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Judge Napolitano Doubles Down: Says Paul Manafort was Exonerated 8 Years Ago — May Call Rosenstein as First Witness (VIDEO)

Judge Napolitano dropped a bomb Tuesday on FOX and Friends.

The FOX News legal analyst told the audience that Paul Manafort was already exonerated eight years ago on these same charges and… Rod Rosenstein was the lawyer who exonerated him!

Here’s the Transcript via Bizzy Blog:

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Here’s Manafort’s defense: I was investigated for all this by the government eight years ago, and I was exonerated. And I’m going to put on the stand as my first witness the young lawyer who exonerated me.

You know who that young lawyer is? Rod Rosenstein.

STEVE DDOCY: What?

NAPOLITANO: Yes! So this is going to be quite a show if they succeed in getting Rosenstein, who now runs the Justice Department —

DOOCY: So why was I innocent then and guilty now?

NAPOLITANO: There you go.

That’s correct!
Manafort was “exonerated” by federal prosecutors led by Rod Rosenstein.

Napolitano On Manafort Exonerated — F&F 073018 from Thomas Blumer on Vimeo.

Judge Napolitano made the same points again on Tuesday afternoon.

And, once again, Judge Napolitano says that the Manafort team may call Rod Rosenstein in for their first witness.

Via BizzyBlog:

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Congressman and Gubernatorial Candidate Polis Doubled His Wealth While in Congress

Jared Polis, one of the 10 richest members of Congress and the Democratic nominee for governor of Colorado, saw his wealth double during his 10-year run in the House of Representatives according to one benchmark estimation, and the congressman had the ability to actively manage the vast majority of his wealth in that time despite boasting about creating a blind trust "to avoid even the appearance of impropriety."

The congressman’s net worth hovered around $140 to $170 million dollars between 2007 to 2010, according to an analysis of financial disclosures by the Center for Responsive Politics. By 2014, his wealth spiked to about $387 million.

Those figures are only an estimate, however, as congressional disclosure forms only require the elected official to list an asset within specified ranges of value. However, because the CRP is a clearinghouse for all kinds of public information on members of Congress, which includes parsing and estimating financial data from disclosures, and because their methodology is applied consistently, their estimates are often used as a baseline standard by politicians, candidates, and journalists.

Disclosures from the earliest years after Polis took office created controversy in 2012 when conservative political author Peter Schweizer published a book that included a section critical of some of Polis’s health care investments, given that the congressman ultimately voted "yes" for the Affordable Care Act despite initially casting a "no" vote in committee when the bill was in its earliest forms.

Polis co-founded the private company BridgeHealth Medical in Colorado, which in its early days was a pioneer in what’s known as "medical tourism," whereby patients—with the help of a company like BridgeHealth—could find lower surgery costs in places such as India or Costa Rica.

Because much of Polis’s activity with BridgeHealth came in the years leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Schweizer called it "[o]ne of the more creative and cynical plays on health care reform." He wrote:

In other words, Polis was betting that there would be more, not less, medical tourism after the passage of health care reform. Companies in the medical tourism industry generally agreed, and favored Obamacare. They did not believe the bill would actually contain costs, and if anything, they expected overseas medical procedures to become more attractive. Medical Tourism magazine featured an article after the passage of the bill entitled, "Medical Tourism Expands as Alternative to Obama- care." As the article put it, "Interest in medical tourism has expanded rapidly as Americans react to the new federal law."

As the controversy developed, two D.C.-based ethics watchdogs were also critical of the investments.

Polis has fired back after an excerpt of Schweizer’s book was published in the Denver Post.

"The fact is I have not purchased stock in any publicly traded company since entering Congress," he wrote in a rebuttal op-ed. "[Schweizer’s] assertions are blatantly and verifiably false. Additionally, when I was first elected in 2008, I decided to set up a blind trust to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, a step few members take and that is not required."

A summary of the 2015 disclosures shows Polis listing assets for a blind trust in the range of $25 to $50 million. However, based on estimates from the Center for Responsive Politics, Polis had at least four other assets listed in the same monetary range, making it a reasonable estimate that his blind trust only represented between 10 and 30 percent of his overall wealth. And his investments in BridgeHealth, which have continued well into 2015, have never been in the blind trust.

The Washington Free Beacon asked Polis and his campaign if restricting his investments to strictly private companies, which BridgeHealth is, presented a more ethical option than investing in public companies. No comment was provided to that question and several others.

The Boulder-based congressman emphasized in 2012 that his investments into BridgeHealth were loans.

"I have loaned this business money virtually every quarter since its founding in order to sustain its operations and to avoid layoffs," the congressman wrote. "I am not otherwise involved in this company as either an employee or board member."

Many of the BridgeHealth transactions documented by Polis in his disclosures list them as "Convertible Notes Receivable."

"A convertible note is an investment vehicle often used by seed investors investing in startups who wish to delay establishing a valuation for that startup until a later round of funding or milestone," according to FundersClub.com. "Convertible notes are structured as loans with the intention of converting to equity. The outstanding balance of the loan is automatically converted to equity at a specific milestone, often at the valuation of a later funding round. In order to compensate the angel investor for the additional risk of investing in the earlier round, convertible notes will sometimes have additional clauses, such as caps, and or discounts."

According to 2015 disclosures—the last year for which CRP aggregated, estimated, and sorted all of the financial information for the congressman—Polis had an equity position in BridgeHealth somewhere between $5 and $25 million, and he had "note/note receivable" positions in the company for the same asset range.

Polis built his wealth at an early age through entrepreneurial endeavors, most of them technology related, and has used his wealth to self-finance most of his political ambitions. He is currently sponsoring a bill that would reverse the tax cuts from the 2017 bill passed mainly by the GOP in party-line votes.

He’s also well known in Colorado as one of the so-called "Gang of Four"—four multi-millionaires who donated heavily to create a Democrat-based advocacy structure of non-profits and media organizations that remained outside of the reach of the party itself. It’s generally accepted that the results of the "blueprint" by the Gang of Four showed enormous success between the years 2004 and 2006, when Democrats began taking back majorities in the state general assembly and winning back the governor’s chair. After those successes, Democrats at both the national and state levels began duplicating many of the strategies Polis and the others had invented and deployed.

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Oregon judge rules that schools must allow boys in the girls’ locker rooms

Here we go again, with another court case which could have been ripped from the headlines in dozens of other cities around the country over the past several years. But as you’ll see below, this one has at least a bit of a twist. The subject at hand is a ruling from Oregon federal District Judge Marco A. Hernández in a case involving a school which decided to allow so-called transgender children to use the bathrooms, locker rooms and showers of the opposite gender. A group of concerned parents took the school district to court, but Hernandez brought the hammer down against them. (NY Times)

A federal judge in Oregon issued a ruling this week in favor of transgender students, saying that forcing them to use restrooms that correspond with the gender they were assigned at birth would violate civil rights law.

In a 56-page opinion released Tuesday, Judge Marco A. Hernández of Federal District Court in Portland said that transgender students should be allowed to use bathrooms that match the gender they identify with. The ruling upheld the policy of a school district in Dallas, Ore., that allowed a male transgender student to use the boys’ restrooms, showers and locker rooms.

The judge dismissed claims by some students and parents saying that other male students experienced “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, intimidation, fear, apprehension and stress produced by using the restroom with students of the opposite sex.”

Hernández, an Obama appointee, took the same position we’ve seen in too many (but not all) of these cases, further demonstrating a need for some final clarity from the Supreme Court. But there was one interesting difference in this case, at least from a technical perspective. As Doug Mataconis points out at Outside the Beltway, most of the previous cases along these lines have involved suits brought by transgender students against schools which maintained normal privacy routines. This was a school already adopting gender-bending rules of behavior which was being sued by the parents.

The present case is somewhat different from many of these previous cases in that, rather than involving a challenge by a transgender student to a policy that barred them from using the restroom facility that matched their gender identity, it deals with a challenge by a group of parents and community groups challenging a school policy that recognized the rights of transgender students to use the restroom facilities that correspond to their gender identity. In their lawsuit, these parents claimed that this policy was unconstitutional and in violation of existing laws based on a number of claims ranging from violations of a “right to privacy” to religious liberty claims and a number of other arguments.

It didn’t change the outcome in this case, but if more of them like this one are brought in districts where you’re less likely to run into a decidedly liberal, progressive judge, we could see judgments going in the other direction. A more robust case could be made for traditional values, privacy and the rights of parents. And if we have conflicting decisions in a number of states, that might prompt the Supreme Court to take up the real, underlying question here.

We need to find out if there is still enough common sense left in our legal system to allow the courts to reject this warped interpretation of what has long been recognized as a psychological aberration. With the exception of those born with damaged chromosomal structures, we have two genders, and as a societal convention, we’ve always recognized certain levels of privacy for each in these scenarios.

Simply declaring that you “feel like” or even sincerely believe that you are the opposite gender from what you clearly are does not merit placing a burden on the other 99.9% of society. Medical science has dealt with many problems faced by individuals who may sincerely believe something about themselves which is patently not true and can be readily identified by even casual medical examination and diagnosis. (When a murderer tells the court that the neighbor’s dog gives him orders to kill we don’t issue a subpoena for the dog.) Hopefully SCOTUS can still muster the common sense and decency to stand up for traditional privacy rights, centuries of proven medical science and simple common sense. If not, we’re heading quickly toward a dystopian future normally only seen in certain Luke Wilson films.

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