Important headlines for November 1st:
Bottom Line: These are the stories you don't want to miss (but probably would if I didn't find them for you)...
Robert Mueller's Big Catch Was Low-Level, Unpaid Intern Paul Sperry, New York Post
Excerpt: While the Russia-obsessed media self-combust, the biggest takeaway isn’t “Russia collusion,” but the revelation, buried in footnotes, that the FBI has had in its possession “high-level” Trump campaign e-mails since last year — and yet all investigators could get out of them is a false-statement guilty charge against a young, unpaid campaign aide.
From e-mail exchanges among “high-ranking campaign officials” examined by investigators — including Paul Manafort — there apparently has emerged no evidence of collusion or espionage by the campaign.
What's with facts and details? It's like Journey - Don't stop believing. After all the GSS media has staked their credibility on Trump-Russia collusion. Oh, wait - that implies there was credibility in the first place.
Nunes's Intel Committee Plods on With Real Russia Investigation Bill McGurn, WSJ
Excerpt: The best way to think of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Monday-morning indictments is as a compliment—backhanded as it may be—to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes.
Like the special prosecutor, Mr. Nunes and his committee have been investigating the 2016 presidential campaign. Unlike the special prosecutor, Mr. Nunes has unearthed hard evidence about both Russian influence on the election and domestic spying on Trump campaign officials. And if the committee gets the documents it has been demanding for months about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s handling of the salacious Christopher Steele dossier, this week may end even more explosively than it’s begun.
So what has Mr. Nunes’s committee found? Turns out that in the Obama years, especially in 2016, officials made many requests to unmask the identities of Americans, including Trump campaign officials, who were caught up in foreign surveillance.
When asked about it by PBS’s Judy Woodruff back in March, Obama national security adviser Susan Rice claimed she was “surprised” and told Ms. Woodruff “I know nothing about this.” Under oath before Mr. Nunes’s committee, Ms. Rice’s memory returned, and she admitted of unmasking senior figures in the Trump campaign.
Meanwhile the committee learned that Ms. Rice’s colleague at the United Nations, Ambassador Samantha Power, had made hundreds of unmasking requests. During Ms. Power’s appearance before the committee, she oddly claimed others were doing much of the asking—even though her name was on these requests.
Then there’s the Russian question. The Steele dossier is at the heart of the narrative that Mr. Trump had colluded with Moscow to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Now the same people who pushed this narrative have lost all interest in the document that helped fuel it.
...the committee didn’t give up. It subpoenaed Fusion’s bank records, ultimately forcing the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to acknowledge they had paid for the dossier, notwithstanding earlier Clinton campaign denials. On Saturday the committee announced a deal over Fusion’s bank records it said would “secure the Committee’s access” to what it needed for its investigation.
Big questions remain for the FBI. The main one requires a simple yes-or-no answer: Did the FBI use the information in the Steele dossier to spy on Trump campaign associates? If so, did it first verify the information in the dossier? And why would the FBI want to pay for more information from a man doing opposition research for Mrs. Clinton?
So, here's an easy way to tell if you're speaking with someone who's an honest broker and genuinely interested in truth and justice. If all they want to acknowledge is Muller's indictments, that have no connection to the President at this point, and don't know or want to know about the conspiracy that's been revealed in legal documents this week tying President Obama's campaign, Hillary Clinton's Campaign, The DNC & multiple federal agencies to false and likely illegal activity you're not dealing with an honest person that's worthy of your time. The rest of the story this week is indeed the biggest story in Presidential politics this week.
Republicans Should Cut Taxes Before Thanksgiving Deroy Murdock, National Review
Yes, Americans have been asking for it since Election Day. Make it happen & make it good.
Until tomorrow...