Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

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Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

Post by Vēritās »

This was written back in 2017

25 Years (And Counting) Of Fake GOP Outrage
The Republican Party and its allies in the right wing media specialize in generating and sustaining outrage. Stirring up anger is how the GOP motivates its voters and manipulates the press. Moreover, the very lucrative business model of the right wing media is all about maintaining a 24/7 outrage machine. It never stops. It also works and has had a significant (and very negative) impact on modern American history.

The history of fake GOP outrage began during the 1992 presidential campaign and the Clinton Presidency. That era also marked the emergence of right wing talk radio on the national scene and the Fox News Network. For years, the GOP railed about Bill Clinton’s affairs and they even tried to impeach him for lying under oath in a civil lawsuit that had been dismissed.

What we found out about Clinton’s accusers was that many of them were guilty of much, much greater sins than the ones they claimed they were so mad about. Then House Speaker Newt Gingrich was carrying on an affair with a junior staffer who was eventually his third wife. After Gingrich was ousted, he was replaced by Robert Livingston — who was forced to resign due to his own many affairs. The Speaker who actually presided over the impeachment of Clinton — Dennis Hastert — plead guilty to sexually abusing four boys. Then House Whip Tom DeLay committed perjury in a civil lawsuit over the breakup of his pest control business.
This highlighted portion falls under the category of "every accusation a confession."

As it turned out, the GOP’s fake outrage over Bill Clinton turned out to be effective. The Republicans conned the mainstream press into following these fake scandals and it had a big influence on the 2000 election. This despite the fact that Clinton had a 65% approval rating in 2000.

The person who was probably most outraged over the Lewinsky matter was Al Gore. This influenced him to choose Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman to be his running mate. Gore selected Lieberman because he had been very quick to express outrage over the Lewinsky issue on the Senate floor. Lieberman added nothing to the ticket since he was from a Blue State that Gore was going to carry anyway. If Gore had selected then Florida Senator Bob Graham to be his running mate, Gore would’ve won the election and the country would have avoided the disastrous Bush Presidency.

The fake GOP outrage we experienced during the Clinton Administration was replicated during the Obama Administration. Perhaps the biggest source of outrage from the GOP during Obama’s Presidency was over the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in 2012 in which four American heroes died. The GOP sank so low that it began its assault on the Obama Administration even while the battle still raged in Benghazi. Subsequently, there were no less than 8 Congressional investigations of Benghazi conducted by GOP majority committees and none of them confirmed any of the right wing’s paranoid conspiracy theories.

What was never mentioned by the GOP and the mainstream press was that there were 13 embassy attacks during the George W. Bush Administration in which 61 people died. During the Bush years, there was no outrage from the GOP about these embassy attacks and no investigations. This proves once again that it was 8 years of fake GOP outrage during the Obama Administration over Benghazi. The GOP shamelessly exploited the deaths of four American heroes for crass partisan political purposes.


Republican fake outrage over ethics in government reached its apogee during the 2016 election cycle. The GOP went into full outrage mode over Hillary Clinton’s private email server and literally made that server the biggest issue of the campaign — bar none. The attacks over the private email server were especially audacious since many prominent Republicans had used private email accounts to conduct official business.

George W. Bush’s staff made extensive use of private email accounts from the RNC and went so far as to delete 22 million emails. Both Colin Powell and Condi Rice used private email accounts when they served as Secretary of State. Moreover, Mitt Romney purchased the email servers he used as Governor of Massachusetts and destroyed the entire email correspondence compiled during his four years as governor of Massachusetts. In addition, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry all used private email accounts to conduct official business.

Despite this brazen hypocrisy and fake outrage from the GOP, the mainstream press and the Clinton campaign never mentioned the extensive use of private email accounts by these prominent Republicans. As a result, millions of voters were misled by the GOP and the mainstream press. That is one of the many reasons why we ended up with Trump as the president.

Republican hypocrisy on the use of private email accounts has carried over into the Trump Administration. Many of Trump’s White House staffers — like the Bush Administration — are using RNC private email accounts. But we’ve heard no outrage from the GOP over this. Nada. Nothing.

One of the GOP’s big complaints during the campaign was that Clinton’s private email server caused her to allegedly be careless with classified information — even though there was never any evidence of any security breaches. Nevertheless, it is the Trump Administration itself that has already committed serious security breaches.

Trump himself continues to use an unsecured android phone to communicate and post tweets on the internet. At a recent meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan at his Florida estate, Trump conducted an open air situation room meeting over a recent North Korean missile test. This classified conversation occurred in a dining room in which the discussion was overheard by other diners and the wait staff.

Perhaps the biggest security breach of the nascent Trump Administration revolves around Michael Flynn’s short tenure as National Security Adviser. In late January, the Department of Justice warned the White House that Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Yet Flynn wasn’t fired by Trump until after three weeks had passed. During that three week period, Flynn had complete access to all U.S. intelligence secrets.


Flynn is just the tip of the iceberg of the emerging Russia scandal that has cast a dark cloud over the new administration. That burgeoning Russia scandal is one of the greatest examples ever of fake GOP outrage. For years, the GOP has postured as the party that is tough on Russia. During the Obama Administration, the GOP blamed him for the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and claimed he was soft on Russia. Yet Obama and the international community hit Russia with devastating sanctions after that invasion. Currently, the Russians are desperate to have the sanctions lifted.

Since the election we found out that Putin and Russia had meddled in our elections with the goal of electing Trump. The Russians supported Trump because they are (justifiably) hopeful that Trump will lift the international sanctions. Recent revelations indicate that the Trump team was in regular contact with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election. There is no benign way to explain frequent campaign contact with Russian intelligence. Campaigns just don’t do that. Ever.

Trump and the Republicans have responded to these allegations by either denying them or simply refusing to discuss them. Already, most Republican members of Congress have expressed no interest in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections. As Rand Paul said: “I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party. We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense.”

So far, with the exception of Ben Sasse, Nebraska’s Congressional representatives haven’t commented on the explosive revelations coming out about the Russia scandal. Sasse has posted a few tweets that were mildly critical of Trump but he hasn’t done anything. At the same time, all five of our members of Congress have voted with Trump 100% of the time. It’s obvious that our Congressional delegation is emphasizing party over country.

As activists, we need to contact our members of Congress and demand the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Russia-Trump scandal. If our members of Congress ignore this request, then we need to vote them out in 2018. Already, several prominent political analysts have indicated that Trump’s unpopularity could lead to Democratic control of the House in 2018. We can do it! Let’s get it done!

So we're already well aware of the botched investigations into Hillary's emails and Benghazi. They turned out to be a complete waste of time. But this is the modus operandi of the GOP, and it works together with Right Wing fake news media to push the narratives.

Take the whole birther movement as an example. For many years Trump insisted he had hired really smart people to get to the bottom of it and he had proof, soon to be released, that Obama wasn't American born. "Wait and see" we were told. "Heads are going to roll," we were assured.

Turned out to be a huge flop, and Trump as to this day never apologized for any of that nonsense, which, of course, couldn't possibly be racist.

The next example that comes to mind is the Stolen Election and the thousands of sworn affidavits about witnessing voter fraud. The My Pillow Guy insisting he had hard proof Dominion machines were compromised and controlled by Venezuela.

"Wait and see" we were told. "Heads are going to roll," we were assured.

Related to this was the promise that investigations would prove the election counts were all wrong.

"Wait and see" we were told. "Heads are going to roll," we were assured.

But the Arizona recount investigated by Republicans only proved Biden's win was by a larger margin, and the three recounts in Georgia proved Biden won all three times.

Then there was the Hunter Biden Laptop story - Just two weeks before the 2020 election Tucker Carlson clings onto a viral internet story about Hunter Biden's laptop, claiming he had obtained "'Authentic and damning" documents from the laptop. He never told us what they entailed or how they were damning, he just promised his audience that he was going to release them soon. The next day he said he lost those docs when he mailed them on a USB jump drive. Then after he and the Right Wing ecosphere pushed conspiracies about how someone tried stealing them from the mail, the jump drive was eventually recovered. So did Tucker produce what was on them? No. Instead he said he was going to back off the story because he didn't feel like piling on Hunter Biden, whom he referred to as a "broken man."

Bobulinski swore that the docs he had proved Joe Biden was guilty of crimes, but the news division of the Wall Street Journal deemed that to be false. Right Wing media criticized the legit media for failing to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story but the reason was because Rudy Giuliani had a copy of the hard drive and he refused to provide it to any media outside the NY Post.

NY Post Reporter Behind Dubious Hunter Biden Story Refused to Put His Name on It

Then, Fox News Passed on Hunter Biden Laptop Story Over Credibility Concerns

John Durham was going to blow the lid off of the "hoax" that was the Trump/Russia investigation. FOX News ran wall to wall coverage with predictions of multiple indictments and people going to jail.

"Wait and see" we were told. "Heads are going to roll," we were assured.

But after a three year probe by Durham, his case was reduced to nothing more than trying to prove a former Clinton lawyer had lied to the FBI. The case was so weak that the jury acquitted the attorney in just a few hours, which was a humiliating defeat to Durham and the Right Wing angertainment industry.

And today Twitter is full of GOP folks talking about "mounting evidence" against the "Biden Crime family" based on mysterious "whistleblowers" who never seem to appear when they're needed.
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Re: Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

Post by ajax18 »

51 intelligence officers testified that this laptop had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. There's nothing politically partisan about the justice department. Had they not all signed off on this lie, Trump could have been reelected, therefore in their worldview lying is good and necessary.
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Re: Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

Post by Vēritās »

ajax18 wrote:
Fri May 05, 2023 1:19 am
51 intelligence officers testified that this laptop had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. There's nothing politically partisan about the justice department. Had they not all signed off on this lie, Trump could have been reelected, therefore in their worldview lying is good and necessary.

The Laptop story did have all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. And to a large degree it WAS Russian disinformation as Russian media pushed the extreme conspiratorial versions of it that have never been close to substantiated.

The fact is your own Right Wing media refused to touch it because even they knew there was something really fishy going on when Rudy refused to provide the data to anyone other than the NYP, and then the NYP journalists refused to put his name on it. If the tables were turned and a CNN journalist backed off a story about Russian Collusion because of "credibility issues" you'd be dancing in the streets screaming this was proof of some kind of Liberal Media hoax.

And Trump was never going to win the election no matter what. After all, the Hunter Laptop story was already out there for a full three weeks before the election. There was hardly a single Biden voter who hadn't already heard about it. FOX news and the NYP both dropped it for reasons that had NOTHING to do with this letter signed by 51 former intelligence agents. And the letter never once said for a fact it was Russian Disinfo, it said it had all the hallmarks of that, which is absolutely 200% true.

They preface the letter with this, referring not to the existence of a laptop, but to the purported emails that were never allowed to be validated because of Rudy disallowing anyone access.
It is for all these reasons that we write to say that the arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175 ... 9f9b330000
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Re: Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

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You might be right that had the left failed to censor the New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop on social media, mainstream media, etc. that it wouldn't have changed the vote of most Democrats. But it doesn't change the fact that 51 intelligence officers either lied to the American people or demonstrated gross incompetence in labeling the laptop as Russian disinformation purely out of partisan political motives. The FBI, CIA have shown themselves to be nothing but partisan political Democrat operatives in the same way the mainstream media has done. They routinely lie to Congress. And they wonder why the American people don't trust them.

Hunter Biden laptop letter's Joe Biden 'talking point' strategy confirmed in email to John Brennan

An email to John Brennan has been published imploring him to sign the Hunter Biden laptop letter to help give Joe Biden a “talking point” against then-President Donald Trump, confirming Washington Examiner revelations earlier this week.

On Thursday, the Washington Examiner revealed that Mike Morell sent a recruitment email, along with a draft of the letter, to intelligence officials days ahead of the second presidential debate between Biden and Trump. In the letter, Morell admitted that one purpose of the letter was to give Biden an opportunity to rebut Trump should discussion about the "laptop from hell" come up.

After the Washington Examiner published its story on Thursday, Just The News revealed a separate “talking point” email that Morell, a former acting CIA director under former President Barack Obama, sent to Brennan, Obama’s final CIA director, the morning of Oct. 19, hours before the letter was published that evening by Politico.

The Brennan email revealed other former top national security officials Morell was attempting to recruit, at least one of whom did sign the letter, but included others who did not publicly add their names to it.

More than 50 ex-intelligence officials subsequently signed the laptop letter, which was co-authored by Morell and former senior CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos, and helped contribute to the baseless narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop was nothing more than Russian disinformation.

Morell told Brennan that he was “trying to give the campaign, particularly during the debate on Thursday, a talking point to push back on Trump on this issue.” Brennan told Morell to “add my name to the list” and called it a “good initiative.”

Brennan is slated to testify in front of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on May 11.

Morell told Brennan he would “be adding” a number of other officials to the letter that day, but only one of the names he listed, former Obama CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, was definitely a public signatory.

The other names Morell listed as signers he would be adding did not materialize as among the 51 names: Lisa Monaco, a Homeland Security adviser under Obama and now the deputy attorney general under Attorney General Merrick Garland; Sue Gordon, the principal deputy director of national intelligence under Trump until August 2019; Jeh Johnson, Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security; and Mike Rogers, a retired four-star admiral of the U.S. Navy who was director of the National Security Agency from 2014 to 2018 under Obama and Trump.

Morell said he was also adding “George” to the list that day, a likely reference to former national intelligence officer Roger Zane George, who signed the letter.

Morell was “working on adding” three other Republican officials to the letter: Dan Coats, a former director of national intelligence under Trump from 2017 to 2019; Tom Bossert, a Homeland Security adviser under Trump from 2017 into 2018; and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), a former congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 2011 to 2015.

The trio is not listed as signing the letter.

The published laptop letter did say that “nine additional former IC officers who cannot be named publicly also support the arguments in this letter,” but it is unclear who those anonymous supporters were.

The new revelations come on the heels of bombshell House testimony by Morell, the former Obama CIA acting director who said now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken “triggered” him to write the October 2020 laptop letter.

Morell had also sent an email the evening prior, on Oct. 18, to a number of former intelligence officials. The email, first reported by the Washington Examiner, was subsequently published in full by Breitbart. The recipients of the email, which was sent by Morell on behalf of himself and Polymeropoulos and included a draft of the laptop letter, were blind carbon copied “to protect folks' privacy.”

“Marc and I drafted the attached because we believe the Russians were involved in some way in the Hunter Biden email issue and because we think Trump will attack Biden on the issue at this week’s debate and we want to give the VP a talking point to use in response,” Morell wrote.

Morell told the CIA officers he'd "like to find a way to highlight your Russia work” when listing their names on the letter. The email was signed “Michael and Marc.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Morell testified to the House this year that one of the two reasons he helped put the letter together was to help Joe Biden "win the election" against Trump.

Konstantinos "Gus" Dimitrelos, a cyber forensics expert and former Secret Service agent, conducted an examination of the laptop for the Washington Examiner last year, concluding that “my analysis revealed there is a 100% certainty that Robert Hunter Biden was the only person responsible for the activity on this hard drive and all of its stored data” and that “the hard drive is authentic.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... ed7c&ei=41
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Re: Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

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So Morell, a life-long Republican, wanted Biden to beat Trump in the election.

Ok, so how is that any kind of indictment against anyone but Trump? People in his own party wanted him out and for good reason.

None of this changes the fact that there was legit reason to believe the Hunter Biden Laptop story was part of Russian disinformation, especially when the only guy with the HD was Rudy Giuliani and he refused to let anyone verify it. Six months prior to this Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), an ardent Trump partisan whom the president had nominated to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was testifying at his Senate confirmation hearing and he noted several times that Russia was covertly intervening in the ongoing 2020 election. This Russian campaign to feed America disinformation was well known among all intelligence agencies, because they had already been monitoring it since the 2016 election.
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Re: Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Just a review of the Hunter Biden laptop cOnTrOvErSY:

Republican claims about Hunter Biden’s laptop are a 🤡 🚗 of unconnected non-stories, and direct appeals to QAnon. Their delusions usually involve tHe BiG gUy, 2016 election meddling by Ukraine, 2020 stolen election fantasies, and of course their main obsession, child porn - Hunter Biden’s niece to whatever projection each accuser is engaging in.

I did see something on CNN about Hunter Biden’s sketchy business practices, to include getting a sinecure on Burisma’s board. That's a far cry from the myriad of paranoid conspiracy fever-dreams spouted nightly over at FOX Entertainment, and lapped up by the addled-brains who watch that crap. And because none of these people have any integrity and they care about truth about as much as they care about babies immediately after birth, if Hunter Biden gets indicted for tax fraud, or buying gun while taking drugs, or something similarly anti-climactic, these chucklefucks are going to claim victory and take a lap, forgetting the scope of their accusations over the years. As Republican thought leader Alex Jones proves, if you claim that every goddamn thing is a conspiracy theory, eventually you're going to get one close enough to right that you can ignore the specifics of what you said for years and pretend you've been vindicated. Absolutely crap birds, the lot of them.

So, what did we get with this laptop?

Screenshots pasted into a word doc and then printed as a PDF to insulate everything on it from its source metadata, something you'd do if you wanted to make it impossible to see where it had originally come from.

*IF* someone had that hard drive image and it contained even half of what they claimed, you could release it today and Biden would be gone within the week. IF you had access to the contents and it DID have what was claimed on it, and (as claimed by Giuliani) they had a hard drive image of it, *AT ANY POINT*, they could have just uploaded it online and spammed Right-wing media with the source and let the Internet sleuths pick it to pieces.

Every byte of data would’ve been dissected in minutes, and ANY incriminating data on it would’ve been made public within a few hours. The downside of that is that it would’ve been impossible to fake it without being detected one way or another.

But, that's not what they want, is it? They want idiots like Xanax repeating whatever lies they feed them, unquestioningly gobbling up every little salacious mendacity like the gullible muppets they are. 🤑

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Re: Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

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https://youtu.be/Jersey Girl-1xmjLb5c?t=283

Even FOX News isn't having any of it. Geraldo Rivera laughed off the idea that Biden was engaged in bribery and that the whistleblower just conveniently disappears after these political pundits push his alleged claims.
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Re: Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

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RIght now, from hearing all the rantings from video clips of MTG and Boerbert and Ted Cruz and Hawley, it appears the thrust of their argument is that they heard from a whistleblower that is no longer around to blow anymore, that Joe Biden is guilty of selling secrets to China in a bribery scandal. When they are pressed to produce evidence they just keep saying they have to get the documents from the FBI, which they believe contains this evidence. Why do they believe the FBI has such evidence? Because the FBI is part of the deep state and corrupt, and so they're hiding it from them.

What in the ever living fuq!?!?

Here is Hawley literally telling FOX News "If you think Joe Biden is innocent then fine just give us the document to prove it."

https://youtu.be/Jersey Girl-1xmjLb5c?t=186

In other words, guilty until proven innocent. And basically saying, we need you to prove you're innocent because our incompetent asses don't know how to argue points using actual evidence.
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Re: Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

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That the coke-addled fever dream Republicans live in includes vague stories about the president's son shows how damned coke-addled it really is. Who gives a damn about Hunter Biden? Is he running for President? What does he have to do with his father's ability to do the job?

If we cared about a person's offspring when judging someone for the President job, Trump never should have been in office (even if he did have any redeeming qualities, which we know he doesn't). Don Jr. and Eric are damned morons.
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Re: Litany of Bogus GOP investigations that Backfired

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ajax18 wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 12:13 am
But it doesn't change the fact that 51 intelligence officers either lied to the American people or demonstrated gross incompetence in labeling the laptop as Russian disinformation purely out of partisan political motives.

They didn’t ‘label the laptop as Russian disinformation’.

They labeled claims about its contents as Russian disinformation.

Are you trying to convince me that you don’t know the difference, or are you relabeling the statement by 51 intelligence officers as something that it’s not, purely out of your own partisan political motives?
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