Breakfast For The Brain Weekend Edition

Enjoy the weekend Deplorables, you’ve earned it.

Checkmate: How President Trump’s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller

Via Human Events

When the Mueller Report was released on April 18th, most commentators focused on the “explosive” factual allegations. But other than the shocking revelation that the President once used an expletive in private, very few of those facts were novel; most were leaked long ago.

At the end of Volume II of the Mueller Report, however, there were 20 pages of genuinely new material.

There, the former FBI director turned Special Counsel Robert Mueller defended his “Application of Obstruction-Of-Justice Statutes To The President.” These overlooked 20 pages were dedicated to defending Mueller’s interpretation of a single subsection of a single obstruction-of-justice statute: 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2).

That’s quite strange, but you know what’s stranger still?

In June 2018, Bill Barr, then in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote a detailed legal memorandum to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. This memo came to light in December, when Barr was nominated for Attorney General.

The subject was Mueller’s interpretation of the aforementioned 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2).

Read the entire article HERE.

Barr Vs. Mueller On Obstruction Statute: Anatomy Of An Epic Chess Move

Via The Lid

A fascinating article appeared at Human Events on Wednesday. Will Chamberlain, a lawyer and the publisher of Human Events, laid out an argument that centers on the interpretation of the federal statute used by Robert Mueller for his consideration of obstruction charges as regards the “Russia-Trump” investigation: 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2).

The short story on this is that the Mueller team decided to pin its deliberation of the obstruction issue to 1512. There are several other obstruction-related statutes (see the Chamberlain piece, as well as the tweet thread from @JohnWHuber below). But none of them was arguably relevant in a situation with no predicate crime and no pending legal proceeding.

The current attorney general, William Barr, disagreed strongly with the Mueller team’s reasoning about 1512, and in June 2018 – while in private practice – forwarded a brief on the matter to Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who at that point was the supervising authority for the special counsel. The situation thus boiled down to dueling interpretations of 1512.

Trending: A Sting That Exposed Facebook’s Liberal Bias

This sounds like an eye-wateringly arcane legal dispute. And it is. But two crucial windows of insight into its significance have been afforded by @JohnWHuber (“Undercover Huber”) and Will Chamberlain.

The key “Huber” insight is that the Mueller team’s argument on 1512’s applicability was most probably structured and advocated by Mueller’s deputy Andrew Weissmann.

Read the entire article HERE.

China’s Mass Surveillance App Hacked; Code Reveals Specific Criteria For Illegal Oppression

Via Zero Hedge

Human Rights Watch got their hands on an app used by Chinese authorities in the western Xinjiang region to surveil, track and categorize the entire local population – particularly the 13 million or so Turkic Muslims subject to heightened scrutiny, of which around one million are thought to live in cultural ‘reeducation’ camps.

By “reverse engineering” the code in the “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” (IJOP) app, HRW was able to identify the exact criteria authorities rely on to ‘maintain social order.’ Of note, IJOP is “central to a larger ecosystem of social monitoring and control in the region,” and similar to systems being deployed throughout the entire country.

The platform targets 36 types of people for data collection, from those who have “collected money or materials for mosques with enthusiasm,” to people who stop using smartphones.

[A]uthorities are collecting massive amounts of personal information—from the color of a person’s car to their height down to the precise centimeter—and feeding it into the IJOP central system, linking that data to the person’s national identification card number. Our analysis also shows that Xinjiang authorities consider many forms of lawful, everyday, non-violent behavior—such as “not socializing with neighbors, often avoiding using the front door”—as suspicious. The app also labels the use of 51 network tools as suspicious, including many Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and encrypted communication tools, such as WhatsApp and Viber. –Human Rights Watch

Read the entire article HERE.

Ilhan Omar: The Left’s Ideal American

Via American Greatness

There is a broad, emerging agreement in the Democratic Party that American citizenship is an arbitrary and unjust distinction. This is the logic behind Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D.-N.Y.) famous formulation that illegal immigrants are more patriotic than Americans who favor limitations on immigration. For liberals, immigrants are very much the moral superiors of the reprobates who still believe in national sovereignty.

Omar’s politics articulates this vision of faux American nationalism. She is their ideal patriot. She advocates passionately on behalf of “comprehensive immigration reform,” labeling all who seek immigration restrictions as incorrigible racists and traitors. Omar’s idea of “immigration reform,” by the way, is abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service, ending all deportations, and mass amnesty.

Omar loudly proclaims the United States is a country born and living in evil. Her views of America’s history and destiny come straight out of academia: the United States was “founded on genocide,” and all true Americans have an obligation to overcome this shameful history to build a more inclusive, “diverse” future.

In a 2013 interview, Omar equivocated between al-Qaeda and the United States, placing them on the same moral ground. Westerners adopt a grave tone when they refer to terror groups, but “you don’t say America with an intensity,” she complained.

The irony, of course, is that Omar herself, as a former refugee from Somalia, is a beneficiary of America’s generosity. But no matter. For the Left, Omar is an exemplary American. Not only does she fight tirelessly for diversity, but as a hijab-wearing Muslim woman of color, she does so from a position of vulnerability and weakness that they find admirable, precisely because she is audacious and offensive.

So her glib remarks about 9/11 get a pass; Omar’s habitual carelessness is just her “being equal,” taking her rightful seat at the table of power. It is impossible for her to give offense; she can only receive it.

Read the entire article HERE.

Baltimore Mayor Third In A Row To Leave Office In Disgrace

Via The Federalist

On Thursday, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh resigned after a month of scandal that culminated with an FBI and IRS seizure of dozens of boxes of documents last week. Pugh’s second career as a children’s book author of future classics like “Healthy Holly: Fruits Come in Colors Like a Rainbow” and “Exercising Is Fun” became the subject of much controversy when she began to collect huge sums for her works.

Pugh’s shady financial practices date back to years before her time as mayor, but as the sources of revenue from her book sales became known in early 2019, the evidence of her misdeeds became impossible to ignore. In March, The Baltimore Sun broke the story about Pugh’s possibly inappropriate collection of payments from Kaiser Permanente and Associated Black Charities. Kaiser Permanente was vying for a lucrative contract to insure Baltimore City employees at the time they purchased $115,000 worth of children’s books authored by Pugh. Associated Black Charities collected funds from multiple other sources to buy $80,000 worth of the books.

Earlier in the year, Pugh had taken $500,000 for the books from the University of Maryland Medical Systems. She was a board member at the time. All in all, the total purchase of books, which were all earmarked to be donated to Baltimore City Schools, should have equated to nearly 85,000 copies. Yet a printer in Canada claims to have produced only around 65,000. Baltimore schools and other charities have accounted for only a fraction of that number having ever been delivered to the children for whom they were intended.

Once the scandal became publicly known, Pugh ignored initial requests for her resignation. Soon after, however, she took a curiously timed leave of absence, which she attributed to an ongoing illness.

Read the entire article HERE.

Journalism Institute Poynter Tries to ‘Blacklist’ 29 Conservative Outlets as ‘UnNews’

The attack on the conservative internet has reached a new low.

Poynter, the journalism institute responsible for training writers and reporters, decided to promote a left-wing smear of conservative groups online. The result was a hit job written by someone who works for the anti-conservative Southern Poverty Law Center for a journalism organization funded by prominent liberal billionaires such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar.

Poynter, which has started the International Fact-Checking Network, shared the new report and dataset called “UnNews,” declaring at least 29 right-leaning news outlets and organizations to be “unreliable news websites.”

Report author and SPLC producer Barrett Golding combined five major lists of websites marked “unreliable.” That result, which consisted of 515 names, included many prominent conservative sites — Breitbart, CNSNews.com, Daily Signal, Daily Wire, Drudge Report, Free Beacon, Judicial Watch, LifeNews, LifeSiteNews, LifeZette, LiveAction News, the Media Research Center, PJ Media, Project Veritas, Red State, The Blaze, Twitchy, and the Washington Examiner.

These sites stood next to conservative organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented baker Jack Phillips in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. While the ADF is not a news site, it was likely targeted because Golding works for the SPLC. The ADF is considered a “hate group” by the SPLC and is marked on the “hate map.” The Washington Post even questioned SPLC’s “political activism” and “bias.”

SPLC has been dropped by Twitter from its Trust and Safety Council and slammed by the mainstream media after multiple scandals rocked the organization. Its hate map even helped shooter Floyd Lee Corkins find the location of the Family Research Council, where he shot and wounded one person.

Poynter is funded by Open Society Foundations, liberal billionaire George Soros’ massive foundations, as well as the Omidyar Network.

Read the entire article HERE.

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