Ivanka and Hillary: They're both wrong

A public records request has revealed that Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of e-mails regarding government business from her personal e-mail account. This has prompted cries of “Lock her up!” from the left and defense of the violation from the right. Allow me to be the adult in the room.

First, it’s unconscionable that anyone in government, on the right or the left, is so unaware about government e-mail protocol that this could happen. Least of all the daughter of the man who made this a major campaign issue in the 2016 election. One would think that after the media attention of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails that everyone in the Trump administration would make doubly sure they were following the letter of the law. Apparently they didn’t. This is an embarrassment to the president and Ivanka should face the consequences just like anyone else.

There are two major distinctions between Ivanka’s scandal and Hillary’s. First, Ivanka wasn’t using a private server. Using one would appear to be a deliberate attempt to deceive. The second distinction—and this is a big one—is that there’s no evidence at this time that anything Ivanka e-mailed through her private account was classified. The fact that a secretary of state did that is monumental.

But what’s interesting is how the left circled the wagons around Hillary and are now demanding full prosecution of Ivanka. That reeks of hypocrisy. They had completely moved past Hillary’s debacle and now are fixated on Ivanka’s. That’s part of what’s wrong with today’s political discourse. It’s all about “gotcha” as long as the one being “got” ain’t their own.

And this applies to the right as well. While it’s proper to draw distinctions between the two cases, it’s not at all fair to ignore Ivanka’s and point to Hillary’s. Especially someone who should’ve known better. She claims to have not understood the protocol. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Another related story got very little traction in the press. Turns out James Comey used his personal e-mail to conduct official FBI business, as we learned from another Freedom of Information request. That story got virtually no play in the mainstream media. Anyone who looks at this objectively would have to concede that the FBI director doing this is certainly more serious than an unpaid advisor to the president. It also brings more into focus Comey’s actions in July of 2016 when he made the unilateral decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton despite revealing that she had sent or received 110 classified e-mails to and from her private servers. Yes, that’s plural because they discovered more than one. Perhaps prosecution of such a crime hit a little too close to home for Mr. Comey.

Letting someone skate because the investigator found himself in a similar situation does not mean that someone is innocent. It only means she wasn’t prosecuted at the time. The more serious laws Hillary may have broken have a statute of limitations of ten years. That means if laws were broken during her first year as secretary of state the clock is winding down on prosecution.

The solution to all of this is we investigate both Hillary and Ivanka. And I would throw James Comey in the mix while we’re at it. If either of those three is found to have violated federal statutes then they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Hiding from the law should not be determined by what position you hold in government. Nor should it be determined by who your daddy is.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Where does #MeToo go after Kavanaugh?

I’m sitting here wondering how all of the pink hat ladies can reconcile the fact that they so opposed Justice Kavanaugh because of some unsubstantiated claim of sexual assault yet they turned out in droves to support Hillary Clinton who has a long history of covering up for an alleged predator. It does really make one question the sincerity of the movement. And to see Hillary herself in interviews day after day saying we have to believe the women. Not one interviewer confronted her with the ugly truth that she was in charge of “bimbo eruptions” while her husband was running for president and after he won.

The Democrats aren’t through with Brett Kavanaugh. They vow to impeach him if they take control of Congress. All the more reason that these people shouldn’t be anywhere near the keys of power. Someone needs to remind them that you can only be impeached for conduct while you’re in office. That goes for justices and presidents. In other words, they can’t reach back in the histories of Kavanaugh and Trump and remove them from office. Chances are if they ignore their own inconsistencies on sexual assault they’ll ignore the Constitution too.

I was told of a conversation with a drunk millennial recently. The night after Kavanaugh’s confirmation he insisted “the bastard is guilty.” When pressed on what he was guilty of he eventually had to confess that he hadn’t followed the story and didn’t really know what he was accused of. But whatever it was, he was guilty.

Both sides engage in this type of judgement against the other all too often. We all have our preconceived notions and we all make our assumptions. However, when it comes to something like sexual assault it is totally irresponsible to assume guilt. Should we #BelieveSurvivors? If they’re really survivors of sexual assault, sure. That’s the problem. We have no idea how many of these unsubstantiated claims are made up. We have no idea how many of these women screaming at senators claiming they’re “survivors” have actually survived anything. That’s not to diminish the horror that victims of sexual assault have gone through. Quite the contrary. Those who have been proven to be victims deserve our deepest sympathy and their attackers deserve our fiercest rage. But just claiming someone did something is not—and should not be—good enough for victim status.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the whole Kavanaugh circus it’s that there’s now a new standard when it comes to sexual assault. If you’re accusing a conservative, you’re automatically believed. If you’re accusing a liberal, then the burden of proof is on you. We saw this with Bill Clinton. We saw this in the midst of the Kavanaugh hearings with Rep. Keith Ellison. Here’s a guy with far more evidence against him than Kavanaugh, yet a lawyer from a law firm that gave $500,000 to Democrats says she could find no evidence against him.

The left tried to tell us that normal standards of proof didn’t apply to Brett Kavanaugh because this wasn’t a trial, it was a job interview. OK, let’s go with that. So you’re saying that anybody who applies for a job can be immediately disqualified if someone just accuses him of something?

When this #MeToo movement first started I joked with a female conservative activist friend of mine on the air about this being a conspiracy to silence men. She laughed. She’s not laughing any more. Make no mistake about it, this is a war against men. Specifically white men. No one should be silenced through false allegations.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

It's open season on men

The #MeToo movement has gotten out of hand. Brett Kananaugh’s accusers are to believed, but Rep. Keith Ellison’s accuser—with far more evidence—is totally ignored. Not only ignored by the same leftists who want to crucify Kavanaugh but by the complicit left-wing media.

Part of this is our fault. We allow the New York Times and the Washington Post to drive the narrative. CNN says it’s a hot story and we just go along. 

Let me tell you what’s a hot story. A sitting member of the Senate, Democrat Mazie Hirono from Hawaii, tells men to “shut up.” She said, “Guess who’s perpetuating all these actions. It’s the men in this country.” The men in this country? The left has long lectured the rest of us about profiling and stereotyping. Now we’re going to put all the men in one deplorable basket? It’s obvious how inflammatory that would be if a male member of the Senate had told all the women to just “shut up,” but how about saying that to all black people? Or all Hispanics?

We’re told not to stereotype, but that’s exactly what the #WeHateMen movement is doing.

I’m no psychologist, but I see a pattern with these liberal women who hate all men. Most are in relationships with a horrible guy, someone who’s treating them like dirt, and for some reason they stand there and take it. Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, and many other so-called feminists draw their anger from their personal relationships with men. Lord knows where Sen. Hirono’s anger comes from, but how would you like to be married to her?

In a piece for the Washington Post, Northeastern University professor of sociology, Suzanna Danuta Walters asked “Why can’t we hate men?” She said, “Maybe it’s time for us to go all Thelma and Louise on their collective butts.” In other words, it’s time to start killing men. She then tells men, “Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong.” Obviously another woman who’s been in a horrible relationship. It’s not hard to imagine the never-ending outcry if such a broad stereotype were ever applied to any other group. 

But enough is enough. It’s time for men—and the women who love them—to fight back.

Should we believe every woman who comes forward with an allegation of sexual abuse against a man? The leftists, like Sen. Kamala Harris, tell you yes. #BelieveSurvivors. The short answer is absolutely no. We should not automatically believe every woman who comes forward with an accusation. Need I remind you of the UVA gang rape accusation against the fraternity? Completely made up. Mattress Girl at Columbia? Made up. The Duke Lacrosse team gang-rape allegation? Made up. 

There are certainly many cases of men who abuse women. They are not the norm. Nobody I know condones such behavior. However, every woman who ever slept with Harvey Weinstein to get a part in his movies is not a victim. As his lawyer put it, he didn’t invent the casting couch.

The irony is such independent and powerful women choose to portray themselves as powerless victims when they do something despicable to advance their careers. Monica Lewinsky’s now a victim? Please.

The days of simply being able to step forward, levy an accusation, and destroy a man have got to come to a stop. The presumption of innocence is still a cornerstone of our judicial system. That doesn’t change just because you’re a man.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The real story of Trump and Putin in Helsinki

The news media went hysterical over President Trump’s comments at a press conference in Helsinki after meeting with Russian President Putin. It’s instructive to first examine what it is the president actually said.

What got the media stirred was this answer to a question about Russian meddling in the election. Trump said, “All I can do is ask the question—my people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be but I really want to see the server but, I have confidence in both parties.”

The Trump haters seized on that line of “both parties” and spun it that Trump was trashing our intelligence services. Keep in mind this is while Congress is investigating the possibility that several FBI agents were involved in a plot to first block his election to the presidency and then bring him down once he won. It’s important at this point to break the issue of Russian interference down into two distinct categories.

First, there’s no doubt that the Russians have been buying ads on platforms like Facebook to sow discontent in the country. What is not widely reported is they bought ads both pro-Trump and anti-Trump. They bought ads both pro-Hillary and anti-Hillary. They play both sides of the Black Lives Matters issue as well as Texas and California secession movements. In other words, the Russians take the opportunity to drive the wedge deeper on any issue that divides us. Why? Nobody really has a good answer. There could be a geopolitical strategy to topple us as the world’s superpower. It could be as simple as Putin’s hatred for America. Whatever it is, they’re certainly active on every side of the issues.

In the indictment of the twelve Russians unsealed recently by Robert Mueller’s team they contend that the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency set up shop to interfere with the U.S. presidential election in the spring of 2014. That was over a year before Donald Trump jumped into the race. It is inconceivable that such an operation was devised to get Trump elected president.

But it’s the second part of this equation that Trump is questioning. The part about the Russians hacking the DNC servers, or as the left-wing media like to say it, “hacking the election.” There’s no evidence at all that the Russians or anybody else “hacked the election.” Whatever the Russians did had no bearing on the outcome of the election. That’s one of the reasons why Trump is so defensive. The left is trying to convince the American people that his presidency is illegitimate because the Russians got him elected. That is utter bovine scatology. 

The real issue is the DNC server itself. This is the point Trump was making when he said, “I really want to see the server.” Something most Americans don’t even know is the FBI has never examined the DNC server that was supposedly hacked. How incredible is that? The whole investigation hinges on testimony from a company, CrowdStrike, hired by the DNC to say the server was hacked. Until our intelligence agencies have actually examined the server themselves how on Earth can they definitely say who hacked it, or if it was hacked at all?

That is the point Trump was making in Helsinki, and the left-wing media chose to ignore the real story in favor of flogging the dead mule of Trump-Russia collusion.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Mr. Trump, beware the Mueller trap

The news media are abuzz with speculation as to who leaked the questions Robert Mueller is going to ask President Trump, if he ever gets the chance. At least one CNN legal analyst thinks Trump is the source of the leak. Michael Zeldin points to improper grammar as the smoking gun. He didn’t elaborate.

The general consensus is these questions were compiled by Trump’s lawyers during negotiations with Mueller’s people over a Trump interview. Then who leaked them? It’s difficult to tell. The bigger question is who stands to gain anything by the leak? The media say Trump does. I’m not so sure. He tweeted there were no questions about collusion, but at least one question asks what he knew about Paul Manafort reaching out to Russia. Another question refers to “any meeting with Mr. Putin.” Another asks what Trump may know about Jared Kushner trying to set up a back channel to Russia.

None of this would’ve been illegal nor improper. Trump was already elected president and setting up communications with Putin and/or Russia would be no more extraordinary than setting up communications with any other country. It’s just that Russia has been so vilified since the “witch hunt” began.

Remember when Hillary was hitting that reset button? There was nothing at all sinister about dealing with Russia then. It was only after the DNC claimed they were hacked by the Russians that anything Russian became suspect. By the way, we still have never seen the DNC servers to determine if they were hacked by the Russians or anyone else. The irony is the lawsuit filed by the DNC against Trump, Russia, and others may force the DNC to produce those servers. We may yet learn definitively that no hacking occurred.

But back to the leaked questions. If these really are questions Mueller wants to ask Trump then it’s troubling for the Trump legal team. Mueller isn’t going to ask any question he doesn’t already know the answer to. That means he has proof of the answer, either by wiretaps or other witnesses. If President Trump slips up on one tiny detail he could be facing a perjury charge, which is most definitely an impeachable offense. It’s what Bill Clinton was impeached over. He wasn’t convicted, of course, but this is a far different climate. There are plenty of Republican Never-Trumpers in the Senate who would jump at the chance to take this man down.

Then there are the people who claim Trump will be compelled to talk if he doesn’t agree to meet with Mueller. I would assume the same laws against forced self-incrimination apply to a deposition as they would in a court of law. That’s probably why Mueller and his team keep insisting that Trump isn’t the target of any criminal investigation. If you’re not the target then it’s more difficult to argue the self-incrimination angle. 

Whether they’re openly targeting Trump, make no mistake, he’s the ultimate goal. Manafort, Flynn, Papadopoulos, et al. are small fish. If that’s all Mueller has at the end of the day then this whole investigation was for naught. And knowing that Mueller already knows the answers to all the questions put to Trump only solidifies the fact that he is, in fact, the target. When you’re the target you don’t talk to the people targeting you.

President Trump is so eager to clear his name it’s almost a given that he’ll sit down with Mueller and his people at some point. He’ll be walking into a minefield. He has to be very careful where he steps.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Much ado about Facebook

The frenzy around Facebook is a bit perplexing. I firmly believe the vast majority of Americans have no idea what this case is all about. They think Facebook has sold deep, dark secrets about them. What they don’t understand is they are the ones who gave away the secrets.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress recently to explain how a third party gained access and then sold information about Facebook users. What Zuckerberg failed to adequately explain is we gave them everything they got.

Photo: WatchingAmerica.com

This is not a case of someone stealing identities. No credit card numbers were stolen. No Social Security numbers were leaked. Plain and simple, what Cambridge Analytica got from Facebook is a profile you painted when you posted to Facebook. Your likes and dislikes, your habits, your personality are all intertwined with your profile and postings.

As this whole so-called scandal was taking flight I was listening to a BBC interview with an American professor who sued Cambridge Analytica last year. British law requires them to hand over any information they may have accumulated on citizens upon request. He got several pages that painted a profile of him. What he found outrageous is they had him pegged as “very liberal.” He’s a college professor, so go figure. The host asked him if they had correctly identified his political persuasion. He said they had and that’s what prompted him to sue. He accused them of spying on him in the polling booth.

You would think a reasonably educated college professor would immediately understand that no one was spying on him in the polling booth. They didn’t have to. All they had to do was read his anti-Trump/pro-Hillary rants on Facebook to figure out he’s “very liberal.”

No surprise that Facebook lists me as very conservative. Do I care? Why should I? I am. Plus it keeps me being bombarded with ads from the global warming kooks. I happen to be a big fan of targeted advertising. So are advertisers. Instead of the old shotgun approach, they can now target ads specifically to people who will be more receptive to them.

For example, my car got totaled recently and I was searching for another one. I was continually shown ads relating to the type of car I was looking for. No trucks. No motorcycles. Just the car I was wanting. I actually clicked on several ads because they were helpful. That’s basically what Facebook does. They’re not following you into the polling booth as people have been led to believe. However, it’s the political angle that has so many people upset.

It’s like these people who constantly post their political rants don’t realize that anybody can read them. When some robot reads them and creates a profile, they get angry.

If you’re curious, you can actually see your advertising profile with a few clicks on Facebook. I won’t detail how here. Just do a search for “get your Facebook data.” They know I live away from the town where I was born. They know I’m a frequent traveler. They know my birthday is in September. They also know I’m very conservative. How do they know all this? Because I told them. In fact, I’ve told the whole world.

What’s troubling about Facebook is not that they’re actually reading my posts, it’s that they’re throttling and outright banning people like Diamond & Silk. At least the House members had the good sense to shift the focus to that.

So, you post what you had for dinner and someone actually cares. Advertisers. Surprise!

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

What to do about Mueller

How’s this for a theory? Robert Mueller is setting himself up as a kamikaze. He has nothing on Trump and is going to antagonize him until he fires him. Then the Democrats and the Never-Trumpers in Congress can cry “obstruction of justice” and they impeach and convict him.

Sound crazy?

The folks on MSNBC are already salivating over the dream scenario of Trump defying a Mueller subpoena to be interviewed and wondering out loud what happens when the U.S. Marshals show up at the White House gate.

In other words, there are plenty of folks in this country who would welcome even a constitutional crisis if it meant getting rid of Donald Trump. They hate him that bad. Let me tell you just how bad they hate him. They hate him so bad that they would rather have a conservative evangelical who opposes abortion and gay marriage in the Oval Office instead. For the left, that’s deep hatred.

Why?

There are myriad reasons, but his personality is the primary driver. He’s egotistical. He’s bombastic. He’s unapologetic. All of these traits play well in the celebrity world, but when you couple them with common sense conservative policy they become intolerable.

Donald Trump is no rock-rib conservative. What he is is a practitioner of common sense. That tends to lend itself to conservatism. You see an invasion of illegal aliens and you want to build a wall to stop it. Common sense. You see businesses being driven out of the country so you propose cutting taxes to bring them back. Common sense. The fact that he was for gay marriage before either Hillary or Obama is inconsequential. It’s these other issues that make him dangerous to the left.

They’ve been constantly disappointed for the last 18 months. First it was the shocking loss by Hillary Clinton. Then they pinned their hopes on a recount. Didn’t happen. Then it was the Electoral College not seating him. Didn’t happen. All they have left is impeachment. Robert Mueller was supposed to be the conduit through which all their dreams flowed, but after a year of fishing expeditions he’s got nothing.

Their only hope now is that Trump gets mad enough to fire Mueller. He has every reason to. By most accounts, he has the authority to. That doesn’t mean he has to. He would be much better served to ignore Mueller, but I’m sure that’s nearly impossible. Eventually one would think he’d blow. That might be underestimating Donald Trump.

So many people think he’s a loose canon, a guy who flies by the seat of his pants (or any other cliché you can think of). I happen to believe that every tweet, every off-the-cuff remark, every flaming response to an attack is carefully planned. One need only go back to his Twitter feed to see that much of what was lampooned in the press has come to fruition. Anybody forget his “Trump tower has been wiretapped” tweet? Me either. After months of ridicule, it turns out he was exactly right. And what must be extremely frustrating is there’s no special counsel looking into who was responsible. But they’re raiding Trump’s lawyer’s office looking for Stormy Daniels dirt.

It’s like People Magazine is calling the shots.

I think it’s safe to say there was never any Trump-Russia collusion. Despite the lack of evidence the anti-Trump forces want him out at an any cost. They’ve carefully set the perjury trap. They’ve even enticed him with the juicy lure of Robert Mueller’s head.

I just hope he doesn’t take the bait.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Face it, there was no collusion

The House Intelligence Committee has concluded its investigation into Trump/Russia collusion during the 2016. They found there was none. They concluded that the Russians did try to meddle with the election process through propaganda ads and disinformation campaigns, but the 14-month long probe found no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

All it turned out to be was an extension of Hillary’s book tour of What Happened in which she tries to relive 2016 as if doing so will change the outcome. She was recently on a book tour in India where she stumbled down some stairs and essentially had to be carried to the bottom, emblematic of her whole campaign.

Reuters reported the Intel committee’s decision in frustration, citing the fact that the Mueller investigation seems to be heating up. They point to Paul Manafort pleading guilty as evidence. Manafort pled guilty to charges totally unrelated to not only Trump but to Russia. They also pinned their hopes on a grand jury questioning former Trump aide Sam Nunberg. Nunberg made the now-famous drunken round on the cable news shows climaxing when CNN’s Erin Burnett said she smelled alcohol on his breath. He seemed to have a permanent seat in CNN’s green room because he held bitter animosity toward the president. Despite his hatred of the man, once Nunberg sobered up he admitted after being questioned by the grand jury that, “I don’t believe it leads to the president.”

Oh, well.

Congressman Adam Schiff and other Democrats wanted to keep the investigation going even though there’s no evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians. Schiff said there were all sorts of questions left unanswered regarding such things as Russian money laundering. I’m sure there are, but none of this has anything to do with the fundamental issue the Democrats were pressing. They insisted Donald Trump and his campaign colluded with the Russians to steal the election. There’s just not a shred of evidence to back that up.

If they want to further investigate that Russia tried to involve themselves in our election process then they better be prepared for an endless investigation. The Russians aren’t the only ones. The Chinese routinely do exactly what the Russians have done and worse. And while we’re at it we may as well investigate how the United States tries to influence elections abroad. Anybody remember Obama’s efforts to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel?

If you want to talk about evidence of collusion then let’s look into Hillary and the Uranium One deal. Christopher Steele, the author of the now-infamous Trump dossier, admitted he was on a mission to keep Trump from getting elected president and we know he colluded with the Russians to spread lies about Trump before the election. Hillary also paid him for this smear campaign which is against the law. Does Adam Schiff want to go there? Not on your life.

Trump got his tax cuts and now Americans are seeing more money in their paychecks. Companies are hiring and giving bonuses. Jobless claims in the U.S. are at a 50-year low. Black and Hispanic unemployment are at all-time lows. The economy is going like gangbusters. The stock market keeps hitting all-time highs. The left-wing media keep trying to tell us it has nothing to do with Trump but we instinctively know better.

That’s why the Democrats are desperately clinging to Russian collusion. November is their last hope. If they don’t seize control of Congress then it may never happen again. It’s all they have. This I can tell you.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

FISA memo blows the lid off liberal corruption

Well, what an interesting turn of events. The whole “Trump colluded with the Russians” brouhaha has boomeranged. The hunters have become the hunted. And is it not interesting how frantic the Democrats were in keeping a lid on the FISA memo? This is what I call the cheating girlfriend syndrome. (Sorry, ladies. Feel free to substitute cheating boyfriend. It’s just that I’ve never dated a boy. How last century of me.)

The cheating girlfriend syndrome goes as follows. Your girlfriend is super suspicious. Every girl you even glance at has her giving you the third degree. How do you know her? I don’t. Why were you looking at her? I was just looking around. She happened to be in my line of sight. Are you sleeping with her? No.

Andrew McCabe

The reason she’s asking so many questions is because she’s the one sleeping around.

The Democrats have been accusing President Trump of colluding with the Russians for 18 months now. There’s been not one shred of evidence to back it up. Now the story is beginning to take shape. They were colluding with the Russians. Let me explain.

We now know that Hillary Clinton paid for the Trump dossier by, in essence, laundering money through her attorney to Fusion GPS. We also know that Christopher Steele, the former British agent who authored the dossier, got his info from who? The Russians. It’s hard to know who was zooming who, but somebody was lying. It could’ve been Steele making it all up, or it could’ve been the Russians feeding him a line of baloney. One thing seems certain. Hillary must’ve known it was a load of bovine scatology or she would’ve used the dirt in one of the presidential debates. Instead, she feed it to gullible media folks and politicians like John McCain. Anybody who hated Trump.

It was also fed to the FBI. That’s where it gets interesting. They used it to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump and his campaign. Surely they knew it was bogus. Either that or we have the Keystone Cops in charge at the Bureau. If they didn’t tell the FISA court that their warrant requests were based, at least in part, on the Trump dossier, of which they couldn’t confirm the contents, then we’re only left with one theory. They were crooked instead of incompetent.

If they used their vast power to spy on a political campaign then Watergate looks like jaywalking by comparison. If they also used their vast power to try and unseat a sitting president then we have treason. I don’t use that term lightly. It was an attempted coup d’état. 

As I’ve written here before, I’m sure those involved convinced themselves and each other that it was the best thing for the country. Changing governments by illegal means is never good for this country. Some tinhorn dictatorship? Sure. But we have a civilized and proven way of transferring power that’s worked for over 200 years. It’s called the vote. Problem is the vote didn’t go their way. Too bad. The vote didn’t go my way in 2008 or 2012. Heck, it didn’t go my way in 1992 or 1996. It would never dawn on me that fabricating a story of collusion with a foreign government would be the proper course of action.

The question is where do we go from here? There needs to be a top-down purging of hostile elements in our intelligence community. I don’t mean everybody who voted for Hillary. I mean everybody who thinks the end justifies the means in removing Donald Trump from office.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Hollywood has no moral high ground

I was in Europe last week for a river cruise. I highly recommend it, by the way. My wife and I would wind down from the day’s excursions with BBC news. I don’t know what everyone was talking about back here in the States but it was wall to wall Harvey Weinstein. This is not purely a political issue, but I find it so ironic that this pig was hailed far and wide by liberals all across Hollywood as a wonderful guy who gave selflessly to liberal candidates and causes. The irony is that all the while Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment was legendary.

And now starlet after starlet is coming forward to reveal that they too were sexually harassed by Weinstein. They kept their silence because they were afraid it would hurt their careers. What does that say about them?

Everyone’s focused on Harvey, as well they should be, but we have to have a conversation about culpability. You can’t at once say you kept silent to advance your own greedy desires to succeed in Hollywood and call yourself a victim.

I don’t want anyone to misunderstand my point here. There are plenty of women who have been sexually harassed by pigs like Weinstein. They keep quiet for a variety of reasons. Some know they’ll lose in a he said/she said situation. Others actually like the guy and don’t want to ruin his career over what they hope is a temporary lack of judgement or an isolated indiscretion.

What I’m talking is the Hollywood community that knew full well that Harvey Weinstein was a monster. Still, they dealt with him because he could help them. And I’m talking men and women. What they should’ve done was lived by the principles they preach to everyone else and stop dealing with people like him. Instead, they fed on Weinstein for decades when it served their own purposes.

Hillary Clinton is one of them. She’s now going to give the money Weinstein gave to her campaign to charity. Or so she says. She’s using the Weinstein story to bash Trump. “After all, we have someone admitting to being a sexual assaulter in the Oval Office,” she told Andrew Marr on BBC. I’m sitting there screaming at the TV, “What about your frickin’ husband?” Of course, Marr never brought that up.

And another piece of irony is Weinstein helped pay Bill Clinton’s legal bills during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

Again, Hollywood knew full well about Hillary’s husband and not only never said anything, they continued and continue to give to the Clinton machine. Hillary once said on the campaign trail that any woman who accuses a man of rape should be believed. Unless that woman happens to have been raped by her husband. Then she needs to be destroyed.

This whole Weinstein thing isn’t just a Harvey Weinstein scandal. It’s a Hollywood scandal. It’s about people like Ashley Judd who put up with Weinstein asking her to watch him take a shower and never say anything, then publicly complain about an airport employee who says she’s pretty. It’s about the countless actresses who came to town very willing to take their turn on the casting couch if it got them that big part and now cry that they’re victims.

And, yes, there are plenty of victims. I just don’t think a whole community who knew of the monster in their midst and tolerated him because he was powerful are among them. Let’s stand against not only the monsters like Weinstein but the many enablers who keep a predator like that in business.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.