RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/14/dni_richard_grenell_deserves_the_nations_gratitude_143200.html

Before he was appointed U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell was a foreign policy expert and a media commentator, recognized for his insight and independent analysis. Now that he’s the acting Director of National Intelligence, Grenell is after one thing on behalf of the American people: the truth. In his role as the DNI, Grenell has used his power responsibly, thoughtfully, and constitutionally to find the facts about what happened across the intelligence agencies serving the American people and how they were weaponized for political purposes before and after the 2016 election. 

Although Grenell’s appointment earlier this year was always intended to be temporary, he has not taken the job lightly. Just weeks into his new role, Grenell began reforming the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to enhance transparency and accountability while implementing measures to protect our intelligence agencies from future political interference.  

In May, Grenell announced even more structural reforms designed to improve ODNI’s efficiency and effectiveness. “[M]ore changes to come…because there have been 4 studies in the last 2 years from other career IC officials asking for reforms,” Grenell tweeted, adding that these reforms “should have been done before I arrived.” 

But Grenell’s most important contribution to justice — and truth — has been his decision to declassify the list of former Obama administration officials who “unmasked” the identity of the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Thanks to Grenell’s efforts, Americans now know that the Obama administration abused its power during the 2016 campaign in order to illegally spy on Donald Trump’s associates.  

https://nypost.com/2020/05/13/the-scale-to-which-obamas-team-spied-should-be-focus-of-unmasking/

The presumptive Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden, heads a list of more than a dozen Obama officials who spied on Donald Trump’s ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Others senior officials include chief of staff Denis McDonough, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and UN Ambassador Samantha Power.

A list declassified Tuesday by Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grennel shows that Biden and others asked to have Flynn’s name “unmasked” in transcripts of US intelligence intercepts of foreign officials. The names of US persons or entities incidentally collected by such intercepts are minimized to protect the privacy rights of Americans. Unmasking identities is not in itself illegal, nor even necessarily improper. Occasionally US policymakers will ask to unmask a US person to better understand the nature of the intelligence before them. Obama officials, however, gorged themselves like children at a candy store.

In an almost two-month period starting election day, Nov. 8, 2016, senior US officials made 49 requests to unmask the retired three-star general.

Flynn’s Dec. 29, 2016, call to a Russian diplomat in which they were alleged to have discussed sanctions on Russia was leaked by a senior US official to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. His subsequent column ignited the Russia collusion scandal, which in time became the special counsel investigation. Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI regarding the call, and finally last week the Department of Justice withdrew its deeply compromised case.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/05/anti-social-social-distancing.html

“There’s no reason for increased penalties for reducing the 2  meter (6 feet) rule in the open air because viruses disperse in the open air; the rule isn’t applied when people are shopping in a supermarket and in many other indoor spaces where it can’t be policed.

“I think the govnmt is trying to avoid the formation of crowds and the potential for civil unrest.”  (4.02 PM 5/10)

Prolific writer, Christine McNultty, is often published in the Watford Obsever, in the UK. 

But rationality rarely enters the minds of power-lusters, with only the chance to use brute force whetting their appetite. Reason and force are antipods 

Some good news is that a Dallas Texas salon owner was released from jail after defying a judge’s decision to imprison her for violating the and “social distance” orders. The governor of the state ordered her freed.

Some awful, outrageous news it that an Australian woman in Sydney who was demonstrating peacefully against the lockdown was brutally arrested and her young screaming son wrested from her grip by the police. She was roughly put into the police van, still resisting her arrest. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/13/obama-chief-of-staff-unmasked-flynn-day-of-crucial-white-house-briefing/

According to declassified documents released Wednesday by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, President Barack Obama’s chief of staff requested the unmasking of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn on the same day as a crucial White House meeting that involved all the perpetrators of the Russian collusion hoax.

Denis McDonough, a longtime Obama loyalist and the president’s chief of staff during his second term, asked the NSA to unmask Flynn’s identity on January 5, 2017 related to an unspecified foreign intelligence report. That date is significant because it’s the same day that President Obama met with top aides including James Comey, James Clapper, Susan Rice, and John Brennan for the ostensible purpose of reviewing the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russia’s attempted election interference. (Vice President Joe Biden also attended the Oval Office meeting. Biden made an unmasking request on January 12, 2017, the day David Ignatius at the Washington Post first reported on the Flynn-Kislyak call.)

The real purpose of the meeting, as new evidence suggests, was to discuss how to set up the incoming president and entrap Flynn. After the general briefing, President Obama asked Comey and Sally Yates, the number two at the Justice Department who would serve as acting attorney general until Trump’s appointee was confirmed, to stay behind. (Yates and Comey, it’s worth noting, both signed the initial FISA application on Carter Page.)

That’s when Obama informed Yates about Flynn’s infamous December 29, 2016 phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions. “At that point, Yates had no idea what the president was talking about, but figured it out based on the conversation,” according to the special counsel’s 2017 interview with Yates. “Yates recalled Comey mentioning the Logan Act. It was not clear to Yates from where the President first received the information.”

It now appears that we know the source: McDonough. There are no other unmasking requests between Flynn’s call on December 29, 2016 and the January 5, 2017 meeting.

But that might not have been the only leak tied to McDonough. Mary McCord, former head of the National Security Division that was responsible for seeking the FISA warrants on Page, testified to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that “in theory” the leak to the Washington Post came from the Obama White House.

Igantius’ article first floated the outlandish Logan Act case against Flynn. “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking,” Ignatius wrote. “What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about ‘disputes’ with the United States. Was its spirit violated?”

The illegal leak of classified government information is a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison. The “senior U.S. government official” who tipped off Ignatius about the Flynn-Kislyak call has not yet been identified or charged with a crime.

McDonough’s request is the closest tie between President Obama and the framing of Michael Flynn; as this massive scandal unfolds, Barack Obama still has not been asked a single question about what he knew or when he knew it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/14/obamagate-smashes-media-myth-of-scandal-free-administration/

Despite its many policy failures and foreign affairs disasters, the Obama administration always escaped serious criticism in the media because, we were told, there were no serious scandals during his two terms in office. As just-released documents show, President Barack Obama himself was neck-deep in the silent coup attempt by top U.S. officials at the FBI, Justice Department and CIA.

Another media myth, generated by left-leaning journalists to prop up their favorite politician, bites the dust. How do we know? #ObamaGate is now trending on Twitter, a sure sign of spreading interest in the scandal.

The latest document dump from the trove of secrets that the DOJ and FBI withheld from the public shows that the plot to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency by entrapping his National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn went all the way to the top.

Among the documents is one from the Mueller investigation regarding alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russian officials.

In it, according to the Washington Examiner, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates “told special counsel Robert Mueller’s team (in August of 2017) that she first learned the FBI possessed and was investigating recordings of Flynn’s late 2016 conversations with a Russian envoy following a Jan. 5, 2017, national security meeting at the White House. It wasn’t Comey who told her, but former President Barack Obama.

“Yates, who was briefly the acting attorney general during the early days of the Trump administration before getting fired, also laid out how in the ensuing days, Comey kept the FBI’s actions cloaked in secrecy and repeatedly rebuffed her suggestions that the incoming Trump team be made aware of the Flynn recordings.”

Let that sink in. Comey was investigating a key member of the incoming presidential administration, but didn’t inform the White House about the investigation, apparently at the behest of Obama.

Also attending that meeting, in addition to Yates and Comey, were Vice President Joe Biden, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and others.

Yates says Obama and Comey pulled her aside after the meeting ended to tell her what they were doing, and to keep it quiet.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/when_it_came_to_flynn_it_seems_everyone_on_the_obama_team_wanted_in.html

Thanks to interim Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, we can finally see which people in the Obama administration unmasked General Michael Flynn’s name. Twenty-six names turned up, with some of them making multiple requests. We’ve heard about the big guys (Biden, Brennan, Clapper, etc.), but what’s also interesting is how many people were looking into Flynn who seemingly had no reason to do so. This should disturb us all.

To understand why these many requests point to serious problems in the Obama White House and American intelligence, you have to know how unmasking works. The government routinely spies on written or spoken conversations involving foreign actors. If Americans participate in or are mentioned, their names are considered “incidental” until proven otherwise, and their identities masked to protect their privacy.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/faucis_song_and_dance.html

Dr. Anthony Fauci has never been muzzled by President Trump, as the lamestream media often charged, but maybe he should have been and should be still. Before his tour de farce before the Senate Health Committee, the shy, modest, and unassuming Dr. Fauci emailed a New York Times reporter with a preview of his testimony,  an apocalypse now prediction if we don’t hang on to and follow his sage and expert advice:

Dr. Anthony Fauci emailed New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg Monday night with a preview of his message for a Senate hearing on Tuesday in which he warns of “needless suffering and death” if the country opens “prematurely” from the COVID-19 Chinese coronavirus lockdowns…

Stolberg posted Fauci’s message to Twitter:

“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely. If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”

Or we could just sit here and wait for a vaccine that may or may not come and may or may not work while our economy atrophies and people turn to drugs, alcohol, child abuse, domestic violence and even suicide as their nest eggs dreams, livelihoods evaporates. Many would argue, and I count myself among them, that Fauci’s consistently wrong advice using consistently wrong computer models has led to needless suffering and death.

Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show recently asked Dr. Marty Makary, professor of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. what he thought of Fauci’s performance thus far and his assessment was not good:

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/13/declassified-list-of-obama-officials-who-unmasked-michael-flynn-includes-james-clapper-john-brennan-and-joe-biden/

Eight different Obama administration officials sought to unmask Michael Flynn’s identity from National Security Agency intercepts between December 29 and January 12.

A list of Obama administration officials who sought to unmask intercepted communications involving former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was declassified and released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on Wednesday. The list of officials who asked the National Security Agency to unmask Flynn’s name from certain intercepted communications included former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan, former DNI James Clapper, former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, and former Vice President Joe Biden. The full list was first disclosed online by CBS reporter Catherine Herridge.

“On 8 May 2020 I declassified the enclosed document, which I am providing to you for your situational awareness,” Acting DNI Ric Grenell wrote to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/judges-are-umpires-not-ringmasters-11589387368?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Constitution limits the jurisdiction of federal judges to actual cases and controversies. They may not offer advisory opinions or intrude on executive or legislative powers, except when the other branches have exercised them in an unconstitutional manner. Federal judges are umpires deciding matters about which litigants disagree. If the litigants come to an agreement, there is no controversy. The case is over.

Many judges disapprove of this limitation on their power. Not happy being umpires, they want to be commissioner of baseball. Thus courts have arrogated to themselves powers the Constitution explicitly denies them. They have invented exceptions to give themselves jurisdiction over cases in which there is no longer any controversy between the litigants.

It is against this constitutional background that we should evaluate Judge Emmet Sullivan’s Tuesday order inviting friend-of-the-court briefs advising him whether to accept the prosecution’s motion to dismiss the case against Mike Flynn—a motion to which the defense consents.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-michael-flynn-debauchery-11589410340

Barack Obama is turning into the reverse Oracle of Delphi. He sometimes gets it right for the wrong reasons.

Sensing the populist mood in 2008, he intoned about people “who get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.” Missed in translation was that these “people” thought elites like him were the ones who had separated culturally and politically from mainstream Americans.

Now he says the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against Mike Flynn because of multiple prosecutorial violations of rules protecting defendants’ rights means “the rule of law is at risk.” Right subject, wrong lecture.

Herewith a tutorial. Back in the 1980s, writers for the Journal’s editorial page coined the phrase “inside the Beltway” to describe the moatlike highway around the nation’s capital, whose inhabitants had become politically and psychologically isolated from the rest of the country.

Many Americans then came to believe presidential elections were the one way they could send the Beltway a message. In 2016, we had an Earth-to-Beltway election, whose message was about more than Donald Trump.