RUTHFULLY YOURS

I contended in last weekend’s column that the Justice Department’s inspector-general investigation, focusing on statements by FBI director James Comey in the stretch-run of the presidential campaign, is part of a carefully orchestrated Democratic scheme to win the narrative battle over the 2016 election. The inquiry into whether Director Comey’s disclosures about the Clinton e-mails investigation violated DOJ standards is merely a pretext. The real objective is to bolster the claim that Donald Trump’s triumph was illegitimate, thus undermining his presidency.

The same strategy informs the Democrats’ continued repetition of the theme that “Russia hacked the election.” Notwithstanding that Putin’s regime did not tamper with the actual voting process and that the embarrassing information released by WikiLeaks (mostly e-mails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta) was true, Democrats are determined to depict President Trump not as elected fair-and-square by Americans but as maneuvered into the White House by Russian “cyber-espionage.”

Now it’s the same old wine in a different bottle.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is currently considering Trump’s nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) to be attorney general. On Tuesday, all nine Democrats on the committee signed a letter demanding that, if confirmed, Sessions recuse himself from any investigation of efforts by Russia to interfere in the election.

Let’s once again take a step back and understand what’s going on here.

If Russia merely tried to interfere in an American election, there is no basis to call for Sessions’s recusal. There is no reason to question Sessions’s motivation and commitment to investigate and prosecute espionage by Putin’s regime. The purported conflict of interest would arise only if we accept the narrative — i.e., the fiction — that “Russia hacked the election.” Had that actually happened, then it could be credibly claimed that Trump owes his presidency, and Sessions his stewardship of the Justice Department, to Russian espionage. That would be a major conflict of interest. Thus, Democrats want Sessions to concede, in effect, that he has a powerful motive to conceal Russia’s espionage — such that he must recuse himself because we cannot trust him to lead a fair and impartial investigation. Implicitly, Sessions would be conceding — and thus cementing — the fiction that “Russia hacked the election.”

In other words, the Democrats’ latest recusal ploy has nothing to do with Sessions, just as the IG investigation has nothing to do with Comey. The objective is to engrave a story on the election: The Democrats lost not because their candidate was terrible and their policies unpopular; they lost because Russia stole the election for Trump — rendering Trump illegitimate, and implicitly obliging Americans to resist him as a Putin puppet.

To the Left the highest form of service to America is to betray it.

This is why President Obama yesterday ordered that the 35-year sentence of convicted traitor U.S. Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning be commuted. Manning, who leaked vast quantities of classified materials, was born male with the given name Bradley but now identifies as female.

Bradley’s transgender status, which has made the prisoner a cause célèbre among left-wingers, almost certainly played a huge role in the commutation. Manning, who has tried to commit suicide in prison, has not had sex-reassignment surgery but has been campaigning for it for years.

As a consequence of our Marxist, identity politics-obsessed president’s order, Manning is now scheduled to be released from military prison on May 17 of this year, instead of 2045. This means that upon release Manning will have served about seven years behind bars.

Manning was convicted by court-martial on July 30, 2013, of 20 counts, including six violations of the Espionage Act, along with theft and computer fraud. An acquittal was registered on the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, which can result in a sentence of life imprisonment.

As a clemency-sweetener, on Jan. 12 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange offered to allow himself to be extradited to the U.S. if President Obama ordered the release of Manning.

Will Assange honor his promise? We’ll see.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s comments last Friday may have foreshadowed the Manning clemency.

Responding to a reporter’s question, Earnest said there was a “pretty stark difference” between Manning’s case and document leaker Edward Snowden’s.

“Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes, and she acknowledged wrongdoing,” Earnest said.

“Mr. Snowden fled into the arms of an adversary and has sought refuse in a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy.”

Earnest added that the documents Manning is said to have provided to WikiLeaks were “damaging to national security,” but those disclosed by Snowden were “far more damaging to national security.”

Manning’s actions constituted the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history.

It is naïve to think that political correctness is simply a matter of being scolded for saying something unacceptable to liberals. It has become much more than that. Political correctness is a deliberate tool used by the Left to intimidate conservatives and people of faith into silence, with the goal of making our classic and time-tested opinions illegitimate.

Political Correctness is a strategy, a weapon of social warfare, a bullying against those unwilling to reshape and renounce their traditional belief system and bow to the dictates of the leftocracy dead-set on total domination of our lives and culture. It enforces censorship and activates demonization, threatening those unwilling to submit and apologize with loss of job, livelihood, social acceptability, company sales, friends, reputation, and status. It is the liberal version of Islamic blasphemy laws, ruthlessly excising anyone who questions or strays from the leftwing cultural and social dogmas. It is the most un-American development in our lifetime.

In many ways it is worse than the McCarthyism practiced in the early 50s. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who sat on the Senate Committee of Government Operations, targeted relatively few, whereas liberal political correctness is targeting over 60%, tens of millions, of Americans. And whereas McCarthy was generally correct regarding the communist leanings and activities of his targets, liberal political-correctness czars are off-the-wall incorrect when accusing regular and patriotic Americans of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, or whatever is the latest “ism”. Joe McCarthy’s hearings lasted a mere couple of years, while the scourge and punishment of political correctness is into its 20th year.

Today’s New McCarthyites exist and labor on the Left and are engaged in the thoroughly un-American activity of censoring speech, curtailing and ostracizing religious freedom, and doing whatever they can to deconstruct traditional family life and taint the values of our parents, our Founders, and our grandparents as evil. By deriding everything we hold dear as unacceptable, and making us pay the price of holding onto our cherished beliefs, they hope to transform America, and American family and religious life, into a Sweden/Brussels fantasy or a completely secular and unwholesome political entity. They wish to replace America while we stand by and watch it happen.

But, the good news is that we are not helpless

The nation is now hopelessly divided and will remain so. Unless Trump recognizes this unpalatable reality, much of his decision-making and hard work will go for nought.

Donald Trump has gone on record as wishing to unite the nation. In fact, he has declared it one of his urgent priorities in numerous post-election comments. I hope this is mere presidential rhetoric, for America has long passed the point when unity would be possible. The nation is now hopelessly divided and will remain so. Unless Trump recognizes this unpalatable reality, much of his decision-making and hard work will go for nought.

The left, which includes the majority of national institutions — the legacy media, the academy, television, Hollywood, the social media providers, the judiciary, online and print groups, government departments, the Democratic Party and much of the Republican Party, the political class as a whole and the army of liberal voters — will never be pacified. The left will never cease in its efforts to scheme against a Trump — or any conservative-leaning — administration.

Trump must take seriously Newt Gingrich’s warning against the temptation to “give in” to the left when opposition starts to mount from every quarter — the Greens, government employees, the teachers’ unions, indeed the entire progressivist Category 5 hurricane of demands and vilification. Not only should Trump resist that temptation, he must not waste his time and energy seeking to heal what cannot be repaired, but needs to engage in a kind of domestic cold war, using every legislative means in his purview to contain a dangerous and implacable internal enemy. This is realpolitik applied locally.

Robert Oscar Lopez pillories the academic left and the education industry at all levels, he writes: “Try to build bridges to them, and they punish you for it…[they take] kind gestures from conservatives as a sign that conservatives are weak.” The arts of conciliation tend to be perceived as “an invitation to shame you publicly, using anything you say against you.” He continues: “Higher education is not a swamp to be drained. It is a diabolical machine, and it is time to pull the plug.” What he says of the education consortium is true of the left across the entire cultural, social and political spectrum.

It is naïve to assume that the political fissure between left and right, collectivism and individuality, Socialism and classical liberalism, fantasy and reality, can ever be bridged. In essence, this is a perennial conflict, one which the great satirist Jonathan Swift in The Battle of the Books, drawing from the classics, described as the enmity between the predatory spider, who purls illusions out of his own entrails, and the foraging bee who produces sweetness and light and convulses the spider’s self-spun “citadel.” It is a conflict between opposed epistemological frames of reference — in Swiftian terms, that of the fanatic parvenu and that of the companionable humanist. Today it is a war between progressivists and conservatives, between utopian experimentalism and traditional values. The rupture cannot be parged. One should not invest in a fruitless and destructive effort to create unity where none is possible.

Where the effort to achieve unity has real meaning is in the attempt to mend the surmountable divisions of opinion within the conservative family in order to form a strong front against the forces that would subvert the political coherence and even the survival of the nation. Unity only makes sense if it is accomplished within the often disparate group of genuine patriots who may disagree on many points, yet who are basically at one in struggling to establish the rule of law and a functioning democratic — or rather, republican — polity. But to work for the unification of oil and water is not only an egregious error but a recipe for social and political disunity.

E.M. Cadwaladr argues America now comprises “two separate peoples…where any notion of compromise…is painfully naïve and utterly futile.” Conservatism is about the “freedom from government interference,” the freedom for citizens “to do with their property as they see fit [and to] prosper or fail in accordance with [their own] choices and abilities.” Conservatives believe that “charity is an individual virtue, [the purpose of which] is to raise the unfortunate to a state of self-sufficiency.” Freedom includes the right “to make one’s own judgments about other people” (so much for political correctness). And “equality” means equality before the law.

If Donald Trump had been referring to Rep. John Lewis’s civil-rights record when he wrote on Twitter Saturday that the congressman was “all talk” and “no action,” the president-elect might need a refresher course in U.S. history. One of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest allies, Mr. Lewis was on the front lines of the successful fight to end Jim Crow.

But for anyone who bothers to check out the full tweet, it’s clear that Mr. Trump was referring to Mr. Lewis’s record as a lawmaker. “Congressman John Lewis,” wrote Mr. Trump after the lawmaker questioned the legitimacy of the election, “should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk—no action or results. Sad!”
Mr. Lewis, a liberal Democrat from Georgia, was first elected to Congress in 1986, and he has spent much of the past three decades reminding people what he did before he got there. “Lewis has worked to commemorate the civil rights revolution in which he played such a large part,” explains the Almanac of American Politics. “He got a federal building in Atlanta named for King and won historic trail designation for the demonstrators’ route [for the 1965 march] from Selma to Montgomery [Ala.]. . . . Since 1998, he has led members of Congress on pilgrimages to civil rights sites.
All of which should further secure John Lewis’s rightful place in U.S. history. But to Mr. Trump’s point, what do Mr. Lewis’s mostly black constituents in Atlanta have to show for his time in Washington representing them? Atlanta has one of the widest gaps in the country between high- and low-income households, according to the Brookings Institution. A 2015 report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that although Atlanta “is considered an economic powerhouse and ‘black mecca,’ its wealth and promise don’t extend to many of its residents, particularly those of color, who struggle to make ends meet, get family-supporting jobs and access quality education.” The study found that incomes for Atlanta’s white residents were more than triple those of blacks; the high school graduation rate was 57% for blacks and 84% for whites; and black unemployment in Atlanta was 22%, versus a city average of 13% and a white rate of 6%.

Atlanta also hasn’t avoided the surge in violent crime that has hit other major cities in recent years. Last summer the mayor announced the creation of a task force to reduce gun violence, and in November the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the city had been named “one of America’s top 25 murder capitals, according to the latest data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.”

Mr. Lewis’s poor record is not unique among black politicians with large black constituencies. Atlanta has had black Democratic mayors pushing liberal policies for decades, and blacks have been well-represented as city councilmen and in the top echelons of the police department and school system. Much the same is true of other major cities with large black populations—Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Washington—which are lagging economically, notwithstanding black political clout from Congress down to the local school board. This is what Republicans mean when they say black voters have been getting little in return for their steadfast loyalty to Democrats. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Obama’s decision Tuesday to commute the 35-year prison sentence of Pfc. Chelsea, née Bradley,Manning will be celebrated on the left as a vindication of a well-intentioned whistleblower whose imprisonment at Ft. Leavenworth as a transgender woman was a travesty of justice. The real travesty is the show of leniency for a progressive cause célèbre whose actions put hundreds of lives at risk.

For those who need reminding, Manning was stationed in Iraq as a low-level intelligence analyst when he gained access to troves of classified material. Starting in 2010 he leaked nearly 750,000 documents to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. Included in the material were thousands of secret State Department cables and masses of military information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange worked with reporters from several news organizations to publish the material, to much self-congratulation about the virtues of transparency.

U.S. diplomats and military officers took a less charitable view, with good reason. While many of the State Department cables contained little more than diplomatic party gossip, others disclosed sensitive conversations between U.S. diplomats and opposition leaders in repressive regimes. After the disclosure, Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai was investigated by the regime of Robert Mugabe for “treasonous collusion between local Zimbabweans and the aggressive international world,” as the country’s attorney general put it.

Even more dangerous were leaks of operational secrets, including the names of Afghan informants working with U.S. coalition forces against the Taliban. A Navy SEAL who participated in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan testified that Manning’s leaks were found on the terrorist’s computer.

Little wonder that at the time Mr. Obama criticized “the deplorable action by WikiLeaks.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the document dump “puts people’s lives in danger” and was “an attack on America’s foreign policy,” its partnerships and alliances. Prosecutors initially sought a life sentence against Manning, who was eventually convicted of 17 of 22 charges, including espionage and theft.

Within 24 hours of sentencing in 2013, Manning said he wanted to begin hormone therapy and be known as Chelsea. Last year the Army agreed to finance her medical treatment for gender dysphoria. In December the ACLU and numerous LGBT groups wrote to Mr. Obama urging that he grant clemency to Manning, in part on grounds that she has been held in solitary confinement after suicide attempts.

The commutation sends a dreadful message to others in the military who might have grievances or other problems but haven’t stolen national secrets. The lesson is that if you can claim gender dysphoria or some other politically correct condition, you can betray your country and get off lightly.

On Tuesday Mr. Obama also commuted the sentence of Puerto Rican terrorist Oscar López Rivera, who was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” against the U.S. government. He belonged to the FALN, which was responsible for more than 70 bombings in the U.S. between 1974 and 1983, killing five and injuring dozens. Rivera, who has been in prison since 1981, had become the political project of “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is a pal of President Obama. No word from the White House on whether the President alerted the families of the FALN’s victims.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama shortened Chelsea Manning’s 35-year prison sentence Tuesday, setting a May release for the former Army intelligence analyst convicted of leaking government secrets.

Mr. Obama’s decision about the transgender former soldier was announced along with more than 200 other commutations and dozens of pardons by the White House three days before he leaves office.

The president also issued a pardon in the case of James Cartwright, a retired four-star general and former vice chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was awaiting sentencing for lying to authorities investigating leaks about a classified effort against Iran’s nuclear program. Prosecutors had been seeking a two-year prison sentence for Gen. Cartwright, who was one of Mr. Obama’s most-trusted military advisers.

Republicans immediately criticized the commutation. “This is just outrageous,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.). “Chelsea Manning’s treachery put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. President Obama now leaves in place a dangerous precedent that those who compromise our national security won’t be held accountable for their crimes.”
Commutations shorten the punishment meted out, typically by reducing the time in prison a convict must serve, but they don’t remove the recipient’s criminal record. A pardon wipes their slate clean.

Senior administration officials said Mr. Obama has now granted 1,385 commutations to individuals, more than the previous 12 presidents combined.

This column by a Trump antagonist, published in the paper of dreckord is valuable in exposing the intel report on Russia’s interference in U.S. elections….rsk

After months of anticipation, speculation, and hand-wringing by politicians and journalists, American intelligence agencies have finally released a declassified version of a report on the part they believe Russia played in the US presidential election. On Friday, when the report appeared, the major newspapers came out with virtually identical headlines highlighting the agencies’ finding that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an “influence campaign” to help Donald Trump win the presidency—a finding the agencies say they hold “with high confidence.”

A close reading of the report shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Indeed, it barely supports any conclusion. There is not much to read: the declassified version is twenty-five pages, of which two are blank, four are decorative, one contains an explanation of terms, one a table of contents, and seven are a previously published unclassified report by the CIA’s Open Source division. There is even less to process: the report adds hardly anything to what we already knew. The strongest allegations—including about the nature of the DNC hacking—had already been spelled out in much greater detail in earlier media reports.

But the real problems come with the findings themselves. The report leads with three “key judgments”:

“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election”;
“Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls’”;
“We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes.”

It is the first of these judgments that made headlines, so let us look at the evidence the document provides for this assertion. This evidence takes up just over a page and contains nine points. The first four make the argument that Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to lose. I will paraphrase for the sake of brevity and clarity:

Putin and the Russian government aimed to help Trump by making public statements discrediting Hillary Clinton;
the Kremlin’s goal is to undermine “the US-led liberal democratic order”;
Putin claimed that the Panama Papers leak and the Olympic doping scandal were “US-directed efforts to defame Russia,” and this suggests that he would use defamatory tactics against the United States;
Putin personally dislikes Hillary Clinton and blames her for inspiring popular unrest in Russia in 2011-2012.

None of this is new or particularly illuminating—at least for anyone who has been following Russian media in any language; some of it seems irrelevant. (Though the report notes that the NSA has only “moderate confidence” in point number one, unlike the CIA and FBI, which have “high confidence” in it.) The next set of points aim to buttress the assertion that Putin “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump over Secretary Clinton.” The following is an exact quote:

Beginning in June, Putin’s public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump, probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States. Nonetheless, Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump’s stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine.

The change in the cyber risk environment coinciding with a heightened need for procurement of new technologies and services has created a new paradigm for a cybersecurity partnership between government and industry. The prioritization of that special partnership appears to be in the immediate plans for the new Trump Administration.
The appointment of former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a cybersecurity adviser signals the elevated importance of that intended government/industry partnership. One of his first tasks will be to assemble cybersecurity subject matter experts and leaders from industry to advise and spur innovation in and out of government. Mayor Giuliani has made it clear that the proposed group will work on cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions across industries such as the energy, financial, and transportation sectors.
Collaboration between government and industry stakeholders is a proven model that makes good sense. Together, government and the private sector can identify products and align flexible product paths, evaluate technology gaps, and help design scalable architectures that will lead to greater efficiency and fiscal accountability. Bridging R&D spending between the government and private sectors should also allow for a more directed and capable cybersecurity prototype pipeline to meet new technology requirements.
In addition to being collaborative, a working partnership of government and industry leaders should be focused and strategic in nature. To be effective the evolving cybersecurity partnership must also be 1) proactive and adaptive to change; 2) coordinated with The Department of Homeland Security (DHS); and 3) have a cyber risk management/consequence strategy.
Being Proactive and Adaptive to Change: There are many challenges of functioning in an exponentially changing digital world. This requires restructuring of priorities and missions for both government and industry. That is not an easy task and there is logic in joining forces.
As the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown, so have the cyber intrusions and threats from malware and hackers. The growing and sophisticated cyber threat actors include various criminal enterprises, loosely affiliated hackers, and adversarial nation states. A first mission for the new Administration’s cyber team will be to review recommendations prepared by cybersecurity experts from within and out of government and to assess gaps and vulnerabilities across the threat landscape.
In the past decade, the cybersecurity focus and activities by both government and industry have been predominantly reactive to whatever is the latest threat or breach. As a result, containing the threats was difficult because at the outset, defenders were always at least one step behind. That mindset has been changing due to a major series of intrusions and denial of service attacks (including OPM, Anthem, Yahoo, and many others) that exposed a flawed approach to defending data and operating with a passive preparedness.
Being proactive is not just procuring technologies and people it also means adopting a working industry and government framework that includes tactical measures, encryption, authentication, biometrics, analytics, and continuous diagnostics and mitigation, as applicable to specific circumstances.
The new advisory council led by Mayor Giuliani will become more proactive and adaptive in protecting assets and will also likely address policy and technology development implications around a whole host of other topics related to cyber threats. Some of these topics will include information sharing, securing the Internet of Things (IoT), protection of critical infrastructures, and expanding workforce training to mitigate the shortage of cybersecurity