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Ruth King

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Tensions High As Israel Destroys Palestinian Terror Tunnel IDF deploys the Iron Dome and places troops on alert. Ari Lieberman

By on October 31st, 2017

At least seven Palestinian terrorists were killed and 12 injured hours ago after the Israeli Army discovered a terror tunnel that extended from Gaza into Israeli territory. According to Israel’s Channel 2, eleven terrorists were killed. Most of the terrorists belonged to the Islamic Jihad group but some were affiliated with Hamas.

According to Palestinian sources, the tunnel was destroyed with an airstrike. Israeli sources, which are generally more reliable, claim that it was destroyed with a controlled explosion. Israel’s combat engineering units train incessantly for such scenarios and have played a key role in detecting and destroying terror tunnels. In the past two years, several Palestinian-constructed tunnels have mysteriously and inexplicably collapsed, killing dozens of terror operatives trapped inside. Palestinians have accused Israel of deploying a new weapon and the Israelis have not denied the existence of such a top-secret device.

Israel believes that the tunnel was constructed after Operation Protective Edge, which took place in 2014. Palestinians have attempted to employ tunnels as an offensive strategic weapon for the purpose of infiltrating Israeli territory and perpetrating mass killings and kidnappings. However, at least three dozen of these tunnels were destroyed during Operation Protective Edge, thwarting Hamas’s ghoulish designs. Hamas terrorists have invested substantial sums in creating a network of tunnels that crisscross the Gaza Strip. They have also diverted cement and steel, designated for civilian use, to construct tunnels.

According to Israeli officials, the tunnel ran from the Gazan city of Khan Younis, crossed under the border for several dozen feet, and approached the Israeli Kibbutz of Kissufim. An Israeli military spokesperson noted that none of the Kibbutz residents were in danger as the tunnel was destroyed approximately 1 and ¼ miles from the kibbutz. Officials added that construction of the tunnel was being monitored for a period of time prior to its destruction.

According to Palestinian sources, at least five of the dead were identified as Islamic Jihad members while two were affiliated with Hamas. The discovery of the tunnel, its destruction and the deaths of so many terrorists has significantly raised tensions near the Gaza periphery.

The Israel Defense Forces declared the area near the Gaza Strip a closed military zone. In addition, Israel readied its Iron Dome batteries in anticipation of retaliatory rocket fire. Iron Dome proved its mettle during Operation Pillar of Defense, which occurred in 2012 and then again during Operation Protective Edge. In 2012, the system scored an 85% success rate and in 2014, Iron Dome boasted an even greater success rate, shooting down more than 700 Hamas rockets. Iron Dome calculates the rocket’s trajectory and is only fired if it is determined that the rocket will land in populated areas.

Predictably, Islamic Jihad called for retaliation. An Islamic Jihad spokesman posted the following combative comment on twitter: “The Zionist terror government must realize that we will not hesitate to protect our people and our land.” Hamas issued similar militant comments.

The question that everyone is asking now is whether this incident will spiral into a full-scale conflagration. In 2014, a Hamas kidnapping of three hitchhiking Israeli youths provoked a series of escalations that resulted in full-scale war.

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Islam’s Harvey Weinstein? Tariq Ramadan faces an accuser. Bruce Bawer

By on October 31st, 2017

Almost every day now, since various actresses began pointing fingers at Harvey Weinstein, yet another celebrity has been accused of sexual misdeeds. Among the latest is Tariq Ramadan.

Who is Ramadan? First, he’s Muslim royalty, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, who despised the West and preached the doctrine of Islamic conquest of the Christian world. Ramadan himself pretends to be a different kind of Muslim. Mild-mannered and presentable, the silver-tongued, Swiss-born Ramadan poses as a moderate, or even liberal, bridge-builder between Islam and the West. In perfectly fluent French, and decent enough English, he speaks of a future “Euro-Islam” – a peaceful, modernized version of the faith, ushered in by himself and his followers, that would be entirely compatible with Western life and values.

Some of the West’s major cultural institutions have been sucked in by the visions Ramadan has spun and the image he’s created for himself. He’s been on the faculty at Oxford since 2005. The British Foreign Office, while banning from the U.K. such forthright critics of Islam as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, employs Ramadan as an adviser on religion. The New York Times has repeatedly carried water for him: the Times Magazine ran a glowing full-length profile; the Times Book Review published a review of one of his books that read like a press release, and later, in a bizarre and unprecedented move, a piece in which Ramadan spent 2500 words gushing over the supposed humanity, profundity, and poetic beauty of the Koran – without ever mentioning that it is, in reality, little more than a barbaric compendium of commands to kill infidels and accounts of the torment that awaits them after death.

For years, close observers of Ramadan have been well aware that despite his pretense to moderation, he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s not really that hard to figure out. He openly supports sharia law. He openly supports female genital mutilation and the stoning of women. He’s reportedly on the payroll of the terrorist-funding rulers of Qatar. During the presidency of George W. Bush, he was banned from the U.S. because of suspected terrorist ties. (Hillary Clinton lifted the ban when she became Secretary of State.) He was, and perhaps still is, also prohibited from entering several Muslim countries. For a time he was banned from France, although this ban was apparently lifted at some point, because in 2012, according to a Muslim woman named Henda Ayari, he sexually assaulted her in a Holiday Inn hotel room in Paris when they both there attending an Islamic conference.

I’m shocked. No, not that Tariq Ramadan may have raped somebody. I’m shocked that there’s a Holiday Inn in Paris.

Who is Ayari? She’s a former hijab-wearing Muslim who, after enduring a forced marriage to a man who (she says) beat her mercilessly, rebelled against her religion’s oppression of women and threw off the veil – although, like many such rebels, she continues to identify as a Muslim. Last year published a book entitled J’ai choisi d’être libre (I Chose to Be Free). “I was one of the living dead,” she has said. “Salafism anaesthetized me until I freed myself from its mental chains.” As it happens, her book includes an account of the incident at the Holiday Inn, only with her attacker’s identity disguised. “I was completely under the thumb of this intelligent, seductive and manipulative being,” Ayari wrote. So bewitched was she by him, in fact, that she maintained an intimate relationship with him for several months after the assault, until she finally snapped out of it. Now she’s angry at what she considers the blatant hypocrisy of this man who “continues to give lessons in Islamic morality.” Not until the other day did Ayari disclose that her attacker was, in fact, Tariq Ramadan. She has since filed charges.

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We need to talk about transgenderism Trans politics has engulfed our institutions, with zero debate. Joanna Williams

By on October 31st, 2017

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/we-need-to-talk-about-transgenderism/20418#.WfhFN4gpCUk

When, eventually, enough time has passed for people to consider the current period with some objectivity, surely one thing that will intrigue them most is the shift that has taken place in our understanding of gender. The existence of two distinct categories, men and women, once taken for granted as biological fact, can no longer be assumed. The trend, particularly among young people, is to question whether their gender identity corresponds to their sex. Sex is now considered nothing more than an arbitrary designation, an act of violence performed at the moment of birth. Instead, in the media, in schools and universities, gender fluidity is celebrated and those bold enough to transition and make their biology conform to their new sense of themselves are applauded.

The practical impact of this new belief in gender as non-binary and fluid is felt everywhere. Schools have introduced gender-neutral uniforms and are now busy building new gender-neutral toilet facilities. Time is spent discussing which changing room boys who now identify as girls should use after PE lessons and which gender-neutral pronouns teachers should use to address pupils. At university, women’s colleges admit male students who have ‘taken steps to live in the female gender’. Male rapists who transition after sentencing can be moved to women’s prisons. The Church of England offers renaming ceremonies to parishioners unhappy with the sex they, presumably, think God allotted them at the moment of conception. Debates about how passports and the UK’s national census should accommodate gender fluidity are ongoing. Mermaids, a UK taxpayer-funded transgender charity, was, until last week, advertising ‘same day’ cross-sex hormone treatment for children.

What’s truly remarkable is that this disregard for biology and overturning of social convention is occurring with such little debate. Teenagers, swept along with the current fashion, or young adults with a history of mental illness, are not questioned but affirmed by schools and therapists. Challenging someone’s decision to change gender, advising caution and delaying hormone therapy is seen, by transgender campaigners, as an offensive denial of an individual’s right to exist. As a result, there has been little public discussion of the profound impact new attitudes towards gender are having on society more broadly, on what it might mean for the continued existence of single-sex schools and women-only spaces such as hospital wards and prisons, on whether money spent converting toilets in small schools could be better spent elsewhere. There is little discussion of what it means to be a man or a woman in today’s society.

Attempts to discuss transgender politics are closed down. Last month, feminists trying to meet to consider the government’s Gender Recognition Act, had to change venue after protests were threatened. At the meeting point to share the new location they were attacked by trans activists. Discussion was shut down with physical violence. At Cambridge University, the renowned feminist activist and founder of Black History Month, Linda Bellos, had her invitation to speak withdrawn when it came to light she planned to question ‘some of the trans politics… which seems to assert the power of those who were previously designated male to tell lesbians, and especially lesbian feminists, what to say and what to think’. Bellos had not said anything controversial. Like the feminists wanting to discuss the Gender Recognition Act, she hadn’t been given the chance. Even the prospect of raising questions was enough to have Bellos disinvited.

Elsewhere, research into the experiences of individuals who transition from one gender to another is being shut down. James Caspian, a psychotherapist who specialises in working with transgender people, hoped to study people who had undergone gender-reassignment surgery but then regretted transitioning, a group he was increasingly coming across in his work. Bath Spa University initially approved Caspian’s research but when he failed to recruit enough participants, and so broadened his proposal to include people who had transitioned to men but subsequently reverted to living as women without reversing their surgery, Bath Spa’s ethics committee rejected his proposal and he could no longer continue with his research.‘The fundamental reason given was that it might cause criticism of the research on social media, and criticism of the research would be criticism of the university. They also added it’s better not to offend people’, Caspian has said. In other words, his research was rejected for being ‘politically incorrect’. CONTINUE AT SITE

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When Fantasy Trumps Reality By Victor Davis Hanson

By on October 31st, 2017

The enemy of empiricism is ideology. Translated that means politics make people see the world as they want it to be, rather than as it is.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/30/when-fantasy-trumps-reality/

Take the NFL. Any disinterested observer could see that since 2016 and the beginning of Colin Kaepernick’s crusade to sit or kneel during the National Anthem, the player protests have been an utter financial and public relations disaster for the NFL.

Depending on the calibrations of game attendance and television viewing, and adjustments for diverse local markets and weekly venues, most estimates range from a 15 percent to a 20 percent drop in patronage from the pre-Kaepernick 2015 norms. The league stands to lose well over $1 billion per year.

Yet social justice warriors still praise Kaepernick to the skies and suggest that he is making headway in winning over others to his cause. Supporters of the protests have even said the NFL was mostly unaffected financially or, in Orwellian fashion, that a drop off in viewers was actually due to Kaepernick’s supporters’ own solidarity with the protesting players.

For more than a year sports analysts have cited almost every possible extraneous reason for a decline in viewership—from worries over brain injuries to saturation of the market to competition from other entertainment and recreation. All, in theory, are true. All, in fact, are not the main reason why the league is suffering an abrupt erosion of support.

The truth is, most NFL viewers—middle-aged, male, and center-right politically—want entertainment and a refuge from politics. They do not tune in for multimillionaire players to insult the National Anthem. They do not want uninformed, 20-something multimillionaires lecturing fans on their purported sins. How can it ever be wise for a business to insult its consumer base? Again, reality apparently has been intolerable to the owners, the players, and the media. So it is massaged, disguised, or rejected—up to the point when facts make further fantasy impossible.

Collusion Fantasies
The same disconnect is true of the entire “Russian collusion” narrative. An empirical examination would conclude that if several congressional committees, federal investigators, a frenzied media, and highly motivated Democratic operatives could not—after a year(!)—find proof of Trump’s personal collusion with the Russians, then there likely was none. To save the credibility of the investigation Mueller has had to advise indictment for former and fired Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, in part on the basis of his wheeler-dealer past.

If Manafort’s indictment now sets the bar for “collusion,” then an entire array of Clinton, Inc. operatives are facing even more exposure. Why would Russian interests pay Bill Clinton $500,000 for a brief speech or give more than $140 million to the Clinton Foundation (do they continue to do so now?)—when at roughly the same time control of sizable percentages of small but vital U.S. uranium holdings were transferred to Russian companies, sanctioned by a decision in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had considerable influence?

Why would anyone believe that a “dossier” with bizarre salacious detail, funded by an opposition research firm with a history of destructive invective, and purchased by the Clinton campaign—and later by the FBI to warrant politically motivated surveillance on U.S. citizens—be considered disinterested “proof” of Trump wrongdoing, especially given that it relied on bought Russian sources? And how could a fine man like Robert Mueller escape charges of conflict of interest? His very appointment was the result of deliberate leaks and machinations of his former associate and successor at the FBI, the now largely discredited James Comey—while Mueller himself had overseen, in 2010-11, FBI investigations into Russian efforts to rig the transfer of U.S. uranium? Eventually, there will be an investigation into what Mueller himself found out about Russian collusion six years ago, what he did about it, and why his findings were either ignored or set aside. Pretending there is no conflict of interest, does not mean there is not any.

Despite the absence of proof of Trump collusion and the plethora of evidence that pointed the other way, the media and larger culture have clung to the Trump collusion narrative all the way to the point of absurdity. If Paul Manafort’s indictment hinges on Robert Mueller’s evidence that Manafort was receiving Russian money, it will more likely establish standards by which the Clinton campaign will face even greater legal exposure—given that its purchase of the Steele document was, in essence, a transfer of monies to Kremlin sources.

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ISIS Calls for Attacks on Halloween Celebrations: ‘Get Out Before It’s Too Late’ By Bridget Johnson

By on October 31st, 2017

A pro-ISIS media group circulated an image today of a knife dripping blood over the Eiffel Tower, calling on lone jihadists to attack on Halloween.

“Enjoy their gathering,” reads the text superimposed over the image. “Terrorize October 31.”

Added was the hashtag #Paslechoix: “no choice.” Below that was the message, “Get out before it’s too late.”‘

It was produced by Centre Médiatique An-Nûr, which has produced in French not only videos about jihadist operations but about how online jihadis can practice web security. The group also distributes ISIS’ Rumiyah magazine, which has not yet been published this month, in French.

The image was shared by a Twitter account that distributes caliphate news, images and videos in French.
(ISIS image)

The threat came on the same day that French President Emmanuel Macron signed a controversial counterterrorism law that supplants the state of emergency that has been in effect since the November 2015 terror attacks that claimed 130 lives around Paris.

Under the law, security officials have the permanent ability to shut down houses of worship deemed to be hotbeds of extremism, and will not necessarily need a warrant to search the homes of terror suspects. They will also be able to contain terror suspects to their home neighborhoods and conduct more targeted identity checks near the borders and at transportation hubs.

The state of emergency, which has been extended six times since the 2015 attacks, expires Wednesday. Macron said the new law, which will be reassessed in two years, could go into effect on Halloween.

Macron tweeted a photo of the bill signing, saying it will be “strengthening the security of our citizens.”

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Calling the Cops in Europe? Don’t Bother By Bruce Bawer

By on October 31st, 2017

Are there no-go zones in Europe, or aren’t there? Have political control and the power of law enforcement in some urban neighborhoods been tacitly turned over to local Muslim leaders, with even the police taking a hands-off attitude? Across Europe, some politicians, journalists, and police spokespeople continue to deny that such zones exist, although the evidence for their existence becomes increasingly difficult to disavow.

Even as these establishment functionaries continue to insist that no-go zones are a myth, however, news reports are indicating that in several European countries, the policing problem has advanced beyond the mere fact of no-go zones. Earlier this month, for instance, the Dutch newspaper Het Parool reported that throughout the Netherlands, police departments are now so overburdened by “radicalization, terrorism, and the influx of asylum seekers” that they simply don’t have the time to investigate a large percentage of crimes. In Rotterdam, 54% of crime reports are tossed at once, without even a cursory effort to track down a perpetrator; in The Hague, the figure is 48.5%; in Amsterdam, it’s a whopping 64.8%. The overall national figure is 56%.

One night nineteen years ago, a few steps away from Muntplein, a busy square in the heart of Amsterdam, I was accosted by a young Muslim man who held a knife on me and demanded my money while a half dozen of his pals hovered threateningly nearby, at canal’s edge. More angry than scared, I responded with what may be described as foolish bravado, telling my assailant to hit the road. He backed off, and headed with his friends down the canal, presumably in search of someone else to mug. For my part, I went to the nearest bar and ordered a gin and tonic. I was so stunned that it didn’t even occur to me until I was halfway through my second drink that I should’ve gone immediately to the police. Even all those years ago, I doubted that filing a police report would’ve made any difference. Today, apparently, it would almost certainly be a waste of time.

The same thing’s happening in Britain. On October 16, the Daily Mail reported that every police force in the country was now “abandoning inquiries into thousands of ‘hard to solve’ low-level offences.”

What kinds of offenses? The list includes “vandalism, theft, burglary and antisocial behaviour,” plus minor incidents of “grievous bodily harm” and “car crime.”

Of course, these are infractions that are committed, to a wildly disproportionate degree, by Muslims.

The message is clear: if you’re the victim of a violation that falls into any one of these categories, you need not bother reporting it, unless you actually know who committed it or have evidence that seems likely to help police identify the perpetrator without too much time or effort. Forget those scenes in movies where cops stare at CCTV footage for hours on end in search of a suspect: under the new British policy, police won’t even bother looking at crime-scene videos if the job promises to take more than twenty minutes. Cases will also be abandoned at once if there aren’t any “viable lines of inquiry,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, defended this new opposite-of-zero-tolerance approach, explaining that “we must prioritise so we are using our resources to the best effect and protecting people who need it most.”

What are the priorities of UK police? Well, as the London Times noted on October 12, they’ve been pretty busy the last couple of years collaring people for making “offensive” remarks online. Last year, at least 3,395 people – the real number is probably a good deal higher – were arrested for this purported transgression. No one will be surprised to know that the remarks judged to be “offensive” enough to merit punishment tend to be remarks about Islam. If you’re a Muslim who has repeatedly called for the death of infidels, don’t worry: the police won’t bother you. (A prominent example, cited by the Times, is terror-supporting activist Nadia Chan, who has called Jews “parasites” and white people “swine.”) If you’re an infidel who has merely complained about Muslims who call for the death of infidels, however, you’d better be ready for a knock at the door.

It’s hard not to conclude from all this that the British police – or the politicians who give them their marching orders – have cast their vote for dhimmitude, choosing to overlook Muslim misdeeds and to focus, instead, on muzzling those who dare to express concern about those misdeeds. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Israel Destroys a Gaza Tunnel, Killing Militants At least seven dead, more than a dozen wounded By Rory Jones in Tel Aviv and Abu Bakr Bashir in Jerusalem see note please

By on October 31st, 2017

ANOTHER DUPLICITOUS HEADLINE…WHAT ARE “MILITANTS” DOING IN A TUNNEL AND SINCE WHEN ARE ISLAMIC JIHAD AND HAMAS A “POLITICAL GROUP” AND TO COMPOUND THE BIAS, THE PICTURE ABOVE THE STORY SHOWS AND ELDERLY WOMAN WEEPING…..RSK

Israel blew up an underground tunnel on Monday that had reached Israeli territory from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, killing at least seven Gazan militants and wounding more than a dozen, the Israeli army and Palestinian health authorities said.

The tunnel was “detonated” in a controlled explosion, the army said, without providing further details. It was the third such passageway into Israel discovered by the Israeli army since 2014, when it fought an air and ground war with Hamas, in part to destroy the militants’ network of tunnels.

Officials from both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant and political group based in the West Bank and Gaza, said that they had lost operatives in the explosion. Islamic Jihad also vowed to retaliate against Israel, saying the tunnels existed to defend the Palestinian people.

The incident is likely to increase tensions in Gaza, as the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority moves forward with a long-awaited reconciliation process that would see it take back control of the enclave from Hamas, a move opposed by some extremist fighters in the strip.

The Israeli army since 2014 has developed and begun constructing an underground barrier around Gaza to detect and destroy cross-border tunnels. The army said it used the new technology to find the tunnel destroyed on Monday.

Hamas in 2014 mounted assaults on Israeli forces through a labyrinth of tunnels. The subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza led to the deaths of 2,205 Palestinians and 71 Israelis and the destruction of 18,000 Palestinian homes, according to the United Nations.

The Palestinian Authority in the coming days is expected to take control of border crossings into Gaza and return its security forces to the strip, before organizing presidential and parliamentary elections with Hamas.

Hamas and the dominant Fatah party of authority President Mahmoud Abbas have for weeks been negotiating a rapprochement after a 10-year rift sparked by a short but bloody conflict in 2007.

A key obstacle to the talks remains whether Hamas wiill give up its arsenal of weapons and dismantle its militant arm, known as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Papadopoulos Case The indictment is more exculpatory than incriminatory of Trump. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on October 31st, 2017

As related in my earlier column on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Paul Manafort and an associate, today on balance is a good day for the Trump administration. Of course, you never want to see your former campaign chairman get charged with crimes. Nevertheless, after all these months of investigation, the much-anticipated Manafort charges turned out to be unrelated to Russian meddling in the 2016 election, let alone to any purported Trump-campaign collusion therein.

On that collusion question, today’s other development in Mueller’s investigation seems more relevant. As David French and Dan McLaughlin detail, the special counsel announced the guilty plea of George Papadopoulos — which apparently happened on or about October 5 — to a single count of making false statements to government investigators. As Rich Lowry observes, Papadopoulos was a low-level Trump-campaign adviser. He had contacts with Russians who claimed to have close connections to the Putin regime.

As outlined in a 14-page “Statement of the Offense,” Papadopoulos’s principal offense was to lie to the FBI about when these contacts occurred. He told the FBI they happened before he joined the campaign; in fact, they happened not only after he was aboard but only because he was aboard. Upon close examination, the story unfolded in the offense statement is actually exculpatory of Trump and his campaign. To understand why, we need to revisit the term “collusion.”

First, some background.

Papadopoulos is a climber who was clearly trying to push his way into Trump World. We recall that much of the Republican foreign-policy clerisy shunned Trump during the campaign. Thus did comparatively obscure people like Carter Page get seats at the table. George Papadopoulos was another of these: a 30-year-old who graduated from DePaul in 2009, later got an M.A. from the London School of Economics, and worked at the Hudson Institute for about four years.

While living in London in early March 2016, he spoke with an unidentified Trump-campaign official and learned he would be designated a foreign-policy adviser to the campaign. These arrangements are very loose. Papadopoulos was a fringe figure, not plugged into Trump’s inner circle.

In London, Papadopoulos met an unidentified Russian academic (referred to as “the Professor”), who claimed to have significant ties to Putin-regime officials and who took an interest in Papadopoulos only because he boasted of having Trump-campaign connections. There appears to be no small amount of puffery on all sides: Papadopoulos suggesting to the Russians that he could make a Trump meeting with Putin happen, and suggesting to the campaign that he could make a Putin meeting with Trump happen; the Professor putting Papadopoulos in touch with a woman who Papadopoulos was led to believe was Putin’s niece (she apparently is not); and lots and lots of talk about potential high- and low-level meetings between Trump-campaign and Putin-regime officials that never actually came to pass.

In the most important meeting, in London on April 26, 2016, the Professor told Papadopoulos that he (the Prof) had just learned that top Russian-government officials had obtained “dirt” on then-putative Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The dirt is said to include “thousands of emails” — “emails of Clinton.” The suggestion, of course, was that the Russians were keen to give this information to the Trump campaign.

This may raise the hopes of the “collusion with Russia” enthusiasts. But there are two problems here.

First, Papadopoulos was given enough misinformation that we can’t be confident (at least from what Mueller has revealed here) that the Professor was telling Papadopoulos the truth. Remember, by April 2016, it had been known for over a year that Hillary Clinton had used a private email system for public business and had tried to delete and destroy tens of thousands of emails. The Russians could well have been making up a story around that public reporting in order further to cultivate the relationship with Papadopoulos (whom they appear to have seen as potentially useful). Note that the Professor suggested the Russians had Clinton’s own emails. But the emails we know were hacked were not Clinton’s — they were the DNC’s and John Podesta’s (Hillary is on almost none of them). So, Papadopoulos’s Russian interlocutors could well have been weaving a tale based on what had been reported, rather than on what was actually hacked and ultimately released by WikiLeaks.

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So Where Are the Podesta Indictments? By Daniel John Sobieski

By on October 31st, 2017

If Paul Manafort is guilty of failing to register as an agent of a foreign government, something that occurred when Manafort was not running the Trump campaign, then so is Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton campaign manager, who is also up to his eyeballs in collusion between the Democrats and Hillary Clinton and Russia and Ukraine:

One of Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms did not disclose the wide extent of its lucrative political work for a Ukrainian group tied to both onetime Trump adviser Paul Manafort and to pro-Russian politicians, new records show.

The firm, the Podesta Group, said nothing in a 2012 lobbying report to Congress about at least 32 meetings, emails and other communications it had with the State Department, at a time when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was scrutinizing Ukraine’s upcoming election, records show.

The new disclosures shed light on the web of contacts between Russian-leaning Ukrainians, Washington lobbyists and U.S. policymakers during the Obama administration. The Podesta Group filed new, detailed lobbying disclosures in April to augment lobbying reports from 2012 to 2014 that had given little detail. The firm is run by Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, is a longtime adviser to Clinton and was chairman of her 2016 presidential campaign. John Podesta was a senior counselor to President Barack Obama in 2014 and had previously been lobbying partners with his brother. He is not currently affiliated with his brother’s firm.

The Podesta Group was representing a Ukrainian nonprofit, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, as it sought to counter the Obama administration’s critical stance toward Ukraine’s pro-Russia government and Congress’ growing annoyance with Ukraine’s leaders.

It is easy to forget in the hyperventilation by the legacy media that it was Paul Manafort’s efforts on behalf of the Podsta Group, not Trump, that caused Special Counsel Robert Mueller to expand his investigation to include the Podestas and their group and that Manafort’s alleged crimes do not involve work for the Trump campaign:

A thus-far-reliable source who used to be involved with Clinton allies John and Tony Podesta told Tucker Carlson that press reports appearing to implicate President Trump in Russian collusion are exaggerated. The source, who Carlson said he would not yet name, said he worked for the brothers’ Podesta Group and was privy to some information from Robert Mueller’s special investigation.

While media reports describe former “Black, Manafort & Stone” principal Paul Manafort as Trump’s main tie to the investigation, the source said it is Manafort’s role as a liaison between Russia and the Podesta Group that is drawing the scrutiny…

The source said the Podesta Group was in regular contact with Manafort while Hillary Clinton was America’s chief diplomat…

During this time, the Uranium One deal was being facilitated by the White House.

According to Carlson, “Manafort was clear that Russia wanted to cultivate ties to Hillary” because she appeared to be the presumptive 45th president.

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Manafort, Gates Indicted – But Not For Russian Shenanigans Mueller squeezes former Trump campaign leaders. Matthew Vadum

By on October 31st, 2017

Two former senior Trump campaign staffers pled not guilty yesterday to evading taxes on millions of dollars over a period of years and a litany of other charges sought by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III that appear wholly unrelated to the alleged Russian intervention in last year’s election that he was commissioned to investigate.

It was a busy day in the nation’s capital yesterday.

Paul J. Manafort Jr. and Richard W. Gates III were arraigned in federal court in Washington, D.C., and released on a $10 million bond and a $5 million bond, respectively. The defendants are not allowed to leave their homes except under narrowly defined circumstances.

Trump defenders have long said Mueller has too many serious conflicts of interest to be leading the probe of the electoral collusion fairy tale and that the president should fire him.

At 10:25 a.m. Monday, President Trump tweeted his disgust at the indictments, which in his view are aimed at the wrong people. “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????” Minutes later he tweeted, “there is NO COLLUSION!”

Recent news reports indicate at least one Democrat, “power lobbyist” Tony Podesta, has been under Mueller’s microscope. Podesta, brother of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, abruptly resigned yesterday from the Podesta Group.

“Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure,” according to Politico. The Podesta Group partnered with Manafort on a public relations campaign to promote Ukraine in the U.S.

Mueller has been investigating Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group, NBC News reported last week. The probe has “morphed into a criminal inquiry into whether the firm violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

As Breitbart News reports,

The Podesta Group has also lobbied for Uranium One, the Canadian-based energy company that has come under scrutiny as well. In 2010, the Obama administration allowed Uranium One to be sold to Russian energy company Rosatom, giving the company control over one-fifth of American uranium-mining capacity to Russia, despite an ongoing FBI investigation into a Rosatom subsidiary involved in a racketeering scheme. The Podesta Group received $180,000 from Uranium One over several years between 2012 and 2015, according to records at opensecrets.org.

Hillary Clinton infamously approved the Uranium One transaction when she was secretary of state and her husband received the suspiciously large sum of $500,000 for a single speech from Russian sources.

Commentator Sean Davis, co-founder of the Federalist website, reminded us on Twitter last week who the real villains are. “The Mueller probe is based entirely on two things: a dossier created by Dem[ocrat] collusion [with] Russia, and illegal leaks by [former FBI Director] James Comey.”

“Democrats and Comey didn’t just allow Russia to interfere with our elections. They let shady Russian operatives pervert our justice system,” he added.

Returning to Manafort, he managed the Trump campaign from June to August 2016, until his foreign business dealings, hyped relentlessly by the mainstream media, led to his firing. He was replaced by Kellyanne Conway and Bannon. Gates is a protégé of Manafort who served as his deputy in the campaign and partner in various business enterprises.

Mueller is already the textbook definition of an out-of-control independent prosecutor and these charges may be part of a legal stratagem to strong-arm the two men into cooperating as witnesses. In other words, the charges could be bogus or blown out of proportion, calculated to give the prosecutor leverage over the two defendants.

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