RUTHFULLY YOURS

The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service on Wednesday denied that he ordered his staff to destroy thousands of emails sought by Congress in 2014 during its investigation into the IRS targeting scandal.

Unapologetic and defiant two years ago, John Koskinen appeared very subdued and contrite today as he expressed “regret” for making incorrect statements during his testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2014. “Some of my testimony later proved mistaken,” Koskinen conceded. But he insisted that he had testified honestly to the best of his knowledge at the time.

Via the Washington Examiner:

Republicans on the judiciary panel slammed Koskinen for presiding over the destruction of backup tapes that housed Lerner’s emails.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, highlighted the “coincidence” that occurred when documents that had sat untouched for two years disappeared off the tapes shortly after investigators requested copies.

Koskinen faces potential impeachment at the hands of House conservatives over his handling of the IRS targeting probe, particularly over his pledge to provide emails that had already been erased at the time of his testimony.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) asked Koskinen about his false statement under oath that “every email has been preserved.”

“What did you mean by every email?” Gowdy asked.

“I meant that every email that the IRS had that I knew of had been preserved,” Koskinen stated. “That was my honest belief.”

“Well why didn’t you say that?” Gowdy pressed.

“Well — If I knew then what I know now, I would have testified differently,” said Koskinen. “But at the time, I testified honestly about what I knew and what I’d been told. Nobody regrets more than I do that in some ways this case has been the case that keeps on giving with more information coming out. I wish that all the information had been put out to begin with,” he added.

“It is always always an option to answer,’I don’t know,'” Gowdy said. “Loretta Lynch has made a living of saying ‘I don’t know.'”

He added, “But you were incredibly definitive. You said nothing had been lost. What did you mean by nothing?”

Koskinen answered: “I meant at that time that I had been advised ‘nothing,’ but you’re exactly right, in retrospect, I would have been better advised to say ‘to the best of my knowledge,’ or ‘on the basis of what I’ve been told’ — which was in fact the basis of my testimony.”

Images released of the journal of Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspected NY-NJ bomber, show mention of a recently killed ISIS leader, but that reference is curiously missing from the federal indictment filed against him yesterday.

Is the Justice Department again trying to hide an obvious ISIS connection or inspiration from this past weekend’s attacks, just as they did when they censored Orlando mass killer Omar Mateen’s pledge to ISIS?

Reporters began showing pages of Rahami’s journal earlier today:

First look at bloody journal discovered with alleged bomber Ahmad Rahami, this page cites Al Qaeda & ISIS leaders pic.twitter.com/AT9VsZS9qu

— Mike Levine (@MLevineReports) September 21, 2016

One of the references on the page is to “Brother Adnani,” an ISIS leader killed in a U.S. drone strike just a few weeks ago.

Media reports place Adnani at the head of the ISIS unit responsible for conducting external terror attacks.

Terror expert Tom Joscelyn noted the Adnani mention, as well as other ISIS-related items, from Rahami’s journal.

It appears from notes written by captured New York bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami that he was motivated by ISIS orders to carry out attacks inside America.

A newly released FBI complaint reveals a passage from a journal Rahami kept that contains “a reference to the instructions of terrorist leaders that, if travel is infeasible, to attack nonbelievers where they live.”

While the terrorist leaders are not identified in the complaint, it quotes fragments of a related passage: ” … back to sham [Syria.] But [unintelligible] this incident show the risk are [unintelligible] of getting caught under [unintelligible].”

It’s not immediately known if Rahami attempted to travel to Syria and join ISIS and its jihad there. But for the past several months, ISIS has called on its supporters to strike in the West if they were prevented from traveling to the lands of the so-called caliphate, including Syria and Iraq.

In May, ISIS spokesman Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani advised followers that if American and other Western authorities “have shut the door of hijrah [migration] in your faces,” then “open the door of jihad in theirs.” In his notes, Rahami appears to comply with the plan, praying to Allah to help him carry out “jihad” at home without interference from “the F.B.I. & homeland security.” He started ordering bomb components in June.

“Make your deed a source of their regret,” said al-Adnani, who was killed earlier this month. “Truly, the smallest act you do in their lands is more beloved to us than the biggest act done here; it is more effective for us and more harmful to them.”

Added al-Adnani: “If one of you wishes and strives to reach the lands of the Islamic State, then each of us wishes to be in your place to make examples of the crusaders, day and night, scaring them and terrorizing them, until every neighbor fears his neighbor.”

Adnani told would-be jihadists they should “not make light of throwing a stone at a crusader in his land,” nor should they “underestimate any deed, as its consequences are great for the mujahidin and its effect is noxious to the disbelievers.”

In its latest issue of Dabiq magazine, “Break the Cross,” the Islamic State encourages Muslims in the West who are unable to migrate to “the Caliphate” to “serve a much greater purpose” by striking “behind enemy lines.”

“The blood of the disbelievers is obligatory to spill by default. The command is clear. Kill the disbelievers, as Allah said, ‘Then kill the polytheists wherever you find them,'” the magazine said.

“As they haphazardly kill Muslims in their war against the mujahidin,” it exhorted, “it becomes even more obligatory for you to attack the Crusader nations and their citizens in their homelands.”

Those who believe that sharia law trumps the Constitution should not be allowed in. And those who look the other way should never become president of the United States.
Hillary Clinton, responding to the knife attack in a St. Cloud, Minnesota mall for which ISIS took credit and the bombing in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood by a gay-hating Afghan-born Islamist who was a naturalized American citizen, warned us about the dangers if radical Islamic terrorism, but of intolerance to Muslim-Americans:

“[L]et us remember, there are millions and millions of naturalized citizens in America from all over the world. There are millions of law-abiding peaceful Muslim Americans,” Clinton said.

Yes, Hillary, there are a lot of naturalized American citizens, including the 858 from what are euphemistically called “special interest countries”, naturalized by “mistake” due to the use of multiple identities and fingerprints not digitized in any database. This speaks to Donald Trump’s about a cessation of admitting refugees from these countries until we know what we’re doing. Clearly we do not. What other mistakes are being made that will naturalize the next Mohammed Atta?

Dzhokhar Tsanaev became a naturalized citizen before he and his brother used pressure cookers to bomb the Boston Marathon. Ahmad Khan Rahami became a naturalized citizen before he became a jihadi Johnny Appleseed, planting pipe and pressure cooker bombs in New Jersey and New York neighborhoods. Both in effect took up arms against the United States and its citizens, which one would think amounts to a renunciation of their U.S. citizenship. Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled repeatedly to Dagestan and Chechnya, once spending six months there. Rahami traveled to Afghanistan, returning radicalized. Did anyone care to monitor their movements and motives? Hillary says if you see something, say something, yet is the first to cry “profiling” and “Islamophobia” when we monitor Islamist activities and conduct surveillance radical mosques. The San Bernardino shooters could have been stopped if a neighbor had not been intimidated by political correctness into not reporting their suspicious activity.

There are those who warn against trading liberty for safety and protecting the Constitutional rights of naturalized American citizens. Well, my Constitution has a clause about protecting the rights of all American citizens against our enemies, foreign and domestic. We have a right not o be killed. Naturalized citizens are invited to be American citizens on condition of their loyalty to this country and its beliefs. They do not have a “right” to be here.

There are those who remind us that the Statue of Liberty invites the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We indeed invite those to America who wish to become American, but not those who live in Islamist enclaves in places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis. We are Americans who yearn to keep on breathing, unimpeded by shrapnel from exploding pressure cookers, or being stabbed at the mall by an Islamist who sees America as an infidel waiting to be slain.