RUTHFULLY YOURS

The tragic and still-murky story of how four U.S. soldiers were killed in Niger, what they were doing there, and whether their sacrifice was properly honored, has descended into a case study of America’s cancerous politics and tendentious media.

The story has several distinct elements, which have been compressed and distorted by partisans. Those elements need to be disentangled and clarified.

The first point is how little we actually know about the deadly mission. As citizens, we need to understand the essentials without spilling any operational secrets. There’s no excuse for another bodyguard of lies, like those surrounding the deaths in Benghazi.

The military chain-of-command needs to know what happened in Niger so they can learn from the tactical failures. Their civilian bosses need to know so they can hold the military accountable and provide the necessary resources. Why was the pre-mission intelligence so bad? Why wasn’t backup firepower available? How can we avoid a repetition?

But tactical failures are only half the story. The other half is U.S. strategy. What the hell is it?

As citizens, we need political leaders to state clearly how we are threatened by the spread of radical Islamist groups to ungoverned spaces across Africa and Asia. Why is it worth risking the lives of our soldiers? We already know the terrorists’ bases in the Middle East are shrinking and that they are seeking new footholds. But how, exactly, do their efforts threaten us? What can we do about it and at what cost? The trade-offs are crucial here since we have limited resources and other profound security challenges, from North Korea and the South China Sea to Russia and Ukraine.

Iran poses another of those challenges, one that bears directly on the Niger firefight. The surprise attack involved radical Sunnis, seeking to build bases in new terrain. Radical Shiites face no such pressures. They can expand close to home, and they are doing just that. Their militias are thriving from Baghdad to Damascus to southern Lebanon, thanks to American errors and Iran’s aggressive moves to exploit them. Led by its Revolutionary Guard, Iran has built a crescent of Shiite terror from Teheran to southern Lebanon. Now that Raqqa has fallen, they will move quickly to add that link to the chain. The Russians, too, have exploited American weakness, backing Iran’s mullahs and Syria’s Assad and reaping the rewards, including the first permanent Russian base on the Mediterranean.

This nasty outcome followed America’s catastrophic strategic failure in Iraq. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and their generals had no plan to stabilize the country after overthrowing Saddam Hussein. After a change of American strategy and years fighting to correct earlier mistakes, a new president took office and deliberately junked the hard-won victory by precipitously withdrawing all U.S. forces.

These cumulative failures, compounded by President Obama’s decision to back away from America’s traditional partners, Saudi Arabia and Israel, handed the region to Iran and its proxies. Iran’s rise, America’s fall, and the emergence of Sunni extremists (to oppose the Shiites) are deeply intertwined. They form the context for America’s current troubles across the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

This box of snakes was opened to the public by the death of four U.S. Special Forces soldiers in Niger. Rather than leading to a serious debate, the episode immediately fell into partisan name calling.

For a businessman it must be frustrating to sit at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and realize how unbusinesslike is the government surrounding you.

President Trump issues executive orders, which can be stayed immediately by some obscure federal judge in a deep-blue state. He can ask the State Department to unwind the Iran treaty, but his own employees drag their feet. He negotiates with scores of congressmen who, like cats, enjoy being stroked but immediately go their own ungrateful way. And don’t even purr.

No wonder he is said to be frustrated. Some of these vexations come with the job. They are consequences of the very constitutional system he has sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. Separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and checks and balances are meant, in part, to frustrate over-ambitious office holders and their schemes.

These same constitutional devices, however, are also supposed to lead to better, more deliberative laws, judicial decisions faithful to the Constitution, and a chief executive who can energetically, to use e Federalist’s word, enforce the law and protect national security. They are supposed to produce good government, in other words.

But good government has not been forthcoming lately. This isn’t the Constitution’s fault. Its commands have been disregarded, or reinterpreted, and its operations distorted for so long and to such an extent that it functions as our frame of government much less reliably than you might think. Though still to be reckoned with, the capital-C Constitution yields far too often to the small-c (“living”) constitution, another word for government as usual in Washington, D.C.—that is, government as we have come to know, fear, and resent it since the 1960s.

When Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton concluded the political deal that put the nation’s capital on the banks of the Potomac, the District of Columbia was swampland; and to the metaphorical swamp it is returning. Trump is right about that. Some buildings, mostly monuments, museums, and memorials, continue to rise high above the muck, but others seem to inch lower every year.

Consider the Capitol, and the biggest legislative accomplishment it has seen since the 1980s, Obamacare. How could Congress have passed Obamacare the way it did in 2010—on a party-line vote, with corrupt bargains aplenty, and unconstitutional (big-C) provisions galore—and then turn around and fail to repeal the law the way it did this summer? “To lose one parent,” observed Oscar Wilde, “may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” To have passed President Obama’s health bill may be regarded as a grave constitutional misfortune. But to fail to repeal it smacks of constitutional carelessness. Democrats were responsible the first time, Republicans the second. The former didn’t tell the truth about Obamacare, the latter (some of them, at least) about their oath to repeal it. How then are the American people supposed to reassert control over their own government, if neither party can be trusted?

I don’t believe in coincidences. Not when it comes to crimes. Especially when they involve political corruption.

No such thing as a coincidence. Doesn’t exist.

Yet, we are led to believe it was merely a coincidence that Bill Clinton just happened to be on the tarmac of an Arizona airport at the same time as then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch. We are supposed to accept that their private meeting on board Lynch’s plane had nothing whatsoever to do with the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton which the A-G was overseeing at the time.

Right. They just “schmoozed” about grandkids and what-not.

I guess it was also just a coincidence that a few days after the furtive tarmac meeting the decision was announced that criminal charges against Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president, would not be filed, notwithstanding compelling evidence that she repeatedly violated the Espionage Act by storing highly classified documents on her private, unauthorized and unsecured email server in the basement of her home.

Sure. Makes perfect sense. To a naïve, gullible fool.

Maybe it was purely a coincidence that there was another FBI investigation going on involving Russia’s corruption-fueled purchase of U.S uranium assets and which also happened to implicate the Clintons, but was kept hidden from Congress and the American people by Lynch and her predecessor, Eric Holder. Hmm…

And perhaps it was simply an odd coincidence that the investigation of this uranium bribery, extortion, money laundering and kickback case was supervised by then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, his successor James Comey, and then-U.S Attorney Rod Rosenstein, all of whom appear to have covered it up but are now directly involved in the Trump-Russia probe.

Strange confluence of people and events, eh?

I don’t buy any of it. Not for one minute. And not entirely because I don’t believe in coincidences. It is because all the above-mentioned people are known to trifle with the law or ignore disqualifying conflicts of interest. They seem to be without principles –devoid of the kind of scruples that should guide people in service of our government.

Mueller is serving as special counsel in the Trump-Russia case. He reports to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who appointed him.

Yet both Rosenstein and fired FBI Director James Comey are witnesses in the case, since Rosenstein recommended to President Trump that Comey be fired.

It is well established that Comey and Mueller are long-time friends, allies and former partners. How can Mueller be fair and impartial given these glaring conflicts of interest? He cannot. And he should recuse himself. Rosenstein should also step aside in overseeing the case. He cannot be prosecutor and witness simultaneously.

Their conflicts are compounded by recent reports that all three men were involved in the Russian uranium case which was kept hidden from Congress. How can Americans have confidence in the outcome of the Trump-Russia case if they engaged in a cover-up of the Clinton-Russia case?

Which brings us to Hillary and Bill. The Clinton name is synonymous with scandal. The sleazy Whitewater land deals, an illicit affair with a young White House intern that led to impeachment, deceptions following the Benghazi murders, Travelgate, cattle futures, suspected slush funds, evidence of perjury, the list is seemingly endless.

Through it all, the ability of the Clintons to evade indictments would make Houdini proud. They are escape artists of the highest order.

Loretta Lynch should never have presided over the Hillary Clinton email case. She owed her career to none other than Bill Clinton who nominated her to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York which nicely positioned her for elevation to Attorney General a few years later.

As Hillary Clinton was beginning her job as President Obama’s chief diplomat, federal agents observed as multiple arms of Vladimir Putin’s machine unleashed an influence campaign designed to win access to the new secretary of State, her husband Bill Clinton and members of their inner circle, according to interviews and once-sealed FBI records.

Some of the activities FBI agents gathered evidence about in 2009 and 2010 were covert and illegal.

A female Russian spy posing as an American accountant, for instance, used a false identity to burrow her way into the employ of a major Democratic donor in hopes of gaining intelligence on Hillary Clinton’s department, records show. The spy was arrested and deported as she moved closer to getting inside the secretary’s department, agents said.

Other activities were perfectly legal and sitting in plain view, such as when a subsidiary of Russia’s state-controlled nuclear energy company hired a Washington firm to lobby the Obama administration. At the time it was hired, the firm was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in pro bono support to Bill Clinton’s global charitable initiative, and it legally helped the Russian company secure federal decisions that led to billions in new U.S. commercial nuclear business, records show.

Agents were surprised by the timing and size of a $500,000 check that a Kremlin-linked bank provided Bill Clinton with for a single speech in the summer of 2010. The payday came just weeks after Hillary Clinton helped arrange for American executives to travel to Moscow to support Putin’s efforts to build his own country’s version of Silicon Valley, agents said.

There is no evidence in any of the public records that the FBI believed that the Clintons or anyone close to them did anything illegal. But there’s definitive evidence the Russians were seeking their influence with a specific eye on the State Department.

“There is not one shred of doubt from the evidence that we had that the Russians had set their sights on Hillary Clinton’s circle, because she was the quarterback of the Obama-Russian reset strategy and the assumed successor to Obama as president,” said a source familiar with the FBI’s evidence at the time, speaking only on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

That source pointed to an October 2009 communication intercepted by the FBI in which Russian handlers instructed two of their spies specifically to gather nonpublic information on the State Department.

“Send more info on current international affairs vital for R., highlight US approach,” part of the message to the spies read, using the country’s first initial to refer to Russia. “… Try to single out tidbits unknown publicly but revealed in private by sources closer to State department, government, major think tanks.”

The Clintons, by that time, had set up several new vehicles that included a multimillion dollar speech-making business, the family foundation and a global charitable initiative, all which proved attractive to the Russians as Hillary Clinton took over State.

“In the end, some of this just comes down to what it always does in Washington: donations, lobbying, contracts and influence — even for Russia,” said Frank Figliuzzi, the former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence.

The sleeper ring

Figliuzzi supervised the post-arrest declassification and release of records from a 10-year operation that unmasked a major Russian spy ring in 2010. It was one of the most important U.S. counterintelligence victories against Russia in history, and famous for nabbing the glamorous spy-turned-model Anna Chapman.

While Chapman dominated the headlines surrounding that spy ring, another Russian woman posing as a mundane New Jersey accountant named Cynthia Murphy was closing in on accessing Secretary Clinton’s department, according to records and interviews.

For most of the 10 years, the ring of Russian spies that included Chapman and Murray acted as sleepers, spending a “great deal of time collecting information and passing it on” to their handlers inside Russia’s SVR spy agency, FBI records state.

Murphy, living with her husband and kids in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City, reported a major breakthrough in February 2009 in an electronic message sent to her handlers: she had scored access to a major Democrat, FBI records state.

“Murphy had several work-related personal meetings with [a prominent New York-based financier, name omitted] and was assigned his account,” one FBI record from the case read. “The message accurately described the financier as ‘prominent in politics,’ ‘an active fund-raiser’ for [a major political party, name omitted] and a ‘personal friend’ of [a current Cabinet official, name redacted].”

Multiple current and former officials confirmed to The Hill that the Cabinet officer was Hillary Clinton, the fundraiser was New York financier Alan Patricof and the political party was the Democratic National Committee. None of the Americans were ever suspected of illegalities, but the episode made clear the Russian spies were stepping up their operations against the new administration after years of working in a “sleeper” capacity, officials said.

Patricof did not return a call to his office Friday seeking comment. But in 2010 he told The Washington Post after the spy case broke he believed he had been a victim of the spy ring, saying Murphy had worked for him but that he only talked accounting and not government or politics with her.

“It’s just staggering,” he told the Post about the idea of being targeted by Russia. “It’s off the charts.”