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JUNE 2017- THE MONTH THAT WAS…SYDNEY WILLIAMS

Posted By on July 5th, 2017

With June behind us, so is the first half of 2017, a year that seems to have just begun, yet which has brought so much news.

Mainstream media has assumed a Potemkin village-like stance – twisting news to corroborate a prescribed narrative. James Comey’s testimony before the Senate (see my TOTD “The Dystopian World of James Comey,” June 19, 2017) began as an investigation into alleged Russian interference in last year’s election, but then had to adjust, as Comey suggested that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch needed scrutinizing for persuading him to refer to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server as a “matter.” Muddying the waters further, it was disclosed that then President Obama tried to put a lid on probing Russian interference last fall, when it seemed probable that Mrs. Clinton would win the Presidency. In Georgia’s sixth district, Republican Karen Handel overcame a $30 million spending campaign by Democrat Jon Ossoff to keep Tom Price’s seat in Republican hands. DNC Chair Tom Perez blamed the loss on gerrymandering, while mainstream media took succor from the fact that Democrats narrowed the size of the loss; though they skipped over the inconvenient fact that Congressional wins in Georgia and South Carolina were by wider margins than that achieved by the President in November.

The Senate healthcare bill was released by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but a full vote in the Senate was delayed until after the July 4th recess. Unilateralism, as we saw in the previous Administration, encourages partisanship. In 2009, with 60 Democrat Senators, it took 18 months to pass the Affordable Care Act, and it was passed without a single Republican vote. The insufferable Nancy Pelosi, then House Speaker, said we would have to pass the bill to see what was in it. The American people would like the Party’s to work together, but the media knows that bad news (partisanship and bickering) sells better than good news (reconciliation and concessions). In the meantime, the Affordable Care Act is in trouble. An article in the June 9th The New York Times reported that by next year no insurance companies would be operating in 45 counties in the U.S., and that 1,388 counties will only have one plan. For left-leaning Democrats, the only option to a failing ObamaCare is a single-payer system – socialized medicine. For right-leaning Republicans, the only answer is repeal, and replace later. Neither is good. The best would be for the two Party’s to find a bipartisan path – seek common ground, fix what needs to be fixed, eliminate what’s wrong, work on tort reform and allow insurance companies to compete across state borders. But that is not what Party leaders want, nor is it what the media prefers.

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Inflexible Progressivism: The Rise of a New Dogma

Posted By on July 5th, 2017

By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

As a young man coming from a left-wing pedigree, I embraced a liberal agenda which included most notably, a belief in Israel as a bastion of socialism and democracy. In the 1950’s a good progressive was a good Zionist.

Oh, how the world has changed. Now a progressive has moved 180 degrees to anti-Zionist position. As one wag put it, the Left is now the congenial home of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. One of the leaders of the progressive left recently said, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

Linda Sarsour, the leader of the Woman’s March in Washington and a commencement speaker at the City University of New York clearly embodies the new spirit on the Left. She has praised Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, once anathema to liberals. She has honored Embrased Rasmesh Odeh, a terrorist murderer. She has spoken in favor of Sharia finance.

What is truly remarkable, and to some degree ideologically shattering, is that the New York Times wrote a fawning profile about this woman who challenges all liberal principles. She had the audacity to say that “the vagina of Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be taken away,” the same Ayaan who has worked so hard to promote women’s rights throughout the Muslim world. Yet the ADL defends Sarsour.

For the Left, Zionism has promoted Islamophobia – a false critique from the standpoint of Islamists. As a consequence, anti-Semitism is rendered a virtue, as a way to discourage negative sentiment about Islam. Yet even when the evidence of anti-Semitism is incontrovertible, the Left contends anti-Semitism is a figment of an hysterical, oversensitive imagination. For the most part, Jews are being systematically written out of the progressive agenda, even though they were responsible for that agenda in the first place. But why quibble.

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North Korea’s Fireworks By Claudia Rosett

Posted By on July 5th, 2017

While Americans were celebrating Independence Day, North Korea test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, with a potential range that some experts estimate could reach the United States. As The Wall Street Journal reports, in an editorial headlined “The North Korean Missile Crisis”:

Tuesday’s missile, dubbed the Hwasong-14, has an estimated range of 6,700 kilometers, which puts Alaska within range. America’s lower 48 states may still be out of reach, but the test shows the North has overcome most of the obstacles to a long-range missile.

Enough, already. There is no safe way to end the North Korean menace, but the threats from Kim Jong Un’s regime are amplifying at a clip that suggests it is even more dangerous to allow the Kim regime to carry on. While the world has watched, for years — and while the United Nations Security Council has passed one sanctions resolution after another — North Korea has not only been carrying out ballistic missile and nuclear tests, but enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium to amass ever more bomb fuel. As the Journal editorial also notes, North Korea by now “has an estimated 20 nuclear warheads as well as chemical and biological weapons.”

The threat is not solely that North Korea — well versed in shakedown rackets — could target the U.S. with nuclear-tipped ICBMs, or that North Korea can add nuclear weapons to the massive arsenal with which it has long threatened Seoul.

A further danger is that North Korea could proliferate its advancing nuclear missile technology, or even the weapons themselves, to other rogue states, such as Iran — with which Pyongyang has trafficked and cooperated for decades in missile development, and according to some press accounts (please see my discussion of reporting by Douglas Frantz), in nuclear weapons development as well.

The Pyongyang regime was part of Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, supplied taboo nuclear-related materials to Qaddafi’s Libya, and has a record of proliferating nuclear technology (the clandestine Al-Kibar reactor built with North Korean help in Syria, destroyed by a 2007 Israeli air strike). It is alarmingly plausible that when Pyongyang brags up its missile and nuclear tests, the global headlines double as North Korean advertising to actors around the globe who might be interested in North Korea’s illicit wares.

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MY SAY: A PAEAN TO AMERICA ON JULY 4TH

Posted By on July 4th, 2017

On July 4, 1776 our young nation declared independence from England with the immortal words:

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness……”

Nine years later our magnificent founding fathers held the Constitutional Convention from May 25th, 1787 until September 17th of that year which concluded with what I call “The Torah” of our democracy, namely the Constitution whose preamble reads:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The first ten amendments were proposed by Congress in 1789, at their first session and became a part of the Constitution December 15, 1791, and are known as the Bill of Rights.

For a little perspective on the magnitude of these events, in June of 1793 until August 1, 1974 France was subjected to a “reign of terror” – thousands of death sentences and bloody executions for opposition to the Revolution. In England public executions attracted large crowds of spectators, including tots, until 1868.

America remains a more perfect union and we retain the rights formulated in the First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petitition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

And the irony is that those who take every measure promised in the foregoing, are now doing their best to violate real liberalism and democracy. But, our great nation will prevail. Happy birthday to America the best land of all…..rsk

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The Death Spiral of Socialism By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on July 4th, 2017

The total abrogation of personal autonomy for the parents of baby Charlie Gard as courts in the United Kingdom and in Europe simultaneously and arbitrarily decided what his parents can and cannot do for their extremely ill child is another symptom of the chilling or, should I say, killing world of socialism.

In his 2004 collection of readings for the humanities titled Being Human, editor Leon Kass writes about Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky who was held in the USSR as a political prisoner from 1963 until his release in 1976. Kass writes that “Bukovsky reflects on the ‘soul of man under socialism,’ this ‘new type of man’ who is subject to totalitarian rule.” Bukovsky ponders what it “means to retain one’s human dignity as a citizen of a state” when socialists demand a dream of universal equality while ensuring the “suppression and ultimate destruction of the individual, in body and in spirit.”

And while the pervasive rallying cry of socialists is “equality,” Bukovsky writes that “the defining characteristics of a socialist regime is that ‘the individual may not possess the least inalienable right’ and that the system requires ‘slaves, not conscious citizens.'”

Thus, “the regime is immovable, infallible, and intransigent, and the entire world is left with no choice but to accommodate itself to this fact.”

Despite the fact that the Gards raised money to continue treatment for their baby, the European powers-to-be have denied them this choice. To add salt to the wound, they cannot even take their child home to die.

Ms. Yates said: ‘We’ve been talking about what palliative care meant. One option was to let Charlie go home to die. We chose to take Charlie home to die. That is our last wish. We promised our little boy every single day that we would take him home.’

His father Chris, 32, said: ‘Our parental rights have been stripped away. We can’t even take our own son home to die. We’ve been denied that. Our final wish [was] if it all went against us can we take our little boy home to die and we are not allowed.

‘They even said no to a hospice.’

The couple, who have previously lost battles in the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, claim they also asked doctors to allow them a final weekend with Charlie but say this request has been denied.

‘We begged them to give us the weekend,’ Ms. Yates said, ‘Friends and family wanted to come and see Charlie for the last time. But now there isn’t even time for that. Doctors said they would not rush to turn off his ventilator but we are being rushed.

‘Not only are we not allowed to take our son to an expert hospital to save his life, we also can’t choose how or when our son dies.’

Bukovsky writes that in “a regime of terror the individual cannot have any rights — the least inalienable right possessed by a single individual instantly deprives the regime of a morsel of power. Every individual from childhood on must absorb the axiomatic fact that never in any circumstances or by any means will he be able to influence the regime one jot.”

In fact, “socialized medicine’s killing isn’t just about money, but power.” As Daniel Greenfield explains, “it would have cost the NHS less to allow his parents to take Charlie to America” but this would have sent the “message that socialized medicine is flawed.” It would expose the horrible underbelly of the socialist regime.

Yet far too many still do not understand that we can never “acquire freedom and security, until we refuse categorically to recognize this paranoid [socialist] version of reality and oppose to it our own reality and our own values.”

“Moral opposition” is critical as government control becomes all consuming. But it is frightening that so many millennials who have not been educated on this “ism” are found to favor it. Bukovsky writes that “it is difficult for man to resist this dream and this noble impulse, particularly for men who are impetuous and sincere.” But the reality of this pseudo-nirvana must be revealed.

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Australia: The Madness Continues by Judith Bergman

Posted By on July 4th, 2017

“While terrorism’s origins have many factors, Islamic terrorists, as heinous as their acts are, they are often merely doing what the scriptures are telling them.” — Tanveer Ahmed, Muslim psychiatrist.

In Australia, according to judges, women and children must accept sexual assaults because it is part of the “Islamic culture” of their attackers. It would seem that in parts of Australia, this “Islamic culture” has replaced the rule of law. None of the above, however, seems to be enough to appease Muslim sentiments. In March, Anne Aly, Australia’s first female Muslim MP, said that racial-discrimination laws should be expanded to cover insults based on religion as well.

In March, a teacher at Punchbowl Primary School quit her job after she and her family received death threats from the children in the school, with some of them saying they would behead her. The teacher’s complaints to the New South Wales Department of Education were dismissed.

During the month of Ramadan alone, the world witnessed 160 Islamic attacks in 29 countries, in which 1627 people were murdered and 1824 injured. Nevertheless, the dual efforts to deny any links between Islamic terrorism and Islam on the one hand, and the efforts to accommodate Islam to the greatest extent possible on the other, seem to continue unaffected by the realities of Islamic terrorism — in Australia, as well, which is experiencing its own share of sharia and jihad.

At the end of May, the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) called on the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade to:

“…include a recommendation in its report that disavows the notion that there is any inherent link between Islam and terrorism… The Committee should condemn any politician who refers divisively (expressly or implied) to any religious or ethnic group for the purpose of political gain.”

PHAA Chief Executive Michael Moore said that there is no inherent link between any religion and acts of terror:

“When you look at terrorism and the IRA, I don’t think many people blamed Christianity for terrorism when clearly there was an overlay. In fact there’s nothing ­inherent in Christianity that links to terrorism”.

Since when are public health officials qualified to make authoritative statements on the theology of Islam or its linkage to Islamic terrorism?

Muslim psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed, would disagree. Speaking in June about the Australian media’s disproportionate focus on “Islamophobia” he said:

“While terrorism’s origins have many factors, Islamic terrorists, as heinous as their acts are, they are often merely doing what the scriptures are telling them.”

While Australian officials rush to declare that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, revealingly they have referred to Islam or Islamic culture to exonerate Muslims on several occasions. In April, despite pleading guilty to sexually assaulting eight women and girls on a beach in Queensland, a young Afghan man was acquitted. The reason for the acquittal: “Cultural differences”. According to the judge, “seeing girls in bikinis is different to the environment in which he grew up”. The teen received two years’ probation without being convicted of anything.

Similarly, in 2014 , a registered sex-offender and pedophile, Ali Jaffari, was accused of attempted child-abduction. However, Australian police dropped all charges against him, after a magistrate told prosecutors that he would have difficulties finding Jaffari guilty. According to news reports:

Magistrate Ron Saines said if he was hearing the matter, he would have reasonable doubt, citing “cultural differences” as one factor, which would result in the charges being dismissed.

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World’s Rallying Cry: “Free Iran” by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on July 4th, 2017

“[W]e have a president of the United States who is completely and totally opposed to the regime in Tehran… he completely opposes the Iran nuclear deal signed by his predecessor.” — Ambassador John R. Bolton.

“The fact is that the Tehran regime is the central problem in the Middle East. There’s no fundamental difference between the Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rouhani — they’re two sides of the same coin. I remember when Rouhani was the regime’s chief nuclear negotiator — you couldn’t trust him then; you can’t trust him today. And it’s clear that the regime’s behavior is only getting worse… the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.” — Ambassador John R. Bolton.

Any fundamental change in Iran’s theocratic establishment will reverberate across the region. Many terrorist groups will lose their major financial and weapons support. Syrian dictator Bashar Assad will lose his hold on power, which he has wielded for far too long. Iran’s major player, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which constantly damages the US and its allies’ national interests and incites anti-Semitism, will disappear; Hezbollah will lose its funding; “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” will fade away.

Tens of thousands of people came together in Paris on July 1 from all different corners of the world, to unite against the unspeakable atrocities committed by the Islamist state of Iran. It was the largest gathering of Iranians abroad of its kind.

The conference, organized by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), was spurred by the desire to speak up for human rights, peace, women’s rights, freedom, democracy, and to demand victory over terrorism. Its focus was to generate awareness of the plight of Iran’s innocent and vulnerable citizens, against whom the Iranian government has been wreaking havoc — with no consequences — for decades.

Leaders, journalists, prominent figures from around the world, and scholars joined the rallying cry of “Free Iran”. The array of speakers included several prominent Americans, including former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton; former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; former Attorney General Michael Mukasey; former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; former FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Congressmen Ted Poe, Robert Pittenger and Tom Garret.

(Image source: Maryam Rajavi video screenshot)

During the eight years of Obama’s appeasement policies towards the Islamist regime of Iran, the mullahs became significantly empowered and emboldened. Iran’s opposition hopes that the appeasement of the theocratic regime in Tehran has come to an end. Ambassador Bolton pointed out:

“[W]e come at a time of really extraordinary events in the United States that the distinguish today from the circumstances one year ago. Contrary to what virtually every political commentator said, contrary to what almost every public opinion poll said, contrary to what many people said around the world, Barack Obama’s first Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not the president of the United States.

“So for the first time in at least eight years that I’ve been coming to this event, I can say that we have a president of the United States who is completely and totally opposed to the regime in Tehran… he completely opposes the Iran nuclear deal signed by his predecessor.”

The Iranian regime is still the world leading funder of international terrorism, including the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, the bombings of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in 1983, attacks on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

It does not matter who the regime’s president is; the core imperialist foreign policy of the Iranian regime is the same as it has been for almost four decades. With the passage of time, particularly since the nuclear agreement gave them an even stronger sense of power, Iran’s regime has become more daring and destructive, leaving multitudes of human rights violations in its wake. As Bolton stated:

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Amil Imani :Betrayal At The Highest Level By Former US Officials

Posted By on July 4th, 2017

America: The Enemy of My Enemy Is Not My Friendhttps://newswithviews.com/betrayal-at-the-highest-level-by-former-us-officials/

American politicians sometimes wonder why people of other nations show contempt toward America. Perhaps this article will shed some light in the understanding of this enigma.A few years ago, several high ranking American and European officials and dignitaries attended an NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran) rally held in Paris.

The invitees included MG Paul E.Vallely, US Army (Ret.), former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, former New York City Mayor Rudi Giuliani, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich and several others. The participants gathered in a conference room supposedly to support Iranian Opposition Groups. Here is the problem: NCRI is not representative of an opposition group, in fact, NCRI is an offshoot of the MEK, (Mujahidin Khalq) organization, a devout Islamist-Marxist entity known for their ISIS style terrorism.

Both NCRI/MEK are controlled by Masoud and Maryam Rajavi, a brutal couple who are no strangers to torture, terror and assassination. They both are responsible for numerous killings of Iranians and even murdering and abusing members of their own group for trying to defect or escape from the MEK (Camp Ashraf in Iraq).

Leaving Iran

After long and arduous bickering between MEK and Iran’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, Masoud Rajavi, the leader of MEK started a series of bomb campaigns against the newly formed Islamic government. In 1981, it attacked the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, killing 74 senior officials including the party leader and 27 members of Parliament. A few months later it bombed a meeting of Iran’s national security council, killing Iran’s new president Mohammad-Ali Rajai and his Prime Minister.

To save their lives, Masoud and his companions were forced to flee Iran to Paris. But, the French government expelled the MEK leader, Masoud Rajavi, in 1986. The group then ran into the arms of Iran’s arch enemy, the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Iraq provided MEK thousands of fighters, artillery, guns, tanks and then housed them in three camps near Baghdad and along the Iranian border. Baghdad also provided money for the group. Saddam Hussein allowed the Iranian exiles, members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), to set up their paramilitary base at Camp Ashraf in the 1980s. The dissidents oppose Iran’s theocratic regime.

Human Rights Report

According to Human Rights Watch who interviewed several former MEK members, the organization is a cult that has kept its members virtually imprisoned in a compound in Iraq and controlled them psychologically. They eliminated anyone who expressed their intent to leave.

A RAND report commissioned by the US DOD found that the MEK is a cult that utilizes mind control and practices mandatory divorce, celibacy, authoritarian control, forced labor, sleep deprivation, physical abuse and confiscation of assets.

The FBI reported that the MEK’s “NLA [National Liberation Army] fighters are separated from their children who are sent to Europe and brought up by the MEK’s Support Network. […] These children are then returned to the NLA to be used as fighters upon coming of age. Interviews also revealed that some of these children were told that their parents would be harmed if they did not cooperate with the MEK.”

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Still No Collusion Evidence The latest ‘bombshell’ tells us more about media bias than about election meddling By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on July 3rd, 2017

So here’s the latest big “collusion” story that has been, er, broken by the Wall Street Journal.

About ten days before he died in mid-May, an 81-year-old man who did not work for the Trump campaign told the Journal he had speculated that, but did not know whether, 33,000 of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails had been hacked from her homebrew server. The now-deceased man, “a longtime Republican opposition researcher” named Peter W. Smith, had theorized that the e-mails must have been stolen, “likely by Russian hackers.” But he had no idea if this was actually so, and he himself certainly had nothing to do with stealing them.

Smith’s desire to obtain the hacked emails, if there were any, peaked around Labor Day 2016 — i.e., during the last weeks of the campaign. This was many months after the FBI had taken physical custody of Clinton’s homebrew server and other devices containing her e-mails. It was also two months after the Bureau’s then-director, James Comey, had told the country that the FBI had found no evidence that Clinton had been hacked . . . but that her carelessness about communications security, coupled with the proficiency of hackers in avoiding detection, meant her e-mails could well have been compromised throughout her years as secretary of state.

In other words, Peter W. Smith was one of about 320 million people in the United States who figured that Clinton’s e-mails had been hacked — by Russia, China, Iran, ISIS, the NSA, the latest iteration of “Guccifer,” and maybe even that nerdy kid down at Starbucks with “Feel the Bern” stickers on his laptop.

Besides having no relationship with Trump, Smith also had no relationship with the Russian regime. Besides not knowing whether the Clinton e-mails were actually hacked, he also had no idea whether the Kremlin or anyone close to Vladimir Putin had obtained the e-mails. In short, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you whether Trump and Putin were colluding with each other because he wasn’t colluding with either one of them.

But — here comes the blockbuster info — Smith was colluding with Michael Flynn. Or at least he kinda, sorta was . . . except for, you know, the Journal’s grudging acknowledgement that, well, okay, Smith never actually told the paper that Flynn was involved in what the report calls “Smith’s operation.”

Huh?

If you’re confused, I’d ordinarily suggest that you go back and read the report a time or two. But life is short and rereading would not much clarify this spaghetti bowl hurled against the wall, in the hope that some of the Flynn sauce might stick.

Flynn, of course, is the retired army general who became a top Trump campaign surrogate, and who, later and fleetingly, was President Trump’s national security adviser. As the press likes to say, Flynn was sacked over his contacts with Russia, which were the subject of an FBI investigation. What they unfailingly fail to add is that (a) Flynn was fired not because he had contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak but because he misled Vice President Mike Pence about the substance of them; (b) there was nothing inappropriate about Flynn’s having discussions with foreign counterparts during the Trump transition; (c) the FBI investigation targeted not Flynn but Kislyak, who, as an agent of a foreign power, was under FBI surveillance when he spoke with Flynn; and (d) therefore, the FBI recorded the Flynn-Kislyak communications and knew that Flynn had made no commitment to address Russian objections to sanctions imposed by President Obama (i.e., there was no quid pro quo for Russia’s purported contribution to Trump’s election).

General Flynn is loathed by Obama, who fired him as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency; by the Obama-era intelligence-agency chiefs, whom Flynn called out for politicizing intelligence reporting; and by the FBI, against whom Flynn supported an agent who was claiming sexual discrimination. The Obama Justice Department was giddy over the prospect of making a criminal case against Flynn: dispatching the FBI to interrogate him over the Kislyak conversations, and even weighing an indictment of Flynn under the Logan Act, an unconstitutional 18th-century law that bars Americans from free-lancing in foreign policy — a law that is never invoked, has never been successfully prosecuted, and would be especially ludicrous to apply to a transition official.

Flynn, whose judgment leaves much to be desired, has made himself an easy target. Putting aside whether the FBI had a good reason to interrogate him as if he were a criminal suspect, he was reportedly no more candid with the agents than he was with Pence in recounting his Kislyak conversations. He also got grubby after leaving the military in 2014, starting a private intelligence agency that cashed in paydays from outfits tied to the unsavory regimes of Russia and Turkey. There are legal issues stemming from his apparent failures to register as a foreign agent and to disclose what he was paid. In addition, Flynn’s son became so notorious for trading in conspiracy theories that the Trump transition cut ties with him — imagine how out there you’d have to be to get booted from Trump World for incendiary tweeting!

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Trump’s Leaner White House Payroll Projected To Save Taxpayers $22 Million by Adam Andrzejewski ,

Posted By on July 3rd, 2017

If the White House payroll is a leading indicator of the president’s commitment to shrink government then voters have a reason to cheer. Projected four-year savings on the White House payroll could top $22 million. Savings come from President Trump’s refusal to take a salary as well as big reductions in other areas including the absence of czars, expensive “fellowships,” and spending on FLOTUS staff.

On Friday, the Trump administration released their annual report to Congress on White House Office Personnel. It includes the name, status, salary and position title of all 377 White House employees. (Search the recent Trump administration payroll data – and last two-years of the Obama administration – posted at OpenTheBooks.com.)

Here are some key findings:

There are 110 fewer employees on White House staff under Trump thanunder Obama at this point in their respective presidencies.
$5.1 million in payroll savings vs. the Obama FY2015 payroll. In 2017, the Trump payroll amounts to $35.8 million for 377 employees, while the Obama payroll amounted to $40.9 million for 476 employees (FY2015).
Nineteen fewer staffers are dedicated to The First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS). Currently, there are five staffers dedicated to Melania Trump vs. 24 staffers who served Michelle Obama (FY2009).
Counts of the “Assistants to the President” – the most trusted advisors to the president – are the same (22) in both first-year Trump and Obama administrations. In the Trump White House, Steven Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Omarosa Manigault, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer and 17 others make salaries of $179,700. In Obama’s first-year, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and twenty others held the title with top pay of $172,000.
The highest compensated White House Trump staffer? Mark House, Senior Policy Advisor, has a salary of $187,500. Mr. House is “on detail” from a federal agency which allows him to exceed the top pay-grade of $179,700. In Obama’s Administration (2009), David Marcozzi earned $193,000 “on detail” from Health and Human Services.

Our review of the Trump White House payroll confirms five staffers dedicated to First Lady Melania Trump. Highly criticized for her twenty-four assistants, advisors, schedulers, directors, deputies, advance aides, associates, social and press secretaries and other helpers, former First Lady Michelle Obama’s staff was only slightly larger than Laura Bush’s staff of eighteen.

These five White House employees serving First Lady Melania Trump include:

Lindsay Reynolds, Chief of Staff to the First Lady ($179,700);
Stephanie Grisham, Director of Communications for the First Lady ($115,000);
Anna Niceta, Social Secretary ($115,000)
Timothy Tripepi, Deputy Chief of Staff of Operations for the First Lady ($115,000);
Mary-Kathryn Fisher, Deputy Director of Advance for the First Lady ($77,000).

Starting in 2009, President Obama came under fire for hiring special initiative czars. We found no evidence of “czars” on Trump’s payroll. Examples of these White House czars included Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change Carol Browner ($172,000), Director of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Joshua DuBois ($98,000), White House Director of Urban Affairs Adolfo Carrion Jr ($158,500), and Director of the White House Office of Health Reform Nancy-Ann DeParle ($158,500).