RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/clinesmith-guilty-plea-using-a-digraph-to-conceal-a-massive-deception-of-the-court/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=featured-writers&utm_term=first

He twisted the meaning of a CIA term to define Carter Page as an unwitting CIA source rather than what he was: a CIA informant willingly providing info for use against Russians.

Author’s Note: This is the second of a three-part series (see Part 1).

Kevin Clinesmith’s lies and document doctoring, which resulted in his guilty plea to a felony false-statement charge last week, were prompted by what turned out to be the worst-case scenario, for both him and the FBI.

To recap, we are focusing on June 2017, when the FBI was preparing to submit an application for a fourth 90-day warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The “SSA,” a supervisory special agent at FBI headquarters whom we met in Part 1, was to be the affiant on that application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Not assigned to Crossfire Hurricane until December 2016, the SSA had not been involved in the investigation when the bureau opened it five months earlier. He was personally unaware that, months before the first Page FISA warrant was sought in October 2016, the CIA had informed the FBI about Page’s years of work as a CIA informant, authorized by the agency for “operational contact” with Russians. Though the SSA was not on the investigative team, he had been the headquarters official assigned to swear to the truth of the renewal warrant applications in January and April 2017. He thus knew that the bureau heavily relied on Page’s prior years of contact with Russians in portraying Page to the FISC as a clandestine agent of Moscow, at the center of a suspected Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy.

The SSA became alarmed when Page, while vehemently denying that he was a spy for Russia, publicly claimed that he’d been a U.S. government intelligence source against Russia. The SSA realized that if Page was telling the truth, it would “seriously impact the predication of our entire investigation.”

That was not the half of it. When the SSA asked Kevin Clinesmith, the bureau’s point man for contact with the CIA, to check on Page’s claims, Clinesmith faced the worst-case scenario, not only because Page was telling the truth, but because the FBI had every reason to know — before it began seeking surveillance warrants from the FISC eight months earlier — that Page had indeed been a CIA informant. Moreover, Clinesmith, a lawyer in the FBI branch that reviewed FISA applications, had been involved from the start.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/08/25/ten-ways-binge-buying-bureaucrats-spent-91-billion-in-a-year-end-2019-shopping-spree/#74915f754c45

Christmas comes in September, not December, for federal contractors.

In the final month of the fiscal year, federal agencies scramble to spend the leftovers in their annual budgets. They worry that spending less than Congress appropriated this year will mean a thinner budget next year.

So, rather than admit the department could run efficiently on fewer taxpayer dollars, federal agencies embark on a shopping spree. This is the “use it or lose it” spending phenomenon – and it happens every year on the taxpayer dime.

Our OpenTheBooks oversight report – The Use-It-Or-Lose-It Spending Spree, How The Feds Spent $91 Billion In September 2019 detailed 642,567 transactions – or about 21,418 expenditures per day.

In the final nine days of the year, federal agencies signed $51 billion in contracts, which exceeded the spending in each of the trailing eleven months. In the final two days, agencies authorized a whopping $23.8 billion.

In February 2020, President Donald Trump committed to ending the bureaucratic binge-buying in his budget to Congress FY2021. So, we reached out to the budget hawks at the Office of Management And Budget (OMB) for comment.

PROMOTED

OMB Director Russ Vought responded: “The practice of use it or lose it spending has cost American taxpayers an untold amount of money. It’s a practice that needs to stop and OMB will continue our efforts to end this wasteful spending.”

https://worldisraelnews.com/edward-alexander-a-champion-of-the-jewish-people-1936-2020/

Edward Alexander should have been a household name in the Jewish community. Perhaps the community was too busy celebrating the very people he was defending them against, the likes of Thomas Friedman, Michael Lerner, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Peter Beinart, and many others.

Alexander was a professor of English literature who wrote on the great Victorians, notably John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. About 40 years ago, he shifted gears to largely write on Jewish issues. His style sharpened by studying literature’s greats, he entered the lists an eloquent champion of Israel against its detractors. His writing was  arresting: “The birth of Israel just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry was one of the greatest affirmations of life ever made by a martyred people.”

In an essay praising historian and thinker Yoram Hazony’s The Jewish State for analyzing the maladies of Israel’s intellectuals, Alexander writes that in Hazony Israel has perhaps found its latter-day Jeremiah, “but given the widespread tone-deafness of the country’s enlightened classes to their Jewish heritage, perhaps what is needed at the moment is an Israeli Jonathan Swift.” Alexander himself is the closest the Jews have come to their own Swift with his erudition, wit and scathing shafts against the moral hypocrites and self-haters.

For Alexander was fierce as well as erudite and eloquent. His erudition and masterful style was on display in works like The Holocaust and the War of Ideas and The Resonance of Dust. But he also impaled the sacred cows of the literary and political establishment. In The Jewish Wars he unmasked Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Tutu, “whose speeches against apartheid” writes Alexander in 1990 “return obsessively to gross, licentious equations between the South African system and Jewish practices, biblical and modern.”