During a tense, emotional hearing on Dec. 20, a federal judge rejected conflicting government recommendations and ordered a two-month jail sentence for a former longtime U.S. Senate staff member for lying to FBI agents investigating leaks of confidential information to journalists.
Former Senate Intelligence Commission staff member James A. Wolfe, 58, received the sentence in Washington, DC’s federal court after U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson rejected the Justice Department’s unusual request for greatly increased punishment and an even more unusual plea for leniency by top leaders of the Senate committee.
The case’s drama included the defendant’s tearful apologies for wrongdoing that cost him both his job and threatened his marriage because the FBI exposed how Wolfe, shown in a file photo from an appearance on C-SPAN discussing security issues, had been having an affair with a young reporter.
Wider implications included prosecutors’ claims that Wolfe’s actions endangered national security and the judge’s detailed analysis of why the deserved jail time but far less than prosecutors had been seeking.
The judge, shown below right in a file photo, rejected the government’s theory that Wolfe, the Senate committee’s director of security for three decades, endangered national security in a way that deserved a vast elevation of his culpability under federal sentencing guidelines.
She said that she would sentence him purely on the charge of lying in his plea agreement, but then said that he deserved jail time in part because he had violated his position of responsibility.
This reporter covered in person the sentencing and also the sentencing hearing two days previously in a nearby courtroom for former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who also had pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents.
Wolfe’s attorneys had cited as examples of leniency Flynn’s case, and the probation terms for former Clinton National Security advisor Sandy Berger (for removing classified documents from the National Archives) and for former Obama CIA Director David Petraeus (for disclosure of classified information to his lover and biographer Paula Broadwell).
The judge noted, however, that Berger and Petraeus had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, unlike Wolfe.
Flynn’s sentencing has been postponed until March after U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, left, surprised litigants and commentators alike by denouncing Flynn.
Sullivan expressed doubt that Flynn should avoid jail time as prosecutors had recommended because of Flynn's extraordinary cooperation with the probe of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the Trump administration.
The material in Part 4, highlighted below in red, is taken from the chapter 'George H.W. Bush: Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest' (Part 2). 'Poppy'' was the late president's nickname among his family.
collaboratively with the CIA and FBI operational arms.
After the family moved to Houston in 1959, Poppy became active in Texas Republican politics. His initial post was as Harris County GOP finance chairman. This enabled him to leverage his financial contacts, and prepare for a losing Senate campaign against Democrat Ralph Yarborough in 1964. Bush aimed lower for his next campaign, and won a Houston congressional seat in 1966. By then a millionaire, he exited from Zapata Offshore by selling his shares to fellow Yale Bonesman Robert Gow.
One of the book's central findings was to document via more than 1,100 endnotes that all recent presidents between President Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump established covert ties to the CIA or FBI before they entered politics.
from the Yale's Skull and Bones Society to helping finance Hitler's chief financier, Fritz Thyssen.
All of efforts at historical understanding are too important to delay or leave to hand-picked courtiers of the powerful whom the major media put before us. Several major national problems afflicting the United States have direct roots to little-known aspects of the Bush dynasty and the 41st president (1989-1993) in particular, as will be seen in the last segment of our multi-part series.
Another result traceable to this president and this family is a notable advance in the growing culture of "elite deviance," whereby wealthy, well-connected insiders are spared the consequences of their actions, whether it is Bush family members who helped bring on the multi-billion-dollar Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s or the Iran-Contra criminals whom the 41st president pardoned with the support of his Attorney General 
Russ Baker (Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means For America
Peter Dale Scott (shown at right) (American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan);
Former Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal (shown in a photo at right drawn from YouTube with President Trump), was one of two women, along with Stormy Daniels (shown below left), who have been widely reported as having had affairs with Trump that were covered up in advance of the 2016 election.
describing Cohen's cooperation and another, heavily redacted, asserting that Trump's former 2016 Campaign Manager Paul Manafort deserved a heavy prison sentence because his supposed cooperation was blighted by lying.
Blumenthal, shown below left, told an MSNBC interviewer that the New York filing on Cohen filing essentially names Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in payoffs via the National Enquirer to hide Trump's adulteries to affect the 2016 election by hiding those facts from the public.
Georgetown Law professor Neal Katyal, right, a former Obama Justice Department solicitor general, also told MSNBC that the filings marked an important juncture.
New York Times, 
Washington Post, 
Nakashima, Nov. 12, 2019 (print ed.). The Defense and State departments have certified that Kyiv has taken “substantial actions” to tackle corruption. And European nations spend more on Ukraine than the United States does.
expect a lot of G.O.P. conspiracy theorizing. On Friday, House investigators released the transcript of the former National Security Council official Fiona Hill’s testimony from last month. It showed a Republican staff member trying and failing to get Hill to concede that there might be some validity to the conspiracy theories underlying Donald Trump’s demands of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
cops? President Trump’s former national security adviser wanted nothing to do with the “drug deal” Trump advisers were “cooking up” on Ukraine, according to an aide’s impeachment testimony.
2019.
WMRD 1420 AM / WLIS 1150 AM (Middletown and Old Saybrook, Connecticut), 
director of the Justice Integrity Project and the author of Presidential Puppetry, joins S.T. Patrick to discuss presidential politics of the last 40 years. What should we have known about George H.W. Bush, Bill & Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, John Kerry, John Edwards, and John McCain?
Bush and the October Surprise, the Willie Horton ad, The Election of 1992, Ross Perot’s deficiencies, what Fletcher Prouty still teaches us, the legitimacy of Bob Dole’s 1996 nomination, the value of Jack Kemp, Bush v Gore, The Two Johns: Kerry & Edwards, the real John McCain, and much more.
#MeToo movement, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford decided to send a letter in confidence to a leading Democratic lawmaker alleging that her former high school classmate and Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. The FBI was given 1 week to investigate the allegations, but even after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, two New York Times reporters - Robin Pogrebin, who was in Kavanaugh’s undergraduate class at Yale, and Kate Kelly, who grew up not far from his childhood home – kept digging.
