RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.