The Russian Hoax Thingy

Special Counsel John Durham has scored another big victory after a federal judge ordered Hillary Clinton to hand over documents for the Russia hoax investigation.

The judge in Washington, DC, sided with Durham and agreed to compel the production of documents that Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign claimed were protected by the attorney-client privilege.

Durham is prosecuting former Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI.

Sussmann lied to agents when he claimed to be acting as a private citizen who was handing over information that he claimed showed criminal activity.

However, he was actually providing false information on behalf of the Clinton campaign in an attempt to link then-candidate Donald Trump to the Russian government via Alfa Bank.

Durham had requested the documents last month but faced pushback from Clinton's allies.

As the New York Post noted earlier in the week:

In court papers filed last month, Durham said the Democratic National Committee, Hillary for America, the Fusion GPS research company and the powerhouse Perkins Coie law firm — where Sussmann was formerly a partner — “have all withheld and/or redacted documents and communications” that could potentially be used against the defendant.”

Durham said they made that decision “based on an apparent theory that political opposition research and/or public relations work … falls within the legitimate scope of attorney-client privilege and work-product protections.”

“They have done so despite the fact that almost all of these materials appear to lack any connection to actual or expected litigation or the provision of legal advice,” members of Durham’s team wrote.  READ MORE...

Sending Money to Ukraine

Bethenny Frankel is sending $10 million in aid to Ukrainian citizens affected by the Russian invasion through her disaster relief initiative, B Strong.

BStrong is a worldwide initiative in partnership with Global Empowerment Mission. Over the past couple days, the “Real Housewives of New York City” alum has been sharing updates on her nonprofit’s urgency to help Ukrainian citizens flee to safety as the crisis escalates.

On Friday night, the Skinnygirl entrepreneur took to Instagram to share that BStrong has focused its efforts on helping Ukrainian women and children who fled to the border of Poland.

“So we’re really dealing with women and children at the border in Poland. We just had an incident with a woman whose husband was pulled out of the car. He was taken because he’s Ukrainian, and the men can’t leave,” Frankel said in a video shared to her Instagram Story.

“He’s never held a gun in his life, and now he’s a soldier, so she’s coming through with her family, and we have to get her family to Spain, where she has family because she doesn’t have family in Poland,” she continued.

Frankel first announced BStrong’s assistance on Thursday. The initial commitment was to send 100,000 hygiene and survival kits, sleeping bags and aid totaling $10 million. In addition, financial donations are also going to “individual cases and families through cash, cards and plane tickets.”

Frankel said the BStrong team will be on hand at a welcome booth at an entry center in Medyka, Poland, Saturday.

“Money is flying in and this is what it’s going to be used for. We’re working with the Polish government,” Frankel said. “We will have multiple computers and volunteers. People coming in will come up to us, we’ll find out if they have family, where their family is. Hotels will not be available, so we’ll give them the crisis kits, and then we will be booking them travel to get them where they need to get to. Otherwise, there will be such a backlog at these entry points, and we’ll keep growing this to multiple, multiple entry points.”

As of Friday afternoon, Frankel said donations were coming in every three seconds, and the organization has upped its goal.  READ MORE...

College Campuses: Freedom of Speech

From the moment I stepped foot on campus at NYU three years ago, I’ve been taught that there is right-think and wrong-think. 

Everywhere I look, professors, administrators and peers all fervently parrot the same beliefs.

I have sat through orientation events that were highly politicized, assuming “community values” of radical progressivism — values I don’t share.

On the first day of the semester, a professor blatantly disparaged conservative politicians and their supporters as uneducated and ignorant. 

Even Mayor de Blasio intervened in October of 2018 to prevent right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking to a class of about 25 freshmen about political correctness after the campus erupted in outrage and Antifa threatened to shut down the event.

My experience is not unique. Across the nation, professors are espousing their own views at the lectern and thrusting politicized curricula upon students, teaching them what to think rather than how to think. 

Meanwhile, speech codes, safe spaces, trigger warnings and the conflation of speech with violence have all had a discernibly chilling effect on campus discourse. NYU identification cards even prominently display a bias report hotline to report any instances of offense. 

The resulting fear of saying the wrong thing or being behind on the latest political lingo is palpable.  READ MORE