This Book Is Worth Reading

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.

Equal Outcome vs. Equal Opportunity

Yesterday The Washington Examiner posted an article that provided a preview of the direction the Biden administration is headed in the area of civil rights. We are no longer going to be concerned about equality, we are going to be concerned about equity. This is totally opposite of everything the civil rights movement of the 1960’s represented.

The article notes:

On Tuesday, six days into the Biden administration, it became clear why Susan Rice, hitherto a foreign policy specialist, was named director of the Domestic Policy Council. Rice, unconfirmable for a Cabinet post after her unembarrassed Sunday show lies about Benghazi, ventured into the White House press room to preview President Biden’s “equity” initiative.

With one possible exception, the specific policies announced were less important than the word “equity,” invoked 19 times by Rice and nine by Biden. Ending federal private prison contracts, “strengthening” relations with Indian tribes, and combating “xenophobia” against Asians and Pacific Islanders are small potatoes as federal policies.

Not so, perhaps, the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing initiative, started under Obama, repealed under Trump, and now due for a spirited revival. The idea is for the feds to reverse local zoning laws and plant low-income housing in suburbs deemed insufficiently diverse.

Actually, racial discrimination in housing has been reduced since the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act, to the point that in metropolitan areas from Washington to Atlanta to Los Angeles, most blacks now live in suburbs, not in the central cities to which they were tightly confined in postwar America.

The article explains the difference between equality and equity:

But for Rice and Biden, “equity” requires not equality of opportunity, but equality of results. That’s one of the fundamental tenets of the critical race theory training that Trump’s administration banned and Biden’s reinstated on Day One.

A lower-than-population percentage of blacks in any desirable category, explains critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi, must be the result of “systemic racism,” a term Rice used twice and Biden five times on Tuesday. If you don’t agree, you’re guilty of “white fragility” and must be a “white supremacist.”

As Andrew Sullivan trenchantly observes, “to achieve ‘equity,’ you first have to take away equality for individuals who were born in the wrong identity group. Equity means treating individuals unequally so that groups are equal.”

This is exactly contrary to the central thrust of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It could easily be judged, in particular cases, to violate the 14th Amendment. Individuals discriminated against might have standing to go to court.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. Reverse racism is still racism. Racism in any direction for any reason is not a good path for America to follow. Hopefully a few well-placed lawsuits will put an end to this nonsense.

Was This Really What You Had In Mind?

Liveaction posted an article today about one member of Joe Biden’s cabinet if Joe Biden officially becomes President.

The article reports:

On Monday, former Vice President Joe Biden’s team announced the members of his presumptive Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board, which includes former Obama health care advisor Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel, 63, who currently chairs the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, previously served on Biden’s Public Health Advisory committee during the primary and has been outspoken in his support for rationed health care, discrimination against the elderly in health care, and abortion.

“The advisory board will help shape my approach to managing the surge in reported infections; ensuring vaccines are safe, effective, and distributed efficiently, equitably, and free; and protecting at-risk populations,” Biden said in a statement.

Emanuel’s addition to this board comes with added concerns, as hospitals have already considered rationing health care for patients with COVID-19.

While Emanuel has said that he does not support legalizing assisted suicide or euthanasia, he does support rationing health care for the disabled and the elderly. To ration care in order to save money, he believes, “will require changing how doctors think about their patients.” In other words, doctors should assess the value they place on individual patient’s lives to determine if they are worth living or not — a process often colloquially referred to as “death panels.”

Emanuel advocates the use of “The Complete Life System,” a method which “prioritizes younger people [not including infants or the preborn, as Emanuel supports abortion] who have not yet lived a complete life.” To put it simply, the system prioritizes health care for who have lived just 25 years over people who have lived 65 years. However, Emanuel would not necessarily include a 25-year-old with intellectual disabilities on the list of people who should receive priority over the elderly.

Yesterday Yahoo News posted an article about other possible Biden cabinet picks. The article notes that Susan Rice is a candidate for Secretary of State. You remember Susan Rice–she went on all of the Sunday talk shows and lied about Benghazi. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is a candidate for Secretary of Housing and Development. On June 12, 2020, The New York Times reported that there were 41,290 homeless people in Los Angeles. Senator Bernie Sanders is a candidate for the Department of Labor. Senator Elizabeth Warren is a candidate for Secretary of the Treasury. Jeh Johnson is a candidate for Secretary of Defense. Jeh Johnson is one of the people who propagated the Russian Hoax that wasted so much time and taxpayer’s money.

These are just a few of the leading contenders. Good luck to America if Joe Biden becomes President.

New Information Keeps Dripping Out

Yesterday The Federalist posted an article about some handwritten notes taken by former FBI agent Peter Strzok. The notes are suspected to be related to a meeting in the White  House on January 5, 2017. The meeting was attended by President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Comey, Yates, and then-national security adviser Susan Rice. The meeting and its substance were confirmed in a bizarre Inauguration Day email Rice wrote to herself.

The article summarizes the notes:

NSA-D-DAG = [Flynn cuts?]. Other countries

D-DAG: lean forward on [unclass?]

VP: “Logan Act”

P: These are unusual times

VP: I’ve been on the intel cmte for ten years and I never

P: Make sure you look at things + have the right people on it

P: Is there anything I shouldn’t be telling transition team?

D: Flynn –> Kislyak calls but appear legit

[illegible] Happy New Year. Yeah right

The notes probably won’t impact the Flynn case, which is already on its way to being dismissed. However, it certainly supports the idea that the Obama administration was planning to undermine the Trump administration from the beginning. If nothing else, the notes indicate that the Obama administration definitely was not interested in the smooth transfer of power that is supposed to happen in our government.

The article further reports:

According to Strzok’s notes, Biden explicitly referenced the Logan Act, an 18th-century law that forbids certain political speech from private citizens. The law, even if it were constitutional, would not apply to a national security adviser for the newly elected president of the United States. Biden had previously denied that he knew anything about the investigation into Flynn.

“I know nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn,” Biden said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” when George Stephanopoulos asked what he knew of the FBI’s operations in early 2017. He later admitted that statement was false.

The meeting to strategize against the Trump administration included just a few key law enforcement principals. Their testimony about what transpired is sometimes in conflict. Yates claimed Comey brought up the Logan Act while Comey claims Biden cited it. Rice claimed Obama directed that the anti-Trump operation be run “by the book,” but Comey claimed Obama even directed which personnel to use.

The information currently coming out confirms what many of us have suspected–there is a swamp in Washington that is dedicated to protecting itself from being held accountable for their actions. The way the swamp has behaved during the Trump administration is reprehensible. This has all the markings of an attempted coup and those responsible should be held accountable.

Why Was This Redacted In The First Place?

The redacted part of the Susan Rice memo-to-self was declassified on Tuesday. The Gateway Pundit posted an article yesterday that includes a picture of the entire memo including the redacted version.

The article reports:

Acting DNI Richard Grenell on Tuesday declassified the remaining portion of Susan Rice’s email.

CBS reporter Catherine Herridge obtained the declassified email and released it to the public

It was previously known the junk Russia dossier and General Flynn’s calls to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were discussed in the secret meeting.

The newly declassified portion of the email once again implicates Barack Obama and Comey!

Barack Obama and Comey discussed Flynn’s communications with Kislyak.

Comey suggested to Obama in the meeting that the National Security Council [NSC] might not want to pass “sensitive information related to Russia” to then-incoming National Security Adviser General Mike Flynn.

“President Obama asked if Comey was saying that the NSC should not pass sensitive information related to Russia to Flynn. Comey replied “potentially” and noted “the level of communication (w/Russian Ambassador) is unusual.”

Andrew McCarthy posted an article about the memo at The National Review today.

Andrew McCarthy notes:

Try not to get dizzy. Rice has gone from claiming to have had no knowledge of Obama administration monitoring of Flynn and other Trump associates, to claiming no knowledge of any unmaskings of Trump associates, to admitting she was complicit in the unmaskings, to — now — a call for the recorded conversation between retired general Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to be released because it would purportedly show that the Obama administration had good reason to be concerned about Flynn (y’know, the guy she said she had no idea they were investigating).

Naturally, we have now learned that Rice was deeply involved in the Obama administration’s Trump–Russia investigation, including its sub-investigation of Flynn, a top Trump campaign surrogate who was slated to replace Rice as national-security advisor when President Trump took office. Last night, I did a column for Fox News, analyzing the newly unredacted paragraph from Rice’s previously reported email memorializing a White House meeting on these subjects.

The meeting took place on January 5, 2017, and involved Rice, Obama, and Vice President Biden, the administration’s top political hierarchy on national-security matters, along with Obama’s top law-enforcement and counterintelligence officials, deputy attorney general Sally Yates (soon formally to take the acting AG role she was already performing), and FBI director James Comey. Prior redactions had already demonstrated that the meeting’s central purpose was to discuss the rationale for withholding intelligence about Russia from the incoming Trump national-security team.

The article at The National Review concludes:

It is vital that the documentary record, which should have been uncovered years ago, continue being brought to light. It is good that Trump’s National Intelligence director Ric Grenell is forcing the issue. But let’s not forget: When it turns out that Obama officials have intentionally inserted after-the-fact CYA memos into “the File,” we have to ask why they have done so . . . and to read what they’ve written with that in mind.

I strongly suggest that you follow the links to both of the above articles to read the details of the redacted part of this memo. It is becoming very obvious that the Obama administration was not interested in participating in a peaceful transfer of power.

 

Further Proof That The Russians Did Not Hack The DNC’s Computers

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article with the following headline, “BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Joe Biden’s Former IT Director, Warren Flood, Implicated in ‘Russia Hacked the DNC Email’ Narrative.” Periodically I post an article that I do not technically understand. This is one of those articles, so if you are a computer person, please forgive my feeble attempts at explaining this.

The article reports:

On June 16, 2019, we presented arguments against the Mueller gang’s assertion that the DNC was hacked by Russians. Cyber expert Yaacov Apelbaum posted an incredible report with information basically proving that the DNC was not hacked by the Russians.

Today we have support implicating an IT Direct0r, Warren Flood, connected to Joe Biden.  Flood is linked to the ‘Russia hacked the DNC hoax’.

Last year we reported a series of arguments proving that there is no proof that Russians hacked the DNC. These arguments came from cyber expert Yaacov Apelbaum whose first argument was this –

According to the WaPo (using CrowdStrike, DOJ, and their other usual hush-hush government sources in the know), the attack was perpetrated by a Russian unit lead by Lieutenant Captain Nikolay Kozachek who allegedly crafted a malware called X-Agent and used it to get into the network and install keystroke loggers on several PCs. This allowed them to see what the employees were typing and take screenshots of the employees’ computer.

This is pretty detailed information, but if this was the case, then how did the DOJ learn all of these ‘details’ and use them in the indictments without the FBI ever forensically evaluating the DNC/HRC computers? And since when does the DOJ, an organization that only speaks the language of indictments use hearsay and 3rd parties like the British national Matt Tait (a former GCHQ collector and a connoisseur of all things related to Russian collusion), CrowdStrike, or any other evidence lacking chain of custody certification as a primary source for prosecution?

A second point by Apelbaum was –

… that three of the Russian GRU officers on the DOJ wanted list were allegedly working concurrently on multiple non-related projects like interfering with the 2016 United States elections (both HRC and DNC) while at the same time they were also allegedly hacking anti-doping agencies.

Those are the basic questions that need to be asked, but there is more.

There is the issue of the speed of the transfer of information:

Esteemed NSA whistleblower Bill Binney reported in June 2019 that there was no way Russians hacked the DNC based on the speed of the transfer of the data that was hacked. But according to Apelbaum the transfer speeds is a minor issue here. It’s just an indicator that it would have been difficult for Guccifer 2 who was sitting in Romania to access the DNC system remotely.

The article contains a screenshot that also raises suspicions about what really happened along with further information about the hack:

But of course the Mueller gang never interviewed WikiLeaks in an effort to determine how they received the Clinton emails. Of course the Mueller team could not risk WikiLeaks saying the emails were not received from Russia which would destroy their Russia hacked the DNC fairy tale.

Today we identify Warren Flood, a Biden protege who appears to have helped create the ‘Russia Hacked the DNC’ narrative:

Apelbaum obtained a parts of the Word and PDF versions of the purported DNC Opposition research document showing the original English template and the pasted version into a Russian template and resulting subsequent broken hyperlink error messages in Russian

The article then explains the significance of the screenshot:

In the image above, on the left it shows the Word doc properties of the document created at 1:38 PM on June 15, 2016. The Company name is given as GSA. This appears to be the General Services Administration (US gov agency), which shows as the Company for MS Office documents created via GSA-contracted copies of MS Word.

(Note that the DNC server wasn’t supposed to be using a GSA-contracted MS Office suite. A number of Democratic politicians and aides (e.g,, many members of the US House of Representatives) had DNC email accounts, but the DNC is a private entity and should not have hosted GSA-contracted software.)

The supposed author of this document is Warren Flood as is noted at the bottom left of the diagram above.  He was Vice President Joe Biden’s IT Director at the White House (which does use GSA registered software).

The article concludes:

Based on the document metadata there is little doubt that either Warren Flood (who BTW, speaks Russian), or someone using his GSA licensed MS Word software created the Russian fingerprint. Also, it’s important to note that several other documents also show this type of manipulation, but they were created by users named “Blake” and “jbs836”.

In terms of the big picture, it is possible that whoever added the Russian fingerprint did this as part of laying the ground work or for future unmasking. We know that in June 2016 the Obama administration (via people like Susan Rice, John Brennan, and Samantha Power) started unmasking Trump campaign officials on the pretext of ‘Russian interference’.  This June 2016 activity overlaps with dates of the Guccifer 2.0 saga.

So, it is possible that Guccifer 2.0 and MSM outlets like the NYTimes who promoted him were part of a larger campaign to affirm Russian interference with the DNC hacks.

If this is indeed the case, then it means that the DNC email leak could implicate Obama administration officials who were doing all this document manipulation on government time and on GSA registered computers all in an effort to tie Russia to the DNC email heist.

Based on information available today, there is no way Russians hacked the DNC. This was made up from the start.  Now we know that the Obama White House, and specifically Warren Flood, is involved in the Russian hoax.

Hopefully. someone in the Inspector General’s office is honest enough and smart enough to investigate this.

Not A Cabinet I Would Vote For

The deep state wants its power back. They see the road to that power in the election of Joe Biden as President. As the campaign continues, there are some valid questions as to whether or not Joe Biden is mentally up to the task of being President, but that hasn’t slowed the momentum of the deep state in trying to put him there.

Breitbart posted an article today based on an article in Axios, a liberal-leaning source, about possible cabinet picks by a President Biden.

The article notes:

…Many of the names would return from the Obama administration, constituting an effective “third term.”

Axios says that former Secretary of State John Kerry could return in that role, or be appointed to a new Cabinet-level climate change position.

Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice — who was never nominated for Secretary of State because of fears she would not survive confirmation after misleading the nation about the Benghazi attacks — could find her way to that position in a potential Biden administration, Axios claims.

There would also be room in the Biden Cabinet for some of his former 2020 rivals, including former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who could be UN ambassador, or U.S. trade representative.

Several are also currently under consideration, Axios reports, to be Biden’s running mate, including Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Kamala Harris (D-CA). The final choice may be up to Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), who delivered the key endorsement that helped Biden win South Carolina and change the direction of the entire Democratic primary.

Susan Rice lied about Benghazi; John Kerry lied about the Iran deal. President Obama did serious damage to the American economy in eight years because of over-regulation and increased taxes. Do we really want to bring the deep state back into power?

Telling The Story Behind The Story

There is a new book that is going to be released today. The book is titled, The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History.” The book is written by Lee Smith, an investigative reporter.

There is an article posted at The Federalist which details some of the information in the book.

The article notes:

AFTER DONALD TRUMP was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the operation designed to undermine his campaign transformed. It became an instrument to bring down the commander in chief. The coup started almost immediately after the polls closed.

Hillary Clinton’s communications team decided within twenty-four hours of her concession speech to message that the election was illegitimate, that Russia had interfered to help Trump.

Obama was working against Trump until the hour he left office. His national security advisor, Susan Rice, commemorated it with an email to herself on January 20, moments before Trump’s inauguration. She wrote to memorialize a meeting in the White House two weeks before.

The email is posted in the article.

The article also notes:

Meanwhile, Obama added his voice to the Trump-Russia echo chamber as news stories alleging Trump’s illicit relationship with the Kremlin multiplied in the transition period. He said he hoped “that the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia.”

The outgoing president was in Germany with Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss everything from NATO to Vladimir Putin. Obama said that he’d “delivered a clear and forceful message” to the Russian president about “meddling with elections . . . and we will respond appropriately if and when we see this happening.”

After refusing to act while the Russian election meddling was actually occurring, Obama responded in December. He ordered the closing of Russian diplomatic facilities and the expulsion of thirty- five Russian diplomats. The response was tepid. The Russians had hacked the State Department in 2014 and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2015. And now Obama was responding only on his way out.

The book credits Devin Nunes with figuring out what was going on and beginning to look into the scandal. I strongly suggest that you follow the link above to read the entire article. It is an amazing timeline detailing what was actually going on in the waning days of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration.

This Incidental Information Is Going To Be Very Important In The Near Future

Before you read this article, I want you to consider how the Democrats (particularly the Clintons) have avoided being held accountable for skirting the law in the past. Generally speaking, the playbook means keeping questions about whatever the scandal is in the news until everyone is sick of hearing about the scandal. At that point, when the answers begin to come out, everyone tunes out because they are totally bored with anything having to do with whatever behavior went on. That is exactly the playbook that is being used on the question of how the Russian-collusion investigation began and why members of President Trump’s campaign and transition team were under surveillance. Keep that in mind as you read the following.

Today Breitbart posted an article with the following headline, “Biden Present at Russia Collusion Briefing Documented in ‘Odd’ Susan Rice Email.”

The article reports:

Vice President Joe Biden was documented as being present in the Oval Office for a conversation about the controversial Russia probe between President Obama, disgraced ex-FBI chief James Comey, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and other senior officials including Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice.

In an action characterized as “odd” last year by then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, Rice memorialized the confab in an email to herself describing Obama as starting “the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book.’”

Grassley, in a letter to Rice, commented: “It strikes us as odd that, among your activities in the final moments on the final day of the Obama administration, you would feel the need to send yourself such an unusual email purporting to document a conversation involving President Obama and his interactions with the FBI regarding the Trump/Russia investigation.”

Grassley noted the unusual timing of the email sent by Rice to herself more than two weeks after the January 5, 2017 White House meeting on the Russia investigation, but mere hours before she vacated the White House for the incoming Trump administration.

The email, Grassley documented, was sent by Rice to herself on Trump’s inauguration day of January 20, 2017.

“If the timestamp is correct, you sent this email to yourself at 12:15 pm, presumably a very short time before you departed the White House for the last time,” Grassley wrote to Rice in a letter seeking clarification on a number of issues regarding the email and the Oval Office briefing at which Biden was documented as being present.

The article cites a Washington Post article describing how few people were involved in the Trump/Russia investigation:

The lengthy Washington Post article from 2017 detailed the closed circle of Obama administration officials who were involved in overseeing the initial efforts related to the Russia investigation — a circle than was narrowly widened to include Biden, according to the newspaper report.

According to the newspaper, in the summer of 2016, CIA Director John Brennan convened a “secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI.”

The Post described the unit as so secretive it functioned as a “sealed compartment” hidden even from the rest of the U.S. intelligence community; a unit whose workers were all made to sign additional non-disclosure forms.

The unit reported to top officials, the newspaper documented:

They worked exclusively for two groups of “customers,” officials said. The first was Obama and fewer than 14 senior officials in government. The second was a team of operations specialists at the CIA, NSA and FBI who took direction from the task force on where to aim their subsequent efforts to collect more intelligence on Russia.

The number of Obama administration officials who were allowed access to the Russia intelligence was also highly limited, the Post reported. At first only four senior officials were involved, and not Biden. Those officials were CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and then-FBI Director James Comey. Their aides were all barred from attending the initial meetings, the Post stated.

This is looking more and more like an attempted political coup.

Sorry, Your Stories Just Don’t Add Up

Scott Johnson at Power Line posted an article today about an article that appeared in The New York Times. Because the article at The New York Times is subscribers only, I am not including a link. The article deals with the FBI’s sending someone to investigate the Trump campaign. Spying, actually. So why is The New York Times finally admitting that the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign? The Inspector General’s report is due out shortly, and Attorney General Barr has openly stated that he will be investigating the roots of the surveillance of the Trump campaign. Both investigations are expected to say that the FBI spied on the Trump campaign.

On April 15th, The New York Post posted an article by Andrew McCarthy about the spying on the Trump campaign. The article includes the following:

On Jan. 6, 2017, Comey, Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and National Security Agency chief Michael Rogers visited President-elect Trump in New York to brief him on the Russia investigation.

Just one day earlier, at the White House, Comey and then–Acting Attorney General Sally Yates had met with the political leadership of the Obama administration — President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and national security adviser Susan Rice — to discuss withholding information about the Russia investigation from the incoming Trump administration.

Rice put this sleight-of-hand a bit more delicately in the memo about the Oval Office meeting (written two weeks after the fact, as Rice was leaving her office minutes after Trump’s inauguration):

“President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia. [Emphasis added.]”

It is easy to understand why Obama officials needed to discuss withholding information from Trump. They knew that the Trump campaign — not just some individuals tangentially connected to the campaign — was the subject of an ongoing FBI counterintelligence probe. An informant had been run at campaign officials. The FISA surveillance of Page was underway — in fact, right before Trump’s inauguration, the Obama administration obtained a new court warrant for 90 more days of spying.

The normal protocol if the FBI believed that a foreign government was attempting to infiltrate a political campaign would be to notify the campaign to put the candidate and the campaign on alert. However, this was not done. Those involved in the operation needed secrecy to keep their operation going. Now, as all of this is about to be revealed, some of the mainstream media is trying to get ahead of the story and undo the lies they have been telling for the past two and a half years. Hopefully, Americans are smart enough to see through their hypocrisy.

Avoiding The Consequences Of Bad Behavior

On February 11th, Judicial Watch posted the following Press Release:

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received 215 pages of records from the U.S. Department of Justice revealing former FBI General Counsel James Baker discussed the investigation of Clinton-related emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop with Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall. Baker then forwarded the conversation to his FBI colleagues.

The documents also further describe a previously reported quid pro quo from the Obama State Department offering the FBI more legal attaché positions if it would downgrade a redaction in an email found during the Hillary Clinton email investigation “from classified to something else.”

The newly obtained emails came in response to a May 21 order in a January 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a December 4, 2017 FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)). Judicial Watch seeks:

  • All records of communications, including but not limited to, emails, text messages and instant chats, between FBI official Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page;
  • All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Peter Strzok.
  • All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Lisa Page.

On October 28, 2016, the day that Comey sent a letter to Congress regarding the FBI’s discovery that the Weiner laptop contained Clinton’s emails. Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall, within hours, emails Baker requesting a call “ASAP” about the Comey letter. Baker describes his follow-up call to senior FBI officials:

I received the email below from David Kendall and I called him back. Before doing so I alerted DOJ via email that I would do that.

[Redacted paragraph]

He said that our letter was “tantalizingly ambiguous” and made statements that were “inchoate and highly ominous” such that what we had done was worse than transparency because it allows people to make whatever they want out to make out of the letter to the prejudice of Secretary Clinton.

I told him that I could not respond to his requests at this time but that I would discuss it with others and get back to him.

I suggest that we have some kind of follow up meeting or phone call with this group either this evening or over the weekend to address this and probably other issues/questions that come up in the next 24 hours. Sound reasonable?

Baker’s heads up on the Kendall call was sent to:

The emails show that a conference call for the above senior officials was set up for the next day by Peter Strzok. (Two days before the election, on November 6, Comey sent a second letter reporting that the FBI’s review of the Weiner laptop material would not change his “conclusion” that Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted.)

On October 13, 2016, former FBI attorney Lisa Page sent an email, which apparently references a related Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit and further discusses a previously reported quid pro quo offer from the State Department:

Jason Herring will be providing you with three 302s of current and former FBI employees who were interviewed during the course of the Clinton investigation. These 302s are scheduled to be released to Congress in an unredacted form at the end of the week, and produced (with redactions) pursuant to FOIA at the beginning of next week. As you will see, they describe a discussion about potential quid pro quo arrangement between then-DAD in IOD [deputy assistant director in International Operations Division] and an Undersecretary at the State Department whereby IOD would get more LEGAT [legal attaché] positions if the FBI could change the basis of the FOIA withhold re a Clinton email from classified to something else. [Emphasis added]

The lawsuit also forced the release of a November 6, 2016, email by then-FBI official Peter Strzok telling Bowdich, Priestap, Rybicki, Page, former FBI General Counsel James Baker and others: “[Redacted], Jon and I completed our review of all of the potential HRC work emails on the [Anthony Weiner] laptop. We found no previously unknown, potentially classified emails on the media.”

As Judicial Watch previously reported, there were at least 18 classified emails found on the Weiner laptop by the FBI. Paul Sperry’s RealClear Investigations report revealed that only 3,077 of the 340,000 emails “were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information.”

The new records also include a September 2, 2016, email that Comey forwards containing a press release issued that day by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), in which Grassley criticized the FBI for not publicly releasing many unclassified records related to the Clinton email-server investigation, as demanded by Congress. In his cover note responding to Grassley’s charge, Comey tells his top aides, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” Page then responds with, “Outstanding.”

On October 23, 2016, Strzok forwarded to Page and others the Wall Street Journal article revealing that Andrew McCabe’s wife had received a half million dollars for her Democratic state senate campaign. Page responded that the article, “shaded or omitted or mischaracterized” facts “in order to get out the story [the reporter] wanted to tell.” She claimed the WSJ story was just “another depressing chapter in this whole post-investigation saga.”

“It is big news that, just days before the presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer pressured the top lawyer for the FBI on the infamous Weiner laptop emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents further underscore that the fix was in for Hillary Clinton. When will the Justice Department and FBI finally do an honest investigation of the Clinton email scandal?”

Last month, United States District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that discovery can begin in Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides will now be deposed under oath. Senior officials — including Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, and FBI official E.W. Priestap — will now have to answer Judicial Watch’s written questions under oath. The court rejected the DOJ and State Department’s objections to Judicial Watch’s court-ordered discovery plan. (The court, in ordering a discovery plan last month, ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”)

Judicial Watch’s discovery will seek answers to:

  • Whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system;
  • whether the State Department’s efforts to settle this case beginning in late 2014 amounted to bad faith; and
  • whether the State Department adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.

The Other Shoe

Now it’s time to talk about the other shoe some Americans are waiting to drop.

Let’s talk about the evidence for the government’s abuse of power in dealing with candidate Trump and later President Trump.

Yesterday Joe Hoft posted an article at The Gateway Pundit with the title, “HUGE REVELATION! DEEP STATE LIED! Investigated Trump Campaign with FOUR SEPARATE INDIVIDUAL PROBES – All With Separate Code Names!”

The article reports:

As has been suspected to date, the FBI had four separate investigations – one each on Flynn, Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Manafort. [This is why they were all targeted by Mueller – to attempt to find anything on these individuals to support their spying on them and Trump!]

The article includes documentation on the four investigations and notes that because of “the sensitivity of the matter,” the FBI did not notify congressional leadership about this investigation during the FBI’s regular counterintelligence briefings. So the FBI was purposely avoiding congressional oversight.

On Sunday The Conservative Treehouse posted an article with the title,””Backtracking Lies Worsening – REMINDER: The FBI Counterintelligence Operation into Donald Trump *DID NOT* Start After Comey Firing….

The article reminds us:

John Brennan realized someone has focused attention on Comey’s admission to congress that the FBI intentionally kept congress in the dark during the construct of the counter-intel narrative. Congress was kept in the dark during this phase because the narrative can only thrive with innuendo, rumor, gossip etc. The appearance of the investigation itself was the political need; the substance was non-existent and immaterial to the creation of the narrative.

If Comey notified congress, via the Gang of Eight oversight, the counter-intel narrative would have been harder to manufacture as details would have to be consistent. That’s the benefit to keeping any oversight away while creating the politically useful narrative.

John Brennan, facing the looming certainty of the underlying Russian ‘collusion evidence’ being non-existent, in 2017 was trying to give the appearance that he briefed congress on larger Russian election interference issues. However , the trouble for Brennan is his own admission that these issues were the underlying principle for the FBI counter-intelligence investigation. Brennan specifically says he gave his intelligence product to the FBI.

Additionally, “Brennan put some of the dossier material into the PDB [presidential daily briefing] for Obama and described it as coming from a ‘credible source,’ which is how they viewed Steele,” … “But they never corroborated his sources.”  (link)

The material within Obama’s PDB, placed by Brennan, is what initially set off alarm bells for Devin Nunes (early 2017) because the material underlying the PDB intelligence product was unmasked by Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Today Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial with the following headline, “Deep State: Did Justice, CIA And FBI Commit Crimes To Get Rid Of Trump?”

The editorial reminds us:

The actual investigation by the Justice Department and FBI began during the election campaign. Using half-baked and “unverifiable” intelligence about Trump’s purported links to Russia, officials used the so-called Steele Dossier four separate times for FISA court approval to spy on the Trump campaign.

The only problem is, the Steele Dossier didn’t come from the FBI or Justice Department. It came from Fusion GPS, an opposition research group linked to the Democrats. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for it.

“Ostensibly, the surveillance application targeted Carter Page,” wrote Andrew McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and himself a former federal prosecutor. “But Page was just a side issue. The dossier was principally about Trump – not Page, not Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, or other Trump associates referred to by Steele. The dossier’s main allegation was that Trump was in an espionage conspiracy with Russia to swing the election to Trump, after which Trump would do Putin’s bidding from the White House.”

So for all intents and purposes, the Deep State holdovers from the Obama administration were serving as an adjunct to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Early on in the investigation, CIA chief John Brennan convened multi-agency meetings about Trump. They included Peter Strzok, the head of the FBI’s counter-intelligence, and James Clapper, national intelligence director under Obama, among others.

The premise of the meetings, again, was that Trump possibly colluded with the Russians to hack our election and might even be an agent of Russia.

This is the shoe that has evidence attached. I can promise you that if the rogue members of the DOJ and FBI are not held accountable for their behavior, we will see more of this in the future. At that point, no candidate that does not reflect the values of the deep state will ever be elected.

The Plot May Be Beginning To Unravel

One of the problems with trying to maintain a conspiracy is that as it begins to unravel, people begin to say things to distance themselves from responsibility for any wrongdoing that has occurred. I believe that is what is happening regarding the wiretapping of the Trump campaign and possibly regarding the Mueller investigation.

The Gateway Pundit quoted President Obama’s Former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, today. James Clapper made the following statement on CNN yesterday:

If it weren’t for President Obama we might not have done the intelligence community assessment that we did that set up a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today including Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation. President Obama is responsible for that. It was he who tasked us to do that intelligence community assessment in the first place.

We need to put this into perspective in terms of what was going on during the final days of the Obama administration. During the final year of the Obama administration, Susan Rice, Ambassador to the United Nations. made an unprecedented number of requests for unmasking Americans whose conversations were inadvertently captured in wiretapped conversations. (article here) Americans were routinely being spied on by their government at this time.

Most Americans, particularly those familiar with procedures in the intelligence community were reluctant to believe what was reportedly going on with domestic spying. However, the truth has become obvious in recent days.

The following is an interview with Andrew McCarthy, who was initially skeptical that the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court was being used for political purposes. The interview is posted at YouTube:

I believe that the Mueller investigation is the ‘insurance policy’ discussed in Andrew McCabe’s office. We know that Lisa Page and Peter Strzok were involved in that discussion. We don’t know if anyone else was. The investigation was supposed either to create enough turmoil to remove President Trump from office (before he could cut taxes, appoint judges, or actually accomplish anything) or to cripple his presidency to the point where he accomplished nothing. Obviously the plan has created a lot of turmoil, but not a lot of the results the plotters were aiming for.

Ideally we will see this entire charade resolved within the next year. I am hopeful, but not necessarily optimistic.

This Is Not A Surprise, But It Is Really Tacky

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.

 

Why Are These People Ever Believed?

Victor Davis Hanson posted an article at American Greatness yesterday about four members of the Obama Administration that seemed to be challenged when asked to tell the truth and were never held accountable for their lies.

The four members are former United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, Former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Defense Intelligence Agency Director James Clapper.

These four people routinely misled the American public for political purposes.

The article cites some examples of Susan Rice’s lying:

On five occasions, Rice lied to the media that the murder of Americans in Benghazi, Libya by al-Qaida affiliated-terrorists was a result of spontaneous rioting—in response to an obscure, rogue, and right-wing Coptic filmmaker.

…Rice assured the nation that the AWOL and traitorous Bowe Bergdahl was a hostage taken during combat and had served nobly (“with honor and distinction”). In fact, the renegade Bergdahl likely was exchanged for terrorist prisoners for two reasons: one, to diminish the number of terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as promised by Obama during his campaign, and two, to highlight the humanitarian skills of Barack Obama in bringing home an American “hero,” especially defined as one who was so loudly aware of his own country’s foibles.

Rice also assured the nation that her administration, through its diplomatic brilliance, had eliminated Bashar Assad’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

…Once House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) announced that key administration officials illegally might have unmasked and leaked the names of U.S. citizens on government intercepts connected to the Trump campaign and transition team, Rice issued a blanket denial (“I know nothing about this”). That assertion predictably was untrue, as Rice herself was forced to concede when she altered narratives to later justify rather than deny her role in such improper leaking.

Rice assured the nation there were no hidden side-deals in the Iran Deal, such as a prisoner-swap concession.

Obviously the woman is not a stellar example of honesty.

Next the article deals with former FBI Director James Comey:

Comey did not interview Hillary Clinton in his supposedly exhaustive investigation of her alleged crimes before he cleared her of any wrongdoing.

Comey did know of a FBI communications trail surrounding the stealthy June 2016 meeting of Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton on a Phoenix tarmac.

Comey did accede to Lynch’s cover up by altering the official nomenclature of the investigation to an innocuous “matter.”

Comey misled about the actual contents of Clinton confidante Huma Abedin’s email communications; the versions that he gave at various times and in different venues cannot be reconciled.

In his habitual lies of omission, Comey made no effort to correct a false public impression that he had helped foster and yet knew was a lie—namely that the FBI was investigating Trump on charges of Russian collusion at the very time he was assuring the president of just the opposite.

…Comey had obfuscated or masked the FBI’s role in the acquisition and dissemination of the infamous Steele-Fusion fake dossier. He was likely less than honest as well about his full knowledge of Obama administration reverse targeting, unmasking, and leaking related to U.S. citizens—both before and after the election.

Obviously, Comey expected to be rewarded for his actions in a Hillary Clinton Administration.

Next the article addresses the conduct of former CIA Director John Brennan:

Brennan had a weird habit of becoming outraged at any who quite accurately alleged that he was mendacious, such as when he deceived the Senate Intelligence Committee officials that he had never unlawfully surveilled the computers of particular U.S. senators and their staffs (e.g., “beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we would do”).

Brennan also misled Congress when he assured that U.S. drone strikes had not killed a single civilian—a preposterous claim that was widely and immediately recognized as deceptive before he was forced to backtrack and admit his untruth.

…Brennan also told a series of whoppers to establish his new politically correct bona fides, among them that jihad was “a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.” Tell that to the incinerated victims of self-proclaimed jihadist Mohammed Atta or those beheaded by ISIS.

In his third incarnation, as a postelection stalwart opponent to Donald Trump, the partisan former “nonpartisan” intelligence chief Brennan has both quite publicly denied that U.S. intelligence agencies ever improperly surveilled and unmasked the identities of Trump campaign and transition officials.

Even on his last day of office, Brennan was still busy reviewing intelligence surveillance of U.S. citizens and later deceiving Congress about it. His part in preparing the Benghazi talking points, and in the creation of the Russian collusion mythos, are still not known fully. Nor understood is his apparent background role in the rather strange and abrupt postelection resignation of his immediate predecessor David Petraeus.

Brennan’s misunderstanding of jihad was dangerous to American national security.

Last, the article addresses former Defense Intelligence Agency Director James Clapper:

Indeed, it is uncanny how Clapper emulated the Brennan model: the former Bush appointee reinventing himself as an Obama partisan after assuring the country that Saddam Hussein’s WMD depots were transferred to Syria; lying about the rise of ISIS and pressuring others in military intelligence to mimic his pre-planned deceptions; not being forthcoming about surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition; becoming a loud and partisan accuser of Trump’s supposed mendacities on cable television, while finding himself increasingly exposed at the center of the growing unmasking scandal.

If Brennan lied about surveilling U.S. senators and the drone program, Clapper in turn lied to Congress about the National Security Agency’s illegal monitoring of U.S. citizens.

If Brennan assured Americans that jihadism was not a violent effort to spread radical Islam, Clapper topped that by assuring Congress that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular.”

One thing that is noteworthy but not mentioned in the article cited above is the fact that John Brennan, in 2011, during his time as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism received at request form Farhana Khere, President and Executive Director of Muslim Advocates requesting that all material relating to Islamic-based terrorism be removed from government documents and briefings. According to the book Catastrophic Failure by Stephen Coughlin, “The Department of Defense followed shortly thereafter with a Soviet-style purge of individuals along with disciplinary actions and re-education.” Why our government put the interests of a Muslim-Brotherhood related group above the security interests of America is anyone’s guess. I have personally met a CIA agent who was no longer allowed to brief our diplomats and military after this change was made.

I have no doubt that if Hillary Clinton had won the election, these four individuals would be part of her administration. As it stands, they are still part of the deep state that is working against President Trump. When we hear these individuals make public statements, we need to remember what they have done in the past.

 

The Plot Thickens

It seems as if there were some major infringements on the privacy and civil rights of American citizens during the last year or so of the Obama Administration. Fortunately, it looks as though these violations will be investigated and the guilty parties will be held accountable.

The Washington Free Beacon posted an article today about the ongoing investigation into the unmasking of the names of American citizens who were named in classified intelligence community reports. Oddly enough, many of these citizens were associated with the Donald Trump campaign for President or his transition team.

The article reports:

Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, which is handling the probe, petitioned Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats last week to request his help in addressing the unmasking issue.

Nunes disclosed in his letter that the former Obama administration had “easy access” to sensitive classified information and that they may have used it to “achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information.”

Congressional investigators uncovered that “one official [whose] position has no apparent intelligence-related function”—now believed to be Power—”made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration.”

Little justification was provided for the request of this sensitive classified information, which government insiders described as outside the purview of a U.N. ambassador.

“Of those requests, only one offered a justification that was not boilerplate and articulated why that specific official required the personal information for the performance of his or her official duties,” according to Nunes.

One former senior U.S. official intimately familiar with the national security infrastructure told the Free Beacon that Power would have little reason to be requesting such information, particularly information that included in raw intelligence reports related to Trump and his team.

“Asking for an unmasking is rare at the [National Security Council] or the State Department. It is frankly shocking that anyone would be asking for dozens, and if there are really hundreds it is indefensible,” said the former official. “It does make me wonder why [National Security Agency] didn’t stop her [Power], by questioning this practice and getting the head of NSA to raise it with the president or the national security adviser.”

In addition to Power, the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and other top officials as part of its investigation into these leaks.

This is NOT politics as usual. The unmasking of American citizens and then leaking classified information is an example of using a government position for political purposes. Not only is it illegal, it is a danger to our republic.

The article concludes:

One veteran congressional adviser who has been briefed by senior Intelligence Committee members told the Free Beacon that the emergence of Power’s role in these unmasking efforts could point to the improper use of this information, given her unrelated role at the U.N.

“The outrage about Obama officials spying on Americans, let alone on the Republican candidate and then incoming president, is both real and legitimate,” said the source, who would only discuss the sensitive matter on background. “But there are still a lot of known unknowns, which could make things a lot worse.”

“The Obama folks may have made a deliberate decision to use Power, even though they knew it would risk giving away their unmasking campaigns, because she had no business making those requests,” the source said. “What was so bad they had to use her for the requests, rather than someone who would have had a better excuse but may have balked?”

Stay tuned. Even if the mainstream media ignores this story, you will be hearing more about this in the future.

 

I Think We Are Investigating The Wrong People

One of the worst things that can happen to a representative government is for a political leader to use the power of his position to spy on his political opposition. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more obvious that under President Obama that was the norm.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article about the latest leak from the Washington establishment.

The article reports:

Since that time (March 2017) we now know that the FBI was investigating the Trump Tower servers during the election.

We also know Susan Rice lied at first but then admitted when she got caught that she was unmasking her political opponents phone calls. Rice blamed racism after she got caught.

Ex-officials said what Susan Rice’s unmasking requests were not routine and “never done.” And… she was not alone in her unmasking requests.

Obama officials later moved the unmasking documents to the Obama library.

Tonight Deep State leaked documents to the Washington Post that show the Obama administration were spying on Republican senator Jeff Sessions before the election.

Russian envoy Sergey Kislyak’s accounts of two conversations with Jeff Sessions, who was at the time a Senator from Alabama, were intercepted by U.S. spy agencies, according to the far left Washington Post.

Once again this proves President Trump was right.
Barack Obama was spying on his political opponents.

Robert Mueller is investigating the wrong people. I suspect that is by design.

Finding The Leaks

I am still enough of an optimist to think that there are some members of Congress who actually care about what happens to America. I am tired of watching the dog and pony show of endless accusations, endless hearings, endless anonymous sources, and no one being actually found guilty of anything. I believe that the election of President Trump has illustrated the fact that there is a deep state of the Washington establishment that does not want anyone to rock their boat.

I have quoted Carrol Quigley before:

I would like to believe that he was wrong. There is some hope.

The Washington Free Beacon is reporting today that the House Intelligence Committee has issued subpoenas for Samantha Power and other Obama Administration figures, including former national security adviser Susan Rice, in an effort to find out who has been leaking raw intelligence reports to the press during the presidential transition period.

The article reports:

Power’s role in this unmasking effort is believed to be particularly questionable given her position as the U.N. ambassador, a post that does not typically require such sensitive unmasking activities, according to former U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the matter.

“Unmasking is not a regular occurrence—absolutely not a weekly habit. It is rare, even at the National Security Council, and ought to be rarer still for a U.N. ambassador,” according to one former senior U.S. official who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

“It might be defended when the communication in question relates directly to U.N. business, for example an important Security Council vote,” explained the former official, who would only discuss the matter on background. “Sometimes it might be done out of other motives than national security, such as sheer curiosity or to defend a bureaucratic position. Or just plain politics.”

The Intelligence Committee’s focus of Power and other key Obama officials is a prime example of the Obama administration’s efforts to spy on those close to Trump, according to sources familiar with the ongoing investigation.

“The subpoena for Power suggests just how pervasive the Obama administration’s spying on Americans actually was,” said one veteran GOP political operative who has been briefed on the matter by senior Congressional intelligence officials. “The U.N. ambassador has absolutely no business calling for the quantity and quality of the intelligence that Power seems to have been asking for.”

It is becoming obvious that President Obama used to power of his office to spy on and limit the influence of his political opponents. Under President Obama, the IRS became a political arm of the Democratic party–slow walking nonprofit applications from conservative groups. The Justice Department was also politicized when voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers was ignored despite video evidence. It should not be a surprise that the Patriot Act was also misused in the way feared by those in Congress who opposed it.

It is time to hold those who misused their government offices accountable. Leaking raw intelligence to the media is a crime. There are penalties. The law needs to be applied, and it needs to be applied evenly to everyone who broke it. Either Congressional investigations have value or they are a dog and pony show that wastes taxpayer money. We are about to find out which.

 

The Ever-Changing Story

There are some serious problems with the actions of the Obama Administration in terms of unmasking American citizens making phone calls. It is not an incredible coincidence that the unmasked citizens were people closely connected to the Trump presidential campaign. One name that has continually been mentioned as part of this unmasking is Susan Rice. She appeared on the Sunday News Shows (hasn’t she done that before?) today to explain her innocence.

The details are posted at Hot Air today.

Ms. Rice stated this morning:

Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice denied President Donald Trump’s claim that she tried to unmask Americans in an attempt to implicate Trump campaign officials, adding that she never did anything “untoward with respect to the intelligence” she received.

During an interview with CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” airing Sunday morning, Rice said Trump’s accusation is “absolutely false” and that members of Congress have not found anything inappropriate in the situation.

“I think now we’ve had subsequently members of Congress on the intelligence committees on both sides of the aisle take a look at the information that apparently was the basis for Chairman [Devin] Nunes’ concern, and say publicly that they didn’t see anything that was unusual or untoward,” Rice said, referring to the California Republican.

But what has she said before? The article reports:

You may recall that when the story first broke Rice spoke to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC and at least heavily implied that Trump’s initial accusations were all some sort of fever swamp fantasies. (What she actually said was that she never leaked anything.) But before very long the details which emerged told a very different story. Within days it was revealed that she had, in fact, actively sought to have names revealed to her even if they had originally been picked up “incidentally.” Eventually we reached the point where the best they could say was that it appeared that she hadn’t done anything that was technically illegal.

Now, in the fashion so typical of politicians (as opposed to national security experts), she’s answering an entirely different question. Yes, she did get that information but she never did anything “unusual or untoward” with it. And why would we be so suspicious as to think she might have seen some value in data collected on people associated with the guy who was then in a heated battle to defeat the candidate who was promising to carry on her boss’s legacy? Perish the thought.

If the Justice Department has actually become the Justice Department rather than a political arm of the Democrat party, someone will be charged with a crime in this matter. The leaking of the names and information to the media was illegal. The leaking of the information was exactly what some members of Congress warned about when the Patriot Act was passed–that there would be eavesdropping on Americans that would be used for political purposes. What happened during the 2016 presidential campaign is an example of this. If no one is held accountable, it will continue to happen. That is not good news.

 

The Layers Of The Obama-Orchestrated Palace Intrigue

President Obama has been relatively quiet since leaving the White House, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have people representing his interests in the Democratic Party and the media. What are his interests? The main one is preventing President Trump from undoing his executive orders and other policies that were put in place that were not helpful to the American economy. On Saturday, The New York Post posted a list of recent Presidents and the economic growth under each.

This is the list:

Here are the average growth rates for each president:

  • Johnson (1964-68), 5.3 percent
  • Kennedy (1961-63), 4.3 percent
  • Clinton (1993-2000), 3.9 percent
  • Reagan (1981-88), 3.5 percent
  • Carter (1977-80), 3.3 percent
  • Eisenhower (1953-60), 3 percent
  • Nixon (1969-74), 2.8 percent
  • Ford (1975-76), 2.6 percent
  • G.H.W. Bush (1989-92), 2.3 percent
  • G.W. Bush (2001-08), 2.1 percent
  • Truman (1946-52), 1.7 percent
  • Obama (2009-16), 1.6 percent

There are some real questions as to the methods former President Obama and those who supported him plan to use to prevent President Trump from taking actions to improve the economy. It is becoming obvious, however, that one of those methods is to attempt to delegitimize President Trump. So far the attempts to do this have included bogus information accusing President Trump of strange activities while visiting Russia, a claim that the Electoral College is unfair, and a charge that the Russians helped President Trump win the election. So far the only success these people have had has been the destruction of General Flynn and the withdrawal of one of the President’s cabinet nominations. However, we shouldn’t conclude that they are anywhere near giving up.

Sometimes the best laid plans backfire. An illustration of that is found at Bloomberg.com today in an article by Eli Lake.

The article reports:

White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”

Oddly enough, these conversation involved members of the Trump transition team and contained information that would be of value politically.

The article also points out that Susan Rice has publicly denied any knowledge of President Trump’s transition team being caught up in intelligence collection. I would like to remind everyone that Susan Rice’s record on honesty is not spotless.

The article further reports:

Both the House and Senate intelligence committees are probing any ties between Trump associates and a Russian influence operation against Hillary Clinton during the election. The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Representative Devin Nunes, is also investigating how the Obama White House kept tabs on the Trump transition after the election through unmasking the names of Trump associates incidentally collected in government eavesdropping of foreign officials.

Rice herself has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking. Last month when she was asked on the “PBS NewsHour” about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: “I know nothing about this,” adding, “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today.”

This scenario is an illustration of the nightmare those who opposed the Patriot Act saw coming–the intelligence community being used as a political weapon. The problem is not entirely with the Patriot Act; part of the problem is unethical politicians who do not understand that they are also required to abide by the law and follow the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment rights of a number of people were violated by the actions of the Obama Administration. Those responsible need to be brought to justice.

If The People Negotiating Are Not Being Honest With Americans, Who Can We Trust?

CNS News posted a story today about claims made by the Obama Administration about the interim agreement with Iran. During the State of the Union Address, the President stated, we have “halted the progress of its nuclear program.” President Obama repeated the claim in his National Security Strategy Report issued on Friday. I would love for that statement to be true, but it seems that I am not the only one with doubts.

The article reports:

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column examined Obama’s SOTU claim, and determined that it earned him “three Pinocchios.” (On a scale of one to four Pinocchios, three are handed out for statements deemed to entail “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”)

Obama claimed that progress in Iran’s program had been “halted” as a result of the JPOA. But Post columnist Glenn Kessler, citing non-proliferation experts, said that the amount of nuclear material in Iran’s possession that could eventually be converted for bomb-making had in fact continued to increase over the 2013-2014 period.

It gets worse.

The article reports:

Instead of his SOTU address claim that “we’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material,” Kessler concluded that Obama could have said, “We’ve slowed the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of the most dangerous nuclear material.”

“But instead he choose to make sweeping claims for which there is little basis. Thus he earns Three Pinocchios.”

Hours after the White House released the NSS on Friday, National Security Adviser Susan Rice repeated the claim in a speech at the Brookings Institution.

A little honesty would be nice.

Reading Between The Lines On Benghazi

On Friday, the official report on Benghazi was released by the House Intelligence Committee. On Saturday, Hot Air posted an article about the report. There is no obvious smoking gun in the report, but there are some interesting statements.

The article reports:

The media interpretation of the findings is also flatly contradictory in places. Take for example this declaration of a lack of any culpability. (Emphasis added.)

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

The next paragraph in the report states:

So, nothing to see here. Move along. Except for one problem. The coverage also seeks to make it clear that Susan Rice couldn’t possibly be to blame for her blatantly false portrayals of the attack on the Sunday morning shows. Watch what happens to the analysis on this score.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people.

The writer of the article asks the obvious question:

Keep in mind, these are not two paragraphs separated by miles of text. They’re back to back. And somehow, in the space of four sentences, we went from there was no intelligence failure to reading it was intelligence analysts… who made the wrong call. If you’re making the wrong call – particularly one which turned out to be so incredibly far off base – then that sounds like an intelligence failure to me.

Also rather stunning is the way that a complete vindication of the White House is somehow constructed out of these conclusions. Susan Rice was either lying or she was wrong. Neither possibility paints the administration in a very competent light. And if there was a failure of intelligence, how does that clear the White House? The last time I checked the CIA reports to the Director of Intelligence who, in turn, reports directly to the President… or has that changed? A better translation of this hopeful sounding article would be to say that the report cleared the political arm of Obama’s team of any wrongdoing, while allowing him to throw his intelligence team under the bus.

Unfortunately, we will probably never know who messed up in the Benghazi tragedy. So much for government transparency.

 

What Coalition?

The Hill is reporting today that Turkey has stated that it will not allow the United States to use its military bases in Turkey as operational bases against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The article reports:

National security adviser Susan Rice said Sunday on NBC that Turkey agreed to let the U.S. use its bases and territory, including the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, to train moderate Syrian rebels.

“That’s the new commitment, and one that we very much welcome,” she said.

However, on Monday, Turkish officials denied reaching such a deal, according to local media reports that said both sides were continuing to discuss the use of the military bases and Turkey’s airspace.

Turkey does not want the United States doing anything that will strengthen Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Turkey also does not want anything to happen in the area that will strengthen the Kurds.

The awkward situation regarding Turkey, a supposed United States ally, illustrates the complexity of meddling in the Middle East. Every country where America has toppled a tyrannical dictator has disintegrated into chaos. Our ‘good deeds’ have resulted in people dying and an increase in Christian persecution. Oddly enough, I am not including the ousting of Saddam Hussein in this statement. The problem with Saddam Hussein is that had he been left in place, the United Nations would have been totally destroyed. As much as I would not object to the end of the United Nations, it is the world umpire we are currently dealing with and Saddam Hussein was thumbing his nose at the United Nations on a regular basis. Saddam Hussein had violated every condition of the peace treaty signed after the first Gulf War and he needed to be reminded that his behavior was unacceptable.

It is time to put an adviser in the White House that has some understanding of the Middle East. Right now we seem to be lacking that expertise.

 

Something To Think About

A Constitutional Republic like America depends on informed voters to keep freedom alive. Our current media is not doing a good job of keeping the public informed.

The Young Conservatives website is reporting the following quote from Greta Van Susteren:

“Since day one of Benghazi FOX News has been aggressively investigating. It hasn’t been easy. It’s been more like pulling teeth to get answers from the Obama administration. The Obama administration’s behavior post Benghazi has been weird. Like they’re trying to hide something. First that silly story about that video. Remember Susan Rice on all the Sunday talk shows? Even President Obama kept talking about the video for weeks. So FOX continued to press for information… A few weeks later when FOX news reporter Jennifer Griffin said she was told there was a stand-down order at Benghazi, I got a weird call from the Obama administration trying to pressure me to get Jennifer to back down on her report. I thought the call from the Obama administration was dirty. Incidentally, I don’t control my colleagues and they don’t control me.”

Almost all of the media has caved to pressure from the Obama Administration and avoided reporting on the Obama Scandals–Fast and Furious, IRS targeting of conservatives, Benghazi, etc. We need the press to remember its responsibilities.