It’s beginning to look like the Obama administration was all-in on the Russia collusion hoax long before Trump won the 2016 election.
On Monday, Fox News reported that before the FBI ever launched its politicized probe of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies had “credible foreign sources” indicating the FBI would help spread the Russia collusion hoax, which of course is exactly what happened.
It’s the latest twist in a string of shocking new revelations about how the U.S. intelligence community, at the behest of then-President Barack Obama, manufactured and disseminated a false narrative that Moscow was working to get Trump elected in 2016.
The “credible foreign sources” that predicted the FBI would run an intelligence operation against Trump in the summer of 2016 were almost certainly Russian sources. Back in September of 2020, my colleagues Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway reported that then-Director of National Intelligence (now CIA director) John Ratcliffe told congressional officials that top U.S. intelligence officials knew that Moscow was aware of Hillary Clinton’s campaign plan to accuse Trump of being a Russian asset.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, said Ratcliffe, personally briefed then-President Obama and top U.S. national security officials that Moscow had determined Clinton had approved a plan in late July 2016, “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to Brennan’s own handwritten notes. In September of that year, former FBI Director James Comey was sent an investigative referral regarding Moscow’s alleged knowledge of Clinton’s plans to paint Trump as a treasonous Russian agent. But instead of investigating whether the Clinton campaign had been infiltrated by Russian intelligence, Comey went about obtaining federal warrants to spy on Trump’s campaign.
What’s more, we know that Christopher Steele, whose infamous dossier wound up being a key source for the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that falsely claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” for Trump to win the election, was at the time on the payroll of sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. And his primary subsource for the dossier, Igor Danchenko, was long suspected of being a Russian intelligence asset.
All of which helps shed light on what was reported Monday. Ratcliffe, according to Fox News, is going to declassify the underlying intelligence that reveals that “credible foreign sources” knew about the FBI’s plans to promote the Trump-Russia narrative. Part of that intelligence is a classified annex in former Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe.
Fox News quoted an anonymous source familiar with the contents of the annex who said that the intelligence collected from these foreign sources predicted the FBI’s next move, in the summer of 2016, “with alarming specificity.”
“Ultimately, the release of the classified annex will lend more credibility to the assertion that there was a coordinated plan inside the U.S. government to help the Clinton campaign stir up controversy connecting Trump to Russia,” the source told Fox News.
Together with what we now know about Obama’s involvement in all of this, especially after Trump had won the election, it looks very much like what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called it last week: a treasonous conspiracy and a years-long coup against a duly elected president.
In particular, as my colleague Margot Cleveland reported in these pages yesterday, the extent of Obama’s personal involvement is deeper than previously reported. Last week’s release of the House Permanent Selection Committee on Intelligence’s (HPSCI) report summarizing its investigation into the drafting of the ICA exposed how then-CIA Director Brennan ordered the publication of three substandard intelligence reports. These reports, together with the Steele dossier, “became foundational sources for the ICA judgments that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton.”
But as Cleveland notes, the recently declassified HPSCI report also reveals Obama’s central role in this scheme. Investigators and the ICA authors were “denied access to a trove of information on grounds of executive or congressional privilege,” according to the HPSCI report. One FBI analyst, the report says, argued that this intelligence should be shared with those responsible for drafting the ICA, but the Obama administration “denied ICA drafters access to this intelligence on grounds of Executive or Congressional privilege.”
Setting aside what intelligence might have been protected by congressional privilege, executive privilege rests with the president, which means Obama is the one who barred the ICA drafters from seeing the underlying intelligence.
Why would he do that? To prevent them from seeing that it was laughably unreliable — indeed, that much of it relied on the outlandish Steele dossier. Indeed, the “compartmented” version of the ICA — that is, the version only accessible to specially identified and approved individuals — included the Steele dossier. But the public and even classified versions did not. Why would the Steele dossier be compartmented? As Cleveland explained, “to keep the honest analysts responsible for finalizing the classified and unclassified version of the ICA from discovering the shady and fake intel Brennan buried in the compartmented version.”
A big part of what we’re learning now is the lengths some of these intelligence officials went to hide what they had done. That’s why much of this didn’t come out during Trump’s first term — some of the people who were involved in it continued to serve in the Trump administration — and worked to cover their tracks.
For example, Gina Haspel, who served as CIA director under Trump, personally blocked the declassification of Russiagate documents in 2020. Why would she do that? Well, Haspel was hand-picked by Brennan to serve as CIA station chief in London from 2014 to early 2017 — the same time that Steele, a British national, was in London compiling his garbage dossier on Trump. Haspel was the CIA’s link between London and Washington during this period.
Over the weekend, Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer suggested Haspel should be investigated for her potential role in the Russia collusion hoax. “What role did she play not only in perhaps creating this, but what role did she play in suppressing it when she was CIA director and she was supposed to be serving Donald Trump rather than the CIA establishment?” Schweizer said. “She certainly had access to this material.”
At this point, that’s really the question that should determine who gets investigated: who had access to this material? We know that Obama and his intel chiefs had access to material in the summer of 2016 that suggested Moscow knew that Clinton was going to try to smear Trump as a Russian asset, and that Moscow believed the FBI would go along with that. We know that they did indeed go along with it, and that they cooked up the ICA after Trump won, hiding their reliance on the Steele dossier and other unreliable and outlandish intelligence products.
We know all this now, eight years after the treasonous conspiracy was launched, and soon we’ll know more, as Ratcliffe and Gabbard release more. The question is, will anyone in the Trump administration do anything about it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
President Barack Obama was among the U.S. leaders directing intelligence agencies to lie about Russians tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump, reaffirm newly declassified U.S. intelligence records.
The Obama administration’s use of U.S. intelligence to back false claims about Trump and Russia sabotaged the peaceful transition of power necessary for democratic self-government. It denied the American majority the policies they voted for by consuming the first Trump administration with fabricated scandals, including a massive special counsel investigation. These also wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and damaged U.S. foreign policy, likely feeding the still-raging Russia-Ukraine war.
An unclassified memorandum to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat member of Congress, was released Friday. It quotes newly declassified federal records that demonstrate U.S. intelligence agencies in 2016 believed Russia could not manipulate vote counts in favor of Trump or any other candidate.
It also reproduces formerly classified documents showing that Obama and his top intelligence officials — including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Director James Comey — tossed aside such evidence to rush out a doctored “intelligence assessment” that falsely claimed the opposite. Under U.S. intelligence branding, that assessment relied on fabricated information funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign to falsely claim Trump was a Russian stooge.
The New York Times has run articles just in the last few months still promoting the conclusions of the doctored Jan. 6. 2017 “intelligence community assessment,” or ICA. A Rasmussen poll conducted just two weeks ago found 60 percent of Democrat voters and 45 percent of “moderates” still believe “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election.” Fifty-seven percent of those polled agreed officials who manipulated evidence to “get Trump” should be prosecuted.
Obama Called for Packaging Smears As an Intelligence Assessment
Numerous email communications contained in a 114-page accompanying packet of declassified records also released Friday confirm that it was Obama who directed the rushed creation of an ICA outside normal protocols that lied to Americans about Russian interference in U.S. elections and smeared Trump as a treasonous colluder with Russia.
A Dec. 7, 2016 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) email to CIA, DHS, and ODNI recipients wrote of “discuss[ing] a NIC [intelligence community] product in response to POTUS” that “would mirror” an intelligence assessment produced in September. The September assessment said Russians couldn’t change U.S. vote totals. Later emails agreed the CIA, then led by Brennan, would lead the construction of this Obama-requested ICA.
A Dec. 9, 2016, email from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) tells 13 other ODNI and one CIA recipient, “The IC [intelligence community] is prepared to produce an assessment per the President’s request, that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”
The email set a date target for delivering the assessment to Obama on Jan. 9, 2017. That date was later moved up to Jan. 6, 2017, with top security state officials working through the holidays to release the intelligence-branded packet of smear tinder before Obama left office.
A Dec. 22, 2016 ODNI email about the Democrat disinformation-riddled ICA tells other ODNI recipients, “The only real direction we got was 1) POTUS wants a comprehensive assessment, drawing from all available sources, and 2) it has to be before the end of his administration.”
Another Dec. 22, 2016, email between top-level DNI officials concerns “the IC [intelligence community] report on Russian election meddling that POTUS tasked us to do.”
In addition to the disinformation ICA he directed at Congress and the public, Obama directly lied to Americans in speeches about Russian election interference. For example, on Dec. 16, 2016, Obama stated he was “concerned about … potential hacking that could hamper vote counting and affect the actual election process itself. And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that, that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly. And tell him to cut it out.”
At that time, however, Obama had to know U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that statement to be false, because his staff had prevented the publication of an earlier intelligence assessment saying so, the newly released documents show. This also means the same people and agencies that erected a totalitarian censorship edifice under the pretext of “misinformation” and “disinformation” were in fact the top sources of widely believed misinformation and disinformation that have now affected at least three U.S. presidential elections.
U.S. Intel Said Russians Couldn’t Change Votes
The memorandum gives a timeline showing that U.S. intelligence analysts, agencies, and reports leading up to the 2016 election had repeatedly concluded Russia couldn’t hack U.S. elections or change vote totals. Clapper received an intelligence analysis in August 2016 stating, “there is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.”
Instead, U.S. intelligence believed Russian activity was more propagandistic, affecting public confidence in the election but not its outcome. Numerous other high-level intelligence officials and assessments made similar conclusions — until December 2016.
From the Gabbard memorandum released Friday.
On Dec. 8, there was a sudden switch. Multiple intelligence agencies were preparing to publish an assessment stating, “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.”
Yet on Dec. 8, 2016, Comey suddenly declared the FBI would withdraw its support for that cross-agency conclusion, and the FBI would instead be “drafting a dissent,” the newly declassified documents show. That report was ultimately never published.
Instead, on Dec. 9, the White House held a national security meeting that included Clapper, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, CIA Director John Brennan, Andrew McCabe (Comey’s deputy), Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. After the meeting, Clapper’s assistant sent an email to ODNI leaders with the subject line, “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling.” In the email, the assistant asks them to create an “assessment per the President’s request,” with input from the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and Department of Homeland Security. This meant sidelining several intelligence agencies that normally contribute to such publications.
Hollering Collusion Lies Into a Media Echo Chamber
“That same day,” Dec. 9, 2016, “Deep State officials in the IC begin leaking blatantly false intelligence to the Washington Post,” says the Gabbard memo released Friday, “… claiming that Russia used ‘cyber means’ to influence ‘the outcome of the election.’” The leaks seeded the false “Russia, Russia, Russia” narrative throughout willing corporate media partners in advance of the publication of the disinformation ICA on Jan. 6, 2017.
The doctored ICA itself crystalized and legitimized myriad politicized false claims that went on to hamstring the first Trump presidency. For example, it smeared rising pro-democracy movements across the West of citizens against international oligarchs as authoritarian by linking them with Vladimir Putin, claiming “Russian media hailed President-elect Trump’s victory as a vindication of Putin’s advocacy of global populist movements.”
Rhodes, a top Obama foreign policy advisor, was in on the Dec. 9, 2016 meeting that appears to have planned the ICA switcheroo. Rhodes is infamous for telling The New York Times in 2016 that the Obama administration “created an echo chamber” in corporate media to sell Obama’s payout of American tax dollars to Iran and government takeover of formerly private health markets: “We created an echo chamber. They [corporate media reporters] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes explained. “They literally know nothing.”
The documents released Friday further substantiate previous reporting by The Federalist going back to 2017 that: Obama was likely directly involved with his administration’s spying on the Trump campaign; the Obama administration spied on domestic political opponents; an email from Susan Rice implicated Obama in the Russia collusion smear against Trump; Obama intelligence officials likely lied to Congress; and that Obama himself was involved in ensnaring Trump’s first national security advisor in yet another fabricated scandal using spying, leaking, and manipulation of U.S. intelligence.
Steele Dossier Key to Potential Perjury, Conspiracy Prosecution
On Jan. 6, 2017, two weeks before Trump took office, the Obama administration published the doctored ICA. The Friday memo says that ICA falsely claimed “Putin directed an effort to help President Trump defeat Hillary Clinton,” launching years of smears and investigations.
That falsified ICA at least partly relied on the infamous Steele dossier, according to a memorandum released two weeks ago by current CIA Director John Ratcliffe. That “dossier” was an opposition research packet fabricated by British spook Christopher Steele for the Clinton campaign that has been roundly debunked since, including by a special counsel investigation.
In May 2023 (and at several other times), Brennan testified to Congress that the CIA opposed using the Steele dossier in the 2017 Russia collusion ICA he was heavily involved in creating. Yet a CIA internal review released earlier this month says Brennan included the Steele dossier in the ICA “over the objections of career intelligence officials.”The Federalist also reported that still-classified congressional reports show ICA-related Obama administration corruption is much deeper than what is currently publicly known.
FBI Director Kash Patel opened criminal investigations into Brennan and Comey earlier this month and is considering not just perjury but also conspiracy charges, according to Matt Taibbi at Racket News.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include the NEW “300 Classic Books for Ages 9 to Adult,” the bestselling “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Mike Benz, the founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, one of the most popular podcasts in the world with over 19 million subscribers. During his conversation with Joe Rogan, Benz revealed shocking details about how the Obama administration allegedly misused taxpayer dollars through USAID (United States Agency for International Development).
According to Benz, instead of sending legitimate aid overseas, the Obama administration laundered funds to train and organize “rent-a-mobs” and destabilize foreign governments.
Benz explained, “This was a scandal during the Obama USAID era. We were running a number of rogue USAID operations in Cuba at the time. I’m simply showing the American people where your tax dollars are going and how these things are structured in order to systematically fool you and to fool Congress and to fool the White House.” He went on to describe how USAID pumped $1.2 billion into funding activist groups and civil society organizations, teaching them how to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to coordinate protests and push political agendas.“Learn how to use hashtags, learn how to coordinate street protests so that everyone knows where to go, what street to show up on, what kind of slogans to know, to use in order to create the pro-democracy predicate for it,” Benz added.
One of the most alarming revelations was the creation of a Twitter clone called ZunZuneo, a platform designed to push propaganda in Cuba. Benz stated, “So what they did is they took the exact same thing as Twitter, same user interface, same like, and retweet button. ZunZuneo is the Cuban slang word for hummingbird. So just, it means it’s the Twitter bird, the whole thing. But the whole trick about it was you have to make it look like it’s coming from the Cubans if you’re going to do this operation.” The platform was launched in 2010, coinciding with the Arab Spring, and was funded by USAID money originally earmarked for Pakistan. “They were using USAID funds that were designated to Pakistan,” Benz revealed.
The operation involved contractors funded by USAID who used data for micro-targeting efforts, focusing on both anti- and pro-government users in Cuba. Initially, the platform featured non-controversial content like sports, music, and hurricane updates to build a user base. However, the ultimate goal was far more sinister. Benz explained, “Once they built up enough subscribers, they would begin to introduce political messages through social bots and encourage dissent in this astroturfing—the whole point is, once they hit a critical mass, they would create ‘Rent-a-Riots.’”
The funds for these operations were allegedly funneled through Cayman Islands bank accounts, with the money never reaching its intended destination in Pakistan. “You’re using Cayman Islands bank accounts. You’re saying it’s earmarked for Pakistani aid,” Benz said. Instead, the money was used to fund these covert operations aimed at destabilizing foreign governments.
Barack Obama was using USAID to pretend to send money to a country for “aid” and instead laundering it to the Cayman Islands
He would then use that money to fund and train “Rent-a-Riots” for protests to overthrow governments
This shocking revelation underscores the deep-rooted corruption within the Democrat Party, particularly during the Obama administration. It also highlights why President Trump’s decision to shut down USAID was a necessary step to curb such abuses of power. The Democrat Party’s reliance on taxpayer dollars to fund their political agendas, both domestically and internationally, is a clear indication of their disregard for transparency and accountability.
Nearly a dozen current and former officials serving in the White House and Biden administration, including the president’s national security adviser and the secretary of state, have extensive ties to Hunter Biden, who is accused by Republicans of selling access to his father, dating back over a decade.
A Fox News Digital analysis reveals the extent of Hunter’s potential reach in the White House, while the embattled first son is expected to make his first court appearance on July 26 for two alleged misdemeanor tax violations and a felony gun charge.
The Justice Department announced last month that Hunter had entered a plea agreement in the case that will likely keep him out of jail. U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware David Weiss, who led the investigation, is facing demands from Republicans probing alleged improper retaliation against whistleblowers who claimed the probe was “influenced by politics” and that Weiss was “hamstrung” when making prosecutorial decisions.
The analysis includes two members of Biden’s Cabinet and one former Cabinet member, a top aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a national security adviser, five top Biden White House aides, and a top Biden campaign aide who is currently on leave from her role as a communications director for first lady Jill Biden.
Jake Sullivan
Hunter Biden and President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, served together on the board of the Truman National Security Project, a liberal foreign policy think tank, for roughly two years before Sullivan joined the president’s campaign in 2020.
President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, left, Hunter Biden, President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Getty Image)
Hunter, who started serving on the board in 2012, and Sullivan both served on the Washington-based nonprofit’s board between 2017 and early 2019, according to internet archives captured by the Wayback Machine.
During that time, Hunter was also serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and the Chinese private equity fund BHR Partners. The federal investigation into Hunter’s foreign business dealings, which is still ongoing, also launched during the same time frame in 2018.
Sullivan was recently accused by former White House official Mike McCormick of being a “conspirator” in the Biden family’s “kickback scheme” in Ukraine when Biden was vice president.
Sullivan denied the allegations, telling reporters that he had nothing to do with such an operation.
Jake Sullivan, left, and Hunter Biden (Getty Images)
Antony Blinken
Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a meeting with Hunter Biden at the State Department in July 2015 when he was serving as the deputy secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration and Hunter was on Burisma’s board, according to emails previously reviewed and verified by Fox News Digital.
The meeting was two months in the making after Hunter emailed Blinken in late May 2015, asking, “Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things.”
Blinken said “absolutely” and Hunter forwarded Blinken’s full email response to Devon Archer, who was also serving on the Burisma board with him. However, the initial meeting appeared to have been canceled due to the admission of Hunter’s older brother, Beau Biden, to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland because of a recurrence of brain cancer. Beau passed away on May 30, 2015.
Antony Blinken emails with Hunter Biden on May 22, 2015. (Fox News)
Less than two months later, Blinken and Hunter met, prompting Blinken to send a follow-up email saying it was “great to see” Hunter and “catch up.”
“You will love this,” Antony Blinken wrote to Hunter Biden on July 22, 2015, “after you left, Marjorie, the wonderful african american woman who sits in my outer office (and used to be Colin Powell’s assistant) said to me: ‘He sure is pleasant on the eyes.’ Tell you wife. Tony.” (Fox News)
In April of this year, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell testified to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees that Blinken, as President Biden’s then-campaign senior adviser, “played a role in the inception” of the public statement signed by intelligence officials claiming Hunter’s abandoned laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
Blinken denied having any role in getting the letter signed by members of the intelligence community and claimed, “One of the great benefits of this job is that I don’t do politics and don’t engage in it. But with regard to that letter, I didn’t – it wasn’t my idea, didn’t ask for it, didn’t solicit it.”
Emails from Hunter’s infamous laptop that Blinken allegedly sought to discredit show that Hunter has ties to Blinken and his wife, Evan Ryan, dating back over a decade. Those emails also show that Hunter scheduled meetings with Blinken while he was on the board of Burisma and Blinken was deputy secretary of state.
Multiple profiles pieces over the years said Blinken has advised Biden on more than just foreign policy in his decades-long friendship with the president and serving as a confidant. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., President Biden’s re-election campaign co-chair, told CNN in 2021, “President Biden is personally close to both Tony Blinken and Evan Ryan and Tony has been an incredibly loyal, capable and effective adviser, staffer and personal friend of the sort that is rare in Washington.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Hunter Biden (Getty Images)
Evan Ryan
Evan Ryan, Blinken’s wife who is currently serving as White House cabinet secretary, communicated frequently with Hunter and his longtime business partner, Eric Schwerin, when she was working at the White House during the Obama-Biden administration.
Hunter tried to connect with Blinken on June 16, 2010, when he asked Ryan for his non-government email address, according to emails. Ryan, who also worked on Biden’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, then provided Blinken’s personal email address to Hunter.
It appears that Hunter Biden tried to connect with Antony Blinken on June 16, 2010, when he asked Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, for his non-government email address. (Fox News)
White House visitor logs also show that Schwerin, who was the president of Hunter Biden’s investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners for several years, met with Ryan at the White House’s Old Executive Office Building (OEOB) in October 2010.
She was also in communication with Hunter and Schwerin about a couple of White House events that year, including the Mexico State Dinner and the annual “Easter Egg Roll.”
“OVP has 250 tix to the Easter Egg Roll and your Mom has an additional 200. Family, etc is coming out of your Mom’s allotment,” Schwerin said in the email to Hunter, referring to Blinken’s wife. “Evan is handling your Dad’s and we can pass on names to her for outreach purposes. Let’s discuss. I don’t think we have 50 spots, but if we had 20 or so names we’d probably be fine.”
Eric Schwerin sent Hunter Biden an email about two upcoming White House events and mentioned that he talked with Evan Ryan, Blinken’s wife, about tickets to the events. (Fox News)
“More importantly, OVP has 12 spots to fill for the Mexico State Dinner in May and needs to send in their names by Monday,” he continued. “Evan is looking for any suggestions. Hispanic Americans or just any outreach related suggestions. Obviously they won’t have trouble filling this number but is still looking for suggestions.”
A couple of months later, Hunter and Ryan exchanged emails about the Mexico State dinner guest list, and she sent him the seating chart for his table.
(Fox News)
Evan Ryan and Antony Blinken have ties to Hunter Biden dating back over a decade. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Fox News Digital previously reported several other ties between Hunter and Ryan.
Jeff Zients
White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, who led the federal COVID-19 pandemic response between early 2021 and April 2022, met Hunter multiple times in 2016, according to emails and White House visitor logs.
Zients met with Hunter Biden twice in February 2016 and on another occasion in May 2016, just months before Biden, the vice president at the time, was set to leave the White House.
Former Joe Biden aide Anne Marie Muldoon invites Hunter Biden to a meeting with Zients and his father in July 2016. (Fox News)
Hunter Biden’s former business partner Joan Mayer sends him his schedule on Feb. 12. It includes a meeting with his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, Jeff Zients and David Rubenstein. (Fox News)
Biden attended the first two meetings, which both took place at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where the vice presidential residence is located.
Hunter Biden’s business partner Joan Meyer sends him his schedule on Feb. 23. (Fox News)
Additionally, Anne Marie Muldoon, who was an assistant for then-Vice President Biden between 2014-2017, sent Hunter Biden an invitation to attend a potential fourth meeting with his father, Zients, David Bradley, a Washington, D.C.-based political consultant and chairman of media group Atlantic Media, and Eric Lander at the Naval Observatory on July 12, 2016. While it is unclear whether Hunter Biden joined the meeting, Muldoon sent him a copy of the meeting agenda after it took place.
Kathy Chung
Kathy Chung, who is currently serving as the Pentagon’s deputy director of protocol, communicated frequently with Hunter when she was serving as Biden’s executive assistant during the Obama administration.
Throughout much of her five-year tenure working for Biden, Chung regularly shared information with Hunter about his father’s schedule and passed messages directly from the then-vice president, according to emails.
Chung’s relationship with Hunter also appears to date back to before she worked for his father. The emails showed that Hunter recommended Chung for the executive assistant role when the previous holder of the job, Michele Smith, departed the White House in the spring of 2012.
A month after Chung thanked Hunter for “thinking” of her and getting her to apply for a job in the vice president’s office, Chung emailed Hunter Biden informing him that she had been offered the job.
Kathy Chung informs Hunter Biden that Vice President Biden had selected her to be his executive assistant. (Fox News)
“I cannot thank you enough for thinking about me and walking me thru this,” she said. “What an incredible opportunity! Thanks, Hunter!!”
In another email exchange shortly after the Obama-Biden administration concluded, Hunter suggested that Chung come work at his company. It does not appear that she ever joined Hunter’s company.
Hunter Biden tells Kathy Chung she should work for him in February 2017, adding that he can “make everyone money.” (Fox News)
Chung made headlines in January after she was reportedly questioned by federal investigators as part of the probe into the president’s handling of classified documents.
Ron Klain
Biden’s former White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, who stepped down in February, previously served as the chief of staff for Vice President Biden until the end of January 2011. In September 2012, Klain reached out to Hunter for help in raising $20,000 for the Vice President’s Residence Foundation (VPRF), telling him to “keep this low low key” to prevent “bad PR,” according to emails Fox News Digital previously reported on.
“The tax lawyers for the VP Residence Foundation have concluded that since the Cheney folks last raised money in 2007 and not 2008, we actually have to have some incoming funds before the end of this fiscal year (i.e., before 9/30/12 – next week) to remain eligible to be a ‘public charity,'” Klain, who had left his chief of staff position in Vice President Biden’s office a year earlier but was the foundation’s chairman at the time, said in an email to Hunter.
“It’s not much – we need to raise a total of $20,000 – so I’m hitting up a few very close friends on a very confidential basis to write checks of $2,000 each,” Klain continued. “We need to keep this low low key, because raising money for the Residence now is bad PR – but it has to be done, so I’m trying to just collect the 10 checks of $2,000, get it done in a week, and then, we can do an event for the Residence Foundation after the election.”
Hunter then forwarded the email to Schwerin, who helped manage a majority of Hunter’s finances, and the two discussed donating to the foundation, though it’s not clear what was ultimately decided.
Klain’s career with Biden dates back to his failed presidential campaign in 1988 and serving as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander, the communications director for first lady Jill Biden who went on temporary leave in May to help lead the messaging arm of Biden’s re-election campaign, also has ties to Hunter.
In 2014, Alexander, who served as Biden’s spokesperson when he was a senator and the vice president, reached out to praise Hunter for his statement after he was kicked out of Navy Reserve for testing positive for cocaine.
“Hey Hunter – just wanted to write you a quick note to say David and I are thinking of you,” she wrote in an email. “Your statement was perfect and gracious. Sending you a virtual hug from both of us and hoping you can get some peace this weekend.”
Alexander is married to David Wade, a former State Department staffer who helped advise Hunter with rapid response as he was receiving increased public scrutiny regarding his lucrative position with Burisma.
Emails uncovered by Fox News Digital last month showed Hunter’s firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was paying Wade for communications consulting, and he strategized with Hunter and his partners on how to respond to inquiries by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
Wade has visited the White House at least five times during Biden’s presidency, according to visitor logs.
Annie Tomasini
Annie Tomasini, an assistant to the president and the current director of Oval Office operations, was in frequent communication with Hunter, referred to him as her “brother” and often ended her emails with “LY” for “love you,” according to emails dating from 2010 to 2016.
Biden publicly announced on Dec. 20, 2010, that Tomasini was stepping down to take a position with Harvard University, and Tomasini kept Hunter clued in on the details of that position before she took it, according to emails. The month prior, on Nov. 19, 2010, she forwarded information to Hunter about Harvard’s employee benefits and added, “Thanks.”
Annie Tomasini, director of Oval Office operations, left, follows President Biden on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One on May 17, 2023. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Hey – I looked at benefits And they look pretty amazing. Any word on comp?” Hunter responded on Nov. 23, 2010.
“I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for looking at all the background Hunt,” Tomasini replied.
Tomasini was offered the job on Nov. 30, 2010, writing to Hunter, “Director of intergovernmental relations. > 120k ish – may be a little higher.”
She later thanked him and said she was going to tell his father the news. Months later, Hunter gave a speech at Harvard, but not before running the draft by Tomasini first.
Tomasini has accompanied Biden and Hunter to Camp David twice in the past few weeks.
Michael Donilon, a current senior adviser to Biden who served as his chief campaign strategist in 2020, was on dozens of emails with Hunter and other members of Biden’s inner circle coordinating strategy meetings throughout the 2012 campaign, mulling over a 2016 presidential bid, and later plotting Biden’s endeavors post-vice presidency.
In August 2015, Schwerin shared a Politico article with Hunter that says Donilon and a few other advisers from Biden’s inner circle, including Hunter, are the only ones “involved in the real decision-making.”
An email from February 2016 showed that Hunter, Donilon and a few others were also involved in the planning stages for the Biden Foundation. And shortly after Biden left office in 2017, Hunter, Donilon and others in his inner circle were invited to a meeting at Biden’s residence in McLean, Virginia, according to emails.
Days later Hunter, Donilon and several others were invited to a meeting at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home where classified documents were recently discovered. The meeting took place on Feb. 7, 2017, the same day it was announced that the former vice president would be leading the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where classified documents were also found, and the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware.
Donilon accompanied Biden a few months ago on the trip to Ireland, which included Hunter and Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens.
Steve Ricchetti
Steve Ricchetti, who currently serves as Biden’s White House counselor, was also on dozens of emails with Hunter dealing with strategy meetings and helping Biden with post-VP life.
Fox News Digital reported last year that Schwerin visited the White House at least eight times in 2016, meeting with Ricchetti at least twice when he was serving as Biden’s chief of staff.
Morell, the former CIA deputy director who testified in April, said he received a call in October 2020 from Ricchetti, who was serving as the chairman of Biden’s campaign at the time, following the final debate against then-President Donald Trump, when Biden said the Hunter laptop was a “Russian plant” and a “bunch of garbage.”
Morell said the call from Ricchetti was to thank him for spearheading the letter signed by intelligence officials that tried to debunk the laptop.
Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president, gestures after playing a round of golf with President Biden at Wilmington Country Club in Delaware on April 17, 2021. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
Louisa Terrell
Louisa Terrell, who is serving as assistant to the president and the director of the Office of Legislative Affairs, communicated with Hunter dozens of times during the Obama-Biden administration, with some of the correspondence including Schwerin on the emails.
In February 2014, Terrell emailed Hunter and Schwerin, saying, “So nice to catch up over lunch – thank you. Enjoy the snow day and talk soon.”
Louisa Terrell, White House legislative affairs director, walks with Steve Ricchetti to a House Democrat caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on May 31, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Another email chain from late 2014 through early 2015 shows that she reached out to Hunter for help in getting her daughter into Sidwell Friends School, one of the most expensive and elite PK-12 schools in the country, which includes both of former President Obama’s daughters and some of Biden’s grandchildren as alumni.
“Thank you for agreeing to speak with Sidwell about Olivia’s application to next year’s 7th grade class. I recognize how busy you are and appreciate you making the time to chime in with Bryan,” Terrell said in February 2015. “Below is some logistical information and some background on why Olivia is a good fit for Sidwell. Let me know if this is helpful and/or you need some additional information.”
“[Bryan] was very cordial/ nice – sent me two emails – one saying he received my message and email and a second that was more personal acknowledging that he also spoke to Chris and others who had weighed in on behalf of Olivia and he hopes it all works out etc…” Hunter said. “Very nice – looking forward to having dinner sometime soon – but didn’t give any thing up in the way of real information.”
Less than two weeks later, Terrell emailed Hunter saying her daughter got into Sidwell and added, “Thank you so so much for your help. I hope you know how much I appreciate it. Thank you, thank you!”
Terrell has worked for Biden going back as early as 2001 and served a two-year stint as executive director at the Biden Foundation, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The White House, Biden’s campaign and Hunter Biden’s lawyer did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
Fox News’ Joe Schoffstall and Thomas Catenacci contributed to this report.
Jessica Chasmar is a digital writer on the politics team for Fox News and Fox Business. Story tips can be sent to Jessica.Chasmar@fox.com.
Former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann and others lied to the nation about the special counsel report released Monday that deeply documents years of systemic FBI corruption in favor of the Democratic Party. That report reveals and adds detail to multiple instances in which FBI employees used high-level intelligence and law-enforcement positions to promote misinformation that affected at least two presidential elections, always on behalf of Democrats.
Special Counsel John Durham’s report lists and compares multiple such instances to illustrate “Systemic Problems” that are “difficult to explain.” Many more have been uncovered in the past few years. This information key to Americans’ oversight of their government through free and fair elections has been blacked out on corporate media airwaves and censored online by private grantees and social media companies obeying funding conditions and threats from federal officials.
1. Weaponizing Democrat Party Misinformation Developed With Probable Foreign Spies
It just so happens that the false information the FBI used to immediately open a spy operation on Democrats’ opposition was developed by the Democrat presidential campaign, in conjunction with at least two potential or allegedly former foreign spies.
Danchenko is the guy who may be a Russian spy. Your tax dollars at work funding disinformation that helps the Democrat Party. https://t.co/dFMyHnnC2m
According to the Durham report, top FBI, DOJ, and CIA officials, as well as President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, were told “within days of its receipt” that the Hillary Clinton campaign had developed a “plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server.”
CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama, Biden, FBI Director James Comey, and Attorney General Eric Holder on this intelligence on Aug. 3, 2016, a few days after Clinton’s campaign developed the plan. The CIA reportedly got this info about Clinton’s smear plan from its surveillance of Russian intelligence.
This means that, in the summer of 2016, the FBI and DOJ, and the head of the Democrat Party, knew that the Steele dossier, Alfa Bank allegations, and other claims of Donald Trump being a traitorous Russian stooge “were part of a political effort to smear a political opponent and to use the resources of the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support of a political objective.”
This should have gotten the FBI to question its Crossfire Hurricane operation, Durham’s report says. Instead, however, the FBI raced ahead, with FBI headquarters demanding faster pursuit of Trump under what they knew were false pretenses.
The FBI’s actions indicated a clear double standard for Republicans and Democrats, the report shows. “Unlike the FBI’s opening of a full investigation of unknown members of the Trump campaign based on raw, uncorroborated information, in this separate matter involving a purported Clinton campaign plan, the FBI never opened any type of inquiry, issued any taskings, employed any analytical personnel, or produced any analytical products in connection with the information,” notes the Durham report.
The report says if the Clinton campaign knowingly supplied this false information to the government, that’s a criminal offense. Durham claims his team was unable to establish this criminal intent, but it’s obvious it existed even if it can’t be established with emails and voice recordings.
The Durham report is damning. It shows the FBI operating as a disinformation shop for the Clinton campaign, ignoring its own rules, and blatantly & maliciously interfering in a presidential election. The Steele dossier was fake, and FBI knew it all along. pic.twitter.com/vGkPYloz5B
— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) May 15, 2023
So, again, months before the press started stampeding false claims of Russian collusion into three impeachment attempts that strangled Trump’s ability to wield the power voters had given him, the heads of U.S. intelligence agencies, the sitting president and head of the Democratic Party, and Democrats’ next president were aware it was a political disinformation operation with no basis in fact. The head of that same FBI that ran a multi-year spy operation against Trump based on this claim knew it was politically motivated disinformation before the lie even got its boots on.
This goes far beyond agency “bias.” It is the complete corruption of half of the nation’s political party system and its federal law enforcement. It is the systematic disenfranchisement of Americans who don’t agree with the national security blob — or wouldn’t, if that blob allowed them to learn true facts about its evil machinations.
It is the systematic weaponization of the U.S. national security apparatus against constitutional self-government. It is the end of government of the people, by the people, and for the people in the United States of America. That’s what Durham’s report shows. Anyone who doesn’t treat this as a five-alarm fire set by saboteurs is helping fan the flames.
2. Protecting Democrats’ POTUS Pick While Slandering Republicans’ POTUS Pick
Several times, the Durham report notes that FBI and Department of Justice officials treated the Clinton and Trump campaigns completely differently. Another notable way was in regard to potential contacts with agents from foreign governments.
When the feds learned of a foreign influence operation seeking to target Hillary Clinton, they gave her campaign what is called a “defensive briefing.” That means they warned the campaign about the potential for undue foreign influence.
When the feds learned that a foreign influence operation might be seeking to target Trump, they warned almost everyone except the Trump campaign. The FBI, DOJ, and CIA not only gave Trump’s campaign no defensive briefings on such potential threats, the report says, these agencies used the threats as an excuse to surveil Trump’s campaign and boost Clinton’s disinformation operation linking Trump to Russia in the press.
“The speed with which surveillance of a U.S. person associated with Trump’s campaign was authorized … are difficult to explain compared to the FBI’s and the [Justice] Department’s actions nearly two years earlier when confronted with corroborated allegations of attempted foreign influence involving Clinton, who at the time was still an undeclared candidate for the presidency,” says the report on pages 73 and 74.
3. Dismissing Foreign Funds Transfers for Clinton, Not for Trump
In contrast to the bureau’s full-scale rush to use its powers to smear Republicans with known falsehoods, the report shows that when the FBI knew the Democrat presidential campaign might be violating federal law, the FBI stood down. When an informant told the FBI the Clinton campaign was likely accepting illegal foreign campaign contributions, the FBI told the informant to drop it and did nothing further.
According to an FBI CHS in early 2016, the Clinton Campaign was "fully aware" of and "ok with" a foreign contribution in violation of federal law.
The FBI agent didn't get receipts – and asked the source to stay away from the Clinton campaign.
“Once again, the investigative actions taken by FBI Headquarters in the [Clinton] Foundation matters contrast with those taken in Crossfire Hurricane,” says Durham’s report. “As an initial matter, the NYFO [FBI New York Field Office] and WFO [Washington Field Office] investigations appear to have been opened as preliminary investigations due to the political sensitivity and their reliance on unvetted hearsay information (the Clinton Cash book) and CHS reporting. By contrast, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was immediately opened as a full investigation despite the fact that it was similarly predicated on unvetted hearsay information.”
Another double standard was revealed in this contrasting FBI treatment of different political parties: “Furthermore, while the Department appears to have had legitimate concerns about the Foundation investigation occurring so close to a presidential election, it does not appear that similar concerns were expressed by the [Justice] Department or FBI regarding the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
4. Putting Powerful Democrats Above the Law
We already knew from the years The Federalist has spent unraveling Spygate that former FBI Counterintelligence Division Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok and his mistress, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s staff lawyer Lisa Page, weaponized their government positions to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. These are the two who infamously texted that they’d “stop” Trump from becoming president.
Durham’s report shows multiple instances of McCabe, Strzok, Page, and their superiors wielding federal law enforcement positions as weapons against Republicans. The Durham report contains more evidence that high-level federal intelligence officials see it as routine to put powerful Democrats above the law.
Besides the disparate treatment outlined above and many other such instances, Durham’s report includes a telling text exchange between Strzok and Page. It shows them deciding not to apply the law to Hillary Clinton because of her powerful position. It seems that the powerful are indeed above the law in the United States — provided they’re affiliated with the Democratic Party.
Report makes it clear that DOJ and FBI officials are afraid of Democrat retribution, but not of Republicans. See exchange between FBI's McCabe and Page: https://t.co/CUxd78rFRKpic.twitter.com/7kkSf4U5ai
Key FBI figures refused interviews with Durham’s team, including Comey, Strzok, the Clinton campaign’s Marc Elias, McCabe, Page, and Glenn Simpson of the opposition research firm that cooked up the Steele dossier for Clinton’s campaign.
Add that to the many instances of “former” FBI and CIA figures being employed in social media companies to assist with government censorship demands, and going on TV to fuel the Russiagate hoax and other lies to Americans about crucial public issues. It adds up to yet another indication of an intelligence state using its vast — and unconstitutional — powers on behalf of the Democrat Party.
Oh, look, another FBI Counterintelligence Division guy smearing the Durham report that outed his former department — acting like he's still working for the FBI https://t.co/AoaiCFdbg4
6. Refusing to Obey Congressional Subpoenas About Records on Biden Corruption
Durham’s report indicates that the FBI repeatedly sat on evidence the Clinton campaign was accepting bribes — payments in exchange for policy preferences. The FBI is still doing that with Joe Biden. According to several high-level members of Congress, the FBI has been refusing to release to them subpoenaed, non-classified information about how it handled documentation alleging that Biden also traded political favors for campaign donations.
“We know the FBI relied on unverified claims to relentlessly target a Republican president. What did the FBI do to investigate claims involving a Democrat President?” asked Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Numerous private and congressional watchdogs have documented that the Biden family has received millions of dollars from foreign individuals and companies connected to hostile governments including communist China.
“We believe the FBI possesses an unclassified internal document that includes very serious and detailed allegations implicating the current President of the United States,” Grassley said in a press release earlier this month. “What we don’t know is what, if anything, the FBI has done to verify these claims or investigate further.”
Congressional subpoenas have the force of law. Federal agencies operate at the discretion and funding of Congress, according to the Constitution. The FBI’s leadership doesn’t seem to believe, however, that constitutional checks and balances apply to them. So long as Congress doesn’t enforce its own prerogatives, the FBI’s corrupt leaders are right.
Durham report concludes that FBI had evidence the Steele Dossier could have been sourced to Russian disinformation and didn't disclose this fact to keep getting warrants to spy on Trump. pic.twitter.com/61pbBO0kNb
I was so disgusted by the Jan. 6 riot that I deleted my Twitter account. I wrote introspective pieces on wanting to be part of the solution. (And I never liked Trump, and I thought Biden beat him.)
The Durham Report is 100x worse than Jan. 6. It didn’t reveal a handful of nuts… pic.twitter.com/xYS4Kar9T6
It’s been publicly known for decades that the FBI uses its surveillance, investigatory, and other law enforcement powers to manipulate American politics. Recall its surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. and infamous FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s spying on the Supreme Court, Congress, and presidents.
The Durham report is, in that respect, nothing new. What would be new would be punishing the FBI’s use of blackmail, smear operations, threats, censorship, illegal spying, and election rigging. If that doesn’t happen, the United States is quite simply not a free country anymore.
Obama’s Acting Homeland Security Inspector General Charles Edwards pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the US government. Charles Edwards and his subordinate were indicted on 16 counts of theft and fraud, the Justice Department announced in March 2020.
“The indictment charges Charles K. Edwards, 59, of Sandy Spring, Maryland, and Murali Yamazula Venkata, 54, of Aldie, Virginia, with conspiracy to commit theft of government property and to defraud the United States, theft of government property, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The indictment also charges Venkata with destruction of records.”
The charges alleged that in addition to stealing government software and databases, Venkata helped Edwards by reconfiguring his laptop so that he could upload the stolen software.
“The indictment further alleges that, in addition to stealing DHS-OIG’s software and the sensitive government databases, Venkata and others also assisted Edwards by reconfiguring his laptop so that he could properly upload the stolen software and databases, provided troubleshooting support whenever Edwards required it, and helped him build a testing server at his residence with the stolen software and databases,” the Department of Justice said in a press release announcing the indictments. “As further part of the alleged scheme, Edwards retained software developers in India for the purpose of developing his commercial alternative of DHS-OIG’s software.”
Although Edwards left the DHS in 2013, according to the indictment he leveraged his relationship with Venkata to carry out the scheme which began in October of 2014 and continued to April of 2017.
The ex-watchdog who oversaw the Department of Homeland Security pleaded guilty on Friday to stealing propriety software and sensitive databases from his old job for his private business.
Charles K. Edwards, 61, served in the Obama administration as the Acting Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security between February 2008 until December 2013. He served before that time as the inspector general for the U.S. Postal Service.
During a federal court hearing on Friday morning, Edwards pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss to conspiracy to defraud the United States and theft of government property. Edwards’s sentencing date has not yet been set.
His attorney Courtney Roberts Forrest, from the firm Kaiser Dillon, did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
Manuel Balce Ceneta / APThen-White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson speaks to reporters during a briefing at the White House in Washington Jan. 16, 2018. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP)
Ronny Jackson, who was the White House physician to former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, has joined a growing legion of Americans (and medical experts) who are gravely concerned about the physical and mental health of President Joe Biden.
Jackson — a retired Navy rear admiral who now represents Texas as a Republican congressman — sounded the alarm on Sunday when he said Biden’s lack of public appearances is a “MAJOR red flag” signaling that something is seriously wrong with the 78-year-old career politician. Biden has yet to hold a formal news conference as president.
“I served as White House physician under THREE Presidents,” Jackson tweeted. “I’ve seen what it takes physically AND mentally to do the job.’
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“I can tell you right now that the way Biden is hiding from the public is a MAJOR red flag. Something’s not right!”
Jackson made the remarks two days after Biden tripped three times while walking up the staircase of Air Force One. Keep in mind that he was previously vice president for eight years, so he has walked up those same steps numerous times before. It’s not as if he’s unfamiliar with those stairs.
The White House comically blamed the wind for Biden’s blunder, but the sad imagery of a septuagenarian stumbling helplessly as cameras rolled ignited a worldwide feeding frenzy.
While the liberal American media tried to downplay Biden’s epic stumble, the British and other international press headlined it (as they should, since he’s supposed to be the “leader of the free world”).
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Jackson is not the only physician who has expressed concern about Biden’s mental and physical fitness.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden landed himself in a factually sticky situation Thursday night, arguing former President Barack Obama had never taken part in the policy of family separation carried out at the outset of the Trump administration.
The false claim came late in the second and final debate of the 2020 presidential election cycle, as he faced off with incumbent Republican President Donald Trump on the issue of illegal immigration.
“These 500-plus kids came with parents. They separated them at the border to make it a disincentive to come to begin with,” Biden said. “They got separated from their parents and it makes us a laughingstock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”
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“Kristen, they did it,” Trump said, addressing debate moderator Kristen Welker. “We changed the policy. They did it. We changed — they built the cages.”
“We did not separate — they,” Biden trailed off, changing course.
“Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. What happened? Kids were ripped from their arms and separated.”
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The narrative was not original, having already been fact-checked on numerous occasions by independent sources in the establishment media.
The Associated Press, for its part, checked former first lady Michelle Obama for making similar claims in an address to the 2020 Democratic National Convention this past August.
“Michelle Obama assailed President Donald Trump on Monday for allegedly ripping migrant children from their parents and throwing them into cages, picking up on a frequent and distorted point made widely by Democrats,” The AP wrote. “She’s……………………………..READ THE REST OF THIS REPORT AT https://www.westernjournal.com/fact-check-biden-tells-biggest-lie-night-maybe-entire-election/
Andrew J. Sciascia is an associate staff reporter with The Western Journal, having joined the outlet as a regular contributor of opinion in 2018. He regularly co-hosts the outlet’s video podcast, “WJ Live.”
Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden applaud during President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremonies at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017. (Paul J. Richards / AFP via Getty Images)
Former President Barack Obama directed the conspiracy of top intelligence community aides who sought to take down former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump said Sunday. Trump appeared Sunday on the Fox News show “Sunday Morning Futures.” He was interviewed Wednesday by host Maria Bartiromo.
Much of their conversation centered around the case of Flynn, who had been accused of improperly communicating with a foreign official after his phone calls to a former Russian ambassador during Trump’s transition period were listened to and later leaked. Flynn was forced to step down, and later faced charges after an FBI investigation.
The Justice Department is currently seeking to drop charges against Flynn and have his case dismissed. Flynn was among those “unmasked” by Obama-era officials. Unmasking is the intelligence term used for those instances when American citizens speaking to foreign nationals under surveillance have their identities revealed. It takes an official request to do so.
In recent days, the Trump administration released a list of Obama administration officials who made unmasking requests and who could have learned of Flynn’s identity through them. Due to the presence on that list of former Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, and comments from the attorney currently representing Flynn, Obama’s name has now become linked to the effort to target Flynn.
Other names on the list include former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.
Trump pulled no punches in the interview.
“It was the greatest political crime in the history of our country,” he said.
“If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would have been in jail a long time ago. And I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” the president said. “It is a disgrace, what’s happened. This is the greatest political scam, hoax in the history of our country, and people should be going to jail for this stuff. And, hopefully, a lot of people are going to have to pay.”
He said that “Flynn and others are heroes, heroes, because what’s happened to them — they weren’t after General Flynn. They wanted him to lie about me, make up a story. And with few exceptions, nobody did that,” he said.
“This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt. And we caught them. We caught them,” Trump said.
The president fired a shot at Biden.
“I watched Biden yesterday. He could barely speak,” Trump said. “He was on ‘Good Morning America,’ right? And he said he didn’t know anything about it. And now it just gets released. Right after he said that, it gets released that he was one of the unmaskers, meaning he knew everything about it.”
The president said the Obama-era intelligence community “went after these people viciously, all because they wanted to hurt the president of the United States. They figure they’ll either hurt him or they’ll take him out. That would be the ideal.
“Comey is a corrupt person, but let me tell you, Brennan bad. They’re all bad, everyone. Clapper is a not-smart guy, in charge of intelligence. But here’s the thing. It was impossible for it to happen without the man that sits right in that chair in the Oval Office. He knew everything.”
Bartiromo asked Trump whether Obama directed the effort against him.
“Yes, he probably directed them. But if he didn’t direct them, he knew everything. And you will see that,” he said.
Trump noted that communications from FBI agents involved in the hunt for evidence to show his campaign colluded with Russia mentioned that the then-president wanted to see everything.
“They’re not talking about me. I wasn’t president. They’re talking about ‘POTUS wants to see everything.’” Trump said.
He said Brennan was “totally involved.”
“John Brennan was one of the architects, in my opinion. You look at Brennan, you look at Clapper, you look at them all,” the president said.
Trump said the intelligence community did not go rogue.
“But, ultimately, the president knew everything. The president knew everything. President Obama and Vice President Biden, they knew everything,” he said.
The president said the truth has finally emerged.
“If this happened to Obama instead of to a Republican president that’s popular, 96 percent in the Republican Party, but it’s a whole different thing. If this happened to Obama instead of to me, you know what? Everybody would be in jail for years already, for years. It’s a disgraceful thing,” Trump said.
“We caught them in the act, Maria. It’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “And every day, we’re seeing more and more information come out. We caught them. And their guys are gone. They were guarding the fort. Comey and all these guys, they were guarding the fort. And once they left, it got easier and easier.
“And now it’s like an avalanche of really bad — call it treason, call it whatever you want, but they tried to take down a duly elected president of the United States.”
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Breaking update: Acting DNI Richard Grenell declassified the list of Obama officials involved in the unmasking of General Mike Flynn in his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Grenell was seen delivering a satchel of documents to the DOJ last week and according to ABC, he also discussed the list of Obama officials involved in unmasking Flynn.
The names of the officials who were involved in unmasking General Flynn in his calls to Kislyak have not been released to the public yet.
Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has sought to declassify a list of former Obama administration officials who were allegedly involved in the so-called “unmasking” of former national security adviser Michael Flynn in his conversations with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, a senior U.S. official tells ABC News.
Grenell, who remains the U.S. ambassador to Germany along with being the acting DNI, visited the Justice Department last week to discuss the declassification of the list, according to the official.
Recall, General Flynn’s December 2016 phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were intercepted and Flynn was illegally unmasked — after Flynn’s identity was revealed, the transcripts of his phone calls were then leaked to the Washington Post. Flynn’s leaked calls were published by WaPo’s David Ignatius on January 12, 2017 which led to Flynn being fired as National Security Advisor in February of 2017.
Obama’s former NatSec advisor Susan Rice was forced to acknowledge she unmasked Trump’s senior advisors during the transition period, however she maintained it was not politically motivated. According to previous reports by John Solomon, Obama’s Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power also unmasked hundreds of Americans in Obama’s last year in office. In fact, Samantha Power sought to unmask Americans on a near daily basis.
Congressman Nunes has been on the front lines accusing the criminal Obama administration of illegally unmasking Trump’s transition team and it looks like we may soon find out who targeted Flynn!
The Justice Department dropped its case against Flynn last Thursday after bombshell documents were released showing he was framed by the FBI.
Ed Henry broke the news tonight that DNI Richard Grenell walked a “satchel of documents” over to the Department of Justice on Thursday.
Henry says the satchel contained more transcripts that will likely be released on Friday.
Ed Henry: Breaking tonight, Schiff may be even more panicked right now. Because I’m hearing from two sources familiar with this that as early as tomorrow Rick Grenell, the Acting Director of National Intelligence, could reveal even more documents shedding light on the Russian probe of President Trump and how Schiff and other investigators knew for a long time there was no collusion even as they were saying they had direct evidence there was… There’s a second set of documents that Rick Grenell who now has the job Clapper had brought to the Department of Justice today in a satchel… They say as early as tomorrow we may learn the contents.
Jim Hoft is the founder of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
Two Republican lawmakers stood up on the House floor and voiced their opinion that Obama whistleblower Philip Haney was murdered and had not committed suicide. The original reports claimed that Haney died of a single shot to the chest that was self-inflicted. That seems to have changed a bit as the coroner’s office and the police department both have said they have not yet concluded suicide in Haney’s death.
Representatives Louie Gohmert and Steve King both were friends of Haney’s, and they say it is inconceivable that Haney killed himself. They both pointed out that Haney had information that could have brought down several in the Obama inner circle, and that he kept a flash drive on a chain around his neck with all of the information all the time.
Indeed, Haney had a lot of good things happening in his life at the time of his death. He was negotiating to return to work at the DHS, was getting married, and was just starting on his second book after the first one did so well. Hardly doesn’t sound like suicide material.
In little-noticed speeches on the House floor on Feb. 28, both congressmen bucked claims that Haney died by suicide.
“I’m standing on the floor here saying, Madame Speaker, I don’t believe that Phil Haney committed suicide,” King said. “I expect that we’re going to get a thorough investigation. The evidence that is coming to me indicates that he was murdered.”
“Phil often said, ‘I would never commit suicide,’” King explained, adding that he was a good friend of Haney’s.
Meanwhile, Gohmert explained in a lengthy speech that he, too, was good friends with Haney, so much so, in fact, that he and Haney had made a “mutual pact.”
“I’d been concerned about his safety, with all the information he knew and people who could’ve gotten in trouble,” Gohmert said. “We had a mutual pact. It said: Either one of us ended up committing suicide, then the other is going to make sure that the truth wins out.”
Trump Attorney Rudy Giuliani joined Jesse Watters on Saturday night to discuss President Trump’s acquittal. Rudy also revealed information on the January 2016 meeting in the Obama White House organized by the anti-Trump CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
Records show Obama and his Deep State actors in the White House pressured the Ukraine to provide dirt on candidate Trump and his team in early 2016. Highly respected investigative reporter John Solomon called the 11 AM January 19, 2016 meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building “one of the earliest documented efforts to build the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative and one of the first to involve the Obama administration’s intervention.”
Suspected Schiff whistleblower Eric Ciaramella chaired that meeting, which was also attended by his frequent collaborator Liz Zentos. The meeting was ostensibly arranged by the Obama administration for anti-corruption training and coordination, but it didn’t take long for the Ukrainian participants, during the meetings and afterward, “to realize the Americans’ objectives included two politically hot investigations: one that touched Vice President Joe Biden’s family and one that involved a lobbying firm linked closely to then-candidate Trump.”
The Obama Department of Justice officials were interested in reopening a closed 2014 FBI investigation that “focused heavily on GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort, whose firm long had been tied to Trump through his partner and Trump pal, Roger Stone.”
Nazar Kholodnytskyy, then Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor and a meeting attendee, said he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election, when the “black ledger,” key evidence against Manafort, who had joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016 and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016, was suddenly released to the media in May 2016.
According to Andriy Telizhenko, then a political officer at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington DC and a meeting attendee, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over(it is believed that the FBI attended the January 19, 2016 meeting). Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, was under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was paying then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter as both a board member and a consultant.
All of the above suggests that the Obama Administration used U.S. government personnel in an attempt to enlist a foreign nation to provide negative information about political opponents and to quash investigation of political allies.
And when the Ukrainians did not agree, it appears that the U.S. government pressured the Ukrainian government to replace obstinate Ukrainian officials with more compliant ones.
On Saturday night Rudy Giuliani told Jesse Watters that he has three witnesses who claim in January 2016 members of Obama’s NSC violated the law Mueller was investigating Trump of violating. The Obama officials asked foreigners for dirty information on an American citizen who was going to be involved in a political campaign.
The Gateway Pundit previously reported on the attendees at Ciaramella’s meeting
Rudy says he has a memo and there is no doubt who was at the meeting. Rudy also claims he has a money laundering evidence that involves Hunter Biden.
Rudy also claims he has a money laundering evidence that involves Hunter Biden.
As The Gateway Pundit first reported in December 2018, Andrii Telizhenko, an official at the Ukrainian Embassy, was approached by DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa in early 2016. Alexandra Chalupa wanted dirt on candidate Trump and his campaign manager Paul Manafort. The Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC worked CLOSELY with the DNC operative Chalupa. Chalupa told Andrii she wanted Russian “dirt” on the Trump campaign.
The Gateway Pundit spoke with Telizhenko on the DNC Russia-gate Scandal last year.
Chalupa is also connected to a Ukrainian by the name of Vasili Filipchuk, who ran the organization labeled ICPS. Filipchuk too is suspected of helping to write the phony Trump-Russia dossier. The entity he works for (ICPS) stands for the International Center for Policy Studies and it was founded by Open Society.
Open Society is a well known George Soros funded organization that fronts as an entity that works “to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people.” In reality it is a far-left organization that works against freedoms embedded in the US Constitution and across Europe.
Along with being connected to the fake Trump – Russia dossier and suspicious individuals in the Ukraine, Chalupa also is involved in the creation of astro-turfed (i.e. created by Democrat leadership) anti – Trump events in Washington D.C.
Now this…
OAN’s Jack Posobiec interviewed Andrii Telizhenko again this week. Telezhenko destroys Adam Schiff and the unhinged Democrats.
Andrii Telizhenko: Most of the Ukrainian and government officials do not even understand what the fuss is about here in Washington… We’re supposed to be the victims in this whole thing but we’re not. The Ukrainian president said there was no quid pro quo, there was no pressure. And what I know is he said privately that it was the most diplomatic phone call he’s had in the last couple months with foreign leaders…
Jack Posobiec: Did you see pressure under the Obama administration?
Andrii Telizhenko: Of course, we saw pressure every time. Starting with the Ambassador from the United States in Kiev who would call the president and tell him what to do. It’s unethical to do this anywhere else in the world… And in meetings he would be told what to do, who to fire, who to hire.
This is an amazing interview by Jack Posobiec and Andrii Telizhenko. And this is from the whistleblower who first reported on Obama and the Democrat Party’s shady dealings with Ukraine.
To hear AOC and her fraud squad tell the tale, ICE is practically throwing babies to the wolves. But what does the EVIDENCE say? Short answer — it says that they’re lying. All that weeping and finger-pointing laying the blood of children at the feet of Trump and his administration was a complete fraud.
If they were being honest, they would be thanking Trump for REDUCING deaths at the border. And considering how Democrats are working their damnedest to throw these children to the Coyotes, that’s a REALLY impressive statistic.
A tragic photograph of the bodies of Oscar Alberto Martínez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, who drowned attempting to cross the Rio Grande River from Mexico into Texas, renewed outrage about the border crisis. Politicians expressed their indignation at the image while, predictably, blaming the Trump administration.
[Harris, O’Rourke and Booker denounced Trump’s ‘inhumane’ and ‘immoral’ policies.]
…Former Vice President Joe Biden also tweeted about the tragic photo: “This image is gut-wrenching. The cruelty we’re seeing at our border is unconscionable. History will judge how we respond to the Trump Administration’s treatment of immigrant families & children — we can’t be silent. This isn’t who we are. This is not America.”
Instead of sharpening their pointing fingers, these Democratic hopefuls should have been pulling up statistics. If Trump’s a moral monster, what do you call the LAST administration? (Which, as we recall, had one Joe Biden working in the White House.)
But the reality is that deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border decreasedafter Donald Trump became president, according to data from the United States Border Patrol. During the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years they averaged 291 per year, down from 372 during the Obama/Biden administrationand 382 under Bush.
Source: NationalReview
Of course, that’s only PART of the story, isn’t it? Border Patrol agents are busy SAVING lives of people who try to cross a river and a desert through hostile terrain that happens to cross through criminal territory.
Not only do these hazards cost innocent lives, leaving a staggering number of women and girls to be exploited by predatory men, but the criminal cartels profit handsomely from these actions. First, by charging top dollar to cross through their territory on the way to America, second by assisting them over the border, which can include the use of a child carried over the border for amnesty purposes. (Something like one-in-three children coming over the border are non-relatives trafficked for this purpose.)
And with all that manpower (yes, we said MANPOWER) being spent on rescuing, feeding, securing and caring these thousands of illegals swarming over the border, there is ANOTHER consequence the Liberals have not been honest about.
When’s the last time you’ve heard any Democrat mention THIS:
Diverting border security resources to address the “humanitarian need” of migrants is leading to record-high levels of illicit drug smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border, said James W. Carroll, director of the U.S. Office of Drug Control Policy, in a Thursday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
Carroll said, “I couldn’t tell you how bad this is. Seizures are down, and it’s not because there are less drugs coming in. It’s because their attention has to be diverted because of the humanitarian need, but what that means is more drugs are coming in than ever before.”
…Using federal resources meant for border security on “humanitarian” endeavors compromises the government’s ability to interdict drug smuggling, said Carroll. “That’s what these men and women want to do. They want to protect their families and their friends from these poisons coming in. That’s what we need to let them do. Fix the immigration system. Let them get back to protecting the U.S., and let us get back to the issue of saving lives.”
Source: Breitbart
Can anyone blame Dan Crenshaw for wondering their track record on policy says about the Democrats’ REAL objectives with respect to the borders?
Are we debating open borders? If Democrats are against a wall, against closing asylum loopholes, against deportations, against collecting data on sanctuary cities, and FOR decriminalizing illegal crossings…isn’t it fair to say they’re for open borders?
Then again, Democrats were the ones who said their political future would rise or fall on this issue, remember?
“The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success,” the memo read.
It finished, “If Democrats don’t try to do everything in their power to defend Dreamers, that will jeopardize Democrats’ electoral chances in 2018 and beyond.”
Source: Fox
Dress it up in whatever pretty little bow you like, it doesn’t change the facts. This issue isn’t about the Left’s COMPASSION. They use all the right buzzwords as though it was, but it isn’t. They said itself in that leaked memo — this is about political power, and who gets to wield it.
It is literally nothing any more noble than that ugly brute fact.
THAT is why they don’t acknowledge any history concerning this issue that predates January of 2017. Anything that undercuts the narrative doesn’t matter and is airbrushed out of history. If they showed the big picture in its proper context, the public might see that — however bad Pelosi’s Democrats are making the border situation — Trump’s administration is doing a pretty good job with the bad situation they were handed.
Deaths are down. That’s a GOOD thing, no matter HOW much you hate Trump. Now if we can just do something stop the smugglers from waltzing across our border with drugs, guns, and Lord knows what else… and redirect asylum claimants to using legal crossings where they won’t be exploited and raped by cartels, we’ll be golden.
You know, if Congress doesn’t have anything BETTER to do with its time.
We’ve all seen the dishonest games the left have played with the power they’re entrusted with, they’re obviously unworthy of that trust.
But what about 2020? Could a moral person pull a lever for Trump with their integrity intact? Would Jesus himself vote for Trump? We’re glad you asked. There’s a brand new book that covers precisely that question:
Would Jesus ever choose someone, with a less than stellar past, to be a leader? Would Jesus be cool with how Trump blasts CNN, The Left, and his feckless ‘compadres’ on The Right? What about Health Care? Would the Great Physician give Trump’s opposition to ObamaCare the ‘two thumbs up?’ Find out in this BEST-SELLER!
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But, you know us here at Clash, we don’t give up that easily. We’ve set up an outpost behind enemy lines. If you’re still on Facebook, check out our brand new ClashBriefing page.
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Images: Joaquin Castro (L) — U.S. Customs and Border Protection (R)
The current selective outrage from Democrats today stands in sharp contrast to the deplorable conditions migrants faced in detention facilities during the Obama administration in 2014. The commentary from certain Democrats appears to be more politically motivated than directed at improving conditions for migrants in detention.
In June 2014, Breitbart News Director of Border and Cartel Chronicles Projects Brandon Darby shocked the world with the publication of leaked photos showing the deplorable conditions faced by unaccompanied migrant children and family units. Democrat responses at that time appeared to be more angered that migrants were being detained at all than by the horrible conditions forced upon the migrants by Obama administration policies.
Dozens of photographs published by Breitbart News at that time show migrants packed into small holding cells, often shoulder-to-shoulder. Many of the photos show filthy conditions and some reveal portable toilet units. Other’s show people sleeping on the floor in cold conditions without blankets.
Contrast these with the single photo tweeted by U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) this week that shows clean conditions and women with blankets. It is worth noting that Castro’s brother, Julián Castro, is a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president — seeking to pair off against President Donald Trump in November 2020. Julián Castro has been conspicuously silent on the recent discussion of migrant detention facilities.
When Rep. Castro visited an Obama-era facility in 2015, his concern seemed more focused on ending the detention of migrants altogether rather than improving conditions for the detained illegal border crossers. A report from the San Antonio Current at the time said Castro called it a “very emotional visit.”He reportedly said the migrants should qualify for asylum.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) took it a step further. “What I saw today did nothing but confirm my belief walking through the door that we should end the jailing of women and children in these proceedings. It is by its nature punitive, whether it is intended to be or not,” she said.
More than 130 Democrats in Congress signed a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson asking him to end the use of family detention facilities, the report stated.
“They are in a locked facility that feels quite a bit like a jail. I would say it is a jail camp,” Lofgren said after touring another facility in Central Texas.
On Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), accused Border Patrol agents of forcing migrants to drink from toilets. “Officers were keeping women in cells w/ no water & had told them to drink out of the toilets,” she tweeted.
National Border Patrol Council President and Border Patrol Agent Brandon Judd expressed his anger at the accusations leveled by AOC at the agents his union represents. His interview aired on Breitbart News Tonight.
“Nobody is forced to drink out of a toilet and nobody is told to drink out of a toilet,” Judd explained. “Its completely and totally a baseless and ridiculous allegation and frankly it needs to be investigated and she needs to be exposed.”
Responding to a statement from the freshman representative that she would rather be morally correct than factually accurate, Judd told Breitbart News, “How can you have the moral high ground if you are going to throw facts out the window and spew falsehoods? And that’s what she is doing.”
Judd explained further, “She gives absolutely no contexts to these allegations that she is making and by not giving context she is trying to paint a false narrative and a false picture and she needs to be held accountable for that.”
Since Breitbart’s release of the leaked photos in 2014, Congress, under either party’s leadership, has done little to nothing in terms of reducing the numbers of migrant families and unaccompanied minors crossing the border illegally. In fact, the issue has gotten much worse.
In 2014, Border Patrol agents working the nine sectors of the southwest border with Mexico apprehended 68,445 family units and 68, 541 unaccompanied minors, according to information obtained from the FY2014 Southwest Border Migration Report. A total of 136,986 migrant families and children.
During the first eight months of FY 2019, those numbers more than doubled. The most recent report from CBP shows that Border Patrol agents apprehended 332,981 migrants families and 56,278 unaccompanied minors — 389,259 total families and children (a 184 percent increase).
Despite these massive increases in the numbers of children and family units crossing the border, the most recent spending legislation approved by Congress last week provides “NO funding for ICE Detention Beds,” Breitbart News reported.
AOC went even further — criticizing Mayfair for making beds for migrants families to sleep on.
At the end of a lengthy discussion on Twitter, Darby concluded, “It’s absolutely right and noble to be upset about the humanitarian crisis on our border, my point is that some seem to only be upset now that it’s politically expedient to be upset. That’s all.”
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.
Spoiler alert for Leftists: Barack Obama orchestrated the attack on Donald Trump.
Democrats hold on to the flimsy fruitless branch that (1) they will impeach Trump, and (2) hopefully accomplish this before the truth about Obama is learned.
The Democratic Party is rotten to its core from top to bottom. And they who claim to want the truth now do everything within and outside of their power to hide the truth.
In another Judicial Watch freedom of information request release, we learned that a senior State Department official worked with House Majority Leader (Minority Whip at the time) Steny Hoyer in 2016 on Russia documents provided by British spy Christopher Steele.
“Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation today released 18 pages of documents revealing former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer coordinating with then-House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer’s (D-MD) national security advisor, Daniel Silverberg to work on Russia dossier materials provided by Christopher Steele,” Judicial Watch released.
The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit after requests for communications about the dossier were ignored by State Department officials. They show direct conversations between Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson, Winer, and Nuland about getting together for a meeting about a “Russia related issue.”
Is this the role, these bureaucrats were paid to do what on behalf of America? To collude with people who were paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to bring down Donald Trump?
From Hoyer’s office, Daniel Silverberg praised Nuland’s work on the issue and called her a “warrior.”
“It was a delight to speak today, notwithstanding the context. You’ve been a warrior on these issues, and I look forward to speaking further to preserve and wherever possible strengthen the important work you have done. I’ll follow up regarding a possible working group meeting,”Silverberg wrote to Nuland on November 28, 2016.
Working group. By now we all know what this means.
Obama’s State Department colluded with other weaponized agencies with the government to bring down Trump.
The only question that should be asked on the Russian collusion is, “Why isn’t half of the Obama administration behind bars?”
I wrote a while back before we knew the content of the Mueller Report that Democrats’ biggest fear is that the Mueller Report was ready.
And if Democrats fear anything, it’s the analysis of why they couldn’t get Trump. Imagine the conclusions drawn from this report that will 100 percent exonerate Donald Trump from any collusion with the Russians. The one conclusion many will draw will come from what is undoubtedly the cover-up of the biggest political scandal since the founding of the Republic.
But Democrats have far too many holes to plug, as their genie escaped the bottle.
TBS noted an obscure Democrat co-conspirator, Bill Priestap. You may not have heard this name much. But as it turns out, E. W. Priestap played a critical role in this spy novel. The E. W. are initials for Edward William Priestap, aka Bill Priestap. His background is in law. However, the role that matters to America centers around his work with the FBI as an intelligence officer. In fact, Priestap worked as the assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division from 2015 to 2018.
His testimony before Congress hangs the Democrats out to dry. While the government redacted some of his testimony, somebody tied the strings together creating enough rope to hang the Democrats. Preistap’s testimony does two things.
First, it proves the Hillary investigation didn’t get nearly the attention Trump’s probe garnered.
Second, it creates a sort of timeline of the efforts to entrap the President. Further, we learn of Preistap’s role in the creation of the Steel Dossier.
Priestap met repeatedly with his British counterparts in 2016. Both FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page were completely aware of the ins and outs of this operation. The dominoes continue to fall, all the way the chain. The final piece of the puzzle is Obama himself.
Nailing Obama
Obama’s scandal-free administration is about as real as the goose who laid a golden egg. Yet, leftists eagerly believe Baby Black Jesus should be sainted. However, thanks to the diligence from groups such as Judicial Watch, we now see hundreds of pages of evidence proving Obama was definitely the man in charge.
For a complete transcript of the emails connecting the dots, click here. Long story short, Jonathan Winer’s role in the attempted coup gives us further insight into the situation.
Winer wrote an op-ed claiming anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele and Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal approached him with separate dossiers. Winer wrote: “In the summer of 2016, Steele told me that he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials.”Also, “While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know …”
“Every day of digging reveals more and more political collaboration on this hit job, and at the highest levels. While so much of the media is content to chase Russian conspiracies, The Daily Caller News Foundation and the fantastic lawyers at Judicial Watch are going to keep doing the hard work of holding power accountable,” said Christopher Bedford, editor in chief of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“These documents further confirm the Obama State Department was obviously a way station for Steele’s smear dossier and other anti-Trump activism,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Obviously, Winer was intrumental in giving Steele access to all the right people to peddle his dossier. Even Hollywood knocked on Winer’s door, hoping to make RussiaGate, the movie.
The line connecting Obama’s State Department and the dossier is crystal clear.
And that’s bad news for Obama. Because leftists no nothing of loyalty. As soon as they sense a prison sentence in their future, someone will roll over on Obama.
But it’s not all bad news. Since Obama freed most of the prisoners housed at GITMO, we have the perfect place to put the treasonous democRATS that tried to take Trump down.
It’s no secret that liberals across the country have tried desperately to stop Donald Trump since he became a candidate, but their efforts to undermine him may now be coming back at themselves like a boomerang.
A scandal which began before the 2016 election was even held has just exploded, at least if a bombshell report from the watchdog group Judicial Watch is accurate. The organization has been diligently unraveling the facts around Fusion GPS, and what they recently found is jaw-dropping.
Fusion GPS, of course, is the “opposition research” firm which was contracted by the DNC to dig up dirt on Trump in the run-up to the election. The company is linked to the infamous dossier containing scandalous — and thoroughly debunked — claims about the president, but the controversy is much wider than just those papers.
It now appears that someone working for Fusion GPS was purposely and frequently collaborating with a deputy attorney general within the Obama administration, sending anti-Trump material in a way that was certainly unethical if not completely illegal.
The Obama-era official is Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and the anti-Trump figure working for Fusion GPS was his wife.
“[A] series of ‘Hi Honey’ emails from Nellie Ohr to her high-ranking federal prosecutor husband and his colleagues raise the prospect that Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research was being funneled into the Justice Department during the 2016 election through a back-door marital channel,”explained veteran investigative journalist John Solomon for The Hill.
“Ohr has admitted to Congress that, during the 2016 presidential election, she worked for Fusion GPS — the firm hired by Democratic nominee Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to perform political opposition research,” the journalist said.
That kind of research is often used by political campaigns against their opponents, and is not by itself off limits. But Judicial Watch uncovered 339 emails which reveal that Nellie Ohr likely crossed the line by using her marriage as a political tool, and sending pages of anti-Trump research directly to official Department of Justice email accounts.
“They clearly show that Ohr sent reams of open-source intelligence to her husband, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and on some occasions to at least three DOJ prosecutors: Lisa Holtyn, Ivana Nizich and Joseph Wheatley,”Solomon said.
“Such overt political content flowing into the email accounts of a DOJ charged with the nonpartisan mission of prosecuting crimes is jarring enough. It raises additional questions about potential conflicts of interest when it is being injected by a spouse working as a Democratic contractor trying to defeat Trump,”he continued.
But the scandal is deeper than just emails. Nellie and Bruce Ohr apparently had key roles in pushing the debunked Trump dossier and the false narrative that the future president was colluding with Russia.
“For instance, just 24 days after the anti-Trump screed was emailed, both Ohrs met in Washington with British intelligence operative Christopher Steele,” Solomon said. “She said she learned that Steele had concerns that he hoped the DOJ or FBI would investigate, with help from her husband.”
And that appears to be exactly what happened.
“The next day, Bruce Ohr used his official DOJ position to go to then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe with Steele’s allegations (later to become known as the Steele dossier), and the bureau opened its first investigation into Russia collusion,” he said.
There are obvious parallels to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI officials who were also having an affair all while texting back and forth about how Trump should be stopped. More and more, it looks like partisan politics and anti-Trump collaboration was widespread within agencies which are supposed to be unbiased.
That is the real scandal here: Not that liberals tried to uncover dirt on a candidate, but that official government personnel within our own government eagerly participated in the partisan witch hunt.
It looks like there was collusion, but not by Trump.
Instead, the real collusion took place between Obama-era government officials and activists who saw nothing as off limits in order to install Hillary Clinton as president — and that should alarm every American, no matter their party.
Benjamin Arie is an independent journalist and writer. He has personally covered everything ranging from local crime to the U.S. president as a reporter in Michigan, before focusing on national politics. Ben frequently travels to Latin America and has spent years living in Mexico. Follow Benjamin on Facebook
The Wall Street Journal reporter Sadie Gurman says Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called allegations that AG Bill Barr mishandled the Mueller report is ‘completely bizarre.’ Beleaguered Justice Department No. 2 Rod Rosenstein raised eyebrows Thursday night with a private speech in which he took a swipe at the Obama administration and slammed ex-FBI boss James Comey.
Rosenstein, the U.S. deputy attorney general who supervised the Mueller investigation, spoke out publicly for the first time since the report was released, criticizing the Obama administration’s real-time reaction to Russian hacking and its decision “not publicize the full story” to the American people.
Rosenstein, who was speaking in New York at the Public Servants Dinner of the Armenian Bar Association, defended his handling of the probe and criticized former officials in the process. He also called out former FBI Director James Comey for alerting Congress about the investigation into Russian collusion at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign.
“The FBI disclosed classified evidence about the investigation to ranking legislators and their staffers,”he said. “Someone selectively leaked details to the news media. The FBI director [Comey] announced at a congressional hearing that there was a counterintelligence investigation that might result in criminal charges. Then the former FBI director alleged that the president pressured him to close the investigation, and the president denied that the conversation occurred.
“So that happened,” he joked.
The Obama administration has been criticized for its handling of the Russian interference. Trump has blamed Obama for not acting quickly enough to stem Russia’s influence during the campaign.
In 2016, NBC News, citing unnamed high-level officials, reported that the Obama administration did not respond more forcefully because it did not want to appear to be interfering with the election. One official told the network at the time, “They thought [Hillary Clinton] was going to win, so they were willing to kick the can down the road.”
A reporter for NPR said the Obama administration debated how to handle the information and decided that Obama should deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin privately about the matter.
He blasted “mercenary critics”who benefit financially by expressing “passionate opinions about any topic, often with little or no information. They do not just express disagreement. They launch ad hominem attacks unrestricted by truth or morality. They make threats, spread fake stories and even attack your relatives.”
Rosenstein has maintained a tenuous relationship with Trump. Congressional Republicans have also accused him of withholding documents and not investigating aggressively enough what they contend was political bias within the FBI.
Former FBI General Counsel James Baker, in closed-door testimony before congressional committees last October, provided detail about internal discussions concerning Rosenstein’s reported offer to wear a wire to tape the president in the tumultuous days following James Comey’s firing as FBI director in May 2017.
Fox News has confirmed portions of the transcript to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees.
“At my confirmation hearing in March 2017, a Republican senator asked me to make a commitment,”he recalled. “He said: “You’re going to be in charge of this [Russia] investigation. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that you’ll do it right, that you’ll take it to its conclusion and you’ll report [your results] to the American people.
“I did pledge to do it right and take it to the appropriate conclusion. I did not promise to report all results to the public, because grand jury investigations are ex parte proceedings. It is not our job to render conclusive factual findings. We just decide whether it is appropriate to file criminal charges.”
Rosenstein is leaving his post in two months. He had some fun with his speech and answered the question that so many on social media were asking after watching him standing stoically behind Attorney General William Barr during the lead-up to the Mueller report release.
“Last week, the big topic of discussion was, ‘What were you thinking when you stood behind Bill Barr at that press conference, with a deadpan expression?’ The answer is: I was thinking, “My job is to stand here with a deadpan expression.’”
Fox News’ Catherine Herridge and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Edmund DeMarche is a news editor for FoxNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @EDeMarche.
We wrote an article a while back asking Leftists to at least consider the idea that Democrats attempted a coup against President Trump.
Because Leftists are incapable of thinking they are wrong, I needed to “bitch-slap” them into what I know to be the reality: Democrats tried to set Trump (and satellites) up.
Many now come to that conclusion. Despite the con job currently underway by Adam “I have more damaging info on Trump” Schiff’s protestations otherwise. Things have turned on Democrats in a bad way.
And we see it with what fake news CNN admitted recently in an op-ed:
The Mueller report flatly states that Russia began interfering in American democracy in 2014. Over the next couple of years, the effort blossomed into a robust attempt to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. The Obama administration knew this was going on and yet did nothing. In 2016, Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice told her staff to “stand down”and “knock it off” as they drew up plans to “strike back” against the Russians, according to an account from Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump”.
Apparently Obama was busy striking a nuclear deal with Iran. At least that’s how some people want to frame it. Personally, I think a lot more than a nuclear deal kept Obama’s attention.
Criminal in Chief
I recently stumbled across a list of 78 times Obama violated the constitution or broke federal laws.
Upon the most interesting entries, Obama illegally armed both Mexican drug cartels and ISIS militants. The same day Obama called for stricter gun control, he authorized a shipment of guns to the Syrian opposition. And to add another layer of criminal activity, Obama engaged in racketeering when he pressured banks not to do business with gun stores. Talk about sending mixed messages.
Of course, not all his crimes related to guns. Obama used the IRS to target conservatives.Obama also ordered Boing to fire 1,000 employees for being non-union. Further, Obama terminated his Inspector General after it was discovered that Obama’s friend was embezzling money.Then Obama raided Gibson guitar factory because it’s owned by a Republican.
I don’t even want to start in on ObamaCare and the lies and deceit it embodies. But I will mention the Obama Administration had hundreds of meetings with lobbyists at coffee shops so they could avoid the required disclosures. He also used off-the-books funding for various military endeavors. And on his way out the door, Obama released violent terrorists from Guantanamo Bay. Not surprisingly, more than half of them went right back to attacking us.
In fact, Obama was so busy committing crimes against America, it’s no wonder Obama didn’t have time to hold the Russians accountable for their meddling in US elections.
But has anyone heard from Obama since the Mueller report came out? Of course not. Because if he addresses the nation, questions will be asked. Instead, Obama will stay out of the spotlight and leave it to his cronies to make excuses.
Obama’s supporters claim he did stand up to Russia by deploying sanctions after the election to punish them for their actions. But, Obama, according to the Washington Post, “approved a modest package… with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic.” In other words, a toothless response to a serious incursion.
But don’t just take my word for it that Obama failed. Congressman Adam Schiff, who disgraced himself in this process by claiming collusion when Mueller found that none exists, once said that “the Obama administration should have done a lot more.” The Washington Post reported that a senior Obama administration official said they “sort of choked” in failing to stop the Russian government’s brazen activities. And Obama’s ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said, “The punishment did not fit the crime”about the weak sanctions rolled out after the 2016 election.
Obviously, we know Obama was as crooked as a Clinton. The only real surprise here is that CNN finally admits the only collusion happened on the left.
An informant who was previously silenced by the Obama administration has been called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the FBI’s investigating regarding Russian Nuclear officials.
The investigation is alleged to have connections to Hillary Clinton and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Victoria Toensing, who represents the informant, has asked the committee chairman, Charles Grassley, to allow the testimony about the information into “Uranium One”.
“Toensing said she also possesses memos that recount how the Justice Department last year threatened her client when he attempted to file a lawsuit that could have drawn attention to the Russian corruption during the 2016 presidential race,” The Hill reported on Wednesday.
Toensing said her client witnessed a significant amount of corruption going on in the U.S. and was forced by the FBI to a sign a document that prevents him from revealing what he knows to Congress:
Toensing’s client was an American businessman who says he worked for four years undercover as an FBI confidential witness. Toensing said he was blocked by the Obama Justice Department, under then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, about testifying to Congress about his time as an informant for the FBI. He contends that he has pertinent information that the Russian’s were attempting to gain access to former President Bill Clinton and his wife, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to influence the Obama administration’s decision on the purchase of Uranium One, Toensing said.
“Reporting indicates that the informant’s work was crucial to the government’s ability to crack a multimillion-dollar racketeering scheme by Russian nuclear officials on U.S. soil” and that the scheme involved “bribery, kickbacks, money laundering, and extortion,” Grassley states in his letter. “Further, the reporting indicates that your client can testify that ‘FBI agents made comments to him suggesting political pressure was exerted during the Justice Department probe’ and ‘that there was specific evidence that could have scuttled approval of the Uranium One deal.’ It appears that your client possesses unique information about the Uranium One/Rosatom transaction and how the Justice Department handled the criminal investigation into the Russian criminal conspiracy.”
The timeline may be a little lagging but it won’t be long now folks. The deck is stacked against them.
An FBI agent who allegedly quit the bureau over his belief that the Hillary Clinton email investigation was rigged will testify before the House of Representatives, The Hill reported.
The joint investigation between the House Judiciary and the Oversight Committees — led by Republican Reps. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, respectively — has been a source of consternation for Republicans and Democrats alike.
Conservatives have complained about the slow pace of the examination into how the Clinton email investigation was conducted, noting that only two witnesses have appeared before it.
Democrats, of course, have complained that it exists at all, since anything that distracts from the endless investigation into how President Donald Trump is really a Russian plant is simply frivolous — particularly if it implicates former FBI Director James Comey, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or former President Barack Obama in any wrongdoing.
Well, now we’re finally about to see some fireworks. Three top witnesses are going to testify before lawmakers: John Giacalone, who was in charge of the Clinton investigation for the first seven months; Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division; and Michael Steinbach, former head of the FBI’s national security division and the man who succeeded Giacalone.
All three are of particular interest, especially since Priestap was the supervisor of FBI agent Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump text messages have thrown the objectivity of the entire investigation into doubt.
However, the real headliner here may be Giacalone. Shortly after then-FBI Director Comey announced he wouldn’t be pursuing charges against Hillary Clinton for the email server, Fox News pundit Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote a column in which he claimed Giacalone had quit the bureau because he believed the investigation was rigged.
In the Oct. 28, 2016 column, Napolitano claimed at that at the start of the Clinton email investigation, “agents and senior managers gathered in the summer of 2015 to discuss how to proceed. It was obvious to all that a prima-facie case could be made for espionage, theft of government property and obstruction of justice charges. The consensus was to proceed with a formal criminal investigation.”
“Six months later, the senior FBI agent in charge of that investigation resigned from the case and retired from the FBI because he felt the case was going ‘sideways’; that’s law enforcement jargon for ‘nowhere by design,‘” Napolitano wrote.
“John Giacalone had been the chief of the New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., field offices of the FBI and, at the time of his ‘sideways’ comment, was the chief of the FBI National Security Branch.”
“The reason for the ‘sideways’ comment must have been Giacalone’s realization that DOJ and FBI senior management had decided that the investigation would not work in tandem with a federal grand jury. That is nearly fatal to any government criminal case. In criminal cases, the FBI and the DOJ cannot issue subpoenas for testimony or for tangible things; only grand juries can,” Napolitano continued.
“Giacalone knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would be toothless, as it would have no subpoena power. He also knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would have a hard time persuading any federal judge to issue search warrants.”
Napolitano speculated there were several possible reasons that the case went “sideways.” One was that Obama feared having to testify if Clinton went to trial (he had sent emails to the private server, after all, meaning he was aware of it). There was also the fact that a Clinton indictment could have led to Trump becoming president, and Obama simply couldn’t countenance that. (Less than two weeks after Napolitano’s column was written, it must be noted, that reason became moot.)
Either way, if the investigation had indeed gone “sideways,” it would need to have done so with approval from the highest levels — certainly James Comey and possibly Barack Obama.
Whether or not Giacalone has any concrete evidence of this or not is another issue entirely. My guess would be no, given that we’re going on two years since Comey’s infamous news conference and we still haven’t heard anything to that effect from Giacalone.
However, of all of the congressional testimonies we’ve seen over the past few years, this could be one of the most underreported. John Giacalone may open up a gigantic can of worms for Comey and Clinton — one that drags them back in the spotlight for reasons significantly less pleasant than their book tours.
As the Donald Trump-Russia collusion narrative designed to smear and stymie the Trump presidency continues to unravel, some members of the previous administration have become even more outspoken and shrill in their condemnations of how things are being run than they already were.
The latest to do so publicly is former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder, who took to Twitter to express his grave concern over Trump’s demand that the Department of Justice look into whether former President Barack Obama’s FBI/DOJ investigated his 2016 campaign for “political purposes.”
However, Holder urged the DOJ to “simply say no” to what he viewed as a demand from Trump that was outside “DOJ norms.”
Trump had tweeted Sunday, “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”
On Monday, Trump hosted a meeting at the White House with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, according to The Hill. The meeting’s goal was to no doubt discuss the specifics of the order from the president.
Trump’s tweeted order on Sunday and subsequent White House meeting led to Holder’s Monday evening tweet.
“More DOJ norms being eroded. Trump-a SUBJECT of the investigation-wants access to material related to the inquiry,” the former attorney general tweeted.
“His Congressional supporters want evidence connected to an ongoing investigation. Time for DOJ/FBI to simply say no-protect the institutions and time tested norms,”Holder added.
Holder, who served as head of the DOJ from 2009-2015, has been an especially vocal critic of Trump since the 2016 campaign season, and has even intimated that he is considering mounting a presidential challenge against Trump in 2020.
This most recent criticism of Trump came on the heels of revelations via FBI leaks that the bureau had utilized at least one “informant” during the election season to “spy” on the Trump campaign and dig up dirt on alleged connections to and collusion with Russia.
Unfortunately for Holder and his urging of the DOJ to disobey an order from the president, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced following the Monday meeting that the DOJ had asked Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s office to “expand its current investigation to include any irregularities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s or the Department of Justice’s tactics concerning the Trump Campaign.”
Furthermore, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was set to arrange a meeting involving top law enforcement officials and top members of Congress to “review” certain “highly classified materials”related to the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign that have been sought by lawmakers, Sanders said.
The question that must be asked, given the shrill tweet by Holder and others in recent days and weeks, is that if the actions of the DOJ and FBI under Obama were entirely above board and beyond reproach, as has been insisted, why are they protesting any inquiry into those actions so much? Surely they have nothing to hide, right?
To paraphrase a line from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that seems particularly relevant at this point, the former attorney general doth protest too much, methinks.
President Obama with Secretary of State, John Kerry
The efforts of former Obama administration members are becoming more and more beyond the pale as they desperately try to undermine the efforts and present policy of the United States and the Trump administration.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry’s spokesperson admitted that he had secret meetings with the Iranians to try to save the Iran Deal.People screamed ‘Logan Act’but media barely covered it and no one seems to be taking any action against Kerry.
Now two more Obama administration officials areactually advising European leaders who are upset about the U.S. pulling out of the Iran Deal to boot our ambassadors from their country.
How is this not arguing against the United States? Answer: that’s exactly what it is. It’s arguing and advocating on behalf of Iran and the stated policy of the United States.
The officials argued in an NY Times op-ed that the countries could expel American diplomats to punish Trump.
“Europe Doesn’t Have to Be Trump’s Doormat,” wrote Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson. Simon served as the National Security Council’s senior director for the Middle East and North Africa, while Stevenson served as the regional director for political-military affairs.
“After months of swaggering hesitation, President Trump finally announced the United States’ withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran, to which Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany, and the European Union are also parties,” they wrote. “This action tramples on European leaders, who urged Mr. Trump to exercise restraint in the interest of international security and multilateralism.”
The two officials urged the European governments to take concrete actions against the United States.
“The European Union could, for instance, announce the withdrawal of member-states’ ambassadors from the United States,” they suggested. “Isn’t this what states do when diplomatic partners breach solemn agreements, expose them to security risks and threaten to wreak havoc on their economies?”
Simon and Stevenson went on to suggest that, depending on how the United States reacted, “European capitals might even follow up with expulsion of American ambassadors.”
Has there been any prior administration in history who has done so much to undermine their successors?
This is unconscionable.
It isn’t just an attempt to undermine the Trump administration but it is undermining the United States and hurting our position with our allies.
And they don’t even make any attempt to hide it, putting it in the NY Times and the media gives them the platform to attack our own policy. And this is in addition to Democrats paying for the fake dossier and spreading the Russia collusion story to harm the administration.
Time to connect all the dots and for everyone to condemn this coordinated Obama team effort.
The “WH is running this meeting” – referring to the first time the DOJ and the FBI met to discuss interagency coordination on the case
Harry Reid wrote Comey citing reports of meetings between a Trump advisor and “high ranking sanctioned individuals” in Moscow as a reason for investigation of Trump
Reid’s vague letter offered no citations or sources for its assertions and can be directly tied to the FISA warrant for Carter Page
This sequence of events strongly suggests FBI encouraged Reid to write letter to legitimize its surveillance of Page
Documents demonstrate Reid was in contact with Comey about the letter
Peter Strzok sent Page a link to the letter and said, “Here we go” – inferring they knew it would create public outcry for a Russian interference investigation
Documents obtained by congressional investigators suggest possible coordination by Obama White House officials, the CIA and the FBI into the investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign. Those senior Obama officials used unsubstantiated evidence to launch allegations in the media that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, according to newly discovered documents and communications obtained by Congress.
The documents also reveal that former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, sent a letter on Aug. 29, 2016, asking former FBI Director James Comey to investigate the allegations, which were presented to him by then CIA Director John Brennan. Brennan had briefed Reid privately days earlier on the counterintelligence investigation and documents suggest Reid was also staying in close touch with Comey over the issues.
The documents, which include text messages from embattled FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his paramour Lisa Page, also reveal that former Obama White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was involved in the initial investigation into Trump’s campaign. Comey, Brennan, and McDonough were the “highest-ranking officials at the FBI, CIA and White House”and were working in concert to ensure an investigation was initiated, congressional members told this reporter.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was deeply troubled by the findings.
“We’ve been asking for documents with little cooperation of the DOJ and FBI — we’re having to find these unredacted documents on our own,” said Meadows, who’s also chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. “It appears there was a coordination between the White House, CIA, and FBI at the onset of this investigation and it’s troubling.”
President Obama Names Denis McDonough To Be White House Chief Of Staff
Meadows said John Moffa, who was part of the counterintelligence division at the FBI, met with Denis McDonough on August 10, (2016), Meadows added. “What we’re finding is the more we dig the more we realize that there appeared to be a willful coordination between multiple groups outside the Department of Justice and FBI. Moffa was also the FBI agent who helped draft Comey’s July 5, 2016 exoneration letter to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Meadows said the documents suggest Reid’s briefing from Brennan “was used in Michael Isikoff’s Yahoo News story.”
Isikoff’s articlewas also used as evidencefor the FBI’s FISA warrant being granted against Carter Page. Page was a short-term volunteer advisor on the Trump campaign, who was spied on by the FBI. Congress and the Department of Justice are investigating the FBI’s conduct in obtaining a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant in October 2016 to spy on Page. Page was a central figure in an unverified dossier put together by former British Spy Christopher Steele alleging the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
In April 2017, The New York Times published the first story about Brennan’s counterintelligence briefing to Reid regarding Trump. The briefings to Gang of Eight congressional members suggested Russia might be helping Trump win the election. Brennan alluded to the unverified allegation that members of the Trump campaign may be colluding with the Russians. The information briefed to the lawmakers expanded the number of people who were aware of the unverified allegations, and played a significant role in the increase of leaks to the media, according to the information obtained by the committee.
“A chain of events suggest the FBI encouraged Reid to write this letter to legitimize its surveillance of Carter Page”
A congressional investigator told this reporter that they believe the FBI was involved in the briefing to Reid but are still waiting for confirmation.
In the letter from Reid to Comey, Reid cites information Brennan shared with him that Trump advisor, referencing Carter Page, and other “high ranking sanctioned individuals” in Moscow were meeting. Reid asks Comey to launch an investigation by the FBI into the Trump Campaign and the Kremlin.
The letter, which was obtained by this reporter, refers to reports briefed by Brennan but gives “almost no evidence” regarding the Trump campaign and Russia, according to congressional investigators.
For example, the letter only statesthat “questions have been raised about whether a Trump advisor who has been highly critical of U.S. and European economic sanctions on Russia, and who has conflicts of interests due to his investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom, met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals in Moscow in July of 2016.”
Congressional investigators also note that newly revealed text messages between Strzok and Page also show possible coordination between the FBI, CIA and the Democrats.
Shortly after Reid’s letter was revealed in a New York Times article on August 30, 2016, Strzok texts Page saying, “here we go.” He included a link to the story in the text message. Congressional investigators suggest that the pair were creating inferences “that they knew it would create public calls for an investigation into Russian interference.”
Sept. 23, 2016, Isikoff article, which cites Reid’s letter, is also another example of possible coordination, congressional investigators state. The FBI used the Yahoo news article as part of the evidence in their application to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
“This sequence of events strongly suggests the FBI encouraged Reid to write this letter to legitimize its surveillance of Carter Page,” congressional investigators stated.
Congressional Findings:
What began as an investigation into allegations of Russian cyber hacking of the DNC was eventually broadened into an investigation of the Trump campaign.
By sending high-ranking officials and led to brief members of Congress on the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the DNC hack, and the possibility Trump campaign associates were in contact with Russia, the FBI was given cover for the investigation they had recently opened on Trump with questionable legal justification.
The intelligence community has admitted Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election were only the most “recent expression” of their longstanding desire to undermine US elections.
It appears based on the information “insurance policy” in case Trump won, these briefings by the intelligence community to Congress, which led to several members calling for investigations into Russian interference and Trump, were perfectly timed to plant seeds of doubt in the outcome of the 2016 election.
By utilizing the FBI’s cyber division to look into the DNC hack, the agents exhibiting improper political biases from the FBI’s counterintelligence division, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, were offered cover.
Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz opened an investigation Wednesday into possible FISA abuses by the Justice Department and FBI officials and the nature of contacts between the FBI and a confidential source.
Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who operates independently from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration, announced Wednesday afternoon he will launch an investigation into alleged FISA abuse during the Obama administration.
“Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz announced today that, in response to requests from the Attorney General and Members of Congress, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) will initiate a review that will examine the Justice Department’s and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) compliance with legal requirements, and with applicable DOJ and FBI policies and procedures, in applications filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) relating to a certain U.S. person,” the DOJ Office of the Inspector General released in a statement Wednesday. “As part of this examination, the OIG also will review information that was known to the DOJ and the FBI at the time the applications were filed from or about an alleged FBI confidential source. Additionally, the OIG will review the DOJ’s and FBI’s relationship and communications with the alleged source as they relate to the FISC applications.”
Lavinsky explained that “as part of this examination, the OIG also will review information that was known to the DOJ and the FBI at the time the applications were filed from or about an alleged FBI confidential source.”
Lavinsky noted that the investigation was prompted by requests from several members of Congress and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. House Republicans recently released a memo claiming widespread abuse of the FISA process on the part of the DOJ and FBI in order to obtain a surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
The timing of the investigation and the reference to members of Congress point to Page as the U.S. person. The statement’s reference to a confidential source similarly floats concerns found in the Republican memo which found that the FBI and the DOJ did not disclose the political origins of the Steele dossier in its FISA application and revealed previously undisclosed testimony from former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe that an investigation into Page would not have occurred without Steele’s dossier.
The nature of contacts between DOJ officials and Steele during the opening of an investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign has been the nature of some controversy. The Republican memo especially expressed concern over the nature of meetings between Steele and DOJ official Bruce Ohr, whose wife worked for Steele for some time.
“If circumstances warrant, the OIG will consider including other issues that may arise during the course of the review,”the statement continues.
Michael Isikoff✔@Isikoff
Breaking: In response to requests from AG and members of Congress, DOJ IG Horowitz says he will investigate the FBI’s request for FISA warrant on “a U.S. person”– a reference to Carter Page. Probe will include role of “confidential FBI source”-a reference to Christoper Steele.
Horowitz has also been investigating for months potential misconduct at the FBI during the criminal investigation into Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. That report is due any day.
About a month ago, The Hill reported, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday that the Justice Department will investigate potential abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). “Yes, it will be investigated,”Sessions told reporters at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees FISA warrants, according to the Washington Examiner. He said looking into any abuses is the “appropriate thing” to do.
Trump has publicly pressed Sessions to open up an investigation into potential abuses of the program, which allows U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to obtain secret surveillance orders on individuals in the U.S. suspected of being foreign terrorists or spies.
The president claimed last year that the Obama administration improperly wiretapped members of his presidential campaign and transition team, though the White House has not provided any evidence to support that claim.
Allegations of FISA abuses surfaced again last month, when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a controversial memo alleging that FBI and Justice Department officials misused their authority to obtain a surveillance order on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.
It’s about time the Obama administration and those in it paid the price for all their shenanigans. Personally, I hope all those involved including Yates, Mueller, Comey, Rosenstein, Page and Strzok and others all rot in jail. It’s time to let the Americans know that just because you are employed and work in the “high levels”of government that does not excuse you from the law. No one is about the law.
President Donald Trump ran for office on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration, and repeatedly noted that he would focus on the arrest and removal from the country of “bad hombres” that had criminal convictions or pending charges.
Of course, liberals countered with the tired narrative that hardly any illegal immigrants are criminals, and that Trump would in essence be targeting “law-abiding” illegals— the narrative they lean on to support their sanctuary city policies that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officials in turning over locally detained illegals for federal adjudication, processing and removal.
But according to The Daily Wire, a recent report released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement totally undercut that narrative as it made clear that an overwhelming percentage of illegal immigrants arrested by ICE in the 2017 fiscal year — roughly 90 percent — either had a criminal record or had criminal charges pending against them,with very few qualifying as “law-abiding” with no known convictions or pending charges.
That 18-page summary report detailed how ICE activity increased significantly following a Jan. 25, 2017, executive order from President Trump, and compared the resulting numbers of arrests with previous years.
Pew Research took a deep dive into the numbers of the report and found that of all those arrested by ICE in FY 2017;
Some 74 percent had past criminal convictions.
An additional 16 percent of those arrested faced pending criminal charges,
A mere 11 percent had no criminal record or pending charges to speak of.
Interestingly, the report showed that ICE arrests in 2017 were nearly half of the number of arrests made in FY 2009, former President Barack Obama’s first year in office, and that roughly 61 percent of those arrested in 2009 by Obama’s ICE were of the “non-criminal” variety. That’s exactly the opposite of what liberals would have you believe.
Of course, the total number of arrests dropped significantly over Obama’s tenure in office, with a decisive closing of that gap between criminal and non-criminal over the latter years, though the number of arrests picked up sharply following Trump’s inauguration into office — some 30 percent higher over the previous year.
Of those arrested in 2017 with past criminal convictions, the top criminal category was driving under the influence, followed closely by possession or distribution of “dangerous drugs.” Other traffic offenses, immigration law violations and assault rounded out the top five criminal categories.
Pew noted that there was a bit of regional variance in the numbers of criminal versus non-criminal ICE arrests. For example, some 88 percent of those arrested in thesouthern California area had a criminal record, while only about 60 percent of those arrested in New Jersey were known criminals.
The ICE report didn’t come right out and explicitly condemn sanctuary city policies, but it wasn’t difficult to catch the numerous allusions to such policies at several points throughout the report.
Most notably, a section of the report titled “At-Large Arrests” pointed out that in some jurisdictions, ICE was compelled to make at-large arrests within the community of illegal immigrants, which inevitably brings them into contact with non-criminal illegals.
Comparatively, when ICE is permitted to make arrests in a “custodial setting” such as a jail or prison, it is virtually guaranteed that the arrestee will either have a criminal record or pending criminal charges, and is far less likely to be a non-criminal swept up in the at-large arrests or sweeping raids.
Because of the lack of cooperation from sanctuary city jurisdictions, ICE had to make significantly more at-large arrests in the community than in prior years. The non-criminal illegals caught in those arrests have nobody to blame but themselves (for being here illegally in the first place) and the liberal politicians who refused to cooperate with federal officials for their detainment.
The ICE report noted that it would be far better for everyone involved — both law enforcement officials and non-criminal illegal immigrants — if such jurisdictions cooperated and handed over criminal illegals to ICE within a custodial setting, which would negate the need for at-large arrests and raids to track down known criminal illegals.
The liberal media would have us all believe that Trump and ICE are rounding up and deporting millions of “law-abiding,” non-criminal illegal immigrants, but the numbers released by ICE paint a far different picture, and reveal that Trump has thus far kept his word; that he is focused on rooting out and deporting criminals who shouldn’t be here.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said Tuesday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” that former President Barack Obama’s State Department “was gathering information”on Donald Trump, his campaign and Russia in 2016 before “passing it to very strange places.”
Nunes — who is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — told host Laura Ingraham the committee’s investigation of allegations of Trump-Russia collusion includes three phases.
The first is the panel’s probe of surveillance abuse against Trump campaign volunteers by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI.
The second phase is a review of “irregularities” at the State Department,
and the third will be interviewing “the cast of characters.”
Phase one culminated with the release of a four-page summary memo, prepared by Nunes’ staff, describing the surveillance abuses. Those abuses were enabled by a dossier prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign committee.
Nunes said the second phase is now moving forward.
“I can just tell you that the State Department was gathering information and then passing it to very strange places. That should not have happened,” Nunes told Ingraham, noting he could not divulge more information at that time.
“I will just say that there were comments over the weekend from people within the State Department that said [former Secretary of State] John Kerry had been briefed on the [Trump-Russia] dossier, that they had provided the new dossier, whatever this new dossier is, and they had provided it also to the FBI,” Nunes said.
“So, by people starting to talk about it, it seems to me like some people may be trying to distance themselves from the rest of the cast of characters involved,” he added.
Nunes’ comments came after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) released a highly redacted copy of the criminal referral they sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recommending the potential prosecution of Steele. Wray made public a less-redacted version of the referral late Tuesday.
“It is a vindication of what we’ve been dealing with for the last five days, where we have been scolded that the dossier really played no part at all in the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA] application. So clearly that’s not the case,” Nunes said of the referral.
Grassley and Graham’s referral revealed that Clinton campaign aides and former Obama appointees fed material to Steele as he compiled the dossier. The anti-Trump dossier was used by the FBI and DOJ to obtain warrants from the FISA court allowing the government to spy on Trump associates.
“Sadly, the mainstream media continues to ignore this. Even tonight I was looking. No one’s covering this,” Nunes said of Grassley and Graham’s referral, noting that “it’s pretty clear now you have the Clinton campaign, who was getting information from the Russians, dirt on Trump.”
Former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Joseph diGenova also told Ingraham Tuesday that the Grassley-Graham memo “establishes beyond any doubt that the FBI knowingly deceived the FISA court about the information that it was presenting to them.”
DiGenova accused the FBI and DOJ of lying to the FISA court “about the fact that it was verified information — which it was not, which the law requires.”
“And now we know that additional Clinton allies, including Sidney Blumenthal, were involved in the transmission of false information, unverified information, to the FBI through State Department officials,” diGenova said. “Somebody’s gonna have to go to prison.”
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) implied Tuesday on Fox News’ “The Story” that Blumenthal fed a former State Department employee information used for Steele’s unverified Trump-Russia dossier.
If Clinton lost the election, then the FBI and DOJ sought “to frame Donald Trump and his associates with a false crime,” diGenova claimed.
“There is now no doubt whatsoever that the lawyers at the FBI and the lawyers at the Justice Department deceived, deceived FISA court knowingly,” diGenova said. “They had every reason in the world to believe that the information being provided was not only biased but completely unreliable. They didn’t care.“
The FBI and DOJ “wanted the wiretaps, the intercepts and the electronic surveillance” because it was part of their “plan” to “exonerate” Clinton during the course of the investigation into her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state, diGenova said. If Clinton lost the election, then the FBI and DOJ sought “to frame Donald Trump and his associates with a false crime,” diGenova claimed.
“And they almost succeeded,” diGenova said. “And if she had won, they would have succeeded.”
A jaw-dropping exposé by Politico has revealed former President Barack Hussein Obama’s administration allowed Hezbollah to smuggle drugs into the US so that the Iran Nuclear Deal could proceed on its path.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was actively pursuing the criminal dealings of the Lebanese terror network in an investigation called Project Cassandra, starting back in 2008. In the report, Obama’s people allegedly set a number of roadblocks, stopping the DEA from doing their job and opening the door to trafficking and money laundering operations by Hezbollah.
One could say Obama and his administration paved the way for the terror-network’s cocaine smuggling operation into the US.
SEE DOCUMENTS BELOW
DEA agents have come out stating the administration ‘stopped them arresting key figures linked to Hezbollah as an agreement on the Iran nuclear deal approached – and scrapped Project Cassandra entirely once the terms were agreed in 2015,’reports the Daily Mail.
When the administration wedged themselves between the DEA and Hezbollah, it allowed the terror network to grow into a global security threat.
According to Politico, the undercover investigation’s leaders sought permission for a number of significant prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, but Justice and Treasury Department officials delayed.
Via the Daily Mail: In some cases, they were hindered and some requests from the DEA’s Counter facility in Chantilly, Virginia, were flatly rejected. This hampered Project Cassandra’s efforts to bring the Hezbollah hierarchy to their knees. They included one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers who also supplied Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with chemical weapons.
Talking anonymously, some former Obama officials told Politico the decisions were made to improve relations with Iran.
David Asher, a founder of Project Cassandra, told Politico: ‘This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision.
‘They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.’
Asher went on to explain the closer the Iran deal came to its final stages, the DEA’s job became more difficult. Coincidentally the moment the nuclear deal was announced in January 2016, agents working on Project Cassandra were transferred to other assignments.
After more than a decade of tensions with the West, Tehran signed a landmark deal with world powers to curb its nuclear activity in exchange for the gradual lifting of crippling economic sanctions. President Donald Trump has threatened to scrap the accord. The revelations also come just a week after the leader of Hezbollah swore to ‘end’ the US, calling for ‘martyr’ terror attacks in Jerusalem after Trump’s recognition of the city as the Israeli capital.
Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of the Lebanese militant group, made the impassioned televised speech to thousands of followers, inciting the crowd to chant ‘Death to America’. This was followed by a warning to Lebanon from Israel’s Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz, who said that if Hezbollah attacked Israel, the country would return the whole country ‘back to the Stone Age’.
In his speech this week, translated by the Washington D.C.-based Middle East Media Research Institute, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah appeared to urge followers to carry out terror attacks in Jerusalem.
‘It is time that everybody knows that America is not the sponsor of peace in Palestine and the region,’ he said in the televised speech
‘America is the sponsor of terrorism, of occupation, of Judaization, of deportation, of burning, of destruction and of civil strife.
‘America created ISIS and the takfiri [apostate] groups.’
He continued to state the only position Lebanon can take with the United States is ‘Death to America’, to which the crowd chanted the threats and waved the Palestinian flag. Nasrallah then encouraged the crowd to turn President Trump’s move to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital into the ‘beginning of the end’ for the U.S.and Israel ‘for all eternity’.
He also called for ‘millions of martyrs’ to march on Jerusalem, potentially inciting terror attacks.
Israel and Hezbollah fought a war in 2006 and often trade warnings. But in an interview on Wednesday, Intelligence Minister Katz warned that if the organization resumed a military conflict ‘all of Lebanon will be a target.’
‘What happened in 2006 would be a picnic compared to what could happen…
In 2014, cocaine was second only behind heroin in U.S. drug deaths. A major player in the cocaine traffic into the U.S. was the Iranian-sponsored terrorist group Hezbollah. For year it has been known that Hezbollah has infiltrated criminal gangs in South America and set up its own billion-dollar international criminal enterprise to finance its terror activities. None of this was a secret.
U.S. law enforcement came up with an aggressive plan to take down the Hezbollah international network and its key individuals. But it never happened. We now know why.
Politico Magazine has an amazing expose on how the Obama White House derailed the plans to take down the Hezbollah network, and to allow Hezbollah to continue drug-running into the U.S., in order to avoid upsetting the Iran nuclear deal. The Politico article is so long, so detailed, and so powerful, it’s impossible for me to give a brief summary, so read the whole thing, The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hoo. The subhead line tells the story:
An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah’s billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.
The opening paragraph of the Politico article is stunning in revealing the Obama administrations callous disregard for Americans afflicted by the cocaine epidemic, fed in part by Hezbollah:
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
There is so much detail in the article, you really do need to read it (but I repeat myself). Here’s a short intro segment on the U.S. law enforcement plans that were scuttled by Obama:
The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies….
And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran….
But then law enforcement ran headlong into Obama’s obsessive desire to strike a nuclear deal with Iran. That deal would fulfill Obama’s goal, exhibited since the earliest days of his administration, to keep the Mullahs in power and to establish Iran with regional hegemony, as I documented in Obama sweeps history toward the Mullahs.
In order to fulfill that goal, Obama and his communications assistant Ben Rhodes, deliberately deceived the American public into believing the nuclear deal negotiations were the result of a moderating Iranian leadership. In order to perpetuate that falsehood, Rhodes created an echo chamber of think tanks and pundits, and deceived reporters.
In this mad rush to an Iranian nuke deal, which Israel vehemently opposed as a ruse by the Iranians, the Obama White House also interfered with the law enforcement effort against Hezbollah.Politico reports:
But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.
The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.
These were no rogue players, it was top-down interference:
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
And the results are being felt to this day:
The derailment of Project Cassandra also has undermined U.S. efforts to determine how much cocaine from the various Hezbollah-affiliated networks is coming into the United States, especially from Venezuela, where dozens of top civilian and military officials have been under investigation for more than a decade. Recently, the Trump administration designated the country’s vice president, a close ally of Hezbollah and of Lebanese-Syrian descent, as a global narcotics kingpin.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah — in league with Iran — continues to undermine U.S. interests in Iraq, Syria and throughout wide swaths of Latin America and Africa, including providing weapons and training to anti-American Shiite militias. And Safieddine, the Ghost and other associates continue to play central roles in the trafficking of drugs and weapons, current and former U.S. officials believe.
How many Americans got hooked, overdosed, or died on Hezbollah cocaine so Obama could get his Iran nuke deal? And it all was to appease and please the Iranians:
“During the negotiations, early on, they [the Iranians] said listen, we need you to lay off Hezbollah, to tamp down the pressure on them, and the Obama administration acquiesced to that request,” the former CIA officer told POLITICO. “It was a strategic decision to show good faith toward the Iranians in terms of reaching an agreement.”
The Obama team “really, really, really wanted the deal,” the former officer said.
We knew Obama and others were willing to sacrifice Israelis to obtain the Iran nuclear deal. Now we know they were willing to sacrifice Americans.
As the nation awakes to more news on the corruption of the Democrats and their Russian collusion with the fake Trump “dossier,” there is also other news of the corruption endemic in the Obama administration.
There is much corruption to write about with the Obama administration, sadly. Indeed, Obama’s regime was one of the most corrupt in American history. But the latest news is that of Obama’s scheme to enrich far left organizations at the expense of U.S. corporations, even as conservative groups were purposefully excluded.
At issue is a scheme that forced companies about to be sued by the Department of Justice to donate billions of dollars to left-wing causes and organizations as a payoff to avoid prosecution. It was little else but an elaborate extortion scheme for the liberal groups that benefitted from the policy. And, naturally, only left-wing groups benefitted from Obama’s kickback scheme. No conservatives groups were the recipient of any of these corporate “donations.”
According to a report by government watchdog group Judicial Watch, “The new records demonstrate a collaborative effort among high-level officials in the Office of the Assistant Attorney General (OAAG) and the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to ensure conservative groups did not receive any settlement cash.”
Judicial Watch has more:
The operation is known as a DOJ “slush fund” that filled the coffers of Obama-allied nonprofits such as the National Council of La Raza, Urban League and National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Earlier this year Judicial sued the DOJ for records relating to the problematic Obama administration policy of settling government lawsuits against corporate defendants by requiring that the corporations make “donations” to leftwing interest groups.Back in 2010 Judicial Watch sued the DOJ over a similar program in which the agency’s Civil Rights Division directed large sums of cash settlements in discrimination lawsuits to organization that were not officially connected to the lawsuits. Recipients were also leftist groups that aligned with Obama’s ultra-liberal agenda.
The story is not a new one, of course. Obama’s scheme has not gone unnoticed. But this week the House Judiciary Committee revealed what is being termed a “smoking gun” proving the whole thing.
“It is not every day in congressional investigations that we find a smoking gun,” Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said Tuesday, according to Fox News. “Here, we have it.”
Republican lawmakers have logically dubbed the scheme a “slush fund” for liberal organizations who raked in one billion dollars from Obama’s extortion plan.
Fortunately, the Trump administration put an end to the extortion policy but not before liberals everywhere benefitted from Obama’s corruption.
While Obama’s operatives insisted that there was nothing at all wrong with the program, the newly released records proves that Obama’s DOJ operatives not only made sure that the corporations paid money to the favored lefty organizations, but they also made double sure that no conservative group benefitted from the scheme.
One Obama administration email, for instance, told Citigroup to be sure that no funds go to “conservative property-rights legal services.”
As Fox reported:
“Concerns include: a) not allowing Citi to pick a statewide intermediary like the Pacific Legal Foundation (does conservative property-rights legal services),” the official, whose name is redacted in the email, wrote under the title of “Acting Senior Counselor for Access to Justice.”
The official added that “we are more likely to get the right result from a state bar association affiliated entity.”
“Aiding their political allies was only the half of it,” Rep. Goodlatte said. “The evidence of the Obama DOJ’s abuse of power shows that Tony West’s team went out of its way to exclude conservative groups.”
Goodlatte celebrated the Trump administration’s move to end the forced donations, but said that Congress needs to act to prevent this sort of extortion from ever occurring again.
This is but a single tale of the sort of corruption that plagued the country with Barack Obama at the head of our government.
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago-based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and BigJournalsim.com along with all Breitbart News sites, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, and many, many others. He has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs across the country to discuss his news stories and current events and has appeared on TV networks such as CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network, and various Chicago-based news programs. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
The Justice Department lifted a gag order Wednesday that will allow a former FBI informant to speak with Congress about information he uncovered involving a Russian bribery scheme linked to a controversial uranium deal in 2010.
The move comes as Congress renews its focus on the Obama administration’s approval of Russian-owned energy company Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One, a company based in Canada that controlled 20 percent of U.S. uranium.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led the State Department when it approved the deal back in 2010. Eight other U.S. government agencies also approved the deal.
Three congressional committees launched investigations into the deal last week after The Hill reported that the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that the Russian nuclear industry officials involved in the deal were involved in a racketeering scheme as early as 2009.
However, the Department of Justice waited until 2014 to bring any charges on the evidence first gathered in 2009 and 2010.
The CEO of Tenex, a subsidiary of Rosatom, pleaded guilty to money laundering in 2015.
Congressional Republicans now seek to discover who knew what, and when. Republicans have also expressed concerns about Clinton’s connection to the interested parties in the nuclear deal. The Clinton Foundation reportedly received millions of dollars in contributions from interested parties in the transaction, and former President Bill Clinton received $500,000 for a speech in Russia around the time of the deal.
The FBI informant, who hasn’t been identified by name, went undercover for five years to obtain intelligence on Russia’s efforts to acquire a share of the U.S. uranium market.
Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior said the DOJ would cooperate with the three open congressional investigations.
“As of tonight, the Department of Justice has authorized the information to disclose to the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as one member of each of their staffs, any information or documents he has concerning alleged corruption or bribery involving transactions in the uranium market,” Prior said in a statement Wednesday, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores confirmed to The Hill that the undercover FBI informant is cleared to disclose to Congress “any information or documents he has concerning alleged corruption or bribery involving transactions in the uranium market, including but not limited to anything related to Vadim Mikerin, Rosatom, Tenex, Uranium One, or the Clinton Foundation.”
The informant’s lawyer, Victoria Toensing, told The Hill her client has information relating to “the Russian nuclear bribery case and the efforts he witnessed by Moscow to gain influence with the Clintons in hopes of winning favorable uranium decisions from the Obama administration.”
“He is now able and willing to talk with the congressional committees seeking his testimony, though I will be working with all parties to ensure his identity remains confidential to ensure his safety,” she added.
But some high-ranking Democrats have called foul on the Republican’s renewed focus on the 2010 uranium deal.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Wednesday the investigations are a “partisan effort to distract” from the real issue at hand — special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s alleged collusions with the Russians during the 2016 election.
Trump told reporters Wednesday he believes the uranium investigation will quickly swell to Watergate proportions.
“The uranium sale to Russia and the way it was done was so underhanded. With tremendous amounts of money being passed, I actually think that’s Watergate: modern age,” Trump said, as reported by the New York Post.
DOJ Lifts Gag Order on Uranium One Informant, Hillary and Obama Feeling the Heat
Reported By Kim Smith | October 26, 2017 at 9:40am
The Justice Department announced Wednesday night that it had lifted a gag order on a former FBI informant who could provide testimony to Congress about an inquiry linked to a 2010 Obama-era deal that transferred ownership of a uranium mining firm to a Russian-owned company.
Fox News reported the department said it authorized the informant to speak to the Senate Judiciary Committee, House Oversight Committee, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as select staffers.
The Justice Department said the informant could provide “any information or documents he has concerning alleged corruption or bribery involving transactions in the uranium market,”including Russian company Rosatom, its subsidiary Tenex, Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation.
The FBI said in court documents and in interviews that they had gathered enough evidence to prove that Rosatom-connected officials were engaged in a bribery scheme that included kickbacks and money laundering in 2010,Circa reported.
Despite that little tidbit, the U.S. government approved the sale. Not surprising considering who was in office. Now we have a chance to know what really went down.
The informant’s attorney, Victoria Toensing, told Fox Business Network Monday that her client could “tell what all the Russians were talking about during the time that all these bribery payments were made.”
Toensing said her client, an American businessman who reportedly worked as an undercover FBI confidential witness, was prevented from testifying by former attorneys general Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch after having signed a non-disclosure agreement, according to Fox News.
Circa reported that Toensing also said the informant has pertinent information regarding Russia’s attempts to gain accessto former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to influence the Obama administration’s decision on the purchase of Uranium One.
After the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom was completed, millions of dollars flowed to the Clinton Foundation from Russian officials, as reported byThe Hill.
This FBI informant can also testify about comments made by FBI agents that suggested “political pressure was exerted during the Justice Department probe of the Russia corruption case and that there was specific evidence that could have scuttled approval of the Uranium One deal if it became public,”according to The Hill.
There is little doubt that if Clinton had won the presidency, this gag order would still be enforced.
Thus, the truth about who really colluded with the Russians would likely never be known. Hopefully, the informant’s testimony will shed some light on what happened during these deals and the truth behind them can come out. You can bet this news has former President Barack Obama and Clinton sweating bullets.
You can also bet the mainstream media will take its sweet time covering this news because it doesn’t fit their Trump-hating agenda.
On Monday evening, the political world was blown wide open when a bombshell report emerged revealing former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had been wiretapped — and, even worse, that his conversations with President Donald Trump may have been recorded as a result.
Of course the liberal media has been quite slow to admit that the revelation proves Trump’s infamous allegations in March that he had been wire tapped at New York City’s Trump Tower weren’t quite as insane and unfounded as they claimed.
Speaking on his show Tuesday, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh explained that he believed this revelation is actually “worse than Watergate,”according to a transcript from RushLimbaugh.com
“This is much worse than Watergate, folks. That was a third-rate burglary that went awry,”Limbaugh said. “Trump was called a liar. He was mocked for tweeting about Trump Tower being wiretapped.”
Limbaugh went on to explain that it appears that former President Barack Obama and former FBI Director James Comey spied on a rival political campaign — possibly in an attempt to sway the election.
“Now we know, ladies and gentlemen, that Obama and James Comey’s FBI wiretapped the head of a political campaign,”Limbaugh said. “This is bigger than Watergate. The phone lines and other aspects of life that were wiretapped and surveilled were that of Paul Manafort, the first campaign manager for Donald Trump.”
We should point out that right now there is no proof that Obama ordered the wiretaps, or that this was done to sway an election. The wiretaps on Manafort preceded his work with the Trump campaign, and actually weren’t in place for much of his time as manager. But that doesn’t change the accuracy of Limbaugh’s essential point.
“What the government’s doing is bigger than Watergate. Nixon never did any of this. He may have dreamed about it, and he may have gotten drunk and talked to people, but he never did this. Nixon never actually used the IRS to penalize enemies, but Obama did. Ever heard of Lois Lerner?”Limbaugh asked.
This wiretapping revelation raises serious questions that need to be answered. Multiple high-level Obama officials, like former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, insisted before Congress that there was no wiretapping (or claimed they weren’t aware of any).
Clearly, that wasn’t the truth.
This is one of the biggest political bombshells to drop in a long time. If Obama was spying on Manafort for political reasons, the ramifications could be extreme. The American people need answers, and they need them now.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that a state has the right to defund Planned Parenthood. The 2-1 ruling specifically provided that while plaintiff Medicaid recipients who brought the suit are entitled to care, they cannot dictate that care includes Planned Parenthood facilities.
“The plaintiffs are asserting a right — the absolute right to a particular provider of their choosing — that (the law) does not grant them,”Judge Steven Colloton wrote in the majority opinion.
Several states, including Arkansas, the defendant in the suit, voted to defund Planned Parenthood after the release of a series of undercover videos that allegedly showed executives from the top abortion provider in the country discussing the sale of aborted babies’ body parts.
In April, Congress voted and President Donald Trump signed into law legislation guaranteeing states the right to defund Planned Parenthood, overriding an Obama administration Department of Health and Human Services regulation that had gone into effect two days before Trump took office. The regulation mandated that “states and localities could not withhold money from a provider for any reason other than an inability to provide family planning services,”The New York Times reported.
In a statement, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson described the 8th Circuit Court’s ruling as “a substantial legal victory for the right of the state to determine whether Medicaid providers are acting in accordance with best practices, and affirms the prerogative of the state to make reasoned judgments on the Medicaid program.”
The 8th Circuit’s jurisdiction includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota.
Planned Parenthood noted that it had won federal suits against other states that sought to defund the organization.
“To date, seven other states (Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas) have sought to bar Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, and all have been blocked by federal courts,”Planned Parenthood said in a statement.
Louisiana has asked the 5th Circuit to rehear the case en banc, meaning all of the justices (rather than just three) would preside. The differing rulings between the eighth and other circuit courts make it more likely the Supreme Court will take up the matter.
“This is not over,”said Planned Parenthood Federation of America chief medical officer Raegan McDonald-Mosley. “We will do everything in our power to protect our patients’ access to birth control, cancer screenings and other lifesaving care. Extreme politicians are trying to defund and shut down Planned Parenthood — and this is not what Americans want.”
Jerry Cox, the executive director of the Family Council, an Arkansas-based conservative group, told public radio station KUAR, “The videos aside, the question is should the state of Arkansas do business with an organization that aborts babies, when they don’t need to.”
The long arm of government regulation has grown considerably shorter in the first months of the Trump administration. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said regulatory reform is intended to address “that slow cancer that can come from regulatory burdens that we put on our people.”
Federal agencies have withdrawn 469 regulations that had been proposed by the Obama administration last fall, according to information from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That total included 19 regulations with an economic impact of $100 million or more,the White House said.
The White House said 391 regulations have been delayed for further evaluation and consideration.
According to the White House, during the final five months of fiscal 2016, the Obama administration put in place rules that imposed $6.8 billion in annual costs on the economy. The White House said rules imposed in the Trump administration’s first five months have imposed no costs.
“It’s really the beginning of a kind of fundamental regulatory reform,”Neomi Rao, head of the office, said Wednesday.
Some Trump administration rules are devoted to killing other rules. For example, the Interior Department plans to reduce the paperwork burden for outdoorsmen, fish restoration programs and Native American tribes, while the Labor Department wants to change the approval process for new apprenticeship programs.
“There is a substantial withdrawal and rollback of proposed regulatory actions,”Rao said. “It is also important to note that what we are doing now is in some ways fulfilling a number of longstanding principles that other presidents have always talked about.”
Trump’s approach to regulations has been cheered by business.
“We just got through eight years of a regulatory onslaught, aimed at curtailing oil and gas production. So we are very supportive of the administration’s efforts to roll back regulation,”said Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil and gas drillers in Western states.
Rao noted that while reducing regulations is a major goal of the Trump administration, it cannot be done instantly.
“Deregulation is going to take time,”she said. “It is not something you can just do at the snap of a finger.”
“Agencies want to move quickly to get things done, to fulfill their priorities,”she said, adding that her office would be working with agencies to be sure they follow the law and are “doing things the right way.”
President Trump’s administration is moving forward to implement an executive orderthat revokes the Obama policy on waters of the United States. The EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers are proposing a rule to rescind the Clean Water Rule regulation established by President Obama.
The Obama-era policy gives the federal government authority over a staggering 60% of the water bodies in the United States, including small streams, private ponds, intermittent streams, and even “wetlands” on private property created by seasonal rain.
The president intends to return to a policy consistent with the original Clean Water Act of 1972 and grant authority only to federal authorities over actual navigable waters that affect interstate commerce. Montana Senator Steve Daines put it this way: “Out-of-state D.C. bureaucrats shouldn’t impose regulations that hurt Montana farmers, ranchers and landowners.”
The story below is just one among many that illustrates the importance of getting the boot of the federal government off the necks of ordinary Americans.
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Note: I wrote this column in 2008 when I served as the director of the Idaho Values Alliance. I worked with Sen. Mike Crapo’s office to get a pardon request into President Bush’s hands before he left office in January, 2009, but unfortunately the pardon request was not acted upon.
My latest information is that Lynn Moses served his full stretch and was eventually released to a halfway house before returning to his hometown. His eyesight was affected during his incarceration because of the lack of medical attention he received while in federal custody.
Here is the column as it originally read. You might want to duct tape your head before you read this.
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August 5, 2008
Lynn Moses is scheduled to be locked up in federal prison on August 6. His crime? Protecting the city of Driggs from flooding.
When Mr. Moses began to develop a subdivision along Teton Creek in 1980, Teton County required him to implement an engineer’s plan to modify the Teton Creek stream bed to prevent the flooding of subdivision property, caused by the buildup of gravel bars and downed trees, during high water flows in the spring.
In fact, the county would not allow him even to record the plat for the subdivision until the modification work had been done, and only allowed the development after requiring the homeowner’s association to maintain the flood control channel year after year.
Teton Creek used to be a flowing stream, but irrigation diversion over 100 years ago dewatered the Creek and left the stream bed dry for all but two months a year at the most. Water only fills the stream bed when irrigators have more water than they can use. (Note: this means there is no “aquatic environment” here, nor any “wetland.”)
Officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were invited to a planning meeting with the county and Mr. Moses in 1980, but they soon left the meeting after informing county officials that they had “classified the stream as intermittent and therefore outside their jurisdiction.”
So working on plans developed by an engineer and approved — in fact, required — by the county, Mr. Moses got to work and cleared the channel of gravel bars and downed cottonwood trees to ensure that the channel would serve as a flood control structure.
For years he has walked the entire length of the creek to evaluate conditions and then remove gravel bars, sand, logs and debris as necessary to keep the channel clear and satisfy the subdivision’s obligation to the county.
When Driggs flooded in the spring of 1981 — due to a clogged culvert under a county road — the county approached the Corps a second time, asking for funding and help to replace the culvert with a bridge to prevent future flooding. Once again, the Corps said, Nope, not our problem, not our fault, not our responsibility to fix, we don’t have jurisdiction.
Why? Because, they repeated again, Teton Creek is an intermittent stream and we have no jurisdiction unless there is water in the stream bed at least three months out of the year. Thus twice the federal government pointedly and definitively washed its hands of the whole thing.
Since 1982, all Mr. Moses has done is to provide the necessary maintenance to ensure that the stream bed does not get clogged with gravel, sediment, fallen trees, and other debris so that the stream bed can continue to siphon flood water away from homes and the city of Driggs.
He did his work when the stream bed was dry, of course, and never put anything into the stream bed, only took “pollutants” (sedimentation, sand, gravel, etc.) out.
Tellingly, in 1984, when the Forest Service needed to build a road, they came to this same stretch of Teton Creek and — without any kind of permit — contracted with Mr. Moses to excavate between 5,000 and 6,000 cubic yards of gravel from the bed, all of which was inspected by government officials.
Every four or five years, when new staff would replace the old, and a generation would arise “who knew not Joseph,” Mr. Moses would receive a letter from the Corps of Engineers, insisting that he needed to get a permit from them for his maintenance work. He’d write them back, informing him that, according to the Corps itself, they had no jurisdiction over intermittent streams. That would be that.
He’d hear nothing for another four to five years, after which another staff rotation led to another letter from the Corps and to a similar reply from Mr. Moses. And so it went for over 20 years.
An aggressive Corps staffer tried to convince the U.S. Attorney to prosecute Mr. Moses in 1995, and the U.S. Attorney told him to take a hike since the Corps had no jurisdictional authority to initiate legal action.
According to former state legislator Lee Gagner, the Corps “discussed his process many times with him, but could not show where they had jurisdiction on the seasonal, intermittent stream.” Gagner adds, “[T]o this day they do not have written rules indicating this to be true.”
As far as Gagner knows, the Corps never completed what is called a “Jurisdictional Determination” that their own rules even gave them any authority over this particular intermittent stream. (Jurisdiction is determined on a case-by-case basis with intermittent streams.)
At this point, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), emboldened by newly granted bureaucratic authority, jumped in and went right after Mr. Moses, indicting and prosecuting him for violating the Clean Water Act in the years 2002, 2003 and 2004 for doing nothing more than the routine maintenance on the channel he had been doing for 20 years, under requirements imposed by local government.
Presiding federal judge Lynn Winmill, who has a well-deserved reputation for judicial activism, refused to allow Teton County commissioners to testify to the original agreement, nor would he allow the aggressive Corps staffer to testify about the refusal of the U.S. Attorney to prosecute in the mid-90s.
Before the jury was dismissed to enter into deliberations at the conclusion of his trial, Judge Lynn Winmill instructed the jury, believe it or not, to disregard every bit of information from 1980 to 2002, including the Corps’ denial of jurisdiction and the mandate from local government for Mr. Moses to maintain the flood channel.
Instructed by this notoriously activist judge to ignore facts, reason and legal history, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, finding Mr. Moses guilty of “discharging” “pollutants” into one of the “waters of the United States.”
His conviction ignores the fact that no evidence was ever presented in court that Mr. Moses “discharged” anything into the stream bed at all. He only removed sand and gravel bars that were already there and which he was contractually obligated to remove. He was extracting material from the channel, not discharging material into it.
No evidence was presented in court by the EPA that there was any water at all in the stream bed during those years for Mr. Moses to “discharge” anything into. The EPA claims that “fallback” — material from the bank falling back into the stream bed — represents a “discharge,” but it offers no objective criteria for deciding how much “fallback” it takes to cross the magic threshold, meaning the EPA used sheer speculation to assert a violation.
Worse, Mr. Moses was convicted of “pollut(ing) a spawning area for Yellowstone cutthroat trout,” despite the fact that there have been no fish in this stream bed for more than 150 years. Mr. Gagner, who has lived near the flood channel for 18 years, says he has never seen fish in this stream bed. And it’s not even possible for the stream bed to serve as a spawning ground since it only has water two months out of every year in the first place.
Although the director of the EPA in Idaho, Jim Wernitz, asserts that Mr. Moses had damaged “wetlands” associated with the stream, there are no wetlands there! The very word requires that land be, well, wet, but the stream bed is bone dry for at least 10 months out of every year. Wernitz is apparently ignorant of the fact that the Government had previously stipulated that there are no wetlands surrounding the storm channel, nor any “aquatic environment” that could be damaged.
In the plurality opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2006 Rapanos case, Justice Scalia wrote that the Clean Water Act in fact gives the federal government jurisdiction only over “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water,” and explicitly added, “[T]he ‘waters of the United States’ does not include channels through which water flows intermittently or ephemerally, or channels that periodically provide drainage for rainfall.”
Embarrassingly for Judge Winmill, this ruling was handed down on the very day Mr. Moses was originally sentenced to prison. Eight months later, the Corps of Engineers revised its own rules in a way that makes it abundantly clear that the federal government has no jurisdiction over an intermittent stream like Teton Creek.
No matter. With other notoriously activist federal judges in the 9th Circuit refusing to overturn lower court convictions on appeal, Mr. Moses has been forced to spend almost $400,000 of his own money in a losing effort to defend himself for protecting the city of Driggs from catastrophic flooding.
Mr. Moses’ wife died unexpectedly of a heart attack a year and a half ago. Friends tell me the stress of their 25-year battle with the federal government and the stress of the guilty verdict contributed to her early death. Mr. Moses, when I spoke with him this morning, agrees that this is a likely possibility.
The death of his wife has left Mr. Moses to raise his 17-year-old daughter by himself, a daughter who will have to fend for herself once her sole surviving parent is tossed behind bars — in another state no less — for the next 18 months.
His daughter, just now entering her senior year in high school, will be deprived of his comfort and counsel right when she needs it the most. Mr. Moses will miss his daughter’s companionship, and miss the joy of her 18th birthday party, her senior prom and her graduation ceremony.
Virtually everything is wrong with this story. It’s an egregious violation of the constitutional limitations on federal power, as federal bureaucrats simply dismissed the fact that Mr. Moses was required by local authorities to do exactly what he was doing.
Bureaucratic government agencies, aided and abetted by activist judges, acted as petty tyrants and incarcerated a man not for doing evil but for doing good. A fine man has been chewed up by the grinding maw of a mindless and inhumane federal government, and will spend the next year and a half of his life behind bars, not for endangering the families in his community, but for protecting them.
His attorney calls the whole thing “a travesty,” which is just about the mildest thing that can be said about this unconscionable miscarriage of justice.
As Elaine Jones said in a letter published by the Idaho Press-Tribune, “A good, honorable widower is leaving his daughter to others to raise, and is going to prison for following the rules, obeying the law and helping his friends stay safe from flooding.”
As George Washington is reputed to have said, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” Lynn Moses will tell you that the government’s fire cannot just singe you but burn you to a crisp.
IfCNNhas the story right, this would be HUGE news, and it would be particularly satisfying for Judge Andrew Napolitano.
You might recall that about a month ago Judge Nap announced on Fox News’ morning show Fox & Friends that his sources told him that President Obama had gone outside of the United States toget intel on Donald Trump from the UK’s GSHQ(their intelligence agency).
Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice… He used GCHQ.What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database. So by simply having two people go to them and say ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving Candidate Trump, conversations involving President-Elect Trump,’ [Obama’s] able to get it, and there’s no American fingerprints on this.
A few days after that Fox News suspended Napolitano after their media competitors and the British Intelligence community attacked Napolitano’s story as ridiculous. When Napolitano finally returned to the airwaves, he doubled-downand said that he and his sources stand by their reporting and were sure the truth would one day be made known.
Yes, I do [stand by the original report], and the sources stand by it. The American public needs to know more about this rather than less because a lot of the government’s surveillance authorities will expire in the fall, and there will be a great debate about how much authority we want the government to have to surveil us. The more the American public knows about this the more informed their and Congress’ decision will be… I think a lot more is going to come.”
British and other European intelligence agencies intercepted communications between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials and other Russian individuals during the campaign and passed on those communications to their US counterparts, US congressional and law enforcement and US and European intelligence sources tell CNN.
The communications were captured during routine surveillance of Russian officials and other Russians known to western intelligence. British and European intelligence agencies, including GCHQ, the British intelligence agency responsible for communications surveillance,were not proactively targeting members of the Trump team but rather picked up these communications during what’s known as “incidental collection,” these sources tell CNN.
The European intelligence agencies detected multiple communications over several months between the Trump associates and Russian individuals — and passed on that intelligence to the US. The US and Britain are part of the so-called “Five Eyes” agreement (along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand), which calls for open sharing among member nations of a broad range of intelligence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Onan Coca
Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Liberty Alliance media group. He’s also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children. You can find his writing all over the web.
FBI Director James Comey planned to write an op-ed early last summer making the case that Russia was meddling in the U.S. election, but other top Obama administration officials vetoed the idea. That’s according to a report from Newsweek magazine.
“The White House shut it down,” one source told the magazine of Comey’s op-ed offer. “They did their usual — nothing.”
The revelation, if accurate, would appear to suggest that the Obama administration did not take Russia’s meddling in the presidential campaign as seriously as many Democrats would have liked. Comey, who took over the FBI in 2013, proposed the op-ed during a meeting in June or July in the situation room of the White House in which Sec. of State John Kerry, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, National Security Advisor Susan Rice and Sec. of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson were also present, according to Newsweek.
“He had a draft of it or an outline. He held up a piece of paper in a meeting and said, ‘I want to go forward, what do people think of this?’”a source with knowledge of the meeting told Newsweek of Comey.
According to Newsweek’s source, Comey’s op-ed would have laid out some of the evidence showing that the Kremlin was attempting to influence the presidential election. The Obama administration would not make a similar public accusation until Oct. 7, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security alleged that Russia was involved in cyber attacks against Democrats.
The piece, which likely would have been placed at an outlet like The New York Times, would not have revealed anything about an investigation into possible ties between the Russian government and Trump campaign. Comey said earlier this month that the FBI opened that probe in early July.
The other Obama administration officials opposed the idea, Newsweek reports, because they preferred a more coordinated message.
“An op-ed doesn’t have the same stature, it comes from one person,”Newsweek’s source said.
Democrats have blamed the Obama administration for failing to address Russian meddling early enough in the campaign cycle. Comey has been one of the biggest targets for criticism, largely because of his public involvement in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
We already have seen numerous moves by the former Obama administration to extend its policy preferences into the Trump era, including $500 million sent just days before the inauguration to fund the Paris Climate Agreement.
According to reports, a similar tactic was used to evade congressional opposition to transferring funds to the Palestinian Authority after complaints about its incitement efforts, including paying monthly salaries to convicted terrorist in Israeli jail.
Officials say the Obama administration in its waning hours defiedRepublican opposition and quietly released $221 million to the Palestinian Authority that GOP members of Congress had been blocking.
A State Department official and several congressional aides said the outgoing administration formally notified Congress it would spend the money Friday morning. The official said former Secretary of State John Kerry had informed some lawmakers of the move shortly before he left the State Department for the last time Thursday. The aides said written notification dated Jan. 20 was sent to Congress just hours before Donald Trump took the oath of office….
Congress had initially approved the Palestinian funding in budget years 2015 and 2016, but at least two GOP lawmakers — Ed Royce of California, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Kay Granger of Texas, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee — had placed holds on it over moves the Palestinian Authority had taken to seek membership in international organizations. Congressional holds are generally respected by the executive branch but are not legally binding after funds have been allocated.
Obama is called out for not standing with Israel against a horribly biased UN Resolution.
Right outside the White House, at the National Hanukkah Menorah ceremony, Rabbi Levi Shemtov slammed the Obama administration for abandoning the historically close relationship of the US and Israel. He equated the US failing to veto UN Resolution 2334 which condemns Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to aligning themselves with Israel’s enemies.
East Jerusalem is the site of the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount. The Old City of Jerusalem includes the only existing remnant of the historic and religious site — the Western Wall. The Western Wall came under Isreali control following the Six-Days War of 1967. The 1967 borders are part of the ‘disputed territory’ that many consider a hindrance to ‘Peace in the Middle East’. Historically, however, Jerusalem is an Israeli city and is of great significance to the Jews.
Rabbi Levi Shemtov gave a speech after Obama’s proxy, acting treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence Adam Szubin, spoke of dealing with the ‘darkness’ of terrorism by ‘drowning [it out] with light’.
The Orthodox Jewish rabbi took that speech and turned it around, transforming Obama’s actions into the ‘darkness’ that he said settlement-supporting Jews must fight, The Washington Examiner reported.
Shemtov was motivated by the UN vote held on December 23 that condemned as illegal the settlements created by Israeli citizens in the West Bank.
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The UN voted 14-0 in favor of the resolution. The US allowed the measure to pass by abstaining from voting – a major shift in the US’s long-standing policy of backing Israel.
‘Secretary Szubin spoke before of fighting darkness with light,’ said Shemtov, who is also the executive vice president of Orthodox Jewish group American Friends of Lubavitch.
‘I remember those words being spoken to a particular man by the rabbi many many years ago on Simchat Torah,’ he continued, referring to the time of the year in which one reading of the Torah ends and another begins.
‘The rabbi told him: “You are working in a place where there is great grief and darkness, but remember that in that place of darkness, you can only counter it by lighting a candle. By creating light.” ‘That man was Benjamin Netanyahu, and he was at the time the ambassador to the United Nations.’
He continued: ‘So as I know that some of us are so sad at what happened there with regard to Israel, we must remember that the way to counter any darkness, any disappointment is not with harsh rhetoric, not with anger, but when we create light, the darkness dissipates.’
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The resolution is an existential threat to Israel.
The anti-Semitism historic shift in mid-East policy under Obama has many wondering if it was the US that initiated the controversial resolution.
On Friday Ben Rhodes, the White House’s deputy national security adviser, dismissed Trump’s objections.
‘Our position is that there is one president at a time,’ he said. ‘President Obama is the president until January 20, and we are taking this action of course as US policy.’
‘We could not in good conscience veto a resolution that expressed concerns about the very trends that are eroding the foundation for a two-state solution.’
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The reverberations from Friday’s vote were still being felt in Israel on Friday, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a meeting with the ambassadors of the ten countries that voted in favor of the resolution, as well as the US ambassador.
A furious Netanyahu even accused Obama of organizing the vote itself, according to NPR.
‘From the information that we have, we have no doubt that the Obama administration initiated it, stood behind it, coordinated on the wording and demanded that it be passed,’he said in Hebrew.
‘Over decades, American administrations and Israeli governments had disagreed about settlements, but we agreed that the Security Council was not the place to resolve this issue.
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‘We knew that going there would make negotiations harder and drive peace further away.
“And, as I told John Kerry on Thursday, friends don’t take friends to the Security Council. I’m encouraged by the statements of our friends in the United States, Republicans and Democrats alike.
‘They understand how reckless and destructive this UN resolution was, they understand that the Western Wall isn’t occupied territory.’
QUESTION: Rabbi Says Obama & Terrorists Are Birds Of A Feather – Do YOU Agree?
Rabbi Says Obama & Terrorists Are Birds Of A Feather – Do YOU Agree?*
It is always dumbfounding to find the Left against Israel.
It is a free, secular democracy in a region that wants fanatical religious theocracies that limit freedoms.
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Golda Meir, a woman, was elected in 1969 as their 4th Prime Minister after a stellar political career. Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion called her Meir ‘the best man in the government’.
It is an inclusive nation surrounded by enemies along all of its borders.
You would think that Liberals would just love the ‘pluck’ of the Israelis and the values that they support.
But no, they side with… Hamas? WTF?
To paraphrase a former President, ‘Either you’re with Israel, or you’re with the terrorists.’
Does the inaction by the Obama administration actually count as action against Israel?
What do you think of Obama’s handling of the situation with the UN resolution?
Of “nearly 11,000 [Syrian] refugees” admitted to the United States by September, “only 56 were Christian.” (Photo: Stephane Mahe/Reuters /Newscom)
<!– Of “nearly 11,000 [Syrian] refugees” admitted to the United States by September, “only 56 were Christian.” (Photo: Stephane Mahe/Reuters
/Newscom) –>
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In an otherwise unremarkable opinion over the federal Freedom of Information Act, a federal appellate court judge has issued a sharp rejoinder to the Obama administration over an issue that has been discussed in the news—the almost complete lack of Syrian Christian refugees being brought over to the U.S.
The Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center, a progressive liberal advocacy organization “dedicated to ensuring human rights protections” for immigrants and asylum seekers—including apparently terrorists—filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.
The lawsuit claimed that DHS was refusing to release the identity of Tier III terrorist organizations, unlike the identities of what are defined as Tier I and Tier II terrorist groups that are publicly identified.
Tier III terrorist organizations “tend to be groups about which the U.S. government does not have good intelligence, making it essential that [DHS] be able to obtain information about them during screening interviews that are as focused and complete as possible.”
The government argued that Tier III terrorist organizations are exempt from disclosure under FOIA because it would disclose “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations.”
Individuals in Tier III groups are more likely than other asylum seekers “to commit violent or otherwise unlawful acts.”The court accepted the government’s assertion that if immigrants become aware of the identity of these Tier III organizations, which the Heartland Alliance made clear it intended to publicize, then members of the groups would “have a very strong incentive to falsify or misrepresent ” their “encounters, activities, or associations” with the terrorist groups.
If the immigrants don’t know a terrorist organization they have been associated with has been identified by the government, they are “likely to be less guarded in answering questions about [their] activities or associations with the organization.”
All three members of the panel agreed that the FOIA exemption applied, particularly because the Heartland Alliance could not “explain what the government would gain by pretending that harmless organizations are actually terrorist groups.”
The Heartland Alliance also made it clear that “its goal in the litigation” was to “discredit” the government’s classification of terrorist organizations, according to the court. Both “the tone and content”of its briefs “signals its disbelief that the government has secrets worth keeping from asylum seekers and their helpers.”
However, in a spirited concurrence written by Judge Daniel Manion, the judge expressed his “concern about the apparent lack of Syrian Christians as a part of immigrants from that country.”
According to Manion, it is “well-documented” that the refugees are not representative of that “war-torn area of the world.” Ten percent of the Syrian population is Christian and “yet less than one-half of 1 percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian.”
President Barack Obama set a goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S., and by August that goal had already been exceeded. But of the “nearly 11,000 refugees admitted by mid-September, only 56 were Christian.”
Yet Christian Syrians have been one of the primary targets of the Islamic jihadists infesting Syria and butchering, murdering, and killing civilians. The Islamic State has made it clear that it is going after Christians because it intends to “conquer Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.”
Muslim Christian Persecution / Image added by whatdidyousay.org
Thus, one would expect that Christian Syrians would represent a significant portion of the Syrians being accepted into the U.S. as refugees. But that hasn’t been the case, and, according to Manion, the Obama administration has no “good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy.”Thus, we “remain in the dark as a humanitarian catastrophe continues.”
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This is also relevant to the complaints of various states about the Obama administration settling Syrian refugees in them without providing any information about the people arriving. As Manion points out, “the good people of this country routinely welcome immigrants from all over the world. But in a democracy, good data is critical to public debate about national immigration policy.”
The courts and the Obama administration “demand high evidentiary burdens for states seeking to keep their citizens safe, and then prevent the states from obtaining that evidence” on these refugees.That creates a catch-22 for state governments.
So while the administration brings Syrian refugees into the country by the thousands, it is concealing basic information about those refugees behind a wall of government secrecy. This, despite the fact that the Syrian refugee crisis has been the catalyst for the infiltration of terrorists into Western Europe.
Yet the administration refuses to tell the American public or the states how it is making its decisions on who it is accepting for resettlement in the U.S., or even what steps it is taking to ensure we don’t have the same infiltration here.
Or why, in a religious civil war where Christians are one of the main targets of the Islamic terrorists engaging in indiscriminate slaughter, it is bringing in almost none of those victims of one of the worst human rights atrocities of the new century.
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research.
“High-profile Muslim Americans tend to be the subject of a fair amount of blogger criticism, and so the individuals on this list would need to be ESPECIALLY carefully vetted.”
As a “blogger” critic, I am gratified to see this, but it is odd, since so many high-profile Muslim appointments were so obviously not carefully vetted. Take, for example, Mohamed Elibiary, who believes that the U.S. is an Islamic country and that the return of the caliphate is “inevitable,” who was for years a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. There were questions about Mohamed Elibiary’s true allegiances long before he was appointed to the Council. For quite some time, his Twitter profile incorporated the pro-Muslim Brotherhood hand signal, “R4BIA.” And years ago, he was one of the speakers at a December 2004 conference in Dallas titled “A Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary.” The visionary in question was none other than the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
None of that appeared to bother the Obama team.
“LEAKED: Obama Team Kept List of Muslims For Top Jobs, Excluded Non-Muslims,” by Justin Caruso, Daily Caller, October 24, 2016:
The newest batch of John Podesta’s hacked emails released by Wikileaks shows Obama’s transition team kept lists of Muslim and Asian candidates for jobs in the administration.
According to an email chain from 2008, John Podesta received lists of exclusively Muslims and Asians to be considered for jobs in the Obama administration. The email chain revealed that in this process, Middle Eastern Christians were purposefully excluded, or set aside in a separate list, with an aide writing,
In the candidates for top jobs, I excluded those with some Arab American background but who are not Muslim (e.g., George Mitchell). Many Lebanese Americans, for example, are Christian. In the last list (of outside boards/commissions), 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).
Also notable, there was concern that some of the Muslims suggested would not survive media scrutiny, with one aide writing, “High-profile Muslim Americans tend to be the subject of a fair amount of blogger criticism, and so the individuals on this list would need to be ESPECIALLY carefully vetted.”
She continues, “I suspect some of the people I list would not survive such a vet — but I do personally know, at least in part, virtually all of the candidates in the 1st two categories (but I know very few of those listed for outside boards/commissions).”
Within the lists themselves, candidates were further broken down, with every candidate labeled by their nationality and sometimes race.
This follows a pattern of the Obama Administration using race and religion to determine hiring, with other leaked emails showing potential political appointees being labeled with an F for female, B for black, H for Hispanic, and M for Muslim….
Thousands of Syrian refugees walk to cross into Turkey / AP
The Obama administration plans to spend $4.6 million next year on health promotion and “emotional wellness” for refugees as President Obama plans a 30 percent increase in the number of refugees admitted into the country.
The Department of Health and Human Services issued a grant forecast last month detailing its plans to issue health care grants for refugees on top of government programs that are already available, such as Medicaid.
“The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) invites States to submit applications for Refugee Health Promotion (RHP) discretionary grant funds,”the grant forecast says. “The purpose of the RHP grant is to support health and emotional wellness among refugees. The program is designed to coordinate and promote local health and mental health services and education.”
The agency said the funding would be in addition to Medicaid and programs that provide cash and medical assistance for refugees.
“The RHP grant is intended to encourage partnerships with community-based organizations and complement existing care coordination and medical assistance programs such as Medicaid and Refugee Medical Assistance (RMA), which includes refugee medical screenings (RMS), and other ORR-funded social service programs, including Preferred Communities,” according to the grant forecast. Preferred Communities is a job placement program for refugees.
The administration said it would post an official grant announcement on Jan. 6, 2017, less than two weeks before the president leaves office. Funding would be awarded next August.
The call for increased health funding comes as President Obama plans to admit 110,000 refugees in fiscal 2017, a 30 percent increase from this year, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The administration has already admitted 10,000 Syrian refugees this year, and is seeking “a significantly higher number”next year. The president’s plan would admit 40,000 refugees from the Near East and South Asia, including Syria.
Each refugee admitted into the United States from the Middle East costs taxpayers an estimated $64,370 to resettle.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Johnson’s plan would allow the federal government to essentially take over the state voting systems, by administering standards for their performance even more actively than is already the case under the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
My chief concern so far has been that the integrity of these systems should not be entrusted to a central, federal authority. I’d say this no matter who was in the White House, because it’s just a bad idea. It centralizes the power to affect every election in the country, in a way there can be no effective checks and balances on. In the case of the Obama administration, it would be setting the fox to guard the hen house. The states need to retain control of their voting systems. And the less centralized the standard-setters and the vendors are, the better.
But this weekend, WND pointed out another reason to be leery of Johnson’s plan. A WND article cites Philip Haney, the former DHS analyst and whistleblower, reminding us that DHS itself has been the target of high-profile hacking. Jeh Johnson’s interest in declaring voting systems “critical infrastructure” has reportedly increased with the FBI’s revelation that hackers penetrated the state election boards of Arizona and Illinois.* What they gained access to was the voter registration database in each state. But DHS has also been targeted successfully by hackers, including within the last year.
In the WND article, the instance Philip Haney refers to is the massive hack of the federal Office of Personnel Management in 2014-15, which affected nearly 22 million current and former federal workers, including thousands at DHS. But DHS was hacked in a different case more recently. In that case, a group of apparently independent foreign hackers (including at least one 16-year-old)gained access to DHS and DOJ records, and published personal information about 9,000 federal employees. The hack was reported in February 2016.
DHS’s track record with hacking hasn’t been impressive. It’s interesting to note that the state election board hacks were accomplished through the method called “SQL injection.” The reason that’s interesting is that the method has been a known vulnerability for two decades – and DHS was itself hacked by SQL injection attacks in 2008and2012.
Yet an audit done by the agency’s Inspector General in 2015 revealed that DHS was deficient in guarding against attacks by SQL injection, having failed to implement adequate precautions against those and other forms of cyberattack.
It’s all very well to condescendingly assure skeptics that DHS would of course do better than that in preparing to secure America’s voting infrastructure. But what was stopping the agency from doing better at securing sensitive things like the personnel data of ICE and CBP, between 2008 and 2015?
It’s a legitimate question, why we should let control of our voting systems become centralized in a federal agency, when neither that agency nor most of the rest of the federal government has a respectable record of avoiding cyber-intrusion. It’s quite possible that centralizing control of our voting systems would just make life easier for hackers. That’s a serious and valid point. If cyberattacks are as hard to ward off as they seem to be, less centralization is inherently better.
* Here, it’s important to keep in mind that the state election board websites are not inherently “voting systems,” which typically are administered separately. There may be electronic connections between them, but they’re not the same thing. So don’t let the hacking of state administrators’ websites mislead you to believe that the computer you cast your vote on has necessarily been hacked.
It might be possible for someone to use voter registration data from the state election board database to enter false votes into the voting system itself. But that would require penetrating another system. Such penetration is possible, of course, but if it has happened, it hasn’t been reported.
A missile is displayed during a military parade in Tehran / AP
The Obama administration is brushing aside new German intelligence reports indicating that Iran has accelerated its efforts to procure key nuclear materials, despite promises to end this behavior as part of last summer’s nuclear accord, according to comments by a U.S. official provided to the Free Beacon.
Germany’s internal intelligence agency concluded in a recent report that sources have witnessed “extensive Iranian attempts” to procure illicit materials, “especially goods that can be used in the field of nuclear technology,” according to the report. The report appears to show that Iran is not upholding its most critical commitments under the nuclear deal.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel made it clear this week that the intelligence shows “Iran continued unabated to develop its rocket program in conflict with the relevant provisions of the UN Security Council,” particularly one Security Council resolution that bars Iran from pursuing ballistic missile technology.
The intelligence report and subsequent warnings were met with a tepid response from the Obama administration, which declined to comment on the intelligence and told the Free Beacon that it continues to view Iran as complying with the nuclear accord.
The administration’s response stands in sharp contrast to that of leading GOP lawmakers, who told the Free Beacon that the White House is intentionally ignoring Iran’s bad behavior.
“We believe that Iran is continuing to meet its [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] commitments,”a State Department official authorized only to speak on background told the Free Beacon.
When pressed to explain how this comported with Germany’s warnings, the official said the administration “would refer you to German authorities for any comment about reports attributed to them.”
The administration official would not take a stance on indications that Iran’s procurement activity—which has increased nearly twofold since the nuclear deal—could violate U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which bans such activity.
“As for UNSCR 2231, we have spoken previously about how Iran’s reported missile launches are clearly inconsistent with the resolution,”the source said when asked if the new intelligence shows that Iran’s behavior constitutes a violation of the resolution.
A CIA official declined to comment on Germany’s findings and whether they comport with U.S. intelligence assessments.
The administration’s response stands in sharp contrast to comments made by many lawmakers who view the German intelligence as proof that Iran is in violation of international accords. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), the House majority leader, told the Free Beacon that the administration is ignoring mounting evidence of Iran’s illicit actions.
“The Obama Administration can’t ignore the sheer weight of evidence showing Iran isn’t upholding its side of the bargain,”McCarthy said. “From illicit procurement for its nuclear program to testing ballistic missiles, Iran is showing that it had no intention of ever following international agreements, even ones that granted them enormous concessions.”
“The administration’s decision to continue implementing the deal and ignore Iran’s actions isn’t just delusional, it’s dangerous,”he added. “Iran must be stopped, which is why we need the sanctions legislation we are voting on this week.”
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a member of the House intelligence committee, also said Iran’s behavior indicates that it is not faithfully abiding by the nuclear deal.
“The latest German intelligence report on Iran’s efforts to secure nuclear and missile technology and material is extremely troubling,”Pompeo said.
The German intelligence report’s “naming of more than 1,000 associates of Iranian-backed terrorist groups that are living in Germany should serve as a wake-up call to the U.S. and other European countries who are prefer to ignore Tehran’s active support for entities like Hezbollah and Hamas,”Pompeo said.
One source intimately familiar with the administration’s thinking on Iran told the Free Beacon that Iran’s illicit activity has forced U.S. officials to walk back certain claims made about how the deal would reform Tehran.
“The administration isn’t even sure what to say any more. Sometimes they say that the nuclear deal is so weak Iran can’t violate it even if it illegally imports nuclear technology,” said one senior congressional adviser who works closely on the Iran portfolio. “Other times they say the nuclear deal is really strong, and they just ignore what even they admit are violations, like when Iran accumulated more heavy water than allowed a few months ago.”
Germany’s disclosure is the latest in a series of revelations that appear to show Iran stretching the limits of last summer’s nuclear deal. The issue of ballistic missile technology has emerged as an issue of concern on Capitol Hill in light of the administration’s refusal to describe Iran’s ballistic missile tests as violations of UNSCR 2231.
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Ric Grenell – Director of National Intelligence
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Chuck Ross | Reporter | 9:32 PM 03/29/2017
When pressed to explain how this comported with Germany’s warnings, the official said the administration 
assessments.
“The administration’s decision to continue implementing the deal and ignore Iran’s actions 
activity has forced U.S. officials to walk back certain claims made about how the deal would reform Tehran.
Germany’s disclosure is the latest in a series of revelations that appear to show Iran stretching the limits of last summer’s nuclear deal. 
What Did You Say? 
The Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center, a progressive liberal advocacy organization “dedicated to ensuring human rights protections” for immigrants and asylum seekers—including apparently terrorists—filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.
The lawsuit claimed that DHS was refusing to release the identity of Tier III terrorist organizations, unlike the identities of what are defined as Tier I and Tier II terrorist groups that are publicly identified.
Tier III terrorist organizations “tend to be groups about which the U.S. government does not have good intelligence, making it essential that [DHS] be able to obtain information about them during screening interviews that are as focused and complete as possible.”
The government argued that Tier III terrorist organizations are exempt from disclosure under FOIA because it would disclose “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations.”
Individuals in Tier III groups are more likely than other asylum seekers “to commit violent or otherwise unlawful acts.” The court accepted the government’s assertion that if immigrants become aware of the identity of these Tier III organizations, which the Heartland Alliance made clear it intended to publicize, then members of the groups would “have a very strong incentive to falsify or misrepresent ” their “encounters, activities, or associations” with the terrorist groups.
If the immigrants don’t know a terrorist organization they have been associated with has been identified by the government, they are “likely to be less guarded in answering questions about [their] activities or associations with the organization.”
All three members of the panel agreed that the FOIA exemption applied, particularly because the Heartland Alliance could not “explain what the government would gain by pretending that harmless organizations are actually terrorist groups.”
The Heartland Alliance also made it clear that “its goal in the litigation” was to “discredit” the government’s classification of terrorist organizations, according to the court. Both “the tone and content” of its briefs “signals its disbelief that the government has secrets worth keeping from asylum seekers and their helpers.”
However, in a spirited concurrence written by Judge Daniel Manion, the judge expressed his “concern about the apparent lack of Syrian Christians as a part of immigrants from that country.”
According to Manion, it is “well-documented” that the refugees are not representative of that “war-torn area of the world.” Ten percent of the Syrian population is Christian and “yet less than one-half of 1 percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian.”
President Barack Obama set a goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S., and by August that goal had already been exceeded. But of the “nearly 11,000 refugees admitted by mid-September, only 56 were Christian.”
Yet Christian Syrians have been one of the primary targets of the Islamic jihadists infesting Syria and butchering, murdering, and killing civilians. The Islamic State has made it clear that it is going after Christians because it intends to “conquer Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.”
Muslim Christian Persecution / Image added by whatdidyousay.org
Image added by WhatDidYouSay.org
This is also relevant to the complaints of various states about the Obama administration settling Syrian refugees in them without providing any information about the people arriving. As Manion points out, “the good people of this country routinely welcome immigrants from all over the world. But in a democracy, good data is critical to public debate about national immigration policy.”
The courts and the Obama administration “demand high evidentiary burdens for states seeking to keep their citizens safe, and then prevent the states from obtaining that evidence” on these refugees. That creates a catch-22 for state governments.
So while the administration brings Syrian refugees into the country by the thousands, it is concealing basic information about those refugees behind a wall of government secrecy. This, despite the fact that the Syrian refugee crisis has been the catalyst for the infiltration of terrorists into Western Europe.
Yet the administration refuses to tell the American public or the states how it is making its decisions on who it is accepting for resettlement in the U.S., or even what steps it is taking to ensure we don’t have the same infiltration here.
Or why, in a religious civil war where Christians are one of the main targets of the Islamic terrorists engaging in indiscriminate slaughter, it is bringing in almost none of those victims of one of the worst human rights atrocities of the new century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hans von Spakovsky/ @HvonSpakovsky