Tea Party Patriots Action Weekly Report from Washington for 8/19/19

CALENDAR:

The House and Senate are both in recess, and will not return until September 9.

BORDER SECURITY/IMMIGRATION:

One week ago today, the Trump Administration released the final version of a rule that will make it easier for the government to ensure that immigrants seeking to enter and stay in the United States, either temporarily or permanently, are self-sufficient and don’t depend on the government for social welfare programs like food stamps, housing assistance, and Medicaid. The rule was officially released on Wednesday, and will go into effect 60 days later.

“For over a century, the public charge ground of inadmissibility has been part of our nation’s immigration laws. President Trump has delivered on his promise to the American people to enforce long-standing immigration law by defining the public charge inadmissibility ground that has been on the books for years,” said USCIS Acting Director Ken Cuccinelli. “Throughout our history, self-sufficiency has been a core tenet of the American dream. Self-reliance, industriousness, and perseverance laid the foundation of our nation and have defined generations of hardworking immigrants seeking opportunity in the United States ever since. Through the enforcement of the public charge inadmissibility law, we will promote these long-standing ideals and immigrant success.”

According to the statement from the Department of Homeland Security, “DHS has revised the definition of ‘public charge’ to incorporate consideration of more kinds of public benefits received, which the Department believes will better ensure that applicants subject to the public charge inadmissibility ground are self-sufficient. The rule defines the term ‘public charge’ to mean an individual who receives one or more designated public benefits for more than 12 months, in the aggregate, within any 36-month period (such that, for instance, receipt of two benefits in one month counts as two months). The rule further defines the term ‘public benefit’ to include any cash benefits for income maintenance, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), most forms of Medicaid, and certain housing programs.

“The regulation also excludes from the public benefits definition: public benefits received by individuals who are serving in active duty or in the Ready Reserve component of the U.S. armed forces, and their spouses and children; public benefits received by certain international adoptees and children acquiring U.S. citizenship; Medicaid for aliens under 21 and pregnant women; Medicaid for school-based services (including services provided under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act); and Medicaid benefits for emergency medical services.”

Not surprisingly, California sued the Trump Administration on Friday to block the imposition of this new rule. California was jointed by Pennsylvania, Oregon, and the District of Columbia in the complaint. The suit asserts that the new rule unfairly targets “marginalized populations, such as children, students, individuals with disabilities, older adults, and low-wage working families.”

The Friday lawsuit followed the filing of a different lawsuit by 13 states. That lawsuit asserts that the new rules would add unlawful barriers to legal immigration, violating the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

CLINTON EMAILS:

You remember last year, when we got all worked up about what appeared to be evidence that someone, including, possibly, a foreign actor, including, possibly, a HOSTILE foreign actor, seemed to have found a way to insert code into Hillary Clinton’s private email server so that every email that crossed her server was copied and sent to this foreign actor? And we got even more worked up when former FBI agent Peter Strzok was revealed to have been told about this so-called “anomaly,” but was decidedly aloof when he was given this information by officials of the Intelligence Community Inspector General?

Well, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is, it turns out it wasn’t a foreign actor at all. In fact, it turns out it was Hillary Clinton’s own IT consultant at Platte River Networks, the company she hired to manage her server. Paul Combetta, the IT consultant, created what he called a “dummy” Gmail account – [email protected] — and then inserted code in the server so that every email that crossed the server would be copied and forwarded to that email address. Why? To serve as an archive.

And why was Strzok aloof when he was presented with evidence that someone had set up a system to forward Clinton emails to another server? It appears it’s because he already knew it, and he knew it wasn’t a hostile foreign actor that had set up the code insertion to forward emails. He knew that it was Clinton’s own IT consultant who had done that.

The information comes from a memo that was sent to Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, chairmen of the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, respectively, by the majority staff of the two committees, reporting on their investigation of the DOJ’s and FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. You’ll find a link to the 105-page report in the Suggested Reading.

And now for the bad news. The bad news is that we still don’t know much about that so-called “dummy” Gmail account. We don’t know if it was secured. We don’t know if it was hacked. We don’t know if anyone else had access to it. So while the Finance/Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee joint investigation was helpful in determining that the inserted code was NOT hidden there by Chinese intelligence services, and was not auto-forwarding all of Hillary Clinton’s emails to Chinese intelligence, it has left unanswered at least as many questions as it has answered.

GUN CONTROL:

On Friday, it was revealed that the House Judiciary Committee will end its August recess early and return to the Capitol on September 4, to consider new legislation to prohibit high-capacity magazines, to incentivize states to enact so-called “red flag” laws, and to ban people convicted of misdemeanor hate crimes from possessing firearms. In addition, Chairman Jerry Nadler has scheduled a September 25 hearing to focus on so-called “assault weapons.”

On Sunday, President Trump continued his evolution on gun control, emphasizing a need for the nation to focus on what he called “a very big mental health problem” in the wake of the most recent mass shootings. “It’s the people that pull the trigger, not the gun that pulls the trigger so we have a very, very big mental health problem and Congress is working on various things and I will be looking at it … These are people that have to be in institutions for help, I’m not talking about as a form of prison, I’m saying for help and I think it’s something we have to really look at, the whole concept of mental institutions. I remember growing up we had mental institutions, then they were closed – in New York, I’m talking about – they were, many of them closed. A lot of them were closed and all of those people were put on the street. So I think the concept of mental institutions has to be looked at.”

NEW YORK TIMES:

It’s not often we discuss media bias, because we just know it exists. It’s there, it’s a fact of life, we know that as conservatives, we get the short end of the stick in the mainstream media. In fact, an old riddle I like to use is this – what’s the difference between a Christian, a Marxist, and a journalist? The answer is, a Christian asks us to believe that which we cannot see, a Marxist asks us NOT to believe that which we see all too clearly, and a journalist ALLOWS us to see that which he WISHES us to believe.

That truth of that axiom was put on display last week, when various media outlets published the transcript of an all-staff conversation that took place in the newsroom of The New York Times last Monday. The all-staff conversation took place in the wake of an internal mini-revolt, when staffers were up in arms over a headline that seemed insufficiently anti-Trump: “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism” read the headline on the story covering President Trump’s remarks after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. Apparently, New York Times believed any headline short of “Lying, Racist President Lies Again While Pretending To Call for Unity” was insufficiently anti-Trump.

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the newspaper, called the meeting, and explained that after the Mueller report was released, the newspaper had to find a new storyline against President Trump. “We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.”

“Chapter I of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom, but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russian, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.”

But then came the release of the special counsel’s report, and Mueller’s testimony before Congress. Oops. Continued Baquet, “The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”

So, having spent two years driving a narrative on what turned out to be a dry hole – in other words, fake news – what’s next for the Times? Why, racism, of course, as in “Donald Trump is a racist.”

Said Baquet, “I think that we’ve got to change.” The Times must “write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions … I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier. How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump?”

Baquet promised to change the newspaper’s “vision” for the remainder of the Trump presidency. “How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have do for the rest of the next two years.”

You know, the motto of The New York Times is “All the news that’s fit to print.” That’s on the front page of every single issue of the Times. But that’s no longer the case. They’re no longer reporting news. They’re shaping news, they’re influencing news, they’re making news. And that’s a shame.

RUSSIA HOAX:

On Tuesday, Greg Jarrett – author of “The Russia Hoax” – published a new op-ed piece at FOX News entitled, “Comey’s FBI Was Running a Secret Counterintelligence Operation Against Trump, New Docs Show.”

Writes Jarrett, “Newly obtained documents confirm that James Comey’s FBI was running a secret and corrupt counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016 and repeatedly deceived the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) thereafter in order to wiretap a Trump campaign associate. The disclosure was the result of a federal lawsuit and a year of litigation. Despite efforts by FBI Director Wray to obstruct, a federal court issued an order that forces the FBI and Department of Justice to produce the records known as ‘302 reports.’ They are a summary of interviews FBI agents conducted with Bruce Ohr, a top DOJ official. These 302s show that the FBI and DOJ were warned repeatedly by Ohr that ex-British spy Christopher Steele was virulently biased against the target of their investigation, Trump.”

I’ve included a link to the Jarrett piece in this week’s Suggested Reading.

And National Review Online has excerpted four different segments from Andy McCarthy’s new book, which has just been released. It’s called “Ball of Collusion: The Plot To Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency,” and you’ll find links to the four excerpts in the Suggested Reading.

Tea Party Patriots Action Weekly Report from Washington for 8/19/19

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