RUTHFULLY YOURS

After disgracing itself once with its thoroughly discredited attack on Dr. Sebastian Gorka last month, getting egg all over its face, The Forward, incredibly, has leaped back up for more dishonor, like a swamp thing flinging itself up from its ooze again to spray its slime of lies all over.

Last March, The Forward tried to smear Dr. Gorka as an anti-Semitic closet Nazi, citing an old Hungarian pin he wore in honor of his father, a leading freedom fighter from Hungary’s 1956 uprising against Soviet barbarism, and the claim of some standing Nazi (they call THAT a credible source?) who admits he never met the man, but says he heard from someone else that Gorka had a relative who swore eternal fealty to Nazi principles or something like that. And they reported this as straight news! Naturally, the Jewish people who knew Dr. Gorka stepped forward and called it for the garbage it was.

Now The Forward is back with more grotesquely false attacks, not the least bit concerned about their reputation. They’ve cooked up a heavily spliced and edited news video, dating from 2006, when Dr. Gorka was a Hungarian citizen in Hungary. At the time, he correctly defended the principle of citizen militias in the face of a broken-down, tumbledown military, which afflicted then-socialist Hungary at the time. Yet Gorka very carefully separated Nazi actions and nationalist fervor a couple of far-right parties, one of which rules Hungary today, from the constitutional principle itself. Those are the parts The Forward edited out, apparently with their teeth, as it was so crudely done. Dr. Gorka made these temperate statements in Hungarian on Hungarian TV a decade ago (he became a U.S. citizen in 2012) doing this when he couldn’t have known that fate would take him to the states and his position as President Trump’s top counter-terrorism advisor. He just did it because it was the right thing.

But slice and dice as you like – and this one, according to Hungarian-origin David Harsanyi, who is also Jewish, was a doozy of crudely atrocious, bottom of the barrel-standard ‘journalism’ unworthy of any word but ‘despicable.’

I was immediately suspicious when watching the two-minute snippet of an 11-minute interview with Gorka provided by Forward. (Only later did the publication add the full video of the 2007 interview to the bottom of the page.) The conversation seems to cut off at a pretty important point. So I sent the video to someone fluent in the language.

If the translation I was given is correct — and after comparing it to the video, I have no reason to believe it isn’t — it turns out that the contention that Gorka “publicly supported a violent racist and anti-Semitic paramilitary militia that was later banned as a threat to minorities by multiple court rulings” is only true in the most risible sense.

Harsanyi points out that The Forward completely distorted his words, cherry-picking the parts they could claim amounted to Nazi support and leaving out the parts that absolutely exculpated him from any such charge.

Susan Rice returned to the friendly confines of MSNBC Tuesday to respond to softball questions about the news that the Obama national security adviser had “unmasked” the identity of at least one member of the Trump transition team who was surveilled by U.S. intelligence. Her answers make it all the more imperative to hear her under oath before Congress.

Ms. Rice didn’t deny that she had sought the name of a Trump transition official in intelligence reports, though she said she hadn’t done so “for any political purposes.” We’ll take this as confirmation that President Obama’s confidante was receiving summaries of surveilled foreign officials that included references to, or conversations with, Donald Trump’s team.

Ms. Rice insisted that unmasking was a routine part of her job and is necessary to understand the context of some intelligence reports. Perhaps, but why specifically did she need to see intel summaries dealing with Trump transition plans and policy intentions? And what was the context for seeking the name of any Trump official? Unmasking is typically the job of professional intelligence analysts, not senior White House officials.

Ms. Rice was also at pains to say that unmasking is not the same as leaking to the press and that she “leaked nothing to nobody, and never have.” But she hasn’t been accused of leaking the name of the Trump official. She is responsible for unmasking a U.S. citizen, which made that name more widely disseminated across the government and thus could have been more easily leaked by someone else. Michael Flynn lost his job as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser because of leaks about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

Meanwhile, Democrats and the Beltway press are rallying to defend Ms. Rice by claiming that it isn’t news for a senior White House official to unmask the name of a political opponent of an incoming Administration. Thanks, guys. If you want to cover only one side of the Trump-Russia-intelligence story, we’ll be happy to cover both.

Holy smoking gun, Batman!

Once you wave away all the smoke created by our dishonest media, the story of this past week was pretty simple. The Trump-Russia-Conspiracy narrative is falling apart. The Obama-Spied-on-his-Political-Opposition narrative is coming together. The media has given credence to Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff’s hysterical charges about how the Republican chair of the committee, Devin Nunes, made his latest discoveries. But Schiff is a dishonest McCarthyite, spewing insinuations and accusations without any proof to back them up. Nunes, on the other hand, has obviously gotten hold of solid intel showing that Obama spied on Trump and his people, pretty much as the president tweeted back on March 4. The willing Democrat executioners of truth — i.e. the news staffs at ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the New York Times — give equal weight to the statements of both men, making it seem like the House Intelligence Committee has simply descended into partisan bickering. But that’s a lie. Nunes has found something. Schiff is smearing him and the president. Those two actions do not deserve the same sort of coverage.

An intelligence whistle blower has apparently shown Nunes documents containing intelligence gathered on members of Trump’s transition team. Though this intelligence may have been gathered legally — i.e. as part of a wiretap on foreigners — at least two of the names of Americans, including the name of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, were illegally revealed and shared widely. Other names were made obvious even though they remained concealed. None of the investigations seems to have had anything to do with Russia.

You can tell that Nunes has got this stuff solid because after he saw the documents he first informed the media, then informed the president, then informed the media that he had informed the president. The White House has since invited members of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to view certain documents which may or may not be the ones Nunes saw. That’s a lot different than Schiff making McCarthyite noise about there being “more than circumstantial evidence” that Trump works for SMERSH. Schiff and other Democrats have tried to confuse the issue with cries that Nunes isn’t playing fair and demands that he recuse himself.

But in a stunning piece of video, a former Obama official who went on to advise the Hillary Clinton campaign essentially confirmed that she was urging the previous administration to abuse intelligence on the Trump people. Evelyn Farkas, former deputy assistant secretary of defense, told Mika Brzezinski earlier this month: “I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration. Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left, so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy. That the Trump folks – if they found out how we knew what we knew about… the Trump staff dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.” But Farkas was already out of the administration and advising Hillary. Why the hell did she know anything about secret intelligence?

Pseudo-conservative Foreign Policy blogger Max Boot is making the outrageous claim that the entire Republican Party has been taken over by a dangerous racist fringe.

Boot’s insane argument rests on one core contention: that because Republicans tolerate, even like, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a patriot and a truly courageous conservative champion, their party has therefore fallen into the hands of white nationalists. The fact that King isn’t actually a white nationalist or a racist, which is the real thing Boot is accusing the lawmaker of, in no way hinders the writer from making his pitch.

Nor does the unbalanced Boot make any effort to define the term “white nationalism,” presumably because being limited to a rigid definition would make the smear less marketable. Boot’s working definition for the expression appears to approximate, “anything of which I don’t approve.”

Even worse, according to Boot, is the supposed fact that King is similar to President Trump, whom Boot has described as the “No. 1 security threat to the United States today.” He claimed America’s enemies would be emboldened by a Trump presidency. The fact that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are now squirming with Trump in the Oval Office proves Boot wrong.

Reflecting the view of left-wing coastal elites, he described Trump last year as “the most radical and most ignorant major-party presidential candidate in our history.”

Which must be why employment is picking up, consumer confidence is surging, and the stock market is going gangbusters.

Boot is certainly not an apologist for Muslim terrorism but he accepts many of the arguments made by those who do make excuses for it. He pushes the same smears and “Islamophobia” nonsense that the Left habitually deploys, treating Americans’ legitimate concerns about Islam and Muslim immigrants to the country as manifestations of hateful racist bigotry. In at least that way, Boot’s writings bear more than a passing resemblance to those of the arch Israel-hater Max Blumenthal.

For promising to get tough on illegal immigration and making demonstrably true observations about the criminals invading the nation from the south, people like Boot have pilloried Trump as a bigot.

To the Left, mainstream conservatives are regarded as racists and white nationalists because they happen to believe that all lives matter. There is nothing radical or disturbing about opposing illegal immigration and open borders.

Yet on these issues Max Boot sides with the Left.

In a recent Foreign Policy screed titled, “The GOP Is America’s Party of White Nationalism,” Boot declared that “[t] he list of King’s asinine, bigoted, and offensive words and acts is too long to recount.”

I read with increasing alarm what appears to be a coordinated smear campaign by former members of the Obama administration and their ivory tower proxies, taking aim in the now-partisan press (including the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR) to undermine the reputation of strategic theorist Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Gorka has risen to prominence over this very same period after his appointment to serve as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump.

Without a drop of evidence, these critics have unfairly ridiculed Gorka’s fine scholarship and academic background, ignoring his many contributions to the literature of warfare over many years. In so doing, these liberal policymakers and ivory-tower academics in international relations and strategic studies show they remain unfamiliar with – and consequently unappreciative of – the great work their counterparts at America’s military academies. In fact, they appear all too-quick to dismiss America’s military scholars whose dedication and service to America’s warfighters should instead be respected and appreciated.

This is very much the case in the recent assault upon the reputation of Dr. Gorka. Gorka’s work deserves to be read, not attacked without merit. The attacks we see seem to be the work of a small group of Obama partisans indifferent to the carnage caused on their own watch, based on their failed leadership and strategy. They are likely still in shock at now being exiled from the swamp, but their own records speak to their responsibility for the rise of ISIS, and the spread of jihadist violence across the Middle East, North Africa and into the heart of Europe. Now, they have launched a coordinated hit job against Gorka within weeks of his joining the administration.

Consider perhaps the most egregious example, by Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin in the Feb. 24 edition of the New York Times. Their hit-piece was shamefully mistitled, “The Islamophobic Huckster in the White House.” Simon, a former NSC-staffer now at Amherst College, and Benjamin, the State Department’s former counterterrorism coordinator now at Dartmouth, were both Obama administration officials and thus complicit in the orgy of violence unleashed by Obama’s counterterrorism policies.

Nearly as offensive was Daniel W. Drezner’s Washington Post hit-piece, “Survival Tips for Sebastian Gorka, PhD,” which came to press three days later, which stooped so low as to malign Dr. Gorka’s doctoral thesis, which I myself have found to be a fascinating, thoughtful, and original work. I know originality of thought, especially conservative thought, is seldom welcome within the liberal-biased academy, so one must fear for any students of Drezner who dare to think outside the box, or more aptly, outside the bubble. But don’t take my word for it, you can read Dr. Gorka’s fascinating dissertation here.

Lord knows I’ve had my differences with the Forward before. I have them still, and often. They rarely unsettle me, if only because robust disagreements, especially on things that matter, are what we journalists should seek, not shun. But reading the paper’s exclusive report this morning arguing that Trump aide Sebastian Gorka is an actual crypto-Nazi, I’d like to reach out to my friends and colleagues across town and ask, with clear eyes and a full heart: Have you lost your minds?http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/227733/tale-of-trump-advisors-alleged-nazi-ties-unravels

To hear the piece tell it, Gorka, a top counter-terrorism adviser in the Trump White House, has sworn a lifetime oath to Vitézi Rend, an outfit that the story tells us is nasty nationalist group in Gorka’s native Hungary that giddily collaborated with Hitler. Well, not the Vitézi Rend—that group was outlawed by the Communists, naturally—but the off-shoot of Vitézi Rend, resurgent after Communism’s fall in 1989. Or at least an off-shoot of the group: there are two, and Gorka, according to the Forward’s sources, appears to belong to one of them, called Historical Vitézi Rend. How do we know that? A member of the group, Kornél Pintér, said so. “Of course he was sworn in,” Pintér told the Forward in a phone interview. “I met with him in Sopron [a city near Hungary’s border with Austria]. His father introduced him.”

Where to begin? Even if you take the Nazis at their word—which is inadvisable, as I realized from the very first time I watched Casablanca at the age of 9—you’ll notice that Pintér isn’t saying that he’d witnessed Gorka’s swearing in; he’s merely saying that he’d met the man because he was an associate of Gorka’s father Paul, a renowned member of the nationalist anti-Communist resistance.

Gorka himself told me that the allegations are flat-out false.

“I have never been a member of the Vitez Rend. I have never taken an oath of loyalty to the Vitez Rend. Since childhood, I have occasionally worn my father’s medal and used the ‘v.’ initial to honor his struggle against totalitarianism.” It’s a perfectly plausible explanation, and you’d have to be of a very specific mindset to still pursue allegations of Nazi affiliation.

Why didn’t Gorka simply tell this to the Forward? A source close to the White House, who was briefed on how the administration treated this story, explained things a little more to me.