Emails from Hillary Clinton’s home server contained information classified at levels higher than previously known, including a level meant to protect some of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence, according to a document obtained by NBC News.
In a letter to lawmakers, the intelligence community’s internal watchdog says some of Clinton’s emails contained information classified Top Secret/Special Access Program, a secrecy designation that includes some of the most closely held U.S. intelligence matters.Two American intelligence officials tell NBC News these are not the same two emails from Clinton’s server that have long been reported as containing information deemed Top Secret.
The letter doesn’t make clear whether Clinton sent or received the emails in question, but in the past, emails containing classified information have tended to have been sent to Clinton, not written by her.
The new revelation underscores the extent to which the email classification issue could continue to dog Clinton, as State Department and intelligence officials review sensitive information within messages that were blacked out before being released to the public.
Clinton, who tops national primary polling as a Democratic presidential candidate, has repeatedly said that none of the information she sent or received while secretary of state was marked classified, and nothing has emerged to contradict that. But it’s become clear that classified information bled into the emails, which were sent over unencrypted channels open to interception by foreign intelligence agencies.
Both men are excellent legislators and deserve support from New Yorkers with Republican values…..stay tuned…rsk
John Faso, a former Republican leader in the State Assembly will run for Congress.Faso will seek the seat in the 19th District being vacated by Rep. Chris Gibson. Both men come from Kinderhook, and Faso was an early supporter of Gibson’s first run for office in 2010.
Congressman Chris Gibson is retiring from Congress to run for Governor. He has an impressive record….. MPA and PhD in government from Cornell University and author of “Securing the State,” a book on national security decision-making published in 2008.
Over the course of his 24 year Army career, Chris rose to the rank of Colonel and deployed seven times. This included four combat tours to Iraq, and separate deployments to Kosovo, the Southwestern US for a counter-drug operation, and most recently – just prior to his retirement – Haiti where he commanded the 82nd Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team (BCT) during the opening month of that humanitarian relief operation. The Secretary of the Army awarded the BCT the Superior Unit Award for their actions in Haiti.
Chris earned two Legions of Merit, four Bronze Star Medals, the Purple Heart, the Combat Infantryman’s Badge with Star, the Master Parachutist Badge and the Ranger Tab. For their actions in Mosul in support of the first national election in the new Iraq, his Battalion Task Force earned the Valorous Unit Award. For their actions in Tal Afar during the 2nd and 3rd national elections in Iraq his Battalion and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment were recognized for excellence by President George W. Bush and earned a 2nd Valorous Unit Award.
Other key assignments included tours teaching American Politics at the United States Military Academy at West Point, serving as a Congressional Fellow with US Representative Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and completing a Hoover National Security Affairs Fellowship at Stanford University. Chris was also the Distinguished Honor Graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College.
The enemies of Israel neither slumber nor sleep. They include not only the technically competent barbarians of Iran, exuberantly aggressive with the prospect of nuclear weapons and the $150 billion “signing bonus” paid them for signing a sham agreement with America; not only Iran’s proxies to the north (Hezbollah) and the south (Hamas); not only most of the surrounding Arab nations, including at least two Palestinian states; not only its own Arab citizens waging a third intifada; and not only those Europeans whose main regret over the Holocaust is that, for a time, it gave anti-Semitism a bad name.
Isn’t this enough? Not in the opinion of numerous Jewish academics of the ostensibly “progressive” persuasion, imbued with the conviction that the litmus test of contemporary liberalism is dedication to “the Palestinian cause.” In actuality, this has come to mean turning the pariah people into a pariah state, and replacing the old question “Can Jews take the right to live as a natural right?” with the newer one: “Does Israel have the right to exist?”
The latest “target of opportunity” for these Jewish academics, a great many of them employed in Jewish Studies programs, is the Hillel Foundation, which in this country and others serves the same function for Jewish university students that the Newman Center does for Catholic ones. They are parochial institutions, not academic ones; they exist to complement universities, not imitate them. Rabbi Hillel’s best-known utterance is: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Cardinal Newman’s “Idea of a University” is the vade mecum on its subject; but he insisted that a liberal education can give “no guarantee of sanctity or even conscientiousness.”
One of Hillel’s primary tasks has long been to nourish in Jewish students a sense of shared destiny with the constantly beleaguered state of Israel. To ask Hillel to open welcoming arms to ideologues of politicide for Israel would be akin to asking all chapters of the Newman Center to start inviting lecturers who endorse the old Protestant view that “the Mass is of the Devil,” or “the Pope is the Antichrist.”
As American talking heads continue to express their “moral outrage” at Donald Trump’s call “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” perhaps they should first consider what the official position of foreign Muslim governments is on Americans—beginning with U.S. “friends and allies.”
As it happens, jihadi hate for non-Muslim “infidels” is not limited to the Islamic State, which U.S. leadership dismisses as neither a real state nor representative of Islam. Rather, it’s the official position of, among others, Saudi Arabia — a very real state, birthplace of Islam, and, of course, “friend and ally” of America.
Saudi Arabia’s Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Issuing Fatwas[1]—which issues religious decrees that become law—issued a fatwa, or decree, titled, “Duty to Hate Jews, Polytheists, and Other Infidels.” Written by Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz (d. 1999), former grand mufti and highest religious authority in the government, it still appears on the website.
According to this governmentally-supported fatwa, Muslims—that is, the entire Saudi citizenry—must “oppose and hate whomever Allah commands us to oppose and hate, including the Jews, the Christians, and other mushrikin [non-Muslims], until they believe in Allah alone and abide by his laws, which he sent down to his Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him.”
Obama and his political allies seek normalization with Iran. They are unconcerned with Iran’s nuclear weapons programs or its support for terrorism and they are willing to provide fig leaves for these and other threats by the Shiite terror state to the United States and to the rest of the free world.
Iran, however, is looking to escalate its conflict with the United States. Perversely, normalization is the best strategy for escalating a conflict with the United States while extracting maximum benefit from it.
Without normalization, Iran has few options for escalating its conflict with America. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) generals are fanatics, but they know that they cannot win a major military conflict with the United States. Instead, the IRGC terror hub seeks to carry out attacks that hurt the United States, but in ways that fall short of summoning up a full American military reprisal.
Under Obama, Iran has more options than ever because the United States is now willing to tolerate what it would not have tolerated in the past. But excessive escalation would still risk a scenario in which even a pro-Iranian administration would be left with no choice but to strike back at Iran. And Iran remembers the lessons of Operation Praying Mantis all too well. It has nothing to gain by losing billions in precious military equipment while the United States demonstrates its superior firepower.
Students campaigning to get universities to divest from fossil fuels are in two minds about free speech. They want it for themselves, but don’t seem keen on free speech for their opponents.
The divestment movement didn’t invent free-speech hypocrisy, but divestment activists offer a range of old and new reasons as to why opposing views should not be tolerated.
The debate is over
The divestment movement claims to like debate. It is convinced that anyone with an open mind can’t help but agree that divesting is a good thing to do.
‘Colleges would already be divesting if it were just about the arguments, because there are plenty out there’, says full-time campaigner Jess Grady-Benson, leader of an ardent student divestment campaign at Pitzer College in California. Bill McKibben, founder of the activist group 350.org and the international divestment movement, declared at a recent rally: ‘We won the argument. Twenty years ago we lost the fight and that’s because the fight was never about data.’
If, in your own mind, you have won the substantive argument, but your opponent continues to persuade the audience to his side, what can you do? Declare the debate to be over? Yank the microphone away from the moderator? Refuse to share a platform with anyone who so wrongheadedly persists in thinking the debate is not over? These might sound like exaggerated metaphors, but they are actual examples of what divestarians have done in the past. The commandeering of the microphone, for example, took place when a group of divestment activists, calling themselves Mountain Justice, took over a debate on divestment with Swarthmore College’s board of trustees. The rowdy group then went on a 90-minute screed about the need for ‘radical emancipatory action’ and cancelled the question-and-answer section where students and faculty could weigh in. When two students in the audience dared to ask if the meeting could be returned to order, divestment activists clapped them down in unison and told them to leave.
These creepy leaflets are testament to a much deeper malaise.
Something deeply disturbing is happening in Europe. Take a look at the multi-language leaflet, produced by the Health and Social Services Department of the Swiss city of Lucerne. It informs migrants not to assault women ahead of Lucerne’s upcoming carnival. It features a cross next to a cartoon of a man hitting a woman and a man beating a child, and a tick next to a picture of a man kissing a man, a woman kissing a woman, and a woman kissing a man. Similar flyers – emphasising local rules of behaviour – have been produced in towns throughout central Europe. In Bornheim in Germany, the authorities have gone a step further and banned male migrants from a public swimming pool after women complained of being sexually harassed
Although the educational propaganda produced by local authorities for migrants is full of modern, right-on terms like ‘appropriate behaviour’, the principal focus is sex. So a leaflet circulated in the German town of Hardheim might ask migrants not to relieve themselves in parks and gardens, but it’s mainly concerned with telling migrants to avoid contact with young women. These leaflets recycle the traditional narrative of protecting the ‘weaker sex’ from uncivilised types in the ostensibly value-free language of multicultural Europe.
It is particularly disheartening that these instant rules of conduct echo failed and discredited attempts to ‘educate’ immigrants in the past. The classic example of a well-meant but misguided attempt to educate Muslim immigrants in the values of a host nation is the 2006 film produced by the Dutch government. To The Netherlands told viewers that ‘people do not make a fuss about nudity’, ramming the point home with footage of an attractive woman sunbathing topless. It also explained that homosexuals possess the same rights as heterosexuals, including the right to marry. To illustrate the point, the film lingers on two men kissing in a meadow.
lIt isn’t the Israelis who are paranoid – it’s anti-Israel Europeans. They’re the ones who madly look upon one nation, one people, as toxic, destabilising, destructive, out to get us all and do over world peace. Such swirling paranoia often means that anti-Zionism crosses the lines into antisemitism.
Some Israelis I spoke to [recently] seemed more upset about the turn against Europe in Israel than they were about the more immediate threat posed by Islamists in the Middle East.
It wasn’t hard to work out why. As one said, “We considered Europe a friend”; “We thought Europe and Israel had a lot in common, being Western and democratic.”
This cuts to the heart of the Euro-elites’ paranoia about Israel, their turn against it; it is really European values, the ideals of modernity and democracy that they’ve given up on.
The thing that riles them most about Israel is that it reminds them of what they used to be like, of the values they once espoused, before they lost the moral plot and sank into the cesspit of relativism and post-Enlightenment self-loathing.
Plucky, keen to protect its sovereignty, considering itself an outpost of liberalism … Israel is a painful reminder to today’s anchorless European thinkers and agitators of what their nations once were.
They hate Israel because they hate themselves.
Israel has become the whipping boy of guilt-ridden Western liberals who’ve given up on the very idea of the West.” [Emphasis added]
So wrote the Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked Online, in an admirably perceptive article in the London Jewish News late last year that was picked up by the Australian Jewish News.
This video, in which the Canadian writer/commentator Mark Steyn (how wonderful it used to be to read his regular columns in the UK Daily Telegraph back in the days when Conrad Black owned that newspaper) declares Multiculturalism as “the slipperiest of all isms,” illuminates the loss of direction and purpose that’s befallen and bedevils the West.
Some 90 young men — “mostly Afghan refugee kids,” according to police — were apprehended in connection with the mass sexual assaults at the concert.
A recurring theme in recent articles by prominent feminists is the assertion that ethnic Swedish men act exactly the same as migrant gang-rapists.
One can draw only one conclusion: Feminists would rather protect Muslim men from criticism than protect Swedish women from sexual assaults.
None of the women’s shelters would admit that the mass sexual abuse of Swedish women might have anything to do with the perpetrators’ ethnicity or religion. They did not wish to “generalize,” they said — then hung up.
What Swedish politicians intend to do about the “Rapefugees” that are now in the country is anyone’s guess.
On New Year’s Eve, the same kind of mass sexual assaults that happened to women in Cologne — in Arabic called the “Taharrush” game — also took place in Sweden, but the police and the media have chosen to bury the information. The men, it turned out, were mainly Afghan, and claiming to be “unaccompanied refugee children.”
In reality, many of them are much older than 18, and are now commonly referred to with the recently coined name, “Rapefugees,” rather than “refugee children.”
It recently emerged that the Immigration Service urged its administrators to accept as a “child” everyone who looked under the age of 40 — apparently without any thought as to how inappropriate it is to place grown men in elementary and secondary schools with teenage girls. As Sweden — until December — kept its doors wide open to the migrants of the world, the country has accepted vastly more asylum seekers than its Nordic neighbors. Statistics for 2012-2015 are available via Eurostat, and provide the following statistics on the number of migrant arrivals:
Sweden: 342,635
Norway: 63,370
Denmark: 41,290
Finland: 40,470
Iceland: 675
Many who seek asylum in Sweden come from war-torn Syria: 51,338 in 2015. Afghanistan comes in at second place with 41,564 for the last year — an increase of a staggering 1,239% compared to 2014. Most of the Afghans seeking asylum claim to be children, and are therefore fast-tracked to being admitted within six months of the asylum application.
Where there are open flames, there will always be curious moths. Tonight, at a little after six o’clock, Sarah Palin will succumb at last to overwhelming temptation and sign up for Donald Trump’s ever-glistering light show. And in that remarkable moment, the mask will fall off completely.
If you are surprised by this development, you shouldn’t be. Ours is an age in which politics and entertainment are melted together without opposition or disfavor; a silly, self-indulgent, shallow age in which Kanye West thinks he can be the president of the United States and the president of the United States thinks he can be Kanye West. That Palin and Trump are together at last is no accident of ideology or timing; rather, it is the inevitable and rational confluence of two ghastly cults of personality — a fat-cutting, cash-saving merger that will serve to increase overall market share. Under their own steam, both figures have convinced a significant portion of the American population that their personal advancement is the key to the country’s success. Together, just think how great America can be!
Talk to a Palin fan and you will be told in a matter of moments that to oppose her is to oppose “real America.” Talk to a Trump fan, and you will be told that to knock him is to knock “We the people” — of which, it is made abundantly clear, you are no longer a valued part. All told, this symmetry makes sense, for the pair have of late become mirror images. Sarah Palin started in politics and moved seamlessly into television and entrepreneurship; Donald Trump started in business and, after a quick foray onto the small screen, readied himself for the ballot box. Now their most effective cudgels can be wielded as one: You’re not so effete that you’re against the both of them, are you?
