Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

A letter written by a host of progressive Democrats – among them U.S. Representatives Hank Johnson, D-GA, Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., Jared Huffman, D-Calif., Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and five other progressive Democrats — marks the beginning of a concerted attack on U.S. Attorney from the District of Connecticut John Durham, appointed by Attorney General William Barr to investigate events surrounding what might be called the prelude and aftermath of the completed Robert Mueller report which, much to the disappointment of Democrats leading the charge against President Donald Trump, did not find prosecutable instances of collusion between Russia and the President.

Blumenthal and Schumer The papers are full of news reports concerning Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s long awaited investigation. Both Republican and Democrat antagonists in the apparently never ending President Donald Trump soap opera are claiming vindication. Briefly, the Horowitz report makes and defends two primary claims: 1) that the OPENING of the Trump investigation was justified, and 2) that the prosecution of the investigation on the part of the FBI had been mishandled. Attorney General William Barr and the State Attorney from the District of Connecticut, John Durham, have been roundly criticized by U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, who has praised the Horowitz report in extravagant terms as an “authoritative objective report [that] completely demolishes President Trump’s false claims and right wing conspiracy theories that the Russian investigation involved political bias or other improper motive[s]. It explodes President Trump’s fictitious narrative about a ‘wit...

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

I’d like to thank Dennis Swanton for inviting me here.  I want to touch on two areas of interest tonight, national and state government --they impinge on each other -- and end with a prayer to God to save us from ourselves. Otto von Bismarck used to say “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Let us hope it’s true. We’ll need a little divine intervention if Connecticut is to survive as a prosperous and welcoming state.  If you feel inclined to chuckle along the way, don’t restrain yourselves. Laughter is therapeutic. I’m hoping we might be able to bat around some questions in the Q&A that will follow. “All politics is local,” said Speaker of the US House Tip O’Neill. The phrase is pretty common, though it is most often associated with O’Neill, President Ronald Reagan’s Democrat counterpart in the glorious -- for conservative Republicans -- 1980’s. In many other ways, the 80s were a painful regurgitation of the 60s.  I’m ...

Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi came to Connecticut trailing clouds of impeachment. Impeachment is the removal of a governmental official from office. When the official is a president duly elected to office in a national vote -- rather than, say, a judge -- cautious politicians tend to be cautious. Pelosi herself is said to be, in most news reports, opposed to impeachment. Newly elected U.S. Representative Jahana Hayes said she would favor impeachment “if the facts merit.”

Someone should nudge awake Connecticut U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy. The FISA warrant used to secure the services of special prosecutor Robert Mueller was defective from the get-go, we learn in a series of stunning opinion pieces in The Hill written by John Solomon . It appears there is an after-story to the Mueller investigation after all, and the second act will almost certainly disappoint the two Trump-slayers. One of the stories’ ledes probably should garner Solomon a Pulitzer for commentary eye-candy: “The FBI’s sworn story to a federal court about its asset, Christopher Steele, is fraying faster than a $5 souvenir T-shirt bought at a tourist trap.” And the second graph might be a close runner-up: “Newly unearthed memos show a high-ranking government official who met with Steele in October 2016 determined some of the Donald Trump dirt that Steele was simultaneously digging up for the FBI and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was inaccurate, and lik...

The recently re-installed Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, will be the featured speaker at the Connecticut Democrat’s annual fundraising dinner. Pelosi is known, among other things, for her ability to bring home the bennies, and Connecticut Democrats no doubt will be happy to receive them – not that the state’s Democrat Party is, by any measure, a poor waif begging for pennies on street corners. The Annual Gathering of Democrats used to be called “The Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey Dinner.” But Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, and Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States, generally regarded as the father of the modern Democrat Party, were both booted from the marque some years ago because both were slave owners. Jackson, in addition, displaced Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in what later became known as “ The Trail of Tears .” Upon ejection, the Ha...

Blumenthal sworn into office by Biden in a mock ceremony The leading Democrats scrambling up the presidential campaign greasy pole are former Vice President in the Obama administration Joe Biden, 29 percent in a Quinnipiac poll, followed by Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders, 19 percent in the same poll, both of whom have had past sweet and sour relationships, none of them the subject of congressional hearings,  with communist Russia. President Donald Trump continues to be slammed by Democrats owing to his still alleged warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, collusion with the Ruskies having been put in the cooler after the Mueller investigation, but these two… not so much. Biden’s questionable relationship with Ukraine, a country that had in the past locked horns with Russia numerous times – in 1932, Joseph Stalin created a man-made famine to haul Ukraine into the Soviet orbit – recently re-surfaced in a New York Times piece that is certain to catch th...

The sound and fury over President Donald Trump’s now exploded "conspiracy" with Russian President Vladimir Putin to undermine the Trump/Clinton election in favor of Trump is abating following the publication of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s exhaustive 448 page report. New York Times columnist Charles Blow reported last December , “Members of Trump’s team were extremely interested in and eager to accept any assistance that the Russians could provide.” The serpent coiled in that line is that the Trump team HAD colluded with the Russians.   Naturally, the mud throwers are perversely unrepentant. After a two year investigation, Mueller’s team “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign colluded or coordinated with the Russian government,” according to Mueller’s report. In fact, the often touted suspicions of leading Democrat propagandists – first that Trump had “conspired” against the interests of the United States, a crime and a charge later lowered t...

CTMirror tells us that President Donald Trump has “attacked the credibility of Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal and several other Democrats, warning television networks against booking them on their news shows.”                                Tim Murtaugh, spokesman for the Trump campaign, wrote to the television networks, “You should begin by asking the basic question: Does this guest warrant further appearances in our programming, given the outrageous and unsupported claims made in the past? Murtaugh pointed to “reckless” and “outlandish, false claims” made by Blumenthal; among them “was Blumenthal’s statement in October on MSNBC that ‘the evidence is pretty clear that there was collision between the Trump campaign and the Russians.’”

“The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/ Gang aft a-gley” -- Robert Burns We can no longer pretend, after the release of Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the findings of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation, that the more important findings mean nothing at all and may be safely ignored. The leaders of what Victor David Hanson called back in February a “dead coup” will of course seek to minimize the import of the concluded investigation in their rush to continue their coup. However, without scouring the details of the investigation, two things are indisputable: 1) that Mueller’s two year probe is over —future indictments are not in the offing -- and 2) that Mueller did not cite anyone in the Trump administration, including the president himself, with conspiracy, a crime, or collusion with the Putin regime in Russia to win an election against then Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton. Mueller’s two year investigation has been b...