Never in my 68 years have I heard a president of this country mock and name-call people in the way that Donald Trump does. His demeanor is that of a 13-year-old spoiled brat, certainly not that of a ‘man’ holding the highest office in a nation of 330 million people. He uses and tramples people, and who knows how many lives he has ruined with his targeted rancor. One of those people is former attorney for the FBI, Lisa Page, who has waited two years to tell her side of the story. Thanks to our friend Jeff for writing a post about Ms. Page and what she has gone through.
Tag Archives: Peter Strzok
♪ Snippets, Snippets, I Got Snippets ♪ …
I came across a few tidbits, or snippets yesterday that I thought were deserving of a mention. So, I am mentioning them. The first involves one of my favourite people to snark about, former Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff Joe Arpaio! Yep, folks ol’ Sheriff Joe is back in the news! He is reminiscent of that bad penny that just keeps turning up everywhere. Or the paperclip that keeps turning up under my daughter’s desk and the vacuum finds it every bloomin’ time!
A Case of Hypocrisy?
You may remember that just a year ago, Sheriff Joe was convicted of Contempt of Court. He never served a single hour of jail time, and then the month after his conviction, Donald Trump pardoned him. Now, you might think, having dodged the bullet, so to speak, that ol’ Sheriff Joe would be thankful, cut his losses and slither silently back under the rock from whence he came, right? Wrong. Sheriff Joe is now running for the United States Senate, hoping to fill the seat that is being vacated by Jeff Flake. But that isn’t what put him on Filosofa’s radar. It was yesterday’s tweet that did it this time:
First, isn’t it ironic that the man who committed the crime and didn’t do so much as an hour’s time, can baldly make such a statement? And second … those ‘tent cities’ were partly what got him in trouble in the first place, as he abused and mistreated his prisoners. The good people of Arizona need to make damn sure that Mr. Arpaio does not win the election in November!
Sue!!! Sue, sue, sue!!!
Okay, folks. Donald Trump has been involved in nearly 6,000 lawsuits in his life, which equates to approximately 120 per year if he started suing and being sued at birth. I’ve been involved in exactly one lawsuit in my entire life. Anyway, apparently it is a trend, one of those things that … if something isn’t going quite the way you expected or wanted it to, why then … just sue somebody. Things still won’t be going the way you expected or wished, but hey … at least you’ll have a bunch of money, right?
You all remember the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas last October? The gunman, Stephen Paddock, opened fire from the window of a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel on the Las Vegas strip. At the end of his shooting spree, 58 were left dead and 851 injured inside of a 15-minute period. Stephen Paddock had not just one, but several semi-automatic weapons with bump stocks that allowed him to shoot at a rate similar to a fully automatic weapon. But guns are not my point today.
MGM Resorts International, the hotel conglomerate that owns the Mandalay Bay, is suing more than 1,000 victims of the aforementioned massacre. Stop just a minute now, and think about this. The hotel where the gunman was a ‘guest’, and from where he perpetrated his heinous crime, is suing the dead and injured parties. Huh? Say what? Why, you ask?
Because … some of the victims have filed a suit against MGM Resorts, a security firm hired to manage the festival, and other companies, alleging negligence. A group of 450 victims filed the suit … that’s a bit less than the 1,000+ victims that MGM is suing, but they want to head any future lawsuits off at the pass, as well as putting the current ones to bed.
MGM is not seeking monetary damages from the victims, but is hoping a federal judge will dismiss any current or future lawsuits brought by victims against the company. For the record, I think both lawsuits are wrong. The guilty party was Mr. Paddock and he is dead. The Mandalay Bay Hotel had no way to know what his intent was when he rented the room, so I see no reason for a lawsuit against MGM. If I were among the victims and wanted to sue anybody, it would be the NRA for blocking all legislation that could have prevented this tragedy. Neither, however, do I see a reason for MGM to sue the victims … all of them. It seems like pouring salt in the wound. Frivolous lawsuits seem to be the trend of the day. Not happy? Fine, sue someone … you still won’t be happy, but you’ll have money.
The Blame Game Redux …
Donald Trump has attempted to blame nearly everyone for almost everything. His favourite targets, though, have consistently remained Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It has become obvious to those of us who are not mesmerized by Trump’s pathological lies that he is guilty as hell in conspiring with Putin & Co to affect the outcome of the 2016 election. While Trump is not, in this writer’s opinion, particularly intelligent, even he is surely able to see that the people of this country are no longer buying his tall tales. So, of course, he has to find somebody to blame. Eenie meenie miney mo … who shall it be this time? President Obama drew the short straw on Monday! SURPRISE!!! Not.
Trump accused President Obama of rigging the ongoing Russia investigation against him and instructing FBI agent Peter Strzok to carry out the task. He pulled this theory from the dark recesses of either his mind or his posterior during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity Monday night, after having made a mockery of the nation he is purported to represent, in Helsinki. Best guess? He needed to distract attention from his own disastrous behaviour. His theory doesn’t even deserve more than these two paragraphs.
Paint the Plane??? WHY???
This is a picture of the plane the president and his entourage fly on, known as Air Force One. You may remember that Trump has ordered two replacement jets from Boeing at a cost to us of $3.9 billion. Okay, the old ones are … old … 28 years old, so I get needing new ones. While the cost sounds exorbitant to me, I am no expert, and frankly the cost of a new pair of shoes sounds exorbitant to me. I am cheap.
But look at the picture again. Not a bad looking plane, eh? But it is too tame for Donald Trump. When he was in Scotland, killing time until he could meet with Putin in Helsinki, Trump did an interview with Jeff Glor of CBS News.
“I said, ‘I wonder if we should use the same baby blue colors?’ And we’re not. You know what colors we’re using? Take a guess. Red, white and blue.”
The colour change isn’t likely, I suppose, to add to the cost, but knowing Trump, it will be garish and ugly, for he seems to like garish and ugly. I imagine he has to change the colours because the current schema was good enough for President Obama. But here’s the real kicker … the new version is scheduled to be completed by 2024, but Trump has pushed for that date to be pushed up to 2021 so that he might have a chance to ride it. HAH!!! If he’s still around in 2021, I will eat my socks!!!
And that concludes today’s roundup of snippets. My street is being paved today, and the noise is driving me nuts, so I think I will wash windows or something productive to take my mind off the noise. Have a great evening, folks!
DOJ’s IG Horowitz Releases 18 Month Investigative Report Into FBI’s Handling Of Clinton Email Case
Two days ago, the Department of Justice released the anticipated Inspector General’s report summarizing the investigation of the FBI’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s emails. I have not the stomach to delve deeply into the report, nor to watch the games Trump will play for the next several weeks, but thankfully our friend Gronda can always be counted on to do the deep digging, and so I am sharing her informative post today. The conclusions? Read Gronda’s post and find out! Thank you Gronda, for covering what I cannot, and for this highly informative post!
The Inspector General of the US Department of Justice (DOJ), Michael Horowitz has just formally released his 500 page report based on his 18 month long investigation surrounding the FBI’s actions regarding its management of the Hillary Clinton’s email mishandling case while she acted as US Secretary of State between 2009-2013.
The report is highly critical of the FBI’s Director James Comey’s part in how he acted inappropriately by saying anything publicly about the Hillary Clinton’s email case when he knew she would not be criminally charged which is totally against FBI’s internal rules. But, it was determined that his actions were not politically motivated.
The final determination is that the FBI did not act with bias either for or against the Hillary Clinton’s email case. The investigation was fair.
In fact, any actions taken did damage to the Democratic Party’s Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Nothing was shared by…
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What’s All The Republicans’ Hullabaloo About An FBI Secret Memo
Two days ago, I wrote a post about ‘Integrity’. It was inspired by a couple of stories I saw in the news about republicans inventing conspiracy theories and doctoring false information in an attempt to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation into the connections between Donald Trump and the Russian abduction of our election in 2016. The sheer dishonesty, the brutal lies created by the republicans that WE elected to serve US, is appalling and disgusting. Gronda has summarized this abominable situation better than I could have, so please take a moment to read her post, share it with your friends. We need to shine a bright light into the dark corners that are being created. Thank you, Gronda!
As far as I can determine, it looks like all the hullabaloo that the republican President Donald Trump and his sycophants operating in the White House, the US Congress and right wing media outlets, is about some questionable text messages that they have uncovered and whipped up into a conspiracy theory about how the deep state within the FBI have been out to get the president at all costs.
It seems that on the day after President Trump was elected, there was a single text sent by a senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page to Peter Strzok (both were involved in an extra-martital affair), the top counterintelligence officer at the FBI and a key figure in the bureau’s past investigations into President Trump and Mrs. Clinton.
The text message is as follows: “Are you even going to give out your calendars?,” Page asks Strzok. “Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should…
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Integrity Is Not Dead
The word of the day is ‘scandal’ … at least in the halls of Congress, the White House, the senate race in Alabama, college sports (see Hugh Curtler’s post) and the entertainment industry. I asked the question just a few minutes ago, while commenting on Hugh’s post, if ‘integrity’ had become a thing of the past, just another archaic word. But, there are two examples of integrity from the news of the past week that I think are important to point out. Both involved actions taken that were likely unnecessary, but were done to prevent any breath of scandal, any possibility of controversy, and I applaud the efforts.
First, Robert Mueller, Special Counselor leading the most important of all the investigations into the Russian interference in our 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s role in said interference, removed a top FBI agent, Peter Strzok, this summer from his investigation. No, the agent had not been a leaker, had not compromised the investigation, but what he had done was sent text messages that were said to express anti-Trump political views. Okay … and??? Well, ordinarily I would be jumping in defense of this agent, for even though he is an FBI agent, was part of Mueller’s team, he is still a citizen with the rights to free speech that we all have, and who among us have not texted or tweeted anti-Trump sentiments? But this is different.
Peter Strzok (left) with Bob Mueller
Agent Strzok is considered one of the most experienced and trusted FBI counterintelligence investigators. He helped lead the investigation into whether Hillary Clinton had mishandled classified information on her private email account, and then played a major role in the investigation into links between President Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Mueller moved swiftly in the face of what could be perceived as bias by one of his agents amid a politically charged inquiry into Trump’s campaign and administration. In this day, with Trump grasping at any opportunity to screech and rant about “fake news” and airing his opinion that Mueller’s investigation is a “witch hunt”, it is imperative that Mueller and his team keep their noses squeaky clean, even extending to their personal lives. As much as I hate to see a valuable part of the team removed and re-assigned to a clerical job, it is necessary.
The second item involves ABC News and Brian Ross, chief investigative correspondent for ABC News since July 1994. Early Saturday, on the heels of the news that Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI and would be cooperating with Bob Mueller’s investigation, I happened to catch wind of Brian Ross’ statement that Flynn would testify that President Trump had directed him to make contact with Russian officials while Mr. Trump was still a candidate.
Brian Ross
Now, note that this was not necessarily a falsehood, and in fact I suspect there may be a great deal of truth to it. However, it was jumping the gun, for as officials at ABC News said, “We deeply regret and apologize for the serious error we made yesterday. The reporting conveyed by Brian Ross during the special report had not been fully vetted [emphasis added] through our editorial standards process.”
Mr. Ross, who reports on a number of ABC programs, including ABC World News Tonight with David Muir, Nightline, Good Morning America, 20/20, and ABC News Radio, has been suspended for a period of four months without pay. Again, under normal circumstances I would be yelling “FOUL” at the top of my lungs and claiming this to be a strike against a free press. But these are not normal circumstances. There is a madman at the helm, and his potential reaction must always be considered.
Brian Ross is a professional who stands above all the rest. His response to the suspension was this:
“My job is to hold people accountable and that’s why I agree with being held accountable myself.”
This, folks, is a man of integrity. This sets the standard for what journalism ought to be. I give Brian Ross a two thumbs up for his most superior example.
The importance of Mueller’s investigation cannot be stressed enough. He must get it right the first time, have every duck lined up straight, for there will be no second chances. Incidents such as the two above can only give the appearance of bias, and that appearance, at this juncture, is all-important. Had Mueller not relieved agent Strzok from his team, it could have given an appearance of bias within the investigation, which would have no doubt been seized upon by Trump and his minions, compromising the faith of the public in the results. Had ABC News not taken action against Mr. Ross, it would have played directly into the hands of Trump and those who loudly scream “fake news”.
It is a sad state of affairs that, in this new alternative universe with people of low character in charge of the nation, we must discipline people who are doing a good job, trying to keep us informed and get to the bottom of the crimes against our nation, but that is where we are today. A portion of We The People screwed up royally on 08 November 2016, and now all of us must pay the price. My only hope at this point is that Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not somehow de-railed, for I fully believe that at the end of the day, all the strands of this tangled web lead straight to Donald Trump, and I am looking forward to the day that result is made public, leaving no choice but to run the madman out of town on a rail. Meanwhile, I am thankful for the integrity of Mr. Mueller, ABC News, and others that will be sure to follow in those footsteps.
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