Conservative Musings

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Monday, February 19, 2018

Does She Ever Stop Lying?

Hillary Clinton Caught in Another Massive Lie… This Time About School Shootings

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BY CILLIAN ZEAL
FEBRUARY 19, 2018 AT 7:12AM

If there was ever a time when America needed Hillary Clinton — and it’s debatable whether such a time existed — it certainly wasn’t in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting.

Yet, there she was — and lying as always.

After the shootings, the 2016 Democrat presidential candidate issued a series of tweets supporting the typical amorphous “gun control” agenda of the left, all without any actual policy proposals but plenty of weepy “we can do better” rhetoric.

16 Feb

Hillary Clinton

✔@HillaryClinton

This week we lost 17 Americans in Parkland - the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012. Since then, 438 people have been shot and 138 killed in over 230 school shootings. That’s 5 school shootings every month, 16 of which classify as “mass shootings.”

Hillary Clinton

✔@HillaryClinton

Now is the time to listen to the students, teachers, and parents demanding that we end this carnage once and for all with gun safety laws that keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them.

2:25 PM - Feb 16, 2018

18.6K

5,504 people are talking about this

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One tweet, however, was particularly outrageous — mostly because it was pretty much an outright lie.

“This week we lost 17 Americans in Parkland — the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012,” Clinton tweeted Sunday.

Do you think Hillary Clinton needs to go away?

“Since then, 438 people have been shot and 138 killed in over 230 school shootings. That’s 5 school shootings every month, 16 of which classify as ‘mass shootings.’”

Note that last sentence, which may seem a bit ambiguous or confusing to you.

As The Washington Post notes, that statistic is from Everytown for Gun Safety, a heavily astroturfed, left-wing, gun control group. And its statistics on school shootings were so misleading that even the WaPo — hardly a den of covert NRA activity — wrote an article about the group’s statistics bluntly titled, “No, there haven’t been 18 school shootings in 2018. That number is flat wrong.”

“The figure originated with Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group, co-founded by Michael Bloomberg, that works to prevent gun violence and is most famous for its running tally of school shootings,” the newspaper reported.

“A tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) including the claim had been liked more than 45,000 times by Thursday evening, and one from political analyst Jeff Greenfield had cracked 126,000. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted it, too, as did performers Cher and Alexander William and actors Misha Collins and Albert Brooks. News organizations — including MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, Time, MSN, the BBC, the New York Daily News and HuffPost — also used the number in their coverage.”

However, as The Washington Post noted, “Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counted as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.

“Also listed on the organization’s site is an incident from Jan. 20, when at 1 a.m. a man was shot at a sorority event on the campus of Wake Forest University. A week later, as a basketball game was being played at a Michigan high school, someone fired several rounds from a gun in the parking lot. No one was injured, and it was past 8 p.m., well after classes had ended for the day, but Everytown still labeled it a school shooting.”

Everytown’s definition of a school shooting — “any time a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds” — is obviously deceptive. And Hillary Clinton obviously knows that.

According to USA Today, the actual number of fatal school shooting incidents since Columbine in 1999 is 25 — certainly no small number, but nowhere near 230 school shootings since 2012.

After moments like Parkland, it’s important we have serious discussions about who we are and who we want to be as a nation. It doesn’t help when demagogues like Clinton use numbers that are outright lies to advance her agenda and maintain her relevancy.

This discussion can happen without you, Hillary. It’s time for you to go away. It’s been more than a year since Nov. 8, 2016. At this point, all you can do is divide us with lies and self-aggrandizement.

Please like and share on Facebook and Twitter if you agree.

How do you think school shootings can be stopped?

Did The Government Withhold Vital Information In The Flynn Case?

Order by New Judge in Flynn Case Raises Possibility Guilty Plea Could Be Thrown Out

By Randy DeSoto
February 16, 2018 at 1:11pm

Orders given by the newly assigned judge in former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s criminal case have raised the possibility that the retired general’s guilty plea in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation may get thrown out.

In November, Flynn plead guilty to one count of lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition in December 2016

Observers, including President Donald Trump, noted there was nothing inappropriate about the incoming national security adviser talking to representatives from foreign governments. The conversations had nothing to do colluding with the Russians during the presidential campaign, which was supposedly the focus of Mueller’s investigation.

The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York pointed out an unusual sequence of events in Flynn’s case following his guilty plea that has not received widespread media coverage.

Just days after accepting the plea, Judge Rudolph Contreras recused himself from the case, which is being heard before U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

In his place, the court assigned Judge Emmet Sullivan, who presided over the corruption case involving the late Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens.

Do you think Flynn’s guilty plea will be set aside?

Stevens’ conviction in October 2008 cost him his re-election bid a few weeks later. It came to light just months afterward that the Justice Department had withheld exculpatory evidence that would have helped the senator’s defense. The conviction was set aside in April 2009.

According to York, “Sullivan ripped into the Stevens prosecutors with an anger rarely seen on the bench.”

“In nearly 25 years on the bench, I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case,” Sullivan said at the time.

The judge “was furious that the federal government had repeatedly withheld evidence from the Stevens defense and has been known ever since as a judge who is a stickler for making sure defendants are allowed access to all the evidence they are entitled to,” York wrote.

When he took over the Flynn case in December, Sullivan ordered Mueller’s team “to produce all discoverable evidence in a readily usable form.” And he declared that “if the government has identified any information which is favorable to the defendant but which the government believes not to be material, the government shall submit such information to the Court for in camera review.”

In other words, the judged declared that he, not Mueller, would be deciding what evidence needs to be turned over to Flynn’s legal team.

As part of his plea agreement, Flynn had foregone “the right to any further discovery or disclosures” from government prosecutors.

“It certainly appears that Sullivan’s order supersedes the plea agreement and imposes on the special counsel the obligation to reveal any and all evidence suggesting that Flynn is innocent of the charge to which he has admitted guilt,” wrote National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor.

One piece of evidence that may prove helpful to Flynn is that FBI agents who conducted his interview in Jan. 2017 — among them special agent Peter Stzok of anti-Trump text fame — came away believing he was telling the truth.

“On March 2, Comey testified to a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee that, while Flynn may have had some honest failures of recollection during the interview, the agents who questioned him concluded that he did not lie,” according to McCarthy.

“(B)ut apparently because Strzok’s finding that Flynn was truthful was negated by Mueller’s very aggressive prosecutors,” the columnist added. “Did they decide they knew better than the experienced investigators who were in the room observing Flynn’s demeanor as he answered their questions?”

McCarthy wondered whether Flynn’s team knew that information before they agreed to the guilty plea. Fox News reported at the time that Flynn, facing financial and emotional pressure due mounting legal bills, may have agreed to the plea in order to simply end the case.

Additionally, McCarthy speculated the reason Contreras recused himself from the case following Flynn’s plea is that he is one of the judges assigned to the FISA court. In that capacity, he may have signed off on at least one of the warrants allowing surveillance of Trump campaign figures including Carter Page and Paul Manafort.

Whether Flynn’s legal team will have factual grounds to undo the plea agreement is not yet known, but Mueller’s prosecutors agreed last month to put off sentencing in the case until at least May.

What do you think?