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September 2017

ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Do Palestinians Define ‘Terrorism’? As the U.S. moves to cut aid, setting out a clear legal meaning would be a good step. By Jonathan Schanzer and Grant Rumley

By on September 12th, 2017

The Taylor Force Act is gathering momentum in Congress. Named for a West Point graduate who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian during a 2016 trip to Israel, the bill would cut American aid to the Palestinian Authority until it takes “credible steps to end acts of violence” and stops paying stipends to convicted terrorists. The legislation recently passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with rare bipartisan support, and last week Sen. Lindsey Graham attached it to the 2018 Foreign Operations budget, all but guaranteeing it will go into effect next year.

That means the clock is now ticking for the Palestinian Authority, which receives around $350 million from the U.S. each year. The Taylor Force Act wouldn’t block humanitarian or security aid, meaning U.S. funds wouldn’t be zeroed out, but our sources say the total could fall as low as $120 million, depending on how far Congress and the Trump administration want to go. At the same time the PA’s support from other donors is dropping, putting further strain already on the government in Ramallah.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his coterie say they cannot roll back the practice of paying convicted terrorists, which dates to 1964. They say failing to pay the salaries—estimated at around $350 million a year—would create an opening for the terror group Hamas or even Iran. They further argue that pulling the funding would deprive thousands of families of their livelihoods, which could spark protests and threaten the Palestinian Authority’s rule.

Congress will rightly reject these arguments. The PA’s obstinacy is the reason the Taylor Force Act is so close to becoming law. Lawmakers and the White House signaled for months that a cutoff was coming, yet Mr. Abbas refused to take action.

There is one step Mr. Abbas could take to demonstrate that he is taking Congress seriously: He could issue a definition of terrorism to his own people. Remarkably, the Palestinian Authority’s “Basic Law” does not mention terrorism. The State Department says that although the PA has criminalized acts of terror, it lacks legislation “specifically tailored to counterterrorism.”

The PA’s security forces do regularly raid terror cells and detain operatives across the West Bank. In late July, for example, they nabbed Hamas members in four major cities. But the PA typically justifies such actions under presidential decrees, such as one that prohibits “harming public security.”

In the past, PA forces also had claimed jurisdiction under a combination of legal parameters, including the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Revolutionary Penal Code of 1979 and a set of Jordanian military codes. But since Mr. Abbas’s election in 2005, and especially after the 2006 elections and the devastating 2007 civil war with Hamas, he has governed almost exclusively by executive decree.

A law passed by the PA’s parliament that defines and criminalizes terrorism would carry greater weight and almost certainly garner more respect from the Palestinian people. But internecine conflict has rendered the parliament defunct, making a new law all but impossible to pass.

Mr. Abbas’s decrees provide the Palestinian security forces with a broad mandate for arresting terror operatives who plot attacks against Israel or the PA. Mr. Abbas issued an order in 2007 that states “all armed militias and military formations . . . are banned in all their forms.” At times, he has condemned acts of terror, such as last month after three Arab-Israelis killed two police officers in Jerusalem. The PA’s news agency reported that Mr. Abbas called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “expressed his strong rejection and condemnation of the incident.”

Yet the PA continues to pay stipends to people convicted of such attacks. The Palestinians could buy considerable goodwill merely by defining what the PA considers terrorism. Setting out such a definition would not change Congress’s demands or prevent the Taylor Force Act from passing. But it would signal the PA is taking steps to address the problem. From there, the PA’s next step would be to cut off money to convicted terrorists, pursuant to its new definition. CONTINUE AT SITE

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Cruelty of Barack Obama On immigration, the ex-president isn’t what he says he is.By William McGurn

By on September 12th, 2017

Throughout his political life, Barack Obama has been hustling America on immigration, pretending to be one thing while doing another.

Now he’s at it again. Mr. Obama calls it “cruel” of Donald Trump both to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protected hundreds of thousands of people who came to the U.S. as children illegally—and to ask Congress to fix it. The former president further moans that the immigration bill he asked Congress to send him “never came,” with the result that 800,000 young people now find themselves in limbo.

Certainly there are conservatives and Republicans who oppose and fight efforts by Congress to open this country’s doors, as well as to legalize the many millions who crossed into the U.S. unlawfully but have been working peacefully and productively. These immigration opponents get plenty of attention.

What gets almost zero press attention is the sneakier folks, Mr. Obama included. Truth is, no man has done more to poison the possibilities for fixing America’s broken immigration system than our 44th president.

Mr. Obama’s double-dealing begins with his time as junior senator from Illinois, when he helped sabotage a bipartisan immigration package supported by George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy. Mr. Obama’s dissembling continued during the first two years of his own presidency, when he had the votes to pass an immigration bill if he had chosen to push one. It was all topped off by his decision, late in his first term, to institute the policy on DACA that he himself had previously admitted was beyond his constitutional powers.

Let this columnist state at the outset that he favors a generous system of legal immigration because he believes it is good for America. Let him stipulate too that a fair and reasonable solution to 800,000 children who are here through no fault of their own should not be a sticking point for a nation as large as America. But once again, here’s the point about Mr. Obama: For all his big talk about how much he’s wanted an immigration bill, whenever he’s had the opportunity to back one, he’s either declined or actively worked to scuttle it. CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Throwing Away the Russian Card The love-hate relation with Putin, from the Obama-era red reset button to the current collusion hysteria, has been a disaster. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 12th, 2017

“They [the North Koreans] will eat grass but will not stop their program as long as they do not feel safe.”— Vladimir Putin, Beijing, China, September 5, 2017

China has put the U.S. into an existential dilemma. Its surrogate North Korea — whose nuclear arsenal is certainly in large part a product of Chinese technology and commercial ties — by any standard of international standing is a failed, fourth-world state. North Korean population, industry, culture, and politics would otherwise warrant very little attention.

Yet in late 2017 North Korea poses the chief existential threat to the United States. We fret over its daily assertions that it is apparently eager to deploy verifiable nuclear weapons against the U.S. West Coast, U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea, or U.S. bases and territory abroad such as those in the Marianna Islands.

Even if such offensive thermonuclear threats are ultimately empty, they continue to eat up U.S. resources, demand diplomatic attention, make us spend money on deployment and military readiness, and prompt crash anti-missile programs.

Central to the strategy is China’s “plausible deniability.” The ruse almost assumes that China’s neighbor North Korea — without a modern economy or an indigenous sophisticated economic infrastructure — suddenly found some stray nukes, missiles, and delivery platforms in a vacant lot in Pyongyang. Thus China is willing to “help” resolve the issue it deliberately created.

As the U.S. obsesses over North Korea, China is in theory freed to do even more of what it already does well — intimidate its Pacific and Asian neighbors, in the passive-aggressive style of violating sovereign air, ground, and sea space of other nations. Its tactics are accompanied by implied quid pro quos along the lines of “If you would just join our Chinese Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, there would be no need for such misunderstandings.”

Beijing is following somewhat the Japanese model of imperial construction of the 1930s. Chinese aims are based on similar radical increases in naval construction and air power; massive importation of Western military technology; intimidation of neighbors; assumptions that the U.S. is a spent, has-been power in decline; and reliance on morally equivalent and circular arguments that regional hegemons have a natural right to impose regional hegemonies.

China does not want a pro-U.S. country on it borders. It does not wish reunification of the Korean Peninsula by South Korea. It does not want North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal. It does not want another major land war on its border. It does not want Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan to have either a nuclear deterrent or a missile-defense system.

But it does favor the status quo, in which North Korea every few months upsets the world order, threatens chaos, wins concessions, and then behaves — for a while. So North Korea is an effective surrogate — it keeps the U.S. busy and distracted from China’s aggrandizing strategies while not upsetting the commercial trajectory of the Pacific.

The result of the North Korean crisis is a sort of strategic stalemate, in which both sides in the stand-off try to find advantages or new breakthroughs in technology. North Korea escalates by detonating a heretofore unknown thermonuclear weapon. South Korea responds by taking caps off its conventional missile-delivery weights. The U.S. scrambles to beef up missile defenses while ratcheting up diplomatic pressures.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vox Trump, Vox Populi Why raising the debt ceiling is an especially revealing moment in our democratic politics. Bruce Thornton

By on September 12th, 2017

Donald Trump’s deal with the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling for three months and fund $15 billion in disaster relief has delighted the Dems and infuriated Republicans. “Trump got rolled!” was the refrain, said in disgust by one side and exultation by the other, since the Dems gave up nothing for the deal. The president seemed to rub salt in the Republicans’ wounds when he called the Senate minority leader and House minority leader “Chuck and Nancy.” The old NeverTrump claim that Trump is neither a true Conservative nor a Republican appeared prescient.

Leaving all that aside, the move probably will satisfy a majority of voters. The vote in the House before the meeting was 316-90, suggesting that the most democratic branch of government, and hence most accountable to the people, had an idea that such a move is what the people want. Later, the presumably more sober and judicious Senate agreed with an 80-17 vote. The old lesson of democracy is still valid: politicians succeed by giving people what they want. Ignoring vox populi is a surefire way to get tossed from office.

Raising the debt ceiling is an especially revealing moment in our democratic politics. The problem is critical: Common sense and simple mathematics tell us our runaway debt, deficits, and entitlement spending will in a few decades hit our economy like a Cat 5 hurricane. But the electorate’s fondness for these programs makes them nearly untouchable.

Nearly two-thirds of the annual budget goes to “mandatory” spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on $20 trillion of debt, along with some of the 83 social welfare programs. This spending will continue to grow as the population ages and interest costs return to normal levels. Social Security illustrates the problem. Its unfunded liability for the next 75 years is $12.5 trillion, an increase of 166% from just ten years ago. Social Security is losing money every year, $54 billion in 2016. In ten years that deficit will reach $215 billion in real dollars. Today, the “trust fund” financing the program is made up of Treasury debt, which means the feds have to borrow more money or raise taxes when the bonds are cashed in to pay recipients. It’s sort of like using one credit card to make a payment on another.

If left unreformed, programs like Social Security and Medicaid will hit the demographic wall: right behind the 75 million Boomers are nearly 76 million Millennials. Increasing longevity means that benefits for more people will be paid out for more years. We can’t grow ourselves or tax ourselves out of this looming disaster. Programs have to be reformed (higher employee contributions and retirement ages, and means-testing benefits), and more importantly, cut.

This problem is well known, amply documented, often decried, and seldom addressed meaningfully. Deficit and debt hawks blame politicians for pandering to the people, especially Democrats who think the “rich” don’t “pay their fair share,” and have secret vaults of money they’ve unjustly finagled from the people, even though the collective wealth of the country’s some 540 billionaires couldn’t fund the federal government for one year. Weak-kneed Republicans go along, afraid of their constituents and the progressive media that will Scrooge them royally every time a modest reform––such as cutting just the rate of increased spending for a program––is put on the table.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Unknown Girl – A Review By Marilyn Penn

By on September 12th, 2017

If the Dardenne brothers were filming in English instead of French, it would be easier for critics to admit that The Unknown Girl is a Christian soap opera in which a young idealistic doctor discovers that everyone harbors a secret which is just another version of sin. Whether it’s jealousy, vanity, pride, lust, theft or murder, we’re all guilty and one sure way of atoning is to choose a life of service to the poor and downtrodden

In an early scene, we see Doctor Jenny tending to the infected foot of an overweight elderly diabetic – no gloves for this saintly woman, nor do we see her wash her hands before sitting down to have a snack with her patient. This is but a preamble to her taking on the role of detective to solve the mystery of a young murdered girl’s unknown identity. Jenny will venture into some rough places on her own; she will stand up to shady characters, she will put herself in harm’s way even when it makes little sense. Questioning a man who has procured a prostitute for oral sex as to whether he got her name would be instantly laughable in American English but gets a pass as a sub-title. Would Carmen have been as desirable or successful if her name had been Ms Sonia Perez?

At one point, I had hopes that the Dardenne boys were about to admit that the doctor’s naivete was more disruptive than helpful in a scene where the police complain that her treading on their turf complicated their own investigations and antagonized their inside stool pigeons. Unfortunately, they quickly reverted to some pat scenes of guilt and atonement and our heroine ends on the high note of helping an elderly patient negotiate some stairs. If you like your whodunnits garnished with piety and unlikely remorse, see The Unknown Girl. If you don’t need moralizing with your murder/mystery, especially in French, skip this one – c’est un dud.

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“We need to have a transparency revolution. In as real time as possible, citizens, We The People, need to engage and review that spending, and hold our elected officials accountable for their decisions.” Adam Andrzejewski

By on September 12th, 2017

Watch the C-SPAN interview, click here.

Adam Andrzejewski discusses OpenTheBooks, a watchdog organization he founded that tracks government spending at the federal, state, and local levels.Brian Lamb’s inquiries dug into our OpenTheBooks’ mission, vision, data capture and oversight reports. It’s a robust body of work that we are very proud of – there was a lot to discuss over the course of an hour.

In the interview, we had an opportunity to tell our organization’s story from the beginning and explain the vision behind our lifelong commitment to government oversight.

Have you ever wondered how OpenTheBooks conducts its oversight? Adam Andrzejewski explained the process we use to hold government accountable.

Brian Lamb asked hard questions about our federal oversight reports. Here’s a list of our reports covered in the interview:

Ivy League, Inc. – The government’s $42 billion subsidy of the Ivy League schools. Watch the segment. Read the report.

The National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities – Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal arts and humanities grants flowing to asset-rich organizations, not the starving artist. Watch the segment. Read the report.

The Veterans Affairs Scandal Two Years Later – Spending $20 million in luxury art while sick veterans die waiting to see a doctor.
Watch the segment. Read the report.

Farm Subsidies & The Big Dogs – Millions of dollars in federal farm subsidies to urban areas where there are no farms.
Watch the segment. Read the report.

Fortune 100 Companies – $1.2 trillion in federal contracts and grants to the Fortune 100. Watch the segment. Read the report.

Lawyered Up 2017 – 36,000 federal lawyers enforcing the regulated states of America. Watch the segment. Read the FY2015 report.

Watch our interview now posted online:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?432472-1/qa-adam-andrzejewski

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S STRANGE OBSESSION : CAROLINE GLICK

By on September 12th, 2017

The decision to follow through with sending Iraqi Jewish archives back to Iraq is part of a disturbing pattern.

The law of Occam’s Razor, refined to common parlance, is that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

If we apply Occam’s Razor to recently reported positions of the US State Department, then we can conclude that the people making decisions at Foggy Bottom have “issues” with Jews and with Israel.

Last Friday, JTA reported that the State Department intends to abide by an agreement it reached in 2014 with the Iraqi government and return the Iraqi Jewish archives to Iraq next year.

The Iraqi Jewish archives were rescued in Baghdad by US forces in 2003 from a flooded basement of the Iraqi secret services headquarters. The tens of thousands of documents include everything from sacred texts from as early as the 16th century to Jewish school records.

The books and documents were looted from the Iraqi Jewish community by successive Iraqi regimes. They were restored by the National Archives in Washington, DC.

The Iraqi Jewish community was one of the oldest exilic Jewish communities.

It began with the Babylonian exile following the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem 2,600 years ago. Until the early 20th century, it was one of the most accomplished Jewish communities in the world. Some of the most important yeshivas in Jewish history were in present-day Iraq. The Babylonian Talmud was written in Iraq. The Jewish community in Iraq predated the current people of Iraq by nearly a thousand years.

It was a huge community. In 1948, Jews were the largest minority in Baghdad.

Jews comprised a third of the population of Basra. The status of the community was imperiled during World War II, when the pro-Nazi junta of generals that seized control of the government in 1940 instigated the Farhud, a weeklong pogrom. 900 Jews were murdered.

Thousands of Jewish homes, schools and businesses were burned to the ground.

With Israel’s establishment, and later with the Baathist seizure of power in Iraq in the 1960s, the once great Jewish community was systematically destroyed.

Between 1948 and 1951, 130,000 Iraqi Jews, three quarters of the community, were forced to flee the country. Those who remained faced massive persecution, imprisonment, torture, execution and expulsion in the succeeding decades.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump, Nixon, and the Media Back to the future. Bruce Bawer

By on September 12th, 2017

Ever since the election of Donald Trump, the media have been grabbing at everything they could come up with to smear him – and have been shameless lemmings in echoing one another’s nonsense. He’s in bed with Putin! He’s got Alzheimer’s! And then there’s this one: good God, he’s the second coming of Richard Nixon!

Just a sampling. In May, Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, Nate Hopper in Time, and Alyssa Rosenberg in Washington Post wrote articles drawing parallels between Trump and Nixon. In their efforts to yoke the two presidents together, all three journalists seemed desperate to find likenesses. “As Trump does today,” wrote Rosenberg, “Nixon faced questions about his tax dealings and whether he was using the presidency for personal profit.” I don’t remember Nixon facing major questions along those lines, but I do know that Trump, far from using the presidency for personal profit, has waived his salary and took a financial hit for entering politics; it’s the Clintons, of course, who over the last quarter-century have cashed in on their political positions to a degree that has made fellow grifters the world over gasp in wonder.

In a June issue of New York Magazine, Frank Rich joined the Trump = Nixon club, suggesting that The Donald, like Tricky Dick, would end up being brought down by a scandal; on August 1, CNBC’s website ran its own Trump/Nixon story, claiming that “[o]n Russiagate, Trump appears to be taking his playbook directly from Richard Nixon and Watergate.”

That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Nothing new here, of course: the news media have been trashing Republican presidents ever since the cultural revolution of the 1960 – since, that is, the Nixon Administration. In order to maximize the impact of the trashing, to be sure, the media invariably argue that most previous GOP commanders-in-chief were actually not that bad, but that the current one is terrible. This has led to a great deal of silent self-revision on the media’s part. While Reagan was in the Oval Office, the media, by and large, depicted him as an out-of-touch Hollywood amateur who would destroy the economy, oppress minorities, and maybe even start a nuclear war with the Soviets. When George W. Bush was in charge, however, the same media contrasted him with Reagan – whom they now professed to consider an accomplished statesman – even as they painted W. as half idiot and half evil incarnate, in some cases even equating him with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Predictably, now that Trump is head of state, Bush Derangement Syndrome has been dropped down the memory hole – in fact, he’s being widely rehabilitated (how wonderful his paintings of wounded soldiers are! How knowledgeable he turns out to be about art! And look, he and the whole Bush clan are chummy with the Clintons!) – and been replaced by Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump, it turns out, is the worst GOP president since Nixon – if not worse: in July, Politico trumped the Trump = Nixon line with a piece by Susan B. Glasser headlined: “Don’t Compare Trump to Nixon. It’s Unfair to Nixon.” Glasser, it turned out, had interviewed veteran Washington insider Elizabeth Drew, who argued that Trump is dumber than Nixon and that his abuse of power had already eclipsed that uncovered by the Watergate investigations.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The real Middle East colonialist settlers By Thomas Lifson

By on September 12th, 2017

One of the standard arguments of leftists who want to see Israel destroyed, but won’t admit to hating Jews, is that Israelis are colonists, outsiders who came into the land that rightfully belongs to the indigenous population. You probably know the drill, which pushes many of the buttons of the international left: Racism (the Arab Semites are ‘People of Color” while the Jews are “Europeans”); colonialism (The Jews are outsiders); imperialism (the Jews are more successful and richer than their neighbors, so it is unfair); and Marxism (Israel has a flourishing market economy and is now a hi-tech powerhouse, so it must be at the expense of exploited people).

All of this is looking at history through the wrong end of the telescope. Dr. Alex Joffe of the Begin-Sadat Center refutes this bogus narrative. In fairness I can only briefly excerpt, but read the whole thing, if you want to understand the real history.

The entrance of Caliph Umar (581-644) into Jerusalem, 19th century colored engraving, via Wikipedia

The idea of Jews as “settler-colonialists” is easily disproved. A wealth of evidence demonstrates that Jews are the indigenous population of the Southern Levant; historical and now genetic documentation places Jews there over 2,000 years ago, and there is indisputable evidence of continual residence of Jews in the region. Data showing the cultural and genetic continuity of local and global Jewish communities is equally ample. The evidence was so copious and so incontrovertible, even to historians of antiquity and writers of religious texts, some of whom were Judeophobes, that disconnecting Jews from the Southern Levant was simply not conceived of. Jews are the indigenous population.

As for imperial support, the Zionist movement began during the Ottoman Empire, which was at best diffident towards Jews and uncomfortable with the idea of Jewish sovereignty. For its part, the British Empire initially offered support in the form of the Balfour Declaration, but during its Mandatory rule (1920-48) support for Zionism vacillated. The construction of infrastructure aided the Yishuv immensely, but political support for Jewish immigration and development, as stipulated by the League of Nations mandate, waxed and waned until, as is well known, it was withdrawn on the eve of World War II. This is hardly “settler-colonialism.”

Ironically, the same cannot be said for the Palestinian Arabs. A recent analysis by Pinhas Inbari reviewed the history of Palestine (derived from the Roman term Palaestina, applied in 135 CE as a punishment to a Jewish revolt). Most notably, he examines the origin traditions of Palestinian tribes, which continue even today to see themselves as immigrants from other countries. Inbari’s review, along with many additional sources of information he did not address, demonstrates that modern Palestinians are, in fact, derived from two primary streams: converts from indigenous pre-modern Jews and Christians who submitted to Islam, and Arab tribes originating across the Middle East who migrated to the Southern Levant between late antiquity and the 1940s. The best documented episodes were the Islamic conquests of the 7th century and its aftermath, and the periods of the late Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Call It On—Or Call It Off? Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 12th, 2017

Will America, nine months into Donald Trump’s unexpected presidency, continue to chase its tail while a nuclear Korea looms, tax and immigration reform are pending, and the country is torn apart by identity politics—or will it return to sanity?

Presumably, special investigator Robert Mueller is focused mainly on whether former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, or ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, or members of the Trump family, or Trump himself colluded with agents of the Russian government.

Allegedly, either individually or in combination, they racketeered for money or business opportunities or for inflated honoraria—in exchange for abetting Russia’s efforts to hack information from the Clinton campaign affiliates that would vault Donald Trump to the White House.

Ostensibly, Mueller would be looking for suspicious bank deposits, sudden increases in cash spending, or any of the other tell-tale signs of quid pro quo profiteering. By extension, he would be pursuing leads that might show how such efforts actually altered the election, in a way that Barack Obama on the eve of the election—and a purportedly assured Clinton victory—suggested was impossible.

So far little seems to have turned up in nearly a year of intensive press and political probing—other perhaps than the lurid Christopher Steele/Fusion GPS file accusing Trump of criminal conspiracies along with a host of sexual perversions. But that dossier apparently was paid for by opposition candidates and even may have been purchased by the FBI. Its preposterousness and weird origins have turned attention back to the authors and financiers of this calibrated smear document.

As Mueller continues this inquiries (if the history of special counsels and investigators is any indication, the time, money, and effort expended is inversely related to the number of successful convictions), several investigations are underway on the other side of the aisle.

Unmasking the Unmaskers
The House Intelligence Committee at some point may turn over its findings to the attorney general to ascertain whether John Brennan, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and other high Obama intelligence, cabinet, and diplomatic officials were requesting covert intelligence findings on American citizens, having their names unmasked, and then leaking them to pet reporters. The Obama team’s activity apparently spiked during the 2015-2016 campaign season and may well have been directed at perceived political opponents. If ­­so, the leaking likely constituted criminal activity—and would represent a violation of government trust not seen in decades. The committee may also finally take a careful look at the Steele file to ask what exactly was the relationship between this political hit job and James Comey’s FBI—and those implications are every bit as serious as the unmasking mess.

Meanwhile, the FBI and Capitol police are scrutinizing former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her former information technology team, headed by Imran Awan and various members of his family. Imran, et. al., allegedly engaged in bank and procurement fraud, and may have been peddling classified government information.

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