RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-robert-mueller-shredded-the-fbis-credibility-centralization-intelligence-investigation-crossfire-hurricane-bush-911-clinton-email-sussmann-11663173014?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Mr. Baker is a retired FBI special agent and legal attaché and author of “The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy,” forthcoming in December.

Four days after 9/11, Robert Mueller was summoned to the presidential retreat at Camp David. It was little more than a week since he’d become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

That Saturday morning, Mr. Mueller gave President George W. Bush the FBI’s initial report on the attacks. The Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation, or Penttbom, would become the largest ever conducted by the FBI. It had already identified the 19 hijackers as well as their roles, nationalities, travel documents and histories. The focus had turned to establishing links between the hijackers and al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, wearing a leather bomber jacket, sat at the head of a big square conference table in the rustic oak cabin. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was at the president’s right. Mr. Mueller, as he later acknowledged, was confident in the report. The FBI had done what it does best—investigate.

Expecting praise or thanks, Mr. Mueller was taken aback when the president interrupted him. “Bob, I expect the FBI to determine who was responsible for the attacks and to help bring them to justice,” he said. “What I want to know from you—today—is what the FBI is doing to prevent the next attack.” That same morning Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet presented a proposed plan of action. At the conclusion of Mr. Tenet’s presentation, Mr. Bush exclaimed, “That’s great.” He turned toward Mr. Mueller and said, “That’s what I want to hear.” Mr. Mueller told me later that he felt humiliated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/delayed-repairs-shrink-the-submarine-fleet-taiwan-china-navy-amphibious-assault-aircraft-private-shipyards-deployable-boats-materials-11663162266?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet, America’s essential war-fighting instrument in the Indo-Pacific, is about three-fifths the size it should be, chiefly because of maintenance and production delays. This comes amid stepped-up threats to Taiwan by China.

Contesting such an assault would require a submarine force at maximum strength. Congress and the White House should act swiftly to integrate private shipyards that repair submarines into the Navy’s maintenance plans.

American strategists rarely concern themselves with the material issues that determine victory or defeat. They tend to regard international strategy as a question of will, not means. This takes for granted the traditional and outsize U.S. economic-material advantage.

America’s objective in a struggle over Taiwan would be to deny China a rapid victory. The war must become a slog, one that China labors to sustain in a geographically limited form. Generating this situation requires contesting China’s ability to stage an amphibious assault on Taiwan. Submarines would be crucial in such a contest.

The U.S. military today lacks the air forces, air defenses, and surface combatants with sufficient range to contest Chinese air control over Taiwan indefinitely, absent an interdiction campaign against the Chinese mainland that the U.S. has signaled it doesn’t wish to wage. Chinese anti-ship and ground-attack missiles, moreover, would cause damage. Recent war games suggest that in defending Taiwan, the U.S. would lose half its active air force and at least one carrier strike group—a collection of warships defending the aircraft carrier and its air wing. In such a scenario, China would lose 150 to 200 warships and tens of thousands of men.

https://www.newsmax.com/john-gizzi/joe-biden-vladimir-putin-propaganda/2022/09/12/id/1087015/

Nearly 20 months after Joe Biden became president, the area of public diplomacy — that is, using television, radio, digital venues, and other means of communication on the international front — is almost completely unused, grossly underfunded, and neglected.

This is happening at a turbulent time in the world. In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin increased the state media budget to 211 billion rubles (roughly $2.8 billion) — a 34 billion-ruble ($460 million) increase from earlier years — to spend on propaganda to win and enhance support at home for his war on Ukraine.

It is difficult to gauge the overall amount China is spending on propaganda. It has been estimated that $6.6 billion has come out of Beijing since 2009 to accentuate the Chinese media presence worldwide and to sculpt, as Raksha Kumar wrote for Thomson Reuters, “a sophisticated strategy to portray the country’s leadership in a good light.”

Further, Chinese foreign agent spending has skyrocketed from just over $10 million in 2016 to nearly $64 million last year, according to the Center for Responsible Politics.

In the U.S., public diplomacy, funded at $701 million, is funded at a microcosm of the overall State Department budget — just 1.16% of $60.4 billion, according to the budget for the Fiscal Year 2023.

But while the $701 million figure may sound impressive, the 1995 budget for the U.S. Information Agency (which then had exclusive oversight over public diplomacy) was $1.4 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that figure today would be $2.72 billion.

When USIA disappeared in 1999, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and their sister media became free-standing. All the rest of Public Diplomacy disappeared into the State Department.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/bidens_illegal_migrant_surge_costs_taxpayers_204_billion_a_year_study.html

As if inflation brought on by government overspending weren’t high enough already, a new study shows that Joe Biden’s illegal migrant surge is costing taxpayers $20.4 billion a year, or $9,232 for each illegal migrant.

According to Fox News:

FIRST ON FOX: The number of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. since President Biden took office will cost the U.S. taxpayer over $20 billion each year, according to a new analysis by a hawkish immigration group.

The study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which advocates for lower levels of immigration overall, calculates that the illegal immigrants who have entered the U.S. since Jan. 2021 will add an extra $20.4 billion burden a year, in addition to the $140 billion existing illegal immigrants already cost.

The analysis is based on an estimated 1.3 million released into the U.S. by immigration officials, as well as approximately one million “gotaways” — or illegal immigrants who have slipped past overwhelmed agents. FAIR calculates that each illegal immigrants costs $9,232 a year to support.

Some two million migrants have come on in at Biden’s incentivization of illegal entry, flooding cities such as El Paso, which has now been described by locals as looking like “a third world country,” according to the New York Post. Biden’s catch and release policies of unvetted migrants into the country has created a disaster for U.S. national security, imported third world crime, and created a huge burden for U.S. taxpayers, who are already burdened by Biden’s multiple government spending packages, all of which create inflation.

The $20.4 billion figure, times four years of Joe Biden’s presidency, would bring the migrant total cost to $81.6 billion for the taxpayers which is well more than the $62.5 billion that Joe Biden has shipped to Ukraine to help that country protect its borders.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/12/bidens-doj-doesnt-want-to-disclose-classified-mar-a-lago-documents-except-through-selective-leaks-to-leftist-media/

The government’s latest motion strongly suggests the Biden administration is all-in on pursuing a criminal case against the former president.

Hiding behind the horror of 9/11, the Biden administration demands that a federal judge and the country trust its targeting of a top political opponent—all while leaking details of classified documents to a pliant press.

This development and six others flow from recent court filings in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to obtain a special master’s oversight of the FBI’s seizure of thousands of documents and personal effects from his Mar-a-Lago home. The government doesn’t want to allow an independent review of the documents it’s seized. Trump’s legal team does.

First, The Backdrop

Three days after the August 8, 2022, raid on Trump’s Florida home, an attorney representing the former president spoke with Jay Bratt, the chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Bratt has apparently been leading the investigation into the former president.

Trump’s lawyer asked Bratt “to agree to the appointment of a Special Master to protect the integrity of privileged documents.” Bratt refused. A week-and-a-half later, Trump filed a separate action in a Florida district court seeking judicial oversight and the appointment of a special master.

Federal judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, granted that motion last week, holding a special master shall be appointed to review the seized property, “manage assertions of privilege and make recommendations thereon, and evaluate claims for return of property.” Significantly, Judge Cannon also entered an injunction prohibiting the government from using the documents “for criminal investigative purposes pending resolution of the special master’s review process.” The court then ordered the parties to recommend individuals to fill the special master role, along with proposed procedures for the process by last Friday.

https://johnkassnews.com/the-scream-pritzker-lightfoot-and-their-great-unraveling/

There is nothing that curdles the fortunes of Gov. JB Pritzker and his ally Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot quite like the scream. It exposes them for what they’ve done.

It is a woman’s scream, a real scream of fear that was randomly captured the other day on a Ring doorbell security camera as she was attacked, pulled to the ground, and robbed by thugs as she walked on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Chicago’s “mostly peaceful” and leafy Lakeview neighborhood.

Within that scream of terror hides another, buried sound, part of what the writer Matt Rosenberg, senior editor at wirepoints.org, brilliantly calls “the great unravelling.”

It is the sigh of a once-great but thoroughly exhausted city, a Chicago bone-tired, spent by decades of political corruption, hammered by the brutal application of race card politics in a city of tribes, and in 2020 Lightfoot’s City Hall failed miserably to stop the riots and looting that grew out of the George Floyd protests, and then Lightfoot endorsed the Soros-backed State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for re-election.

It is a city drained by street gang violence and political indifference, where police have been weakened and demoralized, even as private security forces crop up, paid for by those with means who demand protection. In this, Chicago is like Rome.