Alexander Vindman's Wife Delivers a Psychotic Statement for the Ages

Yep.

At Instapundit, "WELL, ANYONE WHO’D MARRY VINDMAN HAS TO BE CRAZY." 

Click through for the entire thread:

Dumb. https://t.co/B7rWV0KdQn

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) March 1, 2022

Eileen Gu Is Golden Again at the Beijing Olympics After Win in the Freeski Halfpipe

The "Genocide Olympics" end tonight. Thank God! 

And now Eileen Gu/Gu Ailing's being hailed --- after wining three medals --- as the most successful athlete at the Winter Games. 

I didn't see it, but #EileenGuTraitor might as well have been trending on Twitter.

At WSJ, "She will leave Beijing as the first athlete—man or woman—to win three freestyle skiing medals in a single Olympics":

ZHANGJIAKOU, China—Eileen Gu snapped up another gold medal for Team China at the freestyle skiing halfpipe event on Friday, capping off the 18-year-old’s first Olympics with three medals (two golds and a silver) and cementing herself as the belle of the Games in the host country.

She will leave Beijing as the first athlete—man or woman—to win three freestyle skiing medals in a single Olympics. The big air event, in which Gu won a surprise gold, debuted at these Games. Gu earned a silver medal in the slopestyle event earlier this week.

Gu’s performance was so dominant that her final trip down the halfpipe was a de facto victory run, as her 95.00-point second run was the highest in the field by nearly five points. Defending gold medalist Cassie Sharp of Canada attempted a third run with the highest degree of difficulty of any competitor in the field, but fell short, earning 90.75 points—placing her in silver medal position. Rachael Karker, also of Canada, took bronze with a 87.75-point run.

Of all the medals Gu won in Beijing, her gold on Friday was the most expected. Across five competitions during the 2021-22 season, Gu was undefeated in the event. She made her victory on Friday all but a foregone conclusion with a solid first run that scored 93.25 and vaulted her to the top of the standings. When it came time to climb the podium, she did so wearing an Anta-branded panda hat, a nod to the Beijing Olympics’ pudgy panda mascot Bing Dwen Dwen.

“I have an Olympics panda hat. This is the coolest thing ever,” Gu said, pointing to the Bing Dwen Dwen mascot sewn on the left side of her hat. “Bing Dwen Dwen is very hard to get now so I want to wear it and show off,” she said in Mandarin. The skiing supernova spent nearly an hour walking through the mixed zone to take questions from broadcast and print media. Looking back at her two-week Olympic run fraught with both plaudits and controversies, Gu said: “These few weeks have been emotionally the highest I have ever been and the lowest I have ever been.”

“At the end of the day, I feel very proud, and feel very grateful for the people who have supported me. And for the people who don’t support me, I’ve actually genuinely made peace with it. I’ve dismissed it,” she said.

“My motto is now if they don’t think I’m doing good in the world, then they can go do better,” she added.

Though the score from her first run was high enough to win the competition, Gu improved upon her margin on the second run. She laid down a more difficult final trick involving twists on two different axes and put up 95.25 points. It was the third-highest score she has posted this season, having put up 97.50 points at a World Cup event in California in January.

“She’s competing against herself now,” said the announcer at the Genting Snow Park, as Gu readied for her second run. Starting last in a field of 12 women, her score from the first run topped the field even after the other 11 women had completed two trips down the pipe.

After Sharp failed to top Gu’s score during her third run, despite landing a combination of tricks that no other woman in the field attempted, Gu just needed to wait for two more skiers to throw down. Estonia’s Kelly Sildaru, bronze medalist in the women’s slopestyle competition earlier in the week, scored 85 points; Karker fell.

With a gold medal assured, Gu appeared visibly emotional ahead of her third and final run. She slid down the halfpipe with a few effortless tricks, appearing to have fun by posing with her poles between spread legs after catching big air and whizzing to the bottom to a euphoric home crowd.

M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History

At Amazon, M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies.

9/11, Twenty Years Later

From Brian Stewart, at Commentary, "A new book highlights the enduring failure of liberalism’s approach to terrorism."

Stewart reviews Spencer Ackerman's, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.

In doing so, he focuses a scorching microscope on the evil (but not new) anti-Americanism that has poisoned American politics in the wake of the September 11 attacks. 

Remembering 9/11 With Taliban Victory

From American Military News, at Pamela Geller's:

What we remember and forget on 9/11. The boy clings to the undercarriage of an evacuation plane leaving Kabul.

Remember Todd Beamer of United 93. His heroism on 9/11 drew from a lifetime of faith and character.

The Bush White House reveals its unfiltered 9/11 story in new documentary. The documentary “9/11: Inside the President’s War Room” looks at how the Bush White House responded to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, by interviewing officials about how they reacted in real time to events throughout the day.

Between then and now, they did not die in vain. I was among the first to parachute into Afghanistan in 2001. This is how I will remember the war.

The tragic price of forgetting 9/11. We will never forget. That was the solemn promise we heard again and again from our nation’s leaders after the devastation of 9/11.

Biden’s Afghan Disaster

SECDEF: al-Qaida may seek comeback in Afghanistan. The Taliban had provided al-Qaida with sanctuary while it ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

Biden is embracing a redefinition of war — but not an alternative to war. For those of us present at the beginning of the war on terrorism, the effective surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban just in time for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has been a very jagged pill.

US Afghanistan withdrawal becomes ammo for disinformation attacks. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has given NATO’s adversaries ammunition for disinformation attacks intended to sow doubt about America’s reliability as a security partner, officials here say.

Army chief calls for Afghanistan review: ‘Let the cards fall where they fall.’ The Army’s chief of staff wants a review of the decisions that led to the fall of Kabul and the U.S. military’s withdrawal.

Countries are establishing relations with the Taliban even though none has offered formal recognition of the militant government. Nearly a month after its takeover, there has been no formal recognition of the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. But that step appears increasingly irrelevant, at least for the short and medium term, as countries around the world have established varying degrees of relations with the militant regime.

AFGHAN EVACUATION

White House approves ‘partnership’ with vets evacuating U.S. citizens, Afghan allies. The White House has approved a recommendation by the nation’s top military officer that the administration create a “public/private partnership” with the ad hoc groups that have been working to evacuate American citizens and at-risk Afghans from the country, two State Department officials told POLITICO.

Dozens of Americans, other Westerners, to fly from Kabul on commercial flight. The large group of foreigners would depart Thursday on a Qatar Airways flight. Americans refuse to leave Afghanistan without their families as evacuation flights resume. In the days and weeks before the U.S. military’s hectic departure from Afghanistan, two former interpreters for the American military already resettled in the United States — one a naturalized U.S. citizen, the other a holder of a green card — journeyed back into the war zone to rescue stranded female relatives.

National Security

A ‘persistent, proximate threat’: Why the Navy is preparing for a fight under the sea. As Russia and China bolster their own submarine fleets and capabilities, the U.S. Navy has renewed its focus on undersea threats and has labeled anti-submarine warfare a priority for all sailors — and perhaps some Marines, too.

China, Russia loom over routine air operations across the globe. “What happens when our diplomats no longer have the might of the U.S. military or our economy as their backstop?” said Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown.

The world 9/11 created: The waning of the American superpower. The aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks marked the height of a particular American moment on the world stage.

China Threat

Taiwan commissions homemade ‘carrier killer’ warship. Taiwan’s president oversaw the commissioning of a new domestically made warship Thursday as part of the island’s plan to boost indigenous defense capacity amid heightened tensions with China.

Another Japan-based F-35 squadron is ready for operations. A second U.S. Marine Corps squadron in Japan has declared its F-35B fighters are ready for operations, less than a year after officially kicking off the process of transitioning to the stealthy fifth-generation aircraft.

Military

Less door-kicking, more resistance: Inside Army SOF’s return to unconventional warfare. For much of the past two decades, the American public has associated the Army’s special operations forces with counterterrorism, often conjuring images of night-time direct action raids.

Pentagon Watch

YES. THEY ARE – Army chief: We’re not pushing critical race theory. Just one day after the removal of Richmond’s Robert E. Lee statue, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville pushed back on claims that the military is attempting to “indoctrinate” troops into critical race theory.

Who Is Responsible for the Darkness That Has Descended on Us?

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine, "The Treason Party":

The late author Susan Sontag once famously said, “Communism is fascism with a human face.” A more perfect description of what the Democrat Party has become would be hard to come by. For five years the Democrats have focused their energies on laying the foundations of a communist economy and a one-party state. In pursuit of the latter, they have tried to abolish the electoral college, change the election laws to undermine the integrity of the voting system, give non-citizens the right to vote, eliminate voter I.D.’s which connect legitimate voters to their ballots, pack the Supreme Court, end the filibuster, pass legislation that would put control of presidential elections in the hands of the Democrat-favoring Washington bureaucracy and remove that control from the fifty states, as the Constitution now requires.

These efforts led to massive irregularities in the presidential election results that put the brain-damaged, pathological liar in the White House and led directly to the crises on the southern border, in America’s streets, and in Afghanistan. They were accompanied by a campaign to demonize former President Trump and the 74 million Americans who voted for him as “white supremacists” and “cultists.” This was itself a dagger aimed directly at the heart of the democratic process which depends on respect for the political opposition and compromise on legislation. If an opposing political party is placed beyond the pale, the inevitable result is a one-party state.

Character assassination has become the Democrats’ first weapon of choice, with Trump’s multiple bogus impeachments providing examples of how far Democrats are prepared to go to tear up the Constitution and two-hundred and forty years of American political tradition. Trump is no longer president but as a private citizen he is still the target of a Pelosi “commission” or “committee,” stacked completely with members who voted to impeach him, whose sole purpose is to convict Trump of inciting a fake “insurrection” in an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. This is one more despicable effort to demonize Trump and his 74 million voters as “domestic terrorists” and therefore enemies of America to be dealt with as such.

The same result is the purpose of Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project and the Black Lives Matter racist narratives, developed by American Marxists, currently being inflicted on all the men and women who have volunteered to defend their country in America’s armed services. This travesty comes courtesy of a General Staff deliberately politicized by the Obama administration. The consequence of training enlisted personnel to view America as a racist slave state founded in 1619, which has racism in its DNA (as Obama proclaimed) and is “systemically racist” (as Biden maintains) is to undermine military morale and program soldiers to regard “white America” as the enemy rather than the Islamic terrorists who seek to murder and destroy us.

Yet this demonizing creed was the preoccupation of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs’ Chairman General Mark Milley in the months they should have been focused on the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the potential massacre of Americans and their Afghan allies if the withdrawal wasn’t properly planned.

Inevitably that withdrawal was not properly planned. If the Chinese Communists had used their hammer over Joe Biden to dictate his decisions, the suicidal choices for which Biden is responsible wouldn’t be one iota different from the ones he actually made. No one in his or her right mind would have withdrawn American troops and abandoned American bases (and their weaponry) first, and then depended on the good will of Taliban terrorists not to behead the thousands of Afghans who had helped us during the twenty years we occupied their country.

“Partnering” with the Taliban, legitimizing them as a responsible government are the latest capitulations committed by Biden’s fascist-with-a-human face regime. Their cover for this betrayal is that the Taliban has changed and will be a responsible partner.

But here is what the religious zealots of the Taliban actually say: “We are the Taliban and this is our way and this will be our way till Judgement Day.” To encourage Biden’s treachery the Taliban’s spokesman put forward the reasonable-sounding offer to respect our culture if we will respect theirs. But what is their culture? Their culture is to throw acid in the face of any woman whose required Burka shows too much flesh, and to murder them if they are guilty of “fornication” - after a trial in which the jury is all male. Their culture is to behead an entire family in front of its father and then to behead him for working for the Americans. This atrocity occurred during the Kabul airlift after Joe Biden had made these barbaric killers the security for America’s withdrawal.

And it’s worse. Fearing America’s military might, which Joe Biden was busily crippling, the Taliban had actually offered America the privilege of providing the security for its withdrawal, which would have saved countless lives. Joe Biden rejected the offer.

In normal times, the remedy for Biden’s treason would be a firing squad or a life-term in a military prison. Today, who knows? Not a single general has been court-martialed for this disgraceful and dangerous surrender of American power, pride and national security. It is a surrender that will cost the lives of countless innocents not only in Afghanistan but around the world and in America itself. Biden’s response to this debacle? Full steam ahead and pretend defeat is - in Joe’s words - “an amazing success.” This is exactly the kind of response one would expect from a one-party regime.

After the Taliban took Kabul, and the country fell into the grips of Islamic barbarians, the Democrats in Congress were sitting up late into the night in the Capitol working on another emergency. They were putting together a $3.5 to $5 trillion bill to socialize the economy, and make every man, woman, and child in America dependent on the state. Their leader in this communist enterprise was Senator Bernie Sanders a lifelong half-wit supporter of Communist dictatorships and their failed economies, who is now the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

The Democrats proposed and inflicted all this damage with a one-vote majority in the Congress, which is the ultimate expression of their contempt for democratic order and their determination to establish a one-party state.

Unfortunately for them, but a light at the end of the tunnel for all Americans who love their country, the Democrat atrocities, aggressions, and failures have produced a reaction – a pro-American, pro-democracy counter-revolution that began with a parental revolt against indoctrination in the schools. This counter-revolution will sweep the Democrats from power in the coming mid-term elections, a transformation that cannot happen too quickly or too completely. The hour is very late and the condition of our country and our way of life is critical.

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Following-up, "A Bitter -- and Angry! -- End to America's Longest War (VIDEO)."

Via the New York Post:

A Bitter -- and Angry! -- End to America's Longest War (VIDEO)

Certainly Americans are bitter --- and untold numbers of folks may very well be angry --- but it's the president himself who's the angriest of all.

And why? Well, he literally can't blame anyone but himself. And as most analysts now agree (on cable news, at least), this is the greatest military debacle in U.S. history. He's left to screaming his frustrations, blaming the pox of public opinion, for his failures, but it's all on him. What a craven and pitiful imitation of a man, gawd.

And angry? Shoot, I've been fuming with rage these last few days, and not just because he botched everything, but especially for the literally tens of thousands who've been left behind --- and don't be fooled, it's not just "100-200" Americans whom the administration's abandoned. Peter Bergen was on CNN a little while ago just hammering the president, excoriating him for leaving so many behind, and especially for turning Afghanistan into the #1 terrorist hotspot in the world, with Jihadis now surging into the country from around the globe.

And people are wondering if the U.S. is now vulnerable to a new attack on the homeland? Well duh, and it's all on Biden and the hypocritical and ghoulish leftists who put him into power --- and aren't Democrats supposed to be "antiwar" after all?

It's all horrifying and this country will reap the whirlwind of totalitarian Islam's rape, carnage, famine, and endless --- never-ending --- murder and terror. 

At LAT, "America’s longest war ends as last U.S. troops depart Kabul airport":

KABUL, Afghanistan — With the roar of a U.S. military cargo plane lumbering into the night sky over Afghanistan’s Taliban-held capital, the last U.S. troops departed the country at almost the stroke of midnight Monday, ending America’s longest war and leaving lasting but disparate wounds that cut across two nations.

The momentous final scenes played out in darkness. But Tuesday’s first light marked the dawning of incontrovertible knowledge: Afghans had once again been delivered into the hands of the Taliban, the medieval-minded Islamist group that horrified the world with its cruelties before being toppled in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

In a gesture by the Biden administration that was perhaps intended to bring closure to Americans but instead bestowed a bitter aftertaste of defeat, the final U.S. withdrawal came a dozen days before the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks carried out by Al Qaeda, which used Afghanistan as a staging ground.

Death stalked and circled until the very end. In a war that cost the lives of nearly 2,400 U.S. service members, a final round of bloodletting came Thursday in the form of a suicide attack by Taliban rival Islamic State that killed 13 young troops and left more than 170 Afghans dead.

So long did this war last that to many, if not most, Americans, Afghanistan had slipped in and out of consciousness, like a disappearing Instagram story, until it was all but forgotten.

The war was eclipsed by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, its aims morphing and muddying with passing years. It wore on amid a dramatic shift in American politics marked by rancor and division that led to the election of President Trump, who in 2020 signed a deal with the Taliban to pull out U.S. troops. The move undercut Afghanistan’s fragile government.

The conflict tested four American presidents, left thousands of soldiers maimed, plowed ahead even after the death of Al Qaeda’s chieftain, Osama bin Laden, and marked the latest devastating blow to the image of an America that believed itself a force for good in the world. That reckoning is still resonating at home and abroad, a stark reminder that U.S. forays into other lands often have lasting consequences — and end with a degree of humiliation.

For Afghans, the war brought countless fresh graves and frequent doses of abject misery. But also, notably in Kabul, the U.S.-led military presence heralded a generation of economic opportunity and freedom — especially for women, who came out from beneath burqas to work as journalists, teachers and human rights activists. All this is now in jeopardy, even as the Taliban attempts to convince the world that it will not rule as before.

Like much of the war, this denouement was a long time coming but unfolded in a headlong rush.

The leader of the U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. Kenneth F. “Frank” McKenzie, said the last liftoff of an American military aircraft came one minute before midnight in Kabul — just before the start of Tuesday, the day set by President Biden as the deadline for the departure of U.S. troops.

Within moments of the final U.S. plane’s takeoff, Taliban fighters swiftly moved into Hamid Karzai International Airport, which had been the scene of a massive U.S.-led airlift that carried more than 116,000 people out of the country — and into uncertain lives — since the militant group seized power two weeks earlier in a quick but nearly bloodless offensive.

As if to symbolize the dizzying turnabout, the group’s foot soldiers surged onto the airfield wearing U.S.-supplied uniforms and carrying once-coveted U.S.-made weapons and gear such as night-vision goggles. They fired salvos into the air and shouted “Allahu akbar!’’

The final C-17 cargo plane to depart carried the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, and Ross Wilson, the acting U.S. ambassador, who stayed on at the airport after the embassy was shuttered two weeks earlier. Strings of tracers lit the sky as the last U.S. warplane — providing cover for the hulking C-17 below — flew toward the horizon, the sound of its engine fading.

Below, some of the arriving Taliban fighters appeared befuddled by their new domain; one walked up to a metal gate and fiddled unsuccessfully with the handle, then tried to bash it into submission. In cavernous hangars, the fighters unearthed odd finds: boxes of military MREs, or meals ready to eat, tool boxes and an especially large power saw.

One Taliban squad posed in front of an assortment of partially disassembled Chinook helicopters, calling for a Taliban cameraman to record the moment. The men lifted American M4 rifles into the air as they cheered...

Just awful. Biden's turned this great nation into a colossal, bumbling hegemon of despair. 

This is not the country I grew up in, and I'm sure I've said this before, but I just never --- I mean never --- could have believed how this country could be put so low.

I'm sure you're angry, too, dear readers. We can commiserate for a while, and then it's back to the front lines of resistance. This is not our destiny, and the American public knows it. A righteous repudiation of the president and his party is on the way, and it's going to the most awful and terrifying rebuke of rank political cowardice and perfidy in my lifetime.

Carry on...

Federal Investigation Into Rep. Ilhan Omar's 'Worst-Ever Crime Spree'

This is interesting. Let's see if justice gets done.

The Feds — including ICE — appear to be investigating Rep. Ilhan Omar.

“At least three departments are reviewing what could be the worst-ever crime spree by an elected US official”

https://t.co/UnRJav4U71

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) January 16, 2020

Even in 2016, there was already enough against Ilhan for an @FBI investigation -- per @FBI guidelines.

But the @Comey FBI was busy with drunken hearsay.

And media/@TheDemocrats felt @IlhanMN’s “identity” was just too perfect for fighting Trump: https://t.co/gdhYT1R2HC
(7/x)

— David Steinberg (@realDSteinberg) January 16, 2020

Democrat Adam Schiff Spearheads Efforts to Sabotage Release of Damaging FBI Memo

From Kim Strassel, at WSJ, "Operation Sabotage the Memo":

Operation Sabotage the Memo https://t.co/061ZCV19jM

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) January 26, 2018

Rep. Adam Schiff has many talents, though few compare to his ability to function as a human barometer of Democratic panic. The greater the level of Schiff hot, pressured air, the more trouble the party knows it’s in.

Mr. Schiff’s millibars have been popping ever since the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on which he is ranking Democrat, last week voted to make a classified GOP memo about FBI election year abuses available to every House member. Mr. Schiff has spit and spun and apoplectically accused his Republican colleagues of everything short of treason. The memo, he insists, is “profoundly misleading,” not to mention “distorted” and “political,” and an attack on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He initially tried to block his colleagues from reading it. Having failed, he’s now arguing Americans can know the full story only if they see the underlying classified documents.

This is highly convenient, given the Justice Department retains those documents and is as eager to make them public as a fox is to abandon the henhouse. Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had to threaten a contempt citation simply to get permission for his committee to gain access, and even then investigators had to leave Capitol Hill to view them, and were allowed only to take notes. Mr. Nunes has no authority to declassify them. The best he can do in his continuing transparency efforts is to summarize their contents. Only in Schiff land is sunshine suddenly a pollutant.

The Schiff pressure gauge is outmatched only by the Justice Department and the FBI, which are now mobilizing their big guns to squelch the truth. That included a Wednesday Justice Department letter to Mr. Nunes—written by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, designed as a memo to the media, copied to its allies in Washington, and immediately leaked to the public. And the department wonders why anyone doubts the integrity of all its hardworking professionals.

Mr. Boyd gets in his cheap shots, for instance slamming Mr. Nunes for moving to release a memo based on documents that Mr. Nunes hasn’t even “seen.” He apparently thinks Rep. Trey Gowdy —the experienced former federal prosecutor Mr. Nunes asked to conduct the review of those docs—isn’t qualified to judge questions of national security. He hyperventilates that it would be “reckless” for the committee to make its memo public without first letting the Justice Department review it and “advise [the committee] of the risk of harm to national security.” Put another way, it is Mr. Boyd’s position that the Justice Department gets to provide oversight of Congress. The Constitution has it the other way around.

The bigger, swampier game here is to rally media pressure, and to mau-mau Mr. Nunes into giving the department a veto over the memo’s release. Ask Sen. Chuck Grassley how that goes. Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently sent a referral to the department for a criminal probe into dossier author Christopher Steele. He then in good faith asked the department its views on an unclassified portion of that referral that he wants to make public. The department invented a classified reason to block public release, and has refused to budge for weeks.

The Boyd letter is also a first step toward a bigger prize: President Trump. Under House rules, a majority of the Intelligence Committee can vote to declassify the memo. Mr. Trump then has up to five days to object to its release. If he doesn’t object, the memo goes public. If he does, a majority of the House would have to vote to override him.

The shrieks of reckless harm and national security are designed to pressure Mr. Trump to object. And wait for it: In coming days the Justice Department’s protectors will gin up a separate, desperate claim that Mr. Trump will somehow be “interfering” in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe unless he objects to the release. According to this view, it is Mr. Trump’s obligation not just to sit by while the media and the Mueller team concoct their narrative, but to block any evidence that might undercut it...

Why is the Press Ignoring the Exploding Clinton-Russia-FBI Scandal?

At IBD, "There's One Russia Scandal the Press Doesn't Want You to Know About":

All the news fit to suppress: Just like with #Benghazi, the media has circled the wagons around #HillaryClinton. https://t.co/CujyfJNeK5

— IBDeditorials (@IBDeditorials) October 21, 2017

In one of his Thursday evening tweets, President Trump complained once again about the "Fake Media," this time for not covering a fresh scandal involving an Obama-era uranium deal with Russia. Does Trump have a legitimate beef? You be the judge.

By any objective measure, the story that The Hill broke on Tuesday was shocking. According to documents unearthed by the news outlet, in 2009 the FBI had uncovered evidence of a sweeping, illegal Russian scheme to boost Vladimir Putin's atomic energy business, which included bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering.

The FBI had also obtained an eyewitness account that Russian nuclear officials "had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit (the Clinton Foundation)."

That's eye-opening in and of itself. But the findings are even more alarming when you understand the context.  While the FBI was learning about these illegal Russian activities, Russia's state-owned nuclear company Rosatom was trying to acquire mining rights to 20% of the uranium in the United States through its purchase of Canadian-based Uranium One.

To do so, however, they needed to get approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. Sitting on that committee were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder. In 2010, the committee unanimously approved the sale of Uranium One to the Russian nuclear company.

In other words, while top Obama administration officials were deciding whether to hand over control of one-fifth of the nation's uranium supplies to Russia, the FBI had piles of evidence that officials at Rosatom were flagrantly violating U.S. laws and possibly compromising national security. The FBI also had evidence that officials had directed millions of dollars to Hillary Clinton's family charity, creating a clear conflict of interest.

But as the Hill notes, none of this information was made public before the Obama administration approved the sale.

Even more intriguing, key people at the FBI at the time of the Uranium One deal are now spearheading the special counsel probe into allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to swing the November election.

Needless to say, this raises a lot of important questions. Did the FBI keep the Committee on Foreign Investment in the dark about its findings? If so, why? Did Clinton, or Holder, or anyone else involved in the sale's approval know about this investigation? Why did the FBI wait until after Hillary had stepped down from State before taking action on the case? What role did those donations to Hillary's charity — as well as lucrative speaking fees to Bill — play in all this?

This is the real Russia meddling in American politics, and the Democrats are treasonous accomplices.

More.

Hysteria Over Monuments Metastasizes

Leftist hysteria is like a cancer, so it's spread is tantamount to metastasis of cancer.

At the New York Times, "Far From Dixie, Outcry Grows Over a Wider Array of Monuments" (safe link):

It began with calls to remove Confederate generals.

But since the violence in Charlottesville, Va., two weeks ago, the anger from the left over monuments and public images deemed racist, insensitive or inappropriate has quickly spread to statues of Christopher Columbus and the former Philadelphia tough cop mayor Frank Rizzo, Boston’s landmark Faneuil Hall, a popular Chicago thoroughfare and even Maryland’s state song. An Asian-American sportscaster named Robert Lee was pulled from broadcasting a University of Virginia football game so as not to offend viewers.

The disputes over America’s racial past and public symbols have proliferated with dizzying speed, spreading to states far beyond the Confederacy and inspiring campaigns by minorities and political progressives across the country. But along the way, they have become to some an example of politically correct sentiments gone too far, with the potential to mobilize the right and alienate the center.

Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said his party was “driving straight into a trap Trump has set,” because the president seeks to shift the focus away from comments he made about white supremacists to his charge that opponents are trying to “take away our history.”

“While I understand the pain those monuments cause,” said Mr. Begala, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton, “I just think it in some ways dishonors the debate to allow Trump to hijack it.”

New disputes seem to be springing up daily.

In a Democratic mayoral candidates’ debate in New York on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio did not rule out removing Manhattan’s 76-foot Columbus Circle monument as the city reviews “symbols of hate.”

Philadelphia placed barricades and guards around a statue of Mr. Rizzo, loathed by some African-Americans for his harsh tactics toward blacks in the city, after protesters surrounded the bronze edifice and a city councilwoman, Helen Gym, wrote on Twitter, “Take the Rizzo statue down.”

Mr. Rizzo, who died in 1991, cultivated a law-and-order image as a police commissioner that included raiding gay clubs and once forcing Black Panthers to strip naked in the street.

“Just because Philadelphia wasn’t a part of the Confederacy doesn’t mean we get a pass,” Ms. Gym said in an interview. She is less concerned about turning off voters who support the president than in rousing members of the Democratic base, including minorities, who did not vote in November.

“My concern is about the number of people who stayed home, who felt government doesn’t speak for them,” she said. “I’m trying to show government can be reflective in a time of anguish.”

In Chicago, a campaign is underway to remove a monument to Italo Balbo, an Italian air marshal, which the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini presented to the city in 1933. Balbo Drive is a well-known street in the heart of downtown.

In Boston, there are calls for renaming historic Faneuil Hall because Peter Faneuil, who donated the building to the city in 1743, was a slave owner and trader.

Columbus, who, most Americans learn rather innocently, in 1492 sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World, has undergone a revisionist treatment in recent decades because of his impact on native peoples...

See that?

It's all about "rousing the Democratic base." Or, it's all about politics.

Leftists care about power. They don't care about the well-being of any of the so-called victims of "racism." They care about raw power and they'll destroy the country --- totally destroy this once-great nation --- in order to get it.

Still more (FWIW).

President Trump Pardons Sheriff Joe Arpaio

I met Sheriff Joe in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2010. Everybody loves Sheriff Joe. The only people who don't are the treasonous racist MSM fifth columnists out to destroy our great country!

Here's the headline at NYT, via Memeorandum, "Trump Pardons Joe Arpaio, Who Became Face of Crackdown on Illegal Immigration."

I don't care what these leftist media hacks say. Sheriff Joe's a freakin' patriot.

Here's my report from 2010. I had so much fun! See, "Sheriff Joe Arpaio Headlines 'Stand With Arizona' Rally in Tempe."

New York Times Defends Decision to Identify Undercover CIA Agent

Heh.

Of course they do.

At Instapundit, "I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN MENTIONING VALERIE PLAME — WHO WAS NEITHER UNDERCOVER NOR AN AGENT — WAS TREASON OF THE FIRST ORDER: New York Times defends decision to identify undercover CIA agent."

And here it is, so casually reported:

In the @CIA he decimated core Al Qaeda. Now he'll run Iranian operations. https://t.co/xe6mWnXhky

— Adam Goldman (@adamgoldmanNYT) June 2, 2017

Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations

This is really shocking piece, considering how nonchalant everybody is about spying and intelligence these days. All this hacking and leaking and political payback can get you killed. A lot of people are getting killed.

At NYT, with the response at Zero Hedge:

Killing @CIA Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations, rivaling if not worse than Ames/Hanssen betrayals https://t.co/U22mdiTTvt

— Adam Goldman (@adamgoldmanNYT) May 20, 2017

CIA Incompetence Allowed China To Murder A Dozen CIA Assets: NYT https://t.co/tYmMeSI5NS

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 20, 2017

Julian Assange Rape Investigation Is Dropped in Sweden

He's gonna be extradited to the U.S., one way or another.

British authorities said they'd arrest him if he leaves the Ecuadoran embassy.

At Memeorandum and Twitter:

⚡️ “Sweden drops rape investigation against #JulianAssange”https://t.co/etdgpxGNbe

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 19, 2017

Israel and Obama's Political war

From Caroline Glick:

Eli Lake from Bloomberg set off a firestorm in the US this week with his revelation on Monday that in the last six months of the Obama administration, Susan Rice, former president Barack Obama’s national security adviser, requested that the US intelligence community enable her to use foreign intelligence collection as a means of gathering information about Donald Trump’s advisers.

According to Lake’s story, during the course of the US presidential campaign, and with steadily rising intensity after President Donald Trump won the November 2016 election, Rice used her access to intercepted communications of foreign intelligence targets to gather information on Trump’s advisers. Some of those reports were then leaked, injuriously, to the media in violation of US criminal statute.

Whereas in the normal course of events, the identities of American citizens whose conversations with foreigners are intercepted by the US intelligence community are shielded, in the final months of the Obama administration, Rice repeatedly – on “dozens of occasions” – asked that the identities of Americans who conversed with foreigners be exposed.

The Americans in question were Trump’s advisers.

Lake’s scoop both confirmed and expanded House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s charges from two weeks ago against the Obama White House. Nunes said that he had seen evidence that the Obama administration collected information on incoming Trump administration officials that had no intelligence value. In other words, Nunes alleged that the data gathering was not for national security purposes.

This week’s discovery that Rice played a central role in the intelligence collection regarding Trump’s advisers brings Nunes’s allegations that the outgoing Obama administration conducted surveillance of the Trump team to the highest reaches of the administration. Now that Rice has been exposed, it is impossible to claim that in the event such surveillance occurred, it did not reflect the Obama administration’s concerted policy.

With the exceptions of Obama and his top adviser and confidante Valerie Jarrett, Rice was the top official in the White House.

Lake’s story and subsequent stories have obvious implications for the public’s assessment of Trump’s March 4 allegation on Twitter that Obama spied on him. But the Rice story is equally, if not more, important for what it teaches us about Obama’s mode of governing.

The Rice story strengthens the assessment that for eight years, Obama and his associates weaponized the federal government to wage a political war against their domestic political opponents in a manner that is simply unprecedented...

Still more.

Who Asked Susan Rice to Unmask Those Names?

Following-up, "Susan Rice Unmasked as Top Obama Aide Who Sought Surveillance Reports on Trump Transition Team (VIDEO)," and "Obama Flunky Susan Rice Denies 'Inappropriately Unmasking' Trump Transition Team (VIDEO)."

Here's Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "Obama’s national security advisor is a liar -- and possibly a felon":

Former President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice asked for the names of Trump transition officials to be unmasked and made public in raw intelligence files, according to media reports, a move apparently carried out to harm the incoming Trump administration.

As recently as March 22, Rice denied knowing anything about the intelligence reports. In an appearance on “PBS Newshour,” she said pretty definitely, “I know nothing about this.” The new news reports paint Rice as a liar.

The evidence we know about in the Trump-Russia saga so far seems to be pointing at Obama.

Adam Housley of Fox News reports:

The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.

The names were part of incidental electronic surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump and people close to him, including family members, for up to a year before he took office.

The spreading of the unmasked names was carried out for “political purposes that have nothing to do with national security” or foreign intelligence, Housley said. "It had everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team," he said, citing his sources.

What is incidental collection, by the way?

Incidental collection “happens when an individual is in contact with the target of surveillance,” or is communicating “about” the target, according to Robyn Greene. “So if Bob were being targeted for surveillance and Alice called or emailed Bob, Alice’s communications with him would be collected incidentally.”

In this example, “if Bob is targeted for surveillance and Alice contacts him during that surveillance, resulting in the incidental collection of her communications with him, her name should be redacted or ‘masked’ unless leaving it unredacted provides foreign intelligence value.” Masking is done to protect U.S. persons (i.e. U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, etc.) who get inadvertently caught up in the electronic dragnet from being falsely accused of crimes or otherwise improper behavior.

If a National Security Agency analyst “believes Alice’s communications may contain evidence of any crime, the NSA can share those communications with law enforcement or other relevant agencies … even if the crimes are completely unrelated to the purpose for surveilling Bob’s communications, or to foreign intelligence or national security investigations.”

According to former Obama State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, “if the intelligence community professionals decide that there’s some value, national security, foreign policy or otherwise in unmasking someone, they will grant those requests,”

Assuming these news reports about data that supposedly was incidentally collected are accurate, they raise a multitude of new questions about the ongoing scandal concerning alleged collaboration between the Trump team and Russia.

We still don’t know who asked then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice to unmask those names – or if she acted on her own initiative. But the most likely culprit has to be President Obama himself, along with those in his inner circle such as his Islamist CIA director John Brennan and his slimy national-security aide Ben Rhodes.

But whoever did the deed, it appears someone used America’s taxpayer-funded national security apparatus to engage in likely unlawful espionage against an opposition presidential campaign, an incoming administration, and that administration’s transition team. It’s the stuff of banana republics, which makes sense, because Obama spent eight long, lawless years trying to turn the United States into precisely that...

Keep reading.

Obama Flunky Susan Rice Denies 'Inappropriately Unmasking' Trump Transition Team (VIDEO)

She's vile.

And she's a bald-faced liar.

At the Hill, "Rice denies Obama administration inappropriately unmasked Trump team."

Here's the interview, with Andrea Mitchell, at MSNBC this afternoon:



PREVIOUSLY: "Susan Rice Unmasked as Top Obama Aide Who Sought Surveillance Reports on Trump Transition Team (VIDEO)."

Susan Rice Unmasked as Top Obama Aide Who Sought Surveillance Reports on Trump Transition Team (VIDEO)

CNN's running interference for the Democrats, at the video below. But the latest revelation of Obama administration surveillance, and "unmasking" of Trump transition team members, blows the lid off the left's Russian-meddling election scam and further vindicates President Trump's allegations of the Obama regime's wiretapping. .

At WSJ, via Memeorandum, "Susan Rice Unmasked" (and Ruth King):

Susan Rice sought the name of at least one Trump official in intelligence reports: https://t.co/txUIgCElLY

— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) April 4, 2017

Well, what do you know. On the matter of who “unmasked” the names of Trump transition officials in U.S. intelligence reports, we now have one answer: Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser.

A U.S. intelligence official confirms to us the bombshell news, first reported Monday by Bloomberg, that Ms. Rice requested the name of at least one Trump transition official listed in an intelligence report in the months between Election Day and Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Ms. Rice received summaries of U.S. eavesdropping either when foreign officials were discussing the Trump team, or when foreign officials were conversing with a Trump transition member. The surveillance was legally authorized, but the identities of U.S. citizens are typically masked so they cannot be known outside intelligence circles. Ms. Rice asked for and learned the identity of the Trump official, whose name hasn’t been publicly disclosed and our source declined to share.

Our source did confirm that Ms. Rice also examined dozens of other intelligence summaries that technically masked Trump official identities but were written in such a way as to make obvious who those officials were. This means that the masking was essentially meaningless. All this is highly unusual—and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in antiterror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.

We’re told by a source who has seen the unmasked documents that they included political information about the Trump transition team’s meetings and policy intentions. We are also told that none of these documents had anything to do with Russia or the FBI investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. While we don’t know if Ms. Rice requested these dozens of reports, we are told that they were only distributed to a select group of recipients—conveniently including Ms. Rice.

All of this helps to explain the actions in the last week of House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, the one official in Washington who seems interested in pursuing the evidence of politicized surveillance. Mr. Nunes was roundly criticized by Democrats and the media last week for publicly revealing at least one instance of Obama White House unmasking, albeit without disclosing any names.

Now we know he is onto something. And we know that Mr. Nunes had to go to the White House to verify his information because the records containing Ms. Rice’s unmasking request are held at the National Security Council...

More.

PREVIOUSLY: "Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel."