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BY: David Rutz July 16, 2017 9:55 am

Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) said Sunday it would not have been appropriate for Democrats to get help from the Ukrainian government in the 2016 campaign, stressing that its efforts to help Hillary Clinton did not come close to Russia's on behalf of Donald Trump.

ABC host Jonathan Karl read from a JanuaryPolitico article headlined, "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire" during his interview on "This Week" with Schiff.

The article detailed how Ukrainian government officials sought to help Clinton and sabotage Trump, and how a Ukranian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee "met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia."

The efforts helped force Manafort's resignation as campaign manager and reinforce the narrative of Trump connections to Russia, although the article stated Ukraine's efforts on behalf of Clinton were far less expansive than Russia's to boost Trump.

"I understand Hillary Clinton lost, and I understand this effort was not as elaborate as the Russian effort, but was it acceptable or would it have been acceptable for the Democrats to accept help from the Ukrainian government in this campaign?" Karl asked.

"No, it wouldn't be appropriate for the Democrats to accept help from the Ukrainian government," Schiff said. "But I think if you look at the Politico article If you accept all the facts in the article, the scale of what the Russians did is not comparable to anything in that article."

Schiff said it would be comparable only if the Ukrainians stole Republican emails or had meetings with Chelsea Clinton and John Podesta, a reference to the meeting last year between Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign brass with a Russian lawyer who Trump Jr. thought had compromising information on Hillary Clinton.

"So the scale is different, acknowledge that, but this is problematic, this Ukrainian meeting is problematic in your eyes?" Karl asked.

"Well, it would be problematic to get any kind of support from a foreign government, but again, I think to compare the two is a bit like comparing a bank robbery with writing a check with insufficient funds," Schiff said. "Both appropriate money from the bank improperly, but a very different degree of seriousness and involvement in this case by a foreign government."

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Schiff: Not Appropriate for Democrats to Get Help from Ukrainian Government - Washington Free Beacon

The most ignored story of the 2016 presidential campaign is the press corps unwillingness to focus on Russias election meddling before election night, according to one of Hillary Clintons former top aides.

After all, the circumstances that led to the accusations of collusion that continue to dog President Donald Trump were visible during the campaign itself. The same Trump associates who are currently being questioned for potential ties to the Kremlin had senior positions on his election team.

But to the eternal frustration of Clintons camp, the press never seemed interested in the Russian-meddling angle during the campaign.

In the latest episode of Candidate Confessional, Jennifer Palmieri, Clintons campaign communications director, recounts how she tried to repeatedly get reporters to write about Russia, to little effect.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

It was so surreal. I felt as if I had been catapulted into another dimension where we would have these surreal conversations about the Russians and Trump and Mike Flynn and Carter Page and Donald Trump Jr. saying, Were really invested in Russia, she explains. And no one in the press really cared.

Palmieri probably overstates the case, as numerous articles were written about Trumps Russia ties. But the coverage always seemed to drift elsewhere, she says, obscured by a focus on Clintons own missteps and Trumps odd, controversial behavior on the trail. Palmieri tried to refocus reporters at various junctures. During the Democratic National Convention, she had off-the-record meetings with the major television networks to discuss Russia, she says. Even Fox News took it seriously, Palmieri recounts.

After campaign chairman John Podestas hacked emails were published online by WikiLeaks in the elections final month, Palmieri and others again argued that the press needed to further explore the role Russian hackers were playing.

But the leaks themselves dominated coverage, forcing Clintons team on the defensive nearly every day until voters went to the polls.

The big problem with it was it was blocking out the sun, Palmieri said of the Podesta hack. That is what I worried about.

Listen to the full episode above.

Candidate Confessional is produced by Zach Young. To listen to this podcast later, download it on Apple Podcasts. While youre there, please rate and review our show. To subscribe, visit the following: Apple Podcasts / Acast / RadioPublic / Google Play / Stitcher / RSS

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Hillary Clinton Campaign Aide To Press: We Told You Russia Was A BFD - HuffPost

This summer we mark the 20th anniversary of a major investigation by Congress of attempts by a hostile foreign power to influence an American presidential election.

Im glad the news media is pursuing the TrumpRussia scandal, but lets not forget the differences between how they are covering Russia compared with how they reported a similar story this one involving Communist China that developed during Bill Clintons 1996 reelection campaign. The Washington Post reported in 1998 that evidence gathered in federal surveillance intercepts has indicated that the Chinese government planned to increase Chinas influence in the U.S. political process in 1996.

Many people still believe that a major cover-up of that scandal worked in part because the media expressed skepticism and devoted only a fraction of resources they are spending on the TrumpRussia story. Network reporters expressed outright skepticism of the story, with many openly criticizing the late senator Fred Thompson, the chair of the Senate investigating committee, for wasting time and money. On June 17, 1997, Katie Couric, then the Today co-anchor, asked the Washington Posts Bob Woodward about the story: Are members of the media, do you think, Bob, too scandal-obsessed, looking for something at every corner?

According to an analysis by the Media Research Center, the news coverage of the congressional hearings on the China scandal in the summer of 1997 were dwarfed by reports on the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace and the death of Princess Diana.

The Chinese fundraising scandal involving DNC finance vice chairman John Huang first came to light in the final weeks of the 1996 presidential campaign. A former Commerce Department official, Huang was a top fundraiser who scooped up suspect foreign cash for Team Clinton.

A 1998 Senate Government Affairs Committee report on the scandal found strong circumstantial evidence that a great deal of foreign money had illegally entered the country in an attempt to influence the 1996 election. The DNC was forced to give back more than $2.8 million in illegal or improper donations from foreign nationals.

The most suspect funds were brought in by Johnny Chung, a bagman for the Asian billionaire Riady family. Chung confessed that at least $35,000 of his donations to the Clinton campaign and the DNC had come from a Chinese aerospace executive a lieutenant colonel in the Chinese military. Chung said the executive had helped him meet three times with General Ji Shengde, the head of Chinese military intelligence. According to Chungs testimony, General Shengde had told him: We really like your president. We hope he will be reelected. I will give you $300,000 U.S. dollars. You can give it to...your president and the Democratic party.

The sprawling fundraising scandal ultimately led to 22 guilty pleas on various violations of election laws. Among the Clinton fundraisers and friends who pleaded guilty were John Huang, Charlie Trie, James Riady, and Michael Brown, son of the late Clinton Commerce secretary Ron Brown. But many questions went unanswered, even after the revelations that Clinton had personally authorized offering donors Oval Office meetings and use of the Lincoln bedroom. A total of 120 participants in the fundraising scandal either fled the country, asserted their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, or otherwise avoided questioning. The stonewalling worked and probably encouraged Hillary Clinton in her own cover-up of her private e-mail server and her ties with the Clinton Foundation.

Indeed, much of the media basically gave the Clintons a pass on evidence that special-interest donors to the Clinton Foundation frequently managed to score favors from the State Department. Journalist Peter Schweitzer revealed in his book Clinton Cash that State had helped move along an infamous deal that granted the Russians control of more than 20 percent of the uranium production here in the United States. The company involved in acquiring the American uranium was a very large donor to you guessed it the Clinton Foundation.

None of this history should dissuade the media from questioning the White Houses often shifting and blatantly inaccurate accounts of what happened and who was involved and when. Either the presidents team is infected with a self-destructive gene or they really do have something to hide.

But a little humility and honesty on the part of the media would be appropriate. Much of the breathless and constant coverage of the Russia scandal is motivated by the medias hatred of Donald Trump, which is of course reciprocated.

When it came to the Clintons, the media tended to downplay or even trivialize many of their scandals. But, to be fair, a little bit of self-awareness is beginning to show up in the Russia coverage. Last Thursday, Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC noted that when it came to opening the door to lowering the standards of conduct by a modern president, Bill Clinton led the way with his lying and scandalous behavior. She was referring, of course, to the Lewinsky scandal, but her comments are equally appropriate to the many other Clinton scandals that didnt receive wall-to-wall coverage.

READ MORE: With Trump, the Benefit of the Doubt Is Gone 16 Things You Have to Believe to Buy the Witch Hunt Russia Narrative Anti-Trump Overreach Could Backfire

John Fund is NROs national-affairs correspondent.

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Not All Foreign-Influence Scandals Are Created Equal - National Review

ANKARA/ISTANBUL (Reuters) - President Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday defiantly stepped up his attacks on the European Union, saying Turkey had to go its own way and vowing to bring back the death penalty if parliament passed it.

At the opening ceremony of a memorial dedicated to the roughly 250 people who died in last year's failed coup, Erdogan accused Brussels of "messing about" with Turkey's decades-long bid to join the bloc.

The speech in the early hours of Sunday wound up a marathon session of public appearances by Erdogan in both the capital and Istanbul overnight to mark the anniversary of last year's defeated coup.

"The stance of the European Union is clear to see ... 54 years have passed and they are still messing us about," he said, citing what he said was Brussels' failure to keep promises on everything from a visa deal to aid for Syrian migrants.

"We will sort things out for ourselves. There's no other option."

Ties with the West were strained when European governments voiced alarm at the scale of the crackdown that followed the coup. Some 150,000 people have been sacked or suspended from their jobs and more than 50,000 detained on suspicion of links with the U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for the attempted putsch.

Erdogan also said he would approve, "without hesitation" the death penalty, if parliament voted to restore it -- a move that would effectively end Turkey's bid to join the EU.

"I don't look at what Hans and George say. I look at what Ahmet, Mehmet, Hasan, Huseyin, Ayse, Fatma and Hatice say," he said, to cheers from a flag-waving crowd.

Erdogan, the most popular and divisive politician in recent Turkish history, sees himself as the liberator of pious millions who were deprived for decades of their rights and welfare by the secular elite.

The coup's defeat has likely ended decades of military interference in Turkish politics. But the purges have sharpened the divide between Erdogan's supporters and Western-facing Turks who want closer ties with Europe.

Critics say Erdogan is using a state of emergency introduced after the coup to target opposition figures including rights activists, politicians and journalists.

More than a dozen members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) - including its two co-leaders - are in jail, as well as local members of rights group Amnesty International.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists calls Turkey the world's biggest jailer of journalists, with some 160 now detained. Leftist, pro-Kurdish and opposition media outlets have also been shut.

Authorities on Saturday detained the editor of a local newspaper over a column criticizing the aftermath of the failed coup, her newspaper said.

In the run-up to the anniversary, Turkish media has been saturated by coverage from the coup attempt, with some channels showing almost constant footage from last year of young men and headscarved mothers facing down armed soldiers and tanks.

On Saturday, mobile phone networks played a 13-second pre-recorded message from Erdogan before connecting calls. In the message he honored the "martyrs" who died during the coup attempt and those "veterans" who took to the streets.

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said the EU remained committed to dialogue with Turkey and called on Ankara to strengthen democracy and the rule of law. He also warned against reinstating the death penalty.

"One year after the attempted coup, Europe's hand remains outstretched," Juncker wrote in Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

"If Turkey were to introduce the death penalty, the Turkish government would finally slam the door to EU membership."

Addressing a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Istanbul on Saturday evening, Erdogan threatened to wreak violent retribution on Turkey's enemies, including FETO - his term for Gulen's network - and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

"We know who is behind FETO, the PKK and all of them," he said. "We cannot defeat the queen, king, or sheikhs without defeating the pawns, knights and castles. Firstly, we will rip the heads off of these traitors."

He also said that alleged members of Gulen's network would be forced to wear jumpsuits like those worn by prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, after one detainee showed up to a court hearing wearing a T-shirt that said "Hero".

Additional reporting by Michael Nienaber in Berlin; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Keith Weir and Richard Balmforth

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Defiant Erdogan attacks EU, promises to bring back death ...

The crowds cheered the comments. In interviews, several attendees said the president was right to prioritize the security of the state above all else.

These things are necessary, said Halit Emin Yildirim, a 21-year-old student at the rally. The homeland comes first. If I dont have a homeland, where can I have a democracy?

Officially, however, the anniversary events were a commemoration of the failed coups victims and a celebration of the resilience of Turkish democracy, rather than a means of burnishing Mr. Erdogans brand.

Were actually very sad when somebody is saying that the government is taking advantage of this military coup, said Mehdi Eker, a lawmaker and deputy head of Mr. Erdogans party, the Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P. Saturdays pageantry, Mr. Eker added, was intended to fortify the democratic institutions.

But critics of the government say that Mr. Erdogan has tried to use the failed coup not only as the pretext to accelerate a crackdown on most forms of opposition, but also to further his vision of a new Turkey.

Since his partys election in 2002, Mr. Erdogan, a conservative Muslim, has slowly eroded some of the foundational myths that had underpinned Turkish identity since the creation of the secular Turkey republic, in 1923.

Though avoiding a full-frontal challenge to secularism, Mr. Erdogan has long expressed a wish to create a new Turkey. He spoke of inspiring a pious generation of young Turks, steadily increased references to Islam in the national curriculum and removed some references to the ideas of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

Mr. Erdogan has also revived interest in the Ottoman sultans who ruled Turkey and the surrounding region before the creation of the Turkish republic, and whose legacy Ataturk sought to play down.

At noon prayers on Friday, thousands of imams read a sermon, written by the central government, that compared the failed coups civilian victims to those who died during the liberation struggle. In his speech on Saturday, Mr. Erdogan even cited a nationalist poem about that war.

This is Erdogan 2.0 in tackling the secular republic, said Aykan Erdemir, a former opposition lawmaker who is now an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research organization.

Rather than tackling the secular republican vision head on, he is transforming it by harnessing some of the key touchstones of the secular republican tradition for his own purposes, Mr. Erdemir said.

But while liberals see Mr. Erdogan as a threat to many democratic freedoms, his supporters often argue that he has upheld the civil rights that are most important to them. Since coming to power 15 years ago, he has gradually removed restrictions on public displays of Islamic piety while rapidly improving infrastructure, health care and social security programs.

Another supporter at the rally on Saturday, Mustafa Bas, a 44-year-old tile builder, recalled visiting Europe in 2000 and being crushed with disappointment that the services there might never be available in Turkey.

I sat down and cried, said Mr. Bas, who carried a placard in honor of a relative killed during the coup attempt. I thought, When will these things come to Turkey? And then Tayyip Erdogan brought them all to Turkey, all these things that citizens deserve.

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Erdogan and Supporters Stage Rally on Anniversary of Failed Coup - New York Times