Tag: Paul Manafort

If Manafort is Going to Jail, then why not Comey and Mueller, they have defrauded the American treasury of far larger sums of money

OK, so let’s get this straight, the government prosecuted President Trump’s campaign manager from the 2016 election for denying the IRS $6 million of revenue by not reporting $16 million in income and for that he has to go to jail for 47 months as a 69-year-old man stripped of essentially everything he has built over a lifetime only to beg and plea like a dog in the end so that he won’t die in prison. There’s a little bit more to the Manafort case but essentially, he was busted just because of his association with President Trump by a FBI investigation in search of a crime. When they couldn’t find one that implicated President Trump they prosecuted him for what they did find, issues that would have went uncharged had Paul Manafort never been involved as a campaign manager for the future president. However, that same FBI under the care of special investigator Robert Mueller who had just recently been denied the job as Director of the FBI was able to spend more than $25 million on a political witch hunt to go after Manafort and many other Trump associates kicking down the doors to Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, running General Flynn through a career ruining process as well as many others, yet no jail time is proposed to Mueller for the same type of fraud that the courts against Manafort proposed. Why is that?

Of course, we all know the rhetorical answer, the entire Manafort case is a gross abuse of power by a government that is out of control. The FBI had become weaponized to protect a below the line status quo and the intention was to ruin the Trump presidency and spit in the face of half the nation that legitimately elected him by creating a false narrative and blaming a hostile country with the GDP of a rattlesnake, as if Russia could do anything on the world stage that might actually be harmful, with no money to perform the task. The FBI and their accomplices didn’t care if they started WWIII with hostile nations like Russia, Iran or North Korea so long as President Trump was pushed out of office so they could still have their hour-long lunch breaks and 30% more pay raises over civilian markets by keeping any sort of change away from them.

I say it all the time and will continue to do so, if Manafort is the bench mark for who should go to jail for crimes, then everyone from Robert Mueller to Hillary Clinton should be going to jail for the same. Certainly, at the very least FBI chiefs such as Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey should—it was their work to blatantly push for the $25 million special prosecution in the first place to fulfil a purely political objective and tamper with an American election in favor of their wives’ sensibilities. In Comey’s case as a typical beta male, his wife runs his household and she was a Hillary Clinton supporter. So to make her happy and his network of socialites within the Beltway culture he acted against the nature of America’s political system to overthrow an election by abusing his office. Who thinks that Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok acted alone in their own crimes? Hillary Clinton was guilty beyond doubt yet under the care of Peter Strzok evidence was destroyed, immunities given and illegal spying and witness tampering was going on. And his bosses knew about it, that is why James Comey was fired by Trump as the Director.

Millions and millions of dollars were wasted not only on the Mueller investigation which was completely politically motivated, but on hiding the crimes of the FBI aligning themselves with the Democrat party to get Hillary Clinton elected. There seems to be an assumption among all those government employees that they are not guilty because so many of them participated in the crime. That the only difference between them and Paul Manafort is that he was an individual and they were a collective and that their crime is hidden behind the sheer numbers of participants. The assumption that they can’t be busted because they themselves are the government and there are simply too many people to prosecute is at the core of their behavior. That accounts for the smugness of these government criminals, they don’t believe that they can be prosecuted and their actions show their raw arrogance and disregard for justice, or the money they wasted in the process.

Remember Lois Lerner who as a big chief at the IRS used that agencies collection powers to strong-arm Tea Party groups. I remember that case well because I was drug into it myself. If the IRS could have found any dirt on me you can bet I would have received the Paul Manafort treatment just through my associations with the Liberty Township Tea Party that was at the center of that case and my friend Justin Binik-Thomas. Yeah, I’ve tried these shoes on before so I have quite clear clarity on the matter. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the federal government grossly abuse its power and the resources they have confiscated from the electorate to manipulate the political tide of our nation. I’m not in jail because I live a squeaky-clean life and if people abuse my freedom, I have a tendency toward violence. So I’m not as easy of a target as Paul Manafort who did live a checkered life that was easy to prosecute. But the ideas are the same, if Manafort hadn’t helped Trump in the summer of 2016 win the delegate count ahead of the RNC convention, he wouldn’t be in jail now. He’d just be another white-collar criminal like most of the Beltway culture is, and he’d still be invited to Washington D.C. parties on Friday nights to mingle with the other social butterflies.

What happened to Paul Manafort and the government’s ability to toss him into jail for 47 long months is a gross abuse of power. It’s a shame that it was even allowed to happen. Paul Manafort may have defrauded the IRS and the government of money they expected to receive just by the sheer power of their offices, but they have abused the system far worse and wasted far more money than he did, yet they are not going to jail. Why the hell not? So what if 20 to 30 of the top players involved in trying to remove President Trump from office did go to jail? Would the system collapse on itself from the revelation that so many government officials are just dirty cops and massive abusers of power? Would knowing such a thing wreck our system of government far into the future? I don’t think so. Rather I would argue that by not prosecuting them far greater damage is being inflicted and that is the real crime here—not acting when its obvious that we must. Just in the case of Robert Mueller, he has defrauded the American treasury of over $25 million on a political witch hunt, completely motivated by political theater than the pursuit of justice. Why wouldn’t we treat him the same. The answer is, we should!

Rich Hoffman

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SPYGATE: Everything you need to know about this disturbing reality

It was interesting to watch the Fox News interviews of Trey Gowdy and Judge Napolitano speaking on Spygate—whether there was a physical person spying on the Trump campaign which would be a big deal. I respect both of those legal minds, but it was obvious that something else was going on after Rudy Giuliani turned up the heat on the premise that the FBI under the Obama White House had put a spy into the Trump campaign in the spring of 2016. Neither Gowdy or Napolitano were willing to go that far and were obviously attempting to back off the flaming claims. The FBI is after all in a lot of trouble all on their own, and the heads of all our intelligence agencies are under serious suspicion as we learn more about what went on from their behalf to keep Trump out of the White House even though the election process favored him. The institutionalists seem to realize the weight of this consideration and they are trying to preserve what’s left, and as much as I hate to say it Gowdy and Napolitano in this case are institutionalists, meaning they will put the institutions of justice ahead of thoughtful rebellion against them. A nefarious reason was clearly present by the Obama administration to spy on Trump leading to this Spygate controversy which is one of the most dangerous things to ever strike our republic within America.

Judge Napolitano wants to see the proof the such a nefarious person infiltrated the Trump campaign, but obviously so much evidence has been destroyed by the FBI to favor Hillary Clinton’s eventual election, that proof may be too elusive at this point to conjure up—which is what happens when we have criminals running our intelligence agencies. At this point I’m sure that both Gowdy and Napolitano are looking to repair the image of the FBI for the sake of the people still working there who weren’t a part of this Spygate mess. But the intent is what we should be more than concerned about, because if it happened in 2015, then it is bound to happen again, and we can’t let that happen.

Let’s go back to the spring of 2016, shall we, it was just becoming obvious that Donald Trump was going to beat Marco Rubio and John Kasich for the Republican nomination which was shocking to the establishment. The Obama/Clinton forces had been preparing for either Kasich, Rubio or Cruz not even considering that the businessman and television reality star Trump would succeed in breaking through the election process and into the official establishment. The moment it was realized that Trump would in fact be the nominee the false story of a contested convention was put to the press to give the establishment hope that Trump would not make it to Republican Convention in Cleveland later that July. It was also around this time that Trump fired Corey Lewandowsky and hired Paul Manafort to be the campaign manager. The reasoning at the time was that Lewandowsky was taking a big hit in the press over shoving a reporter and that the campaign needed someone more polished now that the attention was turning toward the convention and a run for the presidency in the fall. Things were getting serious and it was time to change-up the campaign’s professionalism in the conventional sense of things.

Everyone knew that Manafort had connections to Ukrainian businesses because it was on his resume for years, the media hailed the move as a very positive sign that Trump was taking the whole presidential thing serious in hiring an establishment figure in Manafort. Obviously in hindsight there were figures in the campaign and within the media pushing Trump where they wanted him to go by creating the delegate hunt stories, and Manafort was specifically brought on to be the delegate hunter specialist, to make sure there were enough votes on the floor to give Trump the nomination and keep John Kasich from trying to launch a rebellion from the floor in July.

It should be remembered that John Kasich refused to attend the Republican Convention even though it was being held in his state for which he was the governor. Somewhere somebody gave John Kasich the false hope that if he held the line that he might be able to knock Trump out of the picture even though the primary votes leading up to the convention were not even close to anybody but Trump. The seeds for a Russia story were being planted by many establishment types as a last-minute conspiracy to provide insurance for Hillary Clinton in the fall if the antics of the contested convention failed. Lucky for Trump he played the game of convention in hiring Manafort to get through the convention period, because he acquired his delegates and secured the Republican nomination. But what nobody counted on was that Trump would fire Manafort in August and hire Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon to run the presidential campaign into November, and that proved to screw up all the plans of all the parties trying to sabotage the Trump campaign with a last-minute revelation that Manafort and the Russians were trying to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.

These parties got the idea from Trump himself in the spring of 2016 when it was obvious that he was going to win the nomination and he held a press conference where he famously joked that if the Russians had Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails please let him know. With Trump forcing the world to look at the illegal antics of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the institutionalists needed to turn the tables on him somehow. So they wanted to build a story of Russian collusion into the Trump campaign to divert attention from their chosen candidate in Hillary Clinton and Manafort was always supposed to be the straw man because Trump needed an establishment campaign manager to get those much-needed delegates that the media kept talking about, and to go from a crazy campaign of saying anything anyway he wanted to something more conventional. This is where these spies in the Trump campaign were working full-time, they were helping to shape the media narrative and they were whispering in all the right ears to make the moves within the campaign that would feed the media narrative. With Trump being inexperienced with politics at this level, they figured they’d get away with it. They never expected him to fire Manafort in August. The establishment didn’t panic because they figured that sex scandals would torpedo the campaign just before the election, so they didn’t start panicking until literally that night of the election in November.

As far as evidence, it’s there, but its covered up with lots of other things and to see it we have to be willing to look under the carpet of the Obama White House and admit that Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, a former president himself, had cut a deal to keep Hillary out of trouble with the FBI. Comey had to do right by the law and navigate the minefield to let his field agents know that they had investigated Hillary Clinton, but that she was going to be their new boss when she won the election, so they started pandering to her early. Comey did his press conferences to not hurt Hillary but to keep his field agents satisfied so that he could blackmail Clinton once she came into office with all the dirt he really had on her, which he helped destroy to get her elected. She’d keep him on as the director in exchange for him not leaking what was destroyed and everyone would live happily ever after. Only Trump won which blew everything up.

The evidence that Trey Gowdy and Judge Napolitano are seeking to acknowledge a Spygate controversy will likely never manifest. The spy in this case turned out to be ineffective and the information they were giving to the Obama White House was useless because Trump was his own man not controlled by any establishment types in the form of a campaign manager. Their straw man in Manafort had been fired blowing up their case. They would of course try to resurrect it later, but the story is so flimsy its like wet paper, it nearly falls apart under its own weight. The entire operation was meant to leave almost no footprints except for the obvious intent of all the parties and their bloodlust to destroy Trump before he ever reached the White House and of course it continued thereafter. The very first thing Comey said to Trump was an attempt at blackmail by discussing the Russian dossier hoping to embarrass Trump into becoming a willing accomplice. But that didn’t work either. Four months later Trump fired Comey which is what launched this whole Russian investigation because it was out of revenge for daring to fire a Director of the FBI and that just didn’t happen in Washington D.C. In a rage the FBI pulled out all their stops and tried to get revenge on Trump for firing Comey and in doing so they revealed many of those footprints they had been trying to cover up—and the rest is history.

Yes, Spygate is real, it happened and there was at least one physical person spying directly into the party of the opposition as directed by a reigning White House. Lots of people need to go to jail because they allowed the institutions to fail the American people so spectacularly, and audaciously. They didn’t care about the law because they figured they controlled the law and they went well past Watergate in their weaponizing of our intelligence agencies to preserve their careers. I understand that Gowdy and Napolitano don’t want to destroy the institutions they have learned to love—in the legal manner of things, but the reality says that everything they are protecting is garbage and needs to be created anew with an honesty that has not been present for well over a hundred years. Before we can fix it, we have to admit that there was a problem and Spygate is just such a circumstance. And its time we deal with it.

Rich Hoffman

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Robert Mueller Did Justice a Huge Favor: Trump is a tactical genius

In a lot of ways, the Robert Mueller investigation and apprehension of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort is a blessing. Let’s forget about the hypocrisy of it for this little article, but instead focus on the long-term implications of it. On the morning after the big bomb that Mueller’s investigation had set its sights on Paul Manafort and that’s all he could show for all the efforts over the last half-year of investigation the media keyed on one last-ditch set of efforts at stopping the Trump success story. An article about Rand Paul and Chris Christie announcing that they think Trump may leave after four years out of fear of being primaried out of office, another about how low Trump’s job approval ratings were, but then this strange admission from CNN hoping that this constant special counsel probing will ground Trump to admitting that he has been unusually successful and is now limited. That little chink in the armor tells the whole story of politics in 2017. By 2020 it won’t look anything like it does today and here’s why.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mueller-probe-may-ground-trumps-unconventional-success/ar-AAufWDM?ocid=spartandhp

When Paul Manafort paid his $10 million-dollar bail and left custody smiling and Trump’s supporters were not even slightly phased, a gentle worry floated above the Washington D.C. swamp—and with that came a light cast directly at the Podesta brothers and their actions that have been essentially the same as Manafort’s. The entire world of politics essentially shifted in that moment and not in the way that the anti-Trump forces would have hoped. Manafort knew it. Trump knew it, and several conservative advocates knew it as well. Bob Mueller had set and impossible standard for the Beltway which has been built on corrupt politics for two centuries. If Trump wanted to drain the swamp, Mueller just helped him take the next step. I actually thought of the Battle of New Orleans where Andrew Jackson defeated the established regiments of superior forces in very short order as the Mueller news broke. Trump in a lot of ways is a modern version of Jackson and for the Battle of the Beltway, it now looks like Trump is going to emerge the clear and easy victor. In their vigor to destroy Trump the opposing forces of the new president ran themselves into a trap that has now ensnared them, and there is no going back now. Mueller maybe knowingly understanding that rock and a hard place position he was in did it quite obviously. The standard has now been set and there is no way Democrats can live up to the methodology.

Going back to 2006 and looking at Manafort’s oversea lobbying efforts the book is now open under equal justice to go after Hillary Clinton and the Podesta brothers as well as the entire approach of the DNC operation which has ties to many corrupt dealings that have been reported recently—particularly the Uranium One deal. Nobody defending the Clinton efforts can now claim that 2010 was so long ago because Manafort has been officially investigated and held for his actions as far back as 2006. That puts a lot of things on the table for investigation which obviously would lead to massive arrests in Washington D.C. If Manafort can be apprehended and held under scrutiny in the way he presently is, then a huge percentage of the Beltway can as wall because that is how business is done there. Mueller has opened up a huge can of worms, and I think that’s a very good thing.

Trump had to part with Corey Lewandowsky after the former advisor got into trouble for pushing a female reporter—if you can call it a push. It was obvious at that time that Trump was going to win the nomination so the anti-Trump forces went after Lewandowsky hoping to derail the campaign momentum. Trump showing he could be as savvy as anybody in the Beltway hired Manafort to run the campaign from there to secure delegates for the upcoming convention—which worked as it was supposed to. Many pundits thought the Manafort hiring was a good one because he was an “establishment” type and they felt more secure with him running the campaign. After the nomination process was finished at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, some negative stories came out about Manafort and Trump cut him loose. In his place Trump put Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway in charge of the campaign and became president a few months later. What Trump showed over that span of six months was incredible ability to be very malleable to the political conditions of the moment and this is a major problem for establishment types who rely on conventional rules of engagement to win and lose in Washington. Manafort was only with Trump for a few months and didn’t have time to learn anything much about Trump himself—so with Mueller’s emphasis on punishing Manafort to force him to flip on Trump shows the true lack of understanding that everyone working for Mueller truly has on this entire issue.

That’s why the media was flat on the Tuesday that followed. Their big rabbit in the hat turned out to be a turd and their October surprise was more like a firework that failed to explode as the wick burnt out and uneventfully fizzled out. What we all got instead was an established period of analysis that is now acceptable. Remember over the Benghazi issue when in 2013 Democrats said, “Oh, that was a whole year ago. Who cares about that now?” Well, now we know we can go back to 2006 and look at—–EVERYTHING. All Jeff Sessions has to do now is start his own special prosecutions and let them spin out of control like Mueller did and likely the Democrats will be on such a defense that they won’t have a single candidate to put up in 2020. I actually think John Kasich will at that point flip parties and run against Trump—and Trump will easily beat him. It won’t even be close. Kasich will do it because he wants more than anything else in the world to be president. But Trump isn’t the loser that Kevin Spacey plays in House of Cards. Trump is the real deal.

Speaking of Kevin Spacey in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sex scandals, Hollywood just showed what will soon be happening to Washington D.C. Anthony Rapp who is now 46 years old claimed that Spacey made sexual advances on him as a 14-year-old boy. Because of that Spacey was locked off the set of the sixth season of House of Cards and Netflix announced that it is ending the show! A top-rated show like that and it’s over so quickly over the slightest controversy. I would argue that if not for Trump Weinstein would still be the head of Hollywood and there would be a seventh season of House of Cards. But when Hollywood came out against Trump for being a womanizer and nothing stuck, they then had to apply the same standard to their own kind, and that is what we see happening now, with the wheels of Hollywood coming off completely. They can’t hold up to that level of scrutiny and neither can those political players in the Beltway. If Manafort is the standard, then the rest of Washington will drown in the wake of the application of that standard. What is happening now to Hollywood will soon happen to the Swamp. All Jeff Sessions needs to do is allow for the special investigations to do their thing and let those houses of cards fall.

Yes, Trump is in charge, but he’s not a bad guy like Obama was. Trump is not one to abuse authority, he certainly doesn’t want to use the IRS and Justice department as weapons against his political opponents. He couldn’t exactly come out and throw Hillary in jail the moment he was inaugurated as president—he could technically, but he couldn’t politically. She is still the best option Democrats have in 2020 so it wouldn’t have looked good to put a prosecutor on her which would then destroy her very criminal life. There’s other ways to skin that cat, and Trump has been very wise to let other people do those things for him and in their vigor to impeach him, Trump’s opposition revealed too much about themselves. Now they are at a serous tactical disadvantage and the momentum will not favor them ever. They can only go downhill from here, and is something that couldn’t have happened better, in our favor as liberty minded patriots, then if we had put the cuffs on Hillary Clinton ourselves. Finally, justice has a voice and it was the enemy that gave it that voice.

Rich Hoffman
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