Tag Archives: Samantha Power

This Book Is Worth Reading

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On October 1, The Center for Security Policy posted a brief book review of The Arab Spring Ruse: How the Muslim Brotherhood Duped Washington in Libya and Syria, by investigative journalist John Rossomando.

The book review includes the following:

The new book, The Arab Spring Ruse: How the Muslim Brotherhood Duped Washington in Libya and Syria, by investigative journalist John Rossomando and published by the Center for Security Policy offers a definitive account ̶ derived from interviews with Syrian and Libyan opposition figures and a top Obama administration official, Hillary Clinton’s emails, social media posts, Arabic-language news accounts, and never before reported documents ̶ of the foreign policy disaster in Syria and Libya that placed the U.S. government on the same side as al-Qaida-aligned jihadists. Those countries have never recovered from these policies that led to the rise of ISIS and still on-going civil wars.

Now-familiar names, such as Antony Blinken, William Burns, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Lloyd Austin, make appearances as Rossomando details how the Obama administration opened the door to Muslim Brotherhood propagandists secretly aligned themselves with pro al-Qaida jihadists in Syria and Libya.

“With the unfortunate collapse of Afghanistan, this book could not be timelier,” said Kyle Shideler, the Center’s Director of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, “The Biden administration’s reliance on cooperation with the Taliban, falsely characterized as growing in moderation, is a mirror image of the failed Libya and Syria policies that John extensively documents.”

The Arab Spring Ruse details how liberal Arab opposition figures were snubbed in favor of the hardcore pro-jihadist figures, who allied with al-Qaida and ISIS, while being sold to Washington as “moderates.”

Emails to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal highlight how the Obama-Biden Administration knew about links between Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Libya and Egypt and al-Qaida figures during the so-called Arab Spring, but chose to support jihadist rebels anyway.

The book also details the role of U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders in influencing U.S. policy towards Syria and Libya. Operating out of a Northern Virginia mosque famous for being led by Al Qaida cleric Anwar Awlaki and hosting two of the 9/11 hijackers, Islamist leaders created lobby groups that targeted Libya and Syria and served as a conduit to deceptively pass jihadists off as moderate supporters of democracy and human rights.

The Biden administration is simply the third term of the Obama administration and includes and will amplify all of the failures of the Obama administration. We can expect to see massive government overreach and a loss of many of the freedoms we take for granted over the next three years.

Sunlight Is The Best Disinfactant

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Townhall is reporting today that Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has declassified documents showing the Obama administration officials allegedly involved in the “unmasking” of Michael Flynn in transcripts of calls he had with Russia’s former ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

The article reports:

Information on the Flynn-Kislyak phone call was leaked to The Washington Post in 2017, leading many to wonder whether an Obama administration official had illegally disclosed classified information.

In 2017, Rep. Devin Nunes, who was then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he had evidence “current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information.”

He continued, “The committee has learned that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence-related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration.”

The article notes:

Both former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were pressed by GOP senators in 2017 about their role in alleged unmasking abuses, and denied any wrongdoing. There were reports that United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power unmasked hundreds of U.S. persons, but she has said this is “absolutely false.”

Former FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that the National Security Agency, the CIA, the FBI, and the Justice Department all had the ability to unmask individuals.

U.S. Attorney John Durham is reportedly investigating the leaks of potentially classified information related to Flynn to the media in early 2017. (Washington Examiner)

There were many things that went on during the Obama administration regarding classified information that need to be examined. Things that should have remained classified were leaked for political purposes, and things that were classified solely for the purpose of hiding illegal surveillance activities by the administration were kept secret. It’s time to examine that and correct the misdeeds.

What They Actually Did

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Yesterday Sebastian Gorka posted an article at American Greatness about the recent dust-up about President Trump’s comments in an interview with George Stepanopoulos. The comments had to do with accepting information on an opposing candidate from a foreign source. Sebastian Gorka’s response to the dust-up is to list the offenses committed by President Obama and candidate Hillary Clinton that fit that description. I strongly recommend that you follow the link and read the entire article, but I will try to list the highlights.

The article lists what we know as fact so far:

  • Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with close ties to the Kremlin and an intense hatred for Donald Trump was paid by Hillary Clinton’s lawyers and the Democrat Party to compile a file of damaging information on candidate Trump. He did so without registering as an agent of a foreign power.
  • This file was replete either with unverifiable fabrications, old accusations that were already out in the open or which were deceptively repackaged to implicate Donald Trump, or outright propaganda Steele had “acquired” from his contacts associated with Russian intelligence.
  • Steele was deemed so unreliable and biased a political actor by the FBI and the State Department, that he was terminated as a source by the Bureau.
  • Senior DoJ official Bruce Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS, the company that hired Christopher Steele, and he funneled anti-Trump opposition research from his wife to the FBI.
  • The DNC dispatched a contractor to the embassy of Ukraine to collect proffered opposition research on Donald Trump from the government in Kiev with a plan to coordinate a smear campaign with officials from that non-NATO nation, foreign power.
  • As the Trump campaign grew in strength, Clinton’s allies in the Obama Administration initiated an unprecedented cross-agency operation code-named CrossFire Hurricane to target Donald Trump and his associates.
  • This involved the exploitation of foreign “liaison services,” especially in the UK (and possibly Italy and Australia as well) in order to circumvent constitutional protection that forbid U.S. intelligence agencies from spying on Americans citizens for political reasons. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, was the pivotal actor driving these operations, which led in part to the sudden resignation of the director of GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA, and included FBI Director James Comey as well.
  • On multiple occasions, U.S. intelligence assets were tasked with penetrating the Trump campaign to lure its representatives into what they believed were attempts to connect with the Russia government.
  • This included targeting George Papadopoulos, a minor figure in the campaign, via the offices of the Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, and a female FBI “analyst” known as Azra Turk who no one has been able to locate. (Note: When Downer was Foreign Minister he funneled $25 million of taxpayer dollars to the Clinton Foundation).
  • The NSA’s massive database of surveillance intercepts was repeatedly accessed illegally, often by contractors with no authority to do so.
  • At a rate never seen before in the history of the U.S. Intelligence Community (I.C.), the identity of hundreds of American citizens innocently caught up in NSA intercepts were “unmasked” by senior Obama Administration officials. Some of the officials who authorized the unmaskings weren’t even members of the I.C. and who had no plausible reason for the unmasking, including Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.
  • The fabricated allegations provided by Russian government sources that Clinton and the DNC bought from Christopher Steele were used to obtain a secret FISA Court warrant to spy on Carter Page and the Trump campaign. The unverified quality of the “Steele dossier” and the fact that is was opposition research paid for by Donald Trump’s political opponent was hidden from the secret FISA court.

The article concludes:

In sum: Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party paid a foreign agent to collect or manufacture damaging information about the Republican candidate for president, information that was sourced from the Russian government. The subsequent propaganda file was used to surveil members of the Trump campaign, illegally, as NSA and British assets were also used to spy on those associated with Clinton’s political rival, and as human intelligence assets were deployed in an attempt to entrap Trump advisers and members of his staff.

The fall-out of the Stephanopoulos interviews is great. But not in the way George and his allies would like it to be.

With one sentence, the president has yet again turned the nation’s attention to the real scandal that should claim our focus: how the Democrats willingly colluded with a nation that remains our enemy in an attempt to win an election and defraud the will of the American people, in the biggest and most successful information operation Moscow has ever deployed against us.

Now it is up to Attorney General William Barr to uncover the rest of their crimes before our next election.

Much of America is waiting for equal justice under the law.

 

Checking On Big Brother

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Yesterday Breitbart reported that Attorney General William Barr is checking on intelligence records prior to July 2016 to make sure that American citizens were not illegally spied upon. This is guaranteed to get very interesting.

In September 2017, Fox News reported:

Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was ‘unmasking’ at such a rapid pace in the final months of the Obama administration that she averaged more than one request for every working day in 2016 – and even sought information in the days leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, multiple sources close to the matter told Fox News.

Two sources, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said the requests to identify Americans whose names surfaced in foreign intelligence reporting, known as unmasking, exceeded 260 last year. One source indicated this occurred in the final days of the Obama White House.

…During congressional testimony since the unmasking controversy began, National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers has explained that unmasking is handled by the intelligence community in an independent review.

“We [the NSA] apply two criteria in response to their request: number one, you must make the request in writing. Number two, the request must be made on the basis of your official duties, not the fact that you just find this report really interesting and you’re just curious,” he said in June. “It has to tie to your job and finally, I said two but there’s a third criteria, and is the basis of the request must be that you need this identity to understand the intelligence you’re reading.”

Previous U.N. ambassadors have made unmasking requests, but Fox News was told they number in the low double digits.

This is old news, but the unmasking was probably illegal. Look for relentless attacks by the political left on Attorney General Barr as he begins to reveal the misuse of government agencies that went on during the Obama administration.

The Evidence Slowly Drips Out

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The American Center for Law and Justice posted an article yesterday about the documents they have begun to receive as the result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding the unmasking of Americans in wiretaps.

The article reports:

We’ve all seen the reports of the unprecedented unmasking of U.S. citizens by senior Obama official, Ambassador Samantha Power, in the final days of the of the Administration – to the tune of more than one a day.  Now, through our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, we have unearthed evidence of significant political bias during the same time period she was unmasking Americans.

Last fall the media began reporting that among other Obama Administration officials, former Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power made numerous requests seeking the “unmasking” (or unredacted identification) of names and other information about members of the Trump campaign team whose communications had been incidentally caught up in intelligence surveillance efforts. Power’s requests, reported to number in the hundreds, occurred mostly in the final days of the Obama Administration, that is between the election of President Trump in November 2016 and his inauguration in January 2017.

What the media has not reported, but the ACLJ has since discovered through one of our FOIA lawsuits, is that the clear political—and personal—bias of Power against the incoming President and the conservative agenda led her to undertake efforts aimed at undercutting support for the new Administration.

The article further reports:

We warned you about the 73 Days of Danger – the final days of the Obama Administration, and this new evidence confirmed what we said all along. The Administration was fully engaged in attempts to do whatever they could to undermine the conservative agenda and the will of the American voters.  But it was far worse than we thought.

Power goes on in this November 11th email to pitch a 60 Minutes episode to help lay a public foundation to undermine the incoming Administration. She wrote:

I am not sure exactly what I am pitching, but it seems there could be something interesting to show through USUN about this waning multilateral moment for the US, how we use these last two months, what we are trying to defend, how we are consoling other countries, etc. I wondered if there could be something in this that would hit home for viewers, even or perhaps especially those who support Trump. Let me know if you would like to brainstorm.”

The conversation continues four days later with Owens acknowledging and agreeing to help pitch the piece. He further stated, “I can only imagine the conversations you are having with some of our allies now and I would love a chance to brainstorm.”

The article concludes:

Further, and of critical importance, is that nothing in the unredacted portion of either email chain that day is responsive to our FOIA request. That means, that something in those redacted email chains – sent just 3 days before the presidential inauguration – is responsive to our FOIA request.

What is the Deep State hiding?

We will be challenging these redactions. The American people deserve to know the truth. 

In addition, we are pleased to report that late last week we secured a federal court order increasing the State Department’s required processing rate for production in this case by 33%. With nearly 9,000 pages that we know have yet to be processed, there is much more that we can and will learn about this situation.

Power’s political bias was palpable and calls into severe question any suggestion that Power’s unprecedented unmasking requests against U.S. citizens was done with anything other that political animus.  If this production is what the Deep State was willing to turn over to us, we can only imagine what remains to be turned over, litigated over, and be unredacted.

Stay tuned. The Freedom of Information Act may be the only way will be able to save our republic.

This Is Not A Surprise, But It Is Really Tacky

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The Center for Security Policy is reporting today that a new think tank has recently formed in Washington. The think tank, called National Security Action (NSA), is made up of about fifty former Obama administration officials. Three founding members are Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. Even in Washington, could anyone find three people with a worse record of telling the truth?

The article reports:

The mission statement of the group is anything but subtle: “National Security Action is dedicated to advancing American global leadership and opposing the reckless policies of the Trump administration that endanger our national security and undermine U.S. strength in the world.”

National Security Action plans to pursue typical liberal foreign policy themes such as climate change, challenging President Trump’s leadership, immigration and allegations of corruption between the president and foreign powers.

This organization uses the acronym NSA, which is ironic. Three of its founding members – Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice and Samantha Power – likely were involved in abusing intelligence from the federal NSA (National Security Agency) to unmask the names of Trump campaign staff from intelligence reports and to leak NSA intercepts to the media to hurt Donald Trump politically. This included a leak to the media of an NSA transcript in February 2017 of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s discussion with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak. No one has been prosecuted for this leak.

…It is interesting that the new anti-Trump group says nothing in its mandate about protecting the privacy of Americans from illegal surveillance, preventing the politicization of U.S. intelligence agencies or promoting aggressive intelligence oversight. Maybe this is because the founders plan to abuse U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on Republican lawmakers and candidates if they join a future Democratic administration.

I am sure that the formation of this group is not unrelated to the 2018 and 2020 elections. I also suspect that part of the purpose of this group is to create a positive image of Barack Obama. As the Trump administration continues and the economy and foreign relations improve, it is becoming very obvious that America needed to move in a new direction after eight years of President Obama. I suspect that this group is going to work very hard to undermine President Trump and convince Americans that President Obama’s policies were successful. Good luck.

 

Making The World A More Dangerous Place

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One of the best articles explaining the history and consequences of the recent abstention vote by America at the U.N. was posted at PJMedia on Saturday. The article was written by Claudia Rosett.

The article reports:

To President Obama‘s legacy of foreign policy debacles, we can now add his landmark betrayal of Israel, carried out Dec. 23rd at the United Nations. By declining to wield the U.S. veto at the Security Council, by choosing instead to abstain — by Vanishing-from-Behind — Obama allowed the passage, by a vote of 14 in favor, 1 abstaining, of Resolution 2334. In the guise of condemning Israeli settlements, this resolution is configured to delegitimize and imperil Israel itself, America’s longtime ally and the only democracy in the Middle East.

With that signal abstention, Obama abandoned decades of U.S. practice of defending Israel against the bigots and thug governments that routinely sit on the Security Council, including permanent members Russia and China, and their rotating sidekicks, such as Venezuela. As a Wall Street Journal editorial accurately put it, referring to the U.S. abstention: “What it reveals clearly is the Obama administration’s animus against the state of Israel itself. No longer needing Jewish votes, Mr. Obama was free, finally, to punish the Jewish state in a way no previous president has done.”

This can be undone, although it will be difficult. There is the possibility that this will result in the end of any relevancy the U.N. might have had. I suspect President Trump will give the U.N. a choice–undo the resolution or lose the financial support of America. Since America provides about a quarter of the funding for the U.N., that could be interesting. The fly in the ointment might be that the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation), which has become a major power bloc in the U.N., might decide to use some of the oil money America supplies to their countries to fund the U.N. This is another reason America needs to become energy independent. Because the U.N. has advanced the cause of Sharia Law and terrorism by its refusal to condemn the violence against Christians and Jews in the Middle East by Muslims, the OIC might be willing to keep the U.N. funded. This could get very interesting as soon as Donald Trump takes office.

One of the highlights of the article is a reference to an article by Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.

The article explains:

In 1989, Kirkpatrick published in Commentary magazine an essay of scorching clarity, on “How the PLO Was Legitimized.” Kirkpatrick described Yasir Arafat and the PLO as “attempting to come to power through international diplomacy — reinforced by murder.”

In richly documented detail, Kirkpatrick explained how the UN had become the prime vehicle for this odyssey. She wrote about the duplicities this entailed, and the dangers:

The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one. That will take more than resolutions and more than an ‘international peace conference.’ But having succeeded so well over the years in its campaign to delegitimize Israel, the PLO might yet also succeed in bringing the campaign to a triumphant conclusion, with consequences for the Jewish state that would be nothing short of catastrophic.

Plenty has happened in the 27 years since Kirkpatrick wrote those words. But the Palestinian duplicities, diplomatic manipulations and acts of terror persist, including the campaign — with UN complicity, now abetted by Obama — to delegitimize Israel.

I suspect history will not be kind to President Obama.

About That Apology Tour

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When Mitt Romney mentioned the ‘Obama Apology Tour’ during Monday night’s Presidential debate, President Obama interrupted him saying, “This has been probably the biggest whopper that’s been told during the course of this campaign, and every fact-checker and every reporter who’s looked at it, governor, has said this is not true.”

Well, Investors Business Daily has a few comments on the tour: The article at Investors Business Daily takes a look at the advisers behind the tour and what they believe. A few examples:

Samantha Power. “U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought,” according to Obama’s national security adviser for multilateral affairs and human rights. “Instituting a doctrine of mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.”

Power has suggested the president literally bow to foreign leaders, as atonement for Americans’ “sins” — and that’s exactly what he’s done.

…Anne-Marie Slaughter. The former State Department policy chief, who last year returned to Princeton University, also has advised the president to apologize for the war on terror.

“The president must ask Americans to acknowledge to ourselves and to the world that we have made serious, even tragic, mistakes in the aftermath of Sept. 11 — in invading Iraq, in condoning torture and flouting international law, and in denying the very existence of global warming,” Slaughter said.

…Rashad Hussain. The White House adviser-turned Mideast envoy helped Obama kick off his apology tour in 2009 with a remorseful speech to Muslims in Cairo that he helped draft.

…Hussain also helped engineer the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt as Obama’s envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a powerful bloc of 57 Muslim governments that some say is a caliphate in the making.

…Rose Gottemoeller. Echoing the president, the top State official thinks America is a global “bully” and that its nuclear superiority has created a global arms race.

She argues the U.S. must show humility by signing nuclear disarmament treaties and become strategically equal with Russia and China.

…”She (Gottemoeller) loves to shmooze the Russians,” said national security expert Bill Gertz — and the Chinese, who she’s invited back to the nuclear weapons labs. After Gottemoeller kicked open Los Alamos as head of the Clinton Energy Department’s national security office, Chinese espionage exploded.

Sounds like a great bunch.

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