Wisdom From Someone Who Executed Successful Middle East Policy

On Sunday, Legal Insurrection posted an article about the recent events in the Middle East.

The article reports:

Former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, had some wise words yesterday about Israel.

Israel has to finish the job. Now. She cannot stop.

People have responded, “I don’t agree with you politically at all, but this is true!”

Kushner wrote:

September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.

I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible.

This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel. Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent.

President Trump would often say, “Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.” The Islamic Republic’s regime is much tougher when risking Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian and Houthi lives than when risking their own. Their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them.

Iranian leadership is stuck in the old Middle East, while their neighbors in the GCC are sprinting toward the future by investing in their populations and infrastructure. They are becoming dynamic magnets for talent and investment while Iran falls further behind. As the Iranian proxies and threats dissipate, regional security and prosperity will rise for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike

The article concludes with more of Jared Kushner’s statement:

The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote on X, “I keep reading everywhere that Lebanon is ‘on the brink of collapse.’ No. It is on the brink of relief and deliverance.”
Moments like this come once in a generation, if they even come at all.

The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes. Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited. Do not squander this moment.

Let’s all pray for success, for peace and for the good judgement of our leaders.

Lebanon used to be the garden spot of the Middle East. I pray that someday it will again be the beautiful, free land it once was.

 

Reevaluating The Past

I came across this video on Twitter. I wish all Americans would watch it. It illustrates one man’s journey in realizing the good that President Trump did for America. There are some basic differences between businessmen and politicians, and many Americans did not appreciate that fact when Donald Trump became President.

The above is posted because the “Show more” on the post below is not active. The information that you would receive by clicking “Show more” is above. In order to watch the video, click on “Watch on X,”

Another Award

On Friday, Reuters reported that Morocco’s King Mohammed VI has given President Trump Morocco’s highest award for his work in advancing a normalization deal between Israel and Morocco.

The article reports:

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Avi Berkowitz received other awards for their work on the Israel-Morocco deal, which was reached in December.

The United States in the last five months helped broker deals between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. The agreements are aimed at normalizing relations and opening economic ties.

Trump, who leaves office on Wednesday, has drawn some criticism over the Morocco agreement because to seal the deal, he agreed that the United States would recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

The interesting part of the treaties made in the Middle East brokered by the Trump administration is that the negotiators worked with the people who actually wanted peace and ignored the people who didn’t. If you still believe that the Palestinians want peace, do some research on what they are teaching their young children in their schools. The issue of Palestine has always had more value to those Arab nations who want to get rid of Israel than the solution would have. President Trump has been both a strong ally of Israel and a strong supporter of Middle East peace. I am hopeful, but not optimistic, that the Biden administration will learn from the Trump successes and continue on that path.

The 2020 Davos Economic Conference

The 2020 Davos Economic Conference will convene this month. The Conservative Treehouse posted an article yesterday announcing that President Trump has announced the Presidential Delegation that will attend the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, from January 20 to January 24, 2020.

The article notes some interesting aspects of this conference:

As a result of the recent U.K. election, pending Brexit, a favorable $7.5 billion WTO ruling and USTR Lighthizer’s new $2.4 billion EU targeted tariff program, the administration has significant advantages going into a trade discussion with the EU in 2020.

Team USA has the world’s strongest economy, the largest market, legally bolstered tariff authority and a quiver full of powerful economic arrows.

Meanwhile Team EU has: (1) the UK leaving; (2) severe drops in German industrial manufacturing; (3) a shrinking French economy; (4) yellow-vests in the streets; and (5) demands for greater economic autonomy from many key member states.

Overlay Germany, France and Italy large economy challenges such as: their promise to meet NATO obligations – and their attachment to the strangling Paris Climate Treaty, and the EU’s collective economic position is precarious at best.

The article includes the list of delegates:

The Honorable Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury, will lead the delegation.

Members of the Presidential Delegation:

1. The Honorable Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury (Lead)
2. The Honorable Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce
3. The Honorable Eugene Scalia, Secretary of Labor
4. The Honorable Elaine Chao, Secretary of Transportation
5. The Honorable Robert Lighthizer, United States Trade Representative
6. The Honorable Keith Krach, Under Secretary for Growth, Energy and the Environment, Department of State
7. The Honorable Ivanka Trump, Assistant to the President and Advisor to the President
8. The Honorable Jared Kushner, Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor to the President
9. The Honorable Christopher Liddell, Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Coordination.

The pictures included in the article are an indication of things to come:

Stay tuned.

Comments On John Bolton And Robert O’Brien

I haven’t said anything about John Bolton’s leaving the White House. I think John Bolton is an honorable man who has served his country well. I also think some of his ideas were not in harmony with the ideas of President Trump. John Bolton sees traditional war as an option is almost all cases. I think the time has come to put the idea of traditional war on the back burner. We now live in the era of cyber wars, trade wars, ‘Nintendo wars’ and wars that involve the theft of intellectual property. Because of the great political divide in America, America is not capable right now of fighting a war until we win. The politics in Washington are such that war is used as an opportunity to bash the other party rather than to advance the cause of peace, freedom, or our national security.

Robert O’Brien has been appointed to replace John Bolton as National Security Advisor.

According to a post today at The Conservative Treehouse:

Robert C O’Brien … is currently the State Department’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.  A founding partner of the Los Angeles-based law firm Larson O’Brien.

NYT – Mr. O’Brien served with Mr. Bolton when he was President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations and has advised Republican candidates like Mitt Romney, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz. In both the Bush and Obama administrations, Mr. O’Brien worked on an initiative to train lawyers and judges in Afghanistan.  (link)

People describe O’Brien as similar to his friend John Bolton without the virulent twitchy trigger finger. In his capacity as special envoy for hostage affairs, O’Brien wrote a letter to Swedish prosecutors urging them to release A$AP Rocky.  According to CBS O’Brien’s work “on Rocky’s case endeared him to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and one of his top advisers.”

I believe Mr. O’Brien is the right person for this job. His links to some mainstream Republicans may help heal some of the divisions in the party. It also seems that he has some very strong diplomatic skills.

We need to understand that there is an effort to draw America into another war in the Middle East. The effort is underwritten by the globalist community that seeks to weaken America. America is one of the last obstacles to global governance. Americans like our freedom. We like our inexpensive energy. We like our prosperity and our growing economy. We like our economic mobility–the ability to move from poverty to the middle class to wealth. Note that these are the things that the radicals in our country are attacking. As long as America is strong and its people have hope, we will remain free and continue to be an obstacle to those who seek global power.

High Crimes–Not Misdemeanors

Yesterday Sebastian Gorka posted an article at American Greatness titled, “ObamaGate: No Misdemeanors, Only High Crimes.” I understand all of us are getting tired of hearing about any of the garbage that went on in the Obama administration in terms of spying on the political opposition. However, because that issue has not yet been dealt with, it will remain in the news until those guilty of misusing federal agencies are held accountable.

Sebastian Gorka points out:

…Or look instead at Anderson Cooper, CNN’s putative doyen, who can’t even garner 0.3 percent of the population as viewers for his “flagship” program, and who recently accused Jared Kushner of “gaslighting” the nation over Russia; in other words of making statements aimed at convincing the listeners that they are insane.

This from the network that has so stoked the flames of Russia conspiracy-mongering every day for two years, that they publish outlandish pieces on Robert Mueller’s sealing indictments against the president, and as Cooper’s fellow show host Chris Cuomo qualifies the president’s public statements as those made by a convict already wearing an “orange jumpsuit,” statements that are less gaslighting than full on tinfoil-hattery.

And why was Kushner so calumniated? What craziness was he trying to sell to America as fact? His “gaslighting” sin was to state early last week that the Mueller investigation and the rest of the related farrago had done more damage to our republic and democratic practices than the original illegal actions of Russian actors on Facebook. Yet, ironically, Kushner was lambasted all over the corporate leftist media as the majority of Americans actually agreed with the president’s senior advisor.

The article concludes with some troubling information:

It has been brought to my attention by a former CIA station chief of some prominence and who has a legendary reputation inside the community of pre-Brennan operators, that Hillary Clinton’s loss did not curtail the worst activities of the outgoing Obama team. In fact, through the use of a walled-off team of contractors working inside the Intelligence Community, and for political realms alone, with no FISA-authorization or other national security justification, the Trump White House was spied upon after the January 20 inauguration. (Those responsible for this on-going crime are known to more than one investigative journalist and I have been told that the first of the new revelations will be published in the coming week).

Simply put: the Obama Administration used the most powerful intelligence capabilities in the world to attempt a penetration and subversion of the presidential campaign of the the opposing party. When that failed, they used a special prosecutor to divert attention away from that activity, log-jam the work of the new president, and clean up the evidence of what had been done to him and his team. And most un-American of all: the former intelligence leadership of the Obama Administration continued to spy illegally on Donald Trump and his closest advisers after they had moved into the White House.

Many take offense at the way President Trump uses language, at his tweets and at what they see as his hyperbole. But this week when he called the operations against him and the will of the people who chose him, a “coup” and an “attempted overthrow” of the government, he was making a simple statement of fact. One that will soon make Watergate an irrelevance.

The spying that was done in the Obama administration more closely resembles Soviet Russia than it does America. It is frightening to think that someone whose administration had so little regard for the law or the civil liberties of Americans sat in the White House for eight years. I don’t think a lot of Americans realize that the same force of government used against individuals in the Trump campaign and transition team could someday turn against them for no reason. The punishment for the actions taken against the Trump campaign and administration needs to be severe enough so that another coup attempt will never happen.

 

What We Know Didn’t Happen With The Mueller Report

Yesterday Byron York posted an article at The Washington Examiner titled, “Five things that didn’t happen in the Mueller investigation.” Please follow the link and read the entire article. It is very insightful.

The article reports:

1. Mueller did not indict Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, or other people whose purported legal jeopardy was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year.

2. Mueller did not charge anyone in the Trump campaign or circle with conspiring with Russia to fix the 2016 election, as was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year.

3. Mueller did not subpoena the president, as was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year.

4. The president did not fire Mueller, as was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year.

5. The president did not interfere with the Mueller investigation, as was the subject of intense media speculation in the last year. In his letter to Congress, Barr noted the requirement that he notify lawmakers if top Justice Department officials ever interfered with the Mueller investigation. “There were no such instances,” Barr wrote.

All of those five things are very different than what we have been hearing from the media for the past two years. What about the reckless comments made by former government officials and cable news anchors? Can they be held responsible for what was either total ignorance masquerading as inside knowledge or outright lies? When are the government officials who violated the civil rights of innocent people by unmasking their identifies when it was unnecessary? When are the people who used government agencies to wiretap on spy on an opposition party candidate going to be held accountable? When are the public officials who leaked information going to be held accountable? I have no answers to any of the above questions. My hope is that there is an Inspector General somewhere who is looking into these matters. It is a faint hope, but it is a hope.

Failing To Learn The Lessons Of History

In October 2002, Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash while running for office in Minnesota. A Memorial Service was held in October 2002.

In Its reporting on the Memorial Service Time Magazine asked the question:

Did the memorial service for Paul Wellstone cost Democrats the election?

The Memorial Service was a Democrat pep rally that disgusted many of the people who watched it.

According to a CNN article posted at the time:

Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, was booed Tuesday night when he entered Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota for the service. Scattered boos also greeted independent Gov. Jesse Ventura, who Wednesday lashed out at Democrats for what he called a “political rally.”

Unfortunately, we are seeing a similar phenomena with the media’s handling of the death of John McCain. John McCain was an American hero–he stayed in Hanoi with his men after being given the chance to come home. He was tortured. He showed courage. Fine. We can celebrate that aspect of his life. Let’s not forget, however, that he betrayed the voters of Arizona who re-elected him to repeal ObamaCare after he promised to do so, but he refused to vote to repeal ObamaCare because of his dislike for President Trump. Let’s remember what the Democrats who are so lavishly praising him right now said about him when he ran against Barack Obama in 2008. This funeral has turned into pure political theater.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about John McCain’s funeral. The headline of the article is:

“HOW AWFUL! Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Look Sick As Elites Pile on Their Father at McCain Funeral”

Ivanka and Jared attended the funeral to pay their respects. They behaved like the lady and gentleman they are. It is a shame that they had to sit there and listen to political garbage from people who have been running Washington for years and accomplished very little.

The Wellstone Memorial backfired on those who politicized it. I wonder if the McCain funeral will have the same effect. There has been so much of John McCain on television since his death, it is beginning to look like “Weekend at Bernie’s.”

The Problem With Special Prosecutors Is That They Don’t Have Limits Even When They Are Supposed To Have Limits

If we think back to recent (a year) history, Robert Mueller was appointed as a special prosecutor to investigate whether or not there was Russian interference in the 2016 election. He has been searching for a year, and so far has charged two people formerly associated with the Trump Administration with crimes unrelated to the purpose of his investigation. It seems as if he is using his unlimited budget to follow rabbit trails. Now there is a new controversy about some of those rabbit trails.

Yesterday Townhall posted an article about some recent problems with the Mueller investigation.

The article reports:

According to Axios, special counsel Robert Mueller has confiscated thousands of e-mails and communications from President Donald J. Trump’s transition team, including from notable figures such as Jared Kushner and other high profile aides.

“Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said.

The emails include 12 accounts, one of which contains about 7,000 emails, the sources said.

The accounts include the team’s political leadership and the foreign-policy team, the sources said.”

These e-mails supposedly all occurred after  the 2016 presidential election. Mueller’s investigation is explicitly to determine if there was any Russian interference before the election that could have rigged the results for Donald Trump. But, according to Axios’ source “Mueller is using the emails to confirm things, and get new leads.”

If these are the emails of the transition team, they have nothing to do with events before the election–they are the records of the new administration organizing its policies. They are subject to executive privilege and to the Fourth Amendment. It sounds as if neither was honored.

The article concludes:

As Fox News notes, Langhofer says that Mueller’s team gained access to the e-mails via the General Services Administration. The Transition team was using the GSA’s office space and e-mails severs. Trump’s attorneys say that in doing so, Mueller may have violated the 4th amendment by asking the GSA for e-mails which were supposed to be private and secure. 

According to Reuters, the letter says “career staff members at the agency unlawfully produced TFA’s private materials, including privileged communications, to the Special Counsel’s Office.”

Stay tuned.

Does Anyone In Congress Have Any Sense Of Perspective?

Breitbart reported yesterday that Representative Trey Gowdy plans to investigate the use of private emails by government officials in the White House. The initial focus is on Jared Kushner.

The article reports:

The Washington Post first reported Monday that Gowdy, along with ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings (D-MD), wrote to White House counsel Don McGahn and leaders of two dozen federal agencies requesting information about the use of personal email accounts.

Gowdy succeeded Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) as chairman of the committee as it was coming under increasing pressure to turn up the heat on the administration, just as it had so thoroughly investigated, in 2015 and 2016, Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

Politico first reported Sunday that Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, had used a private email account for occasional White House business. Kushner released a statement saying that the emails sent from his personal account were forwarded to his official address and stored in accordance with policy.

The italics are mine. Pray tell, what were the consequences of Hillary Clinton’s having a secret server and deleting thousands of emails? Somehow I seem to remember that there was a lot of talk, but nothing was ever done. In the case of Jared Kushner, the emails were forwarded to his official address and saved. I think there is a difference here.

The article concludes:

“Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement. “These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”

Kushner’s usage also differs from Clinton’s in that these instances are infrequent, none appear to have been deleted, and there was no indicated classified information sent. Kushner also did not use a homebrew private server to send the emails as Clinton did. Yet it is likely to draw cries of hypocrisy from opponents of the administration considering how central the Clinton emails were to the 2016 campaign.

The Gowdy/Cummings letter asks for the names of any non-career official who has used a personal account for official business, according to the Post, as well as the names of any officials who use “text messages, phone-based message applications, or encryption software.” The letter reportedly says that the requests are in order to see whether the administration is following records retention laws.

If there were no consequences for Hillary Clinton, why even bother to investigate this? So far the law enforcement arm of the Trump Administration has been no better than the law enforcement arm of the Obama Administration. The current administration is probably our last chance to get rid of the corruption in Washington. It is becoming obvious that Congress is not interested in helping.