RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

The Judiciary Committee sent Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate Monday on an 11-9 “party-line vote,” as the press likes to say. What a shame. All nine committee Democrats lined up like the Rockettes to oppose the nominee whose qualifications and temperament are universally hailed.

At least 41 Democrats led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have also committed to filibuster Judge Gorsuch on the Senate floor, so he will need 60 votes to be confirmed. This will force Republicans to change Senate rules to break what would be the first partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee in history. Democrats and their media friends want to portray Republicans as the radicals in this case, but Democrats are the precedent-busters.

Mr. Schumer is howling that Republicans stole this Court seat because they didn’t give a vote to Merrick Garland last year. But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared before Barack Obama nominated Judge Garland that there would be no vote on any nominee in the election year. He was merely echoing the standard that Mr. Schumer had set when he declared in 2007 that Democrats would block any nominee that George W. Bush would send up in his final year as President.

Democrats have no good reason to oppose Judge Gorsuch so they are inventing bad reasons. Montana Democrat Jon Tester, who likes to portray himself as a centrist, announced that he’ll oppose the judge for what he didn’t say. “I cannot support a nominee who refuses to answer important questions,” he said, as if more than 2,000 Gorsuch opinions don’t provide enough insight into his jurisprudence. If the Judge wasn’t as gabby in the confirmation hearing as Mr. Tester would like, the reason is that Democrats would have used anything provocative he said to defeat him. But now even saying nothing offensive is disqualifying. What a crew.

Well, what do you know. On the matter of who “unmasked” the names of Trump transition officials in U.S. intelligence reports, we now have one answer: Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser.

A U.S. intelligence official confirms to us the bombshell news, first reported Monday by Bloomberg, that Ms. Rice requested the name of at least one Trump transition official listed in an intelligence report in the months between Election Day and Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Ms. Rice received summaries of U.S. eavesdropping either when foreign officials were discussing the Trump team, or when foreign officials were conversing with a Trump transition member. The surveillance was legally authorized, but the identities of U.S. citizens are typically masked so they cannot be known outside intelligence circles. Ms. Rice asked for and learned the identity of the Trump official, whose name hasn’t been publicly disclosed and our source declined to share.

Our source did confirm that Ms. Rice also examined dozens of other intelligence summaries that technically masked Trump official identities but were written in such a way as to make obvious who those officials were. This means that the masking was essentially meaningless. All this is highly unusual—and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in antiterror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.

We’re told by a source who has seen the unmasked documents that they included political information about the Trump transition team’s meetings and policy intentions. We are also told that none of these documents had anything to do with Russia or the FBI investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. While we don’t know if Ms. Rice requested these dozens of reports, we are told that they were only distributed to a select group of recipients—conveniently including Ms. Rice.

White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”

The National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.

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.

Rice did not respond to an email seeking comment on Monday morning. Her role in requesting the identities of Trump transition officials adds an important element to the dueling investigations surrounding the Trump White House since the president’s inauguration.

Both the House and Senate intelligence committees are probing any ties between Trump associates and a Russian influence operation against Hillary Clinton during the election. The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Representative Devin Nunes, is also investigating how the Obama White House kept tabs on the Trump transition after the election through unmasking the names of Trump associates incidentally collected in government eavesdropping of foreign officials.

On this new special edition of Anni Cyrus’s “Top 10”, Anni discussesObama’s Top 10 Betrayals of the American People, unveiling the treacherous record of a Radical-in-Chief.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2017/04/04/obamas-top-10-betrayals-of-the-american-people/