Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like "U.S. Person One."
The National Security Council's senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice's multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel's office, who reviewed more of Rice's requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.
The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations -- primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration...
President Trump, elected on a promise to use his deal-making prowess to get Washington working, blinked Friday in the face of defeat, agreeing to halt a House vote on a GOP healthcare overhaul amid crumbling Republican support.
The move came just hours after the White House insisted the vote would go forward regardless of the outcome, and followed Trump’s extraordinary ultimatum Thursday night, when he told rebellious lawmakers that if they didn’t vote for the bill, he would move on to other priorities.
To avoid an embarrassing vote, Trump asked House Speaker Paul D. Ryan to abandon the effort.
The collapse of the bill — legislation that managed to displease both Republican conservatives and centrists — dashed the party’s immediate hopes of fulfilling a longtime campaign promise to repeal and replace President Obama’s signature healthcare law, also called Obamacare.
Trump made a hard, last-minute push for the GOP bill. His spokesman said Friday that the president "left everything on the field."
In an Oval Office appearance after the vote was pulled, Trump described it as a “very interesting experience.” He praised his fellow Republicans and deflected blame on Democrats — who opposed the bill. He also said he’d learned something about “loyalty,” apparently referring to the GOP defections.
Trump predicted the country would eventually need to revisit the issue, saying, “We will end up with a truly great healthcare bill in the future after this mess that is Obamacare explodes.”
Both Trump and Ryan, however, said the Republican Party had no plan to revive the repeal-and-replace effort anytime soon, so the current healthcare law will remain in place.
The defeat exposed Trump’s limits as negotiator in chief and raised doubts about his administration’s ability to achieve the rest of its conservative agenda, including tax cuts, deregulation and trade reform.
The fallout was also a setback for Ryan. Critics say the legislation was crafted too quickly and without enough input from other lawmakers or consultation with industry and interest groups.
"Hopefully there will be a lesson learned that let’s work together to write the bill instead of writing it in private," said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).
The failure will only complicate the odd-couple partnership between Ryan and Trump. The president may think twice next time about relying on the speaker to lead legislative campaigns. Though Trump signaled his continued support Friday for Ryan to remain in his post, and many lawmakers were standing by his side, finger-pointing over what went wrong is bound to linger.
Ryan could have afforded to lose no more than about 21 Republican votes to reach the 216 needed for passage. Defections were estimated at one point to be 30 or more.
The conservative House Freedom Caucus wanted Trump and Ryan to go further and faster in unwinding Obamacare rules and taxes. Centrist Republicans were worried the GOP plan would leave too many Americans without health insurance.
“Moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains and, well, we’re feeling those growing pains today," Ryan said. "We came up short.”
The GOP defeat marked a victory for a broad coalition of patient advocates, physician groups and hospitals, which had mounted an intense and sustained campaign to highlight the damage they said the bill would do to patients' medical care.
Congressional offices reported a huge influx of calls urging a "no" vote on the bill...
I've been saying this all along, and now here comes Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, indicating that some of President[-elect] Trump's communications were captured at Trump Tower during the transition.
Absolutely nothing is safe these days from cyberhacking, and what's worse, the C.I.A. may well have been involved in domestic espionage, which is prohibited by statute. Either that, or other operators using the same technology.
WASHINGTON — WikiLeaks on Tuesday released thousands of documents that it said described sophisticated software tools used by the Central Intelligence Agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions.
If the documents are authentic, as appeared likely at first review, the release would be the latest coup for the anti-secrecy organization and a serious blow to the C.I.A., which maintains its own hacking capabilities to be used for espionage.
The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first part of the document collection, included 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments, the group said. The entire archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code, it said.
Among other disclosures that, if confirmed, would rock the technology world, the WikiLeaks release said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”
The source of the documents was not named. WikiLeaks said the documents, which it called Vault 7, had been “circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”
WikiLeaks said the source, in a statement, set out policy questions that “urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the C.I.A.’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency.” The source, the group said, “wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”
The documents, from the C.I.A’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, are dated from 2013 to 2016, and WikiLeaks described them as “the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.” One former intelligence officer who briefly reviewed the documents on Tuesday morning said some of the code names for C.I.A. programs, an organization chart and the description of a C.I.A. hacking base appeared to be genuine.
A C.I.A. spokesman, Dean Boyd, said, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”
WikiLeaks, which has sometimes been accused of recklessly leaking information that could do harm, said it had redacted names and other identifying information from the collection. It said it was not releasing the computer code for actual, usable cyberweapons “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the C.I.A.’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published.”
Some of the details of the C.I.A. programs might have come from the plot of a spy novel for the cyberage, revealing numerous highly classified — and in some cases, exotic — hacking programs. One, code-named Weeping Angel, uses Samsung “smart” televisions as covert listening devices. According to the WikiLeaks news release, even when it appears to be turned off, the television “operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert C.I.A. server.”
The release said the program was developed in cooperation with British intelligence...
It isn't out of the question. The former president's administration wiretapped journalists and spied on Congress.
So President Trump set off a firestorm over the weekend with a series of tweets alleging that Obama had tapped Trump Tower. But getting hung up on imprecise language in the president's tweets isn't the right way to look at things. What seems to be at true is that the Obama administration spied on some of Trump's associates and we don't know exactly how much information was collected under what authority and who was targeted.
As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy summarizes in National Review, the Obama Justice Department considered a criminal investigation aimed at a number of Trump’s associates. When they didn’t find anything criminal, they converted the investigation into an intelligence probe under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Elements of that story have been confirmed by The New York Times, the BBC and McClatchy newspapers.
FISA surveillance has to be approved by a special court, which almost always allows the government to spy on people when asked. But when the Justice Department asked to spy on several of Trump's associates, the court refused permission, according to the BBC. As McCarthy writes, this is notable because “the FISA court is notoriously solicitous of government requests to conduct national security surveillance.”
Not taking no for an answer, the Obama administration came back during the final weeks of the election with a narrower request that didn’t specifically mention Trump. That narrower request was granted by the court, but reports from the Guardian and the BBC don't mention the tapping of phones..
Former Obama officials issued denials that the former president had anything to do with it, which McCarthy calls “disingenuous on several levels.” Others have characterized them as a "non-denial denial.”
President Donald Trump is “absolutely right” to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community...
Here a Russian story, there a Russian story, everywhere a Russian story — all based on leaks from anonymous sources. You don’t have to be a spook to spot the plan: Destroy Donald Trump by putting him in a bear hug.
To judge by their scattershot approach, the conspirators are fishing for a bombshell. The fallback goal is to inflict death by a thousand cuts.
Already they’ve gotten one scalp and part of another. Gen. Mike Flynn is gone, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions is wounded. Each made a mistake that obscured a larger truth: Somebody in the government has been spying on Trump’s team and giving top secret information to anti-Trump media outlets.
Our president is many things, but dumb he’s not. He recognized the stakes, so yesterday he struck back in a way that dramatically upped the ante in the war over his presidency.
Trump’s early-morning tweets accusing President Barack Obama of having wiretapped him at Trump Tower startled the world. It is a sensational claim, but in light of the tsunami of leaks from intelligence agencies, the president is right to suspect that he’s the target of a dirty game.
To start with, the unprecedented alliance against him clearly includes remnants of the Obama administration, and probably the former president himself. The recent New York Times report that Obama and his team dropped intelligence findings like bread crumbs so they would get wide readership and to prevent the Trump administration from burying them reveals an attempt to undermine if not subvert a legally elected president.
The Times report conveys suspicions that Trump would deep-six the findings if he could while giving a free pass to Obama’s leakers who may have committed crimes. The Times knows who in the Obama camp was involved and what they did. The paper has an ethical obligation to report it.
Yet here’s the rub: What exactly was in those findings? All the public knows is that intelligence officials said they investigated whether the Trump campaign had ties to Russia, and we only know that because it was leaked by anonymous sources.
But that knowledge, while sounding suspicious, raises more questions than it answers.
For example, did investigators looking at Trump’s campaign find anything substantive? The Times has said no but keeps suggesting the probes continue. Publicly, the FBI won’t confirm or deny anything and even Congress is frustrated by the bureau’s behavior.
Yet the fact that there are leaks reveals something important: The investigation involved monitoring phone calls and maybe computers and maybe physical surveillance...
I haven't been blogging all this stuff, not because it's unimportant, but because I don't much care. Of course Obama bugged Trump Tower. It'd be nice to have evidence, but to me it's a no brainer.
For a president who has a uniquely hostile relationship with the press, positive news cycles are both rare and fleeting. The Trump team displayed remarkable discipline by refusing to step on the president’s well-received address to a joint session of Congress. A lot of good discipline did them. Just 24 hours after Trump’s address, a series of troubling reports involving links among those in Trump’s orbit to Russian officials reset the national discourse. Those stories make for a trend, though, that has little to do with Trump and a lot to do with his predecessor. The Obama administration’s foreign-policy team seems to be campaigning to rehabilitate itself one leak at a time, and the press is helping.
The frenzy on Wednesday night began with a revelation in the New York Times that members of Barack Obama’s administration had left a trail of breadcrumbs for investigators who happen to be looking into the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russian government. The report revealed that intelligence officials intercepted communications between Russian officials and “Trump associates,” and that the administration worked frantically in the final days to ensure those revelations could not be buried and forgotten after they left office.
More than six “former officials” described efforts to reduce the classification on some reports relating to Trump associates’ contact with Russians so they would be widely distributed. They also revealed their efforts to raise the classification level of some information related to Russia that was so sensitive they feared the Trump administration might leak it to Moscow. Some officials apparently even touted their efforts to ask leading questions during intelligence briefings so their questions would be transcribed and archived, leaving clues for congressional investigators should they ever come looking for them.
The Times report revealed that a “former senior American official” disclosed that Jeff Sessions had met with “Russian officials.” The Washington Post confirmed that Sessions took a private meeting with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, appearing to contradict testimony Sessions provided to the Senate. The controversy whipped up around the discrepancy between Sessions’ confirmation-hearing testimony, and these reports have resulted in Democrats calling for his resignation and Republicans running for cover.
Though it received less attention amid the flurry of reports involving Team Trump’s connections to the Kremlin, the Washington Post published another story involving the decision-making process that led up to the Yemen raid. That raid, in which Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens was killed, an Osprey helicopter was lost, and up to 31 Yemeni civilians died, cannot be said to have gone according to plan. This report alleges that the plan might have been the problem.
The report quoted former advisor to Vice President Joe Biden on national security, Colin Kahl, who averred that the raid was the result of an Obama administration-era initiative expediting the approval of partnered ground operations. Yet, this raid was greenlit as a result of “a more abbreviated White House process.” Kahl took particular issue with the revelation that a sub-Cabinet level meeting on the raid—a meeting scheduled after the raid had been approved by the president and following a variety of briefings on the mission—lasted less than an hour. “You can’t cover the complexity of a topic like that in 23 minutes,” he declared. Other “former officials” quoted in that piece criticized the raid for straining relations with the Yemeni government. In sum, the Obama administration deserves all the credit for what went right in Yemen and none of the blame for what went wrong.
At least a few of these “former officials” who so freely offer reporters at the Times and the Post intimate details about the Obama administration’s approach to foreign policy are members of the infamous gang of nine. These officials within the Obama administration’s intelligence apparatus confirmed to the Post that former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn had misled Mike Pence when he said he did not discuss the Obama-era sanctions regime in his phone conversations with Kislyak. As the Times revealed last night, federal officials monitored those calls, transcribed the conversations, and related the substance to the press.
There is an assumption permeating these reports: that those unnamed Obama-era officials are selflessly sacrificing in the effort to prevent the Trump administration from undermining American national security. Some have even dedicated themselves to creating an elaborate Da Vinci Code for future scavenger hunters to decipher. More likely, the Obama administration’s foreign policy professionals are doing their best to retroactively vindicate themselves after leaving office under a cloud of mistrust. In their effort to self-aggrandize at the expense of the current administration, these rogue officials have found willing partners in the press.
The Obama administration was engaged in narrative manipulation surrounding Russia’s intervention into the election process even in its final hours...
Actually, the first couple of chapters are chilling. It really hits home. John Stormer might as well have explaining Obama's America and the left's glorification of Islam.
Donald Trump was elected president last November by winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to "drain the swamp" in Washington, D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation's capital and major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country mired in stagnation and decay. "What truly matters," he said in his Inaugural Address, "is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people."
Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, "the people" elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government—that happened last year—but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.
There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren't supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.
Here was a case of current and former national security officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be disturbed. Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive, nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the voters.
But why should we believe that? And who elected these officials to make this judgment for us?
Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year's election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump's nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.
How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. "I can't think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this," a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.
Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women's March.
But here's the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?
The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.
The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the "least dangerous branch," now presume to think they know more about America's national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief...
Former President Obama is waging war against the Trump administration through his generously funded agitation outfit, Organizing for Action, to defend his monumentally destructive record of failure and violent polarization.
It is a chilling reminder that the increasingly aggressive, in-your-face Left in this country is on the march.
Acclaimed author Paul Sperry writes in the New York Post:
Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.
In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.
What is Organizing for Action? It is a less violent version of Mussolini's black shirts and Hitler's brown shirts, or of the government-supported goon squads that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Castro brothers used to harass and intimidate their domestic opponents.
OfA isn't, strictly speaking, a new group. After the 2008 election, the group, then known as Organizing for America, was a phony grassroots campaign run by the Democratic National Committee that sought to replicate the community organizing techniques Obama learned from the teachings of his fellow Chicagoan, Saul Alinsky. OfA was created in large part because the White House could not legally use the 13 million e-mail addresses that the Obama campaign compiled in 2008.
Former U.S. Rep. Bob Edgar (D-Penn.), sounded the alarm about OfA in 2013, suggesting the group was dangerous to democracy. "If President Obama is serious about his often-expressed desire to rein in big money in politics, he should shut down Organizing for Action and disavow any plan to schedule regular meetings with its major donors," he said as president of the left-wing group Common Cause. "Access to the President should never be for sale."
"With its reported promise of quarterly presidential meetings for donors and 'bundlers' who raise $500,000, Organizing For Action apparently intends to extend and deepen the pay-to-play Washington culture that Barack Obama came to prominence pledging to end," Edgar said. "The White House's suggestion this week that this group will somehow be independent is laughable."
But Edgar’s admonitions were ignored and since then Organizing for Action has thrived and grown rich, just like the Obamas.
As FrontPage previously reported, Obama has rented a $5.3 million, 8,200-square-foot, walled mansion in Washington’s Embassy Row that he is using to command his community organizing cadres. Michelle Obama will join the former president there as will the Obama Foundation. To stay on track, Obama wants his former labor secretary, Tom Perez, to win the chairmanship of the DNC in a party election later this month. “It’s time to organize and fight, said Perez who appears to be gaining on frontrunner and jihadist Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). “We must stand up to protect President Obama’s accomplishments,” adding, “We’re going to build the strongest grassroots organizing force this country has ever seen.”
No ex-president has ever done this before, sticking around the nation’s capital to vex and undermine his successor. Of course, Obama is unlike any president the United States has ever had. Even failed, self-righteous presidents like Jimmy Carter, who has occasionally taken shots at his successors, didn’t stay behind in Washington to obstruct and disrupt the new administration.
Organizing for Action, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors, is at the head of Obama’s network of left-wing nonprofit groups. OfA, Sperry warns, has “a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country.”
On its website, the group claims that there are “5 million Americans who’ve taken action” with OfA, and that those individuals “are part of a long line of people who stand up and take on the big fights for social justice, basic fairness, equal rights, and expanding opportunity.” Among its key issues are “turning up the heat on climate change deniers,” comprehensive immigration reform (which includes mass amnesty), “telling the stories of the millions who are seeing the life-saving benefits of Obamacare,” fighting for “a woman’s health care” which is “a basic right,” and redistributing wealth from those who earned it to those who didn’t.
OfA communications director Jesse Lehrich told Memphis-based WREG that the “grassroots energy that’s out there right now is palpable.” The group is “constantly hearing from volunteers who are excited to report about events they’re organizing around and all of the new people that want to get involved.”
Organizing for Action is drowning in money, by nonprofit standards.
By the end of 2014, OfA, which was formally incorporated only the year before, had taken in $40.4 million, $26 million of which was raised in 2014, according to the organization’s IRS filings. OfA’s big donors are members of the George Soros-founded Democracy Alliance, a donors’ consortium for left-wing billionaires devoted to radical political change. Among the DA members donating to OfA are: Ryan Smith ($476,260); Marcy Carsey ($250,000); Jon Stryker ($200,000); Paul Boskind ($105,000); Paul Egerman ($100,000); and Nick Hanauer ($50,000).
OfA also runs a project called the Community Organizing Institute (COI) which it says partners “with progressive groups and organizations to educate, engage, and collaborate.”
Organizing for Action describes COI in almost lyrical terms...
