On Friday, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III blasted Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team during a hearing on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, saying that they are only concerned with trying to take down President Donald Trump.
"You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort,” Ellis told Mueller’s team of Democratic prosecutors. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever."
A free speech report from the University of California, Berkeley, released this week said a “coordinated campaign” to invite controversial right-wing guest speakers on campus in 2017 “caused” “acute distress” among students and staff — and was an attempt to advance a narrative that colleges “are not tolerant of conservative speech,” Politico reported.
Things heated up in February 2017 when riots broke out at UC Berkeley — long associated with the 1960s Free Speech Movement — over a planned speech by “alt-right” figure Milo Yiannopoulos, which led the school to cancel the event. Republican President Donald Trump then threatened to defund the college.
“Contrary to a currently popular narrative, Berkeley remains a tolerant campus,” the report asserted, according the outlet. The report also noted a survey that found 75 percent of incoming freshmen last fall agree that the school “has the responsibility to provide equal access to safe and secure venues for guest speakers of all viewpoints — even if the ideas are found offensive by some or conflict with the values held by the UC Berkeley community,” Politico said.
The report added that unrest surrounding the Yiannopoulos and Coulter events were sponsored by “very small groups of students working closely with outside organizations,” Politico said.
Image source: YouTube screenshot
“Although those speakers had every right to speak and were entitled to protection, they did not need to be on campus to exercise the right of free speech,” the report continued, according to the outlet. “Indeed, at least some of the 2017 events at Berkeley can now be seen to be part of a coordinated campaign to organize appearances on American campuses likely to incite a violent reaction, in order to advance a facile narrative that universities are not tolerant of conservative speech.”
Image source: YouTube screenshot
The report also said Yiannopoulos and Coulter “expressed little interest in reasoned discussion of contentious issues or in defending or revising their views through argument,” Politico noted.
More from the UC Berkeley report, according to the outlet:
Many Commission members are skeptical of these speakers’ commitment to anything other than the pursuit of wealth and fame through the instigation of anger, fear, and vengefulness in their hard-right constituency. Speech of this kind is hard to defend, especially in light of the acute distress it caused (and was intended to cause) to staff and students, many of whom felt threatened and targeted by the speakers and by the outside groups financing their appearances.
The report added that many students and staff felt threatened “not just by the message of the speakers, but by the large police presence required to assure everyone’s safety,” Politico said.
Image source: YouTube screenshot
And while the report noted that conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke at Berkeley in 2016 without controversy, his high-profile appearance on campus last year resulted in protests, nine arrests and the school forking over $600,000 for security, the outlet noted.
Why the difference in reactions on campus?
The report blamed the “rise of ultra-conservative rhetoric, including white supremacist views and protest marches, legitimized by the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, encouraged far-right and alt-right activists to ‘spike the football’ at Berkeley. This provoked an at-times violent (and condemnable) response from the extreme left, tearing at the campus’s social fabric,” Politico said.
Image source: YouTube screenshot
How did Yiannopoulos respond to Berkeley’s report?
Politico said neither Coulter nor the Berkeley College Republicans — which helped organize 2017 events and have sued the school — could be reached for comment.
But Yiannopoulos had plenty to say, calling the commission members who put together the report “Marxist thugs … criticizing people they don’t listen to, books they haven’t read and arguments they don’t understand” and arguing the report “gets Berkeley off the hook, doesn’t it?” the outlet said.
“I get that people find it difficult to imagine that a conservative with big ideas might also be a showman, a provocateur and an Instagram thot, but here I am. Deal with it,” Yiannopoulos wrote in an email to Politico. “As for their lofty dismissal of the obvious reality that conservative speech is relentlessly and systematically suppressed on campuses… actual lol!”
Here’s raw footage from the February 2017 riots. (Content warning: Some rough language, both visual and chanted):
BREAKING: Mike Pence’s Physician Who Targeted Admiral Ronny Jackson RESIGNS
by Cristina Laila May 4, 2018
As previously reported, VP Mike Pence’s physician was behind the attacks on Admiral Ronny Jackson out of jealousy, according to investigative reporter, Sara Carter.
It is now being reported that Mike Pence’s physician, Dr. Jennifer Pena has resigned.
Sara Carter previously reported Ronny Jackson was a target by Dr. Pena due to a longtime grudge because of Jackson’s continuing promotions in the White House.
Dr. Pena was appointed to the White House Medical Unit during the Obama administration.
Vice President Mike Pence’s physician, Army Dr. Jennifer Pena, resigned from the White House Wednesday according to several senior Administration officials. Pena’s resignation comes just as the allegations she brought against President Trump’s physician Adm. Ronny Jackson were proven to be unsubstantiated. The onslaught of unfounded allegations – also propagated by Montana Sen. Jon Tester – led to Jackson’s decision to withdraw his name from consideration after being nominated by Trump to lead the Veteran’s Affairs Administration.
Dr. Pena officially left the White House Friday, according to sources who spoke with Sara Carter.
Democrat Senator Jon Tester led the charge last week spreading false rumors against Trump VA pick Admiral Ronny Jackson.
Tester played point man to smear and slander Admiral Jackson with false allegations of inappropriate behavior.
Admiral Jackson withdrew his nomination after the false allegations were released and shared widely by the liberal mainstream media.
The Secret Service later came out and said the allegations were completely false.
It’s too late; another good man has been destroyed by lies and fake news media.
Ronny Jackson is currently still in the medical unit, however; he withdrew his name from nomination of Veteran’s Affairs.
None of the allegations against Ronny Jackson have been substantiated.
Good riddance, Dr. Pena.
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Pro-lifers have been gaining ground in the war against abortion ever since women began viewing ultrasounds of their babies; now a new Israeli invention may signal another tremendous piece of ammunition against the murder of innocents: a device that would let women view an ultrasound of their babies on their smartphones.
The FBI has been facing off against a new menace: drone swarms under the control of criminal groups.
This past winter in a US city, criminal suspects used drones against an FBI hostage rescue team to flush out the federal agents, according to Joe Mazel, the head of the FBI’s operational technology law unit.
During the incident, the drones made a series of “high-speed low passes at the agents” to disrupt the rescue team’s operation, Mazel said at a conference on Wednesday, according to Defense One.
“We were then blind,” Mazel said, describing how the rescue team lost situational awareness. “It definitely presented some challenges.”
The criminals not only used the drone swarm to rattle the rescue team, but to also conduct counter-surveillance. “They had people fly their own drones up and put the footage to YouTube so that the guys who had cellular access could go to the YouTube site and pull down the video,” Mazel added.
According to Defense One, Mazel declined to offer details of when or where the incident took place. But he said criminal groups are increasingly using drones for their schemes. This can include attempts to intimidate witnesses by sending a drone to surveil police stations to see “who is going in and out of the facility, and who might be cooperating with police,” Mazel said.
He also pointed to their malicious use in Australia. Criminal groups will deploy the flying bots to help them monitor shipping containers carrying their illegal goods. If a port authority worker gets too close to the container, the crooks will know and call in a false alarm, like a fire or a theft, to distract the port authority worker away from the container.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the drone swarm incident. But it’s also not a complete surprise. Reportedly, drug cartels have also been caught planting bombs on drones or using them to smuggle drugs. In addition, militant groups in Syria, including ISIS, have been weaponizing off-the-shelf drones to drop explosives on US and Russian forces.
A federal judge sharply criticized the special-counsel prosecution of Paul Manafort in court this afternoon, accusing Robert Mueller’s team of attempting to unseat the president by proxy. Judge T.S. Ellis told prosecutors that “you don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud,” and questioned whether Mueller had gone beyond his jurisdiction in bringing the case:
A federal judge expressed deep skepticism Friday in the bank fraud case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller’s office against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, at one point saying he believes that Mueller’s motivation is to oust President Donald Trump from office.
“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud,” District Judge T.S. Ellis said to prosecutor Michael Dreeben, at times losing his temper. Ellis said prosecutors were interested in Manafort because of his potential to provide material that would lead to Trump’s “prosecution or impeachment,” Ellis said.
“That’s what you’re really interested in,” said Ellis, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. He repeated his suspicion several times in the hour-long court hearing.
This might revive an issue that Manafort had lost last month. Judge Amy Berman Jackson had dismissed a civil suit over the issue of Mueller’s jurisdiction, but pointedly not on the merits of the complaint. “A civil case is not the appropriate vehicle for taking issue with what a prosecutor has done in the past or where he might be headed in the future,” Berman Jackson ruled in dismissing the lawsuit, which puts the issue squarely on Ellis’ plate.
Ellis notes that the evidence gathered on Manafort has nothing to do with the special counsel probe, and that the Department of Justice had most of it before they began investigating the 2016 Trump campaign. Shouldn’t this have been handled by a US Attorney rather than the special counsel, Ellis asked:
Bank fraud charges did not arise from the Mueller probe and unrelated to #Russia or the @realDonaldTrump campaign, says federal judge.
Ellis accused special prosecutors essentially of extorting testimony from Manafort. However, Ellis stopped short of tossing the case out of court:
Judge T.S. Ellis III suggested the real reason Mueller is pursuing Manafort is to pressure him to “sing” against Trump.
Ellis withheld ruling on dismissal of the indictment.
Ellis says he will consider his judgment after reviewing the Rod Rosenstein memo under seal, assessing whether Mueller has jurisdiction over this case. That may not be enough to convince Ellis, at least considering the breadth of his remarks from the bench. Jurisdiction is one thing, but malicious prosecution — which Ellis seems to be accusing Mueller of doing — can occur within proper jurisdiction, too. And a judge can certainly dismiss charges under those circumstances.
If Ellis tosses out the indictment, it might cripple the overall investigation, assuming that it doesn’t get reinstated on appeal. Mueller has gotten a lot of support based on his history of personal integrity even as the expanding scope of his investigation has raised questions. If a judge throws out the one substantial and serviceable indictment he’s produced over ethical questions, it will undermine Mueller’s reputation and that of his investigation, perhaps fatally in terms of prompting congressional intervention against Donald Trump. Even a reversal from an appellate court might not cure the political damage that a dismissal might create.
Update: Bear in mind, too, that this still doesn’t mean that Manafort’s off the hook. Even if Ellis dismisses these charges with prejudice, some of these charges could get refiled by state prosecutors. One of the more curious aspects of the Manafort case was why the DoJ didn’t prosecute him in 2014, when they had nearly all of the components of the case except for a few process crimes allegedly committed during this investigation. At the time, BuzzFeed reported in February, he was considered too small a fish:
In the summer of 2014, an FBI special agent questioned Manafort at his attorney’s office in Washington, DC. Manafort denied knowing anything about money reportedly stolen by the Yanukovych government, according to internal FBI emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News, and promised to turn over documents to the Bureau. He never did, according to the two officials.
“We had him in 2014,” one of the former officials said. “In hindsight, we could have nailed him then.”
The FBI’s top brass, both of the former officials said, deemed Manafort’s suspected financial crimes as too petty: They amounted to only tens of millions of dollars — small potatoes compared to what Manafort’s boss, Yanukovych, was suspected of stealing.
Mueller is cleaning up the DoJ’s fumble, but that doesn’t fall within his mandate. Or at least it shouldn’t, since those crimes had nothing to do with the 2016 campaign. If the DoJ wanted to reinvestigate Manafort, it should have done so on its own.
The longtime lobbyist has argued that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein overstepped, giving the special counsel’s office a “blank check” to go after Manafort for conduct the Justice Department was investigating as early as 2014.
The charges are a “potpourri of purported misdeeds that have nothing to do with alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” defense attorneys Kevin Downing and Thomas E. Zehnle wrote in a court filing earlier this month.
Prosecutors countered in their own filing that an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government “would naturally cover ties that a former Trump campaign manager had to Russian-associated political operatives, Russian-backed politicians, and Russian oligarchs.”
Manafort’s defense attorneys have filed similar arguments in his DC circuit court trial, which is hearing charges of money laundering and the process crimes related to the investigation. We’ll see how far that gets.
Update: One more thought on Ellis’ upcoming decision. He could dismiss the charges without prejudice, which would allow the US Attorney to pick up the case. Presumably, that would fall into the lap of Tracy Doherty-McCormick, appointed by Donald Trump after serving as the First Assistant US Attorney appointed by Barack Obama.
It is staggering to witness the Justice Department go off the rails and barrel toward a showdown with our president over innuendo and manufactured misdeeds. From the beginning of the special counsel appointment and despite Jeff Sessions’s recusal, I felt confident that Trump and Sessions had a behind-the-scenes plan to navigate this quagmire. Ridiculous was the notion that Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was not fully in his camp in light of the glaring double standards of justice demonstrated at every point from before the election to present day. I expected the A.G. to pursue other completely legitimate avenues that might create leverage and pressure on Rosenstein and by proxy, the special counsel, to gracefully withdraw their aggression against the president. And yet we sit here dumbfounded as the witch hunt lingers on. Earth to Jeff Sessions?
A.G. Sessions has rock-solid ground on which to rescind part if not all of his recusal. First of all, he and the rest of the nation were misled on the basis of the counterintelligence investigation, among many other things. As it was recently made public by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, the counterintelligence investigation was launched against Trump without any real intelligence or tangible evidence of a crime by any American. Next, consider the FISA and unmasking abuses and the Comey setup to get the dossier into the news cycle and the list just keeps going on and on. It’s a historic fraud.
There’s too much information to cover all the DOJ corruption that is in the public domain at this point. Does none of this compel the attorney general of the United States to take action? Wasn’t his recusal expressly for Russia-Trump campaign collusion before the election? So why is he considered recused for the post-inaugural obstruction of justice portion that seems to be at the heart of the special counsel’s investigation today? Earth to Jeff Sessions: Your president could use a hand.
I agree with many who have strongly questioned the integrity of Sessions. Joe diGenova, Rudy Giuliani, Gregg Jarrett, and Mark Levin, just to name a few, have all used strong language in protest of his negligence. It’s worth noting that some of these men are close personal friends of the A.G. Nobody can understand what Sessions is thinking. It just doesn’t add up.
Sessions is AWOL in a moment of national crisis. What a shame, too, as many of us were so ecstatic by the appointment of Jeff Sessions at the onset. I couldn’t think of a more honest and stalwart conservative appointment that Trump could have made. Sessions’s behavior ever since has been a shocking disgrace. Wait, disgrace is not adequate. His behavior is meandering into the realm of treason. I share president Trump’s outrage on a daily basis. This charade was completely unnecessary. Its continued existence is a slap to the face of law-abiding citizens who voted Trump into office.
A.G. Sessions could fire Rosenstein tomorrow on any number of grounds. That would be a well justified first step in the right direction. I wouldn’t even suggest that the A.G. shut down the special counsel. The political peril of doing so might be too great at this juncture. However, he could state his grounds for rescinding his obstruction-related recusal and, if need be, cite example after example of improper behavior by the DOJ and FBI as supporting justification. From there he could help orchestrate a soft landing to this mess. Let Mueller write his hyper-partisan report, and then let the Dems in Congress howl like banshees for 15 minutes or however long their attention spans last.
Sessions is trying to take the easy path and stay out of the fray, presumably for self-preservation’s sake. What a fraud we got when the country needed a hero. The president needs the stand-up guy we all thought Jeff Sessions was. If he stood tall with the POTUS today, they would have the critical mass to defeat this collection of Clinton donors.
Is swamp survival motivating Sessions to just sit back and watch this train wreck unfold? Things far bigger than these are hanging in the balance. The business of the POTUS is being impacted and diminished. There are high-stakes affairs waiting for the attention of our president. Instead of marching forward with the business of our country, our president is being pulled repeatedly into a foxhole.
It is staggering to witness the Justice Department go off the rails and barrel toward a showdown with our president over innuendo and manufactured misdeeds. From the beginning of the special counsel appointment and despite Jeff Sessions’s recusal, I felt confident that Trump and Sessions had a behind-the-scenes plan to navigate this quagmire. Ridiculous was the notion that Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was not fully in his camp in light of the glaring double standards of justice demonstrated at every point from before the election to present day. I expected the A.G. to pursue other completely legitimate avenues that might create leverage and pressure on Rosenstein and by proxy, the special counsel, to gracefully withdraw their aggression against the president. And yet we sit here dumbfounded as the witch hunt lingers on. Earth to Jeff Sessions?
A.G. Sessions has rock-solid ground on which to rescind part if not all of his recusal. First of all, he and the rest of the nation were misled on the basis of the counterintelligence investigation, among many other things. As it was recently made public by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, the counterintelligence investigation was launched against Trump without any real intelligence or tangible evidence of a crime by any American. Next, consider the FISA and unmasking abuses and the Comey setup to get the dossier into the news cycle and the list just keeps going on and on. It’s a historic fraud.
There’s too much information to cover all the DOJ corruption that is in the public domain at this point. Does none of this compel the attorney general of the United States to take action? Wasn’t his recusal expressly for Russia-Trump campaign collusion before the election? So why is he considered recused for the post-inaugural obstruction of justice portion that seems to be at the heart of the special counsel’s investigation today? Earth to Jeff Sessions: Your president could use a hand.
I agree with many who have strongly questioned the integrity of Sessions. Joe diGenova, Rudy Giuliani, Gregg Jarrett, and Mark Levin, just to name a few, have all used strong language in protest of his negligence. It’s worth noting that some of these men are close personal friends of the A.G. Nobody can understand what Sessions is thinking. It just doesn’t add up.
Sessions is AWOL in a moment of national crisis. What a shame, too, as many of us were so ecstatic by the appointment of Jeff Sessions at the onset. I couldn’t think of a more honest and stalwart conservative appointment that Trump could have made. Sessions’s behavior ever since has been a shocking disgrace. Wait, disgrace is not adequate. His behavior is meandering into the realm of treason. I share president Trump’s outrage on a daily basis. This charade was completely unnecessary. Its continued existence is a slap to the face of law-abiding citizens who voted Trump into office.
A.G. Sessions could fire Rosenstein tomorrow on any number of grounds. That would be a well justified first step in the right direction. I wouldn’t even suggest that the A.G. shut down the special counsel. The political peril of doing so might be too great at this juncture. However, he could state his grounds for rescinding his obstruction-related recusal and, if need be, cite example after example of improper behavior by the DOJ and FBI as supporting justification. From there he could help orchestrate a soft landing to this mess. Let Mueller write his hyper-partisan report, and then let the Dems in Congress howl like banshees for 15 minutes or however long their attention spans last.
Sessions is trying to take the easy path and stay out of the fray, presumably for self-preservation’s sake. What a fraud we got when the country needed a hero. The president needs the stand-up guy we all thought Jeff Sessions was. If he stood tall with the POTUS today, they would have the critical mass to defeat this collection of Clinton donors.
Is swamp survival motivating Sessions to just sit back and watch this train wreck unfold? Things far bigger than these are hanging in the balance. The business of the POTUS is being impacted and diminished. There are high-stakes affairs waiting for the attention of our president. Instead of marching forward with the business of our country, our president is being pulled repeatedly into a foxhole.
At least Rep. Eric Swalwell is honest about his authoritarianism.
The California Democrat writes in USA Today that it’s not enough to ban so-called assault weapons. Reinstating the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, Swalwell correctly points out, would leave “millions of assault weapons in our communities for decades to come.”
It’s time to institute a buyback program instead, he argues. And to “go after resisters” who refuse to sell their rifles back to Uncle Sam. But the arithmetic and the character of the country makes that proposal especially authoritarian.
Like many advocates of gun confiscation, Swalwell points to Australia as an example. They banned assault weapons in 1996 and then proceeded to buy back 643,726 rifles and shotguns. Confiscation was pulled off without a shot a fired in anger.
It is tempting for some to make that one-to-one comparison. It is also dangerous.
Banning the assault weapon in the U.S. like in Australia requires defining them, an already daunting and arbitrary task. Although Swalwell would make allowance for assault weapon ownership by gun clubs, plenty of law-abiding citizens would bristle to discover that their legally purchased firearms had become illegal overnight.
They would do what Swalwell expects. Plenty of people without any criminal record would suddenly own criminal weapons. Armed with pocket Constitutions and recently-banned assault weapons, they would become “resisters.”
The unemployment rate dropped below 4 percent for the first time since 2000, prompting analysts to call it a “wow” number. It also provoked a surprising election analysis from MSNBC Morning Joe contributor Donny Deutsch on May 4.
“3.9 jobs, if he does the North Korea thing, ISIS. This man, unless there’s some real serious stuff in these indictments is gonna get reelected in a landslide,” Deutsch said following Sara Eisen’s update on April 2018 unemployment.
The CNBC correspondent and co-anchor Eisen told MSNBC about the “big headline 3.9 percent” unemployment, which is the lowest rate since December 2000. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also announced that 164,000 jobs had been added in April. They included a 32,000 job upward revision to the March numbers, and a downward revision of 2,000 to February’s data, for an added 30,000 total jobs.
Eisen called the 3.9 percent rate “a wow number” and said the stock market “loves this number.
The also told MSNBC there aren’t a lot of inflation signals so the Federal Reserve won’t need to be “super aggressive when it comes to interest rates.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be MSNBC’s Morning Joe if someone didn’t throw cold water on the administration. The show’s economic analyst Steve Rattner, told fellow Morning Joe panelists that “Donny is right, it’s a good number,” and “Sara is right” that the numbers are at a “sweet spot,” before implying that the economy won’t remain this good.
“I take Donny’s point, in the fall of 2020, if the economy looks like this, it will be very good for Donald Trump,” Rattner admitted, but added it “has a long way to go from here to there without some kind of economic bump in the road.”
A.G. Sessions has rock-solid ground on which to rescind part if not all of his recusal. First of all, he and the rest of the nation were misled on the basis of the counterintelligence investigation, among many other things. As it was recently made public by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, the counterintelligence investigation was launched against Trump without any real intelligence or tangible evidence of a crime by any American. Next, consider the FISA and unmasking abuses and the Comey setup to get the dossier into the news cycle and the list just keeps going on and on. It’s a historic fraud. 
The unemployment rate dropped below 4 percent for the first time since 2000, prompting analysts to call it a “wow” number. It also provoked a surprising election analysis from MSNBC Morning Joe contributor Donny Deutsch on May 4.
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As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to edit or remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, anti-Semitism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. The same applies to trolling, the use of multiple aliases, or just generally being a jerk. Enforcement of this policy is at the sole discretion of the site administrators and repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without warning. Guest posting is disabled for security reasons.