NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The FBI’s Hillary email probe is looking even more like a coverup Paul Sperry

Posted By on September 29th, 2016

It’s bad enough that FBI Director James Comey agreed to pass out immunity deals like candy to material witnesses and potential targets of his investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal private e-mail server.

But now we learn that some of them were immunized despite lying to Comey’s investigators.

In the latest bombshell from Congress’ probe into what’s looking more and more like an FBI whitewash (or coverup) of criminal behavior by the Democratic nominee and her aides, the Denver-based tech who destroyed subpoenaed e-mails from Clinton’s server allegedly lied to FBI agents after he got an immunity deal.
That’s normally a felony. As a federal prosecutor, Comey tossed Martha Stewart in jail for it and helped convict Scooter Libby for it as well. Yet the key Clinton witness still maintained his protection from criminal prosecution.

With Comey’s blessing, Obama prosecutors cut the deal with the e-mail administrator, Paul Combetta, in 2015 in exchange for his full cooperation and honest testimony. But the House Judiciary Committee revealed Wednesday that he falsely told agents in a Feb. 18 interview that he had no knowledge that e-mails he bleached from the server were under congressional orders to be preserved as evidence.

In a second interview on May 3, Combetta admitted he, in fact, did know. But he still refused to reveal what he discussed with Clinton’s former aides and lawyer during a 2014 conference call about deleting the e-mails.

Instead of asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch to revoke his immunity deal and squeezing him, Comey let him go because he was a “low-level guy,” he testified at the House hearing. It’s yet another action by Comey that has left former prosecutors shaking their heads.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Let’s Lock The Door To Islam by Geert Wilders

Posted By on September 29th, 2016

Yesterday, I visited Maassluis. It is a town near Rotterdam, where the indigenous Dutch inhabitants have become the victims of immigrant youths of Moroccan descent.

Cars have been demolished, houses vandalized, people threatened. The Dutch no longer feel free and safe in their own city. When the local radio station interviewed some of the victims and referred to the perpetrators as Moroccans, it received an anonymous letter: “You are racists! Your time will come! I won’t take care of it because I am too old. But our boys are the new soldiers.”

Maassluis. It is just one of the many Dutch towns and neighborhoods terrorized by Moroccan or Turkish youth gangs. Others are Schilderswijk, Oosterwei, Kanaleneiland, Zaandam, Helmond. Not surprisingly, a poll shows that 43% of the Dutch people want fewer Moroccan immigrants in our country. These people are not racists; they are decent people, patriots who love their country and do not want to lose it.

The great Ronald Reagan once said that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” These wise words are more true today than ever before. We are the free men and women of the West.

Freedom is our birthright. But if we fail to defend it, we are bound to lose it. And, sadly, that is exactly what is happening today.

2016’s Black Summer of Jihad, with terror attacks all over the free world, teaches us that the enemies of freedom are already among us. The ruling elites all over the Western world have accepted millions of people into our countries without demanding that they assimilate.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Georgetown University’s Errant Priest-Professor : Andrew Harrod

Posted By on September 29th, 2016

Who writes of the “stubborn, feckless resistance of Hamas,” an anti-Israeli jihadist terrorist group? Astonishingly, it is Georgetown University ethics professor and Catholic priest Drew Christiansen, a man like many Georgetown academics who pairs distinguished credentials with abiding antipathy towards Israel and apologetics for Islam.

Christiansen is the former Jesuit weekly America’s editor-in-chief and director of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Office of International Justice and Peace. His resume can thus impart considerable authority to his causes. Accordingly, he recently addressed on September 12 yet another event against “Islamophobia” at Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).

Notwithstanding Christiansen’s erudite pedigree, his views concerning Islam and Israel are not at all nuanced. His priestly colleague, the late eminent conservative scholar and commentator FatherRichard John Neuhaus, already discerned in 2008 that America “under its editor, Fr. Drew Christiansen, has an apparently irrepressible urge to engage in bashing Israel.” The same outlook dominates a National Catholic Reporter blog column begun in 2014 by him and his coauthor Ra’fat Aldajani, described by Christiansen as a “Palestinian-American who represents the majority Palestinian view.”

The pair unequivocally describe Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as the “West’s last colonial war.” Apparently oblivious to longstanding Arab attempts to destroy an Israel condemned as illegitimate, these authors claim that “Israeli occupation of Palestinian land” after Israel’s 1967 Six Day War victory is the “root cause of the conflict.” This occupation is “illegal,” they proclaim, even though it resulted from Israel’s defensive war and is legitimated by United Nations Security CouncilResolution 242. As properly interpreted, this resolution calls upon Israel to make undefined territorial withdrawals while receiving in return “secure and recognized boundaries.”

Not heeding Israeli legal claims to the Jewish ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria captured by Israel in 1967, Aldajani and Christiansen deem Israeli settlements here “more properly ‘colonies’ as the French call them.” This Israeli “predatory land grab” also includes Jerusalem and “Israel’s illegal and internationally rejected claim” to the entire city unified by Israel’s 1967 victory. “No amount of insisting that all of Jerusalem is Israel’s ‘undivided and eternal capital’ will change the reality that it never will be,” the pair writes, who call for renewed division of the city into the capitals of Israel and a future Palestinian state.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary failed as secretary of state – why would president be any different? By: Betsy McCaughey

Posted By on September 29th, 2016

Hillary Clinton boasts that her experience traveling to 112 countries as secretary of state qualifies her to be president. Don’t believe it.http://nypost.com/

Evidence shows she left the State Department in shambles and our nation weaker. Her record at Foggy Bottom disqualifies her to be president.

Her failures go beyond leaving four Americans to die in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, the ridiculous Russian “reset” and the carnage in Syria that she and President Obama idly watched unfold – and that gets more horrific daily.

A string of investigative reports from the Obama administration shows that she botched key management jobs as secretary of state, threatening American lives and our diplomatic secrets.

Clinton’s State Department repeatedly rebuffed requests for additional security for the vulnerable compound at Benghazi, Libya. The result? Heavily armed terrorists were able to storm the compound and kill Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

But Benghazi wasn’t an isolated case. Clinton failed to secure diplomatic posts in Pakistan, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and other global hot spots. Internal State Department reports show the posts lacked emergency plans in case of attack. Guards assigned to them had no training in chemical or biological threats and, amazingly, some hadn’t undergone background checks.

Clinton tried to weasel out of taking the blame for Benghazi, testifying to Congress that she wasn’t personally involved in embassy security. But e-mails later revealed that was false.

Investigators also point to Clinton’s total neglect of cybersecurity. The Bush administration – reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center – had made it a top priority to protect information flow among embassies, the CIA and the FBI.

But Clinton dropped the ball, creating what the department’s inspector general called “undue risk in the management of information.”

In November 2013, the IG issued an alert to the State Department’s top executives about the urgent “recurring weaknesses” in cybersecurity that had been red-flagged in six previous reports between 2011 and 2013, almost all on Clinton’s watch. The “recurring weaknesses” had still not been addressed, including vulnerabilities to hackers.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Lejla Colak Video: What My Experience With Islam Tells Me About “Islamophobia”.

Posted By on September 29th, 2016

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/09/29/lejla-colak-video-what-my-experience-with-islam-tells-me-about-islamophobia/

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary’s Talk of ‘Implicit Bias’ Should Scare Every American This is a road we don’t want to travel. By David French

Posted By on September 28th, 2016

You’re guilty and you don’t know it. Sure, you think you’re a decent person who treats people fairly, judging them on the content of their character and not the color of the skin. But let’s face it: You’re deluded. Especially if you happen to be white, you’re biased and you don’t even know it. You’re unaware of your own privilege, and of the extent to which your beliefs, speech, and even mannerisms oppress people of color. It’s time to confess. It’s time to be re-educated. It’s time to rid yourself of your false consciousness.

This is the message of the modern campus radical, of the diversity trainer, and, increasingly, of the Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton.

Like many of the most dangerous progressive ideas, “implicit bias” or “unconscious racism” seems reasonable enough at first glance: Aren’t we all shaped by our environment and upbringing to make snap judgments about people? Aren’t those judgments often wrong? Couldn’t we all use exposure to different cultures and ideas to help us get past preconceived notions and casual bigotries? What could be wrong with that?

Indeed, in the debate Monday night, Clinton framed her discussion of “implicit bias” as a malady we all suffer from, telling Lester Holt: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other.” Well, yes, too many people do jump to conclusions. So, what’s the solution, Hillary?

When it comes to policing, since it can have literally fatal consequences, I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers.

Wait. What? If we’re all biased, who’s training whom? Let’s be very clear: When it moves from abstract to concrete, all this talk about “implicit bias” gets very sinister, very quickly. It allows radicals to indict entire communities as bigoted, it relieves them of the obligation of actually proving their case, and it allows them to use virtually any negative event as a pretext for enforcing their ideological agenda.

Is this overblown? Well, let’s look at how Clinton has used “implicit bias” to deal with a specific incident: the shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Okla.:

Hillary Clinton comments on #TerenceCruthcher on @SteveHarveyFM: “How many times do we have to see this in our country?” Full: pic.twitter.com/MdCbvHjHF5
— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) September 20, 2016

This is extraordinarily irresponsible. How does Hillary possibly know that Crutcher’s shooting had anything at all to do with race? I don’t recall her being in Tulsa that night. There is no “we” about a police officer’s decision to pull the trigger. So why are we talking about collective guilt?

Ah, but that’s the magic of “implicit bias” and “unconscious racism.” Skepticism of its existence is proof of its existence, and you can just “know” that Crutcher or Philando Castile or Michael Brown or Keith Scott would be alive today if they had been white. In other words, the very existence of the incident proves the racism. The denials of racism prove the racism. And everyone who’s “keeping score” or “gets it” knows the real truth.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Gowdy Rips FBI Director Comey: This is ‘Not the FBI That I Used to Work With’ By Debra Heine

Posted By on September 28th, 2016

FBI Director James Comey returned to the Hill for a third time Wednesday to defend the integrity of the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email setup, and for a third time he encountered dubious Republicans who peppered him with questions to which he didn’t always have a satisfying answer.

Via Politico:

“You can call us wrong, but don’t call us weasels. We are not weasels,” Comey declared Wednesday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. “We are honest people and … whether or not you agree with the result, this was done the way you want it to be done.”

The normally stoic FBI chief grew emotional and emphatic as he rejected claims from Republican lawmakers that the FBI was essentially in the tank for Clinton when it recommended that neither she nor any of her aides be prosecuted in connection with the presence of classified information on Clinton’s private email server. He acknowledged he has “no patience” for such allegations.

“I knew there were going to be all kinds of rocks thrown, but this organization and the people who did this are honest, independent people. We do not carry water for one side or the other. That’s hard for people to see because so much of our country, we see things through sides,” Comey said. “We are not on anybody’s side.”

Congressman Trey Gowdy was one of the Republicans trying to get some answers regarding the integrity of the FBI investigation.

He started off by dryly “acknowledging progress” in the Clinton email matter.

Referring to the House Judiciary Committee hearing, he quipped, “This morning we’ve had nine straight Democrats talk to the FBI about emails without asking for immunity.”

“You and I had a discussion last time about intent,” the South Carolina firebrand told Director Comey. “You and I see the statute differently. My opinion doesn’t matter — yours does, you’re the head of the bureau…but in my judgement, you read an element into the statute that does not appear on the face of the statute.”

The former prosecutor agreed that “intent” is often very hard to prove.

“Very rarely do defendants announce ahead of time, ‘I intend to commit this crime on this date. Go ahead and check the code section, I’m gonna do it,'” Gowdy pointed out.

He added, “That rarely happens so you have to prove it by circumstantial evidence.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Republicans Criticize FBI Director Over Recent Terrorist Incidents The Homeland Security Secretary says the landscape has become more unpredictable. By David Fishman

Posted By on September 28th, 2016

Republican senators sharply criticized FBI director James Comey Tuesday for his agency’s handling of recent terrorism incidents, including a bombing in New York and a shooting in an Orlando nightclub.

“Let’s just admit we’re not perfect and we made mistakes here,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on global terrorism. “Because if we don’t admit to mistakes we’re not going to get better.”

Paul said the FBI should make better use of existing tools instead of requesting more power. In addition, he suggested officials keep investigations open longer to prevent potential terrorists from slipping through the cracks after inquiries are closed — citing recent incidents as examples.
Comey defended the agency’s handling of both attacks and pledged transparency. But he did not concede to missing important details in either ca

“Sitting before you is a deeply flawed and fallible human being who believes deeply in admitting mistakes when they’re made,” Comey said.

In 2014, FBI officials investigated Ahmad Rahami — the 28-year-old accused of setting off bombs earlier this month in New York and New Jersey — but found no links to terrorism and subsequently dropped their case. The FBI also investigated and questioned Orlando gunman Omar Mateen several years prior to his June rampage.

Appearing with Comey, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the landscape of terrorism has become less predictable and more dangerous since the 9/11 attacks in 2001. We have moved from a world of “terrorist-directed attacks” to one in which internet propaganda and self-radicalization take center stage, Johnson said.

Johnson pointed to recent bombings as examples of the “evolving” threat of homegrown extremism and the imperative of working more closely with community leaders.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Devlin Barrett: FBI Director Defends Agency’s Actions in Clinton Email Probe James Comey says FBI weren’t ‘weasels’ in Clinton investigation

Posted By on September 28th, 2016

The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation sparred repeatedly with Republican lawmakers Wednesday as they questioned the handling of the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State.

The FBI announced in July that investigators found extremely careless conduct in Mrs. Clinton’s handling of sensitive government information under the email arrangement, but also concluded that no reasonable prosecutor would have brought a case under the circumstances. Conservatives have been highly critical of the FBI for not pursuing the case more aggressively and for not recommending prosecution of Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president.

That criticism has intensified in recent days when it was revealed that the Justice Department granted partial immunity to some witnesses, including Clinton aide and attorney Cheryl Mills, to get access to data or testimony.

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, James Comey bristled at times when lawmakers suggested his agency gave Mrs. Clinton or her people a pass on conduct that would have merited charges for low-level government employees.

“We are not on anybody’s side. This was done exactly the way you would want it to be done,’’ Mr. Comey said. Partial and limited grants of immunity were given, he said, to get a laptop from a lawyer or testimony from a technology worker who otherwise refused to talk to investigators.

“You can call us wrong, but don’t call us weasels. We are not weasels,’’ said Mr. Comey, who served as deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Comey’s Immunity Deals Plus, the real story on stop-and-frisk. By James Freeman

Posted By on September 28th, 2016

FBI Director James Comey appears Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee. The big question is why—if he believes Hillary Clinton committed no prosecutable offense—he has given immunity deals to no fewer than five Clinton associates. A Journal editorial cites Beth Wilkinson, who represents Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, saying the immunity deals were designed to protect her clients against “classification” disputes. “This is an admission that both women knew their unsecure laptops had been holding sensitive information for more than a year,” adds the editorial board.
Donald Trump is right about the “stop and frisk” police tactic and on Monday night he was “unfairly second-guessed by a moderator who didn’t give the viewing public all the facts,” notes a separate editorial. NBC’s Lester Holt and Mrs. Clinton called the tactic unconstitutional. “They are wrong,” adds former prosecutor and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani . “Stop and frisk is constitutional and the law of the land,” based on an 8-1 decision of the Supreme Court, Terry v. Ohio .

Speaking of Monday night’s debate, Jason Riley saw it as a clear Clinton victory and so did William Galston. But Holman Jenkins says the event helped clarify that this election “will resolve into very flawed outsider vs. very flawed insider—and will be decided by the American people in that vein.”