Tag: George Soros

Mark Welch for 2017 West Chester Trustee: Maintaining the great economic growth of a Cincinnati suburb correctly managed

IMG_4719.JPGI feel privileged to live in one of the best places in the United States, West Chester, Ohio.  I remember when it was called Union Township and was much more rural as a kid, and have watched it grow into essentially a city without losing its spirit of accomplishment which is rare in the world.  Over the years I could have moved anywhere and would have if I thought the opportunities for my family would have been better, but they aren’t.  While I don’t live in West Chester, I do work there and it is a part of my daily life most days of the week.   I have to credit George Lang with a lot of the government foundations which have allowed West Chester to become such a wonderful place.  As a politician you have to know when to manage a situation and when to leave it alone and George has managed to do that over the years even when hostile liberals pretending to be Republicans operated openly in ways that usually destroy communities—people like Cathy Stoker and Lee Wong—so it hasn’t been easy.   But George has done a very good job of being active where he needed to be and hands off depending on the situation and that style of government should be the model for the rest of the country.  The best thing however that happened to West Chester from the perspective of government is when Mark Welch joined George as a trustee in 2013. Over the last four years West Chester has exploded with opportunity and a lot of that silent credit goes to those two guys who have removed the barriers of creation and investment into business and landed many great opportunities to such a thriving, and diverse community.  If the benefits of Republican run government could be better shown anywhere in the United States I’d know about it—but that evidence has yet to present itself.

http://markwelchfortrustee.com/

I was having lunch with some friends at the new Chuy’s Tex-Mex restaurant that just opened in West Chester and had the opportunity to sit outside on a mild day that was very pleasant.   From there the Top Golf facility towered over my head, the Main Event was thriving with business and Barnes and Noble sat proudly as one of the few area bookstores to have survived the hard transition of Amazon’s influence on the publishing industry. Across the highway hotels had sprung up much to my advantage because out-of-town guests now had many places to stay when they visited—I no longer had to drive them to downtown Cincinnati to stay in a decent place for the night when visiting on business.  West Chester, the relatively new exit along I-75 had the optimistic feeling that I typically feel when I visit the Disney World complex in Orlando—the money is flowing which is the lifeblood of any economy and people were enjoying themselves on a daily basis with lifestyle options.

My kids had told me about Chuy’s and recommended that I try it out.  We had all just returned from Canterbury, England where we had dinner at a Tex-Mex place they had in the center of town there—which we thought at the time was the best we had ever had.  The decorations alone were extraordinary so we thought that type of experience was a once in the lifetime event.   But then Chuy’s opened and it was everything and more that you’d expect from a Tex-Mex style of operation, so in that context I was quite impressed.  As I turned around from my seat I could see the newly opened Deluth Trading company complex offering yet another shopping experience to West Chester guests.  Behind Deluth IKEA loomed on the horizon and I had to think how many people it took to make all this happen—and the answer is a good Republican plan that transpired over many years to make it happen and attract all these investments from all over the world to build West Chester into such a world-class destination for commerce.  George Lang and Mark Welch were smart enough to not inject themselves into the mechanisms and when they needed to they did a lot of soft selling to help push some of those deals over the top—and that really has been the difference.

I mentioned that I grew up around West Chester so I’ve had a front row seat to many of the positive things that have taken place over the last three decades of development.  But my optimism doesn’t come from a lack of perspective.   My observations from Chuy’s comes after I recently took my wife shopping at Harrod’s in London after having dinner at the Restaurant Gorden Ramsay in Chelsa just a few weeks prior to that experience.  We also had plenty of experiences in Paris which most people swoon over—but I have to say, having lunch at Chuy’s with Deluth literally right next door was far better as an experience than anything I’ve seen overseas.   I also recently had a trip to Japan where they have several facilities like Top Golf to serve as entertainment destinations in their land restricted environment—but none of them that I was able to see were as good as that West Chester facility.  Top Golf is an entertainment destination that is a very high quality experience—quite remarkable.  It is worth an out-of-town visit just to stay at that facility and play golf in such a unique way.   Mark Welch didn’t build any of these places, but as a successful businessman and corporate sales executive prior to his own entrepreneurial activities he had the experience to get out-of-the-way when all these investment opportunities were considering utilizing what West Chester offered, economically, demographically, and in supported infrastructure.

But of course I’ve just been talking about one little part of what has become one of the top interstate exits in the Cincinnati region.  Just north of these West Chester destinations are three more exits of the same type of explosive growth—everything from a new Cabela’s to the Cox Road shopping destinations. Which are extensive.  For a community that still has a small town tradition it now has all the amenities of a big city including a great hospital.  And in the middle of all this activity is one of the largest Metro Parks anywhere at the Voice of America, lots of top-level soccer fields, baseball fields, fishing, hiking, and boating—it is an astonishing place for something that is just a few hundred yards from the entrance to a Target, or a T.G.I Fridays across the street.

Mark Welch is up for election this year and has done so much in his first term that it would be crazy not to return him to the current position he holds which is president of the board of trustees.   There are a lot of con artists out there who put the much-needed “R” in front of their political affiliation to get elected in Butler County, but Mark is the real deal.  It isn’t easy to manage such a large township with so much fiscal wealth flowing into it, and still represent people the correct way.  Not everyone gets what they want, but I have watched Mark balance some really intense debates over the last few years with great skill and still not discourage investment.  Not an easy thing to do.  I attribute a lot of that skill to his success as a private citizen well before he was ever a trustee.  Now he has an opportunity to do it again for another term.   It’s important to keep him in the role he is currently so that more opportunity even yet may continue to flourish in West Chester.

It is important for everyone involved to work toward the correct objectives in this upcoming election.  After November, likely there will be a special election for another trustee seat and when that occurs we’ll need another strong Republican to work with Mark to keep the votes out of the hands of the many closet liberals who are lingering in the shadows looking for some way to get attention for themselves. So a clear strategy is needed to settle the minds of the many business opportunities that are looking at West Chester for stability and continued growth.   The first objective of course is to get Mark re-elected.  The second is to hold that second vote.  The ability to do that will go a long way to maintaining the explosive opportunities that West Chester residents have gained over this last decade, and to carry great optimism into the next and beyond.  West Chester is a unique place in the world and we should keep it that way with good government led by Mark Welch who truly understands how to go about it.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

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Donald Trump’s Tomorrowland: Making “Failure’s Not An Option” great again!

I kept looking for it but have yet to see any news really covering what Donald Trump’s administration has been doing in regard to American space exploration.  It was only just before July 4th 2017 that Trump signed an executive order reactivating the National Space Council at NASA and  making Mike Pence the is the chairman of the board.  Then just a few days after that great American Holiday Mike Pence was giving a speech at the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center announcing that the first meeting of the new council would before summer ended.  It was a big speech with grand national appeal but it was eclipsed behind Trump’s G20 visit and the first face to face meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.  The news media was completely consumed with the news of this oversea visit and the antics of Trump’s combat with the various news organizations—so they missed the announcements about America’s new role in space that sounded much more spectacular than when Kennedy gave in his famous challenge ahead of the Apollo program in the 60s.  Trump was thinking bigger—much bigger and Mike Pence is about to make his mark as a very strong VP in the vastness of space.

As Trump and Pence were unleashing space once again the Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article which was quite familiar to me, that “smart medicine” was in fact the wave of the future and ultimate cure to illness on earth.  And to what effect?  We don’t need to get sick as humans and die of old age—we can fix all that now and until very, very recently–publications like the Wall Street Journal were not covering those regenerative technologies.   I bring it up here because space exploration takes time and the best way to embark on such an adventure is to live the amount of time that Noah did from the Bible, to see many years of development to and from the vastness of space and to colonize the once unthinkable.  We’ll want every human being and more available today for such adventures. There were so many magnificent quotes given in Trump’s speech then Pence’s speech at the Kennedy Space Center to be played back to history for many years.  I thought many of those quotes were better than when Kennedy made his famous challenge to the American people when he announced that he intended to put man on the moon within a decade.   In case you haven’t heard, Trump wants to do that by 2020.  Trump then wants to be on Mars by 2024.  Those are ambitious goals for a space agency that has literally been turned off to study climate science and Islamic contributions to science.  Trump’s commitment to space is actually astonishing and will carry with it a new era in adventure, science, philosophy and politics.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-smart-medicine-solution-to-the-health-care-crisis-1499443449

I haven’t been down to our family retreat at Cape Canaveral for a few years now.  I have often spoken glowingly about my visits there to my favorite beach in the world, Cocoa Beach and the many famous landmarks that evolved in the wake of the space program at NASA.  From our condo we can see the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center.  My kids are especially in love with the place and have watched several launches from that four story balcony.  They were there to see the last Space Shuttle mission return home under the Obama administration and they have recently seen the Space X rocket tests and have been enthusiastic about it still.  But they don’t know it like I do—where Space Shuttles seemed to take off every month and we were on a fast track to life outside of earth.  I love the optimism of space, the promise not only of adventure but of new discoveries and opportunities, such as mining Helium-3 off the moon for real nuclear power.   There is great talk now of going to Mars in weeks not just months which of course would allow us to mine the moons of Jupiter and even Saturn realistically and carry our civilization toward a Type 1 classification—where we master our solar system for resources to advance our technology.  Having that promise ripped away by the Obama administration and other previous presidents has been extremely disheartening.

It was my fault; back when my kids were getting more home school from my wife and I than anything they learned in ten years of school I took my children on a very special trip to Florida to visit the Kennedy Space Center then directly to Disney’s Epcot center.  The entire trip was focused on science and technology showing them the possibilities that were in front of their lives.  That was in 2003, George W. Bush was in the White House and I really thought he was serious about returning America back to the moon.   So I took my kids to the family condo at Cape Canaveral and let them meet astronauts at the Space Center and literally turned their imaginations loose.   Since then there really hasn’t been any ambition for space by virtually anybody.  This has been reflected in a few very forward-looking movies, like Tomorrowland based on the Disney attraction at Magic Kingdom and the very good Christopher Nolan movie, Intersteller.   I was very surprised to learn from my oldest daughter that her favorite movie so far in her life is Intersteller.  It made me a little sad because it was I who planted those seeds so long ago and in her life nothing had so far came from it.  So many kids in her generation have had their minds turned off and now they look at the world inwardly instead of outwardly.  Their vision is small because they have their faces pressed into the feces of their own existence and that folly is literally destroying mankind with remarkable swiftness.  And bright thinkers like my daughters—ignited by an overly optimistic dad have seen little to match that zeal from their generation.  When Trump said that in the vastness of space many of our problems would seem small—he’s right.  The solution to much that sickens us as a species will be solved in space and in the journey of mastering it.

It was during that trip that I bought a t-shirt from the NASA shop stating “Failure is not an option” which was the classic line from the Apollo 13 mission that was made into a movie by the great movie director, Ron Howard.  I wore it everywhere because it matched my optimism for everything.  Anyone who deals with me knows that this is my basic philosophy.  Failure is never an option for me—and never has been.  It is kind of an innate instinct that I have always had, but the space program in America framed the spirit in a way I have always fed from.   It was quite remarkable to wear that shirt to Epcot Center the next day with my kids asking questions and taking them to Tomorrowland to see all the optimism contained there for our future.   Even though my kids were impressed, I was frustrated because I felt we could be doing so much more as a country—but from the very top—in the White House we lacked vision and the great dreamers had been grounded, seemingly on purpose.

If you’ve ever been through a NADCAP audit dear reader you’ll understand what I’m talking about.  For many decades now government has imposed so many rules and regulations onto the aerospace industry that we’ve stifled creativity and brave innovations with so much bureaucratic red tape that the love for adventure that used to be present even in engineers has been stuffed into a bottle and sealed up tight.  The days where World War II fighter pilots were the test pilots and advisors for NASA are over—they have been replaced by pin headed politicians and paper pushers whose only adventure in life is to decide who will make the coffee run to Starbucks.  The industry bureaucrats have replaced the type of horse sense innovation that actually invented space travel with static manufacturing plans designed to take the thinking away from production leaving us all with a cold—dead work environment of people disconnected from the passion that can be garnered from being a part of the industry.   Aerospace today from the top to the bottom look for reasons not to do things than in how to do them because the regulatory zeal placed upon it by government has crushed the desire to achieve things.  The good news of Trump’s commitment to space means so much more than just going back to the moon—it means uncovering that American spirit that put us there in the first place and going back to what worked—and allowing young people to dream of a work culture that stated “Failure is Not an Option” and spent every last breath of their lives articulating that type of thinking.

It was as if there were a cloud of negativity that has taken over the world and until Trump unleashed his big ideas that cloud has been in full rebellion.  It doesn’t want Trump to succeed in these quests and it has been so thick that even the magnanimity of the two speeches done after the 4th of July 2017 by first the President then the Vice President down at Kennedy Space Center that nobody heard about these events.  They were probably the most important news stories of the week, yet nobody covered them—not even Fox News.  Even supporters of Trump’s administration like Jessie Watters and Eric Boiling didn’t make a mention of these bold speeches on their coverage that I could see watching them through the following weekend—the news was all about CNN’s fake news coverage and the G20 Summit.  Nothing about America’s new commitment to space or the wonderful science that will come from it—we are talking about a new dawn for the human race while the attention is on keeping our heads in the waste of our lives by cowardly bureaucrats who want to keep our feet firmly in concrete sealed to the shallow history of European stagnation.

Everyone should have seen this coming, after all Trump is all about thinking big, and by the time he is done our previous visits to space will seem like distant history—not to be forgotten, but certainly not the focus of future visits of people to the Kennedy Space Center. Based on what Mike Pence said, Cape Canaveral is poised to be a true space port where private sector and government truly work properly toward the goal of expanding mankind into the vast cosmos above our heads. Instead of saying “remember that” we will be making t-shirts of what was just said in a board room off in the corner of the Vehicle Assembly Building as some engineering problem revealed major headaches for everyone.   It is in the thrill of overcoming those obstacles that the adventure of space happens—not from the losers who throw their hands up in because the word “the” is placed in the wrong place in a manufacturing plan.

But that those plans will be written once more as discovery happens and innovation dictates light feet and an indomitable spirit.  Yes, Trump’s commitment to space is the best thing to happen in America over many years and I am proud once again of our space program.  It won’t take long to see the results even though at this point very few people are talking about it.  Soon however, that won’t be the case.  It will prove to be one of the biggest things to have ever happened to the human race and its happening right now. And not a moment too soon!  We’ve needed this, and now Donald Trump is starting that train of successes in science moving again and the results will be positive for every single human being on planet earth—and that’s not an understatement.

Rich Hoffman

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The Press and “Dirty Laundry”: Trump literally body slams CNN to become the greatest president in history

It was September 15th of 2015 when I predicted that if Trump were ever elected president what kind of effect he would have on the nation when I said this:

Out of all his accomplishments, the sentiment that Trump is an inductee of the WWE in the celebrity wing of the Hall of Fame likely makes him most equipped to be President of the United States in the years following the embarrassments of Obama, Clinton and Bush more than anything else.

You can read the whole article at the link below because it is directly relevant to the tweet that Donald Trump put on his account Sunday morning July 2nd 2016 which ignited the world ablaze with bewilderment.  I am very proud of the President.  Extremely proud, because this is what it takes to make America great again.  It’s not his skill as a great leader, or his knowledge of business and deal making—or even his tireless work ethic.  The most valuable thing that Donald Trump brings to the White House is his induction into the WWE where he learned how to communicate with people in every spectrum of the known universe.

https://overmanwarrior.blog/2015/09/16/the-unconquered-donald-trump-cnns-debate-of-the-century-and-beyond/

I know moderates on the conservative side of things think this whole Trump twitter thing is disgusting-but that is only because they are part of the problem.  You show me a man who is in his sixties—which Trump was at the time of that video body slamming his friend Vince McMahon to the floor of a wrestling arena–without throwing their back out and you’ll see a more qualified person for the White House.  Because there isn’t one.  Sure the whole thing was staged between Trump and McMahon but the stunt was real and it is an added level of communication that has changed our American presidency for the better.

Gone are the aristocratic leanings of the Oval Office and thank God.  Nobody should care about the tea that the president drinks and from what room, or any of the ornamental elements of the office pageantry.  I recently came from Buckingham Palace and witnessed the formality of that culture and you can keep it.  I prefer a president who can body slam a 225 pound man flat against the ground and still get up and walk any day over some legal mumble jumble and slack-jawed wine banging over protocol.  CNN has been hard on the White House and Trump has a right to make his feelings known.  Holding back thoughts is what caused us to get into all these messes to begin with—it’s time to put everything out on the table and let everyone know how we feel about each other—because in not saying it—we have created immeasurable evil in this world with what was previously unsaid.  There are far worse things in life than in not stating what’s obvious because it allows for a pretense of civility where there clearly isn’t.  So we might as well get things out in the open so we can function from the truth.  Do we hate each other—yes.  What do we do about it remains to be seen, but at least we are being honest.

I find it astonishing that clean thinking conservatives think it is actually appropriate to continue on letting people think that lying to people is a good thing—that the presidency should be “above” the squabbles of political theater.  Since we are saying that these news organizations want press passes to the White House under the guise of “free speech” so they can broadcast anger on the airwaves at the expense of the really good positive thinking that Trump has tried to bring to Washington D.C. culture—then why shouldn’t Trump give them more to talk about in the manner of theatrics such as what we often have seen in the WWE over the years. Isn’t it all the same thing?

What these complainers of Trump’s behavior really mean when they criticize the antics of the president is that they want it one way.  They want to take their shots but they don’t want anything coming back.  But isn’t that, and hasn’t that been a large part of the problem?  We’ve had these wimpy American presidents who yielded to the masses and they were effectively complacent place holders allowing every kind of intellectual insurgent to change our culture from the inside out?  And if Ronald Reagan was the great communicator who talked tough and had great one-liners through his terms—even he knew of the plans to insert communism into our public schools after the Department of Education was officially created in 1979.  Reagan knew about it all that time and did nothing—and it has always bothered me.  These other presidents from Bush to Obama lately have just been terrible.  They were all pushovers who invited the world to pick on us and take our money at will—and it is so nice to see that we are finally at a place where we have a guy in the White House who isn’t afraid to put a stop to it.

There is nothing wrong with thinking out of the box, and Trump was certainly doing that when he played his part in the WWE.  It was good theater and nothing more but for a businessman like Trump who made a lot of money legitimately—it was quite something to do.  The physical nature of it alone is something to talk about.  It was more than an act—it showed just how far Trump was willing to go—and it also shows his range of communication ability—even to the point of physical stunt work.  When you are the whole package—which he is—why not show it off or why not use it when needed?  After all, Project Veritas showed what goes on behind the scenes with the CNN producers and what they really think about people.  Why not go for the jugular if you are Trump?  I would say that one of the main reasons I voted for him was because I hoped that he would behave like this in the White House and wouldn’t take any lip from the world, or our domestic enemies—people who speak against the culture of America as it has been.

We are not talking about the rights of the press to cover Trump.  We are talking about the show and that show is getting in the way of Trump’s agenda.  Don Henley wrote a song about this very problem many years ago called “Dirty Laundry.”  Trump is by nature an extremely positive person and anything that keeps him from communicating that reality to people is a target for his wrath.  His goal is to get everyone—no matter who they are into a positive reflection of American sentiment and right now the media is the part of our government which refuses to cooperate—so he’s attacking them in the same way they have been attacking him.  What he has exposed over the last several months of his first year in office is essentially what Don Henley sung about way back in the 80s—that news as they have been are mostly concerned about entertainment and through this conflict with Trump—they have finally been exposed.  By putting out that old WWE video on his Twitter page, Trump just put an explanation point at the end of his grand sentence which everyone clearly heard.

If Trump stopped being president right now he would clearly go down as the greatest that we have ever had—but folks—he’s only six months into it.  We have a long way to go and the media is not going to survive the journey.  And for that I am very glad.  The media likes dirty laundry, but I don’t.  I want leadership from the White House that will make America great again.  Not a bunch of neurotic news people who are really just failed actors in entertainment. Remember where you heard it first.  I called it way back in 2015 and now I’m telling you now—Trump is and will be the greatest president of this current century, perhaps forever and we are seeing it all happen right in front of our faces.  It is a privilege to witness up close and personal!

Rich Hoffman

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Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Have Lost Their Minds: The flawed Facebook data and advocacy of Universal Basic Income

I personally like Elon Musk so I’ll forgive him for his ridiculous support of this re-packaged communist proposal that lefties are so excited about, the idea of Universal Basic Income distribution.   Musk is doing good things with his billions of dollars so I can forgive dumb ideas based on his baseline left-leaning philosophies identifying that he has become slightly out-of-touch with reality due to his various projects which happen to be populated by Earth-first wackos.  Musk makes a great car and his SpaceX company is way out in front on driving the frontier of space in the direction that mankind needs to go.  But that stupid kid Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook I have no sympathy for.  He’s an idiot who made his money collecting vast amounts of data from the world population and selling it to intelligence agencies for their covert work.  He’s essentially a sell-out who came into a lot of money because he had no predilection for privacy invasion and he has been fed vast sums of money to keep doing what he’s doing—because the end game is just another modern version of communism disguised as something else for the tech age.

Universal Basic Income is a global idea being floated around that essentially gives everyone a no strings attached paycheck to live life. The big problem is—who pays?  Who pays for the entire world to have a paycheck without having to earn it?  Of course Zuckerberg will tell you that it is the “states” that will have to pay as we all must become one global government working toward the same goals.  Through his Facebook analysis he knows that a majority of the world is lazy and would rather not work a job toward productivity so he’s using this trend to launch this push toward Universal Basic Income.  After all, he’s a billionaire kid who clearly doesn’t understand the value of working at McDonald’s for the summer to buy a new car or earn a down payment on an apartment. Such a proposal as Universal Basic Income will never touch him and his vast wealth—so what does he care.   But he knows that a huge part of the population currently under 30 would rather stay home and play video games and talk on Facebook all day instead of being productive people toward goals of GDP.  Zuckerberg isn’t so smart—he’s not a great visionary.  He’s just a kid who won the lottery doing what other people wouldn’t because their conscious wouldn’t allow them to.  So what Zuckerberg and his other tech buddies are suggesting is an all out assault on our basic sovereignty and it should be challenged boldly.

I’ve made my feelings about Facebook clear. I think it’s vile, and evil.  I want nothing to do with it because it’s essentially a data collection operation designed to study personal habits and associates for sale to intelligence agencies and commercial enterprises.  Facebook wants to know what you know, who you know, how you interact with those people—how important some of those people are compared to other people and essentially what your daily habits are.  Facebook knows that humans are essentially social creatures so it uses a lot of code to exploit that need for the gains of the state.  So I don’t participate.  Facebook is different from other online activity opportunities because it’s a one stop shop of data collection.  Twitter isn’t nearly as invasive, and most other web activity forces data collection to cooperate with each other to build a profile—which is much harder than most people would think.  Facebook puts it all into one place for sale and distribution to those who want to use that information for their own needs.  Facebook isn’t revolutionary it’s just a big spider web designed to capture intellectual property from its users for others to consume at their leisure.

To assume that these advocates for Universal Basic Income are smart because they are part of the tech sector is a folly. As Zuckerberg and Musk both said recently, they think artificial intelligence and robotics are going to replace the human workforce so that gives justification toward Universal Basic Income because as they say, people will still need money in that changing economy.  All this is, is a dressed up new fear created by nothing to back it, to force people into a kind of communist thinking—that we will all be replaced by robots that these tech people are building—so we should listen to them because they have “hidden knowledge” we don’t have.  So we should all be grateful to them for sharing that information—and listen to their proposal.

I don’t mean to come across arrogantly, but I seriously doubt there is anybody in Silicone Valley who can see over the horizon better than I can—into the distant future.  I’d argue that even the best futurists couldn’t outthink me on the matter.  They may be as good, but better would be a statement based on lunacy.  I don’t typically beat people over the head with it—but in cases like this, I can see clearly elements to this puzzle that Zuckerberg and Musk don’t.  In Musk’s case, I think he’s enchanted a bit too much with the power he’s helping to create—but there is a diminishing return on all that he hasn’t yet factored in.  With Zuckerberg, I just think he’s a modern communist hiding his intentions behind modern terms and technology—and he doesn’t care.  What is being ignored which is represented directly by the GDP of a nation is the effect money has on the human soul and the necessity of productivity to extract it for the benefit of spiritual growth.  Humans need to be productive and in capitalist countries that necessity is obvious—and the culture expands at a rate that is very healthy for further development.  Thus, what is missing from these so-called “genius” billionaires is the basic reality that money by itself is worthless without productivity to back it up.  If you just give someone a paycheck—the value of it might buy them groceries, cars and lodging, but it denies them the merit of productive enterprise—or the incentive to be more productive so they could participate in more of life’s fabulous treasures acquired through financial surplus.

I heard a nice challenge to Mark Zuckerberg—if he believes in his Universal Basic Income plan than why don’t he put $1 billion of his so-called $60 billion in total net worth into a little village in Africa and watch what happens.  Give those people a pay check so they can live a basic life and put no demands on it.  Let automated electric cars donated by Elon Musk drive them everywhere they need to go and introduce the best of automation to run their fast food restaurants and their basic needs for manufacturing and measure what happens.  Within a few years the total sum of all that money would be gone and the region would be sucking for more investment but GDP would not contribute to any surplus leaving more investment needed and the rate of invention would decrease because there would be no real incentive to do so except for the back yard mechanics naturally inclined to tinker with things to make them work.  They’d regress as a mini society even from the point where the billion dollars was initially given.  Within a few years there’d be no trace of that billion dollar investment and the village would go back to its status of hut dwellings and chieftain hierarchy.  But why?

Out of all the data Facebook collects it is missing one important element. Facebook can track your associations with other people, your mood at various times of day, your career choices, what you like to eat, the type of music and movies you enjoy—just about everything except for what’s most important in your life—how productive are you.  Productive people don’t tend to spend much time playing on Facebook—but lazy worthless people do—so the data that Mark Zuckerberg is looking at and selling is tainted—it cannot predict the next great revolution in thought, economic, and practice.  And before humans are ever replaced by robots and artificial intelligence, they’ll find a way to excel in other fields where imagination and human input is needed—because at the core of the human experience is the need to be productive.

Now, not everyone feels this way. There are many sick human beings out there who are psychiatrically broken and laziness is part of the symptom of living these shattered lives as a bi-product.  I would go as far to say that likely 90% of our society at all levels is psychiatrically broken to some degree—and those idiots are on Facebook giving a lot of people bad, distorted data based on a whole host of mental illness—such as needing too much correspondence with other human beings to cover deeply personal problems that lay hidden.  That’s not to say those people are not valuable or beyond hope—but as far as functioning in a democracy they are unreliable because they will always seek socialism and other forms of mass collectivism to hide their dysfunctions not only from themselves, but from society as a whole.

It is productivity that is the best way to draw out mental health issues and to become a proper human being and the human race will never surrender productivity to robots, artificial intelligence and other emerging systems of technology just so they can sit around all day and play Call of Duty.  It’s just not going to happen.  There may be a lot of people who will desire such things so they can hide in the shadows and get a free paycheck so they don’t have to deal with real life issues—but giving everyone a free pay check without attaching to it some expected productive output will only lead to a mass psychosis in human activity and we will discover too late—(a hundred years from now) that machines couldn’t do half of what we thought they could because the mysterious human soul is still needed for imagination—and imagination is the first step in all productive output.

I am so certain about these things that you can mark it on your calendar and remember that I told you first—because I just did. Mark Zuckerberg has performed a con by over-sampling human deficiencies while ignoring what matters most to human beings—which is why he and people like Elon Musk are so terrified of artificial intelligence and robots.  Most liberals don’t understand the things I’ve presented here and I would go as far to say that everyone one of them on the liberal side of thinking is operating in some rendition of mental illness.  Even though they are part of shaping tomorrow technologically, they are still liberals who don’t understand the nature of productivity properly—thus they have nothing to contribute on the really big philosophical issues of our time.  And believe me, Universal Basic Income is not a part of any human future that thrives.  It would only contribute to the Vico cycle and destroy our present course because missing from its introduction is the crucial ingredient of productive enterprise that is at the core of all human development.

Rich Hoffman

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Ron Howard Directing the New Han Solo Film: Why hating Donald Trump is toxic for people in the entertainment industry

There is no way I couldn’t do it because it was only the biggest news story of the week—bigger than Donald Trump’s latest speech, bigger than the latest terrorist threat in Europe—it was so big that it actually led the headlines for three solid days worldwide.  The new Han Solo Star Wars movie production fired its two directors—whom I liked—Phil Lord and Christopher Miller with just three weeks left on the schedule and a summer of re-shoots still needing completion.  Obviously, I have designated myself as a Star Wars fan and out of all the characters in that fantasy sci-fi series Han Solo is my absolutely favorite character.  So even though there are thousands of other topics I might otherwise discuss—I must cover this issue by default of its cultural importance—because as I’ve said many times, Star Wars is not just a movie.  For many people it is a nearly religious event with tremendous cultural ramifications.  And yes, this was big news to a lot of people—and to the film industry as a whole.  My first inclination was optimism for reasons that I’ll describe because it tells me that Kathy Kennedy has her arms around these Star Wars movies—she understands what needs to be done and she isn’t afraid to do it—and I respect that.  Her pick for the next director couldn’t have been better—Ron Howard fresh off the Genius National Geographic drama about Albert Einstein.

I understand now that it was the kid playing the young Han Solo who actually started the process, Alden Ehrenreich.  He apparently was concerned that the directors known for their comedy in films like 21 Jump Street were not taking the picture to a place it needed to go and he spoke to people about it.  His instincts were correct, Han Solo is serious business even though there is comedy that surrounds a character like that—it’s a very fine line.  After Ehrenreich stated his concerns the word got back to Kathy Kennedy who took a look at the dailies and the film just wasn’t working.  It’s not necessarily the fault of Lord and Miller, but if they weren’t getting that fine line—then they needed to be fired.

Additionally, and this is something I don’t think any of them would admit, I noticed that both Miller and Lord were openly protesting Donald Trump and were members of this new Hollywood “resistance” which happens to be the same name of the group that works against the Empire in the new Star Wars films—and this was making Disney and Kathy Kennedy nervous.  The Han Solo film went into production in February of this year and I just happened to be in London at the same time so I was seeing news that wasn’t so available in the United States and I was very concerned that these new Star Wars directors were so openly against Trump and were fully supporting demonstrations in the streets of London.  There is no question that some of that radicalism was finding its way into the new Star Wars movie—where it clearly didn’t belong.  By pissing off half the country in America with political activism in a Star Wars film it would certainly take a hit at the box office and the franchise led by Kennedy these days can’t afford something like that, directly or indirectly.  It was so bad that I actually Tweeted the kids to knock it off—they needed to keep their eyes on the big picture.

Just this week Johnny Depp effectively ended his career when he stated that he thought that a modern actor should assassinate Donald Trump—he was speaking to a group in England where that kind of talk is quite popular these days and he forgot really how far his statements might go—and once it hit the American media it was too late for him.  Depp’s latest Pirates of the Caribbean film had done decent business and if he had kept his mouth shut, he might have recovered as an actor.  His recent divorce and difficulties on the set of Dead Men Tell No Tales have flagged him as a has been that can’t deliver at the box office.  His money was over extended and he really needed to just ride the wave of Pirates and actually hope for another one to pull him out of this slump. But now—he’s toxic. Like it or not, Trump is president and many people are having a positive experience because of it—and they don’t want to hear a bunch of spoiled brat actors and directors taking shots at their president in movies they pay to see. It’s just not good business.  I think Johnny Depp—as much as I like him as an actor—just killed his career forever.  He’ll never recover. He literally just went from riches to rags—because with his financial problems he needed to stay on top to get large pay checks and he just killed that opportunity.

Although I was critical of the Genius show on the National Geographic Channel, Ron Howard did a great job as he always does directing it.  He is one of the top filmmakers in the world clearly functioning from a different place—and when it was announced that Lucasfilm had hired him to replace Lord and Miller I was very happy about it.  Ron Howard knew how to keep the modern politics out of his projects just like many older directors could. For instance, I never knew whether or not George Lucas or Steven Spielberg were conservatives or liberals in the 80s.  When Ronald Reagan invited them to the White House they went and took pictures and they certainly didn’t protest in politics.  If Return of the Jedi had references to the Vietnam War in it sympathetic to the Vietnamese—I couldn’t tell by watching the product.

I was quite shocked to find in the 90s that Spielberg and Lucas gave money to the Clintons and were becoming more active within the Democratic Party—and as much as I liked them—I thought differently about them since then.  No longer did I rush out and see their movies because they had shown themselves to be against conservative positions—and honestly they never recovered their former positions culturally because of it.  However, Ron Howard has never lost that and is the closest thing we have in Hollywood to a good traditional director and actor who established his roots on the Andy Griffin Show.  He knows how to walk that fine line so that people can enjoy a project of his without thinking about the modern politics of the moment—because ten to twenty years from now—you still want the film to be relevant.

For this Han Solo movie to have the kind of appeal that Disney needs out of it they really need to pull off something special and it’s a credit to Kathy Kennedy that she took action before it was too late.  Ron Howard will know what to do and I’m relieved for it.  The world is changing and that radicalism that Hollywood has embraced cannot find its way into something that needs to stay relevant well into the future.  By the time this Han Solo movie is released in May of 2018 we will be living in a different world–largely shaped by Donald Trump’s presidency—and a lot of people will be supportive of him.  They don’t want to see a movie made by people who openly hate him and have filled their Twitter pages with disparaging Trump remarks.  They’ll want to go to the darkened theater and enjoy a new Star Wars movie without politics trying to shape their opinions—and Ron Howard knows how to do that.  After all, it wasn’t Howard’s fault that I liked Albert Einstein less after his Genius series.  It was to Howard’s credit that I was able to get to know Einstein much better than ever before.  As an artist he just presented the facts—he didn’t tell me how to feel—and that is the difference between a great director and people who are just average.  That is why hiring Howard to direct the Han Solo movie will prove to be so brilliant—and I’m glad the production had the courage to do it—before it was too late.

Rich Hoffman

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‘The Book of Henry’: More than a film review–but an articulation of the very nature of evil

I was stunned by the movie reviews for The Book of Henry—they were illustriously bad.  In fact, they were so bad that there was often hatred in the utterances of the reviews.  Some people just hated this movie.  Yet, I have been very excited about it and did go and see it on the opening weekend—and I thought it was an absolutely brilliant film.  It wasn’t just a little good—it was great and in any other time, it would win many awards.  So how could all the critics be so wrong—well, to get to that let’s study the reaction to just the trailer that Grace Randolph from Beyond the Trailer provided when she reviewed the preview back in March.  I’m not picking on Grace, I usually lover her opinions even when I don’t agree—but this reaction is one of those raw–primal hatreds that certainly influenced all the negative reviews and that is why this is such a brilliant film.  Watch closely.

I think it said a lot about Colin Trevorrow that he wanted to even make this movie between the blockbusters of Jurassic World and the ninth Star Wars film upcoming.  He could have made any movie he wanted yet he picked The Book of Henry, which features a boy genius, 11 years of age who knows that there is great evil in the world and he spends much of his time contemplating how to stop it.  Trevorrow brought in some great talent, wonderful editing, great composer, great actors, great cinematography—great film business people from top to bottom and gave a project like The Book of Henry a top notch indie film treatment.  It’s a movie with a lot of heart but it has a judgment and that is what has people so outrageously upset with the movie and seek to punish it with their own needs to deflect their own guilt for the theme for which the movie is about.

The little girl next door to where Henry lives with his single mom and his little brother is being sexually abused by her step father who happens to be the police commissioner. So let’s answer Grace’s question from above, because her reaction was pretty innocent but some of the people in the film review business, from Variety to Rolling Stone are no doubt like the Sarah Silverman character—whom I don’t like as a political activist.  But she played a wonderful normal person in this movie—a person that likely 90 percent of our population could identify with.  She’s a loser, a hard-core drinker who misses work too much and has an ugly tattoo on her breast which she shows off most of the movie—she is the best friend of Naomi Watts who plays Henry’s mom.  And what a poor creature she is—she represents another large segment of the population who have lost her way in life.  She’s not a bad person, but she’s afraid to make her mark on the world and she drinks and plays too many video games to hide from that inclination—and she is totally dependent on her oldest son Henry who is an impeccable genius.

Most of the reviewers have commented that Henry seems otherworldly and un-relatable. After all, there just aren’t 11-year-olds out there who are as mature and wise as Henry.  But movies are supposed to take us to places we can’t go in normal life and meet people worth the hard work that usually goes into making movies.  And lucky for me, I completely understand Henry.  I knew people like him and there are parts of him that I can directly understand.  There is a scene in the movie that I thought was particularly powerful, it’s where Henry, his brother and his mom are at the grocery and they see a guy beating his girlfriend as they are having an argument. Nobody does anything to help the woman, but Henry is inclined to get involved and his mom stops him telling him its none of their business.  “Don’t get involved.”   Later that night Henry and his mom are in bed talking (innocently because the mother still reads books to her boys even though they are probably too old) and Henry tries to explain how disappointed he was in his mother for not wanting to get involved in the argument between the couple at the grocery store.  Of course his mother uses the excuse that she didn’t want to become embroiled in a violent episode.  Then Henry explains to her that violence isn’t always the worst thing.  Curious, his mother asked the young man what is the worst thing in the world.  Henry pauses for a second and answers, “apathy.”

When Grace Randolph was so outraged that The Book of Henry relied so heavily on a child genius to tell a rather ordinary story about revenge, redemption and family assimilation she made the mistake to assume that these things are normally very obvious to people—and they are in the third person.  After all, we are used to watching other people in the god-like position of viewer, with television and movies where we often have more information about what’s going on than the characters on the screen do and the drama we experience is in hoping that people we care about learn what we do in time to save themselves.  But in real life where stories are not broken down into typical three act plays, introduction, articulation of the conflict, then wrapped up nicely and on que to climax—events do not hold to that structure and because we have trained our minds in such a fashion—we often do not see evil sitting right in front of us.  Evil comes at us in subtle ways through loved ones, our jobs, our politics—even the kid who wants to mow our grass, install our cable, or check out our food at Wal-Mart.  We as human beings trust our structures and our institutions.  But most of the things that happen in the world happens outside of those organized elements and in the case of The Book of Henry, we see a society stuck in its structures and trust in institutional figures—such as the police chief next door who complains that the leaves of his single parent mother neighbor keep blowing into his yard giving him psychological leverage over her to hide his real crime—that he is sexually molesting his step daughter and using the institutions of government to keep inquiries away from him.  It takes someone free of those institutions—someone bigger than what human kind has to offer at that moment to see the evil—and that is why it was necessary to have Henry in this film be a brilliant kid.  Without that genius, nobody would have the courage to step beyond the veil of adulthood with all its trickery and diversion tactics meant to deceive themselves into believing they were living good lives—to see the truth.  That the police commissioner was destroying this poor little girl for extremely selfish reasons he deserved a style of justice that has nearly been outlawed in America. The Book of Henry nails all this and more making it a remarkable work of art.  That it has pissed off so many reviewers say more about them than the movie—for they are like the institutionalists in the film who failed the little girl while only Henry thought to act and took action to start the process. There are a lot of little girls—and little boys in the world who need someone to see how much trouble they are in but unfortunately their plight is invisible to most of our adult population.

The Book of Henry is a rare film that like all great art shows us what is difficult to see and in this case the plot device is genius to show it to an audience stuck in life much like the Naomi Watts character—not a bad person, but a person stuck in hundreds of bad decisions holding her down in life.  Her son Henry is pure and free of such things and it is through him that she comes to see the world for what it really is—and is compelled to act accordingly.  Even with some of the truly tragic story lines in this film it is an uplifting tale of optimism and genuine love of life. It is a truly remarkable work and something everyone should see at least once.  The reviews don’t like the film because it’s a bad movie—but because it makes them look at things they are partially guilty of creating—so that should not be a reason to avoid the picture.  Rather, The Book of Henry should be watched with open hearts and open minds and an honest assessment to what role the viewer might play on the side of villainy so that they can correct the situation for the good of everyone. The Book of Henry nails it and is certainly one of the great films of history and should still be remembered many years from now.

Rich Hoffman

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Oskar Eustis and his Poor Understanding of History: The director of New York’s Julius Ceaser gets everything wrong

Oskar Eustis as the “artistic director” of the controversial Julius Ceaser play at the Shakespeare in the Park in New York City doesn’t even understand what kind of country America is, let alone have a proper commentary on translating the 400 year old play to contemporary subject matter.  He’s the guy who thought it smart to dress up Julius Ceaser as a modern-day Donald Trump and have the character murdered on stage by a “diverse” senate filled with women, people of color and many others stabbed to death by a mob.  We are a republic Oskar, not a stupid, mind numb democracy.  This play has nothing to do with America—in fact our mode of government was an invention to step away from this kind of mob driven drivel.  Shakespeare’s Julius Ceaser play is about revenge, murder and political conspiracy—and all that plot driven nonsense—but its relevancy to Donald Trump for which you made him the lead character in this modern rendition—with Trump Tower leering on the skyline in full view of the audience is an attempt to taint the waters of the ignorant into poking their unsophisticated asses into open insurrection—and it isn’t forgivable.

I feel like I say this all the time about way too many subjects but I know something about William Shakespeare. My favorite of his plays is Titus Andronicus which is a character I understand completely.  I love the way it reads and to date Julie Taymor has done the best job of taking the play to film with Anthony Hopkins doing a phenomenal job as Titus.  Many creative people have applied their hand to Shakespeare and for good reason, the material is rich and it forces actors to really dig deep in understanding theater from a long ago time in a language that is almost completely foreign to us now.  So it was an insult to me to hear how this latest New York modern rendition of Julius Ceaser was abusing its artistic power and trying to explain it away once Bank of America pulled out as a sponsor for wistfully putting Donald Trump into the contemporary role of “protagonist” brutally murdered by a bunch of conniving senators. You don’t have to look too far to understand that the play’s director in this case is rooting for the Chuck Schumers of the world to plot the same kind of assassination in modern politics and that his grasp on this modern history is as shallow as a dry lake bed in Nevada.

When Oskar Eustis said in his remarks on his play that “democracy depends on the conflict of different points of view, nobody owns the truth, we all own the culture,” he displayed a predilection toward insanity that I found quite alarming.  People clapped because they figured he was an art guy who knows more than they do about these matters, but honestly the lack of understanding displayed by Eustis of this material is shocking.  It is because democracy is unreliable that we even have a republic in America—and the analysis that William Shakespeare was constantly obsessed with about the Roman republic failures in his plays are explorations in mob violence for the sake of theater and the compelling subject matter it evokes.  The Donald Trump presidency is actually an evolution beyond this kind of animalistic chaos.  Trump is not power-hungry in the way that Julius Ceaser was and he is not a person who would ever be in a position to allow a mob of conniving senators access to him in a way they could commit murder.  Trump is much more strategic, and a lot smarter than people think he is.  I would warn people not to assume that they can “outthink” the Trump—which is one of the appealing aspects of his presidency for which people like me voted for him.  I don’t want a Shakespearian White House for a change.  I want an evolution beyond it—and I have found it in Trump.

https://publictheater.org/Tickets/Calendar/PlayDetailsCollection/SITP/Julius-Caesar/

We are not all equal in a democratic America.  Some of us work a lot harder than others and thus we need the representation of a republic to prevent the mob from running the show—because the lazy, the drug obsessed, and the sexually manipulative need to be kept at a distance from the legislative process as much as possible—and the hardest working among us should be the ones running things.  We can only determine value through merit so as far as owning the truth—it doesn’t all belong to us equally.  And regarding the political left, democracy has already defeated the progressive offerings philosophically and they don’t like it and have turned toward these violent threats to stay relevant in the world.  Oskar Eustis can play word gymnastics all he wants in an attempt to take the edge off what he did—which was an open plea for the modern senate to assassinate Donald Trump.  Eustis knew that most people wouldn’t understand the words spoken in the play and that most people haven’t worked hard to gain the meanings of Shakespeare’s language.  But dress up Ceaser in Donald Trump looking suits and make his wife sound just like Melania Trump and even the dumbest people in the audience will understand and that will be what they remember.  And at the pot parties before and after the big show—which always go on with creative people the stoned losers hope that out there in the audience is a James Hodgkinson who might be a committed enough leftist with nothing to lose in life who might sacrifice themselves for the cause of “democracy” otherwise known as “mob rule.”  Don’t kid yourself in thinking that this kind of talk is not happening.  Listen to what leftists say in public—what they say when the cameras are not on is much worse.

I found it particularly insulting that Oskar Eustis on the front page of their website actually said “Act Three, Scene One of Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR takes place on the Ides of March, 44 B.C. By the time that scene is over, democracy will have vanished from the face of the earth for almost two millennia, until some English colonists on the eastern seaboard of North America start throwing tea into Boston Harbor.”  This open appeal toward the conservative movement to connect his play with the efforts of the American Revolution were disgusting—and again it’s not democracy that we’re analyzing, it’s a republic—a representative republic that requires the participation of the engaged and wise and allows the fools and addicts to beg for money on the sidewalk as “unequal” participants in history. There is quite a difference between the players on the field of a sporting event and those who just sit in the stands and watch.  Those who participate in our republic are on the field whether they vote, or become part of the mechanisms of government.  The mob is in the stands cheering or booing depending on how things go—but they are not equal participants.  People who smoke dope and study 400-year old plays about violence and the darkest of human emotions are not equal to the law student who spends 18 hours a day preparing their mind for a big case and will eventually become a senator perhaps after a successful career over many years.  They are not equal people.

Additionally I would offer that Donald Trump is a superior offering to anything that William Shakespeare ever conceived in his plays.  Understanding Donald Trump’s White House is beyond the grasp of people like Oskar Eustis and his thin understanding of history.  We are looking at an evolutionary design for which history will record and will be thankful for over the coming millennia.  To put Trump into the shoes of Julius Caesar is to try to take a full-grown adult and put baby shoes on them—Trump is far more evolved than anything Rome ever created as an emperor. The very stupid of our society may not understand how or why yet because history is being written with each moment that we breathe—but Trump is an idea that will change history for the better.  All Eustis could see as a director of a play was a way to try to hold those animalistic concepts of human nature to a White House that is moving well beyond the reach of the political left and their failed ideas.  All they have is the threat of violence to attempt to stay relevant in this tragedy of modern politics.  They are not equal in this American republic because their liberal concepts for our reality have been rejected in the theater of debate and all they have left is to attempt to redefine the definitions of fairness and the recollections of history to suit their current crises—and to hope that by calling our American system a democracy that enough dumb people will believe them in an effort to get out the vote and ignite their base for the 2018 midterms between the haze of marijuana smoke and a drug induced orgy of dirty, smelly, tattooed covered liberals laced with body piercings and a lack of deodorant forgotten due to their spending the day bitching about Donald Trump instead of getting a job and jumping on the many opportunities this administration has created for them to be more successful.  They like most liberals would rather complain, and plot murder so that they could keep their welfare checks and government jobs intact hoping beyond hope that Karl Marx will find his way into the philosophy of American politics before all the old hippies die off.  But in America its Adam Smith who set the stage and it’s not Julius Ceaser who runs our Republic—its Donald Trump, and he is a creation beyond the reach of classic literature.  That book is being written before our eyes for the first time in history—and it’s much more exciting than anything the human race has ever created before.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Jim Comey Should go to Jail: How the former FBI director lied and how

Given the nature of the subject and the amount of time I personally gave to it last week this is sort of a three-part response to the Comey testimony provided on June 8th 2017 to the senate.  (Click here to review the previous entries.)  So for this let me answer the question that was given to me by CNN and explain my reasons—the question of course was whether or not I thought James Comey—former director of the FBI, should go to jail.  In my 20 second answer, I couldn’t give the kind of answer I wanted because of the necessary theatrics of television so here it is in writing.  Yes, James Comey should go to jail for lying under oath and for subversion of our republic.  I’m sure he was lying, and I’m sure he held back information deliberately which is in many cases equivalent to lying and he is for all practical purposes a villain.  Here’s why.

There was something that really bothered me about the way James Comey prepared his statements before the testimony, and the way he referred to tangible observations in such a lurid way.  As I said to CNN, Comey’s written testimony along with the delivery of additional information to the senate reminded me of the early James Bond novels from Ian Flemming–of a much more disgraceful and reckless British agent than we saw in the films with Sean Connery and Roger Moore.  The flair of Comey’s writing style reminded me not of a long time FBI agent—but actually that of a pent-up author wanting desperately to mater in the world just a few years before turning 60 years of age.  My comments below come from the experience of being an employer myself and working with people the same age as James Comey—and in reading voluminous amounts of books over the years—particularly the work of Ian Fleming.  I know all too well that when you hire fire and discipline around a thousand employees over a period of time some of them by nature will not agree with you.  Sometimes they will work against you, and at some point in time will think you are the most evil person in the world because they can’t get you to see things their way—and they find themselves on the outside looking in—which often hurts their feelings.  There are people out there who think I’m the most mean and evil person in the world.  Does that make them correct?  Of course not, but from their perspective their opinion is all they care about.  And this is what we are talking about with Comey—an ex-employee who gambled and lost his job and is now on the outside and it hurts him.  His testimony says all the things we need to know. If you know what to look for Comey spelled it all out before the hearing even took place by what he had written down, then illustrated gloriously during his sworn statements.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-jcomey-060817.pdf?platform=hootsuite

Again, this is experience on my part that I offer this breakdown, but Comey opened the door to it by his own testimony.  Because he did that we have to account for the way he thinks and what his motives were based on the instinct of experience. For instance, below are a few of the Comey written comments that I found particularly damning for him so let me talk about them one at a time which will then be summarized to properly articulate my conclusion of why Comey should go to jail.  Here is the first:

The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.

That’s not what the IC was doing on their January 6th meeting with Trump where Comey cleared the room to report the unverified salacious and unverified material to Trump.  They were showing the new president what they had on him and were warning him of information they “could” possess if needed for their own preservation.  They were guilty of trying to create the kind of leverage that Comey complained about later which indicates that they were prone to thinking this way themselves—as a point of reference.  The IC (intelligence community) was trying to throw Trump a bone so that they could win him over for their further employment.  When Trump failed to feel threatened by this attempt, the members of the IC were deeply concerned as they left Trump Tower that day and it was at this point that the leaks from the IC began to flow freely to the press.

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past. I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) – once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016. In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions. I can recall nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in four months – three in person and six on the phone.

By his own admission Comey never did this with any other president prior, but the meeting rattled Comey to such an extent that he felt he better start now because it was always his intention after January 6th to rid the Beltway of this Trump threat. That was the same type of behavior that an employee who knows they are about to be fired does in an attempt to save their job, they begin gathering written recollections to use in human resources later. Comey lacking personal courage reverted to a passive aggressive approach, which was writing everything down. Comey understood early that Trump had doubts about him and his leadership in the FBI so he began to keep notes that he could use later to extort his futher employment.

 

My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.  A few moments later, the President said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.

Here Comey is hoping to use his experience as an FBI agent and director to overcome any doubt about what he’s saying about Trump.  This detail about his personal dinner with Trump in the Green Room of the White House is particularly revealing.  First Comey wants to show that he has a story to tell and is trying to attract agents for a big book deal, or even a Hollywood movie based on his experiences.  The liberals of the Beltway who know film producers likely put the bug in his ear which he was receptive to after that January 8th meeting where Comey started writing things down.  The salacious details here say a lot about Comey’s motives because he goes into almost screenplay detail—which has nothing to do with facts the way you’d expect an FBI director to illicit.  Instead he relied on his feelings which are more aligned with the way a novelist would write.  People forget that Ian Flemming, the great British writer and creator of James Bond was a British Naval Intelligence Division agent before he was a writer and if you go back and read his first book, Casino Royal, it actually sounds a lot like the way Comey writes in his interactions with Trump.  Since Comey himself offered that “instinct” is admissible as evidence for the deduction of reason in this case, then I feel quite comfortable in concluding that Comey decided he was going to be a writer after his FBI career and Trump was going to be his villain that he’d write about.  He’d be the toast of the swamp as his friends around the Beltway would honor him for all time as the Boy Scout who saved them from the lunatic businessman from New York during a short-lived presidency.  The more he thought about it, the more alluring the thought became until it became so obvious that Trump could see it on his face.  Prior to that January 27th dinner meeting, Comey had hidden his fantasy—but Trump could detect it and it changed the way that Trump thought about Comey as director of the FBI.

On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of the President. He sat behind the desk and a group of us sat in a semi-circle of about six chairs facing him on the other side of the desk. The Vice President, Deputy Director of the CIA, Director of the National CounterTerrorism Center, Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, and I were in the semi-circle of chairs. I was directly facing the President, sitting between the Deputy CIA Director and the Director of NCTC. There were quite a few others in the room, sitting behind us on couches and chairs. The President signaled the end of the briefing by thanking the group and telling them all that he wanted to speak to me alone. I stayed in my chair. As the participants started to leave the Oval Office, the Attorney General lingered by my chair, but the President thanked him and said he wanted to speak only with me. The last person to leave was Jared Kushner, who also stood by my chair and exchanged pleasantries with me. The President then excused him, saying he wanted to speak with me. When the door by the grandfather clock closed, and we were alone, the President began by saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” Flynn had resigned 5 the previous day. The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President. He added that he had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify. The President then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information – a concern I shared and still share. After he had spoken for a few minutes about leaks, Reince Priebus leaned in through the door by the grandfather clock and I could see a group of people waiting behind him. The President waved at him to close the door, saying he would be done shortly. The door closed. The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied only that “he is a good guy.” (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at FBI.) I did not say I would “let this go.” The President returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Mr. Priebus and the Vice President. I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership. I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December. I did not understand the President to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. I could be wrong, but I took him to be focusing on what had just happened with Flynn’s departure and the controversy around his account of his phone calls. Regardless, it was very concerning, given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency.

Even going to the trouble to mention the grandfather clock in this segment of Comey’s testimony is more of an attempt to paint a picture of the moment more than just reporting the facts.  This only reiterates what I said about Comey wanting to be a novelist because the clock has nothing to do with the facts of the matter. The point of this entire segment is to paint Comey as the sole survivor of a treacherous cloud of villainy.  Comey knew that his Beltway friends would soak all this up so he added extra detail for the sake of drama.  In the contents of the discussion its obvious Trump wanted to protect his friend Michael Flynn from further embarrassment as the guy had just resigned a few days prior.  There was no conspiracy or ill intent on the part of the president—since “instinct” is now admissible as evidence.  What is particularly revealing here is the part where Comey tries to portray himself completely in control by saying “I did not say I would ‘let this go.” The president returned briefly to the problem of leaks.  I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock”—and so on and so on.  Listening to Comey speak in writing he was very much in control and was the protagonist of his own adventure, but from what he stated in his testimony he added that he was terrified of this one on one with Trump and he felt compelled that the weight of the office was upon him to stop the Russian investigation.

Essentially Comey decided some time before the election of 2016 that regardless of what happened he was going to seek money and fame in the private sector which likely shaped the way he handled the Hillary Clinton case.  If he had prosecuted her—like he should have, the agents and movie makers would have held it against him.  So days before the election when things were tight between Trump and Clinton he tried to take the light off her and help her out a few percentage points—because he wanted his book deal.  It would have paid a lot more than he made as an FBI director and he’d gain fame for he and his family—along with his professor friends who leak stories to The New York Times. From Comey’s perspective of trying to make a little money for his family he’s a hero—he’s the protagonist standing up to the president in the Oval Office like a Boy Scout honest, clean and full of pride in Amerca. But in reality he was just another swamp monster working against the American people, actively subverting justice to keep a political party in power and when none of that worked he became one of the big leakers to the media in an attempt to bring down a properly elected American president violating his employment agreement with the FBI and the natural trust his position carried with it as head of the intelligence community.

Comey lied because he took it upon himself to become an activist, he wrote down information on government computers to be used as a weapon—no wonder he let Hillary Clinton go—but he did not state these intentions which were clearly present.  Instead he painted himself as a bastion of the law who would uphold truth, justice and the American way. In reality he was just another cowering bureaucrat trying to hide in the swamp and ride out his years as he propped himself up as a future writer in the private sector.  He lied because he did not state his intentions correctly for why he actually became a leaker.  He said it was to preserve justice—but in reality it was to take down a president he didn’t like from the beginning and he wanted to be a hero to the left.  He also lied in saying that he wasn’t political.  His actions were very political and more than justified his termination without any further drama.  But we all know how that turned out. Comey placed himself on a pedestal hoping to play at being the sacrificial lamb for the good of the ”Beltway.”  But what he revealed of himself was that he was an activist for the preservation of the status quo and a leaker of information gathered in the Oval Office to be spread upon a salacious press in the way a plot from House of Cards might have a hard time believing.  Yet that is precisely what happened.  That is why Comey should go to jail. He abused the trust of his office. He sought to bring down an American president’s administration, and he misrepresented himself under sworn testimony. And he wrote down the evidence forcing us all to act on it.

And that’s that.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump is Not Guilty of Obstruction of Justice: The case as to how Comey broke the law and is the real villian

Before anyone says that the legal opinions provided here are not valid, because I’m not a practicing lawyer, let me just say this.  It is not good to be overly specialized in one particular field of endeavor. Every person should make themselves well versed in many aspects of human society and its inventions—and law is one of those inventions.  It is just as good to know the basics of the legal profession as it is to know how to change the oil in your car.  The declaration that one should not have a legal position because they aren’t playing golf with county judges on Saturdays doesn’t mean that opinions of great merit cannot be made.  But in my case I do have quite a lot of legal experience in law even to the point of representing myself in court because I deemed legal counsel ill-equipped intellectually to do so on my behalf.  And I have always been successful in these endeavors even when the other side threw in a lot of resources hoping to tip the scales of justice.  In that context I can say with certainty that Donald J. Trump absolutely can never be prosecuted, impeached, or in any way penalized for obstruction of justice in the White House over the James Comey termination.  Trump is free of guilt 100%–unequivocally.  Here’s why.

Clearly from the testimony I heard James Comey give Trump fired the former FBI director based on merit—meaning Comey had failed at his job.  When Comey started his testimony rehashing his work experience using the many times that President Trump had told him he was doing a good job, he was seeking to cover-up the later opinions which led to the termination with feel good language designed to illicit a cover-story—which is typical of most government employees who find it difficult to live within the parameters of reality.  Government work tends not to be merit based, but viewed more as an entitlement—so Comey’s testimony was geared to support that false reality.

Putting Comey’s account into direct comparison with Donald Trump’s—if I were the judge sitting in a chamber debating the legal positions put forth I would have to conclude that Comey was insecure with his job performance during the fall of 2016 and his new boss was a merit based individual which was terrifying enough to the FBI Director.  So Comey hoped to keep his head low and avoid any confrontations with Trump.  To secure his job he let it float that he was going to conduct an investigation into the Russian connection to ensure that Trump would never fire him for fear that the optics would look terrible.  This is why Comey agreed to help the Obama administration spy on Trump’s transition team hoping to gather up some evidence to use in case the new president decided to pull the plug on Comey’s remaining six year’s appointment as director of the FBI.

Upon meeting Trump, Comey realized that dealing with the star of The Apprentice for 14 seasons was going to be a lot tougher than the former community activist, Barack Obama was.  Obama had to completely rely on other people to make value judgments making Comey much more important in discussing matters of intelligence gathering.  Trump on the other hand had his own opinions about things—and knew how to read people and make value judgments completely free of other people’s opinions.  This really worried Director Comey because as a person—he was functioning from deep insecurities regarding his masculinity—likely cultivated through his years working closely with other Washington D.C. types in that bubble of the Beltway where rules were known and unconsciously followed.  Trump was a departure of that thinking and had earned his way through life on his own merit which made Comey very uncomfortable due to his own lack of such experiences.

This is why Comey felt he could clear the room in a December meeting for a one on one discussion with the new President—because the FBI director had the institution of the FBI at his back and felt he could trust it to protect him from someone like Trump. But with each subsequent meeting thereafter Comey realized that Trump was reading him too well.  The dinner invites and other discussions on the phone and elsewhere revealed that the now President Trump had doubts about the Obama appointee.  Making matters even worse, likely, Comey had been listening to the Trump people at Trump Tower in New York and knew Trump’s true opinion of the FBI Director.  Trump, like he would anybody in business, was sizing up Comey to decide if he wanted to continue having his FBI led by such a guy—because he wanted to make his own mark and put his own kind of person in place.  So when Trump shook Comey’s hand where Trump would say—“you’re doing a good job,” Comey suspected otherwise either by direct evidence from spying on Trump, or from his own knowledge that this new president had the skills to sniff him out in a crowd for being not very effective in his job.

Trump appears to have been vetting Comey from the start.  He was willing to give the FBI Director a fair shake because some of the timing of the Comey comments on the Hillary Clinton email scandal did help Trump in the election.  But Comey obviously was not a Trump supporter and the way the big man avoided eye contact and shook hands concerned Trump.  Comey was too sneaky to be trusted so Trump’s many personal meetings with Comey were like the boardroom on The Apprentice—to assess the merit of the FBI Director to decide what to do with him.  The assurances that Comey had been doing a good job were to put his mind at ease so that Trump could really get to know the man on a basic competency level.  Through those meetings Trump learned that most of what Comey was had been purely show and that competency at the level of his job heading the FBI just wasn’t there.  Obama might have liked Comey—but what did he know?  Trump wasn’t a fan and by February was leaning away from keeping the Director on as an appointee to the President.

When Trump asked the room to clear in the Oval Office to speak directly to Director Comey just days after Trump had to fire General Flynn, at one level the President was seeking relief for his friend—who had been through enough of a witch hunt from the press over the whole Russian thing.  Yes, Flynn had lied to get the job, but Trump being a loyal guy wanted to let the General recover in peace from further scrutiny.  Plus Trump didn’t want dark clouds to interrupt all the optimistic things he wanted to do as president.  But more than anything, Trump wanted to strip away the various institutions that people like Comey rely on to hide their lack of competency and he wanted to speak to the man one on one knowing that many of the leaks that had been coming out of the various intelligence agencies were pointing directly to Comey. So having all that stripped away, Trump wanted to be sure that the man standing in front of him was really a sleaze ball who was still very sympathetic to the Obama administration and had botched the case with Hillary Clinton to make his Beltway friends happy with him during cocktail hour with back slaps and future dinner invites.  Comey knew enough about people to know that the president could see through the careful façade he had constructed over his many years of public service—so he was naturally uncomfortable.

After the meeting Trump made up his mind—he just needed to find the right time. Trump and Comey never spoke together again after April 11th.  And it was after the Comey testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3rd that Trump had heard enough.  During that testimony Comey admitted that it made him “mildly nauseous” to think that the FBI had affected the 2016 election and that he failed to prosecute Hillary Clinton because of pressure he had received from Loretta Lynch.  Comey’s testimony showed a FBI Director who made bad decisions based on political pressure and that was all Trump needed to terminate Comey’s employment which occurred on May 9th—a few days after the Senate testimony.  Trump had given Comey a shot and the news just kept getting worse the more the President had dug—really leaving no other choice.

Thus, the termination of James Comey from the FBI had nothing to do with the Russian case.  By Comey’s own testimony to the Senate on June 8th 2017, he stated that his termination would have no impact on the Russian case—that the FBI work would still be done with or without him.  That means that the termination could never have been about the investigation, but was always about the merit of the work Comey had done as director.  If the termination had no impact by the admission of the person who had been removed, and his own testimony revealed that Trump had never asked to have the Russian investigation terminated—then there was never anything close to obstruction of justice.  Trump had simply rooted out a drain in the swamp that once he pulled it, a lot of things hidden were suddenly visible.  Comey was one of those drains holding back a lot of swampy water and once removed, the slimy water of the Beltway went down the drain exposing a lot of crazy critters who needed concealment to survive.  And now they didn’t have it. They screamed “obstruction of justice” to regain those hiding places, but nobody was biting and now they all have a lot of trouble.  So with all that said, only five months into a new presidency full of contention and conflict from the other political side, Trump successfully found the drain on the swamp—and he pulled it—and James Comey turned out to be a big part of what was wrong.  It didn’t take the new president very long to figure it out—just as James Comey had feared after the first direct meeting he had with President-elect Trump in December.

Trump is innocent of obstruction of justice, and Comey is guilty of leaking classified information with access to the highest office and placing it in the hands of a Columbia college professor to leak to The New York Times.  If Comey thought his termination was a bad day—he hasn’t seen anything yet.  There are many more bad days coming because the person who broke the law wasn’t Trump—it was Comey and his swamp who have now been exposed like never before—and it is an ugly sight indeed.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-james-comey-timeline/

Rich Hoffman

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CNN in Butler County, Ohio at Rick’s Tavern: From Eliot Ness to Ian Flemming–Comey is in trouble

IMG_4642Of course when CNN came to Butler County to do a piece on the James Comey hearings seeking the reaction of Trump supporters I wasn’t going to pass up on the opportunity.  CNN has been hostile to Trump and they were coming to my turf—and I got an invite.  So I spent the day with several other Trump troops from southern Ohio at Rick’s Tavern in Fairfield watching the Comey hearings which CNN set up as a kind of watch party and we stuck around to give our live reaction on Anderson Cooper’s show later that night.  The CNN people were very professional and accommodating so the event went off without any contention.  We originally were supposed to be on the Anderson Cooper show for two 15 minute segments, but because of the busy news day that was whittled down to a 4 minute piece at 9:35 PM.   So we had a problem, we had nine Trump people at Rick’s Tavern to do live television and we all had a few pages of notes that we had taken from the testimony to fill a half hour of air time.  But somehow we had to narrow all that down into a 20 second statement.  So when the camera turned to me I wasn’t sure what I was going to say or even where to start about my various thoughts–I said this.

I’ll get more into the details of the Comey hearing itself in the days to come but for this occasion, I’ll share my notes for future reference and focus on the positive experience we had with CNN at Rick’s Tavern as Americans.

Comey Notes taken on 6/8/2017:

  • Mark Warner made a dangerous assertion with the resolute conclusion of the Russian investigation as his foundation argument. How would he know that?

  • In a world where international cooperation and compromise are praised, it is interesting that working with the Russians is even something that would cause suspicion in the first place.

  • Comey says that the impression of the FBI was not in dismay, which is a purely emotional response. Saying something doesn’t make it true.

  • Russian cyber intrusion by the Russians according to Comey, started in 2015 under Obama.

  • Comey said that Trump lied about him and the FBI. That perspective comes from a guy who was in charge at the time and is now an ex-employee speaking from hurt feelings.

  • Judgment of Trump’s character was that Trump might lie about him—based again purely on feelings.

  • Comey assumes that the Trump dinner was a way to get something on the FBI director to use his job as a bargaining chip to control Comey’s investigations. Again, this was purely emotionally based.   Comey made a lot of assumptions.

  • Don’t remember that Comey specifically said “chose to defame me.”

  • How did Comey know he needed to write down everything—the premise was rooted in mistrust from the beginning? The interesting thing is that Comey did not have the same level of conviction when Attorney General Loretta Lynch told him to handle the Hillary Clinton case as a “matter.”  Lynch was clearly trying to shape the FBI case, yet Comey did not respond with indignation the way he did with Trump.  He obviously had made up his mind about Trump before the president took office.

  • Comey said he was uncomfortable with Trump after the meeting with him on January 6th.

    https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/873295786834108417

  • Trump and Comey never spoke after April 11th.

  • Comey said he’d be “honestly loyal,” to Trump.

  • Comey didn’t do his duty because of the pressure from Lynch. Shows a history of bad decisions by over thinking things.

  • FBI leadership team didn’t want to speak with Jeff Sessions.

  • “Gut feel of the nature of the person I was interacting with.” This is how Comey referred to Trump.

  • Comey asked a friend that is a professor at Columbia school of journalism to leak his personal notes to the press hoping to invoke a special investigation.

  • Comey says that Russia actively participated in American elections with a great level of sophistication. But that’s nothing new, the United States does the same.  The problem is with the DNC letting themselves become victims with loose information.

  • Why would the president kick everyone out of the room—because business guys know from experience that it’s a good way to communicate and size people up—not letting them hide behind other people.

  • What is the difference in speaking one on one in a private setting and speaking on the phone with someone. This is something that Roy Blunt brought up—why would Comey feel different in person than on a phone call?

  • Comey leaked info to a friend—guilty of activism—seeking a special counsel to do what he didn’t have the courage to do himself. While he showed caution in not having a special investigation occur with Hillary Clinton, but had no problem letting one happen to President Trump.

  • Comey established a pattern of very weak behavior which likely has more to do with his firing than anything otherwise contemplated.

  • Likely, notes leaked to The New York Times are still in the possession of Comey’s friend. Seriously bad judgment.

  • Case is on obstruction of justice only if the intent was to cover up the Russian investigation. It assumes that job performance was not a factor.

  • Comey referred to himself as “captain courageous.”

As we went on the air many other Trump supporters showed up to fill in the background of the bar—specifically the Biker’s for Trump guys—so there was an ambiance of positivity that was distinctly patriotic.  The news coverage all day long had been very negative for Trump, but I didn’t see things that way, which is why I answered my question the way I did.  Clearly Comey wasn’t an honest Boy Scout as he had been playing.  He was in fact one of the big Washington Beltway leakers and he was doing it from a very high level.

He was in trouble—serious trouble and that wasn’t lost to me during the testimony.  When Comey had said he leaked his memo to a friend who then leaked it to the press, I made eye contact with the CNN producer Stephen Samaniego and he knew it too.  This wasn’t a partisan issue or a group of Ohio Trump supporters living in the bubble of regional conservatism.  Comey had admitted to something that was very serious and Trump had nailed him to the wall with Comey’s own show boating.  Once the smoke cleared from the day’s events, to the time we went on live with Anderson Cooper—that was the story.

As I watched the CNN guys and the live show on the monitor as we were finally set-up for our official shots it was clear to me that this was all part of making America Great Again.  The epic showdown on Capital Hill with Comey–flushing him out as a leaker, getting him to reveal what Loretta Lynch had revealed about the Hillary Clinton case—which we all suspected—was all part of this new Trump approach to things.  Now we had proof—testimony anyway—it all occurred because of the way Trump does things. None of this would have happened with any other president.  The Iran Contra hearings nearly destroyed all the good things that Reagan did—and here was Trump plowing through everything relentlessly and the political left was making major mistakes under the pressure of Trump.  And here was CNN honestly soul-searching for an understanding of how people think from the heartland of the Trump voter—Butler Country, Ohio with some of the leaders of the ground game there to talk.

They were truly curious whether or not we’d still be with him and they picked Rick’s Tavern with its big America flag hanging out front to understand why. They asked good questions and we answered them the best we could in 20 seconds.  When it came to me I said what I did, Comey portrayed himself as an honest Eliot Ness FBI agent from the Untouchables.  But what he ended up being was just a 6’8” cowering bureaucrat who knew how to talk a good game, but when the rubber hit the road, he was lost.  Trump was exposing that month by month making it so that Comey couldn’t hide it any more.  Barack Obama had no idea what competency was but here was a real businessman who knew value in people and Comey knew he was in trouble. So he decided to become the villain of a spy novel and go about passive aggressively leaking information about Trump to take down the new president—and Trump sniffed him out.  That’s when Comey made the biggest mistake of his life—he leaked his notes to a Columbia professor friend to leak the story to The New York Times.  That’s how I came up with the Ian Flemming reference—because Comey was far more interested with images and storylines than substance and facts.

I think there were around 5 million people watching CNN at that time slot so I was very proud of the opportunity to defend President Trump in the trenches, even if it was only 20 seconds—the comments did what they were supposed to do.  And for those who read here everyday, they know that there is a lot more where that came from.  I’d do it again in a second.  Trump is doing a great job, and I appreciate it, and will fight for him all day long so that he can keep doing that job.

Rich Hoffman

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