US Ambassador to India Richard Verma denounces “unacceptable rhetoric” against Muslims

Posted November 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: "Unacceptable rhetoric" about Muslims, Islamophobia, Obama administration, Obama and Islamists, Obama's affinity for Islam
Tags: , , ,

US Ambassador to India Richard Verma denounces “unacceptable rhetoric” against Muslims, Jihad Watch, , November 2, 2016

“We see this in many parts of the world, with growing pockets of intolerance and anti-immigrant sentiment. This has included instances of unacceptable rhetoric against Muslims, including in the United States, and particularly during this Presidential campaign season.”

Verma here echoes the common Leftist/mainstream media conflation of concern about jihad terrorists coming into the country with “anti-immigration sentiment” and “unacceptable rhetoric against Muslims.” No advocate of the massive migrant influx has ever addressed the problem that Trump (who is clearly Verma’s target) is trying to address: how to keep jihad terrorists from entering the country from among peaceful refugees. They just say they will “vet” the migrants, when that vetting has been shown to be deeply flawed and ineffective. To call the concern over jihadis entering the country “anti-immigrant sentiment” is patently dishonest: no one — no one — is concerned about Hindu or Buddhist or atheist or any other kind of migrants. There is only concern over one group, and it isn’t because they’re “brown,” it’s because many of them are lethal.

Verma also conflates this concern over jihadis with “unacceptable rhetoric against Muslims.” Once again, this is unfair and untrue. Neither Trump nor anyone else of substance has engaged in any rhetoric denigrating Muslims as a whole. The concern is about jihad terrorism. If the Muslim community would actually work against jihad terrorism in an honest, transparent manner, there would be no problem. Instead, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has more than once advised Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. In January 2011, its San Francisco chapter featured on its website a poster that read, “Build A Wall of Resistance / Don’t Talk to the FBI.” In November 2014, CAIR-Florida’s “14th Annual Banquet Rooted in Faith” in Tampa distributed pamphlets entitled “What to do if the FBI comes for you” and featuring a graphic of a person holding a finger to his lips in the “shhh” signal.

Another CAIR pamphlet, entitled “Know Your Rights: Defending Rights, Defeating Intolerance” featured a graphic of the Statue of Liberty likewise making the “shhh” symbol. Cyrus McGoldrick, a former official of Hamas-linked CAIR’s New York chapter, even threatened informants, tweetingwith brutal succinctness: “Snitches get stitches.” Zahra Billoo of CAIR-San Francisco regularly tweets that Muslims have no obligation to talk to the FBI, and should contact Hamas-linked CAIR if the FBI asks to talk to them.

Is that “unacceptable rhetoric,” or can such rhetoric only be uttered by foes of jihad terror? Hamas-linked CAIR and its allies routinely tar any discussion of how jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims as “hate speech” against Muslims as a whole. Verma is just repeating their talking points, heedless of the fact that his rhetoric is directed toward silencing all opposition to jihad terror, as all such opposition has been characterized as “hateful” by these Islamic supremacist groups.

No U.S. official, moreover, should ever denounce “unacceptable rhetoric.” The message of the First Amendment is that any rhetoric that isn’t advocating violence or criminal activity is acceptable. But this administration is, of course, on record against the First Amendment in numerous ways.

richard-verma

“US Ambassador to India Richard Verma denounces ‘unacceptable rhetoric’ against Muslims,” PTI, November 1, 2016:

NEW DELHI: US Ambassador to India Richard Verma today reached out to Muslims here, denouncing “unacceptable rhetoric” against the community, particularly during the ongoing Presidential campaign in US, and in pockets of “intolerance”.

Verma said that any form of discrimination was “unjustifiable” and stressed on the need to embrace diversity, which he said was the real promise in the shared values of India and the United States.

Delivering a lecture at the Jamia Millia Islamia University, Verma said Indo-US relation was at the central level, crediting the leaderships at New Delhi and Washington for the upswing in ties, which he said will continue “well into the future”.

“Strains to the international order, compounded by globalization and economic inequality, are also bringing to the fore voices who seek to exploit our fears and build barriers to cooperation.

“We see this in many parts of the world, with growing pockets of intolerance and anti-immigrant sentiment. This has included instances of unacceptable rhetoric against Muslims, including in the United States, and particularly during this Presidential campaign season,” Verma said.

Responding to a question on the anti-Islam sentiments in US, Verma said no explanation can justify discrimination against any individual, while underlining that a broad swathe of the population was not discriminatory.

He called for the coming together of “like-minded partners” to overcome challenges like terrorism and asymmetrical warfare, cyber threats, environmental degradation and climate change in the 21st century.

Describing India and US as “melting pots” that celebrate diversity, respect minority rights, freedom of religion, protect free speech, the Indian-origin diplomat said Maulana Azad’s message of diversity and knowledge holds more importance than ever….

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Judge Berates Obama Admin for So Few Christian Refugees

Posted November 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Christian refugees, Islamic refugees, Obama and Christians, Obama and Islamic refugees
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Judge Berates Obama Admin for So Few Christian Refugees, Clarion Project, November 1, 2016

(Please see also, Obama’s Secret Muslim List. — DM)

iraq-christian-girl-takes-refuge-in-erbil-getty-640A Christian girl from Iraq takes refuge from the Islamic State in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan (Photo: © Getty Images)

In the course of a trial concerning a related issue, a federal judge chastised the Obama administration for allowing in to the U.S. such a small number of Christian refugees from war-torn Syria, as reported by The Daily Signal.

While the administration exceeded by almost 1,000 its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrians to the U.S. (during the 2016 fiscal year), only 56 were Christian.

“To date, there has not been a good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy,” wrote Judge Daniel Manion.

“It is well‐documented that refugees to the United States are not representative of that war‐torn area of the world. Perhaps 10 percent of the population of Syria is Christian, and yet less than one‐half of one percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian,” he added.

Thus, he concluded, we “remain in the dark as a humanitarian catastrophe continues.”

In addition, Manion pointed out that while the Obama administration demanded a high-level of evidence from states objecting to the resettling of refugees due to security concerns, it kept that information secret from those states.

In addition, the government is not forthright about telling the public or individual states what steps are taken to ensure terrorists are not posing as refugees with the goal of infiltrating the U.S.

Between a half- and one-million Syrian Christian have left the country since the outbreak of the war that has seen their communities targeted for genocide by the Islamic State (ISI/ISIL) and other radical Islamist groups.

Manion clarified his comments were made “not to suggest that any refugee group is more or less welcome: quite the contrary,” but rather to point out the Obama administration is not willing to provide states with information about the refugees allowed to enter.

“It is at least possible that incidental affiliation with some Christian militia could lead an immigration officer to deny entry to Syrians on this basis. That would be a dubious consequence,” he wrote.

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Am I back in Argentina?

Posted November 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: 2016 elections, Argentina, Clinton corruption, Clinton cover ups, Clinton Crime Family, Clinton e-mails, Clinton Foundation, Clinton investigation, Clinton lies, Clinton obstructions of justice, FBI
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Am I back in Argentina? Israel National News, Rabbi David L. Algaze, November 1, 2016

I awoke last night from a nightmare dream: I was in my ancestral country of Argentina and I was afraid once again of the dictator named Juan Domingo Peron and his wife Evita. That was scary indeed. The government was dominated by a party that made the laws as they pleased and no one had the power to check them, let alone prosecute their misdeeds. Even the press was muzzled or complicit. Here the wife of the president had a special foundation, Fundacion Eva Peron that accepted donations from wealthy donors and who received special treatment from the government. Anyone who dared to challenge this state of affairs was in trouble and the debate over the propriety of any act was thus ended.

But it was morning now and I relaxed knowing that I was now in a democratic country protected by a Constitution, honest organizations and lack of corruption, where no one is above the law, ordinary citizens are not threatened by any arm of the government and where no special favors are dispensed to high donors or foreign entities. Here the law is equal for all, and we can be sure that no one gets special treatment because they give money to a special foundation. My night was over and with it that awful dream.

Suddenly, though, I saw a high government official who was testifying that she never sent any classified material incorrectly, who lied about keeping a private email server. When the secret was out, she and her staff were busy destroying evidence.  But wait, the government was investigating and we could breathe easily. After months of “investigation” by top enforcers of the law, the government forgave her trespassing. They criticized her for just being “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information but let her off the hook. The FBI did not pursue evidence of any statements that could be false, did not investigate any obstruction of justice and the destruction of evidence.

Even more, the agents gave immunity to people who could have provided evidence of crimes and these people went on to plead the Fifth Amendment refusing to testify before Congress. The entire investigation by the FBI and the Department of Justice reeked of willful negligence or favoritism – that is, until this week when the investigation was reopened because of a new set of emails.

Even more striking, I saw that the Clinton Foundation and the State Department headed by Hillary Clinton were one seamless entity, employing the same people and coordinating schedules. Emails discovered by people outside of government — who had forced their release against State Department wishes, showed that Clinton Foundation staff was questioning some State Department decisions by stating that President Clinton “will be very unhappy if that’s the case.”

Donors to the Foundation expected to receive special treatment such as being invited to State dinners or being given special business opportunities. The scandal of President Clinton in Haiti and his business partners, i.e., donors to the Foundation, and the confluence of extraordinarily high speaking fees at groups that later received profitable business deals and special access to the State Department headed by his wife—are these real or imagined?

Donors to the Foundation expected to receive special treatment such as being invited to State dinners or being given special business opportunities. The scandal of President Clinton in Haiti and his business partners, i.e., donors to the Foundation, and the confluence of extraordinarily high speaking fees at groups that later received profitable business deals and special access to the State Department headed by his wife—are these real or imagined?

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Obama’s Secret Muslim List

Posted November 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Obama and Christians, Obama and Iran scam, Obama and Islam, Obama and Islamic refugees, Obama and Islamists, Obama and Israel, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Obama's America, Religious tests
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Obama’s Secret Muslim List, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, November 2, 2016

muslist

Like a warped Islamic version of Santa Claus, Obama had a secret Muslim list. And his people checked it at least twice. The list was of Muslims who were prospects for important jobs and appointments.

It included a Muslim who had described Israel as an “Apartheid State,” Iran’s “go-to guy in New York financial circles” and a number of figures linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

It was the ultimate religious test from an administration that had vocally rejected them.

Obama had claimed that having religious tests for migration was “shameful” and “not American.”

“When I hear folks say that, well maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims,” he huffed from Turkey. His Muslim host country was run by a bigoted sponsor of Islamic terror.

“We don’t have religious tests,” he insisted.

Except we did and we do. Obama also had religious tests. His religious tests excluded Christians and favored Muslims. That is why his Syrian refugees were between 98% and 99% Muslim with only 68 Christians and 24 Yazidis, even though both groups are real victims of the Muslim religious war.

Syria is 10% Christian and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. Yet only 68 have made it past Obama’s iron curtain. That’s either an Islamic religious test or the world’s greatest coincidence.

But would the man who piously lectured us on the evils of religious tests really have a religious test?

Of course he would.

The hacked emails include a list of “Muslim American candidates for top Administration jobs, sub-cabinet jobs, and outside boards/agencies/policy committees.”

The list was sent to John Podesta who headed the Obama-Biden Transition Project. It had been put together by a woman who had sat on the Commission on International Religious Freedom, but boasted that she had, “Excluded those with some Arab American background but who are not Muslim (e.g., George Mitchell). Many Lebanese Americans, for example, are Christian.”

How “shameful.” How “not American” of Barack Hussein Obama.

“Most who are listed appear to be Muslim-American, except that a handful (where noted) may be Arab American but of uncertain religion (esp. Christian),” she assured Podesta.

Religious tests are only out of line when they exclude Muslims. Not when they exclude Christians.

That’s the pattern which emerged from the Obama-Biden Transition Project and Obama’s refugee policy. There has been a clear pattern of administration bias against Christians and Jews. And in favor of Muslims. That bias has been obvious in a foreign policy which backed Islamic supremacist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood over more moderate governments at the expense of non-Muslim populations.

This policy led to the displacement and death of countless Christians, and the persecution of entire communities, by an administration which then denied safe harbor to the victims of its own policies.

Administration bias replicated that same bigoted policy at home when it favored Islamic candidates.

Obama appointed Farooq Kathwari, the first name on the “Muslim list” sent to Podesta, to the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The “Muslim list” email had warned that, “Kathwari’s then 19-year-old American-educated son Irfan (aka Imran), was killed in 1992 fighting Jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan.” The actions of his son, who may have been with the Mujahedeen but was also apparently outraged over India’s defense of Kashmir, is of less relevance than Kathwari’s appearance at an ISNA conference and another conference co-sponsored by the Muslim Students Association. Both groups are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

He co-chaired the American Muslim Task Force whose members included Salam Al-Marayati, Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which has defended Hamas and Hezbollah, Yahya Basha, president of the American Muslim Council and a former board member of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and assorted other Islamists.  Its report complained that Muslims were inhibited from donating to “charities” run by Islamic terrorist groups such as Hezbollah. Yahya Basha also appeared on Obama’s Muslim list.

Also listed was MPAC’s Aslam Abdullah who had claimed that “Zionists,” Christians and Hindus were behind the War on Terror. He had described Israel as an “apartheid state” and a “racist state.”

The second Muslim on the list, Cyrus Amir-Mokri, was named assistant treasury secretary. He became the first Iranian to be named to such a high position and defended the Iran nuclear sellout. Mokri attended a meeting with members of the Iran Lobby at the White House. He also reportedly advised Obama on Iranian sanctions.

Obama had famously told NASA boss Bolden that one of his three tasks at the space agency was Muslim self-esteem. But Bolden almost didn’t make it in. The Muslim list included two alternative candidates for NASA administrator. One of them, Dr. Charles Elachi of JPL was dismissed as “possibly Christian.” Indeed Elachi, who grew up admiring John Wayne and believes that American success is possible because it isn’t “held back by the long-standing, ingrained systems and beliefs found in the Middle East” would have been a rather poor fit. But it is deeply shameful and un-American that his potential NASA appointment questioned his religion. That is an inappropriate religious test that Obama must apologize for.

The other name on the list however is Firouz Naderi, an Iranian board member of the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans which advocated in support of the Iran nuke sellout.

Eboo Patel, whose name would frequently appear on lists of Islamists in the Obama administration, first made an appearance on the Muslim List. Despite his Islamist ties, he got the posting at the Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships. Also listed were Keith Ellison, Andre Carson and Larry Shaw. Shaw sits on the board of CAIR.

Dilawar Syed, the first name to appear on the list of possible appointments, was named to Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Syed is a co-founder and chair of the Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Victory Fund which has come out for Hillary Clinton. The secret Muslim list describes him as “animated by policy issues relating to the Muslim world.” A similar description is appended to the bio for Kashif Zafar who served as a Co-Chair of the South Asian American Leadership Council at the DNC.

Also on the list was Hamid Biglari. Bloomberg described Biglari as “Iran’s Man in New York” and as the Iranian president’s “go-to guy in New York financial circles.” Biglari was a key Iran Lobby figure.

The recently revealed secret Muslim list is deeply troubling. There should be no religious test for political appointments. Yet Obama had one. And his people sought to screen out Christians and favor Muslims.

This represents behavior that is in Obama’s own words, “shameful” and “not American.” One can’t help but conclude that, based on his own principles, Obama is shameful and not American.

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Netanyahu’s critical foreign tour

Posted November 2, 2016 by Joseph Wouk
Categories: Uncategorized

Source: Netanyahu’s critical foreign tour – Opinion – Jerusalem Post

Caroline Glick

The unraveling of the US electorate comes against the backdrop of the diminution of US military power.

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a news c

 RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a news conference at the Kremlin in Moscow. (photo credit:REUTERS)
 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trips to Australia, Singapore, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan might be the most significant diplomatic visits he makes in his tenure in office. The trips will take place against the backdrop of two major international shifts that cast Israel into uncharted waters as a small state with a dizzying array of strategic threats arrayed against it. The states that he will visit are all well-positioned to help Israel navigate its next moves.

The first shift is the US’s political crackup.

Next week American voters will choose their next president. The major candidates, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, are the weakest candidates to have ever stood for the highest office in the land. Their rise is a testament to the weakening, if not the unraveling of the glue that has held America together since the Civil War.

The unraveling of the US electorate comes against the backdrop of the diminution of US military power. The US’s multi-trillion dollar investment in inconclusive if not failed wars in the Middle East over the past 15 years has come at the expense of military modernization. The F-35 program has sucked up the majority of the remaining research and development funds.

And it has yet to produce a reliable airplane.

Worse, the F-35’s long and problematic gestation period has given Russia and China the time and opportunity to develop air defense systems capable of neutralizing the F-35’s stealth systems.

Those systems were supposed to be its chief advantage as the next generation fighter for the US and its allies.

The deterioration of the US’s military capabilities has gone hand in hand with the US’s apparent loss of strategic rationality.

This is apparent worldwide, but is nowhere more obvious than in the Middle East.

President Barack Obama’s decision to effectively abandon the US’s major allies in the Middle East in favor of cultivating ties with Iran has made the region far more dangerous to the US and its spurned allies than it was eight years ago.

True, in theory, Obama’s decision to prefer the Shi’ites to the Sunnis makes sense given the totalitarian and imperial nature of Sunni jihadism. But in light of the genocidal, totalitarian and imperial nature of the current Iranian regime, his move made no sense and its impact has been massively destructive.

Moreover, Obama’s willingness to rack up the US’s national debt in an unprecedented manner and repress economic growth through overregulation has left a large question mark over the possibility of a military buildup.

In other words, even under the best circumstances, it is hard to imagine that the US will be capable of reestablishing its global primacy over the next four years or even over the next decade.

The implications for Israel are far reaching. For decades, Israel’s strategic posture has been predicated on its ability to depend on US power. This strategic posture is no longer tenable.

The second major international shift is Russia’s sudden rise as the primary global power in the Middle East.

As Channel 2 reported Sunday night, Russia has deployed sophisticated naval and air systems in the region that can detect all of Israel’s air and naval operations. In a matter of months, Israel has lost the air and naval supremacy it has enjoyed for the past four decades.

The air force reportedly is convinced that the F-35’s stealth systems will be able to neutralize Russia’s detection capabilities.

But given the well-documented current problems with the F-35’s stealth systems, this conviction is unwise. And even under the best circumstances, in which Israel has the opportunity to develop its own electronic warfare systems and apply them to its F-35 without American interference, it will take Israel years to surmount the challenge that rapidly improving Russian systems present to our air force.

According to Channel 2’s report, air force and naval commanders are in a panic over the sudden turn of events.

Rather than panicking though, Israel needs to roll with the punches and figure out how best to cope with this new situation. The obvious answer is that we need to quickly expand our capabilities in areas that Russia’s military primacy does not reach.

Specifically, Israel needs to expand massively its capacity for under-the-radar operations. The first area that needs to be massively strengthened is our intelligence capabilities, particularly human intelligence capabilities. Israel should be investing massively in developing and expanding our cultivation and direction of proxies on the ground throughout the region.

Second, Israel needs to adapt its cyber technology capabilities in a manner that diminishes our enemies’ ability to strike us. Israel needs to be able to disrupt and disable command and control and other systems. Israel’s reach needs to extend as low down the line of its enemies’ military chain of command as possible.

If our offensive capabilities are being checked, so must the capabilities of our enemies.

Indeed, our enemies need to be subverted.

Part of the intelligence and cyber capabilities that Israel must develop and deploy must be geared toward destabilizing with the goal of overthrowing the regime in Iran. At the same time, Israel should be empowering anti-regime sectors in Iran in a manner that expands the prospect of developing close ties with a successor regime along the lines of the strategic alliance Israel built with the regime of the shah in the decades which preceded the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Third, Israel needs to expand and diversify the capabilities of our ground forces. Israel needs to be capable of using new means to deploy its fighters at home and on distant shores. It needs to align its both its special and regular forces with the new threat environment. And it needs to be able to utilize its ground forces in manners that can extend the reach and diminish the compromised positions of its air and naval assets in the era of Russian regional primacy.

Fourth, Israel needs to expand its economic growth and diversify its economic ties in a manner that positions it as a regional economic power. It needs to use it natural gas resources specifically as a means to expand and deepen its ties with Asia. Such economic growth and power will positively influence Russia’s willingness to allow Israel to carry out air and naval operations against its enemies – and Russia’s allies in Lebanon, Syria and beyond. In other words, the more economically powerful Israel is, the more Russia will be willing to side with Israel against Hezbollah and others that are currently operating under the Russian umbrella.

This then brings us to Netanyahu’s upcoming trips. Each state that he will visit has something to offer Israel in expanding its intelligence, cyberwarfare and economic capabilities. Australia, a major Western economy, is moving toward China as America has become less engaged in the Pacific. Israel has an acute interest in using Australia as a platform for expanding its ties to China and other Asian countries, both because of the economic advantages such ties convey and due to China’s strategic importance to Russia.

As for Singapore, Israel effectively built the Singaporean military in the 1960s and 1970s. The country remains extremely supportive of Israel. Like Australia, Singapore has close ties to China.

It has technological and other capabilities that can be extremely advantageous for Israel today.

Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are critically important to Israel today. Their strategic proximity to Iran, and their ties to Russia, along with their ethnic composition and their natural resources make securing good relations with both critical to Israel’s ability to advance and security its strategic interests in every sphere.

Israel has tremendous assets to offer each of the four countries that Netanyahu will visit. These assets must be deployed wisely to ensure that Israel gains as much as possible from his trip and from its future ties with all of them.

Given the dramatic changes in the global power balance, and their implications for Israel, Netanyahu’s decision to fly to visit these four countries just after the US elections tells us that he gets it. At a time of regional and global turbulence and uncertainty, in the context of swiftly multiplying threats, this is no small matter.

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Clinton and Trump offer diverse ME scenarios

Posted November 2, 2016 by Joseph Wouk
Categories: Uncategorized

Source: Clinton and Trump offer diverse ME scenarios

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis November 1, 2016, 4:34 PM (IDT)


Whoever is elected US president on Nov. 8, he or she will land in the middle of a foreign policy shambles and face a pressing need to rebuild America’s fences in most parts of the world, including the war-ridden, messy Middle East. The Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump, whose approaches are so different in every respect, will both find it impossible to isolate America from the Middle East

debkafile’s military and intelligence experts postulate divergent developments in response to the alternative results of the Nov. 8 presidential election, depending on the winner.

If it is Hillary Clinton, then –

  • Russia will deepen its expansion in the region, including in Syria and Iraq. The Russian naval units speeding to the Mediterranean at this moment are part of Moscow’s ramped up deployment in readiness for Clinton’s entry to the White House.
  • Vladimir Putin will not forgive the Democratic candidate in a hurry for her anti-Russian campaign gimmicks of depicting Donald Trump as his friend and alleging that Russian intelligence hacked DNC emails to turn the race against her.
    The Russian leader is not the forgiving sort when it comes to his reputation – and still less so when Russian intelligence, his alma mater, is impugned.
  • The high tensions expected to prevail between the Kremlin and the Clinton White House may well ignite a limited military conflagration between US and Russian forces in the Middle East.
  • Syrian rebels are counting on Clinton giving them arms and funds – in contrast to Barack Obama, and are therefore tenaciously holding out, despite their inferior resources against Russian-backed Syrian and pro-Iranian forces. They see her focusing on Bashar Assad’s ouster and, even more, on empowering the rebels to hamper Russia’s military designs in Syria. In this, she will find support from her friends in the Gulf emirates. The Syrian opposition believes that the sharper the tensions between Washington and Moscow, the better for their cause.
  • Clinton has a dilemma with regard to Iran. As co-author of the nuclear deal, she will also try to improve relations with Tehran. But by doing so, she risks alienating her friends, the Arab Gulf leaders.
  • She will soon discover that Iran’s rulers and military chiefs have no wish to cozy up to Washington, certainly not at the expense of their highly profitable ties with Moscow and Beijing.
  •  Clinton will no doubt try to repair the damage to US relations with Israel that piled up during Obama’s term of office.

If it is Donald Trump, then –

  • He will go for a US-Russian summit with Vladimir Putin to lay out a new world power order for the distribution of spheres of influence in different world regions, including the Middle East. He may make the summit trilateral by inviting Xi Jinping of China.
  • This summit will also seek economic understandings, a prospect which is already unnerving international markets. Trump will ask the Russian and Chinese leaders to share wholly or partly in the plans he put before the voter for strengthening the American economy.
  • The Republican candidate has said repeatedly that he would be glad to leave the war on ISIS in the Middle East to Putin and Tehran. In any case, his military advisers, led by Ret. Army Gen. Mike Flynn, perceive Moscow as already in control of the current military situation in consequence of Obama’s policies.
  • This policy however will put the Trump administration at odds with the Arab world, the Gulf emirates and Israel, all of which fear Iran’s continued drive for expansion across the Middle East under a supportive Russian umbrella.
  • He may try to compensate for this lack of equilibrium by taking a strong line against Tehran – even revoking the nuclear deal, which the outgoing president saw as his crowning foreign policy achievement. This could spark a US-Iranian showdown in the Gulf region. On the other hand, Iran is perfectly capable of dumping the nuclear accord on its own initiative.
  • During Trump’s first year as president, the traditional US-Saudi partnership for political, military and economic policies may start crumbling – especial on oil pricing. This alliance between the royal house of Saud and the US dates from the first encounter between President Franklin Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud 71 years ago. debkafile’s Saudi experts estimate that after some initial rough patches, Donald Trump and King Salman will be able to find common ground and so put relations on a firmer footing than before. This would repair the discord with Riyadh engendered by the Obama administration and during Clinton’s term as Secretary of State.
  • Trump will endeavor to improve ties with Israel. In so doing, he will try and contain Binyamin Netanyahu’s ongoing understandings with Putin on the Middle East.

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Top Justice Department Official Overseeing Clinton Probe Is Close Friend of Podesta

Posted November 1, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Clinton e-mails, Clinton investigation, FBI
Tags: , ,

Top Justice Department Official Overseeing Clinton Probe Is Close Friend of Podesta, PJ Media, Debra Heine, November 1, 2016

kadzikPeter Kadzik, Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs at the Department of Justice

A Department of Justice official who is overseeing the reopened Hillary Clinton email investigation has a close relationship with Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, leaked emails show. Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, who notified Congress on Monday that the agency would “dedicate all necessary resources” to the investigation, appears to have a major conflict of interest in the case.

Via the Washington Examiner:

Emails made public by WikiLeaks over the past several weeks raise fresh questions about the Justice Department’s handling of an investigation into a case with such close ties to the agency’s leadership. Just one week before FBI Director James Comey closed the original Clinton email probe in July, Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s private meeting with Clinton’s husband sparked a wave of outrage that ultimately clouded the Justice Department’s decision to end the investigation.In 2008, Podesta raved about Kadzik to Cassandra Butts, a member of President Obama’s transition team, and noted Kadzik was “willing to help” with vetting for Obama’s Cabinet.

“Fantastic lawyer. Kept me out of jail,” Podesta wrote of Kadzik.

wikileaks-john-kadzik

Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, are in frequent contact. The leaked emails show them discussing plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday, and arranging other social get-togethers. Podesta had dinner with Kadzik and some other well-connected friends the day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi in October of 2015, in fact.

Kadzik also had dinner with Podesta at his home on Jan. 12, 2016, while the first Clinton email probe was well underway. Kadzik emailed Podesta: “We on?” Podesta replied, “Yes sorry. 7:30 at our place.”

Kadzik helped keep Podesta out of jail in 1998 when independent counsel Kenneth Starr was investigating him for his role in helping Bill Clinton’s former intern and girlfriend Monica Lewinsky land a job at the United Nations.

Via the Daily Caller:

As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky.In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.

Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.

Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time.

“He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe.

Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.

Fox News reported:

Kadzik had been an attorney with Dickstein Shapiro LLP for 18 years before he represented Podesta in the Clinton/Lewinsky investigation. He was hired in 2000 as a lobbyist for tax cheat Marc Rich, who was controversially granted a pardon by President Bill Clinton during Clinton’s final days in office. Kadzik got the job “because he was ‘trusted by [White House Chief of Staff John] Podesta,’ and was considered to be a ‘useful person to convey [Marc Rich’s] arguments to Mr. Podesta,’” according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report.Podesta and Kadzik kept up their relationship after Kadzik was appointed to the DOJ. In a May 5, 2015 email, Kadzik’s son, PJ, wrote to Podesta seeking a job on Hillary Clinton’s newly launched presidential campaign.

“I have always aspired to work on a presidential campaign, and have been waiting for some time now for Hilary [sic] to announce so that I can finally make this aspiration a reality,” PJ Kadzik wrote.

Podesta said he would “check around,” but it’s unclear what came of the request.

The Kadzik conflict of interest is not the only one to have been noticed in recent weeks.

Andrew McCabe, second in command at the FBI, has come under scrutiny for the campaign donations his wife received from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally.

Some Republicans are now charging that the Obama DOJ is nothing more than a cover-up operation for corrupt Democrats.

“There is public information that the Justice Department is protecting the Clinton Foundation,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton Tuesday morning on Fox and Friends. 

Fox News reported:

Kadzik had been an attorney with Dickstein Shapiro LLP for 18 years before he represented Podesta in the Clinton/Lewinsky investigation. He was hired in 2000 as a lobbyist for tax cheat Marc Rich, who was controversially granted a pardon by President Bill Clinton during Clinton’s final days in office. Kadzik got the job “because he was ‘trusted by [White House Chief of Staff John] Podesta,’ and was considered to be a ‘useful person to convey [Marc Rich’s] arguments to Mr. Podesta,’” according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report.Podesta and Kadzik kept up their relationship after Kadzik was appointed to the DOJ. In a May 5, 2015 email, Kadzik’s son, PJ, wrote to Podesta seeking a job on Hillary Clinton’s newly launched presidential campaign.

“I have always aspired to work on a presidential campaign, and have been waiting for some time now for Hilary [sic] to announce so that I can finally make this aspiration a reality,” PJ Kadzik wrote.

Podesta said he would “check around,” but it’s unclear what came of the request.

The Kadzik conflict of interest is not the only one to have been noticed in recent weeks.

Andrew McCabe, second in command at the FBI, has come under scrutiny for the campaign donations his wife received from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally.

Some Republicans are now charging that the Obama DOJ is nothing more than a cover-up operation for corrupt Democrats.

“There is public information that the Justice Department is protecting the Clinton Foundation,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton Tuesday morning on Fox and Friends. 

“Right now there’s a cover-up going on within the Obama Justice Department and the FBI about what the Clinton Foundation has been up to with these pay to play scams which has been confirmed essentially by WikiLeaks, and we’ve been exposing for almost a year at Judicial Watch,” he said.

Fitton reminisced about how the politicized DOJ handled the IRS targeting scandal.

“An under-reported aspect of the IRS scandal is that the Justice Department reached out to the IRS and asked, ‘how is it that we can prosecute the very groups you’re suppressing?'” he said.

Documents obtained by Judicial Watch in July of 2015 revealed that Lois Lerner and officials from the DOJ and FBI met in October 2010 to plot the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity. “They wanted to go after donors,” Fitton said. “They were thinking of creative ways to put Obama’s opponents in jail. And this is the same Justice Department that is looking the other way on the Clinton Foundation.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy,R.-S.C., meanwhile said on “Fox & Friends” that he wasn’t concerned about any potential conflicts of interest. “Peter Kadzik is not a decision maker, he is a messenger,” Gowdy said.

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Brazile Under Fire As More Emails Purport to Show Secret Leaks of Questions To Clinton

Posted November 1, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Clinton advisers, Clinton campaign, Clinton e-mails, CNN, Donna Brazile, Media and Hillary Clinton
Tags: , , , , ,

Brazile Under Fire As More Emails Purport to Show Secret Leaks of Questions To Clinton, Jonathan Turley’s Blog, Jonathan Turley, November 1, 2016

donnab

 

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It would seem of more than passing interest for the media to determine if the head of the DNC, let alone a former CNN contributor, is lying. Yet, there appears to be a minimal level of coverage of the story.

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We discussed earlier how Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, denied the legitimacy of emails that showed her leaking a question to Hillary Clinton that would be asked verbatim at the CNN downhill event. The media has largely declined to investigate the claim, including confirming the receipt of the earlier email from the Clinton staffer. Now additional emails allegedly show Brazile secretly feeding information to the Clinton campaign. Again, there has been relatively little media attention to the story and CNN issued a remarkably weak response that it was “uncomfortable” with the new disclosures on Brazile’s actions while a CNN commentator. “Uncomfortable”? How about words like “unethical”?

There are now three troubling levels to this story. First, CNN maintained throughout the primary that Brazile (who was well known as a supporter of Hillary Clinton) was a “neutral” commentator. It was a facially ridiculous claim for anyone familiar with Washington. Second, Brazile then alleged passed along questions to Clinton in what would be a deeply unethical act. Third, Brazile then said that the emails were not real and that she could prove it.

The easiest way to confirm the earlier story is to ask the recipient campaign adviser Jennifer Palmieri who is readily available to the media. However, reporters have not pressed Palmieri. In the meantime, Brazile gave a rambling denial of the story that would normally trigger a feeding frenzy. In addition, some techies have posted a research that they say strongly support claims of authenticity, but the response of the media has been crickets.

Now, the latest email show that Brazile revealed to the Clinton campaign the name of the person who provided her with a question that was asked of Clinton at a March 13 town hall co-hosted by CNN and TV One. Brazile also shared a question from a debate hosted by CNN a week earlier. She allegedly named Roland Martin, a TV One host who co-moderated a March 13 town hall with CNN’s Jake Tapper, as her source. The March 5th email shows Brazile sharing a question with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and communications director Jennifer Palmieri that was to be asked in a March 6 debate hosted by CNN in Flint, Mich.

In a March 12 exchange, Brazile again refers to Martin and offers to provide more than just the one town hall question: “I’ll send a few more. Though some questions Roland submitted,” Brazile wrote to Palmieri in the March 12 email thread, which is entitled “From time to time I get the questions in advance.”

Now the emails contradict the denials of other CNN figures about sharing questions with Brazile.

In a March 5 email, Brazile reportedly leaked a question that was to be asked the next day at a debate that was hosted by CNN’s Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper: “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash . . . Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint.”

Then in the debate a woman named Lee-Anne Walters did ask the question of both Clinton and Sanders:

“After my family, the city of Flint and the children in D.C. were poisoned by lead, will you make a personal promise to me right now that, as president, in your first 100 days in office, you will make it a requirement that all public water systems must remove all lead service lines throughout the entire United States, and notification made to the – the citizens that have said service lines,”

In response, CNN again denied sharing questions and said “We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor.” CNN has cut all ties with Brazile, but of course she remains the DNC head after replacing Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who ironically was viewed as working to rig the primary for Clinton).

It would seem of more than passing interest for the media to determine if the head of the DNC, let alone a former CNN contributor, is lying. Yet, there appears to be a minimal level of coverage of the story.

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Don’t Be Fooled: Hillarygate Probe Is Now a Formal Federal Criminal Investigation

Posted November 1, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton campaign, Clinton character, Clinton cover ups, Clinton e-mails, Clinton investigation, Clinton lies, Clinton supporters, Comey, Department of Justice, FBI, Grand jury, U.S. courts
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t Be Fooled: Hillarygate Probe Is Now a Formal Federal Criminal Investigation, American Thinker, James G. Wiles, November 1, 2016

The NY Times and the Wall Street Journal both reported on Monday morning that an FBI warrant application to a federal judge over the weekend for permission to search Huma Abedin’s emails and laptop had been granted. The application was made on the basis of the Clinton email investigation. Necessarily, that application (as required by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment) would have been supported by FBI affidavits.

This new fact is a development of immense potential significance – both for Mrs. Clinton personally and for us as American citizens. It is also unprecedented in American history.

At a minimum, it enables us to pierce the thick cloud of black ink and disinformation released over the weekend by Team Hillary and which is being widely misreported in the current news cycle.

The FBI agents had to make this warrant application because their existing Fourth Amendment search authority was on the basis of Anthony Weiner’s (unrelated) suspected misconduct with an underage girl. That investigation was already a grand jury matter. However, that grand jury’s authority – which is supervised by a federal judge — did not authorize the Bureau to pursue information which might be pertinent to the inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email server while she was Secretary of State. Making that application, under standard DOJ protocol, required approval from Main Justice. In this case, the assistant attorney in charge of the Criminal Division, if not the attorney general.

Since the application was made, it’s safe to conclude that the Criminal Division at Main Justice authorized the warrant application. Thus, at a minimum, the senior leadership of the Justice Department is not as unanimously condemnatory of FBI director Comey’s letter to Congress on Friday as media reports would lead us to believe.

It also explains why Director Comey issued his letter to Congress. The reporting tells us that the FBI’s decision to make a warrant application to the supervising judge of the Weiner grand jury triggered Mr. Comey’s decision to notify Congress. Having promised Congressional leaders (perhaps unwisely, since he was not required to do so) that, if the Bureau uncovered new evidence relating to Hillarygate which required further inquiry, he would so notify them, he proceeded on Friday to keep his word and do so.

Now he’s being condemned by the Democrats and the MSM for not saying why. We’ll get to the reason why he’s not in a minute. But, first, the granting of the warrant application means several important and new things:

1) A federal judge supervising a grand jury has now made a finding, based on FBI affidavits which present evidence gathered during the preliminary Hillary inquiry (the one which the FBI director stated had been closed back in July), that there’s probable cause to believe that a federal crime was committed in connection with Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server.

We still, however, don’t know what crime(s) are suspected to have been committed. Or by whom.

2) The FBI can use this new grant of grand jury authority to investigate Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server for the first time to issues subpoenaes to obtain testimony from witnesses and compel the production of documents and things. The Bureau and DOJ can, furthermore, use the judge’s probable cause finding to support further warrant applications.

This means that, if DOJ authorizes it, a United States attorney now has the ability for the first time to put subpoenaed witnesses before a grand jury. There, without their lawyer in the room, they may be questioned under oath by a federal prosecutor. If the witnesses take the Fifth – and the witness’s lawyer is allowed to sit outside the grand jury room and be consulted by the witness before answering a question, they can be immunized and, if they still refuse to testify, a judge can jail them indefinitely until they change their mind.

Huma Abedin, according to prior reporting, received a grant of immunity during the FBI’s preliminary investigation. During the first Clinton presidency, Clinton allies chose jail over cooperating with the federal grand jury investigating both Clintons.

We may get to see if a new generation of Clinton allies are willing to do the same.

3) The liberal media’s reporting that the Hillarygate email server investigation has not, in fact, been “reopened” is totally false.

Why?

Because, not only is the probe reopened, it has been upgraded and expanded. It has been upgraded from a preliminary inquiry to a formal criminal investigation with grand jury power. That also means that, at least at the level of the federal grand jury itself, assistant U.S. attorneys assigned to that grand jury are now for the first time formally involved.

In other words: the Beast is now fully awake.

4) This weekend’s development potentially escalates the threat to Mrs. Clinton. While several other procedural steps and processes are necessary, it is a federal grand jury, not the FBI,  which issues indictments. The FBI — using the the grand jury to obtain testimony, conduct searches and compel the production of documents and things – investigates crimes. The U.S. Attorneys, acting though the grand jury, charge and prosecute those persons whom the grand jury finds probable cause to believe have committed those crimes.

5) This weekend’s development also means that, for the first time in American history, a candidate for President of the United States is likely now a subject/target of a federal grand jury investigation.

These facts now enable us to analyze and dispel Team Clinton’s attempts to lay down a thick fog of misdirection over the scene.

Here it is: Mrs. Clinton’s demand that the FBI be “transparent” is pure posturing — spinning to the max (which Mrs. Clinton, as the most criminally investigated presidential candidate in U.S. history, well knows). Younger readers, please take note: this is not, to put it mildly, Hillary Clinton’s first rodeo.

Not for the first time, Mrs. Clinton is being totally disingenuous with the voters (and the media). She is also making FBI director Comey into her personal punching bag. And she’s doing it because she knows that the director can’t fight back.

In this, Mrs. Clinton is simply repeating a tactic which she and her catspaw Sidney Blumenthal used to good effect during the Whitewater, Travelgate, and Monica Lewinsky investigations in the 1990s. And that tactic worked.

It’s called grand jury secrecy. Now that Hillarygate is, for the first time, a grand jury investigation, Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) prohibits the FBI and prosecutors from saying anything about “matters occurring before the grand jury.” Their lips are sealed.

Team Hillary’s lips, however, are not. They are neither federal prosecutors nor “agents of the grand jury.” So, Mrs. Clinton and her spokesmen — unlike the federal law enforcement officials they’ve been targeting all weekend — are free to tell us everything they know.

Let’s see if they do. A reporter should ask them.

And, in the meantime, let’s not bother to hold our breaths.

If Hillary really wants “transparency,” let her release the FBI’s warrant application for permission to search Huma Abedin and Mr. Weiner’s emails for evidence relating to whether Hillary’s use of a private server violated federal law. Huma’s lawyers likely have it. If not, they can certainly get it.

Huma, of course, is also free to release the emails too.

That’s why Hillary’s demand for “transparency” by the FBI is moonshine. She damn well knows the feds can’t do it.

She also now knows that the threat level against her has just been upgraded to ORANGE.

William Safire and Christopher Hitchens, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

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Dem Pollster Pat Caddell: ‘Dam About To Break’ On Hillary

Posted November 1, 2016 by Joseph Wouk
Categories: Uncategorized

Voters abandoning establishment candidate in droves — According to former Jimmy Carter pollster Pat Caddell, Hillary Clinton is hemorrhaging support as a result of the FBI announcement and we could see a repeat of the 1980 election when anti-establishment candidate Ronald Reagan won in a landslide.

Caddell drew comparisons to the 1980 presidential race, which was close right up until the final days before the electorate abandoned Carter and rallied around the anti-establishment candidate, leading to Reagan taking victory in a landslide. Caddell noted that Carter’s entire campaign had been built around portraying Reagan as unqualified and “dangerous,” in a similar vein to how Clinton has demonized Trump.

Caddell explained that the polling between Reagan and Carter was close up until the final weekend when “the dam broke” and Reagan shot ahead by ten points. Stating that he had been looking at the data regarding unfavorability ratings for both Clinton and Trump, Caddell noted that since Friday, large numbers of voters had been structurally “moving against the status quo – the incumbent who is essentially Hillary Clinton.” As an ABC News poll found, Hillary’s unfavorability rating just hit its highest ever mark. Caddell said that the latest information regarding the FBI re-opening its investigation into Hillary’s email scandal was the “popper” that “could open up significantly before it’s over,” meaning it would be the decisive factor that enables Trump to defeat Hillary.

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