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The World Is Paying A Deadly Price For Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy


BY: DAVID HARSANYI | APRIL 16, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/16/the-world-is-paying-a-deadly-price-for-barack-obamas-foreign-policy-legacy/

Joe Biden and Barack Obama

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If a belligerent state launched 186 explosive drones, 36 cruise missiles, and 110 surface-to-surface missiles from three fronts against civilian targets within the United States, would Joe Biden call it a “win”? Would the president tell us that the best thing we can do now is show “restraint”? What if that same terror state’s proxy armies had recently helped murder, rape, and kidnap more than 1,000 American men, women, and children? What if this terror state were trying to obtain nuclear weapons so it could continue to agitate without any consequences?

This is what Joe Biden and the Barack Obama acolytes, Iranian dupes, and Israel antagonists he’s surrounded himself with demand of Jewish State. And by “Iranian dupes,” I don’t only mean the Jake Sullivans and Antony Blinkens of the world, who worked to elevate the mullahs over Sunni allies and the Israelis, or even a Hamas-bestie like Rob Malley or Israel-hater like Maher Bitar. I mean assets of the Islamic State who promised the Iranian government to help out in any way possible.

Their worldview is a cancer that’s metastasized within the Democratic Party. To these people, Israel will always be the villain. And if the Iranian regime’s murder of more than 600 American servicemen couldn’t cool that bromance, 1,300 dead Jews certainly aren’t going to do the trick.

To begin with, Jared Kushner’s Middle East policy efforts were, by every measure, more successful than not only Obama’s efforts but the decades of Brookings Institute-endorsed failures the region has endured. The Trump administration undercut Palestinian terror efforts, stifled Iranian ambitions, and created space for the Gulf States and Israel to enhance ties.

Biden immediately reversed those gains, reverting to Obama-era Iranian boosterism. We’re now experiencing the consequences of pacifying Islamic ideologues. Obama might have sent the mullahs pallets of cash in the middle of the night, but the Biden administration openly subsidized the Revolutionary Guard with a $6 billion ransom payment, at least $25 billion in sanction relief, including $10 billion via a waiver, and so on.

Let’s also remember that one of Biden’s first foreign policy decisions was to overturn Trump-era policy by releasing millions to Gaza that would be sifted off by Hamas, releasing funding to Hamas-allied UNRWA, and removing the Iranian-backed Houthis from the terror list.

But to truly comprehend how demented our foreign policy has become, consider this: Iran reportedly informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, and the U.S. told Iran through Ankara that the attack should be “within certain limits.” This is a longtime ally of the United States we’re talking about — and a foe that’s murdered and kidnapped Americans for decades.

It should be mind-boggling that Biden likely knew Iran was moving forward with its attack but still gave his goofy and impotent “don’t” when asked about it by the press.

Indeed, the Biden administration’s position seems to be that Israeli military and defense forces exist to allow Iran to have a hissy fit and save face. The Iranian attack is only “symbolic” because it failed. According to officials, the attack, indiscriminately aimed at civilian centers, was designed to cause “mass casualties.”

Just because you shoot at someone, and miss doesn’t mean you’re not trying to kill them. Yes, the Iranians were embarrassed. But they almost surely view this as a win. And they also crossed a red line by firing on Israel from their own territory. Yet Israel is apparently the only nation on Earth that is permitted to fully defend itself only if its enemies succeed.

Then again, virtually every conflict against Israel unfurls the same way: Its enemies threaten or attack the country. Israel responds and heads for a victory. Only then does the world demand “restraint.” Finally, the antagonists demand Israel rewind history to a more convenient spot. (Modern Democrats demand that Israel show restraint before it even has a chance to respond. That’s a new twist.)

Those, for instance, who contend that Israel started the conflict when it hit a “diplomatic mission” in Syria last week are engaged in restarting the historical clock when it suits them. There are no Iranian diplomatic missions in Syria. There are buildings where IRGC terror leaders coordinate attacks on civilians — against Arabs as well as Jews. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the “general” Israel killed last week, helped plan the barbarism of Oct 7.

Recall that the United States atomized Qasem Soleimani at a neutral nation’s airport. Though, of course, Obamaites protested that killing as well.

Now, it is something of a cliché to contend that Israel must be right 100 percent of the time while its enemies only need to be right once. It also happens to be true. The lo-fi Hamas attack last year was a devastating failure for the Jewish state and its leadership. Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with a dense population area, relies on deterrence and preemption.

Democrats blamed their strawman, Benjamin Netanyahu, not Hamas or Iran, for trying to “drag” the world into war. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, perhaps the wrongest person ever to tread on this planet, theorized that the prime minister wanted “a war to shore up his own crumbling political base.”

Meanwhile, Axois reports that Netanyahu was reluctant to strike back while his cabinet wanted to move immediately. Anyone who’s paid five minutes of attention to Israeli politics knows that Netanyahu is frustratingly cautious. The “war hawk” perception of him is a myth, created by the left because of the prime minister’s open opposition to Obama’s mullah bootlicking.

We have no idea what Israel will do. Maybe caution is the best policy. The notion that the Jewish state simply lashes out in revenge and doesn’t rationally consider all its options is preposterous. Whatever happens, it should be Israel’s terms, not Iran’s.

Despite what Obama’s retreads demand.


David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

To Distract from GOP’s Biden Family Business Investigation, Media Dredge Up More ‘But Trump’ Excuses


BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/14/to-distract-from-gops-biden-family-business-investigation-media-dredge-up-more-but-trump-excuses/

Joe Biden speaking behind podium
Corporate media are trying to distract from the Biden family scandals by conflating that corruption with the Trump family’s conduct.

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One of House Republicans’ first steps after regaining the majority was to launch an investigation into President Joe Biden’s role in the Biden family’s lucrative pay-to-play business. Corporate media, however, are trying to distract from the first family’s scandals by conflating them with the conduct of the Trump family.

The Washington Post published an article last week, during the height of buzz about the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation, pointing the corruption finger at former President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

“An investment fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is backing ventures that profit the former president and his senior adviser, raising questions of conflict,” the article alleges.

Within days of the report’s publication, corporate media outlets such as CNNMSNBC, and even Rolling Stone featured anti-Trump information on their pages and networks. The point of amplifying the report is twofold. First, it gives the media and their Democrat allies more ammo against Trump’s third presidential run. The Washington Post is clear about that:

Now, with Trump running for president again, some national security experts and two former White House officials say they have concerns that Trump and Kushner used their offices to set themselves up to profit from their relationship with the Saudis after the administration ended.

Second, reports about the Trumps give anyone looking to escape conversations about the Biden family’s well-documented history of enriching their bank accounts with funds from foreign oligarchs an excuse to pivot to their favorite scapegoat.

Already, leftist commentators are claiming the Biden family “deserves grace,” while the Trumps deserve investigation. Despite countless real reports and ongoing federal investigations into the Biden family’s affairs, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan even bizarrely asserted there is “no real evidence” that the Biden family business leveraged Joe Biden’s status for personal profit.

The Political Enemy Playbook

Even before Trump’s White House tenure, the corporate media did everything in their power to make him look like a corrupt politician who was sold out to foreign governments. When they weren’t amplifying the Russia hoax, a fake scandal created and paid for by Democrats, the propaganda press scrutinized Trump’s tweets, twisted his words, and tried to undermine his presidency with lies that won Pulitzers.

They also aided Democrats in orchestrating two sham impeachments against Trump, whom they claimed was guilty of treason. These political attacks were sustained with plenty of negative press coverage of Trump’s sons, daughters, and son-in-law.

Where was the media’s outrage about White House familial corruption when Hunter exploited his father’s political reputation to strike business deals with oligarchs in Ukraine and China and then likely gave a cut to his dad? Joe Biden and his youngest son are the epitomal of the scandal and corruption Democrats and the corrupt corporate media desperately want Trump and his family to be.

There are literal receipts of the Biden family conducting shady business dealings overseas and profiting from relationships with sworn enemies, yet publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times worked overtime to downplay and mischaracterize the findings to save the Biden patriarch from criticism and losing the 2020 election.

They didn’t want the public to know that when Biden was vice president and overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine relations, Hunter received a whopping $50,000 per month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company he had no qualifications to be on. They didn’t want the public to hear that Hunter also raked in millions from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, and they certainly didn’t want Americans to discover that just two weeks after he traveled to communist China on his dad’s Air Force Two jet, Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.

Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.

Why COBALT? It’s one of the primary components of EV batteries.

No, for the media, there was no politically advantageous reason to expose that “an arm of the Chinese government” funneled money directly to a company managed by Hunter to compensate him for offering legal representation to the vice-chairman and secretary-general of Chinese energy company CEFC, Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping, the “spy chief of China.” And there was certainly no good reason for them to communicate that Ho, who was arrested, charged, and later convicted for using millions of dollars to “bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC,” made a phone call to James Biden, Joe’s brother.

Instead of covering bombshell stories about the questionable actions of a tight-knit family whose patriarch is in charge of the U.S. government, the propaganda press is still hyper-fixated on the Trumps.

When they aren’t going after the former first family, the media are amplifying the current president’s excuses and shilling for his son, who admitted through his lawyers that the infamous laptop exposing the Biden family’s foreign dealings was his. This investigation, they have claimed over and over and over and over and over, is a politically motivated one. But it’s not.

It’s About Joe, Stupid

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has repeatedly declared Republican investigators are interested in Joe Biden’s “knowledge of and role in his family’s foreign business deals to assess whether he has compromised national security,” not Hunter.

Evidence obtained in our investigation reveals the Biden family business model is built on Joe Biden’s political career and connections. Biden family members attempted to sell access around the world, including individuals who were connected to the Chinese Communist Party, to enrich themselves to the detriment of American interests,” Comer said in a statement last week. “If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision making, this is a threat to national security.

Despite the corporate media’s attempts to distract from, stifle, and smear Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family business by going after Trump again, the GOP can’t give up. Unlike when Democrats rallied their partisan network to falsely paint Trump as a Russian asset, this legitimate and evidence-based investigation is essential to determining whether U.S. national security is compromised from top to bottom because of Biden.


Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Morocco Will Normalize Relations With Israel, Trump Administration Announces


Reported by CHRISTIAN DATOC, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT | December 10, 202011:51 AM ET

Read more at https://dailycaller.com/2020/12/10/morocco-relations-israel-trump-administration-middle-east-peace-abraham-accords/

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Kingdom of Morocco has agreed to normalize relations with Israel, making it the latest in a string of majority-Muslim countries to do so.

“Another HISTORIC breakthrough today!” the president tweeted. “Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco have agreed to full diplomatic relations – a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!” (RELATED: Trump Removes Sudan From Terror Sponsor Blacklist, Prompting African Country To Normalize Relations With Israel)

 

 

Senior advisor to the president Jared Kushner told reporters shortly after the president’s announcement that Morocco — like other signatories onto the Abraham Accords — will immediately open liaison offices in Israel, start scheduling direct flights from the country to Israel, and foster “cooperation” between companies in both nations. He confirmed that in addition to Morocco’s decision to normalize relations, Trump had also signed a proclamation recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara.

“This comes on four years of very, very hard work and diplomacy,” Kushner stated. “We have peace sprouting in the Middle East.”

Kushner called the announcement a “part of the president’s efforts to bring peace and prosperity to the world,” and stated that other countries in the region “want to keep this progress going.” He claimed that the more majority-Muslim countries begin to interact with Israel, the less Islamic terror groups will be able to justify their actions.

Trump has touted the Israel “peace deals” as some of his administration’s greatest accomplishments. Prior to the Morocco announcement, the Trump administration had helped foster normalization negotiations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Somalia.

This is a developing story and will be updated with new information as it becomes available.

Columbia Law Professor Explains why Donald Trump Jr. did Nothing Wrong


Reported By Onan Coca | July 14, 2017

MSNBC had an interesting conversation this morning with Columbia University Law Professor Richard Briffault who told the hosts and their viewers that basically everything that Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner have been accused of is wrong. Legally, technically, wrong.

As Briffault expertly, and concisely, explains neither man is guilty of “treason,” “perjury,” giving “false statements,” or “colluding” with Russia. Based on all of the “evidence” gathered, the worst that can be said is that Jared Kushner might have lied or he might just be forgetful and Donald Trump Jr. showed bad judgment.

The MSNBC hosts were visibly saddened.

RICHARD BRIFFAULT, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL: Treason is a little extreme for this, I mean it is not clear — [Russia] may not be our friend, but it is not clear they are our enemy. We are not at war. It is not clear this violates — it is against the U.S. government. So I am not up to treason yet.

STEPHANIE RUHLE, MSNBC: So take ‘T’ off the table. What about the ‘P’? Perjury definition: ‘A person under oath states any material which he does not believe to be true.’ Would be constituted as perjury. 

BRIEFAULT: Well, with the possible exception of Jared Kushner and the forms he filled out to get his security clearance, I’m not sure any of this has been under oath yet. On those, maybe it is not perjury, but there is a crime of lying to the U.S. government, but you would have to prove he was knowingly and maliciously misleading, and his claim is to say he just forgot. So we’re in a gray area there. 

STEPHANIE RUHLE: So can we add in? The TIME Magazine [cover story this week] currently has Don Jr. on the cover, but in their piece they say that in the email chain between Don Jr. and the Russian intermediary, they say ‘Kushner maintains he did not read to the bottom of the email invitation to the meeting, so he didn’t understand the Russian promise it contained, that was on the fourth page. And yet, the subject line says ‘Russia, Clinton Private and Confidential.’ Does that argument that he didn’t scroll down hold any water? 

BRIFFAULT: Is is irrelevant. The thing was that he was at the meeting and he didn’t report having been at the meeting –as I understand it– in his intial filing to get the security clearance.

So, at the very least, he has corrected that, but there is some question about how knowing that was. So, perjury no, lying to the government maybe.

ALI VELSHI, MSNBC: We have another one: False statements. This is about a person knowingly and willfully making any materially false statement or representation within any of the three branches of government. This is obviously a lower standard, but does this apply here? 

BRIFFAULT: This relates to the filing for the security clearance. It is a simlar kind of question. It was a false statement. Did he know it was false, or did he just forget? And it has been corrected. It may still affect whether he should have a security clearance. But it is not quite up to the level of a crime.

OK. Did you get all of that? Basically Donald Trump Jr. did nothing that was “actionably” wrong. Ali Velshi tries one more time and asks Professor Briffault about collusion, and Briffault crushes Velshi’s liberal dreams…

BRIFFAULT: Collusion isn’t really a crime, I think we are getting at things like ‘conspiracy to commit a crime,’ or coordination of campaign finance stuff. Collusion is more of a political term than a legal term.

Trump Wins Over 3 Tech CEOs in Private Meeting


URL of the original posting site: http://conservativetribune.com/amazon-google-apple-ceos/

The CEOs of Apple, Google and Amazon offered praise for Donald Trump after a meeting with the president at the White House on Monday, Breitbart reported. According to The Hill, the meeting was a brainstorming session for Jared Kushner’s Office of American Innovation, which seeks in part to modernize the federal government through technology.

The session was attended by a number of tech industry CEOs — including Google’s Eric Schmidt, Apple’s Tim Cook and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — as well as roughly two dozen business experts. In the aftermath of the meeting, the three CEOs came out with praise for the president.

“I’m absolutely convinced that during your administration there is going to be a huge explosion of new opportunities because of the platforms that are getting built in our industry,” Google’s Schmidt told the president.

Schmidt said that “huge” growth due to entrepreneurship, immigration and skilled workers was “going to happen soon during your leadership.” Schmidt was far from the only one predicting growth. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos praised the administration’s emphasis on information technology for improving government and saving taxpayers money, saying that Trump’s presidency could be the “innovation administration.”

“I think you guys are already headed that way,” Bezos said. However, he said there needed to be more emphasis on artificial intelligence.

“I think it would be impossible to overstate this, is that the United States needs to — in every way at every level — be working on machine learning and artificial intelligence,” he said. “That can be used in every part of government to improve the services that government provides to citizens.”

Apple’s Tim Cook also offered support for the administration’s efforts to streamline government.

“The U.S. should have the most modern government in the world, and today it doesn’t,” Cook said. He advocated a citizen-centric focus for how the federal government works.

“The government should be focused on its citizens, and the services of the government should be measured on how pleased the citizens are with receiving its services,” Cook said.

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He added that learning how to code for computers should be “a requirement” in America’s public schools: “We have a huge deficit in the skills that we need today, vs. the skills that are there,” he said.

It’s worth pointing out that none of these individuals are on the Trump train. According to Newsweek, Bezos and Cook both openly opposed the president’s travel ban and Google filed an amicus brief in the case. Google also opposed President Trump’s reversal on the Obama administration’s guidance on transgender bathroom policy for public schools.

An administration official said that Monday’s meeting was just the start of the administration’s technology initiative.

“This is just the beginning of a multiyear process,” the official said.

“The problems we are looking at in the Office of American Innovation are not quick fixes,” they added. “These are things that are going to require years to really make significant progress on. Our systems are in some cases 10 to 20 years out of date, so we’re not going to fix that in one day. But we have to start now. And this day we believe will be a significant one in terms of generating ideas and potential solutions to some of the problems.”

Needless to say, the left wasn’t happy about the meeting. A liberal group called Tech Solidarity urged employees to force CEOs to boycott the meeting.

“This meeting doesn’t have to happen. Tech employees have the power to stop it,” the group said in a statement. “We’ve learned in the last six months that there is no clean way to do business with the Trump Administration. The President does not respect boundaries or institutions. You are either for him, or against him. That decision doesn’t belong to our CEOs; it belongs to us as an industry.”

That clearly doesn’t seem to have worked.

Trump son-in-law: a calming power in the new presidency


waving flagAuthored by AFP / 10 Jan 2017

But while Trump’s penchant for publicity, rows and controversy are legendary, Kushner is a stark contrast in social media silence, appearing only in smiling family photographs posted by his wife, who converted to Judaism before their lavish society wedding. But behind the scenes, his influence is almost second to none.

He was reportedly instrumental in personnel decisions, such as demoting scandal-dogged Chris Christie — the former prosecutor who jailed his father for tax evasion — and Trump’s selection of a fervent advocate of Jewish settlements as US ambassador to Israel.

Trump said last year that Kushner, whose family foundation has reportedly donated to Israeli settlements, was so talented that he could help “do peace in the Middle East.” Such is his influence that the New York Times reported that the outgoing White House was told that foreign policy matters that need to be brought to Trump’s attention should be relayed through Kushner. 

He has also been a bridge to tech leaders, has won the friendship and support of legions of influential New York and global players, many of them significantly older than him, such as Rupert Murdoch. Even liberals welcomed his appointment as a potentially moderating influence.

I respect him a lot,” New York’s left-leaning Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Monday, saying that he had known Kushner “for years” and considered him “a very reasonable person.”

The eldest son of developer Charles Kushner, he attended a private Jewish high school before going to Harvard, singled out as an example of the wealthy getting preferential admittance to Ivy League schools, before going onto New York University to get an MBA. Kushner was still a student when Christie jailed his father for tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions.

His son picked up the pieces, reportedly flying down to visit his father most weekends, and took up the reins of the family business, proving himself astonishingly successful.

– Ran campaign –

Like Trump, he shifted the focus of the family real estate business to Manhattan. Today Forbes estimates that together with his parents and brother Kushner is worth $1.8 billion. Under his leadership, Kushner Companies says it has completed more than $14 billion in transactions and $7 billion in acquisitions.

Kushner’s lawyer said he would resign as CEO of Kushner Companies and “divest substantial assets in accordance with federal guidelines.”

Ten years ago he also added The New York Observer lifestyle newspaper to his portfolio and revived its fortunes by taking it online.

During the campaign he went from writing speeches to masterminding a data-driven campaign that focused on message tailoring and harnessing social media to an unprecedented extent. “Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources,” Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, told Forbes.

After the inauguration he is expected to work closely with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon. The Times reported that he plans to work on issues involving the Middle East and Israel; try to forge government partnerships with the private sector and collaborate on free trade issues.

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