RUTHFULLY YOURS

How far did the Obama Administration go in collecting intelligence on Americans, including members of the political opposition? This question has aroused little curiosity in much of the press corps or among Democratic politicians like Rep. Adam Schiff, who used to at least pretend they were concerned about government monitoring of telephone networks. But for citizens who still care about such potential threats to liberty, there was interesting news on Friday.

Specifically, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said during an appearance on Fox News:

I have reason to believe that a conversation that I had was picked up with some foreign leader or some foreign person and somebody requested that my conversation be unmasked. I’ve been told that by people in the intelligence community. All I can say is that there are 1,950 collections on American citizens talking to people that were foreign agents being surveilled either by the CIA, the FBI or the NSA. Here’s the concern: Did the people in the Obama Administration listen in to these conversations? Was there a politicizing of the intelligence gathering process? So what I want to know: Of the 1,950 incidental collections on American citizens, how many of them involved presidential candidates, members of Congress from either party and if these conversations were unmasked, who made the request? Because I want to know everything there is about unmasking, how it works and who requested unmasking of conversations between foreign people and American members of Congress.

Mr. Graham added that he does not know if he was in fact unmasked. But he made clear that he intends to learn the extent of the executive branch’s surveillance of him:

…I’ve sent a letter to the NSA, to the FBI and the CIA requesting any collection on Lindsey Graham. Now if you’ve got a reason to believe that a member of Congress is committing a crime, then you go get a warrant to follow us around like you would any other citizen. But I meet with foreign leaders all the time. And I would be upset if any executive branch agency listened in on my conversations, because I’m in another branch of government.

Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) has been saying for a while that two reporters have told him that he too was surveilled by the Obama Administration, according to the journalists’ sources within government. And then last month Mr. Paul said, also on Fox News, that a Senate colleague had confided that he believed he was also surveilled by the Obama Administration. Today a spokesman for Sen. Paul tells this column that the Kentuckian was referring to Sen. Graham and adds:

Senator Rand Paul remains very concerned about potential abuses committed by the Obama administration that led to members of congress being surveilled or unmasked. He has discussed potential legislative reforms with Senator Graham on preventing the executive branch from spying on the legislative branch in the future.

That’s fine to consider sensible legislation, but first let’s find out if the existing laws have been followed. Along with Messrs. Graham and Paul, the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team were swept up in the net of Obama-era intelligence collection. Mr. Graham, Mr. Paul and of course Mr. Trump were all competitors in seeking the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. All of this raises the question: which Republican presidential candidates in 2016 were not surveilled? CONTINUE AT SITE

In an article published Friday, The New York Times outed the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) top spy overseeing the organization’s efforts in Iran. The paper justified its outing of the undercover CIA spy and his role within the agency by saying it was necessary since the agent is “leading an important new administration initiative against Iran.”

Yes. That really happened.

In an article entitled “C.I.A. Names New Iran Chief in a Sign of Trump’s Hard Line,” the newspaper of record revealed that Michael D’Andrea, who previously led the hunt for Osama bin Laden, will now be in charge of the agency’s operations in Iran.

As the Times explained in its report, Iran is “one of the hardest targets” for the CIA to keep tabs on.

“The agency has extremely limited access to the country — no American embassy is open to provide diplomatic cover — and Iran’s intelligence services have spent nearly four decades trying to counter American espionage and covert operations,” the article noted.

So the Times has apparently made it the newspaper’s mission to make the agency’s work much more difficult and far more dangerous by publicly identifying the man in charge of its covert operations in the Persian country. The paper’s rationale? The report’s authors claimed that because the newspaper already outed D’Andrea in 2015 as the official in charge of a CIA drone program, ignoring desperate pleas from the CIA at the time to keep his name secret in order to protect both the agent and overall national security, it was kosher to out him as the agency’s new Iran chief in 2017.

Here’s what the Times article says (emphasis added):

The C.I.A. declined to comment on Mr. D’Andrea’s role, saying it does not discuss the identities or work of clandestine officials. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because Mr. D’Andrea remains undercover, as do many senior officials based at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va. Mr. Eatinger did not use his name. The New York Times is naming Mr. D’Andrea because his identity was previously published in news reports, and he is leading an important new administration initiative against Iran.

The bolded portion of the excerpt above links to a piece dated April 25, 2015, in which D’Andrea is identified as the man in charge of growing the CIA’s drone programs in Yemen and Pakistan. But the paper’s real reason for outing D’Andrea, who was depicted as a character known only as “The Wolf” in the film “Zero Dark Thirty,” is that he’s an Iran hawk likely to oppose the previous administration’s attempts to normalize the nation by giving it billions of dollars, trading it terrorists for hostages, and blessing its nuclear program.

Our country has become a Banana Republic. Anything minor Trump does is leaked (a crime), taken out of context, hyped through the roof, and then turned into hysterical headlines by the media.https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/wayne-allyn-root/commentary-conspiracy-theories-and-the-death-of-a-democratic-national-committee-staffer/

But if Democrats conspire to fix an election and a Democratic National Committee staffer winds up killed, you hear nothing about it in the mainstream media. We’re not talking about a conversation here. We’re talking about a real-life murder.

It may be an ordinary street murder by thugs, but just the idea that it could be attached in any way to the DNC makes it off limits to discuss. It’s verboten. We see a total mainstream media blackout. But let’s put the shoe on the other foot and see what the media would say.

What if a Republican National Committee staffer was murdered in the streets of Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2016?

What if WikiLeaks publicly stated that this RNC staffer leaked the 44,000 emails that showed Donald Trump and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus conspired to fix the GOP presidential primary and cheated Jeb Bush out of victory?

What if those emails proved a former RNC chairman now working for CNN cheated and gave debate questions in advance to Donald Trump, so he would always have the perfect answer?

What if Trump and the RNC chairman were badly embarrassed by this leak of sensitive, private documents … and Trump’s chances of being elected president were damaged … and the RNC chairman wound up fired because of this leak?

What if the cold-blooded killing of this RNC staffer looked more like an assassination — with the killers never even attempting to grab his wallet, cash, watch or jewelry?

What if WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information on the murder of this staffer, yet no reward was ever put up by the Trump campaign or the RNC?

‘Democracy dies in darkness,” declares the Washington Post, in a line that Dean Baquet, editor of the rival New York Times said, not inaccurately, “sounds like the next Batman movie.” Now the Times has joined the WaPo in dumping its designated internal soul-searcher (dubbed the “public editor” at the New York paper, “ombudsman” at the Washington one). So a more fitting DC Comics–style motto for both papers would be “Who will watch the Watchmen?”

That line (from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, with a nod to Juvenal) became painfully relevant to the Times’ exceptionally conscientious public editor, Liz Spayd, when she was fired and her position eliminated this week. Spayd served less than a year of her announced two-year term. News broke only on May 31 that her last day on the job would be two days after that, and the office of public editor would be replaced with a “reader center.” Read the comments beneath a Paul Krugman column sometime and you’ll gain some sense of what that might be like.

Why so hasty, premature, and unceremonious a sacking? Spayd, who said upon her appointment last summer that “I’m not here to make friends,” was apparently a little too good at not making them. A peeved Baquet called one of her efforts a “bad column” and “fairly ridiculous.”

Worse, Spayd was morally on the same team as lynch mobs, according to Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress in his piece “The dark history of how false balance journalism enabled lynching.” This was a slippery-slope argument in response to Spayd’s having said that journalists shouldn’t “apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidate.” Millhiser believed that the many felonies committed by Hillary Clinton in the course of shielding her e-mail from public scrutiny and removing classified information from secure channels was a non-story and that the Times should shut up about it.

The Atlantic attacked Spayd by approvingly quoting bloggers who wrote that Spayd, a 25-year veteran of the Washington Post who rose to the position of managing editor of that paper before editing the Columbia Journalism Review and then moving on to the Times, is “inclined to write what she doesn’t know” and that her work has become “iconic in its uselessness and self-parody.” Slate accused her of “squandering the most important watchdog job in journalism” by being too solicitous of the readers, notably when she wrote a column under the “smug” headline “Want to attract more readers? Try listening to them” and when she “sympathized with readers’ chauvinistic gripes about the Times’ sports page.” (The “chauvinists” quoted by Spayd were saying things like “Why are there big stories on Nordic surfing, German ice water swimming and Brazilian badminton and hardly any beat coverage of the Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Devils or Islanders?” The sports editor replied, in Spayd’s paraphrase, that “routine game coverage is not a priority.” Did I mention that the public-editor column was the second-funniest part of the resolutely humorless paper, after the corrections column?)

After Spayd told Tucker Carlson that some tweets by professionally neutral Times news reporters that displayed open contempt for and hostility to Donald Trump were “outrageous” and “over the line” and should face “some kind of consequence,” the blue-checkmark battalions rose up to denounce Spayd, calling her “the worst possible public editor for the Trump era” and “a disgrace,” adding that the Times had “embarrassed itself” by hiring her.

Spayd did her best to be even-handed in the eleven months she held the job. The angry Left could not forgive this.

Conservative website The Daily Caller has published a thorough analysis of the Washington Post’s report accusing Jared Kushner of requesting a secret, secure line of communication with Russia so the incoming Trump administration could talk to the Russians without any interference from the Obama administration. It’s worth your time to read it completely, but here are some key quotes:

WaPo also claimed American intelligence agencies discovered the ploy through an intercepted open phone call by Kislyak to Moscow. Observers have noted that Kislyak, a seasoned spy, made the phone call on an “open line,” and therefore knew it was likely to be intercepted.

[…]

To date, there has been no independent verification the letter is real or that WaPo’s description of its contents is accurate. The Washington Post editors also never explain why they withheld the letter.

Why would they withhold it? Sure, there may be reasons to do so in order to protect a source, but if the letter is anonymous, that’s not a possible excuse. In any case, on we go:

The story is weakened further since its reporters only cite unnamed government officials to confirm the anonymous letter’s charges.

[…]

“I don’t know who leaked this information, but just think about it this way — you’ve got the ambassador of Russia reporting back to Moscow on an open channel, ‘Hey, Jared Kushner’s going to move into the embassy,’” Graham said on CNN.

Former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova told TheDCNF other unreleased parts of the letter could undermine the credibility of the author and discredit the allegations about Kushner.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan government watchdog group dedicated to openness and transparency, said he thought there could be references that show the letter’s author had a partisan agenda, which WaPo reporters wanted to hide.