RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first community organizer to become president has managed to anger community groups so much with his planned personal monument, aka a “presidential center,” that part of the plan was just scrapped.

Lolly Bowean of the Chicago Tribune reports:

Bowing to community pressure, the Obama Foundation has scrapped its plan for an above-ground parking garage and will instead build an underground facility below the presidential center in Jackson Park, officials said late Monday.

The original plan would have grabbed a treasured part of Chicago’s park system, the Midway (site of Chicago’s World’s Fair), for a two-story garage. The group Save the Midway sprang up to protect the historic public park land from a private developer (the Obama Foundation) appropriating the land for a private purpose (the Obama Center will not be part of the National Archives System):

The embarrassment is palpable:

After numerous meetings with the community and other valued stakeholders over the past months, the Foundation understands that many of those voices feel strongly that the parking for the OPC should be located within the OPC campus in Jackson Park. The Foundation has heard those voices, and has decided to locate the OPC’s parking underground in Jackson Park.

The FBI used the unverified anti-Trump dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to obtain the warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court (FISA), investigative journalist Sara Carter reported Wednesday.

Representatives of four committees — the House Intelligence Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee, House Judiciary Committee, and Senate Judiciary Committee — have been able to examine FISA documents in a secure room at the Justice Department, according to the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.

They were not allowed to take the documents out of the room or to copy them, but they could make notes. They thus know the answer to the was-the-dossier-used-for-spying question.

The answer to the question is classified, however, and as of Wednesday morning, no one had yet leaked.

Nevertheless, later in the day, according to Carter, multiple sources told her that “the dossier was used along with other evidence to obtain the warrant” from the FISA court. Fox News’ Sean Hannity corroborated the news on his show Wednesday night, reporting that three separate sources told him the same thing.

Most of the 35-page dossier, which was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele for the liberal opposition research firm Fusion GPS, has either been proven wrong or remains unsubstantiated. In spite of this, the FBI used the DNC/Clinton campaign-sponsored dossier to seek and gain approval from the FISA court to surveil members of Trump’s campaign, sources claim.

“It’s outrageous and clearly should be thoroughly investigated,” a senior law enforcement source with knowledge of the process told Carter.

According to Carter, the sources “also stressed that there will be more information in the coming week regarding systemic ‘FISA abuse.’” CONTINUE AT SITE

California Senator Dianne Feinstein is getting media raves for flouting Judiciary Committee rules Tuesday and releasing the testimony of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson without committee approval. Mrs. Feinstein’s disrespect for procedure aside, she has the right idea. Let’s make all of the Russian- Trump -FBI record public.

Democrats seem interested in revealing only what adds to their hope that Donald Trump canoodled with the Kremlin. This includes Mr. Simpson’s self-serving account of the origins of the infamous dossier about Mr. Trump that he hired British ex-spy Christopher Steele to compile. Mr. Simpson, a political gun for hire, spun a heroic tale of noble intentions and praise for Mr. Steele, calling him a “Boy Scout” with “quality” intelligence-gathering skills.

Yet Mr. Simpson couldn’t corroborate the dossier’s claims and had to backtrack on his newsiest allegation. Democrats and the media seized on his claim that the dossier supported information the FBI already had from “a human source from inside the Trump organization.” The Fusion CEO used the same language about a source “inside the Trump camp” last week in a New York Times op-ed.

Yet Fusion waited until after the testimony was released to inform its media friends that this was a “mischaracterization” by Mr. Simpson. Turns out he wasn’t referring to a confidential informant from within Team Trump, but to the fact the FBI had been tipped off by a foreign diplomat about a Trump staffer, George Papadopoulos. Mr. Simpson has a hard time telling a straight story.

The bigger point is that the public is in an evidence-free zone in which Democrats spin the dossier’s unproven claims, while Republicans speculate about the FBI’s partisan motives. The way out is to release to the public the documents the FBI used to justify spying on Trump officials during a presidential campaign. The good news is that Congressional investigators have finally obtained those documents from the FBI and Justice Department.

How Hillary’s FBI Allies Undermined Trump Before the Election

Peter Strzok wanted some insurance.

The senior FBI figure, who had participated in the Hillary email investigation, interviewed Flynn and had been part of Team Mueller, wasn’t looking to State Farm for his insurance needs.

Chatting with his mistress, an FBI lawyer who worked for Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok worried that Trump might win. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he wrote.

“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

It was the summer of an election year. The official odds all favored Hillary. But a failed FISA request had already been made. And the real insurance was still coming. Its policies would include a second successful FISA request, the Steele dossier, the mass unmasking of Trump officials and the Mueller witch hunt. The insurance still hasn’t paid off, but the men and women behind the coup are betting that it will.

By the time October rolled around, the cost of the insurance was still rising. In late October, as Election Day was coming up, Strzok and Page were looking over their own leaks to the media. They discussed the stories in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post that they had allegedly helped shape.

Leaking, not football, is the supreme sport of our nation’s capital. Sabotage and self-promotion are the two reasons that government types leak. And this was clearly sabotage. Election Day was coming up and a top investigation figure was seeding damaging stories about President Trump through the media.

“Article is out, but hidden behind paywall so can’t read it,” Strzok’s mistress texted him.

“Wsj? Boy that was fast. Should I ‘find’ it and tell the team?” he asked.

The team wasn’t aware of what Strzok was up to. And he didn’t want them to find out. Like other anti-Trump operatives, Strzok was playing a complicated double game. He was pretending to conduct fair investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, even as he wanted her to win and him to lose.

Recent mass demonstrations in Iran, and the government’s violent crackdown has been met with a deafening silence by Muslim “civil rights” organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Why have they refrained from supporting the Iranian people’s uprising to overthrow the oppressive mullahs? After all, the same organizations have vocally and financially supported the mass demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa that erupted in December 2010 and led to the rise of Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government and caused turmoil and destabilized these regions.

American and Canadian Muslim organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the U.S. and Canada, the Muslim Student Association (MSA) in the U.S. and Canada, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) (including its Canadian branch), share the similar agenda and boards and serve as umbrellas to many smaller associations and community-based groups. Their charities aim to expand the implementation of their agenda, and a few of them have been identified as unindicted co-conspirator in Islamist terrorist financing trials in the U.S. Their common mission: dedication to “da’wah” (proselytization), building “an Islamic way of life in North America[, and] commitment to Islam as a total way of life” by practicing sharia (Islamic law). This desire to impose any version of Islam on society to establish global Islamic theocracy via political activism, has been accurately described by Prof. Clive Kessler as “political Islam” or “ISIS/Daesh lite.”

Political Islam has been successfully enforced by the mullahs in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Over the years, they have increased their efforts to enforce and spread political Islam everywhere. Their efforts did not stop with Shite groups; rather, they extended especially to Sunni Muslim Brotherhood offshoots such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, the first foreign trip of Egypt’s now deposed Muslim Brother president, Mohammed Morsi, was to visit Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s short-lived government (June 2012-July 2013) has failed because the Egyptian people rejected its oppression early on.

The ousting of the M.B. government was followed with banning its activities in Egypt and later in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria. But by then, the global Brotherhood’s movement has been well entrenched in the West, where their activities are not limited and often encouraged. The leaders of the Islamist movement have doubled their efforts to spread and whenever possible, to enforce political Islam on Muslims and infidels alike.

George H. W. Bush gave up power quietly and turned to charity work and occasional ceremonial speaking after his reelection defeat in 1992. George W. Bush — like Jerry Ford in 1977 and Ronald Reagan in 1989 — did the same when Barack Obama assumed power in 2009.

Unending Presidencies

Recent Democrats emeriti — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — apparently had a different vision of the post-presidency, unlike the quiet retirement of Lyndon Johnson back to his ranch in 1969. The three saw politics in more Manichean terms, as an existential struggle far too important to cease at the end of a presidential tenure.

Carter freelanced abroad for 30 years in successful quest for a Nobel Prize, but he often undercut presidential diplomacy. He regularly weighed in on the shortcomings of his successors — in a way he would have deeply resented had either Ford or Richard Nixon done the same.

No sooner had Bill Clinton left the presidency than he and Hillary Clinton began the grand plan for a return to the White House in 2009, and, after a setback, then again in 2017. Theirs was a two-decade long post-presidency of glad-handing, politicking, and, to use a euphemism, quid pro quo fund raising.

Barack Obama has already weighed in, including while overseas, on the shortcomings of his successor. His aides, led by Ben Rhodes, are at the forefront of the “Resistance” to thwart the Trump administration. Susan Rice and John Kerry comment regularly on supposed Trump foreign-policy blunders, as do James Clapper and John Brennan — usually in proactive fashion to deflect news accounts that may reflect poorly on their own past tenures.

Resistances

But all that said, we have never quite seen anything like the opposition of the so-called Resistance to the elected presidency that followed the Obama tenure.

There were the initial false charges that pro-Trump Russians had shut down power grids in Vermont. There were frivolous suits claiming that voting machines in three states were rigged. There was an organized, anti-constitutional effort to subvert the Electoral College so that it would not reflect the vote tallies of individual states. On Inauguration Day, there were congressional boycotts of the swearing-in ceremony. There were demonstrations at which, to take one example, Madonna envisioned blowing up the Trump White House.

An entire genre of assassination chic followed. Politicians, celebrities, actors, academics, and wannabees variously reenacted beheading Donald Trump, stabbing him to death, shooting him, torching him, hanging him, or, in the words of Robert DeNiro, dreaming of punching Trump in the face. Few in the media were bothered by the imagery or threats. Yet sometimes the hysteria became real violence — as when Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson’s shot prominent Republican politicians practicing for a charity baseball game, gravely wounding Republican House whip Steven Scalise, or when libertarian senator Rand Paul (present at the Scalise shooting) was attacked and injured by a disturbed neighbor and proponent of socialized medicine.

When you look at it hard, two conclusions are impossible to escape: First, at the height of the 2016 campaign, Obama intelligence officials anxiously adopted Christopher Steele’s allegations of traitorous conduct by then-candidate Donald Trump rather than first subject his “dossier” to rigorous investigation — even though Steele himself admits that his “raw,” “unverified” reports might not be true.

Second, at the same time the FBI was receiving Steele’s reports — which were based on multiple-hearsay from anonymous Russian sources, and paid for by the Clinton campaign — Obama intelligence officials were briefing congressional leaders about them, thereby ensuring that they’d be publicized just six weeks before Election Day.

This is the second of two columns addressing the relationship between Steele and American government officials. To recap, Steele is a former British intelligence agent who compiled a “dossier” of uncorroborated reports alleging a Trump–Kremlin conspiracy. Steele was retained for this project by his contractor, the research firm Fusion GPS. The work was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, through their lawyers.

The first column, on Monday, dealt with the recent referral of Steele to federal law-enforcement agencies by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee members. Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham seek an investigation and potential prosecution of Steele for making false statements to the FBI. Though most of the referral is classified and non-public, we can glean that it focuses on Steele’s representations about his communications with journalists regarding dossier information.

As President Trump’s first year in office comes to a close, media hysteria about the grave harm he will cause to the nation and the world continues unabated – even though predictions of disaster he would supposedly cause in the past year never came to pass.

Since Donald Trump’s upset election victory in November 2016, commentators, anchors, reporters, columnists, editorial writers, op-ed writers all manner of experts have been opining on the horrors his presidency would bring about.

Gazing into their crystal balls, these sages told us: a monumental stock market crash was just around the corner; there was a good chance we were headed toward a nuclear war with North Korea; U.S. relations with nations around the world would hit a new low; investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election would create a path eventually leading to President Trump’s impeachment; and a Republican revolt in Congress would stop President Trump from winning approval for any significant legislation.

While the prophets of doom have not recanted their claims – and in fact have continued making them – the reality of President Trump’s time in office so far speaks volumes about what never happened.

Looking back at President Trump’s first year in office as it winds to a close we see the following positive developments under his leadership:

The stock market is booming. In 2017, the Dow Jones Industrial Average posted its biggest gains ever, with the most closing highs for the index in a single calendar year. Volatility diminished to historic lows and many global stock markets finished the year at or near record highs.

There’s no evidence of collusion available to the public that shows Russia worked with the Trump campaign to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.

Unemployment is low. The unemployment rate of 4.1 percent is the lowest in 17 years. The labor participation rate has increased steadily throughout the year, meaning more people are getting and keeping jobs.