RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Democrats and some Republican NeverTrump bitter-enders are still so addled by losing the election that they have lost themselves in a political Area 51. Like peddlers of space-alien autopsies and earthling abductions, they are spinning preposterous conspiracy theories straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while the real story––the illegal leaks of classified intelligence involving American citizens––is ignored.

We all know the lurid scenario: Vladimir Putin, filled with hatred of Hillary for criticizing and sanctioning him for his invasions of his neighbors’ territories, “hacked” the election in order to tilt the outcome to Donald Trump. Trump, after all, said some vaguely nice things about Vlad during the campaign, and most likely has secret dodgy business interests in Russia. Several of Trump’s friends probably do too, and so they cooperated with Russian intelligence, its WikiLeaks minions, and its propaganda rag Russia Today to smear Hillary and the Democrats. And, don’t forget, it’s likely Vlad has some embarrassing untoward info on Trump he can use to blackmail the president. QED.

This conspiracy theory is preposterous, and the media’s and Dems’ continued use of the phrase “hacked the election,” as if voting machines were meddled with, is rank propaganda and confirms the continuing absence of real evidence. Of course Russia tried to influence the election, as it has tried to influence every American election since the 1930s. And we have tried, and continue to try, to influence elections in other countries all over the world. Have the Dems forgotten how Obama in 2015 interfered in Israel’s elections by spending $350 on “campaign infrastructure” to be used against Benjamin Netanyahu? As for Americans colluding with Russia during an election, where was all this high dudgeon when in 1983 Ted Kennedy offered Soviet premier Yuri Andropov a quid pro quo? As Forbes reports of the deal, “Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.” Kennedy also offered to visit Russia and help them with access to the American media.

This typical Trumpophobic hypocrisy is also evident in the amnesia about who was really getting chummy with Putin––Obama and Hillary. Taking missile-defense installations out of Poland and the Czech Republic; working on a “reset” of relations that had soured because of Russian territorial theft in Georgia and Moldova; Obama in 2012 asking Russian president Dmitri Medvedev to assure Vlad of his “flexibility” after the election––all comprise evidence of Obama’s appeasement more solid than the innuendo and rumor supposedly proving Trump colluded with Vlad.

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice is once again in the news, embroiled in a growing scandal. Bloomberg News has reported this week that Rice requested or directed the unmasking of the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports, who were involved with the Trump transition team. The communications of these individuals were apparently collected incidentally during the course of electronic monitoring of communications involving foreign officials of interest. Normally, Americans’ identities are masked, with generic references such as the title “U.S. Person One.”

According to Eli Lake’s Bloomberg report, “The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.”

Daily Caller has reported that Rice “ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce ‘detailed spreadsheets’ of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president,” citing former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova as a source.

Circa has reported that Rice’s snooping actually preceded the election: “Susan Rice accessed numerous intelligence reports during Obama’s last seven months in office that contained National Security Agency intercepts involving Donald Trump and his associates.”

It also appears that the monitoring at issue had little if anything to do with the investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election.

These reports, and others along the same lines, raise serious questions about what Rice was doing with the unmasked identifiable information she obtained access to, even though nothing revealed so far indicates that Rice broke the law. She had the authority to request unmasking under certain circumstances where there was an intelligence need in the interest of national security for such information. But given Rice’s closeness to Obama and concern for preserving his legacy, politics, not national security, was more likely her primary motive.

Michael Doran, former National Security Council senior director, told the Daily Caller that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.

It is a threat to our electoral democracy if a party in power is able to use the nation’s intelligence apparatus to do opposition research on the party out of power. This is what Rice appears to have done, perhaps to protect her boss’s legacy from being undermined by the new Trump administration. Rice denies all of this, of course.

The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations.

Remember that.

Why is that so important in the context of explosive revelations that Susan Rice, President Obama’s national-security adviser, confidant, and chief dissembler, called for the “unmasking” of Trump campaign and transition officials whose identities and communications were captured in the collection of U.S. intelligence on foreign targets?

Because we’ve been told for weeks that any unmasking of people in Trump’s circle that may have occurred had two innocent explanations: (1) the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and (2) the need to know, for purposes of understanding the communications of foreign intelligence targets, the identities of Americans incidentally intercepted or mentioned. The unmasking, Obama apologists insist, had nothing to do with targeting Trump or his people.

That won’t wash.

In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA. All three agencies conducted a probe and issued a joint report in January. That was after Obama, despite having previously acknowledged that the Russian activity was inconsequential, suddenly made a great show of ordering an inquiry and issuing sanctions.

Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies. And if it had been critical to know the identities of Americans caught up in other foreign intelligence efforts, the agencies that collect the information and conduct investigations would have unmasked it. Because they are the agencies that collect and refine intelligence “products” for the rest of the “intelligence community,” they are responsible for any unmasking; and they do it under “minimization” standards that FBI Director James Comey, in recent congressional testimony, described as “obsessive” in their determination to protect the identities and privacy of Americans.

Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.

The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.

The FBI, CIA, and NSA generate or collect the intelligence in, essentially, three ways: conducting surveillance on suspected agents of foreign powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and carrying out more-sweeping collections under two other authorities — a different provision of FISA, and a Reagan-era executive order that has been amended several times over the ensuing decades, EO 12,333.

As Director Comey explained, in answering questions posed by Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), those three agencies do collection, investigation, and analysis. In general, they handle any necessary unmasking — which, due to the aforementioned privacy obsessiveness, is extremely rare. Unlike Democratic-party operatives whose obsession is vanquishing Republicans, the three agencies have to be concerned about the privacy rights of Americans. If they’re not, their legal authority to collect the intelligence — a vital national-security power — could be severely curtailed when it periodically comes up for review by Congress, as it will later this year.

So now it appears that short-lived national security advisor Mike Flynn made speeches before various Russian entities and was paid for it. To those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome this is further evidence of collusion with the Russians. Collusion to do what is to ever said, though it was probably Putin who kept Hillary from campaigning in Wisconsin, made Debbie Wasserman Schultz sabotage Bernie Sanders, and forced Donna Brazile to leak CNN debate questions to Team Clinton.

Speaking of the Clinton News Network, CNN has been reduced to fact-checking jokes about Team Trump members using Russian dressing on their salads:

Proving that the rabidly partisan journalists at CNN have way too much time on their hands, reporter Michelle Krupa on Wednesday actually fact checked a White House joke about Russian salad dressing. During his daily briefing on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer teased, “If the President puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that’s a Russia connection.”

The humor-challenged CNN sprung into action. On CNN.com, Krupa wrote, “Thing is, Russian dressing isn’t Russian.” Wait for it, here is the devastating bombshell:

The mayo and ketchup concoction — often dressed up with horseradish and spices — was created in Nashua, New Hampshire.

It was grocer James E. Colburn who invented the spread in 1924, according to “New Hampshire Resources, Attractions and Its People, a History,” by Hobart Pillsbury. The Washington Post cites the 1927 text, which says Colburn sold the condiment to “retailers and hotels across the country, earning ‘wealth on which he was enabled to retire.'”

Democracy and our republic are safe. Another Team Trump lie has been exposed. For all the righteous indignation about Michael Flynn’s dealings as a private citizen with Russia, one would have thought he was Bill Clinton, making speeches to foreign entities seeking influence with his Secretary of State wife for ungodly sums while donations poured into the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments and individuals to pay, among other thigs, for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding dress and lifestyle.

One would have thought for all the outrage against Flynn and other members of Team Trump, maybe the chattering class has Flynn confused with John Podesta, the doofus whose password was “password” and may have violated federal disclosure laws for not disclosing he was paid to sit on the board of various Russian entities:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, may have violated federal law when he failed to fully disclose details surrounding his membership on the executive board of Joule Unlimited and the “75,000 common shares” he received. The energy company accepted millions from a Vladimir Putin-connected Russian government fund.

Podesta joined the executive board of Joule Unlimited Technologies — a firm partly financed by Putin’s Russia — in June 2011 and received 100,000 shares of stock options, according to an email uncovered by WikiLeaks. Podesta’s membership on the board of directors of Joule Unlimited was first revealed in research from Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer.

Washington is now consumed by three scandals, distinct but overlapping, each significant in its own right. With so many players, so little reliable, public information, and such different partisan emphases, it is hard to disentangle:

Russian interference in the 2016 election;
Collusion, if any, between the Kremlin and senior Trump people, before and after the election;
Surveillance, if any, of Trump transition officials by the Obama White House and intelligence agencies, and the internal dissemination of materials not related to national security.

The first—Russian interference—should concern all Americans, regardless of party. Our democracy depends on free, fair, and open elections, with no interference by foreign citizens or governments. Our laws bar them for good reasons. America’s leaders ought to be chosen by its citizens, and them alone, whatever the global ramifications.

The second issue—possible Trump collusion with Russia—is obviously related to the Kremlin’s overall involvement, but it is distinct. Russia needed no prompting from Trump to oppose Hillary Clinton and seek to harm her election prospects. Whether it actually received help is another matter.

The Democrats have deliberately blurred the lines between Russian involvement and Trump collusion, and so have many commentators. The effect is to claw away at the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, something he is capable of doing all by himself. The Democrats’ goals are increasingly clear. As the chairman of their national committee, Tom Perez, said last week, Trump “didn’t win this election.” That charge ought to chill the soul of every American.

Vladimir Putin has succeeded in casting doubt on a democratic election and thus on constitutional governance. He did it with tactics straight out of the Cold War, KGB playbook, updated for the information age: disinformation, fake news, and illegally hacked documents.

Russia’s efforts to develop financial ties to powerful figures follow the same pattern. Persistent leaks suggest such ties to senior Trump officials. Such influence-buying, whether by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, or U.S. corporations, is, alas, common practice—and one that rightly troubles voters. That’s why the enormous speaking fees paid to the Clintons and donations to their foundations were so controversial. But even if the Russians did develop these financial ties to Trump associates, and even if their goal was to buy influence, those are not proof they worked together to influence the election.

That is exactly what we need to know. Beyond Russia’s efforts to meddle in the American election and muddle the results, did they work directly with Team Trump? If they did, those connections would be a body blow to the American Constitution and a scandal of the highest order.

Finally, now appearing in the third ring, is President Trump’s tweet that the Obama White House “wiretapped” him. The term is old-fashioned (no one wiretaps anymore), and the claim is typically inflated. But that does not mean it is bunk.

The serious charge is that the Obama White House deliberately spied on Trump officials. The spying was presumably directed at foreign targets but inevitably swept up Trump officials, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not.

When John Edwards touted the “Two Americas” during his presidential campaigns before his political career ended in disgrace, it was still a metaphor. It stopped being a metaphor at the end of last year.

If you doubt that, you can watch Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Committee, yelling that President Trump didn’t win the election. There is a huge difference between opposing the winner of an election and denying that he won it. It’s the difference between opposition and rebellion.

Democrats have not recognized a single Republican presidential victory this century. There is no real reason to think that they will recognize a third one. We can safely assume that the third or fourth Republican to win the White House, no matter who he is, will face the same treatment.

A two-party system can’t function if one party denies the legitimacy of elections won by the other side.

In the Edwards era, the Democrats denied that President Bush had won the election, but they still remained part of the government. That’s no longer the case. Their political mantra is resistance. Their position is that Trump and Republicans are inherently illegitimate and must not be allowed to govern. Instead the government must be defied, opposed, subverted and brought down by any means.

The Democrats have become an unelected shadow anti-government that is seeking to bring down an elected government. That is what I described in an earlier article as a civil war.

The crisis has its roots in Two Americas.

The Democrats artificially created another America. They built it in the elitist urban and suburban enclaves of the left. They drew it with urban welfare ghettoes and with mass immigration. But despite the vast financial, political and cultural power invested in this “New America” it did not represent the majority of the country. And democratic elections dealt repeated setbacks to this Anti-America.

Political maps show these alien concentrations of blue amid a vast national sea of red. Democrats have lost much of the country. They have been wiped out at the state level. They retain power only because they have illegally concentrated them in undemocratic political, financial and cultural centers.

If you’ve seen Geert Wilders’s film Fitna, you may not have noticed a single headline amongst all the bombings, beheadings, and earnest expressions of Islam’s eventual world domination: Halal-fund: investments for Muslims. But the investment vehicles referenced are an essential part of radical Islam’s efforts to insinuate itself into Western societies in order to destroy them from within. And Wall Street, barely out of the woods from its disastrous run-in with sub-prime mortgages — and having lost one of its historic investment houses, Bear Stearns, in the process — is now chasing the very kind of “sharia finance” against which Wilders’s movie warns, a business line that may eventually wind up being even more calamitous than the subprime-mortgage fiasco.

For the growing army of its acolytes, who salivate at the prospect of tens of billions of dollars in transaction fees from the burgeoning industry, sharia-compliant finance is seen as little more than a cuddly Islamic version of socially conscious investment — with ethical strictures forbidding usury and sin industries, and emphasizing charity. Indeed, a conference on the subject last Fall co-sponsored by the Wall Street Journal was titled just that: “Islamic Ethical Investment.” According to this rosy interpretation, sharia finance is a windfall for capital markets — allowing Wall Street to skim some foam off the ocean of petrodollar liquidity in the Middle East, and put it to good use.

Other interpretations are possible, of course. Critics see sharia finance as a massive subversion campaign by radical Islam designed to legitimize sharia in the West, to undermine our markets, and ultimately to imperil our free-enterprise system and national security — all the while exposing banks to financial risks that make the sub-prime fiasco look like a walk in the park. For its proponents and ideological enablers — such as the well known suicide-bombing advocate, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi — sharia finance is nothing less than “Jihad with money.” As al-Qaradawi explains, “God has ordered us to fight enemies with our lives and with our money.” Unfortunately for Wall Street, it’s hard to argue with the good sheikh on that score. Far from being a guide to ethical investment, sharia finance is indistinguishable from sharia itself.

Sharia is a reactionary-to-the-core medieval Islamic doctrine that claims control over every aspect of every Muslim’s life. It imposes such “ethical” mandates on Muslims as the obligation to discriminate against women and non-Muslims; to kill homosexuals, adulterers, and apostates; to establish and maintain Muslim rule around the world; and to carry out violent offensive jihad against infidels. Notably, for those Muslims who cannot engage in physical jihad using force of arms, sharia requires that they support jihad financially. This is what sharia finance is all about.

Far from being a legitimate investment vehicle, sharia finance facilitates religiously sanctioned support for terrorist organizations — as well as providing radical Islamists with highly paid sinecures as sharia-finance board advisors in the sanctum sanctorum of capitalism, all the while that they are pursuing a subversive campaign to destroy it.