Christine Blasey Ford: No Proof And Less Credibility

After the confirmation hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the nomination of Appellate Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court concluded, comes an eleventh hour allegation of sexual assault against Judge Kavanaugh by a woman who claims to have known him in high school, when the assault presumably occurred.

To be sure, the details provided are, at the very least, salacious, and had they been contemporaneous with the event, tantamount to the accusation of crime.

However, they are not contemporaneous.  The assault, if it occurred, was in the early 1980s.  The accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, by her own admission did not mention it to anyone until decades later:

Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” The notes say four boys were involved, a discrepancy Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Ford said there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.  

Note that Ms. Ford not only makes no mention of the event until 30 years after the fact, she made no mention of Kavanaugh's name at first, and goes on to challenge the accuracy of the therapist notes she herself provided, presumably to bolster her claims of trauma.

How is this a credible allegation? Where in this sordid tale is there anything that amounts to substance? Where are the provable facts, the evidence, the corroboration of her claims?  There is none.

There are no recitations of events to friends at the time.

There is no police report.

There is no complaint made against Judge Kavanaugh either at his school or anywhere else.

There is no proffered diary entry from Ms. Ford's teenage years.

There is, however, refutation against Ms. Ford's claims.  In her statement, she alleges that a friend of Judge Kavanaugh's, Mark Judge, was present during the assault.  Mark Judge has flatly denied such an event ever took place: 

Reached by email Sunday, Judge declined to comment. In an interview Friday with The Weekly Standard, before Ford’s name was known, he denied that any such incident occurred. “It’s just absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way,” Judge said. He told the New York Times that Kavanaugh was a “brilliant student” who loved sports and was not “into anything crazy or illegal.”

Ms Ford does not accuse Mark Judge of any misconduct.  In fact, she credits Mark Judge with facilitating her escape from the situation:

Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house. 

Her presumed hero of the moment, in other words, claims the event never happened.

Those defending Ms. Ford and her allegations will no doubt raise the standard rhetorical question, "why would she lie about it?"  Given the severity of the offense, that is a reasonable question.  Amazingly, Ms. Ford herself, and her husband, provide the answer:

In an interview, her husband, Russell Ford, said that in the 2012 sessions, she recounted being trapped in a room with two drunken boys, one of whom pinned her to a bed, molested her and prevented her from screaming. He said he recalled that his wife used Kavanaugh’s last name and voiced concern that Kavanaugh — then a federal judge — might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.

Several things are remarkable about this statement. 1) the revelation presumably came six years ago, and nothing was mentioned to anyone at the time; 2) Russell Ford recalls his wife using Kavanaugh's last name (but not his full name); and 3) Ms. Ford and her husband were concerned that Judge Kavanaugh might be elevated to the Supreme Court.

Until that nomination happened, Ms. Ford was willing to "let bygones be bygones," and move on with her life. By her own admission, Ms. Ford is making this statement specifically to prevent Judge Kavanaugh from being confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice.

She is not seeking redress, she is not seeking justice, she is seeking merely to hurt Judge Kavanaugh.

Again comes the question: how is this a credible allegation? And again comes the answer:

There are no recitations of events to friends at the time.

There is no police report.

There is no complaint made against Judge Kavanaugh either at his school or anywhere else.

There is no proffered diary entry from Ms. Ford's teenage years.

There is no evidence.

There is no corroboration.

From this answer comes the conclusion: this is no credible allegation.  Not only is the allegation unproven, but the span of time since the alleged events has rendered the allegation unprovable.  It cannot be proven to be true, and it cannot be proven to be false.

Claims which cannot be proven have no place within a court of law. They have no place before the Supreme Court of the United States. They should have no place in the proceedings for confirmation of Supreme Court Justices.

Christine Ford's allegations have no place in the public dialog. Period.

More Convictions, More Guilty Pleas, Still No Evidence Against Donald Trump

Last month--July, 2018--I observed that, despite nearly two years of investigation, there was as yet no credible case of wrongdoing to be made against President Trump.

At the time, Paul Manafort's trial had not concluded, and Michael Cohen had not entered any guilty pleas. Now, Paul Manafort has been convicted on 8 counts of tax evasion and bank fraud, and Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to tax evasion, lying to investigators, and, intriguingly, two counts of campaign finance violations.

Does this mean the "beginning of the end" for President Trump?  On the facts, Trump's demise seems as remote now as it did last month.

Manafort's offenses took place years before he became involved in the Trump campaign--his convictions, while of some comfort no doubt to Mueller, do not advance in any way a case against the President.  They do not bolster claims of "collusion" or of conspiracy, nor do they build a case of obstruction of justice. As big a headline as Manafort's conviction is, in the ongoing effort to unseat Donald Trump his conviction is simply not relevant.

Arguably, Michael Cohen's plea deal does create a legal issue for Donald Trump, but while Cohen is now alleging Donald Trump violated campaign finance laws, the best witness against Michael Cohen is none other than....Michael Cohen.

Previously, prosecutors have alleged that Cohen made payments to two women in order to buy their silence about alleged extramarital affairs with Donald Trump many years ago, and that he was repaid by the Trump campaign through a set of "sham" invoices submitted by Cohen for legal work. Cohen himself recorded a conversation with Donald Trump where they discussed one of the payments.  Yet that recording--quite unlike the recordings that doomed Richard Nixon during Watergate--have shown to have exactly zero traction as proof of malfeasance by Donald Trump.

Further, Michael Cohen has made numerous public statements denying the very thing he is now alleging.  We must therefore ask the question "was he lying then, or is he lying now?" With federal prosecutors threatening him with decades of jail time, the notion that he might, in the vernacular popularized by Alan Dershowitz, "not merely sing, but compose" is not at all unreasonable--a possibility that is strengthened by the fact that one of the offenses to which Cohen has pled guilty is lying to investigators; it is hard to fathom how a witness who is an admitted liar can enjoy much credibility at trial.

Finally, there is the reality of Michael Cohen being a lawyer and Trump's "fixer". As a lawyer, one of Cohen's ethical obligations to his client is to advise him of when a particular course of action is against the law, and to guide him so as to avoid violating the law. The crux of the prosecution's allegations of campaign finance violation is that Cohen was repaid by the Trump Campaign, as opposed to the Trump Organization--which would have not been subject to the same scrutiny regarding campaign finance law.  In other words, it is not the payments themselves that were illegal, but that they were paid out via a political campaign entity and not a private business.

Thus we have the conundrum that if Cohen knew or had reason to believe the campaign paying off the two women was an illegal activity, why did he a) not advise Trump to take a different tack on the matter, or b) bill the Trump Organization or even Donald Trump personally for reimbursement? By the same token, if a member of the bar submitted invoices to the Trump Campaign for reimbursement of expenditures in this fashion, is it unreasonable to impute from those invoices the likelihood that Cohen did not consider the modality of payments to be illegal?  

That Donald Trump largely self-funded his campaign only makes the legal case against him even murkier--ultimately, the argument that Cohen might simply have been repaid from the wrong checking account cannot be dismissed. Impeachment over what amounts to a bookkeeping error is too absurd even for the most rabid of Never Trumpers.

As for the payments and the extramarital affairs, the legal assessment of both, as well as their potential for supporting impeachment, can be summed up as "so what?" For all society's railings against adultery, it is not a crime. Buying silence--especially when the payments were solicited by the women involved, as is the case here--is also not intrinsically criminal.  In neither case did Donald Trump suborn perjury or encourage anyone to make false statements to law enforcement.

Moreover, President Obama received the largest FEC fine in history for improprieties in how his 2008 campaign handled contributions, and no one--not even the most strident of Obama critics--mentioned impeachment over the matter.

As a practical matter, when evidence is murky and unclear, that becomes "reasonable doubt" to a jury. Despite the fulminations and jeremiads against Trump coming on the heels of Cohen's guilty plea, the reality of Cohen's latest statements is that they are murky and unclear, and easily challenged by Cohen's previous testimony (some of which may have been under oath before Congress, raising the specter of perjury charges). Cohen himself is a damaged witness of dubious credibility.

Unless more damaging material comes to light, either in regards to Cohen's allegations or to any other matter under scrutiny by the Mueller investigation, we still do not have clear evidence of any crime committed by Donald Trump.

Facts Do Not Matter Where Russia Is Concerned

There is one certain method to send Democrats and the legacy media into major meltdown mode: simply use "Trump" and "Russia" in the same sentence.  The sentence need not even be coherent or logical. The sentence works best if it does not rely on facts, for facts are simply not relevant where Russia is concerned. 

Witness the latest "bombshell scoop" from CNN, where Michael Cohen claimed to have been in the room when Donald Trump and Don, Jr., discussed meeting a Russian national with dirt on Hillary Clinton. Presumably, this now "proves" that Donald Trump is merely a Putin puppet, and all the excoriations heaped upon him by the legacy media are now justified.

What a pity none of that is true.

As has been noted on Gateway Pundit, the lead rebuttal witness against Michael Cohen is--wait for it--Michael Cohen. CNN's recent breathless reporting even makes a passing note of the obvious contradiction:

Cohen privately testified last year to two Congressional committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. A source familiar with Cohen's House testimony said he did not testify that Trump had advance knowledge. Cohen's claims weren't mentioned in separate reports issued by Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.

However, Michael Cohen's actual statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee leaves little room for his latest revelation to be true, as he declaimed not only any knowledge of any such improprieties, but also that Donald Trump participated in any improprieties:

Given my own proximity to the President of the United States as a candidate, let me also say that I never saw anything - not a hint of anything - that demonstrated his involvement in Russian interference in our election or any form of Russian collusion.

If we assume, as the legacy media insists we must, that a meeting with a Russian claiming to have opposition research on Hillary Clinton, represents "Russian interference," then either Cohen is lying now, or he perjured himself before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The one and only escape valve that would reconcile his past and current statements is if Don, Jr.'s, now-infamous meeting at Trump Tower is in fact not an instance of Russian meddling--a conclusion which immediately topples the entirety of the Russian collusion narrative. 

Cohen is not the only factual problem faced in perpetuating the current hysteria over Russia.  Even Special Counsel Robert Mueller's latest round of indictments, alleging a dozen Russian intelligence agents hacked the DNC computers and released several embarrassing documents retrieved from those systems, runs afoul of earlier claims and assertions made regarding Russia.

Mueller's indictments specifically allege that the named Russian agents used a hacker known as "Guccifer 2.0" to facilitate leaking the stolen data:

Beginning in or around June 2016, the Conspirators staged and released tens of thousands of the stolen emails and documents. They did so using fictitious online personas, including “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0.”

However, not only does the original forensic analysis by Crowdstrike identify two different Russian hacking entities--"Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear"--thus discounting the claimed involvement of the Guccifer persona, but further analysis of Guccifer-related material by cyber security firm ThreatConnect explicitly discounts Guccifer's involvement.  ThreatConnect's conclusion is that Guccifer is an intentional distraction from the "real" Russian cyberattack:

Although the proof is not conclusive, we assess Guccifer 2.0 most likely is a Russian denial and deception (D&D) effort that has been cast to sow doubt about the prevailing narrative of Russian perfidy. While targeting political campaigns for espionage purposes is not new, the greatest concern would be the use of the Guccifer 2.0 persona to leak documents of questionable integrity and authenticity in an effort to manipulate the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

Both the Mueller indictments and the Crowdstrike/ThreatConnect analysis are themselves challenged by analyses performed by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which makes the case that the "hack" was in fact an inside job: 

Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2017, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computers, and then doctored to incriminate Russia.

As I have observed before, the VIPS memorandum is one of the few analyses which can be independently assessed, as the source materials are made available to public scrutiny--a quality noticeably lacking in the Crowdstrike report and ThreatConnect's complementary analysis.

In almost every regard, the current narrative of Russian electoral interference is contradicted by the 2017 version of that same narrative. Even if we assume that Russian meddling happened (an assumption which must be regarded as problematic, given the VIPS memorandum), we are still confronted with reconciling past and current reporting regarding said meddling. As with Michael Cohen's latest claims, the 2018 narrative can only be true if the 2017 narrative is false. Mueller's indictments of Russian agents can only be sustained if the Crowdstrike analysis of the DNC hack is refuted.

For the rationally-minded, this will not do. Historical facts do not change--the past is always permanently etched in stone. Understanding can only come when all established facts are scrutinized and reconciled--something the legacy media has not even attempted to do. Whatever malfeasance Russia may have done is not revealed by a constantly evolving and incomplete recitation of the underlying facts. A case for impeaching--or defending--President Trump is not advanced by a constantly evolving and incomplete recitation of the underlying facts. Strengthening measures for guaranteeing the integrity of our elections cannot happen when there is a constantly evolving and incomplete recitation of the underlying facts. 

Despite the rantings that pass for reporting among the legacy media, we must look at the facts--all of the facts--without regard to the conclusions they support if we are to come to a full understanding of them. Regardless of the hyperventilations of the legacy media, the facts--and only the facts--matter.

There stands President Trump. What Crime Has ANYONE Found?

Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD under Josef Stalin (The Soviet Union's secret police and precursor to the infamous KGB), is often cited as having said "show me the man and I'll find you the crime."

We should be mindful of these words in regarding the broad authority granted Robert Mueller in his appointment as Special Counsel for the US Department of Justice, charged with investigating possible "collusion" between the campaign staffs of Donald Trump and Russia. We should be mindful for the simple reason that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, at the time of Mueller's appointment, explicitly discounted any presumption that any criminal offense had even taken place:

“In my capacity as acting Attorney General, I determined that it is in the public interest for me to exercise my authority and appoint a Special Counsel to assume responsibility for this matter,” said Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. “My decision is not a finding that crimes have been committed or that any prosecution is warranted. I have made no such determination. What I have determined is that based upon the unique circumstances, the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command.”

Mueller's appointment was never even an assertion that a crime had been committed, much less that President Trump had committed one.  This alone made Mueller's appointment something of a legal oddity, for the federal statute governing the appointments of Special Counsel, 28 CFR § 600.1, specifically references criminal investigations:

The Attorney General, or in cases in which the Attorney General is recused, the Acting Attorney General, will appoint a Special Counsel when he or she determines that criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted....

Moreover, the investigation must be grounded in a specific crime (or at least the allegation of a crime), as 28 CFR § 600.4(a), requires some specificity as to the subject of investigation:

The jurisdiction of a Special Counsel shall be established by the Attorney General. The Special Counsel will be provided with a specific factual statement of the matter to be investigated....

Former US Attorney Andrew McCarthy highlighted these apparent defects of Mueller's appointment in a 2017 piece for the National Review, and I encourage those wanting a fuller understanding of the legal issues to read it.  I highlight these points merely to underscore the "Beria-esque" nature of Mueller's appointment: He was shown Donald Trump, and challenged to find the crime.

After a year (and an untold number of millions of dollars spent), the question now becomes: "What crime has Mueller found?"  What crime has anyone found? What credible accusation of criminal offense may now be laid at President Trump's feet?

The answer appears to be: none. There is no crime alleged. There is no accusation to be made.

Consider the tangible fruits of the Mueller probe to date:  

• George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI.
• Michael Flynn, President Trump's one-time national security advisor, pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to making false statements to the FBI.
• Rick Gates, business partner and lieutenant to Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, plead guilty in February 2018 to one count of making false statements and one count of "conspiracy against the United States", both charges arising out of political consulting work Manafort and Gates provided to Ukrainian politicians several years ago--work wholly unrelated to either the Trump campaign or the 2016 election cycle as a whole.
• Richard Pinedo, someone with no known affiliation to either Donald Trump or the Trump campaign, pled guilty to a charge of identity theft, in connection with a series of indictments Mueller announced involving a number of Russian nationals and Russian-based companies.
• Alex van der Zwann, also with no known affiliation to Donald Trump or the Trump campaign, pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI.

These represent the sum total of prosecutorial "wins" Mueller has obtained as a result of his investigation.  Not one of these guilty pleas even hints at a larger crime or conspiracy having been perpetrated by President Trump or members of his campaign staff.  As regards President Trump, Mueller has failed to even allege any crime.

Mueller's investigation has also resulted in the following criminal indictments:

• One-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was indicted in October of 2017 on a number of charges, including money laundering and making false statements, all in relation to work done long before his involvement with Donald Trump's Presidential campaign.
• Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik, was indicted in June of 2018 with obstruction of justice, purportedly by attempting to tamper with potential witnesses in the Manafort case.
• In February of 2018, Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges of conspiring to interfere with “US political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” However, it must be noted that, in announcing the indictments, the Department of Justice explicitly excluded any allegation of any American--including Trump campaign operatives--being a willing party to the criminal acts alleged: "There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election. "
• In July of 2018, Rod Rosenstein announced indictments of 12 Russian GRU intelligence agents on charges surrounding the alleged hack of the DNC servers in the spring and early summer of 2016.  As with the February indictments, American involvement was specifically discounted: "There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity or knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers."

27 individuals and three companies indicted, and none of the indictments even hint at a crime committed by Donald Trump or his campaign staffs.  Moreover, in announcing both sets of Russian indictments, the Department of Justice specifically rejected the possibility that the alleged activities influenced the outcome of the election, stating outright that "there is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the vote count or changed the outcome of the 2016 election." Even if every single indictment results in a conviction, not a single one points to any criminal conduct by President Trump or his associates.  A year after Mueller was shown Donald Trump, he has failed to find any crime.

Nor has anyone else managed to find an actual crime.  Outside of the Mueller investigation, the most notable potential source of wrongdoing is the allegation that President Trump had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels in 2006, and possibly another with Playboy model Karen McDougal. Because of payments made to Daniels and McDougal, arranged by Trump lawyer and "fixer" Michael Cohen, during the fall of 2016, there has been some intimation of campaign finance violations, but even that becomes highly problematic given Cohen's revelation of recorded conversations with Donald Trump discussing such payments.  Even if the allegations themselves are true, adultery is not a crime.

It is disingenuous and facile to say that Donald Trump "may have" committed crimes, either in relation to Russian involvement in the 2016 election or with regards to his supposed mistresses.  Strictly as an hypothetical, that is always true, not just of Donald Trump but of anyone.  However, crime is not an hypothetical.  Crime is factual. Accusations of crime require there be a date, a place, a time, and a law that has been broken. Accusations of crime require there be facts.  So far, there have been no facts that even identify a crime that Donald Trump could plausibly have committed.

Lawyer after lawyer has been shown Donald Trump, and lawyer after lawyer has failed to find a crime. Maybe there is a crime lurking just out of sight, and maybe it will be soon brought to light.  Maybe.

For now, the reality is there are no crimes that can be alleged against Donald Trump.

Facebook Fact Checkers -- Just More Fake News

Apparently, I am now part of the "alt-right"/"alt-media" cadre.  Facebook has decreed the page I have to help publicize this blog as contributing to the spread of "fake news.":

First, some background.  I maintain a Facebook page of the same title as this blog, "A Voice Of Liberty", and in addition to using it to promote my various postings and pages here, I also post links to news stories that I consider to be interesting and relevant to the political discourse at large. I also share a substantial number of these postings to various Facebook groups.

On July 17, 2018, I posted an article from TruePundit which highlighted an alleged assertion by Lisa Page that Chinese hackers penetrated Hillary Clinton's email server:

The embattled Page tossed James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap among others under the Congressional bus, alleging the upper echelon of the FBI concealed intelligence confirming Chinese state-backed ‘assets’ had illegally acquired former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 30,000+ “missing” emails, federal sources said.

As I have done countless times, I shared this article among several Facebook groups. Yesterday, on July 20, 2018, I received the notification in the graphic above, that Factcheck.org reviewed the TruePundit article and labeled it "false".

Unfortunately for Factcheck.org, what's "false" is its review and rating--that is provably false.

Factcheck's "rebuttal" is in reality a rather ham-handed red herring argument, centering on an assertion by Lisa Page's lawyer, Amy Jeffress:

“These stories are completely false,” Amy Jeffress said in a statement provided to FactCheck.org. “In nearly ten hours of testimony before the Committees, Lisa did not say a single word about China hacking the DNC server, and this conspiracy theory about the FBI instructing her to cover up such a story is nonsense. Her testimony was consistent with the intelligence community’s unanimous assessment: the evidence demonstrated Russian interference in the election.

Except the TruePundit article did not mention the DNC server, but Hillary Clinton's email server. Factcheck.org even quotes TruePundit and explicitly mentions that Lisa Page's assertion was in regard to Hillary Clinton's server, and not the DNC server, yet focuses on the alleged hack of the DNC server. The quoted statement from Lisa Page's attorney, Amy Jeffress, makes no mention of the Hillary Clinton server; it has no bearing on the TruePundit article.

Factcheck.org is disputing a claim TruePundit did not make. Factcheck.org is thus itself demonstrably guilty of producing "fake news". Facebook is guilty of disseminating "fake news" by attaching Factcheck.org's red-herring rebuttal to my sharing of the TruePundit article.

Additionally, the possibility--even probability--of China having hacked Hillary Clinton's email server has been reported upon by the legacy media, including the New York Times and Politico. The Washington Times reported in 2016 on indications that at least the US Secret Service was aware that Hillary Clinton's email server had been hacked.

The "revelation" in the TruePundit article is not Lisa Page's claim that China hacked Hillary Clinton's email server--which has been rather widely reported in the past--but that the FBI knew this and chose to cover it up. Even that assertion is not without some historical precedent thanks to the aforementioned Washington Times report.

Factcheck.org is demonstrably guilty of producing fake news. Facebook is guilty of disseminating fake news.

The facts prove it. The links prove it.

A few disclaimers and disclosures in the interests of transparency:

• I have no affiliation with TruePundit. I read their content from time to time, and share links to their content when I find it interesting and relevant to the larger political discourse in this country. The only way I can vet their content is by comparing it to other content from other sources--which is what all well-informed citizens should strive to do.
• I have no affiliation nor conflict with Factcheck.org. 
• I have no affiliation with Facebook other than I maintain a Facebook page.
• TruePundit's article may prove to be inaccurate or completely wrong. Until Lisa Page's congressional testimony is made public--or, preferably, that she give actual testimony in an open forum without redactions--we cannot know absolutely the accuracy of the article. However, this is the case with all news articles, and it is only when we have access to primary sources that we may plausibly hope to actually fact check any news article.  Skepticism and a focus on the facts are virtues to be cultivated, particularly in regards to political reporting.