Feel the collapse 29

 Resist not evil (Matthew 5:39 KJV)

In humility count others more significant than yourselves (Philippians 2:3 English Standard Version)

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago.

The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life.

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity.

There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.

Joe Biden has conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care.

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

America has never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism.

At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages [thanks to Trump – ed.], Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing.

In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed.

Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive.

Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back.

No one seems to acknowledge that both students and the universities—which lured them to borrow—knew exactly the risks they were taking. Meanwhile, millions of American youth, the working classes who choose not to attend college, and those who paid their loans off or whose parents saved enough over the years to cover their tuition obligations, will subsidize those who renege of their debts by paying higher taxes.

Inflation is roaring back as the administration is printing trillions of new dollars that do not reflect commensurate gains in productivity or population.

Soaring prices are a direct result of incentivizing the unemployed not to work, while discouraging manufacturers and producers of food, gas, oil, timber, mineral, and metals.

The crime wave likewise is not accidental. It is the logical result of deliberate nihilistic policies of releasing thousands of criminals from jails and prisons, defunding and defaming the police, and empowering woke mayors and prosecutors to contextualize crime as the fault of society, not of the criminal.

In response, millions of Americans now simply avoid the mayhem and chaos of blue-state big cities.

Race relations have regressed 50 years. Under the fad of critical race theory, the color of our skins is now deemed essential to who we are.

The current woke revolution is an elite, top-down effort to smear the nation as some sort of contemporary racist hellhole. 

All this multifaceted chaos is not just faculty lounge stuff. We are beginning to see the collective craziness filter down to disruptions in our everyday lives.

Airliners cannot take off due to fuel shortages. Automobiles, houses, gas, and lumber are in short supply.

Consumers can’t get their roofs fixed or their houses painted or the trees trimmed as employers plead to their idle government-subsidized employees to come back to work.

No one knows whether our laws even still exist—or at least exist haphazardly depending on who breaks them.

Thieves steal with brazen impunity.

Scared Americans have lost faith in the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the CDC, and most of the federal bureaucracies that are as politicized as they are increasingly incompetent.

What started out as elite woke nonsense now warps everyone’s daily life. If we don’t wake up from wokeness, we will continue on our sure trajectory to self-inflicted, systemic paralysis—followed by civilizational collapse.

Accused by the ruling elite, many Americans are doing penance for actions they never took, words they never spoke, ideas they never thought. They plead guilty to being oppressors. In penance they hand power to their destroyers and abase themselves.

Why do millions of Americans accept the accusation that they are guilty of oppressing minorities when they are doing no such thing?

Could it be because a religion, still common to millions of Americans, taught self-abasement to generation after generation? Taught that you were born guilty? That you must always put the wants of others above your own?

That you must not resist evil?

America’s state religion 431

Wokeism is fast becoming the American state religion.

Ben Weingarten identifies it as such, writing – surprisingly – at (woke) Newsweek:

Should it overtake our government, in making identity politics paramount it will unmake any semblance of a unifying American identity.

In so doing, it will serve as the ultimate tool of cynical, radically leftist power-grabbers, who will be dividing and conquering under the guise of a fraudulent virtue, justice and morality.

It is the religion of the party that is now in power. The government is woke. It is making identity politics paramount.

The Woke’s core views have been bubbling up from elite classrooms to the commanding heights of society for decades.

What is different is that now such views have been legitimated by the authorities and mainstreamed in our culture. If you dare to challenge them, you are liable to end up excommunicated from American life—canceled. After all, dissenting from the Woke orthodoxy makes you a racist.

Consider some of the signs that indicate the fast-accelerating ascent of Wokeism.

In New York City, at the same time Mayor Bill de Blasio was preventing Jews and Christians from freely exercising their religions—including peaceably assembling—he permitted adherents of Wokeism to assemble en masse in protesting, rioting and looting with impunity. The Woke enjoyed First Amendment rights foreclosed to the [other] faithful.

Mayor de Blasio, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the relevant health authorities had argued the coronavirus-driven draconian shutdown of New York City, and the rest of the state, was necessary to save lives. If so, by permitting the Woke to flood the streets, were not New York officials conceding that public health was not really the number one priority? Were they not suggesting that they were willing to let people get sick and die because the right to practice Wokeism was absolute, sacrosanct and preeminent—this, incidentally, after instructing citizens to take to the streets in celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year in February, coronavirus be damned, in context of a broader campaign against purported coronavirus-related anti-Chinese discrimination? Were they not affirming that Wokeism mattered more than the lives of the Woke—and everyone else?

Certainly, this view would seem to have been reinforced, as, in the face of the Woke, New York reduced police funding, and policing itself, which coincided with a dramatic rise in violent crime.

In St. Louis, menacing protesters by the dozens were able to threaten a couple, the McCloskeys, at their home, without consequence. The police did not rush to the McCloskeys’ aid. In fact, after the husband and wife were recorded brandishing firearms to deter those descending on their home, authorities left them not only defenseless, but threatened to disarm them and throw them in jail.

Did it not appear again as if privileging the Woke was now the highest responsibility of government, over and above protecting our natural rights, including those to life, liberty and property—all of which the Woke threatened?

The religion of Wokeism is the most extreme racist ideology since segregation.

While the “summer of love” may be over in Seattle, with CHOP/CHAZ—the ultimate symbol of government acquiescence to Wokeism—no more, its ideals persist. Seattle recently held a training session for white municipal employees—to be clear, a government training session for those of a specific race—called “Interrupted Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.” Meanwhile, Washington’s state phase-in plan for public schools calls for giving priority to “students furthest from educational justice first,” specifically including “students of color”—that is, on the basis of race.

Tal Bachmann deplores it at Steynonline:

Wokism is now the official state religion of the United States of America.

By constitutional standards, this means something has gone wrong. The United States isn’t supposed to have a state religion. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion. Yet it now has one, and its name is Wokism.

Wokism is now celebrated or taught as Absolute Truth in every elementary school class, every middle and high school class, every university class, every corporate training session, every Capitol Hill political chamber, every Hollywood movie or cable show, every civic ceremony, every law, every political speech, every novel, every awards show, every sports league, every everything.

Government, its corporate allies, and cultural institutions all fund Wokism. They, along with their street troops, all demand Wokist belief and perfect compliance with Wokist commandments and rituals. They all punish those who question Wokist orthodoxy, often by completely ruining their lives. They fire dissenters, ban them from social media forever, initiate global social media pile-ons, and even threaten to kill them. Sometimes our officially Wokist government sends in goon squads to scare, or even arrest, those who dare criticize Wokism.

Wokism, the writer rightly says, is a “bellicose, uncompromising, ruthless, unself-critical, totalitarian movement“.

Does that remind you of anything else? If you say Islam, you win. The fact is that Wokism is now well on its way to becoming to American government and society what Islam is to Iranian government and society.

That this has happened means—can only mean—that something has gone terribly wrong in America (and the rest of the West). America’s original plan was to avoid funding and pushing any particular religious ideology or practice. It was to have full religious freedom. It was to keep government limited to solely protecting a few basic liberties. It was for Americans and their government to live and let live.

But things have changed. Why?

Maybe luxury spoiled us and made us fat and lazy and stupid. Maybe the Frankfurt School communists really did inject a lethal dose of philosophical poison into American thought. Maybe misguided government policies, and socially corrosive movements like sexual libertinism or feminism, really did start the implosion of the family unit.

Somehow or other, we’ve wound up in a total mess. And somehow or other, we need to find a way out of it. This is no way to live. I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to live in a society run by frothing ideologues who have declared war on human biology, logic, and mathematics; on unborn children, confused adolescents, and the traditional familial arrangements which raise them; on Shakespeare and Homer; on fairness and decency; on reality itself—on survival itself. These people are all manic, obsessive-compulsive nation-destroyers, community-destroyers, culture-destroyers, family-destroyers, individual-destroyers, love-destroyers, beauty-destroyers, everything-destroyers.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win”, by now we all know where it will end up.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America.

The public is now increasingly bombarded by 360-degree, 24/7 wokeness in the fashion of the Maoist Red Guard gangs. There appears little refuge from it. Not in television commercials. Not from CEOs. Not from professional sports. Not from movies or television shows. Not from Wall Street, the internet, and social media. Not from the administrative state, and not from the military. Not from the K-12 teachers, much less the professors.

It is largely the well-off professionals, the “privileged” and the rich—CEOs, news anchors, actors, star athletes, college presidents, foundation heads, corporate board retired military brass, Wall Street grandees—who usually do the woke remonstrating (or fund it) to the supposedly non-privileged but guilty un-woke.

The most law-abiding of Americans now seem terrified of the law—the FBI of James Comey vintage, John Brennan’s legacy at the CIA, the same old IRS of Lois Lerner, the Justice Department once branded by Eric Holder, and the predictable court order of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Enlisted men fear their inquisitional officers.

Conservatives especially fear that the once-revered FBI can become analogous to the Stasi, the once indomitable CIA after 2015 began emulating the KGB, and the federal prosecutor has become a vindictive Inspector Javert. And just when you think they are crazier for such fears, another couple is rousted out of bed by agents for supposedly being at a riot they were not at.

The current madness is the stuff of history as we watch it predictably unfold. 

Roger L. Simon writes at the Epoch Times:

An iron-fisted, ideologically extreme minority has our country under its thumb—play along or face excommunication. This is stronger than anything in our history and almost identical to what we see and have seen in totalitarian countries.

All key aspects, most parts of them anyway, of our society “get it” … the media, the corporations, the government bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the military (yikes!), entertainment, the university system, the K-through-12 system, the medical community, the scientific community (incredibly), the religious, and on and on.

All, to one extent or another, believe in “woke” except—the people.

What the extremist ideology of “woke” actually provokes is talk of—and not just talk—secession and even civil war.

Few of us have heard anything like that in our lifetimes. But now it’s real. We have been driven apart as never before. We have been awakened indeed.

Anything can happen and some of us, who would never have considered anything like secession and civil war, suddenly do—highly disturbing to us as those thoughts may be.

How long will it be before “considering” comes to decision and “some of us”  – ideally most of us – act?

Is resistance futile? 17

As more and more information emerges on how wide and deep and zealous the opposition to President Trump was throughout his four years in office, it becomes more and more astonishing that he was able to accomplish anything at all, let alone the enormous amount that he did.

He was still president and head of the executive branch of government when agents provocateurs led a few of his supporters in a raid on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 – so that the Democrats could accuse him of inciting an insurrection. Yet none of the officials who worked under him and in theory for him did anything at all to counter the resulting onslaught against him by the legislative branch, including his second impeachment by the House and the farce of a trial by the Senate.

Even his vice president, Mike Pence, who seemed exceptionally loyal, has been exposed as a Swamp denizen.

William B. Allen writes at American Greatness:

Where was Trump’s national security team, and what counsel did they provide? The gravity of this obvious lacuna should instantly appear to anyone who considers this was a national security event of the greatest significance …

That it was a national security event is apparent from the immediate and since daily repeated descriptions of the riot as an attempted “insurrection” or “coup’. It is also apparent what protocols prevail in such an event: a national security team exists precisely to appraise and respond to such threats.

But where was FBI Director Christopher Wray? Where was the director of national intelligence? Where was the director of homeland security? Where was the attorney general? Where was the secretary of defense? Where was the director of central intelligence? Were they gathered in the White House within 30 minutes of the development of an event that lasted for hours? What counsel did they give? Were they rebuffed by the president? If the president were guilty of criminal negligence (a “high misdemeanor”), here would be the irrefutable proof of the fact.

At no point … since the events of January 6 has this question been raised in a publicly visible forum. It stands to reason that it should have been raised by virtue of the clear fact that the president’s conduct has been repeatedly described as “criminally negligent”. This would have been a credible charge of misconduct that could have supported impeachment. That such a charge was not filed, and such questions not posed, indicates the high likelihood that to pursue the inquiry on that line would have proved embarrassing—and even condemning—for the officials involved and for those pursuing the impeachment on the weak and inappropriate grounds of “inciting an insurrection”. 

One is forced to think that an obvious path to secure conviction was not pursued solely because it could not be sustained. If that is so, however, it also means that something far more significant happened. Namely, the president was not in control of the government.

The Democrats’ enormous exaggeration of the danger in the raid, their determination to make it seem that Donald Trump had tried to overthrow the legislative branch of government and that he is the leader of some 74 million “white supremacist terrorists” actively threatening American “democracy” – and therefore equivalent, they imply, to an alien enemy – gives them the pretext to take every step they can think of to make it impossible for him, or anyone like him, ever to come to power again. They will destroy him personally by any means  they can, and make it criminal to be on his side.

And they are destroying all his accomplishments. Every problem, domestic and foreign, that he solved, they are returning to its problematic condition. Everything he saved from ruin, they are ruining.

William Levin writes at American Thinker:

The Democrats are pursuing a multi-prong strategy to cement a permanent majority.  To accomplish the goal requires upending the constitutional design.  Until the scope of this effort is seen in its entirety, it can proceed in the shadows.

It has six astonishing elements:

    1. Enable Congress to determine who can run for President,
    2. Eliminate the Electoral College without amending the Constitution,
    3. Override the states’ constitutionally mandated authority to determine presidential election rules,
    4. Grant statehood to the District of Columbia by statute,
    5. Rewrite the First Amendment to limit political speech, and
    6. Enable open border immigration through executive agreement instead of Congressional action.

Taken together, the program represents a comprehensive challenge to representative democracy. …

Right. It is they who want to end democracy in America. As usual, they accuse their opponents of the wickedness they themselves really are plotting and doing.

Two more articles at American Greatness explain what is happening.

Christopher Roach writes:

Trump thought if he was a loyal American running for president, it would not be possible the CIA and FBI would wiretap him and destroy his supporters’ lives in the process. Similarly, he thought he could talk to foreign leaders or make changes to executive branch policy, and those subordinate to him would do what they were told.

His supporters thought elections mattered, and that they had a right to protest when those elections appeared fraudulent.

But he and they were wrong. Those expectations were aroused by advertisement. They are advertised in the Constitution and its Amendments. But the reality is, as always, different:

The rules, procedures, and priorities of the bureaucrats determine which laws get enforced and which ones don’t … [and] which companies, donors, and groups are entirely exempt from the rules that apply to everyone else.

In other words, these are the real laws, determining what is permitted and what is forbidden. … The mandarin class that writes and interprets them, decides when a riot is “mostly peaceful” or a dangerous “insurrection”. They determine when democracy means the opposite of democracy.

Dan Gelernter writes:

The Left’s hatred of Trump is merely a symptom of their guiding philosophy, which is … gradually to exclude people from government. The Left is in favor of any action that will expand the authority of bureaucrats by taking decisions out of the hands of citizens.

With the coronavirus, the Left is beside itself with glee: This is the first crisis since 9/11 broad enough to make possible a fundamental transformation of American society. …

The reason coronavirus so delights today’s Left is that the public response to their power grab has been overwhelmingly docile: The numbers of deaths are vastly below historic health panics, even with generous inflation via guidelines encouraging doctors to record anyone who previously had the virus as having died from it.

Even so, the government was able to lock people in their homes for a “two-week period” that turned out to be roughly a year, destroy much of the hospitality sector of the economy, force people to cover their faces in public as though living under a secular sharia, and, perhaps best of all, they got neighbors to snitch on neighbors and children to report their parents when these edicts weren’t followed.

It has been a bonanza. The everyday American citizen will always remember 2020 as a painful, terrible, soul-crushing year. For the Left, that makes it one of the best years on record. It is one of those great years in which they changed how Americans live….

They need only to cement this victory by making those changes permanent. …

The Left wouldn’t want you to think that the danger has lessened. This is why the Biden Administration suggested that social distancing and mask-wearing will continue to be vital, even once the entire population is inoculated. They don’t want the pandemic to go away: A successful Biden Administration is not one in which coronavirus disappears, it is one in which Americans accept wearing masks for the rest of their lives.

These are incremental steps on the road to tyranny: They don’t necessarily increase public safety—they may harm it. But they do give the government more power, and that is the important thing, the operative goal. Europe is a few steps ahead of America in its gradual dissolution of democracy, but America will follow just as fast as the public is willing to tolerate.

Tolerate the process of decline and fall?

Is there a choice?

Hasn’t resistance proved futile?

An impeachment process in search of a crime 225

Rep. Devin Nunes truthfully accuses the lying accusers at the start of the impeachment enquiry, which is the latest move in the Democrats’ evil plot to overthrow the elected president:

Posted under corruption, Crime, Russia, Ukraine, United States by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, November 13, 2019

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Never forget the failure 88

We rightly celebrate heroism today on the anniversary of the tragedy of 9/11/2001 at the same time as we mourn.

It was a day of pride as well as grief. But it was also a day of failure and shame.

Whose failure? Whose shame?

Brandon J. Weichart writes at American Greatness:

The September 11, 2001 attacks were the result of an unmitigated intelligence failure. No, 9/11 was not an “inside job”, as many conspiracy theorists believe. Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network were responsible. But, the 9/11 plot did not happen in a vacuum.

In reality, America’s elephantine national security state had known of bin Laden and his network years before the horrific events of 9/11. Some of the most powerful people in the national security state routinely downplayed and ignored the threat al-Qaeda posed to the United States before 19 hijackers murdered 2,911 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.

More troubling, though, is the fact that many of the same people who downplayed or ignored the threat of 9/11 and al-Qaeda were also intimately involved in nearly every foreign policy disaster of the last 18 years—from the Iraq War blunder to the inexcusable plot to frame President Donald Trump as a Russian agent.

The enduring failures of the national security state—from its inability to anticipate 9/11 in spite of clear warning signs, to advocating boneheaded Mideast policies—can be plotted in the career paths of individual members of the so-called deep state.

Consider John Brennan. Here is a man who was a self-described Communist when he joined the CIA in the Reagan Administration, at the height of Cold War against the Soviet Union. A supposed expert in U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, as well as a fluent Arabic speaker, Brennan eventually rose to the rank of CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (where he may or may not have converted to Islam).

While there, Brennan apparently developed a powerful case of “clientitis” (a term for when U.S. foreign policy experts become so involved in their regions of focus that they start substituting for U.S. national interests those of the countries they are observing).

Brennan routinely ignored calls from his colleagues to pressure his Saudi counterparts to hand over more information on bin Laden and the rising al-Qaeda terrorist network in the 1990s (al-Qaeda was, first and foremost, a political and religious movement consisting of and controlled mostly by Saudi nationals).

Things got so bad with Brennan that when the Clinton Administration considered using force either to kill or capture bin Laden in the 1990s, Brennan led the effort to stop it. Had Clinton followed through with his earlier promises of bringing bin Laden to justice, instead of listening to compromised bureaucrats like Brennan, 9/11 might have been avoided. Of course, it did not help that Clinton’s own CIA director, George Tenet, backed Brennan’s opposition to the proposed bin Laden raid.

When George W. Bush took office, inexplicably he chose to keep Tenet on as the director of central intelligence. Tenet, in turn, kept incompetents like Brennan in place (while either marginalizing or forcing out those few intelligence officials who actually took the al-Qaeda threat seriously, such as Richard Clarke and Michael Scheurer, the original head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit).

Sadly, Brennan would go on to enjoy a long career, even after 9/11. This is as much a failure of the permanent bureaucracy (which is supposedly a meritocracy) as it is of the political establishment for leaving people like Brennan atop the sprawling intelligence community and not demanding answers for how such “wise men” could have missed 9/11. In a bygone era, after enduring a catastrophic professional disaster, men like John Brennan would have been forced to resign.

Instead, Brennan got a promotion. Barack Obama elevated him to CIA director in his second term. Brennan’s short-sightedness and incompetence eventually calcified into outright hostility for the very democratic ideals that he was purportedly defending. For instance, when the American people began questioning the authority that our opaque intelligence services had assumed in the dark days following the 9/11 attacks, Brennan used the potent power of the CIA to spy on members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were charged with investigating reports that detainees in CIA custody may have been subjected to abuse.

Then, as the coup de grace to his otherwise disturbing career, Brennan oversaw one of the greatest abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). He, along with several other fellow travelers in the national security state, concocted a counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

The investigation was based on innuendo and lies that Brennan knowingly (and wantonly) perpetuated, which claimed that Trump and key members of his presidential campaign were aided and abetted by the Kremlin to swing the 2016 presidential election in his favor. Other Obama national security officials, including former Undersecretary of Defense Evelyn Farkas, proudly proclaimed in 2017 that this cabal had “buried” the details of the investigation deep in the federal bureaucracy, so as to prevent Trump from using the power of his office to end the investigation.

Where was this zeal in the 1990s, when it came to an actual threat like al-Qaeda?

The trajectory of Brennan’s career is a perfect snapshot for the growth—and compounding failures—of the U.S. national security state since 9/11. Many of the same people who refused to accept that al-Qaeda was a threat, or who advanced equally disastrous policies in the Middle East, are the same individuals who launched a frightening covert, rolling, administrative coup against a duly elected president. Not only is our deep state painfully incompetent but it is also clearly corrupt.

How might the last 18 years have turned out if ignoramuses like Brennan, who downplayed al-Qaeda’s threat to the United States in the 1990s, and who had refused to pressure our Saudi “allies” into being more forthcoming with information about Osama bin Laden, had been fired for failing to anticipate 9/11? Instead of being fired, though, these bumbling bureaucrats were given more power and money to run roughshod over our democracy in the name of protecting us. They had no clue how to protect us before 9/11—and they were certainly clueless about how to protect us after that terrible day.

When Americans say, “We will never forget 9/11,” they should add: “Or how U.S. intelligence failed us!”

Will the guilty men and women ever be made to pay a price for their betrayal?

At the very least, may their names live in ignominy.

Obama’s great idea: have a Communist Muslim run the CIA 85

The chief US intelligence agencies appear to consider themselves a fourth branch of government. They now deem themselves not answerable to Congress, nor to this president.

This is because their recent, now departed, leaders put them on the side of the enemies of the US.

In the long sad years (2009 – 2017) when America was led by anti-America Barack Obama, who had been a member of the far-left New Party, was a follower of the Communist Saul Alinsky, and manifestly loved (supremacist totalitarian) Islam – particularly as it was represented by the Muslim Brotherhood – the heads of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA all helped him  implement his anti-America policies. (For Obama’s warm relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, see, for instance, our posts here and here.)

Obama felt it was perfectly okay to choose Muslim Brotherhood personnel to be his advisers in the White House. So James Clapper, head of the NSA, lied to the public about the Muslim Brotherhood, declaring it to be  “largely secular”, peacefully pursuing “social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt”, with “no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence”.

James Comey headed the FBI and apparently considered it his chief duty to shield Obama’s secretary of state, and presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton from the justice she deserves for her numerous crimes, including selling the favor of her office as Obamas’ secretary of state for her personal enrichment.

Bad as Clapper and Comey were for the nation, the  worst of the three was the head of the CIA, John Brennan.

They all hoped and expected that the corrupt candidate Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election. Since she lost it, they have sprung with fury on the winner, President Trump. John Brennan recently described the president as “unstable, inept, inexperienced, and unethical”.

Joseph Klein writes at Front Page:

The words “unstable, inept, inexperienced, and unethical” more accurately describe Brennan himself.  

Brennan claims to be worried about the Russian threat to U.S. national security, which he accuses President Trump of irresponsibly ignoring. However, Russia is a shadow of the Communist Soviet empire it once was while Brennan was coming of age. What does it say about Brennan’s judgment when, by his own admission, he once “voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall,” even though Hall by then had been a long-time enthusiastic supporter of  the Communist Soviet Union’s hardline expansionist policies? Brennan got through his first polygraph test to enter the CIA in 1980 by saying simply “I’m not a member of the Communist Party”. But he had no problem with voting for its ardent pro-Soviet Communist cheerleader, a fact he may have obscured during his CIA application process.

Fast forward to 2014, while Brennan was serving as CIA director under former President Barack Obama. Brennan referred then to Russia simply as “a major power,” not as an enemy of the United States or as a significant geopolitical threat. In 2016, as the U.S. presidential election year was getting into high gear, Brennan reminisced that what stood out in his 35-year career in U.S. intelligence was when he [said:

I welcomed the head of the Russian FSB [Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB], Alexander Bortnikov, to the CIA last year. And I walked with him across the lobby, across our infamous CIA seal there. It was rather surreal, that the head of the FSB and the head of the CIA were walking together.

Gus Hall would have been so proud of the man who once voted for him.

He only turned against Russia when he could claim to be outraged by the alleged “collusion” of President Trump with that country. Suddenly Brennan was implying that Russia was an enemy state after all.

As for Russia’s meddling in the U.S. presidential election during 2016, Brennan claims to have told the head of the Russian FSB, with whom he had such a cozy get-to-together at CIA headquarters the year before, that if Russia pursued its efforts to interfere, “it would destroy any near-term prospect for improvement in relations” between the two countries. Brennan’s rhetorical slap, with no immediate follow-up actions to impose severe consequences on Russia for its behavior, was inept at best.

All Brennan really did while in office on the subject of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election was to politicize the issue by pressing for an FBI investigation of alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

Now, in a typical case of psychological projection, Brennan blames President Trump for not dealing effectively with Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election process, when that is precisely what Brennan failed to do himself when he had the chance. And in trying to distance himself from the infamous Steele dossier, which played such a critical role in moving the collusion investigation forward, Brennan may have committed perjury in his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017. Brennan claimed that he did not know who commissioned the Steele dossier and had “no awareness” whether the FBI ever relied on the Steele dossier as part of any court filing. He also denied that the CIA had relied on the dossier.

According to a report by Paul Sperry, published by RealClear Investigations on February 11, 2018:

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes next plans to investigate the role former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump – including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it. … Several Capitol Hill sources say Brennan, a fiercely loyal Obama appointee, talked up the dossier to Democratic leaders, as well as the press, during the campaign. They say he also fed allegations about Trump-Russia contacts directly to the FBI, while pressuring the bureau to conduct an investigation of several Trump campaign figures starting in the summer of 2016.

If this turns out to be true, Brennan unethically abused his office as CIA director for partisan purposes to smear candidate Donald Trump and then lied about it to Congress.

As bad as all this is, Brennan was at his worst when it came to the global Islamist threat.

On May 26, 2010, for example, while serving as Obama’s deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, Brennan delivered a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in which he claimed that Islamists or jihadists were not our enemies. He said that “jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community”. Throughout his tenure as both Obama’s deputy national security adviser and CIA director, Brennan fundamentally misunderstood the ideological underpinnings of ISIS that had its roots in traditional Islam, as embodied in the Koran and in the words and actions of Prophet Muhammad. Islam began in the first place the same way that ISIS developed in carrying out and spreading its literalist dogma during Obama’s presidency – as a religion built on jihadist conquests to kill or subjugate disbelievers and make Islam supreme in the world.

Brennan misunderstood the Islamic nature of ISIS? If that was the case, it would mean that the man was both ignorant and stupid. As he is neither (he is said to have converted to Islam while he was posted in Saudi Arabia, and is obviously too cunning to be plain stupid) the only conclusion to be drawn from the fact of his defense of both Islam and ISIS is that he is on their side.

During a February 13, 2010 address at a meeting at the Islamic Center at New York University, facilitated by the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Brennan, whom some have claimed became a convert to Islam himself, said that Islam “helped to shape my own world view”.  He said Islam was “a faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity”.  He added, “We’re trying to be very careful and precise in our use of language, because I think the language we use and the images we project really do have resonance. It’s the reason why I don’t use the term jihadist to refer to terrorists. It gives them the religious legitimacy they so desperately seek, but I ain’t gonna give it to them.”

Brennan referred in his speech to Jerusalem by its Arabic name, Al-Quds. He blamed overzealous enforcement by the U.S. government for “creating an unhealthy atmosphere around many Muslim charities that made Muslims hesitant to fulfill their sacred obligation of zakat.

Zakat – one of the five obligations of a Muslim, called the “five pillars” of  Islam – is charity that goes to Muslims only, to promote Islam, which is to say the jihad, now being actively fought by the savage method of terrorism.

Apparently, Brennan was blind to the fact that many of these charities were used as fronts to fund terrorism, including the notorious Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. During the same 2010 Islamic Center speech, Brennan expressed satisfaction with the 20 percent recidivism rate among Guantanamo detainees, some of whom he acknowledged had participated in new terrorist attacks. “Twenty percent isn’t that bad,” he exclaimed.

In 2011, Brennan called for the FBI to eliminate its “offensive” curriculum and training materials, which made reference to “jihad” and “radical Islam”. 

Which plainly enough shows that he was, de facto, the Muslim Brotherhood’s man – heading the CIA!  

Both before and after Brennan served in the Obama administration, he has also consistently understated the threat posed by the radical fundamentalist Iranian regime and its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. In a paper he published in July 2008, Brennan called on U.S. officials to “cease public Iran-bashing”.

As Obama’s deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, Brennan advocated reaching out to the so-called “moderate” elements of Hezbollah.  As CIA director, Brennan praised the Iranian regime for what he said were the “concessions” its leaders supposedly made to reach agreement on Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal. He claimed the deal was “as solid as you can get”. 

In fact, Obama made all of the concessions, agreeing to a deal full of loopholes exploited by Iran, which in the end allows Iran a pathway to developing nuclear weapons and the missiles capable of delivering them.

On January 2, 2018, Brennan tweeted his displeasure with the Trump administration’s condemnation of both the Iranian regime and the nuclear deal:

With wholesale condemnation of Iran and nuclear deal over past year, Trump Admin squandered opportunity to bolster reformists in Tehran and prospects for peaceful political reform in Iran.

There were no “reformists in Tehran”, and no “prospects for peaceful political reform in Iran”.

In fact, the appeasement policies followed by Obama and Brennan bolstered the Iranian regime and filled its coffers with cash to fund its state sponsorship of terrorism and support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s brutal war on his own people. Obama and Brennan also turned a blind eye to the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses at home.

John Brennan, who entered the CIA despite his past support for the head of the U.S. Communist Party, rose to the top of the intelligence agency to become perhaps its worst director ever. He is the last person to give anyone advice on national security, let alone to President Trump, who has had to clean up the mess left behind by Obama and Brennan.

The biggest scandal in American history 52

If the Clintons and their multitudinous gang in the “deep state”  are guilty of the dark crimes it seems they are, what would be the just punishment for them?

There is no precedent in American history for such crimes; none for so wide and deep and conscienceless a conspiracy to undermine the constitutional processes of the Republic.

They amount to treason, but not treason as defined by US law. (Article III of the Constitution defines treason as levying war against the United States, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort.) For clear cases of treason, even if they do not come within the legal definition of the crime, capital punishment alone may be  the right retribution. The Rosenbergs, who gave US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, were found guilty of committing espionage, and were electrocuted to death. For the deep corruption of the intelligence services of the United States – for that alone – such a punishment would not be too extreme.

Failing the death penalty, how long would prison sentences have to be? How many “life” terms, served sequentially?

Or will they all get away completely with their crimes, every last one of the guilty men and women?

If they do, what will the rule of law mean in the USA? Nothing. Because it will have turned out that some people are above the law.

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

It may be that Russians penetrated the DNC/Podesta email accounts, but the reports don’t prove that fact. More important, they contain nothing beyond bare assertion to support the implausible claim that Putin wanted Trump, rather than Hillary “Reset Button” Clinton, to win the election. Washington insiders say that the intelligence agencies have provided some evidence that Russia was behind the spearfishing of both the DNC and RNC accounts, but no evidence that Russia’s goal was to try to secure the election for Trump. On the contrary, there is little doubt that Russia’s agents in the U.S., relying on the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc., were reporting that Clinton had the election in the bag.

The FBI/CIA/NSA reports supplied an important link in the Democrats’ anti-Trump strategy. They implied that Trump’s alleged collusion with the Putin regime bore fruit: the Russians wanted Trump to win, they “meddled” in the election to achieve that purpose, and sure enough, he won the election. The intelligence community’s reports went a long way toward delegitimizing the Trump administration before it even came into being.

It now appears clear that this entire story was a fraud. There was no collusion; not by Trump, anyway. The collusion was all on the other side, and it looks to me as though the CIA’s and NSA’s politicized leaders were part of it. Who was the Director of the CIA when these reports were prepared and handed to the press? John Brennan

Who was the Director of National Intelligence? The clueless and virulently anti-Trump James Clapper, who just a few days ago called President Trump an “asset” of Russia …

You could say these people are crazy, but a few short months ago they were in charge of the U.S. intelligence community. It seems clear that by the end of 2016 they were collaborating in the DNC/Clinton campaign/Steele/Fusion GPS/FBI/Russia effort to undermine the incoming Trump administration. An obvious question is, how far back did cooperation by CIA and NSA go? Did those agencies corruptly collaborate with Obama’s DOJ in spying on Trump and his associates during the campaign?

Based on what we already know, the DNC/Clinton campaign/Steele/Fusion GPS/Russia/FBI collusion looks like the biggest scandal in American political history. To the extent that the CIA and NSA were also involved, it can only get worse.

The illegal activities of Obama’s NSA and FBI 2

In a video released yesterday (May 25, 2017), Chris Farrell of Judicial Watch tells how Obama used the NSA against his political opponents. Illegally, in defiance of the Constitution, the intelligence service collected information on Americans and “unmasked” them – ie. revealed their identities – for nefarious political purposes:

And this is from Circa, by John Solomon and Sara Carter, on how James Comey’s FBI illegally collected spy data on Americans, and deliberately leaked the information to serve Obama’s political ends:

The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks.

In his final congressional testimony before he was fired by President Trump this month, then-FBI Director James Comey unequivocally told lawmakers his agency used sensitive espionage data gathered about Americans without a warrant only when it was “lawfully collected, carefully overseen and checked”.

Once-top secret U.S. intelligence community memos reviewed by Circa tell a different story, citing instances of “disregard” for rules, inadequate training and “deficient” oversight and even one case of deliberately sharing spy data with a forbidden party.

For instance, a ruling declassified this month by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) chronicles nearly 10 pages listing hundreds of violations of the FBI’s privacy-protecting minimization rules that occurred on Comey’s watch.

The behavior the FBI admitted to a FISA judge just last month ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight the bureau promised was in place years ago.

The court also opined aloud that it fears the violations are more extensive than already disclosed.

“The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI’s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI is engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported,” the April 2017 ruling declared.

The court isn’t the only oversight body to disclose recent concerns that the FBI’s voluntary system for policing its behavior and self-disclosing mistakes hasn’t been working.

The Justice Department inspector general’s office declassified a report in 2015 that reveals the internal watchdog had concerns as early as 2012 that the FBI was submitting “deficient” reports indicating it had a clean record complying with spy data gathered on Americans without a warrant.

To put it bluntly, the FBI was lying.

FBI officials acknowledged there have been violations but insist they are a small percentage of the total counterterrorism and counterintelligence work its agents perform.

Just some lies, they pleaded. They did a lot of honest work too. Ignore the mud in the milk.

Almost all are unintentional human errors by good-intentioned agents and analysts under enormous pressure to stop the next major terror attack, the officials said.

And besides, they lied with the very best of intentions.  

Others fear these blunders call into the question the bureau’s rosy assessment that it can still police itself when it comes to protecting Americans’ privacy 17 years after the war on terror began. …

One of the biggest concerns involves so-called backdoor searches in which the FBI can mine NSA intercept data for information that may have been incidentally collected about an American. No warrant or court approval is required, and the FBI insists these searches are one of the most essential tools in combating terrorist plots.

But a respected former Justice Department national security prosecutor questions if the searching has gotten too cavalier. Amy Jeffress, the former top security adviser to former Attorney General Eric Holder, was appointed by the intelligence court in 2015 to give an independent  assessment.

Security adviser to Eric Holder? And we should expect her findings to be impartial?

Turns out they may be. She is gently critical of the violations which her report does confirm.

Jeffress concluded agents’ searches of NSA data now extend far beyond national security issues and thus were “overstepping” the constitutional protections designed to ensure the bureau isn’t violating Americans’ 4th Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

By  early 2017, the court became more concerned after the Obama administration disclosed significant violations of privacy protections at two separate intelligence agencies involved in the Section 702 program.

The most serious involved the NSA searching for American data it was forbidden to search. But the FBI also was forced to admit its agents and analysts shared espionage data with prohibited third parties, ranging from a federal contractor to a private entity that did not have the legal right to see the intelligence.

Such third-party sharing is a huge political concern now as Congress and intelligence community leaders try to stop the flow of classified information to parties that could illegally disclose or misuse it, such as the recent leak that disclosed intercepted communications between the Russian ambassador and Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

“Improper access” to NSA spy data for FBI contractors “seems to have been the result of deliberate decision-making”, the court noted.

The recently unsealed ruling also revealed the FBI is investigating more cases of possible improper sharing with private parties that recently have come to light.

The government “is investigating whether there have been similar cases in which the FBI improperly afforded non-FBI personnel access to raw FISA-acquired information on FBI systems,” the court warned.

The ruling cited other FBI failures in handling Section 702 intel, including retaining data on computer storage systems “in violation of applicable minimization requirements”.

Among the most serious additional concerns was the FBI’s failure for more than two years to establish review teams to ensure intercepts between targets and their lawyers aren’t violating the attorney-client privilege.

“Failures of the FBI to comply with this ‘review team’ requirement for particular targets have been focus of FISA’s concerns since 2014,” the court noted.

The FBI said it is trying to resolve the deficiencies with aggressive training of agents.

Oh, “aggressive”. To make the training sound very fierce and merciless. So in future they will not be as lax as they have been in the recent past. You see?

That admission of inadequate training directly undercut Comey’s testimony earlier this month when questioned by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

“Nobody gets to see FISA information of any kind unless they’ve had the appropriate training and have the appropriate oversight,” the soon-to-be-fired FBI director assured lawmakers. 

Another lie. In this case perjury? Didn’t he swear an oath to tell the truth to the Congressional inquiry?

Now that there is a Republican Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, in place of Obama’s puppet, Loretta Lynch, will the law be applied to all who break the law, even to corrupt, felonious law-enforcement officials? Even to Barack Obama?

Posted under Espionage, Videos by Jillian Becker on Friday, May 26, 2017

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James Comey’s mission impossible 28

The FBI in 2015 created an interactive website called Don’t be a Puppet, for the purpose of preventing “susceptible youth from getting recruited online by terrorists”, but they were pressured by Islamic groups to omit all mention of Islamic terrorism. Comey caved and the site was changed to feature white supremacists, militia groups, religious extremists and so on, even though terrorist acts by such groups are quite rare while Islamic terrorists have committed tens of thousands of terror acts worldwide since 9/11. The only time the website mentions Islam is when it explains that Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS “do not represent mainstream Islam”.

That comes from an article in the American Spectator by Steve Baldwin. Its intention is to show that James Comey was dangerously incompetent. We think it demonstrates convincingly that James Comey was a disastrously bad choice to head the FBI.

FBI Director James Comey was incompetent and as FBI Director, his policies placed the lives of American citizens at risk. An in-depth look at his record as FBI Director reveals an incredible naivety toward the Islamic terror threat and a willingness to appease radical Muslims at the expense of protesting Americans. This piece will not address Comey’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal or his failure to investigate the obvious illegal pay-for play schemes concocted by the Clinton Foundation.

Nor will it look at his failure to prosecute anyone associated with the IRS’s effort to silence hundreds of political groups during Obama’s reelection or his refusal to come clean about his knowledge of how numerous Americans were “unmasked” for having the audacity of associating with Donald Trump. No, this is just a peek at how the FBI under Comey handled the Islamic terrorist threat. …

In 2011, in one of the most incredible acts of stupidity ever by the FBI, the agency agreed to purge its counter-terrorism documents of terms, concepts, and statements that a number of Islamic pressure groups objected to. The government watchdog group, Judicial Watch, forced the FBI to release documents about this purge which revealed that the FBI systematically purged some 900 pages and 392 presentations deemed “offensive” to Muslims. This occurred under the previous FBI director Robert Mueller as a result of meeting with Islamic pressure groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), both named in 2007 as unindicted co-conspirators in a case involving raising funds for Islamic terrorists.

This purge crippled the FBI’s ability to track terrorists and many believe the loss of this intelligence caused the FBI to miss clues that could have prevented future terrorist attacks. Indeed, Judicial Watch actually called the purge “part of a broader Islamist ‘influence operation’ aimed at our government and Constitution.”

The purged documents including records linking the Muslim Brotherhood to terrorism, probably because the Obama Administration had, by this time, appointed a number of MB sympathizers to key positions and was quietly supporting Muslim Brotherhood political movements in a number of countries such as Egypt and Libya. The purge also deleted all usage of the term “radical Islam,” and any statement that defined “Jihad” as “Holy War,” even though that’s the definition used by Islamic terrorists. Strangely, the FBI also destroyed all documents linking al Qaeda to the 1993 World Trade Center and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombings, despite the fact these are important events in the terrorist timeline.

Judicial Watch also revealed that the purge “removed references to mosques specifically as a radicalization incubator,” even though every intelligence service in the world knows that mosques are regularly used to plan and organize terror attacks. FBI agents were even told what words they could not use in writing reports on terror threats. Banned words included sharia, jihad, Muslim, Islam, Muslim Brotherhood, enemy, Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda. The FBI was basically more concerned about the feelings of radical Muslims than the security of American citizens.

While the file purging occurred under Bureau head Robert Mueller two years before Comey took the helm, there is no evidence Comey made any effort to restore these files and all evidence indicates that he continued to use this politically correct mindset as he investigated the Jihadist threat in the U.S.A. And it soon became a heavy price to pay.

Indeed, one of the FBI documents obtained by JW titled “Guiding Principles: Touchstone Document on Training” stated that “mere association with organizations that demonstrate both legitimate (advocacy) and illicit (violent extremism) objectives should not automatically result in a determination that the associated individual is acting in furtherance of the organization’s illicit objective(s).”

In other words, the FBI was instructing its agents that if a person is found to be involved with a group that advocates “violent extremism”, they are not to assume the person is involved with violent extremism! This give-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-to-potential-terrorists mindset is what may have caused the FBI to ignore clues that could have stopped the Ft. Hood, Orlando, San Bernardino, and other terrorist attacks even though it had prior knowledge about the Islamic extremist connections of those who carried out those attacks. …

And it gets worse. Judicial Watch reported that the FBI in 2015 created an interactive website called Don’t be a Puppet, for the purpose of preventing “susceptible youth from getting recruited online by terrorists”, but they were pressured by Islamic groups to omit all mention of Islamic terrorism. Comey caved and the site was changed to feature white supremacists, militia groups, religious extremists and so on, even though terrorist acts by such groups are quite rare while Islamic terrorists have committed tens of thousands of terror acts worldwide since 9/11. The only time the website mentions Islam is when it explains that Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS “do not represent mainstream Islam”. 

But the idea that obscure militias and white supremacists pose a threat to the national security in the same way as do Islamic terrorists happens to be a favorite theme of the loony left and Comey seems to have bought into this fantasy. …

Clearly, they are allocating resources based on political correctness, not reality.

Before Comey became director, the FBI initiated a policy that actually banned the FBI from conducting surveillance of mosques … Nor did Comey make any effort to change this policy even though Mosques have repeatedly been implicated in Islamic terror plots worldwide.

Moreover, Comey continued Director Mueller’s practice of heavily recruiting Muslims to be agents with apparently very little vetting. Indeed, the FBI placed recruitment ads in the publications of extremist Islamic groups with the slogan “Today’s FBI. It’s for You.” And it paid off. Indeed, WorldNetDaily broke a story that a Muslim agent working for the Los Angeles FBI field office “tipped off a Muslim suspect under investigation for terrorism about FBI surveillance”. 

In years past, such a violation would result in not just the agent being fired, but also being prosecuted. However, this agent was allowed to remain with the FBI with only a reprimand!Moreover, other Muslim FBI agents have been exposed for assisting radical Islamic groups but the only consequence has been a transfer to another FBI office. Congressional investigators should review the FBI’s hiring and vetting polices when it comes to Muslims, because it’s likely Comey may have hired a slew of agents who are more loyal to the Jihad than to the U.S.A. …

But let’s take a look at how Comey’s FBI actually handled a few of the more well known domestic terror cases during his tenure.

In 2015, an Islamic couple from Pakistan murdered 14 people and injured 22 others at an after work Christmas party in San Bernardino. The terrorist couple, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, spent time in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and used bomb technology commonly used by al Qaeda. The two jihadists were linked to Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic extremist sect with a history of supporting terrorism. However, all records related to this particular group were purged from the National Targeting Center database, according to former DHS counter-terror analyst Philip Haney, who stated that “this Administration is more concerned about the civil rights and civil liberties of foreign Islamic groups and foreign nationals than securing the freedom and security of the American public.” NTC’s data is shared with the FBI. Had Comey made any effort to restore these valuable counter-terrorism files, there’s a chance the Bureau could have prevented this attack. But again, there is no record of any push-back by Director Comey to recover counter-terrorism files. Too bad, it would have saved American lives.

Also in 2015, two terrorists attempted to kill attendees at an event in Garland, TX hosted by anti-Jihad activist Pamela Geller, at which participants were drawing images of Muhammad, which is considered a sacrilege by Muslims. The terrorists had enough ammunition to kill dozens of people and they did wound one security guard before being shot dead. But the attack could have been prevented because not only did the FBI know the terrorists were planning something but, as 60 Minutes reported, they had an undercover agent working with them who sent an encouraging text to the terrorists three weeks prior to the attack: “Tear up Texas.”

That’s bad enough, but 60 Minutes also revealed that this agent was actually at the location of the terror attack. He was in a car behind the car containing the terrorists but when they opened fire on a security guard, his reaction was to photograph them. He did not intervene. Why not? And why weren’t more FBI agents placed at the event to stop the attack? Or prevent it before it even started? Why did they not even alert Pamela Geller, the organizer of the event? As Geller states, “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Obama FBI wanted me and the other speakers at the even dead.” This was a display of incredible incompetence, but neither the FBI nor Comey have ever been forced to explain their actions.

Mere incompetence? Or could it be that Comey, like John Brennan who was then head of the CIA, was actively helping terrorist Islam? The evidence cited here strongly suggests it.

The article goes on to provide more evidence, each example endorsing the suspicion that Islam was positively favored to such a degree that Muslim terrorists were greatly helped by FBI policy under James Comey. (Read it all here.)

… Lastly, the FBI under Comey has ignored a large network of domestic terrorist training compounds. In his book, Twilight in America, author and researcher Martin Mawyer documents the existence of at least two dozen compounds in rural areas operated by a terror group known as “Muslims of America (MOA).” MOA’s Islamic name is “Jamaat ul-Fuqra” and its leader is Sheikh Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, a radical jihadist cleric who mentored the Christmas Day bomber and many other terrorists. He has declared jihad on America and his compounds are clearly involved with training jihadists. Indeed, MOE members were involved with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Before Obama came to power, the FBI prepared a report about these Islamic warriors: “MOA members have participated in ten murders; one disappearance; three fire bombings and one attempted firebombing and two explosive bombings with one attempted bombing …. the leadership of the MOA extols members to pursue a policy of jihad or holy war against individuals or groups it considers enemies of Islam which Include the U.S. Government .…members of the MOA are encouraged to travel to Pakistan to receive religious and military/terrorist training from Sheikh Gilani.”

There is little doubt the FBI possesses enough information about MOA’s activities to obtain court warrants to search their compounds or wiretap its phones, but Mawyer says that his sources tell him “the FBI under Comey showed no interest in investigating these compounds.” Mawyer says while a few field agents understand what these camps are really all about, many in the FBI “think they are just Muslims who want to be left alone.” Sure. Meanwhile, these compounds continue training jihadists unimpeded. Mawyer has spent twenty years researching MOA and its network of compounds but Comey wouldn’t know him from Adam. In any case, the latest chatter from MOA operatives is a fear that Trump will actually close down their compounds. They will miss Comey dearly.

While Comey made quite a media splash informing Americans that the FBI is investigating ISIS-related terrorists in all 50 states, one now has to wonder how many of these investigations are just for show? Or how many cases will the FBI drop for fear of offending Muslims?

If Congress would spend more time investigating the FBI’s competency, rather than phony Russian conspiracy theories, perhaps someday we will have an FBI that’s not driven by political correctness. In the age of terrorism, we need a FBI Director who is fearless and aggressive in investigating Islamic terrorism. Comey has bungled many high profile Islamic terror cases under his watch. Trump did the right thing by firing him and he needs to now hire someone who will ignore political correctness and do what is necessary to keep America safe from Islamic terrorism.

James Comey was required by his employer, Barack Obama, to seem to protect Americans while actually protecting and even assisting Islam in its perpetual jihad. It says something for him that he couldn’t do it – that the self-contradictory task drove him out of his mind. Which accounts for his erratic behavior. John Brennan plainly loves Islam, so it was easy for him to work the trick. James Comey should never have undertaken the job. It needed more than competence; it needed the mind of a traitor.

Five Eyes spying 174

US intelligence agencies cannot legally spy on Americans. So they get foreign allied spy agencies to do it for them. Which means they spy on Americans.

Five countries form the “Echelon” global surveillance system: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – the “Five Eyes” of Western international espionage.

When something they have done leaks out and becomes a public scandal, they spread the blame wider and more thinly by including other agencies, such as those of Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, and France.

When the British were first accused of helping the NSA and CIA spy on Donald Trump and his associates, by Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox News, they angrily denied it.

But they did it.

It’s a squalid story about a real international conspiracy, launched by the Obama administration, to concoct a monstrous lie about Donald Trump; that he was in league with the Russian government. It is a lie that the Democratic Party is still using to cast a shadow of illegitimacy over the Trump presidency.

From the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism, using as its main source the leftist Guardian newspaper:

The British Guardian posted a report on April 13 claiming that its sources now admit that the British spy agency GCHQ was digitally wiretapping Trump associates, going back to late 2015. This was presumably when the December 2015 Moscow meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lt. General Michael Flynn took place.

This runs contrary to the blanket nature of the denial insinuated in GCHQ’s carefully-crafted statement of March 17 claiming it was all “nonsense” and “utterly ridiculous” that they conducted surveillance of “then president-elect” Donald Trump (emphasis added). The surveillance went back a year before he became “president-elect”. 

President Trump’s claim of being “wire tapped” has been vindicated. Indeed, the surveillance is far more extensive than even he suspected at the time.

Based on the new disclosures, we can safely conclude that the world’s most advanced and extensive system of computerized espionage was indeed used against him and people he worked with, for political purposes, with the knowledge and approval of top Obama officials such as CIA Director John Brennan (one major name implicated by the Guardian).

Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano, who said GCHQ was involved in wiretapping Trump, has also been vindicated. Fox News owes Napolitano an apology for yanking him off the air for a week for making that “controversial” and now-verified assertion.

President Trump stressed the pervasive “extent” of this Obama political “wiretapping” to Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business in an Oval Office interview on April 11 (aired April 12).  “Me and so many other people” surveilled, Trump said. He explained again that he had picked up the “wire tapped” terminology straight from the headline of The New York Times (of January 20) …

Now we’re learning that GCHQ did wiretap Trump for a year before the election. “Trump” is, of course, shorthand for Trump associates and possibly Trump himself directly, depending on context. But GCHQ is trying to put a positive spin on what it admits would be illegal spying on US citizens if done by US agencies.

The Guardian’s sources claim a heroic role for the British GCHQ as a courageous “whistleblower” in warning US agencies to “watch out” about Trump and Russia — but carefully avoiding mention of the US’s NSA, which must be protected at all costs as part of the NSA-GCHQ spy-on-each-other’s-citizens “wiretap shell game”. …

These sources virtually admit the mutual “wiretap shell game” by inadvertently mentioning the Trump-Russia data was originally passed on to the US by GCHQ as part of a “routine exchange” of intelligence. The use of this term, “exchange”, suggests what we had previously reported — the shell-game “exchange” between the NSA and GCHQ where they can spy on each other’s citizens and deny it all. 

Past British Prime Ministers have been implicated in various scandals involving wiretaps.  Some have involved the “Echelon” global surveillance system set up by the NSA with its counterparts in the other “Five Eyes” nations — UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  Any one of these countries is able to circumvent domestic laws against spying on their own citizens by asking another Echelon member country to do it for them. This is precisely the “wiretap shell game” used by the Obama administration to have British GCHQ spy on Trump, as outlined by Judge Napolitano and his sources.

To avoid unraveling the longstanding Five Eyes spying “wiretap shell game”, the GCHQ had to pretend they “routinely” came across this Trump-Russia wiretap data “by chance”, unprompted by requests from US. agencies (such as the NSA or CIA) or by Obama officials, working outside normal NSA chain of command on Signals Intelligence or SIGINT (as Judge Napolitano reported on March 14).

So the heroic British GCHQ comes to the rescue with conveniently “accidental” (our word) captures of wiretap communications between Trump people and sinister-sounding “Russian intelligence agents”, with the wiretaps sent here to help out the US agencies. We are supposed to believe the US agencies and the Obama White House just passively received this bombshell wiretap data from GCHQ, no questions asked, for over a year from late 2015 to early 2017. (The Guardian has no end date for the surveillance, such as the November 8 election, and indicates continued surveillance into the Trump transition, with the FBI “throwing more resources” into the investigation then.)

Did Obama officials ever say, “Wait! Stop sending us this material, it may be illegal!” It does not appear so. Hence, the questions that have to be asked by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are:

  • Were there requests for more wiretap data on Trump and his team?
  • Were there requests for more complete transcripts, or even voice recordings?

This “alerting” of the US on Trump-Russia communications was needed, according to the Guardian and its US and UK intelligence sources, because the US agencies were “asleep” or “untrained,” or were legally prohibited from “examining the private communications of American citizens without warrants”. But to the GCHQ, America is a “foreign” nation and evidently they think they are free to spy on Americans “without warrants”.

Previous reporting has said that an interagency task force of six US intelligence agencies was set up to investigate the alleged Trump-connected names supposedly discovered in “incidental collection” of digital wiretap surveillance of Russian communications. The six agencies are said to consist of the CIA, NSA, FBI, the Justice Department’s National Security Division, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Treasury Department financial crimes unit.

Until now, no one has known who in the Obama administration set up the task force, who directs it, what its operating directives state, what its activities have entailed, and who it is really accountable to.

But the Guardian is now reporting that it was CIA Director John Brennan who initiated, in about August 2016, what clearly seems to be an illegal domestic investigation of the Trump political campaign, which would be prohibited by the CIA charter.

Reportedly “Brennan used [British] GCHQ information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major interagency investigation.” The infamous fake “Trump dossier” is apparently dragged in too.

You can read the “dossier” here. It’s a pile of ludicrous bilge.

Brennan then proceeded to give highly classified “urgent” briefings to individual members of the Congressional “Gang of Eight”. Beginning on about August 25, with then-Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) on that date, CIA chief Brennan claimed that the Russian email hackings of the Democratic National Committee were designed to help Trump win the election, according to The New York Times. [!] These partisan briefings represent the politicization of the CIA under Obama, and are of dubious legality.

In September 2016, this anti-Trump intelligence task force changed the previous “incidental” collection to outright direct targeting of Trump people so that their communications with Russia were “actively monitored”, not merely retrieved retroactively in digital archives with names having to be laboriously “unmasked”. …

Unmasking is unnecessary if one starts with the specific names of Trump personnel first, and then flags them for future surveillance, going forward in time. In that case, the “actively monitored” and flagged Trump names automatically trigger alerts in the NSA-GCHQ computers whenever the names turn up. These wiretap reports would then have been submitted to Obama officials at the level of national security adviser Susan Rice and CIA director Brennan, and perhaps to Obama himself.

Interestingly, the Guardian’s sources carefully try to avoid implicating or involving the NSA in GCHQ’s allegedly unprompted reporting on intercepted wiretap data on Trump associates. It’s the “shell game” again with the NSA and GCHQ covering for each other.

Instead, the Guardian’s anonymous intelligence sources say that then-director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan passed on a top secret “director level” report on Trump-Russia in “summer 2016” to CIA Director John Brennan, rather than to the NSA. However, if GCHQ was using NSA’s digital wiretap facilities to “routinely” spy on Trump people, then the NSA would be implicated by the very arrangement used. …

The unexpected sudden resignation of GCHQ director Hannigan, announced on January 23, makes him the potential villain and scapegoat. …

In an unprecedented BBC interview on April 5, Hannigan fired a parting shot at the Judge Napolitano and White House reports of his GCHQ’s spying on Trump. Hannigan snidely dismissed the reports, saying,

We get crazy conspiracy theories thrown at us every day. We ignore most of them. On this occasion it was so crazy that we felt we should say so and we have said it’s a ridiculous suggestion.

The Guardian’s report refutes Hannigan, barely a week after he left office, possibly with official connivance or approval. But why is Hannigan being thrown under the bus so soon? Is it fear of the impending findings of US Congressional and official investigations exposing GCHQ?

Now that Trump is president, the British have some urgent repairs to make.

Such reports in the British press on highly sensitive intelligence matters surely must have been quietly cleared by the British government as a first fallback position on GCHQ spying on [now President] Trump. Otherwise the Guardian would be in deep trouble under the UK’s Official Secrets Act and its D-Notice procedure to suppress or censor news stories on secret intelligence matters.

Finally, the British also seem to be trying to spread the blame around to a laundry list of other countries allegedly passing on intelligence about Trump-Russia contacts—Germany, Estonia, Poland, Australia, the Dutch and the French DGSE.

Still, no “smoking gun” has ever been found in any of this wiretap material, for it would already have been leaked like Lt. Gen. Flynn’s fairly benign conversations with the Russian ambassador that got him fired.

Despite the sensational news from The Washington Post that the FBI obtained a FISA warrant to wiretap ex-Trump adviser Carter Page, which may even still be in effect, his “Russian contacts” also seem to be completely ordinary and routine. Page is so confident of his innocence that he has been going on various television news programs to talk openly about his work on Russia, supplying Russian contacts with some of his New York University classroom materials.

To be sure, a certain large percentage of these kinds of business meetings with Russians will turn out to be with undercover Russian intelligence officers —  unbeknown to the Western business and academic people meeting them. The media portray them as suspicious. But this kind of Russian spy game has always been going on since the Cold War and is nothing new.

The FISA warrant, rather than proving any malfeasance by Carter Page — again no “smoking gun” — only adds to the evidence that what President Trump said from the start was true: that Trump and his associates were under electronic surveillance.

What do the wiretaps on Trump actually say? The media don’t want to know if the NSA-GCHQ wiretaps actually exonerate President Trump.

One of the advantages of the adversarial system in the courts is that advocates on the opposing side ideally get a fair chance — unlike the one-sided media with journalists who, at the rate of more than 90 percent, contributed to the Hillary Clinton campaign …

Questions not asked of Rice or other sources by the media include whether she or other Obama officials “flagged” the unmasked Trump team names for future NSA (or British GCHQ) automatic unmasking and delivery of transcripts and summary reports.

Did the Obama people regularize the “unmasking” so that routinely a new retroactive search was automatically ordered with automatic unmaskings? That would be another way to turn “incidental collection” into an effectively ongoing wiretap order. Did President Obama or Rice or others request actual sound recordings of Trump and others to review?

Did the Obama team “unmask” other presidential candidates and associates besides Trump, such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who visited Moscow in December 2015 and dined with Putin? Fox is reporting that Congressional investigators are now looking into whether other presidential candidates and Members of Congress were surveilled too. In 2014, CIA director Brennan was caught red-handed lying to the Senate about the CIA’s criminal hacking of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer system.

We are told that many, if not most, of these wiretaps and unmaskings of Trump people were not even wiretaps about Russia or “incidental collection” on legitimate foreign intelligence subjects, though they may have begun that way.

The evidence now indicates that the information was procured for partisan political purposes — to spy on the Trump opposition to Hillary Clinton using the full weight of the US government’s NSA spying apparatus (or NSA facilities used by British GCHQ).

Scandalized? Prepare to be more so:

Trump’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo is in a position to get to the bottom of this scandal. Yet, on April 13, 2017, in his first public speech as director, he seemed to indicate that the evidence being developed in connection with the CIA’s role in the illegal surveillance of President Trump was going to be ignored or brushed aside. It was a forceful, even strident, defense of the Agency.

“I inherited an Agency that has a real appreciation for the law and for the Constitution,” he claimed. “Despite fictional depictions meant to sell books or box-office tickets, we are not an untethered or rogue agency. So yes, while we have some truly awesome capabilities at our disposal, our officers do not operate in areas or against targets that are rightfully and legally off-limits to us.”

The evidence suggests the opposite. The CIA under Obama’s CIA Director Brennan was involved in illegal surveillance, using those “truly awesome capabilities” against political targets that should have been off-limits.

One of those targets was the President who appointed Pompeo as CIA director.

We need our intelligence agencies. But they have gone bad under bad leadership.

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