RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/11/whistleblower-ties-clinton-campaign-to-fake-russia-hack/

A whistleblower report declassified last week suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign efforts to manufacture evidence tying Donald Trump to alleged Russian hacking in 2016 were deeper than previously known – as were Obama administration efforts to conceal them.

According to the report, a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst who investigated alleged Russian attempts to breach state voting systems during the 2016 election suspected the breaches may have been “related to activities” of the computer contractors involved in the Alfa Bank hoax, who were accused of manipulating Internet traffic data.

In that well-publicized case, a Clinton campaign lawyer worked with federal computer contractors and the FBI to create suspicions that Russia was communicating with Donald Trump through a secret server shared by Alfa Bank of Russia and Trump Tower in Manhattan.

The anonymous whistleblower – who served as the deputy national intelligence officer for cyber issues in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2015 to 2020 – told Special Counsel John Durham he stumbled onto “enigmatic” data while leading the investigation of alleged Russian cyber activity for the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. He said that his discovery took place in December 2016 when President Obama ordered the ICA.

After examining state-reported breaches of election networks, the whistleblower said, “It seemed only brief interaction was occurring – in some cases, no unauthorized access, or even attempted access, was detected on ‘victim’ systems.” Though the suspicious activity initially was attributed to Russian actors, further analysis raised doubts.

But when he brought his findings to his boss, ODNI’s national intelligence officer for cyber issues, he was ordered to stop investigating and not include his findings in the final ICA draft.

“After being directed to conduct analysis of Russian-attributed cyber activity for the ICA, I had been abruptly directed to abandon further investigation,” the whistleblower analyst said.

He added that his boss, whose name was blacked out in the whistleblower statement, “directed me to abandon analysis of these events, stating reports of Russia-attributed cyber activity were ‘something else.’”

While the names of the whistleblower and his boss are blacked out in the report, a RealClearInvestigations search of federal records shows Vinh Nguyen was the national intelligence officer for cyber issues at the time. The whistleblower would have been Nguyen’s deputy.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/08/11/voters-back-investigation-of-obama-white-house-role-in-russiagate-scandal-ii-tipp-poll/

Amid new revelations, spurious Russia collusion charges against President Trump have become both a major scandal and a grand jury investigation. Do voters want top spies in former President Obama’s administration investigated? Yes, the I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The national online poll was conducted from July 30-Aug. 1, with 1,362 adults taking part. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.7 percentage points. I&I/TIPP asked a total of five questions about what has been called “the dirtiest political trick in history,” and worse.

The first question asked: “Do you believe the Obama administration deliberately fabricated the Trump–Russia collusion narrative to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency?”

Among all who answered, 38% said “yes,” while 40% said “no,” a statistical toss-up given the margin of error. Meanwhile another 22% said “not sure,” which means they harbor some suspicions that the statement is true, just not enough yet to believe it.

The political affiliation breakdown is enlightening. Among Democrats, 16% answered yes, and an even-larger portion responded “not sure” to the question. So a third of all Democrats believe there’s at least something to the charges. That leaves only 65% of Dems answering no, they didn’t believe the Obama White House made the scandal.

Not a big vote of confidence from Obama’s own party.

Republicans, perhaps predictably, answered 66% yes, to 16% no, and 16% not sure, while independent voters were 27% yes, 40% no, but a sizable 33% not sure.

Among independents, just 27% said yes while 40% said no and a sizable 33% were not sure.\

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/10/why-derek-chauvin-will-languish-in-prison-regardless-of-the-facts/

I missed Rachel K. Paulose’s column about George Floyd—sorry, Saint George Floyd—when it appeared in The Spectator World at the end of May. Knowing of my interest in the case, a public-spirited individual brought the column to my attention. I thought it was an appalling regurgitation of the established, but erroneous, narrative about the larcenous, drug-and-woman-abusing miscreant George Floyd and the former police officer primarily involved in his arrest.

Paulose is worried that President Trump might pardon Derek Chauvin, the former policeman who is now rotting away in prison for a long list of federal and state crimes, including multiple counts of murder, manslaughter, and “civil rights deprivation.”

Paulose pretends to be concerned about Donald Trump’s legacy among blacks. He has made such impressive inroads with black voters, she notes. Pity to throw it all away by pardoning someone like Derek Chauvin, a brute who all the world knows callously murdered the noble George Floyd in cold blood by kneeling on his neck and depriving him of oxygen. “President Trump,” she writes, “should respect the verdict of the people and protect his own legacy by rejecting the ignoble calls to absolve the fired officer of his guilt.”

Paulose notes with satisfaction that Trump’s pardon power extends only to federal crimes. To be released from prison, Chauvin would also need to secure a pardon or commutation from the governor of Minnesota. Yes, the governor’s office is overdue for a serious upgrade. Currently, however, the position is held by the great hunter and dispenser of feminine hygiene products in boys’ bathrooms, Tim “Nimrod” Walz. The contingency of Walz granting Chauvin a pardon is, as Jeeves might put it, remote.

I wonder whether Derek Chauvin ran over Paulose’s bicycle when she was a little girl? In her column, she hauls out gigantic hairballs of evidence from Chauvin’s trial to remind readers of what a despicable chap he is. Her most prized evidence comes from Dr. Martin J. Tobin, “an internationally renowned doctor, pulmonologist, and academic” (well then!) who testified that “the cause of Floyd’s death was the position in which Chauvin detained him.” “A healthy person subjected to what Mr. Floyd was subjected to,” quotes Dr. Tobin, “would have died.”

Case closed? Not quite. As I noted in The Spectator in 2021,

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/08/08/doj-launches-explosive-grand-jury-investigation-targeting-letitia-james-n4942521

For years, New York Attorney General Letitia James has fancied herself as the scourge of Donald Trump, chasing him with a vengeance to fulfill her campaign promise of getting Trump at any cost. Now, in a stunning turn of events, the Department of Justice has launched a grand jury investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James over her sham civil fraud case against Donald Trump. The partisan hit job that scored James a bloated $454 million judgment against Trump is now facing the heat of federal scrutiny, and the tables may finally be turning.

Beyond the baseless 2022 civil fraud charges she leveled against him, James has been a key player in mounting legal attacks on the current administration’s executive actions. This isn’t about impartial justice; it’s political warfare by another name.

And now James herself is being targeted by federal prosecutors. 

Fox News Digital has the story:

The investigation is being run out of Albany, New York, and focused on possible deprivation of rights allegations, two well-placed sources familiar with the probe told Fox News Digital. 

The investigation is in an early stage, but Fox News Digital has learned that James’s office received subpoenas for documents this week, including for information related to her civil fraud lawsuit against Trump. 

James, a Democrat who was elected attorney general in 2018, has long been a target of Trump. James successfully brought civil charges against him for business fraud in 2022 and has had an instrumental role in challenging his current administration’s executive actions in court. [Fox News Digital]

What we’re seeing play out is the raw, ugly reality of Democrats weaponizing justice in America. James, who made her name by trying to destroy Trump’s business empire, now finds herself the target of federal subpoenas as the DOJ asks tough questions about her own conduct. 

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/09/thanks-obama/

Someday, when today’s young Americans look back in anger at what their country has become—and believe me, they will be angry—they will have their pick of culprits to blame for the sad state of affairs. If there is any justice in the universe, however, they will focus their resentment and frustration on one man: Barack Obama. Although the United States (and the West more generally) had been drifting toward collapse for decades, Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform” the nation were, in retrospect, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Now, to be clear, I’m not referring here to something as small and meaningless as policy, foreign or domestic. As Presidents Trump and Biden amply demonstrated, policy can be changed and then changed back again, over and over and over. To be sure, the effects of these changes may be deleterious, and they may create substantively different outcomes than would have occurred otherwise. For the most part, however, the effects of policy changes are limited and, if corrected, temporary. Obama, for example, may have thrown the entire Middle East into flux and threatened the very future of the planet with his policy of appeasing the Mullahs of Iran, but Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, between them, undid most of that damage and returned the region to its pre-Obama status quo.

And nor am I referring to Obama’s inarguable and inarguably troubling role in the scheme to undermine Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign (and, eventually, his presidency) by painting him as an agent of Russian influence. Russia-gate is ugly and treacherous, and a significant number of players—perhaps including Obama—should be held to account for what they did and how they manipulated the nation’s intelligence apparatus to serve partisan political ends. Some of them—perhaps including Obama—deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison. This “scandal” is far more serious and far more perfidious than any other in American history—save, perhaps, the scandal of saddling the American people with an incoherent and incompetent president for a full four years, while others, still to be named, ran the country surreptitiously.

Nevertheless, Obama’s true offense is even more damning still.

As I have argued in these pages and elsewhere, none of the people who deserve to go to jail for the crimes involved in the scandals noted above will ever actually do so.

https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/douglas-murray-on-political-violence-immigration-and-his-win-in-a-defamation-case

Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. This episode, we’re doing something a little bit different. We thought we’d do an experiment. And so I’m very pleased to be joined by my colleague Douglas Murray. Douglas is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He’s a journalist and the bestselling author of eight books. Now eight books, right? Yeah, I think that’s the total.

Douglas Murray: Right.

Charles Fain Lehman: Including The War on the West, The Madness of Crowds, and his most recent book On Democracies and Death Cults, which came out earlier this year. And we thought… We had the opportunity to pick Douglas’s brain. And so we thought we’d have a one-on-one conversation, talk about some of the issues that have come up on the show, the sort of core to what MI and CJ are interested in, but also that what you’re interested in. So thank you for taking the time.

Douglas Murray: It’s great to be with you.

Charles Fain Lehman: So I want to start us off by turning our attention to, I think, a story that drives to a number of themes. It’s been a big focus of ours at CJ, and I’m curious for your thoughts on. As you may be aware, last week, New Yorkers were shocked by a mass shooting at 345 Park Ave. It took the lives of four New Yorkers, including an NYPD officer, an off-duty NYPD officer, the perpetrator, guy named Shane Tamura, who killed himself during the act. It seems like based on the reporting that has come out since then, he was trying to target the NFL offices in the building. He believed himself to have a football-related injury and was trying to draw attention to that. At least that’s the theory of the case. New details have emerged since we last talked about this on the show, which indicate that he had a long history of mental illness, including two police visits back in Nevada where he’s from over fears he was armed and suicidal.

But part of what has drawn my attention to this story is the internet sort of in the immediate aftermath lit up in celebration of the murder of Wesley LePatner, one of Tamura’s victims, who’s a Blackstone executive who’s involved in their work on real estate. Social media users posted that she had been, I think the phrase is Luigied, evoking Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson. So there are a bunch of different threads that I want to unpack here with you and get your thoughts on.

I think we can start with the story itself. I think there’s something really evocative. My colleague, sometime panelist Jesse Arm raised this to me the other day, which is like, this is a guy who was walking down the street in the middle of Manhattan carrying an assault rifle. Nobody stopped him. He walked into a building. He had a history of serious mental illness. You’ve written about urban disorder, urban dysfunction. You and I have talked about this before. I’m curious about what you see that incident as symbolizing, how you think about how we get to a point where a guy can basically a crazy guy can unchecked kill four people in the middle of Manhattan and this is in some sense is normal.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democratic-socialists-of-america-hold-panel-on-abolishing-the-family/

Earlier this week the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) uploaded to YouTube the video of a panel discussion from its annual Socialism Conference, held in Chicago over Independence Day weekend. For those who hear the term democratic socialism and picture happy Scandinavians living their best lives instead of being chewed up in a capitalist rat race, it’s worth noting that the discussion featured open calls for the abolition of the nuclear family in the United States.

No surprise there. The DSA is not a separate political party but aligns with far Left Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (until they determined she wasn’t pro-Hamas enough) and Independents like lifelong communist Bernie Sanders. Like the Democrat Party itself, the DSA has become increasingly radical with younger generations over the last half century. Their anti-family stance aligns with Karl Marx’s imperative to abolish the family, which is essential to the establishment of his collectivist utopia. Why is it essential? Because Marx and the DSA view the nuclear family to be – as the video description on YouTube declares – “an inherently repressive, racist, and hetero-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism.” So it must be deconstructed, dismantled, and discarded on the ash heap of history.

The panel, titled “The Left and the Family: A Roundtable,” took place on July 4, while patriotic Americans everywhere were celebrating their freedom from tyranny. Socialist ideologues have no time for such unserious recreation; after all, they have an entire, deeply entrenched system of oppression to tear down. As my friend, author Michael Walsh, is fond of pointing out, “The Left never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.”

The all-female panel featured speakers Emily Janakiram of New York City for Abortion Rights, University of Chicago sociologist Eman Abdelhadi, Katie Gibson of the University of Chicago, and long-time BDS activist and Portland DSA member Olivia Katbi. As an aside: of course she is a BDS activist, because the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement designed to permanently destroy Israel as a Jewish nation-state has in recent years become one of the more prominent intersectional goals of socialism; at the DSA national convention in August 2017, for example, the organization passed a resolution explicitly affirming “solidarity with Palestinian civil society’s nonviolent [!] struggle against apartheid, colonialism, [and] military occupation, and for equality, human rights and self-determination.”

In the video (the comments section of which has been turned off, unsurprisingly, because the Left is totalitarian at heart and doesn’t tolerate opposing opinions), Abdelhadi declared that she and her fellow socialists are in a “reactionary, fascist moment” and must keep their eyes on the prize of a “radical liberatory horizon” in which food, housing, education, and child care are collectivized – just as Marx envisioned. She stated that black women and “indigenous communities” – groups that she claimed are “disposable to capitalism” – have already modeled this and the rest of the world should follow suit, as if this sort of collectivization is such a rousing success. She didn’t mention that a disproportionate number of black women have been forced to model this way of life because there is no husband and father in the home, which has proven disastrous for the black community and society at large.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/08/how-intelligence-community-analysis-rules-were-flagrantly-violated-in-the-fraudulent-russia-collusion-intelligence-assessment/

The 2017 Russia ICA wasn’t intelligence—it was political sabotage, rushed and rigged to smear Trump before he even took office, the House report now reveals.

A bombshell House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) Majority Staff Report recently released by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard explains in detail how the rules for drafting intelligence assessments were deliberately ignored to produce a highly politicized Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in early January 2017, designed to sabotage the first  Trump administration.

Worried about the House report’s clarity and persuasiveness, former Obama officials, former intelligence officials, congressional Democrats, and liberal journalists are desperately trying to discredit this report.

President Obama ordered the ICA, titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 Presidential Election,” during a December 9, 2016, meeting with DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others. The ICA was issued less than a month later, on January 6, 2017.

Because ICAs are high-profile analyses of significant national security issues that are supposed to reflect the views of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, they usually take many months – often over a year – to complete. For this reason, the speed with which this ICA was issued sparked immediate controversy.

The Intelligence Community’s tradecraft standards are guidelines taught to all U.S. intelligence analysts to ensure that their analysis reflects analytic rigor and excellence. The House report explains how these standards were set aside to produce this assessment in less than a month and ensure that it had one preordained conclusion: that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election and that Russia meddled in the election to help Trump win.