WarSclerotic

Next week, a major military drill will be conducted across Israel by IDF and American troops. The exercise simulates massive simultaneous rocket attacks from the southern and northern fronts and comes at a time when the tensions between Israel and Hezbollah are relatively high.

Sean Duffy / Getty Images

BY: Adam Kredo
January 30, 2018 2:26 pm

Lawmaker: FBI Memo Will ‘Shock Americans,’ Warrant Removal of ‘FBI, DOJ Officials’

A classified memo alleging abuses by the FBI and Department of Justice in its handling of a surveillance operation against President Donald Trump and his associates will “be shocking to many Americans” and likely prompt the removal of “a high number” of senior officials in these agencies, according to one member of Congress who has viewed the highly classified document.

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines late Monday to declassify the hotly contested memo, which outlines alleged surveillance abuses by senior FBI and DOJ officials pursuing what many have described as partisan campaign against Trump.

Following that decision, the president has several days to decide whether he will allow the memo to be released to the American public or kept classified.

Rep. Sean Duffy (R., Wis.), speaking about the decision, said allegations in the memo “will be shocking to many Americans and warrant the removal of a number of high [level] FBI and DOJ individuals as well as at least one of those individuals being prosecuted,” according to comments made in the lawmaker’s podcast, an advanced copy of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

“There is a lot of smoke blowing around the FBI, the DOJ,” Duffy said during a chat with his colleague, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.), on national security issues and Trump’s upcoming State of the Union address.

Zeldin, one of just two Jewish Republicans in Congress, said he expects Trump to discuss the rising threats posed by Iran and North Korea, particularly the ballistic missile programs being operated by both rogue nations.

Zeldin also praised Trump’s recent decision to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv.

“He is not only fulfilling his own campaign promises, but the promises of candidates in the past,” Zeldin said. “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and the U.S. should be recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”

“It shouldn’t be controversial and should have happened a long time ago,” Zeldin said.

The two lawmakers also discussed the growing threat posed by North Korea and its nuclear weapons program.

Discussing a recent flare up over Trump’s reference to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as “little rocket man,” Zeldin disclosed that Trump is not the only diplomat to refer to Kim Jong Un in that manner.

“We have heads of other countries who, I’ve been in the room when its happened, they call Kim Jong Un ‘little rocket man’ and it’s amusing to hear, especially when you hear it with a British accent.”

On Iran, both Duffy and Zeldin agreed that Trump is pursuing a much better course than the Obama administration, which provided Iran with billions of dollars in sanctions relief in pursuit of the landmark nuclear deal.

The lawmakers both took aim at entrenched State Department officials who they say are continuing to push policies first introduced by the Obama administration.

“These are the same people that administration after administration give the same bad advice that leads to the same bad results,” Duffy said, noting that Trump is willing “to do things differently.”

The intelligence community, which remains stacked with officials from the former administration, is leading Trump down the wrong path when it comes to Iran, according to Zeldin.

“There are products that are formulated by the deep state that come to him [Trump] and say, ‘Mr. President Iran is not violating the letter of the [nuclear] deal,'” Zeldin said.

“You have this deep state product that’s working its way up that could wind up on the president’s desk and it might not be getting filtered” through the proper vetting channels, Zeldin said. “The president really needs to question some of the advice that he might be getting from these agencies, from these career diplomats who are so invested in creating this fatally flawed deal.”

The lawmakers also expressed concerns about how close North Korea is coming to a capable nuclear weapon, an outcome that would likely warrant a military response from the United States.

“If the red line is that North Korea cannot acquire a nuke weapon capable of hitting the U.S. at all, if that’s the red line, we’re getting really, really close to using that military option and I don’t want to,” Zeldin said.

By Pamela Geller – on January 30, 2018

Democrat Party of Treason: Conspiracy Theory vs. Conspiracy Fact

In order to address the absolute corruption and weaponizing of the FBI and DOJ under President Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democrat party of treason, let us review the illegal machinations we have suffered the past year. Imagine if the Republicans, upon the election of Barack Hussein Obama, did this?  Excerpting great American mind, the singular Victor Davis Hanson:

• A nonstop effort by the opposition to use the courts, the legislative branch, the investigatory agencies, and the administrative state to discredit, undermine, and remove an elected government. In modern terms, that might entail opponents suing to challenge the legitimacy of the election, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,” voting machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were null and void.
• Subvert the Constitution by pressuring state electors not to honor their constitutionally defined responsibilities to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce articles of impeachment in the House.
• Sue under the 25th Amendment to find the president non compos mentis, accompanied by a popular campaign to clinically diagnose the president as mentally unfit or physically decrepit.
• Use the courts to seek the removal of an elected president on grounds he was a rank profiteer and had violated the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution
• File suits with cherry-picked liberal judges to delay and stop the president’s executive orders.
• On the petty side, an organized effort to discredit a president would range from boycotting the Inauguration to deliberately holding up and delaying confirmation of his appointees.Pop Culture Provocations
  Any “resistance” aimed at removing a president would also involve the proverbial street and popular culture. A good way might be to implant to such a degree the idea of killing or harming the president that it would become something more than just a sick fantasy, but become contextualized as an act of near patriotism across the broader culture. Celebrities accordingly might dream out loud at rallies of blowing up the White House. Or a movie star might announce to his audience his hopes for a repeat of a John Wilkes Booth-style assassination. Or a state legislator might post hopes that someone would kill the president. Or a rapper might release a video in which the president is shown shot. Or a comedian on camera might hold up a facsimile of the bloody severed head of the president. Or a New York troupe might perform public plays in which the president each evening is ritually stabbed to death.We might also see and hear ad nauseam from actors and other celebrities expressing desires to beat him to a pulp, or hang him, or shoot him—all the insidious efforts not of those easily disregarded as unhinged, but of those with public personas, and with the effect of incrementally normalizing violence against the president. Late night comedians might vie with each other in their profanity and scatology, ridiculing the president with references to him fellating a foreign leader. Who knows, a secret service agent might even post a brag that she would not be willing to “take a bullet” to defend the likes of this president. Or a left-wing zealot might think shooting Republican congressmen was doing his part to thwart the evil Trump agenda.All that, too, transpired in Trump’s first year.Blue, anti-Trump states might seek to nullify federal law, in the fashion that the states of the Old South insisted that they were not subject to federal jurisdictions. California, for example, might declare itself a sanctuary state, a declaration that would forbid federal immigration agents from enforcing fully the law. Or the states might incessantly sue the president’s administration on everything from immigration to environmental policy—such that every two weeks California is ritually filing a new suit in a friendly court to curtail federal government jurisdiction over state residents. The California governor might declare the president an immoral agent who had no fear of God, as grandees in his state talked of Calexit, a secession from the president’s United States. Or the California legislature might dream of subverting the new federal code curtailing state tax deductions in adolescent ways that would earn any taxpayer who tried such a con an IRS indictment.

  In fact, in just Trump’s first year, we have seen all those efforts transpire as well.

  Control the Media, Control the Narrative
  In historian Edward Luttwak’s semi-serious Coup d’état: A Practical Handbook, control of the media is essential to abort a leader’s term. Ideally, a resistance should hope to so influence or enlist popular television, radio, electronic media and print journalism to ensure that 90 percent of all coverage of the president would be classified as negative. Reporters would issue fake news reports, ranging from stories that the president deliberately phoned a foreign leader and threatened invasion, or in racist fashion had insulted minorities by removing the bust of a black civil rights icon from the West Wing. Some reporters would use on-air obscenity and scatology in expressing their hatred of the president, in efforts to normalize the once abnormal. The more theoretical would ponder the need to jettison disinterested reporting, claiming that the danger of Trump justified biased coverage. The deep-state media might brand as believable a fake-news, tell-all book about the secret and private lives of the Trump inner circle.

  All of that happened in 2017. And it’s still happening.

  What better way to derail a presidency would there be than to allow a blank-check special counsel to search out alleged criminal activity on the part of the president? We have seen FBI Director James Comey confess that he deliberately leaked, likely illegally, confidential notes of a meeting with president Trump to the media, with the expressed intent of creating a “scandal” requiring a “special counsel”—a gambit that worked to perfection when Comey’s close friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed.

  To facilitate those efforts, the counsel would appoint to his team several attorneys who despised the very target of their investigation. In fact, many special investigators have given generously to the campaign of Trump’s past political opponent Hillary Clinton and in at least one case had worked previously for the Clinton Foundation. Note that after nearly a year, the Mueller investigation has not indicted anyone on collusion charges and is unlikely to. Rather, in special counsel trademark, low-bar fashion, it is seeking to indict and convict suspects for not telling the whole truth during interrogations, or violating other statutes. As Peter Strzok—once one of the FBI’s lead investigators in the Mueller investigation—concluded of the “collusion” allegation to his mistress Lisa Page: there was “no big there there.”

  The FBI itself would have earlier trafficked in a fraudulent document funded by the Clinton campaign to “prove” Trump and his team were such dangers to the republic that they required surveillance under FISA court warrants and thus should surrender their constitutional rights of privacy. The ensuing surveillance, then, would be widely disseminated among Obama Administration officials, with the likely intent that names would be unmasked and leaked to the anti-Trump press—again, in efforts to discredit, first, the Trump campaign, and later the Trump transition and presidency. A top official of the prior Department of Justice would personally consult the authors of the smear dossier in efforts to ensure that its contents would become useful and known.

  In fact, all that and more has already transpired.

  Subversion as Plain as Day
  Key officials of the prior government would likewise weigh in constantly to oppose the subsequent Trump agenda and demonize their own president. Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Ben Rhodes would warn the country of the threats posed by their successor, but fail to disclose that they had previously requested to view FISA surveillance of the Trump team and to unmask the names of U.S. citizens which predictably soon appeared in media reports. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, according to the Jerusalem Post, assured a prominent Palestinian government leader, “that he should stay strong in his spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to President Trump’s demands.” Kerry reportedly further assured the Palestinian representative that the president may not be in White House for much longer and would likely not complete his first term. In sum, the former American secretary of state all but advised a foreign government that his own president is illegitimate and thus to be ignored or resisted in the remaining time before he is removed.

  If any of these efforts were undertaken in 2009 to subvert the presidency of Barack Obama popular outrage might well have led to criminal indictments. If Hollywood grandees had promised to do to Barack Obama what they boast doing to Donald Trump, the entire industry would have been discredited—or given the Obama investigatory treatment.

   

• Indeed, in many cases between 2009-2017, U.S. citizens the Obama Administration found noncompliant with its agendas became targets of the IRS for their political activity or monitored by the Justice Department. The latter included reporters from the Associated Press and James Rosen of Fox News. Many a journalist’s sources were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917.  In another case, a filmmaker had his parole revoked and was scapegoated and jailed to advance a false administration narrative about the death of four Americans in Benghazi. Still others were surveilled by using fraudulent documents to obtain FISA court orders.

Hillary’s ‘Sure’ Victory Explains Most Everything

Stretching or breaking the law on her behalf would have been rewarded by a President Clinton.

By Victor Davis Hanson — January 30, 2018

The Page-Strzok text exchanges might offer a few answers. Or, as Lisa Page warned her paramour as early as February 2016, at the beginning of the campaign and well before the respective party nominees were even selected:

One more thing: she [Hillary Clinton] might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi?

The traditional way of looking at the developing scandals at the FBI and among holdover Obama appointees in the DOJ is that the bizarre atmospherics from candidate and President Trump have simply polarized everyone in Washington, and no one quite knows what is going on.

Another, more helpful, exegesis, however, is to understand that if we’d seen a Hillary Clinton victory in November 2016, which was supposed to be a sure thing, there would now be no scandals at all.

That is, the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity.

On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1 percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails. Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of the United States?

Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation” in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation.

How could Lynch in the middle of an election have been so silly as to allow even the appearance of impropriety? Answer: There would have been no impropriety had Hillary won — an assumption reflected in the Page-Strzok text trove when Page texted, about Lynch, “She knows no charges will be brought.” In fact, after a Clinton victory, Lynch’s obsequiousness in devising such a clandestine meeting with Bill Clinton may well have been rewarded: Clinton allies leaked to the New York Times that Clinton was considering keeping Lynch on as the attorney general.

How could former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe assume an oversight role in the FBI probe of the Clinton email scandal when just months earlier his spouse had run for state office in Virginia and had received a huge $450,000 cash donation from Common Good VA, the political-action committee of long-time Clinton-intimate Terry McAuliffe?

Again, the answer was clear. McCabe assumed that Clinton would easily win the election. Far from being a scandal, McCabe’s not “loaded for bear” oversight of the investigation, in the world of beltway maneuvering, would have been a good argument for a promotion in the new Clinton administration. Most elite bureaucrats understood the Clinton way of doing business, in which loyalty, not legality, is what earned career advancement.

Some have wondered why the recently demoted deputy DOJ official Bruce Ohr (who met with the architects of the Fusion GPS file after the election) would have been so stupid as to allow his spouse to work for Fusion — a de facto Clinton-funded purveyor of what turned out to be Russian fantasies, fibs, and obscenities?

Again, those are absolutely the wrong questions. Rather, why wouldn’t a successful member of the Obama administrative aparat make the necessary ethical adjustments to further his career in another two-term progressive regnum? In other words, Ohr rightly assumed that empowering the Clinton-funded dossier would pay career dividends for such a power couple once Hillary was elected. Or, in desperation, the dossier would at least derail Trump after her defeat. Like other members of his byzantine caste, Ohr did everything right except bet on the wrong horse.

What about the recently reassigned FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI top investigator Peter Strzok? Their reported 50,000-plus text messages (do the math per hour at work, and it is hard to believe that either had to time to do much of anything else) are providing a Procopian court history of the entire Fusion-Mueller investigation miasma.

So why did Strzok and Page believe that they could conduct without disclosure a romantic affair on FBI-government-owned cellphones? Why would they have been emboldened enough to cite a meeting with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, in which they apparently discussed the dire consequences of an improbable Trump victory?

I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s [probably Andrew McCabe, then deputy director of the FBI] office that there’s no way Trump gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.

And why would the two believe that they could so candidly express their contempt for a presidential candidate supposedly then under a secret FBI investigation?

Once more, those are the wrong interrogatories. If we consider the mentality of government elite careerists, we see that the election-cycle machinations and later indiscretions of Strzok and Page were not liabilities at all. They were good investments. They signaled their loyalty to the incoming administration and that they were worthy of commendation and reward.

Hillary Clinton’s sure victory certainly also explains the likely warping of the FISA courts by FBI careerists seeking to use a suspect dossier to surveille Trump associates — and the apparent requests by Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and others to read surveilled transcripts of Trump associates, unmask names, and leak them to pet reporters. Again, all these insiders were playing the careerist odds. What we view as reprehensible behavior, they at the time considered wise investments that would earn rewards with an ascendant President Hillary Clinton.

Did Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, or Debbie Wasserman Shultz worry about their fabrications, unethical behavior, and various conspiratorial efforts to ensure that Hillary Clinton would be exempt from criminal liability in her email shenanigans, and that she would win the Democratic nomination and general election? Not when their equally unethical and conspiratorial boss would appreciate her subordinate soul mates. For a deep-state careerist without ethical bearings, one of the advantages of a Clinton sure-thing presidency would be that the Clintons are known to reward loyalty more highly than morality.

Then we arrive at the tragic farce of former FBI director James Comey. It is now easy to deplore Comey’s unethical and unprofessional behavior: In all likelihood, he wrote an exoneration of Hillary Clinton before he even interviewed her and her top aides; then he lied about just that sequence while he was under oath and virtue-signaling before Congress; he feigned concern about Clinton’s felonious behavior but used linguistic gymnastics in his report to ensure his condemnation would be merely rhetorical and without legal consequences.

Had Hillary won, as she was supposed to, Comey would probably have been mildly chastised for his herky-jerky press conferences, but ultimately praised for making sure the email scandal didn’t derail her. Comey’s later implosion, recall, occurred only after the improbable election of Donald Trump, as he desperately reversed course a fourth time and tried to ingratiate himself with Trump while hedging his bets by winking and nodding at the ongoing, unraveling fantasy of the Steele dossier.

And Barack Obama? We now know that he himself used an alias to communicate at least 20 times with Hillary on her private, non-secure gmail account. But Obama lied on national TV, saying he learned of Hillary’s illegal server only when the rest of the nation did, by reading the news. Would he have dared to lie so publicly if he’d assumed that Trump’s presidency was imminent? Would he ever have allowed his subordinates to use the dossier to obtain FISA warrants and pass around and unmask the resulting surveillance transcripts if he’d seen Trump as the likely winner and a potentially angered president with powers to reinvestigate all these illegal acts?

We sometimes forget that Barack Obama, not candidate Hillary Clinton, was president when the FBI conducted the lax investigation of the email scandal, when Loretta Lynch outsourced her prosecutorial prerogatives to James Comey, when the FBI trafficked with the Clinton-funded Fusion GPS dossier, when various DOJ and FBI lawyers requested FISA-approved surveillance largely on the basis of a fraudulent document, and when administration officials unmasked and leaked the names of American citizens.

Had Hillary Clinton polled ten points behind Donald Trump in early 2016, we’d have none of these scandals — not because those involved were moral actors (none were), but because Hillary would have been considered yesterday’s damaged goods and not worth any extra-legal exposure taken on her behalf.

Similarly, if the clear front-runner Hillary Clinton had won the election, we’d now have no scandals. Again, the reason is not that she and her careerist enablers did not engage in scandalous behavior, but that such foul play would have been recalibrated as rewardable fealty and absorbed into the folds of the progressive deep state.

The only mystery in these sordid scandals is how a president Hillary Clinton would have rewarded her various appendages. In short, how would a President Clinton have calibrated the many rewards for any-means-necessary help? Would Lynch’s tarmac idea have trumped Comey’s phony investigation? Would Glen Simpson now be White House press secretary, James Comey Clinton’s CIA director; would Andrew McCabe be Comey’s replacement at the FBI?

In reductionist terms, every single scandal that has so far surfaced at the FBI and DOJ share a common catalyst. What now appears clearly unethical and probably illegal would have passed as normal in a likely 16-year Obama-Clinton progressive continuum.

A final paradox: Why did so many federal officials and officeholders act so unethically and likely illegally when they were convinced of a Clinton landslide? Why the overkill?

The answer to that paradox lies in human nature and can be explored through the hubris and nemesis of Greek tragedy — or the 1972 petty burgling of a Watergate complex apartment when Richard Nixon really was on his way to a landslide victory.

Needlessly weaponizing the Obama FBI and the DOJ was akin to Hillary Clinton’s insanely campaigning in the last days of the 2016 campaign in red-state Arizona, the supposed “cherry atop a pleasing electoral map.”

In short, such hubris was not just what Peter Strzok in August 2016 termed an “insurance policy” against an unlikely Trump victory. Instead, the Clinton and Obama officials believed that it was within the administrative state’s grasp and their perceived political interest not just to beat but to destroy and humiliate Donald Trump — and by extension all the distasteful deplorables and irredeemables he supposedly had galvanized.

by Kristina Wong 29 Jan 2018

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/01/29/house-intelligence-committee-votes-to-release-the-fbi-memo/

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

EU vows to increase its welfare payments to Palestinian terrorists to make up for the billions in funding Trump has decided to cut

January 29, 2018 by BareNakedIslam 16

http://barenakedislam.com/2018/01/29/eu-vows-to-increase-its-welfare-payments-to-palestinian-terrorists-to-make-up-for-the-billions-in-funding-trump-has-decided-to-cut/

EU Foreign Affairs Chief reassures the Palestinian Authority and Hamas that all EU countries, including the UK, are committed to providing the Palestinian Authority with billions of dollars, including aid to UNRWA in Gaza, so it can continue building terror tunnels for Hamas under the UNRWA schools and hospitals. It will also ensure that lifetime payments to Palestinian prisoners (in Israeli jails) and martyrs, as well as to their families, will continue.

January 29, 2018

Netanyahu warns Putin: Israel ready to act against Iran         

Israeli PM Netanyahu in discussion with Russian President Putin in Moscow, Jan. 29, 2018. (AP/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

The Israeli prime minister flew to Moscow amid escalating concerns over Iran’s push to have a permanent presence in neighboring Arab countries.

By: Batya Jerenberg

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met President Vladimir Putin in the Russian capital on Monday for two hours of talks, with Iran first and foremost on the agenda.

“This meeting occurred while there is a watershed change in Syria,” he explained. “Will Iran establish itself in Syria or will this process be stopped? If it is not halted on its own then we will act to stop it.”

Throughout its military campaign in Syria, however, Russia has maintained good ties with Israel, with the two countries’ air forces establishing close communications to avoid clashes when Israel would bomb weapons convoys to Hezbollah or other targets in Syria.

The other major topic of conversation was Lebanon. Here, the Israeli prime minister presented Putin with information on Iran’s activities that could directly endanger the Jewish state.

“[T]he threat of precision weapons against Israel is a serious threat that we are not willing to accept and if we have to act, we will act,” Netanyahu said, without going into detail.

Possibly referring to the recent marking of International Holocaust Day on January 27th, the prime minister stated firmly, “We will stand before them [Iran] with all our might. There will not be another Holocaust.”

According to Netanyahu, the Russians “fully understand our position and the seriousness with which we view such threats.”