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In British Columbia, retired road engineer David Pacey has pleaded not guilty to two counts of damaging flora, fauna or a natural object in a national park. Pacey has repaired and cleared of debris some five kilometers of existing trails in Kootenay National Park. He says officials at Parks Canada are just angry with him for doing the job they should be doing.

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In an otherwise unremarkable opinion over the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a federal appellate court judge has issued a sharp rejoinder to the Obama administration over an issue that has been discussed in the news–the almost complete lack of Syrian Christian refugees being brought over to the U.S.

Perhaps Obama thinks that we have enough Christians already.

(Really — If Obama actually were a ‘secret Muslim’, what would he be doing differently?)

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The architects of the Affordable Care Act thought they had a blunt instrument to force people — even young and healthy ones — to buy insurance through the law’s online marketplaces: a tax penalty for those who remain uninsured.

It has not worked all that well, and that is at least partly to blame for soaring premiums next year on some of the health law’s insurance exchanges.

The full weight of the penalty will not be felt until April, when those who have avoided buying insurance will face penalties of around $700 a person or more. But even then that might not be enough: For the young and healthy who are badly needed to make the exchanges work, it is sometimes cheaper to pay the Internal Revenue Service than an insurance company charging large premiums, with huge deductibles.

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Following the public release of rates for health insurance plans under Obamacare for 2017, brokers from around the country began fielding calls from angry clients, many of whom were panicked about the rising cost of their health insurance.

But separate from the worried voices of clients on the other end of the telephone, many brokers themselves are looking toward 2017 with anxiety as health insurers have slashed or eliminated the commissions that helped them make a living.

“It’s gotten more aggressive and competitive with those who are still left because everyone is fighting for survival,” Scott Leavitt, of Scott Leavitt Insurance and Financial Services in Boise, Idaho, and the former president of the National Association of Health Insurance Underwriters, told The Daily Signal.

“The carriers are bleeding, agents are losing commissions, things are tougher than they’ve been before this,” he continued. “[Obamacare] did nothing to keep the cost of health care low.”

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Hipsters don’t eat American cheese anyway.

Large milk supplies are bringing down the price of milk. As a result, in August, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) purchased $20 million worth of cheese to reduce the cheese supply and drive up allegedly low milk prices. This discretionary authority to make such purchases exists as a result of Section 32 of the Agriculture Act of 1935.

Apparently, the first cheese bailout was insufficient. So earlier this month, the USDA announced it would buy an additional $20 million worth of cheese. This intervention is on top of the already existing federal programs to help dairy producers.

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Social Security faces a $10 trillion funding shortfall. Since 2010, Social Security has been running a constant cash flow deficit, meaning that the taxes collected for the program aren’t enough to cover the benefits paid to beneficiaries. To fill the gap and keep the checks going out, the program has been drawing from federal trust funds. However, the government’s trust funds aren’t like trust funds in the real world. Trust funds in the real world contain assets; the government’s trust funds basically contain IOUs. What that means in simple terms is that the government already has to go further into debt to pay Social Security’s bills—and it’s only going to get worse.

The Social Security system is another example of the government doing something for which a non-government actor would go to jail — it’s basically a state-sanctioned Ponzi scheme.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Whenever the government gets involved, you can count on two things:

1. The price will always go up.
2. The supply will always go down, meaning long lines and eventually a ‘black market’.

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Hey, how about that ‘affordable health care’…?

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Thank God for those strict Chicago gun control laws, or the place would look like Texas.

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Taxpayers shelled out millions of dollars in 2013 when the golf-addicted President Obama took Air Force One to Florida on vacation and played a round of golf with Tiger Woods, according to a new government study.

From Feb. 15-18 in 2013, the president went on a four day trip that included an official speech in Chicago and some leisure time in Palm Beach, Florida.

According to a forthcoming report by the Government Accountability Office that was obtained early by The Daily Caller, the government spent a total of $3.6 million to fly, protect and support the president during this trip to Illinois and Florida.

He’s going to miss it, when it’s gone.

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A global warming research center at the London School of Economics got millions of dollars from UK taxpayers by taking credit for research it didn’t perform, an investigation by The Daily Mail revealed.

The UK government gave $11 million dollars to the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) in exchange for research that the organization reportedly never actually did.

Many papers CCCEP claimed to have published to get government money weren’t about global warming, were written before the organization was even founded, or were written by researchers unaffiliated with CCCEP. The government never checked CCCEP’s supposed publication lists, saying they were “taken on trust,” according to the report.

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Secretary of State John Kerry’s daughter and her staff traveled around the world on the taxpayers’ dime to secure more than $9 million in Department of State-funded contracts, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.

The Peace Corps authorized an estimated $46,000 for 20 international and domestic trips for Dr. Vanessa Kerry and her staff, agency documents obtained by TheDCNF show. The purpose of the travel was to form the Global Health Service Partnership (GHSP) – a Peace Corps-run and State Department-funded program Kerry proposed.

Being a Child of the Crust means never having to pay your own way.

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Minnesota’s version of the Affordable Care Act is called MNSure. Like all such implementations of the federal law, it has been a disaster. Last week, Minnesota’s left-wing governor, Mark Dayton, created a firestorm when he accidentally blurted out the truth: “The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable to increasing numbers of people.”

Dayton has been furiously backpedaling away from that comment ever since, but local Democrats are so worried about MNSure’s unpopularity that they are calling for a special session prior to the election to try to fix the problems with the statute.

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President Obama’s 2016 budget makes this brutal reality clear. Entitlements there already absorb almost 70 percent of all federal spending. Defense spending, the next-largest budget item, takes up about 15 percent of the total, while interest payments on outstanding government debt take up some 6 percent. That leaves only about 10 percent for all the rest of what Washington does, and nothing for walls, free college, new bridges and the like. Indeed, entitlements, which have already expanded from 56 percent of all federal spending in 2000 and from 43 percent twenty years ago, promise to intensify the pressure they place on the budget, as the retirement of the baby boom and the increased obligations under the Affordable Care Act disproportionately enlarge the demands on these programs year after year, without even a requirement that Congress vote on the matter.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. This is true even with a government that thinks that everybody’s money is at its disposal.

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Officers with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) responded to the Stanton Glen Apartments on Naylor Road after an unknown suspect open fired in the Southeast, D.C., neighborhood. A woman who wished not to be identified said at least 15 bullets went through her home while she and her children were sleeping. She says she awoke to the sounds of gunshot and saw smoke, reports NBC Washington.

“They thought they were fireworks,” the woman told NBC4.

No one was injured in the shooting and police are investigating the incident. Bullets went flying into another apartment on the 3400 block of 12th Street at roughly the same time. Officers also found multiple cars riddled with bullet holes on the 300 block of Stanton Road in Fort Stanton.

Thank God for those strict D.C. gun control laws, or the place would wind up like Texas.

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When farmers plow their land, it produces grooves called “furrows,” bordered by small ridges of dirt.

But in pursuit of new regulatory powers, federal agencies refer to the little dirt mounds by another term: “mini mountain ranges.” That seemingly absurd distinction is being used to impose more federal control over private land use decisions made by U.S. farmers.

I am not making this up.

The rule would allow puddles, tire ruts and standing water to be labeled “disturbed wetlands” and regulated under the Clean Water Act. The Senate committee report states the rule would allow EPA to get around legal limits to its authority over ditches, draws, low areas, or other wet areas by simply calling them a “regulated tributary” or “wetland.”

I wish I were.

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Delivering mail in the Georgia heat can be hard work, but one intuitive mailman found a way to streamline the process: dump all the mail in a ditch.

The U.S. Postal Service is investigating the behavior of one of its employees after a homeowner recorded a mailman carrying boxes of letters and dumping them in a ditch, according to local news station WSB-TV Channel 2.

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What do cottage cheese, “extra fancy” apples, and chicken noodle soup all have in common? It’s a crime to sell any of them without meeting arcane federal regulatory standards.

Heritage Foundation scholars James Gattuso and Diane Katz write in their 2016 report, “Red Tape Rising,” that the costs of federal regulations “have not been fully quantified,” but “many of the worst effects—the loss of freedom and opportunity, for example—are incalculable.”

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A teacher at Norman North High School in Oklahoma recently upset his students when he boldly proclaimed that all white people are inherently racist.

One of his white students, who requested to remain anonymous, recorded her teacher’s lecture with her cellphone. “And he pulls out this globe with a bottle of white out and marks over a country or a piece of country and puts his name on it,” the student told News Channel 4 in Oklahoma. “So he was basically comparing what he had done to the globe to what we did to America.”

Two words: ‘home school’.

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Hillary Clinton swiped State Department furniture to decorate her Washington home, a former member of her security detail has alleged to the FBI.

“Early in Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, she and her staff were observed removing lamps and furniture from the State Department which were transported to her residence in Washington, DC,” an agent on the detail told the FBI.

The agent “does not know whether these items were ever returned to the government,” according to FBI notes.

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A cyber-intelligence company found about 200 files from one of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s closest confidantes on a Romanian server, according to the FBI’s latest release of findings from their investigation into the former secretary of state’s handling of classified materials.

Judicial Watch, the conservative group suing the Department of State over Clinton’s emails, paid an unnamed company $32,000 to conduct a search of the “Deep Web and Dark Web” for data that could have been taken from the private servers of Clinton and adviser Sidney Blumenthal.

Well, that was awkward.

In reviewing the data, an unnamed investigator found “one sensitive Excel file listing the names of known or suspected jihadists in Libya,” a portion of which was “in Russian,” the FBI reported.

The discovery is the latest FBI release of findings concerning Clinton’s use of a private email server while working in the Obama administration.

Which they dump on Friday afternoon, hoping that the media won’t cover it — which they haven’t.

Read it.

That’s how much a recent report from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, estimates state and local governments across the U.S. have promised to their employees, but can’t afford to pay.

Normally, if an employer promises its worker more than it can pay, its workers lose out, but that’s unlikely to be the case here.

Since most state and local pension promises represent legal obligations, it will be state and local taxpayers who bear the burden of their governments’ unfunded promises.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

Especially amusing are the cries from the female reporters in the back of the plane to one of their own  who is blocking the view ‘Sit down!’.

This is, indeed, the year of no shame, so we’re jumping on the bandwagon.

Read it.

Read it.

Despite internet hype, a prototype of the solar “road” built in Idaho couldn’t be driven on, didn’t generate any electricity and 75 percent of its panels broke within a week of installation. Of the panels installed to make a “solar footpath,” 18 of the 30 were dead on arrival due to a manufacturing failure. A short rain shower caused another four panels to fail, and only two panels appear to be presently functional.

If it had worked, the panels would have powered a single water fountain and the lights in a restroom, after more than half-a-million dollars in installation costs provided by a grant from the state government. The U.S. Department of Transportation initially handed $750,000 in grants to fund the research into the scheme, then invested another pair of grants worth $850,000 into it. The plan, dubbed, “Solar FREAKIN’ Roadways” raised another $2.2 million dollars in crowd-funding even though several scientists publicly debunked the idea.

Read it.

Four churches filed a suit in federal court on Tuesday challenging a Massachusetts law that they say is forcing them to speak and act contrary to their Christian faith.

The Massachusetts legislature passed a law last year requiring all public accommodations to implement policies that are properly “inclusive” of transgender individuals.

Read it.

The Washington Examiner claims President Obama is on the verge of stitching up a deal to pass a massive raft of green pork tax credits in the final weeks of his Presidency, after the November Presidential election.

Of course he will.

Steve Sailer scratches his head.

As evidence, here in the San Fernando Valley with a half-million or more Latinos, there’s virtually zero demand for Hollywood movies dubbed into Spanish. Latino teens want to hear Captain America speak English. They now have no problem following rapid-fire English language dialogue in comic book movies.

Being able to speak English, the world’s economically dominant language, is the single most fundamental blessing public schools can bestow on Latinos.

…

Yet, now the ethnic activists are planning their revenge.

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The Navy’s overwhelmingly unpopular decision to eliminate its time-honored job titles was conceived and advocated by its former top enlisted sailor who, with the backing of its top two admirals, pushed for the controversial change despite having gathered very little input from the rank-and-file personnel principally affected, Navy Times has learned.

Ultimately, the decision was made by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, whom multiple sources described as eager to announce the new policy before his impending departure after more than seven years atop the the sea service. Mabus, the first to broadcast this new policy Sept. 29, was motivated by a fervent desire to promote gender neutrality across the Navy and the Marine Corps, which he also oversees. He was presented with four options for removing the word “man” from nearly two dozen job titles — what the Navy calls ratings — and opted for the most extreme option.

Disgraceful. I remember suffering under the uniform changes made by Admiral Zumwalt, all of which were eventually reversed. The same process gave us the recent change from the traditional working uniforms to a form of ‘blue-toned’ camouflage, which is worse than useless if somebody is lost overboard at sea. The problem is that all it takes is one very highly placed individual to propagate a stupid decision across hundreds of thousand of people at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Read it.

Criminal laws and regulations in the United States have increased to absurd proportions in the past few decades, posing a growing threat to our constitutional liberties.

There are nearly 5,000 criminal laws and an estimated 300,000 or more criminal regulations at the federal level alone. In fact, there are so many possible criminal offenses that Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties attorney, contends the average American probably commits at least three felonies a day, most without knowing it.

In April, the perils of overcriminalization were on full display when Brian Everidge traveled to Michigan with more than 10,000 bottles and cans, seeking to capitalize on Michigan’s generous 10 cents-per-bottle refund program. He stood to make $1,000.

Everidge was pulled over for speeding and found himself facing a $5,000 fine and up to five years in prison after the state trooper discovered his cargo. As it turned out, transporting more than 10,000 bottles into Michigan with the intent to collect a deposit is a felony.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

This is why the economy sucks: Stupid government mandates.

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I guess that’s why they call it the ‘Affordable Care Act’.

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Earlier this year, we reported on how President Obama’s much-ballyhooed executive clemency program was releasing felons who had been convicted of using firearms in drug trafficking crimes. We noted then the jarring inconsistency of this program with Obama’s executive gun control measures, which targeted hobbyists and collectors making occasional gun sales, licensed dealers, and even Social Security recipients.

But Obama is nothing if not hypocritical. Not only has he increased the scope of his pardons and commutations, but – according to an article in USA Today – he has shifted his strategy to reach more serious and violent offenders. “Before last month, 13% of inmates receiving clemency had used a firearm in the offense,” the article states. “For those granted presidential mercy last month, it was 22%.”

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Our cognitive elites dislike the very idea that Los Angeles, as Dorothy Parker once supposedly described, has long been “72 suburbs in search of a city.” Yet, Southern California, as I discuss in a new Chapman University report, has from its early emergence grown around a “post-suburban” model of dynamic, smaller clusters. This urban form has become common in many major metropolitan areas as automobiles have replaced transit as the primary means of getting around.

This model worked here brilliantly for most of the last half century — until planners, real estate speculators and California bureaucrats decided that we needed to emulate New York City and other older monocentric core cities. Like the provincials they consistently prove themselves to be, our leaders have generally complied.

So, after nearly 15 years spent in pushing this direction, what have we accomplished? A transit system that barely serves as many people as it did before we started building trains, housing prices among the highest in the nation, super-high poverty rates and a population that continues to seek to go somewhere else, including some 1.6 million net domestic migrants who have left the L.A. and Orange County area since 2000.

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The newspaper claimed emails from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents used local police officers in Southern California to drive around the parking lot of a large gun show to “collect all of the cars’ information.”

You never can tell, somebody might try to exercise his Constitutional rights or something equally suspicious.

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Before President Barack Obama’s transition into the White House his administration labeled position political appointees by race and gender, hacked files leaked to The Daily Caller reveal.

…

Notably missing are the categories white, Democrat, Christian, and Jewish.

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Administrators at taxpayer-funded James Madison University gave student orientation leaders a list of 35 politically incorrect statements which were not to be uttered at this year’s freshman orientation.

The student orientation leaders were supposed to avoid uttering the 35 statements because the statements might cause someone to decide to become frustrated or angry — or feel sad and marginalized, reports The College Fix.

Don’t go to James Madison University.

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Despite not having to show up for work since June 2007, Manuel Avila received periodic increases in pay, managed to double his monthly pension and qualified for free healthcare for the rest of his life at the expense of city taxpayers.

Avila qualified for all those benefits while spending the past nine years on paid leave from the Paterson, New Jersey, police department because he was under investigation for having sex with a female prisoner at the city’s jail. It gets worse, though, because that crime would never have happened if Avila’s bosses hadn’t already been trying to give his retirement benefits a little boost.

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A Connecticut mom who was having trouble convincing her 12-year-old to go to school left her home at 9:30 a.m. after locking the boy out. She called the cops to ask them to come persuade him, while she headed off to an appointment.

Inviting the cops into your family life? Huge mistake. I’m sure you can guess what happened next.

The mom was arrested and charged with “risk of injury to a child.” According to the Middletown Patch, she was released on bond and has an October 3 court date.

I’m sure that will make the family so much more functional. Now the mom, Tamika Jackson, needs a lawyer and has a fine or possibly jail time staring down at her. And I really doubt this is making her son a whole lot easier to deal with.

ODF for living in a Blue State.

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You’ve head that ‘Those who have the gold make the rules’? Well, remember also that those who make the rules get the gold.

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The latest news coming out of the FBI’s faux investigation of the Clinton email scandal boggles the mind. At FOX News, Catherine Herridge and Adam Shaw report that the FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson as part of the immunity deals to which it agreed with them.

So as part of their immunity deal they got the FBI to assist them in the cover-up. Why didn’t Nixon think of that?

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The experts want us to entrust our kids to expensive, micromanaged strangers rather than pay our friends and neighbors to look after them.

Of course. What could go wrong?

Oh no! Why would anybody entrust their children to an illegal shadowy underworld (as cool as that sounds)? Well, it turns out that “most of the unregulated providers are known to the parents—a neighbor or a friend—and the convenience is attractive. Parents of infants are also sometimes hesitant to leave their babies with people they have only just met, the specialists said.” In addition, unregulated day care is cheaper, “undercutting licensed home providers by as much as $150 per week.”

So… entrust your beloved children to expensive strangers, or inexpensive friends and neighbors. It’s so hard to decide.

Read it.

The Obama administration is set to use an obscure Treasury Department fund to bail out big insurance companies that were complicit in the president’s illegal effort to save Obamacare. So reports the Washington Post, though not in these terms. It took Christoper Jacobs at the Federalist to explain what’s really going on.

Most readers will recall that in 2013, millions of Americans received notices informing them that their existing health insurance plan would disappear once Obamacare’s major provisions took effect. President Obama’s “if you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan” mantra was exposed as a lie.

In response, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) agreed to ignore the requirements of Obamacare and allow people to keep their prior coverage. Insurers could permit individuals who purchased coverage after the law’s enactment but before October 2013 to keep their plan for a few more months (later extended until December 2017).

But, as Jacob explains, this move, in addition to being unlawful, placed insurers in an untenable financial position. Healthy individuals kept their existing plans and stayed out of the Obamacare risk pool, while sicker individuals signed up for Obamacare in drove. Because insurers hadn’t anticipated the Obama administration’s rule change that produced this phenomenon, they had substantially under-priced their Obamacare products.

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And they call Trump crazy.

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I guess the fix was in.

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I wouldn’t call the following statement an iron rule, but it’s a good rule of thumb: When congressional Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly agree on legislation, the legislation is probably bad.

Concur.

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Seventeen political Obama appointments across eight different agencies converted to career positions without receiving the required Office of Personnel Management (OPM) approval.

After President Obama leaves the White House on Jan. 20, 2017, over 4,000 of his political appointees also vacate their government offices as well. Federal employees prepare for new administrations by converting some of the outgoing White House’s political appointees to permanent career civil servants.

According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had the most unapproved political to career conversions with six, followed by Health and Human Services (HHS) with three, and the Department of Energy (DOE) with two.

All of these agencies made seven of these conversions in 2010, when OPM’s previous approval policy was first established, and made two conversions in 2015 (through October 1).

As Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.

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In the latest bombshell from Congress’ probe into what’s looking more and more like an FBI whitewash (or coverup) of criminal behavior by the Democratic nominee and her aides, the Denver-based tech who destroyed subpoenaed emails from Clinton’s server allegedly lied to FBI agents after he got an immunity deal.

That’s normally a felony. As a federal prosecutor, Comey tossed Martha Stewart in jail for it and helped convict Scooter Libby for it as well. Yet the key Clinton witness still maintained his protection from criminal prosecution.

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Texas Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson recently accused her Republican colleagues of “acting as an opposition research arm” for Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign.