Follow Jim Jordan and Rudy Giuliani -- Stand Up for America! Stand Up for Trump !!

IT IS TIME TO STAND UP FOR AMERICA AND FOR TRUMP. Loud and clear. There has been enough of kowtowing to the radicalization of the Progressive-Globalist Left of the Democrat Party and its propagandist media. Stand up for Trump. Now. • • • FOLLOW THE EXAMPLE OF RUDY GIULIANI. As Newsmax reported on Sunday, Giuliani said "Over My Dead Body" will Mueller interview Trump. That is real Stand-Up for Trump spirit. We need more of it. President Trump and Rudy Giuliani, his personal attorney, unleashed a new series of attacks Sunday on the Mueller investigators, questioning their integrity and categorically ruling out the possibility of a presidential interview with the special counsel. Giuliani said he was "disgusted" by Mueller's Russia probe tactics, including Mueller's securing guilty pleas from the President's former national security advisor Michael Flynn on a charge of lying to federal investigators. Giuliani told Fox News that President Trump would not submit to an interview by Mueller's team : "They're a joke...Over my dead body, but, you know, I could be dead." • That was not a joke from Rudy, when we consider all the deaths of people who have been associated with the Clintons over the years. • Last month, the White House sent written answers in response to Mueller's questions about possible collusion. The White House has resisted answering questions on possible obstruction of justice. Giuliani did joke when he said that the only thing left to ask the President about was "several unpaid parking tickets that night, back in 1986, '87 that haven't been explained." • If we consider the mechanism used by Mueller to trap Trump associates and supporters into pleading guilty to federal crimes -- those guilty pleas have been related to lying to federal prosecutors and were garnered by the use of questionable tactics that come dangerously (for Mueller & Gang) close to being illegal entrapment. As Newsmax put it : "The special counsel's investigation has spun out charges and strong-armed guilty pleas from Trump underlings while keeping in suspense whether the President -- "Individual-1," in Mueller's coded legalese -- will end up accused of criminal behavior himself." • • • THE CAMPAIGN LAW FARCE. Last week, President Trump's former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison after admitting he issued hush-money payments to women who alleged sexual trysts with Trump. Prosecutors and Cohen say he acted at the President's direction, which Trump and Giuliani deny. The President and Giuliani have accused Mueller's prosecutors of intimidating the President's associates into making false claims. President Trump recently tweeted : "Remember, Michael Cohen only became a 'Rat' after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable & unheard of until the Witch Hunt was illegally started. They BROKE INTO AN ATTORNEY'S OFFICE!" • The FBI executed a search warrant obtained from a judge in conducting a raid in April on Cohen's home, office and hotel room and seizing records on a variety of matters, among them a $130,000 payment made to porn actress Stormy Daniels by Cohen. The application for the warrant was approved high in the Justice Department. Prosecutors have said Trump directed Cohen to arrange the payments to buy the silence of Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal in the run-up to the 2016 campaign. Federal prosecutors in New York say the payments amounted to illegal campaign contributions because they were made at the height of election season to keep voters from learning of Trump's alleged infidelities. Rudy Giuliani said to ABC : "If there's another purpose, it's not a campaign contribution. Suppose he tried to use campaign funds to pay Stormy Daniels. It wouldn't be illegal. These are not campaign contributions." • Representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee and the likely chairman come January, says he wants Cohen to testify before Congress about what he told prosecutors. Meanwhile, in another of her classically #NeverTrump actions, Trump's fellow Republican, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, agreed on CNN that "it was not a good week for President Trump" and urged "that the special counsel be allowed to complete his investigation unimpeded." Stand Up, Senator Collins, Stand Up!! • President Trump compares his situation to one involving President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. The Federal Election Commission, which typically handles smaller campaign finance violations when the actions aren't willful and with civil penalties that are typically fines, fined the Obama campaign $375,000 for regulatory civil violations. The fines stemmed from the Obama campaign's failure to report a batch of contributions, totaling nearly $1.9 million, on time in the final days of the campaign. • If, as Giuliani points out and as is very likely the factual situation, the payments were made not for the purposes of advancing his campaign but rather to prevent salacious stories from emerging that would be personally humiliating to him and harm his marriage, then President Trump's reimbursement to Cohen for one of the payments had nothing to do with the campaign -- he never reimbursed Cohen for the second payment, leading us to question whether the entire hush-money affair was a gambit planned and carried out by Cohen alone with no prior knowledge or input from Donald Trump. • When federal prosecutors tried to convict former Senator John Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat, in a similar campaign finance case that went to trial, they lost -- jurors acquitted Edwards on one charge of accepting illegal campaign contributions but couldn't reach a verdict on the five remaining counts, including conspiracy and making false statements. Prosecutors elected not to retry Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee. • American Thinker published a long article on Monday by Jeremiah Morgan, titled "Why Did Michael Cohen Plead Guilty to Campaign Finance Crimes That Aren't Campaign Finance Crimes?" It's available at < https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/why_did_michael_cohen_plead_guilty_to_campaign_finance_crimes_that_arent_campaign_finance_crimes.html#ixzz5ZxOHGRUU >. • Morgan notes that on Monday, the President tweeted that the Democrats are shifting their focus from Russian collusion "to a simple private transaction, wrongly call[ing] it a campaign contribution." Then, on Thursday morning, Trump refined his messages: "Cohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me, but he pleaded to two campaign charges which were not criminal." Morgan says : "As usual, either Trump is right or he's crazy. Did Cohen plead guilty to a non-crime? The liberal media and law professors automatically assume anyone who would work with Trump is guilty, even referring to the President as an 'unindicted co-conspirator.' But their conclusions are based more on wishful thinking than on critical analysis of federal election law." • Both of these illegal contributions charges depend on the Federal Election Campaign Act's technical definition of a "contribution." The US Attorney's Office never explained how expenditures made to suppress news stories meet the definition of a "contribution." It was just assumed. • Morgan takes the tack that while it is "generally understood that the campaign finance laws were designed to regulate money being spent to affect federal elections....It has not been generally understood to apply to money that is spent not to influence public communication. Indeed, not publishing a story cannot logically be 'for the purpose of influencing' an election. Instead, it does not influence an election." • Morgan states that "no federal court has ruled that not influencing an election constitutes influencing an election. The federal government tried that theory once before, when Senator John Edwards had help supporting his mistress to keep his affair quiet and prevent it from hurting his political aspirations. He was charged with four campaign finance violations but was acquitted on one charge, and the other charges were later dropped. Thus, this creative legal theory by the prosecutors has never previously been successfully used against anyone during FECA's 45-plus years in existence." • I would add a far simpler explanation of why the entire hush-money payment affair was not a campaign contribution and therefore not a crime of any kind. Paying someone to be quiet is not a crime unless it involves an outright agreement to commit perjury. That is not the case here. BUT, FEC regulations and examples make it very clear that a payment made during a campaign by a candidate that would have been made even if there were no campaign and the person was not a candidate IS NOT A CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION. Simple, isn't it. Donald Trump was ready to pay these two women to be quiet about encounters that he in fact says never happened on a sexual level -- and he reimbursed his lawyer for one of the payments. He would have done that whether he was a candidate or not. Therefore, there was no campaign contribution. End of story. Stand Up for Trump. • • • STAND UP LIKE JIM JORDAN AND THE FREEDOM CAUCUS. The Washington Times reported on an AP story on Sunday that covered an interview with Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, who says House conservatives back Trump on his call for a vote on border wall funding. Jim Jordan told the AP : "Heck yeah -- and I think it’ll pass. We’re going to have money for the wall -- exactly what the President talked about.” • The Washington Times says : "House conservatives are cheering President Trump on in his desire for a government shutdown, saying they have his back in the standoff over border wall money. Although party leaders have been reluctant to test the GOP’s strength, the conservatives insist they should vote on a bill containing $5 billion for wall funding in the House....That optimism stands in contrast to other Republicans, who say they don’t think such a bill could pass -- and point out that little has changed, votes- wise, from the summer, when they ducked holding a vote on the Homeland Security spending bill for fiscal 2019. That bill is the key hurdle in a funding deal to avoid a partial government shutdown looming this weekend. Current funding for Homeland Security, the Justice Department and dozens of other departments and agencies is slated to expire Friday. Congress left town last week without any discernible plan on how to avoid it, with both parties saying the ball is in Mr. Trump’s court. Conservative rank-and-file members say the practical and symbolic importance of the wall can’t be overstated, and they’re prepared to follow Mr. Trump over the edge if necessary. 'If it turns into a shutdown, I’ll be the last one to blink,' said Representative Steve King, Iowa Republican. Conservatives say the House should send the Senate a funding bill with $5 billion for the wall -- higher than the $1.3 billion Democratic leaders now say they’ll accept -- and force Democrats to block it. Representative Warren Davidson, Ohio Republican, said House Republicans already have blown two chances this year to pass conservative border security bills spearheaded by GOP Representative Robert Goodlatte, but he said it’s worth a third try. 'Only in the Canadian Football League do you punt on third down,' Mr. Davidson said. 'In America, we run three plays before we punt, so I hope we run at least a third play before we bring out the punter.' " • The House Freedom Caucus has taken an official position calling for the wall funding in any spending bill, giving the approximately 40-member conservative group significant sway in the closing days of the House’s GOP majority. Jim Jordan says : “We’re going to do exactly what we told the voters we were going to do.” • But House Democrats say they’re not budging, and many say that even the $1.3 billion figure that their leaders have offered for border security is too high. If they uniformly oppose a funding bill, GOP leaders can afford no more than about 20 defections to get a package through the House. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democrat leader, says flatly that Republicans can’t muster the votes on their own : “They do not have the votes to pass the President’s proposal, $5 billion, whatever it is, for the wall. The only obstacle is the President of the United States.” She sparred with Mr. Trump over those claims in a White House summit last week, and conservatives say they want to hold a vote just to prove her wrong. Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said : “Nancy kept saying to the President, ‘You don’t have the votes in the House.’ And it might be useful to say, ‘Yeah, we do. Other than that, it’s not going anywhere in the Senate. So I mean ultimately, we got to have a plan. I don’t know what it is, and we’ll see.” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California says he’s 100 percent confident he could garner the votes for $5 billion in wall funding if necessary. But, the Washington Times says : "GOP leaders agreed with Simpson’s analysis that the real test is to get something through the more evenly divided Senate, where Democrats wield the threat of a filibuster. 'We can get the votes in the House to pass what’s necessary. The issue has always been what the Senate can or can’t do,' said House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana. 'Ultimately we want to get an agreement that can get to the President’s desk.' ” • BUT, compromise may be coming. The Washington Times says : "Leaders also are competing to satisfy moderate GOP members who are more keen on avoiding a shutdown and appear more willing to budge. Representative Tom Reed, New York Republican, said there can be a dollar figure for border security between the lines that both sides have drawn. “There’s been some prior votes out there where I think $4 billion, $20 billion over five years has been discussed,” Mr. Reed said recently on CNN. “And we’re talking even less than that. And we can get there.” • Like the Freedom Caucus -- Stand Up for Trump !! • • • PRESIDENT TRUMP IS FORMING HIS 2020 STRATEGY. American Thinker's Rick Moran wrote on Monday : "Trump knows that he has to get his base of white, middle class Americans...to vote in order to survive. So why shut down the government? The Hill : Frustrated Senate GOP leaders appeared to throw up their hands heading into the weekend as they await some direction from the mercurial President. 'There is no discernible plan, none that’s been disclosed,” said Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn of Texas. It’s a perilous moment for the Grand Old Party. Either Trump folds and backs off his demand for the wall -- the signature promise of his 2016 campaign -- or the government will shut down over the holidays. 'The odds are 65/35 we're shutting down. I'm not optimistic we're going to see some kind of compromise on appropriations on Homeland Security,' said Representative Paul Mitchell, the freshman Representative to the GOP leadership team. 'I don't see that they're going to get done bickering.' 'Trump will get the blame, but he won’t care,' added a second GOP lawmaker. 'And the base will love him for it.' ” • And, that is exactly Rick Moran's point : "It won't matter to his base if Trump is indicted. It won't matter to them if he's impeached. In fact, I suspect most of the President's core voters would see being indicted or impeached as a badge of honor. It might even energize his base to get out and vote even more, given the circus that Democrats will make of impeachment. A recent CNN poll found that 50% of Americans do not want to see Trump impeached. Only 12% of Democrats don't want to see impeachment. The Democrat's base will drive their party over a cliff to get Trump, regardless of the political cost." • And, that is exactly the Democrat's problem. They continue their anti-Trump hysteria and it is their only agenda going into 2020. Moran says : "Democrats have nothing to say, nothing to offer, except they are 'the resistance' and should be elected based almost solely on that. This plays beautifully into Trump's hands. He doesn't have to care about the Republican Party. All he has to do is carve out a sizable element from it and drive those voters to the polls. And a government shutdown would be a good start." • The wall is necessary. Shutting down the government to get it is not a cynical campaign ploy but a truth -- without a permanent concrete in-their-faces wall, the illegals will just keep coming -- with human traffickers getting rich by smuggling them over the border, with women pushing their still-being-born babies under border fences in order to try to argue that the baby is an American citizen and that gives the mother the right to enter America, too. Cynical ProgDem propagandist media perpetuate these stories and encourage more actions of the same kind. It is time to stop it. Stand Up for Trump !! • • • ISSA TAKES FLYNN'S SIDE IN HIS MUELLER FIGHT. California Republican Representative Darrell Issa, a true conservative lawmaker who is sadly retiring from the House, told Fox News on Sunday that the FBI had "tricked" Flynn into not having a lawyer and had improperly "post-dated" documents to "morph" them into critical evidence against him. He promised Comey would face tough questioning about the episode : "Tomorrow is going to be a very different day for Comey, particularly in light of what we've learned -- the misconduct during the Flynn investigation was all about, thanks to a judge that demanded to understand what had happened. I would not be surprised a bit if the conviction of Flynn is overturned, because of the Justice Department and FBI's misconduct -- and that in fact, we go potentially all the way to the Supreme Court, with new protections -- when the FBI and the Department of Justice lies to someone and tricks them into making statements, and then charges them with a lie they entrapped them in....This kind of conduct we haven't seen in a long time." • In shocking court documents filed last week by Flynn's legal team, it was revealed that FBI agents in his case deliberately did not instruct Flynn that any false statements he made could constitute a crime, and decided not to "confront" him directly about anything he said that contradicted their knowledge of his wiretapped communications with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. A memo written by then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe stated that he called Flynn and “explained that I thought the quickest way to get this done was to have a conversation between [Flynn] and the agents only. ... I further stated that if LTG Flynn wished to include anyone else in the meeting, like the White House Counsel for instance, that I would need to involve the Department of Justice." • That is entrapment in its purest form -- as well as denying General Flynn his constitutional rights, the McCabe plot was intended to entrap Flynn into perjuring himself without understanding that he was in an official interview situation. The filed court documents also show that the FBI's interview report -- known as an "FD-302" -- documenting Flynn's statements, was dated six months after the actual Flynn interview took place in the White House. And, Peter Strzok, the agent who led the Flynn interview and said he did not feel Flynn was lying at the time, was fired from the Russia probe in late July 2017 for his apparent anti-Trump bias. • Stand Up for Trump and for eveyone who is being railroaded by the Deep State for supporting him. • • • MORE ILLEGAL ACTS BY THE MUELLER GANG. American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson wrote on Friday that : "Robert Mueller's Special Counsel's Office (SCO) destroyed a potential treasure trove of evidence about the 'insurance policy' Trump-haters Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were implementing against the Trump administration as it prepared to take office and establish itself in its first few months. Whatever the purported lovebirds texted each other and others during the tumultuous period, the SCO thought it was not worth scrutiny by outsiders not on the team. Given the scandalous earlier texts between the two released by the OIG, this claim is so arrogant that it would be laughable, but for the profound implications of a rogue law enforcement operation covering its tracks, secure in its belief that it will never be prosecuted thanks to Deep State operatives throughout the FBI and DOJ." • This destruction of evidence was only revealed, states Lifson, because of "the DOJ Office of Inspector General, headed by Michael Horowitz, who issued a report on its investigation of the "gap" in the text messages of the two from 12/15/16 to 5/17/17....mobile devices assigned to FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page relevant to a matter being investigated by the OIG's Oversight and Review Division. Specifically, the OIG's Cyber Investigations Office (CYB ER) was asked to attempt recovery of these missing text messages for the referenced period from FBI issued mobile devices issued to Strzok and Page. But when the OIG went looking for the phones, there were two different sets of smart phones in use by Strzok and Page, apparently. The SCO issued iPhones to them, in addition to Samsung Galaxy phones that the FBI had utilized. Those SCO-issued iPhones, like dead men, will tell no tales : The OIG was told that the DOJ issued iPhone previously assigned to Strzok had been re-issued to another FBI agent following Strzok's departure from the SCO. The SCO obtained the iPhone from that individual and provided it to the OIG. CYB ER obtained a forensic extraction of the iPhone previously assigned to Strzok, however. [T]his iPhone had been reset to factory settings and was reconfigured for the new user to whom the device was issued. It did not contain data related to Strzok's use of the device. SCO's Records Officer told the OIG that as part of the office's records retention procedure, the officer reviewed Strzok's DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO and determined it contained no substantive text messages." • As Lifson so sarcastically says : "But relax : according to the SCO, none of Strzok's text messages would be of any interest, so we should just chill out. We are supposed to trust the merry band of Clinton donors, because we can rely on the integrity of people like Andrew Weissman." • Page's smartphone was treated even more cavalierly, says Lifson : "The SCO was unable to locate the iPhone previously assigned to Page, which had been returned to DOJ's Justice Management Division (JMD). Subsequently, in early September 2018, JMD informed the OIG that it had located the iPhone that had been assigned to Page. The OIG took custody of the device. Page's iPhone had been reset to factory settings on July 31, 2017, but had not been reissued to a new user. (The Office of the Deputy Attorney General told the OJG that the Department routinely resets mobile devices to factory settings when the device is returned from a user to enable that device to be issued to another user in the future.) The OJG forensic review of the phone determined that it did not contain any data related to Page's use of the device. SCO's Records Officer stated that she did not receive the phone following Page's departure from the $CO [sic] and therefore she did not review Page's iPhone for records that would possibly need to be retained prior to the phone having been reset." • But, says Lifson : "the FBI-issued Galaxy phones apparently left some digital footprints, so we have some of the evidence. The OIG asked the FBI Inspection Division to locate the FBI issued Samsung Galaxy S5 devices formerly assigned to the subject employees and to obtain from the same individuals their assigned FBI issued Samsung Galaxy S7 devices. The FBI provided these four devices to the OIG in late January 2018. CYBER utilized digital forensic tools to obtain data extractions from the four FBI issued mobile devices. To ensure the thoroughness of text message recovery efforts, OIG also consulted with the Department of Defense, conducted additional quality assurance steps and hired a Subject Matter Expert. The result of these steps was the recovery of thousands of text messages within the period of the missing text messages, December 15, 2016 through May 17, 2017, as well as hundreds of other text messages outside the gap time period that had not been produced by the FBI due to technical problems with its text message collection tool." • The FBI maintains a system to wirelessly collect text messages sent to, or received by, FBI-issued mobile devices, BUT the IG found that the system had failed systemically while Strzok and Page were texting : "Approximately 9,311 text messages were recovered from Strzok's [phone] during the collection tool failure period. Approximately 10,760 text messages were recovered from Page's [phone] during the collection tool failure period." The FBI switched to a new model of phone for agents amid the problems with the automated system, according to the IG. And in its response to the IG's report, the FBI acknowledged that : "Text message collection failure, and rate of collection failure, has been an issue the FBI has worked to understand and correct since its identification in 2014. During calendar year 2017, the FBI phased out use of the Samsung Galaxy S5 devices by its employees and replaced them with Samsung Galaxy S7 devices because of software and other issues that prevented the data collection tool from reliably capturing text messages sent and received via FBI issued Samsung Galaxy SS mobile devices," according to the IG, "As an example of the purported tech problem, the IG noted that the FBl's collection program "had collected (and therefore produced to the OIG) the text message on August 8, 2016, from Page to Strzok that stated, 'He's not ever going to become President, right? Right?!' But the FBI text-message collection program had not collected Strzok's response later in the day, which stated, 'No, No he's not. We'll stop it.' It was only through the enterprise.db extraction that the OIG obtained this Strzok text message," the IG noted, referring to its deep-level probe of a file on Strzok's FBI-issued phone.] • Technical problems? Really ?? • OUTRAGEOUS. There is no other word for the corrupt actions of the DOJ and FBI in destroying or trying to destroy evidence related to matters that the entire nation was engrossed in. Mueller & Gang, love to construe from thin air crimes related to the President, but blithely deep-six any data it that may tell a story favorable to the President. Trust them ??? Better to Stand Up for Trump. • • • DEAR READERS, don't think that the Progressive-Globalists are to be found only in the US. British Prime Minister Theresa May has accused one of her predecessors as Prime Minister, Tony Blair, of “undermining” the Brexit negotiations by going to EU headquarters in Brussels and calling for a second referendum : "For Tony Blair to go to Brussels and seek to undermine our negotiations by advocating for a second referendum is an insult to the office he once held and the people he once served. We cannot, as he would, abdicate responsibility for this decision. Parliament has a democratic duty to deliver what the British people voted for.” Ex-UK prime minister Blair actually told the official EU media outlet, Euronews, on Friday that he had been lobbying European leaders to prepare for a second vote : "I need to get the European leaders to the next stage, which is to realize the probability is it [a second referendum] is going to happen and they have got to prepare for it. One important component of any such re-fought referendum will be whether Europe is prepared to meet what are not just British concerns around immigration but Europe-wide concerns.” • Progressives are all cut from the same cloth. They will lie, cheat, and even interfere with ongoing government negotiations -- remember John Kerry's recent meetings in Iran?? -- in order to push their radical agenda to the front while defeating the wishes of their own electorates. • Stand Up for Trump. And while we're at it, let's stand up for Mrs. May and British democracy as well.