of questions about Trump, about life, about love. And they asked him whether the First Lady, Melania Trump, believes the Stormy Daniels allegations, that Stormy and Trump had an affair back in 2006, while he was married to Melania. And Rudy said, “She doesn’t believe Stormy Daniels.” [Laughter] And then went on to say this.

RUDY GIULIANI: She believes in her husband. She knows it’s not true. I don’t even think there’s a slight suspicion that it’s true, excuse me, but when you look at Stormy Daniels. I know Donald Trump.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Let’s respect her.

[ON-SCREEN: Rude Rudy? Giuliani Criticizes Stormy Daniels]

GIULIANI: Look at his three wives, right? Beautiful women, classy women, women of great substance. But Stormy Daniels? I respect all human beings. I even have to respect, you know, criminals. But I’m sorry, I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman or a woman of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman and as a person, and isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation. So, Stormy, you want to bring your case, let me cross-examine you.

KELLY: So NBC reached out to him just this morning. He said he stands by his comments. “Why wouldn’t I?,” he said. He said, “Look, are you going to try to tell me that porn is not demeaning to women?” And when questioned about whether he was trying to undermine Stormy’s credibility, he said, “I don’t have to undermine her credibility, she has none.”

STEPHANIE GOSK: Megyn, if you sat me down right now and said, “Stephanie, please script the worst possible thing that could come out of Giuliani’s mouth in answer to that question,” I’d be hard pressed to come up with something worse. I mean, honestly. It is shockingly, shockingly dumb. And offensive. [Laughter and applause]

MEGAN TWOHEY [NEW YORK TIMES]: I mean, it’s also part of the – an ongoing Trump playbook. I mean, not just in the case of Stormy Daniels, but going back to the 2016 presidential race, when there were women who came forward with, not claims of consensual affairs, but actual sexual misconduct against him. One of his defenses was, “She’s not attractive enough. I wouldn’t have done that. She’s not attractive enough.”

KELLY: Right, “Have you seen her?”

TWOHEY: So this is sort of a continuation of a defense that’s rolled out when they want to discredit women, saying they’re not attractive to be telling the – attractive enough to be telling the truth about him.

KELLY: And can I just tell you, so the notion that, you know, he respects women of substance, a woman who won’t sell her body for sexual exploitation. So Melania Trump is classy and gorgeous, and I really admire her, but she has posed nude for GQ magazine back in 2000. [Applause] And so, to suggest that Trump would never respect, and that Giuliani wouldn’t respect anybody who’s ever sold her body for sexual exploitation, I mean, is not – now, I’m not comparing the two, posing nude is not the same as being a porn star – but come on. Right? Come on.

Let me play devil’s advocate, though, on Giuliani’s behalf, since he’s not here. I went back and I looked at Stormy Daniels’ Twitter feed, which I cannot say that I recommend to you. But she’s very open about how she is offensive, how she’s offensive. And talking about “Whores do lie, but on their backs. Sometimes we kneel or bend over.” “Have you seen my [blank]. Of course you have.” “F-off” to people on Twitter. Talking about what kind of sex she’ll do on camera in very vulgar terms. So there is a contingent of folks out there watching Giuliani who are going to be, like, “Right!” I’m playing devil’s advocate.

GOSK: Certainly, those things are going to be offensive to people and they’re not going to –  they’re going to look at that and say, “Oh, God.” I get that. But she’s also playing to them a bit, and she said, “I have every right in the world to be who I want to be, to be this person.” And when what happened to her happened with Trump, she’s fighting her fight. And I think when Giuliani comes out and talks about her substance and her appearance – he can come out and say, “You know what, it didn’t happen.”

KELLY: Right.

GOSK: “Trump says it didn’t happen, Melania said it didn’t happen.” Fine. That’s a perfectly fine defense. But now, he’s going after her character and her substance and it just is –  

KELLY: And being an adult film star does not make you a liar. Doesn’t make you a liar.

TWOHEY: Right, and exactly. I was doing reporting on Stormy Daniels this winter, and I actually traveled out to Los Angeles for the Golden Globes equivalent for the porn industry. And I spent –  

KELLY: Oh, that must have been interesting.

TWOHEY: It was interesting, it was interesting. [Laughter] Stormy was up for best director for a film at the time. I thought maybe I’d be able to catch her there. She didn’t show. But I actually spent a lot of time talking to women in the adult entertainment industry and spent – you know, have had many conversations with women in the field since then. And you can say whatever you want about them, but they are certainly career women. I mean, these are professional women who take their jobs very seriously. And oftentimes are running their own companies and directing their own films. And it’s just, I think that beyond what he’s saying about Stormy Daniels, to do a categoric dismissal of this, you know, entire profession of women is – you know, is uncalled for.

KELLY: Can I just ask the audience? Do you believe that Melania Trump believes Donald Trump?

STUDIO AUDIENCE: No!

KELLY: Right? In his denial of the affair.

GOSK: I didn’t say it was a good argument. [Laughter] I just said it could be an argument.

KELLY: Alright, we’ll leave it at that. Great to see you, ladies. We’ll be right back.

According to a new Senate committee report out Wednesday, not only did the Obama administration give Iran tens of billions of dollars in seized assets through the nuclear deal but they also sought to facilitate the transfer of roughly $6 billion from Oman to Iran’s radical Islamic regime.

Despite the report showing how the Obama administration lied in congressional oversight hearings about the access it would allow Iran, the liberal broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) along with Spanish-language outlets Telemundo and Univision completely ignored the bombshell during their evening newscasts.

“The nuclear deal gave Iran access to its international bank accounts. One account in Oman held about $6 billion in local currency,” Fox News Channel’s Rich Edson explained on Special Report that evening. “To use it, the Iranians needed to convert that money first U.S. dollars, then to euros. The Obama administration was ready to help.”

According to the Senate committee report, and noted by Edson, “the Obama administration bypassed existing sanctions and cleared the way for Iran to use the U.S. financial system.” Obama administration officials, including then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, made impassioned declarations during congressional hearings proclaiming they would continue to bar Iran from working through the U.S. financial system.

“Iran will be denied access to the world’s most important markets and unable to deal in the world’s most important currency,” acting Treasury Undersecretary Adam Szubin said in a clip from August 5, 2015.

Edson walked viewers through the Obama administration’s shady process of helping Iran out, which included pressuring not one but two U.S. banks, who ended up not caving to them:

The report says that in January 2016 Iran complained about its nearly $6 billion stuck in an Oman bank. One month later, the Obama Treasury Department issued a license, allowing a transaction that federal government would otherwise prohibit. Officials then tried to persuade two U.S. banks to execute it. The report says, quote, “Both U.S. Banks eventually declined primarily due to the unwillingness to take on the legal and compliance risk. But also reputational concerns in doing business with a comprehensively sanctioned country like Iran.”

“As for what happened to the $6 billion in Oman, the report says Iran likely retrieved it gradually using European banks,” Edson concluded.

Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which put out the report, shared his thoughts on why the Obama administration sought to help Iran. “I think they did so because they were desperate to get a deal,” he said.

“So, on the one hand, they were saying that the Iranians were not going to get access to the American financial system. On the other hand, they actually granted Iran a specific license to allow them to take some of the funds that had been in escrow,” Portman continued.

The network blackout of this damning nuclear deal news came a full day after they ignored Iran’s announcement that they would be ramping up their uranium enrichment. It’s the latest in a disturbing series of pro-Iran moves by these networks.

The transcript is below, click “expand” to read: 

FNC’s Special Report
June 6, 2018
6:20:47 PM Eastern 

SHANNON BREAM: A Republican Congressional report says the Obama administration deliberately misled Congress and the public in its efforts to funnel billions of dollars to Iran as part of the nuclear deal. Correspondent Rich Edson as the specifics tonight from the State Department.

[Cuts to video]

RICH EDSON: After signing the 2015 nuclear agreement, Iran had a $6 billion problem. The nuclear deal gave Iran access to its international bank accounts. One account in Oman held about $6 billion in local currency. To use it, the Iranians needed to convert that money first U.S. dollars, then to euros. The Obama administration was ready to help.

ROB PORTMAN: I think they did so because they were desperate to get a deal. So, on the one hand, they were saying that the Iranians were not going to get access to the American financial system. On the other hand, they actually granted Iran a specific license to allow them to take some of the funds that had been in escrow.

EDSON: A report from the Republican majority of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations says the Obama administration bypassed existing sanctions and cleared the way for Iran to use the U.S. financial system. Even as officials claimed that would never happen. The Senate report cites pledges, then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and other top administration officials.

ADAM SZUBIN (Acting Treasury Undersecretary): Iran will be denied access to the world’s most important markets and unable to deal in the world’s most important currency.

EDSON: The report says that in January 2016 Iran complained about its nearly $6 billion stuck in an Oman bank. One month later, the Obama Treasury Department issued a license, allowing a transaction that federal government would otherwise prohibit. Officials then tried to persuade two U.S. banks to execute it. The report says, quote, “Both U.S. Banks eventually declined primarily due to the unwillingness to take on the legal and compliance risk. But also reputational concerns in doing business with a comprehensively sanctioned country like Iran.”

A former administration official refused to go on record, though tells Fox News the license fulfilled U.S. commitments under the nuclear agreement to, quote, “give Iran access to pools of its money held overseas. This specific license cannot be described as ‘granting access to the U.S. financial system.”

[Cuts back to live]

As for what happened to the $6 billion in Oman, the report says Iran likely retrieved it gradually using European banks. Shannon.

BREAM: All right, Rich Edson at the State Department. We’ll have more on that coming up. Thank you.

Having enjoyed my 82nd birthday, I am part of a group of about 50 million Americans who are 65 years of age or older. Those who are 90 or older were in school during the 1930s. My age cohort was in school during the 1940s. Baby boomers approaching their 70s were in school during the 1950s and early ’60s.

Try this question to any one of those 50 million Americans who are 65 or older: Do you recall any discussions about the need to hire armed guards to protect students and teachers against school shootings? Do you remember school policemen patrolling the hallways? How many students were shot to death during the time you were in school? For me and those other Americans 65 or older, when we were in school, a conversation about hiring armed guards and having police patrol hallways would have been seen as lunacy. There was no reason.

What’s the difference between yesteryear and today? The logic of the argument for those calling for stricter gun control laws, in the wake of recent school shootings, is that something has happened to guns. Guns have behaved more poorly and become evil. Guns themselves are the problem. The job for those of us who are 65 or older is to relay the fact that guns were more available and less controlled in years past, when there was far less mayhem. Something else is the problem.

Guns haven’t changed. People have changed. Behavior that is accepted from today’s young people was not accepted yesteryear. For those of us who are 65 or older, assaults on teachers were not routine as they are in some cities. For example, in Baltimore, an average of four teachers and staff members were assaulted each school day in 2010, and more than 300 school staff members filed workers’ compensation claims in a year because of injuries received through assaults or altercations on the job. In Philadelphia, 690 teachers were assaulted in 2010, and in a five-year period, 4,000 were. In that city’s schools, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes. That doesn’t even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year.”

Yale University legal scholar John Lott argues that gun accessibility in our country has never been as restricted as it is now. Lott reports that until the 1960s, New York City public high schools had shooting clubs. Students carried their rifles to school on the subway in the morning and then turned them over to their homeroom teacher or a gym teacher — and that was mainly to keep them centrally stored and out of the way. Rifles were retrieved after school for target practice (https://ift.tt/2Jgn8df). Virginia’s rural areas had a long tradition of high school students going hunting in the morning before school, and they sometimes stored their guns in the trunks of their cars during the school day, parked on the school grounds.

During earlier periods, people could simply walk into a hardware store and buy a rifle. Buying a rifle or pistol through a mail-order catalog — such as Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s — was easy. Often, a 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to a boy by his father.

These facts of our history should confront us with a question: With greater accessibility to guns in the past, why wasn’t there the kind of violence we see today, when there is much more restricted access to guns? There’s another aspect of our response to mayhem. When a murderer uses a bomb, truck or car to kill people, we don’t blame the bomb, truck or car. We don’t call for control over the instrument of death. We seem to fully recognize that such objects are inanimate and incapable of acting on their own. We blame the perpetrator. However, when the murder is done using a gun, we do call for control over the inanimate instrument of death — the gun. I smell a hidden anti-gun agenda.

Quick, grab the smelling salts and clear the fainting couches.

President Trump’s pardon of conservative author Dinesh D’Souza last week violently triggered Beltway media elites. It’s peanut butter, weed pollen, gluten, manspreading, Chick-fil-A, the national anthem, and Kryptonite all rolled into one giant political allergen. Allow me to administer the rhetorical, metaphorical antihistamine.

To The Washington Post editorial board, President Trump’s use of the pardon is “another show of disrespect for the justice system.” Outspoken D’Souza was the subject of a highly politicized prosecution by former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara (now an anti-Trump resistance leader) over campaign finance violations totaling $20,000. The WaPo punditocracy grudgingly admits that the president “has constitutional power to do this” and that it is “Mr. Trump’s prerogative” to pardon individuals the newspaper considers “unsavory.”

Yet, the editorialists fulminate that what “is offensive here is not the pardon power, but the use of it” for “arbitrary, political and unjustified” reasons.

G-U-Double F-Awww. The protesting Posties wouldn’t be capable of acknowledging an acceptable exercise of the pardon power by Trump if it body-slammed them off the ropes on UFC Fight Night.

Former Navy sailor Kristian Saucier received a Trump pardon after serving a year in prison for taking photos on his submarine to show his family where he worked (in contrast to the hands-off treatment of the classified information-breaching Clinton brigade). Too political, the pundits cry.

The late boxer Jack Johnson, America’s first black heavyweight champion, received a Trump pardon after being jailed under Jim Crow for traveling with a white woman (who later became his wife) across state lines. Publicity stunt, the bitchers bitched. Not enough, the moaners moaned. Trump’s still a racist, the grievance-mongers mongered.

Indeed, The Washington Post opinion writers have depleted their Bank of Selective Outrage accounts while spewing about Trump’s pardons. “Nothing but right-wing trolling,” harumphed Paul Waldman. “Twisted brand of mercy,” decried Ruth Marcus. “A warm-up for a constitutional crisis,” squawked Jennifer Rubin.

Spare us all the hot air, media heavers. Democrats have long wielded pardon powers to reward deep-pocketed cronies, absolve unrepentant domestic terrorists and lionize national security leakers. The “democratic values” that WaPo-lemicists claim are now under siege thanks to Trump’s pardons got crushed under the wheels of the corruptocrat bus a long, long time ago.

Self-dealing Bill Clinton handed out pardons and commutations like Pez candy to relatives like half-brother Roger Clinton (convicted of cocaine possession) and family-tied associates like his brother-in-law Hugh Rodham’s clients, including convicted cocaine distributor Carlos Vignali and convicted herbal supplement fraudster and perjurer A. Glenn Braswell; the two felons had forked over $400,000 to Rodham in legal fees to win their clemencies.

Hillary’s other brother, Tony, raked in more than $240,000 from a couple convicted of bank fraud, who he just happened to mention to his brother-in-law in the White House, who granted the pardon — after which brother Tony denied being paid for any work having to do with a pardon. Meanwhile, Madame HRC’s Senate campaign treasurer, William J. Cunningham III, pocketed $4,000 to prepare clemency for two Arkansas-based convicted tax cheats, Robert Fain and James Manning. President Clinton granted both; Hillary played dumb and feigned shock, shock that political favor-trading was going on in Clinton land.

And don’t even get me started on the putrid Marc and Denise Rich pardon scandal, overseen by Clinton/Obama alum Eric Holder.

If systemic pay-for-play pardons aren’t a “twisted brand of mercy,” what else are?

Critics assail President Trump for “bypassing the traditional review process,” which 1) is his prerogative; 2) was standard operating procedure during the Clinton years; and 3) has been questioned by watchdogs on all sides of the ideological aisle because of the inherent conflict in the federal pardon lawyer’s office being overseen by federal government prosecutors reluctant to undo any convictions.

No one did more damage to the integrity of the federal pardon attorney’s office than Eric Holder, who pressured its staff to abandon its full-scale opposition to Clinton’s clemency for 16 members of the deadly FALN Puerto Rican terrorist group and Los Macheteros. The office tossed its original report rejecting clemency at Holder’s behest and replaced it with a new and improved “neutral” memo giving Clinton cover to grant the pardons without contradicting the “traditional review process,” to borrow a phrase.

These Clinton/Holder beneficiaries were linked by the FBI to more than 130 bombings and six murders. Nearly two decades later, Holder was at the DOJ helm as attorney general when President Obama commuted the sentence of another seditious FALN terrorist, Oscar Lopez Rivera, who proudly declared to a federal judge, “I am an enemy of the United States government.”

“Unsavory” is in the eye of the beholder. So is the “arbitrary” use of the presidential pardon. Will the resistance ever acknowledge a legitimate use of this power by President Trump?

Quoth the raving ravers: Never. Never. And never more.