RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

“As a Muslim immigrant from the great blue state of California, I’ll be a triple threat to Donald Trump. I’m running for office to fight against him, and to fight for our families.”

That was Dr. Asif Mahmood, a Democrat, last Wednesday outside ICE headquarters in Los Angeles, announcing that he is running for lieutenant governor of California.

The 56-year-old physician was born in Pakistan, but as he explained, “I wanted to live in America because of my children. I wanted them to grow up in a place that celebrates diversity and tolerance. . . Donald Trump continues to attack people like me – immigrants and people of color and Muslims. I say President Trump has it all wrong. It’s time to get tough on hate. California must be the leader of the Trump resistance and I will fight every step of the way.”

CAIR representative Danna Elneil told reporters, “We’re not 100 percent sure whether he’s the first Muslim to run.” Many Muslim countries, organizations and scholars would not be 100 percent sure if the candidate is a Muslim.

Dr. Asif Mahmood is a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, founded in 1889 on the belief that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908) was the long-awaited Messiah. Allah sent him, the Ahmadis believe, to end religious wars, condemn bloodshed and reinstitute morality, justice and peace.

According to the Congressional Record, in 2012 Democrat representatives Brad Sherman and Zoe Lofgren welcomed to Congress “His Holiness, Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad.” Based in Britain, he is “the worldwide spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, which has tens of millions of adherents around the world in 190 countries and tens of thousands of adherents here in the United States.” Sherman commended the Ahmadi motto, “Love for all. Hatred for none.”

Sherman also welcomed “distinguished leaders” Dr. Asif Mahmood and Kareem Ahmed

who show such leadership of the Muslim community in the Los Angeles area. As Dr. Stephen M. Kirby noted in 2015, the Sunnis who represent nearly 90 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims would have a problem with the Ahmadi claim that they represent the “true” Islam.

In 1984, Dr. Mahmood’s native country of Pakistan added Section 298 to the penal code, prohibiting the Ahmadis from calling themselves Muslims, posing as Muslims by reciting Koranic verses, referring to their faith as Islam, and preaching or propagating their faith. The Pakistani law even prohibits Ahmadis from sounding the call to prayer.

Indonesia and Kyrgyzstan deploy similar prohibitions and in 1997 Sheikh Ali Bin Abdur Rahman Al Hufaifi, chief Imam of the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, condemned the Ahmadis as “traitors” spouting “false Quranic commentary.” As Dr. Kirby noted:

Former President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice asked for the names of Trump transition officials to be unmasked and made public in raw intelligence files, according to media reports, a move apparently carried out to harm the incoming Trump administration.

As recently as March 22, Rice denied knowing anything about the intelligence reports. In an appearance on “PBS Newshour,” she said pretty definitely, “I know nothing about this.” The new news reports paint Rice as a liar.

The evidence we know about in the Trump-Russia saga so far seems to be pointing at Obama.

Adam Housley of Fox News reports:

The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.

The names were part of incidental electronic surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump and people close to him, including family members, for up to a year before he took office.

The spreading of the unmasked names was carried out for “political purposes that have nothing to do with national security” or foreign intelligence, Housley said. “It had everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team,” he said, citing his sources.

What is incidental collection, by the way?

Incidental collection “happens when an individual is in contact with the target of surveillance,” or is communicating “about” the target, according to Robyn Greene. “So if Bob were being targeted for surveillance and Alice called or emailed Bob, Alice’s communications with him would be collected incidentally.”

In this example, “if Bob is targeted for surveillance and Alice contacts him during that surveillance, resulting in the incidental collection of her communications with him, her name should be redacted or ‘masked’ unless leaving it unredacted provides foreign intelligence value.” Masking is done to protect U.S. persons (i.e. U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, etc.) who get inadvertently caught up in the electronic dragnet from being falsely accused of crimes or otherwise improper behavior.

A recent report in Spain’s El País touts “the Spanish connection with Trump’s Russia scandal”:

On February 1, Alexander Porfirievich Torshin, 63, a Russian politician and banker who is close to Vladimir Putin and whom the Spanish anti-corruption prosecutor and the Civil Guard define in their reports as a godfather from a notorious Russian mafia organization, had in his diary for the next day an appointment to meet in Washington with the world’s most powerful man: Donald Trump.

The meeting never took place, but according to El País, Torshin, who is currently the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia and is suspected by Spanish authorities of being part of a Russian money-laundering operation, has other links to the administration: Last May, he sat beside Donald Trump Jr. during a private dinner in Louisville, Ky.

Links between the new administration and the Kremlin are not hard to come by. There are the legitimate (e.g., Jeff Sessions’s visit with the Russian ambassador), the dubious (e.g., ousted NSA director Michael Flynn’s many communications with the same), and the alarming (e.g., nearly anything involving campaign advisers Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, or Carter Page). But after months of “explosive” revelations, it remains unclear precisely what the charges against the White House are. Has the new president simply been too friendly to Vladimir Putin? In his stupendous ignorance, has he permitted his egotism to reshape American foreign policy? Or — more troubling — has he wooed the Kremlin to advance his overseas business interests? Or — most troubling — did he work with Russian sources to manipulate November’s election? Prominent critics of the president have suggested that Donald Trump is “a Kremlin stooge,” “a pawn of Putin,” and a “collaborator” with Russian intelligence. But what the president is being accused of is always left hanging in a cloud of insinuation.

This is likely because, as of now, there is no concrete charge to make. There is no evidence that the president or his close advisers have broken the law in their communications with Russian officials. There is no reliable evidence that anyone “collaborated” with Russian officials to influence the election, or that Russian influence was more than indirect (i.e., votes may have been swayed by WikiLeaks’s exposure of the DNC e-mails, but Russia did not “hack the election,” in the sense of manipulating voting machines). Even Manafort, Stone, and Page, the three advisers with the closest and most troubling ties to the Kremlin, have not been shown to have done anything prosecutable. All of this is provisional, of course — and must remain so until the congressional intelligence committees complete their investigations — but it’s noteworthy nonetheless, as critics on right and left compare Donald Trump to Richard Nixon and whisper about impeachment.

What, then, is the problem with the administration’s Russia ties? The news from El País is instructive.

Part of Donald Trump’s appeal was that he would keep out of the White House Hillary Clinton and her whole network of should-be felons. The Right’s chief concern about the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons’ “charitable” work was that it provided a veiled way for parties — especially foreign parties — with alarming agendas to purchase White House influence. Right-leaning voters were convinced that the Clintons would not surround themselves with responsible, ethical public servants, but with people happy to sell American policy to the highest bidder.

There have been roughly two sorts of Democratic presidents over the last century. A few were revolutionaries who sought to take the country leftward with them. They were masters of “never letting a serious crisis go to waste” transformations and came to power after the chaos of national crises and near collapse.

Franklin Roosevelt created the modern notion of intrusive, redistributive government during the panic of the Depression. Lyndon Johnson, following the trauma of the John F. Kennedy assassination, pushed through the Great Society, which institutionalized the idea that it was the duty of government to use its power and money to seek an equality of result among the citizenry.

Barack Obama, following the economic crisis of 2008, sought to implant “lead from behind” foreign policy and an update of the Great Society, and to “fundamentally transform” the country, usually by focusing on identity politics as the core of the culture (in which the color of our skin rather than the content of our character would brand us for who we are).

In contrast, Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton acted more as caretakers. They more or less administered what they had inherited but lacked the ideological fervor (or perhaps the political savvy or desire) to take the state further leftward.

The immediate Republican antidotes to Democratic revolutionaries were rarely themselves counter-revolutionaries. Dwight Eisenhower modestly tried to pull the country back to the center after 20 years of the New Deal — but nonetheless was hounded unmercifully for trying to do so. The supposedly dark and evil Richard Nixon instituted wage and price controls, created the EPA, and went to China. He did not dismantle the Great Society.

A true conservative revolutionary has been rare — Goldwater failed to get elected, and Reagan, without both houses of Congress, ended up more moderate than he expected and was followed in office by a Republican centrist.

Nonetheless, the media and the Left, in their respective arenas, howled that these modest corrections back to the center by Eisenhower, Nixon, and now Trump were nihilistic and extreme.

True to form, we are now hearing those same end-of-days accusations — even as Trump seeks to bring the U.S. back to about where it was between 1980 and 1992. Note that this endless cycle of change and counter-change is not a static phenomenon but incrementally (and over time radically) takes government and the culture ever more leftward.

So far, Trump has adopted the old Bill Clinton approach to illegal immigration, a formerly centrist but now strangely unorthodox position: He favors law enforcement rather than politically inspired amnesties calibrated to give him electoral and demographic political advantage.

His appeals to the white working classes are right out of the Clinton-Gore appeals in 1992, and they’re a rehash of Reagan’s courting of Democrats.

For many weeks, we’ve watched the Democrats and their allies in the media attempt to hide what is now an established fact: the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign and transition team. The principal method of obfuscation is an effort to link Trump’s people to Russia’s efforts to influence our election. But there is a secondary effort that also needs to be addressed.

Ridicule is a powerful weapon. There a consistent media effort to ridicule President Trump by intentionally misunderstanding him. There is a parallel effort to ridicule the discoveries of House Intelligence chairman Nunes by questioning his methods for getting to the truth. The important point is that Nunes got to the truth.

Eli Lake writing in BloombergView reports that on dozens of occasions, Obama national security adviser Susan Rice requested raw intelligence reports involving members of the Trump team.

The intelligence, which is routinely collected on foreign nationals, adheres to a strict policy of masking any American inadvertently eavesdropped upon. On multiple occasions, Rice had the American Trump team members unmasked. Quoting Lake, “[o]ne 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.” That is spying, pure and simple.

We all need to guard against letting our partisan perspectives interfere with sound judgment.

I want my liberal friends to ponder the following. The raw intelligence came from the NSA. They collect virtually everything communicated electronically. I’m told that the NSA often picks ordinary private face-to-face conversions. When a government official can pick through NSA transcripts, identify the ones she wants, remove all privacy safeguards, disseminate them, and leak them to the press, we’ve effectively repealed the Fourth Amendment.

We have been distracted by the investigations of Russian interference in our election and by the Democrats’ vain hope of tying the Trump team to this interference. All we know about Russian influence is that they hacked John Podesta’s emails. We can all agree that hacking into and disseminating other people’s private communications is a bad thing. It’s bad if the Russians did it, but not really any worse than if it had been done by a teenager in the next block. Hacking is a bad – period.

Call it the tale of two National Security Advisers, Michael Flynn and Susan Rice. As much as Flynn has taken fire as being an architect of unspecified “collusion” with the Russians, Susan Rice has been like the iceberg that sank the Titanic — barely visible above water but dangerous enough to threaten the Trump administration’s ship of state.

As reported by Circa News, Rice, while serving as Obama’s National Security Adviser, requested the unmasking of the names of Team Trump officials mentioned in the so-called “incidental” surveillance of the Trump transition team:

Computer logs that former President Obama’s team left behind in the White House indicate his national security adviser 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, Circa has learned.

Intelligence sources said the logs discovered by National Security Council staff suggested Rice’s interest in the NSA materials, some of which included unmasked Americans’ identities, appeared to begin last July around the time Trump secured the GOP nomination and accelerated after Trump’s election in November launched a transition that continued through January.

The intelligence reports included some intercepts of Americans talking to foreigners and many more involving foreign leaders talking about the future president, his campaign associates or his transition, the sources said. Most if not all had nothing to do with the Russian election interference scandal, the sources said, speaking only on condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the materials.

Ordinarily, such references to Americans would be redacted or minimized by the NSA before being shared with outside intelligence sources, but in these cases names were sometimes unmasked at the request of Rice or the intelligence reports were specific enough that the American’s identity was easily ascertained, the sources said.

Well, isn’t that special? While Trump’s pick for this sensitive post was under scrutiny, Obama’s adviser was doing opposition research which involved data mining classified intelligence reports. Rice requested the unmasking of names, something only three people, according to Circa, were authorized to do:

Dozens of times in 2016, those intelligence reports identified Americans who were directly intercepted talking to foreign sources or were the subject of conversations between two or more monitored foreign figures. Sometimes the Americans’ names were officially unmasked; other times they were so specifically described in the reports that their identities were readily discernible. Among those cleared to request and consume unmasked NSA-based intelligence reports about U.S. citizens were Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, his CIA Director John Brennan and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.