MEDIA Comments turned off

Oops! Alleged Russian spy Maria Butina met with Obama officials in 2015 By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/oops_alleged_russian_spy_maria_butina_met_with_obama_officials_in_2015.html

Desperate Trump-haters, searching for something – anything! – to show that the Trump administration is in bed with Vladimir Putin seized on the news a week ago that a young Russian named Maria Butina had been indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), or, in the words of the DOJ, for “conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General.”

Here at last was a face – and a red-headed female one, to boot – to attach to the charges of treason being thrown around by the likes of John Brennan.

So intense was the fever that their dream had come true that, as Bre Payton reported in The Federalist:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, members of the media mistook a Trump administration staffer for a Russian spy.

Emily Singer, a senior political reporter for Mic, tweeted out a photo from inside the White House and claimed that Maria Butina, who was charged Monday for conspiring against the U.S. as a secret Russian agent, was among a gaggle of staffers inside the Oval Office. She later realized her mistake and deleted the tweet, but only after it went viral.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

One photo from Israel the liberal media don’t want you to see By Ed Straker

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/one_photo_from_israel_the_liberal_media_dont_want_you_to_see.html

Israel is under attack, as always, this time for passing a law saying Israel is a Jewish state. As if it hadn’t been already. Liberals (among them, shamefully, some Jews) worry for the Arab population of Israel, as if their lives in Israel weren’t 1,000% better than the lives of Arabs in any other Arab nations, who are slaughtering each other by the hundreds of thousands.

Now Israel, which has been providing Syrian civilians with medical care for years during the civil war there, has helped several hundred civil defense workers escape from the Assad regime in an act of pure goodwill to its Arab neighbors.

In a predawn operation on Sunday, the Israeli military’s 210th Bashan Division oversaw the transfer of 422 Syrians from the “White Helmets” rescue organization and their families from the Syrian Golan Heights through Israel to Jordan.

“The families crossed [the fence], at first apprehensively, but once they reached the border, their eyes twinkled from happiness with the knowledge that they’d gotten their lives back. I am happy to be an officer in an army and in a country that is carrying out this mission and expressing the values of humaneness and compassion,” [a] lieutenant colonel said.

“This is the nature of our work and this is a significant moment like no other,” he added.

In recent years, Israel has been engaged in a massive multi-faceted humanitarian relief operation to keep thousands of Syrians along the border from starving or falling ill due to the lack of food and basic medical care.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Satellite Images Indicate North Korea Has Started Dismantling Rocket Launch Site Although some experts have played down the value of any dismantling activity, move is seen as a confidence-building measure by By Jonathan Cheng in Seoul and Michael R. Gordon in Washington

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellite-images-indicate-north-korea-has-started-dismantling-primary-nuclear-test-site-1532390574?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=1&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Satellite imagery shows North Korea has begun taking down its main satellite launch facility, an apparent confidence-building measure by Pyongyang amid concerns about the slow pace of progress on dismantling the country’s nuclear weapons programs.

North Korea has begun to raze its rocket engine test stand and a related building at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station, the country’s primary launch site for rockets since 2012, according to new imagery published Monday by North Korea-focused website 38 North.

The move, which hasn’t yet been announced by North Korea’s state media, is an apparent follow-through on a promise that President Donald Trump said was made to him during his June 12 summit meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In the six weeks since that handshake, concerns have grown about North Korea’s sincerity in fulfilling its pledges as part of the detente—particularly following apparent delays by North Korea in returning the remains of U.S. soldiers killed in the Korean War, the most immediate of the four points agreed to in the Singapore statement.

The moves to dismantle facilities at Sohae, on the country’s northwest coast, in contrast, “represent a significant confidence-building measure on the part of North Korea,” said Joseph Bermudez, an analyst for 38 North.

Mr. Bermudez, relying on commercial satellite imagery from July 20 and 22, said that given the progress of the activity, the dismantling had likely begun in the past two weeks.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Pompeo’s Iran Truth-Telling The President’s tweet distracts from a better speech.

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pompeos-iran-truth-telling-1532388462

Donald Trump’s all caps Twitter warning Sunday night to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani not to “THREATEN” the United States or suffer severe consequences gathered all the media attention on Monday. Which is too bad, because Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a speech Sunday that deserved more notice for speaking the truth about Iran.

Mr. Pompeo explained at the Reagan Presidential Library how the Iranian regime’s zeal to spread Islamic revolution has led its leaders to direct funds to “terrorists, dictators and proxy militias” rather than to the welfare of ordinary Iranians, and he called out Tehran’s corruption by name and example.

Consider Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli’s “lucrative construction and oil trading contracts” with Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked (IRGC) companies. Or Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi, the “Sultan of Sugar,” whose business has generated more than $100 million. Or Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s “own personal, off-the-books hedge fund called the Setad, worth $95 billion,” which is untaxed and serves as a “slush fund for the IRGC.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The FBI’s FISA Faults The documents show the bureau relied heavily on the Steele dossier.

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-fisa-faults-1532388874

The FBI over the weekend finally released its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications for warrants against former Trump aide Carter Page, and now we know why the bureau resisted disclosure. Even in heavily redacted form, the applications confirm that the FBI relied on dubious partisan evidence to justify its warrant and withheld relevant information from the court.

The applications also vindicate the criticism of the FBI’s surveillance requests that were laid out in February by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. The committee’s findings were based on a review of the FISA applications, which were still classified at the time. The main Nunes claim was that the FBI made the Steele dossier—which was commissioned by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee—“an essential” part of its initial application. The FISA documents confirm this.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Can the Center Hold? It Must Solve Immigration First By Alexander Stern

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/07/23/can_the_center_hold_it_must_solve_immigration_first_110723.html

The country seems perpetually stuck in 2016. Pundits and authors continue rehashing what “really” happened in the election. Our president — as he demonstrated once again in Helsinki last week — remains preoccupied with electoral math. The Justice Department continues to grind away on the campaign, emerging every few weeks to send the media into a frenzy. And Republicans are still deciding whether, how, and how much to separate themselves from Trump.

The Democrats seem to be stuck even further back — in 2016 primary season — with their establishment wing trying to beat back a populist surge to its left. Bernie’s latest bounce back took the form of a surprising win by fellow New Yorker and self-described socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, over one-time Speaker hopeful Joe Crowley. Meanwhile, long-time senator Diane Feinstein lost the support of California’s Democratic Party to Kevin de Léon, the challenger to her left, despite crushing him in the primary. Even presidential hopefuls looking ahead to the 2020 primary season have darted left, likely in fear of being outflanked.

In other words, moderate Democrats face in 2018 much the same challenge Hillary Clinton faced in 2016, with populist storms surging on both sides. The difference is that today’s Democrats can learn from Clinton’s mistakes.

New Democracy, an initiative led by the Progressive Policy Institute’s Will Marshall, seeks to do just that. For New Democracy’s recent debut at the Washington Court Hotel, center-left politicians and policy experts exchanged ideas on a new Democratic platform. Speakers included Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who was domestic policy adviser to Bill Clinton. Galston’s talk focused on what he argued is a sine qua non for the center-left’s agenda: sensible immigration policy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FISA Applications Confirm: The FBI Relied on the Unverified Steele Dossier By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/carter-page-fisa-applications-fbi-steele-dossier/

A salacious Clinton-campaign product was the driving force behind the Trump–Russia investigation.

On a sleepy summer Saturday, after months of stonewalling, the FBI dumped 412 pages of documents related to the Carter Page FISA surveillance warrants — the applications, the certifications, and the warrants themselves. Now that we can see it all in black and white — mostly black, as they are heavily redacted — it is crystal clear that the Steele dossier, an unverified Clinton-campaign product, was the driving force behind the Trump–Russia investigation.

Based on the dossier, the FBI told the FISA court it believed that Carter Page, who had been identified by the Trump campaign as an adviser, was coordinating with the Russian government in an espionage conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.

This sensational allegation came from Christopher Steele, the former British spy. The FISA court was not told that the Clinton campaign was behind Steele’s work. Nor did the FBI and Justice Department inform the court that Steele’s allegations had never been verified. To the contrary, each FISA application — the original one in October 2016, and the three renewals at 90-day intervals — is labeled “VERIFIED APPLICATION” (bold caps in original). And each one makes this breathtaking representation:

The FBI has reviewed this verified application for accuracy in accordance with its April 5, 2001 procedures, which include sending a copy of the draft to the appropriate field office(s).

In reality, the applications were never verified for accuracy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s Oakland in Muellerville By Roger Kimball

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/its-oakland-in-muellerville/

I liked what the great Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch had to say about the heavily redacted 400-page DOJ document dump regarding the FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page. It is, he said, a “self-licking ice cream cone.” The image is appropriately surreal.

But the more I think about it, the more I think it is only partially applicable to the whole RussiaGate melodrama we’ve been witnessing for the last year and a half.

Wikipedia defines this autogleipsimous activity as “a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.”

The Mueller investigation and its attendant pseudo-pods in the media and “intelligence community” are indeed self-perpetuating.

But they exhibit a purpose that goes far beyond their own self-perpetuation.

No, in this safari, big game is the object, the end, the purpose, to wit: the destruction of the president of the United States.

That is the true purpose of this charade: not the truth about “Russian meddling,” not alleged wrong doing by Paul Manafort in 2005, not a lack of candor under FBI questioning by George Papadopoulos (who?) or Michael Flynn. The one true purpose (in addition to the welcome subsidiary effect of helping out the ratings of the MSM) is to hobble Donald Trump, a prelude to removing him from office.

There have been hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of words expended on trying the explain the “Russia collusion” narrative. It’s hard to get a handle on because its prime elements keep, er, “evolving.”

Absent any new revelations, I’d say that commentators like Kimberley Strassel and Lee Smith have it right. The whole show started with John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director and Gus Hall-voting Trump hater. It was Brennan, operating on an erroneous tip, who cobbled together rudiments of the Trump-Russia narrative. He couldn’t get anyone to act on his story at first, but he then went to Harry Reid, former Senate majority leader, who lit a fire under James Comey, the disgraced former director of the FBI. CONTINUE AT SITE

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Still Missing: One Arab Altalena… by Gerald A. Honigman

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

It’s been quite some time since I thought about this tragedy. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent comments brought it back onto my brain’s front burner…

YNet News reported on July 8, 2018 that seventy years after theAltalena Affair, Prime Minister Netanyahu stated “not only were the Etzel (Irgun) fallen not traitors, they were patriots of the first degree and acted in the benefit of the State of Israel, with immense effort and great sacrifice.”

The June 1948 confrontation was a nightmare which saw some twenty precious Jewish soldiers lost in patriot-on-patriot fighting for the heart and soul of the newly resurrected Jewish State.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s backtrack a bit…

Even though he’s been out of the picture since 2004, polluting the soil from Jerusalem sprinkled onto his coffin in Ramallah, nothing has really changed regarding the two peoples struggling over rights to this land.

The problem has always extended beyond Yasir Arafat himself. He was simply carrying yet another local banner for a wider, age-old Arabism which–as I like to remind readers–rejects the rights of any (i.e., not just Jews) of the scores of millions of non-Arab peoples who were conquered in a region Arabs call purely Arab patrimonyand the Dar ul-Islam… among other things, the Arab-Israeli conflict in a nutshell.

To expand on this important point (especially for those who specialize in singling Israel), Arabs have treated all would-be national competitors similarly–with, admittedly, a bit more disdain for Jews. The latter were subjected to additional vilification in the Qur’an and other religious teachings of Islam for rejecting, from the very beginning, Muhammad’s religio-political claims–despite his overtures to the Jews (like praying towards Jerusalem) in the date palm oasis founded by them in Medina to which he fled from enemies in Mecca (the Hijra)… Geez, now why does that sound somewhat familiar? Ponder that a bit.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

How Far Will the Left Go? by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

There was no honeymoon for the unlikely winner of the 2016 election. Progressives have in succession tried to sue to overturn Trump’s victory using several different approaches. First on the bogus claim of fraudulent voting machines. Then they sought to subvert the Electoral College by bullying electors into renouncing their respective states’ votes.

Massive protests and boycotts marked the inauguration. Then there were articles of impeachment introduced in the House. Some sued to remove Trump on a warped interpretation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Others brought in psychiatrists to testify that Trump was ill, disabled, or insane and should be removed in accordance with the 25th Amendment. The former FBI director, CIA director, and director of the Office of National Intelligence have variously smeared the president as a coward, a traitor, and a Russian mole.

The Mueller Investigation

We are about 430 days into Robert Mueller’s investigation; the special prosecutor whose team of lawyers and investigators has in a large part been made up either of Clinton donors, clear Clinton partisans, lawyers who have in the past represented Clinton interests or employees, or partisans already removed for expressing clear Trump hatred. The media grew ecstatic over its creation, dubbing it an “all-star” or “dream” team, as leaks assured the public that next week, next month, or “soon” there would be a sensational indictment proving that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the presidency.

We have gone through the psychodramas surrounding Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and a host of others. Any second, any minute they would be indicted for collusion in throwing an election, or they would soon flip and end the Trump presidency.