Lt. Col. Shaffer on wiretapping: This is Soviet behavior, Fox News via YouTube, March 4, 2017
(Please see also, Trump Goes Nuclear with Claim Obama Wiretapped him During Election [Updated] and my parenthetical comment there. — DM)
Posted tagged ‘Obama Administration’
Lt. Col. Shaffer on wiretapping: This is Soviet behavior
March 4, 2017Ex-CIA Officer Abandoned by Obama: Without Trump Admin, ‘I Would Be Spending Tonight in an Italian Prison’
March 4, 2017Ex-CIA Officer Abandoned by Obama: Without Trump Admin, ‘I Would Be Spending Tonight in an Italian Prison’, Breitbart, John Hayward, March 3, 2017
REUTERS/Pedro Nunes
Former CIA case officer Sabrina De Sousa thanked the Trump administration for intervening to save her from extradition to Italy and imprisonment in a statement on Friday.
“I want to extend my deepest appreciation to the Trump administration for all their efforts on my behalf. Without their support I would be spending tonight in an Italian prison,” said De Sousa, in a statement quoted by Fox News.
“The Obama administration and former CIA Director John Brennan abandoned De Sousa the last seven years, and in six weeks, the Trump team made her freedom possible,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) told Fox News.
Hoekstra was one of De Sousa’s strongest champions and an outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s conduct in her case. He laid out her case and castigated Obama for abandoning her, along with a healthy dose of criticism for the governments of Italy and Portugal, in a Tuesday op-ed and Fox News:
Originally convicted in absentia in 2009 by the Italian legal system, America, until recently, has done very little to defend and support Sabrina and her family since. They have lived under the shadow of these convictions for years. Now she’s on her way to face punishment in Italy.
Roughly eighteen months ago Sabrina took a risk returning to Portugal. During her trip, Sabrina was arrested and instructed not to leave.
Portugal has detained her ever since.
The Obama administration did nothing for seven years following Sabrina’s conviction. They did nothing while she was detained in Portugal. Meanwhile, President Obama released prisoners from GITMO. The White House handed out pardons. Not a finger was lifted to assist Sabrina.CIA Director Brennan visited Portugal twice in 2016. Sources in the Portuguese intelligence community indicate that Sabrina’s case was never even discussed.
De Sousa, 61, was working undercover for the CIA in Italy when Egyptian cleric Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, a.k.a. Abu Omar, was plucked from the streets and returned to Egypt in an “extraordinary rendition” operation. He was believed to have been involved in a plan to bomb a bus full of school children in Milan.
The case against Omar turned out to be thin. He was interrogated — he says “tortured” — by the Egyptians and released, then he was convicted in absentia by Italy for “criminal association for the purposes of international terrorism” and given a six-year sentence. He has never actually served time in an Italian prison for this conviction.
One might argue that De Sousa bears no responsibility for the Egyptian government’s conduct in the case, but the maddening truth of the case is that she did not even have anything to do with his rendition. She has documentary evidence in the form of phone records that she was over a hundred miles away when the operation occurred. She and 25 other Americans, mostly CIA employees, were convicted in absentia by an Italian court.
As Newsweek chronicles, De Sousa was en route to visit her mother in India in October 2015, having long since left the employ of the CIA, when she was detained at the Lisbon airport. To her astonishment, she ultimately found herself in a Portuguese prison awaiting extradition to Italy for what remained of a five-year prison sentence. Her mother, sadly, passed away while she was detained in Portugal.
She says she was scapegoated for the operation, which she has been highly critical of, expressing puzzlement that everyone from President George W. Bush’s national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to the Egyptian government was so eager to move against Omar. In one interview, she suggested the “ambition” of the CIA station chief to impress his superiors might have played a role.
According to the Washington Post, Italian law enforcement somehow became convinced De Sousa was secretly the head of CIA operations in Milan rather than a case officer and that Omar’s rendition was “close to the hearts” of both De Sousa and the CIA chief in Rome.
Rep. Hoekstra compared De Sousa’s case to President Obama’s abandonment of Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi, who played a crucial role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In his Fox News op-ed, he lambasted everyone from Italy and Portugal to Bush and Obama administration officials for allowing De Sousa to suffer, even though everyone knew she was merely “a political pawn in a much larger dynamic.” He bluntly accused the Italian government of cowardice for going after De Sousa instead of the high-ranking Bush administration officials — possibly including former President Bush himself — who actually authorized and executed the rendition of Abu Omar.
Hoekstra told Newsweek about his campaign to get help for De Sousa from the Trump administration:
He had a number of friends in the national security apparatus from his time on the House Intelligence Committee—people like Michael Flynn, the recently departed White House national security adviser, fellow former Representative Mike Pompeo, now director of the CIA, and former Senator Dan Coats, the new director of national intelligence. And it didn’t hurt that he had chaired Trump’s Michigan campaign.
“I just said this was terrible that she should go to jail for something that was approved by the National Security Council and probably President Bush himself,” Hoekstra said. “They recognized this had to be a front-burner issue,” he said. “The optics” were bad. “You don’t want a CIA case officer sitting in an Italian jail.”
Hoekstra said he kept administration officials apprised of De Sousa’s situation “in real time” as the day, and then hour, for her extradition grew near. “I was convinced that Wednesday morning she would be transported back to Lisbon and onto a plane to Italy,” he said. And so was she. Her husband, a retired Department of the Army employee who had joined her in Portugal, packed her suitcases with only the light clothing she had. “It was warm here,” she said, “and I dreaded freezing in Milan.”
Newsweek described De Sousa as “bitter at Obama administration officials” because they did not invoke diplomatic immunity to defend her (she was nominally a State Department diplomat while on CIA assignment to Milan). She even sued Hillary Clinton’s State Department for abandoning her to suffer “significant emotional, professional and economic harm, including, but not limited to, possible criminal or civil liability.”
Years later, she felt compelled to officially disclose she had been working for the CIA as well as the State Department, which did not please the CIA. She has flatly accused Obama and his CIA director, John Brennan, of throwing her “under the bus.”
It turns out that one of the things De Sousa has been doing since escaping from her legal entanglements in Italy is reading Newsweek because she used her Twitter account on Friday to swiftly dispute a nameless Obama official’s claim that she was not abandoned by the previous administration:
Fmr Obama off. failed to mention that in 2014 @CIA had excluded me from getting a pardon by Prez of Italy http://www.newsweek.com/trump-cia-sabrina-desousa-italy-portugal-rendition-pete-hoekstra-hassan-563225 …
The arrangement reached by the Trump administration involved reduction of her sentence, so there was no longer any reason for Portugal to extradite her to Italy, and the 11-year-old warrant against her is finally nullified.
“I had an arrest warrant issued against me 11 long years ago that prevented me from seeing members of my immediate family in Europe,” she told Fox News. “Finally, I can rest with the assurance there is no warrant hanging over my head.”
“In six short weeks, the Trump administration has given me more hope and support than I ever received in the past eight years from the Obama Administration or the CIA, my former employer. I had feared that the country I signed up with in good faith to serve had abandoned me,” De Sousa said.
Trump Goes Nuclear with Claim Obama Wiretapped him During Election [Updated]
March 4, 2017Trump Goes Nuclear with Claim Obama Wiretapped him During Election [Updated], Power Line,
(Please see also, Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama’s ‘Silent Coup’ vs. Trump for this confirmation of the wiretapping:
October: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
— DM)
Someone in the intelligence/law enforcement bureaucracy had applied for a FISA warrant to tap the Trump people in June, It was turned down. Renewed and granted in October, I think. The details are out there. That’s what he’s talking about.
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Early this morning, President Trump unleashed a barrage of tweets accusing then-President Barack Obama of wiretapping his office in Trump Tower during the presidential election:
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!
I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
This is the most explosive political allegation in many years, far more explosive than Watergate. Is it true? I assume it has some basis in fact, e.g., Trump’s security people may have told him that they detected a tap on one or more of his phone lines. I have no idea how that works, or why it would only be detected now, or how the presence of a wire tap could be connected to the Obama administration. But it seems unlikely that Trump would make such a dynamite allegation without some kind of support.
I also wonder what Trump means by “turned down by court earlier.” It sounds like the Obama administration applied for a tap on Trump’s phones at some point, and was denied. Is it possible that Obama later succeeded in getting a wire tap order from a partisan judge, and that is what has now come to light? That is hard to imagine, but there are some very bad federal judges. The comment “nothing found” may support this interpretation.
At this point, it is all quite mysterious. But the claim is nuclear, and I can’t believe it is wholly without basis. Stay tuned!
UPDATE: Scott emails:
Someone in the intelligence/law enforcement bureaucracy had a applied for a FISA warrant to tap the Trump people in June, It was turned down. Renewed and granted in October, I think. The details are out there. That’s what he’s talking about.
This is astonishing to me, as I have never heard a word about this story. If the Obama administration abused the FISA process to wiretap a political opponent, it is a scandal of the first order–the worst political scandal of my lifetime, easily. And the press has known about it and covered it up? Unbelievable.
Obama Admin. Arranged Sessions’ First Meeting with Russian Ambassador, Fmr. DOJ Atty. Reveals
March 4, 2017Obama Admin. Arranged Sessions’ First Meeting with Russian Ambassador, Fmr. DOJ Atty. Reveals, CNS News, Craig Bannister, March 3, 2017
It was actually the Obama Administration that set up Senator Jeff Sessions’ (R-Texas) first meeting with a Russian ambassador last year, which Democrats are attempting to demonize, a former Justice Department attorney reveals.
Attorney Hans A. von Spakovsky, former civil rights counsel for the Justice Department who also served two years as a member of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), lays out the innocuous details of Sessions’ first meeting in his commentary, “Get real, Democrats, there is no good reason for Sessions to resign”:
“So what are the two meetings that Sessions had? The first came at a conference on “Global Partners in Diplomacy,” where Sessions was the keynote speaker. Sponsored by the U.S. State Department, The Heritage Foundation, and several other organizations, it was held in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.
“The conference was an educational program for ambassadors invited by the Obama State Department to observe the convention. The Obama State Department handled all of the coordination with ambassadors and their staff, of which there were about 100 at the conference.”
So, Obama’s State Department not only sponsored the event, but it also invited the Russian ambassador Democrats are now vilifying, thus setting Sessions up to interact with him, Von Spakovsky explains:
“Apparently, after Sessions finished speaking, a small group of ambassadors—including the Russian ambassador—approached the senator as he left the stage and thanked him for his remarks.”
It would be impossible to clandestinely plot anything nefarious in such a public gathering, von Spakovsky concludes:
“That’s the first ‘meeting.’ And it’s hardly an occasion—much less a venue—in when a conspiracy to “interfere” with the November election could be hatched.”
So, members of the Obama Administration sponsored and arranged the event. Then, as The New York Times reports, they carried out plans to sensationalize and draw suspicion to the very encounter with the Russian ambassador that they prompted.
Climate “Science” Rocked by Another Scandal
February 5, 2017Climate “Science” Rocked by Another Scandal, Power Line,
A just-retired scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has blown the whistle on a scandal of epic proportions involving fake news ginned up by climate “scientists.” Dr. John Bates, who until the end of 2016 was one of NOAA’s top scientists, told the story to the Daily Mail:
The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.
A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.
But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.
NOAA violated its own rules by publishing the report without subjecting it to required verification procedures–procedures that were designed by Dr. Bates himself.
His vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact’ of what became known as the Pausebuster paper.
Of all the “fake news” stories that emerged in the last two years, this is undoubtedly the most important. More:
NOAA’s 2015 ‘Pausebuster’ paper was based on two new temperature sets of data – one containing measurements of temperatures at the planet’s surface on land, the other at the surface of the seas.
Both datasets were flawed. This newspaper has learnt that NOAA has now decided that the sea dataset will have to be replaced and substantially revised just 18 months after it was issued, because it used unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming. The revised data will show both lower temperatures and a slower rate in the recent warming trend.
The land temperature dataset used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software that rendered its findings ‘unstable’.
This is just one of the tricks the NOAA “scientists” employed to exaggerate warming:
The sea dataset used by Thomas Karl and his colleagues – known as Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperatures version 4, or ERSSTv4, tripled the warming trend over the sea during the years 2000 to 2014 from just 0.036C per decade – as stated in version 3 – to 0.099C per decade. Individual measurements in some parts of the globe had increased by about 0.1C and this resulted in the dramatic increase of the overall global trend published by the Pausebuster paper. But Dr Bates said this increase in temperatures was achieved by dubious means. Its key error was an upwards ‘adjustment’ of readings from fixed and floating buoys, which are generally reliable, to bring them into line with readings from a much more doubtful source – water taken in by ships. This, Dr Bates explained, has long been known to be questionable: ships are themselves sources of heat, readings will vary from ship to ship, and the depth of water intake will vary according to how heavily a ship is laden – so affecting temperature readings.
Dr Bates said: ‘They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did – so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.’
The Earth’s surface temperature record has been so hopelessly corrupted by “adjustments” made for political purposes by NOAA and other agencies that it likely can never be accurately reconstructed. This is a great loss to science. The Mail story suggests that evidence may have been destroyed to cover the tracks of NOAA’s activists:
Then came the final bombshell. Dr Bates said: ‘I learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure.’
The reason for the failure is unknown, but it means the Pausebuster paper can never be replicated or verified by other scientists.
Sounds like they borrowed the computer from the IRS.
NOAA is a rogue, politicized agency, like so many others. It has defied a Congressional committee’s subpoena, and apparently lied to the committee:
NOAA not only failed, but it effectively mounted a cover-up when challenged over its data. After the paper was published, the US House of Representatives Science Committee launched an inquiry into its Pausebuster claims. NOAA refused to comply with subpoenas demanding internal emails from the committee chairman, the Texas Republican Lamar Smith, and falsely claimed that no one had raised concerns about the paper internally.
Heads need to roll. Donald Trump has his work cut out for him, to put it mildly.
You’re Fired!
January 31, 2017You’re Fired! Front Page Magazine, Matthew Vadum, January 31, 2017
(Please see also Trump Fires Acting Attorney General. There Prof. Turley explains why President Trump was right to fire the acting Attorney General.
Trump clearly has the right to fire Yates. Indeed, Yates’ action (and rationale) contradicts long-standing Justice Department policies on such issues.
— DM)
President Trump last night fired the insubordinate acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she ordered federal prosecutors to ignore Trump’s lawful emergency executive order restricting travel and immigration from Islamic terrorist-infested nations.
The Yates termination may foreshadow a major house-cleaning at the U.S. Department of Justice. That agency is overrun by left-wing careerists who have no respect for the rule of law and who operate under the legally and morally grotesque assumption that aliens, including suspected terrorists, ought to enjoy all the same rights as U.S. citizens.
Yates “has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States,” Trump said in a press release. “This order was approved as to form and legality by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.”
He called Yates “an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”
“It is time to get serious about protecting our country,” Trump continued. “Calling for tougher vetting for individuals travelling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.”
Last night President Trump also relieved acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Daniel Ragsdale of his duties. No reason for the decision had been reported at press time. The new acting ICE director is Thomas D. Homan who has been executive associate director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) since 2013.
When the U.S. Senate was considering Yates’s nomination for deputy attorney general in 2015, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), whose nomination as attorney general is pending in the Senate, made his opposition known. According to Politico, Sessions “urged his colleagues to defeat Yates” objecting “to what he said was her involvement in defending the federal government against a lawsuit 26 states have filed challenging unilateral actions Obama took in November to grant millions of illegal immigrants quasi-legal status and work permits.” Sessions described the Obama actions as “presidential overreach.”
Hours before Trump ended Yates’s employment, Yates took the extraordinary step of directing Justice Department attorneys to refuse to defend Trump’s executive order in court.
“I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right,” she wrote in a letter to lawyers at the Department of Justice. “At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful.”
“Consequently, for as long as I am the acting attorney general, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the executive order, unless and until I become convinced that it is appropriate to do so,” she wrote.
Yates’s tenure as acting attorney general ended around dinnertime last night. Around 9 p.m. the president replaced her with Dana Boente, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Boente will serve in the post “until Senator Jeff Sessions is finally confirmed by the Senate, where he is being wrongly held up by Democrat senators for strictly political reasons,” Trump said.
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz described Yates as “a terrific public servant” who “made a serious mistake here.”
“This is holdover heroism,” he said. “It’s so easy to be a heroine when you’re not appointed by this president and when you’re on the other side.”
Reaction on Twitter was predictably ridiculous.
Unsurprisingly, the nearly-impeached former Attorney General Eric Holder expressed support for Yates.
Holder tweeted last night, “Sally Yates: person of integrity/attorney with great legal skill. Has served this nation with distinction. Her judgment should be trusted.”
Leftist column writer and Obama idolator E.J. Dionne tweeted, “Monday Night Massacre: Trump fires Sally Yates, Acting AG who refused to defend his indefensible #MuslimBan. History will remember her well.”
Football player Rob Carpenter tweeted, “AG upholds the law. Dictator wanna be says you don’t agree with me. You’re fired.”
Actor Jason Alexander tweeted, “King Trump fired the Attorney General. So law and constitution, which he sworn on a bible to protect now clearly mean nothing. Like truth.”
Yates may have a lucrative career ahead of her on the public speaking circuit. Maybe MSNBC will give her a talk show. The Left takes care of its own.
All of this drama flows from the executive order President Trump signed Friday that suspends travel from Muslim terrorism-plagued countries.
The executive order blocks visas for 90 days for “immigrants and non-immigrants” from the terrorism-producing Muslim-majority countries of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen.
The order also prevents refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days, indefinitely halts the entry of Syrian refugees, and adjusts downward the cap on refugee admission into the U.S. to 50,000 during the current federal fiscal year which ends Sept. 30, 2017.
The presidential directive also requires the government to keep Americans informed about terrorism-related activities and crimes committed by foreign nationals in the U.S. and to report on the individuals’ immigration status.
Critics have mischaracterized the executive order as a Muslim immigration and travel ban. It is an odd critique given that the three countries with the largest Muslim populations –Indonesia, Pakistan, and India– aren’t included in the order.
Groups funded by radical financier George Soros are behind a lawsuit challenging the order.
On Saturday evening Obama-appointed Judge Ann M. Donnelly of the Eastern District of New York blocked part of the executive order and prevented the Trump administration from deporting arrivals detained in airports across the nation. The restraining order preserves the status quo for those who arrived in the country shortly after the executive order was signed if they have visas or lawful permanent resident status.
Before Donnelly’s narrowly drawn restraining order was issued Saturday evening, near-riots broke out as leftist freak shows descended on airports across America. Demonstrators were horrified that some individuals were actually being detained at ports-of-entry as required by the president’s 100 percent legal and constitutional executive order. The left-wing hissy-fit consisted of radicals trespassing and endangering airport security by staging disruptive in-your-face protests at airports around the country.
The HAMAS-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is playing a major role in the protests against the executive order, Lee Stranahan reports at Breitbart. The group has been organizing demonstrations and promoting opposition to the order on social media. The United Arab Emirates has declared CAIR a terrorist organization.
To no one’s surprise, former President Barack Obama praised the airport protesters, saying through a spokesman he was “heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country.”
“Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by the elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake,” the spokesman said Monday.
Obama intends to conduct his own shadow presidency and attack the Trump administration for years to come. The former president has rented a fancy house on Embassy Row in the nation’s capital that is expected to serve as his anti-Trump administration war room.
Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D) tweeted Saturday night, “I stand with the people gathered across the country tonight defending our values & our Constitution. This is not who we are.”
Meanwhile, although left-wing law professor Jonathan Turley said he disagrees on policy grounds with Trump’s executive order he argues it is nonetheless legally bulletproof.
“The law does favor President Trump in this regard,” Turley said Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” show. “I don’t like this order. I think it’s a terrible mistake — but that doesn’t go into the legal analysis. The Court has been extremely deferential to presidents on the border.”
The courts won’t buy the left-wing talking point that the order constitutes a ban on Muslim travel and immigration, Turley explained.
“I do not believe a federal court will view this as a Muslim ban,” he said.
I don’t think the court can. Regardless of what the court may think of President Trump’s motivations, the fact that other Muslim countries are not included is going to move that off the table and what’s going to be left is whether the president has this type of authority. Historically, courts have said that he does.
Americans who want their country back after eight years of Obama-created lawlessness don’t need to get upset at the chaos left-wingers are trying to generate to undermine President Trump.
In this case the law is on their side.
Honeymoon’s over: Ex-Obama official Susan Rice calls Trump NSC reshuffling ‘stone cold crazy’
January 29, 2017Honeymoon’s over: Ex-Obama official Susan Rice calls Trump NSC reshuffling ‘stone cold crazy’, Washington Times, Valerie Richardson, January 29, 2017
National Security Adviser Susan Rice during the daily press briefing in Washington on July 22, 2015. (Associated Press) **FILE**
She also retweeted a message from “Juan, P.E.” that said, “Trump loves the military so much he just kicked them out of the National Security Council and put a Nazi in their place.”
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It didn’t take long for the old administration to attack the new administration.
Former national security advisor Susan Rice ignited a feud Sunday with the Trump White House by ripping the recent reshuffling of the National Security Council as “stone cold crazy.”
White House spokesman Sean Spicer fired back by calling Ms. Rice’s comments “clearly inappropriate language from a former ambassador” and took a swipe at the Obama administration’s track record on national security.
“And when you talk about the missteps made by the last administration, with all due respect, I think Ambassador Rice might want to wait and see how we handle this,” Mr. Spicer said on ABC-TV’s “This Week.”
The back-and-forth came in response to Saturday’s memo placing White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, the former editor of Breitbart News, on the National Security Council while removing the director of national intelligence and the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff from NSC principals meetings.
“This is stone cold crazy. After a week of crazy,” Ms. Rice said on Twitter. “Who needs military advice or intell to make policy on ISIL, Syria, Afghanistan, DPRK?”
She also retweeted a message from “Juan, P.E.” that said, “Trump loves the military so much he just kicked them out of the National Security Council and put a Nazi in their place.”
Mr. Spicer said reworking the meetings represents an effort to “streamline the process for the president to make decisions on key, important intelligence matters,” insisting that Mr. Trump will receive guidance regularly from top military and intelligence officials in other venues.
“The president gets plenty of information from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He continues to meet with him on a regular basis,” Mr. Spicer said. “He gets briefed by the secretary of defense, but what they have done is modernize the National Security Council so that it is less bureaucratic and more focused on providing the president with the intelligence he needs.”
This wasn’t Ms. Rice’s first attack the Trump administration. Ms. Rice, who served under President Barack Obama for the entirety of his two terms, including four years as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., spent the first week of Mr. Trump’s presidency leveling critiques on Twitter.
“Trashing Trans Pacific Partnership is a big fat gift to China, a blow to key allies, and a huge loss for American global leadership. So sad!” Ms. Rice said in a Monday tweet.
On Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mexico, she said, “Messing with Mexico is stupid and dangerous. Mexico has been key to limiting the flow of Central American migrants to the U.S.”
A few days later, she hit the Trump administration for issuing a Holocaust Memorial Day message that referred to “innocent people” without specifically mentioning Jews, saying, “Just imagine the response if Pres. Obama did that!”
That Ms. Rice would target the Trump White House so quickly represents something of a departure from the traditionally hands-off approach of previous administrations. President George W. Bush was widely praised for refusing to criticize Mr. Obama after he took office.
One week into his successor’s term, Mr. Obama has stayed above the fray, but others close to the former president have felt no such compunction.
His 18-year-old daughter Malia was spotted last week at an anti-Dakota Access pipeline protest during the Sundance Film Festival after Mr. Trump signed a directive to expedite the review process.
Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder has been hired by the Democrat-controlled California state legislature to serve as a bulwark against the Trump administration’s policies on issues such as climate change and immigration.
Ms. Rice’s combative stance drew pushback on social media. Not surprisingly, criticism has centered on her five Sunday talk-show appearances blaming the deadly 2012 Benghazi raid on a “hateful” anti-Islam YouTube video.
“Don’t you have some YouTube video you should be basing foreign policy on, has-been?” actor Nick Searcy, who appears in FX’s “Justified,” said in a tweet.
Others have cheered her on. “@AmbassadorRice Please stay active, don’t retreat into prudence and retirement,” said Jorge Guajardo, former Mexican ambassador to China.
Ms. Rice said she also was outraged that Vice President Mike Pence may chair NSC meetings instead of the president. “Never happened w/Obama,” she said.
Before the inauguration, Ms. Rice struck a more cooperative note, insisting she was “rooting hard” for incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
“While it’s no secret that this administration has profound disagreements with the next one, I intend to make myself available to him, just as my predecessors have for me,” Ms. Rice said in a Jan. 10 speech to the U.S. Institute for Peace. “We are all patriots first and foremost. Threats to our security and democracy should be above partisanship.”
Regarding Mr. Bannon’s role on the council, Mr. Spicer said the chief strategist is a former naval officer who has a “tremendous understanding of the world and the geopolitical landscape that we have now.”
“Having the chief strategist for the president in those meetings who has a significant military background to help guide what the president’s final analysis is going to be is crucial,” Mr. Spicer said.
Feds Blame “Lapse in Vetting” for Admitting Syrian Refugees with Terrorist Ties into U.S.
January 26, 2017Feds Blame “Lapse in Vetting” for Admitting Syrian Refugees with Terrorist Ties into U.S., Judicial Watch, January 26, 2017
Circling back to Syrian refugees, as Obama let thousands settle in the U.S. his own intelligence and immigration officials admitted that individuals with ties to terrorist groups used the program to try to infiltrate the country and that there is no way to properly screen them.
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Dozens of Syrian refugees already living in the Unites States may have ties to terrorism and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is downplaying it, claiming federal agents missed “possible derogatory information” about the immigrants due to “a lapse in vetting.” Among those who slipped through the cracks is a man who failed a polygraph test after applying to work at a U.S. military installation and another who communicated with an Islamic State leader.
Information about this scandalous security lapse comes from federal agents with firsthand knowledge of the situation. They spoke to a mainstream newspaper on condition of anonymity, as many Judicial Watch sources who expose delicate information do, out of fear. This is the type of case the government works hard to keep quiet and consequences could be serious for those who blow the whistle. The news article reveals that federal agents are now “reinvestigating the backgrounds” of the dozens of Syrian refugees because somehow DHS discovered that the lapse in vetting allowed refugees with “potentially negative information in their files to enter the country.” The newspaper attributes the information to “U.S law enforcement officials” who were not authorized to discuss the matter.
Coincidentally, on the day this story broke a national newswire service reported that President Donald Trump drafted an executive order to stop accepting Syrian refugees. The president also plans to suspend issuing visas for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Under President Barrack Obama’s lax immigration policies, large numbers of terrorists from some of these nations entered the U.S., including members of ISIS and other radical Islamic groups. They include individuals who have engaged in or attempted to engage in acts of terrorism, conspired or attempted to conspire to provide material support to a terrorist organization or engaged in criminal conduct inspired by terrorist ideology. Some have been convicted and sentenced in American courts.
Additionally, the Obama administration was very generous in granting citizens of Muslim nations special amnesty protections and residency benefits in the U.S. During a five-year period, Obama’s DHS issued around 680,000 green cards to foreigners from Muslim countries, according to the agency’s figures. Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Libya were among the nations. In 2015 Judicial Watch reported on a special “humanitarian” amnesty program offered to illegal aliens from Yemen, an Islamic Middle Eastern country well known as an Al Qaeda breeding ground. Yemen is the headquarters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the State Department has revealed that AQAP militants carried out hundreds of attacks including suicide bombers, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), ambushes, kidnappings and targeted assassinations.
Circling back to Syrian refugees, as Obama let thousands settle in the U.S. his own intelligence and immigration officials admitted that individuals with ties to terrorist groups used the program to try to infiltrate the country and that there is no way to properly screen them. In 2015 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) confirmed that individuals with ties to terrorist groups in Syria tried to gain entry to the U.S. through the refugee program and that the program is “vulnerable to exploitation from extremist groups seeking to send operatives to the West.” Before that the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Matthew Emrich, admitted during a congressional hearing that there’s no way to adequately screen Syrian refugees because the Syrian government doesn’t have an intelligence database to run checks against. Additionally, FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach conceded that the U.S. government has no system to properly screen Syrian refugees.
Lies and Hypocrisy over Aleppo
December 21, 2016Lies and Hypocrisy over Aleppo, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, December 21, 2016
There are no good guys in an Islamic civil war. Both sides operate by Mohammed’s ancient Islamic rules that treat the property and women of conquered populations as the rightful loot of the attackers. The atrocities of Shiites and Sunnis, Iranians and Alawites, ISIS, Al-Nusra and the countless Sunni bands are not aberrations from civilized norms, they are the entire horrid purpose of this Islamic conflict.
There are no innocent victims in an Islamic civil war because neither side believes in anything except demonstrating the Allahu Akbaring supremacy of their religious doctrine by subjugating the other.
Aleppo was once a great center of civilization. Under Islam, it became a sad remnant of its former past. Whoever wins in Aleppo, it is a victory for Islamist triumphalism and a defeat for human civilization.
The bigger question is not who wins in Aleppo, but who will win in Paris, Brussels and Rome.
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250,000 Christians lived in Aleppo before the Sunni-Shiite Islamic civil war began. Today their numbers have fallen to 40,000.
There were no worldwide protests over this ethnic cleansing of Christians from Aleppo as there are over the fall of the Sunni Islamic state whose Jihadis are euphemistically described as rebels. There were no photos of crying Christian children blanketing every media outlet. But today you can hardly open a newspaper without seeing a teary Sunni Muslim kid allegedly being evacuated from Aleppo.
Given a chance, the weeping Sunni Muslims did to their Christian neighbors in Aleppo what they had done to them back during the Aleppo Massacre a hundred years ago when they were upset that the decline of Islamic Sharia power led to Christians gaining some civil rights. The Jewish population of Aleppo, which had once made up 5% of the city, had already been wiped out in the 1947 Muslim riots.
The last Jewish family was evacuated from Aleppo to escape the Sunni Jihadis two years ago.
The destruction of the Jewish and Christian communities of Aleppo happened without a fraction of the hysterical tumult over the defeat of the Sunni Jihadis and their fellow Muslim religious dependents.
“Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later,” Samantha Power declared at the United Nations.
Why doesn’t the ethnic cleansing of 210,000 Christians stain Power’s conscience? Or the church bombings by Islamists in Egypt, the stabbings of Jewish women in Israel and the Boko Haram genocide of Christians in Nigeria? True modern evil is the righteous conviction of liberals that only Muslim lives matter and that their Christian, Jewish and other non-Muslim victims somehow have it coming.
The fall of the Sunni theocracy is denounced as an outrage that will stain the conscience of the world. Journalists have taken a break from their ski vacations to lecture us on how we should have done something. That “something” being the thing they didn’t want us to do in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had butchered hundreds of thousands, but that is somehow now a moral imperative in Syria.
Why do the Sunni Muslims of Aleppo matter while the ethnically cleansed Christians of Aleppo don’t? And why was removing Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, a crime that liberals still howl about while removing Assad, an Alawite Shiite, is a moral imperative? Because the “righteousness” axis of our foreign policy is controlled by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Saudis and the rest of their Sunni Gulfie ilk.
The Muslim Brotherhood set our agenda for the Arab Spring. It’s why our government and our human rights organization backed the popular overthrow of Mubarak, but fought the popular overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi. Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, an organization which despite its name has solicited money from the Saudis, the sugar daddies of the Sunni Jihad, sneers at Copts for supporting the “persecution” of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s not just Orwellian. It’s evil.
The outrage over Aleppo is a surreal partnership between Islamist butchers and their left-wing enablers.
“Are you truly incapable of shame?” Samantha Power demanded of Syria, Russia and Iran at the UN.
It goes without saying that three brutal dictatorships whose crimes run the gamut from raping teenage girls so that they won’t die as virgins and be allowed into Islamic paradise to radioactive poisonings of its political opponents have nothing that resembles shame or conscience.
But where is Samantha Power’s shame? The Iranian advance in Aleppo is funded by illegal cash shipments that Obama put on unmarked cargo planes and delivered to Iran’s Shiite Jihadists. Iran’s military budget increased 39% thanks to Obama’s cargo pallets full of Swiss Francs and Euros.
The barrel bombs that Power so angrily condemns were bought and paid for by her own boss. They were enabled by every American liberal who switched from defending the proposed Iranian nuclear genocide of millions of Jews to bewailing the Iranian attack on the Muslim Brotherhood in Aleppo.
Where is their shame? Is the American leftist even capable of shame anymore?
Obama’s inaction in Syria wasn’t caused by any philosophical struggle over the limits of intervention, as his media lackeys would have us to believe. The truth is uglier, simpler and more outrageous.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to back the Sunni or Shiite Islamists. Russia, which went all in on the Shiites, won. Obama tried to play both Islamist sides, funneling arms to the Sunni Jihadists in Syria and cash pallets to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He backed the Shiite regime in Baghdad over the Sunnis in Iraq. But he aided the Sunni Jihadis in Syria over the Shiite government in Damascus. Yet he was afraid to go all in for fear of trashing the Iran nuke sellout that even he admits will create a Shiite bomb in a little over a decade.
All the noise over Aleppo doesn’t testify to an atrocity, but to the enormous power of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi lobby to control not only our politicians, but our national narratives.
There is no doubt that the Shiite Jihadist gangs will extract their blood price from Sunnis in Aleppo, that money and gems will disappear, women will be raped and bodies will wind up in mass graves. But the death toll will fall far short of the hysterical rhetoric about Rwanda. And what will happen to Sunnis in Aleppo is the same thing that happened to Shiites when Sunni Jihadists seized a town or village.
There are no good guys in an Islamic civil war. Both sides operate by Mohammed’s ancient Islamic rules that treat the property and women of conquered populations as the rightful loot of the attackers. The atrocities of Shiites and Sunnis, Iranians and Alawites, ISIS, Al-Nusra and the countless Sunni bands are not aberrations from civilized norms, they are the entire horrid purpose of this Islamic conflict.
There are no innocent victims in an Islamic civil war because neither side believes in anything except demonstrating the Allahu Akbaring supremacy of their religious doctrine by subjugating the other.
Beheading captives, raping their wives and looting their belongings was how Islamic Jihadis, dating back to Mohammed, knew that Allah was on their side and favored their murderous cause.
The Jewish population of the Middle East now exists almost entirely in Israel, protected by guns wielded, as often as not, by the descendants of Jewish refugees from Islamic oppression in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Iran. The Christian population, lacking an independent state of its own, continues to dwindle, dependent on the shaky goodwill of dictators like Mubarak or Assad who find them temporarily useful.
There is no future for non-Muslims in the Muslim world. Christians and Jews in the Middle East first achieved civil rights when European powers gained sway over the region. As Muslim migrants swarm into Europe, Jews and Christians now face Muslim persecution in France, Sweden and Germany.
But the media is far less interested in the tears on the face of 8-year-old Miriam Monsonego in Toulouse when a Muslim terrorist grabbed her by the hair, put a gun to her head in the schoolyard where she had been playing moments ago and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. He switched guns and shot her. Then, as she lay bleeding, he lifted up her little head and shot the dying Jewish girl two more times.
Muslims in France consider the Muslim terrorist who did this a hero. A child was even named after him.
The Sunni Muslim Jihadis fleeing Aleppo like rats are the same breed of Allah’s killers as the murderer of a little girl in Toulouse, as the hijackers of September 11, as the San Bernardino shooters, the Boston Marathon bombers, the Benghazi militias, the rapists of Yazidi girls and the bombers of Coptic churches.
They are human predators that have nothing that resembles a conscience as we understand it. Their religious doctrine has taught them that preying on non-Muslims and the wrong kind of Muslims is their duty. They believe that their rapes and murders are proof that they love Allah and Allah loves them.
It is as impossible for us to coexist with Islamic supremacists as it was for the Christians and Jews of Aleppo. You can share a room with a tiger, but eventually the tiger will try to eat you.
Aleppo is a tragedy, but not because of the hypocritical theater of lies that the media has put on for us. The tragedy of Aleppo isn’t that of the Sunni Jihadis who failed to conquer the city and complete their ethnic cleansing of the last Christians living there, but of the endless war of Islam against non-Muslims.
And of the collaboration of those who call themselves liberals in that war against human civilization.
Aleppo was once a great center of civilization. Under Islam, it became a sad remnant of its former past. Whoever wins in Aleppo, it is a victory for Islamist triumphalism and a defeat for human civilization.
The bigger question is not who wins in Aleppo, but who will win in Paris, Brussels and Rome.
Remember when the Russians Hacked the White House’s Computers?
December 12, 2016Remember when the Russians Hacked the White House’s Computers? Power Line,
Now, the same news outlets that refused to cover the Russian government’s hacking into White House and State Department computers and email systems try to tell us that an intrusion into Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s and John Podesta’s email accounts by someone–allegedly the same Russian government–is a story of world-historical importance. What a load of bulls–t.
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You probably don’t. We broke the story on Power Line in October 2014, writing about it here, here, here, here, here and here. The White House’s computers were down for weeks because of the intrusion by a “foreign power,” which the administration finally identified as Russia. It wasn’t just the White House, either; it was the entire Executive Office of the President, which comprises a good chunk of the executive branch. Nor was that all: the State Department’s computer system was hacked, too.
While we pounded away at the story, the White House refused to respond to our inquiries. The Washington press corps, which must have known that the White House’s computers were out of action, maintained a discreet silence, declining to write about the Russian hack, even though many D.C. reporters no doubt followed the story on Power Line. Why the coy silence? Because it was October 2014, weeks before the midterm elections, and the story reflected poorly on the Obama administration, which didn’t even discover the intrusion itself. It turned out that American officials were alerted to the Russian hack of the White House and State Department by an unidentified ally (I’m guessing Israel).
Only when the election was safely over did news outlets like CNN report the story (“How the U.S. thinks Russians hacked the White House”). Throughout, the Obama administration minimized the story, claiming that no harm was done and only unclassified material was accessed–an excuse that, as CNN wrote post-election, “belies the seriousness of the intrusion.”
Now, the same news outlets that refused to cover the Russian government’s hacking into White House and State Department computers and email systems try to tell us that an intrusion into Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s and John Podesta’s email accounts by someone–allegedly the same Russian government–is a story of world-historical importance. What a load of bulls–t.
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