Benghazi Survivor: ‘Anybody With Half a Brain Can See It Was Due to Political Reasons’

/0 Comments/in , /by

Last week, United States District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered multiple senior State Department officials under the Obama administration to answer Judicial Watch’s questions related to Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi.

During Industry Day at the Range at SHOT Show 2019, I had the opportunity to talk with Kris “Tanto” Paronto, one of the men who survived the attack in Benghazi. Unfortunately, it was so windy at the range that the audio is hard to hear. But here’s what he had to say:

Beth: We heard last week that Hillary Clinton’s people are going to have to answer questions about Benghazi. How do you feel about that?

Kris: They’ve been answering questions so they knew what was going on. What bothers me is they knew what was going on. And they admitted it. They left us. They left us behind. Anybody with half a brain can see it was due to political reasons. So there’s more questions, good. Let’s continue gathering information–

. . .

Kris: But are we going to get answers? Bottom line is this: There has to be a politician that goes in there and says, ‘You know what? We left these guys behind. And we tried to cover it up. And then we lied about it. And we utilized our own justice system and our own intel agency to hand off responsibility.’ And now they’re being held responsible, whether it’s jail time or mass humiliation…I don’t have a problem with that. It’s necessary. There’s enough information out there to show that they lacked any integrity…

(Read more from “Benghazi Survivor: ‘Anybody With Half a Brain Can See It Was Due to Political Reasons'” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Nathan Phillips Led Protest Attempting to Crash Mass After Covington Catholic Confrontation

/0 Comments/in , /by

Soon after Native American activist Nathan Phillips confronted high school boys from Covington Catholic in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he reportedly led a protest of about 20 fellow Native activists, unsuccessfully attempting to crash the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception’s Saturday evening Mass.

Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported Tuesday:

While chanting and playing ceremonial drums, a group of Native American rights activists reportedly led by Nathan Phillips attempted Jan. 19 to enter Washington, D.C.’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception during a Saturday evening Mass.

. . .

Over the weekend, the Kentucky teens were smeared by the media for allegedly harassing Phillips based off a selectively edited video clip. However, after the full video context came out, it was clear that the boys were the ones harassed by another activist group and approached by Mr. Phillips. Mainstream media outlets were forced to walk back their initial one-sided reporting after rumors of lawsuits from the boys’ families floated around online. . .

“A source close to the shrine’s leadership corroborated the security guard’s account, telling CNA that during the Mass, Phillips and the group tried to enter the church while playing drums and chanting, and were prohibited from entering the building by security personnel, who locked the main basilica doors with the congregation still inside,” the report notes. (Read more from “Nathan Phillips Led Protest Attempting to Crash Mass After Covington Catholic Confrontation” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Nancy Pelosi Charged the Air Force HOW MUCH to Fly Around the Globe?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

A series of documents obtained by Judicial Watch show precisely how much money Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has spent on previous jaunts abroad, similar to the one she was prevented from going on by a White House order last week — and it isn’t pretty.

The Daily Caller reports that Pelosi’s CoDel trip, that was canceled at the last minute by President Donald Trump in response to the the Speaker of the House accusing the White House of abusing scarce resources by holding the State of the Union address in the midst of a government shutdown, was hardly her first trip abroad on the American dime.

A Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act request seeking information about Pelosi’s previous CoDel trips turned up a jaunt Pelosi took in 2015 to Italy and the Ukraine aboard Air Force planes. The total cost of the trip: $184,587.81.

The Washington Post reported on the trip at the time, seeking information specifically as to why Pelosi made a stopover in Italy part of the Congressional delegation’s visit to the Ukraine which, at the time, was in the midst of a national crisis. Pelosi’s trip took place in August, just a few short months after the Crimean crisis, just as the country was recovering from riots, a major revolution, and a standoff with Russian forces. . .

In a statement on the subject, Judicial Watch notes that Pelosi’s jaunt to Europe cost considerably more than other CoDel trips, including a late-2015 trip by Sen. Cory Gardner to East Asia (which included stops in notoriously expensive cities like Tokyo, Japan). That Congressional trip cost taxpayers a mere $26,009.03 because Gardner used commercial air travel and took a per diem instead of charging his meals directly to the federal government. (Read more from “Nancy Pelosi Charged the Air Force HOW MUCH to Fly Around the Globe?” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

SCOTUS Punts on DACA, Giving Democrats No Reason to Take Trump’s Deal to End Shutdown

/0 Comments/in , /by

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court declined to take up the court case involving President Trump’s effort to end DACA amnesty for approximately 700,000 so-called “Dreamers.”

The New York Times reports that the court’s inaction all but guarantees the court will not hear the case until at least its next term, which leaves the program in place indefinitely. This means congressional Democrats have one more reason to refuse to compromise with President Trump on border security and reopen the government.

President Trump declared DACA unconstitutional in 2017 and moved to revoke President Obama’s illegal executive order, only to be thwarted by federal courts. The Ninth Circuit issued a nationwide injunction blocking the Trump administration from rescinding DACA and leaving the fate of the 700,000 program participants uncertain. The Supreme Court will ultimately need to resolve the case, but having declined to hear it today, the earliest it can be taken up is in February, with oral arguments likely to begin in October.

Meanwhile, the government shutdown fight over border security continues in Congress.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump proposed a three-year extension of work permits for DACA recipients and a three-year extension of temporary protected status amnesty in exchange for $5.7 billion in border wall funding to reopen the government. His proposal was embraced by Senate Republicans and pre-emptively rejected by Democratic leaders Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Pelosi and Schumer have no reason to compromise with Trump on DACA. With SCOTUS taking the issue off the table until at least October, Pelosi and Schumer will see no point in accepting Trump’s deal. They’ll wager that the government will be reopened long before DACA recipients are in danger of losing their amnesty, and they’re probably right.

There are three options for President Trump now. The first is make more concessions to the Democrats to reopen the government, which will be unacceptable to many Trump supporters. The second is to refuse to cave and use the bully pulpit of the presidency to hammer the Democrats on the border security issue until they agree to a compromise. If they refuse to budge while federal workers continue to go without pay and the border continues to be unsecured, then President Trump’s third option is the lawful declaration of a national emergency to direct the military to construct physical barriers on the southern border. (For more from the author of “SCOTUS Punts on DACA, Giving Democrats No Reason to Take Trump’s Deal to End Shutdown” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Nathan Phillips, ‘Vietnam War Veteran,’ Never Fought in the Vietnam War

/0 Comments/in , /by

The Washington Post has issued a major correction to its story detailing the heavily reported back-and-forth between Native American leftist activist Nathan Phillips and the Catholic school teenagers he approached in Washington, D.C., over the weekend.

Countless legacy media outlets and media personalities have described Phillips as a “Vietnam War veteran” or a variation of the phrase to describe a veteran who fought in the Vietnam War. We now know Phillips served in the military but not on a foreign battlefield.

They all turned out to be incorrect. In a massive correction Tuesday, the Washington Post reports that Phillips served in the Marines but “was never deployed in Vietnam.” Before correction, the Washington Post story claimed he had “fought in the Vietnam War.”

Some outlets appear to be engaged in full damage-control mode, while others that reported the fake news about Phillips have failed to correct their stories.

The New York Times incorrectly describes him as a “Native American veteran of the Vietnam War.”

CNN has run misleading chyrons, and its on-air broadcasts have described Phillips as a Vietnam War veteran.

BuzzFeed, Slate, the BBC, HuffPost, and many others described him as a “Vietnam War veteran.”

USA Today went with “Vietnam veteran.”

Vogue falsely claimed that Phillips “served as an infantryman in the Vietnam War.”

And that small list of course doesn’t include the mountains of politicians, celebrities, media figures, and leftist “journalists” who anointed Phillips with war veteran status.

By attributing “war veteran” status to Nathan Phillips, the institutional press and pundit class added a layer of fake news to a story that was already fake news. (For more from the author of “Nathan Phillips, ‘Vietnam War Veteran,’ Never Fought in the Vietnam War” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

GoFundMe Launches Its Own Fundraiser to Help Federal Workers Who Aren’t Getting Paid

/0 Comments/in , /by

GoFundMe has launched a fundraiser on its platform to help the 800,000 federal workers who aren’t getting paid during the partial government shutdown.

The organization has partnered with Deepak Chopra to create a relief fund for workers who’ve been either furloughed or have been required to continue working without pay for the past month. Chopra is an Indian-born American author and alternative medicine advocate.

“Government workers, through no fault of their own, can’t afford to put diapers on their newborns,” GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon wrote in news release on the website. “Employees of the most powerful nation in the world are being forced to work without pay and line up at diaper or food banks. It makes no sense.” . .

The donations will be given directly to nonprofits that are assisting federal employees with food, counseling, housing support, and other needs. . .

More than $170,000 had been raised by Tuesday morning since the page was launched over the weekend. (Read more from “GoFundMe Launches Its Own Fundraiser to Help Federal Workers Who Aren’t Getting Paid” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

This Weekend, the Media Demonstrated Why Conservatives Can’t Trust Them

/0 Comments/in , /by

Over the weekend, the media engaged in coverage of three separate stories that once again demonstrated just why the America people don’t trust them. The first story: the attempted destruction of Covington High School students over false allegations of harassment of an elderly Native American. The second story: the imploded BuzzFeed scoop that President Trump told former personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. The third story: an attempt by Left-wing media to portray a 21-second clip from my show as a bizarre defense of Hitler. . .

Take, for example, the Covington High School story. On first blush, it’s understandable that members of the punditocracy immediately leapt to the conclusion that the students had done something wrong – after all, would members of the media, the blue-checkmarked brigade, really have butchered video badly enough to completely lie about the story? Between Saturday night and Sunday morning, according to Newsbusters, CNN and MSNBC spent some 53 minutes and 20 seconds on the original, false narrative. . .

Then take the BuzzFeed scoop. That story audaciously claimed that not only had Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress about a prospective Trump Tower deal, but that the lie had been documented via “interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.” This report was so badly flawed that in unprecedented fashion, the Mueller investigation actually slammed it: a spokesman stated, “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.” . . .

Finally, there’s the story of my podcast last Friday at the March for Life. During that podcast, I discussed the oft-made argument that abortion lowers the crime rate. Here’s what I said, in total:

. . .

The idea, of course, is that this was a random comment about Hitler that was stupid, because the March for Life is stupid, and thus should be ignored. Again, idiocy at the top level from the media. But that didn’t stop the out-of-context story from being utilized by the media for purposes of clicks and mockery. (Read more from “This Weekend, the Media Demonstrated Why Conservatives Can’t Trust Them” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Wealth Inequality Accelerates to Worst Level in History

/0 Comments/in , /by

. . .David Rubenstein has doubled his fortune since 2009. Jamie Dimon has more than tripled his net worth. And Stephen Schwarzman has increased his wealth six-fold.It’s a remarkable showing given the economic and political tumult of the past decade, from Lehman Brothers to Brexit to Donald Trump. The fortunes of a dozen 2009 Davos attendees have soared by a combined US$175 billion, even as median U.S. household wealth has stagnated, a Bloomberg analysis found.

The data illustrate the ever-widening gap between the true haves—those in the 0.1 percent—and the have-nots of a global economy. Data from UBS and PwC Billionaires Insights reports show that global billionaire wealth has grown from $3.4 trillion in 2009 to $8.9 trillion in 2017.Central bank actions to fight the financial crisis—record low interest rates and bond-buying programs—have underpinned this ballooning wealth by driving up the prices of stocks and other assets.“Ten years ago, ironically at the lows of the market, what you wanted to own was capital and if you did own capital you did incredibly well,” said Michael Hartnett, Bank of America Corp.’s chief investment strategist. . .

For those with minimal or no assets, it’s been a more challenging decade. Wages have stagnated and while equity markets have risen, fewer U.S. adults are invested in the stock market than in 2009. Compensation for chief executive officers in America’s largest firms is now 312 times the annual average pay of the typical worker, compared with about 200 times in 2009, 58 times in 1989 and 20 times in 1965, according to a 2018 report by the Economic Policy Institute.

The recent turmoil in the stock markets means some attendees may have discomfiting flashbacks to 2009. U.S. stocks in 2018 had their worst year since the financial crisis while oil ended the year mired in its steepest quarterly slump since 2014. And plenty of risks loom this year, from the U.K.’s impending exit from the European Union to U.S.-China trade talks and the continuing showdown between President Donald Trump and Congress over the budget.

It’s possible this means Davos Man has peaked. Bank of America’s Hartnett detects a transition in which “Joe Six Pack” will benefit relatively more as central banks withdraw easy money, populist politicians win at the ballot box and nationalism tops globalization. (Read more from “Wealth Inequality Accelerates to Worst Level in History” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Texas Man Open Fires With AK47, Shoots Five Armed Burglars

/0 Comments/in , , /by

By The Epoch Times. Five men tried breaking into a house in Texas just before 1 a.m. on Jan. 20, but were shot by the homeowner. . .

One wounded man fled on foot while the other three left in a vehicle. The car crashed into a pole and a man was later found dead inside. Another occupant fled on foot after the crash and later died. . .

Another neighbor told KHOU that he was on his porch with his baby when he saw the two men show up with large rifles. The neighbor went inside his house to take cover. . .

Officials told KTRK that the homeowner shot the men in self-defense using a fully-loaded AK-47, an assault rifle.

The 20-year-old homeowner said that the men, wearing ski masks, approached his house and busted inside, demanding cash, forcing him to defend himself. (Read more from “Texas Man Open Fires With AK47, Shoots Five Armed Burglars” HERE)

______________________________________________

Homeowner Fatally Shoots 3 Men, Injures 2 During Home Invasion, Police Say

By Click 2 Houston. Police said three men are dead and two others are in a hospital after a homeowner shot them during a possible home invasion in east Houston.

A shootout occurred just before 1 a.m. on Sherman Street near 71st Street, as the homeowner responded to five men who allegedly tried to break in, according to Houston police.

One man was left dead in front of the house, at least one wounded man took off on foot and the others left in an SUV, police said.

The car crashed into a pole nearby at Harrisburg Boulevard, where a man was found dead inside, according to police. Police say another person in the car fled, collapsed down the street on Capitol Street and later died. (Read more from “Homeowner Fatally Shoots 3 Men, Injures 2 During Home Invasion, Police Say” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Top Mueller Officials Coordinated With Fusion GPS Spouse

/0 Comments/in , /by

A senior Department of Justice official says he repeatedly and specifically told top officials at the FBI and DOJ about dossier author Christopher Steele’s bias and his employer Fusion GPS’ conflicts of interest, information they kept hidden from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. These conversations involved high-level officials, including some who are now senior officials in the special counsel probe. And the conversations began taking place in the earliest days of August 2016, much earlier than previously revealed to congressional investigators seeking to learn the facts about the FBI’s decision to spy on the Trump campaign.

Testimony from Bruce Ohr, the demoted associate deputy attorney general at Justice, informs a years-long partisan debate about the role he played in funneling information to the FBI from the terminated source.

Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., expressed concern in February 2018 about Ohr’s role in their memo warning about abuses of the process by which the federal government spied on Trump affiliates. They claimed the high-ranking Justice official was in contact with Steele after the foreign actor had supposedly been terminated with cause as the primary source of negative and outlandish information on Trump.

They also said Ohr, whose wife worked for the very same information operation that Steele did, had shared critical information about the source that did not appear in the applications to spy on Carter Page. Finally, they claimed that Ohr funneled to the FBI his wife’s opposition research, which had been secretly bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign. . .

Meanwhile, Democrats on the committee, led by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said the Republican majority overstated Ohr’s role. They claimed Steele’s conversations with the FBI “occurred weeks after the election and more than a month after the Court approved the initial FlSA application.” (Read more from “Top Mueller Officials Coordinated With Fusion GPS Spouse” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE